The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast

A brand-new podcast from Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt, the creators and hosts of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. This limited series is eight episodes long, dedicated to make you a better writer and understand story structure better. You get to listen in on Autumn and Jesper's conversations as they plot a short story from scratch. It's a behind the scenes look at the process of creative writing. Simply search for 'Write the Story' in your podcast app, or visit the website here: https://www.writethestory.show/, to get started right away.

Come for three days of writing workshops, writing time, one-on-one coaching, and group activities. Leave with a completed short story to be included in a published compilation, polished writing skills, and new author friends. Sure, writers are often introverts, but aren't you tired of everything happening online? We are! Plus, you can learn more and improve your writing skills faster with a select group of writers (no more than 40!) along with personalized coaching. Be warned, this is not going to be one of those events where you simply show up, listen to a bunch of PowerPoint presentations, and then head back home by the end of the weekend. No! We want you to actually complete a work of fiction. During this weekend, all attendees will jointly worldbuild a setting for a story together with five elements which everyone needs to incorporate into the story along with a character. Each participant will then write a short story between 1,000 and 10,000 words. Along the way, we'll cover writing aspects such as worldbuilding, character development, plotting, outlining chapters, and more… all of which you'll get to use that weekend. By Sunday afternoon, all stories will be handed over to us, Autumn and Jesper, and we'll then get them all edited and have a cover made for inclusion in a compilation made free for readers! We'll do all the final work—you just need to come, learn, have fun, and write the story. YES! You'll get a published piece of work and a bunch of new author friends to help you promote it. The benefits of this Getaway doesn't end on Sunday—not by a long shot! Check out the registration page and the full event schedule here: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/getaway-2023/    And just in case you're interested, here's the link to our brand-new novel, Magic Unleashed: https://books2read.com/MagicUnleashed    As mentioned, we're also working on a new podcast for you. Find it here: https://www.writethestory.show/ Make sure to subscribe in your podcast app, so you don't miss any episodes once we start releasing them.    Stay safe and happy writing.

We've unfortunately come to the end of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In this short brief, you'll learn why and where to go from here.

The New York Times bestselling author, Anthony Ryan, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast for a discussion with Jesper about fantasy writing, publishing, and marketing books in today's publishing landscape.   Find Ryan's books here: https://anthonyryan.net/   Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). 0 (2s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 154 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And Autumn is putting the finishing touches on editing our next novel today. So instead I'm joined by a New York times bestselling author, Anthony Ryan. And normally when I do these interviews, I have like a massive time difference, Anthony, but not today because I think you're in the UK or something. Is that right? Anthony (58s): Yes. Almost instantaneous. Jesper (1m 4s): Yeah. And it's, and there's even light outside my window today, which I'm not used to when I do podcast recordings, but you are you're from Scotland originally. Is that right Anthony (1m 17s): Originally? Yes, I don't sound Scottish, but I was born then spent most of my childhood there. Jesper (1m 24s): I would actually love to visit Scotland one day. I've been to the London and stuff like that multiple times, but I've never been to Scotland and it's just like the scenery there. It's, it's almost a bit fantasy inspiring sometimes. Isn't it? Anthony (1m 39s): It is obviously if you, if you grow up there, you have a different view of things. You don't know you growing up in it, you know, I see landscape the, yeah. Obviously, you know, as a true Scott, I recommend everyone should go to Scotland at least one. Jesper (2m 1s): Yeah. I would really love to go one day, but perhaps before we sort of get started for real here, maybe you could just share a few words about yourself, Anthony, and just talk a bit about what you're writing and maybe how you got into writing. And so on Anthony (2m 17s): Anthony Ryan, the also the raping shadow trilogy, the cottage Memorial, Trelegy blatantly the covenant of steel, excuse my most recent work and I, which is what I'm currently working on. I got published. I self published back in 20 11, 20 12 and was persuaded to go the traditional route when my first novel blood song took off and been a full-time author since the end of 2012. So yeah, this is what I always wanted to do. Anthony (2m 57s): And I consider myself really to be able to make a living doing what I love to do. Jesper (3m 4s): Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. So you have, you have some stuff that you publish and some stuff that is traditional puppets. Is that still the case today? Anthony (3m 14s): Yes. I don't do that much self publishing these days. It's usually one or two things a year, if that, and it's usually a short work, it's a novella or short story or something like that. Full length works with pretty much always traditionally published these days. And to be honest, given the time and I'm sure, you know, better than I do the time it takes to do self publishing. Well, it's a lot of time. It's a lot of efforts to do it properly. And frankly, that was the time to do all sort of being traditionally published for the most part. Anthony (3m 55s): It suits me quite well. Jesper (3m 59s): Right. And you're with penguin IO Anthony (4m 2s): These days is mostly all wet, a little and brown, I believe, but I'm still, you know, technically published by a switch is part of a penguin. So, you know, it's a thing with traditional publishing. You can be a bit confusing with all the different contracts and everything, but I don't think meters care that much, you know, you publish your next book. So yeah. Yeah. Well, within the national publishers as well, got a lot of different contracts and things with various different publishers around the world can be a bit hard to keep track of them all. Jesper (4m 45s): Yeah. But then coming from a situation where you have experience with both the traditional side of publishing, but as well as some self publishing, what would you, sorry? Well, you touched upon this slightly there, but what would you say is the pros and cons of each of those two approaches? If somebody is sort of listening to this and debating, should I do one or the other? Anthony (5m 8s): Well, it's weird. I think the advantages of self publishing are the disadvantages of self publishing of the same things. The advantages are you have to do everything. You know, you do everything yourself. You have complete control over everything. The disadvantages are, you do everything yourself and you have complete control over everything. So, you know, it's, it's a lot of work basically to self publish. We're new at officially published. You will have an editor who works for a publisher. Who's a professional editor. You won't have to hire them yourself, which can be very, probably the most expensive part of the process for self publisher. Anthony (5m 48s): Especially if you're starting out, you know, a professional editor doesn't come cheap. And if you're writing epic fantasy, I mean, and the charge by the word, I mean, typically in the 200,000 word range, paying somebody a word by word basis to edit one of my novels. That's a lot of money would be very expensive for me. So publish as well as very time consuming. But you do, I think with self publishing, you do get control over the control you get. I know we'd be telling you attractive for a lot of people. If you know, I'm a bit of a control freak, I'm not too bad, but I can't be obsessive about details. Anthony (6m 33s): And if you're that kind of person, self publishing is probably going to see it quite well, especially when it comes to cameras and cover design and you know, book descriptions and all that kind of thing. So yes, the advantages are that say are the same as a disadvantage, it's all on you. Or you either do it all yourself or you pay people to do it when you're traditionally published. Some of the burden is taken off you because you're not paying for you are an editor, a cover designer and all of the, Jesper (7m 6s): Yeah. And I'm also thinking maybe what about reread with gods to the editing itself? I mean, of course when you are self publishing, you, as you said, you hire the editor and basically you can just decide what to ignore, what to agree to, whatever, whenever the editor tells you something, but with the traditional publishing, is it more in your experience that you have to more accept what the editor is pushing on you? Or can you still, do you still have the freedom to say like, like, no, that's not going to, I'm not going to change this or that. Anthony (7m 40s): Unfortunately, I've never got to the point where I vehemently disagreed with us in the editors have told me there is a back and forth and other things we don't, you know, sort of mindless things don't always agree with when it comes to word choice, you know, cutting smaller scenes or something like that. But there have been times when I've been asked to do more substantial rewrites and others, some books don't require a lot of work at the editing stage and others do I take the view that these are professional people who've been doing this for entire life and it would be foolish of me to ignore their advice. Anthony (8m 22s): If I ever got to the point where it is vehemently disagreed with what they were asking me to do, I would say, so we did have a discussion, but you know, as of yet, it hasn't come up where it really just completely at loggerheads and can't reach an agreement. I don't know what would happen if we got to that point, you know, contractually, you know, they can reject the book and then they want to have advanced back. We haven't asked, but yeah, that's, that's always the nuclear option, but it it's extremely, rather than the publishing world, you know, for that to happen, you know, it can happen sometimes when you get controversial figures, who've been given large Southerns to write a memoir or something. Anthony (9m 10s): And, you know, especially with the insist on not having a ghost writer. Oh yeah. I've heard stories of people submitting manuscripts that were just unreadable tripe, and then wondering why the, you want to do advance back can happen. But yeah, when it comes to professional writers, people who wrote fiction for a living, it's very, very rare. And as yet, luckily for me as it come on, hopefully no. Jesper (9m 39s): Yeah, no, I agree. And of course it's also a matter of, I mean, of course some editors could be difficult to work with, but so could some authors, right? It could also sometimes be the author who just makes a big deal out of something where the editor might be actually quite fair in what they're asking Anthony (9m 56s): And I'm never going to nitpick over commerce or, you know, stuff like the semi-colons in the wrong place of don't get excited about that. You know, when it comes to, you know, the overall arch arc of the plot and stuff like that, it's, you know, it's pretty rare for them to have a problem with it. In my book, there's been a few things about have, by my own admission, I've gone down the wrong route. I've gotten down a kind of blind alley when it comes to plus and tried to get over and being a bit too convoluted. A good editor will point that out. Anthony (10m 37s): They don't. Yeah. They don't come back and say, oh my God, this is a pile of crap. Where was wrong with you? You get what's called the compliment sandwich. The first paragraph is, oh, this is really great and so on. But the second paragraph is now here's some things I think needs some work. And then the third paragraph is once again, and this is really great novel and I look forward to publishing it. So they always bracket where they actually want to tell you, it's some nice words, sweeten the bell. Yeah. Jesper (11m 9s): But what does your actual writing process look like? Anthony (11m 14s): What I'm writing on right. Every day I rarely have days off. And my thing has to do with when life just gets in the way. So I will, if I have a doctor's appointment or something, or have to do something with family, then, then I'll, you know, I will take time off. But when I'm actually working on book, most of the time I write every day, don't actually produce a huge amount of words on a daily basis. But because I write every day because I'm consistent, you know, it looks from the outside, like I'm quite prolific and I've have reached at least one book a year for the last 10 years, which is a bad, I'm not actually that fast. Anthony (11m 58s): Right. But I haven't consistent. My average word count in these days is about 1200 words a day, but I'm doing the thing where, you know, I use Scribner as my main writing program. And it has, it tells you how many words a day you need to do to reach you or a word goal by a certain date. And these days they just tend to stick to that. And long as you're consistent, as long as you speak to it, it works. Yeah. I don't do a lot of, you know, actually sitting in front of the computer and actual time spent sitting in front of your computer. Anthony (12m 40s): Writing is relatively minimal, but I do do a lot of pacing around my living room. And you know, I remember Stephen fried at the British, you know, comedian and author. He said that writing consists mostly of making coffee for me, even though I drink tea rather than coffee, there's a certain amount of truth in that. There's a lot of things. Jesper (13m 7s): Yeah. I was, I was myself through a, maybe I could call it an experiment, but quite recently, over the last six months, I, because I I'm also at the place short of where you are. I, I, I tend to, I don't really count my word count, but I, I write half a chapter a day because I feel like that's what I can get done in maybe about two hours. And in two hours after that, I feel like my creativity really goes down. But then I heard a lot about many authors who like, are really prolific, you know, the people who write like 5,000 words a day and stuff like that. So I thought like, let me try that. And then I tried to look into all the stuff that they did to increase their word count. Jesper (13m 50s): And I really, you know, pushed myself. And I just came to the realization after a while. I probably tried it for like two, three months. And then by the end of it, I was like, I don't enjoy this anymore. You know, I want to take my time with it. I want to sort of think about what I'm writing. I don't want to just plow ahead. I don't know, for me, it just, it, it moved, removed all the enjoyment of the writing process to try to do it faster. So yeah, Anthony (14m 22s): And also just might be mundane, but I'm not getting any younger. My hands I've typed a lot of words in my life. And after a while it hurts and I don't get on well with dictation software or anything like that. I don't write long hand fast enough to write that. Well, you know, I can write 85 words a minute long hand write eight. So just say my hands are quite happy to not trying to do the 5,000 words a day saying if you can great, if you comfortable for you, good for you. Anthony (15m 5s): You know, but I think probably done photos in words once in a day when I was running up against deadline and it wasn't fun. It definitely would. Jesper (15m 18s): No, I mean, I think when speaking about writing processes, it is really about finding your own sort of what suits you. Of course. I mean, of course, if you have like physical things, like your hands are hurting, then you have to respect that. But, but more in general, I mean that some people enjoy writing fast, other peoples don't. And I think it's actually good in my view to try to experiment with different approaches when you're starting out to figure out what works for you, but then something will probably be something you prefer versus something else. Anthony (15m 48s): Definitely. I think there's no one size fits all when it comes to writing, you have to find it. Yeah. You have to experiment, find what works for you. And I think a lot of people do read whatever their favorite writing book is. Stephen King's on writing or, you know, save the cat or wherever it is and the bank, well, Stephen King writes 2000 words a day. Therefore I must write 2000 words a day. If you've never done that, it's a big ask. You know, it's a big thing to do if you're just not used to it. So, you know, my advice for novice writers is to find your comfort zone and actually embrace the comfort zone. Anthony (16m 32s): Don't try and push yourself too much because what you're doing is difficult. And a lot of the time, especially with people who have jobs, they have families, it's carving out the time. You need to write it, come easy. All you can manage your day is half an hour and you do 500 words by 500 words a day adds up to love words after a year. But yeah, find, find your own comfort zone. Embrace. Not all. We'll give you at least a benchmark to, you know, you know how to push it. You know, you know, if you need to do more, whoever reason then you'll know just how much more you need to do, but tends to be what I tell them. Anthony (17m 15s): Younger writers anyway. Jesper (17m 17s): Yeah, no, I think it's a good advice. And because of as well, the, you know, you've written for quite a while, and as you said, you've written a lot of words, but do you ever feel like when it comes to getting story ideas and so on, do you ever feel like you get stuck in the same loop with the same kind of ideas? Or how do you go about getting fresh ideas? Anthony (17m 39s): You have absolutely no problem with new ideas. To be honest, if we could turn off the idea factory in my head, I would for a while, at least, cause it was a while ago I tweeted, I had 26 books. I could probably start writing tomorrow. If I wanted to. That's probably got up to about 35 now because it just never stops. I just never stopped getting ideas. Ideas are the easy bit for me. Anyway, I'm actually coming up with stories to match the ideas. That's the hard bit, the ideas. Yeah. It's really, I don't go looking for inspiration. Anthony (18m 19s): It always finds me whether it's a television documentary or whether it's, you know, something I saw on the news or just, you know, something I'd read somewhere that I can't even remember where it all goes through my head and just comes together with ideas and they never stop. I'm probably going to shuffle off this mortal coil with a lot of books unwritten, which, and there's not a lot I can do about it. It's just the way it is. Jesper (18m 49s): No, you know, it's funny that you say that because I think when people looking to get into writing or start to write, they worry about this idea thing. But, but because I have it exactly the same way as you do. Well, you know, I have a notebook where I write down when I get ideas and just so chock-full of ideas, it's just like, I don't know. That must be 20 novels in there as well. And I will probably never get to half of them. I don't know. But, but getting ideas is like one of the favorite things that people think about a worry about in the beginning, but, and maybe don't ask some people who are finding it difficult to get ideas. I'm not saying that that doesn't happen, but I have also through this podcast, talk to a lot of different authors by now. Jesper (19m 35s): And I'm yet to hear an established author say that I don't know, I can't get ideas. You know, everybody seems to be flooded with them. Maybe that's part of what makes us writers. I don't know. Anthony (19m 48s): I think it is a thing it's probably something innate to people who do this for a living or at least have the potential to do it for a living is, you know, never running out stories. So this thinking in those terms, I guess you could probably train yourself to do it if you tried hard enough, but it does seem to be something that's just innate with me. You know, even as a kid, I was remember telling the kids go stories at playtime school and Clustered around me and I just make them up on the spot, you know, quite easily. Cause ghost stories are easy, especially when you're telling kid there was a house, it had a ghost in it. Anthony (20m 33s): But yeah, in terms of getting stuck in the same ideas occurring, I'm always keen not to repeat myself. I don't want to be writing the same book over and over again. You know, another summarize have a formula, a character and series of books and those books follow a formula. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. As long as you can keep it fresh, if you're just writing the same book over and over again and you know, rubbing the serial numbers off and making it a little bit different, you know, I think that's going to get very Dallas. It get very Del for me, nevermind the reader. Anthony (21m 14s): And I think fortunately tend to have the imagination. It doesn't get stuck in a rut too much. So it does. I do tend to think outside my own as well as not every idea I get is not for a fantasy novel science fiction. It's hard crime as well. Kind of like to get around to all of those yamas at some point, if we're going to find enough time to write. Jesper (21m 40s): Yeah. Why did you decide that it was fantasy that you wanted to write originally? Anthony (21m 48s): It's just so general. It probably appeals to me more than all others and it might be my, I thought a lot about wine. I think it might be because it's essentially limitless. You can do anything with it, depending on how you construct the world making up a yeah. There's, there's nothing limiting you. You can, you're not constrained by history. You can bowl from history. And I do all the Diana I steal shamelessly from real world history because it's presenting it in the context of fantasy. It doesn't matter so much. There's no copyright on history. You can take all you want. And also you can take away all the inconvenient, messy bits, keep the good bits. Anthony (22m 32s): You know, the realities of history. History is always messier than people think it is. And it never conforms to the myths that people can't do around it in the UK at the moment, there's a lot of people spinning the stallion myths about Britain's past and prior role. You know what we did in the second world war or as my that. And it's clearly being spun by people who don't have a real grasp of what history is or what that particular history was. It's mythmaking, it's not his, but I think from a novelist point of view, especially even if you're presenting it in a fantasy context, you have to engage with the realities of, who's not the mess. Anthony (23m 20s): Otherwise it's not going to be convincing the messiness of history. I think I'd try and reflect even on quite, you know, ruthless and cutting away on the calf and just taking the exciting birds. Still have to go thinking, reflect the messiness on. Jesper (23m 37s): Yeah. And I, I also think, I mean, of course I, you know, I, as part of fantasy, I, I do of course love all your wizards and the magic and, and all that good stuff. But the other part on a more practical level is also as a fantasy author. I feel like it's because I don't want to get bucked down into research about how does this gun work or, or, you know, all those kinds of, or this particular city that the characters now go to that I've never been to. I don't want to do all that research in fantasy. I can just make it up. And that's quite wonderful. Anthony (24m 12s): Yeah. That being said, I do, I do research. I've done because my second series, a, the draconian memoria was set in that sort of industrialized world, even though it was a fantasy world, it was industrialized and they were fighting with guns rather than salts. So the defense of research on guns for that, and here's a tip for you. If you put guns or anything related to guns in YouTube, be prepared for them to bombard you with all sorts of extremist nonsense. We looked at one gun video and within a day, YouTube had decided I was a white supremacist who hated women judging both were recommending me. Anthony (24m 52s): So it's kind of staggering out the algorithms work, Jesper (25m 1s): But yeah, it's a bit scary. Anthony (25m 3s): It is. Yeah. You can see a lesson in how people get rid of medicalized. So stop recommending this to me button quite a lot now. Jesper (25m 15s): Yeah. I can see that. Yeah. It's been a few years though, but, but I, I read the waking fires some years back the waking fire and I very much enjoyed it and it has dragons in it. So that's always good. But what I, why I'm bringing that up is because we were talking a bit about Writing Fantasy and we were talking a bit about what kind of stories to write and so on. And because you have also written and published quite a lot of books, I'm wondering if you, if you see some common tropes within fantasy, that readers seems to like more than others. Jesper (25m 55s): I mean, dragons could be an example, but how do you see the success of your different books? Like, is there like commonalities that the books that has dragons in them or something else are usually more liked by readers than others? Or do you have any views on that? Anthony (26m 10s): I think some people definitely because it requires Memorial, it was guns rather than So that steam ships, you know, air ships and stuff, some people immediately assumed it was steampunk. And it kind of is. And I don't mind if people call it that, but there are people that just won't read anything. It's got steam punk attached to it and a fantasy readers. You only want the songs, even if it has dragons in it, they just want the swords, you know, the medieval setting rather than industrialized setting, which is fine each to their own, you know, but I try not to be constrained by as a writer, readers have their preferences and that's fine. Anthony (26m 51s): But for me as a writer, I do, I do want to be able to write what I want to write, you know? Yeah. And the drugs from the lawyers didn't sell as well as my other series. So it's sold reasonably well for what it is there wasn't in his big numbers because it wasn't, I think fall into what an epic fantasy series was supposed to be. You know, you're supposed to have people riding around on horses, in air ships, you're supposed to, you know, armies fighting great battles with, you know, dragons might be part, but it also supposed to be hordes of saber wielding barbarians and all of this and kind of wasn't in there. Anthony (27m 41s): But I don't think you can, or you should be constrained by redirect expectation. You should write what you want to write because you can never really anticipate what they want. You know? So it's like apple, you know, apple as a company famously doesn't do market research. It makes the things it wants to make itself. People don't know what they want and you can do it. And there's famous examples of then Coca Cola. When they came out with new Coke, they did immense amounts of research and focus groups and market research about, yes, there's definitely a market for new Coke and people want new Coke. Anthony (28m 24s): We put out new Coke, people hated it. Nobody wanted it. It was one of the biggest flops in commercial history. You can't anticipate what they want and you can't try and give them what they want. And you can only write when you write, I think at the end of the day, if it hits it hits is not alive. So you do buy that. I don't think there's anything wrong with writing to market. If you can, don't expect everyone to be a winner just because you write to a certain market. Cause you think, you know, a few years ago it was about empires and umpire romance. Anthony (29m 4s): But just because it's invoked, it doesn't mean it's going to hit for you. You can never really, there's no such thing as a shoe. If I hated in publishing or in anything else. Jesper (29m 14s): No, I fully agree with you there. There's definitely no guarantees one way or the other. And I also agree that it is incredibly important to write something you are passionate about because yeah, like we talked about writing a novel, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. So even a month later, you are sort of tired of the thing because it wasn't really your thing. Anyway, then you're never going to get to the end. But of course, if you can find some, some overlap between what the market or the readers want versus what you like, then that's probably a good place to focus. I would say, because at least if you look at like streaming services, Netflix and so on, they pump out the same stuff over and over and over again. Jesper (29m 59s): Right. Because readers or viewers in this case, we want what we, what we know we like, we want the same thing just in a new package. A lot of the time. I mean, when you're trying to do something that is very different. Not always, but most of the time it flops also on Netflix. Anthony (30m 19s): Yeah. I think as a creative though, you can, if you're proud of it, if you think it was good, you're, you know, you're happy with it. That's the most you can expect, you know, if it sells itself, it's great. It's really great for itself. But really from a creative point of view, you, you have to be happy with it. Otherwise what's the point for me anyway, you know, I couldn't there's certainly John was, I couldn't write in, cause I don't read them and I'm not excited about them. No. Yeah. No disrespect to romance authors, but I couldn't write a romance novel to save my life. Anthony (31m 1s): I wouldn't know what the hell I was doing. Me attempting to write a romance novel would be an insult to the young, the, you know, perhaps desperate for money. And I tried it it'd be a disaster. Yeah. So I think you have to be a fan of where the genre you're writing it. And it helps if it's a commercial yarn, you know, if it's very niche, it's going to have a hard time making a living at it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't write in it, but you know, just be aware that it's, it doesn't mean that nobody owes you a living is another thing. Nobody gonna drive a dump truck up to you for DOR and give you a load of money for no apparent reason. Jesper (31m 47s): Ah, that would be nice. But given your years in the writing business, less industry here, are there some changes that you've noticed over the years? Like is there stuff that is very different now compared to what it was when you got started? Anthony (32m 9s): Yeah. The basic publishing process, the process you go through hasn't changed that much. And the contracts are, you know, they're still using pro forma contracts that say you have to provide a written typed manuscript on double spaced paper and all that it's in the contract, but nobody ever does that. You send them an email with an attachment like everybody else. But what I have noticed is, you know, an increasing embracing of digital formats by probably they seem to be taking what I would consider a more realistic approach to pricing of, of eBooks. Anthony (32m 51s): And so obviously it's been a bit of an explosion in audio books, audio books are now much more important. And when I started, you could probably negotiate a different contract, separate contract for your audio book, as opposed to print. And e-book these days, no, none of the major publishers will allow you we'll give you a contract unless you're willing to sell them your, your audio rights. You can't take them away and sell them yourself and they won't do it. You get all the manual fallout so that they're not interested. And I think that's probably true of even the biggest names in the industry. That seems to be a bit of a hard line when the publishing industry, because they've realized that audio books are profitable. Anthony (33m 34s): They're very profitable if they're done well, you know, as a digital item to sell audio books are kind of perfect. You have a reasonably high value and a cost comparison to a print book. Don't cost that much to produce. There's a cost baggage. You have to pay an actor to do them, but you know, it's not as cost-intensive I think, as a print book. So yeah, explosion of audio is probably the biggest thing that I've noticed, but also, you know, publishers using social media for marketing and, you know, various different ways of exploring marketing in a digital age. Anthony (34m 18s): They weren't doing so much of that when I started, but they definitely aren't. Jesper (34m 24s): Yeah. And I think as well there, the audio book explosion is also very much linked to nowadays. Many people are way too busy in their life. So audio book is then like, like podcasting, you know, it's something you can listen to while you're doing other things. And I think in part that's why it has taken off in the sense that it has or to the degree that it has, because it, it just goes better with a busy lifestyle than sitting down to read a book. Nobody has that much time anymore. Unfortunately. Anthony (34m 56s): Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of audio books or certain authors or Stephen King these days. I only do Stephen King audio books. I don't read his books. I only listen to the audio books for him. There's a few others as well. So I find this my preferred format for memoirs, you know, comedic memoirs and that kind of thing, especially when it's written, but it's read by the author. A lot of comedians do audio books a few days, which quietly. Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah, there was something else I wanted to mention here before we, before we wrap things up because I was on your website earlier today. And then I saw a menu item called map room. And that really triggered me because I absolutely love fantasy maps. And it was so wonderful to see an entire webpage on the, on the website dedicated to maps from your books. I really liked that. Anthony (35m 53s): Yeah. I'm a big map fan as well. I draw my old, my own maps for the books and you know, so there's no copyright issues with me putting them on my website. And if you are a fantasy also with maps at the front of your book, I would recommend putting you on the website because they don't show up that well on eBooks kind of fiddly, keep referring back to them when you're reading an ebook, but put them on your webpage. People have a place to go to see them, you know? Yeah. It does seem to be a thing for fantasy funds. They like a good map. Jesper (36m 28s): Yeah. I know. I know for me, myself, if I started reading a new fantasy map, even if it's on the Kindle and I do agree, it's it, the resolution of it is not the best air, but if I do open a new fantasy book and I don't find that map within the couple of first couple of pages, I'm already slightly disappointed. Anthony (36m 48s): Yeah. This is, it's become this thing that we all expect. You know, maybe one day I'll publish a fantasy novel without a mark just to be daring, but probably, yeah, Jesper (37m 1s): That's great. Anthony (37m 3s): I heard about David Gammell, loser delight, great British fantasy also, who never, that only, I think only his historical fantasies have maps in them. They were real well-matched but it's actual secondary world fantasies never had maps. And the story I had once was the, the trying to get hired a guy to do a map for him. And he said, all these characters live on the north pole because they're was going east, west, south, and all that. But it makes no sense when you try and track their movements in impossible direction. So basically impossible his roadmap, David them world. Jesper (37m 44s): Right? No, but it is a challenge because when there is a map, then of course it becomes possible to start tracking the distance and how far were, or, you know, because we have it as well in the, in our novel, when, when I need them to go to one place of the, of the world, to another place of the world, I will actually pull out the map and just sort of figure out, okay, if you were a medieval guy who needed to go this distance, how long would it actually take you? So in one, on one regard, that's good that you can make it more realistic in that sense, but another, but on another hand it also makes it difficult sometimes when you're having multiple points of view and then for one character a month passed. And for the other one, you need to take two days, that's a bit of a jealous, Anthony (38m 27s): It was it's. One of the realities of the medieval world was it took ages to get anywhere. And the average person can walk maybe 10 miles a day. You know, you know, a soldier can do 20 miles a day. Cause that's what they're trained for your average person, you know, carrying goods on that bag. He's not going to manage all in 10 miles a day. So it was a hard reality. Then you try and get rounded, maybe Busey magic or something. But if you want your world at one end of the empire Monday, and then they've made it all the way to the other end by Tuesday, you know, it's just not realistic. Jesper (39m 9s): No, no. That's where, well we love time. And also does some tricks with these. I can't remember what, what Michael or what Jordan called them, but it was this way gates or whatever it was. I can't remember the name for it anymore. Anthony (39m 23s): Yeah. Similar in Robin hops, assassin series over these Stoughton portals, people can go to yeah. It's a useful plot device. If you can get it to a Jesper (39m 36s): Yeah, definitely. All right. Well, I want to thank you, Anthony, as well for coming on the podcast and share from, from all your experience and your insights into writing and publishing. Anthony (39m 48s): I'm sorry. No problem enjoyed it. Jesper (39m 51s): And if people want to learn more about you and your writing, Anthony, where do you want them to go? Anthony (39m 58s): My website has all the links to everything. It's a Anthony Ryan dot net. You'll find links to my social media is on there and details of all my books and learn by them and so forth. Jesper (40m 10s): Excellent. I will put the link to a Anthony's website in the show notes as well. So your deal is now you can go and click directly from there. And once again, I want to thank you, Anthony, for coming on the podcast today and fill in for autumn. So I hope you've got a lot from it and enjoyed it. Narrator (40m 28s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Today we delve into the Nebula Award Nominated and bestselling book Jade City by Fonda Lee. What can this highly acclaimed AND popular novel teach us about worldbuildling, plotting, and characters? Join us and we share what we love, what we didn't prefer, and our thoughts on this novel. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (29s): Hello, I'm Jesper and Autumn (31s): I'm Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 153 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And it is time for our Critical Reading of Jade City by Fonda Lee. And we'll be sharing our thoughts and views with the aim to see what we write as can learn from Autumn (51s): Yes, I'm looking forward to it because it was such an interesting story, but you know, listening right now, if you were planning on reading this book and you haven't yet spoilers, there will be spoilers. So keep that in mind. If you're listening, this is a critical review, not a blurb or a teaser. We're going to rip it apart and say what we love, what we wish had been different and see what else we can learn from this book. Jesper (1m 15s): Yes. And we also got a few remarks from patron supporters. So we will also mention some of that Autumn (1m 23s): As well. Yes. I'm looking forward to it. I happen to have read some of those comments and I'm kind of in agreement with them. So that'll be really fun. Jesper (1m 32s): I am for the most part as well. Autumn (1m 36s): All right. End of episode. No, Jesper (1m 38s): That was it. Go on. Read, read, threatened. That's it Autumn (1m 43s): Awesome. Well, how are things over at Denmark? It's been a little while since we talked, which was partially my fault. I will warn viewers now. I am still, I had a cold. It really knocked it. Wasn't COVID knock on wood, but it's definitely knocked me for a loop. So if my voice is a little hoarse or if I will, I swear I will cough. I'll either mute myself or he'll go away from the microphone. But yeah, there's, there's a chance I'm still coughing a little bit. So it's been awhile. This episode was supposed to be the previous one and we just couldn't get together because cold I've got to call. Jesper (2m 18s): Yeah, this was supposed to be 100 and episode 1 55, 2, and then it now turned out to be 1, 5, 3, and, well, it was a bit of a mess because we had to rearrange stuff and redo stuff and rename podcast episodes and whatnot, but we succeeded and we're here now. Autumn (2m 36s): That's what counts. So how are things been? It's been absolutely ages since we talked. Jesper (2m 42s): Yeah. Well now I don't remember if it was last week or the week before, to be honest. But we were in here during winter time, as I've said on previous podcasts, I started doing sea kayaking. So here during winter time, well, you can go out, see kayaking, but you need a dry suit, which costs a lot of money. So, and we don't have that, but then what we can do is we can go to the swimming hole. So we take the kayaks into the swimming stadium and we train in the swimming pool to do like, you know, Eskimo rolls is what we call them. Dana's I don't know what the English word is, but you know, without getting out of the kayak, you basically you're upside down in the water and then you learn how to get back up out of the water without exiting the kayak at all. Jesper (3m 31s): And I actually managed to do the first roll this last time when we went to practice for the first time I succeeded in rolling around. So that was pretty cool. Autumn (3m 42s): That is really cool. I've never managed to do a full one note. I usually, I was a whitewater kayaking so much smaller, like half the size of a ocean kayak, a sea kayak. And I still never quite learned the hip snap part to get myself fully back on my own. So that's really cool that you could advantage one. Jesper (4m 2s): Yeah, well, it was like a w the time before my wife succeeded doing it and she was just like, and she did it like 10, 15 times, like, like w what, what brown run around. And I was, and I was just so much struggling. It was like, fuck, I can't do it. And then, but then last time we were here in the swimming hole, we had a couple of instructors with us. So I think the instructor probably spent like an hour with me trying to explain how, you know, because it is really, I mean, when I succeeded, I was actually surprised to see how little muscle power you need to use it. It's actually, it's all about technique. You, you almost need to do nothing to flip around if you just use the right technique. Jesper (4m 45s): So, and, and if you like, like angle your body just slightly wrong, or you, you use your arm slightly in the wrong way, you're not going to flip around. So it's really about techniques, but it it's, I succeeded, but now of course, I'm concerned the next time we're going to go train, then I can't do it again. Autumn (5m 4s): Well, it's all muscle memory. So eventually you'll get it down with that as awesome. However, it's hilarious. Your wife was like, whoo, I'm just rolling. Like Jesper (5m 12s): Rolling around like, well, it's quite easy. Yes. That's easy for you to say Yeah. At the other than that, then a well on, in terms of working wise, we've sent book one of our new series off to the editor. So we're waiting to get it back from the first edit, and then it'll go to the second editor and so on, but, but we're getting there now. So, so that's pretty cool. And otherwise we've started to look ahead for 2020 and kind of discuss some of our future plans and so on. But I quite like this time of year when we're sort of reviewing, what are we going to do next inside? That that's always fun to me. Autumn (5m 54s): It is. I think it's it's so it's good to do that. You should do in your life. Should do it in your writing, your book, marketing, whatever you got going on. I think so many people don't take the opportunity to reflect and then reorganized and then hit the new year with maybe some new goals and some new operations and stuff. So I agree which again, you know, go figure we've we tend to agree on just about everything. So it's no surprise. We both enjoy looking over stuff. And I think it gets your passion going, if you feel like you're just doing the same old thing and you just need to keep plugging away at it, you'd lose the passion. And, and it's half the fun is getting that back and getting excited about things and what you're going to do for the next year. Jesper (6m 35s): Yeah, indeed. So how about you? What have you been busy with the last couple of weeks Autumn (6m 40s): Sick, but not much. I've well, I mean, I've managed to get the editing done and so that's been off and I'm going to be working, starting to delve into getting our website for dot com, going some minor, things like that. So I'm looking forward to really getting into that more, but I was surprised last time I was truly sick was actually right when I came back from London and in January, 2019, I got kind of the same thing, chills, really sick. And that really knocked me down for three days. But this one, it was funny. I started feeling better and then I'd be sick for two days and then I'd start feeling better. Autumn (7m 20s): And, oh, it's been a nightmare. I really thought I was surprised when I got the COVID test results back as negative. I'm like, really? If this isn't COVID, oh, there's some other nasty bugs out there. No one should ever have to go through this, but I have never had chills, like shaking so hard while I had a fever in my entire life. Thank goodness. My husband has medical wilderness medical training. Cause he's like, I wasn't worried. We're fine. I know what to do. But I was like, he's saying, right, this is not right, Jesper (7m 52s): But there is a buck like that going around because I mean, over the last two weeks, I was sick for a couple of days as well. And I wasn't, I didn't have the shakes like you're describing there, but I did have a fever. And I was absolutely absolutely sure that this is COVID because it felt like, you know, the, all the flu kind of symptoms, all the stuff that you hear about and, and your throat, you can feel it all the time. It was exactly like the symptoms described for, for COVID. But I also went and got a test and it was negative, but there is something going around like that at the moment. Autumn (8m 23s): Yes. I mean, none of our listeners catch it. It's not contagious through podcasts. Thank goodness. I Jesper (8m 28s): Don't think it's contagious through podcasting. Autumn (8m 32s): I hope not. But yeah. I mean, as I've described it, I feel like I've actually been sleeping with a hot water bottle. I feel like my internal thermostat, we, we speak in car language all the time. I'm not sure, but my thermostat is busted. It is not working. So please, if you find yourself getting cold, stay warm, make sure you, I was sleeping with a hat on and a hot water bottle and a coat. And it's just ridiculous. But yeah. Keep yourself warm and healthy and have a good December. Cause you don't want to get sick at the beginning of winter. It's I'm going to have a horse, a sore throat all winter now Narrator (9m 7s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (9m 13s): So I found a very interesting article on the internet that I just thought I would share here. Excellent. Because it's probably over the past month or something like that, I've been posting sort of different topics to our patron supporters about different aspects of PIP, big publishers merging together and sort of the effect that it might or might not have on us authors that all these big publishers are merging, you know, like low advances, lower royalty payments and so on. I mean us indie publishers, it's not so concerning, but for everybody doing the traditional publishing, then I've been just making different patron posts about that. Jesper (9m 55s): But then I found this article as well about a penguin random house and Simon and Schuster was, they are looking to merge in a $2.2 billion deal. Wow. But then the us justice department stepped in and blocked the merger. Did you see that? Autumn (10m 11s): No, I did not. It's funny. I read the news a lot, but I did not see that one. Jesper (10m 16s): No, no. So the U S justice department assessed that the merchant would create a two dominant market role and it would hurt authors and readers. What do you think about that? Autumn (10m 27s): Well, it's funny. I I've, I agree. We need competition. And so there are things to keep the, you know, something from developing into something that's not gonna squash competition, but then I like a Facebook and Amazon and Jesper (10m 43s): Facebook Autumn (10m 45s): And they haven't considered that dominating things. I mean, especially with Amazon bought good reads and they own publishing and, and there's like the dominant market, but at least they're trying to protect the brick and mortar ones. You know, it's good that they're maintaining some competition out there. Jesper (11m 3s): Yeah. I mean, from a publishing point of view, penguin is the largest publisher and they are launches rival is shaman, Simon and Schuster. So those two merging would generate like a massive dominance in democracy. And in my view it would be like unprecedented on re what are you saying, unprecedented? That was what I was trying to say, control of the publishing industry. Right? So I fully agree with the us justice department here. I think it's a good thing that they are blocking this, but of course the lawyer of penguin then claims that it would actually be good for the authors if the two giants merged and that the publishing imprints will continue to compete against each other is what he said. Jesper (11m 46s): I don't buy that for a second. Autumn (11m 48s): I don't buy that. I think it would give them a better edge to compete against Amazon, but Amazon is so far ahead and eBooks and they're just really, and they're pretty solid and paperbacks, but they're just delving into hard cover. So I think it would put them against each other pretty solidly that way, but I don't think it would help authors to have basically your choices, Amazon or whatever penguin and Shuster would be called. But I mean, to me, it's almost like Amazon decided to buy, oh gosh, I might just completely blanked, but where you buy your, where we're also have our paperbacks published Ingram, like Amazon bought Ingram, spark authors would be doomed, just doomed, but I don't think anyone wants to go under, but yeah, that is like the only other real competition for Amazon is Ingram spark. Autumn (12m 38s): And a lot of people don't even realize it. Jesper (12m 43s): Yeah. And Spotify just bought a find a way voices. Autumn (12m 46s): Wow. There's some shakeup going on. Jesper (12m 50s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want to be the dominant audio producer, just like YouTube being for video to Spotify, want to dominate the entire audio Margaret. Oh, Autumn (12m 59s): That'll be interesting. Jesper (13m 1s): But then you also saw, you know, of course that was like early in the year, but also Spotify buying Joe Rogan's podcast for a hundred million dollars and stuff like that. Right. So they're, they're really, you know, playing hot in, in trying to just dominate the audio market, which I probably think, I think, I think they're onto something, but of course from a content creator point of view, you can be nervous that it's going to be the same outcome as it was for musicians. I like getting paid pennies when it's paid on And when or music is played on Spotify and it could be concerned about the same thing here from, from a audio book kind of perspective. Now today bought find a way of voices that you also can end up in a situation where we authors are just going to get paid a few pennies per audio book play. Jesper (13m 49s): So that is a bit concerning. Autumn (13m 52s): I agree. It's yeah. Jesper (13m 60s): All right. So Jade city is a world fantasy award winner. It is, or it was named as one of the times, top 100 fantasy books of all time. And it was a Nebula award nominee for best novel. So, and I actually went, and now it's a couple of days ago, but I did go and check the sales ranking on Amazon. And I think you will see if you do that, that it's selling quite well. So there is a reason why we picked this book in the first place. Yeah. Autumn (14m 28s): And I have to say in some ways it really impressed me. I was so excited. I think by the time I hit chapter two or three, I mean, I was into it. There was no way I wasn't going to finish the book. So I can say that, but I don't know when we'll get there, but my impression at the end I'll let you know if I still felt that way. And I went on because it is a trilogy and there was a book two and a three. So I will say we'll get to maybe how I felt at the end of the little bit. But I will say when I first started reading it, it was unlike the last critical review we did, which was of the fifth season. That one, we were talking about tense changes. I mean, that was very much literary fantasy. Autumn (15m 9s): This one was true fantasy. Not, it wasn't even high fantasy. The setting and the time is more like Japan just after world war one maybe, or just after the U S you know, came in and started taking over just after Japan. Now I can't even remember the date that is, but when Japan opens up to the rest of the world and goes from the Shogun period into a modern era. So it's right at that cusp, there's guns, there's different far-flung politics, but this central very strong government that is used to a very traditional way of doing things and the clans are there. And it's, if you like Kung Fu movies, it has so much of that. Autumn (15m 50s): It was really exciting. I kind of, yeah, I've kind of, it's just like the Grisha of universe. I'm kind of really liking that these a lot of fantasy that is not just medieval, it's really pulling up to different time periods now. And it's kind of like, well, this is, this is different. This is exciting. I'm really enjoying it. Jesper (16m 10s): Yeah. Okay. I think I will, I will not give my overall sort of a conclusion on it. I think we'll talk through it. And then if it's not clear by everything else I say, then I can give my, my final words on, on this book by the end. But I think just as Autumn said, in the beginning of the episode, we are heading into spoiler territory now. So a B one, if you haven't read this book and want to read it, you probably want to stop now and then come back once you read it, and then you can listen in and see if you agree with what we're saying here, but yeah, from now on, you'll have been warned. Autumn (16m 46s): That is very, I think that's been clear to warnings, you know, what you're getting into if you continue on from here. Jesper (16m 53s): Yeah. But so I've made some different notes that sort of some, let's say places where I feel like I can, I can sort of drop in and talk about something, but there was no specific order to this. It's just like different notes on different thoughts. And then also some comments from Stephen, both from good reads our Goodrich group, but also from, from patron. So I have some comments of his and I, I picked some of the comments where I also have a, have you on what he says. So it's sort of like, they are good talking points. But I think first of all, I could start by saying this book is really well written. Jesper (17m 37s): I really feel like, you know, it, it evokes feelings and, you know, the way she described things though, the characters and they do make me as the reader. No, I'm able to picture the scene in my mind when things are happening. So, So that is really well done. So yeah, first, first let's say item on the list is just that it is really, well-written Autumn (18m 3s): Definitely, I think it is worth reading. It is a fun book to read. It is engaging the, again, the world is a different little bit of different time period. If you do like Kung Fu movies, it has that the magic system. I'm sure we'll get into that as well with the Jade and the green bones, the only people that kept kidneys who are the ones who can actually use Jade, everyone else is if they touch it, they're either, unreactive, there's a few people who are in the world who are unreactive to Jade, but the rest of them can basically become addicted. It's like opium. Maybe it's a good substitute for that, but it also gives you really amazing powers. So it's, it's sort of the magic system. And it's really fun. Autumn (18m 43s): I liked that it's tied to a traditional item, that it works in very set ways when she talks about like, you can do this with it, you can do that with it, but it's really hard to do both. Some people are more powerful. They can take, they can wear tons of J jewelry. And there's other people that, you know, you put on five and that's your Bakst out, that's it? I like that there's variation. And it depends on who you are and your heritage. And that there's only this one select group of people, the Keck honeys, who are truly there, the Jade warriors, the green bones who can wear this. And it's also knowing a little bit of Japanese history and Chinese history, how important Jade was, you know, they, they buried their emperor's wearing Jade uniforms. Autumn (19m 25s): And so I'm like, oh, this is it's tying in history. And it's, it's, it's Jade. I love stones and I love green, so, oh, I just liked this matching system. It really resonated with me. Jesper (19m 37s): Yeah. Okay, cool. Because at one of the points that I had written on my list here is really a question mark to my cell is that it's this magic system. Really? That unique question, mark. It was what I wrote on my, on my list because it's basically just superpowers. I mean, yeah, you're using the Jade to, to get your powers, but it's nothing more than that. I mean, the more I thought about it, the less unique I actually feel like the magic system is. I mean, it's fun and all that. It's not, not that, but if you're looking at it from a uniqueness point of view or trying to create something new, then I really don't feel it is that, I don't know if that's fair to say, but Autumn (20m 14s): I think in some ways, I mean, it's based on a lot of traditional, you could substitute any stone instead of Jade on any universe. I mean, I know I've read other ones where it's just a, sort of like the L stones of Shannara. You have stones and you can do something with it. So I think it has a very strong heritage in the same aspect, but I liked that she tied it in to a culture and a history. But again, I also know, and we'll probably get into that or we can get into it now, but the Jade is tied to a history that, again, I keep saying Japan, this is not supposed to be Japan. It's supposed to be Keck, knees and kick on. And that is, I think to me was the biggest weakness is that it was so obvious what country it was and the time period and the era that I was just like, can we just call it Japan? Autumn (21m 6s): It felt like it's an island. So I felt maybe this is supposed to be Okinawa. There's the one area we're against, which to me is the Korea, is which Japan has a huge history of fighting with the Korea. And then there's this sort of English slash for some reason I kept thinking of Spain, but it might be because it was started with like Espana, you know, it had that kind of name to me. So it was like an English slash European foreign power as well. It's just like, it was so obvious that I was like, make it either more different and truly unique, or just call it what it is, because it's not even a filmy gray layer. It's pretty apparent what you're trying to base this on. Jesper (21m 49s): Yeah. I think, I think that's correct. Not necessarily that I think that's a problem as such. I mean, I know we've talked about many times doing our monthly Q and a session with, with our students and, and patron supporters. And so on that if it's a horse, call it a horse. Right. I mean, we set many times, but I, I'm not sure it's a problem as such a, that, that you are sort of mimicking, mimicking close off of some, some real life place, because on the other hand, if you call it Japan and then they were running around with Jade powers, that might, that might also feel wrong. But I, I don't know, but I don't necessarily think that's a problem. That's probably like a, you know, taste kind of thing or opinion thing. Autumn (22m 34s): Some people, yeah, I think some people will not mind it as much, but I, and I was comparing it to like the Grish of books, the Grisha verse, which has also has some key aspects that are very much based on cultures of this planet, but she does a really good job of anchoring the history into her novel it's they develop out of the novel and they have completely unique aspects based on the world. I guess I was, I like my fantasy, just a little bit more fantasy. And this was so close to the real world with just a little van veil of difference that I was like, well, I wanted to see, I think, a little more different. I wanted a little more traditional, a little more history based on the world she was creating for the book rather than something that, oh, I could let me go check Wikipedia and make sure that that is what, how it happened. Jesper (23m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. I, I think on that note, I could just sort of inject the comment we got from Stephen on Goodreads, because it sort of goes very much along with what you're talking about. I think because Steven said a quote here, we have a very Earth-like world where technology is straight out of the late seventies, early eighties. Yeah. So that's just me saying he he's in a different time zone or time period, and you are thinking about it, but okay. Then back to the quote, they have cars, they have guns, they have landline phones, they have vocabulary is completely from modern times. Lee basically took the idea of a Jade based magic system and shoved it into a culture of Oriental gangs from the seventies. Jesper (24m 8s): And right. So, so he's thinking that this is like late seventies, early eighties, where you're talking about after world war one. So there's a bit of, let's say change there, but, but again, I'm not so sure that I fully agree with the fact that their vocabulary is completely from modern times. Like you said, well, maybe it is, but I don't necessarily think that's a problem. I mean, this for me, this is a fantasy setting, so who knows how they talk? I mean, but it goes very much along with what you were talking about. Like, it feels like depends or why not just say it's Japan and so on and so on. Whereas I just think, I just view it as it's a fantasy setting so she can do whatever she wants and maybe it is indeed heavily inspired by some real life cultures and real life locations. Jesper (24m 52s): I don't disagree with that. I also think that it's it's, it is that just like Steven is saying, and like you were saying as well, but I guess I'm just not seeing it as a problem. Autumn (25m 4s): I, and I think that just comes down to personal taste to me. I'd like to see it. I would like to, if I didn't understand a word, like how the people greet each other, there is language used and I'm pretty sure all the language use was Japanese. And I basically could have put it into Google translator and checked it. I think there's a part of me who said, I would rather have that as a fantasy language, make it up to fit your world and don't just make it so that I check it. I did not, but I, I had assumed that I probably could have with that a lot, except for the place names that some of the greetings, some of the words, some of the language, the traditions were very much based on real things that you could Google or check on Wikipedia and double-check. Autumn (25m 52s): And I was just like that's Yeah, to me, I'm like, I would rather have that just shifted a little more into fantasy. Otherwise it w it felt a little not cheating. It just felt like a little bit more work could have been done to make it really have like, wow. That is fantastic. That is so cool. Instead of going like, yeah, I read that the other day in an article on Wikipedia. Cool. Jesper (26m 19s): Yeah, no, fair enough. Fair enough. But I have another call comment as well from, from Steven, which this time I very much agree with him. So I, you ready for this one? Is it also about culture and stuff? So he says a quote. I think if a culture had such a magic system for many centuries, it would have drastically all areas of history and industry in such a way that the world would be a very different place. How would Jade have affected the countless wars over the centuries? How would it have affected the world governments? How would it have affected technology? She doesn't really answer those questions and quote, and here, I really agree with Steven, because if you just imagine, like you take these Jade warriors and you put them in some sort of special forces in the military, I mean, there's nothing they couldn't do, right? Jesper (27m 16s): I mean, yeah, you have guns and stuff. You can shoot them. But, but I mean, if they are like, especially the forces and they sneak in behind enemy lines, I mean, just, they can wreck complete havoc and there's not much you can do to stop them. So, and I don't think that she really concerns herself with, with the fact that wooden governments also try to find ways to basically leverage these kinds of people and conquer other countries and stuff like that is it's never mentioned really from a building perspective. I just felt like that was stuff that could have been explored further here. Autumn (27m 56s): Yeah. I, there, I completely agree. The one thing I did like is that she does have the kind of European foreign power is trying to develop a drug to allow them. Yeah. So yeah. To allow their military to also be able to use Jade and I mean, it has bad side effects. It basically makes you addicted. It can completely overreact. So there, I like that. That was a really cool aspect. But looking at the history, basically all the history you have of Kay Khan and the Keck Annies and the Jade warriors is that they were kind of guerrilla fighters. There was a foreign country that was controlling them and they came down the Hills, they fought for freedom and a revolution, and they want it very, very recently, but it's just like Jesper (28m 39s): Taking over the Autumn (28m 40s): World. I know it gives, like you were saying, I mean, you have these guys train, they can deflect bullets. They have the power to do that. There's like six major powers and one of them is deflection. So yeah, you have some ninja like trained warriors. You could go assassinate just about anyone. Jesper (28m 58s): I have a super fast speed and they have super strong, you know, super strength as well. So I mean, there's almost nothing they can do. Autumn (29m 7s): No. And it's neat because she does have setups where it's like, it's really hard to do two of those at once. It's almost like you can only do one at a time unless you're really, really good. And you have to be well trained. I mean, there's a school you go through. I don't know how many years of schooling, just to be able to learn, to harness this energy. I loved all of that. But again, once you became a full blooded Jade warrior, a green bone here, pretty much it all, it's like, it all was just clan in fighting to control this tiny nation where it's like, they, their history, these people should have rulers. They should have been gone. Like there's mentions of being descended from gods, but it's not developed the point to explain that why they were so insignificant in their own culture prior to this period. Autumn (29m 55s): And I agree with Stephen wholeheartedly, it just felt like it was missing. And if this was a real, real, real fantasy culture, their history would have probably needed a lot more explanation of why they weren't ruling other countries and incredibly wealthy country and a huge superpower because they got skills. Jesper (30m 16s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And then that's the part where I don't quite understand why they're just sticking to the small little island here. I mean, why? I mean, okay, fair enough. I mean, gang fighting and stuff like, you know, it is basically the gangs fighting each other and so on, but, but come on. I mean, the government would have stepped in and say, say, Hey guys, you know, you're going to be filthy risk rich, all of you, if you worked for us and, and we go out and we conquer some nation, other nations, I mean, they would have done that. Autumn (30m 46s): I agree. And I Jesper (30m 49s): Could have just now. Yeah, I was just about to finish my, my thought because they, she could just have mentioned it as a short paragraph somewhere, just saying for whatever reason they didn't want to, or, or just give some sort of explanation to why, and then that, that would have been closed. Right. But because it's never mentioned, then it just makes me wonder. Okay. Autumn (31m 10s): Yeah. And I think, again, this is where she was relying way too heavily on the history of Japan because they did close their borders for two centuries, 200 years. They basically were not open up to the rest of the world until the U S came in with a steam ship and basically opened up a country to, from the Shogun era where they're using samurais to basically fast forward, within a matter of years to a full industrial nation. And if you know the history, you're kind of like, oh, she's just basically assuming this is what happened here. And just mentioning instead of the shoguns, as it's the warriors in the mountains and the revolutions and the gorillas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Autumn (31m 50s): But that doesn't work that's, this is supposed to be a fan of it. Doesn't it's not explained with the magic system she has. And that's where, again, I have the problem that if you're going to develop this culture and this history, and it's a different world, don't just rely on what happened in this world, because it doesn't fit. It's going to leave you these disjointed things that I'm like, I don't understand why this would happen this way. Jesper (32m 14s): No, I agree. I, and one of the things we talk a lot about in our world building causes, basically making sure that you analyze what are the wider consequences of the magic system and of the things that you develop in your world, because it will have impact on other things in society on other nations may be in this case and so on. So it's not that you have to play that all out, meaning that just not like the needs to then conquer the world or stuff, but, but at least you need to think about what does it mean? And then if we, I don't want as an author to have the conquered the world, then at least I should have an explanation for why they didn't do so. Jesper (32m 54s): And, and in the same vein here, Steven also said, if Jade is such a powerful substance, has anyone tried to harness it as a power source, the lead through line in there somewhere about scientists studying Jay to find other users, but to no avail, because it only enhances people of bloodline. I would have been able to accept that, but then it would have brought me back to my initial question of why would those J powered S J powered supers have been content with just their tiny corner of the world? And then we're back where we started. Right? But again, I mean, this is again the wider, the wider consequences of having J powers. Jesper (33m 37s): And if you can really get that many powers out of a Jade stone, then I understand what Steven means in terms of, it's not only about military strength here, right? I mean, you, you probably would wonder as a government as well. I wonder if we can use this as a power source for other things, right. And again, like Steven also says, it's not that the fund, the leader needs to make that into something she could, like Steven says she could just have made a small paragraph some way explaining why they tried and they failed and decided not to go any further or whatever, and then fine. Right. But I'm, I'm really missing from a worldbuildling perspective. I think it is a really cool setting. Jesper (34m 17s): So don't get me wrong. I think it's, it's quite cool, but that what would have just made it even better would have been some, some consideration about this wider consequence of the Jade powers. And I really feel that it's completely missing. Autumn (34m 36s): I then I completely agree with you and Steven, that is just, there's something missing. I mean, there could have been any explanation why Jade warriors were limited, why they, they were sick. There was a disease, something just, I wanted some explanation of why they seem so minimal. They were just figure, you know, they had Klan leadership, but it was just this little island. Why not more, but I also want to get into the character is because I think Jesper (35m 4s): Just thinking about, Autumn (35m 7s): You know, we haven't talked in like two weeks and it's, we're still in the same Playboy that's, that's good. But that was, I think my other love and hate of the story were when it came down to the characters, they were well-developed. They were interesting. They had very strong personalities and there were two I wanted to really bow. Well, I guess there was three I wanted to bond with the one was the clan leader who was land. I really, he was my favorite up until okay, very big spoiler alert. He dies. And up until that point, I was really excited. Like he did not want to be the leader of a clan during a war. Autumn (35m 49s): And that's where this world was heading. There was going to be a clan war. And he was basically the only one trying to keep everything together. He didn't want, he wanted to be, he was an awesome, peaceful clan leader, but I'm like, I want to see how he changes, how he transforms and boom kills them off. So I was like, Ugh. And I also, there was Shay, which was his sister and I wanted to like her, she had gone out and explore the world and come back. And there was a few chapters in there where it was like, do I go back to my clan? Do I knock it back to me? And I got to the point, I'm like, just make a decision. I was getting a little sick of her indecision and I never bonded with her because she was just too wishy-washy. And the only other one I kind of liked was Emery Andin. Autumn (36m 31s): Who was the one who was the young Jade bone who had quite the backstory. His mother was like too sensitive, went bad. His father's European. Well, okay. Quote, unquote, European. We're just going to call him that. And he, so he's highly sensitive to Jade. He can do amazing things with it, but he was also too emotional there's times. I wish he was a girl, but then I would have been really annoyed. He was so emotional. At least as a guy, he was like, oh, okay. A really emotional guy. That's kind of different, but I didn't bond with him either. And at the end of the book, that is actually what kept me from buying book two is like, this is interesting. I have some questions about the world and the Jade and the magic, but I really don't really care. Autumn (37m 13s): They killed off land and I don't really care what happens to any of the characters enough to make me go buy book two right now, maybe if I have some spare time later and that's prized me, I was really all set to love this book, but I didn't find the character that really made me want to turn the next page. Jesper (37m 33s): No. And funny enough as usual, we agree here. I mean the only one that slightly had my interest until he was killed, but because it's like, I feel like from the very first page, the worldbuildling really comes into its own. Right, right. Immediately you're sucked into this pretty cool setting. And I was very hooked in it. The first couple of chapters, like this is really great pot. Then the character building and making me as a Rita care for those characters never really happened. It's also, I feel also it's a bit difficult to care for characters who are part of a crime syndicate and they just heard each other people and stuff like that. Jesper (38m 16s): And it's that alone that in his own, it's a bit difficult. It's like, it's like the, the short story we wrote as a prequel for our new series, basically the main coats are there is, is one of the villain in the, So that also they it's, it was a to make, make a character to read us would actually care about because he is actually not that good of a guy. And I feel like that that's the same problem here. Yeah. That it's just like, there is no real character development. I feel like there's real. No, no real care to ox. It's just like a straightforward standard gangster succession story. Jesper (38m 59s): Really? That's it? Autumn (39m 0s): Yeah. I think you really put your finger on it. What, there's no character arc. I was, I thought li like I said, the land had some potential and I was interested to see where he grew too. And he dies. And that was the only one who really, I saw a potential arc to even Emory. I thought at the end, he totally acts out at the perfectly perfect storm moment to not act out in a culture where you don't act out, insult his family, insult everyone, like a huge slap in the face to his family. And I was just like, I wanted some reservations. Like I understood as a writer, why you would do that because to me, you know, you're Writing Fantasy. Autumn (39m 42s): It's always like oceans are supercharged. Things happen, you know, big drama, but I just wanted some restraint from his character to show some sign of growth of thinking beyond his own needs. And yeah, he was being used. But again, in the family setting, it was kind of, he needed to have been used at that point. And it was also an opportunity for him to grow and he just didn't. And I didn't really, I just was so disappointed in him at the end of specifically where I'm like, okay, maybe there's potential. And I was like, I really don't care what happens to him after this. And like I said, I had that one thought I'm like, gosh, it would have been interesting if he had been a strong woman, because there's only a couple of strong women's because it's a very patriarchal, very patriarchal society, even though it's written by a woman. Autumn (40m 35s): And I thought, well, I, I didn't connect with anyone. And that's really a shame because it's a kind of, it's the story itself had so much potential. Jesper (40m 46s): Yeah. I mean, of course this is a Critical Reading episode, so we are being very critical. I mean, I would say it, isn't an entertaining read. It's a good book. So, so, so, so it's just us being very critical here because it's a Critical Reading episode, but so I'll continue in the second way and being a bit critical because what I also felt like I would really have liked some sort of surprised or, or twist about something, just something, but everything was so straightforward that I really felt like, not that I could predict everything that would happen as such, but I, and I don't know if Lee, maybe Lance Beth, you could say was a bit of a surprise. I was, I actually, I was not expecting him to die. Jesper (41m 29s): And so that was a bit of a surprise, but know, but I, I dunno, it just felt too straightforward if you know what I mean. Autumn (41m 37s): Yeah, no, I do. I see, I was kind of, I knew land was either going to die or he's going to have an awesome character arc. And I was so hungry for that character arc and it didn't happen. And I was a little surprised at how they used Emery to defeat the other clan or, well, it wasn't really a defeat defeat, but how they used him and his power, but it completely made sense. And if you were paying maybe attention to embryo a little bit more, you would have totally seen where that was coming from. So everything very much built off of everything you expected to in the story. And there was no huge surprise twist. There was no women coming in to save the day, which, you know, I always hope for, but it didn't happen. Autumn (42m 17s): I was true. Everything was just a little too stuck in its box and stayed there pretty tightly. And so there, I kind of agree. I, I wanted something a bit more exciting, something a bit more surprising and it never developed. I was actually really holding up when LAN the night he dies, he gets a letter from his ex-wife that he had let go. He was way too nice of a character in many ways for the world he was in. And I always wanted to know what was in that letter. It was like the hanging threat. I was expecting her to say, well, actually I left and I was pregnant with you. And I just he's, he's your son and or your daughter, which would have been really awesome. Autumn (42m 58s): And I it's time she come back and begin her training with you. I would've been heart-stopping Lee so excited, but they never actually mentioned the letter. He puts it in a drawer and no one finds it. I'm like, is this in book two? I don't. And again, that's, that's about the only curiosity I have is what was in this really thick letter edits. At least I'm curious about it, but you know, if there had been some tea, some tea, but it would have been better to end book one with someone having found it and opening it going, oh my gosh. Then I would have been booked to right there then. Autumn (43m 38s): Oh my gosh. Jesper (43m 40s): Oh, lots heat from Rita's if you did that. Oh my God. They said, Autumn (43m 44s): I know, but I would have bought it in this, in a heartbeat just to find out what was said. So I didn't have that draw. And again, I agree with you, this book it's worth reading. It's entertaining. It's beautiful. If you love kung-fu it is such a fun book to read. I think book two and three might be worth reading. I mean, the reviews are astounding. The book sales are astounding. It's probably worth reading. Yeah. But I wasn't drawn to it enough, but I think there is, there's something to learn there as a writer that there's something missing with a character or something. A lot of people, even Steven had mentioned, he didn't connect with the characters. Jesper (44m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. And of course a Windell, everybody could then say, yeah, that's nice. You guys are saying that, but this is, is this a top 100 fans as you broke it of all time. And so neighborly award nominee for best novel and so on. Yeah. And fair enough. Yes. But we can only speak of our own opinions here. And, and if I'm very honest about it, the only thing in my opinion, I can say, I don't understand why it is that highly praised. It's a good book. Yes. It's a good story. Yes, it is very, well-written great. Worldbuildling maybe with some, some missing pieces, like we talked about here, but I don't feel it's that good that it should be that highly pre I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm just, I'm just weird and I'm not like everybody else. Jesper (45m 9s): And fair enough if that's the case, but I dunno, I enjoyed it. Good read, good entertainment. But if I hadn't known that it was a award-winning novel like this, I would never have guessed it. Let me put it that way. Autumn (45m 23s): Agreed. I think I I've read some indie fiction that I think topped it, rivals it and tops it. So it's interesting that it got picked for us is such an award-winning and so touted. I think there's a lot of great books out there. It's no better than a lot of them. I mean, well, okay. It's better than some of the really rough ones, but it's on par. It's a good book. It's entertaining. There's other ones that are probably more exceptional. But other than that, again, it is my opinion. It was worth reading, but wow. I can only complain to complain to have the problems she has with how well it's doing good luck best for her. I'm so excited. Autumn (46m 4s): I wish every author who wrote that well or on par could do as well. Jesper (46m 10s): Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think one last thing I had on my list to mention here, because this is really something I've learned, not from this novel alone, but sort of from all these kinds of bestseller novels that we read over the, I mean, we read, we went one before as well for the, for this podcast. But outside of the podcast here, we, we have also had like what, four or five, something like that, very best-selling books that we've read over the last month, but just because we were trying to see what are the common denominators in these books and what I have learned, and this book is exactly the same. And I've been surprised about this because it's not, I guess my standard preference, but I just have to admit as well that after reading all of these massively successful bestsellers, what they all have in common is that they are fairly slow paced all of them, this one as well. Jesper (47m 8s): You know, it, it takes time before things get going. It's not that nothing is happening, but, but it's not a fast page. One way that you like flipping pages to see what happens next. It it's fairly slow paced. It takes a time with where you spent just spend time with the characters and all of these very, very successful novels. They all do this. So I know, I know some people sometimes say, will, it feels a bit boring because not enough is happening, but at the same time, I just have to, you know, concede and say, well, apparently that's what most people want. That's the only conclusion I can draw because I've seen it over and over and over again now. Autumn (47m 48s): Yeah, no, I agree with something and it's definitely not to my taste. Like I said, there was probably two or three chapters. I'm like, you could have cut one of these out. Oh my gosh. It's so slow in the beginning. Especially without the character development more. I think, I think that could have been stronger, but yeah, a lot of these incredibly best-selling books are slow paced and there seems to be a lot of time just spent dilly-dallying and learning parts of the world. And oh, remember when I read, there's a lot of cooking and food descriptions and I'm a foodie and I was getting a little tired of the cooking and the food description. That's a lot of cooking and food descriptions. Yeah. Jesper (48m 26s): No, I mean, don't get me wrong. The point, the point with slow paced is not to be boring. That's not what I'm saying. Right. I mean, if you just have chapters cooking and nothing is happening, that is boring. That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm more things are happening and things were also happening in JTD, but it just takes it time with it. It, nothing is rusted, you know? Yeah. It's just a slow paced. Autumn (48m 50s): Yeah. Slower than you might think. If you're writing slow and you think it's slow, you might be okay. Read a couple of these books and see how you, you measure up. Yeah. Jesper (49m 0s): Alright. Anything else on your list autumn? Or is that it? Autumn (49m 4s): That's it? I think we covered all my big topics. So I will just say it is a good book. It's worth reading. There's also a lot of great authors out there, so yeah. Go check out a book. All right. Jesper (49m 17s): That's good. So next Monday I have a great interview lined up for you and I hope very much. You're going to enjoy that one. So see you then, Narrator (49m 30s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Jasper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Do you wonder if you've avoided stereotypes in your writing and been appropriately sensitive to people of different races, ethnicities, or neurodivergent? There are aspects to look for as you write and edit to make certain you are aware of how what you've written will be perceived. Plus, there are sensitivity readers who can help you out! With special guest and sensitivity reader Iona Wayland, Autumn covers some tips from tying mental health to character arcs to checking yourself for outdated language which will help your writing cast aside stereotypes. Find Iona on her website at https://ionawayland.wixsite.com/author and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/iona.wayland/ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Autumn (31s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And this is episode 153 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this week we have, yes, we're on vacation and taking a bit of a break, you know, I guess he deserves, but so instead I have with me a different author and sensitivity reader and someone who writes fantasy and I'm so looking forward to talking to her, so welcome to the podcast. I own a Wayland. Iona (59s): Hi there. Thank you for having me. Autumn (1m 1s): Yeah, I'm so excited. I, you said you're a tea drinker. You're a pet mom. This is going to be so much fun. And I even like the sensitivity, I can't wait to talk about that because I know my first story, my first passions were like, well, you know, we have these giant epic fantasy quests and no one ever seems to come out the other side with like PTSD. So that was one of the first things that I thought of when I first started writing back in 2010. So I cannot wait to talk to you, but first go ahead and introduce yourself. I know you have your book, ashes and talk is tell us a little bit about that and tell us how you decided to become like a sensitivity reader. Iona (1m 45s): Well, I, and my day job is a trauma therapist and by night, so to speak, I write and ashes is my debut. It's a dark fantasy novel. It has a Latin X main character named Angela. And she has to decide if she wants to journey and avenge her brother's death. And so it's those trials of figuring out herself in the midst of trying to save her brother. Oh, Autumn (2m 16s): That is cool. So yeah. So he's dead. Is it saving his soul or saving him or is that giving away too much of the book? Iona (2m 23s): It won't give away too much. He is, he is dead at the beginning of the book, but it explores what was behind his death and what is behind like what his soul needs to pass on. Autumn (2m 36s): That is so cool. I love it. Well, that is because I looked at the cover. I'm also a graphic artist and I saw the cover. I'm like, cool. I like this. This is a very nice cover. So, Iona (2m 47s): So glad you like the cover. I designed it. I'm not, I mean, I'm not talented, like what you're saying, but I did design. I was like, this is exactly what I want, please, if you're able to do that. And they were so Autumn (2m 60s): Nice. Fantastic. Well, yeah, it came out really nice. I do like it. So, wow. You've been working with trauma. So that's already your interest in your background and a, did that bring you to writing or have you always been a fantasy reader? Always wanted to be a fantasy writer. Iona (3m 15s): I've always been a reader and a writer to the point where before I even could write, like I knew the alphabet or anything, I would watch cats out of like alley cats out of my window as like a little kid and right. Loop de loops. And that was my version of writing stories about the cats that I saw. So ever since then, I've just always wanted to be an author. And I've definitely, definitely a reader. So fantasy is the main thing, but I really like all genres. There's not any that I dislike. Autumn (3m 47s): I think that's one of the benefits of being like an indie author, that if you want to do a cozy mystery slash fitness slash something, we can mash those up and turn it into something really special. Iona (4m 1s): Yes, it's true. It gets very niche. I love it. Autumn (4m 4s): Yes, very much so. So before we get into some of the topics and I think it's interesting, so it sounds like your, your writing tends towards inspiration, which is a super cool and more like noble bright, but I have to ask what your favorite type of tea is because I never get another tea enthusiast on the podcast. Iona (4m 22s): The hard, oh, that's so hard. Well, right now I'm drinking an English breakfast, but oh man, my favorite tea, I have to say chai tea, which isn't really specific. Cause chai just means tea, but I like the spice tea for sure is, is so delicious. And I I'm really into bubble tea right now. Yeah. I definitely have that as like my Wednesday treat to myself middle of the week, treat to myself, I'll get a bubble tea. Autumn (4m 54s): Oh, I love that. I'm not anywhere close to any place that sells bubble tea. So I will live vicariously through you for that one. Yes. Iona (5m 3s): I definitely got lucky. Yes. Autumn (5m 5s): Oh yeah. Well, chai tea again is a perfect answer for this time of the season and the fall. We're recording this in October. So yeah, we're all in the pumpkin spice attitude right now. Iona (5m 16s): Yes we are. All Autumn (5m 18s): Right. So this is, Ashley's your first one. Are you working on something else right now? Or are you going to Iona (5m 24s): Actually working on a sequel? But there was a bunch of very happy but intense life stuff popping up. That was really good and wonderful, but it also made writing go on the back burner for a little bit, but I am working on the sequel to that. And the goal is to make it a SQL within the same universe. And the main characters of the first book are mentioned, or maybe even run into, but it is like a different main character. Autumn (5m 53s): Oh, I like the ones like that, especially where you can, you know, work in somebody from a previous book or a different book. And they just do like a cameo. That it's Very cool. So yeah, I was like reading about what you do and as, as sensitivity. So you have to tell us what a sensitivity reader is and how you came up with that idea. But I was going to say, looking at your own writing, you like, you like to look at grief and surviving trauma and finding purpose and strength. And when I read that, I'm like, oh, you probably liked the, as someone else put it what's considered traditional fantasy, but they decided to start calling it noble bright, which is, you know, it might go dark, but there's always that hope that's buried in there rather than everything being dark and dire. Autumn (6m 37s): And you're wondering, I remember one of the first dark fantasies I read it was really closely and in a sister died, everyone, this person cared about a diet and he's trudging through a swamp and I can never remember what the purpose, you know, what the final target and goal was. And I'm just like, you know, if I was this character, I would just lay down in the swamp and I'm done. So that's the other side of dark fantasy, but it sounds like you try to pull out a little bit of that hope in the healing. Iona (7m 5s): Yeah. I definitely am healing focus and it's not saying that it's necessarily a happy or what the character expected to have happen. And there's still trauma from those experiences. And at the same time, I feel like healing is such a beautiful, intense process that all humans are capable of making that. I just wanted to make sure I depicted the human experience in that way and my writing for sure. Autumn (7m 34s): I love that. That is so, you know, it's touching and it's, I love not, I it's one of those things when you're writing, you know, some people like have a moral compass and they're, it's almost like the fable where they're like doing a morality play and they're pushing the novel that way. But I do love it when you have characters. And like you said, it's almost like a twist or it's not what they expect. It's not what they fear, but it's a different result. But I do love the power of that change. The character arc, you probably work on that specifically is to see a character go through this trauma of face it and come out the other side one way or the other or somewhere in between. Iona (8m 14s): Yes, exactly. I love some good character arcs for sure. Autumn (8m 18s): Oh, is there a special one that you like to see? Like, is there something you've recently read as a sensitivity reader or even when you're writing or just a book you picked up and you're like, gosh, that was a good healing. You know, what made you think this is not only realistic, but just a very solid character, a character arc and maybe a little bit of a surprise. Iona (8m 40s): There was one. So this is actually from a TV show that I've been watching and it's an, it's an older TV show, but I, there is this character that was really annoying in the beginning and, and he was kind of insufferable at times and very emotionally immature. And as it's carried on, you could tell that his character arc was instead of being insecure and overcompensating by being kind of obnoxious, he was like, no, you know what? I can do this. And if you believe me, then, then great. But if you don't, I'm still going to do it anyway. And he got to be like one of my favorite characters by the end of it. Iona (9m 23s): So I thought that was pretty cool too. I had that whole, like this guy's like really annoying. And I wonder if he's going to be written out. That's how annoying. And it was really cool to see him thrive. It was very neat. So that is something that recently popped up for me. Autumn (9m 40s): That is fantastic. That's actually something I wish I had done in my debut novel. I've a character that he's, I would describe him more as overly sensitive, maybe sliding towards manic depressive with highs and lows and often making bad choices. And I I've actually had a few readers be like, oh my gosh, I can't stand him. I want to skip his chapters. And I don't think I really ever healed him if I ever go back to the story. I think, cause there's always is, I've done two trilogies. And I like even things like three sets of three, it's just, I'm half tempted to write another third set and I might have to finish up his character arc where yeah. Maybe people will not want to like drown him. Iona (10m 24s): It can be done. That's what you decide. Yeah. So, but that is real. That would be a really cool character arc to see having someone have like peaks and lows like that, being able to find more of a stability in between. That's pretty cool. Autumn (10m 38s): It was. But I have to say, especially having published that on in 2012, I've had definitely people not see why I did that. Like they want to have an easy character. They want a character that makes sense. And a character arc. And literally there's times he doesn't make sense because he just, he's got emotional highs and lows that don't always jive with. What's going on or a little extreme on either side. And I do see that as an issue, even though I try to bring out the nuances, like he's a little different in the society, he's a little unhinged, but to other people who are more stable, it's just the way he is. But I think people are getting a little bit more now. Autumn (11m 19s): I mean, it's been almost 10 years since I wrote it Iona (11m 25s): Here since then. Autumn (11m 27s): And what's crazy is how much society has changed. I see a lot more nuances in characters where they are, maybe there's some mental health issues and other things. And that's brought up a little bit more even in fantasy where I think before it used to be more in nonfiction. So I think it's a little more understood, but I would say, I don't know if you would give us any hints or tips on that, but if you're writing a character that does have some stresses like post-traumatic or mental health issues, cluing the reader in that you're not just throwing a crazy character and making them erupt just to like make the plot tense, but that it's actually a character issue, an internal thing that's going on. Iona (12m 9s): I really liked that. I love when people are able to not like to show the nuances like you're talking about and show that it's an inner character struggle and how it shows up for that character through symptoms is a very cool when people are pulling them off in the correct way. There's not that there's a one way that is what's hard. And there is not just one way, but that's where sensitivity readers come in. Where, so I, I read that's so sensitivity reading is where there's someone with expertise or the life experience or both. And they will read through a manuscript that has not been published yet. Iona (12m 54s): And they will point out depictions that may be harmful or inaccurate. So they, they really edit for inaccuracies in that regard. And then also I do diversity reading too, cause I'm a mixed race woman of color. And I like being able to help in that regard as well. Autumn (13m 14s): Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, and that's so important with so many people being more interested in writing different perspectives and viewpoints and races and cultures, even when you get into fantasy. I mean, even a dwarf is different from an elf versus a different color or other race. So that is cool that you can bring that out and see if the experience is, you know, like you said, authentic and valid and not just being cliched and stereotype. Iona (13m 44s): And in writing, like I think most authors and writers would agree that writing is very powerful. It depicts what's going on in our world. It shows even if it's in a totally different realm, it shows what the author's points of views are and what those characters points of views are and what they see. And so it's, it's really important to make sure that the representation is accurate so that there's not a perpetuating cycle going on from generation to generation. Yeah, Autumn (14m 17s): That's so true. I mean, I know I was paying attention when I was, I just wrote a fake contemporary Fe fantasy, urban fantasy, and part of it, I have, I'm a native American as a native American, more of a spiritual being and to not fall in that cliche of the native American, who is a Sage and knows all the answers or, you know, all these other, you know, to make him an authentic character who happens also to be a native American spirit who also has this history that he actually kind of doesn't quite understand, like so many teenagers are like, yeah, great. My grandfather's is great, dude. And he's like go out to the forest and go to class. And I'm like, so it is important though, because sometimes we don't even realize the stereotypes were contributing to. Autumn (15m 7s): I mean, I was just at a fantasy con and I was on a panel for women and fantasy and we decided that it was women characters, not just women authors. And I pointed out that so many times in the U S as a student, all of our examples are here and it's always he and she, or something, you know, the is always first. And I'm like, you know what? Screw that. I started all my pronouns. All my example cases are now female. Or sometimes I'll do 50, 50, I'll switch back and forth. But I always start with the woman for us. I always put she first because why, why is the default he, and you know, it only took me like 40 years to figure that one out. Iona (15m 47s): And there's so many different, like nuances to, to gender expression and experiences and stuff. Like why start with he? You know, I love that. I really love that. Autumn (15m 59s): Yeah. And even like you were saying, I mean, I just finished the late bar to go the Grisha verse books and oh my gosh, kudos to her. She has non-binary transgender. I think she has it all. And it was so fantastic to read. I'm like, this is, I can imagine the fantasy I read. Cause I grew up in a very conservative, very Christian, very rural place. And I know the fantasy, I read changed my perspective of who I became and I'm thinking my goodness, if I could have read the Grisha verse when I was 13, 15, and they thought Dungeons and dragons was bad, the water, Iona (16m 42s): I think that shows the power of writing and how, why it's so important to have accurate representation. It can really change people's lives. It's truly incredible. Autumn (16m 51s): So, I mean, as a, so as a sensitivity reader, what are the steps that you do when you look to help an author and what you're reading, what are you looking for that says, this is an authentic experience versus a, this might be, you know, the wrong way to go. Iona (17m 6s): Oh, that's a good question. Okay. So one of the things I see most often is when certain races or ethnicities or mental health experiences are experienced, like a monolith. So like, like there's, there's like three examples. So like, let's say let's use depression. That's something that a lot of people experience and struggled to overcome or do overcome. And that is something that I think what a lot of people think is depression means sad. And so if that's the only presentation of depression, there's nothing that shows what actually is making that depression for that character. Iona (17m 48s): Like everyone sad, but depression is different. There's way more reactions and symptoms that someone can go through. It can be very different that could be having difficulty getting up in the morning that can be staring off into space in the middle of the Workday that can be forgetting to brush your teeth or take a shower for a while. And then being like, oh shoot, how long has it been or not having the energy to do that? Or some people even experience physical pain of that. So I look for if there's any like broad strokes over simplification of mental health or any other kinds of experiences in the author's work, I think that way I can be like, let's be a little more specific. Iona (18m 32s): And how does it show up for your character specifically? Autumn (18m 35s): Oh, I saw like that. It reminds me of like, you know, I often teach like writing with the five senses. We still rely on visual. And then we might have sound because dialogue is sound, but it's like touch, taste. All of these other things are a way of experiencing the world and doing your world-building. It helps bring the world to life if you can touch it. So you're saying the same thing, like with depression, you know, even to me, I'm a huge foodie. So it's like losing that drive for like good tastes being like, yeah, it's just whatever, you know, that's all a sign and it also gives more depth to your character and more depths to the experience. Oh, I liked that so much. Iona (19m 11s): I'm clad. And I'm glad you talk about the different senses. I remember my world being like totally blown away when I learned that there was more than five senses. Like not, well, there's the five main ones, but like, there's like balance. Like if something feels off kilter, there's heat, hot and cold. There's Like, I there's like 20 more or something like that. But I remember like at the very least let's bring in the five senses, but there's also all these other things too, that we can add on there for the whole experience. Autumn (19m 41s): Exactly. And I always looked at it even the sixth sense, the traditional sixth sense is mind or soul spirit. That's where the mental health comes in is it's not just intelligence, but it's how well you deal with things. And that is such an interesting, you know, we talk about personally Nally tests to develop your character, but looking at just how reactive, how adaptive are they mentally to big changes. Some people are going to break very quickly and some people are going to be surprising and they're going to be able to change and flow, but eventually something might trip them up. And it's, it's part of knowing your character, knowing how they're mentally and emotionally handling the things you're these hurdles that you're throwing at them or letting them fall in love and then yanking of that away, how are they going to be like, oh, wow, there's a deeper impact to those things. Iona (20m 33s): Definitely a consequence. Yeah. Deeper impact for sure. Autumn (20m 38s): Very cool. So what are some tips resize? You know, don't so we have don't, you know, don't just dwell on one aspect, like, you know, definitely do your homework. Are we going to have a character? Who's depressed, looked at some of the other symptoms that are there. Like if they're manic, depressive, understand what the highs and the lows are and find a way of, of explaining that. Like I said, I can see readers being still startled. If you have a character that is truly going through a mental health crisis or has some issues, and especially when you come into across it and fantasy, it's not still not traditional to have those things, but they're creeping in there, but it helps to clue in the reader somehow saying I'm not just being over-exaggerated of this one character. Autumn (21m 22s): There's a real reason. I mean, is there some clues or some tips you can give us that are a way of letting people know that this is, you know, this, these are the things that are happening to this character or for a reason on purpose. Iona (21m 35s): Yeah. I, I definitely tell people to develop the character first, develop the character first because having a mental injury or mental illness is not a character trait. If someone's like, oh my gosh, they're so anxious that doesn't really tell me anything about the character at all. That that is just conveying a diagnosis or, or someone questioning if maybe they might have this diagnosis, like I want you to know, are they extroverted, introverted? Ambiverted do they out loud process, internally process? Are they quick to anger? Iona (22m 15s): Like, do they have a quick fuse or are they really patient? Like, how do they process the world? How do they react to other people? What is, what do they hold, dear? What do they push away? Those kinds of things. And then, then you can add the diagnosis because you already know your character as a person. Because I think that they'll sometimes there'll be writers who will have someone have their villain origin story is that they are bipolar. And it's like, well, that doesn't really tell me anything. There are lots of people who are bipolar. There's different kinds of bipolar. Iona (22m 56s): Like tell me about your character first and then just show through show. Don't tell, really show me what their symptoms are. And I think that's important to remember also not to always villainize those with mental health either. Cause that's a big thing that I see very frequently. And it's kind of cliche now. I think. Autumn (23m 17s): Yeah. I was just about when you said the villain being bipolar, like, oh, but isn't that a stereotype too? I mean, that's just like the joker or something in Batman it's should not always be the mentally ill who goes off the deep end. You can have a way. I think it's interesting. Cause I've even read fantasy recently where there was someone who was going through issues. And I think the elves came up with a drug for them. I'm like, oh my goodness, we're getting into pharmaceuticals. Now this is fantastic. You can be a healthy, productive member of society and how, and just be different. You know, my nephew actually has Asperger's and he and I, it kinda runs in my family. Autumn (23m 57s): We're all very literal. Like if you see a sign on the road that says like road drops 500 feet, our immediate thought is the road is going to fall 500 feet. Once we have a very literal interpretation, but it's just a different way of seeing the world. It's just our lens of the world is slightly different from most other people. But again, what is most other people? What is normal? This is normal for me. Iona (24m 23s): I don't think there is such thing. I think normal is made up as a therapist. Joke is it's a setting on your washer machine and Autumn (24m 34s): That's true. It doesn't say average, like normal cycle. That's true. I like that. I'm going to use that from now on to defend myself. Iona (24m 44s): And I do think that what you're saying is like, yeah, like you process the world or family members are on the spectrum are autistic and they process the world in a different way, but it's also not different. It's also just how you process it. So I would love to see an autistic character with those kinds of like the ability, the different abilities and disabilities portrayed there with that disorder. I don't even like calling it a disorder. It's it's someone not knowing and I'm, I am not neuro-typical so I'm neurodivergent myself. So I think that it's very cool to see all kinds of representation in writing. Autumn (25m 28s): I think it's important too. And that's one of the things I do love that. I mean, I did grow up in the eighties and it seemed like all the, it was all the male characters, you know, He-Man or something and they're wearing swords and they're going off and saving the women. And I was, I was always at least neuro atypical enough to usually just be able to put myself in the place of the hero. It didn't matter. I was a tomboy. I think, goodness, I actually just realized this the other day that my brother never said I couldn't do something because I was a girl. We were like playing Cowboys and Indians together. He let me play with his matchboxes. I'm like, oh my goodness. How much of my weird view of life comes from my brother? Autumn (26m 8s): Not treating me like a younger brother instead of a little girl, all the way down to trying to draw and quarter me once. But we won't go there. Iona (26m 18s): My choice of sibling relationships, Autumn (26m 22s): I love writing about them. They're so horribly wonderful, but it is true. It's it's those different viewpoints and the diversity of viewpoints that make even a quest group. You don't want every single person the same. And I know one of the advices I give is like, if you're having a problem telling your characters apart, which one, your readers will then have a problem, but give them like a totem. I'm like this, one's the Fox, this one's the out you to do something so that you understand their differences, some kind of way of seeing them differently. And I think that goes for even how they, Iona (26m 57s): Especially like, if the person's like indigenous and they understand the backgrounds behind, like what totems mean, but if you aren't indigenous and you want to try something else, you can also do like, smells this one author. Now I forget who said it, but that doesn't help. But she was like, you, you can use smells like sense and like, imagine that their candle, what would it be? I know for me, sometimes I'll imagine characters wearing certain colors, just because color is so important to me and having those different, like connections with color and, and what they mean for me and how I can tell like my characters apart and what makes them different from each other. Iona (27m 40s): Yeah. Autumn (27m 41s): That's when I wrote my debut, that was how I managed to get into character's head. I actually wrote in a different color font for each of the characters Iona (27m 49s): And that's so helpful. It Autumn (27m 51s): Was so helpful. I could, I knew then to stay, if I was especially, I was trying to do all chapters in one point of view. So I knew to stay. If I'm in red, I was in tie and I had to stay in Thai and it really helped me learn a lot better. But I, I liked that smells. That also gives you a totally different perspective and reminds you to use your other senses. Iona (28m 12s): It does. I really hadn't thought of it until this person said it. And now I wish I could remember this person's name. Autumn (28m 18s): Okay. I am sure. Well, you know, Google, I would say we can Google them, but yeah, that sometimes doesn't work. There's just so much out there anymore. Well, that's really cool. So you, I love that you do this kind of reading and sensitivity reading for both mental health, as well as races and stereotypes. And when you do it like character arc wise, what are some tips you can say for like showing a character shifting from the one side of their art to the other, like, are there good turning point issues or what are ways of showing that the, you know, they're becoming they're healing and moving on? Iona (28m 60s): Oh, that's a really great question. Something that I think is helpful to show with healing is that it's not linear. So I think a lot of people, even, even their expectation for therapy sometimes is like, okay, I'm going to have like six sessions. And then on the seventh one, there'll be a big epiphany and then I'll be fixed whatever that even means. And it's like, well, that's not quite how it works and that's not how it's going to work for characters either. So I think it'll be cool to show like, you know, they, they, their tolerance might get longer. Like when they usually are like really quick to anger, maybe show that their tolerance before they blow up is lasting a little bit longer and a little bit longer, or they're able to tolerate another character a little bit longer than usual. Iona (29m 54s): Or if someone has a hard time accepting accolades or like compliments, then showing that change in their effect from being able to just brush off, be like, no, this is it's like, wow, you really saved me. Like you're a hero. And then being like, I'm not a hero. Like we see that so much in fantasy. Like I'm not a hero, I'm just doing my job. But getting to a point where they're empowered enough to accept that they did something very difficult and very brave and courageous is very, very beautiful. I also love because I love seeing this cause this is how it happens in real life is when people regress. Iona (30m 34s): So there'll be these accomplishments, these accomplishments, these accomplishments, and then they might use, they might break a little and use an old maladaptive coping strategy that they don't, they haven't used for months or year or whatever. And then they go back to doing that. And then they're like, oh, was this all for nothing? And of course it's not all for nothing but showing that like, I've been different. I've been, I'm different now. Like, but why did I do this? And showing how they come back from that again and again. And I know someone told me once that healing is, is kind of almost like cyclical, where it'll go in a circle, you're going forward like a wheel. Iona (31m 18s): But it, you have some patterns that you have to break out of that takes some time and you might repeat them. Autumn (31m 25s): Oh, I love that. I reminds me of the anagram, which has like the nine stages for each of the key personality types. And so it's like, yeah, you can move up and down the scale. And it's not just villains moving down, but you know, you can have a character that starts really high and they can go down and they can go back up and they can go back down. I mean, I know, I remember again, one of my characters, one of my favorite characters and he starts off pretty high. He's pretty kick ass, but he, his, the second book, there's a huge event at the end of the second one, he loses his sister and he, he just kind of crumbles and he slides down and some people were really mad at me, but I'm like, this is legit. Autumn (32m 11s): This is, you know, people go through things. I've actually, I've lost siblings. It's you changes you. And I'm surprised that some people didn't want to see a character go down, maybe have, who went from a positive arc to a negative arc in one book and then came back up to the third book. That's what the trilogy is for. Right. Iona (32m 31s): Absolutely. And that's how it is. Like you're saying in real life, like grief, that's something that I heavily have heavily explore in ashes. Is it? I think they used to think that it was like the stages of grief. It's not stages, that's a swinging pendulum. I don't know what's going to happen. We don't know. And you can go move back and forth all throughout your life for the rest of your life. It's going to affect it. You're going to miss that person. And that's what I really wanted to show. And there are times when Angela, my main character, she will sometimes handle things really well and use her resilience and use her, like I'm going to do this for my family kind of attitude. Iona (33m 16s): And then there are other times where she's like, wow, what am I doing here? Like even going to work. Yeah, it's true. Autumn (33m 24s): And that's a stick. And I love that. And again, I mean, we just because it's fantasy and a fantasy setting or has magic doesn't mean that the emotions aren't real. I mean, that's how we can pretend to be a dragon or pretend to be an L for any other species that we come up with. Is those really the emotional connections. And that's also what draws us to characters. So that's why I think explaining it to that as someone who has an experienced grief or hasn't experienced someone in their family who is, has mental health issues might not quite, we'll actually get it a little bit. And I think that's really important is to not just make some people go, this doesn't make any sense, but try to draw out the realism and say, this is, this is how it is for some people. Iona (34m 9s): And I think that's really important. Autumn (34m 11s): Yeah. Well, is there any other tips you can think of that you think would really help writers, you know, talk about how to write, even we talked a lot about mental health, but even bringing out cultural differences, how not to fall into those stereotypical traps or how to even question, you know, when you're developing a character as, or a certain point where you're like, where do you stop and ask yourself, am I just being a stereotype with this person? Iona (34m 38s): Well, it's hard to know what biases, because we all have biases that we don't know about, which is why it's a lovely to have critique partners. I, my advice is to include the community, if you can, like of whatever you're writing about. So like, if you're an autistic person and you're writing an autistic character, then you should have some autistic beta readers. If you're not able to do, I have obviously support someone doing sensitivity reading or having a sensitivity reader, I should say, but if the person doesn't want to do that, then having the community help them. And then being very open to feedback about that. Iona (35m 20s): Because I think even though we can have biases, if we have certain disorders or if we have certain backgrounds like racial and ethnic backgrounds, I think there's more room for biased error when we don't share that. So that's why it's so important to include the community there and just making sure to unlearning certain things does not feel very good, but overall it will improve your writing. Autumn (35m 51s): Oh, that's so very true. And I know as it's, I love question, I swear. I didn't question anything as a teenager. I've made up for it as I've gotten older, but Iona (36m 3s): That's part of being a teenager, Autumn (36m 9s): But it is very important. I think, I mean, when I sit down to create a character and I go with my first gut assumption is like a female or a male and I've always stopped. Why, what color? You know, why do I feel like it should be that way? I think that's so important is to question basically it's exhausting. But when it comes to your main characters or even your sub characters, I know I was reading something, helping a writing coach with something. And it seemed like every default character was a male. The doctor was a male, the nurses were female. I'm like, come on, wake up 20, 20, 20, 21. Even know your doctors are now female. Your nurses are nail male deal with it. Autumn (36m 50s): And when it sneaks in there and sometimes I think you're right, I saw it because I wasn't on the author. And so I really noticed it. I mean, I think if I went back to something I had written ages ago and I looked at it with a clean slate, I would also go like, oh my gosh, why did I choose that? Iona (37m 8s): I've definitely looked at my old writing and been like, well, I've certainly grown because I know these certain thought processes are not accurate anymore, but you never have really thought they were. Autumn (37m 23s): I think, I think we all deserve to be able to grow. I always feel bad, even if it is for politicians, which it's hard to feel bad for politicians, but you know, once like 20, 30 years ago you voted on this, oh, for goodness sakes, let them change. People can change their mind. Over 30 years, your writing will change. Don't be afraid, I guess, to try writing a different culture, writing a different species. I know with my first books, I remember thinking I wanted a fantasy race. I didn't want ELLs. What color should they be? And I was thinking black. Yeah. I was trying to go through everything, but I want it to be fantasy that finally made them their skins, the color of bark. Autumn (38m 4s): So, you know, go ahead. Be different, come up with something totally new. That's fine too. Don't be afraid of trying it, but yeah. Make sure you probably check in with someone else. Some beta readers, some sensitivity readers to make sure you're not off the wall and going to, Iona (38m 21s): Yeah. The bark thing reminded me. This is not me saying your elves are bad. They're gone. It's not, I promise this is something totally different. It just reminded me of that's something that has, has changed a lot is the description of eye, color, hair, color, skin, color. It used to be that apparently, apparently everyone's default white for some reason. And then, and then anyone else would be compared to food. And so they would be like, so they would be like chocolate skin or like mocha caramel. Iona (39m 3s): Yeah. And that wasn't really, I mean, I'm sure it was harmful because anytime you've described someone as food related, it's like, that's a bit othering. I would think. Especially if you don't do it for one race, like the white race, it's cool to see like how that's changed and how authors, like there are authors who didn't know that that was harmful. And they learned, and they were like, okay, that's an easy fix. And they just put that in there. And I love, that's what I love seeing like as a sensitivity reader is not the mistake. I don't care if someone makes a mistake because it just is something that they're going to grow from. I, I, I do care if they don't listen to, not that they have to, they don't have to rewrite their book or anything. Iona (39m 50s): Usually sometimes that does have to have it, but it's just like, are they listening to the feedback of like, Hey, here's a bit of educational piece as to why this isn't working 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it may have worked, but we found that it's harmful. And so, and here's why, and here's a way to do it a different way. And when people are like, oh, that makes sense. We'll do, I'm like, see, that was not difficult. Autumn (40m 21s): Yeah. And it's, it's so much better to get it on, you know, from a sensitivity reader versus seeing it as a review on Amazon or good reads and being blasted for either cultural appropriation or being harmful with stereotypes, Iona (40m 39s): It hurts. It can hurt a lot of people. It can, it has the potential to, yeah. Autumn (40m 45s): We're in a global community, in a global society. And so all of our stuff, as much as we wish it was simpler, you have to be culturally and mental health. You have to be aware that all of these things are out there and you should write the best you can. And I still say, there are times where you might choose to do something that's a little harsh, but always make it a choice, have an answer. If someone says, why did you do this? If you have an answer that's legit. That's Iona (41m 13s): Fine. You were intentional with it. Autumn (41m 15s): Yeah. Just being intentional. I like that. Iona (41m 17s): Yes. The intentions. And I like what you were saying too. Always question your motivation. Why, why, why? And then be intentional when you write is, is so important. And I think that's very, very cool. Autumn (41m 31s): Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And of course, I'm going to put links to your webpage, but pleased to go ahead and tell people how to find you. So if they're interested in learning more about sensitivity reading, that they know where to look you up. Iona (41m 46s): Yes. Okay. So I am most active on Instagram and that's Iona dot Wayland and I'm sure you'll have that information too, but my book is available in ebook paperback, and it just released as audio book. I was very excited to work with Melissa Medina. They did a wonderful, wonderful voice of Angela and brought her story to life beautifully. And then on my website, if you have inquiries about sensitivity reading rates or questions or anything of that sort, you can send me an information. You can send me your question or your manuscript or whatever, have you through my, at the very bottom of my webpage. Iona (42m 32s): And you can sign up for my monthly newsletter, Autumn (42m 37s): The newsletter. I might go back and get that because I think that'd be, I want to stay in touch. That'd be fantastic. Iona (42m 44s): Thank you. Autumn (42m 46s): Great. Thanks again so much for joining us and next week. Yes. For we'll be back. Actually he'll be solo and he'll have another fantastic interview lined up for you. Narrator (43m 1s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

A Game of Thrones has inspired characters who contain such strong good qualities, like honor or justice, that it can lead to his or her death.  And writing classes teach developing characters with strengths and weaknesses to make them well rounded. A heroine can be a skilled warrior AND too self assured.  This makes a more complex character, one that is beyond two dimensions, but what about a good character that just loses it and takes the first punch? In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper discuss the Evil Within. The episode is inspired by this blog post: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/the-evil-within/ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper Autumn (32s): And I'm, Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 155 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And when studying the craft of writing, we learn about creating characters who are well-rounded, who have weaknesses and strengths. But what happens when characters unleased the evil within? Autumn (55s): I like this topic because, well, I do like gray and nuanced characters. I like fillings with good traits and I like heroes with not always the best of traits. I think it makes them more relatable. So this is going to be a fun podcast to explore the dark side of your heroes. Jesper (1m 14s): Yeah. Yeah. Autumn wrote a blog post quite a while back for the AmWritingFantasy a block. So that's sort of the starting point for this conversation. I guess you could call it at least that's what inspired us to dive into the pool of evil to The Autumn (1m 34s): It's good. It's the good evil pool, right? So it should be kind of, I don't know if it's shallow early, deep in a couple areas, but we'll figure it out. Jesper (1m 42s): Yeah, yeah. That's yeah, that'll be interesting. We'll see where it takes us. Autumn (1m 47s): So how are things over in Denmark? Jesper (1m 51s): Well, not much as chains, to be honest since last week, you know, I'm still just preparing for the referee instructor class and practicing presentations. And I had a meeting the other day with, with my mentor. And so, yeah, I still have not gotten back to writing at all. Autumn (2m 11s): Well, I think you have enough going on that. That seems fair. Plus, it's giving me time to read book two so that I'll be ready to help plot book three. So take your time. You're good. Fine. Jesper (2m 25s): Good. Don't worry about it. Autumn (2m 27s): You deserve the break? Jesper (2m 30s): Yeah. Well, something funny. I wanted to mention, you know, how in the master mailing list, because that we have available for sale on I'm Am Writing Fantasy dot com total block there. If somebody wants to check that out, but, but you know, in that course, how we talk about how you can possibly segment your email list? Autumn (2m 52s): Yes. I remember that. Yeah. Jesper (2m 55s): Okay. Yeah. So our insurance company should really learn a bit about this segmentation of email lists. Yeah. Autumn (3m 3s): Oh, Jesper (3m 5s): The letter from the, or an email rather, from the insurance company yesterday, and then I logged in to read what this message was about? Because I was not expecting any message. So I was like, okay. And then I read that email from them and they just wanted to let me know that in some cases they have not treated cases concerning pregnant, pregnant women in the proper way. And they want to let me know that this would change going forward. Okay. That was exactly my thing of like, okay, I'm not a woman. I don't think I'm pregnant. At least I don't, I don't believe so. Jesper (3m 48s): So I was just thinking maybe you should learn a bit about segmenting your email list, at least at least segment between men and women. I think that should not be too difficult. Autumn (3m 59s): Well, maybe they thought, you know, in case you wanted to let your wife know that, you know, the car and send the message to her. I agree. They should have been able to figure that one out. Jesper (4m 10s): Yeah. I mean, may, maybe there's something about it that they thought like they wanted to inform people, you know, in general, like a general information that we are sorry that we have. I mean, I fully understand the message, nothing wrong with the message there. Right. It's good that if they had discovered that they have been doing something wrong and they recognize it and they would want to correct it, I'm all for that very good, good information. Right. But couldn't you just like maybe put an announcement on your website or on your blog or something to say, like, I just, I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand why they're sending out emails to males, letting them know about pregnant women and how they, how they handle cases for pregnant women. Jesper (4m 50s): I don't quite understand. Autumn (4m 52s): I didn't understand either. They took the least, they did the, Jesper (4m 58s): Yeah, yeah. Maybe it was the intern who was at work that day. And it was like, who am I supposed to send it to? I don't know. Send it to everybody. Okay. Autumn (5m 7s): I can do that. I don't know how to segment. Oh, there you go. Well, you know, I guess it's better to be over informative, less informative. Maybe they just never had thought about putting a gender question in their information. Jesper (5m 25s): Well, they have like a, what is that called in English? I don't know. Dennis Deniz is like, you have a, it's not a social security number, but you have like a number, you know, what is it called, named you don't you have like in the U S like a number in the official systems for you yourself, you know, Autumn (5m 49s): Their social security number. Jesper (5m 51s): Is it that in your yeah, but, okay. But anyway, they do have that number, a numbers ending on equal numbers is women and unequal numbers are men. So it's not that difficult to work out. Autumn (6m 6s): Yeah. And it's not like that over here. It's pretty random. Jesper (6m 10s): I couldn't imagine. Yes. Why am I not surprised Autumn (6m 14s): You threw something at the wall? It seems to be working at least it hasn't collapsed in weight yet, so we're good. Jesper (6m 21s): Well, okay. I'm not going to comment on that. Autumn (6m 25s): That's what I covered. Comment on the U S government. Please Jesper (6m 29s): Know, that's what I was thinking. Autumn (6m 31s): This is not a political podcast. Jesper (6m 34s): No, just let it fly. Let it fly. Didn't hear anything. So, but how I think so on your end, Autumn (6m 42s): Pretty good. Just a lots going on doing a little bit of actually be doing a little bit of a seasonal job and just rearranging life and we're going to be moving. And we have some extended family worries with mental health and old age. So that's, you know, weighing on us and, but the good news is at least I've had some gotten to create some really awesome book covers recently. And I'm on like the last chapter for magic unleash. So I'm just moving it up and got to check some of the weird character traits that we came up with, especially dialect. So once I finished that off to the editor, so I'm really excited and I can't wait to delve into the second book, which is being dark gods. Autumn (7m 28s): And then we have to figure out the plotting for the final book and the name. We still only one, we have a name, so we Jesper (7m 34s): Have no name for us. Autumn (7m 36s): So we have to name it and we have to come up with the plot. So that's all going good. So, you know, there's, there's bright lights here and there and mid the murkiness life chaotic. Eventually I keep saying this, eventually my life will settle down, but yeah, we can hope I have hope. Jesper (7m 55s): I hope it's a good note to end on Narrator (8m 0s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (8m 6s): So just a couple of thank yous to share here today. First of all, Pamela Payne joined us on Patrion. So thank you so much for your support, Pamela. Yes. And we also have moose beard. That's actually the name that it goes by on Patrion, but it must be at rejoined us as well. So thank you for that. We really appreciate it. Autumn (8m 33s): Yes. I enjoyed the conversations with moose beard. I know I've talked to him a couple of times in the past, so I'm excited. He came back to us after a little hiatus and it's wonderful to meet you, Pamela. Thank you so much for your support on Patrion and we're well, glad to have you. And it's my responsibility to send you the book cover bookmark that comes with joining. Yeah. Book covers. Sorry. I've got book covers on the brain, but bookmark and it we'll do that tomorrow or Thursday. I promise. So if it's late, it's my fault. I'm sorry. Jesper (9m 7s): Yeah, it happens. But if you haven't checked out patron yet and all the different rewards that we do offer to support us over there, please follow the links in the show notes. And Joel also just to reiterate a patron is the only source of funding we have for this podcast. And to be very honest, we are not Sealy seeing nearly as much support as we would like there. So please go and check it out. Autumn (9m 32s): We appreciate it. If you do support us, thank you so much. Narrator (9m 38s): And onto today's topic. Jesper (9m 41s): I actually re-read the block post the evil within this morning, Autumn. And you started out by talking about using arsenic to poison loved ones and neighbors and stuff like that. So when I started reading, oh, you almost scared me from this, from this. Autumn (9m 58s): Did I tell you I was into poisons that it was an article? I think an Atlas Obscura that got me thinking about this topic. And it started with talking about when arsenic was banned and how prevalent it had been used to kind of take care of some members of the family or neighbors or how many people actually poisoned people with arsenic. And I was thinking not all of these people were bad people. They were people who had LA you know, they might've had kids. They had people they loved in their lives. There was just for some reason, one person or hopefully one, we're not talking about serial killers, just someone they wanted to get rid of. Autumn (10m 43s): And they would use this readily available poison. That was just, you could just buy it at the corner store. And there was very little repercussions from getting as much of it as you wanted. And the symptoms are pretty benign. You could mistake it for a lot of different illnesses. And so a lot of people seem to have been off over the centuries. Jesper (11m 6s): It sounds so horrible. It's just like, I'm just imagining like everybody going to the corner stores and buying an awesome Nick for everybody. They don't like, Autumn (11m 15s): Oh, it's like others that, oh, there's a play. What is it T in our snake or T old lace in our sticks, something like that to you, an old lace. I can't remember the actual title, but it was sort of the same thing as like someone invites you over to T bury the hatchet between you and yeah, they're going to bury something. Maybe not a hatchet. Be careful when you're invited for social calls in the 18th century, I guess in 17th century, not the best time. So I thought that was, Jesper (11m 48s): It's easy to get your hands on. Did he say anything about that in that article Autumn (11m 53s): Regulated? I mean, this was before regulations and things like that. You could, I mean, at the time you can get Bella, Donna, there was a whole bunch of stuff that pharmaceutical that were used as like an, a pocket pocket potluck carry. There we go. So you could just pick this up. It was used to poison rats in LA, you know, other critters vermin around the house, not necessarily your neighbor, but it was Jesper (12m 16s): Readily from many different things, including, I mean, there was a time where it was on a wallpaper. It was used very well. The first wallpapers were almost coated in our Snick. So we just didn't understand. We kind of knew what was poisons, but when we realized how badly it was poisonous, except for the people who were using it to kill off people like guess, oh my God. Yeah. Just imagine that somebody worked it out then this like, Hey, got to tell you a secret. If you don't like that guy, take this bottle, put it in his tea. He just see how bad it is. And then, and then all of a sudden, everybody knows. And isn't like, where did this all start it. Every time you go to a cheap nowadays, you have to be scared. Autumn (12m 59s): That's horrible. Yeah. But anyway, this is a podcast about arsenic and how to, how it was once historically prevalent way of getting rid of people you no longer wanted in your life. Oh, a numeric. But about those people who were probably, you know, good people, maybe they went to church, they were had led good lives, but something made them do something very evil. And it started making me think about even our characters, especially often fantasy, you know, people talk about superficial or cardboard characters. And I started thinking about, well, how often do we really explore the depths or the evil within our heroes? Autumn (13m 43s): Instead of just having, you know, you, we do these lists of traits of, you know, they like blue. They hate their little sister because she wants, stole their favorite toy or something. We make up these stories that go with our characters. But often we don't include like a truly bad character flaw, or even when it comes to just doing a bad action, maybe they just lose their temper. And that was one of the places I really started is what happens if your character, this good person just fricking has a bad day. They've been hiking. They've been struggling, especially if they're not the hero. Autumn (14m 24s): Maybe they're the side character or a sidekick. And they're just a point of view character. And they've gone through all of this quest for their bestie best friend. And they've stood by and they've been hurt wounded. They're sick, they're tired, they're muddy. What did they just snap and just yell or hit or punch, or just go down to the Tavern. And they don't mean to take it out on somebody else, but they're not going to go hit their best friend. And they end up in a brawl. I'm thinking, this is, this is a character trait. That's kind of interesting. Why aren't we exploring more of the evil within our good heroes, Jesper (14m 60s): But it humanizes to protect the nest, right? I mean, having them sometimes make mistakes or just not being the perfect hero. It, it humanizes to me, I think it makes the character more believable and more likable. In fact, I mean, not, not likable because they do a bad thing, but more likable because you can relate to it. You know, you know that that from yourself, you, you can get, you sometimes get angry and you do or say things you regret because you were too, too angry. So having a protectiveness that sometimes end up in that situation as well, I think it's actually a good thing. Jesper (15m 41s): Maybe sometimes as writers, we are too concerned about having the character, always being the likable person that does all the right things. And so on. Maybe, maybe we think too much about it and maybe we just need to dial it down a notch and make them more human. Yeah. Autumn (15m 59s): I think that's such a good way of putting it. I mean, it's, we do relate as a, we've all had those moments where, you know, if we, if you, there were new repercussions, how many times would you just like to go ahead and hit your boss or just, just act out and actually say what is on your mind? But we hold ourselves back. But the fun thing about fantasy is, or any fiction is that we can actually explore what happens if you don't or what is that straw that will break you or break your character and make them act out. And would that be the interesting, usually we have the dark night of the soul and it's based on the character being stubborn and refusing to admit something. Autumn (16m 41s): But what if it comes out that they just don't want to admit that they're wrong about something? What if they do something stupid or horrible or they act out and do something that's wrong and they have to come to a reckoning about their own actions. That's also a very powerful dark night of the soul. And we don't explore that that much and fantasy, it's usually a consequence that happens to them. But what if they're the cause of it? Jesper (17m 6s): Yeah, that's a good point. And I think as well, it, it's not only about the relationship between us as writers towards the reader, but it's also between the characters themselves. You know, that, well, sometimes even having a character who is just like the completely unlike unlikeable or unrealistic love interest, our way, you know, like this is never going to happen. And then in some way, on one way or the other, it ends up happening anyway, between the two characters, like I saw, I saw on good, you know, they have this list, Topia stuff, different kind of things, and listed together. Jesper (17m 54s): And there is a list called couches, hate each other, then fall in love. And there's 263 books in that list. So it's kind of a thing. Autumn (18m 4s): It is kind of a thing, oh, they often I've seen it in real life too. That sometimes people who aren't getting along is because they are too similar and maybe their traits that they need to accept about themselves. And once they do, they can bond, but there's a lot of learning maybe self-learning before you become, can actually get along with this person, who's sort of like your psychological twin. So that is also a good way of, of looking at it is yeah. The characters who should get along, but end up not, but end up then falling in love. That's a fun twist. Jesper (18m 44s): Yeah. It's a, co-talk basically you're talking about there, right? I mean, it's, the coats are realizing maybe something, I think it's more powerful when they realize something within themselves, you know, they realize their own floor and then they figure out how to conquer that floor. And because of that, then they get to fall in love or something like that. I mean, I think that works really well. Autumn (19m 9s): Definitely. And the other thing that I thought about with this is, you know, what if your Good Characters are actually the ones who act first? Cause that's another thing we often see. It's the main heroes, the Good Characters are the ones who are reacting to the antagonist, to the villain. So they're always good ones. They're the ones trying to solve the problems. But you know, if you have a nuanced villain and he's, or she is trying to do stuff in the best of their interests, but it's just rubbing your heroes the wrong way. What happens if they actually are the ones who attack first? What are the ones who go in? Autumn (19m 49s): Cause you know, they go attack the guards or they go attack a village. They do something that's more hostile, even though they're doing it out of the good, what they see their good interest. But that doesn't mean they're always necessarily going to act good. And that's, I mean, it's a theme I explored in my first trilogy, the one of the last scenes in the last book. Well, the beginning of the chaos of the last book comes because the heroes go to save someone who's been kidnapped, you know, but they're being held hostage kind of cruelly, but the person is still alive and they go to rescue them and they're just so angry. Autumn (20m 29s): They act out violently, they destroy some beautiful temple, this wonderful thing that this has been sacred for centuries. They end up destroying it. And then the bad guys, well the quote unquote, bad guys really have a reason to go and attack the heroes because now they're pissed off too. So something that maybe could have been dialed back with some talking like, Hey, you stole, you know, you kidnapped our friend. We want him back. Jesper (20m 57s): Can you please get him back? Oh, okay. My mistake, I'm sorry. Autumn (21m 8s): Maybe they didn't have to go into a full world scale war, but it does because they act out really aggressively. They overreact to something that they shouldn't have. And because of that, they technically hit first. They are the ones who started the whole war. I mean, if you look back in the history books, they always say, the Victor is the one who writes them. But if you looked back, I think they would be like, well, we should probably shouldn't have gone and done that. But that's sort of the difference. I mean, that's a fun topic to explore. If you have a good character with bad traits, are they still good? Autumn (21m 48s): And I've thought about that. And to me, my answer is a good character can do bad things. They just regret it later. They realize their actions were wrong. A villain will do good things and they'll do bad things, but they'll justify the bad. They will have a reason. They did it. And they're like, it's fine that I killed a hundred people because they were going to just get in the way. And they were stopping progress. Well, they're just testifying. Jesper (22m 18s): I killed a hundred thousand to save 10 million or something like that. That will be their way of thinking. Autumn (22m 23s): Exactly. And that's, to me, that's evil, they're justifying it, but a good character will be like, I hurt one person. You know, I acted out violently, you know, other people maybe died or I destroyed this thing and I shouldn't have done it and I am wrong. And again, that can lead into a very powerful dark night of the soul going, what is wrong with me? Why did I follow the same path as this other person? You know, why, why did I become slightly evil? I shouldn't have done that. How can I stop myself from doing that again? That's a huge turning point in a character art in the novel, in a story. So that's fine. Why we should see that more in fantasy in any literature. Jesper (23m 6s): Yeah. Speaking about starting wars because of it. Not that long ago. No. Maybe I dunno. Maybe it's actually a couple of years ago. I'm not sure, but I watched the show. Troy. I think it was on Netflix. Have you watched Troy? Autumn (23m 24s): Yeah. It's been a while ago. Is there so many different versions? There are a few toys, but I did not. I've watched two or three. I, I said I love history, so yeah. I've, I've done a lot on Troy. Jesper (23m 36s): Yeah. I think this one was a TV series. It was not the one where Brad Pitt please. Achilles dad was one of my most, I just absolutely love that. He's so freaking cool in that. But, but I think this one was a different show, but the point I wanted to make was that the Trojan prince Paris is he Smith. And by the beautiful Helen who is married to manna, Laos and Paris is actually as a, as a character. He's a bit of a coward, you know, when he's loved to Helen then sparks the entire Trojan war and at least to the death of a lot of people. Jesper (24m 18s): But Yeah, but, but in the context and the context of evil within, you know, Paris doesn't really care or perhaps he does care, I don't know, but he definitely does put his own wants and desires above everything else. So that the evil within basically, you know, it can take many forms in this case because he is a coward. He's not the one causing direct pain onto others, but he takes actions with them, which then has the consequences that causes the war and all the pain and all the people who are soldiers who die and so on and so on. Right. So it can take many forms. And I think, I think it's important to look at it in a bit of a broader perspective as well. Autumn (25m 1s): Yes, I agree. That's it. It's true. Cause I mean, you can always take just something like selfishness or cowardliness and yeah, let it have, let it maybe be kind of bubbling underneath the surface, but then to manifest in a way that could be the inciting incident like Helen being kidnapped. I mean, it sets off the whole chain of events. They could have negotiated that out. I don't know what Helen's view of that was, it is a relatively silent in the history of the world where she played a part of this. And if you wanted to go even in the first place, but it's all, it is an interesting topic to say, you know, these, these character falls can be in the hero and they can be the ones that really start the chaos of the book. Autumn (25m 49s): It doesn't have to just be because there's a villain who's causing horrible things. I mean, truly the Greeks are not villains in, you know, with, in the Trojan war, they're going to rescue Helen, but it becomes this whole greater, you know, you can get into the socioeconomic issues going on and who wants to rule over everything, but really they're just coming to rescue Helen because she's, there is, and it's a love story. It's a love story. And it, you know, again, we're we see it from the Greeks point of view, but we can also often watch it from the Trojan point of view in modern day shows. So really there's no horrible party in there except for maybe at the end when the Greeks are throwing babies off the walls of Troy and completely flattening the city, that's pretty rough. Autumn (26m 36s): But I just recently read an article about things on those natures and I was just thinking, wow, I ha I'm. I had forgotten that in the Trojan Jesper (26m 53s): War. That that was a scene in the, in the ed. Wow. Yeah. Hmm. I think I just mentally skipped that part. Yeah. But I do have a question here that I'm curious what you think about. Okay. Yeah, of course. Of course. Otherwise there's no fun in recording podcasts. If I can surprise you with something, Nobody, this is more like a reflection because speaking of the evil within, I'm just wondering, do you think that you can take this concept like too far, you know, can you end up actually disrupting your entire story and destroying everything because you're taking it too far? Jesper (27m 37s): Or, or what do you think about that? Autumn (27m 40s): I think so, but I think it depends on then what genre you're writing. So if you're gonna write Nobel bright, your evil within your Good Characters, should there should be something and it can be deep. It could be one, you know, something that is a true evil trait that causes maybe a whole war, but they're going to regret it and they're going to grow from it and they're going to heal and it's going to end up leading to maybe not the glowing future they wanted, but it would be a positive change. If you're writing dark fantasy, it could be what destroys the character or causes the chaos or moves it into like a dystopian dark fantasy. That's really kind of, it would definitely be very, more psychological as well as physical, which could be a very interesting and aspect, almost like a thriller. Autumn (28m 27s): And then of course, if you want to transform either your hero or a sidekick or point of view, character to a villain, this is a great way. Let them, you know, it doesn't have to be either people use things like alcoholism or they want to they're power hungry or they're corrupted by a magic gem. But what if it's just a trait that gets out of control, maybe they're a little self-centered or they're cowardly and they're trying to cover it up. And so they end up making the wrong choices, which leads to more wrong choices, which leads to greater evil and people die. This one Netflix series, the hundred is a very interesting example because one of the, the hero and the hero in of all like the entire series Clark, I think was her name. Autumn (29m 9s): Yeah. She was known as like this killed hundreds and thousands of people and her actions were enough to almost just keep all of humanity from progressing into the next, I don't know what you would call it. Realm or state of being because of her actions. And she is a basically left behind. It was like, you either go forward without her or you don't go forward at all. And you're lost as a whole society or culture race. So that was fast. You still like Clark, you still think she's a great character. She did these things because she was trying to save people that she loved and her friends. Autumn (29m 51s): But I did think at some point there were times I didn't relate to her because I'm like she could have chosen a better way. She's especially towards the end where she's doing it all in the name of her daughter. And I'm just like, oh my, yeah, Jesper (30m 3s): It gets a bit too much. Autumn (30m 4s): Yeah. It's like stop the maternal thing. There's another side to her character. That was much better earlier on. So yeah, it could go too far, but again, it depends. You need to sit back and think about the genre you're writing for and the tone you want for your novel and that's gonna make it, you know, if you go too far, one way, you're writing a completely different genre. Jesper (30m 28s): Yeah. I think there's a good point around what character we're dealing with here as well. Because if it is the protectionist, I do think you need to be a bit careful because if you go too far, all the likeability will go out the window where you just mentioned clock there in the end, in the latest seasons of that show, she started to really annoy me. I liked her in the beginning, but at some point it was just like, oh, it's too much now. But if you take well Paris, for instance, we just in Troy, you know, he's not a very likable character actually, but I don't think it's too bad there because there are different characters. Jesper (31m 9s): That's, it's more like there isn't like a one protagonist in most of those shows. It's more like the, all the characters together that tells the story. So, so in that sense, I feel like it works. But if you take, for example, did you watch the walking dead? Autumn (31m 27s): No, I did. And I don't do zombie movies or shows. Jesper (31m 30s): Okay. No. Okay. But Andrea is a character in the walking dead, and I think she's a great example here because she is not the protagonist in that TV show, but in the comic books, she is a beloved character. I'm not read the comics myself, but as far as I understand, she became like a second mother for their main protectiveness son. And basic, she ends up marrying the protagonist later on in the comic books. As far as I understand I could be wrong, but that's how I understood it. But actually in the TV series, what they did here was that they had her as part of one of the earlier seasons. Jesper (32m 13s): And then they ha they had her basically abandoned the rest of the group, abandoned the protagonist because she sort of got very, I don't know, fascinated or whatever you want to call it with the show's main villain called the governor. And so, so she just sort of went to him and stayed with him. And people just started hating this character, you know, when she sort of just the protectionist and just went for this and he's the governor, he's like a real, like, insane fuck. He's crazy. And she goes in and basically stays with him and is like, okay, then she's out the window. Jesper (32m 55s): Right? Forget about her. Nobody likes her anymore. So this is an example of a character who in the comic books were quite liked. And then, because you made her do some things within the show. I don't think that those things happen in, in the comic books, but in the show they made her do some things that were just like, you couldn't forgive it or ticket it. Take Jamie Lannister in game of Thrones when he pushes the breath, out of the window, in the beginning of the show. Right. Even, and they do like 2 million things throughout the Cummings after following seasons, they're they, they do so many things to try to redeem him and make him a good character and show. Jesper (33m 41s): But at least for me, the fact that he pushed a kid out a window that never left me no matter what he did after that, it was just like, yeah, but you, you push the kid out of the window. It's just not okay. No matter what else you do for the rest of your life, it's not okay. Right. So I do think there's something about, you need to be mindful of how far you take this evil within thing and how far you drive, because some things you cannot come back from. Autumn (34m 9s): Yeah. That's so true. I agree that there's a difference between losing your temper or taking the first punch or even starting a conflict versus, you know, killing an innocent or wounding a child or these other things that are just, yeah, you do those. And it's going to hang over their heads the entire time. And there are some things that are completely unforgivable. I, like I said, I think even Clark, there's a few things in the hundred that I just, you know, they, they called her, there was a blood Raina, or that was the other character. But just like you do something that is so bad, that it is, it becomes your title, that you are a tainted by it and it will follow you everywhere and you might be good, but you're never going to be as good. Autumn (34m 56s): You're never going to hit those high, high points. You're never going to be untarnished and that might work for your story. It might show a great character, but again, if you are writing noble bright, you've got to have people who want that pureness, or at least something a little bit higher where it's like, wow, your, your, your friend or your counselor really did some bad things, but you stayed clean. You stayed out of it, or you at least told them not to go do that. That's sort of who you want as your main character, but another once in dystopian or dark fantasy that might work great for your main character to have that kind of an arc where it's just like, they want to, you know, earn their place back. But they know they're never going to get quite as far or as high and accepting that, that they're going to have to live with this, with this taint in their soul for the rest of their life is, is also a very nuanced thing. Autumn (35m 49s): And then probably a very powerful story to write, but you to make sure you're setting up your entire story for that kind of level of impact and not just, you know, write your way into a corner and then go, oh crap. That's not what I wanted to do with my character. That would be bad. Jesper (36m 8s): Yeah. But also that the thing that happens or the consequence or the action that the character took was something that is, is forgivable. As long as the character is really, you know, regretting it and showing their regret and trying to make it better. But it has to be something that is forgivable because otherwise you cannot come back from it. And for some reason, hurting an animal is just like, nobody forgives it. You know, if the character in the first scene of the story kicks a dog or cat or something, that's it, nobody will forgive it. I mean, you can have stories where the main character kill somebody, and that is forgivable for whatever reason that, you know, if killing another person is, is apparently okay on the some circumstances. Jesper (36m 54s): Of course, not every circumstance, but readers can forgive stories where they're protecting this, kill somebody. But if they protect the kicks, a dog or cat, no way, it will never be forgiven. Autumn (37m 7s): You think game of Thrones? No, it'll never be forgiven. But do you think game of Thrones would have been different with Jamie if he had ever showed true guilt and apology to even brand, just to actually have felt hard out, sorry, because think he did, at least in the show, I didn't finish reading all the books, but in the show he never seemed to be apologetic. He again just said I did it because I wanted to save Searcy because I had to do it for my sister. He always justified it. He never said, I'm sorry. He never, you never felt he was sorry for it. And I think that is part of why we see that tarnishment to his character. Jesper (37m 46s): Yeah. I think you're right there. I think if bran had died from the fall, then it wouldn't have mattered if he had regretted it or shown regret. And I don't think there would be any coming back from that, but because Fran did not die. And if you had shown Jamie Lannister really being saddened about it and it really it's weighing on him and he he's regretting it. And then maybe, maybe you could pull him back from that. And maybe people would w would sort of forgive him after a while. Yeah. But I think it's only because brands survive to fall. Otherwise it would have been, it doesn't matter how much it probably, most people would feel like almost readers. Jesper (38m 28s): And on this case where we're talking about a TV show, so viewers in this case, but probably most people would just be like, yeah, it's good. That you're feeling that bad. You deserve it. You know? So it's not about forgiving any more. It's more like, yeah, you deserve that. So it becomes something else. All of a sudden. Autumn (38m 47s): Yes. I agree. So, yeah. So I think that's a good conclusion that there are, there are some things that you can't pull a character fully back from, which could work for, depending on your genre. But if you're writing certain types of fantasy, if you want your character to emerge scape, you know, scratched, but pretty much, you know, okay, there's probably a few things you should avoid, but otherwise exploring those evil intentions that evil within is, is a really interesting way of progressing a story and showing a character arc and showing a character change that is much more dramatic than some of the minor like, oh, you're mildly irritating and you have a stutter that I can't stand. Autumn (39m 27s): You know, that's, that's so minor compared to the, the, what we're talking about, these traits that we're talking about here. Jesper (39m 35s): All right. That's very good. So we will be back next Monday and this time for a critical reading episode where we will be discussing Jade City by Fonda Lee, which is the one we've been reading over this past month. So see you then. Narrator (39m 50s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Do you want to write a page turning novel that will keep readers up long past their bedtime? Well, one key to doing that is to write chapters that keep readers turning pages. We go over some tips from opening lines to closing and everything in between to help you write chapters that will keep your readers hooked. To check out the book Plot Development that we mention in the podcast, follow this link: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (29s): I'm Jesper Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 150 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we are taking a closer look at Chapters today. How to Create Chapters, That Hook you readers, and hopefully give you some good and strong tips in the process here. Autumn (50s): Absolutely. I mean, these are sort of the building blocks of that. Pull the reader through the story. And I don't think there's a lot of people who realize maybe the importance of setting them up. I mean, we spend so much time talking about that Plot outline and what goes into the intro of your story, but we don't talk a lot about what actually is happening in each individual chapter. So I think this will be a good one we'll chapters or a book is made up by chapter. So I don't know why Chapters would be important at all at all. It's like building a wall without using any bricks. We're putting them on the walls. No, there's you go, but let's assume you want a wall and if you just put your bricks, like just dump them in a pile, you're not going to have a very good wall, so you should make sure you put it together constructively. Autumn (1m 41s): Okay. Well, if I say showed and I guess we have to talk a bit about that today. Jesper (1m 45s): Yeah. I guess we will. We'll talk about some construction equipment. No, thanks where you over there. Autumn (1m 52s): It's quite good. There is a school break here this week. So actually I don't have to get up that early in the mornings. That's very, very nice. That is always a sweet thing considering, especially, yeah, since I'd be getting up at 5:00 AM with my husband to see him off to his current training, he's going through yeah. That's, I'm envious if I'm AM's a little early for me. Yeah. The only problem is that now when you don't have to get up that early, you stay up later. And especially because my wife and I started watching squid game on Netflix. I heard about that. Yes. I've actually, I started up watching episode one and honestly I didn't get into it and maybe I was tired. Autumn (2m 35s): So I just kind of put it aside. How are you guys liking it? Jesper (2m 39s): Oh, I love it. I think it's so good. I finally understand why this caught on so big that it had it's I think it's so good. I buy have to try it again eventually, but yeah, I'll have to keep that in mind. Maybe I was just off that night. I don't know. But I think one good thing that be Taken away from us, you know, for us as writers and authors, is that the writer who wrote squid game, he actually tried to sell the script for 10 years, 10 years. Think about how much success it has right now. And it took him 10 years to, to sell it. Jesper (3m 19s): And finally Netflix said, okay, fine. We'll buy it. And then it's a massive success. Autumn (3m 24s): That's crazy. Jesper (3m 27s): Yeah. And I think that's a good thing too, to keep in mind for us as authors, as Willy, when we write our books. And so on that, sometimes it just takes a long, long time and then success comes so Autumn (3m 38s): Assistance and belief in yourself and just keep trying until someone finally says yes, Jesper (3m 46s): Exactly. Autumn (3m 46s): Very nice. I like that. Oh, it's been good. I, I showed you pictures, but yes, my husband and I entered dog, went whitewater kayaking. It was so cute. Yeah. We've done some really crazy adventurous things with this music, current terrier. So he's, he's a little, he's supposed to be like Toto, but he's a little bit of a, he's a monster version of Toto. He's a little bit like five pounds bigger than Toto would be. But yeah, we went, we went kayaking as a family and it was just gorgeous fall weather. And that was right before it switched from being like 70 degree days to now. It's like in the fifties that I've got the wood stove going, but that's nice too. It feels like fall. Autumn (4m 27s): I can't complain. It's bit of kind of dice. I've been burning the candle at both ends though, because I, I, this is like my, why we're meeting and doing our recording. This is my afternoon slump time. And I'm trying with caffeine to get through it, but I am horrible. I get up at five and I am dead until about six o'clock and then my mind turns on them and I'm fine. And I find, I go through the afternoon and there's this slump. And then right around dinner time, I'll wake up and I'll be good to like 10. And I just can't change that rhythm in my body. It's been that way since I was a kid. And so yeah, I try, I keep myself awake right now. Jesper (5m 6s): Yeah. But, but I think actually, I don't know, but I have a theory that probably a lot of people have it like that because I know exactly what I mean. What do you mean? I can also be like in the morning, you know, getting up for something you like really tired and it's like, oh, it's early. And then you think, oh, then I'll, I'll be thinking to myself then, okay. Tonight, I'm going to go to bed early because I'm so tired and I need to catch up on sleep and so on. And I'll be tired throughout the day as well on those days. Not right today, but in general, I mean, if that happens right. But then once I get to dinner time and afterwards, then I start getting, I start waking up and it's just like, no, you don't want to go to bed. And then the next day, the whole cycle repeats itself. And it's just like, I don't know, but you're not the first one saying it. Jesper (5m 50s): And I have it the same way. I don't know if it's like something, probably not all EVERY everybody, but I think a lot of people, I like that they, they wake, my wife has the same thing she wakes up in the evening. I dunno. It's weird. Isn't it? Autumn (6m 6s): Maybe we are. But I'm also really good at, up until about one o'clock in the afternoon from like 6:00 AM to one o'clock. I am fine. I am full throttle, but it's like, I need an afternoon nap. I needed like at one 30 to two, I need like a little bit of a nap and I'd be fine. And maybe I should just put that in my schedule somewhere. And I would probably be so much better, but I'm usually pushing myself through it. Jesper (6m 30s): So if it goes quiet on UN, then the listener will know it's because you take a nap and then we should just, we just sit around here and quiet on the podcast, waiting for you to wake up and then we can continue. Autumn (6m 41s): I won't do that to you. I think we can make it through. Jesper (6m 45s): Okay. Okay. Narrator (6m 48s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Jesper (6m 53s): I noticed this morning that we just about to reach 7,000 members in the Am, Writing fences, you Facebook group order. Autumn (7m 1s): That is so I knew we were getting close. It actually, it seemed like we hit 6,000 wait went from 5,000 to 6,000 really, really quick. The 6,000 to seven has been a little slower, but oh my gosh, that is so many people and so awesome. Jesper (7m 16s): Do you remember the early days Autumn? Autumn (7m 19s): I Remember when it was me making the group and then inviting a couple of Fantasy authors. I knew it. I hadn't even met you yet. Or maybe if I had, I didn't know you on Facebook yet. I only knew you on Twitter and yeah, it was just me and a couple of people. So yeah, I remember very much so. And it was me and some crickets. Jesper (7m 40s): Yeah. And it was called slate. The fences, the Facebook group. Autumn (7m 45s): That's right. I saw the, I actually still have the original logo, like the artwork I did for it. Way back when tucked away and like terrified. You're right. You're right. That'd be great. I will have to go and do that too. Especially if I happen to catch it at 7,000, I'll do a little celebration and like, oh my God, this was, this was when it was just me and like three other people, which I think are still members too. So that'll be, I will do that. Jesper (8m 13s): Yeah. That would be fun. I think for people to see what it used to look like. But the funny thing is also when you have this many members, because I had the, there was somebody posting a, and there's nothing wrong with this. I'm just mentioning it for the fun of it. So the people involved should not feel bad about it at all, but there was somebody posting whether or not it was allowed to ask for some better readers in the Am, Writing Fantasy, Facebook group. And then I posted a, or I replied to say that, yeah. As long as you don't ask people to sign up to an email list or you know that in, in, in other ways you are trying to, to get them on your list or earn money from it or anything like that, then it's fine. Jesper (8m 59s): And then somebody else replied to say, are you a moderator? Or have you checked this with the moderators? Because I'm not sure, sure. That's allowed. And then I replied, I'm one of the co-owners of the group, but this is what happens when you have so many people. Some people don't even know who you are. Right. Let's say, Autumn (9m 17s): But I think it says like when it says admin next to our name. Jesper (9m 21s): Yeah, yeah. Maybe they just made me laugh. She was asking me if I had checked it with a moderator. I like that. I don't think I need to Autumn (9m 32s): Our Authors. No, we run very tight ship, obviously tighter than we realize. Jesper (9m 40s): Yeah. So if you haven't joined yet head on over to Facebook search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section, and you will find us. But if you don't like Facebook or you don't use Facebook, I should also point out how you can go to Am Writing Fantasy dot com and sign up for our email list. Through there, you will get information and you will get tips on writing. We share some world-building advice and much, much more that we actually don't share anywhere else. And the best way is to just go to so to Am Writing Fantasy dot com and then on the homepage, when you arrive, there is actually the free self-publishing success course. Jesper (10m 23s): So the easiest way to do it is just sign up for that. And then you're going to get a full cost for free. And once you have gone through all the course material, you will be automatically added to our email is so that's the best way to Autumn (10m 35s): Do that. Yes. Come join us Narrator (10m 38s): And on today's topic. Jesper (10m 41s): All right. So chapters, Autumn, what do we say about challenges? They are quite important. I guess if you want to build a house, that's what I, that's what I learned so far. Autumn (10m 53s): That's a very important if you're building a house, you can't build a book. Well, actually I'm sure there, I would say you can't build a book without Chapters, but I am one of those people that would, as soon as you tell me, you can't do something, I'm like, ah, I must try it. So I'm sure you can. I'm sure there is like stream of consciousness writing that James Joyce was probably like never used a chapter and it was just publishers that forced them on him. So you probably could write a book. It would just be really tough. It would be a Jesper (11m 24s): Mess. Oh, Autumn (11m 25s): It'd be such a mess. Don't do it. I think the best way to be organized. It was with Chapters and it gives you so many things you can do. I mean, you can change up your story. You can keep Readers interested, purposely hook them. So they stay up till 3:00 AM. Cause we're cruel to them. You can change point of view of your writing in third person, point of view. So Chapters are really important. There's a lot going on in them. Jesper (11m 51s): Yeah, absolutely. And I think, well, it, it very easily starts sounding like science or something, this stuff, right? Like talking about how to do a chapter in the proper way. But, but I think honestly for start, we have to say like, this is our way of doing a chapter. It doesn't mean that it's the only way or the only right way at all. You might have other ways of doing it. Or maybe you hear some advice from somewhere else that you think makes more sense and then that's fine if it works for you, it works for you. Right. So we can only say that this is the way in all of you, that it should be done, but underlying all of you. Jesper (12m 36s): Okay. Autumn (12m 37s): Absolutely. And I guess to me, we have some social proof that we're not doing things badly. I mean, I have a ton of reviews of people saying I stayed up all night. I finished this book all the way through, or I didn't finish it all the way through, but that's only because it hit 4:00 AM and I'm supposed to go to work at six. So I had to wait until nine the next day when I finally called out a bed after calling in six and finished it at 10. So I don't think we're doing anything wrong because I've seen on both of our reviews that, you know, we have made Readers stay up to the wee hours of the morning to read our stories. And that's partially comes through by the chapters because if you mess up on a chapter and you have a hard end to one, if you don't pull the reader forward and they're like, eh, I don't care anymore. Autumn (13m 24s): I'm going to sleep. That's, that's where they take a break. If they get confused, lost, or you just don't have something that makes them want to flip the page. Jesper (13m 34s): Yeah. True. Absolutely. And when we are talking about Chapters, think of it as a mini story on his own. So by ministry, what I mean by that is that the character should be trying to achieve something just like the dog is trying to achieve something now. So that's in its own little mini story. There Autumn (13m 60s): Was a chapter break Jesper (14m 2s): That was a chapter break. That was a point of view chains. It was saying, Hey, it's my point of view. That's all right. Yeah. What I was trying to say is that this means that the character is trying to achieve something and you know, it shouldn't be so that the coach just sitting around in a coffee, shop, reading a newspaper or talking to some random other character. And honestly I have seen books where this sort of thing happens and you are wondering a bit like, why do I care about this? What's going on here? Right. A chapter should contain some sort of sense of conflict and also some sort of, well uncertainty to some degree, I guess you could say, it's something that makes you wonder what's going to happen next. Jesper (14m 47s): Right? Those should be the recipe for a good Autumn (14m 54s): Chapter. Exactly. It's to me, it's like, it's curiosity, your mystery. There's something going on where, whether it's the character who is curious, you know, is trying to solve something and trawls the reader along. Or if the reader is picking up clues and they want to see what's happening, or even just an action event, they either news that happens off screen or that's just received or, you know, it ends at a battle and someone might be wounded and you're like, I have to turn the page. You know, those are part of the chapters. And I think one of the things we're talking about Chapters as a building block of a novel, but there's building blocks in Chapters. You can have a chapter that it's an entire scene and you could have a chapter that's made up of lots of little scenes, maybe not too many. Autumn (15m 38s): You don't want to put in maybe 10 scenes into a chapter that might be a little intense, but two or three, it can happen. You can have scene breaks within a single chapter. And so those are important parts to remember too, if you approach a chapter and you just don't know what to do, or you not sure what's in it. Think of it as a scene. Scenes are different from Chapters, but a lot of people get them confused. Jesper (16m 1s): Yeah. So maybe put a few more words on that. Autumm okay. Autumn (16m 4s): Sure. Well, so it scene is an event that's happening and usually, you know, it's think of a stage and you have a stage set and you characters walk on, something happens and they walk off sometimes with a scene, you change point of view, but you often change rooms. You change other things that are happening within, but the reason they're combined into one chapter is because the chapter has its own goal. And to me, that's the most important thing. And we talk about this, We, I know you're going to bring it up. Well, we have a Plot development book and we do talk about Chapters in there. So that's a very good way. But to me, the first step in deciding what is making your chapter versus your scenes are the scenes that make up a chapter is a chapter, has a specific goal. Autumn (16m 52s): And I always look at it as like, I have a goal for the chapter as an author. There's a part of the plot. It is, it is unveiling. So it's part of the inciting incident. It is part of the reaction phase. So that's my goal as an author, but there's also the characters goal and that's the part that's moving the stories forward. And that's an important thing you want to make sure the character has a goal when that chapter begins. And you know, it's going to wrap up the end of that chapter is, and when that his goal is met or it's stopped. Jesper (17m 22s): Yeah. Let me put it into context to you because you mentioned our whole flooding guide book here, because in there we actually have, because now you're talking about character gold and so on. So I think just putting a bit of framework around it, the way we describe it in our book is that a chapter has five areas or you, you, you used the worst word building block before. So if we go with that five building blocks in a great chapter, so there is coach goal, there is a hook, there is conflict and Alima there's reaction and decision and there is the disaster. Yes. So by that, the idea is that you have a character who knows when the chapter starts, what he or she wants to achieve. Jesper (18m 10s): And this character then goes after that in one way on other that the reader will find fascinating or interesting. That's the hook pot. And then only it's not that easy to achieve what you want. And especially not. When you live life as a fiction character, you live in the worst nightmare sometimes. Yeah. So it's not that easy. And something is standing in the way and that's then causing the conflict, right? And once you have the conflict, then you have a reaction to what happened. And that will lead into a decision on how to proceed that the character makes. And in the end, we will then finish the chapter on a cliffhanger. Jesper (18m 54s): So if you can construct your chapter around those five steps, it will already be very interesting because you are showing the reader that this character, this is what the character is trying to achieve. Meaning that then the reader understands, oh, okay, this is what's happening. This is I, now I know what's going on. It's like, it's like when you enter a meeting in your day job, and there was no agenda and you have no idea what you're going to talk about it very quickly. It becomes very frustrating because like, why are we here? What are we trying to do? So putting that in front of the reader so that they understand what the character is trying to achieve, that's a good starting point. And then when you, you are making life difficult for the character and introducing the conflict and giving them something to react to, then it also humanizes the character because then you feel like, oh, okay. Jesper (19m 46s): I can relate to that. I see why they're reacting this way. Or are they getting frustrated or whatever it may be. It's not that a chapter, a good chapter has to have like dire consequences or something. It doesn't have to be like that. That's not what I'm trying to say, but more that there needs to be something at stake and something, as they could just mean that I don't want my brother to find this thing out, for example, or it doesn't have to be like fight scenes or anything like that at all. But when you have something at stake, you have a reaction to it. Then when you end the chapter on some sort of, some sort of cliffhanger, and again by cliff hanger can mean a lot of things. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that it's like a, in the middle of a fight or I think James W what is it called? Jesper (20m 32s): James Brown, John Brown. What is he called? The James Brown bet. James Brown. I think he has one where he ends the chapter with the, with the character opening a door, then he stops and you don't get to see what's inside. It that's a bit, I would almost say a lame, but okay. But it's a cliffhanger, but it doesn't have to be like that. It could just be like a cliffhanger could just be like, the character is wondering about something and you don't have the answer for it. And then you want to read on to figure out what is the answer. It could be all kinds of things. So don't say cliff hanger as like, meaning that you have to put some dire consequences on the table, every, in every chapter. Autumn (21m 12s): No, it's more like an, almost an unanswered question or an unfinished event. I think those are better way. And I do agree because we often call it, the chapter ends in a disaster, but it doesn't have to be a disaster. It is. Yeah. That's just maybe a typical way of doing it because often with hurdles, it is sort of a disaster someone's wounded, and you don't know what happens, but you could be in a lull or it could be a love scene or something. And someone walks into the ballroom or whatever, a vendor at the, the tourney or something, the next person walks in the love interest or something. And you just stopped there. And there was other people going, oh gosh, you know, there, he or she is. Autumn (21m 53s): And that's a cliffhanger because you're like, well, what will they say? What will they do you want to turn the page? It always should end on not wanting to turn the page. And it could be as simple as just receiving news, receiving a reading, finally, a letter that they've been holding in their hand and waving the entire chapter. They finally look and see what it says. And they're like, oh, oh my gosh, this changes everything. And of course you want to turn the page to find out what's going to happen next that's, what's important. Jesper (22m 24s): And what's so nice about that. Is that because of what you just explained there, you already have the hook for the next chapter and you also already know what the character wants in the next chapter. So it just adds another minister to the first story. Yes, it's so nice. Because then again, you can build the next chapter with a clear beginning, a clear middle, a clear, and it just makes sense, right? Autumn (22m 48s): It does. They build off of each other, which is why it becomes a whole story. They flow into each other with set happenings and events to see what it's going to happen next. And I always say like, as a writer, I always want to write the ending to a chapter. So excited that I want to write the first line to the next chapter. And so if you're that excited, the reader will be that excited. And I think that's, what's important. It's just, it has a flow to it and going even back to scene. So if you think about it as if there are these five or four aspects into a chapter, well, if you have the hook and then the character is doing something and they're going through the conflict or dilemma things, aren't going well. Autumn (23m 28s): And for some reason that just that character's point of view is done, and you do a scene break, the decision and action and disaster or cliffhanger could end up being in a different character's point of view. And that's sort of why you can have multiple scenes that fit into a chapter, but they still fit the chapter because you are still following that Hook, decision dilemma, the action emotion reaction, and then the cliff hanger disaster event that is unfinished, that you want to turn the page to see what happens to it. Jesper (24m 1s): I think the challenge faced by many writers is actually how to make that conflict part varied, because I mean, you cannot have a 400 page book where every single chapter has a fight in it or nothing. I mean, it could be either a physical fight, but it could also just be people arguing. I, I know when I started out writing at first, I had a tendency to create a lot of arguments and a lot of the chapters because it added conflict. So my line of thinking was good. But the thing is that it, it gets a bit tiresome if, if the characters are always arguing with somebody. Jesper (24m 43s): So I think personally, you know, your first spur of inspiration is in 99% of the cases going to be probably quite full of cliches, you know, and that, that's why we prefer at least to do a detailed chapter outline compared to a very loose one where, or even to compare to riding by the seat of your pants. Because I think that the problem is often that you, you keep beating the same old horse or on and on and on. Autumn (25m 22s): Yes, I think that's very true. And I, I think it also comes down to knowing your character really well, because you, as an author have, like I mentioned, you have a goal for what's happening in the chapter. And if you're trying to force things on your character, it's going to come across as artificial. And it's not as interesting. The stakes don't feel real. Something just feels off to the reader. But if you have a character and you give the character a goal, like you say, okay, this is going to be a hurdle. And you know, you're going to throw something horrible at the character. And you're like, okay, character, you'd go again. This is you're going in there. This is your goal. And this is what's going to happen. And then let the character figure out, you know, what in their world are they going to do to solve this? Autumn (26m 2s): Why do they want to solve it? Knowing your character really well, knowing how they'll react will help pull you through. And I'll also help the reader really resonate with the character. Cause there's a F you know, you want to feel that character trying to problem solve and get out of it on their own instead of being pushed forward, along by the author, because you need to go to the next scene. You can definitely tell when you're reading. Jesper (26m 27s): Yeah. And the, and of course the character arc is incredibly important in this whole conversation too, to make sure that you build in at certain points throughout the novel, in some chapters where you gradually showing on, of course, on less on less characters on a steady arc where they don't change. But otherwise that you have some chapters throughout the novel where you're gradually showing that the characters beginning to change. And we go in through it in great detail in, in our guidebook on, on how to plot a novel, but high level. It's often a good thing to start showing them, showing the reader, how the character actually insists on doing the same thing as they've always done, because that's how we work as human beings. Jesper (27m 16s): We only, we only start changing once we figure out that what I'm doing is apparently not working. And only once we realized that that's where we start changing, because otherwise we, we're not going to change. Human beings are lazy people. We don't want to change, but once we start, you know, we keep banging our heads against, into the wall because we keep doing the same thing and it doesn't work. Then at some point we will usually start questioning ourselves like, Hmm. I wonder if I could do something differently, then that's where you start seeing the change. So that's a good thing to keep in mind when you're writing as well with your chapters to have four, while the coach would keep doing the same thing and keep facing the same problem, like, you know, from a character arc perspective, like they keep failing basically. Jesper (28m 1s): And, and then gradually over time, they'll start trying to try to do some other things and get a different result. And thereby you solidify the change in the character. Autumn (28m 12s): Yes. That is very true in such an important aspect. And of course, when you say doing the same things as you don't mean like, you know, going and trying to attack the night that he's obviously not prepared to do, he's not going to do that three times in a row, but he are going to maybe have him pick three different fights or just always be in over his head, always react stubbornly or arrogantly and not us for help. And then finally, you know, there's going to be that moment where maybe it's usually called the dark night of the soul, that moment where, you know, something happens and someone's wounded or hurt or killed because of their stupid actions. And they finally go, next time, I'm going to ask for help because I don't want that to ever happen again. Autumn (28m 53s): But again, that's more the entire plot, but it's so true. Each chapter is just pulling the novel forward. And I did, I want to get back to it. You mentioned also speaking of, you know, not repeating, you said about not repeating like the same disaster, the same conflicts. And I also think is a really important not to repeat the exact same Hook or the exact same chapter ending. And those can be as simple as like you dialogue is a fantastic, like if two people are in the middle of a conversation, that's a neat chapter opening. And sometimes it's a really neat chapter ending, but you don't want to have every chapter opening being dialogue or every chapter opening being a description or even action. Autumn (29m 34s): All of those are things you should take notice of and kind of vary them throughout your novel. So that one maybe is a dialogue, but another was an action. Maybe one's a description, keep things varied and that'll help make your writing a little bit more interesting and will help remind you to keep things different with each one and, you know, challenge you, isn't Writing all about challenging yourself to become a better somebody. Jesper (29m 57s): Yeah, I would say so. I don't know. Are we missing anything? I feel like, I feel like that's pretty encompassing for, for How to Create Chapters. Autumn (30m 10s): I think so too. I be, and I can't think of anything else. The best thing to do is to check out, like I said, the plotting book we get into so much more detail on character arcs and plotting the whole novel as well as how to lay out your individual chapter. The difference between chapters and scenes and some good examples in there. So I think those are really, what's important to take a look at if you really want to go in depth, because there's a lot more to this and nailing your chapters and knowing how they build your story is going to one help you learn to write better. And you know, if you're doing well in your chapters, those are usually like when I was writing, I had writing goals. My goal was not a word count. Autumn (30m 51s): So I got Scrivener and it, it makes you, it allows you to do a word count goal. But I used to always be like, I want to write this many chapters this week. It's a nice, solid building blocks that helps you break down your novel. And two bites that are really, the reader is bites. The reader is going to stop and start at Chapters. They don't usually stop or start right in the middle of a chapter who wants to do that? That's because someone came in and like you have book from your hand or your Kindle ran out of batteries. That's when you stop in the middle of a chapter or if you're really bad, if it's really, really bad, baby, I don't know. Jesper (31m 27s): Yeah. I mean, the chapter's only pot, it's only one piece of the entire puzzle. So I'll book is called Plot Development and it is a very full step-by-step guy. You know, you you'll get everything in that book. You will learn about the character creation as well. You learn about the character arcs, how to build the entire novel, outline, how it affects the chapters and how to build those chapters and, and so on and so on and so on. So, so you're going to get everything you need in that one book. So we've added the link to that one in the show notes, if you are interested. So next Monday, we are talking about the evil within it's about your characters and how to explore them in greater depth. Narrator (32m 15s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Some plot twists can elevate a story into a masterpiece, whereas others utterly destroys everything that came before it.  In this humorous episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper compete to come up with the WORST five plot twists ever created.    Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I'm, Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 149 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is the first episode of the month. And we all know what that means. Don't we Autumn? Autumn (44s): This one's a challenge where we compete with each other to come up with the worst of something. So these are always kind of fun. Jesper (54s): These are my favorite ones and today's top 10 list is the WORST Plot Twists EVER. Autumn (1m 3s): Oh gosh. At least I'm not going to give you a plot twist and say what? That's not what I prepared for. So I'm ready. Like I just mentioned to you, I actually was, I thought we were recording this two days ago, so I've been ready for two days. So I've got a good list. I think it'll be fine. It was actually really fun. This one was feeling kind of, I don't know what to come up with. And so I did a little bit of reading and research and started thinking and I'm like, oh yeah, there's some fun ones in this slide. Yeah, I think so too. All mine movies, although I only have two movies, so ha I, I actually tried to stick with books as much as possible, but yeah, two movies snuck in there. Autumn (1m 49s): Okay. I know I picked movies on purpose because then I could play some audio clips and I liked those. Lets you do one of these days. I want you to plan ahead and send you some movie, some clips and tell you not to listen to them until you play them. But that's going to be kind of hard cause you have to test them somehow. No, no, that'll be fine. That's fine. I can just click and listen half a second just to see if it plays and then stop it. Okay. One of these days, one of these days I'll really be prepared. It'll be a miracle, but everybody's mind just like my God. Yes, it will be and prepare us. Autumn (2m 30s): That'd be fantastic. Just imagine. Anyway, how are things going for you? Jesper (2m 37s): I'm pretty busy these days. I just finished up the first draft of book two in our new Sherry's over this last week. So that was good. That's exciting. Yeah, but I'm taking a short break from writing now because I have so much preparation to do for my attempt to become a referee instructor. So that's basically, Yeah, it's taking up so much time. So yeah, just taking a bit of a break between book two and book three in our series a so that will probably be okay. But Autumn (3m 11s): I think that is fine since you were so much further ahead of me on the Writing department. I don't mind if you take a little writing break and let me catch up a bit. Jesper (3m 22s): No, no, indeed. That's fair enough. And yeah. And, and, and speaking about referee, actually, sometimes it's nice to have a referee at hand because yesterday my youngest son, he was playing a match and then we arrived there and then the coach came over and he said like, well, the referee who was supposed to be here has not shown up. So can you just refereed this match for me? I was like, oh my God. I mean, I don't have any of the clothes on, I don't have whistle. I don't, I didn't have anything because I was not going, I was just going to be spectator. Jesper (4m 2s): Right. But, but then of course, I mean, they, they don't have a referee and I was just standing there. So I said, okay, fine. But I don't have any of my things with me. So I'll have to shout instead of blowing the whistle and so on, because that's what you're going to get then. And, and we did then, but that why I'm mentioning it because I was really surprised because these are a 13 year old kits. Yeah. Right. And I'm a bit surprised about how their behavior, you know, that, that they can talk the way they do to adults. Autumn (4m 40s): Really. Jesper (4m 41s): Yeah. Because I don't get, I mean, they, the away team there, they were the players that their 13 year old kids. Right. But they were complaining a lot, like all the time, like, well they've, they felt like the free kick was the wrong way or to the wrong team, or it shouldn't have been a free kick and, or the throw in wasn't in the other direction, in their point of view. And it was just all kinds of things. They complained all the time. And then the one point, like during the second half, I, I started getting a bit annoyed by it. Right. So I, one of the guys, one of the kids then complained again. And I just said to him, like, be quiet and concentrate on playing soccer instead. Jesper (5m 24s): And then another teammate of his who was also walking by, he then said, well, we can't concentrate with your round. It took me a bit back. What did these are 13 year old kids talking like that to adults. What's going on? That Autumn (5m 39s): That's crazy. That's quite a backtalk man. Yeah. Jesper (5m 43s): But I didn't do that when I was 13 years old, no, to an adult? I mean, what's going on? Autumn (5m 50s): I don't know. I didn't raise kids so I can not even imagine. Jesper (5m 56s): No. But do you remember when were 13 year old? You wouldn't speak like that to an adult, you didn't even know, would you? Autumn (6m 1s): No, I usually didn't speak. I had my nose in a book and I was just like, I prefer a silence. I am mute. So no, I would never have spoken to a, an adult with a bit of a snap, not till I was at least 16 or 18 and being snarky. Jesper (6m 19s): Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I don't know. I think there's something going, because, and we talked about with some of the parents as well, not, not specifically to refereeing as such, but just in general. How, how the younger generations nowadays, they, they are very like egocentric, you know, they just focus on themselves and their life and they are the ones who are important. And I don't know. It's it's, I I'm, I D I don't like that kind of attitude, I must say. No, Autumn (6m 48s): No, I, I respect any parent trying to raise a kid these days. It's, it's, it's a challenge with internet and so many issues. And I just Instagram for kids that they won the launch. I mean, let's just see this hideous. Absolutely. He is. Jesper (7m 6s): Yeah, indeed. So, yeah. But how about you? You've been busy as well. I know Autumn (7m 14s): I've been working on a portfolio website and, but it was also my husband's birthday. So we went for a hike it's high it's like peak fall colors. The trees are like yellow, and they're just dropping these gentle golden leaves in the sunlight. If it's sunny, this is all for artificial lighting today. It's a kind of a gray day, but other days it's been sunny. It's just, just, you know, in the seventies. So maybe a flannel weather and just absolutely stunningly gorgeous. So I cannot complain. It's, it's always a shame to have to do to computer work on such lovely days, but at least I have a nice view of the forest. Autumn (7m 56s): As someone pointed out, I've got a nice view behind me. So, you know, I'm not suffering too badly that way, but yeah, it definitely seems to be a very busy fall, but it was wonderful to take a day off, to go hiking. And we're actually hoping for a bit of a float trip cause he worked as a whitewater raft guide for the summer. So we're hoping to go back and do the same trip together without paying customers just to have fun. And that'll be really kind of nice to get out. So yeah, I think so. Jesper (8m 28s): Very cool. And you're also busy editing. I know. Autumn (8m 31s): Yes. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. Thank you for jogging my memory. I'm so close. I wanted October one. I wanted to be done, but between that fantasy colony, I went to and a birthday celebrations and fueled their little life hip cups. I'm so close. But then I also remember we are, one of our characters is a dwarf and we created this whole speech pattern for how they speak and was like, oh, bugger that I had tried to do it a little bit, but now I've got to go back and double check. So it's like, I have like two, three chapters from the end and also have to go back and do a quick sweep of everywhere the door speaks. Autumn (9m 9s): And so it'll probably be at least another week. Yeah, probably another week, but I'm living with it because it's so nice to be like seeing Scribner and you like, you're this, this long we're hitting definitely over 40 chapters, by the way, to see this huge list of Barbados so close. So that does feel very, very good knowing this is the last one, but it's still like, I feel like this is the one that every time I think. All right. I'm oh shoot. I forgot about doing that. It is the never ending story. We're so close though. Jesper (9m 45s): We'll get there Narrator (9m 48s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (9m 53s): So after launching our new critical reading initiative, two weeks back, you can go back and listen to episode 1 47 if you missed it. But we also had to pick the next book to read and their voting already took place on Patrion and also in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So if you want to join in, you know where to go, if you want to vote in the future. And we don't know if we're going to keep this upright, I mean, this is was a new initiative we are doing and we will see how much people enjoy it or how much they, they jump on board and participate. And of course, if they don't and we will probably stop it again, at least now we, yeah, at least now we are on the second month. Jesper (10m 39s): So at least the second attempt, we'll, we'll just try a bit more. And the voting this time was between the sudden appearance of hope by Claire, north Jade, JTD by finale, or which marked by cl Polk. And we had a pretty clear winner. Autumn (10m 56s): Yes we did. I, there was no getting rid of wiggle room in this winter. So we had to go with it. I have to say. Jesper (11m 5s): Yeah. So it was a Jade City by Fonda Lee that we, we picked up this time around. So, and of course we already started, you know, the, it was the voting took place like a week ago or maybe over the last two weeks from the time that this episode airs. But of course we still would love you to read along. And this episode where we will analyze JTD will air on the 22nd of November. So by the time you listen to this, if you listen, when this podcast episode releases, you still have a bit of time if you haven't started reading yet. And if we need to give you a bit of incentive, we can say to Jade city is the winner of the world Fantasy award. Jesper (11m 51s): It was shortlisted for a Nebula awards, the Lotus award, the Aurora awards, the sunburst awards, and became best book of the month on Amazon. So you might want to check it out. Autumn (12m 2s): You might, and if you need more incentive, I've already started reading. I picked it up instead of reading the news, which is horrible. Anyway. So I've been reading a Jade city for my breakfast and lunch breaks and I already 30% in. And I think I only started a couple of days ago. I like it. I really kind of got sucked in. I see a few things. I'm like, well, I don't like how, you know, funded this few point of view things that I'm like, eh, but the story, I don't know, it's totally sucked me in all the characters have pulled me in. And so I'm like, okay, now I've gone from, oh, I've got to read a book. Autumn (12m 45s): Where am I going to find the time to, okay, I need more time to read this book. I read this. I even put aside some of my design work last night, cause I needed a mental break from it. Anyway, when you fall asleep too many nights in a row, thinking about the next thing you need to work on, I was like, okay. I took a, an evening off. I read instead and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I have a feeling I'm going to finish this one probably before the end of the weekend. Jesper (13m 13s): Wow. Okay. Yeah. I, I, of course I do audio books because I don't have time to read and I read too slow to read an entire book unless I, well, I could read it in a month, but then I really have to dedicate time to it and I don't have that time. So I do the audio book. I also did that last month, but I, I started listening to it as well. I think I have listened to seven chapters by now. I think I quite like it to so far, I must say, compared to last month book as well, this one is much easier to follow. Yes. You know, there's like the storylines, it's pretty clear. I last the, the one we had last month, it was like listening to the audio books. Jesper (13m 57s): Sometimes I had to like rewind or whatever you would call it on the, you know, go back 30 seconds here and there to just listen to it again, because it was, it was a bit complicated. It felt like that at least in the audio book. And sometimes if I wasn't concentrating, I would, I would sort of lose the plot a bit. But, but this one is much, much easier to follow along. I think this one has, Autumn (14m 23s): Yeah, I really like it. I think it has a ton of characters at least named characters, but once you kind of absorb them and see which ones are the really important ones, you're like, okay, I'm good. The plots this plot straight forward, even though the point of view change. And yeah, it's just a really fun story. So I'm, I, I do like this one. I can not wait to see what other leaders like think of it as well. Jesper (14m 46s): Yeah, exactly. And I'm looking forward to discuss sort of the, all the, all the stuff that was done really well and what we didn't like until I did notice though, in the first seven chapters that there are, she's doing the right thing in terms of sharing world building in the sense that it's characters talking about it. But when I was listening to one of the chapters today, it did sort of rub me the wrong way to like, you know, th th the kind of conversation they were having, it was like a conversation nobody would ever have. Right. They're basically telling each other things that they all, both of them already know, but it was clearly dialogue just to get the billing across to the reader. Jesper (15m 27s): And that, that was not too elegant. That, that part. But otherwise, I would say so far, I really like it. Excellent. Narrator (15m 34s): And on to today's topic. Jesper (15m 37s): So here we go on another competitive list. Oh, no, I hit that one again. Yes, he did. I did that last week as well. You did. Autumn (15m 46s): I'm not editing this one out. Jesper (15m 48s): No. Now I have to live with it. There is this for listening to, is this like a loop thing you can accidentally hit when you do a sound clip? And last week I hit it and I made Autumn edit it out. But I guess this time I have to live with the fact that it played twice, But okay. Another competitive list where we will try to outdo each other with the best worst list, and you are still competitive in the body. And Autumn (16m 18s): That's why this is your favorite. It's not that it's a fun thing to find the worst of something. It's just, you're super competitive. And so you're like, yeah, that's amazing. And I'm like, oh, geez. Jesper (16m 30s): It's not that bad. Autumn (16m 34s): I can pick. I do at least a little bit. I am not quite as competitive as you, but I enjoy coming up with the worst ones I can find. So this one was quite fun. And if I remember correctly, I think I went first, last time. So guess who started his, Jesper (16m 53s): Ah, didn't you say that again? Last time as well? Autumn (16m 57s): Oh, no, I I'm pretty sure. I wouldn't. First listeners will have to tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I went first, unless you want to flip. I was fighting. Do you want me to go? I'm ready? My list is awesome. So if you want me to put the best foot forward, I can decimate you. Jesper (17m 21s): I don't mind either way, but I, I will say though that it was actually quite interesting to build this list of plot twists, because I don't know. I really feel like these plot twists when, when I was sort of building the list and looking through this stuff, it's like, if you get the plus plot twist, right, you can really elevate the story into almost a masterpiece. I was about to say, but it can also like orderly destroy everything that came before it, if it's not handled well. And I think that was quite interesting. Autumn (17m 54s): And I thought, I thought it was interesting. I don't know if we'll need to define it if we want to define it now, but I noticed how many bad plot twists involved the deuce ex Machina, which is the term for the God in the machine, or when something completely never before seen in the entire novel shows up to save the day. And instead of being the hero and it's like almost all the ones I was finding where that was, what was happening in the readers were like, or the Watchers viewers were like, no, you just ruined the character. Went through all of this effort, everything suffered, nearly died, lost their loved ones. And then something comes out of left field and saves the day And they hate it. Autumn (18m 38s): So I think that's going to be my take home. Yeah. That we'll have to see if there's another take-home, but that was definitely the take home I got of this was like, do not do this in your applaud. Jesper (18m 50s): Yeah. I think it Dave's ex McKenna, isn't it? Autumn (18m 53s): Yeah. I did not take Latin. I took French, So I, that's not how it'd be pronounced in French. Jesper (19m 2s): Okay. Fair enough. I didn't take friends, so, and I did not take Latin. So what do I know? Autumn (19m 9s): You're just making it up very well. There you Jesper (19m 10s): Go. Calm. I'm waking up as I go. Autumn (19m 13s): All right. So who's starting, You decide. All right. Well then I'm going to go ahead and start fine. I'll just, I'm just going for it. We got to decide. So are you ready? My number five, which I, I, as you know, I ordered this right before we started recording. Cause I had not done that part. So this is the only one. It is a movie. It's not my only movie, but it's one of two, but it's the only one I have not read or watched. So this is out of the dark, out of the dark by David Weber. And I chose this one to include because I thought it just sounded so crazy. So this is a science fiction novel in which humans are fighting an alien invader on a human colony world that Vader's are too powerful and all seems lost when out of the blow, one of the humans turned out to be wait for it Dracula. Autumn (20m 8s): And he single-handedly destroyed the alien invading force by using his vampire powers. Jesper (20m 17s): Wait, wait a second. So, so Dracula was part of the story all along and nobody knows. And then all of a sudden he is there, or yes, he just came on on screen. All of a sudden when you needed him, Autumn (20m 28s): It turns out he was a character all along. And a lot of people have pointed out that it was very obvious because his name was I'll loop cut because I can't pronounce it. It's Dracula's spell backward is, was his, his name. People are like, oh, it's so obvious. You know, there's these Roman S Scholtz Scholtz soldiers. And there's this, you know, guy who is Dracula spelled backward. Obviously he was there all along, but everyone else said there was absolutely no hint that the guy, this character was a vampire. And it was just so surprising that most readers absolutely found it crazy, just totally out of left field and never saw it coming. Autumn (21m 14s): And it ruined the entire story up to that point. They just felt like an entirely different ending than the novel should have had it. Jesper (21m 22s): Right. But, and the other thing I don't understand is that he would have known all the time that he has that he's powers and you can just defeat them if he wants to. So has he just been walking around letting them take over like, well, I don't care. I'll deal with it later. Autumn (21m 38s): I don't either. I haven't read this one. So I, I can't speak to that, but I was sort of wondering the same thing saying, oh, he was there the whole time. Why was it ever a problem? It'd be like super bad. Like, oh, I can't use my powers. I can't use my, oh fuck. Jesper (21m 54s): You can't be bothered humans. You can die. I don't, I can't be bothered today. I'm too tired. Autumn (22m 1s): Okay. So I probably will not read this one to find out what really happened, but there you go. That was my number five that I, it just sounded so crazy. I S I always joke. It's one of the examples of like John Rose, smashing you can write anything you want as an Indian indie author. You could have vampires in space. Well, someone has vampires in space. I had to pick this one for the list. Jesper (22m 28s): So that, that is so weird. I don't, I'm not familiar with that book, so I don't know, but it sounds really weird. And I'm just wondering how, how the entire characterization of Dracula throughout the book, how that even works, because unless he he's like a very minor character and you almost don't see him, and then all of a sudden he walks onto the scene when you need him in the end. I mean, that even that is annoying too, but if he's part of the story throughout, then it makes even less sense to me, Autumn (22m 58s): Just from the little bit I read, I think he was one of the main characters. He was very important, so Jesper (23m 3s): I don't get it, Autumn (23m 6s): But there you go. Bad plot twists your turn. Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah. That's a, that's a pretty bad, bad product choice for sure. Dracula. Okay. Well, my online five examples on my list are movies, as I said, and I have audio clips for all of them, of course, just because I think it's fun. Not because I think you can guess all of them, but I'm going to make you try anyway, just because of like, I like tormenting, you like that. Autumn (23m 37s): You too. All right, let's go for it. Get the torture going. Jesper (23m 42s): Okay. So my number five is an example of what I earlier about the ending, destroying everything that came before it. Yes, because I actually quite liked the premise of this movie. And I also remember watching it, that it had me hooked as well. Okay. That was until the end of course. And I have a short audio clip here. So it might reveal which movie it is. This was, this is one of the ones that you might be able to guess if you at least are familiar with the movie, otherwise you can probably not get it, but maybe the listeners can, but let me play the audio clip and then you can see if you can guess it. Jesper (24m 27s): Okay. You ready? Yep. Let's go. Autumn (24m 57s): I've never watched this movie. I'm guessing it was called 23, but I have no idea. Jesper (25m 2s): Yeah. It's called the number 23. That's correct. Autumn (25m 5s): At least I guessed right. So, what's this about? Jesper (25m 10s): So this is a thriller with a Jim Carey where he's character gets a book called. The book is called the number 23. He gets it as a person from his wife. You could hear that in the audio clip, which she says that I'm going to get this for you. So that's a book she buys to him for him. And he starts completely obsessing about this number 23. Like he sees it everywhere and he can constantly see things that makes connections to becoming 23, adding things together becomes 23. It's just all the time, everything. And in this book that he, his wife bought him, the chapter 23 is missing as well. Jesper (25m 53s): So everything sounds pretty interesting so far, right? There's something going on. That's kind of fun. All right. Yeah. And it also had me pretty entertained. I actually quite liked it, but then it turns out the plot twist comes onto the stage now. And the mission chapter 23 explains that a girl was murdered and Jim character character, the main character was actually the one who did the killing. And then you learn that he wrote the book himself, but he has no memory of it because he gave himself a head injury. So he would forget the murder. Jesper (26m 41s): He had an injury. I mean, talk about a skilled head injury. I Autumn (26m 44s): Want to forget this bang. Jesper (26m 47s): Yeah. That, that in itself is pretty lame. But the fact is also that once that reveals come, once you get that reveal, the movie spends like half an hour trying to, you know, come up with the explanation for everything that you've seen and how it all fits together. It just keeps explaining all kinds of it's like, they're trying to justify how everything makes perfect sense. And it's just like the last half an hour. It's just a nightmare up until that point. It's actually pretty interesting. And then it gets destroyed completely. Autumn (27m 22s): Yeah. It sounds that way. I mean, they could have make it significant, make it someone else who did, I don't know, make it a mystery, not explain it and then have to explain everything. And just as I say, beat a dead horse, I mean, it just sounds like, okay, moving on. I don't really need to know that Jesper (27m 43s): It was, and it was a real shame because I, I liked the movie. And then when it gets destroyed in the end, it's a bit like, dammit, Autumn (27m 53s): Why couldn't they actually plot? This sounds. Yeah, you're right. Because up until that point, it's like, everything's adding up. It's like, you know, the number 42 is the meaning of life. You know, there's something important going on here with 23 and yeah, it's actually, he's a homicidal maniac that gave himself a head injury. Jesper (28m 16s): Yeah. And also why, I mean, I, yeah, it makes no sense. Autumn (28m 20s): I, is that your way of feeling regret to like bash yourself in the head? Why, why would you have written a book and then you should have brought the book and then hit yourself in the head and then there'd be no evidence you would have forgotten. Jesper (28m 34s): And why would you walk into a store and find your own book? And your wife accidentally buys it to you for you? It's like, okay. Yeah. That's a coincidence. Yeah. I Autumn (28m 45s): And name. Yeah. There you go. Oh, well, Jesper (28m 51s): Yeah. Okay. All right. But that's my number five. It was not Dracula, but I still feel like it was pretty shitty, Autumn (28m 57s): So, so pretty bad. I will not strike that one from my watch list. All right. So my number four and I was, I think I mentioned said my number five out of the dark was a movie. I was wrong. Sorry. That one was actually a book, but my number four is a movie. I don't know if you've seen this one, but it's a superhero movie. So you'll probably have it. It's not superhero. Movies are not your favorite, but as Hancock. And that actually starts will Smith. Yeah. So, yeah. So if it's the one Jesper (29m 29s): Where he, he can fly or something, right? Autumn (29m 32s): Yes, yes. And it sort of starts out the same way he wakes up in the hospital. He has no memory of who he was, but he's has these amazing powers. So he becomes a superhero, but this woman that, you know, he's interested in, but it's like, whenever they're together, she's the villain. She is the arch villain in the story. But then, you know, it starts like, you know, it sounds like this beginning of a superhero story, like this is the B the Genesis of a superhero and there's this evil villain. It's perfect. But that's the twist. The twist is with like no setup, nothing. It's just suddenly revealed that they're both gods and the previous it's just there. Autumn (30m 14s): And she's not really a villain. She's more like his kryptonite. And if they're at the same place at the same time, bad stuff happens. But truly they love each other. And there used to be two other gods and they basically annihilated each other because of the same thing. They loved each other, but they can't be together because if they're together, they destroy things, things just blow up around them. And as most people who watched the movie have said that, it just feels like you're watching a superhero movie. And then there's this switch. Like someone else wrote the completely different movie ending. And now they're instead of superheroes they're gods and he's got his memory back and they're basically trying to come up with some resolution where they both get halves of the planet. So they don't cross paths. Autumn (30m 57s): I'm not explaining it as well as it's confusing as it is, but it goes from superhero movie to God movie, God, and God. Jesper (31m 5s): Yeah. You lost me a bit there halfway. I think it was complicated enough that even the explanation confused me Autumn (31m 12s): And that's just, it, it feels like it could have been you to stick to the superhero, just stick to superheroes. You wouldn't need to suddenly say that the superheroes are really gone well. Yeah. That's, that's fine. You know, whatever all the way through I have. And at the time I didn't really notice it. I'm like, okay, that's just a weird twist. And now it doesn't surprise me that, you know, will Smith tends to get movies where it's, it doesn't surprise me where the villain is actually not a villain. It's just a misunderstood character. That's very will Smith. So that doesn't surprise me so much, but it was kind of like will Smith on my list. Oh, that's too funny. I wonder if it's, there was a one I almost selected that I would call a rum runner up for this list. Autumn (31m 53s): So I'll have to see if it's the one you chose be interesting. But yeah, I, it was one of those ones where it was a perfectly good superhero, fun movie. Why, why, what happened to him that he lost his memory? Who is this other character? Who's sort of not even a huge character for awhile, but as the villain ish one and what what's going on. And then to find out, you know, boom is just like drop reveal. Oh, you're both gods. Oh, this is what's really going on. Oh, here's your memory back? Oh, there's these friends that you've lost a long time ago and boom. It's just like, well, we're at a totally different movie now. Autumn (32m 34s): Thank you. Jesper (32m 34s): Right. Because it's the same, same thing with, with the number 23. Like it's pretty good. And then all of a sudden it a detour and it's just like what happened happened. Yeah. You're just, you feel like you got, they lost the essence of what they were, the whole plot was up until that point. And you're like, I don't, it wasn't a twist so much as a different story. Yeah. Okay. That's a, it's a completely different story than my number five, but I feel like the, the conclusion of it is exactly the same, you know, it's, it's, it's about a good story. That just goes bad. Yes. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. All right. So what's your number four. Okay. I have a number four now and I'm actually not so sure you can guess which movie this is from the audio clip the fans out there of this stuff. Jesper (33m 23s): They will probably know instantly, but I think I would not be able to guess it. I think so. I'll help you at least by saying that it's a Christopher Nolan movie. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I already for the audio clip. Yeah. Let me go get my phone so I can Google it, then I'll go ahead. Okay. Here it comes. Jesper (34m 12s): So don't worry about what they're saying, but the voices might give it away what it is, you know, the way that he speaks. Autumn (34m 18s): I would say based on the way he speaks, Batman, but I also say that is almost the exact level of decibels that I am deaf in for my left my right ear. So I was like, I don't hear you, but I'm guessing that the deep gravelly voice that is spoken slowly. Jesper (34m 35s): It is definitely Batman. Autumn (34m 38s): Okay. Yes. That's pretty good. That's two out of two now. Jesper (34m 40s): That's pretty good. You're on a roll now. I think, first of all, I have to say that in general, I really like Christopher Nolan's movies and it's not that this one is bad either, to be honest, this is the dark Knight rises. Okay. And it's, it's actually okay. And you know, I don't, I don't generally like super hero movies, like you said, but this one is not too bad, actually. Okay. But why I have it on my list anyway, is because of the actual scene where this audio clip is from. So in the dark, not the dark Knight rises. Jesus. That was difficult to say, Batman is fighting bane. Jesper (35m 22s): You know, that's the guy with that mask on and it looks pretty cool. Yeah. And they are fighting each other for like two hours when we get to this scene. Wow. And yeah. And all the way through, up until this point, Bina, he's like a really formidable villain. No, he he's like really good at what he does of being a villain. And he really challenged us Batman. And then they put in this twist in this scene. So just by the end of the audio clip, you could hurt, you could hear a woman talking. Yeah. And that was a Miranda tape as she used to, like Batman's love interest. And then in this scene, it is revealed all of a sudden, you know, like Batman has final defeated pain. Jesper (36m 8s): He has him like on the ground. I got you finally, like after two hours right off movie, you finally got the upper hand. And then behind him is this, he's a love interest, Miranda, Tate. And then she stops him with a knife. She stops Batman. And you're like, what? And then it turns out, well, she's actually the true villain. And she was the one all along who wanted to destroy Gotham city with a nuclear bomb. It was not Bain at all. And the Bain is basically sort of reduced to this like, well, simple puppy who was just like carrying out the orders of his master, because he's so much in love with her as well. Jesper (36m 52s): I mean, it's, it's just, it's such a shame because I really feel like just the mask that Bain wears, right. That the way he speaks you, you, well, you couldn't hear it, but at least I could hear his voice, but he's really cool. Dean is really cool. And he's a really, really good villain. And then because of this scene, you reduce him to dislike petty criminal. Who's just following somebody else who, a mastermind who wants him to do this and that. And, and then this lady, she kills pain, like really, really easily in the scene. And then this just it, and then Bain is done. And it's like, why do I want two hours of Batman fighting this guy? Like the best villain that he's ever fought. Jesper (37m 32s): And then he's just like this Hensman basically, Autumn (37m 38s): It'd be one thing. If, I mean, at least he should have some charisma of his own, you know, be a good, he could still be an amazing, massive villain and she could be in on it, but she doesn't have to be the one pulling his strings that does seem to reduce who this character from. Totally awesome to. Well, that was, Jesper (37m 59s): Yeah, it's doing such a disservice to the character and all the characterization you've been building so far, because I really think that Bain is very iconic. He's a really cool villain until this point, if this stuff had happened happened, he would have been amazing. It's just like, ah, it feels like just because we need a plot twist, we need something exciting. Okay. Let's make a, this woman that Batman thought he was a loving that she was a love interest of his let's. Let's let, let's make her the villain and Tara, all of a sudden there's a new will. And in the end of the movie, it's just like, oh my God, I know. I really hated. Autumn (38m 37s): I don't, especially a two hour, it'd be one thing. If it was like, you know, 45 minutes, the end of a TV episode, you're like sucked. But two hours in a theater to get to like that kind of a twist, I would have been throwing popcorn at the screen and walking out thinking I just wasted two hours of my life. I could've been like kayaking or something. Exactly. Oh yeah. Okay. Well, I agree that once I I'm glad I never watched dark Knight rises. I never got around to it. I don't think I will anymore. No. Next time. Yeah. Next time I break my leg and I'm tied up in hospital for like months at an and or something. Autumn (39m 20s): I'll consider it until then. Yeah. No, I'm good. No. All right. All right. Good. You're number three then number three. So this one is my last movie and it was one when I watched it, I was like, oh, this is just horrible. So the producer shouldn't surprise you because he has he, after his first couple of movies, he made some flops. So the director is M night Shyamalan. I have him on Melissa as well. Well, you have to see which one he's got a couple of bad ones. I selected signs. Is that the one you picked or do you got a different one? Autumn (40m 1s): It might be. Yes. So this is the alien one where it was a good premise. You know, there's this, there was some good scenes, cornfields, everyone. I grew up in the countryside. My neighbors were Amish. I grew up in cornfields. So I do not find them frightening at all at dark. But for some reason, most of the human population thinks massive cornfields are terrifying at night. They think the woods are terrifying at night. I live in the woods too. So I'm just weird. But I, so there's these things happening. It's a, he's a widower. He's got his daughter and there's this threatening music and weird things happening. And you realize this is this alien invasion and it's sort of tense and terrifying. Autumn (40m 45s): And you're wondering how it's going to go actually pretty good up until that point until you find out, until you find out what defeats the aliens is, water, what is what 90% of this planet is made out of. If you're an alien species that can design faster than light ships, which you attack an alien world, that 90% of it is toxic to you. And then don't even bother throwing in the premonition of the little girl, leaving water glasses all over the house because she just subconsciously knows that her dad will need them to fight the aliens. And then they tie in his wife's dying words that are somehow our premonitions also for what was going to happen. Autumn (41m 32s): I'm just, I'm not, I just couldn't buy it. I mean, really, if you're an intelligent alien raised, you're not going to go. You would at least come in a stupid, a suit that could protect you from the thing that's going to kill you. You can design spaceships. Oh, it was just horrible. I just water. You're allergic to water. Yeah. Great. Jesper (41m 54s): I fully agree. It was number two on my list because I just hated so much. Autumn (41m 59s): So I took all your number two. Jesper (42m 2s): You know what I mean? Exactly. Because of what you say, you know, if you, if you know the water is going to kill you and you're like an highly intelligent alien race, number one, either, like you say, you would wear some protection on number two. Why don't you just pick another planet? Some something that wouldn't kill you. There's kind of, I mean, it makes no sense Autumn (42m 22s): Go to Mars. Jesper (42m 23s): Why do you even want it? Why do you even want invade a planet that kills you? It makes no sense. Autumn (42m 31s): I mean, yeah. I, I, we're only trying to go to Mars, which would kill us. I mean, we're not allergic to anything there, but it has no atmosphere, but we're trying to go there because it's like the only other place we have to go, we don't have spaceships. That'll take us across the, you know, solar system. But yeah, I'm pretty sure there's other places we'd go. It's like, we wouldn't choose, oh, look, there's this planet. 90% of it is composed compost of acidic acid. That's going to totally boil our skin. Let's go there. Yeah. That's a great vacation. Jesper (43m 1s): Yeah. And then we will be like, oh look, there are some people living dead. Let's invade. Then we need to conquer this planet. That will kill us. That's an excellent idea. Oh my God. Yeah. I really hated. Yeah. Autumn (43m 15s): Ah, wonderful. I think that was the first one I watched where I was like, I don't like a nighttime alone anymore. I like the village. I like sixth sense. There was the one with the, yeah. The one with the brittle bones disease that he ended up making into a trilogy. That one wasn't bad. Now I can't even think of the name of it, but Jesper (43m 37s): Mr. Glass or something Autumn (43m 38s): That would, I kind, that was not bad. But by the time I got to signs and like, oh, this is horrible. Jesper (43m 47s): I actually had a, an audio clip for it. Do you want to hear, Okay, here you go. Autumn (44m 11s): You did my homework. Jesper (44m 12s): Yeah. So that was also on my list. I absolutely agree. I hate that Twists that they put in there. That's ridiculous. And also because they just very easily defeat stadiums, then Indiana not like, oh, okay. They can't take water then boom, boom, boom. Then they are defeated. It's like Autumn (44m 30s): The irrigation system. Jesper (44m 30s): Why do we spend all this time building up to it? Then if you can just kill them off that easily, it makes no sense. Right? Waste of time, Autumn (44m 39s): The brain will kill them. As I think one of the commenters, it was one of the famous founders. Like, you know, this guy, the lead character is a former priests. There's all this kind of premonitions and godliness. Well, you know what? God could have just made it rain and no problem. So yeah, it was a bad Plot, such a bad flood. Okay. You're a number three. Jesper (45m 5s): You can, you can, yeah, you can get my number three here. And I think you might be able to get, guess what this one is because the dialogue in this audio clip is sort of pretty iconic, but I can give you another hint that this is the one that I mentioned. I had one on my list with will Smith. And this is, this is the one you ready. Jesper (45m 49s): You know what that is, right? Autumn (45m 50s): Oh yeah, that is, I am legend. And that was my runner up for the list. So that is awesome. Jesper (45m 57s): Cool. It's funny that we have the same thing that annoyed us. That's pretty cool. Autumn (46m 1s): I guess I like this. I love this movie up until. Jesper (46m 7s): Yeah. So in summary, I think most people probably know it, but just summary, 90% of the people's population is killed by a man-made virus designed to cure cancer and then it sort of mutates and then it starts killing everybody. And as a result, you get these, Somby kind of like creatures, which they are quite terrifying. And, and, and it's actually a pretty cool the first half of the movie that that's pretty cool, very dramatic and will Smith character. He is, he's like this brilliant scientist, who's working on finding a cure or vaccine or whatever you want to call it. And he's alone in New York city and is basically just sort of surviving and working. That's all he does. Jesper (46m 47s): And up until this point of the movie, the movie is pretty cool. I really, really liked it. And then he comes across to humans who are actually immune to the virus. So, and this, of course for him as a scientist, this is good news because then maybe he found the holy grail and now he can cure the disease. And it just so happens that when he then brings these people back to his house, this also leads to those kinds of some, be creatures to find his house, which he has like worked for years and years and years to make sure that they would never find him. And now they do and how she's under attack and all that is also fine. But then the twist comes now. Jesper (47m 29s): So because of these two people who are immune, he actually manages to find a cure, but then the houses overrun by these some B kind of creatures. And then he decides to help these two people escape down a cold shoot while he himself decides to stay behind and pull the pin of a grenade and blow himself up, taking all the Sunbury creatures with him. And then you might be wondering, well, why is that so bad? That's pretty heroic. Yeah. But not if I tell you that he could easily just jump down to shoot himself. There was absolutely no reason for him to blow himself up. And the other part is that Autumn (48m 9s): Jumped down the coal chute. Yeah. Jesper (48m 10s): He could. And the other thing is that if you just find a cure and he gives it to these two people who are like, they're not scientists, they have no idea. And then he just sends them off. Like, how does he even know if he wants to cure mankind? How does he even know that they know what to do with that cure? Or will they even be able to find people who know what to do with it? He doesn't know. So it's just like the whole thing. It's like what? So years and years and years to find the cue and then he just blows himself up because of two random people. Autumn (48m 42s): But he wasn't, even though no, I remember saying that at the end, when they're approaching, like they find a as another little town, that's like got a wooden fence. And I'm like, yeah, that looks like it has a top secret, you know, lab Labrador, the moratory where they're going to know what to do to create, you know, spread this cure to other people. And so that's part of the reason it almost made into my list. But then what I didn't know is that the book, this is based on has a different ending it's and the movie completely changes the whole meaning of the book where the book, the, the vampire zombie, like creatures actually have found their own cure. Autumn (49m 22s): And they're not evil. They're basically a better race that it's going to just like we transplanted the new young Neanderthals. They were going to take over the human and humans are a legend. We're becoming something archaic from the past. And we're just fighting for our own last survival. But really, we just need to give up the ghost because we've created something that's better and stronger and more intelligent. And I mean, they have a whole culture, but so that's, doesn't show up in the movie. And I was like, no, they took the book and they completely changed the Authors meeting. Wow. So, yeah, there's a fair. Jesper (49m 58s): And what you just mentioned about the book, that's what makes it cool because then it's, there is an irony in the fact as well that he's been working years and years and years to find a cure for something that isn't about being cured. It's not about being cured, but he doesn't understand that. I know that that's what makes it pretty cool to me. I think the book ending that's cool. But yeah, I D I don't know what the heck they were doing when they made this movie. It's just like, it's so stupid to screw it up like that. Yeah. Autumn (50m 29s): I, they completely changed the character of the will plays. They changed the meaning of the story. They obviously did not understand how difficult sciences, other than it took him years to come up with this cure. And then he doesn't even know if they're going to be able to hand it over to someone who's surviving, who knows how to replicate it. Jesper (50m 49s): It's not like you just put it in like some chicken soup and you're good. Oh, that movie. Yeah. It that's why it was all I was trying to divide between Hancock and that one. And I'm just so glad you came up with iron legends. So I got to have both of them on the list. Oh, cool. Okay. Well, you already took my number too, so I guess you need to do two in a row. Now. I only have my one number one, Autumn (51m 15s): Right? Well, maybe I can grab one of your other ones. So my number two were, well, all of the rest of mine are books. So I know they're not going to be the same as yours. So this is actually mocking Jay from the final book in the hunger games series. And that is because, so this is the end where, you know, the whole story, three books, three movies lead up to the moment where Katniss is sent to, you know, take out snow and everything that's going on. And what happens. She actually gets knocked out towards the end of the movie and wakes up to find out the war is over. So it basically invalidates the entire book where she is. Autumn (51m 58s): She accomplishes nothing. And so she spends all of mocking Jay on her super secret mission to reach the Capitol and kill snow. And ultimately, and all these people die to help her get there. And ultimately she contributes nothing. The problem solved totally without her. And she made as well as stayed home. And what's pissed me off almost more than that, because I had already given up on her as a character. She never really resonated with me. She was too wishy washy, but her sister, a little sister prim, who just wanted to do something important. She trained as a nurse basically to go and help the soldiers who were fighting the battle. And she ends up getting killed. Autumn (52m 39s): And what ends up being a faked attack by the Capitol? It was actually the other side making it look like it was the Capitol. She dies as basically friendly fire, sort of, they kill out a whole bunch of people. It was so unnecessary and pointless. I was just frothing at the mouth. I was so furious. So that's why I made it to number two. It was just her Katniss herself. I've always said she, she has a flat character arc the entire trilogy. She never changes. She never does anything. She never grows into her role or takes control of her own life all the way down to getting knocked unconscious and everything happening without her. Autumn (53m 20s): And she's just the most pointless character. And you're really hope that, you know, book three, the third movie, that something exciting would have happened. And it doesn't, I still don't like her. I Jesper (53m 35s): Didn't read those books. Autumn (53m 36s): Yeah. It was just not worth it, not worth it. So I will stop beating it there. But yeah, it just was a pointless, it has such potential. It was so interesting. And I really was hoping that by the end of the book, she would be like, I'm, bad-ass, I'm going to go and stomp somebody. And it really just never resonated. It never grew into that. She never becomes really a hero in, she sort of stays as a propped up figure. And it's just whatever. Jesper (54m 7s): Yeah, because in the movies, I don't, I don't think that that's the case. I mean, in the movie she takes initiatives and she drives the plot forward. And so on. I don't, at least I don't recall it being such an issue in the movies. Autumn (54m 20s): I feel every once in a while she would pop up with something good, but she was always, it was never an upper word arc. She was always never fulfilling her true potential. She never reached it and it's just disappointing. It was very disappointing. All right. And so we're going to skip right ahead since we did your number two to my number one of WORST Plot Twists. And I think this one, it'll be interesting to see, cause this was a movie, but I always look at it from the book side, but it's actually Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets. Jesper (54m 56s): I would have to say, now I have not read any Harry Potter books and I'm not what's any Harry Potter movies. So I don't really know. Autumn (55m 3s): Okay, so this is not yours. So this is the one where Harry is at the end of book one. So he enters the legendary chamber of secrets and Harry finds them face to face with Tom riddle, the younger version of the evil wizard, Voldemort and Ray riddle sends in a ballot. Basilisk I can't pronounce that, which is an enormous Fang snake after him. And it's chasing after Harry and things seem, yeah, snake giant snake. This is not a snake. Well, that's what it is in the movie. We're not going to question what JK Rowling's uses for her creatures. Jesper (55m 36s): So, okay. So let me, sorry. Autumn (55m 40s): So things are looking really bad for Harry. He's very young. Yestermorrow this is the first year he's at Hogwarts and then suddenly a magical Phoenix flies into the chamber dropping the sorting hat in front of Harry, which happens to hold the sort of Griffin door. So he uses that to kill the basle Lisk. And the Fenix is tears even heal Harry's wounds. And professor Dumbledore later reveals that Harry's loyalty caused the Phoenix to fly to him. But really, I mean, up until this point, there's no mention of a Phoenix it's just and brings the sorting hat. Autumn (56m 20s): It brings the sword that Harry couldn't rim thing to bring himself. It's just comes out of nowhere. If that hadn't happened, Harry would have died. Book one, there goes the rest of the series. Jesper (56m 33s): There's Deus Ex Machina. Again, Autumn (56m 34s): It's such to me, it's one of the worst examples. It's like the whole book wasn't plotted and JK Rowling's realized she wrote written herself into a really bad spot instead of fixing what came earlier. She just thrown a Phoenix with a who brought the sorting hat that was holding the sword. Why would the sorting happy holding the sword? Jesper (56m 53s): Why is, I mean, considering how popular Harry Potter is, why is more people not complaining about this? Or maybe they are just noticed it Autumn (57m 0s): Maybe. And I just, even the fact is Harry Potter know how to use a sword. He can see, you know, how to use one. I just it's so ridiculous that, you know, it would've been better with the Phoenix had caused the bass list to blow up in flames. At least I could have said, well, that made no sense, but at least a Phoenix knows how to you know, like night something. So, Jesper (57m 22s): I mean, short fighting is not something you just do. Right? I mean, you have to train pretty well to do that, especially fighting a monster. Autumn (57m 31s): Oh exactly. I'm fighting something that's already, you know, poisoned you in a cut you in you're already in bad shape, but just because you got a magic sword, you're good to go. Jesper (57m 42s): Oh, okay. That's convenient. Isn't Autumn (57m 46s): It just, Jesper (57m 49s): Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I feel like I can, because this one is not Dave's X McKenna. This is just like screwing with your audience completely OTs. And it's, it's really bad in my view, but I have to admit that I really struggled with finding number one, my one number one entry, because I had to find something that was worse than everything else. And I had to do sort of, I did a lot of research on the internet just to see if I could, if it would jog my memory on something. And then I did find, find something that I actually had completely forgotten about. Oh, but this show that I'm gonna talk about. It's not a movie, it's a TV show, but it is one of my all time childhood favorites. Jesper (58m 39s): I absolutely loved this TV show and I'll play the theme song song in just a second. And I promise you, you will know exactly what it is. Oh, that'll be exciting. But the, the show took the world by storm and anyone growing up in the nineties, they will know what this is. Okay. So I ready for your son clip. Jesper (59m 21s): Yes. Okay. Here you go. Autumn (59m 23s): So the X-Files it's going to be the first Twilight zone. I'm like, no, no. That's a different theme song. So yes, Jesper (59m 32s): I guess all of your clips. I think, I feel like I wait, that's a bit, that's a bit of cheating because you didn't even have some place that I could guess. So I just lose automatically because you guessed. Right. And I didn't even have a chance to compete. Well, there Autumn (59m 50s): You go. Ah, I like this rule. I like this game. I Jesper (59m 56s): Think that's a crappy rule. Autumn (59m 58s): This is like playing dune. Every player has their own strategy to win. I know what my showed is. You have to figure out yours. Jesper (1h 0m 6s): Oh my God. Okay. Well, first of all, I want to say again that I love the show, however, and this is why it made it to number one on my list, because do you know like that feeling of your favorite show? Just being ruined completely. Maybe not completely, but they, they throw in some, some span into the wheel that just like what the heck is going on here. And it felt like it was just because the show creators, they had to do something to try to, I guess, spice things up a bit or something. But I had forgotten about this. Probably suppressed it to be honest, but what I found in doing my internet research, it came back to me. Jesper (1h 0m 50s): So let me just explain. So in season 11, in the very first episode, we learned that you remember the wrist is a mysterious secret smoking man, who is part of the series. He's really weird and you don't really know what he's, what's going on with him. But then in season 11, we all of a sudden learn. In the very first episode, we learned that he actually impregnated Scali using some sort of alien science with the aim to create like the first superhuman child. And we get a flashback to season seven where Scully accused the cigarette smoking man of dragging her. Jesper (1h 1m 30s): And it then becomes apparent that Scalia's son is in fact not molded after all then. So, you know, doing something like this, like four seasons later, it is just such a betrayal to the audience. You know, you for four seasons, you have believed that these two characters has have, they have a son together. They finally got together after all that time, you know where, or there was all this tension between them like romantic tension and so on and so on, they get a child and then four season later you'd just drop a bomb to say, well, actually it's not his child. Anyway. I mean, I liked plot twists. Don't get me wrong. And I can probably even stomach more plot twists than most people, because it does take quite a lot bef before I, it stops annoying me, but this one, it was just like, I really felt like a completely destroyed everything. Jesper (1h 2m 22s): I thought about these characters. And it came also completely out of the blue, like, like the created just that, what can we do to spice things up? Oh, let's throw this stuff in here just to create some drama for the sake of drama. Autumn (1h 2m 35s): Yeah. It's I don't know if they changed writers or what was going on, but I agree. I mean, they betrayed everything that the core essence of what you thought was sort of between these two characters and then it was just like, Nope, Nope, Nope. They're not a happy family. Sorry. Yeah, he don't do that. Jesper (1h 2m 55s): Not okay. It's it's such a betrayal Autumn (1h 2m 58s): And it's funny. Cause you, you were mentioning that reminded me of probably one that would have made my list and it might've even been number one. And that is the ending, the Firefly, the movie that pissed me off so much because they, again, not, not a twist so much as what they did to the characters, they killed off the pilot. They make it through this amazing crash landing and this happens and that happens and he gets spirited like by a piece of debris or something, right at the laughter everything is safe. And I'm like, no, it was such, it was done just to yank at the viewer's heartstrings, especially cause he was married to the, yeah, it was just, ah, there was a lot about the movie. Autumn (1h 3m 44s): I wish I had never watched the movie. Anyone who's a Firefly fan. If you have not watched the movie, don't watch the movie. It ruins everything. I wish it's an exist. Jesper (1h 3m 55s): Yeah. I love the series though. The Autumn (1h 3m 57s): Series is awesome. The movie sounds good. And I can't remember all the characters well to enunciate all the ways that it sucks, but it sucks in very, very, it's cruel to several of the characters in ways that it just didn't need to be the series. That was awesome. Jesper (1h 4m 15s): Okay. Well you said before that the it's like playing risk and you have to make up your own rules for how to win. So I actually just brought another one here because that's my way of winning. So if I can't beat you with five bad things on the list, I'll put six on the list. Autumn (1h 4m 31s): I guess we're both winners this week. Jesper (1h 4m 36s): So just an honorable mention here because some people will have this movie on their list of the worst of the worst. And let me just play you the short audio clip and then I will explain. Autumn (1h 5m 16s): Okay. Jesper (1h 5m 16s): I actually, I only watched it like probably a month ago or something like that. But this movie is called mother and it is staring a starring Jennifer Lawrence. And I included this one as an honorable mention because I'm really, really conflicted about this movie. You know, when I first watched the movie, I was like, what's going on? You know, the, the Mo the longer you get into the movie, the more crazy everything just becomes. And it's like, everything goes into chaos and it's like, it doesn't make any sense. It's like, where's what I, I can't even explain it. It's like, you have no idea what's going on. Jesper (1h 5m 57s): And it just makes no sense. There's all these kinds of people who does terrible things, all of a sudden in, in her house. And it's just like, what the heck is going on. And you're completely confused all the way through the first half of the movie is just like normal mystery kind of thing. Pretty, pretty good, actually. And then the second half is just complete chaos with nothing makes sense anymore. And I won't spoil it here and say two months, because, because people might not have watched it yet. And it was not that long ago since it came on Netflix. So I don't want to spoil it. Like some of the other movies that I've mentioned today, they were all very old movies. So I want, I want, don't want to spoil it, but I just have to say, because after I watched the movie, I was like, when it ended, I was like, I have no idea what went on here. Jesper (1h 6m 42s): So I actually went on the internet and I then didn't start searching for some explanations about what is the meaning of this movie. And then I found the answers. And then when I read those, I must admit that then all of a sudden, I say, ah, okay, I see, you know, and maybe it's just me being thick and not seeing it, but I understood it when I read. And it was explained to me what the point was and everything that happens in that movie, even though it seems completely insane, it actually has a purpose and an explanation to it. Oh. And I'm still conflicted about it because on one end, it's, it's, it's crappy because you, you don't understand what's going on and it just feels like complete chaos. But on the other hand, once you actually read the explanation for it, then it's like, okay, I, at least I can re I can respect what they were trying to do at least. Autumn (1h 7m 32s): So, yeah. I mean, it's good that it had a meeting, but it does sound like it was bad. Something filming, plotting something where they, you need to go and read it on YouTube. They're going to hand out a flyer on your way to the movie theater so that you can understand what you're about to watch. Jesper (1h 7m 47s): Yeah. I don't know be because once you, once you read the explanations, you want to also understand why it has to be shown as very chaotic. It's completely on purpose, but yeah. People can watch the movie if you want. I just want you it's. It's crazy. And then, and then go read about what I would definitely say. Don't read about what the movie is about first, because then it'll spoil everything. What's the movie just what's it. And then read about it afterwards and then make up your own mind whether you think it's just either this, either this movie complete stroke of genius oil, it's complete madness. I don't know. Jesper (1h 8m 30s): It's one of the two, that's a good note to end on. That sounds like a fun twist. Yes. I think our plot twists, we both declare ourselves winners, so, Hmm. I don't know if it was the counselors winners, but also because we actually had a few that we actually agreed on. So it's true. Yeah. That's pretty. Okay. We both win. We're good. I'll say I won and then we can close it with that. Yes. You won as well as I did. That's not what I said. That's what I understood. Jesper (1h 9m 11s): That doesn't count. No. Alright. Well, next Monday, we have an episode with writing a vice for you. We'll discuss how to create chapters that will read us. So see you then. Narrator (1h 9m 22s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating

Many authors have considered starting a YouTube channel. Autumn and Jesper tried for a couple of years - and failed. It's much harder than it looks. The questions is... will YouTube videos, focused on writing, actually help with fiction sales? The extremely successful YouTuber, Jenna Moreci, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to offer advice and guidance. She knows everything there is to know about leveraging YouTube as a marketing tool for authors and writers.   Check out Jenna's books: The Savior's Champion: https://books2read.com/tsc/  The Savior's Sister: https://books2read.com/tss/    Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 148 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, and Autumn is taking care of some editing today. And once you use a way I've secured an amazing guest speaker for you, because today I'm going to talk to the very talented Jenna Moreci so welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jenna, Jenna (51s): Thank you so much for having me. I'm super happy to be here. Jesper (54s): Yeah, it's a pleasure talking to you. And I just want to say for those who might not know, Jenna is a number one best-selling author of dark fantasy, and she also runs a very successful YouTube channel. So I couldn't think of anyone better to bring onto the podcast today to talk about YouTube for Authors, Jenna. Okay. Jenna (1m 13s): Well thank you. I'm super honored. Yeah. I kind of fell into YouTube sort of accidentally, or maybe not accidentally, but I didn't expect it to get to this level. So yeah, I'm, I'm super down to talk about it and everything that I've learned along the way. Jesper (1m 31s): Yeah, because wait, well maybe for context, I could just start out by saying Autumn and NAI and even myself before I sort of teamed up with Adam, tried my luck. If you want to call it that and running a YouTube channel and my God is difficult. And then Autumn and I tried for a while as well, probably like two years. And then we transitioned into podcasting and this is going much better to this, but the YouTube stuff is difficult. So yeah, it's, it's tough getting traction unusual. So I'm very going to be very curious during this episode here to sort of get your thoughts on it and maybe some tips and tricks for people who might want to try on their own to see if they can get a YouTube channel going. Jenna (2m 19s): Absolutely. I mean, I've been doing this for almost a decade now, so I've been, I've been around for awhile. I've made all the mistakes and you know, that's what you got to deal with in order to become successful. You got to mess up a few times. So I, I hope I can answer all of your questions. Jesper (2m 37s): Yeah, probably, but I don't know. Maybe we could just start a bit more on the, you know, not low side. I don't, that's not what you call it, but slowly and maybe, maybe you can just, yeah, a bit more about yourself and maybe put a more, a few more words on, on what you just said about why you started the YouTube channel in the first place. Jenna (2m 56s): So I have been wanting to be, you know, author since I was six years old, it's literally my lifelong dream. And around the time I heard what a lot of people, you know, are told when they're young, that's authors don't make any money. It's not, it's not a viable career. You should try something else. And so I started off in finance. I have a degree in business with a concentration in finance and I got a job in finance. I was a stockbroker and I hated it. It was driving me crazy. I, I just, there was a moment where I realized I CA like I can't do this every day of my life. I have to at least try to become an author. Even if it's just a side gig. I just need to know that I gave it a shot. Jenna (3m 39s): So at that point I started writing my first book and I started trying to build a platform. I researched the industry and, and I'm really glad I got a degree in business because I learned all about the business side of things and being an entrepreneur and creating a platform. And I started like most authors do with blogging. And I had a blog for a few years. It, you know, I had about 200 followers and I hated it. I hated blogging. I mean, I liked to write, but I like to write fiction. I don't like to write about, you know, normal life stuff. So I was blogging for a while. I'm working on my book, try to figure out a way to expand my platform even more. And a lot of people had told me, you should do YouTube. Jenna (4m 21s): You're funny. You're sarcastic. You give really good writing advice. I was also doing critiques at the time. So people were like, you should create a Writing YouTube channel. And like most introverted Authors. I was like, no, like there's no way I am. Yeah. The only way I'm sitting in front of a camera and putting myself on the internet like that, sorry, fast forward a couple years, my then boyfriend now fiance suffered a very terrible accident. He fell two stories and broke his spine. And I had to put, you know, I quit my job. I put everything on hold to be as caregiver. And when you go through something like that, it kind of changes your perspective on life. And you know how our time here, isn't guaranteed. Jenna (5m 3s): And I had paused working on my book. I had paused the blog and I just thought, you know what, like as he started to get better and I started to build my platform again, I was like, you know what, I'm just going to try YouTube. Okay. Like what have I got to lose? If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But I, you know, my, my time here is it permanent. So I got make an account and I started the YouTube channel, made a couple of crappy videos and started to get the hang of it. Yeah. I mean, that's how it always works. It always starts off with the bad videos, but I started getting the hang of it and I started off trying to be very professional and like, you know, like, you know, oh, I'm a dignified writer and that's just not really my style. Jenna (5m 46s): And no one was watching the channel. And so finally I said, you know what? No one's watching anyway. So I'm just going to be myself and I'm going to be goofy and I'm going to be custody. I'm just going to be my normal personality. And literally the very next video, my channel skyrocketed, I went from a hundred subscribers to nine to 9,000 subscribers in a week. And, and the rest is history. Now I'm at 260,000 subscribers. I really did not expect to be in this place. But yeah. And because of YouTube, I was able to make Writing and YouTube my full-time career. And I'm doing a whole lot better at this than I was as a stockbroker financially. I'm making triple what I made as a stockbroker. Jenna (6m 27s): So it all worked out. Jesper (6m 29s): All right. Yes. Do you think actually considering that it was quite some time ago since you started out, do you think there's a difference in starting, you know, running a YouTube channel today versus back when you did it, do you think, has that sort of, is it more saturated market had more difficult now? How do you see that? Jenna (6m 51s): Absolutely. I really got in at the perfect time when I started my channel, I looked for other writers on YouTube and I could only find two and their channels were very small and they were really young. And I was inspired by that because at the time I was like 28 and they were teenagers. And I was like, you know, what, if these teens have the courage to do this, that I have no, excuse, I'm a, I'm a grown woman. I have no excuse. And now after my channel kind of blew up, now, there are tons of writing channels on YouTube. So it's, I'm not going to lie. It's definitely harder to get started. Now, the key is, is to find a way to stand out and authenticity. Jenna (7m 34s): Like I said, I started off very professional, a very phony and I wasn't going anywhere. Right. And once I became my authentic self people, people really, you know, gravitate toward that. You know? So I think that if you want to stand out in this market, you really have to create quality content that is consistent and authentic because people want someone that they can relate to. And they feel like they actually know. Jesper (7m 60s): Yeah. Because I think reflecting back on the time that we spent on attempting to run a YouTube channel, I think once I reflect back to it nowadays, look, you know, couple of years since we transitioned into podcasting instead, I think I was very much focused at the point in time around probably thinking too much about how do you make a YouTube video that is engaging. And also because, you know, usually when people watch YouTube videos, at least as far as I've sort of in investigated or researched my way into, it's also about, you know, keeping people's attention in a YouTube videos. Jesper (8m 45s): It's very difficult. It's not like the same as a podcast here. We are talking to each other. People are probably doing the dishes while they're listening to this stuff. And you can sort of do other things, which is very nice. I podcasts a lot for this particular reason myself, but with YouTube, you're competing against them clicking onto Netflix instead of something, right. Jenna (9m 4s): So you really need to grab their attention. And I found that I was probably thinking, overthinking it too much about how to do that best rather the being authentic, like you're saying, but at the same time, your authenticity has to be attention grabbing, you know, I kinda like it to being on a date in the sense that when you're on. And I mean, like, I hate that analogy because dating sucks. But when you're on a date, the idea is to be yourself, but be the best version of yourself. So I'm very, I'm very honest and authentic on my channel. I talk about the fact that, you know, my fiance is disabled and has a chronic pain condition. Jenna (9m 49s): I talk about the fact that I have mental illness. You know, I'm not saying you should say all this stuff on a first date, but the point is real people know about my life. They know about who I am. I I'm giving them my honest, authentic personality, but you also don't want to be authentic to the point where it's like, okay, you know, this is, this is getting to be like a bummer or downer or overshare or something like that. You know, it's like being on a first date, you give them the best version of yourself. Again, I'm not saying that all the other authentic stuff I was talking about is the best version, but people appreciate the honesty, but at the same time, I'm not going to go create a video where I'm ranting because I'm having a bad day. Jenna (10m 30s): And I'm just like, oh my gosh, I had the worst day, I got a bad review and I did this. And you know, like I show them the sides of myself that are fun and quirky and goofy and, and people like that because they can relate to it. Jesper (10m 45s): Yeah. And I think for most part, people are watching YouTube because they want a bit of entertainment as well. I mean, they can certainly watch YouTube videos also to learn something, but unless it's a bit entertaining as well then. Yeah. Well, you're probably going to click on something else instead. Right. Jenna (11m 1s): Exactly. And, and I think that's the key is to be entertaining in your authentic way. I've seen some people because I'm, I've just, since I was a teenager, I've been a potty mouth. Like, that's just how I am my family jokes about it. My, I don't know if anyone used to watch the show Dexter, but there's a character on the show named Deborah who cusses a lot. And my nickname when I was a stockbroker was Deborah because of that, I just do what I taught. And so when I'm on my channel, you know, I'm, Kasie because that's my authentic self. Sometimes I will see other people talk to me and they'll be like, well, I'm trying to be like you, Jenna, you know, like I'm cursing and I'm doing that and I'm not getting followers. And I'm like, well, that's because you're trying to be like me. Like, I am not doing that to get the followers. Jenna (11m 43s): I'm doing that because that's how I talk. And in fact, they get people commenting. Like you're not being a proper lady, you know, like mad about that, but I'm just being me and people are, people can smell a phony a mile away. So it's not about emulating someone else's entertainment factor. It's about being your own kind of entertainment. There are channels that are really successful where the people are very prim and proper, but they have a cute kind of entertainment style or their sense of humor is deadpan. You know, you got to do it your way. Jesper (12m 16s): So would you say that some people will just struggle a lot to ever get success? You know, because I'm also, it's like, some people might want to be an actor or something. Right. But not everybody can be an actor because it's not a, it takes some, you have to have this kind of thing to be successful at it. And do you think it's the same for YouTube that you have to have some sort of, I don't know what you want to call it, but YouTube factor or something, you know, something that makes you entertaining to what your videos or the way you speak about things or whatever. Do you think everybody can do it? Or do you think it sort of requires some unspoken skill or whatever you want to go? Jenna (12m 58s): I think it's a little bit of both. I think you can absolutely learn to, you know, improve your craft. Its kind of like Writing. Like you can, you can learn the skill, you can improve your craft over time, but some people have a natural talent and that makes the improvement and skill like learning easier. It makes that aspect of it easier. And there are some people who really, really struggle with a certain thing. Like, like for example, I'm terrible at all things athletic. Like I have no coordination. I can't even, I can't even shoot the aliens on the buzz light year ride at Disneyland. Like I have no hand-eye coordination and I could practice as much as I want and I will probably still suck. Jenna (13m 39s): And that's just kinda how it is in a lot of activities in life. So I definitely think you can learn the skill and get better. Some people are more naturally inclined for it. Some people it's just not for them. And I think the problem is is that people don't give themselves enough time to learn where they fall in that spectrum. A lot of people will quit if the channel isn't making it after a month, it took me six months to get from a hundred subscribers to 9,000 subscribers. It took me six months to, to experience that leap. And now I'm at 260,000 subscribers. So you got to give yourself the time, but you also need to know when it's like, okay, this just does it for me. You know, I know people who've had their channels for years almost as long as me and they have, you know, less than a thousand subscribers. Jenna (14m 25s): It's like, okay, well maybe, maybe this isn't really, you know, your forte and there's nothing wrong with that. You, you know, we, failure is a part of success. You know, it's a part of learning what you're good at, where your strengths are, where your passion is. And quite often, if, if you're not good at something, a lot of times it comes to the passion element of it. Maybe your passion is, you know, better spent elsewhere. And so sometimes you just got to something a shot and realize if it's for you or not, but you got give yourself the time to figure it out. Jesper (14m 57s): Yeah. But I, I think actually that is an excellent, good point because you know, looking at our, our, you know, myON Autumn's YouTube channel, it's probably been there for like five, six years. There's 2000 subscribers on it. Most videos don't get many views because well we moved into podcasting. So it was just a secondary sort of channel. It just sits there. We don't do much with it anymore other than just uploading these podcast episodes. Right. Whereas the podcasts are getting a much, much, much more and more downloads, but, and I think as well, that it's a good point because we gave it a good run probably longer than we should have to be honest, but we didn't give up right away. We, we kept at it. But at some point we also just had a Frank discussion between ourselves and sort of said, this is not going anywhere. Jesper (15m 41s): Is it? And it's like, no, it's not okay. Let's do something else. We did our best. But I, I, I think as well that we are enjoying the podcast much more and that probably shines through, Jenna (15m 54s): Well, it's like me with blogging versus YouTube. I hated blogging. And I plateaued at 200 followers. I, you know, it, it's kinda like with writing, you know, when you are passionate about the story you're telling it shines through, you can see it in the words, my blog kind of plateaued, whereas YouTube, I get to be silly. I get to be animated. You know, it, it's a more enjoyable experience for me. It's easier for me than blogging. And I think that's why I was better suited for you too. But I think that's why my channel is way more successful than my blog is because you can see that I'm enjoying it more, this feels more on brand. Jenna (16m 35s): It feels more Jenna, you know? Jesper (16m 38s): Yeah. Yeah. So if people are thinking, okay, I think I want to have a go with this stuff. I want to try to do a YouTube channel and I want to be authentic. And I I'm gonna see if I can get a bit of success with this. Just on practical terms. What would you recommend in terms of, you know, you know, they, they need a bit of a recording equipment. They need some microphone stuff, you know, all the equipment things. What would you suggest in terms of just getting started? Because you can buy yourself crazy equipment if you want it. Jenna (17m 14s): Right. Well, when I first got started, I just used my face time camera, my laptop, microphone and natural lighting. It's a little bit of a different environment right now. So that might be a bit risky. But what I will say is that the quality of your content matters more than the quality of the video. So if you are going to start off with any equipment at all, I would recommend it being a microphone because if your voice is Peaky or annoying, that's, what's going to make someone turn off in terms of the quality of the video, it's going to be the audio that turns someone off people can tolerate, you know, video footage that is, you know, clear, unclear, or grainy. Jenna (17m 58s): They can tolerate that. They can tolerate bad lighting. They can't tolerate bad audio. So if you can get yourself a decent microphone, that's the equipment I would start off with. I know people who have really large channels and they're still filming on their iPhone, the, the, the image itself. So you don't need the, the camera and the lighting yet. You can park yourself in front of a window and do natural lighting. I would recommend this for when you're just getting started when you're just figuring out if this is for you. I say this because I know people who spent thousands of dollars right off the gate only to find out that their channel is just, you know, no one likes it. They're not good at it. It's, it's not for them. So, you know, start off with a microphone and let everything else be, you know, the homemade at the beginning as you grow, that's when you want to invest in a camera and lighting and things like that, as you start to see, okay, this is a viable option for me. Jenna (18m 55s): Outside of that, the editing of the video is very important. It's different than podcasts with podcasts. It's conversational, you know, all that good stuff on YouTube. Time is money. People have things to do, and you know, they could be watching Netflix or Hulu. They don't have to be watching you. So edit out the ums. If you need to script your content beforehand, I script all my videos because I am a rambler. So I script them all or else they'd be like, you know, an hour long of me just repeating myself, script your videos, edit out the ums and UHS, you know, make it, get to the point, make it, you know, concise, give them the quality information or, you know, content that you are here for. Jenna (19m 41s): Get rid of all the long pauses. That's the most important thing to start off with and of course being authentic. So if, if you're just getting started, those are the key things that I would recommend because the, even if you're funny and you've got a great personality, if you've got all of the pauses and lagging and the stumbling over words in there, it'll totally destroy the funny it'll destroy the entertainment factor. So get yourself a good editing program. And it's great because a lot of them are free. You know, I movie comes with, you know, apple products. I, I use I movie for like 75% of my editing. And I, and I've been doing this for years. You know, you don't, you don't need to get the fancy stuff right out the gate. Jesper (20m 22s): No, exactly. My, my oldest son just bought a, some editing software. I think he paid like 80 bucks for it or something. And it's, it's very good. I know. So it's not even that expensive, at least that pot, the cameras can be expensive, I imagine, but at least editing software, that's not that bad. Jenna (20m 38s): Yeah. I, I ha I now use I movie alongside final cut pro final cut pro was pretty affordable. And I basically just use that for all the overlays and texts and little doodads that flow on the screen. But in terms of just trimming your video down and getting the sharp cuts and getting out all the crud that you don't need it and your content, something like I move, he works just fine. And I believe PC has something, another free program, but I'm not, I don't, I'm not familiar. Jesper (21m 6s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but then there was also things like thumbnail images, titles of the videos, keywords and that sort of thing. So do you have any good tips when it comes to those things Jenna (21m 20s): For thumbnails? I would recommend something eye catching, you know, funny faces always work. I usually am doing a goofy face in my thumbnails text that, you know, you know, it's gonna catch your attention. When I do my trope videos where I talk about the worst tropes. Oh, right. Something like your romance book sucks. You know, it's just like, it catches people's attention. I make a disgusted face, you know, bright colors, things like that. The title is something that a lot of people mess up and it really hurts their place in the algorithm. People are always trying to make their title stand out. You know, like the clickbait title that time has sort of passed. Jenna (22m 4s): And by that, I mean, you can make your title stand out without it being click baity, without it being like I'm pregnant with an alien. You know what I mean? Like be specific about what your, your video is about, because the idea is you want to get in the algorithm. You want people who are typing in, for example, if I were giving tips for writing a first draft, you want people who are, people are not typing pregnant alien baby. They are typing Well, you never know, but you want to attract the people who are typing in first draft. So put that in the title. You know what I mean? Like if you're, if you're talking about romance novels, you want people who are typing in romance novels. Jenna (22m 48s): So you say what your video's about. And a lot of people don't do that because they think it's not catchy enough, but it's like, it's, you know, go with the common sense title. And then as you work, you'll see that certain words perform better than others. For example, book performs better than novels. So in a lot of my titles, I will say like how to write a romance book, as opposed to how to write a romance novel. YouTube gives you all these analytics. So they make it really easy to figure out like what, you know, what you should be typing and what works. There's also free platforms that you can use that show you, you know, how keywords know perform a lot of my videos, if it has writing or writer in the title, it performs better than videos that don't have writing or writer. Jenna (23m 32s): People like lists, you know, 10 best, 10 worst. And so a lot of my videos have that, you know, and of course, you know, best and worst. These are these, those are sort of the click baity words, best worst. You know, it kind of creates a hierarchy. People like the idea of, Ooh, this might be juicy. There might be drama here, you know, and that, and that's where that comes into play. Jesper (23m 55s): Yeah. Do, do you do any research when it comes to sort of the topics of your videos? So what should you talk about next week and the week after and so on? Or, or do you just go with what you feel like talking about Jenna (24m 7s): A little bit of both, but mostly the former, I'd say it's 75% research and 25% of what I feel like. And by that, I mean, you know, I will, I, about every six months I go through my videos and I see how they're performing. And I look for trends. I also have a wonderful assistant who helps me with that as well. I know not everyone is starting at a place where they can have an assistant, so, right. So I've been, I've been doing this for years. I did it on my own for years. Trust me, you can do it. YouTube makes it super easy, but I go through the videos and I see which ones performed the best, which ones performed the worst. I look for trends. And then I, I, you know, sort of plan my YouTube schedule around that. Jenna (24m 48s): So for example, my best performing videos by far, or my trope videos, you know, the 10 worst romance tropes, the 10 best romance tropes, the 10 worst scifi tropes, et cetera, those performed the best. You don't want to make your entire channel, just that thing, because then it becomes, you know, a one trick pony. It's not, you need, you need variety. You know what I mean? So you want to offer variety. So I try to mix it up with that kind of content, along with the second and third best kind of content. And then w when I plan my videos, you know, I, I know what performs best. And then I just think, okay, of all this kind of content, what do I most feel like talking about right now? So I give, I give myself a pool of the best performers, and then it's like, what am I in the mood to discuss? Jenna (25m 32s): And then I will pick and choose from there every once in a while, I will do a video that isn't as well performing, but I really enjoy it. Or the diehard fans enjoy it. A perfect example of this is my unboxing videos about once every other month, I unboxed presence and books and goodies that fans send me in the mail. They are by far my lowest performing videos, but they are the favorite videos of my diehard fans. The people are all about the brand, all about the platform who really love to support me. They are constantly like, when's the next unboxing video coming out. So for me, it's fine that they're not as high performing because it makes the people who've got my back no matter what it makes them happy. Jenna (26m 16s): So I'm happy to deliver that content to them, but yeah, Jesper (26m 20s): Once in a while, Jenna (26m 22s): Right, exactly about once every other month. And it's fun for me. I mean, I get to basically have Christmas all the time. I enjoy it. So, Jesper (26m 31s): Yeah, for sure. I understand that. But there was one thing I was wondering that I, that I definitely added to my list of things that I wanted to ask you because, and I don't know if this is true or not. So this could just be my, you know, me misunderstanding the situation or miss calculating or whatever you want to call it. But I have always been wondering, because when you have all kinds of different authors often have, you know, the ones who have YouTube channels, they will mostly like you do as well. They will talk about writing more as almost, it can be fun like you do it, but, but it'll be writing advice kind of information more, I would say, mostly targeting people who are interested in writing, meaning other authors and so on. Jesper (27m 20s): And I've always been wondering when it comes to actually selling fiction books. If somebody wanted to start a YouTube channel and the stuff you have to talk about is writing, because that sort of makes sense. Does it actually help on selling fiction books or is it more like a different audience that you're building and therefore you're building like a business on YouTube Prada and then you have fiction sales over on the other end, or what's your experience there? Jenna (27m 47s): It w it can help if you do it the right way. And by that, I mean, I write dark fantasy action, adventure and romance. I write adult fiction. My channel is geared towards writers and readers in that group. By that, I mean, you know, like I mentioned before, I have a bit of a potty mouth. My books feature cursing. If you do not like a potty mouse woman, you're not going to like my books. Also, sometimes people will be like, well, you know, if you, if you talked a little bit different and you made less raunchy jokes, younger people could watch your channel. And it's like, okay, well, that's not my target audience at all fiction. Jenna (28m 27s): I don't write children's books. I've had people be like, can you make your videos better for second graders? And I'm like, well, seventh graders are not going to read my book about the fights or the death tournament. You know, so no I'm not doing that. You need to gear your channel toward that segment. And a bulk of my videos are about dark fantasy fantasy. They're about romance. They're about adventure fight scenes. I gear my content specifically toward what I enjoy, what I'm writing, what, and thus, obviously I'm going to attract a ton of writers, but typically if you're writing FANTASY, you like reading FANTASY. And I actually have a huge audience base of people who don't write at all. Jenna (29m 8s): They just think I'm funny, which I really appreciate it. And they're like, I don't write. I just think you're funny. And I like your books, you know? So I've had acquaintances in the past where they, it didn't translate well, they had a YouTube channel. It didn't translate well to their book sales because their channels brand was completely off from what, from the book they were selling, you know, like the, the channel being very professional, being very all ages friendly. And in the book they re they released as like raunchy. And you know what I mean? Like you, right. And they've attracted the wrong audience. And people are like, whoa, this is, you know, this is, this is dirty and salacious. And it's like, well, you didn't attract the right audience. Jenna (29m 50s): You know? So it, you have to be aware of who you want, reading your books. That's gotta be who you make your channel for. You know? So, you know, if me dropping an F bomb, bothers a person and prevents them from subscribing, that's great because they wouldn't like my books, you know, so I don't need them. I don't need them in the audience. So it's all about being very cognizant of your brand and the image that you are releasing. Jesper (30m 16s): Okay. Very cool. Yeah. And I said to you, before we started recording that I actually asked in our Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group, what people wanted me to ask you, Jenna. So there was quite a number of questions, but I tried to pick the ones that I sort of thought was on topic of what we're talking about here, and also would be a more general interest to more people than maybe the person asking. So, so if you're ready, I would like to just go through some of these questions with you here. I have five for you. Jenna (30m 50s): Okay. Go for it. Jesper (30m 53s): Because Anita asks, if it's worth starting a YouTube channel, if you haven't published anything yet, or is it better to wait until you're ready to launch your novel? I thought that was a good question. Jenna (31m 5s): Absolutely started before. If you're starting it after you're, it's like an uphill battle because the book is already out and, you know, unless you have a big platform already and you're, you're, you know, you've got good sales and things like that, but usually people are starting the YouTube channel in order to, you know, to, to get the sales in order to boost their presence. So if you've got a big platform, you can start gentle whenever you want. But if you're doing this for the sake of selling a book, definitely start the channel before one, because it takes years to build an audience. And you don't want your books sitting, collecting dust published for years. Jenna (31m 45s): And then finally it starts to get sales. And to, if you start the channel after, and then you direct people to the published book and it has no reviews and it's not performing, people are going to be like, oh, well, what's wrong with this book that no one's buying it. You know what I mean? So it's better to start it before that said, I'm saying like a YouTube channel in general, sometimes people, you know, I give writing advice and I also make satirical con content about writing. I started my channel before I was published and I was qualified to give writing advice because I've been in studying storytelling. At that point, I'd been studying, writing and storytelling for about 20 years. Jenna (32m 25s): And I had been doing giving critiques for other writers. They asked me to create the channel. I've had poetry published and things like that. You know, I, I had some, you know, you know, some, some content that made me like qualified to give the writing advice. Sometimes people hop on YouTube and give writing advice because they see that other writers are doing it. And they don't really feel like they're qualified, but they're doing it because it's, you know, what's going on. If you don't feel qualified to do something, don't do it. You can make a video about something else. You can just track your writing journey. You can talk about, you know, the, if you're going traditionally could talk about the Query process or something like that. You, you don't have to give writing advice. So if that's your concern about starting before you're published, then make your video about something else or make your channel about something else. Jesper (33m 11s): Yeah. And I think what you're saying that tracks very much with what Autumn. And I usually say, because we not, we don't get the question specific to YouTube, of course, but we often get the question about mailing lists. Like, do you start the mailing list before you publish the books or after you publish the books? And we also always say started we'll we'll we'll before, because that's the only way you can get enough people on that list. So you can actually sell some books once you do publish it later on. So it's never too early to begin. It's usually our moderate rare. Jenna (33m 41s): Yes. And people always think, well, I have nothing of value to say, and it's like, don't sell yourself. So short, of course he has something of value to say, you just have to have the confidence and you've got to figure out what your voice is and what it is that you want to say. If you have, if you have the ability to write a book, which is obviously what you're trying to do, then you have the ability to do a mailing list or a YouTube channel, you know, just got to figure out what your voice and messages. Jesper (34m 8s): Yeah. Okay. So let me move on to Stephanie's question, because Stephanie wanted to know how much time you actually spent on marketing, your books, working on your YouTube channel and writing new books. Like, do you split your time, like 20% marketing and 20% writing on and so on? Jenna (34m 24s): Oh, I've I couldn't tell you. I honestly don't know. I work about what I can say is I work about 10 to 12 hours a day. Usually it's gotten a little bit better now that I have an assistant, but it really varies. It's I wish that I could give a straight answer, but it's hard for me to track because I'm also a caregiver. My fiance suffers from a chronic pain condition, and he's in a lot of like recovery programs to try and build back a strength. So everyday for me is very flexible. Every week is completely different. So it's really hard for me to track how much time I spend doing each thing. What I can say is that I usually try to devote a week every month to YouTube. Jenna (35m 6s): And by that, I mean, a cumulative amount of time of scripting content for a month filming content for a month. And my assistant does the editing and then I do the little doodads bells and whistles the effects and uploading it. So that is the one thing I can say with certainty about one week out of every month is devoted to my YouTube channel. And then the rest of it is a hodgepodge of writing and marketing. Jesper (35m 33s): Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. So an angel also asked a question that, but I am going to paraphrase it a bit here just to sort of boil it down and get to the point of what I think more or less she was asking, but she wanted to know how you basically built such a great following on YouTube. I think you've talked a lot about it already, and maybe there was also a part of you saying that you got in at the right time. So, but I don't know if you have anything more to add on, on, on that question. Jenna (36m 6s): I really think it's because people appreciate, you know, someone being themselves and being authentic because a lot of the things that I get, you know, cause obviously I'm a woman on YouTube. I get trolls, I get hate comments. A lot of the things that I get hate comments for are the reasons that people, you know, subscribe, they, you know, appreciate that. I'm a straightforward woman on the internet. They appreciate that. I'm myself. Even if it's not always those flattering version of myself, they appreciate the fact that I'm willing to dress up like a pizza or a hot dog. And my channel is if it makes people laugh, like I, you know, being yourself really goes a long way. And also one thing I didn't touch on is, you know, learn and evolve. You know, if you look at my very first videos, they are not the same as they are now, you know, I've upgraded you, you constantly have to learn, okay, how can I make this better? Jenna (36m 53s): How can I improve? You know, I now have professional lighting equipment. I now have, you know, professional camera and all that stuff. I I'm looking for ways to improve the effects to improve the editing, to, you know, looking for what my audience wants more of. Do they want more giveaways? Do you know, do they want more interviews? I'm I'm constantly asking my audience. Okay. What do you want me to talk about? You know, so I think that's really important too. Sometimes people get complacent and they get comfortable and then they never branch out and improve. And when you do that, you plateau. Jesper (37m 28s): Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. I, we still, I think we have like probably, I don't know, maybe 200 videos or something on our channel and I can promise you, I do not dare go back and watch the first one. It's horrible. Jenna (37m 43s): My first one is long since been deleted. It's like, but I mean like at the time it worked, you know, at the time, but like, and that's another thing is like, give yourself time to suck. You know, everyone is they're so they're so embarrassed to post their first video. They're like, it's going to suck. It's like sorted mine and look where I'm at now I've got 260,000 subscribers. Like it's going to suck for a while. You're you're just shaking off the cobwebs. It's okay. Just get into the, like, get into the flow. You're just embrace the fact that you're going to suck at first and that's fine. It's all just, yeah. Jesper (38m 13s): Yeah. It speaks to everything about our personal YouTube, a strategy that we didn't even, we even not even deleted those ones, the old ones they're still there. It's just there. Jenna (38m 23s): Well, to be fair, it took me years to delete my, Jesper (38m 30s): Yeah. So Rob also was asking a question because he was wondering if organic growth is a business model for YouTube, rather than paying for advertising. Jenna (38m 41s): I've never paid for advertising for my channel. So I'm going to say organic growth, but I'm not speaking from a place of personal experience because I've never paid for advertising. I do know other YouTubers who pay for advertising. I even, I mean, we see it all the time. Some of them have really big channels and some of them, it doesn't really look like the advertising has done a whole lot for them. I think it, it really depends on, on the strategy behind it. You know, if your ad sucks and isn't interesting or engaging people probably aren't gonna be interested, but as someone whose entire growth happened organically, then you know, I'm all for that. Jesper (39m 22s): Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. What you just said about placing ads and stuff, this complete detour here, but it just reminded me that it was, I think a couple of weeks ago, usually when I exercise in the morning, I listen to music on YouTube. And then of course, because I'm exercising, I can't click the skip button for when the abs pops up and then this ad popped up and this guy was talking and talking, it just went on and on and on. And I was wondering, when does this commercial stop? And then I looked at my phone and it was, it said there was 45 minutes left. And I was like, what? This is an ad what's going on? You can't have an ad for 45 minutes. Jesper (40m 1s): Oh my God. Jenna (40m 3s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean like, you know, the, a lot of people, they do not do the research and I understand that writers are a creative bunch, but it's a business. This YouTube is a business. You know, selling books as a business marketing is a part of business. Do do the research. That's why I, you know, even though I ended up veering off from finance, I'm really glad I went to business school because it prepared me for self publishing my novels and starting my YouTube channel. And so do the research before you spend money on ads, make sure you're, you know, spending it wisely. Jesper (40m 35s): Yeah, for sure. I have one last question and this not, this one is not sort of directly related to being a YouTuber, but I thought I wanted to include it because the first part is just something that I always find interesting. But then the second part is just a bit, bit of a weird and funny questions. Yeah. I think she was just having a bit of fun, but Terry wanted to know first, how much plotting you actually do for your books and Autumn. And I have written a guide book on how to plot novels. So I'm always interesting hearing that, but, and then she added. And could you also ask Jenna if their cyborg queen would make an Alliance with a chaos potato? Jesper (41m 15s): I have no idea what that means. Maybe you do. Jenna (41m 19s): Okay. So I'll start with plotting. I do a ton applauding. Like I'm on my channel. I am like the outline queen. I'm just like everyone knows that I'm always going to give advice that upsets the pants there is. If you're a pantser, that's fine. I just, it's not for me, but I, I, I, my outlines are hefty. Like my outlines are 30 pages long. I plot everything out. I have a method with no cars and organizing for me, people say that plotting and outlining ruins the fun or excitement for me, it is the fun and excitement because it's like putting together a puzzle and it's like, how is it going to turn out? You know, like, I, I love it. I, for me, it's a very creative part of the process. Jenna (41m 59s): And it's one of my favorite parts. So I'm very heavily into plotting apps for the cyber queen thing. So cyber queen is, is my nickname as a delegated by my audience. My nickname in college was cyborg. And I mentioned it in a video and it blew up. And now in the cyber queen, I would, I would be open to an Alliance with a chaos potato. If the, if the terms and conditions were equal and fair, we can get into it. We just, we need to make sure we're on the same side. Okay. We, we have the same beliefs in world domination. Jesper (42m 37s): Yeah. And also the word chaos. There might be a bit concerning if you're looking at an Alliance, you know, with, with something chaotic. That's I don't know how trustful is that Jenna (42m 49s): Exactly. That's why we need to have a meeting and discuss what, how chaotic is this potato? I need to know. Jesper (42m 57s): Yeah. I don't even know what I was thinking. Ks potato is that maybe something Jenna said in a past video or something, because it felt so odd. Like kid, where did you get that from? I don't know. Jenna (43m 9s): I just imagine a chaos. Potato is like a mashed potato. That's been like splattered across a room. That's a chaos potato. Or that just might be a dead potato. Jesper (43m 17s): Well, maybe it's one of, maybe it's more like you open the door to the room and throw it inside and close the door. Maybe that's what you do. Jenna (43m 26s): But then that grease was splattered. That's a violent potato man Jesper (43m 33s): And people screaming and stuff like that. Well, okay. I asked him I'm at my end of my list of questions for you Janet today. And I w is there anything sort of, I should have asked you that I didn't some very good voice that we never got to? Jenna (43m 53s): Where can everyone buy my books? How about that? Jesper (43m 57s): Of course, of course. Jenna (43m 60s): So right now I'm in the middle of the Savior series. The first two books, the saver's champion and the Savior sister are available wide all over the place at all, major retailers, they are number one bestsellers in dark fantasy romance. The Savior Sheffield was voted one of the best books of all time by book depository, which basically was the highlight of my life. I will never get over that. So yeah, pick them up. They're great. If you like your books filled with magic and steamy swooning, us and stabby stabby die die, then there are the books for you pick them up today. Hey, Jesper (44m 36s): Excellent. Yeah. And if you, you, you can also send me a link to where people can pick up your books or where you want them to go to Jenna. Then I will definitely put it in the show notes so people can just click through from there. And it will also go into the description field on YouTube. If anybody's watching there and then they can go and check out your book. So feel free to send me that link. Jenna, Jenna (44m 58s): Thank you so much. Jesper (45m 0s): And thank you for coming and having a chat here and offer all your advice and expertise today. I appreciate that, Jenna. Jenna (45m 8s): Thank you for having me. It was so much fun. Jesper (45m 12s): All right. So next Monday, Autumn, we'll be back and we're going to do one of our popular and some people call them dreaded worst top 10 lists. See you then. Narrator (45m 24s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

The best way to learn the craft of writing is to study the best of the best! Join us for our first critical reading episode where we take a look at the Hugo Award winning novel the Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. We take a look at what this story does right... and what had us scratching our heads. Warning: there are spoilers if you haven't read the book! Do you agree on our assessment of the book's strength and weaknesses? Leave messages in the comments or join the discussion thread in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/! And don't forget to signup for the Fantasy Map Masterclass to be held October 28. Register at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/fantasy-map-masterclass/. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday. SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn Jesper (33s): This is episode 147 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we've finally arrived at our new initiative. So once a month, we are reading a high profile fantasy book, and then we record an podcast episode about it. So this is our Critical Reading of the Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. Yes, I am looking forward to getting into the nitty gritty because I admit some of the aspects of this one or what kind of gave me the idea for the Critical Reading group when we were first talking about it. I also don't know if our listeners will be surprised at our, I think we both have a very similar takeaway from this book, but the Le there's some aspects of this one that are like, oh, that is so different. Jesper (1m 22s): It's amazing. I see why I want to Hugo for this is such a cool book and there's other aspects that well we'll get there all the way. Yes. You're already teasing it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we got make people want to listen to like the heart of this line, which they should be excited. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's going to be an interesting conversation. And of course the, the idea is also here to see if we can try to draw out some things to learn in terms of either D these are good ideas or this kind of stuff you should probably avoid, you know, that kind of thing is what we're trying to draw out of the Critical Reading. Jesper (2m 3s): Exactly. And we'll, we'll get to it, but it's all matter of opinion, obviously. So yes, you can disagree with us. That's okay. It's just our opinions, but yeah, we'll, we'll get to, it sounds good. Well, if we're going to get to it, how are things going for you over in Denmark? Yeah. Well, I don't think I have wage that much to share this week. I'm just attempting to finish up the first draft of book two in our new series. So a couple of chapters to go and maybe I will be done by Friday. I hope don't tell me that. That that's my, well, you should be happy about that or very happy, but I was hoping to finish the edits on book one, which always seemed to be getting pushed back ever so slightly. Jesper (2m 50s): I'm so close. Maybe, maybe the end of next week, but you're going to beat me on the book too. I will catch up eventually. Autumn (3m 1s): Yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't think I have that much other to share this week. It's just been, you know, what do you call it? Like a head in the sand? No, not head in the sand. That's not good, but in the trailer, how do you say Jesper (3m 15s): Clouds? How did the clouds? Autumn (3m 19s): That was not what I was looking for, but nevertheless, I know, I know you were at some FANTASY con or something or Jesper (3m 25s): Yes, I went to a Vermont fantasy and sci-fi con up in Burlington and that was a lot of fun. I was there, there, it was definitely, I think, more, more than 50% Saifai but at the same time, it was so much fun. You would have, I thought of you several times because they had a R2D2 that was like truly moving. You could have mistaken it for the from the movies and the guy who could control it was so good. Like he didn't have to look down at the remote and the remote was so small. You didn't even really notice who was responsible. And this little thing would come up to your booth would be talking to you. And you're like, this is awesome. Jesper (4m 7s): And there was like Ghostbusters, there was a gorgeous Ghostbusters car and some plasma things. But one of the coolest things is definitely the star wars. And there was a lead the 501st Legion for the stormtroopers. So representatives there. And so there's these guys walking around and for full storm trooper armor. And the coolest thing is that they had to go upstairs to the conference room and I happened to be up there and I look out and I see one in the hallway and I'm pointing out to my husband. He ran out there and got a picture just as the elevator doors were closing. It looks so star wars. I'm like, that is the best picture ever. Jesper (4m 47s): So that one framed, it's just always, we're going to take a picture of a storm trooper. It should be in an elevator. It's just so cool. Autumn (4m 57s): I've always loved those uniforms. To be honest, I think I always also in the movies, you know, when it seems like they just look so cool. And, and sometimes I feel like it's a shame that they had just like Canon father in the movies, just don't troopers because they look so cool. Jesper (5m 11s): They look so cool. It's a very cool armor. And I was actually, I mean, I've been part of the SCA, the society for creative anachronism. I used to do that back in my twenties. And so I really enjoy that, but I didn't know there was a 501st Legion of storm troopers. I'm like, dude, you can go and dress up and be a storm trooper. That is cool. Autumn (5m 38s): Yeah. Well, I would rather be the Sith Lord, to be honest, Jesper (5m 42s): Probably I would want to go in as a Jedi master, but I do come from a FANTASY background. I think any Fantasy author should automatically get to be a Jedi or Sith master just it's in our resume. Autumn (5m 56s): See you, you pick the good guys and I automatically pick the bad guys. I don't know what the tails, Jesper (6m 3s): Well, we have to bounce each other's out. It's the force there's balance. Autumn (6m 8s): Oh, okay. Okay. Fair enough. Narrator (6m 12s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Autumn (6m 18s): One last reminder here on the 28th of October, we are having our very first ever virtual Masterclass. Jesper (6m 28s): I can't wait. It's a Maps. I love fantasy maps. Autumn (6m 33s): Fantasy Maps. Yes. And if you can't make it in person, there will be a recording made available for you as well. So I don't know, I'm looking so much forward to just geeking out for an hour about fantasy maps. This is going to be so awesome. Jesper (6m 48s): It'll be almost better to on, so yeah, it'll be fantastic. Autumn (6m 54s): Yeah. We'll have a lot of fun and I will share some thoughts on map-making that you might not have considered before. So whether you want to learn something or if you just want to, well, kick out with us, we hope that you will join the Masterclass. It is a very inexpensive and it is conducted online. So you don't need to leave your house or anything like that to attend. Jesper (7m 18s): And the fact it's actually a really good deal. It's not only is it expensive, but it's a two for one, you get a second invitation to a second Masterclass as you have to be scheduled. So it's a two for one deal. It's a really good deal. Yeah. Autumn (7m 34s): Yeah. So there's a link in the show notes and you can find the registration page from there and yeah, we really hope to see you otherwise it'll just be you and me Autumm and I think talking, we can talk to ourselves about map-making, but it might be slightly boring. Jesper (7m 52s): Never boring. Autumn (7m 54s): That's true. That's true. Narrator (7m 59s): And onto today's topic. Autumn (8m 3s): Okay. So while we're doing, while we're doing Critical Reading here today, we, I think we better start out by saying that the purpose here is to learn from the books that we read, not to bast them or claim that anything is wrong with these books. Well, with this book in this case, and we should also say that the fifth season is a very popular book. It was awarded by the Hugo award for best novel in 2016. And this means that there's a lot of people loving this novel. So everything we say is personal opinions, and we fully understand that some people will disagree with that. Autumn (8m 42s): And that's okay. Jesper (8m 44s): Yes, exactly. And actually, I didn't realize this, but it's also has won the Sputnik award. It was nominated for Nebula award and it's a world FANTASY award best novel. This, this is a highly acclaimed story. So I think it'll be really interesting to look at it, but it's definitely that's. We want to learn why this is so popular and it's okay to, you know, find things that you don't like about it, but that's why it's a learning experience to find maybe the core features that you love and then, you know, learn from those and maybe learn what you want to stay away from. If you, especially, if people are leaving reviews or comments that you agree with and you can say, well, then I, there are readers who don't want that as well. Jesper (9m 29s): That's great. Autumn (9m 30s): And we gave plenty of warning as well, leading up to this episode that we were going to do this Critical Reading. So we are not going to be careful about spoiling anything here. So if you haven't read the book and you want to, I suggested you turn off the podcast now and then come back to listen to the rest. Once you have done the reading part. So yeah, I might say, oh, I think I will definitely say some sports. Jesper (9m 57s): Yes, I will. Definitely too. And I had written down the exact same thing on my notes for today that spoilers will fall low this. So if you are still reading and haven't finished or plan on reading it, we're going to ruin the book for you. So stop now and go read the, finish the book and then come back and listen and see if you agree. Autumn (10m 17s): Yeah, I think that's a good idea. So I try to divide sort of my notes into some headlines. So I have a headline called plodding, one called magic and one cold world-building and then I have a bunch of stuff underneath each headed air. So I don't know if we just want to start out with a plotting on and then go from there or do you have a different preferences? Jesper (10m 41s): That sounds fine though. I wanted to start with maybe a quick explanation of what the fifth season is. I don't want to do a whole blurb and Sabine Opsis, you know, we're hoping you read the book, so, you know, what's about, but just to set the stage, the fifth season is, you know, we have our summer spring, winter fall. Well, the fifth season kind of lends its name to a world ending event, like a cataclysm, a major earthquake, something that is going to destroy civilization. So it doesn't come every year, but when it comes, it's known as the fifth season. So it's actually a very ominous title once you realize that Autumn (11m 15s): It is definitely so, yes. Okay. So we'll assume people have read it or otherwise go and check the book description on Amazon and UK. You can see what it's about. So should I just get started on the plotting stuff and then we can see where it takes us. Jesper (11m 35s): Maybe we should start almost with the way we would write books and we should start with the world building. Autumn (11m 41s): Okay, fair enough. We can do that. Okay. So I can start out with my first point here. It's, it's a bit of a long one, but let me try to get through it. So first of all, this is from a wealth building perspective. It's incredibly complex with all, like, there was all this seismic activity that is impacting on society and we have slaves, we have outcasts. And to some extent, this book is also about people dealing with being controlled and abused and having a total totalitarian regime. Autumn (12m 21s): And while I, well, I do enjoy the exploration of these sort of horrible things that people are willing to do to each other, as soon as they don't see the other person as a human being anymore, but I'm still wanting it to be more personal. You know, I have to sort of mention, I don't know if it's directly world-building building, but it's in here in my notes. But in this context, I have to mention that the second person present tense that the NKG Emerson uses it's, it's probably the reason why the book won the Hugo war, to be honest, because it's different and it is very well done. Autumn (13m 4s): I mean, don't get me wrong. She pulled it off very, very skillfully. However, none of that changes how it really puts me off. I just cannot get into the story and the characters. I don't know how you feel about that. Autumn. Jesper (13m 20s): I agree. I had a very hard time relating to the characters, especially the main character, which we can get to later. But again, we're not giving anything away, but I wasn't sure if we were not supposed to realize that the older woman, the middle age, you know, the, the motherish woman and the child were the same person. But I mean, as soon as we switched between the two, I knew instantly that the little girl was the same as the older woman who had just lost her son who was the same as the mother. I don't know if it's because we write in a fantasy and it's like, well, duh, or, you know, the idea of the goddess, who's the, the may, the mother of the crone. I mean, it's, it was just so obvious. Jesper (14m 1s): And so I knew the whole time that this is going to be the same person and I still never related to her. But to go on your comment of the second person, I agree. That's what makes this story literary Fantasy is that it switches between a third poison person, point of view, to a second person present tense. And it's amazing that it's done. And it, I didn't notice it as fast as some people who have left comments on what they thought of the story as they read along for today's podcast. So I, it literally, I think I was about a quarter of the way through the book. And I was like, oh, this is a total, this isn't, this is using you. And this is using present tense. Jesper (14m 41s): And this is not what was in this previous chapter. But I will say as a literary story, I think it was done very purposefully because the chapters where the second person is used are the ones where the character has just lost her son. And she goes into shock and doesn't recover for days. And she doesn't really recover for the entire course of the novel because that point of view is always in second person. She is disassociated from herself and her emotions and it works so well. The use of you makes it feel like you're separate from this character, especially compared to the chapters where it's third person. Jesper (15m 25s): And so I think in that way, it works great, but I never bonded with her because this is the adult version. This is the present version of who she is. And all the other ones are memories, which their past tense makes sense, brilliant Writing, but for character, you know, wanting to hear more about this character, I told you I can share it later, but I have a quote who basically her, I grabbed the review and her title to the review are my feelings for this book are complicated leading towards negative. And I'm like, oh, that's I could have written this one. And she too mentions that she couldn't bond with the main character. Autumn (16m 8s): No. And I agree with what you said, because I, I also think that the chose to point of view on purpose to exactly do what you sat there like to, to give you the sense that the character is this issue, this issue associated, I can't even say that now on to tie it, but, but that's definitely the purpose of it. And it works for sure, but at the same time, you know, if you're looking at it from a emotion, emotion perspective, like you want to get in the body of the character, you want to see and feel with them as they go through the story and getting Merced inside the setting and in their lives and all that good stuff. Autumn (16m 49s): Like that's what I enjoy when reading to just disappear into this sort of fantasy world and go with the characters. And that's what you get with the deep point of view. We talked about that in a previous episode as well, but that is what kept, keeps me fully engaged. And it just doesn't happen here because as a reader, I'm also distanced from it because of the second person. And I feel like that's a real shame. And I think Stephen from patron, he also said something that I really felt like was true because he said like, quote, the point of views were a stumbling block for me at first. Autumn (17m 30s): But I read on thanks to you guys with a critical eye so that I could see what made this book tick. And then it hit me the pros, the writing style. It was so lyrical and almost poetic in places. And I think that that hits it home for me because I fully agree. That's also how I see it. It is not, it is more lyrical and poetic than it is storytelling in many places. And for those who love that, then that's great. But I, I, I just can't get into the character and the story you, I just feel almost like I don't care. Yeah. Jesper (18m 6s): And that it is a shame. It is a shame for a book that is, I think, has such potential because the world is really interesting and it sort of relates to what you just said about the lyrical writing. To me, the, I saw it more like poetry, but minimalize, the world is a very harsh world. The book has some really harsh themes things that I don't usually like to think about when I'm reading Fantasy, it's, it's dark, dark Fantasy to me. And the magic is also hard. It's hard. It is basically earth magic. And so you have this hard world it's described very harshly. The language to me is very bare at times, fractured very punctuated. Jesper (18m 49s): It reminds me very much of geology and earth and different types of rock and layers. So it's like this whole thing is designed to be this hard surface as Rocky surface that can, at times it pokes you in it's painful. And that is just as a writer, as someone studying Writing, I'm like, oh my gosh, I want to read this in, you know, a college class. And I would have to break it down and discuss it. But as a reader, I'm like, I didn't bond. I didn't feel it. I didn't buy book two because I didn't have that, you know, warm gooeyness of, oh my God, I love this book. It was more like, I can appreciate this on a literary sense in a scene. Jesper (19m 30s): And I see, well, it was done kudos to you and yeah, good. Don't need to write like that. Thanks. Autumn (19m 39s): No, I agree. And I think I read somewhere that NKG, Amazon didn't intend for the setting to represent our world. And it's like future destruction. I could be wrong about that, but I think I read that somewhere, but one of the characters do call it earth. So there is that, but I sort of quite like the reflections on real life here, you know, whatever, whether the author intended it to be so not, I don't know, but, but I think it is pretty cool to think about, you know, from a climate perspective in a real world and so on. And yeah, I mean, it, it gives sort of the real world angle on thing. Autumn (20m 20s): And I guess that's the kind of thing that also gets awards, right? Because there's more to it than just a story. Jesper (20m 26s): Yes. Especially the end. You know, the last thing that alabaster the one character mentioned is have you ever heard of a moon and this planet that they're on, it's a supercontinent now. So it's like Pangea, but it's called the stillness. And so it's this fast continent and it doesn't have a moon. And suddenly, you know, the last phrase like mentions a moon. So is this future earth that has been torn apart with earthquakes and all this fracturing going on. It's very interesting. And I, over on world building too, I do the previous cultures that are there. They call them the dead sieves. So you see all these ruins of previous cultures and some of them sounded so technologically advanced and there's parts of the book where there's a lot of description and then there's like a dead sieve in the distance. Jesper (21m 15s): And I'm like, I want to know more about the ruined cities. I would have been like hard hat on. I am going to go check it out, but they're basically the culture is, oh, we don't go there. They failed. Screw them. Like, no, I love history. I want to know why they failed. Can't you learn from previous lessons and become something better and not just wipe the canvas clean and start over and fail again. So there was that element too, where maybe it is describing our current world where we're not learning from past mistakes and past things and we're repeating ourselves and this just kind of does it with civilizations. Autumn (21m 53s): Yeah. That makes sense. To me, at least, I don't know if that is the intention, but, but it, it makes sense that it's a commentary on the real world. I feel like, but I don't know. It asks a bit more depth to it, which I actually quite like. Jesper (22m 10s): Yes. And I was definitely teased by the floating obelisks pyramids. I forget how they're described. They have a couple of different ones, but these floating blocks of stone. And I couldn't believe that the, again, that there was very little curiosity about what they were, except for alabaster, trying to figure it out. And a young girl on the cell, in the girls viewpoint. And I get days, I can't remember her name, but her, when she's a child and she's at fulcrum learning to become, I can't even pronounce it. Origin, NIST origin is what they call their magic system. Autumn (22m 50s): I shouldn't going to Jesper (22m 50s): Try. And I had to look up how to say it because it is a world real world. And so I looked up and so there's this girl, and she's curious, but it's like two people in the entire book are curious about these giant floating things in the sky that are made out of stone. And again, I find it, I find the lack of curiosity, which is something that is true for the whole book and especially the main character. She's never curious. And that's sort of against who I am as a person. I thrive off of going to know what things, you know, why things are this way. And so I really think that did not help me relate to the book because there's not a single character who was like, well, why does this happen? Jesper (23m 33s): What happened here? They don't care. Autumn (23m 38s): Yeah. And, and the other aspect of what you're saying, I feel like is, is I don't feel like there's enough at stake for the protagonist. I mean, yes, she is searching for her daughter, but the rest of what happens, like you're talking about the obelisk and all this kind of thing, all of that is sort of dealt with because, well, it's my job. So I'm dealing with it, but it's not, I mean, I just can't help by questioning here. If we, if we're trying to learn from it, what would have happened if the author had found a way to link all of this stuff around the obelisk and all that other stuff closer to the life of the character so that it make a personal difference for the character, whether she dealt with it or not, instead of just I'm taking care of my job, I just feel like that would be a lot more interesting. Autumn (24m 26s): Yeah. Jesper (24m 26s): Yes. I feel like the entire plot, what you have, you said you have a whole section on the plot. I feel like the whole plot revolved around the search, the present search for her daughter, and then the, how she got to where she is now, which is the two past point of views where there was some really cool stuff. Like, you know, the one time, the first time she bonds with an obelisk and a volcano erupts. And I'm still not sure if that was her, the obelisk or alabaster somehow making this volcano up here. And I thought, oh, this is going to start connecting with her. And immediately the next part, she doesn't even really ever think about them again. Jesper (25m 7s): And then when she moves on with the present tense where she has been a wife and a mother in this new new town, and it begins with her losing her son, she's never even wondered about, again, anything that obelisk the things that I thought like, oh, you've connected with an obelisk and it's an alien intelligence and it was talking to you. Okay. Not mentioned for the next 50 chapters. I was like, oh, I want to know more about that. Autumn (25m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. I, I do have some issues then. And I thought as well, if I just say infidel student, know what I'm thinking about, autumn, Jesper (25m 46s): I think they hit you worse, especially cause you're listening. And I think maybe I just kind of skimmed them and didn't realize it was skimming them. But you said that there were more and I realized, Autumn (25m 59s): Well, at least it feels like that to me. I mean maybe, maybe it's just me, but I was listening to the audio book version Al and I, and can I just say, if you haven't, you know, listeners, if you want to check this book out, then Narrator for the audio book is freaking amazing. She does such a good job at narrating this book. So that's definitely worth it. I can highly recommend the, that this narrator she's so good at it, but, but that's, I digress what I want men was just that I noticed in several places, how well, maybe you don't notice it so much when reading and I'm speculating here, but, but because of the very lyrical language, she's so good at writing that maybe you don't really notice that much, but there are quite a lot of info dumps in my view where you just get like a whole section about something that happened like in the older days or blah, blah, blah, something it's like. Autumn (26m 57s): Hmm. Yeah. Okay. But, but if, if it was, if I read it in a book and maybe if, if it was maybe well less written, I could put it like that, then I would just feel like, well, put all of this conversation between characters or something so that I can, I get the, as part of the action of what's happening or characters talking about it and shared that way, because it feels like sometimes there's just a whole sections about old history stuff. And it's like, okay, I guess I don't, I don't know. Yeah. Jesper (27m 32s): One of the reviews mentioned that if they had to read another description of meeting someone on the road and what they were wearing and what their hair color was that she would go and how you knew which part of the continent they were from based on these things, that it just seemed too repetitive. And you know, I, again, I didn't really quite notice that, except I know sometimes I, I would, again, probably just skim ahead a little bit, be like, okay, that's nice. You know, I, I don't need to know all the details. So again, I don't mean to be pointing out the flaws, but I think we're just, we're pointing out the difference between what's literary Fantasy and what is normal, like dark fantasy, what we expect in the two genres. And this is literally sold as literary slash epic slash science fiction. Jesper (28m 15s): So it's, it's a weird mishmash where I think it fits better actually with literary Fantasy than it does with dark fantasy. Autumn (28m 26s): Yeah, I do too, because I mean, as I hinted at just a moment, a Gomez, the writing is exceptionally well done. I mean, she writes really, really beautiful. I have nothing to say against that. It's it's amazing. Jesper (28m 39s): And the world is like you said, it's, Autumn (28m 44s): But yeah, that's what I mean, if that's what you're there for, then it's great. Right. But if you're there for more, like what I guess I could call commercial fiction, you meaning you're there to enjoy a story and so on, then this is not it. Jesper (29m 0s): And I think part of that part is also the not bonding and the plot feeling sort of flat that, you know, all these potential side plot plots could have happened, but they don't because one, the reader, the character is not curious, but it's also the character. What kind of character arc would you call this? I'm thinking it's either a fail or a flat arc. And because she never learned, she never grows. She's not curious at all. She doesn't change. Plot is kind of static. Autumn (29m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to come back to that a bit when I talk about the ending, but I'll save that for a moment, but I did have another comment from, from Steven on Patrion as a last comment, I have at least on my list when it comes to world building, because I think he might have a good point here, but I'm curious what you think Autumm. So he's asked quote, the one aspect of the world building that I didn't care for is that she made up many curse words like rust and rusting. And yet she still used several modern curse words. This is probably nitty nit-picky, but if you make up your own own course words, that fit the culture of your story. Autumn (30m 16s): Why use modern carbon curse words too? So I think he has a point. Does New York, Adam, Jesper (30m 22s): I think he does. I don't know if I would have no, I don't. Can't say I super noticed it. I, I noticed like when she was using rusting and stuff. Yeah. I really, I just, I liked the ones that she made up. Cause again, it fits the world. It fits the culture of, you know, very like metal is not considered safe because it, rusts rust is a bad thing. It's leads to dead sieves, but I don't think I noticed too many modern words and what they were. And so, yeah, I think as a, you know, I would think I would appreciate them more if she, if she had stuck left them in the world that she was, especially if this was not supposed to be a future earth where people are still saying F this. Jesper (31m 4s): So Autumn (31m 6s): Yeah, I get the point that Steven is making to be honest, but at the same time, I must admit sometimes you can just put in the effort. I mean, I know there is a lot of debates. I've seen it in many times being debated whether or not there should be an F-word in a fantasy novel personally, I don't have any problem with it, but yeah, I don't know. I still get the argument. Jesper (31m 30s): I I've used it because it fit, it was actually set in modern day earth. But yeah, I've been, as long as it's not aimed targeted at kids, I don't have a problem with using some of our language because you they're already speaking English. So why wouldn't they have some of the same swear words? I mean, at that point, why are you not making up all the names? Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you making a Calvary word? Just let's keep it simple. Autumn (31m 58s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah. So that was sort of my notes on the world building parts. And if I just go into, let's say, well, we talked about a lot of the plotting stuff already, but what I did want to mention as well, something very positive because I really like how we are following three women. It's the same person, of course, but essentially there's three women here in different ages, but I really liked that because I just don't think that there is enough fiction out there with female protagonists, to be honest. Autumn (32m 40s): And I really liked that. Yes, Jesper (32m 42s): I actually, it would be, it was funny being female. I didn't even think about it, but you're right. It was nice to have that and have that point of view. And also she was a very capable and determined woman. In many ways she could take care of business. She knew what she was doing. She had when she was younger, she was pushed around a little bit. But she overcame that, I guess, about the only growing she does do. Autumn (33m 6s): Yeah, I agree. The thing is though, as you said before, it's just too easy to guess that it's the same person. I, I also guessed it almost immediately. So, but, but at least, I mean, if we disregard the fact that maybe some people didn't get it, I don't know. But if we disregard that for a second, the fact that there is a plot twist or surprise in the story, which if you didn't guess it is, it is a surprise at the end. I think that is a very good idea to take away from that as a learning experience, you know, to try to have something that will surprise and excited readers once they get to that final pots of destroying, they're like, whoa, you know, that kind of thing is great. Autumn (33m 50s): Yes. Jesper (33m 51s): Agreed. I mean, I will be, I would be surprised if people didn't, I guess I, it's hard to know how you're reading it. If you truly, she does make the settings, she doesn't tie them together at all, really until that kind of twist at the end where you realize it's all the same character, but she also didn't really go out of her way to make it seem too different. Like why they might, you know, hints that it was the same time. So I think it was a pretty easy guessed that they're the same ones. So it wasn't a huge twist, but it could have been, it is always good to have a twist like that. Autumn (34m 25s): But honestly, I think if you did not have the second person, if all of them have been third person limited, I don't think I would have guessed it. Oh, it's because the second person stands out so much that I knew that it has to be linked to the other people in there. And maybe it's something to do with we're different on different in different times or something. I don't know. It was just so different that I knew that it had to link together somehow. And then I could just add the two and two together and then I guessed it right away almost right. But if you had three third person limited point of view, then I might not have guessed it to be honest. Jesper (35m 8s): That's interesting. I still, I think I, cause I had noticed a second person at least consciously at that point. I just, again, I think it's kind of Celtic kind of the made mother and crone, as soon as it switched to a little girl, I'm like, oh, this is her as a child. I just, because she was mad, you know, she had the same power. It just seemed right to me. There was enough of the character in there as a, even a little girl that I'm like, yeah, this is the same one. So, but I think everyone would pick it up in their own path. But because the book like you were saying is it makes you think you start trying to think and solve it pretty quickly. Autumn (35m 44s): I have to ask, how could you not notice? I mean, did the second person is like, it jumps right at you. I mean, it's like, oh, what is going on here? I mean, instantly, I mean, how can you not notice that? Jesper (35m 56s): I don't know. I don't, I was reading it at night and if I was just tired or it was a very good. And like I said, I first noticed that the magic being an earth magic, which I had to laugh because of how many times you've picked on me for my debut novels, elemental magic. I'm like, here's a Hugo award winner. It's only earth element of so, but the harshness of the word and the language and just how everything just felt like geology. And I am a huge geology. Gleek I mean, if you like earth and granted and schist and you know, these big geological terms, oh my gosh, read this book and geek out and no one will know you're totally geeking out over just the geology. Jesper (36m 39s): So I think I was so caught up going, oh, this is so cool. Her language is harsh. The world is harsh. I love how it all ties together. I can't imagine the number of revisions to make it sound this way. And everything ties together that I just never even noticed that it was second person. Autumn (36m 57s): Jesus Christ. You must have been tired. It's like, as soon as I got to, to that in the audio book, it was like, I had to pause it, like what, what is going on here? It was just so incredibly different than weird all of a sudden. And I, and that, that, and that from that point on, I just couldn't get into it. So it did. But I agree with, with regards to the magic system, just to match it, I, I, I would hate to do all that research. She must have been, she must have done in order to pull this off and all this seismic stuff and figuring out how it all moves and all my God. So it must have been a lot of research behind that magic system, but it is very well done and I have to applaud her for it. Jesper (37m 43s): Absolutely. Unless she happened to be, or have the family of geologists. And so she was kind of eking out on it as well. So I could see that, but yeah, you would definitely have to have an interest in deep earth sciences to come up with this magic system and make it, so she talks about flop fault lines and you know, some things can only happen here and only happened there. And probably you're not into geology and not into really cool magic. There's probably going to be times you're like, oh my gosh, please stop describing rocks to me. But I loved it. Autumn (38m 18s): No, I, I too. I did too. I think it, because also I feel like it's a different magic system to what I, at least maybe there's already some magic system based on seismic activity and so on, but I I've just not seen it before. Maybe it exists, but I'm not aware, but at least it was a different enough that I thought it was, it was very cool. Jesper (38m 38s): Yeah, definitely very cool. And I would say, cause I do want to point out and it's, I think one of the things that though where I fell out of the book and what lost me is that is with the main character, the present tense, the second person a son is I think what lost me is again, her arc her arc. I assume it's a flat arc to slightly fail, but she never learns from her mistakes, which again, that would be a grow arc. But I just, there was one point what should have been the climax where I'm sure you remember it, she's on the pirate ship. Do you know, she's had this safe Haven, she's in a really good place, but she's bored. Jesper (39m 22s): And so she goes on a pirate ship and she is literally the one she uses her magic and pokes the spear up to the boat. And she realizes when she does it, that I shouldn't have made it visible because now they know there's this robe earth magic orogeny. And so we're going to basically have to kill everyone. She's the one who realizes it. And literally the next chapter, she goes and stops an entire volcano. No, one's going to notice a volcano suddenly just going away. I wanted to bang my head. And then she goes to alabaster the, probably the most intelligent character in the whole book. The one who's really a forward-thinking he's curious. Jesper (40m 2s): And he, she tells him, you know, he knows that she did this and he gets mildly like upset when she says, oh, I saw somewhere on the shore. And he's like, oh, we should, you know, we'll have to be careful. She quelled an entire volcano. He should have been jumping up and shaking her saying, you just gave away where we are. That was 20 miles from here. And so this leads to the death of her first son. The book starts with the death of her second son. I'm like that. That is when I think I decided I wasn't reading book two was when I read through that climax and I'm like, this is supposed to be the clincher for the book. And I don't care. I'm mad at the character. Autumn (40m 46s): Yeah. I cannot disagree with that. I have some points about that ending as well, but I just want to finish off one thing that Stephen said about the magic as well. First. So Stephen from patron said, quote, the magic system was very unique. Erogeny definitely adheres to Sanderson's loss of magic, where in origin he has limits orogeny has a cost. And the reader is given a clear understanding of how Erogeny is in this world so that he or she has a willing suspension of disbelief. In other words, it's believable, magic fits well into the story and it isn't used always to solve the problem or conflict in the story. Autumn (41m 32s): In fact, for all intents and magic is both the problem and the solution in the fifth season. I think that's sums it up very nicely. Jesper (41m 41s): I think that does as well. And even to add to that, that the magic system has the, the 10 rings the tiers. So you even have, you know, what level people are at and what they can kind of do at those levels. It's well done. I liked that. Yeah. You started off as a novice and what you have to do to advanced and how your, your attachment to the magic grows. Autumn (42m 4s): Yeah. Okay. So let me get to the ending here. You touched upon some of it already. So I want to say a few other things in, in addition to what you already mentioned, because I feel like the ending just leaves way too many things completely open-ended, you know, I don't necessarily have anything against cliffhangers. I know a lot of people do, but it doesn't bother me personally that much, but please, you know, when you write a story, at least give the reader a certain degree of closure, you know, just something to at least give a sense of what is going on here. Autumn (42m 46s): If you can take the stone eaters as an example, you know, by the end of this book, I have no idea what the Stoney ETA's want or how it all sort of links together. I have no idea. We also don't know what happened to Eastern's husband and child. I understand that this is the first book in the series, but it just left me slightly frustrated. And if I'm honest, like, you know, very honest, I have to say that I, I did not read like this book at all. Jesper (43m 23s): I agree with the ending, especially it felt, it felt more like the first third of a novel than the first book in a series. It didn't have that book ending. And I thought it was, we never, in the entire story, we hear that the son has a daughter. I don't even, I'm sure we hear her name, but we never see her now even in a memory. And so it's hard to feel that mother's like she gets distracted. She goes up all over the map. You're reading about two other points of view of her that I never felt a huge bond. She's kind of just like the walking dead and, and just, this is her mission. It's her last living child. Jesper (44m 3s): She will find her daughter, but there's no bubbling passion with that at all. And so I just kinda thought it was really weird that we had this huge pivotal character. That is the reason the woman is, you know, walking forever and what happens to her. And we don't ever see her even in a memory. And that's just seems very strange to me. Autumn (44m 29s): Yeah. So maybe it would be fair to say that on the plus side you have amazing world-building lyrical writing and you also have well sort of commentary maybe, or at least there is even if it wasn't intended by the author herself, but there is something you could use as least as commentary to our real world and the, you know, real situation with climate changes and so on. So, so that's sort of on the plus side and I guess those things and well, not on the plus side, but the second per the use of second person in order to emphasize how the couch of fields dos are sort of the things I, I think is what gives you the awards because it is different and it is commentary on more than just being a story. Autumn (45m 27s): And so that's why you is, she has one do your watch. I feel like, yes, but on the negative side to me, you have a very, the plotting doesn't, it doesn't add up, you know, it doesn't connect. Well, there was several times, like you've mentioned things that happen where it's like, it doesn't really like make logical sense. Why the character doesn't question this or look into this. Or there are several places like that. I'm also very much missing the personal stakes that we talked about as well. And if you're reading it for a good immersive fantasy story, then yeah, that's goes on the minus side as well, because it does just does not succeed on this at all. Autumn (46m 12s): Yes, Jesper (46m 12s): I agree is the, the tropes, the things that we would expect from commercial fiction or that make it immersive and maybe build up the passions just aren't there, but for the literary aspects for how well it is put together and how well it all fits together in a literary sense, the writing the magic, the world-building, the use of second person versus third person it's amazingly well put together and it deserves the award. But if you're working on it from more of a commercial and epic or dark fantasy, it is just not as adhesive. It doesn't have what people are looking for, which is often characters. And your just characters are what make you turn the page. Jesper (46m 55s): And that wasn't what drove this story. And so I think that's a really important takeaway is it's the character. I won't even say it's a building, but I did read some of the reviewers said that the characteristics were just shallow. They didn't have that depth. It always stayed kind of on the surface. And the few times you thought you saw more, sometimes it just the contradicted each other. It wasn't very solid. Yeah, Autumn (47m 19s): Yeah, yeah, no, I, I can agree with those reviewers because that's exactly the, that's exactly the point here. Right? I think everything here depends on how look at it, right? Because I, as a reader, what I appreciate when reading is the good story, the good characters, that's the sort of stuff that I enjoy. But of course, I also have to respect that many other people, they enjoy the other aspects that I had on the plus side just a second ago, Ryan, I'm not going to mention them once again here, but, but those things that I mentioned before on the plus side, some other people, they love that stuff. Autumn (47m 57s): So yeah, I think a lot of it, well, it is like that for any book ever written. Some people love it. Some people hate it. That's the way it is, but I can only speak for myself. And I just, this is not the type of book I enjoy reading at all. And I will definitely, it's a bit of a shame because honestly, when, once I started reading it, I had, because of all the awards, I actually had quite high expectations that this was going to be awesome. And then I felt pretty disappointed to be honest. Jesper (48m 28s): Yeah. And I would also say that I was surprised that this one did not come with any trigger warnings in the blurb, maybe because it's an award winner. But I mean, I have, my books are so much more mild, but I mean, this is literally sexual molestation, Istation, exploitation, the death of children. There are some really horrible dark themes in this one that I was shocked as true. And there was no trigger warning. And I was like, wow, I am shocked. I have a slightly rough sex scene. And I had someone, a reader put a trigger warning on my book and I was like, don't touch this one. This one's going to really hurt. Autumn (49m 7s): Right. Yeah. Okay. We'll I have some final remarks, but I don't do what do we have more now on your note list? Autumn? Jesper (49m 16s): I think that covers pretty much everything. I think I said there was, if you go into there, there's a review by NBS Lee. It comes up as the, the highest ranked critical review. Cause 295 people have found it helpful. And I think it sums up really well. The, the aspects that are so interesting about this book, I mean, she gave it a, she or he gave it a two out of five stars. Just, it's such an interesting complex, highly written book, but it's also not what you expect if you're reading commercialized fantasy or science fiction. Autumn (49m 53s): No, totally agree. Okay. So what I wanted to do to finish off here is I want to take the chance to thank Steven for his input on Patrion. It is just so much more fun when we have people reading along with us here. And of course, if you, dear listener also want to provide input for future Critical Reading episodes and us sort of taking your comments into the actual podcast episode like we did for Steven here, then just make sure to join on Patrion. And there is a link in the show notes for that next Monday. I will have an interview with the extremely popular and successful YouTuber, Jenna Morrissey. Autumn (50m 35s): And we'll talk about using YouTube as an author. Narrator (50m 39s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Masterminds and masterclasses has been around for quiet a while - and for good reason. The best thing you can do for your author career is to invest in yourself. To learn and grow.  In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share some of their personal experiences from being part of masterminds, as well as, thoughts on why they are so beneficial.   If you want to join the masterclass on fantasy map making, sign up here: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/fantasy-map-masterclass/   Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (29s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I'm, Autumm. Jesper (33s): This is episode 146 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And today's topic is Masterclasses and Masterminds for authors. And it's actually a topic that we've sort of been sitting on for quite a while. Isn't it? Autumm Autumn (49s): It is. We've had this idea and another big idea that kind of goes hand in hand with it. Why, why are we like Masterclasses or Willy's what the benefit of them are, especially mastermind groups as well. So this will be a fun one to jump into and I'm looking forward to hearing a reader and listener. I should say reactions because I would love to know what their take is on Masterclasses and all of these things that are out there to learn. Jesper (1m 16s): Yeah. Yeah. And of course we have a bit of a culture. W what is it called? Autumn (1m 20s): Altera photos. Yes. Jesper (1m 22s): That's what I was trying to say yes. With this one, but that will become clear Indian, but I think most people can probably guess it already now Autumn (1m 31s): Probably, but we'll see if they're right. Let them consider that we could pull twist ending. You never know. Jesper (1m 39s): Yeah, no, no, that's right. I've had a bit of a cipher weekend this last weekend. Yeah. Autumn (1m 48s): Well, I know because he, over the weekend you had a lot of refereeing and things going on. Jesper (1m 52s): I did, yes, I did do that. I refereed three matches in the weekend, but then Sunday evening, I, I went to watch the new Dune movie in the theater, Autumn (2m 3s): Right? Jesper (2m 4s): Yes. And then I also started watching a foundation on apple TV plus. Which is also sci-fi. Autumn (2m 11s): Yeah. That is a huge sci-fi weekend. How are they, how is Dune? Jesper (2m 18s): Actually, I think, I think for once they have actively succeeded in making a Dune movie, because I think it works. They they've sort of slowed down the pace. It even says in the, in the opening credits. So it's not a spoiler. I won't spoil anything here, but assessing the opening credits part one. So it's only going to be the part of the, part of the doom story that they're going to show in this movie. And it definitely ends as well. That it's very clear that there needs to become be more movies. I don't know how many, but, but this one actually works for once. I mean, they've tried to make doom before and failed, I think, but, but this one was good and the end, the cinematography is it's amazing. Jesper (3m 2s): Oh, nice looking. Autumn (3m 5s): Excellent. I'm going to have to put that one on my list of, you know, date nights with my husband. If I can find it playing anywhere near us, where we're still, Jesper (3m 14s): You should go and what's it for sure. That'd be. And, and also if anybody of the listeners, I don't know, I don't think you have apple plus two TV Autumm, but if any of our listeners do then what's foundation, as well as it goes, it has a very strong dune vibe to it. And, you know, in terms of cinema photography, it looks amazing. And it's so fun. I only watched the first episode I should say, but I actually quite liked it. I was pretty good. So yeah, a lot of scifi this weekend for me, Autumn (3m 49s): Just trying to get out of this world a little bit. Orange juice. Very cool. I will have to go look this up. I'm good. I actually started a Netflix series that kind of goes along with some of the murder mysteries. You and I have been reading, call it high sixties, so, and that's on Netflix. So if you happen to see it, it's actually, it's fun because it takes part. I think the ship is probably the 1920s era, the roaring twenties. And so it's got all that gorgeous styling and the art deco, which is one of my favorite design times. So just gorgeous little elements. And it's a feisty young heroine who, you know, they ship a ship's officer who definitely is kind of interested. Autumn (4m 34s): And she was just kind of batting them off as they did in the roaring twenties. Just like get serious. There's a murder we're trying to solve. So it's really kind of cute and good acting. I think that's actually, it might be Spanish based, but it's, it's really fun. But besides that, life's been quiet literally in a way, because you know, you know that I'm partially deaf and I've picked up a hearing aid this summer, but I finally decided it's I love hearing, but it's incredibly uncomfortable. I like, while we're podcasting, I can't have anything over my ear, like while I have it on. So there's this surgery that I've been contemplating, but I do risky surgeries. Autumn (5m 18s): I'd had PRK done on my eyes so that I could go from like seeing three inches to 2020, it was a miracle. I cannot believe that modern science can do such things. And there's something very similar for my ear. And I'm like all for it, except for one thing, there's the nerve that goes for your taste. Buds goes right over where they need to, you know, do their little finagling. And so then she adds, you know, me, I'm a foodie. So, you know, I'm a foodie. I love food. I was like one of my joys in life. If I can't drink tea, you know, I might as well not get up for the day. Well, just exposing this nerve to light can mess it up. And they're like, usually it's three days. Autumn (5m 59s): Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a couple of weeks in 5% of the cases, it is a term sauce possibly, you know, the rest of your life injury. I'm like 5%. So that's one out of 20 people. This is just the doctor. He's like I said, 5% of my patients have this long-term issue. So one out of 20 people walk out of that door and they're never going to taste quite right again, I'm like, that's like saying I don't like my front door and I could get it fixed and have it moved or changed my front door. But there's a 5% chance that you're going to destroy the entire house. I don't know if it's, so I've been sitting here like flipping coins going. Autumn (6m 43s): I trying to think of an analogy going, you know, if I, if I had a scratch on my front door and it really drove me nuts and I hated seeing it every day, what I risked destroying the entire house, just to have it fixed should probably just suck up the hearing aid, but hurts. It really hurts, Jesper (7m 2s): But it isn't a hearing aid, also something about getting used to it, that wearing it enough and getting used to it. Autumn (7m 7s): I was hoping so, but it's actually the longer I wear it, the worst it's getting, I have, it turns out I have a tiny ear canal. Of course it's got all these problems, but so it actually wearing, it makes it feel like you have a major sinus infection. That's just like clogging your ear canal. So it was like when I pull it out, if I wanted to pay a lot of money. So maybe if I save up a couple 10, 15,000, it's really expensive. Very, very expensive. So yeah, I'm on the fence. If any listener out there or someone reading the transcripts, if you cannot listen, has any suggestions, please let me know, because I am on the fence with this one leading towards sucking it up and not getting it. Autumn (7m 54s): But maybe if someone has had a state, but it's got a stupid doc to me, if anyone else has had that and they've had a success, you know, let me know. I need some advice. Jesper (8m 6s): All right. Well, that's a call for the listeners. I don't think I can help months on that one. Autumn (8m 10s): Okay. Fair enough. You don't have hearing problems. Jesper (8m 15s): No, probably other things, but not hearing. Okay. Autumn (8m 18s): Fair enough. Narrator (8m 22s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Jesper (8m 27s): This week, I was thinking to keep this section sort of short and sweet by just mentioning that we had a soon call with Jason, our Facebook group moderator last week, and Luke was supposed to be there too. He's the other moderator of the group, but unfortunately he couldn't make it, but it was so great talking to Jason, But, but the reason I'm bringing it up is basically because the Am Writing fences, your Facebook group has really come a long way since we started. Autumn (8m 55s): Oh my gosh. As I told Jason, I remember, I remember when it was me and I was inviting a couple of Fantasy authors. I knew to join it. So if he did tell me I should get a pin for Jesper (9m 6s): Being an inaugural member, but yes, it's not two people anymore. It's almost 7,000. It's a crazy, yeah. We were sort of joking if we would make it to 10,000 before the end of this year, but let's see. Autumn (9m 22s): Yeah. That'll be interesting. You never know. I think it's slowed down slightly this last month, but it could pick up again. You never know how these things go. Jesper (9m 30s): No, for sure. Not. So, yeah. So if you, you, dear listener have not joined the best writing group on Facebook yet. Just search for Am Writing Fantasy and you will find us. Autumn (9m 41s): It's not just us saying it's the best one. It's the members and the moderators who just absolutely adore it. So that's kind of special Narrator (9m 52s): And onto today's topic. Jesper (9m 54s): All right. That was a sort of Sweden to the point. So we'll just get right into this main topic of Masterclasses and Masterminds, but I actually did a bit of digging ahead of this excellent Episode. Autumm do you know when the first mastermind was established? Autumn (10m 14s): I have no idea. I'm guessing it's probably, if you're not counting internet I would say it's probably pretty early, but I mean, if you're counting the internet age, I would say probably post 2005, Jesper (10m 27s): Right? Yeah. I did some digging, as I said, I think actually there is something about Masterminds going on in ancient Greece, but, but if we just sort of look at it in a bore Middlemore modern context and I could of course be wrong about this. So this is just as far as I could figure out or find out by searching around. Right. So I could be wrong, but I think it was actually Henry Ford. Oh, really? Cause he met formally with like a group of men who did not work for Ford motor company and they met at least once a month and then they shared ideas and they solve problems and so on. So I think that was actually the first mastermind in, in modern times. Autumn (11m 7s): It makes sense. And there have been, you know, you mentioned that there have been a few notorious as well, groups, I believe in like the New York scene, the art scene slash writers scene, there were some amazing authors and scientists and minds that would get together and just spill out ideas. I think it is an amazing way of cooking up some really innovative ideas and problem-solving Jesper (11m 33s): Yeah, yeah. Indeed. And later on, Henry Ford was also asked about his secret to his success and he actually said that this group, his mastermind was the reason. So I found that pretty interesting. Autumn (11m 46s): It was really interesting. I had not heard that about Henry Ford. Jesper (11m 50s): Yeah. So I think it, it can definitely the needle. I have been part of a few, a mastermind, so myself as, as part of, you know, management groups and so on and I also find it incredibly helpful. Autumn (12m 4s): Yeah. And I've when I was learning to build courses, I was part of a mastermind group there. And so I've been in a couple as well and they can be, and like you said, work with work. I had a leadership mastermind course. So that was really, they're really great. And they can be an amazing way of focused learning as well as coming up with some really great ideas. Jesper (12m 27s): Yeah. And, and I think basically we're just going to have like a general discussion here about Masterclasses and Masterminds and then maybe, maybe a bit about some challenges with it as well. At least I have a few notes about that, but I believe what happens a lot to us authors, it's sort of like we have our head down in the daily grind of writing books and you know, we never sort of stop to consider the options that are available to us. You know, sometimes, sometimes we may not, might not even be aware of them, but this is where like, like Henry Ford that we can actually benefit from what others are bringing to the table because they, they will, other people will have a different take on a problem you have, or they will just bring some ideas to the table that you hadn't even thought about. Jesper (13m 15s): And I think that is some of, one of the main benefits probably from the mastermind. Autumn (13m 21s): Yes. I agree. Because like, like our take our Facebook group, The Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group there, it's really supportive people ask questions all the time, but the problem is it is nearly 7,000 members and that we need to have moderators because every once in awhile, you know, someone's a little snippy and in general, they're really nice and usually very encouraging. But there is also a huge chance because you don't know everyone you're talking to, to misinterpret, what's being asked or not to ask it in a way that everyone understands. And I think the mastermind group, because it is a smaller group, it's usually focused participants. I mean, some of the ones I've been in, you had to be vetted so that you kind of fit in with the other people who are there. Autumn (14m 5s): I mean, obviously it helps when everyone's on Author. So therefore, you know, everyone, a fantasy author, especially you got the ground rules right there, but when you have something like Henry Ford had, that's a S it could be this whole intellectual intellectual thing where there's a whole bunch of different people from different backgrounds coming together, you know, and you're discussing maybe random things. You kind of want to be vetted, but you get to know people and you get to know their concerns and maybe what they're working on. So that when you ask a question, they're like, they're seeing, you know, your lens and your sphere and they're problem solving for you. Not just as like a general, Hey, have you tried writing faster? You know, it's much more like, Hey, I know you have two kids and this doesn't work, but have you tried doing this instead? Autumn (14m 51s): So that may, you might be able to, you know, turn out more words. I just think they're so helpful because you, I know from my leadership course, I mean, we stayed, we're still friends. We stayed friends for years, decade because it really was a powerful impact to get to know someone that closely. Jesper (15m 10s): Yeah. And you took the points, you touched upon something that I think is important here because when you were in Masterminds or even Masterclasses for that matter, we are sort of all like-minded people. And what I mean by that is not necessarily that like Henry Ford, for example, if we use that example again, it's not necessarily that you have to be in the same industry. You don't even have to be authors all of them, but in our case, it will be. But, but even if you're not, I mean, like-minded in the sense that we all are there because we want to achieve something. You know, we, we want to move our author business further along the road. You know, we want to maybe earn more money. Jesper (15m 51s): Maybe we want to become better at writing, whatever it is, but we are there because we want to learn. And by helping each other, it basically becomes for the benefit of everyone. And of course, some people might think, well, I already know enough, but I think the truth of it is that no, you don't. We can all grow. We can all learn. And that will, that's a continuous thing that will go on for the rest of your life. So for me, joining masterminds, joining Masterclasses is there's always something you can take away from those sessions, even if you're already quite accomplished. Autumn (16m 31s): See, I think to me, that's where the master comes in. That wording is when you're still learning and still starting out, like, you're still learning how to write the intro, or maybe you haven't even conquered your first book. You're still learning a lot of stuff, but it's, it's huge and new that might actually not be the best time for the masterclass because you're still absorbing so much stuff that you're kind of figuring it out, but there's comes a certain point where you're like, all right, I've written a series. I've written a few novels. I kind of have the marketing done. I've done this stuff, but I know I'm not where I want to be. I have this growth and there's this kind of gap of what you want to learn, because it's becoming more tailored to who you are and your book and your journey, and nothing else is going to do it. Autumn (17m 18s): So short of paying for a coach, which is very expensive, you know, paying for like one-on-one or joining a mastermind group where you can have that focus and you're helping others. And usually by helping others, you end up helping yourself because, oh my goodness, like, you know, I've, I've learned to life coaching over the summer. So that really, when you start asking the right questions and you re reflect on them yourself, you start solving your own problems really fast. And it's kind of amazing that way. So it becomes this group energy where you're helping each other and you're all excited and you're all really going to push forward. And so, yeah, if you think you'd have nothing else to learn, you probably won't go to a mastermind group and have that energy because you won't be putting out the energy as well. Autumn (18m 4s): And if you feel like everything is too overwhelming, you might not be in the right spot for it either yet. You might need to, you know, write a book, tackle some of those big questions that you can just read a blog post for, or take a intro course on writing for. And then maybe you want to level up to the next stage and try mastermind. Jesper (18m 26s): Yeah. And I think, and maybe you can, you can see if I'm right here, but I think that one of the major challenges or major reasons as to why authors do not join Masterminds or not so much Masterclasses, maybe because they're not, they're not so time-consuming, but more Masterminds is the time commitment of it. I think, I think a lot of the time people are reluctant to join something like a mastermind because they are afraid that they won't have the time for it. And, and then they just decide not to. And as I've said in the beginning, right? Jesper (19m 7s): I mean, I've been part of a few masterminds myself. And of course I can only speak for myself, but I always have found that it is well worth the time that I put into it, because you're going to get so much out of it. And yeah, maybe it doesn't mean that you are prioritizing some of your time or allocating some of your time to the mastermind instead of doing something else, but usually mastermind, they don't go on forever anyway. So it might be like, I don't know, four months, five months, six months, something like that. And you meet maybe once a week, twice a month, something like that. So yeah, you, you will invest some time in it, but I think when time commitment concerns are the main reason for not joining, I think that's actually a bit of a shame, to be honest. Autumn (19m 55s): I agree. And I think it might be good to let's define masterclass versus mastermind. So a masterclass is usually a single course. I've seen them up to three, you know, three sessions, but it's usually like, it's just a very short, very focused course that, like I said, it levels up, it is advanced techniques. You're not coming in as a beginner. So there's going to be lingo and stuff that you're like, oh, you know, I, you should know this already. It might be explained, but if you've never written a book and you take a brighter as mastermind, you might, or masterclass, you might be a little behind and you might not be as you ain't need to watch it a few times. But yeah, Masterclasses usually a very short one to three sessions, you know, at the most, so an hour or maybe three hours is not a big time commitment, but a mastermind group, it tends to be more interactive. Autumn (20m 46s): And like, you, you can meet sometimes twice a month. It doesn't go on forever. It shouldn't be go on forever. I was invited to one that had no end point and cost a God awful amount of money. And I kind of cocked my head and said, you're not trying to teach me anything. You're just trying to get me to pay you and walked away from that one. So do you should always take everything with a grain of salt, but yes, they should be it's to me, it's almost like the life coaching. They should have a definite end point a definite target, a goal that you're going in for that you want to see happen and eat might be twice a month. And maybe it is once a week. It depends on whichever one you end up being a part of. Autumn (21m 29s): But as with all things, maybe you won't be writing as much, but when you get out of it, you're going to be writing so much better, faster, stronger. It's going to be worth giving up some time so that when you get to the other side of it, what you're doing, you're doing with so much more confidence, skill and knowledge. And with some friends that you're going to still have. I mean, like I've had a writers group and we stayed in touch again for ages afterwards, because we really cared for each other and you keep those friendships going even after the group is officially over. Jesper (22m 1s): Yeah. And I want to touch upon that just in a moment, but I just to add one thing to what you were saying about the difference between the master class and Masterminds, the master class are almost always very sort of instructor heavy. It is an instructor led class. So meaning that you have a teacher who is just explaining things, whereas the master mind, it also has it, but it's not so much a teacher. It's more like a facilitator. There is a facilitator there that will facilitate the conversation within the group. And there will be, at least sometimes there will be a bit of cheating as well, but it's, it's only a smaller portion of the mastermind. Whereas in the master class, you, you, you basically, even if it's probably virtual in many cases, but you're in a class room kind of environment. Jesper (22m 49s): If you see what I mean, somebody is teaching something, whereas that that's not so much the case in the mastermind, it's more about a group helping each other to become more successful, whatever success means to you as, as the member of that mastermind. Yeah. So, but I wanted to get back to what you were saying there, because one of the huge benefits I see is, and it ties in with what you were saying. It's the accountability part. You know, you were saying like, you, you get the friends and you, you, you, you stop meeting on a frequent basis, but you have accountability built in. And that makes a huge difference. You know? So you have a mastermind session, you agree some things that you are going to go and do for before the next meeting. Jesper (23m 32s): And that forces you to actually go and start ticking off those, those things on the to-do list. So that you, next next time you show up, you actually did what you were supposed to do because otherwise you're going to get stuck right in the mastermind. And you're not going to get much help. Plus who wants to show off for the next class and say, I haven't done anything of what we agreed I should do. I mean, nobody wants to do that. So not to say it can never happen, but in most cases it really helps you to, it's a lot about motivation. I feel like it's a motivating experience to be part of a mastermind. And maybe that's actually one of the greatest benefits of it now that I think about it. Yeah, Autumn (24m 9s): No, I would agree. It, it definitely, you, you ended up with accountability partners. Do you want to hold up your part of whatever you're working on or learning or doing. So, you know, you've put in the effort, you, you join a mastermind group when you, you know, you're going to be putting in effort, you shouldn't join it already feeling tired and overwhelmed and everything else, because it's, it's a bit of a commitment because you're really, you're trying to take some pretty good skills and move it to the master level. You know, you're, you're pretty solid intermediate. And you want to go to the next tier. You're going to have to put in a very focused time intensive, well, not time intensive, but energy intensive mind intensive. You're going to think about it. You're gonna work on it. Autumn (24m 49s): You're gonna have to be accountable for it. So you don't do this when you're like, I want to go on vacation. It's not maybe the best time in your life to do a mastermind, but it does up your skills, I think a lot. And I agree you end up, you know, putting in your effort, putting in your part. And so I think when you get done with it, maybe you're not quite as high getting all that same amount of workout, but you're higher than you were when you went in and you're better at getting your work done. Jesper (25m 18s): Yeah. And at the same time, I want to say, be careful that it doesn't become an excuse. I mean, I think you'll write into, in what you just mentioned on them, but at the same time, that can easily be turned round to becoming an excuse for not joining and a master. Right. Like, well, Autumm said that I feel like having a vacation. So now I shouldn't. Right. I mean, a mastermind is usually maybe as I said before four or five, six months duration, right. There will be some point during that period probably where you have less energy or maybe you have something going on or whatever. So I also feel like you might need to push yourself a bit to say, I'll give it a try. Right? Yeah. And, and jump into, of course not. Jesper (25m 59s): If, if you truly have something in your life that, I mean, I'm not saying that you should push past any like boundaries that you shouldn't, but Autumn (26m 8s): Keep your health family first. Jesper (26m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. But, but, but at the same time, if you want to sort of get to the next level, at some point sooner or later, you have to start investing in yourself and your business or in your writing skills or whatever it is you want to improve, but it's just tuition not to that's the problem. Autumn (26m 30s): Yeah. Well, I, I guess I'm always the one who's like, oh, learn something new and let's go do that. I don't care that I've got, you know, a mountain of things, but I do see what you're saying. And I agree I've I do think more of a self-evaluation maybe you don't think you have the energy, but if you feel static in your writing career, or, you know, if you're looking at Masterclasses anywhere, but if you're feeling stuck or static, or like you're not progressing, things are not going as quickly or they're just plateaued, even if you don't quite have the energy, but you think you have the time commitment, that might be a good indicator to do a mastermind. Because being with other people who are excited, you know, and an instructor, or at least a facilitator, I like how you use that word. Autumn (27m 15s): Facilitator fits very well with a mastermind group. You know, being with other people will get you the energy to keep going. So as long as you have the time commitment, even if you're not feeling it really good, like you're so excited, like you're wanting to get up at 5:00 AM to go running for half an hour. You don't have to have that level of energy because if you do, I don't talk to me at 5:00 AM. I'm still asleep, but you just have to have that realization that things are not quite going the way you want them to go. You maybe you're not feeling the writing. Maybe you're like fluff about it. You're just like, maybe I'm done. Autumn (27m 56s): I don't know. I'm stuck. That's probably a really good indicator that it's time to, you know, level up, get into a mastermind group, get the energy, find out where you're stuck, get unstuck and push through it and come out the other end feeling really awesome. Like you did get up at 5:00 AM and went for a run and it was great Jesper (28m 16s): Afterwards. It's great. But I think of course the mastermind should in itself be, be a good experience as well. It's not like, it's not like you have to force yourself to it. Like you might have to force yourself for exercising. It is it isn't true. I've always enjoyed the mastermind sessions. They are quite fun. You learn a lot, you take a lot of you get inspired from it. So I think in general, it it's a very good like that. And then I was just thinking about something based on what you said, and now it's escaped my mind again, like a puff of smoke, Autumn (28m 50s): So that doesn't usually happen on the pad podcast. So we'll, we'll forgive you this time, but yes, but no, I agree. It is not like exercise. It's it's more like getting to hang out with some of your favorite people talking about your favorite subject and getting geeking out about it. So if you like getting excited about something. Oh, excellent. See, I just need to talk more. Go ahead. Jesper (29m 14s): You just needed to fill the gap then I, yeah, no, but it was because you were talking about getting excited about the writing and so on, but it could also be of course, that you feel like I've tried every book marketing trick that I have, you know, I I've been able to find on blog, post on podcasts, listenings or YouTube or whatever. I tried, like, I feel like I've tried everything and nothing works. No, maybe then this Whaley, it could also be about, I want, I just want to sell more books, you know, that could also be something you could bring into the mastermind and, and learn from there. So yeah, a lot of good things can come from it. Autumn (29m 51s): Definitely. I think it is just, it's a little cooking pots, Bunsen burner, and a little crucible. It's a crucible. That's what the word I was trying to find of. Just, you know, getting things going and really leveling up your skill to a new level faster than you would be able to do it on your own. And I think that's, what's important. That's why you join a group is because it is sort of like the speed training to get somewhere new. Jesper (30m 19s): Yeah, indeed. So I don't know if should we get to our ulterior motive now Autumm Autumn (30m 26s): I guess we've held out long enough and covered the basis of why Masterminds and masterclasses are actually a really good tool. Jesper (30m 36s): Yeah. Because, well, the ulterior motive is not that surprising, I guess, but that it's because we want to, we actually want to have our first masterclass and we actually made it available for sign up right now. Autumn (30m 51s): I'm so excited. Not just because I built the website and the registration page, but I'm still excited that I got it done. Jesper (31m 0s): Yeah. And so there is a link in the show notes and you will get right to the registration page from clicking death. And we have shared all the different info, not that much, to be honest, but there is the information you need on the registration page, but the master class is on Fantasy map-making Autumn (31m 20s): And that's what I was going to say. If you weren't going to tell people I was going to jump in and be like, we have to tell them what this one is about. So this is, this one is fantastic because what one who doesn't love a Fantasy map and two, this is how we met. So I think it's our inaugural masterclass that we're going to be is going to also be like with the topic of how you and I actually started talking. So it's going to be so cool. We already geek out about Fantasy maps. So Jesper (31m 53s): What was it? Was it last week or the week before last we had the top 10 about Maps. I can't remember. Was it? Yeah, Autumn (32m 3s): I think so. Wow. I don't think that. Jesper (32m 7s): Okay. Whatever, but yeah, we love fantasy maps and the good news of course, is as well that the master class is taking place online. It's a virtual masterclass, so it Autumn (32m 18s): Doesn't matter what country you're in. So that's always better. Jesper (32m 21s): No, no, of course there will be a bit about time zones here in the sense that we are running it on the 28th of October. If you are in Europe, it'll be evening time. If you are in the us, it'll be daytime. But the good news is that we are going to record it. So if you sign up and you can't make it in person, that's absolutely fine. We will make a recording available. So, and I think I can promise it's going to be a lot of fun. Don't you agree? Autumm Autumn (32m 49s): I considering I know what the slides and I know the topic I know is going to be so much fun. We're going to have a blast. And even though being a masterclass, it is mostly instructor led. We have a ton of questions and some Q and a sessions and polls and surveys. So it's going to be so much fun and interactive. And I don't think people are going to be like, that was an hour. That was like 15 minutes. It wasn't an hour. It was going to be a blast. Yes. Jesper (33m 15s): Yeah. And it, and we have purposely made a soda. There are some fun things coming in between the information. So it's going to be entertaining. And I think it was 38. Was it $38 or something like that? It wasn't, it Autumm yeah. $38. Yes. And it's not very expensive. And what you get as part of that package is as well that once you've signed up for this masterclass, you will actually get, get access to a second masterclass on a different topic that we're going to have on a later date. We haven't set that date yet, but you will get in as part of the package here to have that included in the price that you're paying. So it's essentially 38 bucks for two Masterclasses. Jesper (33m 57s): Yes. Autumn (33m 58s): That's actually really good deal. I've looked at Masterclasses there. Even if you go to, what is it? The masterclass Lear learn something from Neil Gaiman. Those are $99. So $38 for a Masterclasses is for two Masterclasses is incredibly genius though. Jesper (34m 15s): Yeah. Well, the other thing is that, sorry, I was speaking over you there. That's all right. Autumn (34m 21s): So maybe we're being a little too cheap thinking about, you know, the, you know, $99 learn from Neil Gaiman and we're only doing 38 for $2 for two classes, but I guess we'll go with it because we've already announced it Jesper (34m 33s): We'll go with it. But the thing is as well that we do plan to, at some point in the future, we, we don't have any dates for anything of this yet, but we do plan some point in the future to actually run a mastermind. And the thing is that our planning, at least as far as it goes right now, is that we are only going to invite people who actually attended Masterclasses to the mastermind when the time comes. So that might be another reason why you want to sign up. So you can actually at least put your, you know, taking the, what, not a tick in the box, but you can put your like ticket in the hat or whatever, whatever you say, your name and the hat. Jesper (35m 14s): Yeah. Well, when we get to the mastermind, because the mastermind for sure will only be a very limited audience. So w w not everybody will be able to get in. So, but we do tend, it tends to add people to a wait list and so on if you don't get in the first time around. But yeah, we'll see about that. The mastermind part is secondary right now. The, the main point is that if you want to entertaining fun, geeking out about FANTASY map class, then get signed up for it. And then you're going to get a second masterclass at a later date. And of course the second one will also be recorded and it will be made available as a recording if you can't join in person and all that. Jesper (35m 54s): So yes, that's it to be a participant. I don't want to geek out about Fantasy maps, but I guess I have to help run the show. I would sign up for that. That's true. Darn it. I can watch the recording later though. That's okay. Yes. Okay. So next Monday, we have our very first critical reading episode. We'll share our thoughts on the fifth season by N.K. Jemison. Narrator (36m 29s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Have you ever opened a fantasy book, looked at the map, and wondered what the author was thinking? Jesper and Autumn pull out their favorite worst fantasy maps and a few map pet-peeves in this humorous episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Oh, plus a ghost story and more! Join our Fantasy Map Masterclass at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/fantasy-map-masterclass/! All maps mentioned were chosen in good humor and jest and reflect personal opinions that aren't meant to be mean! Check out some of the maps we talk: Jesper's maps— Wheel of Time: https://casapittura.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-wheel-of-time-map.html Warbreaker: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/annotation-warbreaker-map/ Warhammer: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/ft00oy/made_the_full_warhammer_map_including_the_east/  Eragon: https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/485637759/map-of-alagaesia-eragon-mapchristopher Kushiel-world map: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/118923246398203552/ Autumn's maps— Game of Thrones: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/File:WorldofIceandFire.png Shannara: https://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/blog/2012/05/29/new-shannara-map-of-the-four-lands/ Terry Goodkind: http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/sot/images/4/45/New_world_map.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100308012633 Anne Bishop: https://www.annebishop.com/s.tir.alainn.map.html ______________ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I'm, Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 145 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we are back with one of our top 10 episodes. And this time we'll each share five fantasy maps that are the worst, and we'll see who can well, basically create the best worst list again. Autumn (53s): And this was an interesting challenge to be describing Maps well on a podcast. So the YouTube listener, I think everyone just go check the show notes. We're going to have a links to some of the Maps we're talking about, but it'll be, yeah, we'll do our best, but I think we can be descriptive enough of what drove us crazy about the map in question. Jesper (1m 16s): Yeah. And we'll, we'll try, we'll try. At least we have 144 episodes behind us. So hopefully we should be able to think about this being an audio medium. Autumn (1m 26s): I know. Compared to some podcasts we're like middle-aged or something we're getting into the here. Jesper (1m 35s): Yeah. Yeah. That, that, when you said that, that reminded me of the, some of the comments on Facebook, around the episode we did about marketing to different generations. And Jason commented on one of the, on that post about listening to that episode, made him feel really old. And I just had to tell him like me too. Autumn (1m 59s): Yeah. When you're aged generation is next to the top, you're like, Ooh, that happened. Jesper (2m 5s): Yeah. Autumn (2m 6s): That's never fun. Jesper (2m 8s): No, no, it's not. Autumn (2m 11s): So how are things over in Denmark though? Jesper (2m 15s): Well, yeah, so this last week has been one of those where it actually started out quite well, but then it just went downhill from there. Yeah. I mean the good news was that I went to that interview to become a referee instructor that I mentioned a couple of episodes back. And then the national football association actually came back and confirmed that I was selected. That was a good start to the week. That is awesome. Of course, I, I still have an exam to pass and I have like tons of homework I do need to do in preparation as well, learning like the laws of the game by heart and interesting stuff like that. Jesper (2m 58s): But it does look like this is going to happen. So I'm pretty excited about that. It's Autumn (3m 2s): Very exciting. Jesper (3m 5s): Yeah. But then it went downhill from day, as I said, you know, so first the party who was selling the house that we were negotiating for, they decided that they didn't want to sell anyway. Oh my God. So I just said that we're going to pull the house off the market. So it was just like a colossal waste of our time, but also money of course, because we actually paid a building inspector to go out and, and look at the house and go through it with us. Right. So totally waste of time and money. But I really think that this, these people selling the house, I think they were just in it for the money. You know, they tried to see if they could sell the house with a huge profit. Jesper (3m 47s): And then when it turned out that they couldn't because when we placed our bit of wee bit far less than what they wanted, and then they decided, well, apparently we can't get this much money for the house. So then we're just not going to sell it. But I, I don't know. I just feel, of course it's, it's there. Right? They, they can do that as they please, but it's really annoying. Autumn (4m 8s): Yeah. You know, that's not the way that, you know, test your house market by like, you know, taking unsuspecting people who are sincerely interested in buying a house and you're like toying with them, you know, it's that little rude. Jesper (4m 23s): Yeah. I dunno. It, it also rubbed me the wrong way to that way of doing that, but, oh, well, what are you going to do? There's nothing we can do about it, but at least now we know it's not going to be that house. So we'll keep looking and searching and figuring out what to do. But what was worse than that was that our youngest son was also tested positive for Corona. Yeah. We talked a bit about it offline already. Autumm yeah. So, but yeah, he's been in self isolation since the beginning of the week with me sort of attending to him. I'm just a room service guy now. Autumn (5m 4s): Yeah. Jesper (5m 5s): Yeah. I think that pot actually, he quite like, so he's like, I would like something to eat and then it was just like me coming with a tray with something, food for him and stuff. So that part, I think he's, he likes, but he's doing all right after the circumstances and he's already starting to feel better and he's, what's like 200 million hours of TV, so we'll see how it goes. But at least I've not got any symptoms yet, even though I'm in close proximity with him, but I just fingers crossed that it'll stay like that. Of course. Autumn (5m 39s): Yeah. So near fully vaccinated. So that's, if you get it, the reason you are vaccinated, that is that it should be, hopefully be mild. So knock on wood that you'll be, everyone will stay healthy and he'll get better. Very soon. I have to admit when I was a teenager, tens, a little young, but when I was a teenager, I think I would have adored being locked in my room with a whole bunch of books and some music kid comic books and been like, yes, just bring me food and T I'll be fine. Just leave me in here for a month. Yeah. Jesper (6m 9s): I think like a 16, 17, 18 year old, you know, they would love that kind of thing I would to have at that age. But Tim, no. Autumn (6m 19s): Yeah, yeah. I was always a drawl or so was all my Crans were with me and some markers. I probably might be fine in there for awhile. Jesper (6m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. True. But yeah, I mean, due to all of these things, I haven't really written much this last week, so I'm not too happy about that, but what can you do that? Autumn (6m 36s): Yeah. We'll get back on track. It's fine. Life happens. Jesper (6m 41s): And how about you? Autumn (6m 42s): Oh, I already hinted. I had a bit of a story. So this is one that there's a lot going on in my life right now. Like everything from a sick dog that has kept me up and I'm hoping I can stay coherent for the entire podcast because I'm unlike, it's like, you know, having a baby every hour and a half the dogs go out. So I'm so tired. This was day four in a row. Parents. I don't know how you do it. I really don't know how you're doing, but I can handle a dog for about a week. And then I'm like, oh, please just get better. But I had an interesting thing that I had to share with you in the listeners that happened as you know, it was just down at my parents' house and that was, oh, it was so much fun. It was great being a kid again and getting to be spoiled with my parents taking me out. Autumn (7m 27s): But the day I went to leave was actually my brother's birthday. And as you know, my brother passed away in 2000. So 21 years ago, he actually would have been 51. And my parents and I were sitting around there's a little island in the kitchen and I'm like, yeah, you know, today was, would have been his birthday. Right. And they're like, yeah, yeah. And my mom said, well, you know, it's funny. It's, you know, it's like, he's there because I'm his youngest son and my one cousin or the spitting image of my brother and all the way down to his voice. And just as my mom was saying that, and my dad was agreeing the two drop-down lights above our head pop like really loud and blue, but they didn't just blow. Autumn (8m 9s): They blew the entire circuit in the kitchen and this is a newish house, you know, it's less than a 10 years old. They've just built it. And so like, we're like, oh gosh, that was, that's quite the timing. When, after my brother passed away, they actually had a whole bunch of electronical issues that happened in our old, old house. So we're like, oh, that was really funny. Ha ha. It's your brother. And so my dad's like, okay, he went on, he went fix the circuit, not a big deal. As we're sitting back down, finishing up breakfast, I, you know, I've got an eight hour drive ahead of me. So I'm trying to get ready to go. Mom's like, oh, I thought it was that light, that blue. I was like, no, it's that light. So they turned back on the lights. They both worked. They didn't blow either light. They're both halogens. Autumn (8m 49s): So when they blow, they're like this pan, the butter Che to change. But yeah, it was a, they turned back on lights and they were fine. We didn't blow either a light bulb. And so we all just, we just kind of sat there a few minutes. Like that's really weird. That's never happened before kind of, you know, acknowledged, Hey, you know, happy birthday bro. And had a few minutes of silence and then we're okay. We gotta get busy today. So I thought that was just so weird. Amazing, Jesper (9m 22s): Which went all out and then you could just turn them on again, as if nothing happened or whatever Autumn (9m 26s): We had to switch the circuit breaker. But for there's no reason. I mean, it's not just that the circuit blue, the lights pop, they won't even do it on the radio. It pops, the loud goes right over my head that I jumped off the stool. It was so amazingly loud, it blew the entire circuit in the kitchen, credible. And then when they turned back, the lights on everything worked fine, no smell of smoke, nothing. The house didn't burn down since then. It was just so strange. Jesper (9m 53s): It was just a sound from beyond. Autumn (9m 56s): Yes. And even my husband's not quite into souls and spiritual beliefs at the moment. And he was like, well, we are all, you know, every S every emotion in your body is done through electrical impulses from your brain. It's like, so yeah. Your brother would screw with the electronics early, like tricks. And yeah. So it was really, it really felt like he was there with us for a moment being his normal troublesome self. Jesper (10m 27s): Ah, that's, that's, that's actually a good story. I like, I like stuff like that. I thought you were like, I really don't know what I think about, you know, the whole souls and spirits and so on, but I'm also not in the place where I could, you know, say that I don't believe in it. I can't say that either, but I'm also not sure if I do believe in it, you know, it's, it's, I think it's very difficult. Autumn (10m 51s): I think it does take time, but there's enough NEF things that have happened in my life. I do believe that there is consciousness beyond our physical bodies. And that's how I put it. Whether you want to call it a soul or what, I don't like the religious context, you know, that, but I do think there's a consciousness that is greater than the sum of our parts and that exists beyond our physical bodies. So yeah, I would be surprised that my brother would hang around for 21 years to drop by on his birthday. But as you know, he had a tragic death, so anyone would have, you know, maybe he would, and it was really interesting though, is just when we mentioned how much my cousin and his youngest son are so much like him at least look like a magnitude totally different. Jesper (11m 38s): And if you should drop by at any day that it would be that day. Right. So Autumn (11m 43s): It would either be the day he died, which it wasn't, it was on his birthday, which yeah, that would be, especially him. And my mom were like, they're two peas in a pod. Their personalities were so similar. They'd each other like five, six times a day. So yeah. I could see him stopping by, on his birthday to say hi to my mom. Jesper (12m 1s): Nice. I like that story. Good story. Thank you. Narrator (12m 6s): A week on the Internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (12m 12s): So we got our monthly critical reading started didn't we Autumm Autumn (12m 16s): Yes, we did. It's very exciting to get, see people voting on the books and getting into the one we've chosen. Jesper (12m 25s): Yeah, because in the next few weeks, we will do the episode where we will analyze last month book pick, which was the fifth season by NKG Emerson. However, it is now time to pick the book for October. That doesn't seem, Yeah, it's crazy, but that's the way it goes, you know, time flies when you're having fun, as they say, but as a reminder, the way this works is that we've created a poll in the Am, Writing Fantasy Facebook group. And here you can vote on which of three books you want us to read and analyze next month. Of course, we would love for you to read along. Jesper (13m 8s): And if you're a patron supporter, you will even be able to provide us with your views on the book. And we might just share that on air as well. So do you want me to share the books that we have the warming up for Autumm Autumn (13m 21s): Yes. Unless you want to pay some in a chat because I did not grab them before we started recording. Again, I here today, I'm not as busy as my dog, so I did not prepare for that. I prepared for the rest of the episode though. I did do that. Jesper (13m 35s): Oh, well, that's already progressed, so, okay. I'll not hold it against you then. Okay. The books that we pick this month, they is the winner of the world Fantasy or what it is called, which mark by cl Polk or another winner of the world Fantasy award, which is the sudden appearance of hope by clear north, or finally a third winner of the world FANTASY award, yet this kind of, kind of a T theme going on here. But the final one that you can vote for is Jade city by fondly. Jesper (14m 15s): So the voting has already started in the Am, Writing Facebook group. So either go there and place your vote, or if you want to become a more integral part of the process, you then go and join on Patrion. There's a link in the show notes for that as well. Autumn (14m 34s): Sounds good. I think we should give the Patrion votes, like double points because you know, they're special, important. They're more important. And I think if you are, I vote, cause you know, I have a vote on this one that we should get like 10 points, but you know, that's my opinion. Jesper (14m 49s): Well, we are not allowed to vote. This is the, the people voting. It's not us voting, Autumn (14m 54s): But we're readers too. Jesper (14m 56s): Yeah. But they, they force us to read Autumm and then we just read what the people want us to read. That's the way Autumn (15m 2s): It works. Well, it could be a worst job, Jesper (15m 7s): But the speaking of patron, by the way, we also want to give Nancy Hurst a huge shout out. Thank you so much for becoming a patron support, Nancy. It really makes a difference. And well, without people like you, we would probably not keep the podcast going for very long. So Autumn (15m 24s): Very true. Thank you, Nancy. And welcome to Patreon. We appreciate your support. Jesper (15m 34s): So before we get into this, we should probably say that where we share maps that were actually created for books or games or movies or something like that, the intention here today isn't to hate on those maps. So everything we say in this episode is meant as like humoristic views on Maps. So there are probably those of you out there listening who might like some of the maps that we are going to mention and you know what that is perfectly fine, nothing wrong with it. So basically just take everything we say from this point, onward as entertainment, rather than critical assessment of the Maps. Jesper (16m 14s): Does that sound fair? Autumn (16m 15s): That sounds very fair. You know, this is definitely, it was a pet peeve or something we point out it's a personal opinion. Other people may totally disagree and that's fine. We're just looking at it from our own perspectives and to have a little bit of fun and poke some fun at Maps because you know, if you want to pull up one of mine to poke fun, please have at it. I'm fine with that. Jesper (16m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, as I said, this is just entertainment guy, so it's a, it's a, one of our worst, top 10 lists. So we wanted to talk about Maps. So yeah, essentially we have to find some maps that we don't quite like. So be it Autumn (16m 51s): That'd be it. I think we manage. Yeah. Jesper (16m 53s): Yeah. So we should alternate, like we normally do Autumm and, Autumn (16m 59s): But I remember, yeah, I remember last time probably because I did the post-production recording and stuff that I went first, last time. So I think it's your turn to go first. Jesper (17m 13s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. One day I'll make up my mind if I prefer to go first and last, but I still don't know. So maybe it's actually good thing just to get the decision made for me. There you go. Autumn (17m 25s): Well, I was happy to do that because as we've said, this is a partnership, so it's good if we both make decisions occasionally. Jesper (17m 33s): Yeah. I think this is the fourth time you pointed that out today. So I don't know what's going on. Something is going on. Autumn (17m 42s): I'm picking idea today. It's fun. Jesper (17m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. You think it's fun? I do. I like when I pick on you Autumm but the other way around, it's not so fun, Autumn (17m 53s): But these lists are all about, you know, giving, giving back as good as you get. So here we go. Jesper (18m 1s): Okay. We'll I can start with my number five, but I must also say that it felt a bit different making this top 10 list compared to some of the other ones that we've made in the past, because it's, it's a bit more like, for example, the last one we, we made with like the worst superpowers, you know, some of it was really wacky and stupid and fun. Yeah. Whereas this is a, this is slightly more serious in the way that it's, it's a bit like, that's true. A little opinion, like you said before, it's not like fun like that in that con in that sense that it's just silly and stupid. Right. So, yeah, but let, let me get going here. Jesper (18m 40s): And number five is not the worst map that I've seen, which is also of course, why it's number five rather than number one. But I decided to include a map, which some people might disagree with me about, but that's okay. I can take it. Excellent. But it's the, it's the map for Wheel of Time. Okay. Autumn (19m 9s): Well that's the famous one. Jesper (19m 12s): It's very famous. Yes. But I've always found this map quite boring. No, it's just like, it's one huge large chunk of land. And then there was one of my pet peeves and as well, you have the 90 degree angled mountain range. Again, I freaking hate those. What I do. Why do they keep popping up on maps all over the place? I don't understand. Mountains will never, ever form like that. So when I see it, I instantly, I mean, seeing, like pulling my head hair out, like why do you do that? Please stop. Autumn (19m 50s): Yeah. It's sort of magic. That would not, I can't imagine how that would happen in nature. So I do agree with you in fact that I might be mentioning something about Maps that do that later. Not quite on the Jesper (20m 2s): Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, because I mean, I could also have used the map for the Lord of the rings, but we have sort of pre-agreed ahead of time that we were not going to put that on the list because if we did, we would probably both have it on the list. Not because Lord of the rings is a Batman in general. I actually quite like it, but it's just the mountains around more, or that it's the same issue again here. And I don't like, I mean, Tolkien did have a reason for it. We won't get into all of that now. Why, why, what Tolkien had a reason for it and so on, but it's just like, come on. I mean, I don't know if it's because Tolkien did it and then everybody started copying or something. I don't know, but it's, it drives me insane. Jesper (20m 44s): And then there was also one this, a Wheel of Time map, like in the bottom left corner of the map, there was some cold something called the wind bites, his finger. And it's sort of like, it almost looks like a small islands that forms a finger or something, but it just looks really weird. So we'll put a link to it in the show notes. So have a look yourself, but I don't know. I just don't, I don't like it. It's not my favorite map. It's not the worst I've ever seen, but it's certainly not my favorite. Autumn (21m 16s): Yeah. I, And I, I picturing it. It's been a while since I've seen that one, but I do. I do know you mean it's never stood out to me as a great X for such, for a book that has become sort of like a hallmark of a fantasy series. It's kind of a map. I will agree with you. They really studied. I never read the, I haven't read the books. I will admit it. I've never read the Wheel of Time. It's too long for me to even contemplate until I like, until I'm locked into a room because I have COVID and someone's serving me to you and then, or I'm locked onto a desert island, then I'll read the wheel of time until then. I'm a little busy. Autumn (21m 56s): There's a lot of books. Jesper (21m 58s): Yeah. I, I got to, I got to book six. I think it was in the night gave up. Indeed. It's just, I mean, I understand the people who like it, but just for my taste, it is way too slow paced. It's just like, nothing happens. And Sunday on book, after book, after book where it's just like, yeah, I think I've mentioned it on the podcast before, but I specifically remember some, some places where you spend an entire chapter where nothing other happens that they need to exit attempt and it takes them all chapter to exit the tent and it's like, come on, move people. It drives me crazy. Autumn (22m 34s): Okay. I'd have to be really, it'd be at the bottom of my book pile and I was desperate for me to get through all of them. Then that's really tough. Yeah. Jesper (22m 43s): I gave up. But yeah, maybe a you're hinting at somebody who needs to serve your tea all the time. And I don't know what you were hinting at there, but maybe you read it one day when that happens. Autumn (22m 55s): I will hope so. Considering my husband is still currently I'm away in may and I'm, he's not kidding this hint. So let's just be in the dog. Are you ready for my number five? Okay. Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah, let's Autumn (23m 10s): Go. This one, there is an example later in my list, so I'm not going to share it now, but this is more of a generic, one of my pet peeves. And it's pretty easy to explain, but names of places that are in a font that is nearly illegible, even when it's at full scale, you know, those big, fancy Fantasy fonts. And then you take that and you shrink it to fit it into like a Kindle. Why, why, why, why do you even bother naming places when you cannot read it? Unless it is full poster size and then you maybe have a magnifying glass. It's just, I don't know. That gets my, just gets me every time. Autumn (23m 50s): I'm just like, why don't you do that? The terrain is already so difficult and you have trees and you have this, and then you have this loopy Fullan that you're like, I don't even know what that says. And it's an Elvish. Y Jesper (24m 5s): Yeah. I know why I know what you mean. I, I like to enjoy Maps, you know, I, I, I'm such a FANTASY map and she asked that I love looking at the maps and I can actually spend quite a lot of time just sitting there looking at all the details. And then if there's something I can't read or I can't see what it is, it's quite annoying to be honest. Autumn (24m 23s): Yeah. And especially, I think a lot of authors, you know, if they get a nice, sweet, done Fantasy map, or if they do it themselves and they use these fonts, they forget that when it's on your Kindle it's or even when a paperback book, I mean, we're talking about a very small image, three inches by four inches. Maybe it's tiny. It should be very clean. And yeah, I've seen some maps that you just kind of look at and you're like, wow, I don't even know what this is trying to tell me. Why did you put it in there? And I think that's just such a frustration and that's sort of why it's a pet peeve. It's just like this, isn't it. You don't want to open it up and be like, oh, I love maps. Maps are awesome. I cannot read this one. Jesper (25m 5s): I did indeed. Exactly. I'm with you there. Autumn (25m 10s): Okay. Well, oh, we're agreeing. So I'm winning. Awesome. Jesper (25m 15s): Oh, well, I don't know. Well, you agreed to the Wheel of Time as well. So we even at least now Autumn (25m 21s): Good memory. I was trying to trick you there. Jesper (25m 27s): Okay. Well, my number four, I might even get even more people on my back for this one on one another. Autumn (25m 33s): It was exciting. Everyone pick on Yesper with me. No. Jesper (25m 36s): Yeah. I already mentioned Wheel of Time with some people probably love, so that's a problem, but now I'm going to go all in and get even more people upset with me because now I'm going to mention one of Brandon Sanderson's maps. Oh, you're Autumn (25m 50s): Just asking to get yelled at. Jesper (25m 54s): I'm asking for trouble. Autumn (25m 57s): Oh geez. So what is wrong with one of Brandon Sanderson's Maps? Jesper (26m 2s): Well, this is a, this is the one for war breaker and it's basically it's in the city. So it's a, it's a map of a city. And, And in my personal opinion, as I said before, I love looking at maps, so they should be visually appealing and they should look good in my view. And it should be something that readers want to spend time enjoying. And this one is not, I mean, it's black and white. There's not necessarily anything bad about black and white maps. That that might be okay. In my opinion, again, I do like colors because I think it adds a lot more to the map, windows colors on it, but it's just like the way that the city has been drawn. Jesper (26m 44s): It is it's hand drawn, but it's extremely busy. It's just like houses all over the map, everywhere there's houses. And I get that this probably reassembling what a medieval city would look like, but it's just way too busy. And I mean, have a look at it. I'll, I'll play, there'll be a link to that one in the show notes as well. But I have a look because I just, yeah, I, I think, you know what I mean when you see it. Yeah. Autumn (27m 17s): I have seen this one. I think it's, it's drawn 3d, but not from the top. More like, kind of a sign. And so you don't really see the streets. I mean, it doesn't make, Jesper (27m 29s): I was just everywhere. Autumn (27m 30s): It doesn't help you. It doesn't work well as a map, it works better as like I drew a picture of a city. It's not really a map. Jesper (27m 40s): No, I know. Well, you're going to have a map of a city, but then at least try to reduce the amount of houses in there and make it a bit like something that is, you have some other things than houses to look at something that sort of makes you want to investigate all the parts of the map and look, oh, look over there. There's a small fountain. Or, you know, just make it a bit more appealing and interesting instead of just 200 million houses stacked on top of each other. Yeah. I don't, I don't like it now, but yeah. So now, now I both assaulted. We love time and wall breakers go from here. Autumn (28m 18s): And you're only at number four. I can't imagine what we're going to go from here. You know, if you touch dragon lands, people are going to like Flay you and bonfire you or something today. Jesper (28m 29s): I can promise I'm not going to go there. Okay, Autumn (28m 31s): Good. I just want to keep him safe. Right? Well, my number four is sort of what you've already hinted at. You had mentioned perpendicular mountains, but for me, I put number four as impossible terrain, as in not magical, but terrain like floating islands, that's fine. It's magical. But I mean, illogical cannot happen like rivers flowing through or mountains, which I have seen or around legs, which would not happen mountains. Like you mentioned, that are perpendicular or just randomly place. Like someone dropped a bag of mountains right. Onto their map. And it's scattered all over our, this is a fun one, which I don't know how many people have noticed continents that are perpendicular to each other. Autumn (29m 13s): And my example for this is game of Thrones. Have you ever noticed that was stereos? And now I can't even remember where the three McKee are. They're like completely right angles to each other. Jesper (29m 24s): They are. Yeah. The other thing is with the game of Thrones Maps, the other thing is that it doesn't even look very good. It looked just looks weird. It does look weird. Autumn (29m 33s): I Jesper (29m 34s): Mean, if you cut out all the, basically, if you think about the game of Thrones intro thing, you know, when the camera goes around the map and all that. Yeah. That looks cool. That looks extremely cool. So as long as you're focusing on the upside down map of England, which is basically a game of Thrones, if you will, if you focus only on Westeros there, then that looks good. Actually in my mind, I think that looks perfectly fine. But then when you take all the, I also don't remember the name of it, but all the lands with the Dothraki and all that up there, when you put that onto the map as well, it just looks weird. Autumn (30m 11s): It does. It does not. It's too. It's like someone put England made it the same size as all of Europe and just put it at the end outside of Portugal. And it's just like, that wouldn't happen. How would that happen? I don't get it. But, and even that, I actually have another example. So I didn't think about this cities. They don't bother me so much when they kind of seem to be somewhere where maybe a city wouldn't exist, because that gets to be curious. I always think, well, the author had a reason for putting a city there. So maybe, maybe not. I always give them the benefit of the doubt. So I think maybe there's a story I'm willing to at least hold my criticism of cities just appearing in the middle of nowhere. Autumn (30m 55s): Maybe it's an ancient ruin. And I just don't know that by looking at the map, but have you ever seen Terry Brooks' Shannara map where there are rivers that literally go nowhere? I mean, they flow and you can see them come together, these tributaries and they flow off and they'd go into other tributaries. It's like an Esher sketch of a Map. IBD stylistically. It's like, it makes me want to, like, I want to make an extra sketch of a, a fantasy world. It makes no sense. So I will link to that one in the show notes, but I looked at that and I think this is my example, too, for like a font that you're like, why did you use that font? But then you start looking at the rivers and they're like, going up, mountains are going, they're just lakes. Autumn (31m 40s): They flow into lakes and the number out of them, which can happen, but not like six times on the same map. It's just, just, it's one of those ones that is a hydrologist. You know, I studied environmental science and I'm looking at this going, no rivers don't go together and then flow apart and just branch off and disappear into the wild. It just doesn't make sense. Jesper (32m 7s): No Am yeah. Well what you're saying, not with rivers, but this stuff that doesn't make sense us. So actually my number three pig as well. Autumn (32m 17s): Oh, go figure we, again, we met, if, if the listeners do not know this, we kind of met because of Fantasy maps. So I would have kind of not be surprised that we have some of the same things on our list of pet peeves. Jesper (32m 31s): Yeah. It's also a pet peeve, but I have a concrete one here though for my number three, but basically again with things that doesn't make any sense. Right. But here we're back to mountain ranges again. So my third pick and w I dunno, tell me why do we keep seeing this problem with mountain constantly? I don't get it, but this third one on my list is the world of Warhammer. Autumn (32m 56s): I Jesper (32m 56s): Don't think I've seen this. So this is a, like a miniature war gaming setting in the middle of the ocean. In this map, you have a very large circular island and yes, you guessed it. There's mountains formed in a freaking circle. Autumn (33m 14s): Volcanic. It could be a massive caldera. Jesper (33m 18s): Yeah. This is where the Elsa lives in the setting. And it's been a long, long while since I read the law for the setting. But if I remember there is a reason for it, but honestly, I can't quite remember. And also I don't really care because it really rubs me the wrong way to see mountain shaped in a circle. It's just like, what the heck is this? Autumn (33m 41s): Yeah. Short, if I had massive caldera, like, you know, center Rini, volcanic kind of area. Yeah. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense. Ambassador asteroid impact that kind of thrust up the land on both sides, but in general, no mountains don't form right angles. And they don't form circles. You have a very weird planet if they do. Jesper (34m 3s): Yeah. And what even makes this map even worse than whites. Number three, I suppose, to number five, it's also had weird mountains is that it's like, take a look at the Warhammer Map. We'll link to it and shown it as well, but take a look at it and then tell me that it doesn't look exactly like a copy of, you know, you have north and south America, there's Russian as Africa. You even have Asia and Australia. The difference is that in the middle of the ocean, there is this circular Elvin kingdom with circular mountains. But otherwise everything else is exactly like earth. I mean, Autumn (34m 39s): Took the Atlanta. Smith's stuck it in the middle of the Atlantic called it where the Elvis came from and called it a new world. Jesper (34m 47s): But he couldn't come up with something just a bit more original than that. I just have a look at it. It's insane how much it's just a copy of earth. Autumn (34m 57s): That is funny. And that's actually a nice segue into my number three, which is different for this one. I know we Jesper (35m 4s): Had coordinated this. Sometimes Autumn (35m 6s): It all works out. No, it's always surprising when we're on the same stream of things, but yeah, it happens occasionally. So this one, Jesper (35m 18s): Occasionally I like the passive aggressive, common. It happens. Okay. Finally, Autumn (35m 27s): I'm being sarcastic. I think what happens every time we talk, we're like, oh yeah, I was already thinking of that easiest part. However, I will tell people that I let them think that we're constantly combating. Like we are on our top 10 lists. So my number three is, have you ever, it's a Terry Good kind Map and not to pick on him because it's a good, he's a good author. But this example is just a good, good example of one that I find so frustrating. And it's sort of what you just said. It's so generic that it can be anywhere or any continent, which makes me wonder, you know, how good is the story? Autumn (36m 7s): How original is any of this? When you look at it and you go like, oh, that's earth or, oh, that's a continent with an ocean. And it's like the Westmoreland's the north valley. Oh my gosh. Please make it interesting. Make it original. Don't just make it. It looks like you took a piece of the Gulf of Mexico and a little bit of Texas and gave it a different name and put it on a river and called it somewhere. You Know, it's horrible. Jesper (36m 40s): All right. I don't think I've seen that one too. Autumn (36m 45s): It's just it's so it's not in color. It's just, I'm like a antique paper in black. So black and white basically. And it's just line drawings and it literally just looks like anywhere. I, this is one of those ones where I think you've seen the world, the map, they call it a cliche Ville or cliche land. That's actually one of my favorite Maps because it is so well done. And it is funny, hilarious. Yes. The dragon tail islands, you know, it's, again, the setting that every Fantasy map has these exact same settings. And it's hilarious to look at, well, this one is sort of the same way, but not done to the gorgeous color quality of that one. And it's just black and white and you look at it and you're like, it could be Mexico. Autumn (37m 29s): It could be a bay in Alaska. You know, there's so many places that you're like, it's like, you know, James bay upside down it's yeah. It could be anywhere. And it doesn't inspire any excitement. And you look at it, you're like, I don't know where I am. Why did you make a map of like my backyard? I don't care. Jesper (37m 50s): No one of course the major difference is also that the, whether it's supposed to be a serious map versus one like cliche, it's just the cliche map world. That's meant to be just fun and goofy. Right. And there's a big difference in that. It is. Autumn (38m 6s): Yeah. And yeah, the cliche one is definitely it's done so well that I would actually buy it as a post or it is just, it is beautiful. And it is funny. It is so funny. So I should find that and I'll try to link to that in the show notes as well. Jesper (38m 20s): Okay. Good. All right. Well, moving on to my number two, so it's starting to get more and more nasty now, but my, yeah, my number one is even worse, but this one is, it's not far off what you were just talking about in the sense that following the same, like, well, yeah, well this is like somebody sat down and then they sort of brainstormed like, oh no, I can't do what I normally find on a Fantasy map. And then they made a list, like a checklist of that. And then they started just checking them off one by one. I put this on the map, put that onto Map, everything that, you know, just one of each. Jesper (39m 0s): So this is, this one is the fictional world of Aragon. And this is the map that they used for the inheritance cycle novels. And basically it's like, you find a volcano check, you find a grant lake check, then the awesome islands off the coast, check again, a single forest. Good. And then next to that, there was next to the forest is a single desert Check. So I might be, I don't know, it might be a bit harsher, but I really don't like the map. And also because they've placed the desert right. Smack in the middle of the entire map and it just looks really weird, but I don't know, sorry if somebody likes this map, but I'm just not a fan of, it just feels like a checklist map and then just smashed together. Jesper (39m 51s): There you go. Here's a Fantasy map and yeah. I'm not a fan. Autumn (39m 56s): No, no. That sounds like my impossible terrain. Why is there a desert next to a forest? I mean there's Jesper (40m 3s): Yeah, those, this doesn't D this one is such, well, there's a huge forest and then a desert right next to it. Autumn (40m 8s): That's just strange. I mean it, yeah. Where you would find that in nature without grasslands or a mountain, a rain shadow or a high plateau to cause lack of rain. I don't know. That would drive me crazy. I'd be looking at it, going through any classes. So I'd do all of the, I think it would drive me insane. Yeah. That doesn't sound good. One. I'll have to check that one out. I don't think I've actually seen the map. So that one will be interesting to take a peek at. Jesper (40m 38s): Yeah, yeah. Have a look at the link in the show notes. Autumn (40m 42s): Well, my number two is one that I, there are some examples out there, but I couldn't find a good one that I wanted to link to. So I'm just going to describe it. And that is Maps with place names that are named descriptively based on like, if you were holding the map and looking down at it and the people on the ground would never be able to see that pattern or the places where it is a fast continent with areas separated by large obstacles. You have the names all sound the same. So there's kind of two different maps there. So it's like, you know, this massive continent, the size of Asia and something at the far east and the far west sounds like they're from the exact same culture that always kind of like, you know, they should be different. Autumn (41m 24s): I want to see, I want to see some representation of different cultures and different types of people in climate, on your map. Because that makes me curious to know what's where I love traveling. That's why I look at these maps. I want to know what's going on, but yeah. But then you have those other maps and one of the examples, and I couldn't find an actual link to, it was a map that, you know, kind of looked like a body. And so there was like, the Heartland was literally where the heart was and the Headlands on the Jesper (41m 51s): Right. Yeah. Autumn (41m 52s): No, no, I don't care if it looks like that, unless they have hot air balloons or were named by a God or goddess, they don't know. It looks like that. That's just silly. So it was sort of like your one, your number of five, you mentioned something about the finger islands or something. It's just, no. So sometimes if there's a mountain and you can stand there and look off and say, oh, they're like fingers and you name it that way fine. But in general you don't go, oh my goodness, this looks like a Lotus flower. I'm going to name this Lotus island. Well, you don't do that. Jesper (42m 30s): No, no, it doesn't. It definitely requires that you get fire away from, from the, If I above the land and new, you can see it from distance. Otherwise you would never recognize patents like that. No, Autumn (42m 42s): Just drives me when I look at it. And I'm like cute though. It's like the Nazca lines, you know, we're going to, we have been debating how the Nazca lines were made and who they were made for, for centuries now. And it's just like, you know, don't do that to your readers. We don't want to, you don't want them to be confused over the map and why you named it? The elbow when no one knows it looks like an elbow. Jesper (43m 6s): Fair enough. Yeah. All right. Okay. Ready for the worst of my list here. Autumn (43m 11s): Yeah. This is going to be exciting. I want to hear what is the worst map you have found out? Jesper (43m 16s): Oh my God. So the number one on my list made it here because it's just too lazy for my taste and I'll start explaining why, and then it's going to sound pretty much like something I already said, but then there was a kicker at the end. Okay. So I mentioned before how Y hammer, the Warhammer map is just a copy of earth. Well, this one is basically the same, but it's just for Europe. So this is the, I think you pronounce it, crucial world map or something like that. We'll, we'll link to it in the show notes as well, but there are three trilogies written in this setting. Jesper (43m 58s): And while I do understand that they are supposed to be a fictional version of medieval, medieval, Western Europe. So I do understand that, but honestly, it just doesn't cut it for me. When you practically just take a map of Europe, slap some new country names on it and call it a day. That's not a fictional Map. No, I mean it, and this is where, I mean, like, that sounds very much like what I just said about Warhammer, because it's basically the same thing. But if you are naming the country on your map, that everybody can see when you know Europe, you can see to this Denmark and I'm from Denmark. Jesper (44m 41s): And instead of writing Denmark, you call it Joplin. And as a Dane, I can tell you that a part of our country, the part of our country that connects to Germany just south of us is called Joplin in real life. That's what it's called. So for a fictional setting, which I'm supposed to immerse, be me, it Mustin, don't freaking put names in there that is called in my national language. That's the name of the place that is already fucking sake. It's horrible. Autumn (45m 12s): That's that is, that'd be like me. I just wrote the tainted face series and it takes place in this world in this time. But you know, a different version where there's Faye and magic. And if I had included a world pap and why bother, so, yeah, and then two per se, it's fantasy and use real place names. But Jesper (45m 33s): I can imagine, I don't, honestly, I have to admit that I don't know what nationality, the author of the crucial series, what nationality it is, but I can imagine, and I might be a mistaking. And if I'm mistaking, then I'm apologizing in advance. But I have a feeling that it might be somebody who doesn't know the geography, maybe that well of Europe. And then they'd just think like, Jutland, that sounds like some FANTASY kind of a war. Well maybe, but it's, it's a real name of a real place. So at least do some Googling first and figure out if it's a real name before you put it on the map, Autumn (46m 10s): Or at least if you're going to, you know, if you're going to call it Fantasy, don't stay away from real-world words. If you found it. And you're like, oh, no one uses that anymore. That was the historic name. Just, just stay away from it. It's not worth it. Yeah. Jesper (46m 24s): And if you then telling me that the author actually didn't know that this is the real name and then put it on the map. Well, then I'm going to tell you, then it only makes it even worse because then, then you knew about it. And then what the heck are you then doing? Are you, it makes no sense to me. Autumn (46m 41s): Yeah. That's again, to me almost like lazy world building. If you're going to create a new world and you're going to call it a new Fantasy setting, make a new map. And if you have a hard time coming up with Fantasy images or a Fantasy landscape, like you just want to write a story and you want someone to hand you a map. There are programs and people who can do that for you. That is not a problem. Okay. I just found out how to randomly make a FANTASY map in like 15 minutes, I was like, oh, this is too much fun. It has, it just creates random things. I mean, it's, it's 3d and it looks pretty and you can start creating a story based on just something, something on someone hands you it's better. The world-building and mapping being is not your forte. Autumn (47m 21s): Get someone to do it for you and give you a hand. All right. Yes, please. You ready for my number one? This is a good, a good lead in to what my number one is because it kind of shows that I am a graphic designer. I have to admit. Okay. So my number one is Maps that looked like you sketched it while you were potentially drunk or you had a migraine and you just wanted to call it done. It's good enough. And just hate that. So there are software out there. There are cartography programs. There are graphic designers. There are people who can make you even a simple map that is quite lovely. Autumn (48m 3s): It can be black and white. It can be color, but don't just do these like little lines sketches. And I actually have an example for you. Have you ever seen an Bishop? She writes dark Fantasy and she has some of the worst Maps I've ever seen. I mean, Jesper (48m 22s): If there's any inhibition there that just got to come and murder, you Autumn (48m 26s): Let me know. Or they might agree. I mean, they're just, they're line drawings. They're just black and white, but there's just, there's no passion to them. There's no interest to them. They're so simple. There's simplistic. There's so they're painful. They're really painful. It's just, you look at it. And you're like, what is the point? Yeah, I will, you will. I will link to it in the show notes, but you look at it and you're like, what was the point of including this? It's just, you know, some trees and land it's, it's so boring that I would look at it. And I would probably not even pick up the book. I'd open up to the map and go, if this is all the time and effort you put into making a map and it is literally, it looks like you sketched it. Autumn (49m 6s): It was some thick lines over it and you call it good and published it. I just, if that's, what's your editing gonna look like, I just, I am making an immediate judgment call, which isn't probably right. But that is what we do. We judge books by their cover. We're going to judge it by their formatting. And we're definitely going to judge it by what that map looks like. And it's going to greet us pretty early in the novel before we even start reading. And if I see a horrible Map, I'll be like, oh, well, there's your book, what quality you're going to have in there. So, yeah. And Bishop one was just one that I was like, oh, this is so painful. I can't believe this. Isn't like a published novel. Autumn (49m 48s): This is really bad. Jesper (49m 51s): Oh my God. I'm, I'm curious to see how much hate we are going to get on the back of this episode, you know, because essentially it's going to be like, here are the world's worst Maps. And then in the show notes, there's just going to be a list of names of settings and all kinds of things that all the bots on the internet can pick up. And then, oh my God, I could just see how much hate we are going to get on the back of all this. But as I said in the beginning, it's Mendez entertainment. So take it for what it is. Autumn (50m 15s): That's a personal opinion, but, and if you need a better map maker, come talk to me. Cause lady I, your books, people say you write gorgeous, wonderful books, but you're a Maps, blah. They're just horrible. Jesper (50m 32s): So I don't really know how do we declare a winner of these two top five list here? Autumm because it's, I think it's a bit difficult. Autumn (50m 43s): I think I'm short of you just admitting I won, which is fine. I think that we, I think we might have to leave this one to the listeners if they don't, you know, come at us with pitchforks and torches for having pointed out Maps that they absolutely adore. So we'll have to see how that goes. Jesper (51m 6s): Well, at least as far as a controversy goes, and I guess we stepped off foot in the hornet's nest of whatever you say in English, but that's about right. But okay. Maybe we'll, we'll leave it for listeners to declare winner here because honestly I can't quite make up my mind because yeah. And not that I have seen all of the maps that you mentioned, but at least the point you made. Yeah. I agree with, and I also felt you agreed with the points that I was making. So I don't know. Autumn (51m 31s): Yeah. I think we can say the winner is the readers who do not have to see these horrible Maps when they pick up a book. So, Jesper (51m 42s): All right. Well, we talked a lot about Maps today and of course our lists here were intended as pure entertainment, as I said, but if you are interested in more like let's call it proper advice on Fantasy map-making and it's not just a lot of goofy, funny stuff that we are sitting here and blowing out then, or perhaps you just love fantasy match and you like to geek out about it then Autumm and I will actually be hosting an online virtual Masterclass about Fantasy mapmaking in a few weeks from now. So if you want interested in that and go check out the details, why the link in the show notes, that'll take you to the registration page. Jesper (52m 22s): And I can tell you, we are looking so much forward to host this map-making Masterclass for the very first time. In fact, yes, Autumn (52m 30s): It will be so exciting and we get to geek out about Maps, which again, it's what brought us together. So yay. It'll be awesome. Jesper (52m 38s): So next Monday, we are going to discuss learning through all the master classes and masterminds. How can such forums be helpful for your author career? Narrator (52m 50s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

You've researched how to ride a horse, maybe how to shoot a bow or what that fiddly bit on a sword hilt is really called, but have you considered how combatants actually FIGHT? Or how long it takes a bruise to heal... and what exactly is the impact of adrenaline post fight? Join Autumn and special guest Carla Hoch from FightWrite as they tease apart what so many authors get wrong about fight scenes, how to write a great fight scene, what Wonder Woman got wrong, and why dragon smoke is actually white (not black!). Visit FightWrite at www.fightwrite.net and follow Carla on Instagram at www.instagram.com/carla.c.hoch/. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Autumm (30s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And this is episode 144 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today Jesper is on break. And instead I have a very special guest with us. So Carla, who is the host of the FightWrite Podcast. Plus you have a website and classes and so much more. So I want you to introduce yourself, Carla (55s): Okay. I am Carla Hoke and I am the purveyor, I guess that's the word for the fight? Yeah, the fight right brand. I have the website fight, right? If I G H T w R I T e.net, and it's kind of a one-stop shop for everything that has to do with fight, right? Which helps writers write fight scenes action, and violence. And I have a book with writer's digest and it is fight right. How to write believable fight scene. And I have class with a writer's digest university. That's always in their library and hopefully we'll have more in the fall. Oh, I guess it is fall. We'll have, Autumm (1m 35s): That's fantastic. This year, Carla (1m 36s): I'm telling you this year has been slow and fast at the same time. It's either in park or it's in full speed ahead, right? Exactly. Autumm (1m 47s): Yeah. And in some ways, days can be, have elements of both. And so I'm not sure where we are. Carla (1m 55s): Yeah. Well, you know, they say that the days are long, but the years are short. Oh, Autumm (2m 1s): It's very, very true. Well, that is awesome. I remember, I think your website has actually won something for reader writer's digest too. Like best law Carla (2m 12s): It has. So it has it's it's in there top 100 websites for writers and they have different categories. And I think mine was in the category of writers helps writers. So three years and I have won a brand award to twice with can Christian authors network. Autumm (2m 35s): That's so brilliant installations. Yeah, that is fantastic. And so I do want to give a shout out because it was actually the secret of how we met is a joint listener. Stephen recommended that I see if you wanted to come on the am writing fantasy podcast because he thought we would just be cool. It's like dream diner duo. Oh yeah. Big shout out to Steven as a thank you for introducing us and making this podcast happen. Carla (3m 6s): And what's his last name? Autumm (3m 7s): Guglich. Carla (3m 10s): Okay. Autumm (3m 12s): All right. Well, I, you have quite the background in fighting yourself. So I Think that is really interesting. So this came about because you're also a writer end of fighter. Carla (3m 27s): Yeah. It, well, it came about because I was a writer and this is a classic case of the days being long, but the years being short, because it seems like I just kind of started, but it's, it's been like 10 years, 10 years since I started martial arts. I can't believe that, but it all started because I was writing a work that had fight scenes in it and I didn't know how to fight. And so I, my kids, I had my kids in TaeKwonDo. I think they were in like first grade and yeah, kindergarten, first grade. And there was a self-defense class that was at the TaeKwonDo studio. And I went to a couple of classes. I thought, you know, how much really do I need to know one or two classes, surely I'll know everything I need to know to write fight scenes. Carla (4m 12s): And I got in there and I kind of loved it. And it just, it just kinda snowballed from there. And the strange thing is I was asked in a podcast one time, and this was the hardest question I've ever been asked. He was like, what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you? And I'm like, where do, where do I even start with that? But one of the weird things, my life tends to backpedal. Like it's, you know, circular, like I taught at a high school that was the Raiders and then moved to a whole new city, whole, whole new state and the Raiders, you know? And it's like this person I knew. And then boom, this person I knew with the same name, coaches, exact same names. Carla (4m 53s): And I'm like, I don't, I'm not planning this, but I went to a writer's conference and I had the work with me that I started taking self-defense for the whole reason. I started wanting to know how to learn fight scene was this particular work. And I went to a writer's conference and I presented it to a man named Steve lobby, who I did not know. I had no idea who he was. It turned out he was Steve lobby of the Steve blobby agency. He was the head of a, a writer's agency. And I presented it to him and he, he didn't really, he, he didn't like it, you know, which I'm okay with that. And he said, I don't like the work. Carla (5m 33s): It's not right for me, but I do like you, so let's keep in touch. And so year after year after year, we would see each other. If you don't go to writers, conferences, writers, I highly suggest it because it's, it's the adult version of camp. You see the same people. It is, you see the same people year after year after year. And so I kept up with him and anytime we saw each other to writer's conference, we would make time to kind of sit and chat. Cause we get along really well. And when I wrote the book, I got in touch with him and I was like, you know, what would you like to read this book? He's I, of course I'd like to read it. So he read it. And he said, because he also has an imprint of small house publishing for craft books. Carla (6m 14s): And he goes, I do love this book. He goes, I don't have it in my budget right now. And I'm like, well, you know what? I, I sent it to writer's digest and he goes, you did what? I said, I sent it to writer's digest. And he started laughing and he was like, okay girl. He said, you go for it. And he goes, what he said, you know, just be patient, it'll take about six weeks for them to get back to you. And if you haven't heard from him by then, then just, you know, reach out. And I said, I'll do that. And it was not six weeks. It was six days. Oh my gosh, I know miraculous. And so I sent him a message back and I said, would you be interested in representing a writer's digest author? And he said, may be. And so the first person, I really pitched this book to the whole reason I started writing fight scenes is now my editor. Carla (7m 3s): I know my agent for a book about writing fight scenes. So circle Autumm (7m 8s): Really good kismet there. That is really Carla (7m 13s): Is, it really is writers don't give up writing honestly is just a war of attrition. It's about successful authors. Aren't necessarily the best writers. I mean, come on. We've we've all read some books. They were like, wow. I mean, I've read books. I'm like, how is this person got this book out? And I don't have this book out, but it really is. It's the difference in who, who gave up and who didn't. I was a high school teacher and a track coach for awhile. And there was a psycho psychological study done that when two runners are running side by side, after three strides, one of them will probably give up, oh. So I used to coach my runners and say three full strides and at time and time again, and I think that's how it is with writers. Carla (7m 59s): Keep the strides. Somebody is going to give up and you're going to be the one left standing. So just, just don't give up, keep pushing. Autumm (8m 7s): I love that. And I think that is so true because it's, I know I've read recently that it's 10 years and 1 million words before you can really start seeing your career take off. Carla (8m 17s): And Autumm (8m 19s): That's a long time I would lose a lot of authors, one or two books, and that's their feeling. They're feeling it. Then they want to see something then, but to really come into your own 10 years in your words, Carla (8m 33s): Right. And, and the average book and its lifetime in its lifetime, a published book only sells 2000 copies in its lifetime. Wow. So if you look and you think, okay, I've self published this book, or I've traditionally published this book and you know, I've only sold a hundred books this first year. Well, yeah, that's right. I worked, you know, people who are rich from writing, first of all are probably lying or, or they have, you know, a ton of books or they are just kind of, you know, this kind of lightning in a bottle kind of situation, you know, the JK Rawlings, you know, that just hit it big. Carla (9m 15s): So if, if you, you know, if you're struggling, if you're not selling as many as you think you should sell, if you're like, well, I still have my day job. Well that makes you a writer. Correct? All of those things. Autumm (9m 28s): Yeah. You might get one series of cells and you might get, you know, three years later it might die off and it might be one, one, a new one that doesn't sell it. It's also, I love Joanna Penn for that. She's very practical saying it's not a linear curve. You don't hit it big and stay up there for, you gotta work for it every day Carla (9m 45s): And write. And one of the reasons why I love what I do is because I do love fight training, and I do love writing and they, they have so much in common when you are a fighter martial arts of any kind, you're not going to walk onto the mat and immediately be a success. You have to, you have to take your lumps for a very long time. And, and it's, you feel very defeated a lot. I had a, a new white belt SAIS. I've been doing Brazilian jujitsu. I've done a wide swath of things, but the one that I just, I really am sticking with. Yeah. I have as Brazilian jujitsu, I've been doing it about seven years, including, you know, quarantine and time off it's surgery and stuff. Carla (10m 27s): And, and the kids, this white belt said, well, I just feel lost all the time. And I was like, yeah, me too. And she was like, what do you mean? You feel lost all the time. I'm like, that's just how it is. And that's one of the things I love about this art. So you really just have to keep plugging along. You have to take your lumps and not, everybody's going to give you a good review and that's okay. I call those. And some people will give you a negative review simply because they're a negative person. Don't always assume it is about your book. Especially if it's ugly, you know what some, what someone says may be based on our actions, but the way they choose to say it is about them. Carla (11m 11s): And so, yeah, you're going to have some people will give you a one-star review. You're going to have some people who are very snarky and they may be fellow writers that, you know, and that's okay. And I liken that to, you know, people who aren't your fans, you know, when I'm competing, not everybody's cheering for me. That's okay. They're not my fans. I don't expect them to cheer for me. So, you know, when you, when you do have people that are critical of you for, in an unproductive way, criticism is incredibly important. You don't get better without somebody showing you, you know, where you need to improve, but I'm productive criticism. That's not about you. Carla (11m 51s): It's not about your work. Those are just not your, that's not your team. That's not your fans. So when you write, keep your team in mind, when I compete, I'm not competing for the people who hate me and what my opponent, it to win. I'm competing for my teammates and my coach. So you just kind of have to have that, that same attitude when you write just, yeah, don't give up, don't give up. Don't take the easy way out. Autumm (12m 15s): Exactly. And it's so true. And I do know it is human nature that we for, what do they say? Like you can have 10 good reviews, but it's that one bad review out of the 10. That is the one that sticks out in your mind. It's just like, well, if you look at the numbers, you probably have more good reviews than bad. So focus on Carla (12m 34s): Differences. Yeah. Right, right. And you know what? I actually learned a lot from a review. I got on good reads. One of the reviews. I forget how many stars it was. It, I mean, it wasn't five stars. I think it was like two or three. And the lady said that I just, she told me the subjects that she wished had been in my book. Oh, that's, that's helpful. One of the things she, yeah. One of the things she asked was, but how does a person fight when they don't know how to fight? And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a brilliant question. And so I actually reached out to her and I thanked her for her review. And I said, you know, I had never even considered that. And so I wrote a whole blog post about it. So that's brilliant reviews are all negative reviews. Carla (13m 17s): Not necessarily negative critical reviews are only bad if you don't learn something from them. But again, if they're ugly and mean-spirited, it's not about you. Autumm (13m 25s): Yeah. It's not about you don't even let it bother you and move on. Carla (13m 31s): Move on. Exactly. Autumm (13m 33s): So my big question for you, and I want to get into like tips and other things, you see authors doing wrong, but why should an author care if they're writing a fight scene correctly? Carla (13m 45s): That is a very good question. And I liken it to how a boxer reps, their hands before they fight. You know, you see boxers with these gloves on, but what people don't know is you take off those gloves and you have yards and yards of cloth. There are people who work for the fighters sometimes, personally, or they work for the event and their job is to wrap hands. It's that important. And what you do is you wrap a hand tightly and you pull all the bones together so that when contact is made, the force is distributed evenly over all the bones. If you compromise that and you break, you get what's called a boxer's break. Carla (14m 26s): And it's a break in the pinky on this very, very edge. It'll take you out of the fight. It doesn't matter how many other amazing bones you have or how great you punch that one, tiny crack compromises the whole. And so that's kinda how I see, you know, with fight scenes. If you have done your work, if you have done your research and you are proud of this, why not give your fight scene as much importance as everything else because you have to serve your story. And I was asked recently what that means. And it was like, you only put things in the work that further the work, if your fight scene is in there, there's a purpose for it. Carla (15m 6s): So, you know, make it believable, you know, don't make it absolutely corn ridiculous because when you do that or just don't do any research at all or anything like that, you're letting yourself sit open for a boxer's break. And though it's the tiniest bone and it may just be a tiny crack. It compromises the entire works ability to pack a punch pretty much. Autumm (15m 32s): And I do agree. I mean, we sit there and Google, you know, that, that lovely meme that it's like, when did you become a neurosurgeon? Do you last night? You know, we research now and it's true, but a lot of people assume they know how to fight and they assume how fighting goes. And I mean, I see this a lot because I'm a big hiker and backpacker and I go into, especially fantasy of blast. Yeah. You go into a fantasy test and like, they're not carrying a backpack. They have no food with them, but they said, I'll do fine for two weeks. And I'm like, Carla (16m 4s): Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Fighting is just like that. You know, hiking is its own language, literally its own language. There's little symbols that, you know, there's things that can know to take. They're really hard. They're really are, you know, and my daughter and I went, we learned this the hard way. We went on a short little jaunt in Colorado and I am in Houston. We are below sea level here, you know? And you get to Colorado, Colorado is super stingy with this oxygen. I don't know what the deal is, you know, Colorado share your oxygen. It's okay. And we got maybe a quarter mile in and I have a picture of my daughter leaning over, supporting herself on her thighs, just breathing. Carla (16m 46s): I was like, yeah, we probably should have gone into this whole thing differently. But it is fighting. Fighting is like a foreign language. And people like hiking people at well, I know how to walk, not a hike, you know, and people will, I've seen fighting on TV, you know, I know, I know how to throw a punch. So you know, it, it it's akin to, well, I speak English, so I guess I can teach it. No, it is. It is. It really is fighting like hiking is its own language. It really is. And so, you know, when you watch people on TV fight and it looks so easy, there's a reason for that. Carla (17m 26s): They've been practicing Autumm (17m 29s): Choreographed. I mean, there's a lot going into creating a fight scene that you're going to watch. It looks so effortless. Yeah. Carla (17m 36s): Oh yeah. And I mean, even like in professional fights you watch a professional fight and you're like, well, that's not so hard. Oh my gosh, you have no idea the work that goes into it. And you really don't until you start. And you're like, oh, okay. Knowing how to punch is only this much. It's the timing and the movement and knowing how to defend and you know, setting up different things. So it's harder than it is harder than people think it is. And yeah, I do have a lot of people come to me with fight scenes and I'm just like, or here's another thing, you know, they have a person in their work. Well, this person does such and such fighting style. I'm like, oh cool. Carla (18m 16s): How long have you done that? Oh, I've never done it. I'm like, oh, I mean, I respect the challenge, but it's like, why would you be willing to write an entire scene in Portuguese? If you didn't speak Portuguese? You know, I really don't think you would just trust Google translate. You just want somebody who actually spoke Portuguese. Yeah. Don't as a foreign language teacher, former full language, don't, don't always trust it. You know, you would want somebody who actually speaks that language to look at it and say, well, that's not really how this works. You know? So yeah. It's not, it's not as easy as it, as it looks. And if you read a fight scene, that's done very well. It didn't just flow out. Carla (18m 58s): You know, Chuck, Palahniuk the writer of fight club. He's been writing a long time and he, to this day, to this day, if I'm not mistaken, he's still in writing groups. He still has people critique his work. He still has the beta reader, you know? So the learning never ends it doesn't and the easier somebody makes it look, the more work has gone into it. Guaranteed. Autumm (19m 24s): Yeah, I can go. I can definitely go agree with that. And so what are, what do you think are some of the worst things you see or maybe the most 10 things authors tend to use that is just not true in a fight scene. So are some of the worst offenses you've seen Carla (19m 41s): The worst offenders, the greatest offenders. I also write for writer's digest blog. I do a monthly fight scene kind of blog post for them. And the one that I recently did was about writing authentic, oh, fight scenes, everybody. One of the things I see is everybody wants it to be authentic. Oh, well, that's not true. Okay. No, you don't don't want it to be authentic if we wanted everything to be exactly as it is. When we walk outside our door, there would be no fantasy. There wouldn't be no scifi. Cause we don't see those things around them. And it was Ernest Hemingway said it is a writer's job to write the truth. And that is, that is true. Carla (20m 24s): But I don't think he meant true as in factual. I think he meant true to the human condition because if you've read old man and the old man and the sea, clearly he didn't make life because you had this old man for whom the short stories name named Santiago, because fights a Marlin, a Marlin that is longer than his skiff by just holding the fishing line. Okay. Nevermind. All the things that come after that, the man is dragged for three days, he ends up fighting off sharks and I'm like, okay, that's not authentic. You know, authentic is the Marlin takes it and he grabs it and it pulls him overboard and snaps at the same time. Carla (21m 6s): So right. It is. And the true thing you want is truth to the human experience, the human condition, you know? And so I think sometimes people get so bogged down with wanting their fights seem to be authentic, that they don't serve the story. It's like, they'll make it authentic to the point to where they'll sacrifice the scene if they have to. But here's the truth of actual fights. And I'll just use fights on the street. For example, most of them are over under 30 seconds and that's a generous estimate. Okay. There is next to no banter and talking well, that's no fun. Carla (21m 47s): I know. And most of the people involved don't know how to fight violent offenders. The majority of the time they pick their target and under seven seconds. And it's not about their height, it's about the way they walk, you know? And so it's all these things that if you're going to make your fight scene completely authentic, it's may not work for the story. If Hemingway had made the old man in the sea completely authentic, Lily would have ended after the first 10 paragraphs or, you know, so what you want rather than striving for complete authenticity, just like the title of my book fight, right? How to write believable, fight scenes. Carla (22m 29s): You want it to be believable. And I don't think that betrays the art because how many times have we watched movies? And we were like, oh man, that was so real. But we know it wasn't right. We know for a fact, what we saw was not real, but we believed it in that moment. And that's the writer's job, you know? So number one, don't aim for 100% authenticity aim for believability too. Don't ride so much, honestly, writers care more, more than what kind of fight it was. What kind of work went into the sword, plane, everything, what they care about most is the impact it has on the fighters, on the story as a whole. Carla (23m 16s): That's truly what matters. And I don't edit fight scenes very often, but every now and then I do contract work for different people and, and publishers. And I worked with a lady who her fight scene. I forget one scene was I forget how many thousands of words w not thousands over a thousand. I do remember that. And I highlighted a few things and I said, you know, these are great. Everything else just kind of needs to go. And she was kind of surprised. And I said, it's not serving the story. It's really not. You have to think of it like a navigation app. You know, if you're driving and the navigation app says, here's a mailbox, here's a road. Carla (23m 59s): There's a two story house. Now here's this road. If it tells you all those things, it's going to divert your attention to your destination. You know, you can't put too much into it. And so I tell people a good rule to kind of think of is only write what you would see illustrated in a comic book or graphic novel, because real estate in those is so prime. You know, every single page of a comic book and graphic novel is major money, every single page. And so they have to make the most of it. And so what they do is they highlight the major portions of the fight. Carla (24m 40s): They leave the rest of it to the reader's imagination and our readers are smart. They can do that. And they also make it a very much sensory experience. And which leads me probably to another thing. I think people are focusing more on the actions than the impact of the actions. You really want to focus on the sensory details because that's what everybody can relate to. Not everybody can relate to being stabbed with a Katana. Thank heavens. Yes, but we can identify with searing pain. And by the way, in my book, I go over diff I've I mean, firsthand account from people who've experienced different wounds to tell you kind of the, yeah. Carla (25m 29s): Kind of the entire spectrum of different things experienced, you know, people know the blood, they know what blood looks like. They know what a scream sounds like. They can understand looking down and seeing your own blood on your hands and it freaking you out. So you really want to hit your reader, make them feel it. It's not what you say. It's how, how you make them feel. You know, you can look back at books. My judo coaches is taking some type of class and every now and then he'll say, Hey, have you read this? Have you read this? And he said something about Anton checkoff. And I don't remember what by Anton check-off I read. But I remember thinking I liked that. Carla (26m 10s): So I don't remember the words, but I remember the feeling connected to it. And Maya Angelou said people, and this is so important thing. Remember this, as you walk throughout the world, people, people will forget what you say, but they won't forget how you made them feel. And so in your fight scene, they will forget the grip. You had, you know, the caliber, caliber of bullet, what type of sword, the foot movement, but they're going to walk away and remember how they felt. And I use Chuck Palahniuk again, as another example, there's a young man at my gym who wants to write and he's really good. Carla (26m 50s): Like he has a blog. And I, I mean, this kid is like 16 in our blog. And I'm like, I'm a terrible writer. This kid is so much better writer than I am. He asked me one time, well, what, you know, what are some writers you like? And I said, you know, for a sensory experience, Chuck pollen, it hits it pretty hard. And the kid read one of his short stories and I warned him. I said, now Chuck, Paula, Nick is gritty. He's not a nice and tidy writer. And he goes, okay. And he came back and he told me, you know, the short story he had read, I think it's called guts. And he goes, I'm still horrified by it. And I want to take lots of hours. And I was like, right. Carla (27m 31s): Isn't that awesome. So even though he doesn't, you know, years from now, he may forget the words of that story, but he's going to remember that when he got done, he was like, oh my gosh. So, you know, that's what you want to read with. You know, lastly probably is less as more. It really is. You know, I think we've all seen somebody who had on too much makeup, you know, and you look at them and you just think, oh my gosh, with half that makeup, you would look amazing. You know, sometimes too much is not enough. It's like, and my coach asked me yesterday, Hey, do you want to spar? And I'm like, yeah, I want to spar. Carla (28m 11s): That's like Starbucks asking me if I want whipped cream. Don't insult me. Yes. I want whipped cream. Yes, of course. I want whipped cream. The rule should be, if you don't want it, say it, there should never be a question about it. So, but when it comes to writing, especially in the time that we live in, if you read more classic works like, you know, Jane Austin, Bronte, DH Lawrence, oh, I love doing Florence. They tell you everything. They tell you about the pebbles on the walkway. They tell you everything about the daisies and the sun. Okay. But those were also people who didn't have TV. And so books where their TV, you really have to get into all the details. Carla (28m 55s): And we're a different society now for good and bad. I think they said that humans officially have a shorter attention span than goldfish kidding. And which is one of the reasons. Well, I mean, it's true. I mean, w we're multitaskers, we jumped to so many things. And for that reason, they do suggest that we make our chapters shorter. You know, if you're a Y a author, they tell you, Hey, make short chapters. Because teenagers that read Y a which actually the audience for why a is like 18 to 35, they want to feel that feeling of progression. You know, oh, I got this chapter done. I got this chapter done. And so we live in a very short attention span society. Carla (29m 40s): And so you have got to make the most of every single word Michelangelo. They asked him how he created David. And a lot of people have heard this. He said, I just took a rock, a piece of stone. And I took away everything that wasn't David, you know? And, and that's how, that's how it is. You have to edit, you have to edit, what is it? They say, edit with a knife or edit with a sword or something like that. But you know, you, you write, oh, well, Hemingway again, he said, write drunk, edit sober. Yeah. You have to be willing to really cut things down. Even if it's something you love, which reminds me of another thing about fight scenes. Carla (30m 22s): I think some, and I'm guilty of it as well. I think sometimes we write to teach rather than reach and that's the wrong way to go about it. We want to show the reader, look how much research I've done. I'm not a surgeon, but I play one in this book. You know? And when, if you're teaching your, unless you're writing a craft book, the, okay, I'm talking about fiction and informational nonfiction, your goal is to reach your reader, not be teaching your reader. If you have to constantly be defining things in your work, you've made an error. Carla (31m 3s): And you know that when you use technical lingo in your work, you risk losing your reader. You know, it can take, it can take, when you send in your work to an agent or an editor, they asked for the first 50 pages they used to, I don't know what they ask for any more, but usually it's first 50 pages. So in their reading, their, their idea is if you don't have me in that 50 pages, you don't have me. So it can take, you know, a ton of time to really get a reader in your work, but it can take a page to lose them, you know? And, and you don't want that. So don't isolate your readers, you know, and again, sometimes you have to use technical lingo. Carla (31m 44s): And I think print the princess bride, the book is absolutely a perfect example of that. Just like the movie, which is one of those that the book and the movie really do each other justice. You know, it's not one that like, oh, this is so much better. You know, they're really both, very tongue in cheek and funny, but the fight between Wesley, as the dread pirate, Roberts and Inigo, they starts the very first one where they're spitting out all that technical lingo. Yes. It's the same thing in the book, same thing. But it talks about the foot movement and about, and not he steps, right. But dust coming off the ground, okay, that's a picture. You told me how fast they're moving. Carla (32m 26s): And you realize that they're shooting out this technical lingo to outdo one another. So in that case, it matters. Technical lingo also matters. If you have someone who has an expertise or proficiency with a something, it makes sense that they're going to use some words, you know, a police officer wouldn't call the trigger, the pew pew thingy. You can do that. Somebody who works with knives, isn't going to call it the sticky part, you know, the stabby end. So yeah, you need to know the technical lingo there, but at the same time, you need to show the reader. What's that means you don't tell them. Carla (33m 6s): You don't tell them that, but you show it. So don't worry, aim for believability rather than authenticity. Number two less is more three, right. To reach rather than teach. And I think I've missed one in there, but yeah, start there. And, and honestly, I give you permission to not write so much, that burden has been lifted off of you. You do not have to convince your reader that you are an expert in this. You only have to convince your reader that the character is an expert at this. Carla (33m 46s): Okay. And Unless they aren't, which is statistically more likely, it is strange. How many people in books know how to fight when the average population does not. They absolutely. Don't when I'm at writing conferences, one of the things I do is I'll say, okay, make a fist and hold it up. And it's shocking. The majority of people don't know how to make a fist. And I'm like, that's why would you know how to make a fist? Nobody's taught you? So I give you permission to not know something it's absolutely. Okay. You know? And when it comes to fighting, there are some great resources out there. There are some great fighting resources. Carla (34m 27s): Mine happens to be a fighting resource from the perspective of a her, which is, is very, very different. So I think I answered your question. If I don't answer the question, say Nope, circle back. Autumm (34m 41s): Great. So yes, you listed definitely some things that authors are doing wrong. And I agree, because I think there's often a tendency to focus on the wrong aspects. I'll see descriptions of like the sword hilt coming towards you. And you're like, you wouldn't know the emblem as it's about to knock you in the forehead. Carla (35m 0s): Oh, you would not. You would not. Absolutely not. Autumm (35m 5s): You know, there a wound is mentioned, but not the pain that goes with it. And then it seems like a chapter later, the character is fine. And I'm like, well, if you'd focus on how it's going Carla (35m 16s): To feel to Autumm (35m 19s): Hold holds, Carla (35m 20s): These people heal so fast. Yes. If you want to go into the tiny nuances. Yeah. Healing time is a thing, people. And if your character is on the battlefield a lot, just because you don't get knocked out, doesn't mean you don't have a concussion just because you're knocked out. Doesn't mean you do have a concussion. And when you do get knocked out from a punch, you're not out all day, it's sometimes 10 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds, you know? So you don't have time to have a whole scene. You know, now, I mean, of course, when it comes to the human body, there's going to be variables that, you know, it depends on the age, the person and all that on my Instagram, I'm on Instagram at Carla C a R L a dot C dot Hoke, H O C H. Carla (36m 9s): Or you can just hashtag fight right. Once a week, I do like a little fight, right? Tip or I put a blog post that you might want to read. And one that I have coming up, I don't know when it's scheduled it. I think it's sometime this month, but it is the healing of bruise, bruise, healing time, and the different colors and the spectrum it goes through. And one of the things I say is, you know, this is dependent upon the age of the person, the health of the person. And don't think you're going to see all of those particular colors, but for reference, you know, this is what you have. So definitely I think it's important to focus on the pain of things. Carla (36m 49s): There's no greater motivator of man than pain. Everybody can relate to pain. So really I'm laser focused in on the things every reader can relate to versus only the readers who have held a bastard sword, or who have swung a mace. You know, how many people really have done that. So focus on the human experience, essence of the scene, which is the pain and the sensory details of it. Oh, I think that's the emotional impact. Yes. I was going to mention the other thing. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Very seldom. Does somebody, it, it seems so easy to kill people and you would, you know, we look at crime statistics and we think it's no big deal. Carla (37m 38s): You just, you know, shoot somebody, you go about your day. It has a lasting impact. It really does. And even if the person just kind of goes blank, that's an impact. That's not normal. It's not normal to feel absolutely nothing. And one of two things is, is going to take place either that person has some psychopathic or sociopathic issues with their brain, which is not normal, or they're going to put it in a little box in the side of their brain and not deal with it. In which case it's going to come up somewhere else in their life and just nightmare. And I cannot to, it is so common from what I've seen when people kill somebody else that they, they dream about that person again and again. Carla (38m 19s): And I mean, these are even people in jail who have killed multiple people in world war two. They did a study. There's a book called on killing by SLA Marshall. There's a lot of it. There's a subtitle with it too, but the main is on killing and, and he did a study of the soldiers and the Pacific American theater and how many bullets per kill. And it was an obscene. I forget like 60 something bullets for every one kill. And there is one instance where they had an enemy combatant running over, running through an empty clearing. And you had all these American shoulders shooting at them. Carla (39m 2s): And none of them hit them. It was very star wars, very, very norm trooper aiming. And they were all shooting over their head or they were shooting in front of him on the ground. And it's because inherently killing another person is not a normal place to exist. It's not our homeostasis. It should not be right. And so between world war two and the Vietnam war, that's the one that came next. Yet the Vietnam war, they started operant conditioning and it's the same thing they have to do with police officers. And it, they literally not only train soldiers to kill from a technical tactical standpoint, they train them from a psychological standpoint. Carla (39m 43s): And so they went through operant conditioning and all these little, all these things, you know, when you hear policemen talk about criminals that may have been killed, they don't, they don't say the person may say the perp, they say the target and that is distancing themselves from the other. And it's the other. And it's not a matter of coldness it's to help their brain process everything they've been through. So, yeah, and, and my book focuses a lot on that. I think people expect my book to be all about punching and kicking. And I would say a good half of it more than half of it is not, and is divided into five rounds. And there's chapters within those rounds, the rounds are sections. Carla (40m 25s): It's five rounds like a championship MMA. And the second round is all about the human experience. You know, it's, it's what happens to us psychologically when we kill another person, it's about what adrenaline does to you, what a surge does, what a dump does. It talks about mental manipulation and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, little things like that, that people don't realize. I'm also amazed how many characters though. They are soaked in adrenaline. Just think so clearly. So, and their hands are steady. And I'm like, I have had people ask me to sign things just after practice. And I can't, I mean, my hand is shaking. Carla (41m 8s): It's the adrenaline it's, it's what it does to your body. So yeah, I think the opportunities that writers are missing are actually the opportunities that number one are the easiest opportunity to, to take. And they make the most lasting impression. So step away from the technical aspect of it. I'm not saying make it completely crazy. You know what I'm saying? Look, there's some things that just, ain't a thing, picking up somebody by their neck and talking to them in the real world and a thing not possible Even then, because I did. Yeah. Oh, I know because my husband works in oil and gas and he's had to go to companies that do, they rent large equipment everything. Carla (41m 55s): And I asked him something about cranes and there is actually a formula. They go through to create a crane so that you know how much weight you can lift before that crane topples over. Right? And so then if I am strong enough to hold you up, your weight is going to topple me forward. And that was something in the wonder woman movie. I have so many issues with the one. I love gal Gadot as an actress. I think she does a beautiful job, but there's one scene in the most recent movie where she's holding a man over the balcony. I think she's holding him by his foot and she's leaning over and talking to him. Carla (42m 37s): And I'm like, gal Gadot is what a buck 25 with weights on. And she's holding this 200 pound man. She may be strong enough to do it, but physics isn't going to let that happen. Physics is going to pull her over the edge. So it's true. Make it, make it easier. And just remember physics is a thing the majority of fighting is physics. So, Autumm (42m 60s): Oh, I think that is actually a fantastic note to wrap up on because that is, that is something. So, you know, even though we're talking about fantasy, even though we can play with magic or maybe tweak the physics of our world a little bit, there's things that are real. Carla (43m 15s): We still have gravity. Magic has rules. You have to establish the rules of your magic. You have to establish reality for your reader immediately. Okay? If everybody on the planet has superhuman strength, it's not superhuman anymore. It's the norm. So you better know the rules of your world and you better print them out and keep them on the wall so that you can just glance at them. So you don't have to open a file. Cause let me tell you, who will remember the rules of your world and that's your readers? Absolutely. So I like it. I always say don't cross the streams. Meaning from Ghostbusters at the original Ghostbusters, at the beginning, don't cross the streams. Carla (43m 56s): Everything in the world will go into nothing. And then what do they do to get the stay? Puft marshmallow man. Yup. But we love the movie they had to, but they broke their own rules. So just, if you're going to put, if you have little rules to remember that you keep on your wall, behind your computer, put up, don't cross the streams, keep the rules handy. Do not defy the rules of your world. Do not defy the rules of your magic. And I'm sorry if we're going over time, do I just go for it? Okay. Okay. You have to have characters that can be beatable. They cannot be invincible. Carla (44m 36s): That's very true. Oh my gosh. If they're invincible, then the story's over the first page. Even Thanatos can be beaten. Superman can be beaten. And a lot of times what your care, if you're having a hard time figuring out, well, how can you beat this person? Okay. Well, a lot of times their strength is, is linked to their weakness. They knows who's super, super, super huge. And so what defeated him? Tiny little nanobots. They were able to drive. I'm pretty sure that's what it was. Another one. Superman. Why is he so strong? Because his home planet, you know, they have the sun and they have different gravity. Carla (45m 19s): Okay. Well what's his weakness. Something from his home planet kryptonite, you know? So look at, and while we're talking about fantasy, let me just, I'm going to digress super quick. Oh sure. Dragons, dragon dragons. I love dragons. I think we need to do them justice. You ain't going to stand on the back of a dragon while it's fine. You're not going to do that. It's like standing on an airplane. It's not going to happen when people think, oh, you've just got rains. And I'm like, okay, have you ever been on a horse? Do you know when you stand up on a, when you stand up on a horse, it's considered trick riding for a reason. Carla (46m 4s): So if you are riding, I should have gotten into the fantasy stuff straight off the bat. I apologize for that. If you are riding on the back of the dragon and you're like, what weapons should my person have? If they're on the back of a dragon, you're on the back of a dragon advantage. You, you don't need a weapon. It's like being in it. You are on the weapon. It's like, well, my person is my soldiers in a tank. What weapon does he need? He's in a tank. You know the dragon. Absolutely. If you need your wag, you know your dragon to do something, have them drop something from their claws. Oh, brilliant. Or have them use their, use that tail for heaven sake. Carla (46m 45s): Now they can't use it so well while they're flying because they need that tail while they're flying. Yes, it's a rudder. And you have to remember when the dragon takes off, it doesn't take off like a helicopter. You know, it's going to have to flap. And so the person on top is going to be, I'm not saying you can't ride a dragon. I'm just saying, I want to see that saddle. And I also don't think you're going to be able to keep your eyes open because of how fast they're moving. Oh my gosh, you're going to need goggles. Also. I don't think dragon smoke is black. I think it's white. And here is why. Whenever you see you have a fire and the dark smoke comes out of it, the dark smoke is what could not be burned off. Carla (47m 32s): Okay. It is what could not be efficiently consumed by the fire, a dragon, whatever is the source of their flame. Pretty sure it's going to be efficient enough to not have anything leftover may seem steam. It, yeah, you may seem steam in the air because the heat, you know, the humidity in the air. But I don't think there's going to be elements of that flame that aren't going to burn. That just doesn't make sense to me. And I talk about dragons in the book and I, and I call it my, my dragon soap box. Oh, the dragon soapbox. I love dragons. Carla (48m 14s): I, it's hard for me to imagine. And you know what, call me crazy. Don't care. Clearly I don't care. Every culture in the world has had a concept of a dragon. And so you're telling me nothing like that ever existed. How can the Vikings and you know, the Chinese who had never encountered each other, both have dragons, you know, you have CATSA. Quadel Exactly. So I, and you know, there, there are descriptions in the Bible that you're like, oh, okay. Carla (48m 53s): Maybe there were such a thing. So also, yeah. Get your dragon, right. People get your dragon, right. If it is a water dragon, it's construction is going to be different than if it's an ice dragon. It's going to be different than, you know, and not all dragons may have wings. Some of them may not. So, but I'm sorry. I love fantasy. Love it. Love it. Love it. And so that's one of my hangups. Autumm (49m 20s): Well, I'm not going to complain about that hangup. I think it's perfect. I already could talk to you for like, there's just so many nuances that I would love to get into and oh my God, this would be, this was so much fun. So yeah, I think we would carry on here for the next two hours. Carla (49m 38s): Yeah. Don't get me started about armor. I can go off on armor. I can go off about the weaponry. Armor is determined by the weaponry. It's not the other way around the armor that existed at the time of crossbows is not going to be the same as the armor that existed before, you know, crossbows armor from Japan is going to be different than armor from Europe. And that has to do with the availability of natural resources. So again, I could go off on that, but I know you we're running out of time. I apologize. Autumm (50m 7s): You know, we, we, like I said, I don't think that any listener is going to complain one bit. It's so true. I think, just to think about things like that, like you have different cultures, even if you're not using China, you're not using the earth. Think about the technology, the weapons and the different, depending on what's it, this is an aspect of you're right. Everyone's a winner. Carla (50m 29s): Right. And I can, I can do a whole podcast on creating weaponry to they look the way they do because they serve a certain purpose, not just cause it's cool. Autumm (50m 37s): So Carla (50m 38s): If you have a podcast on creating weaponry and all that kind of stuff, girl, I will talk your ear off. Autumm (50m 45s): Well, maybe we'll have to think about doing this a follow-up on something like that. Cause that would be, Carla (50m 51s): That would be great. Autumm (50m 52s): We could blast. Well, I, and I'm so excited to know, dragons are in your fight, right. Book, because you just hooked me. That's like, we could just, we could make your check-ins right. Oh Carla (51m 4s): Right. I have a fighting robots, dragons, robots, aliens, and Beasties. When I got the contract with writer's digest, they said, can two things, can you add 25,000 words? And can you add a chapter on fighting aliens? And I'm like, can I write a chapter on fighting aliens? That can be my 25,000 words right there. So yes, if you are fighting mythical creatures, if you have special circumstances, even I talk about, you know, battling telekinesis and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of really groovy stuff in there. Autumm (51m 35s): Yeah. That sounds like, I think just about every listener's dream come true is being offered a book contract to say, can you write about fighting aliens or dragons? Carla (51m 46s): And you let your nerd show, oh, I can. So let my nerd shows like, yeah, what star Trek pajamas do you want me to wear while I ride it? Cause I have, Autumm (51m 55s): Yeah. Brilliant. Oh, thank you so much. And you know, we may have to, we'll have to give listeners, do you want to follow up, you know, let us know and we will maybe Carla back on that would be brilliant. So not everyone know. I will obviously have tons of things in the show notes, but let people know where to find you. Okay. Carla (52m 17s): The quickest way to find me is FightWrite.net. F I G H T W R I T E.net, if you mistake and do F I G H T R I G H T, you're still going to get there. I own them. It will lead you to the blog and the index. Just go to the index and peruse it. I'm trying to make it very search engine optimized so that you can really find keywords quick. And you can also buy my book directly from there. FightWrite. If I G H W R it's right here. It's right there on the back fight. Right? If I G yeah. How to write believable fight scenes with writers digest. Look me up on the Instagram hashtag fightwrite? Carla (52m 58s): Carla dot C dot hope because every now and then I'll put out a call on my story on, Hey, let me answer some questions for you. And I'll go, IGTV, I do have a YouTube channel that I have grossly abandoned, but I will get back to it. I just have too much going on. So that's the best way to find me. I have a contact form in the blog and, and on my website. And I, I literally answer questions, people. So send them my way. That's how I know what to write about on the blog. You know, I can write about what I think is interesting or I can yeah. Or I can write about what readers actually, or writers want me to know the answer for them. So feel free to reach out anytime. Autumm (53m 33s): That was good. And if you go to your website, take a look at your about section, which is hilarious on your wife's. I'm just going to leave that hook there to make people go and read your about section. It's adorable. Carla (53m 47s): You know, somebody called somebody called me and they said, I found your bio on a writer's blog. This is like six years ago. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And they were saying how to write a funny bio. And they had used my bio. I'm like, my bio is real. It's not funny. So get over yourselves, read the bio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it also tells what all my fight experience is, Autumm (54m 10s): Which is definitely you have a resume there alone of what you're finding experiences. It is brilliant. Oh my gosh. Next time I'm in Texas. I am definitely stopping by. It would be way too much fun. Carla (54m 22s): Absolutely. Absolutely. For Autumm (54m 24s): A road trip. Cool. So come back next week for Monday where it'll be another one of our famous top 10 worst lists with Yesper and I they're awesome. There's so much fun. Narrator (54m 42s): You like what you just heard? There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Sure, you can target ads by keywords, age, and gender... but have you ever thought about what all that means? Not every generation is the same or will respond to the same tactics! In this week's episode, we take a look at the different trends of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Where do they hang out online? What are their spending habits? What key phrases will get them to buy your book... or cause them to run away in disgust? You might be surprised at which generation is the most ready to buy your book, what it takes to actually hook Gen X... or why KU might be the best fit if you write YA! Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (32s): and I'm Autumn. Jesper (35s): This is episode 143 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is a bit of a different topic that I actually haven't seen covered anywhere else. And Autumn, you wrote this a really interesting block series for our patron supporters. So perhaps I can just hand it over to you to share what we're talking about here today. Autumn (60s): So you want me to do all the work again? I see how it is. Well, Jesper (1m 6s): I prefer it that way. Autumn (1m 8s): Well, you've been busy, so that's fair enough. But yeah, I don't even, honestly, I don't even know where this idea came from, but there was at some point I was like, what would it be interesting to look at marketing book marketing by generation? Like, is it different to market, to boomers? Should you be marketing your books to boomers? Cause you know, when you do your Facebook ads, it almost, almost all the trainings, like say two 60 and under, well, why are boomers not buying books on Facebook? Are they not on Facebook? So I'm always curious. And you know, I like to question the status quo and see, well, why does it work this way? So I wrote a series of four Patreon posts looking at marketing to boomers, marketing to gen X, go gen X marketing to millennials and gen Z. Autumn (1m 57s): So I was actually really interesting and it did influence all of my thoughts on marketing. So it'll be really fun to dig into that today, Jesper (2m 6s): For sure. It should be a quite interesting and yeah, maybe we'll learn some stuff that we need to think about here. Autumn (2m 16s): No, I, I, I have to admit that it made me even rethink some of the stuff I'm doing my entrepreneurial sphere in my own life. And I think there is one generation that is like the ideal of who you should be marketing to. And I'm like, oh, I want to try this. So we'll have to get there. Jesper (2m 38s): Wow. Nice. Yes. Autumn (2m 41s): So anyway, how are things for you over in Denmark? Jesper (2m 47s): Well, as you said, pretty busy, I would say. And we also really still struggling with the potty who selling the house that we put in an offer for still Autumn (2m 60s): No definite there. Jesper (3m 4s): Well, we are pretty far from each other when it comes to the price at the moment, we probably have a gap like 45, 50,000 us dollars between us at the moment, which is quite a lot. And if I'm honest, I'm not really sure that we are going to be able to agree. Yeah, we did increase our offer with around 17,000 us dollars, but because the house needs a new roof, which will be very expensive to fix. Like I, like I mentioned in a podcast episode, a couple of weeks back, we have more or less offered now as much as we're willing to offer. Jesper (3m 51s): And if we offer more, we basically risk losing too much money if we won one day, want to sell the house again. So I think with the increased offer, we made, honestly, we're probably, if we want to sell the house again, we're probably going to lose around 50,000 us dollars the day we sell the house. And I don't like that, of course, but it's sort of within F acceptable acceptable range. I mean, we can live with that, but it cannot be any more than that. Right. And, and still, if I didn't look at that, then the selling party still needed to drop their price around 45,000 us dollars to meet us, which I don't think that'll happen to be honest, Autumn (4m 37s): Too bad. Cause I know you guys liked that one, so that's really unfortunate. Maybe they'll change their mind. You know, you're going, we're going into winter. And most people, most houses don't sell in winter. I know in the United States. So I can't imagine that they're selling like hotcakes in Denmark. So maybe they'll rethink that. Jesper (4m 57s): Yeah, usually, usually there's no problem selling houses in the winter here in Denmark that does, it goes year round. But I did talk to the real estate agent today and you know that the selling parties real estate agent, because she called me to sort of ask how things were going and what we were thinking. And I was sort of explaining to her like, you know, you're asking way too much money. And the fact that you had to put in a new roof, you need to account for that in the price, which you're not doing. And then I also told her, you know, find if he doesn't want to drop the price, but at the end of the day, the next buying party, if it's not going to be us, but the next party will have the same problem as we have now. Jesper (5m 40s): So you're not going to sell the house. If you keep insisting on chatting this much for it, because other people will also figure out that, okay, we need to put in a new roof, that's very expensive. We want a price reduction because of it. So you're going to end up in the same place next time. And he's been, they've had it for sale for about six months now. Right. So it's also about time that you start questioning. Maybe your price is too high after six months and you still haven't sold it. Yes. Autumn (6m 8s): Especially in the current. Jesper (6m 13s): Yeah. W w we'll see how it goes. But honestly, I, I don't know. Yeah. So we will, we've submitted the, a slight increase in our offer. And then also said in the email that this is our last offer. So we're not gonna increase the price any more than this. So either you take it off or that's Autumn (6m 31s): It, well, I'll keep my fingers crossed. We'll see what they say. Jesper (6m 35s): Yeah. I think it'll be a no, but, but maybe who knows, maybe they changed their mind in, in four or five months when they still haven't sold it. And maybe they'll come back and say, okay, are you still interested? Who knows? You know, Autumn (6m 46s): Maybe you'll find the perfect house coming up. I know you guys are so busy, so it's hard to look for houses at the same time, but you never know. You might find something else you like even more. Jesper (6m 58s): Yeah. Yeah. Who knows, but you're also trying to work out what to do and what not. So I know you are busy as well. Autumn. Autumn (7m 4s): Yeah. Yeah. Just a, I think it's so funny because we were just joking. I mean, it looks like I'm in the middle. It's like midnight here that we're somehow on the same continent, but it's only three in the afternoon and it is just like gray and raining. We got the fall rains coming into Vermont. But yeah, our housing where we're kind of wanting to leave here around November, you know, my husband spent all summer working in Maine. He's got some good job offers up that way. So we're kind of up in the air trying to look around too. But the housing market, the rental apartment market and the U S is just insane. So we're like, well, you can want to change something, but sometimes it's not as easy as you expected. So I don't know why we're going to end up doing where we'll end up being. Autumn (7m 47s): But I know the next, I know the upcoming podcast will be slightly out of order, but I am going to go see my parents and that'll be fun. So I know one of our episodes we'll be recording soon. I'll have a whole different backdrop and maybe some overhead lighting. I won't look like I'm coming from like, Jesper (8m 6s): Just for a change Autumn (8m 7s): For a change just to, you know, make things exciting and keep my life exciting. It'll be good. Jesper (8m 13s): Oh yeah. Sounds like a good idea. Okay. Let's move on here Narrator (8m 19s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Jesper (8m 25s): So the most important thing first here, Autumn. Okay. Are you ready? Oh, I'm going to spring something on you. Autumn (8m 34s): I'm taking a deep breath. Okay. I'm ready. Jesper (8m 39s): So one of the YouTube comments on episode 141, that was the one where we went head to head trying to come up with the worst superpowers ever. But one of the comments was from Zayed and he actually declared a winner. Did you notice that? Autumn (8m 54s): I think I did... Jesper (8m 56s): See that one because it made me rather happy. You want to guess who he thought was the winner or him, Autumn (9m 5s): If it's the same post well, no, that's right. I saw a Facebook comment, not a YouTube one. Shoot. So you better not tell me he thought you were the winner. Jesper (9m 15s): Of course. Otherwise. Why would I bring it up? Otherwise I would just have ignored it Autumn (9m 22s): Really? I swear on Facebook he said I won Jesper (9m 27s): No, no, no. He actually said, he actually said, quote, I'm a practicing Christian. And I got to say, I'm confused about Bible Man. I think yes. But wins on that one alone. Autumn (9m 41s): I don't think so. You had, it was a pretty pathetic list. I have to say that you had, I don't know if it's the worst though. Jesper (9m 49s): Well, that was the point of it. It was supposed to be pathetic. Autumn (9m 54s): It was pathetic, but I wouldn't say it was worse, but the dog had weld, whatever that one was, dog welder. I just put the heck arm fall off point. Just know, I can't believe someone even came up with those as like characters ever much less actually wrote a comic where they're included. I mean really, really stretching, cutting the risk guys. There were some really good writers out there. They'll help you a lot. Jesper (10m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that was an important YouTube comment into, and that's worth mentioning of course, here on the podcast as well, I Autumn (10m 41s): Think was Jesper (10m 42s): For, no, thank you. Say it for, for being so smart about your choices on who should win. I think that it was a good choice. I would just say that. Autumn (10m 55s): I think you guys have a deal going. I don't believe that one. Jesper (11m 1s): Okay. But something else I wanted to mention was a post I did for our Patrion supporters, because I actually wrote about whether or not Kindle unlimited is good for fantasy authors. So if people want to check out the details of that post, I can, of course join over on Patrion. There's a link in the show notes, but I thought it interesting how in the post that all the top 100 fantasy books in the top 100 chart in, on Amazon, all of them are available through Kindle unlimited. That Autumn (11m 40s): Is pretty impressive. Jesper (11m 43s): What do you think about that? Every single one on the top 100 chart is in Kindle unlimited Autumn (11m 48s): Pretty impressive. I think that is a high stat showing whether or not it's for fantasy. I would have to admit. Jesper (11m 57s): Yeah. Yeah. The post I wrote was based on an article written by a written word media and it's based on some research as well, which I always like when I, she stuff that is based on research rather than on opinions. So, so I think that was a very interesting, and in fact, we have recently enrolled some of our books in Kindle unlimited as well. And I have to say, I'm not very happy about the exclusivity demand for Kindle unlimited or from Amazon there, but we do want to see how it affects sales. So yeah. Autumn (12m 34s): Yeah. I, you know, I'm always up for testing, but it is interesting that, you know, you brought up your path, Patreon posts on Kindle unlimited and then today's podcast is based off of four posts and Patreon. So in if I want to, yeah. If you want to hear more about read those posts, which are in depth and have a lot of market research and links to other sources. Yeah. That's on Patreon. If you want to join. And really, if you were inspired by this episode today, and once you check it out and really get into the links and the stats, that's waiting for you on there for just a dollar a month. Jesper (13m 9s): Indeed. Yeah. And also of course, if, if the, if you, dear listeners should be interested in knowing sort of, if we got any results from placing our books in Kindle unlimited, then do let us know. And I dunno, maybe we can dedicate like a future podcast episode to that topic or something. But yeah, if that interests you, then let us know. Sounds good. Narrator (13m 33s): And onto today's topic. Jesper (13m 37s): So we have some different generations to cover here today. We have boomers, gen X, millennials, and gen C. So I don't know, do we just want to start with the boomers and then sort of work down the list of these generations? Or how do you want to do it on them? Autumn (13m 55s): I, that makes sense. Or I guess maybe at times we can compare and contrast, but I think as boomers are a great place to start because they were, it was not the, what I expected was the result of what came up with boomers. It was kind of fun to get a different perspective on who the boomer generation is, especially with marketing and fantasy book marketing. Jesper (14m 21s): Yeah. So boomers are born between 1946 and 1964. So those are the people we are talking about. So this also means that they are an older generation. Autumn (14m 32s): They are they're my, my parents' generation though. Some people have, you know, there are still a few people alive who are known as the silent generation, which is older than boomers, but I left them off our little marketing analysis. We were letting them be, let them be, but they're still readers, but the boomers, they're the, I said, if you're going onto Facebook and you were choosing your targeting audience on your Shane saying 60 and under, you're totally leaving out the boomers. The boomers are the ones who are actually 60 and older. So they're an older generation and you might be surprised. Cause I think the perception is that they're not online. Maybe they do a lot of research, but there's some interesting stats about where they hang out, how often they buy and what it takes them to actually buy something, which I didn't expect. Jesper (15m 24s): Yeah. And also worth pointing out. Like you said, in the article that the boomers hold almost 50% of the total wealth in the us. So yeah. They have money. These people, Autumn (15m 38s): Yes. There's 72 million boomers still alive. This was a massive generation there and they're called boomers. It's from the baby boom that happened post world war II. So there was a huge amount of children born, still a large base of the population, 72 million. The only one that is larger than this as gen of millennials are also really large generation. So lots of people, they hold around 50% of the U S well, that's a lot of money. And I guess the question is, well, you know, do they read fantasy? Do they buy books online? Those are really the big questions of if they're worth marketing to. Autumn (16m 20s): And what I started to think about it, I mean, this is the generation that the first, when their Lord of the rings was published, these were the kids reading them, this teenagers, they were reading token. I would love that. Can you imagine being alive and Tolkien was writing and producing his books. That would be so cool. But they were alive with Isaac Asimov, if you like. Saifai so a lot of the clot, what we consider now, classic, they were the original fans. They were my parents who, you know, took me to see star wars and were fine with it and thought it was so cool. So they saw the moon landing. They are not anti fantasy. So I I've definitely heard that of some people saying, well, they don't read fantasy kidding. Autumn (17m 3s): They may talk in popular. They love fantasy. They just didn't like Dungeons and dragons. Well, that's another story. Jesper (17m 12s): Yeah, that's true. But the one thing that I'm thinking about, at least I, well, I don't have like a statistical research of it, but at least if I compare to my own parents, for example, I'm reading on the Kindle, for example, that took some convincing. You know, I, I don't know. I mean, of course my parents might not be like the stereotypical, you know, version of, of the boom was meaning that, that this is how all the boomers are not, I'm not saying that at all, but I could speculate, at least that might prefer to have the book in their hands, like paperbacks or hot packs and stuff like that, that I could speculate that. Autumn (17m 56s): I think it would be not disingenuous to say that, that if you want to market to boomers, it would probably be a good idea to make sure you have a paperback version, but they have taken, unlike the perception they have taken to computers and the internet age actually extremely well. A lot of them are like, oh, Facebook is the number one place. If you want to go market to boomers, just go to Facebook. That's where they are. But it was the stats on them. I mean, it was 70% of like boomers are online or on a computer. And of those 70%, like 90% of them are on Facebook. So they're online and what my favorite thing about them. Autumn (18m 36s): So they have their huge population base. So if you want to say, even 10% of them like fantasy and you know, or maybe 10% of will read on a Kindle, that's still a huge number of people. They have a ton of wealth they're retired. So they, they might work part-time but they don't need to work because they already have money and they're in retirement. So they have time to read which show that's fantastic. And they are, tend to be impulsive buyers and they're very brand centric. So if you say something to them that they like, they will immediately go and buy because they've got the money. They're not worried. They just learn what they don't have is time. So they want to make sure, you know, they have, they enjoy their lives. Autumn (19m 20s): They're not going to sit there and him and hall, if they think they're going to like a book, they'll go and buy the book. And then if they like you, they love brands. So they will stay with you and be a loyal follower. I mean, they sound like the perfect person to try to sell your book to, you might want to tailor your ads though, specifically to them, they're going to want different wording. And remember they were alive when token was writing. So you don't want to say, hi, as good as a token. Well, you know, you better, gosh, darn be as good as token. Cause they know who that is. And they were reading it before you were born. So make your ads honest, but make it something where they're like, oh my goodness, I want to go and try this out. Autumn (20m 4s): And they click and they may very well just going by like that. Jesper (20m 9s): Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. It might be sometimes a bit harder to get them to read the books, but yeah, the various debt, but I was a bit surprised in your post-test worlds that your post pointed out that a lot of them is actually using YouTube as well. That w I mean, not, not creating videos, but watching YouTube. I mean, that actually surprised me a bit because that's not normally what I would think about this generation that they would be watching YouTube. Yeah. Autumn (20m 38s): And we'll see that across all of them. That YouTube is a really big player often next to Facebook, or a little bit better than Facebook. So YouTube, if you can find a way that taps into that market that is engaging. And I think that's the tough thing with selling books is finding a way of selling your books on YouTube. I don't think anyone has hit the perfect formula for that yet, but at the very least you can, if you can try out some videos, you could try them on Facebook and YouTube and see if you can kind of get people hooked in, try your book trailers, just make sure they're really, really good and really engaging and not boring. Jesper (21m 17s): Yeah. I would not spend time on that to be honest. But yeah. Well we had our little spell with YouTube already. Autumn. So yeah, we gave up on that quite a long time ago. Autumn (21m 30s): I don't, as I said, I don't think anyone, there's some people who do very well on YouTube and it takes a ton of work, more work than I think most people appreciate. And I still don't think when it comes to selling actual books, like being there as an author, not trying to sell a service, I don't think anyone has cracked that nut. So Hey, you could be the first one. Good luck. Jesper (21m 51s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Should we move on to gen X? Yeah. These people are born between 1965 and 1979. So this, Autumn (22m 9s): Yes, this is us. This is ours. And it's even includes my husband. If you count as you, the years you gave also includes something called they call them Zen, not millennials zinnias, which is starts with an X because they are the, a group that's, they're not really millennials. They're not really gen X. They're kind of squished in between. They call them a micro-generation, but they tend to go both ways. It can be a little bit more millennial. They can be a little more or gen X. And that's my husband. He's a little younger than me. There are some differences, but not much. But what is neat about these two generations or this generation micro-generation is we are the first ones who have an analog childhood. Autumn (22m 51s): We had a childhood of books and playing outside and hearing about computers in the basement of giant colleges, you know, but never seeing one until we hit our teenage years. So our adulthood has been taken over by the internet and the digital age, but our childhood, we remember playing war and kick the can and running through hayfields. At least I do. It was much more, much more a hands-on and physical. And as I say, analog, and we're the last generation who has that memory of the time before computers, which is kind of Sky Net App or something. Jesper (23m 28s): Yeah. Nobody, it's actually quite funny because as well, sometimes I've been, I've been talking to my sons about, you know, when we got the very first computer at home, when I was a kid or like teenage young teenager, we've got the very first computer. And I was trying to explain to them how it actually felt, you know, to get the first compete because they don't understand because computers has always been part of their life and they don't get the fact that once you sit down and for the first time ever, you use this kind of machine that has never existed before. And then I was showing them on YouTube. I found some old clips of what the games looked like back then. Jesper (24m 9s): And they were looking at me like, are you crazy? I was like, but you don't understand. That was amazing back then. Yeah. Just some pixels moving on a screen was amazing. Autumn (24m 21s): If you've been that the first time I did a, a game, that was, it was mushing. So multi-user shared hallucination. I did the college. And the fact that, you know, you could be on at 1:00 AM and you're talking to someone in New Zealand and all you had literally was texts on a screen. We didn't even have pixels for the, some of the sites I was on. And I was just like, oh my gosh, you're in Australia, New Zealand, you're in Asia. This is amazing. I can't, I still have an email that I found recently from my dad, one of the first ones on my account that somehow got saved. And it was like, I can't believe it was when I was studying abroad in Manchester, UK. And I was like, I can't believe you, you know, you asked me for this and I just sent it to you and you have it instantly. Autumn (25m 2s): I mean, mail was two weeks long and I could chat with my dad, like, and get information, something I needed from him like that. Well, as long as it took the attachment to upload and download, which is like still an eternity compared to today, but back then 10 minutes for an attachment, you're like, cut, thank you so much. You just saved my life. It was amazing. And I still have one of those original emails and it's just cool. It's cool to think back saying this was huge, huge, huge, huge. Jesper (25m 31s): Yeah, it is. Yeah. And it's so difficult to explain to people who are not gen Xs, what that felt like, but, but it, I think it's Autumn (25m 40s): Pretty cool. It is. I am sure there is. Jesper (25m 42s): And you also pointed out in your post how sorry I interrupted you Autumn (25m 48s): And I'm sure there's listeners who are like, yeah, this is so cool. This thing. No. Jesper (25m 53s): Yeah, yeah. And also you pointed out in your post to how during the teenage years of G annexes, we were influenced by dragon lands and dragons RPG and stuff. And I instantly thought, yes, that's right. Autumn (26m 10s): Yes. That is, that came out usually most of our formative years. So if we're a fantasy fan, it might've started before dragon lands. For me, it started before dragon lands with Anne McCaffrey. But when it came out, it became this huge phenomenon, especially getting to play the role-playing game. Of course, on the side of that, our parents, we were going through the satanic panic, which I mentioned later in some of the other generations. But yeah, it was such a big donor that we, you know, we often hid the fact that we're into Dungeons and dragons from our parents. Lest we be have our games taken away or not be allowed to see your friends anymore, but it was sort of one of the first, I mean, token was big, but I think dragon lands really defines a lot of our generation and our love of fantasy and the type of fantasy. Autumn (26m 57s): Maybe we still enjoy because it's changed a lot, but there's still a core of those stories that have the ELs, the dwarves that are still so much a derivative of token very closely. Jesper (27m 10s): Yeah. And, and the whole thing about a, you know, like an adventure group, like in, in dragon lands, like there, they are a group that goes out together and all that stuff. Right. That's very trophy nowadays as well. And I also liked, which I also felt like hit home in your article was that we like to do research before we buy. So we are checking on the internet for reviews and, and you know, other competitors, other products and stuff like that, which I definitely recognize because I do that myself, whenever I need to buy something, I'm going to check reviews. I'm going to do some, a bit of internet research to see, you know, is there some, a better alternatives or is this really the best product and stuff like that? Jesper (27m 52s): So, so I definitely recognize myself in, in that as well. Autumn (27m 57s): Yes. I think that is a very funny trait. We weren't born into the internet age, but we helped shape it. And we certainly helped shape it as a marketing platform. So a lot of us that are entrepreneurs, we know our way in and out of the marketplace and in and out of running businesses online and we do our research, we will check out comparisons. We will look at competitors, we will check the reviews, we'll read the reviews. So we're not a spontaneous buyer. We are the one that when they say it takes at least seven to 11 times of seeing an ad before someone will go and look at your book, that's us. Yeah. We will not go buy your book just because you sell it on. Instagram will be like, yeah, that's nice. You don't hook us on the first bite. Autumn (28m 38s): Not even close, we're going to check you out. We'll think about it. And compared to boomers. So was it a lot of more research and we are a smaller generation. We're not 72 million. We're like 68, I think. So there's less of us. And I can't remember what percentage of the wealth we have, but obviously boomers have almost half. And we have about half of what's left somewhere around 25%. So we're doing pretty Jesper (29m 1s): Good. We're doing pretty Autumn (29m 2s): Good. We were getting into our, you know, forties now and we're, we're okay. We're doing well. You know, our most famous, I think gen X-er is Elon Musks. So we, you know, some of us have done really well. None of the rest of us are working on that. We're definitely a generation of doing our research. We have some money, but we're pretty much, we've worked really hard to earn our money at this point. And we don't let it go as quickly. So you can get us with a coupon. We will launch, we will jump into an email marketing to get a coupon. That's fine. We know how email marketing works because we probably set it up ourselves. That's just how we, we know how it all works. Autumn (29m 44s): So we'll sign up for something. We'll get on a list. And I thought it was funny. One of the biggest things about our generation is we'll stick with you. We like brands. We like people until they say something we don't like. And then it was like, you're gone. You have one chance to lose us. And you say something we find offensive, or we don't agree with like, you're gone unsubscribe. So we're the, also the unsubscribed generation, Jesper (30m 7s): Right? Yeah. So I think in overall from a book selling perspective, this is where you're, you know, building up your reviews are really important. That's at least that's going to help to convince a gen X person to actually buy your book. Autumn (30m 22s): Yes. Jesper (30m 24s): Move on to millennials. Autumn (30m 25s): Okay. Well, I want to wrap up one quick thing. So gen X is, are on Facebook, so you can still market to them. We're also on Instagram. And I agree if you're going to try to hook a gen X-er, you're probably gonna have to spend a lot more money than you would with a boomer and reviews. Being able to say other people have liked this, be very open with your reviews. That's how you're going to get them more interested than saying we're great. I write just like token and they're not going to buy that Jesper (30m 53s): Molina. Millennial. Stan is born from 1981 to 1996. So these are the people who actually grew up fully in the internet age. And probably most of them probably don't even know what life before computers. Autumn (31m 11s): No, if they have any interesting to me. Yeah. I can't imagine. So they have any recollection of life before computers. They will have memories of life before smartphones. So they might remember flip phones and cell phones. So that's kind of, you know, I can at least relate to that a little bit, but they grew up knowing computers, building computers, and they they're pretty snazzy and know their way around the marketing. What's surprised me is I thought, for sure, all the millennials, they get such a bad rap as being like the more self-centered generation. But at the same time, the oldest ones are in their forties. You know, they're taking their kids to college, they've grown up, but they are really still really good online. Autumn (31m 56s): And I thought they'd all be off of Facebook, but there's still a majority of them on Facebook. And after that Instagram, I mean, those are the two big ones of where you can find still millennials somehow. I don't know how Facebook keeps everyone, but they do. Jesper (32m 12s): Yeah, they do. Yeah. But also things like Twitter and Twitter and tick-tock and that kind of place, they also hanging out. Autumn (32m 19s): Yeah. They're sick talk is especially coming up, but there are, yeah, there are a little more broad spectrum. So it's harder to find out exactly like in what was interesting. It doesn't that study this statistic. I was quoting didn't show if they were on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, which most likely they are, but there could be some orders. Like, are you here or here or here? I mean, this is one of the ones. If you're marketing to them, you're going to have to market to our broad base. Cause I'm not quite sure where they are and how often they're seeing you. Jesper (32m 53s): Yeah. And again, the majority is watching YouTube here. Amazing. Again, I'm not so sure about this. I mean, it's interesting of course, to know that the majority is watching YouTube, but I don't think that they are watching YouTube from a book perspective. So they're just using it as it as entertainment. So there's also means that I I'm not, I don't think that you want you to conclude out of this, that you should try to sell books on YouTube to these people. That's not the point here. No. Autumn (33m 21s): Oh, I think you'll good luck with that. If you can find a way, but yeah. I think they're pretty much on YouTube. Like you said, for entertainment, maybe tutorials. I mean, my that's my favorite use of YouTube. I must be so boring, but I'm on it to watch tutorials on how to, to stuff. Yeah. I wouldn't do it yourself or that's how it works. Jesper (33m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and also for the millennials, you know, they have a very, very large population-based there even lots of than the boomers, but as you pointed out in your article as well, they, on the other hand, they don't have that much cash compared to our gen Xs. We have like five, five times the wealth of the millennials and they are many more than we are. So I think money wise, they usually operate with a fairly limited budget. Yes. Autumn (34m 16s): I agree. There tend to be educated. And I think gen Z are even going to be more educated than millennials, but millennials tend to be educated. Their careers really haven't taken off, even though, I mean, they can be as old as 40, but they're still struggling. We'll get to the statistic when we talk to gen Z, but gen Z and millennials combined, combined, which has a huge amount of population. That's 68 million plus like 72 million somewhere in there. They only have 6% of the U S wealth 6%. So if you're a marketing to anyone who is 40 and younger, we're talking about someone who has only 6% of the U S wealth. They're going to be inheriting quite a lot from baby boomer parents. Autumn (34m 57s): I think it was like 68 trillion. But again, the wealthiest are going to inherit. The most, most people are going to just inherit, maybe a nice modest sum. And then you take out the inheritance tax, which is like 50%. They're not going to be made wealthy overnight. And that was 68 trillion by 2030. So they still have some ears and that's a good a statistic. So that's going to be up and down. It's going to be some sooner. Some later may remind me later. So they're not a very wealthy generation. If you're marketing to them, this is the one you want to be trying free giveaways. They will sign up for free giveaways and free coupons. And again, these are people who have grown up with the internet. Autumn (35m 37s): They have probably started their own businesses in high school. They know how it works. They know what happens when they sign up. Most often they've done it probably a million times and they, but they will do it. They will sign up to check out something and to give a sample, they'll go for the free sample. It might be the best way to hook them. However, they might not be able to afford to go buy all your books right away. They might have the budget for them. They might be the ones on Kindle unlimited. That's going to be the best deal for them because they don't have a ton of money. You want to keep these aspects in mind that, you know, they're the ones who are looking for things. But the nice thing is, is since I grew up in the internet age and because they have a limited amount of money, they're also really good at research. Autumn (36m 19s): They're really into reading reviews. And they're huge at social media, leaving reviews and telling people if they loved or hated you. So these are the influencer generation. They're the ones who, if they like you, they're going to show the unboxing. They're going to give you reviews. They're going to give you a huge shout out. However, they are definitely not brand second shirt. They are quality centric. So they might stick to you for a while. But if they find something better, they're going to move to something better. So you might not be able to hold on to these as tightly, as you might a boomer who was going to basically keep you in cherished for the last breath. Jesper (37m 3s): Yeah. And of course the good news is that the eBooks, at least, I mean, these people are very used to the, you know, technology and so on. So eBooks is not a problem. And then the other part of it is of course as well that they might not have a lot of wealth, but eBooks are like a couple of bucks. So for most of them, they, I think they should be able to afford a couple of bucks for an ebook. Otherwise they have a lot of problems, but not to say that some don't of course, but, but I think there's quite a big, I mean, because they aren't, there are so many of these that a lot of them will have the money to buy a three, four, $5 ebook. So yeah, it's good to know of course, to be mindful that they are operating on a limited budget. Jesper (37m 48s): And like you just said, autumn, this, just to me, that doesn't mean so much about them not being able to afford the books. I think it more speaks to the fact that you have to write really good books too, to keep these people reading. Otherwise they they'll just not buy any more from you. Then they'll go jump on onto another author or something instead, and try to read some other books. But because they might, you might be able to hook them to buy one book, but they're not going to continue reading the series unless they really find it really good. Yeah. So for me, I think that's the important part. Yeah. Autumn (38m 21s): Yeah. I agree. And I'm though, I do, I have met a, quite a few that have mentioned that, you know, they have a book budget, you know, they can only, they, everything is budgeted in their life because they only have so much money and you know, the good ones don't go over, but that's why things like Kindle unlimited are such good deals and they're going for the deals. So if there's a way, if they love reading and they want to be able to read as many books as possible in a month, they're going to read Kindle unlimited. And that's why I think you see Kindle unlimited being such a huge, you know, inducement, why so many people are a part of it because it's a good deal. If you're a serial reader and you only have like 4% of the entire U S wealth. Yeah, I do it. Not a problem. Jesper (38m 60s): Yeah. Okay. So Jen C born between 1997 and two, 2012. So that basically makes them between six years old and 24 at this point in time, they are so there's a lot of them, nearly 68 million people in the U S here. Autumn (39m 21s): So this is another big generation, almost the same as a gen X. So this is like our, our shadow copy gen Z and admittedly they're young. So there's not a ton of market research on them yet, but it's up and coming. They're starting to make their waves known in the world. But again, combined gen Z combined with gen with millennials, only 6% of the U S well, so tiny amount. So they're even less. They have even less than millennials because they're just getting into the workforce. If they finish their education, they almost, all of them have at least one parent that graduated from college and a lot of them are going on to do master's program. They're going to be one of the highest educated generations. Autumn (40m 2s): And so because of that, a lot of them are not in the workforce or working full time. So they have even less money going around. They have also never known a world without smartphones, and that's just terrible by amazing, amazing. They are, you know, they're going to, the next generation is going to come with USB plugs installed. I swear. They just know their way around. Exactly. So they're there. The biggest thing I think in the reason I included them, even though they're not much marketing research is that if you are targeting Y a young adult readers, you're targeting gen Z. So go and look and see what they're doing. Autumn (40m 43s): Of course, I thought it was so funny when I looked at why stats 50% of why readers are adults they're older than 24. So that's, you know, gen X of even boomers, millennials, they're all reading. Why are they just doing a secretly? But technically gen Z is your target audience. If you're Yia. So you should know where they are, what they're doing, how they buy books. This is really important for you to take a look at it and see where they're hanging out, which again is pretty much all over from Tik TOK to F to Facebook, to YouTube, to Snapchat. Tick-tock rising pretty quickly. Jesper (41m 26s): Yeah. I think for these people, you know, think of somebody who's grown up with computers, they grown up with smartphones, they grown up with apps. So it's really important if you want to engage with these people online, which is like the main place where you should be engaging with them, all the, like, you know, nice images, nice user interfaces, eh, corresponding with them through commons and in chats and you know, the whole community building thing. That's the key here. So yeah, to me, like for, for somebody, a, a gen X person, I already feel like, oh, this sounds stressful. Jesper (42m 9s): All the, all the million interactions in commenting on all these different social media platforms. I don't know. It's not my thing to be honest. But I think for these people, for the GNCs, it's important for them, this, this is how they, to a last degree, that's how they view relationships. A lot of their relationships are online. So it's, it's yeah. For, for, for somebody from a gen X, this is just like a different planet kind of thing. Autumn (42m 41s): I mean, they consider their life online almost equal to their physical life. It is about equally important, 50 50, which yeah. As a gen X or having remembered like life offline that I still prefer, you know, to be offline quite a lot. We're the, we're the generation that's like, I'm digging a social media break. I mean, I think gen Z is like, that's half of my life. I would never go offline, but they want the fine touch. They want the, they want community. If you want to get gen Z ears into loving your WIA books, you have to build community. You have to have interaction and beautiful photos and you have to have video. They like video. So they want to see all of these things and you've got to be chatting with them and you've got to be dynamic. Autumn (43m 21s): And you've got to also be really aware. And this is what I've been reading some way books. And the change is so non they're, non token, not at all. If you want to go read like the shadow and bone, the Grisha series of Krisha verse, it's so different from what I was reading as a teenager, there's very few elves, very few dwarves, very few overs. It's almost all humans and different races and their interactions. And, you know, they'll have issues of transgender and homosexuality. It's all there and it's very open. And those are the concerns rather than, you know, a quest group it's totally different. And it's kind of, to me, it was really a refreshing to read. Autumn (44m 3s): It was very exciting to read very different, but it is a completely different audience. And it's interesting. You got to go in and hang out with them and see what they're doing and be on Tik TOK and be very engaged and fun and have that community, and also have the coupons and the free books and Canon limited, because that is definitely how you're going to be able to hook them. At least have one series in Kindle unlimited. If you're doing WIA, because they're in school, they don't got much money. Don't make them pay for everything. They're probably getting it as a Christmas present from their parents. Jesper (44m 38s): It sounds like way too much work on them. I'm already tired. Autumn (44m 42s): And you have kids, your kids are technically gen Z or Jesper (44m 48s): Yeah, but I, yeah, that part is fine. But I marketing to these people sounds like way too much. Autumn (44m 55s): Yeah. I probably is. But just have your train, your kids to do it. You'll, there'll be naturals. That's why you have kids, maybe your marketing managers. True. Jesper (45m 6s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was talking to my oldest son because he's about to, he wants to start his own YouTube channel. He wants to do like a, well, like a true GNC, I guess. Right. So he wants to build a YouTube channel and he wants to, you know, do like those gaming videos and stuff like that. And then I was trying, I w I was trying to be like the good dad who has been, you know, I've been doing the YouTube thing for us as well and all that stuff. So I was, I started talking about something because we were talking about the intro and outro music thing that you put on videos and stuff like that. And I was sort of saying to him, well, just be mindful that you know, that some of that is copyrighted. Jesper (45m 49s): You can't just take some music for wherever. And he was like, yeah, yeah. I know all of that as you do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I also know where to find it. Okay. So he knows all of it. I bet you, like, in, in four months, you'll will know more about YouTube than I ever knew. Autumn (46m 6s): We're going to be hiring him as our social media manager. Just watch the, Jesper (46m 11s): Yes. They just, yeah. They notice stuff. They do know this stuff. Okay. But what can we sort of conclude out of all this order, Autumn (46m 19s): That if you're a gen X-er and marketing to G and you're not doing Y a and marketing to gen Z and millennial sounds too much market to boomers, try it. I would S I would love to know if anyone is specifically choosing like a Facebook audience saying, you know, 50 and older, and, you know, just finding the right words, because again, they will actually spend money. They will go buy your books. Possibly. Like I said, you should have paper books available, but they will read online. As lot of them have adapted to like the Kindle paper, whites and stuff that feel more like a book that look more like a book. I want to know if anyone's doing that because after reading this, I'm like, they have money. They're impulsive, they're brand centric. Autumn (46m 60s): They sound like they have, they're retired. They have time to read. They sound like the gift of book marketing right there. Go for boomers. I want to know if anyone else is because it's totally rethought. I'm like, I now see why, if you're marketing to gen X, you're going to be marketing forever to try to get them to get, you know, give you a try. They'll give you a try, but they're, you know, they're booked, they're tired. They've got kids, they do their research. They're going to be so hard sell to, and the rust, you know, they don't have much money. These are not a huge 6% of the wealth they're going to be. It's going to take some time to get gen Z and millennials to want to spend money on you, unless you've got a really good deal. Autumn (47m 43s): But boomers, you know, 50% of the U S wealth, lots of free time, impulsive shoppers. Oh, I love you. I have to admit in some of my best emails, I put that in the post, some of the best emails I've ever gotten and the lengthiest emails, because boomers will correspond with you and they will stick with you. My biggest fans have all been boomers, but it took until I wrote that article to valet, oh, this is why they care. And they want to get to know you and they will stay with you and they will love you. And maybe they're not going to give you as big as a shout-out as a millennial or a gen Z, because they're going to spread you all over the internet. Autumn (48m 23s): They're going to love you in a really compassionate way. So I want to know if anyone's marketing to boomers. Cause I think it's totally a way to go. Jesper (48m 32s): Yeah. So let us know. And hopefully you got a bit of a inspiration for, you know, well, at least on the Facebook ads, you can target different age brackets. So at least now, you know, for your Facebook ads, at least some things to consider and think about on Amazon ads, obviously there's no way to select certain age groups and so on. So there you, yeah, it doesn't help much, but yeah, but at least with the Facebook ads, I think this is very useful. Autumn (49m 5s): Yes. And in the posts on patron, I actually went into maybe some suggested images because each generation has different traits of the type of images that call to them. So again, come, go check out the post on Patriana. If you're a member or join for a dollar a month, then go check it out and see what the suggestions are. Jesper (49m 24s): Okay, good. So next Monday, autumn has a very special interview lined up for you. It's about how to write fight scenes. And for us fantasy authors that is highly relevant. Narrator (49m 36s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the and writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

The Internet is filled with advice for how to become a better writer. Some are good, others not so much.  In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share the best of them and try their hardest to agree on one winning tip. It's not as easy as it might sound.  Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And, I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 142 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And I've actually been looking forward to this conversation, Autumn. Autumn (43s): Oh, really? This one kind of took me by surprise. I had to look at it this morning. I'm like, oh, I need to come up with some tips. So I did come up with a few and I'm now excited to, to talk about it. But at first I was like, geez, this is so broad. Where do we start? Jesper (1m 3s): That was why I was looking forward to it because I was curious to see what you've come up with. And, and we're talking about the best thing to do every day to become a better writer. So this is going to be interesting. Autumn (1m 16s): It will. I think I came up with some stuff that I'm like, yeah, that's a good tip. So I can't wait to find out what you came up with us. You always research, plan it a little bit more than I do. Jesper (1m 31s): That doesn't necessarily make it better, but at least I try, I put in the effort at least. Autumn (1m 36s): That's right. And it's not that I don't have the effort. I just, I, I intensify my effort into a shorter amount of time. Jesper (1m 44s): Yeah. Like five minutes before we record. Autumn (1m 47s): It wasn't that bad. It was just a few hours ago. Jesper (1m 55s): Well, okay. So it's only a few hours ago that I did it, to be honest. Okay. Hey, this'll be interesting. Yeah. How are you going to have something planned? Yes, we can plan. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes. Well, I'm doing okay. I w I was out doing my kayaking course again earlier this week I had to strain the muscle. Oh no. Well is one on my left side of my torso based somewhere. I, I don't, I don't know quite where it is, but it's like, when it happened, you know, I felt it right away. Something like happened in the muscles. Jesper (2m 38s): Like, but then it didn't hurt too much. Then it was more like, it was just a smaller inconvenience, like, oh, it's okay. But then, you know, one night, once I got back home afterwards and I had taken a shower and I guess my muscles weren't in use anymore, then it started to become really sore. And then a Wednesday morning here, it was just like, oh my God, I slept bad all night. Because every time I turned, I woke up and it was the same last night. So it's starting to feel a bit better. Now I can move my arms around, like without hurting now. So it's, but it's still, if I do the wrong, like move, then I can still feel it. Jesper (3m 18s): But I don't know. These past two days, I've actually taken some naps just to keep up with the last hours of sleep at night. Autumn (3m 26s): Geez. That is pretty bad for you. That's what you're doing like a roller or was it just paddling? Jesper (3m 33s): No, I think it was when, well, because it's, it's the cost of we're checking now. So we also practicing, falling into the water and getting back up on the kayak on purpose and stuff like that. And I think it was one of the times when I was getting back up, I think when I jumped up onto the kayak or something, I think that was when something happened. But yeah, I don't know. It's just a, I mean, it's funny because my wife has been teasing me because she started the kayaking like six months before me. And when she come back, when she came back from kayaking, she was all this like, really like tired. And, you know, you could, you could just see the workout on her, how tired she was. Jesper (4m 18s): And, and then, and I was always like, well, is it really that hard because you don't get your, you know, you don't get your pulse up. You're not out of breath or anything. Right. And, and now she's just laughing at me all the time, because when I get back, I'm just like, oh, my muscles are so, because you're using all kinds of muscles that you don't normally use. And so I'm just so sore when I go, go back and really, really tired from spending a couple of hours out on the sea. So she, she, she, for some reason she finds it incredibly amusing. Now it's like I told you, Autumn (4m 50s): You know, it comes back around, but I will say, I, you know, my mom always told me that there's something about sea air. That just makes you tired as well. So Jesper (4m 59s): It does indeed. Autumn (4m 60s): I will. I, you know, you can always bring that up, say it makes you tired. Hello. Imagine the shock of the cold water would, you know, kind of take a lot out of you too. Jesper (5m 15s): Well, well you have, well, I don't know what the English words, but you have the gear on, you know, so it's not really cool. I don't know what it's called though. The wetsuit, I guess it's called a wetsuit, isn't it? Autumn (5m 25s): Yeah. Jesper (5m 25s): That's one of the times you have a wetsuit on. Okay. So it's not that cold. Really? Yeah. That's okay. That's cool. But, but it's more the workout of it and all that using muscles that I don't normally use. I run a lot of course, because I'm a referee, as people have probably heard me talk about million times before on this podcast. So running I'm very used to, and I'm very using used to using my leg muscles, but here you really use your upper body all the time, which I'm not used to do. So I can feel that. I bet. Autumn (5m 58s): Yeah. I know. Even Jesper (5m 58s): With my little bit of exercise program I've been doing, I, one day is like abs and legs and the next day is upper body. And you can feel, it takes two days to, to work out. I mean, not nearly as bad as the first week I started the first day. It did take me two or three days. I really filled it. But now that I'm in, like my second, yeah. Second week, almost the end of my second week doing it. It's rare when I have a day where I'm like, oh, but I did do something with my upper back arms. Cause again, you're not used to using some of those muscles and doing some weird down plank move and I'm like, that's not even possible. And yeah, it tends to be a little twin to the next day. Jesper (6m 39s): Go figure. Especially as writers who just sits in front of a computer all the time Autumn (6m 45s): Writer, graphic designer. Yeah. Website builder. I, I need my exercise program, my spare time online. Jesper (6m 56s): But otherwise things are going okay on UN you had a storm coming or something, didn't you? Autumn (7m 0s): Yeah. Well, we just had the remnants of hurricane Ida go through and it wasn't actually that bad up here, but yeah, some people died in New York and my parents in Pennsylvania, they had three days of rain and their basement started flooding. So it was bad. But what further west? I think of them. It, the whole town was flooded through, so it was pretty intense. But yeah, we have like, we've went from the eighties and like super high humidity. It was like 89. And like, it felt like the rainforest again, which we've had almost all of August. And then overnight, it blew out after a whip tail end of Ida. And it I've been wearing flat all it's it feels like September it is cool and Chile and I'm thrilled, but I was like, okay, we've gone from high humidity and really steamy, warm to, Hey, it's new England and we're in the fall. Autumn (7m 55s): Just not ready for that. It's good. At least I've had my excitement this week is I've been preparing for Vermont's fantasy con, which is coming up October 2nd and third there's any other new England authors, fantasy authors or readers, which most of us are readers come to Burlington, October 2nd and third, I'm going to be there. I'm going to be on panels and talking. I think we're doing a lot of podcasts. I somehow signed myself up for everything, including organizing a paperback, give away. I don't know. I just, it's my nature. I get excited, but I've done all new swag. I just ordered new bookmarks for my two series and some new banners and a new tabletop display ordered all my books. Autumn (8m 37s): So I have all this author stuff coming and I'm going to, I'll have to do some like unpacking boxes and videos because I am so excited to get author swag. It'll be great. Narrator (8m 49s): Oh, a week on the internet with the M writing fantasy podcast. Jesper (8m 55s): And we have also, apart from all that other stuff, you have ongoing there, autumn. And we also started a brand new initiative here. We decided for, for the podcast. And I don't know, maybe you want to explain what that is all about. Autumn. Autumn (9m 8s): Again, you're not preparing me. This was originally my idea. So I think I can wing this one, but you did, Jesper (9m 14s): You can manage. Autumn (9m 15s): Alright. So I know this idea. I was reading some really good books this summer. So I'm like award-winning novels that were just, I wanted to talk about them with other authors, just pull them apart because that is the best way to learn. It's like I maybe I'm missing like those college courses, the ones that never actually happened to were actually fun where you could really look at a novel and pull out it's world building C. Why, why is this novel selling so well, why do readers love it? So I wanted to start a CRA authors critical reading group because critical reading, like really don't just reading a book and say, oh, that was good. And tossing it aside and reading the next one, but really asking questions and pulling it apart and looking at the point of views and the trends, the tropes, everything that's going on in it that makes us novel tick. Autumn (10m 1s): And why it's really is captivating as it is doing that with other authors is a fantastic way to learn. And it's gone through a few different iterations as we try to pull this together. And you came up with the idea of somehow pulling it into the podcast. And I'm so excited about this. Jesper (10m 21s): Yeah, I think after almost 150 podcast episodes, it was a time to it's time to shake things up a little. So what we decided to do was basically that once a month, we will pick a book that we are going to read. I'm going to explain the books for October, just in a second. And then we will read one of these books that gets picked, which is going to be picked by you, the audience in the am, writing phase fantasy Facebook group, and also for the patron supporters, you'll be able to vote once a month on which book we should pick. And then obviously it would be awesome if you want to read along. So you can read the book while we also reading the book, and then we will dedicate one podcast episode a month to basically do a bit of critical discussion around that book that Western chosen. Jesper (11m 13s): And if you're a patron supported and you will be able to actually submit your views as well before the episode recording happens. So we will basically take your inputs on board as well, probably read maybe not all of it, but probably some of it aloud on the podcast and discuss your points of view as well. So that's sort of the idea and to kick things off, we already, by the time this podcast episode airs, we already did the voting. So for this month, you're too late, but if you're in the am writing a Facebook group, you will have seen it. Or if you're a patron supporter, you will, you will have seen it. And if you're not in the group, then get in there. So the next month, at least you will see the voting when it comes up, but we will be reading one of the following three books. Jesper (12m 0s): It's either going to be the lies of Locke Lamorah by Scott Lynch. And that this book has over 5,500 reviews on Amazon, us with five dot five star ratings. So that's pretty damn good book, apparently Autumn (12m 15s): World building, oh my gosh, the world building in that one. Jesper (12m 19s): Yeah. Or if we are going to read the fifth season by NK Jemisin, and this is not only a Hugo award-winning fantasy novel, each book in the series has also been aboard water separately. So it has over 7,000 reviews on Amazon and afforded a five star rating. And that's the second option. And the last option is shadow and bone by Lee Baidu go, I guess that's how you say it, something like that. Well, it's basically the books behind the Netflix series shadow and bone, and this book has over 9,000, 19,500 views. Jesper (12m 59s): That's crazy popular. Yeah. So by the time this episode airs, the voting will have finished. But right now that while we are recording, it has not. So I can't say which one it's going to be picked, but just go into Dave M writing fantasy Facebook group. And if you're not a member already just get in there and you can find the post where we will have announced by the time that this episode goes out, we will announce in the Facebook group, which of the books is picked. And then you can, you can buy that book as well, and you can read along. And then in October we will then have a podcast episode where we basically discuss what we've, what we thought about the book. Jesper (13m 39s): And there were some critical discussion around it. Autumn (13m 42s): Yes. And I'm so looking forward to it and you want to join the Facebook group anyway, because the discussion after the podcast will carry on in the group. So that way we'll have an ongoing discussion with other authors about the tropes and the trends and the characters and all the things we learned by reading this book. Jesper (13m 59s): Yeah. So does this a bit of an experiment trying to shake things up a bit in terms of a podcast episodes for you going forward here? So we're very curious of course, to see how this goes and if people enjoy it. And if people will actually start reading along and communicating in the Facebook group about they have use of the Brooklyn so on, and we, we hope that it's going to be a bit interactive in the sense that us listeners, I engaged with the stuff that we're doing here as well, because I think that would be quite entertaining and funny for everybody. And if you do, as I said, if you do want your comments and viewpoints of the book to be included in the discussion here between autumn and myself, you need to get on Patrion. Jesper (14m 40s): It, it goes down to as little as a dollar a month. So it doesn't really cost much at all. But $1 a month on Patrion will allow you to submit your views of the books as well. And there is a link in show notes to Patrion. So go and check that one out. There's also all kinds of other things rewards that we're offering to support us there. So, and speaking of patron, we also want to offer a huge thank you to Steven for becoming a patron supporter. Autumn (15m 12s): Welcome. Jesper (15m 12s): Yeah. It's because of people like used, even that we keep this podcast going. So thank you so much for your support on Patrion. Autumn (15m 20s): We appreciate having you there Narrator (15m 27s): And onto today's topic. Jesper (15m 28s): Ah, so like you also said at the top order, and there's so many ways you could approach this topic and there's probably loads of things. One could do to become a better writer. And I've definitely collected a few things here and I was sort of thinking we could just go over what we eat, have autumn. And then by the end, we can see if we can sort of agree on one of the things that is the best of them, all sort of. Autumn (15m 57s): So you want to come off or try alternate. Yeah. Well, I have a feeling there's at least a couple top ones that will really help you become a better writer. Jesper (16m 8s): Yeah. Maybe B B, honestly, I feel like at least the ones I tried to only pick like stuff that I've thought was fairly important, but I'm really struggling to figure out if one of them are better than the other, but let's see. Let's see how we, how we go. Autumn (16m 24s): Okay. Okay. Sounds good. Do you want to alternate or just read off our lists or describe things, how you want to do it Jesper (16m 31s): Now? Let's alternate a bit. That's fun. Autumn (16m 34s): I all right. And do you want to start with the top top one or do you want to like do the more Jesper (16m 40s): Oh, well, if you can, you can do that if, but I have not, at least I have not mine listed in order of importance is just random order mine. So, but if you can do that. Yeah. Autumn (16m 50s): Yeah. I think I, like I said, I have one or two that I think are the definite things that really, these are the things you have to do to become a better writer. So I can start at the bottom of my list. Okay. All right. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. All right. So I think one of the things that is in a general, something that is going to make you a better writer is to write something that you're actually interested in. And the reason is if you aren't enjoying it, you won't put in the effort that you might have otherwise. And you would just, you don't make as much time for it. You'll just kind of maybe just, oh great. I have to do five minutes. Great. And you'll just, you know, word vomit, some stuff out and be done with it. But if you write something you're actually passionate about, don't worry about the marketing yet. Autumn (17m 33s): If you really want to learn to be a better writer, enjoy the craft, put in some love and time and write something. You love, write something you would love to read. And I think you will become a better writer because you'll put so much time and effort into it. Jesper (17m 49s): Hmm. Yeah. Actually I can cross one of my off the list basically more or less with that. I worded it slightly different, but I think it's the same thing I was talking about trying to write something that sort of sits in the middle of that Venn diagram between what you love, but also what readers want to read. I mean, if you're just, I guess if you're just writing for yourself, then don't worry about what readers want to read. But if you want to earn a bit of money from it, I think understanding the market and what readers want, that will also make you a better writer. That's true. Cause you will be able to write books that people wants to read, which I think is quite important, but not everybody, some people don't write because they want to sell anything. Jesper (18m 31s): So, so that's fair enough. I think it depends. I think I can cross that one off the list, right. Because it's very similar to what you just said. Autumn (18m 37s): Yes, I think so. But you're right. It's it definitely depends on what your end goal as an author. What, what meaning a better writer, what that means to you and that might've been right. Where we started is like defining what is a better writer. Do you just pull words together? Do you tell more captivating stories? Are you selling more books? What is your definition? Start there. And then you'll at least have some goals to like, you'll know when you hit your targets. Jesper (19m 5s): Yeah. True. Okay. So yeah, I think that that is a good one. Probably not the one that we're going to pick as the most important one, but it's good. Autumn (19m 14s): The bottom of my list. So you want to, since we, since you had a similar one to me, do you want to pick a different one? Jesper (19m 20s): Yeah. Yeah. So let me start with a piece of advice that you're probably seen very, very often also because a very, very famous author wrote it in a book about writing that he wrote and it is called write every day. And I was sort of wanting to discuss this one a bit because I mean, I understand the whole thinking behind this one. And of course I also fully agree and understand that to become a better writer. You have to write if you don't write you and I'm never going to get any, I mean, study, studying, writing, and listening to podcasts about writing, but not writing. Jesper (20m 5s): It's not going to make you a better writer. It is like a muscle like, like me spraining muscles, because I don't train enough. Right. If, if I was trained enough, then it wouldn't happen. Right. So writing is the same thing. It's, it's a muscle that you need to train. So I'm fully on board with all of that. But the one thing that I'm not so sure about and which is probably also why this one shouldn't make the final selection, I guess, but it's the writing every day part because I'm less convinced about that. To be honest, if, if it works for you then great. But if it sort of stresses you out, I'm not sure it's helpful, is it? Autumn (20m 44s): No, I agree. You shouldn't create stress. And I know I used say write every day, but recently some toss ups between exercising and then my husband getting a job, or sometimes he has to leave really early and I'm the cook. So I make him breakfast and it's like, I can't, I used to get up and I would write first thing in the morning. And if I didn't do it, then it would be all screwed up. And there's days that I'm like, okay, just deep breath, you know, do what you have to do, fit it in later. And if you don't fit it in, don't beat yourself up, you know, fit in what you can. Don't have this major goal that if you don't do it, you know, you're just going to break down and cry and come to me like I did today. So be forgiving of yourself and your writing partners, please, because life can get hectic. Autumn (21m 28s): But I do think it helps to have a writing goal for maybe the week one that is manageable. Not like, yeah, you know, I think I used to have one. I think it was just three chapters or something. You feel accomplished to finish that many. If you go over it, you feel great. But having one that is doable, I think is more important, but maybe being creative every day. Cause I have to admit some weekends recently. I haven't been necessarily writing as much as I used to when maybe I'll find myself drawing or something a little bit more because it's the weekend and I'm going to spend time with my husband or something else. It's, it's good to be creative every day. But I agree. But also what you were saying about it being a muscle, this one is one I think I would, I would have put towards the end of my list and I do actually have right just right. Autumn (22m 15s): Is one of the books, most important things you can do. I mean, you can be creative in a blog post an Instagram post, just be creative. But it's the, I had this conversation with some people, a lot of people like, oh, I want to wait until I'm inspired. And I understand that, but sort of what you're saying, writing is a muscle. And if you write often enough, you know, a certain goal every week when you are inspired, you can grab that and really turn out some amazing pros where if you're still a novice, because you haven't written since the last time you were inspired, which might've been a week ago, two weeks ago, whatever that was your muscles going to be kind of squishy and you're not going to do as much. It's not going to be as good. Autumn (22m 58s): So right. Even when you're not inspired because you want to build up that muscle. So you can really pounce on those days where you have time and you're excited about it. Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah. I agree. Fully agree. Autumn (23m 11s): Well, go figure, we often agree on things, which is why we've had a business together for like four years. Jesper (23m 19s): It's definitely helps. It does Autumn (23m 20s): Help. We do not have a contentious relationship. We should just let people know that now. Yeah. Jesper (23m 25s): We w when we are doing our top 10 worst lists and we argued about the best ones, that's a, that's like the exception that confirms the rule. Autumn (23m 35s): Exactly. Well, we have to poke and prod each other. Do you even get a little grouchy? So it's good. Absolutely though. I still think my husband and you are going to, so team up on me when we finally get together, I'm going to, I'm going to have to be ready. I'm going to have to make friends with your wife a little bit better so that we have a strategy in place. Jesper (23m 54s): I, I, unfortunately I don't think you will have any trouble teaming up with her. If he gets about teasing me, she will be on board right away. Awesome. I shouldn't have said that. That was a mistake. Forget about that. Autumn (24m 7s): That's all right. I already know. I don't trust Adam. He likes undermining me. So I'm a nervous, we're not going to do the spousal podcast interview. That's just going to go back. Jesper (24m 19s): Yeah, I know. Yeah. We don't want to go there. Autumn (24m 22s): All right. Oh my God. Well, I could give him my next tip. And that is, if you are writing, let's say you are an inspired TA or you just actually have some real decent writing time, which doesn't happen that often. And maybe it's a Saturday and everyone's quiet in their way or whatever. If you have some good writing time and you're planning on writing for a good stint, I would say use the Pomodoro technique, which it's a technique you can Google it. There's also, somebody has renamed it tomato technique, but excuse me, it's much older. It's called the Pomodoro. And that's where you do sort of sprints where you write for a certain amount of time. And then you take like a five minute break. So maybe it's 15 5, 15 5. And then when you hit, the end of an hour is a longer break. Autumn (25m 6s): And this really helps because you can work on something. And even when you're passionate about it, once you hit that, you know, sometimes it's different for everyone. Sometimes it's 45 minutes. Sometimes it's 90 minutes. It depends on you. Your brain is just going to be like the ideas aren't there. It's not jelling. It's starting to just be a little bit of out of reach. And so it really helps to have breaks to know that you're going to have a break. I think it's really important to keep your mind fresh. So I would really recommend that it's a good way to improving your writing overall is not to just push through for two hours, three hours, whatever you have, you need to get up stretch, move. Autumn (25m 49s): It really helps you. Jesper (25m 52s): Yeah, I think actually it probably dovetails very nicely with the next one I wanted to say, oh, Autumn (25m 57s): Excellent. We might've planned that. No, Jesper (26m 4s): Not at all. But this one is quite important to me. I think because this one was one that I've sort of learned recently because perhaps actually thinking about it, perhaps we should record a podcast episode about this in next month or something, but it's basically, I guess I could best sum it up as quality over quantity. And what I mean by that is that I've been trying over the last couple of months to try to write faster, to just see if I can get through the first draft quicker. Jesper (26m 44s): And I think it would probably would be worth discussing it in a bit more in depth, maybe next month in a podcast episode about number one, how to write faster. But also if you are one of those people who want to write faster, what you should be mindful about, because what I learned was that the faster I wrote, the more enjoyment disappeared from my writing. And it started to feel like I was just cranking out words because I needed to crank out words rather than enjoying telling a story, which I thought was quite eye-opening for me, because I actually didn't expect that. So for me, I think if you focus more on quality than quantity, it will make you a better writer. Jesper (27m 28s): And then that's not to say that there's anything wrong with writing faster. And some people enjoy that. That's absolutely fine. But I, I think that should probably come down the road somewhere once, you know, you know, you feel very comfortable with writing, which was the case for me, it CA I start, I want to start trying to write fast, like several years after I started writing in the first place. So probably yeah, actually five years ago, so five and a half, I think, but nevermind that. But I just think that it's, it's important to, to make sure you enjoying what you're doing. If you want to be a better writer, I guess that's how I could best word it. Autumn (28m 12s): Yeah. I wish I could say I totally disagree, but no, I, I feel this one too. I think we both had that realization within the last year, because even when I was working on the tainted face series that I just published and I loved the books and I love the stories, but there was times I was working on it and pushing through stuff faster than I thought, you know, I knew I could even do better if I spent more time on it. If something about the whole production schedule of trying to write things so fast that you lose that enjoyment and then you start questioning, and then if the book doesn't do well, because you never know if a book is going to do well, if it does great, fantastic. But if you realize, well, I didn't enjoy it much. It's I love the story, but you know, it's not making me millions of dollars. Autumn (28m 55s): I think I would've enjoyed writing it slower. I would have enjoyed just the process I miss, like when I was writing my debut novel. And I just wrote words for the sheer love of writing those words and describing that world. And I sometimes think even though it was my debut novel, and I think it's the worst thing I've ever written. I think there's a little bit of that soul in there and that sheer enjoyment and love of that world, that it cannot be replicated just because I want to write faster. And so I think, I agree. I think if you really want to be a good writer, no matter how fast you write it, if you're losing that soul and that wanting to be immersed in that world, you're losing something. Autumn (29m 42s): Hmm. Jesper (29m 43s): Okay. Autumn (29m 43s): Well, good. Well, that kind of dovetails it. It's not the one I was going to use next, but it fits with that one. And I would say, if you want to be a better writer, you need to read which fittingly. We already mentioned the critical author reading group, hint, hint, but I hadn't, I had been not enjoying reading very much recently, but then I decided I'm reading the wrong things. And I started really upping my game and going for the Hugo award winning novels and literary fantasy, which once I hit some of those ones that were just outstanding and I fell in love with the world and the characters, and then one of the, you know, tear them apart in a good way to see why they were so good. Autumn (30m 28s): It totally changed. Even what I was looking at in my book saying, oh gosh, you know, I used to enjoy this more. I used to do this more. I want to, especially literally the Hugo award-winning novel that we've mentioned the fifth season. It is a very high level. It is very, very close to literary fancy fantasy instead of just being epic fantasy it's, it's got some word choice and points of view that are really literary fantasy, but I loved it. Oh, my question made me think and wondering why it was working that way and just why the characters were certain ways. And I just thought this is fun. This is what I love about writing. And I think it's important, whatever it is, whatever it is about writing or reading, even that you like remember that when you're writing, because you want to pull that in. Autumn (31m 14s): That's what you want to imbue your own writing with is those elements. And if that is intense, plotting or intense characterization, or just really beautiful words that everyone tells you kill your darlings, but you just love them. Go write your heart out. It'll make you a better writer. You might have to edit some of it out, but you know, Kevin, again, capturing that essence and often finding that inspiration of reminding you of why you were a reader, what it is about the genre that makes you love it will help you be a better writer in it. Jesper (31m 47s): Right? Yeah. I also had study, I studied a writing of the best I also had on my list, but I was exactly what you just said. So, so that's good. But I also had, I also had reading every day as a separate line, other than study the writing of the best, because of course studying the writing of the best. Like you said, it's, it's about understanding the story structure, the tropes. And of course you will, it will increase your vocabulary as well. But there are also days where I don't get to read just like with the writing. It's not necessarily everyday I do it, but I try to read most days of the week as much as I can. Jesper (32m 29s): I, I do try to do it. But one of the things that I often see debated, and I'm not sure I have the answer for it, to be honest, but it is whether you should stick to reading in your Shanghai or you, it's better to read very widely so that you get all kinds of other impressions about writing and so on. And I think for one, if you haven't read enough in the younger you are writing, then you need to read those because you need to understand those tropes. But if we are assuming you already understand this young rhe, then I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to try to read a bit wider as well. Jesper (33m 9s): We have been looking at writing some murder mystery stuff, and I've actually picked up a couple of books that has nothing to do with fantasy, but they are murder mysteries. But just because I wanted to see how let's say outside the fantasy younger people who are very, very popular and good at writing murder mysteries, how did they do it when it just from a plodding perspective that I thought that was interesting. Autumn (33m 34s): No, I agree. And I, I agree if you're going to write in like, especially a new genre or sub-genre that you're not that familiar with, make sure you're reading a few books in it. I've coached a few authors who are like, oh, I've written this, you know, I've written 60,000 words of this novel, but I've never read a thriller before and they're writing a thriller and I'm like, oh, you know, you're and they fight me with all my advice. And I'm thinking, just, please go read one, one of them before you turn away all my advice. But Jesper (34m 5s): Yeah, if you haven't, if you haven't read it before, then don't try to write it. That's for sure. Autumn (34m 11s): You will. You will. If your book takes off and you have never read a single series or novel in what you're writing, it's going to be a miracle because mostly readers, they have things they expect. And if you are not familiar with those aspects, I think that might even be first person versus third person. Point of view. When I wrote my first dystopian story, almost every dystopian story is in first person. And I don't really like it. And if it entered my head that, you know, this is what the genre expects. I probably never would have even tried it, but you can always learn from those genres and you can pool, like you're saying, murder mystery is you can do a murder mystery fantasy. You can criminal thriller fantasy, you know, Charlotte Holmes meets fantasy. Autumn (34m 52s): These are becoming sort of a mishmash that people like it's okay to mix up tropes and mix up some of your storytelling as long as you're doing it well. And also realizing that, you know, maybe some mashups might not work well, a cozy mystery with like dark gallows murderer, you know, like, no, you know, there's a few things that maybe the readers of each John rhe are not going to like each other. So there are those elements, but otherwise, yeah, you can learn and get really exciting tidbits. I mean, you want to learn to do some foreshadowing, read some murder mysteries. They're fantastic. They do such a good job to make you sit there and try to figure it out. Jesper (35m 36s): Absolutely. Okay. Do you have any more on your list? Oh, you actually Autumn (35m 39s): Have a few. It was Jesper (35m 43s): Still Autumn (35m 44s): Good. All right. Yeah. So my next one to be a better writer. This is a very simple one, but I think it's very important. Turn off your wifi. Or if you really think you're going to have to Google something, make sure you turn off all your social media apps, hide your phone, give it to your, your five-year-old and make sure he can't buy anything from Amazon while you're, while mother holding it. But even if you have to use those apps that keep you locked out of your social media accounts for like half an hour, do that because you need to focus on writing when you're actually writing you, can't get that little wall and moment of distraction and just go and automatically jump to Instagram. It's not going to help you. Jesper (36m 24s): Actually, I will say that I don't have that problem. You know, when I, when I write, I don't end up spending all the time on Facebook or something instead. So, but I do do understand, I know a lot of people do have that problem. So, so in that sense, for sure, but it's called it, of course also depends on the individual person, whether or not that's a problem or not. But I think what I also had on my list, which is basically, I think it's the same root explanation or root cause for becoming a better writer as you were, you were just saying, and it is basically about respecting your writing time, right? Jesper (37m 4s): So if you, you mentioned early on, maybe set some weekly writing goals or something that, you know, keep the promises that you make with yourself and follow through on those and respect your writing time. So did you actually get that done instead of spending all your time on Instagram or YouTube or something? So I think that's the core Autumn (37m 23s): Of it. Yeah, I agree. Jesper (37m 28s): Okay, good. Well, that actually crossed one more of my list because that was the same thing I was going to say. But then I want to say something else because well, we, we trade in this stuff ourselves, but, and that's not why I'm saying it. I'm saying it because I think it's important, but educate yourself is on my list because you have to do the writing at the same time. Of course, like we said before, listening to podcasts or taking writing courses will not teach you how to write unless you're writing. But I do think it is very, very well spent money. If you try to, while you are writing also educating yourself, you know, take some online courses. So we have several of them. Jesper (38m 9s): If you want to take some online courses and try to learn, because it will improve your writing a lot. Autumn (38m 17s): Yes. And I, of course, that's it. Yes. Between the books we have and the education you could tell. I mean, part of the reason the first writing course we developed came from the fact that I took two adult ed writing courses at my local place in Maine. And they were just so, and they were not devoted to fantasy. They were devoted more to memoirs and there was times they were ripping apart the fantasy writers in the group for doing stuff. And I just wanted to know why, you know, how am I supposed to write this? Then if obviously these people are not teaching me and that pain, it led to a course for fantasy writers because you know, someone needs to teach this. Autumn (38m 59s): It's, there's so much to learn in so many tips and so many ways of doing things and developing characters. And it's good to be curious, pick up a book, could pick up a chorus, you know, spend some time reading blog posts. We have a ton of blog. We have like 200 blog posts on the I'm writing phases of website. It's insane. Let's be Like, no, we got some stuff for you. The free, just go listen. And it'll make you curious. It'll make things spark. Just sort of like reading books in your mind. So I agree this one was on my list. So this time I get to cross it off, but yes, educate yourself. Be curious about the craft and learn to do it better as a very important thing. I think to add to that. Autumn (39m 39s): And it sort of went well with what I was, we were both been saying about goals and stuff is to develop a routine and honor it. Like you said, if you can say, this is my writing time, just like how I said, normally I have to go, I'm going through a change that hasn't clicked fully into place. But my writing time used to be first thing in the morning, get my tea, go and write for an hour or so. And now that's, I've gotten old jumbled and I have yet to figure it out. That's stressing me out a little bit, but that's okay because it's a change. I had a writing time that I honored and that worked for me. And before that, when I had my full-time job, I would get home, give my husband and kids, get my tea and I'd write for 45 minutes. And that's how I did like 12 books, 45 minutes a night after I got home, I was like, hi, hi, nice to see you. Autumn (40m 21s): Bye-bye I'm going to go right now. It's just that you have to get your family to understand, or at least to leave you alone and turn off your wifi, or at least your social media apps. If you have a tendency to try to distract yourself with them, but I were teens, whatever it is, sometimes you need that too, to like sink into, okay, it's my writing time for me, it was getting a cup of tea, but maybe you need to listen to music. I used to have a PA page of George R. Martin that I just thought was like the most beautiful imagery in the world. And I'd read that. And then I'd be like, yes, I am ready to write, to find those cues that tell your brain. Now it is time to turn on the writing and settle into that and have it and get your mind used to it. Autumn (41m 1s): So that way, if you don't have it sort of like I recently have had my little hiccup, you miss it, you really crave it. And that's, that's a good thing. Jesper (41m 13s): Okay. Yeah. And also along the lines of educating yourself, then I would say, learn how to make sure that every single chapter Autumn (41m 26s): That's a good one. I agree, actually, that kind of goes with the wires. Jesper (41m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. It's very aligned with what we've already said, but then still it's just slightly different, but if you can grab the reader in every chapter, we will definitely be a better writer for sure. Autumn (41m 42s): Because it's sort of going along with that, I actually have learned to plot because I do think Panthers can write well, but I think understanding plot and plot structure is something that will make you a better writer. And whether that once the fall under education or, you know, learning to make chapters that are really gripping, those are like some of the techniques that I think you need to educate and read how other authors do it, figure it out. And by unpacking those specific techniques of writing really gripping chapters or learning to write a really engaging plot, that's character driven. When you understand those really core techniques, you will be a better writer as well. And I think it does take a couple of books and some education and some thinking to realize how that brainstorm moment of, oh, this is how it all comes together. Autumn (42m 30s): And when that happens, you're will be a bunch stronger writer. Jesper (42m 36s): Yeah, absolutely. I only have one more on my list or Autumn (42m 39s): One more on my list. That's a really funny, Jesper (42m 42s): Ah, there Autumn (42m 42s): You go. All right. So let's see. All right. Jesper (42m 47s): Minus something that I've actually talked about several times on the podcast before, but it is about getting feedback, but it comes with a caveat. And this is the part that I've said on previous episodes, because be very, very careful not to ask for feedback from a lot of different people, because especially when you're starting out, you don't know what is good feedback and what is bad feedback. And also if you're getting feedback from a lot of people, you'll get a lot of conflicting feedback, which is not very helpful either because you don't know which ones is correct, and which ones are wrong because you don't have the experience. So I would say, preferably, if, of course this is going to cost them money. Jesper (43m 29s): But if you can, it's best to work with a developmental editor who can, who knows what they're talking about and they can help you. That would be the, by far the best thing. But if you can't afford that, then pick maximum one or two writers who you trust and who, you know, have a proven track record, meaning that they know what they're doing. And then listen to what those one or two people are saying and nothing else, but to get some feedback, because if you're writing in isolation, it's very difficult to understand, you know, you might, well, you might be the blind leading the blind kind of situation. Jesper (44m 13s): I mean, you're just stumbling a heaven. You don't quite know. And that's not to say that it can't work. It can, but you might end up writing five bad books that nobody likes. And then you'll sort of figure it out, but getting some feedback from somebody who knows what they're doing. And couple that with educating yourself, then I think you will get to a better place much, much faster than if you don't do these things. Autumn (44m 40s): Oh yeah. I agree. I can't believe I didn't include feedback in my list, but that is really true. And what you said is very true. I mean, you want to choose who you get feedback from. It should be like an author. You respect, if you can't afford it, a writing coach or a developmental editor will be worth their weight, especially for your first, maybe not your first book, maybe. I mean, that'd be fantastic, but even your second or third, whenever you can afford it, it's worth it because otherwise you can't see, you know that about your life. You can't see your own blind spots because they're blind spots where someone else will read it and be like, oh, this is where you're doing it wrong. But if you don't get someone That's a good day, came up with that. Autumn (45m 23s): One knew what they were talking about. But yeah, it's, if you get too many other people or maybe beta readers or people who just like, oh, I don't like it. And they don't give you very specific feedback because they don't really understand plotting and structure and character development. That's not going to help you learn. It might just make you really frustrated or even steer you in the wrong direction. Just trying to write something that, you know, someone who absolutely adored Twilight loved. And you're suddenly trying to write Twilight when you were more going towards, you know, token, it's not gonna really help you improve. It's just changing your direction. All right. So my last one, which is kind of a strange one, maybe, but it's okay to do something inspiring, just, you know, exercise, take a walk and movement really loosens up your ideas as well as your body. Autumn (46m 16s): So my last one is actually do something that'll inspire you and keep your creativity growing. And along with that, kind of like tailor to it, keep a notebook with you. If at all possible you want to be able to capture ideas and remember to look at them and maybe organize them, put them in a Scrivener file or something. You don't want a couple of ideas and never look at them again. That's not the point, but if you can get out and do something different and creative fun with your family, make up stories, whatever it is, that'll let you know, that'll loosen up your ideas in everything. And you will be surprised at what comes, but if you don't remember to write them down, you will lose them and that's not going to help you either. So make sure you have some way of taking notes and go do something fun. Jesper (47m 1s): I don't know if we can do this autumn, but does any of all of these advices sort of stick out to you as the most important one? Autumn (47m 11s): I don't know. It's like part of me wants to say educate yourself. I think being curious about how to be a better writer is going to make you a better writer very quickly, because you're curious about it. So you're learning. But I also think having goals like weekly goals that really helped me, I guess that helped me write more, which helped me eventually a better writer. But I think curiosity, be curious how to be a better writer, whether that's through education, reading, whatever that takes, that's going to get you going and at least make you unpack things. Every everything you touch, you'll be pulling it apart by whether it's marketing, copyright, which is always good to know as a writer or someone else's book. Jesper (47m 55s): Okay. So I think, yeah, being curious probably encompasses a lot of the things we've talked about here. So, but otherwise I think the listeners can pick the ones that you feel talk the most to you. But yeah, I do definitely think, making sure that you educate yourself is incredibly important. And, and also I would say, unfortunately I think too many people skip that part. So yeah, there is dead. Okay. So next Monday we are going to have a discussion about marketing to different generations of readers. Are they all different or are they the same? Narrator (48m 38s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

It's time for another of our humorously competitive top ten lists! This time Jesper and Autumn go head to head to see who can come up with the worst power to have—you know, the one that makes you think maybe NOT having any magic might not be such a bad thing.

What kind of stories are agents interested in? How do you find an agent and how do you know if the person is any good? And what about your publishing contract? What should you be mindful about there? All these questions, and many more, are answered in this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast by Jane Friedman. Links to what was mentioned in the episode: QueryTracker: http://querytracker.net Duotrope: http://duotrope.com Publishers Marketplace: http://publishersmarketplace.com Not discussed during the interview, but this one is interesting as well: http://mswishlist.com You can find Jane at: http://janefriedman.com Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 140 of the Am Writing fantasy podcast. Autumn is busy launching her brand new novel today, so I've instead brought someone else on, so I won't be all alone because that will be pretty boring on a podcast. Narrator (48s): But joking aside, I have to say that I really looked forward to this conversation, our little piece of intro music there to the podcast says that you don't really need a literary agent, or worry about gatekeepers and all that stuff, but that is all true if we are talking about self publishing, but not so much, if you want to get a traditional publishing contract and Autumn and I have actually started talking a bit about maybe trying to become hybrid authors, meaning that we will have both self published books and traditionally published titles. And so I guess in some ways you could say that it's a bit of, for selfish reasons as well, that I'm are joined by the very knowledgeable Jane Friedman today. Narrator (1m 31s): Welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Jane, and I hope you won't mind me picking your brain today. Jane (1m 38s): Not at all. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Jesper (1m 41s): Yeah. I have a sneaky suspicion that the quite a few of our listeners will already know who you are, Jane, but the, let me just, I'll try to give a short introduction, Jane, and then you can see if I miss out something important here. So Jane has more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. And in 2019, she was awarded what the publishing commentator of the year by digital digital book world. And Jane also has an incredibly popular, I guess I could say newsletter for authors with in 2020, it was awarded media outlet of the year. Jesper (2m 23s): And she also runs the award winning block for writers over@janefriedman.com and has been featured by New York times, Washington post publishers weekly. And the list just goes on and on. And that I miss anything that those are the important ones. Yeah. Yeah. And I think with those credentials, it's quite obvious why I want it to have a chat with you about traditional publishing, but maybe, maybe before we get into all of that, maybe you could just sort of share a bit about yourself that maybe has less to do with the business side, but more like who you are. So Jane (2m 58s): Yeah, I started in the business in the late 1990s, right out of college. So in some ways my, my life has been spent on nothing but publishing in one form or another. I did go full-time freelance in 2014. So I was traditionally employed out a book publishing company and a media company in the literary journal at a university. And then finally after, I guess it was 15 years, 15 years of, of working for other people. I decided to just embark on my own. So I've been very happy working independently. Jane (3m 40s): It's, it's a combination of doing the newsletter that you mentioned, which is for authors online teaching. And then I also do some consulting. So aside from that, you know, I do a lot, I do a lot of travel, but a lot of its because I go to the writing conferences. Mmm. So during the pandemic that certainly slowed down dramatically and I've spent a lot of time that my home office in the past year, but it's been good. I've been able to focus on things that I didn't have time for when I was traveling so much. Jesper (4m 11s): Yeah. W what, what drew you to publishing and writing original that, do you, do you do you know, it was more like some people stumbled out to collage and by coincidence they end up in some sort of industry, but I was there something in particular that drew in there. Jane (4m 26s): So it's, it's hard for me to say that I was drawn as much as it was the, maybe the process of elimination when I was growing up, I, I come from a very rural part of the United States. There wasn't a whole lot to do other than go to school and go to the library. My mother was a very bookish person. She was a librarian, in fact. So I spend a lot of hours in the library and I was just good at school. And I liked reading. And I dunno that I think this happens to many people who ultimately become English majors or they studied creative writing and they think, well, I I'd like books, I'll study literature. And so it just, I, but I think I'm fortunate in that I was able to turn that into something that actually pays the bills. Jane (5m 10s): Not everyone does that. Jesper (5m 12s): Oh, I know that. That's true. Yeah. I still have very fond memories myself of the library when I was a kid. I just, I don't know. I just love I could spend hours and hours in their well, but back then, it was the most comic books I was looking at. Of course. But yeah, you could just go out and take a new one and another one in another one in, and sit there for hours. Just go through all those pages. I don't know. There's something about it. Isn't that? I don't know what it is. Jane (5m 36s): Yeah. I I've always been drawn to bookstores and libraries from a young age, although I will admit now in the digital landscape it's I do a lot less of that. And I do have as much of a fascination with computers and with figuring things out from a digital media perspective. So I like bringing those two areas together. Jesper (5m 58s): Right, right. Yeah. OK. Well, in terms of, of talking about traditionally publishing contracts and how to get one, which is actually something that I'm, we are asked, but not all the time, but on a similar, a regular basis on them. And I, my cohost asked about how to, how to do that, how to get those kinds of contracts. And honestly, we're not the best one to advise on this because while autumn, they did have a contract like 10, 15 years ago, but I don't, we are not like the expert on this topic. And also, as I said, a bit earlier, 'cause we actually considering trying maybe to see if we can find an agent for ourself maybe in the years time or something, once we have a novel written for that particular purpose, I was thinking that maybe we could just try to structure our conversation in, in the same fashion light, sort of a bit of step-by-step where, where did we start and, and with what happens next to the next time. Jesper (6m 56s): So on, in the process, because then it might make a bit more sense for the listener. And obviously where we start is with the story of self, you know, and do you, do we need to sort of think about what kind of story or what kind of novel we are we right. If we want to get it traditionally published? Jane (7m 18s): Oh, a little bit, but not too much. So in other words, I think first and foremost, you need to write the story you feel called to riot, or that your interested in writing or, or that you are passionate about. And that's sort of cliched advice. You hear a lot, but its true that it takes far too much work, especially in my mind to go through the traditional publishing process, to try and write something that you think is going to just fit the market. To me, that's actually what self publishers do. There are always studying what's happening in the market and trying to jump on where the readers are going that happens in traditional publishing to, but I think there's also a concern for what's this writer doing that only they can do on, usually it comes out of your own obsessions or interest areas. Jane (8m 12s): So, but on the, on the other hand, you know, you do have to be aware of kind of the model that traditional publishing works under, which is the way, if you're a first time author for them, they want the book to be a certain length. You know, they're going to get dissuaded. If your book is say more than 150,000 words are more than 120,000 words, it's usually the, where things start to get rejected more often because it's just too long when they don't know you yet as an author, they haven't established an audience for you yet just costs more in terms of time and editing to do a longer book. And if you're writing something that is a real mashup or hybrid of lots of different things, if it's really too far out there that might also dissuade them. Jane (9m 3s): So they like things that are both familiar and fresh, which are, this is very frustrating to writers because what defines that? No one knows, you know that when you see it. Jesper (9m 15s): Yeah. Because, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, but I have this impression as well that traditional publishers and I guess therefore also agency, they don't like to, I mean maybe some agents do, but, but if we sort of just take it in the broader sense here, I have a feeling that they don't like to take meant to many chances, meaning that they probably prefer to have something that is at least fairly similar to what is generally on the market today. Do you think that's a correct assumption or am I just reading into things that I shouldn't no. Jane (9m 53s): And I think its true that they want something that fits the genre or sub genre. They like, they don't like things that are hard to categorize or that don't have good comparable titles or authors. So you should be able to usually imagine your book or yourself sitting alongside other books and authors, you know, you can say a free to use like ex they will like why if, if, if a publisher can't do that because your work is too odd or it's just, you know, it doesn't fit the model and yes, it's going to look risky. Oh Jesper (10m 27s): Yeah. So, so, so that also basically means I fully agree. What you said before about in the others are probably doing far more market research, then the traditional publishers as are bad. But if it doesn't mean though that you should be doing at least enough market research, then to be able to understand what are the true those tropes and what to do, what do I need to deliver upon? Because if you are getting too creative and maybe thinking that, let me write something they've never seen before, because then I'm going to blow their mind. They will probably think, well, I can't sell this stuff. Yeah, Jane (11m 4s): Exactly. Jesper (11m 7s): But what about stand alone versus series? And if you are trying to get an agent, would it be best to just write a complete standalone thing? Or do you give them like, here's this book one of the series and leave it open-ended or doesn't matter maybe. Oh yeah. Jane (11m 26s): Well there is of course a really strong tradition of series in science fiction and fantasy as well as some other genres like mystery or romance. So, but if it's safe or safer to propose a book that is the first and a potential series, so it can stand alone. But if it does really well, you're ready and it would make sense to continue it. Mmm. So I know that it's like a little dance that everyone is doing and, and the reason for this, his publishers or, you know, they like to see how things perform before they fully commit. Jane (12m 7s): So it's not that they're going to abandon you after the first book, but if, if, if the sales just don't go in the right direction, especially like after book to are booked, three of the sales get softer and softer instead of stronger, and you may find yourself getting dropped by the publisher. So in other words, what that would mean on a practical level as that you would never want to query a series saying this is a five books series and you have to take all five Jesper (12m 33s): It's something that Jane (12m 35s): Basically works to both, both of you and the publisher and to a corner. Jesper (12m 40s): Yeah. But I'm also thinking, and I don't know how often that happens, but I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm just speculating a lot here. So do you have to correct me every time and say something incorrectly, but I'm assuming a lot of things I guess, but I would think that spending the time to right, like say the book 1, 2, 2, and three, and then give them big one and say, okay, here it is. I have two more books. If you are interested is probably not the best use of your time. I, I, I'm thinking it's probably a better to just write the first book, leave it in at least enough open-ended that you can continue and then just see if they want it before, because you couldn't, you just as risk spending a lot of time writing three books and they don't even want it. Jesper (13m 22s): Or even if they're want book one and then they will never buy books two and three. Jane (13m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I would not, I would not write all 3, 4, 5, however many books there. I would not write the whole series and then start querying. I would write the first book and then have a really nice outline of how the series might unfold. And that doesn't take much, like it takes maybe a paragraph per book to show what direction you're going to take it in. Jesper (13m 49s): Yeah. Okay. So basically like a bit of a plot overview or something, so to do the age and can see what are your thoughts are. Jane (13m 56s): Right. And you wouldn't even submit that first. You, you have to sell the first book before you could have that conversation or at least interest them in the first book. Jesper (14m 4s): Yeah. Oh, okay. Well let's assume that we have a story written out there and at least we think that it is abiding to tropes and we believe that we have at least written something that is fairly common in of course it has a good cover and it has a good showing are trophy title and all that stuff. And we don't need to find an agent. And I think, I think the general advice is that you should not try to approach any of the big publishing houses without an agent. Is that right? Jane (14m 34s): That's correct. There are closed to authors'. So you're only weigh through the door is through an agent unless you happen to know someone on the inside or do you have a really good famous bestselling author friend who is going to make an introduction for you, even if that were the case though, you'd probably an agent to help you negotiate the contract, which I know we'll talk about. So yeah, I'd, I'd say when you're starting to query agents are step one and if the agent search doesn't go as intended, you can then start looking at publishers that are smaller, independent, that don't require you to have an agent they'll take your submission directly. Jane (15m 14s): Yeah. Jesper (15m 15s): Yeah. And I want to come back to that one about the smaller publishers, but I guess first, I mean, how do you find an agent? That's like the million dollar question that everybody asks? Probably yes. Jane (15m 28s): So it's actually not, it's not rocket science. There are a few recognized up to date databases that you can use. And you just filter down to the agents who would be interested in your work. You can do this at sites like QueryTracker dot nets, do a trope.com. There's also publishers marketplace, where you can look up deals that agents have maid and you can filter the deals by genre. You can also do keyword searches and those deals. So if you are, if you have some sort of EY space opera, let's say that you could actually search the deals for space opera and look for agents who seem to like those sorts of books. Jane (16m 11s): So if you use any, one of those are the best. If you use a combination that helps to consult different sources, you can then once you've got a working list and it might be, you know, for genre fiction, generally you can almost find a hundred agents just write off the bat without even working that hard. So then once you've got your list of a hundred or however many, you would want to go to that agency website, make sure that there are still open for submissions. Sometimes they'll close, you know, check out there guidelines, make sure its a good fit, look at their client lettuce. Do you think that this person is going to actually like what you send them and then you send off your query. Jesper (16m 54s): And can you sort of just assume that the people are the agents that are on the list like that are good agents or, or do you need to like vet the list yourself as well to Czech? Like do they actually know what they're doing? So yes. Yes. Jane (17m 10s): So the, the three sites that I mentioned are I think, quite reliable, it would be hard to find and unreputable agent threw one of those three sources. I'm not saying it can't happen, but the likelihood is greatly diminished. I think where you get into real trouble with bad agents, if you start Googling around very broadly, like if you go to Google and just type in and literary agent that has a terrible, terrible idea, you will get all sorts of scammers and people who have a financial interest in luring you in and charging you money. And who knows what? Now there are definitely good agents better agent's there are some who are more well-known and less well-known. Jane (17m 54s): Those are who, those who are still establishing their career and those who have been around for decades. And that's where you get into really subjective concerns. Like some people they want to get the biggest possible agent or they want an attack dog agent or they're like, actually I would like an agent. Who's still building their list and maybe they'll, they'll pay more attention to me if I'm one of their early clients and these are all legitimate reasons to choose one agent over another in the United States, there's the organization called the AA L a, which if you're a member of, of you have to abide by a certain code of ethics and it's also a place to go with complaints. Jane (18m 36s): So if you do have a bad experience, you can go to the AAL eye and say, you know, one of your members has treated me poorly or you, you tell them what happened and that they can help address it. Not all agents are going to belong to that, but a good number of them do. And there's a similar organization in the UK. And I have to imagine probably in Europe to Jesper (18m 59s): Yeah, because it it's, it's difficult. Right? And, and sometimes you see you on the internet, these really bad examples where you yeah. Almost like bordering on fraud almost right. Like from, from because the, the terrible thing is that the authors in this case are there sort of chasing a dream. And if somebody then says, okay, I'll take you on board. I guess a lot of people won't have there critical census M on God there. And, and then they jump in and say, well, regretted later. So the, oh Jane (19m 35s): Yes, you're absolutely right. A lot of people are preying on people's dreams, hopes and aspirations. You know, one of the first signs you may be dealing with a bad actor is that they praise you to this guy's and then ask for your money. So that's the sequence of events that should raise a red flag for you. People writers, especially to just get really taken in when someone says, oh, you're, you know, you're brilliant. You're a genius. And you know, it's what you've been hoping for all this time, for someone to select you and validate the hard work. But you know, the truth is that agents and publishers both tend to leave you feeling a little cold. Jane (20m 16s): There are not the most complementary people in the world. We tend to be very pragmatic, critical, well, you need to change this and this. And then, you know, maybe it will sell it. They just don't think they don't want to build up your hopes. In fact, there'll be very realistic. Jesper (20m 36s): Yeah. And I guess it's well, well, if, if, if they ask you for money that you should just run for the Hills, right? I mean, why would you, you, you shouldn't pay them anything unless they make a deal Jane (20m 48s): That's right. They only earn money when they sell your books. So they are in the U S agents get 15% of everything that the authors make. That's 15% of the advance, 15% of the royalties, 15% of, you know, an option sale. Or it can go as high as 20%. If there's a co-agent that gets into more complicated territory. But in other words, you're not paying them out of your pocket. There are like some rare cases where maybe the agent will say, look, you know, I really like what you've got, but there are these issues that need to be resolved. I can't resolve them for you, but maybe you should go hire this editor. Jane (21m 31s): And there are going to help you, you know, maybe, maybe in you, you would invest at that point, but just be super cautious because, you know, until you have an actual manuscript that the agent wants to represent, you could just be spending a lot of money for, for nothing. You'd have to agree with what they're saying, I guess is what the point I'd like to make. You have to see that there. Right? Jesper (21m 55s): Yeah. Quite recently here, I heard another example of M and agent, which again, of course it was fraught, but the agent was like saying, well, this, this is really good manuscript, but there is a lot of issues in it. And then lo and behold, I can fix them for you. You just need to pay me X amount of that. I can't remember how much it was, but something, and then I'll get my editor, which I have in house and they we'll fix it for you as well. That sounds nice. But again, don't pay them money. Jane (22m 24s): Oh yeah. I don't, I don't think it's a good idea too. If, if an agent does think, I mean, it's, it's true. There are many projects that need editorial work, but you have to be careful when the agent ha has a possible financial interest in you having that work done. That's not good. Jesper (22m 45s): But if you are then going off of these lists as human, and, but maybe by the way, maybe you can, you, maybe you can email me those lists that you mentioned earlier, then I can put them on the show notes for people. But if we're going off the list and let's say with, and sending out Query letters, which I'll come back to in a moment, because I want to ask about that as well. But let's say we are sending out hundreds of Query letters maybe. And then let's say some of them are a bit positive and they come back and say like, okay, this looks interested. But then I have heard examples of agents and saying like, they want to change something or this character doesn't work or this part of the plot doesn't work or whatever, but wouldn't, you sort of be chasing your own tail. Jesper (23m 29s): If you keep correcting things to every time one of those agents comes back and say something Jane (23m 34s): It's possible. So what you've described is called a revise and resubmit request. So this is where an agent has a phone call or sent an editorial letter saying, look, I'd like to represent this, but you need to change these things. And they'll go into sufficient detail that you, you get it, you know what their trying to get you to do. And then you go off and do it. But you have kind of going back to my earlier point, you have to agree with the work. Like you ha it should excite you like it. You should feel like, wow, yeah, this is going to make such a better book or yeah. I can see why they're making those suggestions and I can do it. Jane (24m 14s): Like I'm willing to compromise in that way. Usually what I tell people as if, I mean, it's like a revise and resubmit request's is great. Just neutral speaking. It means that they are really C something in the project or a new, and they, they would like to see it come to fruition. They don't issue those to just anyone. And there are probably testing to see if you have the ability to edit yourself, because that's really required when you begin working with the publisher, you know, the, the editor you work with is going to expect you to take revision suggestions. So this is like the first, you know, the first hurdle that you have to get over. Jane (24m 58s): But in any event, if you query several dozen agents and then, and you see a pattern in there, response, like there are all wanting you to do X, then, you know, okay, I'm getting a really strong message here. That X is a issue that has to be resolved. But if you get a bunch of feedback and it's all over the map, some people are like, we need to change the character. And others are all, you have to change the plot or no, you can't, you can't have this setting or your dialog sex. Like if there is no pattern, that's when I would really be reluctant to make changes. Jesper (25m 35s): Yeah. No, that makes sense. But what about those famous Query letters then? What, what do you, what, what you do you focus on there? Jane (25m 47s): It's almost all about this story promise. So the query is, were talking about as short, very short pitch are usually not more than 300 words, maybe 400 for some types of fantasy, where it might, you might have to do some set up are world-building to make sure that the whole thing makes sense, but very short. And we're talking about character problem setting. Those are the key elements. The rest of the query outside of that is really just housekeeping. So by housekeeping, I mean, there's, you know, maybe a hundred words of a bio. Jane (26m 27s): There might be an element of personalization there where you talk about I'm approaching you because I see you represent blah, blah, blah, which is similar to my book. And you'll of course I have the title and the word count. And you'll comment on the, the comparable titles, what you think is going to be similar. But the, like I said, the book of the query, though, that decision is made on this story, does the agent or editor think that this story has legs in the market, as it intrigue them, does it make them excited? And does it make them want to read or request the manuscript? Now there's a difference between sending a query by itself and sending a query with sample chapters. Jane (27m 8s): So if an agent or a publisher for that matter is asking for a query, plus the manuscript, they probably know from experience that a lot of writers are crap Jesper (27m 17s): Are writing their queries. So, Jane (27m 20s): You know, if they see the query in there, like, oh, this is a mess, they'll just flip to your first pages and see if there's something there. Yeah. So in those cases, I think the query holds less weight. And the agent's probably more interested in just reading the opening and seeing if you can write. So there is some reassurance there, but I hope, and that you're gonna be judged on the right thing rather than you're ability to pitch. But for those people that you're just sending the query, there are, those might be agents who are more concerned with things like, do you have a high concept? Can you write just to really snappy pitch, were the character are the voice really comes through? Does the book kind of sell itself when, you know, the general outline of the story? Jane (28m 4s): So it does put a lot of it puts more pressure on the writer to have something that just feels exciting, whether that's the character or that premise, or, you know, something about it, you know, that jumps out. Jesper (28m 16s): Yeah. And it's, it's just so much easier said than done to, to right. In, in an interesting M summary, I guess, of this story 'cause as well when you are, well, not even if it's not even in a blurb level. Right. But it's more like just the summary of what's happening. It's it's, it can be very difficult to actually make that sound interesting other than its just like, oh, well then there is this story about this guy who this guy does, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's, it, it very easily becomes this sort of boring bland synopsis, Jane (28m 55s): Right? So that's precisely what you want to avoid in something that's really light kind of plot oriented and mechanical because that will be a turnoff. Even if the book is very plot driven, I think it's necessary in the query to be able to marry together that character and the plot M and in the case of fantasy, you need to probably have a couple sentences upfront that kind of establish the parameters, like our way on a ho in a whole other like a world or planets. What's the what's defining life in this world that you've created. You shouldn't assume too much about what the age and are editor may understand about the world that you've created. Jane (29m 39s): You have to be pretty direct. And you know, I think the thing that often gets left out of the queries icy is the relationship of tension. So most times we're really intrigued by stories where we see people in opposition or people are trying to preserve her relationship that matters to them, but there are forces getting in the way, are there personal motivations or what they need to achieve is in conflict with someone else in the story obviously, and you might have a village and it's really clearly in protagonist antagonist situation I'm. So I think, think about the relationship dynamics and what, what striving the story forward from that perspective, in addition to whatever interesting elements your fantasy world has in it, that's going to be, but hopefully these are whatever's magical or fantastical about your story is also built into what the characters want. Jane (30m 36s): What's giving them trouble rather than just, you know, window dressing. Jesper (30m 40s): Yeah. So in a, rather than just riding about the one on one ring, having to be carried to Mount doom, you also write about the relationship between Sam and Frodo and how the struggle and so on. Jane (30m 53s): It's like excellent example. Jesper (30m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. And why, while you were saying that, I just got to thinking, because you were talking about those sort of websites with lists of agents and so on. I, I just started wondering all of a sudden, if there wasn't like a repository of like, here are the examples of really good query letters or something that some people could look at it as examples, do you know if something like that exists? Jane (31m 19s): In fact, the query tracker site that I mentioned has a really robust set of resources and message boards and posts where they feature query is that actually worked in the, you know, there is even the potential for you to post your query in the message boards and get feedback from other people. Although you have to be careful or you can get a lot of different opinions. Yeah. You're left feeling more confused, but I think one of the best ways to write a better Query, I think to the point you're making is to actually see a lot of them. And you, you start to see what works. Jesper (31m 56s): Yeah. Yeah. Because it's often rather than trying to invent the wheel again, you know, it often works a lot better if you can. Just, the same thing goes for when we're writing blurbs, for example, the autumn. And I often do check out like, what are the, when this shop Shaundra, what our, like the bestselling books in the shop show on her. And it's, there are like some common elements that they use across those slopes. Because again, you will start seeing commonalities and you can start see, oh, oh, okay. I see. They always focus on something to do with this part or whatever. And then you can make your own version of that obviously, but then you are already like 10 steps ahead. Jane (32m 32s): Yes, yes. Jesper (32m 34s): Yeah. Okay. So let's, well now we have a book. We have found some Asians to send Query letters to, and we have written an awesome Query letters. Well, hopefully, so let's say that one of these agents then comes back to us and say, okay, this, this is great. I would like to represent you. What, what happens now? Jane (33m 1s): So they'll have a conversation with you where they talk about that, their strategy for submitting it, there is no right or wrong strategy here, but they, you know, they're going to hopefully be very open and transparent about what they want to see happen. And the approach they'll take. For instance, some agents will put things up for auction and they'll make editors bid against one another, but you have to feel like you have a pretty hot property because if no one that shows up to your auction, it's a little embarrassing. The more common approach that covers most projects is the agent will send it out to a select number of editor's that she thinks are going to be most likely to want the book. Jane (33m 45s): And then there will be some waiting and let's hope it's not that long. You know, maybe a month, maybe two months, you know, some of this depends on time of year. Like right now, it's a slower time because it's summer people in there away. And you can tell the agent, you know, I want to hear, I want to hear from you every time you get something from an editor, whether it's a rejection or whatever, or you can tell the agent, look, that would, it would be really hard on me to hear about every rejection that comes through. Can we, can we touch base on this state? Jane (34m 27s): And we'll talk about what's happened so far. Of course, if there's good news, the agent is going to call you right away. So if there is good news, the agent will bring you the offer and the offer starts off as it's not a contract, its usually a, they say, OK, this is the advance we're offering. These are the most important deal points. Like is it world rights or not? What's the royalty rate look like? And there'll be some other little details. Like, is it a one book deal, a two book deal? And then if you just have one offer, its kind of this very straightforward, do you take it or not? And it's not the agent's job, you know, to push you in one direction or the other. Jane (35m 7s): But to explain to you the merits of the deal, you know, the pros and cons and help you make a choice, that's right for you. If you have a competing interest, that's wonderful. And now you can decide where do you think is the best home for the book who is going to do the best job of bringing the book to market? Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah. And I'm also thinking that, I mean, just from a business perspective, I mean, if, if 'cause at this stage, you shouldn't be too much of the author wanting to get anymore, but you should more put your business hat on and say, okay, what makes sense here? And I'm almost because I, I'm not an expert on this, but I've heard like the advantage. They usually are pretty low when you are first starting out. And what I don't quite like about that to be honest is the fact that the publisher has absolutely zero skin in the game and it's so if they give you a very, very low, a advanced than well, they'll probably just leave it for you to figure out how to market and they're not going to throw as much money behind it. Jesper (36m 15s): So, and, but I guess that's more like common nowadays as well. 'cause the publishing houses probably also struggling a bit with finances and so on. So they put all the money on the big name authors and then everybody else gets us very small piece of the pie. But it is that right to you think. Yeah. 3 (36m 33s): I mean Jane (36m 35s): With the book publishing and sometimes it's hard to talk about it. Generally 'cause each publisher can operate so differently from another one in the us, for example, there's tour, which is really well known in the science fiction and fantasy space. And you know, if you had an offer from them, even if it were a low advance, it could be really helpful to be published by them just because of the really significant direct to consumer community that they have access to that you wouldn't. So there's a lot of this decision variables here. W I think its true that a low advance means the publisher isn't going to be as focused on getting a return on their investment. Jane (37m 21s): But I think people aren't as M there not as gracious with publishers as they might be of other businesses, like let's say Silicon valley startups have a 90% failure rate, but we don't go around criticizing them. Well maybe in recent years we do. But once upon a time we do, they go around criticizing them so much. We called them innovative and disruptive, even though the failure rate was high book publishing has always had a pretty high failure rate. I think the penguin random house CEO, Marcus Stoli recently said, it's a 50% failure rate. And by failure, meaning this book did not earn back the money that was invested into it, not just the advanced, but the time spent by the staff and the printing costs. Jane (38m 6s): But he doesn't see that as a failure of publishing. You just use it as, this is a very risky business that we engage in every book as a startup in his mind. And I think it's true. And it's like creating a new marketing plan from scratch every single time. Unless, you know, you have imprints that are devoted to a single genre, which is why I mentioned tour because I think those sorts of publishers, do you have an advantage in that they're going after a similar group of readers with a lot of the things that their publishing when you get so big five publishing where it's really random, like it's all sorts of books that are coming out. I think that's when it gets very, very, very difficult. Jesper (38m 50s): Yeah. And I want to return to something you said earlier about the publishing houses there, because if, if we're looking at the big five, w we have a chef HarperCollins, Macmillan, penguin, random house and Simon and Schuster, oh, that's probably the five very big one. But so if we haven't agent and where they probably gone on to these big five and nothing happens early on, you mentioned about maybe looking at the sort of next tier down kind of publishing houses. So in what is like the general view on doing something like that and having your agent ghost to go in to those, how do they age and just do that automatically, just you guys just go to everybody automatically or how, how do you approach that Jane (39m 43s): It's going to vary by agent, but most agents are gonna go to mid size houses and there really let's say prestigious or established smaller processes. So for example, in the U S there's a grey Wolf and Grove Atlantic, which were both independent publisher's on the literary ends of things. There are considered small by big five standards, but they punch way above their weight. You know, the, when the book of prizes and get on the bestseller lists and they tend to invest in there authors over many, many, many years. So even if your first book doesn't do well, even if your first five books don't do well, they're probably going to stand by you because they believe in what you're doing as, as an artist, because they believe in literature with a capital L. Jane (40m 31s): So I think that's the advantage you get. When you start working outside of the big five model, you get people who are in it for lots of different reasons, some are in it just for the commercial money, bit of it. And there has to be some focus on that or else the publisher won't stay in business, but many publishers, the smaller they get, the more mission-oriented they are, are they're in the business to bring attention and Lite to certain types of literature or stories. So it can be very satisfying. You could have a closer relationship with your editor and if they can be more agile, more experimental, more open to collaboration, easier to reach in communicate with than your big five publisher. Jesper (41m 10s): And you also need to have to trust the agent that he doesn't go out and query some sort of a very small press somewhere that actually has no, no mussels to, to, to use or whatever. And the market, right. I mean, I guess the agent needs to, he, he should know that, that kind of thing, right. Jane (41m 29s): They ought to, yes. I have seen some shocking sails from agents to really small presses or what I would even consider hybrid publishers where there might be no advanced or even the author is asked to pay some money. And I think of how you did not need an agent for that deal. And that, that was a total waste of everyone's time. So if you have a docent agent, at some point, there are going to say, look, I I've gone to everyone that I think you should publish with. There might be some other publishers out there that could be smaller, or maybe, you know, the places that offer very small advances. It's not worth my time to go to these places, but if you want to be my guest, so you might reach that point. Jane (42m 13s): Yeah. Jesper (42m 14s): Yeah. And at that point, I guess the new self-published that novel and you ride a new one on, and then you gave that one to B and say, okay, try this one instead of, I guess, Jane (42m 22s): Oh yes. Age agents, a good one should have a conversation with you about, okay. Let's what's next? What are you doing? What's your next book? Do you have anything else in the drawer? Like what do we think the next move is? Jesper (42m 33s): Oh yeah. Yeah, indeed. Okay. So, but let's assume that everything goes well, of course, because we want the success stories here and you then get that offer. And you mentioned it a bit earlier on as well, Jayne about the, the contract itself. And obviously the agent should be able to, to some extent advice you on, on the contract. But I, at the same time, I've heard some really like awful examples of what might be in those contracts. So what I mean, well, I guess what I'm getting at is I'm not a hundred percent convinced that you can just trust that the agent will understand everything and tell you everything you probably need to will read everything also to small letters yourselves. Jesper (43m 16s): And if you don't understand them, maybe even get a lawyer to look at it as something. But what, what, what's your view on that? I mean, usually Jane (43m 23s): You can trust the agent to take care of the contract in its entirety and explain to you what every claws means and what you are getting into. And where are you might be making compromises or thinks that where you're agreeing to something that's less than ideal. Usually some of the most important parts of the contract to negotiate are what would S what would be, what would be an unacceptable manuscripts scenario. So like where there is a difference of opinion between you and the publisher about what, what changes to make what's acceptable, what happens in those instances? So that should be carefully negotiated. As you know, most agents are going to try to ensure that you don't have to give back the advance. Jane (44m 6s): If there's some disagreement that would lead to no publication of the book, you don't want to be in that vulnerable position of having to give back money you've already spent. And there is, there are lots of ramifications of negotiating that well, and most agents are very focused on getting that part, right? The other big issue has to do with reversion of rights. So, and again, often, if things haven't gone well, but the publisher, you want to be able to sever that as cleanly in as quickly as possible. So the reversion of rights clause governs how that happens when it can happen, how long it takes, etcetera. You know, those are the areas that every agent knows about. You wouldn't have to have, I think, be concerned about what their doing on that front I'm. Jane (44m 52s): But of course there are lots of things like, oh, you know, what are the royalty escalators? Like? How does your royalty increase the sales increase? What are the different percentages for all sorts of sales, which are there, what are the rights sub rights situation's there is your agent going to be handling any of those sales and you could hire a lawyer to help, but they would have to know that publishing standards are, umm, 3 (45m 15s): Or you could also Jane (45m 17s): In the U S if you're a member of the authors Guild, they have a contract service where they'll review any contract at no charge. There might be something similar in other countries where if you go to your author society, they have something comparable. Right. So it doesn't, it doesn't hurt to get another set of eyes, but your age, I mean, that's your agent's job, but that's job number of one is Jesper (45m 38s): To go out. Oh, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe on just to skeptical, but because I'm, I'm also just thinking that the agent has he sort of playing he or she is sort of playing on to horses at the same time here. I know on one hand they, of course the one to have a good relationship with the author. 'cause the author is the client, but at the same time, they also want to close that deal with the publishing house, because that's the only way they're going to and earn some money on all the on hours they spend already. So I'm just a bit skeptical that you can a hundred percent just trust their word all the time. And maybe they sort of smooth out small things. He in there. Yeah. It's not a big deal that you can, you can access this. And because then we can close to deal kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm too skeptical. Jane (46m 23s): I think where those sorts of issues come more into play is when the books are already under contract. And, you know, there were differences of opinion or there is some tension between you and the publisher. I think there are the agent is I find them, there are going to try and smooth it over to as best they can because they don't want to lose the relationship with the editor or with the publisher because they have more books to sell presumably to those people. And they don't want to burn a bridge. So I think agents still do work. I don't use the word attack dog slightly, but you know, some of them are very aggressive on behalf of their clients and they have too much power to be pushed around by a publisher and they can, they could say, look, I'm not going to bring you my next book by whatever new, huge talent there is. Jane (47m 12s): So they have a lot of it depends on the agent, how much leverage they have in that regard, but they can, you know, give editors' the cold shoulder, uhm, with the contract or something that might offer a reassurance is that you usually agents deal with publishers multiple times over the years. And they end up having an negotiated boiler plate for their agency. So you're not starting from scratch each time you get the benefit of every other contract that agent has negotiated with that publisher. Right. And, and then they'd make some changes that are unique for you in your project. Jane (47m 51s): So anything that, you know, that would be of concern to the opp, to you, it's going to be of concern to the other clients. So that's why I'm less worried about the issue. Jesper (48m 4s): No. Okay. No, that's good to you clarify that because if it's probably in just me being to skeptical, but I'm also not in use to that kind of, that part of the publishing world a as you are. So it, so that was good too. You could clarify that, but, but Looker Jane we've already sort have been from the beginning to the end of the process and we could probably keep on from on our wire if we needed to hear, but you shared so much, very good and insightful information. So I was just wondering if, if people want to learn more about you and your advice and , do you want them to go? Jane (48m 45s): My website is the best place. That's Jane friedman.com. You can find out all the of courses I offer the book's, the newsletters it's all mentioned. They're Jesper (48m 55s): Excellent. And the thank you so much for your time, Jane. It was a pleasure talking to you today. Jane (48m 60s): Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Jesper (49m 3s): Alright. So next Monday, Autumn will be back in and we haven't quite decided what are we going to talk about yet? But I think it's going to be one out of funny top 10 lists. Narrator (49m 15s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.  

Dominic asked a question in our Patreon group and we answered with this episode! Does race and gender really matter in fantasy? We take a look at the history of fantasy up through modern trends, looking at how fantasy has changed and is still changing. This simple question leads to an outcome that surprises Jesper... how important do you think race, gender, and sexuality are in fiction? And a big thank you to Dominic for the question! We really appreciate having you with us on Patreon. ❤️ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn Jesper (35s): This is episode 139 of the am writing fantasy podcast and a while back at, well, to be honest, this is, yeah, Quite some time ago, we received the question from one of the patrons supporters. Dominic asked if race sex like male and female and sexuality matters and is relevant to think about when writing fantasy fiction. And that is what we aim to answer today. Or at least you have some thoughts on that because we noticed how the same topic actually came up a few times in The Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So it's apparently something and above author's are wondering about, Autumn (1m 16s): Oh, I'm looking forward to this one. And actually in a couple of books I've read recently, you kind of prepared me for this one. So I think will have some stuff to discuss, but first, so how were things going in Denmark? Good. Jesper (1m 34s): Well, it's going fine. I actually started a kayaking course. So the other day. Yeah. Well, I, I S I think I emailed you a bit about it, but we never got to talk about how we went Autumn (1m 51s): In curious. So yeah, you're out in the ocean and Denmark. This it is August, so that's okay. Jesper (2m 1s): Yeah. It's okay. I mean, of course you, you have all the gear on and so on. And so it was that because it's called, but there was, and we went out on Tuesday. So a couple of days ago at the point of recording this and that there was a lot of waves and a lot of wind. So it was, and so they do like a five to six weeks course where you sort of learned all the techniques in how to save yourself if you fall into the water and all that kind. So you, you, you do a lot of practicing over like five or six weeks, and then once you're done, you are sort of released, not that you can't just go out as you please, even, I think even after that, but you, you can go out with some other people in and, and so on, but at, on Tuesday than I was out for the first time, and we were to post to sort of first just sale a bit, but there was way too many waves. Jesper (2m 57s): So it's like the instructor said, no, lets just go back closer to the, to the shore because this is way too much waive here. Ah, so we, we did that and the, all my way back I fell in for the first time, which was not on purpose. Oh Autumn (3m 14s): No, it's a good practice though. Jesper (3m 16s): Oh. And then we got back and then yeah. And at that point we haven't even practiced how to save ourselves. So anything so, but it was very shallow water 'cause we were trying to keep close to the beach, but because of all the wave's, so if I could just, you know, stand on there on the bottom of Maya. So we, it was not so bad. And then when you were supposed to Trane saving ourselves, so he set, like we needed to tip over on purpose M two times each. Oh. And then, you know, gate get out of the kayak while you were basically upside down. So underneath water, get out of the kayak and get up and turn it around. Jesper (3m 57s): And then he showed some techniques on how to climb on, on board again, which is pretty difficult. I have to say, because you were out in the water, in the kayak, his shaking and not very sturdy either. And you had to climb on border with that if that's not easy, but M but he showed some techniques to do that. A and so I think the first time I try it, I actually got up on the kayak and the knot plumped into the water on the other side of, if I was just back in the water. Autumn (4m 28s): Oh, that's great. I wish I had a recording of that. Oh, well you make me miss my to practice things. Yeah, yeah. Jesper (4m 41s): Yes. And then I did my two practice, a, you know, tipping over on purpose. And then he said like the Indian, he said, okay, I think that's it w we will stop for today. Let's say go back. And then we, we were sailing back and then I, I accidentally tipped over again. So I ended up in the water for the fifth time then. Well, Autumn (4m 60s): You got you're dunking in that. That's great. Oh, oh, you definitely making me. When I, before I met my husband, like I had done whitewater kayaking and there was never a particularly good at the roles, but, you know, I was used to going down rapids. I was doing all that kind of stuff. And we got to me, it was in, it was a lot of lakes. What we both got CK at kayaks and they had a 17 foot sea kayak, but it had a rudder on the back. So yeah. Some of those techniques on how to get into it and I'm like, oh, you don't want to watch out for the rudder. But yeah, I would, we left, I sold mine. He still has his cause it's a fiberglass one in, and it's gorgeous. Autumn (5m 40s): It's so much later than mine, but I miss the times we've had on the water, you know, me, I've had sailboats like KX, we'd still have canoes. So I like the water. That sounds like a lot of that. Oh Jesper (5m 54s): No, I like it at two one. And, and you, you can, you can sell some really, you know, some of you are very nice trips, right? You that you can do on the sale down on some very nice like streams where you can go and watch some nature in while we were sailing as if it's very nice. I think that like it, but I have to say Tuesday evening when I came back and I had taking my shower and I was back in the couch, I had a bit of soul muscles study. But if it's a good way to get some exercise in as well, Autumn (6m 25s): There it is. You making me miss it. And you will do this. One of these times, there is actually a trail call the Maine coastal kayak trail in main. And I forget, I guess too, like 200 different Highlands. You go to an island every night and you camp and you just keep going down the trail. So you and your wife and your kids, you're going to have to come over and we're going to have to do it because its been my goal to do that. Ever since I moved to Maine was deleted part of the Maine kayak trial. So I think that this might work out a lot of these days it could be really fun. So that would be cool. Okay. Well we get to the gut plans, Jesper (7m 0s): But I'm like, Autumn (7m 2s): Oh well I'm, I'm solitary again. As my husband's off, back up in Maine guiding people on moose, watching tours, canoe watching canoe in whitewater rafting. So if I'm getting all these gorgeous pictures of Lake's in the sunsets and moose and I'm sitting in our little cabin and very dry Vermont working on in graphic design thinking to get myself back up to me and as soon as I can, so we're starting to figure that out so that maybe he'll have less of a commute when he goes to work. Instead of being seven hours away, we, we could maybe be a couple of hours away from home. That'd be nice, but otherwise good doing some fun designs. Autumn (7m 43s): And we're actually in the middle. I dunno if you can hear the rain, but if anyone hears in the thunder, interesting sounds we're in the middle of the end of a tropical system. So we've had this height. It's like not hot the humidity, but its high humidity in damp and its just been raining like the rainforest all day. It's its very nice, but its also very stinky. So I'm, I'm expecting you to the tree to fall over or some thing again. Oh I know. And a bear coming to the cabinet or something. Hopefully not because I don't really want the dog and the bear to say too much. Autumn (8m 24s): Usually every time we dealt with bears, I almost always had the dog like some of our high. So I was never that worried except for one time, literally in this property we were walking to the main house and I saw this creature moving through the field next door in, running into the woods, like running towards us. It was going across our path and I've just looked at me. I'm like, damn, what is there a Shetland pony rules? And then I realized it wasn't a Shetland pony. It was one of the biggest black bears I have seen outside of a Labrador in, I mean I've seen some there seeing a huge, even in a grizzly while we are in dead horse, Alaska, what? This was like at least 300 pounds, he was massive. Autumn (9m 4s): And we had the dog with us and he was ahead of us. And he was well-trained if you dropped out and you kind of throw your arms open and you call for him and he's like, oh, so he turns around and comes running for me. And I'm just focusing in on our dog while there is massive black bear runs right behind them. I'm just like, holy, oh, like I said, I had a little fizzy gig. This was a man. He wasn't even on the size of this thing, but it was really cool to get the sealer bear. What I saw that I mostly saw it blurry behind the dogs come back to the, for a cookie. Jesper (9m 46s): Well, at, at at least that dog is very quick. I mean, I mean even if the, even if the bear wanted to attack it, I guess that the doc had run away. I mean, I think unless it's the stupid enough to fight back, Autumn (9m 58s): Oh, he's a terrier. So we might get an in his head that I can take it out. But Jesper (10m 5s): Tell him, I said that you want to fight me. Autumn (10m 8s): Oh, do you have food as there at the end of this? Because there's are no food. It's not worth it Narrator (10m 22s): Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (10m 26s): So Autumn, I thought I would bring something slightly different for this section. Oh, Autumn (10m 31s): Okay. I liked do you know? I like changes what's up. Jesper (10m 36s): Yeah. I actually found an app that helps to improve your habits and getting rid of bad habits. It's basically like gave me five habits. Autumn (10m 50s): That sounds kind of cool. This, this thing. Jesper (10m 56s): So yeah, it was because doing the you and your summer holidays, as I was sort of thinking, you know, I do a lot of what is cardio exercising, you know, running and stuff like that, but I don't do very much. So in terms of, of, I don't even know what it is called, like, but do you know like bodies, strength, exercise, and kind of, you know, like core so strange. I don't know how much of that. I, I just mostly do. Oh yeah. I mostly just do running and I thought I should be doing more of a muscle strength than, and body strength and stuff like that, but I've always found that kind of exercise and quite boring. Jesper (11m 37s): So I never get around to do it because it's like, ah, nah, I don't want to. So during the summer holidays I started, I, I must find a way where I can sort of motivate myself to do this stuff that I don't want to do. And then I found this app or this app you afford. So especially in, just for the phone that you just downloaded from the app store, but in his called habit RPG. So already from the name, you can hear that it's, it's a game basically. Autumn (12m 5s): But if it's Jesper (12m 6s): It's pretty cool. Oh yeah, because it's pretty cool because you basically create a character like it's a role-playing game, but so you create a character and you as sort of M you leveling up your characters, so you put it in your own habits. Ah, you can either put it in habits that you want to do. Or you can put that in habits that you wanted to not do right in. I don't want you, if you decide you put it in yourself and then you set your own schedule for like, it could be that I want to do on, I want to not do this thing every day for whatever it may be all. And you can put it in several as well. And you define if it's difficult or easy and so on. And then the more difficult it is, the most experienced point that your character will get from completing it. Jesper (12m 51s): And so basically every time that you've done to have that you wanted to do you do you click in the app and you say, okay done. And then your character gets experienced points and he levels up and you can buy equipment for him and all of weapons. And you can go on question and fight boss's in all kinds of stuff. So there's fighting. Like you don't need to sit down and press anything. You just, you just say, I want to fight this boss. And then if you complete enough of your habits, then you'll the feet, the bar. So it's oh, that's awesome. It's pretty in, in a sense it's pretty primitive, right? It is a way to just game-ify your getting good habits. So I showed it to my sons and they've downloaded this as well. Jesper (13m 33s): And they, they, they put it in all kinds of habits that they want, they needed to do like a, we need to read more. So they put it in like, and I have to read 10 pages every day and stuff like that. So they put that stuff in, into their habit RPG. And so it's, I think it's pretty cool. So I, I thought I would share that 'cause some people might find something like we got useful. Autumn (13m 53s): Oh, I think that sounds really useful. I'm always trying to get myself off of it, the computer in, out the door Morris. So that could be a good one. Usually, you know, the dog encourages me, but he's not exactly high M running or anything. Exercise. He can only go so far being so small. So that would be kind of, I might have to look into it too. Jesper (14m 15s): Yeah. It's, it's actually quite cool. Especially for those people who, who like role-playing games and stuff like that, you know, it, this, this will be write down there early and the once you get to the level 10, you can choose. If you want to be a major or a warrior or a range, you're all kinds of this guy. It's Autumn (14m 32s): Pretty cool. It is. I could see this totally transforming someone's writing. You can, you know, you're leveling up your role playing game while getting your writing done. So yeah. You can Jesper (14m 42s): Put it in. Yeah. Oh yeah. You could put it in your writing sprints, if you want to, like, I want to write 500 words per day. You could put that in to you and say, OK. And then I put that in and every time you do what you press that you've done it. I like it. Autumn (14m 60s): Anything else? Oh, oh, I don't think I have anything exciting to announce. I should probably check out stuff, but like, it's been a little hectic. I will have to put that into my role playing habit game. Jesper (15m 15s): Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So it'd be at, let's move on Narrator (15m 20s): And on to today's topic. So, Jesper (15m 24s): So race, sex, and sexuality in fantasy. And well, to be honest, Autumn, I'm not sure that in terms of its relevance, that it's any more or less relevant than in fantasy than it is in any other or do you think Autumn (15m 43s): I would say it's probably, I agree. It's probably just as important in every genre, but maybe fantasy because of its own history in where it stems from has its own hiccups and problems to overcome might be a way of putting it in what way? That, like, if we say that fantasy started with token, which I agree with, most of the fantasy is a genre did start with him. But fantasy, as a type of storytelling has been going on since, you know, go back to ancient Greece, even prior to that, story's a fantastical nature in a magical beast. Autumn (16m 25s): And the incredible powers have been along for around for a long, long time. But if you start with Tolkin and you do read the actual, oh, Lord of the rings, there's very few female characters or absolutely no sex. And there is a lot of instances that if you say this is what our traditions, what were based on, and you looked at what modern readers, like there is a lot to overcome. Jesper (16m 58s): Yeah. Especially in now that would just have some the holidays. You know, I have been reading a lot of work over the summer holidays and at least if we were talking about like the sex scenes and stuff like that, not that this erotic erotica bud, but in fences, you novels, like just the fact that you spent almost any time at all talking about what the characters are doing, you know, in a bedroom kind of things there it's, it is very, very limited what there is in it's actually quite rare. I would almost say that in a fantasy book that there Autumn (17m 33s): Is anything I like that. Yeah. I would say unless you're getting into fantasy romance, there's some babies in some dark fantasy. And I think that there might be a little bit more, but yeah, you're getting into specific sub genres, but if you're in sort of the and epic or high, I think there's a lot less though. Again, it depends on if it's leaning towards Y a or if it's leaning towards adults. Jesper (18m 2s): Yeah. But even the stuff that is written for adults, like epic fantasy novels for adults it's there was almost none of it in, in, in those books. And, and I also think that most readers would expect there not to be stuff like that. So to some extent that I think it is important to consider what reader expectations are and, and think about that. But at the same time, I don't see why this, why you couldn't do it like a bit more of this sexy stuff in the book, if you wanted it to. Autumn (18m 38s): I agree. I think there's a definitely room for there's some room for so much. I mean, up until a two books I read recently, I would have said that gender has become almost normalized. There was a time like in the eighties, it was always like the token female you had. I'm all the guys in the question and one token, female, and that's all, there was an almost, I would say almost every book I've picked, picked up since, you know, the digital age of eBooks and E reading, that there was always been a nice cadre of women that were well-developed. But then I read two books in the summer and they are horrible for the portrayals of women. Autumn (19m 20s): They were noticeable that all the characters were men or that there's a only bit part's for the women are, they were never point of view characters from the women. And I, in one case, the woman in the story, we were one of the two types. They were either mousy in, quiet, in a little insane, or hard-ass brittle cold and possibly an assassin. And that's it. Those were the only type of woman. And I was like, wow, how did we backslide here? I've heard other authors at her, got male authors say, I don't know how to write women. I've been like, there are people, right? People M you know, everyone's a different, it's not that hard, but then I read these two books. Autumn (19m 60s): So I'm like, wow. Some people really don't know how to write the opposite gender. And then I have to admit, I read a different one. What, actually, one of those, the mail point of view character was so strongly was being in the guy's head in a way that most fantasy books I had never been into the house. If I ever needed the description of what it was like to get kicked in the groin for a guy, oh, this book has several really good passages. So I was like, oh, I have never considered that. And so think about it. I've never read that in a fantasy story before either. That's fascinating. Why don't we hear more about this effect and say, oh, I've been in a male's head, you know, the male night for, in male majors for ages. Autumn (20m 43s): They've never gotten kicked in the groin. Huh? Jesper (20m 49s): Well, yeah, to be fair. I think that's the part that would be difficult to write about the other JIEDDO or if, I mean, that, that, that's going to be difficult to imagine what that feels like. Yes. Autumn (21m 1s): I don't expect a guy to under S to write about what it's like the nurse, a child, but they could probably try to make up something. And, you know, at this point I could always refer back to this book if I ever need to write about a guy getting kicked in the groin because very good descriptions, but those are some of the new, so, yeah. Jesper (21m 22s): Yeah. But I think apart from like the sexuality stuff that if we also touching or talking about racist, because I think the nice thing about fantasy is that it sort of offers us this freedom as author's too, where we imagine new resources, we create new cultures, but we can use those things as tools too, like examine maybe the sexual biases or gender biases or stuff like that. And Macy may use it as a vehicle to, to make the reader well, could we say like reconsider his or her on her own cultural assumptions to some degree. Jesper (22m 4s): So I think that that's what fences, you probably does better than most other genres or Spotify as well. Of course, if you could put that in the same category here, but anything that has to do with like our, the kinds of raises in humans and other kinds of people in cultures where you can start playing with these things and maybe show a different perspective as something that makes the Rita thing a bit of like, huh, oh, I guess, I guess you could look at it like that. You know, because it becomes less dangerous is the wrong word, but it becomes less like confrontational when it's an elf and a dwarf rather than, you know, two humans of, of different skin color or whatever. Autumn (22m 49s): I was going to say the same thing that you are differences in skin color become so much less when you're talking about ELs vs door's versus giants versus cognisent dragons are set in and dragons. So sitting at the trees we have, as you know, so there are, I think I agree fantasy, and sci-fi, you have managed to broaden the differentiation of the different races, but also, you know, there's still a lot of subjectivism that there's still a lot of us versus them, you know, human versus, or especially elves, elves are always Hottie. You know, they don't like the other races or dwarves or always in other ways. Autumn (23m 33s): So there's always those portrayals. And I think it's exciting when we get into something that has different, that kind of, you even breaks those moles and starts making me question why certain species are like this. It's why I do like fantasy that comes up with new, new creatures and characters and races, because it's fun to see something different. And it was a, and it's also, sometimes I know some of the newer fantasy is much more nuanced. I just finished a book, which I didn't even tell you. I finished my first one that we were currently reading. And it was interesting because it actually kind of talked about religion and some of like, it kind of tied up some Judaism, Muslims sort of like this that they had. Autumn (24m 20s): This is one God that has the skin, especially woman's flesh, its just like, oh my goodness. So my you don't cover them head to toe. Don't even talk about like they say the problem of writing along in sex, when you came, you used the word sex is, but it was interesting to look at, it had to have that pulled apart and it was literally, it wasn't even a different race. So they just stuck with humans for the whole book. And I'm like, this is really interesting. I think I have a much better understanding of this mindset and when it's being forced on other people in why other people are trying to force it on other people, I really thought the book was well written in that way. And if it was nice because it was a fantasy world somewhere totally different, it didn't use, you use the totally different God just to kind of pull that out elements at if you were paying attention and you're like, oh, oh this is the sort of probably what inspired them. Autumn (25m 14s): And that is so interesting to read. Jesper (25m 22s): Yeah. I think that either, if it's like very deep, world-building where it really has nothing to do with like cultures or races or whatever you want to call it here on earth, but it's just so well developed that you can actually understand Y you know, a certain made of raises behaving the way that they do and how they act toward the other genders or if it's really, really deeply built. I really enjoyed at all. I also enjoy. Or if it's, if it's actually to show that you can almost, you, you can sort of recognize that this is probably built on, on, on this, this kind of this culture or this religion or something from, from real life. Jesper (26m 12s): But then it just starts to sort of explore the, some different viewpoints on it. Or maybe it makes you sort of understand maybe where these people are coming from me. Not necessarily that, that do you agree from it, from reading it, but at least you can sort of, you start seeing their perspective and you can translate that perspective into real life in some ways, I guess, okay. I, I can sign, they kind of see ware in their culture of this makes sense of something. But I kind of like that if, if it's either, oh, I think the stuff just sort of told a plumber's in the middle where it's just this machine thing and it may be based off some reality, but it doesn't quite either as it's, it's almost not well-built enough either that you can sort of map any of the two sides together. Jesper (26m 60s): So I think those are the things that I like the, the least, but it's of course on all of the matter of taste, bud, but I just like, if there is a bit of intention behind it, Autumn (27m 12s): Yes. I think the intention is always the importance and it is interesting to watch an author grow because I always, that was told you, I just let red many of lay BARDA goes M novel's. So the growth of stories, and I thought her world building was not top of the notch. You know, if you could obviously tell which parts were from where, what of this world that she was drawing from, you know, Russia Nazis, there was some neat ones. It was sort of like Africa wild west. I'm like, oh, that was kind of a cool thing to lump together, but it was not really original, but it, as a story grow, we grew and the world's grew more in depth than she explored. The more I became more authentic too, where she was when you stopped seeing what it was based on. Autumn (27m 58s): And I thought that was good, but it definitely, it took the first trilogy to get there. But what she was incredible, one of the best authors I've read about was her characters in her dynamics and actually in another aspect, she was so good when I mentioned she's really good at plot twists, but she's good at character twist, like looking at race's. So she talked, she had transgender or transsexual homosexual, every bisexual EV I think there was one that might've been more asexual. And so almost every diversity that his modern and his really out there with specially with the younger readers, this as a white book, and yet she covers all of these gender and stereotypic topics so well, and every character is, is unique. Autumn (28m 43s): And it's not even that, it's not like when I was reading books as a kid that might deal with homosexuals or asexuals or something, it was always kinda like, you know, if that was so controversial in her world, no, it just is. It's just, just the way it is an accepted. I'm like, this is nice. It's nice to get into that mindset where this is not something you need to bring up and tear her apart and explain it as just like, oh no, that's fine. That's fine till you're a woman, but you would rather be a man. Okay. We're good. Just like this, this wonderful. This is perfect. So that was one thing that you said in her character, his and how they relate it to the world in related to each other. Autumn (29m 26s): I see why she's doing as well as she is, because she's very brilliant in now that her world is getting deeper. Its really good. But yeah, if when you get a chance to read her, as you're going to have to take a little breath every once in a while, because there's definitely parts of the world, you'd be like, oh good, have done more to it. But I think she's a great example of looking at genders and the stereotypes and characters and you know, again, she doesn't have different races. She doesn't have elves and dwarves in all of those things that keeps with humans. And I think that's becoming a lot more of a trend. I'm seeing, you know, some of the high fantasy books going that way, but there's a lot of books that are coming out there. Autumn (30m 8s): It's just people just humans' and just exploring the topic and be in religion or gender, why they were mean to each other, what are the cultural differences? Why are we fighting? And those are all of a hidden Subutex. And it's like, wow, this is, this is different. And I kind of think that's so special in its own way, Jesper (30m 31s): But that was also a bit of what I meant when I said that I'm in my fantasy in this regard and makes you reflect a bit about that, your own opinions to people who are of a different sexual orientation than yourself. If you know, reading a hundred thousand words about these people or however long the book is, but, but you are spending a considerable amount of time in the head of these characters and you start to understand or at least see how they live their life and, and what it means to them. And, and that's where I think it really matters a lot of these kinds of things because it helps us become better people basically. Jesper (31m 15s): 'cause we start to understand that. I mean that this is what reading dusty people in my view, like we, we become better. People, stories heal people because you, you, you, you become more in empathic towards others because you start understanding how they feel and so on. And so I think that that is all very good. But at the end of the day, I'm also thinking now that we're talking about it, that if we are talking about a topic like sex or race or sexuality and stuff like that in, in books, what it really comes down to at the end of the day is just a conversation about characters actually. You know, because with you, it is just the matter of these characters. Jesper (32m 0s): They are who they are and their experiences through the life that they live influence who they are. So the person and they influence their surroundings, but they aren't just people. Autumn (32m 14s): No, that's so true. And it is also, you have characters who, you know, they overcome, they get to be friends with people they might not have thought of before. And so maybe you start seeing that other side, it's really, it's up to authors. And again, you could be maybe a very narrow mindset author where something is right, and something is wrong. And that's what you want to put in your story. But to be authentic to that, you should understand the other side as well. But I would say a lot of fantasy authors have at least the ones that I read are a very liberal and they were trying to make you see, people are people and life is living. You know, whether it's a sentiment tree or a dragon or your next door neighbor who you really just can't stand, but there are a person than they have feelings. Autumn (33m 1s): And so if that comes out in fantasy, that we do our best to understand it. And in your right, the science, there is a bit of actually quite a few studies about readers and reading. And it shows that people who read a lot of books actually have more empathy and they understand we live a hundred, you know, a thousand different lives, but through the stories. So we understand people in can transport ourselves into someone else's head so much easier as a reader. I haven't seen the studies as authors, but I would assume it probably carries over 'cause we really, as an author, you really spend time in heads. I've whether it's a villain or like you always bring up that politician that I just could not get into his head. Autumn (33m 45s): I am not meant for politics. Did you learn something about the strengths and weaknesses of other people by putting yourself in their heads and writing a hundred thousand words in there? Point of view. And I've always said my FA my favorite character is the one who's point of view I'm writing in it at this moment. I don't care if they were the worst character in the room were the best character in the room. But they're my favorite one, because I am going to tell the story to the best of my ability to tell their story the best way I can. And so when you do that, you do transform yourself and you open yourself up to other possibilities. And that is the power of story is to be able to maybe bring some understanding the world in I've said before, it's changed fantasy change. Autumn (34m 34s): The reading I did as a teenager changed who I became because I grew up in a very conservative, very small minded community and I was reading it. It wasn't even dragon Lance Mercedes Lackey. I was totally the one in who I read some things about, you know, a woman. I still remember the scene, a woman who was selling a was a prostitute and they were writing buy in the one person it's like, oh, well that is so low of her. And I was like, she has nothing else to sell, but herself, she isn't that bad of shape in that out of poverty. And it kinda like, this is a slap in the face. I'm like, so yeah, this isn't like, it's a moral choice. She has no other choice. And it made me start questioning things from a very young age and wondering about the stuff I was being taught and whether it was right and how I wanted to view the world. Jesper (35m 27s): Yeah. I think that's, you, you, you were saying a lot of true things too, because essentially, and like you say, if the character, they didn't have any choice, if you, that the fact that the customer didn't have any choice, then that gives you a new perspective. But on the flip side, have that, for example, we've, we've been doing a lot of, or still are doing a lot of research about pirate history and stuff like that, because we want to write a, some stories about pirates in the future. And with regard to all that research as well, we both watch the Netflix show is the pirate kingdom. Oh yeah. I'm and there are, for example, it really rocked me the wrong way. Jesper (36m 12s): That's how they protect, portray and Bonny in that series. There 'cause, if you have like, like you were ex just explaining that from that book, if you understand why to coat it is in that situation. And they act that way because maybe they don't have any choice or maybe they have chosen this because it made sense or it aligns with their motivations or whatever, then it is fine. But in the Netflix show, for example, I really, I must say I really enjoyed the show, so I, I'm not putting the showdown because it is, I think it's really informative and a very good show. If you like pirates, then go and watch it. But the one thing that I did not like what was the on Bonnie pot, because they basically portray her. Jesper (36m 55s): Like, she's just as a kind of prostitute that just runs around and does the, you know, prostitute thing in quotation marks here. Yeah. But, but if they don't give her any sort of motivation or explain anything, so afterwards during the summer holidays hear I got a bit of annoyed with it. So I actually went and I found a nonfiction book about Anne Bonny and her life. And then I bought that and read it. And my God, she Autumn (37m 21s): Is so fascinating. It's so fascinating, Jesper (37m 25s): But they just did not get that across at all. And that a Netflix show, which was the shame, but the, the whole point that I was just trying to make here is that it doesn't really matter if a character is of a certain sexuality, or if there are in a certain situation whereby they are doing things that normally would be frowned upon. But if you can make sure that it is clear why day in the situation and why, what they're doing is aligned with maybe their motivation is just to me, I need to do this to get out of this situation. Or, you know, long-term, I, I, if I can just earn enough money, I can buy my ticket out of here or whatever it may be. But as long as it's clear, why are they doing what they're doing? Jesper (38m 9s): You can easily have characters who are doing things or are acting certain ways, or maybe that's just the way that AI on the personality. But if, if the Rita at least understand, don't, don't necessarily agree with it. But if they at least understand why, then you can get away with all of these things. And then at the same time, you will make the reader start, think a bit about, well, maybe these kinds of people who does this thing that I don't like, whatever that may be, that maybe they're not too bad, all of them. Right. And, and thus, you, you will start healing the world that bit. Autumn (38m 45s): So just a bit, I hope. And I do you think to play on me to add to that is that I think a lot of traditional fantasy up until possibly recently, the people who are different we're changing or leaving there society because they we're like the cultural as normal. And so they were going to find a group where they're accepted. I think that's something a lot of us feel, but I have noticed a shift where there's a lot more stories where no, they want to speak up for the other people in their society who feel the same way, who are also put it down. They don't want to just, if it's not the classic tropes is like, like I said, this, the token female, she's the only one who wants to be your hero. Autumn (39m 29s): And she is the only one who wants to go carry a sword. Well, no, now she's speaking up for her best friend and the sisters that are out there who are, they should be given the choice. And I've noticed that a lot on several, the books that I've read recently. And so I see that as a cultural shift where it's like, people don't want to be the only one. They know that there's enough other people in the planet, even if its a fantasy world there or not, the only one and they want to help everyone. And I think that's also exciting. And again, I think it's interesting. Like if I was studying this in school, you could actually track the difference, the society and the different generations and how we're trying to make things better and save for a lot of different people. Autumn (40m 12s): And it shows and our fiction. And if that is the importance of why it is in there, that's why when society goes crazy, they start outlawing and then burning books. That's why I wasn't Plato who said, you know, basically books are one of the things. If you wanna have a controlled society, you don't let people read because as soon as they start reading, they start understanding each other's so much better. So yeah, they might be fantasy, but it's incredibly powerful literature and it'll change people's minds. Jesper (40m 46s): Yeah. Oh, well it still happens today in some parts of the world where you're not allowed to read whatever you want. Exactly. And yeah, it's not even that foreign. Yeah. Autumn (40m 54s): It's not, unfortunately, I mean there is, we were just talking about other current cultural things going on in, you know, there is a lot of societies where women are not allowed to read or the different people are not taught to read and it's to control them. Once you give people the ability to read, they start questioning and they start learning and they might learn something that you can't control. And I think that's, that's why reading and literacy is so important. And that's why as authors, it's also important that the things we put into our stories, it's one thing to tell the tale, I'm all for a really good story. But I, even if it's not an overt a thing I put into the plot, I think my world view of who is of, of accepting people in protecting life, in caring for people just comes through because those tend to me, the characters I create, or I tend to push all the characters that way eventually. Autumn (41m 51s): And the other ones just get tossed off Jesper (41m 58s): This entire conversation. Just got a lot deeper than I thought, Autumn (42m 4s): Oh, well I think that we can blame Dominic. It is all your fault. Thank you for asking this question. But yeah. So I guess it was an easy question to answer. Does it make a difference? What gender sex, race, ethnicity, or whatever you want to call you or your characters? Is it a big deal to have those in your fantasy? It's possibly the biggest deal if you want to change the world. Jesper (42m 31s): Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's about creating characters and what race and sex and sexuality they are, that that's part of my being. And so it is very important. And to me, it's, it's not something you just pick at random, you know, trying to think a bit about it when you create your characters and see if you can incorporate something that, and now that you need to force any of it into the, in the story, if it doesn't belong there, but if it would make sense or if it would give a different perspective to some of the storytelling and basically enhance the story, then why not use it. And also during your world building, I think it would be good to think about some things and think about how would it influence society. Jesper (43m 12s): How would it influence other characters? If this couch is very different from everybody else, how, how would that influence relationship's and so on? And how do you society view of this group of people or this particular race or whatever it may be. You know, all those sorts of things are very important to think about. So does it matter? Yes. I think it matters a lot. I agree. Autumn (43m 35s): I think we can wrap it up there that this is, this is important and I agree, especially world-building in should come from there. You should not just pick because diversity is a good buzz word. And because you want to be popular around among the Gentiles, you're going to have someone who's transgender, don't do it to be popular or to get the sales, do it because you are care about the topic you've researched it, you understand it, it fits the character and it's the world you want to create. Don't just do it to try to, you know, fit in for the other readers. Do your homework readers will know. They'll know what the difference. Jesper (44m 12s): Yeah. The story is king. As we like to say some times Autumn (44m 17s): Or queen. Jesper (44m 18s): Well next Monday I have an excellent interview lined up for you. I'm talking to Jane Friedman about traditional publishing contracts. Narrator (44m 25s): How did you get an agent and many other things? If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

What is the difference between preselling your book and making it available as a preorder on sites like Amazon? Is one better than the other? Tune in to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, episode 138, where Autumn and Jesper share the result of a recent experiment, using the pre sales function as mentioned by Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords, in episode 118.   If you're interested in the $150 discount voucher, to be used for any of the Am Writing Fantasy premium courses, sign up via this link: https://www.subscribepage.com/awfnewsletter   Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (29s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 138 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Back in the eighth episode, 118, Autumn talked to special guests, Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords. And during that conversation, some new tools where shared, which was around how to resell your books as opposed to set up pre-orders or pre-sale as you write and say, presale you books, as opposed to setup, pre-orders like to do on to Amazon. And you have been testing that out, Autumn. Autumn (1m 8s): As always, I'm the perfect Guinea pig for all our experiments. So I tried out for free sales and I have tried out preorders, both on Smashwords in other places. So we have some results to share on some thoughts and tips. If anyone wants to check out this feature and I can't wait to share it, but really today we're both kind of getting back into the driver's seat because you just back from vacation. Jesper (1m 38s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. I mean, we recorded the bunch of episodes before the holidays to carry us through. So in reality, well, for the listener, that sounds like it's only been a week, but for us it's been a month since we last recorded anything. Autumn (1m 51s): Oh, I know you have to record it even late. Cause we had so much stuff to talk about forehand. So yeah, we have a lot Jesper (1m 60s): Of future pants to the future plans to have to talk about Autumn (2m 5s): Definitley, but you have a good vacation. It's been good. Yeah. Jesper (2m 8s): Good vacation. A lot of relaxation and the doing as little as possible apart from reading a ton of books, I think I managed to read five books, which has never happened before or some of them where a fairly short, but there was also a one very long won in between. And so, yeah, and that was good. And the way it's been busy, so busy coming back, I must say a and the, the, the, the thing is that time off work always makes me think about a million new things. So apart from writing stuff, in what we should write about how we should tackle our next series, which we just talked about offline here, I've also filled up my pocket of marketing ideas, primarily like Facebook ads, strategies. Jesper (2m 54s): I think you noticed all in once I started emailing about, can you make new ad images for this and that? Autumn (3m 1s): I know you're on vacation. I started getting some new tasks. So I was like, wait, what? So I'm not on vacation. Doesn't mean you could assign me things. Yeah. It, you know, so it was fun. Oh yeah. Jesper (3m 14s): Yeah. That, that happens. So, you know, I, I stopped thinking once, once I get down, then my brain start thinking about new things. So I think that's good. It's good to take some time off sometimes. Autumn (3m 25s): Yes. I think it is very good. And I have to admit, even though I S I had a total task list that I, I didn't actually get the bottom, have there still few things on my list of things I've meant to do while you're on vacation when we didn't have our normal sessions when we record. So they're still have stuff to do, but I have to be in, I snuck in some extra books and some extra reading as well. So it was nice to meet me. You slow down a little bit and get some reading in it. It was kind of, Jesper (3m 56s): Yeah. And the, the other thing that actually happened while I was on vacation was that like, I got an email from the national soccer association. Oh yeah. And they, yeah. They asked me or they sort of, well, how do you say that? But they suggested in a nice way, because they have a position coming up a as to become a referee Instructure oh, instructor, referee Instructure. So they send me the email and says that we would like you to apply for this position, if you would please consider it really. So, yeah. That's pretty cool. Jesper (4m 36s): So, and of course there is no guarantees that I will get it. I was not the only one, but I think they have, like, that was five people as something on, on that email that they have picked out and say would like you guys to apply for this. But if I understand correctly, I think there are going to hire a couple. So it's not only one person. I think there are going to be a couple of, but yeah. So as we know from the recording, this podcast, all the courses we do with writing and I love teaching. So I think this is excellent. So I would like to become an instruction. And if I'm honest, one day, at some point in the future, I will not be able to run as well anymore. And she catches up with me. Jesper (5m 16s): So maybe teaching would be good to get into. Autumn (5m 19s): Yeah. Oh, I can see that. Let's not talk about age because I'm even older than you. So lets just not, that might be that, you know, it's so flattering to even get an email asking you to apply, but good luck. That would be really kinda cool. We just spend like two hours talking to you. You didn't oh, you're just telling me this now. And I always do this on purpose and I think he like holding out on me. Jesper (5m 46s): Yeah. I could, I could just say it to the listener that a, we just had a two hour like business and writing meeting. And I think I started up by saying, I want to ask Autumn a question and then I did not ask the question until two hours later and I gave her like three teases throughout the two hours that I'm going to come back to the question Autumn (6m 7s): That you didn't know where it was. We go to each other, having to use, I was like, okay, what is this question? And then you have to keep hitting sing about, but if we got through it with the question, we can do it. Yeah. Excellent. Narrator (6m 24s): A week on the Internet with the Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (6m 27s): So Autumn, another thing I want a spring on you here. Autumn (6m 30s): Already? Jesper (6m 32s): Already? We are recording, but the first time in the months, so I'm kind of like coming to the, the gates running now Autumn (6m 40s): That you saved all of these things up on you have in place. This is why you been thinking about while you're on vacation are the things that you can the spring on me. No, I know. Jesper (6m 49s): No, but this is now on probably a month ago because that's how long it's been since we recorded. What did you notice? How Dominick wave in on Patrion on which one of us? One episode 123 where we did the top 10 lists of the worst characters, all the worst people that we could think about teaching magic. Did you see to the, he actually I have sometimes to say about who Autumn (7m 15s): You bring this up 'cause he said you won that's my reading this out. Otherwise you would probably have forgotten about this topic of conversation, Jesper (7m 30s): But he did say something else as well. Yeah. He did say something else as well. And that's where I first my memory, he was saying that the way I was trying to move the goalpost and change the rules of our top, Tim you where I have no idea what he means. That's you, that's not as important either. That was the important thing was that you said you wanted, he said that I was the wind up that episode Autumn (7m 58s): And he apologize to me, but I don't know that it was just one opinion. I'm still holding out for other's Jesper (8m 8s): I'll really oh, patron supporters. Very important. So Autumn (8m 15s): Maybe we can double Waite him. At least Jesper (8m 16s): They have to say, I want to him, that's it. Autumn (8m 18s): Yeah. That's all you need. So know I see how this goes. Oh yeah. Jesper (8m 24s): Oh yeah. A quick reminder here. A as I mentioned in the past few weeks, on the past few weeks of episodes and we might just mention it next week as well, but after that it'll be too late. So this is one of those last kind of reminders now. But we have decided to offer everyone on our email list, a massive discount for either one of our flagship courses. So I want to mention that in the autumn, Autumn (8m 53s): You said either one, you have forgotten your month off, we decided it was going to be for three, either have the three courses Jesper (9m 1s): Three. Yeah. That was you explain what those costs as well. Autumn (9m 5s): Obviously I've kept my mind going in. Was it on vacation? But yeah, so we're going to offer coupon for either the ultimate fantasy writer's guide, which is our premium premier writing Corus, the one-stop shop for everything, from how to write, develop ideas, to marketing and building your author brand and platform to crafting incredible fantasy world, which is our world-building mega chorus, which is so freaking awesome. But it'll take you to sort of along the, you will develop a world, not just for a world, but you're going to actually develop it in conjunction with really feeding into your story and creating a world in a story that are combined and just intricate. Autumn (9m 48s): Or we decided that you remember it's like, that was like the beginning of the previous episode. We decided we would throw in our master mailing list of course as well. So if you have questions on how to, to email marketing and talk to the readers and turn your readers in the super fans, that of course we'll be having a coupon to only if you sign up for it though. Jesper (10m 15s): Yes. So we will be emailing out this voucher. It's going to be $150 off, but if you want to get your hands on it, you'll have to get on the email list fast now because it's going to be super. So you're going to, you are going to be too late. If you don't get on the list quite soon, we have placed in the link in the show notes from where you can do just that. Yeah, but don't linger. Autumn (10m 38s): You don't linger where you are going to be signing up for the next time. Maybe we'll know if we, when we decide to do this again today. Jesper (10m 52s): So we are going to talk about preorder versus presale as we said up at the top. But I think we need to explain what is the difference here? Yeah. Autumn (11m 1s): Think so as to what you, okay. You want me to explain this, right? Jesper (11m 6s): Oh no, no. Well you hear me. Oh, okay. Autumn (11m 9s): All right. You can see if I get it right. So a pre-order I hopefully a lot of authors are familiar with this though. It was interesting when I was talking to mark Coker that he said that a lot of authors still don't use pre-orders and that typically the authors who do use pre-orders tend to be the higher earning one. So I thought that was the kind of an interesting to statistic, but a pre-order his, when you put up your book and you say it's, it shows up on Amazon, it shows up on Smashwords actually Barnes and noble cobalt. All of those platforms do have pre-orders. And so you'll see it often there is the book cover and it'll say a release date and you can go ahead and click the button so that you were buying technically before it is released, you don't get an actual copy of the book. Autumn (11m 58s): You just gets M you get to put on your order or early it's like you don't, you, once it's released, you will be there in the first ones to get it. And most authors, when they do pre-orders often offer a discount. So you're usually buying in. So if you're book is normally four to 99, maybe you're gonna be able to get in 99 cents are 2 99. Then you get a little bit of a discount by ordering it early. And for authors, it's nice because you usually depends on the platform, but often all those sales dumped in on one day was a pre-order often, those first few days after release are the biggest selling days for your book. And that part of that is because you have maybe a month, two month, six months, or even as possible of pre-order where your book shows up as being live. Autumn (12m 43s): Some authors, they make it fun and they use M a fake cover. They will just say like cover coming soon. And they'll do a cover reveal and you can do all this stuff. It's kinda if there's a lot of stuff that goes on with pre-orders, but that's it. You put up the book for pre-order and you don't see any money from it until it is finally released. The day that is released, whatever day you decide to have as a really estate now pre-sale is different and is something that smashed where it's has come up with. Those are the only platform I'm doing it. And actually my coworker has put it in four, a patent. He just wants to own this one, which I don't blame him. Cause I have seen Amazon pickup. Some of the things Smashwords does first. Autumn (13m 26s): So leave him for, to sign, to kind of copy, write this one himself. But the pre-sale is that in between steppe, you can put your books book up for pre-order and you don't see any money from it until you release it. Presale is that space in between where you put up the book for pre-order you do have to have it up for pre-order and then for certain people, or you could do it for the public at large, it's kind of cool. You can get it into the nitty gritty. You can actually sell the book before its available in stores like Amazon. And what's kind of cool is that means if your book is going to be in the Kindle unlimited, but it isn't released yet. So it's not in Kindle unlimited. Autumn (14m 8s): You can actually run a presale and not run a foul of Amazon's terms of service. So that's kind of a cool tidbit if you are a Kindle unlimited customer, but yeah, this gives you a chance. You, you sell it like as a regular book, except for there's some really kind of cool twists and why it works out as a presale. It's very exclusive. And you know how to readers love exclusive deals. This gives you some income between the pre-order and actual launch. Jesper (14m 39s): Yeah. Now I haven't tried this pre-sale stuff, but since you had the Guinea pig here, Autumn, but it sounds to me very similar on you. You, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds very similar to what we normally like to do in the, in the sense of, if, for example, we want to release a book in Kindle unlimited. We noticed some readers like to read on Kobo or something. So what is a pretty good strategy is to, for example, if you have something on Patrion, you could go to your readers and say, okay, for during this two week window, you can buy the book via Patrion here. Jesper (15m 24s): If you, if you don't wanna buy from Amazon, here's the two week window where you can buy it and you can avoid buying it from Amazon, if you prefer, and then, you know, you can then use book funnel and just post the book from the link inside patrons. So when you buy it from here, but using Patrion that it makes it easier in the sense that they're already paying money in so on so they can download it from there. Or you could, you could do it yourself if you want it to using the sales link directly from BookFunnel. But I guess this the same thing, isn't it? Autumn (15m 53s): It is the difference to me. I think the difference. Well, the, but I was talking to mark. I said, oh, well, you know, I already sell my books on my website and I often have done that, releasing it early. And we've done this for our own books if we re released them early from our website. So if you buy directly from us, you know, it's often available a week or two weeks before the preorder date comes up so that we do that. 'cause we get a higher royalty rate, which is fantastic. You could get people to trust us in, come and buy from us directly. Presales are kind of filling that niche. If you do not know how to do that, set up the actual ebook sales directly from your website. Autumn (16m 34s): So it works and it, you do get a higher percentage Smashwords set. So does a 80% royalty rate. So that is, you know, better than you're going to get off of Amazon, which was kinda cool. And it sort of that idea, there is a few differences where if there is an anti piracy pledge that people are signing. So that works out really well, that if you're selling the book like literally two months before you would ever released it on the pre-order, you, you, you know, you know, they're not going to be sharing it around other people because that's, oh, you, that would be something that would be concerned about it. If I was doing a pre-sale, that was way out front of my pre-order date. And the other difference is you can actually through M through Smashwords they have, they done it so that they can get a second discount that if they sign up using, in giving you your, their e-mail address and so subscribing to your e-mail rate, they can make me get another small discount or a big discount. Autumn (17m 34s): So you could say, pre-sale, it is 4 99. But if you agree to my email list is going to be 2 99. So suddenly this is a way of generating people to get on to your email list. And that's kind of the thing about the pre-sale 'cause if you do that, you would obviously there's two ways of doing the settings and we can talk about the setting's, but you could make it a public one. And so, you know, people who just go to Smashwords where you can just spread the link everywhere, and the people who can go and find it like a regular book, and then they can get a discount. If they sign up to your email list, I was like, oh, that is, you are getting a sale. Is that you're getting money. Autumn (18m 14s): And you're getting someone on your email list. That's pretty cool. Or you can do a private link. And so in that case, you're probably just sharing the private linked, like you sent to your Patriot supporters or the people that are already on your email list. Well, in that case, they're probably not going to care too much about signing up for your e-mail list. Cause they were already on your email list. They probably can still sign up and get the discount. But yeah, in that case, when you have a private link, if you know that little extra coupon deal, isn't that exciting though. Speaking of coupons Smashwords is one of those places that does offer coupons that you can use and generate, and you can use those coupon codes with the presale. Autumn (18m 56s): So if you want to do still do something exclusive too, the readers who are specifically on your email list, you can give them, Hey, go and get this book on presale before it's out in stores. And if you use this code, you can get 10, 25% as well. So if you could make people get so excited, you could, you make the coupon good only for one or two people and use it as a give-away there's a lot of fun things you can do with the presale length and how they have it set up. Jesper (19m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. I can see that, that, that is different than the, for sure. The, the, the part about getting people to sign up. That's not something that you can do anywhere else. So that is quite unique. It was. Autumn (19m 37s): So that's why he kinda convinced me to like, oh, I know you're selling books on your own website, but you should give this a try because you can generate people signing up to your email list. And I'm like, okay. That is, that is pretty gosh. Darn cool. Jesper (19m 50s): Yeah. And the other thing about is that if all of the setting up have the payment modules on your website or setting up the payment collection, some of our books on which you can do now-a-days, but if all of that feels too daunting and to technical than at least this, I mean, it's probably like ticking a box when you have uploaded Smashwords anyway, isn't it? Autumn (20m 11s): Oh, it was two pages, but mostly just radio button check boxes. So yeah, you have to start by uploading you're pre-order and the caveat you have to have your completed final manuscript. So, you know, often with pre-orders people set it up and they're like, okay, you know, S Amazons like gives you five days'. You have to have it before release that you need to have the final version of uploaded on this case. You need to have your final version. So you have to plan ahead and you have to have the final book. And that's I think really the key here. So you're purposefully pushing off your pre-order, even though you have the final book, instead of releasing it, just to use the pre-sale. Autumn (20m 52s): But yeah, once you have that uploaded, there's literally a button in your Smashwords dashboard that says, Hey, you know, sign up for pre-sale and you go through a few questions, like, do you want to public? Or do you want the private, do you want to offer a discount through email? Do you want people to have to sign up the, the antipiracy pledge? And you answered this really quick questions. There are mostly radio buttons, just like thinking about it and have done. And off it goes it's up there. And whether it's public or giving you a private link, there you go. It's it's really pretty painless. I will say. Jesper (21m 28s): Yeah, the, that is pretty cool. And of course the nice thing being as well, that with the presale here, you're, you're collecting the money right away. I, I guess, I mean, some people might not know, but for example, if you are doing pre-orders on Amazon a if the reader then seize you, pre-order on Amazon and they buy via the pre-order, like you said before, it's not going to be delivered also not charged until the date that pre-order goes like, but what some people might not know is that Amazon actually does not count pre-orders against your bestseller rank or the book rank on the release date now. Jesper (22m 11s): So basically Autumn (22m 12s): The time to go, but not in here. Jesper (22m 15s): No. So basically the stuff that you sell during your preorder is not going to help on your ranking at all. So of course, if you're white, other retailers do not punish you like this. And honestly, I feel like it is Amazon punishing you for doing pre pre-orders, which I don't understand why. No, but they do. There's probably some reason for it, for somebody in the past who was gamed the system, and then they have done something like this. I couldn't imagine, but I don't know. But on the contrary, the other retailers, they will actually give you a bonus on release day. So the pre-order will increase your visibility in their store, but your ranking will also increase from the cumulative buys when the book goes live. Jesper (22m 55s): So you actually getting a booster twice, if you are using pre-orders on the other retailers, which is quite cool that, but of course we know 90% of all the book sales for most authors comes from Amazon. So that means that Amazon in general are the only one we are majorly concerned and focused on, unfortunately, but that's how life is we. This also means that the pre-orders in Amazon, I guess that the reason we usually use pre-orders of them. Yes. But the reason we do it is not because it's going to help on the ranking or, and also not because it's going to help on the more sales and so on. Jesper (23m 37s): But actually the reason is just because it can be very stressful when you have a deadline and when you have a pre all the way that we do it, because Amazon is not very flexible in moving the dates at all now. But I think if they allow for you to do it once that one today, what are Autumn (23m 57s): The days? And that is yeah, Jesper (24m 0s): But what we normally do is that we make sure that we have the entire book ready and done and final. So we actually will, we could of done is we could just release it and make it public. But we already said it. We always set it up as a pre-order for one, because there was no stress. Then we don't have a deadline by which we need to upload the final files because we already did. But the other thing is that then that allows us to run some of these other things, doing the pre-order a meaning, for example, then we can tell people, Hey, if you want it earlier, you can buy it directly from us. Of course, we do have all these websites, shenanigans that we need to take care, have a lot of them gets to do, but the, but then we have that possibility too, to sell the book directly. Jesper (24m 46s): And 'cause, we can offer that earlier than other people getting it from buying on Amazon, there was an incentive, they have to buy it directly from us. And of course we want people to buy directly because then we were getting the full royalty ourselves. We don't have to pay 30% to Amazon for instance. And the other thing is that we need, we don't do this always on in, but sometimes we do, we like to run some sort of giveaways or something related to the, to the action release of this new book, just to get the word of mouth going as well and, and people sharing online and so on and so on. So you can do some, have all of these other things when it's on pre-order technically you could also do it if you just pop into the book. Jesper (25m 31s): But the problem is that when there is no time limit limit on things, you could come up with some arbitrary, the time name on and say, you have to do this within one week to get this price. You could do that as well, if you want it to. But yeah, but when you do and the, yeah, Autumn (25m 48s): Yeah. If you do the pre-order though, you can, Elise, you can get people excited about the giveaway. You know, you have you, maybe you have a month or two months to tell people when this releases there's going to be one week where if you get back to me with the first word in chapter 28, then you will be in for a drawling. You know, you get the two month window to let people know about that. Where if you just released the book and you say, OK, you have one a week to do that. If it's you just have those that one week to tell people, Hey, do this and you can get into it. So the time limit is totally different. And I'm surprised you didn't mentioned this, but with you, you have a pre-order you have the website where the book is going to be live. So if you want to set up any advertising, you have the link to the website where, or the book's going to be live. Autumn (26m 32s): You can actually get all your ducks in a row and have your advertising ready for launch week. And that's that's to me, I think Y the authors who do do pre-orders, they have all their ducks in a row. They have the advertising, they have the giveaway are the scavenger hunt after release. They have all of this excitement going on and they use that pre-order period to generate that excitement and to get people ready. And really, they know the rules, they, they know what's going to happen and they can celebrate what the author, where they author said, oh, by the way, really start yesterday that I'll tell you, you're like, Ugh, okay, what you said, you don't feel quite catching and you have to catch up. So I think pre-orders, Mmm. Autumn (27m 13s): Yeah, you have to have all your stuff together in the beginning, but it gives you a chance to have a lot more fun. And I think to celebrate, because you're not freaking out that you need to get the final format done and getting up there and all of those other things it's already to go, and you can kinda kick back in and just do some Instagram posts on it. Jesper (27m 33s): Oh yeah. I, at least I feel like the entire release process of a new book is it's less stressful. Once everything is just on pre-order and you have your time to get all those ducks in a row and so on and so on, and this is how I feel, but I do also know, and I have a full disclosure here. I do know that there are some disadvantages they have, and I mentioned before, right? Ah, how its in a sales on not counting against your sales rank and so on. So there are definitely this advantages to doing pre-orders but yeah, to me taking the stress out of the picture. Oh yeah, yeah. That is worth some money to Autumn (28m 8s): Me. Yeah, I agree. And it is interesting. So I did try to with a presale, I ran it on the last book in my tainted face series instead of putting it up for sale early on my website. And actually I've always been, I'm not a good procrastinator. I always do stuff as soon as I'm supposed to. Or like that's why assigned times and deadlines for it because if I don't do it when I meant to, and then forgot to do it. So I still have to put up the final books for sale on my website, which I do have some odd, some readers who always wait for me to do that. And I'm just realized that and I now feel really guilty and I've got to go on my website and get it all set up. But if you, I did try it out. Autumn (28m 48s): So instead of selling it directly on my website, I decided to do it and Smashwords pre-sale and I think it had mixed results. You know, it was hard because I only tried it once and I literally only did it as a two week window 'cause as you and I both know, I was very behind getting this last book out the door. It was very long, 150,000 words. So I it's not horribly long, but it was so long and I have other projects and other things going on. So it kinda got backburnered when it should of been front in Bernard. And I only had a two week pre-sale trial, but I did it public. And I also did it, did send the link to the mailing list and I did have a lot of people go and check it out, but I will have it. Autumn (29m 31s): The final result is I did not have a ton of sales. I think just like pre-orders just with everything is you have to have your ducks in a row and you have to let people know you have be either advertising it or on social media and posting about it in telling your newsletter quite a few times. And I think there's one, maybe two other things that might cause people to hesitate before they go and buy your presale book office Smashwords and I dunno if you can guess what those are you. Mm, Nope. I've got to put you on this, but Jesper (30m 8s): It's very late from you. My brain is not working. Oh, you know it is, we are recording now. My brain is not working anymore. You Autumn (30m 14s): Just going to make me to take pity on you. Cause you know, I always do. But the first one is not many leaders to know what Smashwords is. So they it's not Amazon. It's not Kobo. It's not Barnes and noble. And goodness know Smashwords has been around almost as long as Amazon has been selling eBooks, but still it's never made it in to that big name categories. So they see Smashwords and they're like, oh K and new profile and knew place to have library of books. And I do you think it's unfortunate. It's out of the problem. It's always as problem, but of all the seller's that are out there and Smashwords M really does it's best authors are from indie authors are from a third near and dear to mark Coker his heart. Autumn (30m 58s): He is an indie author. That's why he created this platform. So I, I respect so much that he does for indie authors. And that's what I try to tell people about smash where it's, because I don't want to see this one go away. I had like the pronoun when the pronoun was out there for authors. Oh, it was just a fantastic thing. And when they collapsed and closed up shop, I was very sad, but Smashwords, I don't want to see that happen because they have been leading a forefront of stuff and tools that are available to authors, indie authors, that the other platforms are slowly putting into place as well. So there are kind of like, you know, there, there scavenging off of smash words like coupons Smashwords you used to be the only place where you could create your own coupons. Autumn (31m 43s): And I just saw, I don't know if it was Kobo. I forget which other platform now allows you to do that as well. I was like, oh, I know where they got that from. They did not come up with that on their own and they're not doing it just to me that they're not doing adjust to compete with Amazon. They're doing it to compete with Smashwords actually. So that's one thing to keep in mind. So yes you, are you going to have some readers who maybe they'll follow the link and they'll see Smashwords I don't know. I don't know if I want to start a whole new profile. So I think you have that going against you. And then the other one in, I almost feel guilty saying this one. So I'm surprised you didn't guess, but have you been on the smash where its website and looked at it recently that you can think of it, but it was developed in, in 2010 ish I'm and it looks like it was developed in 2010 ish. Autumn (32m 34s): And to me that as it's so superficial to say is that, but it's a problem if you've never seen Smashwords not following it, you don't think it's superficial. Jesper (32m 46s): No, I don't think the superficial, because I mean, if you, if you come to a website or you, I mean, it's similar to that. So imagine somebody who wants to let's say buy one of our courses, for example. Yes. And then they go on to Am Writing fences, you have.com and this is something that could of been developed like 15 years ago. Would you, by the cost of, I wouldn't, I would think like, well, okay, if this is the quality than I don't wanna do that. So I understand that part, but I think even more, your first point is probably even more important in the sense that if you think about like the average reader, if you are, let's say you used to buying books on Kindle or even on Kobo, it doesn't matter. Jesper (33m 26s): But you, you used to buying eBooks from one of the major retailers like Kobo or Amazon. So you go on to Amazon, you find the book you wanna buy, you put a, you press, the one-click buy. And the, you say delivered too. My Kindle and whipped. You have to you the books on your Kindle, right? And as soon as you take the reader out of that environment, the first thing they will be asking themselves is how do I get this file on to my Kindle now? Because I can't click that button where it says delivered to my Kindle. And it might be that, you know, that it, at the end of the day, it's quite easy with Smashwords and so on it's because we sometimes have to same problem with BookFunnel yeah. Jesper (34m 6s): Where some readers comes to it and they didn't like, they don't understand how they can download the book and get on the kennel from BookFunnel. Even though like, there, there, there is like a button like click here and then on does a good job in explaining how to do it. And it's very, very easy, but I can easily say that because I've done it so many times. But for the, for the like 65 year old lady who likes to read fantasy books and just goes and click one button on Amazon and the need, the P S Kindle for her to go to BookFunnel or to go to the Smashwords so someplace where she's not used to be and freak out how to, which buttons to click to get. And it might be easy for us because we're used to this and we work in this environment everyday, but I think we have to keep in mind that most Redis they don't right. Jesper (34m 53s): That they are not familiar with all these different sites and services and whatnot. So for them it's massively confusing. Yeah, Autumn (35m 1s): I think, yeah. And in that case, you know, you're, you, maybe you get so send people there because they were really excited. Cause I had a ton of people who have followed the link to go and see like, oh my gosh, the books available in the last book in the series is available early. They were excited. But when you have never been to Smashwords before, if you don't know this story, because you know, what are the readers care that they support in the authors? And they're really fantastic. And all that, they land on a website that was built in 2010 and looked like it was build in 2010 and then they might not feel that comfortable saying, yeah, I can totally use and go with it. And I feel comfortable. I know they're going to support me if it's, it doesn't have that feeling that, that kind of sleek look, modern look. Autumn (35m 47s): And I'm like I said, it as part of me feels bad saying that because I know, I know how many people I've uploaded a book there and they're like your 28 in line to have him, you know, converted in, turned on to a computer, into a book because there's 28 people ahead of me uploading books at the exact same time. This website is active. All the time books are being published at all in on all the time. And I redesigned our course website while it was live. And even though I knew what I was doing to then take it from the staging site too, the actual website while it was live. And we have students who are like taking the class, even though, you know, you, you tell them I'm gonna to take you down for like two, three hours. Autumn (36m 30s): Hopefully everything will be fine. It's wracking it. It's a lot of work. And I can't imagine doing that on a website, the size of Smashwords actually that's oh yeah, for sure. I, there is a really funny story in, I cannot remember which book store it is, but they went and did an update recently and they accidentally turned everyone's book into the exact same one, like this dragon book, which it looks so as the dragon book and they apologized profusely. But I couldn't imagine being on the other side, having pushed the staging site to live and then going wholly, oh my God. Autumn (37m 11s): Yeah. We just screwed up the entire website. I would not, you could not pay well, you, you would have to pay me. Gosh, awful. A lot of money to put up with that level of paranoid craps so I can understand why the website, it hasn't been updated yet, but it shows, and I think it does hurt Smashwords itself. And also you, if you're using it in your sending readers who don't understand what Smashwords is, and they looked at the website and going, and it looks like, you know, 2010 Yahoo Yahoo or something, it does not look sleek and pretty. And so those are the right to especially also let me see. Jesper (37m 51s): Yeah, we actually also 'cause we were talking about putting in your credit card somewhere. Right. And, and that's where there that's really where the big barrier is because even getting people to, I mean, we've been talking at some point in the past, we talked about maybe if we, because there is quite a lot of people who don't like Facebook and probably like a year or maybe two years, I can't remember what quite a long, a while ago, before the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group became what it is today. There was a point in time when we were sort of debating, should we stay on Facebook? Or should we move somewhere else to mighty networks? We talked about at some point. Absolutely. But also then that doesn't even cost money for people. Jesper (38m 32s): But just the fact that you have to create a new user profile somewhere on the mighty networks app that you don't know, you're not familiar with it, that Facebook has on your phone. Everybody knows it. Everybody uses it. So already there is a barrier, but that if you then add on top that you need to put on your credit card and you don't know the brand, you don't notice. And maybe if it looks a bit dated as well, you could be worried about safety, ah, of putting on your credit card information as well. I mean, there's just so many barriers that you need to get across there and it's really not easy. Autumn (39m 4s): It is not. And I saw that with my results. Like I said, I did not advertise it heavy. I was just kind of, you, you know, that it was just, I was happy that we get the book out. Oh, that's that was done. I was happy with that. I was, I should have marketed it a hell of a lot more, but even so I did not see many for the number of people who did follow the list. Cause we have quite a big e-mail of reader list and to see the number of people who did follow it versus the number of people who, because you can see the status, I will say that in Smashwords that gives you a great stat. So you can see how many people looked at it. How many people download it to the sample, how many people bought it, those are all clearly laid out for you in your dashboard. Autumn (39m 44s): And to see those, the number of people who went and looked at the book versus the number of that. So that I actually went and bought that. You're like, yeah, that's something, these are readers who desperately want the last book in the series. And I did not have a ton of people biting it. I get more people who would buy it from me directly from my website. So this shows that there was something about the presale, something about that. That was just like people where like it's something stopped them from actually buying the book early. And as a reader who just, while you're on vacation, I red seven books, I've read the whole everything in lay BARR to NGOs M Grisha vers. So I ran all of her books. And as if I do, I can get one of the, the next one that she hints at early, I wouldn't be buying. Autumn (40m 32s): So knowing that if you're hopefully developing fans, who are that excited for the last book in the series, and they're not willing to pull out their credit card, something was stopping them. And my guess is not that they didn't want my book. It's something on the website. Jesper (40m 48s): Hm. But of course all have that doesn't change that a, the pre-sales function that my Coca and, and Smashwords developed in. It's very, very cool. So I would still say if, if the listener here missed out on the details, then go back and listen, listen to episode 118. When autumn talked to my coach and you can hear a lot more details about all the things this map, which can do if it was a very good interview. So Autumn (41m 16s): Yeah. Oh, in there just so people can know. I mean, there they work as a distributor or that you can send out your pre-orders to Cabo all those other platforms. I still like it. And they have an amazing customer service. So, you know, feel free to join, create an account. I think they're better than digital in many ways. And then send them a message saying, Hey, where are you gonna update your website, helped me out. Jesper (41m 43s): And don't see that autumn asked you to say, Autumn (41m 46s): Please don't get that mad at me. We've had a great conversation. Jesper (41m 53s): Oh right. So next Monday we are looking into a topic which has actually been brought up several times by different people. And that is how relevant race and gender is in fantasy. Narrator (42m 4s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

No matter how fast you type, you can't write an entire novel in one day. So how do you keep your story's flow going? From character traits to how to pick up writing where you left off, we go over tips to help you pull your story together so you can keep writing without letting readers feel something is disjointed. Join our newsletter to receive a coupon for one of our premium writing and book marketing courses at https://www.subscribepage.com/awfnewsletter Learn more about the changes Apple is making to email settings at https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22525195/apple-mail-protection-privacy-pixel-tracking-newsletters-substack Learn more about maintaining your story's flow on our blog at https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/how-to-maintain-your-story-flow/! Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 137 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And we have a writing related episode today as well. Well, We were going to discuss how to maintain your story flow in this one was one of your ideas. Autumn (48s): All of them, there was, well, actually it came off the blog. It was a very popular post there. So I thought we should do an updated content slash podcast on maintaining your story flow, which is convenient because I have, like I shared with you before we started, I've finishing up the final book of the tainted phase. So I wrote this, so I stopped at the end of January. So, you know, almost six months ago now, and I've realized I was missing a chapter. So too, we use all one more. If I always, oh, that's my history. I will write a short book. And when I get to the climax, I'm always adding at least two or three chapters. So what's the right, that, that next chapter that would flow and fit into the whole story after six months it's oh, it's a little more challenging. Autumn (1m 34s): I think that in a lot of people realized to make sure that that kind of meshes Inn and sounds right, and they still have the character in my head. So those are the kinds of tips we are going to look at. Cause it could be six months like I did, it could be a year. It could be just, I don't know, between one day and the next and you just kinda lose that, that drive that makes this story sound like one cohesive whole. And we wanted that. You don't wanna do that. You want to read or not to go, well, what happened with their reading? It did they all, they have a bad date. That's why they character died. Right. But you already had like 150,000 words and then you add up, you decided to have another chapter. Autumn (2m 16s): So that was I, that was counting that chapter. I knew how long it was going to be. So that's 150,000 and yeah, I was aiming for 90,000, but there's just so much going on in so many important storylines when you write the final book of a series and you're pooling all of those together and she let my readers know theirs kind of have a few ending things that could continue on to another book because that's like I said, I swear my tombstone is going to be, I'm going to have it like a design as a book. And on one side, it's going to have all my, all my information of who I was. And the other side is going to say to be continued because I will never, ever wrap up a story completely. Jesper (2m 56s): I don't think so. Yeah. Autumn (2m 58s): Even this one even was the final book. It's not possibly the final, final book ever, but yeah, yeah, that was a lot going on. So yeah, it went from 90,250. That was just the way it goes sometimes. But that's also a good thing, you know, 'cause, if you are well in general, you know, if sales justify it, then it's always nice to have a few open-ended so that you can continue on. Oh, absolutely. Or if you know the character's wake you up three M a little to often, maybe we will continue with anyway. So just for yourself, it is, you have the characters, are you regretted? You didn't kill that character. Autumn (3m 40s): And I don't know how that could be worse and you'll have undead. Jesper (3m 43s): All right. It's all right. You got to watch out which ones you kill off. Autumn (3m 50s): Like they can come back too. And that's true. So otherwise we have just been a writing in going about all that editing stuff. Yeah. So that's pretty, and some book covers. I've got to, I'm trying to finish up this Tainted Fae in staying out of the heat. We're recording early again because we have vacation time coming up. So where we're at now in the world, it is incredibly sweltering in record, breaking temperatures and highs for all. I know that's going to be the next month as well. So I have been hiding from the heat and getting up extremely early so that if I want to exercise or do anything outside, it has done before 7:00 AM. Autumn (4m 31s): 'cause you don't want to go outside after 7:00 AM. Not if you're, we've already discussed that. I have that pro, so that fly protein that, that your brain unwinds at above 80 degrees. And that's it for me. So I'm going to stay inside and do very small, quiet things. Jesper (4m 48s): All right. Well, writing time is not too bad anyway. So of course, if it gets too warm that you can't write it, and that is a bit of annoying thing to do. Autumn (4m 58s): So. Yeah. Yeah. Well that, that's my excuse for the AC is my dog. So as we've talked about, and this is a fizzy gig, he looks like a fizzy gig. He is as free as a fizzy gig and he gets hot. So we have to have an AC on. And then from my poor computer's sake, I have to actually run an AC because that gets too hot and humid. And I can't run all my, I can't write where I can't draw all that's the end of the world for me, so that I have been working on some fun fantasy maps for other authors and some really cool book covers. And I don't want my computer to die on me, which means they probably shouldn't touch it. Jesper (5m 33s): So that famous question of what would you bring to a desert island? It's just like my computer so I can make the very least pen and paper, this giant sketchbook, because you can use that for writing or drawing. Autumn (5m 45s): Oh yeah. That's true. So how have things been for you? Jesper (5m 52s): Good. Yes. I got my first vaccine shot last Friday and I was sort of really crossing my fingers that I wouldn't get sick from it. Like some people have been, but I was actually okay. You know, Friday, Saturday, and I was fine when my arm was sore. Like it is for a lot of people, so that was fine. But then Sunday, Monday, and also part of today, I've just been so drained of energy and extremely tired. I have so much, it's been a, it's been a struggle for me as well. And so I haven't gotten any writing done yesterday, none done today either. Jesper (6m 37s): I just haven't had the energy. So I'm sort of fingers crossed that maybe I'll get some writing done tomorrow, but honestly, I feel like right now it's, it's sort of up in the air whether or not, I don't know. We, I think it depends on how I feel tomorrow. Autumn (6m 52s): I can understand you said that I went through the same thing. So it's something that goes quiet on the podcast and you only hear me talking, you've gone to sleep. Jesper (7m 0s): And so yeah, you can sort of that clap your hands on the podcast and then they might wake me up. Autumn (7m 7s): Oh, all right. Well, we'll have to keep that in mind. If I see the screen go dark and you're kind of off to the side, Jesper (7m 16s): or if you hear a bump in to the microphone, that was just my forehead. Autumn (7m 20s): So that we go, all right, that's fair enough. Jesper (7m 24s): Oh, but I did. I took me awhile to really put two and two together because we'd been traveling and a few other things, but I re I had that for like two weeks. So I hope it doesn't last that long for you, but I even started drinking iced coffees and stuff, and I'm not a coffee drinker. It's, I'm like T all the way, but I needed something because it felt like my whole life had gotten derailed. And I'm usually high energy. I mean, I'm actually low energy compared to my mom. Autumn (7m 50s): And you should meet her. She's like a tornado. I just, I was fading, but right after lunch and, and, and you're right, if it's a tiredness where your brain is just like, you want me to put two words together, know, knock it up. And so I, and it's just that size. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, it's feeling slightly a better today compared to you yesterday evening, if even so I hope fingers crossed by tomorrow. That I'll be somewhat. Jesper (8m 19s): Okay. Again, I I'm not feeling bad or anything. I'm just so, oh, so, oh, well that was the big question you get sick. Autumn (8m 25s): That's good. That's good. But the big question is they are now saying mixing your vaccinations. Your types is a good thing. So are you going to get the same thing again? Are you going to go get something different for your second shot? Jesper (8m 39s): It's the same one that I'm going to go for a second shot. And I, and the nurse did say when I got this first shot, she said that mostly people have more after effects of the second one than the first one. So I'm expecting they might be worse, but let's see. Autumn (8m 58s): It only lasted. I didn't get, even, I felt a little run down from maybe 12 hours and then it was like, oh, I'm fine. I didn't have the same tiredness. So hopefully you will feel okay. Jesper (9m 7s): All right. Yeah. Narrator (9m 11s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, the Jesper (9m 17s): Virtual reported on some interesting information that I thought it would be very good to share with people here on the podcast because it's highly relevant for us authors. Autumn (9m 30s): Yes. So I'm, we talked a bit about this as well before the recording. Jesper (9m 34s): So you're already in the loop here. Autumn (9m 37s): We have just, we've already strategized and discussed it because it does change how you run one of the most important things that you will have as an author. If you're running a business, Jesper (9m 49s): man, that was quite a and efficient Tuesday order. And once you think of it, that you had recorded over a hundred posts, podcast episodes by now, Autumn (9m 59s): and most of them by the seat of my pants. Thank you. Jesper (10m 3s): You don't say that. You just keep that to yourself. Autumn (10m 5s): Oh, okay. Sorry. My mistake I'm always prepared. Jesper (10m 9s): Yeah, exactly. I don't know if, if I said what you needed to lie, but you have just leave out information. That is not the same as lieing. And now you are an outright lying and such. Autumn (10m 18s): I feel like I'm always prepared because I know it's so well, I don't need to do my own work. Jesper (10m 23s): Yeah. Okay. Now we just paddling. Instead. I'm really glad that we get back to this anyway, where we wanted to talk about an article in the verge that they have. They reported from a one of apple, apple usually make announcements on its worldwide developer conference. And a, one of the announcement's that they made on the worldwide developer conference was concerning e-mail marketing. And obviously from us authors email lists and being in touch with readers through email and so on is really, really important. So that of course made me pay attention. Jesper (11m 6s): It's one of the cornerstones for us authors. And it's not only of course some email, this is not only for building an audience, but also maintaining it. So what apple announced was that what they call major privacy protection. Mmm. And what this means is that it's basically a way in which apple will limit the amount of data that people who send you emails can collect about you. So all in all, I'm very supportive of that. I, I liked the privacy protections in general, and I don't like when all the M big corporations. Jesper (11m 47s): And so what not collect information from what you're doing on the internet and so on, but that also to all of us author's of course, because when we are sending out emails, there is in the email and invisible pixel that basically tracks in the sense that if the pixel gets loaded, eh, which means that than the email was opened than the information is sent back to the email providers. So that, that could be whatever email provider you used like us, we use MailerLite, you could be a MailChimp ConvertKit whatever, when you use, right. But all of these vendors incorporate these invisible pixels to be able to tell you what your open rate is. Jesper (12m 33s): So, but when the fall comes, apple will roll out the Iowa iOS update version 15. And within that iOS update, the mail app will basically stop a, that invisible picture from loading. Yes. And this also means that whenever you are sending emails to readers who are using apple, then the tracking of the open rates will start become inaccurate, or basically they, it won't trigger the registration within the email provider. So this also means that when you're looking at the metric called open rates, that's basically what is tracked via this pixel. Jesper (13m 21s): Well, then you need to understand that a certain percentage of the reader's that actually opens the email's is telling you when you are looking at the open rates that they did not open it. So let me just do that again, in case that was a bit confusing. So when you send your emails, the open rates will get tracked, but 'cause this blocking is in place by apple is means to have some people will open the email, but you won't know that they open the emails. So maybe that was a better way of putting it all. Autumn (13m 53s): That makes sense. Jesper (13m 54s): So what that's, what this, all of this means to us, all authors, in my view, I think we need to, first of all, of course, don't be like overly concerned and worried. And now I think that the world is falling apart and now email marketing will be worth nothing and so on. And that is not the case, right? So lets first of all, take a deep breath. Don't worry too much. So it's not like nothing will work anymore. Email marketing is still the most important cornerstone of your author business in my view. But there is of course, a few things you need to be aware of. And one of the things that autumn and I discussed today prior to this recording was that a pretty common, best practice is too recent to on open. Jesper (14m 40s): So again, within your email provider being MailChimp ConvertKit MailerLite blah, blah, blah, whatever it's called, they have always like an automated function where you can set up the system either automatically reset to open one's. If I remember correctly in ConvertKit you have to do it manually, but they will track it. And you can go in and say, I want a recent, this email to unopens M which is a smart thing to do. And it's, it's like a best practice. And we have been doing it for a long time already. But what I would say is that since the tracking pixel doesn't register, whether they opened it or not, this means that it will automatically be displayed as unopened. So if you don't start recently emails, all the people on apple devices, or at least all the people who haven't actively opt into wanting to be tracked, which I will assume will be a very, very small group of people who will actually opt into being tracked. Jesper (15m 37s): So that means that let's just say all of it all like 99% of the people using apple devices, if you receive emails to unopens, you are going to send them the same email that maybe a lot of those people already read and then they're gonna get it again. What's this going to annoy them? Or a lot of it would annoy me. Autumn (15m 56s): Yeah. So, and then you are unsubscribe rate is going to go up unsubscribed Jesper (16m 1s): because why are these people always sending me the same email twice? That's really annoying. And I understand that. So the thing we discussed now was that come September, we will stop re sending to an open. And we'll just hope that people actually open the emails because we can't trust that metric anymore. Yeah. And that's that that's annoying of course, but so is life and life moves on? Autumn (16m 26s): Oh gosh. Well adapt. It's fine. Yeah. It's definitely something to keep in mind. If you clean out your email list based on, you know, people who don't ever open your emails, you might want to, you know, send them an email beforehand with like a link to click or something that gets them to a survey. That's why we liked MailerLite there are so many like active things that people can do to answer questions and click on things and stuff like that. So you might want to make sure you do something before you delete someone because they might of be reading every single one, but that might be reading it on an apple come September. At that point, you're not going to know if they're reading it or not. So keep that in mind. Jesper (17m 6s): Oh, that's a very right. That that's exactly the other part of it. And what of course, where we do is we try to run what we call re-engagement campaign. So that means that we are sending like three, four emails to see if we can get them to re-engage before we delete them. But even then you need to be careful because the way that we set up re-engagement campaigns normally is that if they didn't open the email or so of course, although if they click something inside the email, we will remove the tack against their name for them to be deleted. Autumn (17m 38s): Right. Jesper (17m 38s): But again, that won't work anymore. No. So you can't even trust that. So you have to be, I think very, very explicit in the emails that you send out, like telling that you cannot tell whether or not they're reading your emails and therefore you want to make sure. So if you are doing pruning of your lists, meaning deleting stuff, people that who are inactive, which I think is a good practice to do it. And I also know a lot of people also influencers in the author space who do not agree that it's a good idea to prove the list. So take that as you will. But if something you do, then don't base your decision on deleting people on the open rates know. Jesper (18m 18s): So that's also a problem. Yes. Autumn (18m 21s): Yeah. So we have changes, but will get well adapted. Its not that big of a deal. Well we'll survive unless you're really into metrics. If you're really in a metrics. I'm so sorry if it's going to be bad metrics. Jesper (18m 32s): Yeah, indeed. So we will place a link to the article in the show notes. So if you want to check it out and if you want to read what was more set in in more details, then you can. But honestly I just told you everything. So sounds good. Autumn (18m 47s): And I have one thing to share even though it's, it's not really to the author community, but I know they can celebrate with me. Jesper (18m 53s): Okay. Yeah. Autumn (18m 54s): I don't know if you notice, but over the weekend board of water hit its 400th review, so yay. Oh that's my debut novel. And so it is lovely to see it hit 400 when age. Jesper (19m 6s): Oh wow. That's so good. Very good. Congratulations. You 400 reviews. That's that's not a small, Autumn (19m 16s): oh that's a nice round number. It's a big one. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Jesper (19m 21s): Oh so a very quick reminder, before we move on to the topic of the day here as mentioned last week, we've decided to offer everyone on our email list and massive discount for either of our flagship courses. And we will be mailing out a voucher code of 150 bucks to be used on any of our courses. Autumn (19m 44s): Oh I was gonna say, oh you said two flagships that we actually decided like what an hour ago, it's going to be for a choice of three courses. Jesper (19m 52s): So yeah. Autumn (19m 53s): Why not that big deal? Jesper (19m 54s): Well, yeah that's that's quite a discount. Yeah. So we have the ultimate fantasy, all writers guide course, which is the writing guide or the writing course. We have the well building course, which yeah, I guess you, maybe you can guess what that's about. Autumn (20m 11s): Yeah. Well it's officially called crafting incredible fantasy world. So we do you call it world-building that would of been too easy. Jesper (20m 19s): We also have, then that's the third one that we added into the pot, the email marketing course, which is very much on point of what we just talked about. Oh yeah. So you can get $150 off of any of these courses, any one of them of your choice. Autumn (20m 37s): Yup. Jesper (20m 38s): And we placed a link in the show notes from where you can get onto our email is so that you will also get this emailed once we send out the vouchers. But yeah, if that's something that you interest you, I will alert you to get on the email list right now as you're listening to this, because I'm not gonna say for sure when we're going to send out the voucher, but it's going to come in the next probably maybe three weeks or something like that. So if you forget about it and don't get signed up, then you're going to miss it. So yeah. You better get going. Sounds good. Narrator (21m 13s): And on to today's topic. Jesper (21m 17s): Perhaps I'll just give you the range here, autumn, and that we can explain what we were talking about. Autumn (21m 21s): You just doing that because I said I never did my homework and I do this by this either of my pants. And you're like, okay, go, go for how long Jesper (21m 27s): I'm going to test it. Autumn (21m 30s): So yeah. Well I've already hinted about this at the beginning. So this topic is maintaining your story flow into me. This means sort of what I said before that it makes this story. It's two parts won that when you have a reader reading it, it sounds like one cohesive story. It doesn't matter if it took you five years to write it a decade or if your one of those insane fast writers, it took you a week. It all should still sound like it was one author written in one setting in story. It doesn't sound like it's all over the place where all these big life events happened in between. And the other thing is, as a writer sitting down to write, it lets the reader's response. But as a writer, you know, you have life jobs, personal things, COVID, you know, all of these things that have been every single day, hopefully not that often, but things that interrupt her writing in, how do you maintain that story? Autumn (22m 25s): Almost enthusiasms. How do you keep that voice? That author's voice, the characters have voice going so that you don't feel like you're coming back and going, oh, I have no idea what I was writing and it doesn't make any sense. And where was I going with that? So its kind of have those two principles. I think we're really covering today. If you agree with that. Jesper (22m 45s): Oh yeah. I like the idea for this podcast episode, all that, but it's also a very broad one. We, we can sort of go anywhere where you almost absolutely. Oh yeah. I think that was kind of like the idea is to just help you keep that story vibe going, but, and there are so many different ways of doing that and was one thing that was going to work for somebody might not work for you. So, oh, we're going to cover a couple of different things I think. Alright. So where did we start? Autumn (23m 11s): Oh well to me and I think you'll agree with this is the best way to keep your story on track and flowing. And so that you don't feel like if like last is to have some sort of outline, doesn't have to be a whole plot, but outline, I thought you'd liked that one. I mean we have those old YouTube videos. Maybe we can find the link to them and like how to make a half an hour story outline. It doesn't have to be something you spend days or weeks plotting, but to have a roadmap so that you know where you're at and where you're going. And that way if you happen to be halfway or a quarter or three-quarters you can pick it up and go, oh yes, this is where I am. Autumn (23m 52s): And you can go back on your route again and not get lost. Yeah. I would say even better either go to a Am Writing Fantasy dot com or go to Amazon or wherever you buy books and then just search for my own name. And then you will find the book called plot development and their is a full step-by-step guide, their, that we actually wrote on how to do the outline and it will help you a lot. It will Jesper (24m 19s): And even if your pants or even if you don't blink outlining you just try it on once and then I will fully respect if you afterwards say, yeah, it's not from me. Fine. But I think it's important not to have an idea in your head, that loud lining is not for you, if you haven't tried it. And there's a lot of those people out there, I'm sorry. But there is, there's a lot of people that have prejudiced that outlining is not from me. It doesn't work. That's not how I right. But they've never actually tried it. So I'd say just try it before you judge. That's all I would say. Autumn (24m 51s): I agree. And it'd be having started as a pantser and we all know that I'm the Guinea pig of this spontaneous and hey. You go do this and I go in and do it without him thinking often, I don't know. I've got to work on that. You can't believe I've made it this long in my life. But I, I went from pantsing to at least mildly plotting. I mean, that's why I developed first that half an hour outline. And now when we're writing together, we plot and we plot pretty heavy. And the more I get into writing in the types of writing, I like, I like literary fantasy and I like very involved subplots and plot. So have you only get that if you are plotting because it's too hard and tangled to do as a solid pantser, if anyone could keep that going hats off to you, but I don't know how you can do that intense of a storyline without doing some plotting. Autumn (25m 41s): So give it a try. It's amazing what comes out the other end. And as I said, I tend to be very much so I live my life as a pantser and I'm a plotter when it comes to writing. Jesper (25m 51s): Yeah. And I would also go out on a limb and say that the people who say that they can do that, that's not, that's not right. I I'm sure that the pantsers can make a very, very elaborate plots and subplots and so on. But the thing is that the re the way that they do that is they, they, they have to go over it many, many, many times and see that in and edit it and edit more and more to see that in new things in and make things connected and so on. So that's of course also the way to do it. A but if we were talking about maintaining a flow, then it is easier when you have an outline and you notice that everything is already connecting, you know, all the foreshadowing it's there, you set it up. Jesper (26m 32s): So, you know, exactly what's beats to hit in which chapters and so on. And it just makes it easier. Autumn (26m 39s): It does that even with, even the outlining, and we look beyond the plotting, having a chapter outline and having a chapter flow, where you go, you have a hook at the intro and you have a developing problem and a climate, you know, a resolution. And that's usually tangles into the next chapter. If you're skipping point of view, you know, having those things figured out, what's the next point of view? What is the next thing? What is the next hook? What's the, how has this, chapter's going to end those that are having those aspects figured it out really helped you maintain this, just focusing on this story of focusing on the emotional plot or the character arc that helps you maintain your flow. I mean, I always liked the idea that Einstein had five different suits. Autumn (27m 20s): They were all exactly the same because it wasn't, you didn't want to have to stress his mind about what am I wearing. He had bigger things to think of. And when it comes to your story, it's the same thing. You have bigger things to think of than, oh, you know, how has this next chapter going to start off, get all that figured out so that you can just enjoy writing and the process of writing. And you don't have to spend half of you're writing time. And especially, I mean, like you said, when I have my full-time job, they would have time. You have 45 minutes, a night to write or an hour and a half. And I still finished four books in a year because I had it all figured out. I knew when I came home, I could open it up and see where I was read the last sentence and go, oh, this is where I've had. Autumn (28m 0s): And I could just get to writing. I didn't have to worry about all this other stuff. Cause it was set up ahead of time. Jesper (28m 7s): Mm. Yeah, indeed. And if, if, if, if you don't like outlining and that sort of thing works for the pantser, right. I mean, if, you know, if you think about the day before, where am I going to start the next chapter tomorrow, then that will help keeping the flow going. Even if you don't have an outline. Autumn (28m 25s): Absolutely. That was, that was so of my favorite tricks for myself as when I realized like your down until your last five minutes of writing time, you know, the family there in the background and food, food, food dinner, who are you ever coming out of there and get off the computer and you know, that that's coming and you're like, okay. Instead of writing and trying to finish up the scene, I would actually take a break and start making notes for myself. I would get hit space a couple of times, put it in bold or italics so that I knew this was, this is just notes for myself. And that say, this is where I'm going. This is where this scene is going. This is where the next chapter is. Just brain dump everything that's in your head because you know, you're almost out of writing time and the most efficient use for it. Autumn (29m 7s): So that you'll be able to pick it up again faster. Next time is to leave yourself some breadcrumbs, make sure you do that as a fantastic way of wrapping up you're writing. And then to tell them, look, I only need five more minutes, please just give me this. Jesper (29m 25s): No that that's true. And I was also thinking that M one of the things that I'm very much an advocate for in terms of keeping the flow in the writing going is to get the writing done before anything else, if it's first thing that you do when ever you have to time, whether it's in the mornings or the evenings. So that doesn't matter. But, but if you do the writing before you do any of the other stuff, like maybe managing some ads or replying to emails or whatever, it may be sort of admin stuff that you have. If you do the writing first, then you are taking care of the most important thing first. Jesper (30m 5s): And that, that helps a lot in terms of keeping the flow going and you don't get sucked into, oh my God, it's now a week since I wrote last time, because I've been doing all these other things and maybe you got a lot of fun, but it hurts you're writing. So I'm prioritizing of that sentence is important. Autumn (30m 24s): Yeah, I agree. I mean, it helps before when I had the full-time job, I would often write when I got home, which was at my most creative time. It helps to know when you're most creative time it is. And for most people it tends to be morning. Some people it's after 11, 11:00 PM. And I know they're, they're vampires I have no idea how that is your creative time, but that they do exist. I've been told I've never met one because I'm asleep. I had 11:00 PM at that time, rarely, very rarely occasionally, but you know what I'm doing overnight drop drives to go see my parents. So that's about the only time you have killed me over night up at 1:00 AM. Autumn (31m 6s): All my goodness. But yeah, it's knowing when you are creative time, it is. And trying to set that as your writing time. But if you have nothing else that, you know, having either a set time, this is my writing time and making your family like understand that and not bother you. This is not when you're going to go Facebook and chat, you have to be good to turn off your wifi. So if you have to, I mean, I know we often use it to go do quick research, but you know, leave yourself a blank, you know, come back and do the research later. If you have to do it when you're editing, try to stay offline, truly focus on writing. But I agree now that I I'd rather get up earlier again, I'm in bed early. Autumn (31m 46s): So 5:00 AM to me is, is not that bad of a thing. And if I can get an hour of writing in my whole day is just like glowing and set. I just love that. And it's sort of like the idea of, I'm not a huge exercise fan, but if I can get a little bit of exercise in and then get to writing, oh my gosh. So that day is like a, so I already feel like I've won the championship and it's not even 7:00 AM yet. Jesper (32m 11s): Yeah. And I, I think as well, the, well, when you said you turn off the internet reminded me because that the fact that they're on know disturbances around really helps a lot. So if you are currently in an environment or a place where you find yourself getting distracted all the time, then maybe you need to find a different place to do you're writing. Mmm. And some people like it when they have very many people around, like in a cafe or something, and there was no summer. Some people liked that noise level. Other people preferred extremely quiet and isolated with a locked door, almost a, but it's up. Jesper (32m 53s): So it doesn't matter what it is. But I think it's important that you work out what works for you and try to make sure you create that sort of writing environment for yourself, because that will also again, keep the flow going. Autumn (33m 6s): Oh, I agree. I mean, keeping, and that can be a little things. I mean, where are you write the time of day, all the clutter, if, whether or not, you know, you can have a clean writing space often really works better for people, especially if you're still putting all your stuff into sticky notes instead of Scrivener files. Jesper (33m 23s): And you're doing that thing of that. Autumn (33m 25s): My sticky notes of talking about actual sticky note. So the one of my desktop's, I love my sticky as they work very well. Oh, I think that we've been working together. Jesper (33m 42s): So probably you only had to say one word, but where do you start laughing? Autumn (33m 46s): Or you're like, oh, this sticky is that he's. But you keeping the clutter, you want to be able to find your notes from your writing file, but I have two, or even if I'm hitting up really bad writing package, and I just need that little to know what you need to push yourself over the edge to get your self and that mind space. Umm, I used to have told you that and I have told the audience, sometimes they would be keeping that page like Jara Martin. There was just like some of this writing, they just go in and speak of wow. That I want to go write because then I wanna right. Like that sometimes. And recently like that chapter or that I just tried to finish. I just, I had a whole bunch of notes and they weren't flowing together. I sometimes do that. Autumn (34m 26s): I write backwards. I will just do like scenes and then I'll have little breaks in between them. And I'm like, okay, I've got to make this into a whole thing. And I finally just M sometimes it's putting on headphones. I just put on like a YouTube epic three hours, epic fantasy music. And it helps sometimes having that background and soaring music in battle scenes. And so it was just like, ow, my brain said, oh, okay. Yeah, yay. I know we're going to have right now. And so you need to figure out what your triggers are. You know, what kind of little routine, if you do sit down with a cup of tea and listened to that music or read a paragraph, what do you need to do to make your mind go? Yes, I am ready too. Right. And we're were gonna keep this going. Jesper (35m 7s): And sometimes you're just stuck and you don't quite know what is supposed to happen next in this story. And I can't quite work out the character or whatever it may be. And I think here it's very, very good to go outside, go for a walk and put it aside for a bit and get, go out. And don't think about what should happen. Just let the inspiration come to you because it will, your, your mind will be working on solving the, without you even thinking about it. That some that's exactly why sometimes you will experience that when you are in the shower or you all doing grocery shopping, then all of a sudden it pops into your, oh, I know what it is now. Jesper (35m 48s): And that's because your mind is working on it. So just sometimes accept the fact that your mind needs a bit of time to work on the problem and then go for the walk, go do something else, whatever it may be. I do feel like fresh air is very, very good thing. A but the main thing, whenever you do, don't stop jumping to the new shiny story idea that you got and leave this one behind because then the other one feels easier to go to because you're not stuck there yet. You have to finish the stuff you're working on. And I know, I know that some people like to have multiple projects that they juggle and fine if that's what you like then, but at least from my point of view, I will never give the advice that you should be jumping into a new projects all the time. Jesper (36m 33s): Because the fact that you can prove to yourself that you can finish something is massively important. And even if that, that means that today you are going to go for a walk and you're not going to do anymore writing until tomorrow and wants you slept on it and allowed your mind to work on solving the problem at hand, then that's fine, but don't just put it aside and start writing something new because chances are, you will also hit a roadblock in the new project and then on what you are going to do, are you going to jump to the new one again? And you see all of a sudden, you'd have 10 of unfinished manuscripts on your computer and 'cause every time you get stocked, you jumped you something new and set. You have to teach yourself how to overcome those obstacles and actually finish the work. Autumn (37m 16s): I agree. And I would say usually the best ideas come to me, not in the shower, but usually when I have like three things on the stove. And that's always, when you get a good idea and you're like, darn it. That's why I always keep note paper like stickies around so I can keep it quick and, and not forget because writing down those ideas will also help you keep going so you can add them. Like, that's why I do love Scrivener. I can just say, oh, I've got this idea for a seen, and I stick it, you know, in the chapter where I know that needs to be, I love being able to do that. So when I get to that chapter, it's already sitting there waiting for me, but I do. Jesper (37m 54s): Yeah. Or, and the court board and script. And that has what looks like sticky note. So that probably nicer as well. Autumn (37m 58s): You were thinking of me. But I also, I read, I definitely agree. I always had this rule that if I had only been sitting down for 15 minutes and I was stuck, I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave until I hit that 15 minute or 20 minute mark. I had to at least try to write and work on my story for those 15 to 20 minutes. Cause it is your brain is like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to go to Facebook. I don't want to do this. I wanted to go do something else. But if you can get into it, you'll usually push past that and keep writing. And sometimes I would need to not be, we work with exactly what I thought I was going to write on the story, but I'd have to sink into the character Jesper (38m 37s): head saying, okay, what does the character seeing right now? Autumn (38m 39s): Was it raining? Is that what, you know, just kinda pull myself up into the story and it may end up cutting out of that stuff. Maybe they're all be bits. I keep because it's a really good description and really places, you know, the reader into the character's head. But I have to admit if I have been there for 15, 20 minutes and I have put in an honest effort and I haven't been jumping off to Facebook or something, I agree sometimes just saying, what else can I do? I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to let this sit because sometimes that's all you can do. However, I will admit there was a time I was working on two projects in tandem and I thought it was fantastic because I would write like, I'd have a goal of four chapters in one and just half a chapter and the other one. Autumn (39m 20s): And if I hit those glitches where it's like, oh my gosh, I can not think what happens next. This character is not flowing. Especially that story. You had a politician and I've talked about that before. I don't do politician. Well, it was so hard to write in his voice, but then I could, so I could switch to the other one saying, okay, I'm gonna do that half chapters and jumping between them. I worked very well, but I have written over a trilogy at this point. And it was not a fresh out of, you know, gay. I have earned my little Stripe's and I knew that I could do it. And I only stuck to both of those and I managed to continue and get it done. Autumn (40m 0s): So it works. So if you have a blog maybe or short stories or Vela is a good thing. And as long as they were in the same vain and you don't switch two new ideas where you actually can have two side-by-side like parallel projects and one's your main project, but maybe you're going to write a quick Vella story. You to go with it, to get some new reader interests that can work. Sometimes. I don't know. Maybe if you're brain is like mind on a squirrel in cocaine, that we will work really, really well for you. Jesper (40m 30s): You, if you work, so you speeding up and down to three trees of carrying sticky notes and putting sticky notes on today, my name and sign this tree it's all right. Autumn (40m 42s): Now, you know what my brain looks like. Jesper (40m 46s): And also you hit did too. What we were just talking about. I think pro athletes, for example, they, they often visualize the outcome that they want so that they visuali visualizing their case. For example, what does it feel like to cross the finish line as number one or whatever, if it's a running or if it's a soccer game, which I like a lot than visualizing, how does it feel? Or how does the whole curve in the air when I score the goal and stuff like that. Right? But if you are, if you haven't proved to yourself that you can finish work yet, and you were in that rod of things where you have a bit stuck and you can't quite figure out how to move ahead and you really wanted to jump to that new project, because it sounds so much exciting right now than this I'm grateful, middle of the novel you are stuck in, then that I think, try to copy a bit what this pro athletes do, try to visualize in your mind, what will it feel like once I have the novel done, how will I feel about it? Jesper (41m 55s): And then hang on to that feeling. All right. And try to channel that feeling into forcing yourself to actually write it, because you know that by the end of it, I'm going to get to this place where I know how good it feels. And that's another way that you can try to trick your mind to battle that challenge that you have facing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think sometimes just give you the energy to push through some of those really tough chapters to say, Autumn (42m 22s): okay, you know, especially with like the seven steps of story structure, all can stuck in the reaction phase, but how cool is it going to be when I get to write that, that horrible scene of, of, you know, that dark moment that happens with flips the whole SI you know, a whole book and, you know, you, when you start thinking, okay, what's it gonna feel like we finally get to write the climax in this big, wonderful thing that happens then that can keep you going as well, especially when you realize what it's going to feel like they finish it in the, and when you speak a visualization, I made me think sometimes having a writing session, sometimes you get so stuck and bogged down in the intricacies of each chapter, that beginning and ending a writing session session with an eye, you know, a quick look over your synopsis or blurb, or your two sentences that kind of where your theme for the novel step back and make sure you're still on track and remember, oh, well, this is what this story is about and get yourself excited about the whole arc of it. Autumn (43m 16s): Again, sometimes that could help get you going as well. Jesper (43m 21s): Very true. And I have another one and it might sound a bit weird at first, but there is a logic to the madness here. The thing is that, that you might actually want, if you feel like keeping the flow is a challenge for you, you might want to try out dictation. Oh, and I know the default reaction have many people is like, know, thank you. I don't want to dictate anything. That's crazy and fine. Yes. You might say that. We act, we did actually, by the way, have a podcast episode in the past about dictation. Jesper (44m 3s): So you can go and search that one out. If, if, if you want to hear more about how to go about the dictation, but my point about it this morning, that dictating your story will increase. You're writing speed significantly. And sometimes when you have things to keep, you know, pulling you off, ah, and distracting you or interrupting your flow, if you can just churn out of the chapters quicker, you will also just get the riding out of their way. In the sense of that, then you are going to prevent those things from interrupting you because you already got the writing done 'cause you can dictate a ton more faster than you can ever write. Jesper (44m 44s): So that something you might wanna try out just to see if it worked for you, go I'll, I'll go back and listened to that. The passed episode that we have on dictation and get some good tips and guidelines from, from that episode and then go and test it out and see if that works for you. Yes. I know. Just like before we talked about all outlining, don't say no to something you haven't tried. I agree. It's like talking to kids, isn't it . And until you did that, you tasted it. Autumn (45m 12s): All right. I know. Fake spitting it out. It just because you have to think you're right. I know. I think you have to have a little bit of a logical brain for dictation, but again, I think anyone can learn to do it, and it really does help get ideas down very quickly. And so they have a spot. I think it's very useful. And I think just to wrap up, because I mentioned that story flow is also the reader's experience. So how to make a book that maybe took you a year, year and a half, even longer to write sound like a cohesive whole. I hate to say that the big tip is editing. Make sure you self edit. I would say, do I like content editing before you proofread, read the whole thing, get maybe an alpha reader to read the whole thing and point out of the places where things are out of line and out of junk, especially if you don't know how to do it, if you know, that's your first book and you've really, you can't see the forest for the trees, get an alpha, we have to get a mentor, find that content editor. Autumn (46m 9s): I have them look at it over and they will point out to places where things aren't kind of kicked off a little bit. That way the reader doesn't go. Okay, did we start a different story? You halfway through this, a different author picked up. Occasionally I do find books like that, but it's usually not as bad as the author things, but it definitely only comes about by editing because only if you were like one of those really crazy productive authors who can sit down and write 50,000 to 80,000 words in a single week. None of that, I mean, we were both professionals and the I've never had that kind of level of, they don't know if I know, I don't know if I didn't enjoy it. I think that's beyond my enjoyment of writing. Autumn (46m 49s): And I still wanna kind of have fun playing with words. So I'm never gonna write quite that fast 'cause I don't want too. So that's why you edit. Jesper (46m 59s): That's why. Autumn (46m 60s): Well, I love writing. I just don't want to write a hundred thousand words in a week. That's just know fun. You, you get to spend time with your characters that way two months that'd be good, but that's fine. Yeah. Jesper (47m 10s): Well, if I could, I probably would. Autumn (47m 16s): That's crazy. Jesper (47m 17s): But I think based on this conversation, at least what we can conclude is that there isn't one magic bullet to resolve this situation and be looking for a magic bullet that feels like something said before about being that there isn't one, Autumn (47m 34s): there doesn't know magic beans, but were still looking, but definitely know magic bullets know. Jesper (47m 40s): And I think we can also conclude is that we are all different and that's okay. And I think based on the things that we covered here, the main takeaway is probably that maybe we set something that inspired you, that you want to go and try it. If you feel like maintaining that story flow is a difficult thing than maybe try one of the things we said, and maybe something sort of clicked with you. And then there's some of the other one's we mentioned might not, and that's fine, then you leave those alone. But I, I think we all have different, so yeah, you would have to find your own way. Autumn (48m 21s): Exactly. Jesper (48m 21s): All right. So next Monday we'll be looking at pre-sales versus pre orders. What's the difference And is one better than the other. Narrator (48m 32s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWriting Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

It's time for one of Autumn and Jesper's very entertaining episodes. This time they have prepared competing lists of the WORST characters they've ever encountered in either works of fiction or movies and TV series. Tune in to episode 136 of the Am Writing Fantasy and judge who you think have the best of the worst listed. As mentioned during the episode a massive discount for the premium writing course and worldbuilding course will be offered to those on the email list. If you want to get your hands on the discount voucher, make sure to sign up right away. Here's the direct link: https://www.subscribepage.com/awfnewsletter Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (29s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This episode 136 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And you know, I always love these top 10 episodes. Autumn (45s): Oh, they are definitely some of the most fun ones that we recorded. I have to admit that I'm rather enjoyed them as well. And today we've created two competing lists, five entries, each of the Worst Characters EVER. And I just confessed to you before we started recording that if it wasn't for a sheer chance of luck, I mean, I meant to go into where we keep our podcast list and check it sooner, but kind of checked out this morning because we have another reason. And I made me realize that like, oh, I have to come up with five characters. So I kind of queried my parents. Autumn (1m 26s): So, oh my God, I cheated. None of them are actually helpful, but they helped get my mind going as well as the last minute panic, that always helps us procrastinators. So, so you don't probably relate to that, but yeah, I feel my list is pretty solid. I even put it in order, so I'm ready. I'm ready. Jesper (1m 54s): Okay. Okay. Well, I com very, very prepared. So I have some really annoyed characters that I can't wait to do. Autumn (2m 3s): I'm guessing here them, you knowing what you've come prepared with. Jesper (2m 7s): Yeah. So of course I had some sound clips because it makes it a little funnier to listen to all the podcasts listeners as well. Autumn (2m 14s): So one day I swear, I will come prepared enough to have emailed you some sound clips to play for me. What I ask you, that will be pretty cool, but that would be M I deserve a cooky if I do know, but I already feel bad about it because the last time we had the top 10 last month, yeah. Jesper (2m 33s): You came really prepared and you, and of course, I do like to know when the S lists and the last month you came so prepared that I was a bit nervous already from the start of that. I have a better list of you, but now that you are saying, you, you only realize that this morning, I feel much better already. Autumn (2m 52s): Hey, yeah. We'll have the sea I'm so curious have, Jesper (2m 55s): well, I actually, I have one on my list that I think he'll have as well, and he has a mention for me. Autumn (3m 3s): Okay. I'm curious to see if we end up with the same and I try to keep everything actually related to fantasy slash superhero. I tried to actually keep it all in general. So all that. So I didn't do that. I just thought of the most annoying characters I could think of. So I know almost dude, but I decide to go for the extra challenge of in John. Jesper (3m 24s): Okay. Okay. Well that is pretty cool. I will admit that, but it also means that all this stuff probably not overlap well, that's good, but ah, thank you for admitting. Autumn (3m 33s): I did extra late minute, last minute homework. Jesper (3m 36s): So, oh yeah. That, that, that's pretty cool. You are in a few points for that, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well that that's all right. So I already start the head. That's all that matters. So things over their, for you. Well, good. We have 30 degrees this weekend. We know that Celsius in 86, 90 Fahrenheit, something like that. Yeah. So we spent the entire Saturday at the beach and that was pretty varied because we do with the new apartment, we lived like a hundred meters from the beach. So it was that that's pretty lovely. But I also have to admit that we actually are starting to wish to move back into a house. Autumn (4m 19s): Well, I bet I've surely a small part, but as much as it's nice to have that closer to the ocean, there's nothing living in a small cabin as I do. I would give anything for like my own office space and to be able to close a door and stuff like that. Jesper (4m 34s): So yeah, I know. I'm sure you're feeling the pinch right now. I am the, that, there's just a, I mean the, the, the neighbor or the area here is really nice, but it's, there's just not enough space in here in this apartment. So, but, but we had a building plot in, in mind this well where we all want to build new housing, but actually some new challenges of surfaced because the city council start to make plans about putting a road right next to the place where we, we want to build a house. So that's not good. Know there is a town hall meeting this Thursday. So I'll attempt that and try to learn a bit more. Jesper (5m 15s): But if they do end up building the road where they talking about billing road at the end, that there's no decision made yet, but that's what they're talking about. But if they do do that, then, well, we need to find the alternatives. And honestly, I don't know where that should be. So that at the end of the day, the challenge here is that we want to build a house close enough for the kids to be able to go to school, you know, by themselves, are you using the bicycle or something like that? And if you get too far away, that's not no longer possible. Right? So that limits sort of our options, but it's just, it's just politicians being weird. 'cause this particular route where they apply that they're talking about building the road, what's actually looked at like three years back and it was discarded as a possible route road back then, because it goes straight through a forest where there's also an endangered species of bats living. Jesper (6m 13s): So write. And then all of the sudden the politician sorta put it back under the table and say, well, let's build a road there. And then of course, a lot of people started complaining because there's also people living in that area already on one thing is of course the endangered species. But the other thing is that it goes straight past the neighborhood where people live, right? So people started complaining and then the M the mayor of this town, she was like, wondering why, why is people complaining about this road? And the, I mean, nobody has ever, ever said that it was a problem before and so on and so on. And it's like, well, maybe that nobody's complaining 'cause this was this God of three years ago. So nobody thought it would ever happen, but I don't know. Jesper (6m 55s): This has just politicians being politicians. All right. Well, you make no sense or they're an alien species. That's why we never talked politics. That's true. We don't want to go there. I know. Right. How about you? How are things going on your side of the Atlantic? Autumn (7m 16s): Oh, it's been good. It was fun. My husband came home for like a week and a couple of days, and he's back off to a rafting guiding. And actually he even ref guided when he was here at a place, it was only 45 minutes south. So I got to see him before he ran off again, all of a sudden, but we've had some beautiful weather. It was like a perfect week where it was just in the seventies. Cool enough Knights that you actually need a blanket. And it was lovely. And then, you know, as soon as you left it, like hit the high eighties with super huge high humidity. It felt like, it felt like when I was in Mexico in the times, I've traveled to like Mexico in Acapulco, in Costa Rica where you wake up in the morning and the CSR has still. Autumn (7m 59s): And so that humidity off the ocean is just sitting on top of you. And you're like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine what it's going to be like at three in the afternoon. But by then the sea breeze kicks up and it's so much better. But those mornings where everything is still and damp, when you hold up a piece of paper and it kind of goes, whew, it's fin it's, it's just damp. I've always wanted to live on a sailboat. And I said, I won't ever get another sailboat. Cause I've had too in my life. And I went once a third, but I said, I wouldn't get one until I can live on it and travel on it. And so as much as I want to there's days make up that humid. Jesper (8m 38s): And you're like, oh, I don't know if I could do this 24 7. Autumn (8m 44s): No, we actually, we got that problem solved. After traveling for four years across the country, we have repeaters and cell phone towers. If you are sailing in the middle of the ocean, well, that's in the middle of the ocean. Most of the time you are around land though. That's only like a one to two week window. So that I'm not that worried about those times. You do too many crossings. Jesper (9m 4s): Oh my God. I would never want to live on a boat. I'm where two luxury minded to do this. One of my couch, all of those things. Autumn (9m 12s): And shower's, and you could have, you just have the download the Netflix before you go, and then he can just binge watch. So that as well, the other person's at the tiller. Yeah, but still there's no showers and this again, so it has a good, but how shower? Jesper (9m 29s): Yeah. If you have a luxury boats, maybe that most of the sail boats I have been on, I wouldn't go for it or anything that can cross the Atlantic has got to have a shower, even if your, on the back. So that's what it is that you want to have ahead and a bathroom. Autumn (9m 45s): So I, I think my adventure itch honestly, is acting up a little bit. I've been good ever since my husband got back from whitewater rafting and lost like 20 pounds, we've been getting up even earlier. I mean, he's getting up at like four 30 and I'm getting up about 5, 5, 15 in the morning. And every other day I get to go for a run. And the next day I usually do some yoga in some stretch exercises. And I am feeling so much better. Suddenly I'm feeling much better. And all my gosh, I just want to go hiking again. I want to a, I want to get all my motorcycle, which we don't have here. Cause we don't have enough room for it and I wanted to sell those. Jesper (10m 22s): So I think that if you have Kevin fever, all the, all the editing and you're just sitting around and, and Kevin editing books all the time, you are drawing. Autumn (10m 31s): I mean, I have gotten some wonderful and working on some wonderful M book covers and fantasy map. So that's lovely. But at, I love every day I wake up and think, oh, I'm so lucky I get to do this, but I have to admit, you know, they just opened up the Inca trail and as a new trail down in Peru, I want to do so. I don't like, we need to get those out of my system sometime soon. Or I'm going to just send you a note saying, run off to and talk me through and I'll see if they have a VPN down there, but the otherwise see you, you sounds good. Narrator (11m 8s): Oh, we go all the internet with the yam Writing Fantasy Podcast, Jesper (11m 13s): We have something quite exciting to mention. Mmm. And I don't know, perhaps it's the summer heat getting to us all the cabin fever or something like that, who knows, but at something, something is getting too. And if you work out what it is, let us know because we don't know how the sales, but you send me more. Yeah. What we decided to offer everyone on our email list, a massive discount to be used on either of our two flagship courses. Yeah. So within the next three to four weeks or thereabouts, we are going to email out a voucher code giving probably I think it's going to be 150 off the, off our two courses. Jesper (11m 59s): Yeah. Maybe you could just explain a bit about what are these two courses that you just don't know that I always like to drive, stuff like that all on you. And you're like how you build a website. So you talk about it. Narrator (12m 10s): These are our two premium courses. So we have the ultimate fantasy writer's guide, which is our first one. We put, well, actually M what's in the name of our first one we put out, but this is our first premium one we put out. And it is a 12 module, complete course of knowledge of how to develop an idea and right. Well, but then how to edit market, build a platform, how to format, how to upload to Amazon because, oh my gosh, have you have not done that yet? Autumn (12m 38s): There's times where it's not that hard, but the first time it's like, well, there was a lot of what, what is this? I got to Google what they're talking about. So it covers all of that and then how to keep growing your author platform. So that's a one-stop shop, everything that you need to know about developing an author business and becoming a writer, which I think that's a pretty good start for courses. But then we decided we wanted to do a world-building course. And this is a, this is the one that you've been following along. And the podcast that took us oh, two and a half years. Yeah. It was massive. Massive, which I don't want to say that because I don't want people to be like afraid of taking the course, of course, oh my God, this massive, it's massive. Autumn (13m 21s): It's actually wonderful. And incredibly well organized. And you don't have to do every video. There's like these optional places and extra information. And it's just wonderful. I mean, it takes you from again, the Colonel of you, how to start with the current, all of the story, you can develop one as you do it, but it helps you develop a world. Worldbuilding a story along with the world that the two are intertwined and inseparable and unique and just wonderful. And that it teaches you, you know, all the components you need to build that world to fit the story so that you don't get lost with worlds builders, disease, or just lost in your own world for six years, we, we try to not have to be too bad, actually. Autumn (14m 3s): That's well, I guess if it's a portal there and it's a world where you can at least be an avatar that could kick, but that would be a good option. Pretty good at that would to cure my itchy feet. And actually, so if anyone that has a little bit of sitting around letting me know, but otherwise you can take the course and learn to build a world and develop your story and all the components so that when you're done, you know, we have an amazing world. You have a story that you are ready to write, to go with it. And then the final modules actually go into how to weave the two together without info dumping, how to bring the story to life in different ways so that you can really engage the reader. Autumn (14m 47s): And I think that if you're a writer and you are worldbuilding and you just really want to bring out something amazing, I think it's a fantastic course. We have used it and test, we ran it ourself for our world have Alyssa, so we know how it works and it's pretty darn good. So those are two primary courses and it'll teach you everything like creating cultures, creating history, creating groups in Coles and gills and the magic systems and maps. Everything is so we did. Jesper (15m 17s): So. Yeah. So if any of that interests you and you would like a massive discount, then we will include a link in the show notes that from where you can just add in your email address, because then you're going to get on our email list. Autumn (15m 33s): And then you're also going to get that email. When we send out the voucher code, you can simply use that one and get the course at a very low price. Jesper (15m 43s): That's pretty cool. Autumn (15m 45s): I think that's fantastically cool. Yeah. We must be a little crazy this summer. Jesper (15m 50s): Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what happened, but the thing is that these courses are self-paced as well. So you can dip in and out as you please, and you can of course do it from the safety of your own home Narrator (16m 4s): Now onto today's topic. Jesper (16m 8s): So we agreed that this top 10 list of the worst case, the characters ever B from the books that we read, or it could also be from movies we've seen. Autumn (16m 23s): And that probably also means that since we're not going with some of the past top 10 list, we made, we create something completely made up. In this case, we are actually using characters that exist either in written works or in movie. So that means that may be some listeners. Will it disagree with us here? All them? Jesper (16m 40s): I think that they might. Autumn (16m 42s): I, yeah, I know it was funny cause I did Google some other list and there was a few characters. I was like, you know that character, I hate that. So I expect some disagreement. I expect someone to say, no, no, no, there are Worst Characters, but these are the ones that are near or not. So near and dear to my heart, I suppose I, I chose ones that were worse for a variety of reasons, maybe a little illustrative of some points. And so I went kind of along those lines. So their worst for not just their actions or just poor acting, I avoided poor acting just to give people a break. Autumn (17m 22s): And I have to admit, I didn't choose any book ones just because of the character. Was that bad. I most likely didn't finish the book unless they were just like a tertiary character in the background. And I promptly just erase them from my mind. Jesper (17m 36s): And that's when normally deal with these top 10 list. We are trying to come up with the best worst list. But in the end we also have to work out who actually won all them. Autumn (17m 48s): All right. Well have to see which one we came up with that I remember I got some bonus points for sticking to genre. So I'm already ahead. Jesper (17m 55s): As we get off the started off the gate, you said a small bonus point, but I can hear you all the way to make it like into boneless points. Autumn (18m 6s): I did. So we can hear that. So this is what happens in you gave Kyla Fe anything. Jesper (18m 13s): Yeah, that, that is true. But we also, I think you, even though I try to prepare, well for this episode, M I also have to say that that was actually quite hard because I wanted to try to find characters that were so bad that they basically made me want to stop watching the movie or the series. Autumn (18m 36s): So when it's that bad, you know, that you've got the worst of the worst, but on the other hand, it was also pretty difficult to find the ones that are truly that bad. Jesper (18m 47s): Yes. I agree. I've watched some really bad movies, as we've mentioned in previous podcasts on worst list where I, I binge watched all over the streets, signs theater 2000. You're like, why did you brought your brain with those? But they were fantastically horrible, but yeah, defying characters. And especially to you then to try to remember these characters that I absolutely let you know, spark some kind of level of hate where I didn't just forget them. Autumn (19m 17s): It actually wasn't that easy. But I think that there's a few worst characters I could have probably chosen if I thought longer, had more time, but I feel very satisfied with my list. It is the good illustrative example list. Jesper (19m 36s): OK. Well, I still feel like that because you weren't, that you have not as prepared as me. I, I have to say I have to win this one. Otherwise I'll feel disappointed, but we'll see how it goes. So, so who's starting out here with number five. Autumn (19m 50s): I think I started, or you started last time to be honest, which is unusual for , but I'm trying to be nice to you. So I guess that was my turn to go first, if you would like okay. T Jesper (20m 3s): han, than come with your number five. Autumn (20m 5s): All right. I'll have at it. So my least of the worst is actually Sabrina Spellman from the chilling adventures of Sabrina, which is a Netflix remake from the books of Sabrina, the teenage witch. Jesper (20m 22s): Ah, and I said, it's that new one? Is it is the new, I heard some very bad things about this series. Yeah, cool. Autumn (20m 31s): I chose her, but honestly the entire cast, again, not for the acting, but for the roles and the plot and just all there were just so pathetic except for two characters that were two, I actually liked, which was in bros and prudence. And there's a part in the second series, which I began watching and that it was just so bad. I turned it off saying, I never want to see this again. But there was a point where they were tagged teeing off to go and hunt down the former head teacher eval dude. And I'm like, Darren, that I could watch a spin off of the two of them as hunters. Autumn (21m 12s): You know, they were fantastic. But the rest of that, I was just rooting for more deaths. I think more of them needed to talk to me so badly. I can't even get into what was horrible. It's just, it was so, so tropish, they're just teenagers make me, I don't know, but I really afford them. So it was just like annoying in the way that you couldn't put your finger on. Yeah. Just bad. The characters themselves we're in very deep, the smells were pathetic. Ah, the Forsythe was horrible. They make stupid mistakes just to keep the plot running. Autumn (21m 52s): Things were inconsistent about them from one episode to the next. And it was just so again, a lot of it was bad writing, but just there was no substance and there was nothing in the character I really wanted to root for. I didn't care if devil sucked her down to how it would have been fine. It would have been more interested. Maybe she would know, learn the lesson. I was so pathetic. There was a boyfriend that bounced back and forth in a really stupid love triangle that I just wanted to lb my head against the wall. She cured her best. Friend's Brian blindness. After not being able to cure it after curing it, not carrying it. I was just know, I couldn't guess it was a mess. Jesper (22m 34s): It wasn't that, that sounds a bit like, it, it almost sounds like a bit of like, it's the series that is bad. Autumn (22m 40s): And I mean the characters as well, but it sounds like the series as a whole, this just as bad as the character. Let's just say when the wrote, the second part of the series starts out that they're trying to go to hell to rescue Sabrina's boyfriend. And not only is it super easy to get into hell after a whole first season where they could never find the way there and demons were trying to rise up to earth and ends up like a doorway, they can go, but it ended up mimicking the wizard of Oz and all the way down to the tin man and the Lyon. And that's where I have said, no, just done done. If you lack of imagination, just know. And if anyone out there that likes it, just tell me why, because I don't care how bad it was. Autumn (23m 25s): Horrible, horrible writing, but you know, the characters too, the characters were just, they lacked any depth and I just couldn't do it. Jesper (23m 37s): Okay. Well, I have not watched that series, but now I know what, I'm not gonna watch that either double dog area. No, thank you. Autumn (23m 47s): Good answer. I did that to my husband once and he still blames me for getting sick off of a piece of chocolate. I told him he doesn't have to take the double dog, the air cheese. Jesper (24m 0s): Okay. So I haven't learned to find that as well. Yeah. You hear it. I'm going to stop out strong here. This character is the most irritating and up noxious character that I've ever come across. Well, this is gonna be good. Bad, good. That she was actually the first one I thought of for my list here today. She truly made me want to stop watching. Wow. And you've probably watched friends all from have a you, I have, it's been years. I am not a friend's worshiper. Jesper (24m 43s): Unfortunately. Fortunately, if you, if you can remember, what is the worst character in the cast of friends that you can think of? Autumn (24m 52s): Maybe Phoebe, I know it's been so long. You listened to this sound clip. And then just telling me that this was not annoying. All right. Character 1 (25m 2s): The me Chandler bang. Oh no, I don't seek me out something deep in your so called out to me. Like, you want me, you hate me. You can't live without me. And you know, it, you just don't no, you know it so Jesper (25m 34s): Well, that is Janice. Littmann from my friend and from friends and my, that character is just so incredibly annoying. It's that meeting. Autumn (25m 43s): I can honestly say I do not remember watching an episode with her in it. So obviously I did not watch all the episodes, but that, that actually reminds me if I show that again, I'd probably could of used that character, but I can't remember the name of the show. It has been. So white-listed from my brain and despair, my S entity. Right? Jesper (26m 6s): So at what else? She, well, she was just so incredibly annoying, but it's like both the way she speaks and she is so stupid as well. She has. And does you don't understand that the, the people don't know sort of like what she does and, and her laugh is so annoying that it's incredible and it's just made like that on purpose obviously, but it, it really works in the sense that I have to come up with list of characters that actually make me want to stop watching. That was her CHITAS she's annoying. So I think that is a pretty good stat for number five, but that is a pretty good start for now have five, like you said, it does it remind me now we have some show. I did watch, he had the character, had that exact same accent. Jesper (26m 47s): And that was kind of like, I'm not watching this, I don't care. I'm not doing it, but yeah, I know. I can't remember what it was. Sorry. Autumn (26m 55s): So I can't even bring up her name, but yeah, that's the, that's a pretty bad one. Jesper (27m 1s): Yeah, pretty bad. Autumn (27m 2s): Okay. So your number for my number four is actually syndrome from the Incredibles. I don't know if you watch that. So that's the animated cartoon. I love animation because I actually studied it when I lived in Manchester, UK. And So I just, that was the whole time stuff with paper and pencils and all my gosh, but they can do that with computers was amazing, but syndrome annoys me because I like powerful villains with cold hearts and decisive actions. And he's just nothing. He is still, and he's got a good backstory, but even up until the present day, when he was trying to kill off superheroes, he's doing it because he is the whiny little kid who wants to be a superhero in just isn't good enough. Autumn (27m 46s): And he's still not good enough. And he dies stupidly and it's just blah, but it's just not so much. It's not what I want in the villain. And I think when you have a really bad villain that it ruins a lot of the story, a lot of that you could have a really fantastic character. And if they're up against a squishy Villa and you're like what, you're wasting them. So I just found syndrome just pathetic. Hmm. Okay. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know it, but, but it is important that we, we have talked about over and over again, the importance of having strong villains. So it definitely destroys the story of there's just this really both week. Jesper (28m 30s): So annoying the villain. And I could say something about a villain in the last star wars movies, but I'm probably not going to go there because then somebody will jump on the and kill me. So we do not touch start wars secret. Autumn (28m 45s): Okay. So let's go on to your number four of them. Jesper (28m 49s): Okay. Now, before I have another clip repaired here. Autumn (28m 52s): Oh, of course. Jesper (28m 53s): Yes, of course. I have a clip from all five. Of course its going to bring home victory bonus points. Yeah. The way that sort of a, I actually canceled out of your bone is pointing. Gives that to me. I think, Autumn (29m 9s): I don't think so. Lets hear. Jesper (29m 11s): Okay. So in this scene, one of my favorite characters of this show has just been picked up by the character that I really don't like. So are you going to hear of a male voice and a woman in this clip and the it's the woman that I don't like. Autumn (29m 30s): Okay. Jesper (29m 30s): But I'll explain it afterwards. So you have just listened to it. I don't think you can guess who this is to be honest, but just to have a list and I'll explain Character 2 (29m 42s): The walking for days, thank God you came alone, but are you going to America, New York? He's yours. This is the one of going family there. I know Jesper (30m 1s): We need to find this man Dr. Sue rest, or you know what series that is from know I do not that doesn't ring a bell at all now it's from heroes and how has it? Yeah. And so I don't know if I have watched that now, but you say that well, that's actually a pretty good series'. So in this scene and the male voice is Skylar, who is like a really like bad-ass character. And I really like him and he's just been picked up by this woman called Maya and M Maya is just like the opposite of skylight. Jesper (30m 45s): And that the problem I have with her is that she always comes across as so incredibly helpless and she's never able to sort of work out herself what's she supposed to do with it. So she always depends on the other characters to sort of take her hand and lead her down the path of wherever whatever's gonna happen. And of course at the same thing applies to in our writing a you don't want to see characters that doesn't know how to think for themselves because those characters just so annoying. And I really got quite worked up this my character and to be honest. And so you just ruined every single episode she was in than unfortunately, and the latest season she's in their quite a lot. Autumn (31m 32s): And that's funny you say that. Cause a lot of that, the list that I saw, they listed a different character. Jenny Wisley was actually listed quite a lot for the exact same reasons. It's like she never does anything. Her like biggest fame is that she marries Harry Potter for whatever reason. And no one's like she cast spells in the entire show. She breaks into the chamber of secrets and they find her sleeping on the floor. I mean, she's just the static. And so that was a huge reader, no know to have the character that is just never manages to stand up on her or his own two feet that we indeed, and that it's so annoying to watch or read for that matter. Jesper (32m 18s): It's just like that again. And I think Maya is that like this in my era character, who is the perfect example of what I don't want in characters. So let's say that the top hop number too. So that's pretty, or the number four I should say. All right. So I was only in number four. I still have the ones left. So the blowing you out all the water and only just started. Autumn (32m 40s): Wow. So think, all right, you ready from my number three then? Jesper (32m 44s): Yep. Autumn (32m 44s): So this one, I didn't even have any problem thinking of it's a character. I really don't like, and that is Bella's Swan from the Twilight series. Jesper (32m 57s): Oh my gosh. Autumn (32m 58s): So you agree then? Jesper (32m 60s): So I did not put her on my and this, but I could have yes, Autumn (33m 4s): I despised her and I mean, not just the movies, I read the books and I read the books purposely because they were so popular and I wanted them to know why, you know, what in the writing was so right. And I read the books despite Bella Swan, because I absolutely hated her. She was just, I don't even know where to start, but she needed a big dose of like growing up really fast, being a lot less, less self absorbed stuff. Wishy washy over Edward versus, oh the nine. You can't remember the name of that, Jacob. Yeah. Yeah. I know it just and what was worst for the books in the movie? Autumn (33m 46s): You could almost put up with it because the character's, you know, it's a movie you're watching things. That's a little less internal. The books is written in first-person and so you are literally in her head for three quarters of a novel and it's just the novels. I read the whole series. Oh, it's just, you feel icky. I'm sorry. I have felt icky after reading her chapters, I was just, you know, dunk me in an ocean so I can clean myself off. I did not like her at all. No one actually, you know, saying that it is slightly strange to think about 'cause we talk a lot about the importance of making good characters in, how, how do you make of characters and what makes them likable and how it's important and so on. Autumn (34m 29s): And then when you think of something like bill, this one and how massive the success that Ceres has been, the main character that is not likable at all. And that, that is a bit counter intuitive. I don't understand that to me. Well, I know obviously there's a lot of people who either relate to her or a, like the ropes of this series despite her, but oh, I don't know her. So we're going to get a lot of listeners on our back here for just like that. That was used to use characters ever. But if you think she is Y tell me what about her resonates with you? Because admittedly, I was a tomboy. I have motorcycles. I played with matchboxes. Autumn (35m 9s): I don't get the whole, I've never been romantic, like oohing over someone my entire life. That may be my husband, but I don't get it. I don't get her at all. She makes me want to smack her upside the head and tell her to grow up and you know, go and dig a ditch in Africa and we'll talk later. Jesper (35m 29s): Well, that is a good number three. All of them. I can agree with that one. Autumn (35m 34s): You put for me that that's the point. Jesper (35m 36s): That's okay. That's a good one. Autumn (35m 39s): Thank you. Jesper (35m 39s): Okay. Number three, here is email more annoying than Jen is Littmann. Oh, so this is a bit of a blast from the past and you can probably recognize it because I think there's a good chance that you also like me watched the series growing up. Okay. Well, I tried to watch it because back then we didn't have any streaming services. So you watched whatever was on TV. And yet, even though this was the only thing that was on this character annoyed me so much that I would rather do nothing than watching more of this series. So I'm just going to play this little sound clip here. Jesper (36m 21s): And I think you might be able to guess it is. Character 3 (36m 31s): Would you look at this? You know, I think Ms. Ellie had this wallpaper in south fork. Jesper (36m 38s): Okay, I'm going to stop it. There is, oh, I can't take how loud and annoying her voice is. I can you recognize that? Autumn (36m 46s): I recognize it and I cannot think of the show, but I do recognize it. Jesper (36m 53s): I have seen it in the cities as you tell me, like, oh yeah, it's the non-issue right. It's it's from, Autumn (37m 1s): oh, that's right. Oh, she is so annoying, Jesper (37m 4s): but it's not only her nasal voice that makes this character really annoying. It's also that constant relationship building between her character and Mr. Scheffel that just shot of it goes up and I know the down and blah, blah, blah. And the round and round, it's just getting on my nerves. Autumn (37m 20s): It's like, when it's like plotted off of a soap opera where it's like today, you don't take Tuesday and it's all just please make up your mind. Either love each other. We hate each other. We don't do both. It's so annoying, but that is really, really fight that character. And I'm also starting to think that you don't like that New York, New Jersey accent, but maybe I'm wrong. Jesper (37m 41s): Maybe. I don't know. I have never thought about that, but maybe, I don't know. Autumn (37m 44s): I, at least I say that because I know my husband a, that is an accent. He's got a Boston Kennedy accent and he says, cause and stuff like that. So it's about the opposite of New York. They have a good rivalry with New York. Boston does. So he's pointed out at quite a lot of like that. So that she's definitely annoying. Why are you ready for that? I don't know if you watched this series yet, but Sheldon Samson, AKA utopia in Jupiter's legacy, which is a new Netflix one. So you don't watch a lot of superheros ones. So I didn't think you would watch this one, but if you don't like superhero movies in this has a very good back story and I actually really enjoy the in series, but he, the archetypical character of he's just a bit too, God-fearing a bit too pro USA. Autumn (38m 48s): Democracy loves you, you know, just how he's too perfect. He's too rigid. He's just too, this is the way things have to be in. And this has democracy and we're going to protect it. And we're going to allow what people to make horrible choices and not take that away from them because they're allowed to make free choices. And it's just like gagged me so that I can not take, I would definitely, I've always joked. I would be a super villain, but I'd probably do something good. It ended up being one of the superheroes, but I just can't take that level of patriotic, red, white, and blue. And I'm American. I'm just know gray. Autumn (39m 27s): There is so pure. And I have like characters with flaws. I'd like characters with doubts. I like characters that question. I love this clever, clever character. And when you're that Ridgid, you're not clever. Or you just see with blinders on. And I just don't like them. And there's a couple of characters that I could of used for this one. Jean grey in X-Men it's very similar. She's like the way to goody two-shoes captain America. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no. And it seems like it's a superhero trope where you have the perfect one. I mean his name utopia. It's just know, I, I just can't do that. I want flaws. Autumn (40m 8s): I want weaknesses, not weaknesses that you're just so perfect. And you're upset. The rest of the world can not match your perfection. Jesper (40m 17s): Yeah know, I agree. And it's, it's so tough because we were talking so much about the is a very important like characters or the, the importance of making a good characters in them. And then we come up with a ton of these are really annoying ones, but yes, there are out of the word though. Autumn (40m 46s): Okay. Your number too. Jesper (40m 50s): Yeah. So This is, well, this next one is one of those characters where I just couldn't wait for another character to kill him. Autumn (41m 0s): It sounds like my number one. And I wonder if we we'll have a match. He's a real little Pete that is exceedingly statistic. Jesper (41m 11s): Okay. This may be, imagine. So it sounds like my name is one of the worst and also most unlikeable characters that I can think of. Autumn (41m 19s): Okay. I can't wait to hear this. Jesper (41m 22s): And I also found on the internet that ranker, you know, that the internet service that sort of ranks different things, they actually did an online poll asking who the most hated character in T V history was at this character was by file on the top of that list. Oo. All right. So he is a spoiled Brett that makes my life miserable for everyone else. And why don't I just play the clip here? And then you can tell me who this is. Autumn (41m 52s): All right. character 4 (41m 53s): My mother wishes me. Join the Knights, watch stripped all the titles and polished. You would solve the room in Pomona in takes up on my lady, sons. I was begged mercy for her father, but that have a soft hots of woman. So long as I have your king tree's in shall never go on punished. So in and bring me in my head. Jesper (42m 27s): That is right. Yes I can. 'cause this one is my number one. So it said free marathon. Autumn (42m 35s): Yes. Oh yeah. That was when you said, you said oil brats make everyone's life. Hell yup. Rooting for him to di oh, we could not die painfully in fast enough. Jesper (42m 48s): Yeah. But actually very honest. And I'm very being very honest here. All right. It is very, very rarely wear. I have watched a series where I actually like, not like, oh, it would be nice if this character disappeared or you sort of, but actually rooting for somebody to kill him. Autumn (43m 7s): I can remember almost that ever happening until this character showed up and game of Thrones Christ he's in my husband said I almost the exact same thing. He's like, he loves game of Thrones, which is really cool because he doesn't watch a lot of fantasy with me. And except for that. So he's like, what's, that was over once Jeffrey was gone, he was good. And we almost started watching and again, and he's just like, as long as we skip those episodes with T take him knowing what was coming. And for me, I had to say that he's, he's definitely the worst, but this, this serious and Ramsay we're also too. Autumn (43m 47s): And the show where I was like, duh, duh, duh, duh. You know, you have to be horrible ends as fast or as slow as possible. You know? Jesper (43m 57s): I agree. But, but, but that was, I agree. Ramsey was also somebody you, you rooted for him to die, but yes, but Ramsey was not in annoying in the same way I used to me ruthless. Yeah. He was just ruthless and he was not a nice character at all. And you certainly did not root for him whatsoever, but still, he was just not annoying in that same way. Whereas this character of, so I still remember the episode when he finally died, he was just like, yes, yes, yes. It was like watching a football. And that says something like we do instead itself when you're rooting for him, I think it was the character. It wasn't a real person rooting for their death because I give George RR Martin credit for making it character that you are like, oh, so every one of the world can get behind wanting this character that I have amazingly powerful for a Villa, a young villain. Autumn (44m 52s): You just fantastically horrible. You wanted him to die. Jesper (44m 55s): Yeah. So it was in unlike some of the other examples. It's excellent writing. Cause you really hate him. It was my number one. Autumn (45m 3s): Your number two. I can't imagine what your number one is. Jesper (45m 7s): Well, my number one is so bad. Well, I'm going to let you, since I was my number one, we can skip to yours. Autumn (45m 13s): And then if it isn't your number one, I have, like I said, a dishonorable mention. Jesper (45m 20s): Okay. All right. So my number one, and honestly I knew right away when I made this list that this character have to be the number one and he is worth worst than any of the other ones that I've mentioned. Autumn (45m 31s): Oh gosh. I can't imagine anything worse than Jeffrey. Jesper (45m 35s): Oh, just wait here. And I have to say as well though, I love this universe. I love these movies as do millions and millions of other people. All right. However, I am the only one who find this character incredibly irritating. Oh, let's hear it. He was originally designed to give some funny laughs. But instead he is just so incredibly simple minded and stupid that he becomes intolerable. Let me play this a couple of four. Autumn (46m 12s): You sounds good. Jesper (46m 12s): I'll try again. Maybe it didn't say. Hmm. Okay. Interesting. Oh no. I don't know. Let me fix it. Yeah. I can tell you. So Character 5 (46m 28s): I think that, can you tell your mommy, I love you. You almost got killed. We have brainless eyes. So the ability to speak does not make them intelligent that out of him know Mrs. Mrs. In our humble seven. Oh my God. I love you so much. Jesper (46m 45s): I know. It's it just keeps playing how annoying it that you can't stop it and know. Autumn (46m 54s): Oh, you're right. So yes. I saw the judge of things on so many lists as just hated, hated, hated him for everything from his character, his idiocy too, the cultural appropriation of what they based it on. Jesper (47m 11s): And yeah, people hate our banks with that passion. I started checking in with a passion as well. I still think he is just so incredibly annoying that the all most destroys like, so I love this star wars movies, but at this character almost destroys those movies where he's in. Autumn (47m 30s): Oh my God. Yeah. He's he's incredibly painful. I think one person had one redeeming quality sing. At least your kids can probably laugh at him where there is other characters like Geoffrey and others that are just like, no one laughs at that. They're just so bad or horrible that your, your not giggling at all. Jesper (47m 49s): Oh yeah. But that is definitely up there. Autumn (47m 51s): Like I said, I still think Jeffery's worst, but me. All right. So you wanna hear my dishonorable mention and I'm actually surprised she didn't mention this one because you stopped watching the series because you couldn't take this character. Oh, which one have, I know I've thought about the Lucifer from the T V series. Jesper (48m 13s): Oh yeah. Yeah. That's true. Autumn (48m 15s): Yes. And he was really annoying, but I know he didn't annoy me as much of these five that, but, but he is the norm. He is annoyed and I have, so I did watch it, the whole series and I just, just, they just released the funnel part of it. And it was worth to me it was worth watching, but even his character arc is amazing. He goes like for our and M anagrams, he has at the bottom, bottom bottom. And he goes all the way up to the top, over the course of the series, which is amazing to watch a little ups where, you know, you have backslides a little bit fantastic writing that way. And that's why I enjoyed the series in what he becomes is amazing. But there were times that I was just going, oh my God, I can not take just level of arrogance. Autumn (49m 4s): Stupidity is in those first few episodes for painful, but once you've got more until the story, and once we got into the detective, Chloe and what is going on there, and then you and I will, I love the fact that Netflix did allow them to finish up the series and finish up the story arc because the writers did a fantastic job of doing that and tying up all these loose ends. So the series itself was definitely worth watching, but there were times that it was just like, holy rap. They had him start at such a low, low point that if I was writing a book, I don't know if I'd want to have you, you take a big risk to start with a main character that has that much of a oh yeah. Autumn (49m 45s): But they do such a good job pulling him all the way up to the character arc where he's at the absolute upper end. And it's amazing. Jesper (49m 55s): All right. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Oh, I think this is a tough one to conclude on Oren because there's a lot of really bad characters on these two lists. You are. I think we have very good points on both sides. You have had some really annoying characters. Autumn (50m 12s): And I think of my list with their very specifically purposely genre chosen niches are very, it was very well done. And I say so myself, yes, yes. Jesper (50m 28s): Yeah. At least argued as well. Good for you a you aren't who'd well from your list as well. And you know, of course in some of them I have not watched, so I don't know. And the same for me, of course, some of my list do you have not watched? So you also don't know, but I might have to leave. And then we have a couple where we just agree. Autumn (50m 45s): I think we can say Jeffrey is one of the worst characters out there forever, but yeah, he is. Yes. All right. Well maybe, I don't know. We have to have to have half that have the listeners way in which maybe we missed the one. Did we miss someone who's could be worse than these? I don't know. Right? Yeah. Jesper (51m 6s): I'm even though I started out by saying that I should win this one because we both had, I have audio clips prepared, which I do think I should have some point. You have time for all audio clips, you got a 0.4 being stronger, specific to fantasies. So, and so that's pretty cool. Ah, and then we have a couple where we either, I didn't know that it wasn't, you didn't know mind. And then we have a couple of, we agreed upon. So maybe actually from the beginning, I would of been a sad. So as I said it in the beginning for not winning, because I actually came more prepared than you did. But on the other hand you pulled some pretty good stuff out of your sleeves there. Jesper (51m 48s): So maybe, oh yeah, yeah. Autumn (51m 50s): So maybe, maybe we can, maybe we can make it a DRO. I actually know if you too bad about it all. That's pretty good for a last-minute homework thing that, you know, I agree to withdraw because that was a pretty much a whipped up this morning list. Jesper (52m 7s): Alright. But, but as you set, some of you listeners can think of some really annoying characters that we forgot about it. And please let us know. I would like to know what those are that we missed, or if you liked any of these characters, please tell us why please eat well. And we promise not to start arguing with you. So just say we accept your point of view and that's it. Autumn (52m 27s): Yes, absolutely. I'm just curious, especially Bella, why it's especially Bella. Narrator (52m 35s): All right. So next Monday we have back to the topic of writing craft. I always enjoy those too. And we're going to talk about how to maintain your story flowing despite all of lifestyle. So if you liked what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/Am Writing Fantasy For as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Sure, you've heard about beta readers, but why do they help improve your writing so much? And what's the best way to utilize (and organize!) their help? Join Autumn and two special guests, Pam Burleson and Paul Kilpatrick from Betabooks, as they talk about how beta readers can be such an asset, how best to use and find them, and how they created Betabooks to help authors learn to ease into the intimidating realm of asking people to read your book. PLUS, grab the 25% off coupon on Betabooks! Use AWF when you enroll in a paid plan on Betabooks at https://betabooks.co/. Check out the articles Paul mentioned on ​How to Run a Beta Read and How to Find Readers who will Love your Book. And don't forget to check out Pam's Beta Jam (PBJ) and submit your book if you'd like to have it considered! Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (3s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Autumn (31s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And this is episode 135 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today Yesper is off on vacation in Denmark and having hopefully a lovely time. And instead I have with me two very special guests. We have Pam and Paul from beta books. Welcome to the podcast. Pam (55s): Thank you. It was great to be here. Autumn (58s): So I, I, I sent this in an email when I asked if you wanted to join me, that a, my niece actually is responsible for having found you and introduced me and I've set up an account and started playing around. But I have yet to understand the full breadth of beta books. So I'm looking forward to hopefully of crash course, but first, please, please introduce yourselves and a little bit about, you know, how you found or you writers. I didn't even find much information on beta books and your backgrounds other than a really cute blur up at the bottom of the website that made me want to desperately reach out to you. Pam (1m 36s): Yeah. So my husband, Andrew is the third, have our little triumvirate here. He's a programmer and Paul and Andrew and I are all friends and Raleigh, Andrew wrote a book and had trouble getting anybody to read it. And then when people did read it to beta or whatever, he had trouble finding all the feedback. He was tired of that. So we decided to build it all so that he wouldn't read Andrews' book until Andrew build the thing. And so he did all right. I know, but at work, I'm not sure of Paul wanted it to work, but it did. Yeah. We've been going since then. Pam (2m 17s): And the reason the books exist is to make it easy for writers to run their beta, to send their, their documents out securely, to, to readers because of the document doesn't even go out, its all on one side. So there's no PDFs or other documents floating around the feedback has all their in one place for it to be sorted and mark and yeah. So the idea of their just to make and easy way for, for all authors to do that. So I M right now I handle the customer support and we Paula and I have done or conferences together and not this last year, obviously, but no, we did. Paul (2m 60s): We did it. We did at digital conference together. We did an online conference. That's pretty much it. I mean, technically speaking, a, one of the big headaches for Andrew was that when you did find a group of people, he just emailed them a word doc. And then he heard back from a number of people saying, oh, I can't open this. And so we sent it in a different format and then he started getting feedback via a series of emails, each person sending their own kind of email thread. And then he began making corrections and he sent out a new drafts to some people. And he ended up in this situation where he couldn't figure, he couldn't Colgate all this feedback from all of this emails, figure out who had, which draft and figure out what feedback he'd already used in making revisions in his draft. Paul (3m 45s): And he said, well, this is a, this is a data flow issue. And that's kind of what software is ideally suited to solving. So I bet I could do this. And we were sitting around at dinner and he said, does that sound like a good idea of Paul? And I said, that sounds like a fantastic idea. In fact, I won't read your book until I can read it on the software. So I didn't just get asked to read a book and say, know, make me a better tool to do it. Autumn (4m 10s): I absolutely adore that, that your husband is like, I had a problem and solve that because as it is definitely a problem that author's have of, especially as Yesper And I, as you heard it from the intro, you know, as we've come out with more books last summer, we released three NonFiction's and we were doing them all at the same time with different teams of beta readers, you know, 40 here, 30 here, 70 they're. And to get the feedback and to do the, all my life, I thought I was just going to go insane. Cause I'm the format or of the two of those. I'm the software person and our side of the business. So yeah, I was just, I think it must have ooze out to my family that my niece was like, Hey, have you seen this platform? Autumn (4m 59s): And as soon as I saw that, yeah, it's like people come to you and you know where they are so that you don't do formats one day and then two days later, someone else, since you something else, and you've done so many edits, you can't leave. You're like, did I do this, this error they found? Or did I not? Oh my gosh. Paul (5m 16s): So it is. And so you just described exactly, essentially the S the, the, the work flow issue that Andrew had in that we set out initially to solve. And then over time, we were in basically in a, sort of a semi open beta for over a year, just inviting authors and telling authors they can invite their friends. And that's when we began to get more and more feedback about, oh, I have this problem and all have this problem at some, like, the formatting issue was a very interesting one for us. I know we've talked to a bunch of people, but we wanted to make reading books easy on a phone and on the computer. And so we basically said, this is pre formatic. This is a prepress tool. So we do dynamic formatting on pretty much everything. Paul (5m 58s): Cause we have so many people reading on phones. I think over it's over 90% of beta readers are doing at least some of their reading on phone. So that was really important for us. Autumn (6m 9s): Wow. That always impresses me partially because I have bad eyesight. I've had M PRK, which is like LASIK done, but, and I starting to see it starting to phase out just a little bit, but it's been a decade. So I mean, I can, I used to only be able to see literally three inches and then the world was blurry. So I'm happy to have 25 20 is fantastic, but I cannot read on a phone to save my life. I get an important email and I'm like, where's the computer. I just need computers. But it is amazing that people, you know, they're they got younger eyes, I suppose. I know, but so good. No, go ahead. And do you think a lot of things, well, I think a lot of people that are also Paul (6m 50s): Are busy, so their reading, while they're waiting to pick up their kids on there and you know, they're like, oh, we need something new and you finish the book you have in your car. You're like, oh, I'm a Bader waiting for so-and-so. I can just pick it up. I'm waiting in a waiting room somewhere. I'm in line at the grocery store. So we hear a lot of stories like that from people saying, oh, wait, this is so easy. I can read a little bit here. Like, like using any of your e-readers as well. Autumn (7m 11s): Oh yeah. He just stuck at little league practice for the next hour and a half or something. So you're kind of whipped out the book. If we just know I'm taking fixers, honey really is what I'm doing. We were all good. Parent's at heart. Oh. And this sneaky one, but that is fantastic. So you've mentioned that it, you know, you are in beta testing and everything for a while. So when did you, when did this happen? Where did it? And Andrew have this book in this idea and he started developing it. Oh, wow. So, yeah, but not that, no, that's fantastic. Paul (7m 45s): And when did you move? So we, Pam (7m 49s): We left and 2017 left Raleigh in 2017. Paul (7m 52s): So it was 2016 when we started. Pam (7m 55s): Right. And I think we, we launched Paul (7m 58s): Into like the public and then in 18. Pam (8m 0s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Autumn (8m 2s): I see. I love stories like that because I think being on the computer and I have, my dad was into computers. My nephew is a coder and I dabble enough to break things and fix them on my own. And so I think it's important for people just like with writing a book. So many people don't realize, you know, some authors. Yeah. They seem to be able to whip them out. And like five days, I know that's probably an insane, but you know, you know, it seems to be a month or two, they released 12 books a year. And for others it's over a year. I mean, I know I've had people ask my first series, which literally they all talk all day. Every single book took me or it took me a year of those a year of my life. And they asked for free and you are like, Hey, it was a year of my life. Autumn (8m 45s): So I think that's fantastic to know, you know, how to code this website. And it looks, it is look very lovely on the surface, which is fantastic. That takes a lot of it's that takes design skill. It takes coding skill. You've got to be able to click a button and it actually does something without breaking. So a couple of years' seems so incredibly reasonable to me. Paul (9m 8s): And how much, like a lot of authors, I mean, we were both working our regular jobs and this was something we did on the side and this is still a fairly small kind of operation. It's something we do because we're passionate about the community and the role that we think finding beta readers and connecting with readers plays and kind of an author's journey. Yeah. Autumn (9m 28s): Do you want to get into the beta readers and you can finish what you're about to say, Pam, but I also want to talk about is so used to, or not authors. I have to know how you met. There is a story. They're how you got sucked into the reader universe, which is a wonderful place to be. Yes. Pam (9m 44s): So goodness. So we, we met because we lived next door to each other. I mean, I have missed calls my mom from him. I met his mom, Melissa, and we became friends and then I was hanging out at her house and this is how I remember it. Well, and then I met you and then we were going to the same church. So Andrew met Paul and I was over at Melissa's house a lot with my kids and Paul, you, you have a history in the publishing business. So, Paul (10m 18s): Okay. So I worked in publishing right into college and I did a co-write some stuff. And so I work in film production and then all sorts of theater a lot. So I've actually written plays and produced plays. So writing is been a big part of stuff that I've done. I'm not like a spot, an aspiring author. Let's just not really one of the things that is a passion of mine. I have I'm in the fourth book of a non fourth draft of a nonfiction book. And I mean, it's really more kind of, of venting exercise for me, I've realized over time and then probably ever gonna be for people. Pam is leaving out of that. I think eventually we found out that we both like similar books, then we started lending each of their books. Paul (11m 0s): And then someone gave Andrew I think, risk legacy, which is one of these board games that you play for eight months. Yes. And, and then we all started playing that Andrew and I and a couple of other friends and, you know, as risk is, it was one of those rage inducing either you love each other or hate each other by the end of the things. And most of us love, hated each other. And then we ended up and then we started playing D D and we just kinda kept doing stuff. And I'm, and then I think maybe a couple of years later, Andrew did NaNoWriMo, which his, where he wrote the book that he ended up wanting to beta through beta books. Paul (11m 43s): Well, that's fantastic. Him and Andrew are married. So that helps. So that's how they know each other. Pam (11m 48s): Well, why not say that? Yes, yes. Yeah. And know I am a professional musician. So I come at the creative business from a slightly different angle, but I have learned is you can't make it unless you really put yourself out there and we just need to try it. And you're going to face rejection and you're going to face what feels like failure, but artists who want to make it camp. And it really just matters that you continue honing your craft in, reaching out to find your audience. And that's what I think beta reading really is at its heart. It's finding your audience, reaching out to readers, finding the readers who love your book and will tell other people about your book. Pam (12m 32s): So we really see beta reading, not as a transaction, necessarily the way you would with an editor or other like professionals, because beta readers, aren't professionals. They are people who love books. And I think it's something really special to, for a reader to be part of an author's process. And we've found that those readers who are involved in the process become really attached to the writers and promote their work and just, it's a very special thing. And so we encourage authors not to just say thank you for the feedback, but so can you continue to develop relationships? And for those beta readers, you know, maybe offer a free copy of the book. Pam (13m 13s): You mentioned the mat in your acknowledgements at the very least, but treat it like, like relationship with each leader. And you'll get their reputation as a writer who is really in it for the craft, but also for the people that you're writing for. And I think that's important. And we've seen that in beta books, at least authors and readers can interact in the books themselves. So a reader can leave a comment and a writer can respond directly to the comment in that book. And so there is some back and forth their, that can lead to have some really neat interactions. Oh, Autumn (13m 46s): That must be really cool to see on the backend to be able to see like that relationship develop, which you can have over an email, but it's, you know, like you said, is all on one platform. It makes it kind of easy and you can literally just respond as their reading instead of, you know, oh, I've got an email and into my spam folder. Paul (14m 4s): Right. Well, we don't watch, we don't watch too much of what happens. One of the things is, is it's big for us as it is kind of people having a private workspace. So most of the workspace is very private and we only really look at something if we're asked by an author for a technical reason. Yeah. So it would be awesome to like Snoop on people, but we don't do that. We generally hear about it when an author or a reader decides to tell us that. Autumn (14m 29s): Yeah. Just, just Pam (14m 34s): It's very behind the scenes is sneek reading anybody's books. So Autumn (14m 37s): I know that's probably a very ethical choice. Have you as, as a very good, what are you, what you think? I mean, I love your description of the process, especially coming from a musician because I agree it's, it is hard work. You S I see so many authors who, I mean, they say, you know, so many people will start at writing a book and if they finish their first one, that's already a huge chunk of people who don't make it to the finish at the first one. And I do see a lot of first-time authors make the mistake of just launching without beta reading or getting feedback or a content editor, which is expensive. I mean, that's where be at a reader is make a good cheap version of a content editor, but it's something to get feedback and they just put it out there and then they get disappointed and they never keep working on something new. Autumn (15m 23s): So that is definitely, I think, where I see beta reader coming in. But what do you think has been some of the strengths that, you know, you've then you're even your husband's books. There are things you've heard from authors that why beta readers can be so important, especially for new authors, trying to learn the craft and how to write something that readers will love. Paul (15m 44s): So I'll tell you all started kind of with the technical side and Pam, we can try him and kind of with what we're all in thoughts, but kinda from a business perspective, you know, authors should know if they wanna sell books, you need to treat it like a business. And if we were talking about software or any other thing that we would all be talking about, finding your customers or, or product fit. And so one of the things that, especially in the process of finding beta readers, a lot of authors or forced to discover his, so who is my books for, and what is it about my book that certain readers we'll like? So we were talking about fantasy, you know, there's a, there's a wealth of sub-genres, right? And you're not just going to say, Hey, this is a fantasy book for fantasy readers. Paul (16m 26s): You're going to say, well, this is his, this urban fantasy, or is this high fantasy? Has this grim dark light, and then narrowing it down and figuring out, oh, like, do I have a reader profile or do I have multiple reader profiles? Do I have a book description from myself kind of from marketing and for understanding who I'm writing to and why I'm writing to these people. And so that's one of the things that we see authors, we see them, we encourage authors to do. And the beta reading process forces, forces you to figure out who your readers are and then to go out and look for them and find out, oh, where, where do these people congregate? How can I find them? How can I reach them? And if you don't know that before you launch a book, you're not going to be effective at say, targeting ads, even writing, press copy or blurbs or back cover matter, because you're not thinking about who the person is, that's reading it and why they're going to resonate with it. Pam (17m 24s): It's true. And I think artistically, it's important to get over the hurdle of sharing something that's so precious to you. You know, as you've mentioned, you might have spent 12 months reading this thing, and it's not a thing, right. It's, it's just the baby. Right. And you know, it's a scary thing to send your baby out into the world. And so you should be at your right. So it makes sense to look for those people that you think will be good for your book. And to really treat it as this is something precious that I love. And I think it can be a gift to the world and to a certain community of people. Pam (18m 9s): And it's, if it's so hard, we need to make just a little bit of detachment from your work. And I think people are scared to, to share, to share their work because they're afraid of mean people. Yeah. I will say, I think, I think most people are not mean people, you know, you can say to someone, I wrote this thing, I love it. I'd love your feedback. Please be nice. And they will, you know, so I Paul (18m 39s): Think that this, which is it's own feedback, Pam (18m 44s): But then most people will not read it and say, this is terrible. What are you doing? And so you have, have faced in your own work and in the people that you are initially reaching out to. And when you're doing that first foray into finding readers, it's okay to use the people in your social circle. And I think Paul and I really love the same kinds of books. So if I were writing a fantasy novel, I would ask him to be one of my first readers, because he has so much familiarity with the genre. And I have other friends who we share the same interests. So just start with people who have, you know, but how do you also share that passion with us is a good place to start. And they might know other people that you don't know who would also be interested. Pam (19m 27s): So I think to be, to be open-minded as you, as you send your book out into the world, but it's okay to start with those people that you already trust to be sure that when you talk to you, but also you don't want to just ask if the book is good and if they liked it, because if they love you, they'll say, yeah, it was good. I liked it. Autumn (19m 55s): And you and your readers. Yeah. That is the problem. But having family Reed at your mom's always going to love it. It doesn't matter. Okay. So I do, I, do you remember seeing with beta Ray with the beta books, you know, you could set up actually questions as you are going through like, Hey, does this scene make sense? Is this character ring true? I like being able to ask those questions because you're right. I mean, a good beta reader who maybe has, does this for a couple of different authors because with indie publishing, oh my goodness. There are some very savvy beta readers who could basically do this as a profession. That's how they get maybe three books and they are so darn good. But otherwise you have to, you, right. Autumn (20m 36s): You have to coax them kinda of like, did this character sound right? Did I screw them up somewhere? Cause you let me know. And then you start getting the full story. Paul (20m 46s): Yeah. That was something that we were very mindful of when we were making the software is finding there's an, there's not, there's not an overwhelming amount of customization on beta books, but there is a fair amount specifically with asking questions as one of the things we were, we were very mindful of. So you can give full book guidance in your table of contents. You can give individual specific guidance at the beginning or the end of each chapter where you ask, you know, this is the climax of the romance. Can you tell me this, this and this. And then we also kind of offer guides about asking questions. We tend to encourage people not to ask yes or no questions, ask things that are more about opinion or have an open and open answer ability. Paul (21m 30s): I personally say it's better to ask a question at the end of the chapter. So they're not thinking about it as their going through, but some people like to have their readers focusing on something per chapter. And then we also let authors insert kind of broader questionnaires kind of as a, like an act break or at a book break as they're going through, which some people like, because they're like, Hey, we've just finished the first act. Which of these characters, or do you like the most? Why you, why do you think they're the KIRO you no. And then sometimes you run into authors. We were like, oh no, they all thought so-and-so was the main character. And I'm about to kill them or something of that nature. It's not a problem with their grr Martin. Autumn (22m 9s): So that's, that's just part of the plot, but Dick and put it in their readers and twist it a little bit. so that's fantastic. I'd like to that you, you know, you talked about, you know, coaxing and I think that was part of the platform. You, if I remember correctly, you could see where people were. So if you suddenly saw that like 15 of the 20 people, you asked, it only made it to chapter 10, you would know, even if they weren't giving you feedback, you're like, okay, everyone stopped at 10 once, you know, my passive feedback. Autumn (22m 54s): And hopefully someone will have at least tell you what's wrong with chapter 10, but that is, yeah, you did something is wrong. There's a usefulness then that kind of, of statistics instead of sending out those emails, like you said, and never hearing back or just getting the, oh yeah, I read that month ago. It was great. We were kidding. Anything else? Go ahead. Oh, and one Paul (23m 24s): Of the things we found is we've helped authors when a ton of betas is yeah. That, that very thing that you just said, oh, I read it a month ago. What we've discovered is if you treat it like an important part of your process, you actually get better response and a more engaged readership because they perceive that, oh, this beta is a part of this author's business and I have a responsibility to them. So it's saying, Hey, you know, can you read this book in the next two weeks? Or the deadline for being finished is this day. And then the book is closed, which is a future we have where essentially we just shut the book and you can work with your feedback. We found that that's actually very effective. It's also one of those things, but a lot of authors are really resistant to because they feel like they're placing some strange and position on people. Paul (24m 5s): But it's one of those ironies where when you give people a higher expectation of their importance and their responsibility, they often respond positively because they are affirmed in how important they are and how valued they are by an author. Yeah. Autumn (24m 21s): And that probably helped weed out some of the chafe, the chaff two, you know, the people who just want the free book versus the people who are, feel like part of the team and want to help. Yeah. Yeah. Pam (24m 33s): And I think it's important to treat your beta. It's important not to treat it as if you're asking a favor from the readers. I mean, on one hand you are, but on the other hand, you really need their health, I think, and you should want to develop those relationships. So I'm just saying in a different way of what Paul said, that you don't need to be hesitant and, you know, and as people that try it, you know, you, you can approach with some confidence because this is something that you have worked on, you see value in it and you trust that other people will see value in it as well, and that they will drive value from it. Pam (25m 12s): And now they may say see different things and your work than you see this, as we all have their relationship with the thing that we create and then we output. But that's one of the beautiful things about, especially casting your net wider with beta readers. It's great to have M 10 20, if you can find it. So you got a nice sample size and you might see, see trends that you weren't even aware of in your own work and the things that you can capitalize or lean into in the next books and the series. If your, if your writing series M which is good, my business, if that's where your, but yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of value to be shared. Pam (25m 53s): And it's really good to approach it with, with the idea that you are bringing something valuable into their lives. Not only asking for their help, with their little project, Autumn (26m 4s): I like that. I think we all do better when we realize that we are taking this seriously. I mean, we have it as a hobby and something we're passionate about, but giving it that dedication, that time on our own part and the people who love reading, giving their expertise as readers is very valuable because yeah, there's a lot of things that they can catch that a careful reader that knows that they're really doing it to help the author and not just their going to, you know, our creator as being an example. I mean, their getting an advanced reader copy just to leave a review. That's great. But their not often being very cautious readers, they might be looking, they might notice a typo, but their not going to sit there and go, why did you the character do that? Autumn (26m 44s): I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense. And who's, or that's what the beta readers are for. Pam (26m 50s): Yeah, exactly. Autumn (26m 52s): And I do think it was so interesting threw me off at first, but you know, you, from when I saw you, you have to bring in your own manuscript. Like you have basically almost copy and paste might be the fastest way to get a book up there. But I do see the value. I mean, I still remember I read the Twilight series. It's definitely not one of my favorite, but the, what Stephanie went through when someone took the books that she finally is taken, what five, almost a decade for her to finally release Edward's point of view from the first book, because someone took her file and started sharing it. And I mean, not all of us are going to be Stephenie Meyer and be these famous authors, but that is the problem that is this fear that when you're sending this out to the world, whether you're sending an EPUB file or just like book, book, funnel has a place where you can send out reader copies to then PDFs, how someone can take that N share it. Autumn (27m 46s): So where were you? Don't need it to be, so this one, you, you make, it all stays right there, which has kind of have I, do you see the point to that? Paul (27m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's, I mean, even I go back and forth on manuscript theft because when it happens, it's very publicized and people have a lot of fear about it. But generally when you're an aspiring author at the risk is very low, especially if you're trying to start a business because as you know, like writing a book and selling a book is, is not the, the goal it's, it's creating a platform and having books. You exactly know, but, but there's also, there's, there's increased vulnerability that an author is kind of sharing with the readers, especially depending on where they are in the process, because some authors will beta unedited chapters. If they have a group of people that are really hungry, like for instance, there's an author. Paul (28m 38s): We use this site early on when we were in beta to would dictate a chapter and immediately share it to a small section, like the elite tier of his mailing list to get feedback before it even went through edits or, or copy of it because they were so hungry and such big fans, but also because they would give him good feedback. And that sounds terrible, like a terrifying thing for their ability to me. And that's one of the reasons we want to make sure that people feel that they have the control of our access. Autumn (29m 7s): So that's really cool. So is it possible to do that, to set up different tiers like this, as I'm sharing this with just this subset group that our, my special fantastic fans, and when you're ready to get more beta, as you can have open it up to other people as well. Pam (29m 22s): So yeah. So the way the process works as you upload you manuscript, and when you send out invitations to readers to their email addresses, and if you want them to run 20 rounds of betas with 20 different groups, readers', you could, and so you just, you invite the readers that you want and that first time, and then they're done, you can just remove them from the book and then do whatever you want. If you want to make any edits, you can, and then just invite another group and they can go through the book. And as the author, you can decide whether readers are seeing each other's feedback or not. So you can decide whether they're experiencing a clean read every time. Pam (30m 7s): And I really think you ought to do that, but there are authors who like to build reader community by letting readers see each other's comments, sort of appreciate the books together in that sense. Well, almost like a Paul (30m 20s): Bit is like a beta book club. Autumn (30m 23s): Okay. Now I want to be an, a book club is going to really, and I did C so you can send out emails. I just like that. Cause, so if you already have, like, you've been doing this and you have, you know, 40 emails, you can send out an email list, but you, there are actually beta readers who are on the site. And you can like, as an author, I think for what is all you could basically go and like, look at their profile and say, Hey, would you like to try out this book? Is that right? Pam (30m 53s): Yeah, that's right. I mean, all leaders joined at the invitation of an author at one point or another. So you don't just have people showing up. You have people invited who likely are trusted by another author. So we ask readers to fill out a reader profile if their interested, if they're looking to be contacted by new authors and we call that the reader directory and they involve, include as much information as they want their areas of expertise, genre, preferences, genre of this preferences, anything that they think uniquely identifies them as a reader home. And the database is searchable both by you. Pam (31m 36s): You can just start at simply genres. Yeah. Anything you want. There is an advanced search you could search for roller skates and see if you come up with, as a reader and then it's searchable on our free trial. But querying readers is available only on our subscription because we wanna protect our leaders. We don't want them to get spammed. Oh, thanks. So yeah, you send out a query and the reader can decide whether or not to read. And it's just a real click, but quick button in their e-mail just accept or reject. It's also on the, on their dashboard, on the home screen. And we find that a number of our others have, I dunno at Paul, I think most authors find a few readers on the reader directory, but a lot of, a lot of people really do their own work to find their own. Pam (32m 21s): Readers' we also have so many, sorry, go ahead, Paul. Paul (32m 25s): Well, I mean, the director is a bit of a, kind of, it was a sneaky way that we thought that we could help authors get used to the idea of asking people to read their book. So I like that. So there's no expectation from us that you'll be able to find a group of beta readers through the directory. You might find one or two people. We encourage, we encourage the readers when they get queried. If they don't like the query to say, Hey, the reason I didn't like this query is because I list this in my preferences. And you said this, or, you know, I don't want to read my book, your book. It sounds amazing, but I'm busy, but it's really kind of a, a backdoor way to get authors used to the idea of maybe having a much softer approach where people they know we were already interested in. Paul (33m 16s): So they can say, oh, here's my 160 word pitch to you. I know you liked this and this, let me practice how to approach someone. So that's kind of why it's there. Also a lot of people who came to this site for one author started emailing us and saying, Hey, I really enjoyed doing this. Can I feed them more bucks? And so that was when we created. And then we tried to find ways to make it a useful part of the author process. We so strongly encouraged people to go out and find their own group of readers out in the world, because that's going to be your business. Autumn (33m 48s): Yeah. I mean, especially if you said you're sending out an email to invite them, so you have their emails. So you're creating you're newsletter list and there's a lot of people you're gonna like say, Hey, it's all out and stores. And I think that you are in it. And if we want to buy it, that'd be great. But you don't have to just tell your friends and family or anyone you think, yeah, that is how you want that author platform. Because without that, if Amazon decides that you aren't good enough and kicks you out, which is rare, but occasionally things do happen with people's authors profiles that get accused of something are break some rule and then toss out of Amazon. And that's a big deal. That's it? No matter how I'm of an wide author, I'm across everywhere, because I just think the world should have competition and should be available and open. Autumn (34m 33s): But yeah, you know, Amazon's still is mostly the most of the eggs in the basket. Paul (34m 40s): Well, I mean, I'm sure you've done 135 episodes. I'm sure the importance of mailing lists is something you have talked about extensively. And then that's, I mean, that's one of the reasons we tell people to find their readers, start, start building that list. Now start building that list. When you're halfway through your first draft, start thinking about who you're going to want to find. If you're going to start marketing an online community in your book, isn't Dunn, you should join the community and become a member so that when you are ready, people will know, oh, this isn't some stranger. And this is a Panda friend, 64 is asking me to read their new books. And now, you know, I've had 15 interactions with Panda friend, like let's read their book. Autumn (35m 22s): That's true. That's where I was like pay into front. And you, you just came up with that one or is it secretly? You're all going somewhere. Paul (35m 29s): I'm never gonna tell, Hey, everyone on a Panda buddies.com Autumn (35m 37s): Sounds great. But then I did see how it is. It is true. So it's nice to know though, if you were an author and you are truly new, you, you, you should at least learn how to work on your marketing and like, say, how do you ask people to do this? But then you might actually get a couple of people. So if you're brand brand spanking new and you have no one to outreach for you, you might get one or two, you might get your first start. And that's always important. But I do. I love the fact that free trials, I've tried out a whole bunch of different editing software recently and stuff like that. And there was one or two that didn't have free trials. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me even a 14 day, but you have a free level of free tier. And I'm like, there's like, you've got Pam (36m 25s): My gosh. So it really is meant to give writers an idea of what it's like to use to use this software. And, you know, a lot of, a lot of writers are contentious. They have the one book and they have a few friends. They want to read it. But then if you do have more aspirations and a larger readership than you already know whether the software works for you. So that really was, was the goal there. Autumn (36m 51s): We give it a whirl with book one and a couple of readers just to see how you like it. That's an example. And if you like it, you're going to come back for this, if you're really into writing. Pam (37m 0s): Yeah. And we, we find that most, most writers will use the use data books for about a month to run their beta. And you can turn off your subscription after that. And all that means is that the readers no longer have access, but of course is retained access to your work indefinitely, whether your paid are not at that point. And yeah, I think a lot of people come to our site looking for readers and they see beta books and say, oh, these people will find me beta readers. And that is one of the reasons of among many that Paul's already mentioned that we instituted the reader directory, but we also have, I've got a book club called Pam S Beta Jam, and anybody can submit a novel of anyone who's looking to find readers can submit and I'll review. Pam (37m 48s): And I choose pretty much any fiction genre. And I'm also looking for memoirs cause we got a lot of interest in that among our leadership. Oh, but it's, I make it available to our about, gosh, I think there are about a thousand readers that have come through PBJ at one time. And so most writers find they have two or three really dedicated readers who make it all the way through to really enjoy their books at the end of the process. So we try to make that available. That's available, whether you are on the free trial or subscribed or whatever. So that's, if you're looking for a way to find readers for free, that's a good way too. Pam (38m 28s): So yeah. All it just requires that you upload your book and do a query at the group's homepage. And we're just getting started this summer after, after a hiatus, because a lot of people just were not, we're not writing, but I'd love to be able to send out a bunch. So anyone listening who is interested, it has a book that you need to get some eyes on it and don't know how to do it. So you submit Autumn (38m 52s): I'm and check this out. That is an opportunity because I think that is definitely, it's not maybe the number one question I get asked by new writers, but it's probably in the top five. So that's yeah. So cool. Paul (39m 4s): But the question being, how do we find readers or Autumn (39m 8s): Just, you have the question being, what was, how do I find beta readers specifically? Like where do I go find them? It seems to stump a lot of people. I honestly think a lot of new authors especially get stumped by the difference between author groups, which authors are readers, but often we're so busy writing. We don't read as much as we want to. Or I know with me, I'm like currently on just like, if it hasn't won a Hugo or a Nebula award, I'm not reading it because I just want to, I want to see the top tier fiction. That just makes me go, holy crap. This is amazing. And that's just kind of like my goal for the year. So I know I've read a lot of other peoples books, so unless I'm doing edits and yeah. And then the authors to new authors, do you know? Autumn (39m 50s): So their go to the, this author group, their asking them, Hey, you want to be a beta reader and their not going into like the reader groups and asking them if they want to be a Bader, you, it takes a little while to figure that out. I think. Pam (40m 1s): Yeah. If, oh, sorry. Well, I'll just, if, if another writer is reading your book, but they're going to critique your craft and that's not what you need from a, a beta reader. That's very true. Paul (40m 13s): The version of the book that they would. Autumn (40m 16s): Yes. Oh yes. So my favorite reviews have been, well, that's not what I would have done it, so that's great. Then you write it. You are away. Paul (40m 28s): Yeah. And one of the things that's, I mean, it's, it's frustrating for all authors, especially new authors. And it's also frustrating for us trying to help people. Is that a T two things I wrote into a lot of times is very naturally, you're used to asking authors for advice on how to be an author, because you've gotten great advice on how to write your book. But a lot of times what happens is they either instinctively their successful found readers kind of through luck or doing something that they were doing already kind of naturally, or they use a process maybe eight years ago. One thing I hear a lot of writers conferences is authors going, oh, well, you know, I started writing a blog and all you have to do is write everyday and then you'll get readers. And I'm like, well, I mean, when was the last time you actually read a blog? Paul (41m 12s): I mean, it's not the same as it was and say, oh two, when people had a list of blogs, they would visit every day. Now you might be relying on your Instagram feed or a sub stack or Pinterest. So you have to find new things and, and it's always changing the best way to reach readers. And then the second thing is your early readers, that's almost like a fingerprint finding them and forming that relationship is, is going to be an incredibly unique to you, your book and who they are. And so I think you have to do some fairly systematic and deep thinking about who you are, who the book is and who you want to be reading it. Autumn (41m 50s): Well, that's, that's a very good advice and so true. And I do think, I remember when you are right. I started on Twitter back before the second resurgence of Twitter being popular. And I loved it. And I remember someone saying is like, your first hundred followers are going to be the ones who remember and interact with the most. And I think that's true, even with beta readers, it's going to be those first ones that you, even, if they fade off, for some reason, they're going to be the ones you remember, and you are so appreciated. I have. So building that first a hundred list and just fantastic to do. Paul (42m 24s): And you, you learn as they enjoy your book, you learn what you're doing because I mean, there's, there's so much focus on writing and craft, which I think is very important. And I feel like at, in some ways it's a dirty trick because write this book with a group of authors, you work really hard on a, you edit and then you decide, okay, I'm going to publish. And then it's a completely new skill set. It's a completely new set of expectations. And, and that's one of the reasons that we're like, okay, well you want to build a tool to make this less of a logistical headache. And that was something that as we were developing better books for their, we really found to be encouraging to all of us, which is, this is a hard process asking people to read your book. Paul (43m 5s): When you don't have a name, you have never written a thing, involves a tremendous amount of rejection and it's awkward and uncomfortable, no matter how confident you are, no matter how strong your ego is. So just taking away the headache of you finally got someone to say yes, and then you send them a file and they say they can't open it. You feel embarrassed and you doubt yourself. And you're like, well, if I reform at this and send it, well, they even open it. Have I already blown that chance? And it going, going through that over and over just is demoralizing. So we really worked to make a tool that could remove as many opportunities for you to feel worse about yourself as we could. Autumn (43m 47s): Well, it could almost be like your tagline, beta books will teach you marketing and this soft software. So that's so lovely. So we have to wrap up, I mean, is there any final advice or like your favorite thing or a favorite moment that has come out of working with authors? Because I know that my husband is a photographer and I was just shocked at how cruel other photographers could be on technique and composition. And, oh my goodness. So it's not like that with authors. I think there's some of the sweetest people on the planet. So any last notes that you would like to end on collecting my thoughts? Autumn (44m 28s): That's fair enough. I'll Paul (44m 30s): Go first. I mean, you're right. And the author community is amazingly open and they share and support each other. And an incredible way. I think one of the reasons is because it's so hard and because the information is out there and a lot of people just don't do it when they get to the hard parts and the hard part. And the hard part is first finishing your book. I mean, the stats, what's something like one in 10 people finished their book or a 10 out of 100 and something like that. But then the marketing part is, is just as challenging. People will keep writing books and won't put in the hard work of saying, okay, I'm gonna have to go out and find people that I think will like this book. And I'm gonna have to ask you a hundred to get 10, and I'm gonna have to do that over and over. Paul (45m 11s): And authors will tell you that because it's not a secret and they're not worried about an author's just, aren't worried about people competing with them because they can't write books fast enough for all of the readers. And then, because it doesn't get talked about as much as an author. Well, I always encourage people to do something like go on YouTube and watch the Y Combinator startup school videos. You were talking about tech companies, but really the rules apply when you're talking about a customer fit. It's the same as a reader fit. And you are talking about finding your early customers is the same as finding you early readers. When you talk about honing your vision and your mission statement, like create a mission statement or a vision for your book and for your author career, and use that to guide how you look for readers. Paul (45m 53s): The, the practice is very similar between say tech, startups and your creative startup. So if you're not finding things that are helping you in the author world, look for their field because there's a lot of entrepreneurs and that's what you are. If you're an author, and if you're serious, you're building a business as an entrepreneur. And you want to look for people. If someone so launched and a hundred million dollar tech company, maybe they have something to, we can help you find, find a hundred readers or a thousand readers. Autumn (46m 23s): That's a good idea. Pam (46m 25s): Yeah. And I think I would just circle back to the belief in your work as maybe not perfect yet, but there are so many readers outdoors and know reader goes, I like this other, and I don't have room for any other authors. None of us, we love reading are like that. We're all like I've finished all these books, but this one person who else can I read all of their books of. And so there are readers out there who will love your book. All you have to do is find them, all right, let's say are find-able. They are find-able and not everybody is your reader and that's normal and good and fine. Pam (47m 5s): And when you find someone who's not your reader, that is one more step toward finding someone who is, because you've learned something maybe about your book, all about the people or person that you reached out to. So I would say just, just persist, just stay out there, keep going, because what you've done is significant, and we'll be really valuable, not only to you, but to other people who will enjoy and appreciate your work and enjoy getting to know you. And the process Autumn (47m 39s): Is very cool. And Hey, you might get to join your book club and get to talk to you as well. And that's really Pam (47m 46s): Trying to do it a little bit of a coaching also for people from whom is their first beta. We choose to book. So we've got resources on our website for how to find readers and sort of best practices for How to Run a Beta. And we really want to help writers be successful in this, this segment of talking about rejection a lot. Yeah. Well, you know, it's a part of growth you can't grow unless we put through uncomfortable situations. Yes. Autumn (48m 15s): And you can't grow unless you actually start producing something in trying. So God is fantastic. I love the resources. And of course, we're going to link to beta books in the show notes. Otherwise it's pretty easy to find it's just beta books.com. So go and find it that way as well. So thank you so much, Pam and Paul for being here. Thank you so much for making beta books and actually having some resources on there that are free, which of their fantastic. And then you make it so good that you just have to buy in and join in as well. Paul (48m 48s): Well, thank you for having us. This has been fun. This, this, this is our first one in a, in a year. I mean, I was like, oh no, I haven't. Podcasted in forever. Is this going to be okay? And it was okay. It was actually better than it was just fantastic. Autumn (49m 3s): Good. Thank you for letting me a break you back into podcasting. Pam (49m 8s): Yeah. So this has been really fun. I think we've got a coupon code Am Writing Fantasy. So H AWF, anyone who finds us through this podcast Use AWF for twenty-five percent off any subscription M four line. Autumn (49m 26s): Oh, we go use that phrase of my accounts and has been fantastic. I will put that in the show notes as well. So thank you so much where you appreciate it. Have a fabulous day. And if there's anything that we can do to help you out again, let us know. It was fantastic having you here. Thanks so much. Okay. And so next week, so yes, we're at, I will be back and it will be one of our top 10 lists this time, the today 10 worst ever characters. Narrator (50m 4s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You could also Join Autumn in Yesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

We've had listeners ask SEVERAL times for us to talk about our books and writing... haven't we done that yet?!

The more you write, the better you'll get at it. Some think that you're naturally born as a good writer, but that's not the case. Practice is the only thing that'll make you better. In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper aim to make your journey a bit easier with some advice on fiction writing which you can go and implement right away. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I'm on, Jesper (33s): This is episode 133 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And then we are talking about how it well today, Right? And the, I suppose this could be both a very broad topic as well as very narrow one. All of them. Autumn (49s): Yes. When I saw the topic for this one this morning, I was like, oh, this was the one we were like, oh, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll come up with some tips. It'll be fine. I'm thinking, I wish we had done some more specifics of it. I sat down and I wrote out some tips. I did my homework for this one. I Ramez. Jesper (1m 7s): Wow. That's that's good. So you're probably gonna have some very, very good tips today. Autumn (1m 12s): Yeah. You sure this is a couple of them. I think you probably already have on your list and I know you already have a list, so I'm not that worried. Jesper (1m 19s): Yes, I do have the list yet. Autumn (1m 20s): So I just knew that this sort of melting away or we're there in the U S at the moment. So yeah, I don't like warm weather. I always laugh when I was in a science class and found it out there. There's a fly that you think that it gets below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. There is some protein in it's brain that unwinds, it, it kind of like fall's over and ex dead and you cool it down and be like, oh yeah, there really is it all. I heard that I'm like, its true. I always send my brain kinda just like go and it gets too warm and I get too warm and I've just not myself. And I'm like, is this true? It's about 85 degree is definitely my, my threshold. Autumn (2m 3s): And it's, it's not, it's probably, it's supposed to be cooler today as it goes to the upper eighties, it's been in the nineties, but it's high humidity. Jesper (2m 11s): Like literally there's tender storms around. So we're at ed, the 90% humidity. You walk out, say side and it's like breathing water and it's just, oh I can't do that. Just know. Autumn (2m 24s): So you're gonna fall over at any minute now. And the act it until somebody comes in, cools you down. Good. Jesper (2m 30s): Yeah. So if you are suddenly left in charge of the podcast on your own, if people are listening and you're like, where's all that up. Well, that's how I passed out. It's fine please. Don't I got a cool drink and to turn off my AC for the recording. So, you know, listeners I'm care about you, but the sound quality I turned off my AC, which means we are going to wrap this one up quick. In about 10 minutes. We are going to be done on out of here. Oh, but that's okay. Autumn (3m 2s): It'll be a, yeah. You don't know if you saw the Instagram picture, but I, I took my dog and Dalton very well. It took my dog to the vet and he did very well. And he was so excited to get out of the cabin because of the, you know, Adam has been away north. So it just makes me and him and it's been too warm to go for a walk. You, it looks like he looks like a fizzy gig with legs. Okay. If anyone needs to picture my dog and he's a Fizzigig with legs, small legs, you are a small X. And so I hadn't been walking him is way too hot for him. He's he was bred for the Northern Scotland. He does not like the heat either, but we knew he was so excited to go somewhere to the vet. He was like whining and the car. He never whined, but the whole time. Autumn (3m 43s): So you would just chattering away. Then finally we got back from the, but we got out of the vet and I looked at him and he looked at me and like, you wanna go walk you so it, you know, and so even though it was so hot, I drove him to a nice, there's only so many places around here that there is forested and water for. It does not have a ton of water compared to me and where it used to live. And so we did the hike around this lake and I throw him in, had him go chiefs, frogs. He is a M predator dogs. So he loves choosing small creatures like frogs, the defenseless creatures. He likes feeling things. He is a home murderer. I sleep the next door every night. Autumn (4m 23s): I mean the dragon he is. So that's where it he's been. He has been the inspiration for, to have of my small sidekick characters. And by the time we got to the top part of the hike, I just looked at him and then bring it swimsuit. But screw it. I jumped in with them and we had a little bit of a swim. It was good. So how are things on your side? Yeah, well, yeah, I think for the most part is just a lot of sports on TV these days to be all right. It's an exciting though. So we have sports again, right? Jesper (5m 0s): Yeah. It's pretty cool. You know, and we, of course, so we're recording a bit ahead of time here. 'cause we are trying to bang some episodes to cover for some of the occasion we're of course we're still going to release episodes even though we're going to be on vacation. So we're trying to prerecord. So that's just to say that what I'm about to mention now already took place some time ago, by the time you listened to this. So that's why it might seem off a bit time wise. But anyway, we watched the world cup final in ice hockey this past weekend and it was between Canada and Finland. Oh, those are two good teams. So that's exciting. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a nerve wrecking experience. Autumn (5m 41s): You know, as the listeners might Jesper (5m 43s): Know my wife, his finished and my son's AR also finished citizens, ah, as well as Danish. So, you know, you, you can work out who we were rooting for it Canada. Not really, but honestly I feel so bad for my youngest son because during the, over it, it went to the overtime. And then I dunno if it was a couple of minutes of something into, I don't know, I don't remember it, but into the over-time one of the Finnish players makes like this slightest mistake. Oh, you know, and on this level and the world cup final, just the slightest mistake. It does not go on punished at the squat at the winning goal as sort of some of my youngest son, he was so sad that he started crying. Jesper (6m 34s): He was so, so sad. And even in the next day he woke up a and I ask it, I always asks him in the morning, went when the boys we go have all their way is to ask them how the slept not really good was so, so sad. I'm so sorry for this little guy you just met so much to him. Two when that final and that's he is going to need therapy is gonna remember this 20 years from now. He'll remember it. I'm sure it was like, I I'm pretty sure he was in there. It was, it was good. But we had a new channel now though, because of the European championship in sucker kicking off this week. Jesper (7m 16s): So nice. Actually on Saturday then Marc will play against Finland. Ow. Oh, that's cool. So who do you route for in the family? Just like, it's so much of a dilemma, but I actually, to be honest, I think its worst for my son. Then it is for me, 'cause, you know, I I'm born and raised and Denmark show. Yeah, of course I route for Denmark. Right. But that's, that's the tough one because they're both. So who do you roofer? I don't know. We can draw straws and the thing of switch halfway through this, just let the family too and to, and that's fair. No, that's just the way it is going to be. Jesper (7m 58s): My, my son, my son is a soccer coach. I actually asked him. So how are you gonna handle the fact that the Finland plays against them mark? And he, he is, he was sort of, you know, looking at, into the sky for the moment thinking, and then he said, well, I think I'm going to sort of paint down the middle and then I'll have Finland and then Denmark one on each side, Autumn (8m 22s): They're adorable. Narrator (8m 26s): Oh, weak on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (8m 30s): Okay. So I notice that the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group has passed 5,000 members. Now I think we have 5,200 or something when I checked this morning and goodness knows. But at the time this has released, it's probably gonna be 6,000. Its crazy. There is so exciting. It's a lot of fantasy authors in one place really is. We are a very powerful and well I'd say the group, we're not even that quiet. Autumn (8m 58s): We're quite feisty. Like it it's fun and chatty and supportive and talk fitness, the art and characters and life and promotions. It's it's there there's always something going on in there, right? Jesper (9m 12s): Yeah, for sure. I, when I, I posted about the podcast episode where we talked about a worst things you can do to a character. And that was an episode 1 28 and I laughed so much. So Terri and the response, did you see that right? Autumn (9m 27s): No, no. I have to go in and see it. I haven't been in there. I had a small computer swapping issue that we'll discuss later, but I was kind of absorbed into fixing a problem. So no, I didn't go see it, but no, with Terry an say she is pretty funny. Yeah. And remember, we're talking about bad things to do against characters here. So, so disrespected from Terry on is of course in that nature and therefore also pretty nasty. Jesper (9m 54s): So can you just didn't wanna hear it? Autumn (9m 56s): So yes is definitely. Jesper (9m 58s): OK. So she said, quote, I have one that I didn't realize until after the fact that I killed every once you loves her parents, her had adoptive mother, one of her children. I'm pretty sure if she ever met me, she would slap me. And of course, oh yeah. I always, I could see that. I think in that episode I said, I always feel bad for my favorite characters because I'm so mean to them, but I know that it can take it out, but I'm so mean to them. And as you said, when I was going through my cursed phase this year and you're like, well, you're just the, you're the hero in some story. And the author thinks that you're going to, you need to be tortured a little bit for some character development. Autumn (10m 39s): Yeah. That's great. I love it. Yeah. I imagine, imagine you could talk to them in real life. They're like, why are you doing all this to me? Well, on the other side you will come out a better person. Just trust me. It was just like, no, I didn't want to try it. Just stopped doing it. I want an easy day, Darren. It. So whenever your yelling into the universe and this is so unfair and unjust, think about your characters talking to you. That's how they feel. Yeah. Could I just fall ones have one single chapter where nothing bad happens, please. It's a long healing because your unconscious no, no. Jesper (11m 20s): The, the group is definitely been so much fun recently. So I do love it over there. Yeah. So if you are a deal list, now haven't joined us yet. The just search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will find us. Yes and no. Actually I noticed that Ernest Hemingway had the following tips when it comes to writing well, so I thought that was probably an interesting place to start. So he said sounds good, shoot. Autumn (11m 54s): Yeah. You said you should stop all. You should use short sentences and also right. Short, first paragraphs. Jesper (12m 2s): What do you think of those two tips to start off all of them? Autumn (12m 6s): I would say you use varied sentences, but I definitely think a short lead in sentence, especially with like your first, not how people worked so hard with that first line of their novel, but I sometimes think just a short kind of punchy one that makes you go ha is a fantastic way of opening a story and keeping that first paragraph kind of short. But I would definitely say I noticed this and I've talked with other authors about this currently because of the size of reading screens, like Kindle screens are kind of small and people need on their phones, shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences are definitely becoming the norm because you don't want to read something that is literally a wall of text on your phone screen. Autumn (12m 50s): So some paragraphs have gotten down to like two sentences, which sometimes I think that's crazy, but I also have to admit whenever I see something that's longer than like three sentences, I'm like, oh for goodness sakes. So in some way, or you could say it, Ernest Hemingway was way ahead of his time. Jesper (13m 8s): He was thinking about the Kindle before it even existed. Autumn (13m 10s): Exactly. And he just, he was a head of the curve. Jesper (13m 14s): He nailed it. Autumn (13m 15s): But I do you like some Hemingway quotes because he was the one who said write drunk, edit sober. I'm like, yeah, that is, that's the wonderful writing advice. So yeah. I'm not sure you're convinced About that one, but one at least, but then Right tipsy, then don't be drunk on writing. I did. Jesper (13m 33s): Right. Autumn (13m 33s): Actually just see that as a famous quote by somebody else to always be drunk on your writing because it'll keep you inspired. Okay. Yeah. That's one of those fancy quote things that sounds really good, but in reality it's right. You really like that, but probably not. But I mean, yeah. I don't know. I, I sort of have some things that sort of, it's both here and there and whatever. So I mean there was no particular order to do it. Jesper (14m 5s): Right. Tough. To be honest. Yeah. I did the same thing. It just, yeah. It's just some thoughts about this and that. He and they're right. Well, how come we both shared you share thought and I'll share a thought and I'm sure we have some thoughts in common because I know one of mine is, is totally already on your list. I already know it. Okay. Yeah. We can do that. So do you want me to start? Autumn (14m 25s): Sure. Since you've volunteered, go ahead of you or you can stop it. That's okay. If you want, you want to, if you feel like that's so important then right. If you're intimidated and want me to go first, I can do that just to make all of your mind, then you want to go, go, go, go. I'm going to melt here. Come on. Quick, quick, quick. Jesper (14m 48s): Yeah. Well I think for stop, there is something to be said about using like simple and direct language. I think clarity brings a lot in order to improve one's writing. So, but I think as well, I want to say that there are no like real fixed rules that you need to follow. And there's nothing like once you've learned these rules, then your writing will be the best it can ever be that this doesn't exist. And so I feel like that's probably the, one of the best things to get out there before we even get any further into this topic. Autumn (15m 25s): No, I totally agree. And actually that was one of the, it's not on my list, but it, it was one of my thoughts is there, there are a few rules for writing, but at the same time, there really aren't. Like I said, one of my favorite poems as the Jabber walkie, which is a hundred percent nonsensical words, but I love it cause its so much fun to say, so you don't have to even use real language. You can completely make it up and be famous for centuries. 'cause it is such a fun poem. So there really aren't any rules, but you need to take everything we say and everything that editors other authors, other readers say and figure out what fits your style and what you want to create with your writing. Autumn (16m 8s): But you should also, you know, if you're just learning, following some of the top guidelines will help you maybe figure out where your going with your own author, voice and style. Jesper (16m 24s): Yeah. I agree in that. I think as well that, I mean, of course we're going to, we're going to share some tips here and of course is not that wants you just ignore tips and I, it, it's a good take on board, the good advice and so on and, and, and figure out what works for you. But at the same time, I think the point is just don't follow it blindly, you know? Autumn (16m 49s): Oh, he's be purposeful. Yes. But do you think that makes sense, but for your first one where you talked about brevity, I mean, I agree that's such a, I mean there's so many, there are so many quotes about you. No kill your darlings, cut out the flour and the language. You know, if it, the fewer words that you can use to say something really helps you don't need to be over prosaic. There are some genres, maybe the literary genres and stuff where you, where those flowery prosaic languages are fun and they're more accepted, but mostly, I mean, fantasy has some beautiful descriptions, but then it has a lot of, you know, action and things happening and punchy language. Autumn (17m 30s): I especially love short, punchy sentences. It helps me to know some really long ones. Yeah. So figure out you'd do some varied, but I definitely, I recently had an editor say that they had never read a story. I think how did she say it that, you know, use their was so well-described and so vivid and real, but you such minimal amount of words. Very I'm very minimalistic, I guess in my word choice, I don't repeat myself, but I don't have tons of weird new words. I just, I want the story to shine. Not how I say the story, right? No. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Alright. So are you ready for my first tip? Jesper (18m 12s): Yep. For sure. Autumn (18m 13s): Some how this became a competition again. Jesper (18m 14s): I think so. Well, yeah, that's it. I was just thinking about it before and then I thought, well, I'm not going to say anything because I don't want to draw attention because the point of this episode is really not to make one of our top 10 coroner, the source of competition listed at all. So I'm going to stay away from that. And I'm just going to listen to your advice now. Autumn (18m 32s): All right. Well, mine is, is a typical one that you'll hear everywhere, but I have a specific purpose for it, but I would say if you want to learn to write, well, you do need to read and read in your genre. But I would say don't just read. My advice is actually to take your favorite book and rip it apart and find out why does your favorite book? What makes it tick? What is the plot? How are characters introduced? What are the sentence likes? What is your favorite scene? Don't just read it, but actually pull it apart and look under the hood and see what's there. It's like your own little study. You know, if you're in high school is your, your private study tasks or whatever when you're going to work on your own. Autumn (19m 14s): So do that. It really helps. I think to look at something you absolutely adore and not just say I love it. That's my favorite book with is find out why one in it. Do you really love? And you will learn probably more from that than I think I did in my college classes on the writing. So go and go and tear it apart. Jesper (19m 36s): Look it adverb reuse. That'll really tell you and your genre, how may or how often you should be using adverbs, how often you, you should be using SED versus growled or whispered, looked at your favorite story and don't mimic it, but pull it apart. C why you like it? I put it back together in your own style and see what you create. Yeah, I think I remember you said at some point as well, that when you need it to get your head into the right sort of writing mentality or writing space, then you read, or you read a bit of George RR Martin, I think you set at some point and then your right back into where you want to be. Autumn (20m 10s): Yeah. He, there is something about his writing that is so fluid and concrete in this deep point of view that I can re I have a few favorite paragraphs and some pages that I can read one of his, and it's just, it instantly resets my mind at this is the level of writing I want to do and I can get back into my own voice, but it reminds me of the voice that I'm trying to find. Jesper (20m 34s): Yeah. I'm still struggling with that. To be honest, I fully agree with, with your response or you advise in terms of reading aloud in this genre. And I do that as well. I, I always, I'm always reading a book, one book on the other, but I think, I don't know why, but I'm really struggling with finding something that I really like. Mmm. Most of it, I try to even pick up the stories that are hugely popular and stuff like that. And I just don't, I don't, I don't, they don't engage me very well. I don't know what's going on. Maybe I'm just weird. I don't know. I don't disagree. The last three or four books I've picked up. Jesper (21m 16s): I've been frustrated and the little disappointed and yeah, its I'm in a definitely, I'm trying really hard to find something I'm enjoying. I'm actually thinking, I want to go read some open sticking to it like an epic fantasy and regular fantasy, you know, heroic fantasy. Autumn (21m 34s): I actually think I want to go read some literary fantasy, which has a stronger emphasis on foreshadowing and really deep plots as well as really strong characters. So you sometimes don't do as well in the characters, but I think I just want to cut my teeth on something with some really strong plot lines. Cause if I read something else that is nonsensical, I'm going to bash my head against the wall or my kid at all or something. Jesper (21m 58s): Yeah. I'm not going to mention the name of either of the book or the author here, but I am reading the one that is insanely popular right now at the moment. I, I, I'm only okay. To be honest, I'm an only like 15% into it. It it's a very, very long book, like fantasy books sometimes. Huh. But if it's just not engaging at all, I mean the writing is okay, but it it's in the past episode we talked about writing and the point of view and with just the way we ride and that is so much more engaging and this is not really. And the point of view is so it's a bit like, yeah, I dunno. It's a bit boring, but that's off topic now, but I just want to, yeah, it was just your tip there made me think about how even sometimes if you pick up some very, very popular books and you start reading them, they might not really do much for you. Autumn (22m 49s): So yeah. But again, that only just support the fact that you should read a lot because your, you know, keep reading different books and so on. Yeah. And that's why I said, yeah, don't just read. Don't just pull apart any books or whatever it is. Your favorite book, you read that one, figure it out. Why it's your favorite? That's the worst. Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah. That's a good advice. All right. Okay. Then the next one here is it might be the one that I feel is the most important one, to be honest, maybe because this is very simple, in some extent, in some sense, but also very complicated, but it is really figuring out what you want to say. Autumn (23m 31s): Oh, I like that because anyone can string sentences together, but you need to have a story to tell. Yes. And outlining really helps here. To be honest, I was going to ask you you're into that. You should learn the plot and we'll all right. Jesper (23m 48s): Yeah. We, of course, do we have a full step-by-step hook on how to plot a novel, but if you're interested, you, you can search for plot development on Amazon and you'll find it, but we should really not why it was mentioning it. The reason I'm mentioning it is that going through the motions of trying to understand your story before you just start writing, even if you, even if you're not applaud and you don't wanna do like a full of plot or whatever, but trying to get your mind around, what is this story really all about? And what is it that I really want to say that will help your writing tremendously and make this story so, so much better then when you just sort of doing a brain dump on the page. Jesper (24m 29s): Right? Autumn (24m 29s): I agree. Yeah. I mean, whether you outline or like I said, I, I, we have YouTube videos on just a 15 minute, half an hour outline, which can do so much for guiding you in a direction, even if you're a pantser. But yeah, I think knowing the purpose of the story and maybe the theme of the story, all of those things can really want, it will help you right. Faster. 'cause you'll know you're going and the right direction. Your not just wondering leaf through the maze lost, but it'll really help you make a better story. And you'll write better. Because I mean, the point is, is to write a story and to tell tales, there's times that I'm like, oh, this is so cool. I want to go into that, but I don't have to be a short story of somewhere else. Autumn (25m 12s): It, it doesn't really involve what is important for the story. And this plot are the subplot. It, it doesn't really need to be in there. So that'll help you with your writing. And so that you're not having readers, I work coaching with other authors and you don't want your, we are going, why didn't you mention this name? Why did you bring this up? And then you never mentioned it again. Oh my gosh. I hate it. When I read that as a reader, that your, like, why didn't you tell me this? If you never do anything with it, and that's a good point about the YouTube videos. So then we have like, I dunno, I will guess like modern 150 video is probably on the Am Writing as a YouTube channel. Jesper (25m 48s): So if you need to find some inspiration about how to do a plot four series or a shorter plot overview or what, probably whatever you can think of almost go to the Am, Writing Fantasy as a YouTube channel, because they're actually YouTube videos on their that is not on this podcast feed. Right. It's all right. That's the first one is before we switched to you. Autumn (26m 10s): Yeah. Yeah. Before we switched to podcasting, we did YouTube videos. So there's probably like a hundred videos, I would guess that it's not on the podcast feet. So yeah. Go, go and explore a bit then if you, if you need some help, so you'll definitely find videos. That'll help you. You taught me what B rolls, where we had those or some really good videos. Jesper (26m 29s): So I think we still get comments on them. So I know people are still watching though. So yeah. Only wanting is to some of those videos are very old. So the first video is on the channel. They with those, well, not professionally reduced in this political like that, the advice are good, but the production value is not right. I mean, we all improve in time. Autumn (26m 50s): Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. You ready for my second tip? Jesper (26m 56s): Yup. Go ahead. Autumn (26m 57s): All right. Mine is learn the craft, very vivid characters. And I was going to say realistic, but I don't actually mean realistic because I hate to say it real people, real people could be a little boring. It. So you want someone who is personality, who a friend once said, this, describe this other person to me that they were like a motorboat when everyone else was at the canoe. And like their weight just kinda topples you right over. That's kind of what you want your characters to be that whole idea of larger than life. But you also want them to feel like they really could exist. So there are three dimensional. They have likes and dislikes. Autumn (27m 39s): Those are really important to you by creating a character that is just beautiful overpowers, maybe, and so many ways, but it also feels like someone, you really want them to be your friend or you desperately do not want them to be your enemy. Create those types of characters and people are gonna be like, whoa. Wow. That is amazing. Right? Jesper (28m 1s): No agree. And characters with the characters. Those are why people come back to the stories. It, it is not the old wall plopped on the day. What really engaged as the reader is to character. So fully agreed at, at this insane, the important it, it might not be directly. Autumn (28m 20s): Well. Yeah, just some, it depends on how we interpret improving the writing. It, it, it's not specific writing. Jesper (28m 29s): So, but, but again, my, my, my point about figuring out what you want to say, it's not Pacific Pacific to the sentences either. Autumn (28m 36s): Right. So, but it's yeah. It's about storytelling, I guess. Yes. How do we know how to tell your story better? How's that? Yeah. Yeah, indeed. So when you have two ones that I'm like short and quick, one of them we already touched upon too. I'll just get those out of the way. And then I'll move on to the T two to another one. Okay. So the first one you talked upon that don't use the complicated words. So I had that one as well. And then another variation of that is use different metaphors. That what you used, you used to see, you know, find new ways of saying something that, that will improve the writing quite a lot as well. And so that, that was to small, easy ones, but that's a good one. Jesper (29m 17s): We get out the way. And then the next one I have here is any words that can be stripped out without losing the meaning. Cut it out every time as the more, once you remove the bed and the story we'll get. Autumn (29m 34s): All right. I agree. I was just probably a point where you have removed too many, but occasionally losing meaning that's true. It without losing, meaning it, occasionally I do it because I'm, you know, the, the editor hat usually on, in the two of us and I'm often taking it out words, but then all of a sometimes stop and be like, I needed that, right. I'll be like this, I'm adding something massively something, or being a massively booming. You, you know, something I'm adding in there because those words are fun. It's good to remember to put in some of those fun adverbs, the occasionally, but it is. And there's times where I'm editing and I'm like, okay, there's four words that I can turn into one. Autumn (30m 18s): And I will always switch to something that is, or miss Ernest Hemingway must be, you know, I'm channeling him at times. I just really likes, just shortened up the sentences to drop all of the does. They call it sticky sentences, which is what I learned through pro writing aid. I didn't know they had a term, but when you have something that has all those filler words, like in the, a, all of those little ones that we really don't have, meaning there, the, just the little bit's there, that kinda connect everything with two, the more of this stuff, you can remove the sh punchier in more concrete, your sentences, our, and the more you get out of them, you don't get lost. And all of those little words that your, like, why are we, are we going with the sentence? Autumn (31m 1s): You don't want it to have those sticky ones. They make people just stop and go, wait, I have to start over again. I don't know what you were saying. Jesper (31m 9s): No, I agree. Absolutely. Autumn (31m 11s): All right. Yeah. So I actually went to the ones on my list was learned, apply it, but I think we kinda, we kinda covered that one is important, but I would say for fantasy again, this is not a sentence structure, one, which is funny. I'm employed, I'm the editor and I'm avoiding all the sentence structure ones, but I would say, learn to world, build something unique and then learn how to share it with readers without info dumping or confusing the crap out of them. What are the stories I just recently read, which is interesting, because I actually meant to mention this one with the characters as well. But again, I won't mention any names, but it was an impressive world and this was not Brandon Sanderson. Autumn (31m 55s): I would say that it, it was someone else and very impressive world. And really in depth, all this history, I was so freaking confused, you know, horrible job explaining any of how it related to the world and how old, who these people and God's in all of these things. We're I literally had two, I finish the book and I kinda had an idea of it. And then I read through the glossary and then I'm like, oh, they'll still don't get it. It's sad. I had to literally just suspend my own questioning or I would never have gotten past probably the third chapter, because I'm like, this doesn't make sense where you please explain what the frig you were talking about. Autumn (32m 40s): He just horrible. And he was the same way with some character. Is he literally didn't describe the character, a sidekick. It's all three quarters of the worst of the novel. Up until that point. I knew one thing about the sidekick. Okay. Well, how it looked at three quarters of the ways through the novel, I've finally got a description. It was like, thank you read. I've got an hour to revise everything, but I just thought of till now, but he also did the same thing with it. It was one of the first times I've read a book where I can, honestly, I see a lot of authors saying, you know, I don't know how to right. Men, if they're all women or a woman saying, I don't know how to write. Autumn (33m 22s): So men take it. I don't know how to right women. So all of the few times I can say you have two types of women in your novel assassin coldhearted or mousy and an insane. And was it, so then I say it, right? Vivid characters, right? Vivid characters of every genre at color race, no one should be one of two characteristics because I finished it going. I don't care who is buying this book. They're not women. I read it. And I'm kind of like this almost insulting I'm either. So these are my two types of characters. So learn the moral build and learn how to describe things. Autumn (34m 3s): It makes sure you described things appropriately, but tone info dump it. So that's, that's, that's circled back to what my point was is you should create something amazing in this world that I just read was really, truly unique and amazing. I think for what the hits I caught out of it. I, I assume it, it seemed it under the hood from what I was gathering. I just don't know how it works. Jesper (34m 30s): It reminds me of the advice to give when you are to Reed, the Silmarillion, have you ever read that one? Autumn (34m 37s): No, I haven't. I will. I swear. Jesper (34m 40s): Yeah, I have it all my Kindle. And I'm going to read it for the second time, but it, it is, it's a very nerdy book to read, of course, because it's not really a story as such. It's more like a wool compendium, but their advice when reading the Silmarillion. So I can give this to you now. That is, since you haven't read it, but the device is just read it. You know, you're going to get like 250 names of this, on this father to that blah, and do not try to understand who is, who just read and ignore it because you're gonna get so lost and you have no idea, five pay it later. What the heck is actually who, here we go, it's impossible to follow full glossary's and all that, but I just forget it. Jesper (35m 22s): I just read it for, you know, the history of the world and just ignore. Autumn (35m 27s): All right. Okay. All right. It that's the only way to read the Silmarillion the, without going insane, right. Jesper (35m 34s): That's right. Autumn (35m 35s): I will keep that in mind this speaking of that, and don't know if you're, so I just saw and share it on Patriot and Patriot how to create your own magic book. I'm just going to stick with my own philosophy of how to do that. And I'll ignore the similarity. I can't even pronounce it today. And I told you what my brain is slowly, this proteins, all we need to speed it up. All right. But yeah, so I'm going to, I will save that for later in cooler weather. Jesper (36m 5s): Okay. I found a piece of advice from George Orwell. Now this is not something new to most of us, I think, but at the same time, it's, it's a good reminder. That is not to use passive voice when you can use active voice. Autumn (36m 26s): That's a good reminder. Jesper (36m 28s): Yeah. So the example all with all wheel uses was the Mann was spitting by the dock that is very passive at this very passive and not very engaging. And it is better to say the DOK with the man is active and it's much more engaging. And again, we talked about the point of view we early on, and if you right, and the point of view, you usually do not have the passive voice problem as much at least. Autumn (36m 52s): Yes. And I, I, it's funny. I have seen that with editing a lot of books. I do it too, that I often see something in passive voice that you don't need to have to switch to the now. And they have, like, she was sitting down. You can just change that to, as she sat down. Yeah. I've noticed that if you see a was, and then a verb adding an ending and an I a T G I can guarantee you that is the verb. That should be where the was was, or was it is most, what is it just became a talk to her Susan episode. And I I've just seen it so many times. I maybe, because I'm like editing like crazy since like may or April or something, but I just I've seen that so often. Autumn (37m 38s): And so many different authors that I'm like, this is really, it could just be, I don't see any one else having this roll, but if you have a was, and some of the verb finding and ending an ING, it is just getting rid of the, was it turned the verb into the act of choice. That's all you need is perfect. It'll be like, you're writing that much stronger because you'll be an active voice and it will not be this kind of passive. Oh, is that she was sitting down? No, she sat, she just sat down. So it's fine. Yeah, no, and dude. Jesper (38m 8s): Yeah. And it was funny. My next one was M to right. Informative and punchy dialogue. So I think we covered that. All right. Autumn (38m 16s): Yeah, I did. Yeah. I like punchy dialogue. My editor sometimes does it like my punchy dialogue, but I like my punchy dial. OK. But so my, as one is actually my last one on my list is to add humor to your writing. So yeah, a lot of is a tough one for a of people. I mean, a lot of authors use romance or friendship as a good subplot as a way of binding characters is getting an emotional event investment from the reader. But there's that old saying that if you can laugh together, you can stay together. When they talk about marriages, it's also true with your characters and with your readers. Autumn (38m 57s): If you can make them laugh out loud, they will kind of love your book just the little bit more of than even a romance scene. So keep that in mind. I liked snarkey characters and I loved sarcasm. So I, you know, you're gonna definitely find that on my books. But then at times it's, I've had a few Maverick meanie at kind of characters. And even in the book, I just read that I couldn't understand the world. And I didn't really like some of the female characters because there were like one of two types, except for the main, the hero's wife who ended up in prison for three quarters of the novel doing absolutely nothing. But anyway, there were parts the parts of the book. Autumn (39m 38s): I absolutely adored because some of the banter between characters and this kind of devil may care, sarcastic attitude. I'm like, dude, I like you. So that overcomes quite a lot of sins. Jesper (39m 53s): No, I agree. I agree. Fully a M adding human makes a huge difference, but I personally find it very, very difficult also to come up with something that feels like smart enough, if you know what I mean, my name of humor is it's difficult. I think so. And so I do think it's funny cause I know when the best scenes I come up with our, one of those, one's like, you know, your in the middle of the cooking dinner or something, you're like, oh, this was the perfect dialogue. And you have to basically burn everything is shut everything off and do you run it right? It down. There's something about humor where I think it just is something that comes, you can create it at another thing. Autumn (40m 34s): It comes from inspiration. But when it comes, you're like, oh, this is the perfect. So I do think, but it, if you could develop that, learn it. I don't know. Do it learn the improv? That would be a good class to learn, to do some fun humor and you just come up with some stuff. Yeah. But I think it will really, it would add a lot to a lot of stories that I read and they seem good, but man, if you can make me laugh and especially if you start T my goal and every, every interaction with people is to make them snort the hot or very cold liquid. That is perfect. Oh yeah. Jesper (41m 14s): That's good advice. I have two more and then I think that's it they're short. So the first one is just very simple, but make sure to hook the reader. Autumn (41m 24s): Oh yes. That's simple, but very effective. It is. And I think M not to make you take longer, but we say hook and people understand concept, but I think sometimes they don't realize what that actually means and concrete advice. And its, it can be anything that you just want to make them read the next sentence, whether its curiosity, whether it's and emotional outcome, you just wanna make some, keep reading and all hooking. It is it's, there's a lot of different ways of doing it from emotions to curiosity to, I don't know. Jesper (41m 58s): So shadowing excitement. Yeah. That's all you do. It's finding that reason that the, you hit the paragraph or the period and you go, no, I got to know what comes next. Yeah. I mean, especially with the first chapter, Autumn (42m 11s): Of course that's important Jesper (42m 15s): And the next one is also a very short, but I just sort of general good advice. Just not really about the writing itself, but it's more taking a break from it and you know, walk away from your writing, leave it alone for a bit and then come back and have a look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. That's usually going to help a lot to improve the text. I think so too, especially if you're editing or you're writing and you do hit that wall, especially to me editing, if you, if the words are starting to run together and you were just kind of fed up or you're, if you find yourself trying to finish on an artificial deadline, that you were completely a hundred percent in control of walk away from it don't force yourself. Autumn (43m 0s): I admit, I just kind of took a weekend break. I meant to like edit a zillion chapters and instead I finished reading a book and then I did a really good drawing. Sorry, Jesper. I didn't get my editing done, but I've felt so much better when I opened it up on Monday, I was like, oh, you know, boom, boom, boom. Just got stuff done. It floats so nicely. So yeah. Everyone needs a break every once in a while, once and awhile for sure of it. Yeah. And I think sort of maybe to round things off, I think it's worth saying that the more you're right, the better you'll get at it and why I'm saying that it is because some, some people think that you were like natural born as a good writer, but that's not the case. Jesper (43m 49s): You know, practice is the only thing that'll make you better. Yeah. And of course it is challenging, especially because writing is very objective. Then that only makes it even more challenging, but you get better as you go along and it also gets easier as you go along. Autumn (44m 5s): So it looked at me. I sometimes we could do things in reverse, but in general it gets easier, but you have to. So I live in reverse sometimes too, but I agree. I mean, when I look back at my debut novel versus what I'm writing, now you get a better, you get better. Your next book. There's a certain point where you have done the best you can for your skill level right now. Just go to your next story. It's okay. And just keep writing. Jesper (44m 40s): So amen. So next Monday we are doing something slightly different because we have collected a bunch of questions from our listeners and we are going to answer as many as we Narrator (44m 54s): Can. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/AmwritingFantasy For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Some people don't make great teachers... so imagine what would happen if they were teaching magic! Join us as we try to out-do one another with the worst person we can imagine having as instructor for magic. Expect to laugh, and to be suddenly grateful that any bad classes didn't include having to learn hexes... Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (29s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (32s): and I'm Autumn Jesper (34s): This episode 132 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And I'm looking forward to this one because You going to do one of our competitive top 10 list today. And a perhaps you want to say what the topic of today's lists are and what we are trying to beat each other at all of them. Oh, so today is topic. I've noticed that I think you even came up with the idea of this competitive list. I think this was just, this might be unhealthy for you. You want to compete so much today's topic. So we are going to talk about the 10 worst people to teach magic. Jesper (1m 14s): And this is definitely going to be fun. I was having giggle fits, trying to come up with M characters. I would never want teaching me magic. Autumn (1m 24s): So this will be interesting. Just see who comes up with the worst. Like yeah. That's, that's it. We have to include body. And then she was like, well, it's more like the combined five worst ones. Right? So it's more like who made the best or the worst list, the best worst lists. That's a, not the best, worst at it. Yes. I'm not confusing it all. Jesper (1m 52s): No, not at all. Autumn (1m 53s): And that's a bit, I had tons of time to work on this because it rained all weekend here. So I had some good thinking time. How about you? We were probably on a refereeing again. Jesper (2m 10s): Yeah. And indeed. Yeah. So I was just coming up with my list is wanting, so I have not thought about it as much as you have a apparently. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I I'm confident in my list. Autumn (2m 24s): Of course. Well, you usually AR, but we usually give you a reason for your money. You, so we'll see. How are you saying I'm too confident possibly. You need to be a little more humble and admit that I have some pretty good lists. Jesper (2m 42s): Yeah, well, yeah. I do admit that. Do you have a top-notch like this, but mine are just like a, a bit above, so we will see, I don't think that all the listeners agree with you. Autumn (2m 55s): Thank you, Dominic. Jesper (2m 56s): Oh, no, we don't bring that up again. Autumn (2m 60s): So how are things over in Denmark? Jesper (3m 3s): A it's as good as good as a you and I, we actually interviewed on a field as a storyteller, a podcast yesterday a, which was quite fun by the way. I'm but I'm mentioning that because during that product cost, I set how I finished watching American gods on Amazon prime and a I've mentioned how much I love this show on a few of our past episodes here. So, and I also mentioned that I feared that this show was canceled by the end of season three soda, there was no satisfying ending. And that was exactly what I found out. It happened because I finished up watching the American gods over the last week. Jesper (3m 44s): So that's really annoying a, I still think it's a great show and I still would recommend people watching it. But then yesterday, or because I was preparing for this podcast episode, I did actually did a bit of digging and a bit of research. And it seems like that American gods might get a proper ending made either as a minister series of perhaps a movie. So, oh, but I don't know if that's just rumors or true, but that's what I could sort of find, but I really hope that that'll happen because I don't know why do the network's do that? I mean, I hate when they create a series and then just suddenly decide just to stop it in the middle of things. Jesper (4m 26s): I mean, couldn't, they at least let the writer's room note at, we are going to end up at the end of this season. So we come up with some sort of it. I don't, I don't get it. Why is that? They're so difficult. I agree. I think it would be nice to not have it open-ended contract and be like, this was going to be a four seasons. And you know, if you do well, we'll come up with like another one or two. But I mean, I've definitely heard Netflix prefers shows is that only like two season. So that's why I thought it made it a three is a pretty good, but I mean that it's like you to look at supernatural if it was 16, 17 season's I mean, I, and I watched them all at the mall, but then we see others that are a perfectly good shows on what you can at least let them, let the people wrap it up. Autumn (5m 8s): And that happened with Lucifer, which I saw the final episodes of that just came out and I want to watch it, but Adam's is not back yet. And we've watched the whole thing together. So I'm waiting till he was returned so we can finish out the series, but that was nearly there nearly stopped it. And they did give the writer's a chance to write the one last series. Thank goodness, because I hate stories that are left hanging. Yeah, man, I just find it weird because I mean, surely I mean, no problem that a network decides to locate, we don't think that there is no enough views on the series and therefore we wanna end it. No problem. I fully get that. Jesper (5m 48s): That's fine. But what, I don't understand this, that they would know that ahead of time is not something that they all of a sudden realize that there is no sails this stuff, right? They will. No. So why can't you just tell the writer's room? Okay. We're going to do six S episodes more and then you need to wrap it up by the end of that, because there's probably not going to be anything else. You don't know how, how can that B oh, you know, it planning is okay. So maybe then all the producers are a pants or is, and then just kinda like a wake up one morning and going, no we're done. And then just keep going. We cut the strings, right. They're yeah. But, but, but the thing is it still, it's still a product that they are selling to the a consumer's here, right? Jesper (6m 32s): I mean, as a user of Netflix or Amazon prime or whatever, a, if I constantly get series on a streaming service that is ended abruptly with no prep, I mean, I'm probably start going to dislike. It's a streaming service. 'cause every time I watch this show on it, it doesn't end properly. Whereas if, if they plan for it and always close to a series, well a or as well as they can, at least then they should also be getting more happy customers and thereby more people watching a streaming service. So I, it feels like this shooting themselves in the foot. I don't quite understand why. Yeah. I agree. And then you have some of the writer's, you know, something is popular and enough fans asked for it, then other ate, you know, a star as someone else might pick it up. Jesper (7m 20s): And I've seen that happen where like the first three series are in Netflix and the next six are in stars or HBO max. And it's just like, okay. It just, it just gets confusing. But I don't know. I guess the world makes even less sense. Then we realized, yeah. And you have a show like a, well, it's old now, but as you all like Firefly, which it's just like really, really liked that it was so good. And the was so much demand in the fan community that they wanted more of it, but nobody made it known. So they did come up with that movie. And honestly, I, I thought the movie, it was horrible and I did a huge disservice to the actual series. Jesper (8m 4s): So that's the other problem. Yeah. So anyway, that was sort of my week. Autumn (8m 11s): What about you all as well, as you know, I mean, I'm currently so alone as my husband's off a whitewater raft, guiding and learning to that kind of stuff. So I get to hear every night about his M events of falling into hydraulics and holes and having the raft go over is just absolutely it stuff I would of totally loved in my twenties, but I have to admit, there's a part of me looking at him now, going, you're giving up at like five year and a bus to go rafting, buy five 30, your off the bus. It at like five 30, you have less than an hour to eat something. Before you go back for some evening classes on a raft guiding, like can say you can't up with you. Autumn (8m 57s): So usually he and I was like, we telegram each other and were telegram. You, you know, when he was away visiting us as parents or I'm away, we were like telling screaming at each other, like every hour and sending each other a stickers and things. And I hear from him for like about 15 minutes now, I was like, this was a really weird to not even hear from him more than that. So that's definitely been an adaption. And plus it rained, like I mentioned all weekend and I'm in a tiny cabin in the woods and its pouring down bucket's so I can't even go for a walk and I've all alone out here. And I'm like, OK, I'm a little bit of cabin fever. Like he do leave. So I do go there and walk at least yesterday, I'm thinking of some of the dog and they keep me entertained. Autumn (9m 40s): But yet there's definitely a time. And you're like, I'm not used to being this alone. There was a time I used to be this alone, but this was a really a loan. Yeah. I can see it. And you want some locks on your doors is, well, the worst thing out here is the 300 pound black bear when he was a shy little thing. And then we have a raccoon that is figured out how to open a cooler outside of the little bugger, a eye. But besides that, the scariest thing in the woods or people, and no one else really knows where this cabin is. So I'm not that worried about people, but yeah, people are scary. I started watching a Netflix show on true horror stories. Don't do that. Autumn (10m 25s): So people are mean to you just don't wanna do with ghosts. And so then they get a deal with other people. Yeah, that's a recommendation passed on then. Absolutely. Narrator (10m 40s): Oh a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (10m 46s): So I've started working on something new, what's a autumn and I will make available to all our listeners and the author community. It is still in the very early conceptual stage, but we are planning to put out a few master classes and I don't think it will be ready until the fall a but the idea of is that these will be some meetings so that everybody can join from the safety of their home and there will be a, a recording and all of that good stuff for those who can't join live. And then there should, that's gonna, it's gonna be so that it, by the end of it, we're going to hook up some sort of a mastermind, two, it, but a lot more on that later, once it becomes relevant, I am excited about it. Autumn (11m 36s): It, yeah, yeah. Go ahead and say, oh, I just think it was going to be, it would just be such a great opportunity to reaching out with other authors. And I actually am, might've picked up a life coaching course. That'll kind of go hand in hand with helping learning some more new, fresh coaching techniques. So I think this will be really kind of fit well in it. It will definitely. Jesper (11m 60s): Yeah. But we'll see you. But I would really also like to put together some sort of a, you know, the first ever Am Writing Fantasy in-person event in 2022, I don't know. Do you think that will be possible with COVID-19 and all of that? As long as what of these new new, new variants are going to rule the world? Autumn (12m 19s): There has been a wonderful research coming out of Brazil. That seventy-five percent is the threshold. If you get a vaccinated above 75%, it is pretty much contained the virus. And if he hit 95%, its like, basically you're fine. The everything is fine. And there was like, no COVID death's so I'm really hopeful a 20, 22, because I would love, I love and person conferences and working with students and more than a zoo actually like spending time. So that would be fantastic. Yeah. I would really like to put some in-person event together for next year and I think that would be really nice. I did hear though it as well, that that was some people in, I think it was Norway that they were vaccinated and then they got COVID-19 anyway and they went to the hospital and they actually died. Jesper (13m 15s): So I, yeah, the, so I'm not trying to be a downer, but I ju I'm just not so a, a a hundred percent convinced that those vaccines are actually the wonder sort of how it will fix everything in medicine that may be some people think it is. Autumn (13m 31s): Yeah. There's always a chance of a mutation. That'll be different and go around that. So that's what makes me nervous. So we'll have to see. Yeah. And the vaccine is not a a a hundred percent either. It doesn't give a a hundred percent protections. So you, you cannot be sure, but ah, but lets say we'll keep on a, an eye on things. However it evolves and a, if it goes well and maybe next year will put some sort of all of these trials. Jesper (13m 56s): So she, if there's enough interest four and an event for my next year in-person but let's see, we'll come back from that. Okay. Anything else to mentioned before we go into our lists? Autumn? Autumn (14m 8s): Oh, you know what? I had something I thought of and it's a completely out of my head. I'm blaming the pollen. It's a, I think the locus tree is decided to bloom now the sun's out and yeah, my brain has a little, so we do it for next time. It, when I remember it. Okay. Narrator (14m 28s): And onto today's topic. So Jesper (14m 31s): Let's start out by reminding listeners of the ground rules here. Just in case we have some new listeners joining us today. I didn't know if there was this a rules that is good, but there is a, a, a reminder here. Oh, all right. What are the roles? The idea with the alternating lists is that we try to come up with the best suggestions and by the end we should conclude, ah, we have the best five suggestions. And so that was pretty simple. And straight-forward five, a C I thought that was always just like the best, worst one. Autumn (15m 9s): I think you were changing the rules. I mean, I have to go back and watch one of the other lists. Jesper (15m 14s): Yeah. You do do that. And then come back and tell me I'm right. Because it's about having the best list. So a of course, if you have the best entry on the list and there is a good chance to lift as a whole as also the best, but if you need to have the best list, right. Autumn (15m 28s): I disagree is in my mind, is it always been like that? And it, then it, it is like that because that's how I remember it. I will find proof if I probably can find some time to go find some proof. I think you're and I think it was just like to do that. Jesper (15m 45s): Yeah. Probably. It's probably a pretty good bat. Wow. So as you mentioned that at the top of the episode today is list will be to chop 10 WORST People to Ever Teach Magic. We decided that this can be completely made of people, although they don't have to be. So that's up to each of us, whatever you want to include on to this. So I think that's just set us off well enough or then I think so. I, I think I already know you have me wondering what's going on. You're changing the ground rules. I'm not sure I liked this and not at all at all. And just reminding you of what the rules were just, they've always been like that. Jesper (16m 28s): You would just agree. Alright. So how are you flipping a coin to C who goes first? Or did you want me to ease us into this? I actually think that last time I got to decide who went first, if I remember correctly. Autumn (16m 43s): So you should decide this time. All right. I'm going to have you go first then. Yeah. Last time I, I ask you to go from us as well though. It seems like there is a pattern here maybe as best not to go first, baby. I always like to go second and speeches like glasses. So that way you weren't the first one, you got an out of the way it really quickly. And then you could just get back and enjoy it. So I'll go number two. Jesper (17m 10s): Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, so my number five, which is like the least of the bath, what do you do? Something like that. At least a worst of the bad ones. So it sounded very complicated. So a number five and this one I call misses, what did I tell you? A oh, and now this is not meant in a scolding kind of way, right? It is. In fact men meant in a, I don't remember what I just told you. Jesper (17m 50s): Wait, so this is a teacher who has absolutely zero short-term memory. So imagine how terrible that would be. You know, like every single lesson you start over, we were like 25 times because she can't remember what you just told you, what was she taught you? And then yeah. Yeah. And then you might try to get clever. And then you think that you're going to invent some sort of system. So, you know, it will keep her on track, but the problem, as you can remember that a system either. So it, it doesn't matter what you're do. She's just laughing all the time, this chart. And like I was at the spells, we were working and they'll spend a half your time doing a whiteboard chart structure of this is where we are. Jesper (18m 35s): And this is where we were going. This is what you said, do you, at least he has a good longterm memory. Is she still remembers her smells. But yeah, because we imagine you were going halfway through something and then she thinks she was actually doing a different spell and he'll turn it into like a mushroom Tony and that's that you put it on the board. And then all of a sudden she was stop and say, why is that a bot? They're like, what is this a, Autumn (19m 1s): I think I'll be looking for it. Another teacher, she, you don't have to be the only person in the universe who could teach magic for me to put up with that. I'd be getting her lots of just like pretty annoying. But yeah, it's just, it helps memory and I'm sure there's got to be a spell it for that. So she could only remember is, well, Jesper (19m 23s): yeah, but yeah, memory is spelled up. Might help. So she can find one a, hopefully she has some book's sitting around that. It might be a better, a better bet is to just go with whatever books she's gotten a house. Autumn (19m 40s): Yeah. Okay. All right. So do you want to know my number five? Jesper (19m 45s): Yes, please. Autumn (19m 46s): All right. So this is my easing into your worst potential teachers is that you actually find a magical dragon who is willing to teach you. So you're going to have a dragon as you're instructor. However, the deal, I know it sounds perfect, right? Just the deal is if you get the spell wrong, he gets to eat you. Why did you take yeah. And considering, I mean, do you have to decide if you trust the dragon enough to like set you up, like a smell that is not going to work? Jesper (20m 28s): I don't think that many students will survive that for very long. Autumn (20m 32s): I don't know if the dragon care. Jesper (20m 35s): No, probably not, but a, I don't think it will. It'll get too sort of a graduate very many people. Autumn (20m 42s): Well, if you do, you're going to be an awesome wizard. Jesper (20m 46s): Oh yeah, for sure. And you're going to a drag and as your friend afterwards. Autumn (20m 51s): Yeah, exactly. So I thought it would be a good start, something massive and very powerful. That gets a little snacky. Occasionally. Yeah. Snuggie on students. Jesper (21m 5s): Yeah. I don't know that this isn't your toes. Autumn (21m 10s): Imagine not turning it in your homework assignment. Just go. Jesper (21m 16s): I think at least what will happen is the students will try really hard not to make mistakes, but a vision you bunk to make a mistake. It you're learning. Right. So you are bound to make a mistake sooner or later. Yeah. That's a good nuts. So that is a pretty horrible teacher, for sure. Yes. Alright. Well at least you, you can appreciate that. Won a little bit. You get to see a dragon. So it's like, Hey, you are not that impressed. I can tell you all, we always love dragon. So you just put a dragon and then everybody will always like that. So I didn't think that I should have how I'm doing. Jesper (21m 56s): Good for a number one. All right, lets go for four. Okay. So number for this teacher, a teacher, yeah. Is a heavy, heavy smoker. She's a gambler cheese and C and she probably has the worst quality and teacher can have a gun. You get to what that is. All of them was just like the worst quality of a teacher. Well being always right. I'm not sure. I'm not a, I'm not a, a, well, okay. Autumn (22m 32s): I teach writing, but I don't know what trying to think of how all the teachers of my life, who of annoyed me and most of them are the ones that never listened to their students. Yeah. That's not bad is. Yeah. Basically its like she doesn't care one bit about teaching. So that's pretty on top of that. I would do it. OK. Yeah. Jesper (22m 53s): She doesn't care it all about teaching it. In fact she disliked her students. I have actually prepared, but this teacher a bad, oh no. You of an audio clip. Oh fantastic. All right. Let's hear this worst teacher. So see if you can a hear who this is. OK. Here it goes. Character Voice (23m 18s): So I don't want you to worry class. These tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and financial success. If any, do you know who that is? Autumn (23m 33s): I was at the tip of my tongue, but I cannot say I can't think of the name. Character Voice (23m 39s): Do you want to hint that? Autumn (23m 40s): I do remember it. Yeah. I want a hit. Character Voice (23m 44s): It's a character from the Simpsons. It's a Simpsons. Autumn (23m 49s): O is it the, yeah, she is a brunette. I can't even think of her name though. It really can't. Character Voice (23m 56s): And I'll try and just see if I can pronounce it correctly. Misses crap up a crop, apple or something like that was a crab apple. Autumn (24m 6s): Yeah. I'll yeah, something like that. I can't even pronounce it, but yes I do remember her. Jesper (24m 16s): Oh, magic teacher. That would mean that was pretty me. I think it was. So she would be one of the worst teacher's you could have, especially around fireballs a, you know, I think that the school will be on fire rod. It quickly when she was taking like a break and smoking and she doesn't really care what the kids are doing with the spells. Autumn (24m 35s): Yeah. That would be bad. So it would be bad. But I have to admit as a student and her class, you could probably get away with pretty close to murders so that it might actually probably it probably yes. See the, is the magic toads, a neutral running around the room and the Al coming and eating someone's frog and it was just chaos. Jesper (25m 3s): One of my class I might actually do well. Okay. So you don't think she stepped out of a teacher then? Autumn (25m 10s): There is. And I was just a horrible teacher, but I'm just thinking of a classroom chaos as a student would be a blast, but it wouldn't be like, you don't have a fear of getting Eaton. Jesper (25m 19s): So it's kind of a nice yeah, but you would, unless you are like at the top of the pyramid, you, you would need to be worried about getting bullied because she don't give a crap care. Autumn (25m 32s): You would have to be, you would have to either have you're a little posse that you are teamed up and no one's going to pick on you or B be her meiny and to be like this zap, zap, zap to be done with it is shoot. Jesper (25m 46s): All right. But it wasn't bad. Okay. But it wasn't a dry and then okay. I can agree that dragon is a bit more terrifying. Yeah. Alright. Autumn (25m 59s): So you're ready from my number four, then this one's pretty simple. A is just, you're going to have a teacher, your teacher today for magic one-to-one is a super intelligent AI that has absolutely no magic abilities, but understands the theory very well. Okay. Good luck. Jesper (26m 22s): Is it able to explain how to actually do this building? Autumn (26m 26s): Is it understands? The theory can tell you the ingredients, you know, wave your hands, the pronunciation. But if there's something, some other essence that you have to draw, especially like a emotions, are it doesn't understand emotions at all. So if there is some other layer like, like in our spells, like you have to be happy or you're pooling on something internal where you believe in yourself, it doesn't get that. Just try. Yeah. Here's a book. Good luck. And I'll see you. Jesper (26m 58s): It would be difficult, but it might not be the worst teacher because I think it can teach people some, some of it, at least I think you, you might not be as you might not be the best spill cost off the word, but I think it can teach you some spills or at least probably you could get something out of it. Autumn (27m 18s): And I think if you could figure out whatever that ingredient is that it probably doesn't know since it doesn't have magic, maybe you could actually do it very well. If you could kind of figure out what's missing, but until you hit that point, it would probably be the most frustrating experience of having no, you are trying it wrong. Please attempt to spell number three again, just so we found it in my head against a wall O actually that reminds me a, of what was called a, I think it was just, oh my God, I'm sorry. Now I forgot the name of it. But we watched a friends' a, I think it was a friend's movie. Jesper (27m 59s): You, you have the week a where it is also a scifi movie. Its like somebody wakes up in a, like a cryo chamber and they can't get out and there is something wrong and a cryo chamber. So it, so it's running out of air and there is an AI managing it so she can talk to the AI and all that. And it's, it's actually done really well because Dai just follows commands. Right. So she has to think about how can I get out of this and find the right, because the AI knows it at all all the time, but it doesn't think about suggesting anything to her and that's not what he does. Is it just, if you ask it something, it will reply like, yes I can do this or no cannot be done a or something. Jesper (28m 44s): So, and is quite interesting. And at the end as well, it doesn't mean I don't even know it kind of where the name of it. I can't go look it up. Yeah, no, but, but at, at any rate she comes up with a solution in Indiana that you could probably have done in within the last two first two seconds if she had just thought of it. And that, that was actually quite neat. That is quite kind of good. Autumn (29m 5s): Oh, I like that. So it's a fair you again, you admit having an AI as a teacher could be a very interesting, horrible teacher. You just you'd have to be best for. Jesper (29m 18s): Yeah. Well I did that. No, because I, I guess what I'm saying is that it's actually not that bad as if a teacher, so you just have to be able to out-think your teacher, which could be difficult. Autumn (29m 34s): Yeah. That is difficult. Yes. All right. Well, we'll see. I'm glad you agreed with me. So we will go to your number three. Jesper (29m 42s): You're putting worded in my mouth then. Okay. So I don't know if I took the easy way out here with my number three, but I really think this is going to be a very poor teacher. Well, I, you better come up with a very good poor teacher. You're gonna lose some points on and taking it easy way out. Oh shoot. Okay. So my name number three is the wizard who were once very competent, perhaps one of the most skilled wizards in the whelm. However he has since turned into a complete drunk. So I'm not, I'm just talking about someone who's like fond of a bit of alcohol and may be a glass of wine in the evening and stuff I'm talking about. Jesper (30m 28s): Like somebody who's so drunk that he keeps falling on his ass all the time. You mean all the time? Autumn (30m 37s): Oh no. So good luck learning any magic from that guy. Jesper (30m 40s): Yeah. It would be like slurring his words. You said it. Yeah. You pronounce it. Like what do you correct? That would be, and what he's on about and know that I have to admit. That would be pretty. I just, yeah, I think I would be walking away going. You just know, give me, just give me your spell book and you don't deserve this. It would be horrible. Autumn (31m 7s): Yeah. And I've got to, you know, kind of learn anything at all from that guy. No, that, that would be a pretty bad teacher. I could see like your T your parent's like, would they set you up with this? So I was like, is this an internship or something? So we got you to the best mentor and is the famous all day long. And you find out he was like this smelly drunk idiot. He's like, oh my God. And tell your parents no, just Dell. So that'd be kind of, it'd be an interesting story you to write it. But I think I'd get tired if you watch, you didn't watch any of the cursed, which I've talked about things I didn't like about it. But they do have, when the show starts, Merlin is completely drunk himself into having no magic. Autumn (31m 50s): Basically actually sort of lost his magic. It's complicated, but he is, Merlin starts out is a completely drunk wizard. And I'm like, oh, that is different. Take it. Jesper (32m 0s): Yeah. That is different for sure. Yeah. Autumn (32m 3s): So very drunk wizard, but that's not what do you want to have a round? Not as a teacher, but not in general. And I get, especially if I think we talked about this before, like a, a, I think you had come up with a wizard who only can really perform magic. Like we loosened up and it was drunk. But so this is like the opposite. Can you imagine if you're at this teacher incredibly powerful magic, I'm probably drunk so much just hallucinating and still have a magical ability. So it just be just driving through a fireball. You are going to be in the middle, middle of the Tavern and he's gonna be like, oh, this was a dragon. Then shoot a fireball across the room. And there's nothing like a place. Autumn (32m 47s): Okay. Yeah. That is nuts. But that would be fantastic. Ways of learning. Magik you learned a run and jump really? Well. It would be in shape. Jesper (32m 57s): All right. Yeah. You'll you learn how to avoid magic? Not to use it very much, so. Autumn (33m 2s): All right. You want to hear my number three? Jesper (33m 7s): Okay. I'm ready. Alright. Autumn (33m 8s): So I think a horrible magic teacher would be a Fae any Fae because they always require bribes. They always require some kind of payment. They speak in riddles. They, as we both know, they break electronics. If you just touch it. So don't ever handle it at your cell phone. So there's a temperamental. They're impatient. I mean, you just, they're a bit elitist. You just don't want to learn from a Fae because I mean, I could see it. You'd wake up in the morning and they have grown a hedge maze that you've got a travel through to learn something that they wanna teach you. And you bought a time, you arrive in to the middle, they've heard a groan bored and went to a party. Autumn (33m 48s): So she, I just wouldn't want to learn from a face. And that's just a normal thing. I mean, if you think you could have a banshee as a teacher, and if they are a temperamental and angry and she's shrieks, and then you blow your air drums possibly dropped dead from a banshee and we will have those little brownie is like my Bramble. You, you know, we just covered in spine, but it really likes hugs. It's just, you just don't want to deal with Fae. You just don't go there. Jesper (34m 19s): No. All right. I can see that a yeah. Autumn (34m 27s): Hm. Oh, you're not depressed. You just don't realize, smell like loses interest. Jesper (34m 36s): So yeah. Yeah. But do the Fe even know how to cast mat? Do they have magic? Autumn (34m 40s): Yes. Most do. I think they do is sell it to fail. I know. Okay. It's more like math nature of man and nature. Magic. I am not as temperamental eye must only be partially Fey, I think. No. No. Okay. All right. So I'm gonna have a sit down and have some soul searching. Am I, what do you say? Jesper (35m 7s): 20% off. 30% off. Autumn (35m 10s): Let's move on. Then I'm feeling, I'm feeling self-conscious now. Okay. All right. Jesper (35m 19s): So you want my number two, then you are number two. Autumn (35m 21s): Let's move on. I changed my mind and I, my, my number three. Jesper (35m 28s): Yes. Okay. My and number two is quite a character. Oh, all right. Now I have a sound clip of this guy in a second. A really, but a, let me first explain why he's such a terrible teacher. Okay. Okay. Well, first this M first traits I'm going to mention doesn't actually have anything to do with teaching a church, but it just shows why he is a really bad person. So number one, he is a horrible racist. Ooh. Number two, he is home. We phobic and three, he was extremely arrogant. Jesper (36m 13s): So that was, or not the best at qualities. I think we can agree. Yeah. No, I don't think I want to hangout with this person. Nope. And what makes him at a very poor teacher though, is that he is rude and he was cruel is a vindictive O and he actually enjoys humiliating, humiliating his students O that does not sound okay. Like a very healthy teacher. No. And if that's not bad enough, this will give you a hint as to which character I'm talking about. So how are you ready for us? A short, some clip here, listening. Jesper (36m 54s): Okay. At first he might be in St as well. So we might be insane as well, because he has an alter ego in the form of a hand puppet. So maybe now you can S sort of guess who that might be, but okay. I'm going to play the clip, but I do. So just a warning here. This guy is not appropriate for some listeners. Okay. So if you have sensitive as you want. Yeah. If you have sensitive ears and if you want too, then please just skip 30 seconds a head on your podcast app now, and then for the rest of us, a buckle in 'cause a, here we go. Character Voice (37m 40s): All right, kids. It is now my job to teach you the theory of evolution. Now, I, for one thing, that evolution is a bunch of bull crap, but I've been told after, teach it anyway, was thought of a by Charles Darwin. It, it goes something like this. In the beginning, we were all fish, okay. Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different. So we got to laugh. So retard, fish, it goes on to make more retard babies. And then one day a retard, baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands. And it had, but sex with a squirrel or something and made this retard, frogs squirrel. Character Voice (38m 24s): And then that has a retard baby, which was monkey fish frog. And then this monkey fish frog had, but sex with that and monkey, and that monkey add a mutant retard, baby. It screwed another. And that made you, so there you go. All right. A part of an offspring, a five monkeys having a butt sex with a fish squirrel, congratulate who does this Autumn (38m 55s): Actually totally lost it at first. I thought I knew, but now I'm just completely confusing. It just too shocked, I think is just my brain would into a meltdown, a lockdown mode going just, no. So please, Melissa. Character Voice (39m 12s): It's Mr. Garrison from south puck. Autumn (39m 15s): Oh, geez. Okay. So that's going way back. I have not watched Southpark for a very long time, but now that you said that it's there on my memory is extremely shitty teaching. You really don't want this lunatic teaching any magic. Jesper (39m 34s): No, I also would hate to imagine you would learn any thing other than just a sheer lawsuit, a bill. Autumn (39m 47s): So yeah, no, he wouldn't last long at the magical academy. I would hope. Jesper (39m 55s): Oh no. Can you imagine him? He has a teacher. If it were magic, that was to be a nightmare. So that's my number two. All right. Autumn (40m 3s): Well that's that is legitimately have a pretty horrible teacher. All right. I will. Now my number too is slightly complicated. So you are going to have to stick with me on this one. Jesper (40m 15s): Okay. Okay. Okay. Autumn (40m 16s): So it's sort of a simple concept, but a, so you're a teacher is actually going to be a wizard that is traveling it through time, in the reverse direction you are to him, it's forward. But to also, it would be a backward. So the last time you meet him, which is the first time he'll meet you is you are gonna be at your most powerful. And he's going to be like, I'm doing what I have to teach you. What I tomorrow, you're going to know Les. So I have to teach you this spell you're doing now tomorrow. Right? So, but the first time you meet him, he's going to have been teaching you a for 20 or 30 years and being like, don't worry, you don't understand it. Now you'll get it. And like five days, it don't worry about it. Autumn (40m 58s): So it's just going to be complicated. Or you can make it really complicated that you actually teach him magic until you switch. And then he is teaching you the magic. You taught him later. So it becomes this infinity loop. That's just going to blow your mind. Jesper (41m 16s): My brain is on fire. Autumn (41m 20s): Glad I could help you out. Jesper (41m 21s): How is that? Even gonna work? Autumn (41m 25s): Its magic. Why not? Jesper (41m 28s): But the first time, the first time did you meet him? He will think that you already know everything. There is no reason to teach you. How so? How do you even get to the end where you actually learned anything? Because you will never teach it to you. Autumn (41m 40s): Well, he will have it to you for 20 years. So he'll know to you. It will be the first day. It would be like, oh my God, I don't know who you are. What are you talking about? Magic. And he's going to be like, look, I'm going to be your teacher for the next 30 years. Just get ready. You're going to tell you, you got to figure this out. I'll be back tomorrow. So you're gonna be like twice as a annoyed because just like, oh, I don't understand this. So I think he's gotta be all sappy because it's gonna be the last day he's ever gonna see you. So in to you, it's just the first day. You're all going to see. And it's just going to be really crazy. It'll be fairly fine in the middle. Maybe we not. Jesper (42m 19s): So he is, he is aware that he is traveling in the opposite direction in time. Autumn (42m 24s): He knows that. Yes, he knows it. So it, you just got to him its forward. But tell us is backward is timeline just goes into reverse compared to the way we see time. Jesper (42m 35s): So he's also getting younger. Autumn (42m 37s): I don't know. I didn't figure that one out. I guess. No, he'd be aging because he, to him, it says forward time. So guess it's backwards at him. It's forward. Jesper (42m 48s): Oh my God, my brain can't even comprehend. How does that work? Is this too complicated? Autumn (42m 54s): All of them. I thought it wasn't. I had to days of 12 hours of nothing but rain. Jesper (43m 3s): Okay. But you mentioned a cabin fever before a, now I start seeing the symptoms. Autumn (43m 8s): Yes. Coming up with teachers who are traveling backwards in time. And especially when I thought of the loop where actually your teaching him magic. When you, when you, when he first meets U and then eventually you switched and he was actually teaching you the magic. You taught him. And it's just this lovely, infinite loop of who actually knew magic first because yeah, go figure that one out. Jesper (43m 34s): No, I can't. I still can't figure out how are you going to learn anything, but okay. Well, it, exactly, this was supposed to be worst possible to a person to teach you a magic. Yeah, you, yeah, you mind. But it's like when I was the Terminator movies, that was the same thing all day. Autumn (43m 57s): I can get into a rabbit hole of trying to figure out, but how is this even working? So if they destroyed a microchip in moving up a two, how did it move it? Number one ever happened so I could get completely sucked in to it. So you're overthinking it. That's all right. Let's just agree. It is a hole Teeter and we will move on it. Jesper (44m 19s): It, it is a bad teacher for sure. Autumn (44m 22s): Yes. Okay, great. Excellent. I can agree to that. All right. Jesper (44m 27s): Okay, good. So you ready to go on to my top one? So our number one, so yes, I'm ready. And this one is sort of in the same vein as your dragon. It is not a dragon, but it, it, is it the same wane in this sense that this team is also incredibly cool and would probably honestly be a very awesome teacher in some regard, but also incredibly dangerous. Autumn (45m 4s): Hmm. Okay. So like a dragon, but not a dragon. Okay. Not a dragon. Jesper (45m 8s): No. And I have a recording of his voice here. All right. So I'm going to play in and then see if you can guess who this is. Okay. All right. So far I haven't gotten any of the gasses, so we have to say no. And that's why I like to keep putting a questions for you. You can't get it. So, I mean, okay, here we go. Character Voice (45m 56s): Jesper (45m 57s): That was not his voice. Then that is yours. Autumn (46m 6s): It might have been a bit weird. There's this voice it at the dog. Is it like, what is it the, you said is the voice of it and set off my dog. We are going to go with that. He was like, what the heck? I must protect you from this thing and need indeed. Jesper (46m 20s): Yeah. So it took a few hints. You feel lost? Autumn (46m 23s): I had a few hints. Oh. It's like, I wouldn't normally have thought is a dragon. That was actually the immediately as a small gun like that. It's not a dragon or is it Soren? Is the, okay. So not as a dragon though. All right. Jesper (46m 35s): Okay. A hint, number one, he's also known as the necromancer. Is that help? No. What I mean, is it narrows down the potential list? Autumn (46m 48s): Okay. And this, but obviously I have a one more week. All right. Jesper (46m 51s): Yes. Yes. It has been a movie. That's correct. All right. What's the next 10 is the next time. It is. What do you just heard was the blacks speech of model. So that is like sarin or S M if not, so you can't think as a whole, Autumn (47m 9s): but yeah, I knew it was a Lord of the rings or at least. Jesper (47m 13s): Okay. Okay. All right. You didn't get that. All right. So which, which one is it from Laura of the rings? How you gonna make me go back and watch the installer? Or is it, Autumn (47m 20s): I said it was Saren you didn't say yes. A Jesper (47m 27s): ll right. So we, yeah. OK. In a roundabout way, I guess, but a, I will replay the clip. I said what? Autumn (47m 35s): I said, I thought it was small. And then I thought, okay, it's not a dragon. It's Saren so I will reply. I got it. And then just say it. Okay. Jesper (47m 43s): So maybe I talked over you then. Okay, fine. Okay. Then you're guested, but this guy is definitely can teach you a lot. It will also end in your own doom. Yeah. He will suck out your soul. Yeah. Yeah. Toll can actually set that absolute evil couldn't exist, but he then stated that sovereign came S Neah to a wholly evil we'll ask what's possible. Autumn (48m 11s): Wow. Talk and set that. So do you want that guy to teach you not without a lot of magical protection and even then it'd be pretty desperate that it would be a really, yeah. I like my soul too much to want to have Saraj. And it was my, my, my instructor, but talk about learning. Darke magical. Art's you would be like a rockstar this, but that's what I mean. Right. In terms of how he probably could teach you a lot. Jesper (48m 38s): And that sense, he was probably an awesome teacher, but yeah. You're gonna get sucked into darkness. Buy doing it. Yeah, probably. Yeah, you do. If you wanted it to be eval, it, it would probably be a good fit. But since he's a mortal, you're never going to take his place and it's just not going to end well at all. Autumn (49m 2s): No, not really. Jesper (49m 2s): And in that sense, it's it's, I would say maybe it was, is, it is a bit worst than the dragon, because it's a dragon you just get killed. How do you have to shuffle for eternity the way through all of this stuff? Yeah. Yeah. That would be a pretty bad. So that is a very good number one. I will admit it's hard and soft and I was pretty much a Trump card for that was like saying Darth Vader was going to teach you the Force. So you're like, well, is there you go? Yeah. He tells you a kill all this pupils, but you, if you survive, you will be great. Autumn (49m 36s): Yeah, exactly. Alright. Well, I don't know what is a pretty good it is. I still have the dragon though. So I think we're pretty even. So you wanna hear my number one? Jesper (49m 45s): OK. Autumn (49m 46s): All right. Here it, so this is a sort of actually along the lines of one of yours, but it's a sorceress that isn't good at explaining things, but is it a really good at demonstrating? She just loves to demonstrate. So you could imagine her coming in, in and going, okay. Class' today. We are going to learn to turn that attacker into a slime mold volunteers, and someone would always have to be the victim to get turned into whatever warts POCs, but you know, curses, exes that are being demonstrated that day. And I mean, if I was at a class, I would just live in fear of the day. You actually get to the ones that could possibly kill you. Autumn (50m 27s): And her were like, I would like to volunteer for the death spell and the reincarnation when right after slate of next semester, we learned, we will keep you a card technically frozen until then would be like, oh, I know you could imagine when your parents permission slip for her. Jesper (50m 57s): Oh yeah. And then if there is no volunteers, she will pick somebody at random. Autumn (51m 1s): So that's what a good teacher always does. It just goes in the one who is sliding in the back. The closest thing. No, I don't look at me and Lisa, not me, not me, but again, so that it is my number one. I just think she would then be bad, a horrible teacher to learn from it. It would, I would the anxiety of going to a class with that kind of a teacher and with magic, we would just be a teacher. I think I'd crack. Definitely I'd run away. Jesper (51m 39s): Yeah, pretty much. So I think just like a, it, it looks like both our lists, most of it will just get you killed basically. Autumn (51m 47s): So you had soul sucking for your number one, but yeah, you have pretty much any of this as this either. You're not going to learn magic or you're going to die learning magic. Jesper (51m 59s): Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I struggle to see which lists is the worse, to be honest. Autumn (52m 5s): And I kind of agree. These are a pro thought is, is a pretty bad top 10 list. I have to do it. I would not want to learn from Sorin, but there is pretty much any of this. Like I said, like this a sorceress you likes to demonstrate. I mean, I could just imagine going to class everyday was a teacher you hated that would potentially turn you into something nasty and hopefully turn you back. Jesper (52m 27s): I mean, can you imagine acting out in her class, what she would do to you? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Even a, a hundred, like Mr. Garrison, what did you, you, if you didn't listen to what he said. Autumn (52m 45s): Yeah. And especially is lack of passion for teaching this subject. Well, would just kind of end in frustration. I think. Jesper (52m 58s): Yeah. I don't believe in magic at all, but they tell me I have to teach it to you. Is that so I will so open your books. We're going to then, oh, shoot it. Just get rid of the books. I hit his books. You just keep going. Yeah. And then, oh, well, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So I don't know who won this one. Autumn (53m 17s): No, this was actually a pretty good, I think again, we'll have to leave it up to the listeners and they will have to let us know who had the best list since you want it to be the whole list. I still think dragon, but then sarin, they're pretty evil in this time. Jesper (53m 34s): A siren and beets a dragon. But then, but yes, he does. He, he can, he could kill a dragon by snapping is finger. Autumn (53m 44s): Hmm. I don't know. Maybe. Jesper (53m 47s): Yeah, for sure. But the, the V but the problem is the rest of the list there. I'm not quite sure which one is the best. So we just go by your rules. So that is only about the best in the list then I one, but you, you, you said that a, you trusted me in the fact that I was remembering correctly. That is about the entire list. That's what you said it, and therefore I'm not too sure who won, but do you want to contradict that you, that I was wrong and it was not about the entire list and it was only about the best one on it. A, I want to contradict that. I will say we agreed to the ground rules for this one was only about the whole list. Autumn (54m 29s): I have to go back and check on the earlier a podcast on the worst list. But so this one, we set it up. That is the whole list. And I don't think we can change it at this point, unfortunately. So, and they're both pretty even lists. I'm not sure who's going to be the winter. We'll have to flip a coin and hope it's not a magic coin. That's been hexed so that the winner gets the worst. I'm not sure. Jesper (54m 57s): No. Okay. So next Monday we are going back into writing and we'll, she has some great tips Narrator (55m 2s): On how you all right. Well, simple as that. And then looking forward to it. If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/and Writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Jeff Wheeler is a highly successful fantasy author. His books have been on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list 5 times and have sold more than 4 million copies. His novels have also been translated into many languages. Jeff Wheeler joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to talk about his road to becoming a full time author, having Amazon as a publisher and his love for fantasy.   Jeff can be found here: https://jeff-wheeler.com/    Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello I'm Jesper and this is episode 130 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, and Autumn is busy editing our novel today, so I brought on an awesome guest instead, and that is Jeff Wheeler. So welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jeff, Jeff (47s): Thank you so good to be here. Jesper (50s): Yeah, I've prepared a, just a bit of information about your Jeff. So I can just go through that and then see if I'm missing something. And then, then you can add to it, but basically if anybody listening should not be aware who Jeff is already, then Jeff is a, an author of multiple fantasy series. He has sold over 4 million books and he has also been on the wall street journal bestseller list five times and a year. Novels have been translated into multiple languages as well. And I was on your website earlier today. Jeff and I counted 33 books. So you're quite prolific. Jeff (1m 24s): Hmm. Thank you. So it's my, my dream job was to be writing book, so I love it. I do every day. So Jesper (1m 33s): Yeah, that's, that's so wonderful. It, especially if you can, a once a week, once you can make a living from it, then that's, that's really nice. But a, but I think I also read on your website that you started out self publishing and then God, a traditional publishing contract a bit later on. So w is that right? Jeff (1m 51s): Ah, it is the, of my publishers, not exactly traditional it's Amazon publishing. So after creating the platforms like KDP and things like that, they created their own publishing companies. And I was one of the first authors. They picked up for their fantasy, a line in 47 north. Jesper (2m 9s): All right. All right. Cool. Why did you decide that you wanted it to self publishing in the first place, Jeff? Jeff (2m 18s): For me, it, it, I'm sure my story's very similar to too many of your listeners and others that I tried, the traditional routes. I tried like getting an agent. I tried doing those things and I even created my own magazine to get a readership going through that, so that when I started a self publishing novels that they would take off and none of that worked. And, and so I kind of put it aside. And then I, I wrote as another series of novels, my mirror would novels and again, tried the route of getting an agent was turned down over 40 times. And I finally said, well, either I either going to try this by myself, because the other way isn't working. Jeff (3m 1s): And so I decided to self publish all three of those books simultaneously. So that way readers wouldn't have to wait a everything in between. So I invested the money in there, put it out there, and it happened to come right around the time that Katie P was launching and things like that. So before, when you could only order a print book, a ha having a digital version made things a lot easier. And then suddenly fans started to come in and as my sales increased, that kind of put me on the radar for Amazon publishing. And they reached out to me and asked to acquire that series. So I didn't even, I didn't even get sent a query letter. They, they, they, they sent me a query letter. Jesper (3m 41s): That's a position you want to be in, but that, I guess that's a couple of years down the road that it isn't it a, that Amazon reached out about that, or Jeff (3m 51s): That's true. I had, I had been trying, it's a break into the market for over a decade. So I I'm an overnight success story that took over 20 years to happen. But again, that story is not unique to me. I know a lot of other authors that tried that route and many of them, ah, even who've self-published, you then got a, a contract with some of the big publishing company. So it's not a unique story, but I love working with Amazon because at their heart, there are a tech company in having grown up in Silicon valley, having worked for Intel, a myself, a I understand in their DNA, I understand how they work in their, their constant search for innovation and creating new ways of, of looking and breaking into markets. Jeff (4m 34s): And I thought that they were absolutely my, the kind of model that I was looking for a publisher that was going to be innovative and try to reinvent how publishing works. And boy, have they done that? Jesper (4m 47s): Oh yeah, you could definitely say so, but I guess some people might be curious about what, what is Amazon like as a publisher? How is it to work with them? Jeff (4m 58s): For me, it's, it's been a delightful experience. And I, again, I know many other authors that have a publishing contracts with the major publishers. So there was a lot of core differences, but to me, those differences or advantages that Amazon has, like, for example, I have a dashboard, I can see my book sales every single day. And I know we get that through KTP as well, but I think we get it in and Amazon publishing as a, as a little bit more robust in terms of the market demographics and things that we have access to. I, I get my royalty statements every month, so I know what I'm going to be making in advance. I get to see those royalty statements. I get to see a brake, you know, broken down a, through all the different markets in the world that, that do that. Jeff (5m 40s): A, I earn, you know, a competitive royalties that you would get it, any of the major publishers as well. So I get paid more frequently and, and just as much in the fact that I don't have an agent also helps cause I don't have to pay an agent fee as well. So that's, that's a bonus, a working with them also really nice because certain publishers have cadences. So you have to be like, I'm very prolific. And most publishers wouldn't be able to keep up with a indie schedule that I have, but Amazon can. So I published three to four books with them every year. And then I still publish indie titles occasionally as well. Cause I want to keep that side a open as well. So I'm kind of a hybrid author, but most of my work comes out through Amazon. Jeff (6m 23s): And I can really understand that the decisions that they make are based on data, they're based on a lot of research, they test a lot of things. And so they're able to see what efforts yield to book sales. And so that is amazing. A lot of publishers don't have that visibility to see what they're, what, what effort and what strategy actually increases the number of sales. So all of those things said, I think it's really a wonderful publisher to have Jesper (6m 52s): Do it. Do you also have like a dedicated team of, you know, and as a dedicated editor and dedicated, covered of signs or, or are they more like menacing their pool of authors with a pool of resources? If you know what I mean? Jeff (7m 5s): They definitely use a pool of resources, independent contractors. So I have a editor, you know, assigned to me at Amazon, but then I have a team of, at a development editor for a copy editor for a proofreader that I work with the same people every time. And I do that by request because they know my body of work and they're able to help me see when I've made mistakes, which is frequently. Right. So that's helpful, but they also, you, you contact people to do cover design. So, I mean, I've worked with several different cover designers. I don't really have ultimate say in that, but I, you know, they often say, Hey, these are the three or two that we're looking at. Do you have a preference between them? So I do get to speak up at the beginning a, but we don't use the, this the same ones. Jeff (7m 49s): They, these are a variety of them to work with all of the different authors that they publish. Jesper (7m 55s): Right, right. You okay. And if a, some of our listeners, which I'm sure some will be interested in a way, how do people normally get picked up nowadays by Amazon publishing? Is it, it just based on when they see somebody has enough sales, they are reaching out or, or how, how does that work? Normally Jeff (8m 15s): Today, the way I was picked up was more how it was done in the past. That was over 10 years ago, it's much more traditional now. So they mostly work through agents who then will submit at all, not only to the big five, but also to Amazon publishing as well. So to get in there really having an agent is almost the only way. I mean, I'm sure there's other ways too, that they reach out to other authors that are established and invite them to come in as well. But a there, there definitely, as they were growing a w they were, they were at the one searching for authors and now authors are coming to them through agents for the most part. Jesper (8m 51s): Yeah. It's a wonderful, a first mover advantage. You can get some times Jeff (8m 56s): So, absolutely. And I feel very lucky that I was, I happened to be catching the wave when it happened and have had works already in, and I was writing a whole new series. So when they purchased my mirror with a series, they said, well, what else are you writing? And I told him about my next one, my mirror wind series. And they, they grabbed those to, so I'd signed a six books deal just right off the bat, which is kind of unusual that doesn't happen to everybody. Jesper (9m 20s): No, I can imagine. Yeah, that's a pretty good. So, but are you then also doing some of your own advertising or is Amazon taking care of all of the Amazon ads for you? And so on Jeff (9m 31s): A Amazon covers the advertising and the marketing for sure. And so all the resources that people can pay for today through KDP and things like that, we've been using it within a pub for years, and they even have more things that they can do than our, what we're available. So they can send targeted emails and things to past readers to make them aware of my books coming out. That's not something that's available through KDP. So they definitely have all of their tools plus all the tools that they are now a allowing indie authors too use. And so it, it, it's just neat to see how they've invented this ecosystem to make it possible for writers all over from, from all over the world, a to be able to make careers out of this. Jeff (10m 13s): And so it's just, it's, it's amazing. And I have a lot of friends in the, in the space as well and get it here, but what they're doing and what they're spending their money on in terms of marketing that I don't have to do, because Amazon's giving that to me is just part of being one of their authors. Right. Jesper (10m 29s): Are you running any sort of advertising besides what Amazon does? So you, are you completely leaving it? Everything to them? I doing like I'm thinking like BookBub ads or Facebook ads. So anything like that, or do you do any of Jeff (10m 40s): That? I, I don't, I've, I've tried different ones for my self published title's as well, but I found that just the machine than Amazon is that by the virtue of them selling my books, my indie titles get sucked into that machine. And so it, it makes it available for readers. Anyways, I've tried those different approaches. I know different people have. It's just not something I personally spend my own money on because I already have the benefits of being able to utilize it through Amazon. Jesper (11m 13s): Yeah. And I think over the years, I've also come to the realization more and more that a, if you can find a way to, well, some people call it a tickle the algorithm in Amazon. But if you could, if you couldn't find a way to get Amazon to just push you a book that is a million times easier than anything, you can do yourself basically Jeff (11m 34s): True. But I don't want to underestimate the importance of having a social media presence, having a newsletter list, being engaged with your fans, because that's something they appreciate. And a little bit of effort like creating a newsletter or responding to a message on Facebook or Twitter, or I'm on Instagram as well, and creates that relationship between the author and the reader much more so than when I was a kid growing up, or you'd have to write a letter and mail it to the publisher. And you would eventually maybe if you get to author who may eventually ride back or you'd might see them that a convention are, you might see in them in a book signing, the relationship is much more dynamic now. And I think that having a social media is, has a great enabler of that because it allows us as authors to be able to connect with those fans. Jeff (12m 22s): And the more, a connected they are to you, the more they like you as a person, the more they're going to stay on top of your re re release schedule. And they're going to be wanting to pre-order in and by things coming off so that that's outside the algorithm's, you cannot overstate the importance of word of mouth and how your loyal fans are your most likely source of a future leaders more than an algorithm, I think. Jesper (12m 47s): Oh yeah. Yeah. For sure. No doubt about that icon. I also saw that you are also running a, a, like a newsletter and you have a mini mail list and I sought out on your website as well. How, how, how effective do you find your email list in terms of, you know, generating sales and so on? I, are you using that whenever you have a new book, you're sending out an email and do you then see that convert to sales or, or do you have more Relias as you said before on Amazon pushing things? Jeff (13m 12s): Well, I, I know Amazon con their email list is a lot bigger than mine, so I don't know how much, I don't know how much my newsletter does, but I know that I know, for example, when I send out a newsletter about a pre-order available for a new book that I do, I immediately see a pre preorders going in. So it, it absolutely helps, but I'm not going to a kid myself so that the 800 pound gorilla is not me. And, and in terms of, of, of, of moving the needle. But again, I know my fans like hearing from me, they, they respond back to those e-mails, we, we, I, I respond back to them. I try to be very open and available to my, to my readers and let them know that I'm not, I'm not afraid to talk to them, not afraid to interact with them. Jesper (13m 57s): I think that's a good point. We had actually a podcast episode probably by the time this goes out, it's probably like a month, two months ago or something like that. But autumn and I was discussing the effectiveness of social media in today's landscape in that episode. And I, I do think it's a bit of a difficult one because I fully agree with what you're saying in a sense of interacting with readers and people and responding to them if they tweet at you and you're you send it back a, a, a reply on. So I think that is really important, like you were saying as well. A, but the thing that I am wondering about when, what we discussed quite lengthy in that episode was that it really worth one thing is like somebody tweets out at you all are sense of Facebook messages and you apply it to that sort of one thing. Jesper (14m 43s): And another thing is being actively engaging and trying to build up some sort of a, let's say using as a marketing tool to try to get sales on so on. Whereas I'm not so sure that that part is very efficient anymore. I I'm really not. So convinced that because social media is also a time suck, right? You can spend so much time and generating new posts or a new content to post there and whatnot. And I'm not really sure that it helps so much when it comes to sale. I think you are you're time is probably better spent writing and releasing a new book, to be Jeff (15m 16s): Honest. No, I, I would agree with you. And, and if you've been on social media at all, you've seen, especially brand new authors, you using that too, to market a book in, and people don't pay attention to that, what they pay attention to a friend who's recommending you're book. So yeah, I, I use social media and let my fans know when my books are on sale. That's another awesome thing Amazon does for me. They put my books on sale regularly, even after the initial launch, it could be years later, there's still a marketing. My releases, my fans would want to know that they're on sale for 99 cents or a, a, you know, a, a British pound, right. They want to know that. So I want to make sure that they're aware of it. Jeff (15m 57s): And then I find my fans will often forward and boosts that signal to saying, oh, this is on sale. And they share that with their friend. So that's, that's effective much more effective than, than me doing it because I don't, I mean, I, I've never bought, brought in a book because of the author reached out to me. I've, I've, I've, I've, I've bought a book because my friends and my author friends are recommending books to read. So that's, that's the power of it. I think people can definitely try to beat that too much. And what's more important is just being genuine and real in your social media and not just posting about your books, but posting about other things. I, all my Instagram account, I do, I do photos. I D that's a different thing than what I do on my Twitter. Jeff (16m 39s): And so it, I just try to use the different social media is depending on the purpose of it, but it's not just for promoting a, a new release. Jesper (16m 51s): Hmm... No, I get you a and I was also thinking a, just shifting gears slightly here, because I noticed that as well on your website, that you have a book called your first million words, a where you are describing your journey to publication. And, and as far as I could tell, at least I think that's the only a non-fiction book. If you had, at least this was the only one I found on your website, but why did you decide to write that one? I was a bit curious about that. Jeff (17m 14s): It's a, it's a great question. I get asked so often, you know, I get, I get email request from authors that are starting out students in college, high school students. I'm part of teen author bootcamp as a player, I get asked for advice a lot. And so over the years I had written articles T which I put it on my blog, but I kept getting asked, like in, in speaking appearances, tell us your author journey, tell us how you got where you are. And I, my story's kind of a different and unique and a lot of twists and turns. And it that I think, I thought it would be helpful to other who are beginning their own journey. And so, I mean like many I've read Stephen King's on writing. Jeff (17m 56s): I've, I've read a lot of different things all on the craft, but over the years, like looking at Intel and then in doing this, you know, dealing with the discouragement of getting rejected so many times, there's a lot of aspects to it that I think weren't being covered. And so I just, I, you know, I've, after having shared in speeches and talks my story so many times, I said, you know what I mean, just going to start writing these things down in a book, it's probably only gonna be like 70 pages. And it ended up being almost, you know, a lot more than that. And I just, I wanted it. I wanted it to inspire. I wanted it to inspire future authors. I wanted them to see the good, the bad and the cringe-worthy right. Jeff (18m 37s): There's things that, of the mistakes I've made along the, the, the, the, the road that it's like, look, you know, I didn't get this right on the first try. I, I mean, I, here's what I did. Here's how I plotted my own course when, when nobody was telling me yes, and everyone was telling me know, and I just want it to give it, give some of the hope that if they tried not necessarily what I did, but just see that they're going to have their own journey. And I just felt like sharing that experience. In fact, I got a text from a, a, a high school buddy of mine just last night who finished your first million words, and he's a high school teacher down in LA. And he was like, wow. It's like, I knew you were in high school. I had no idea of these things that you went through. Jeff (19m 18s): Thank you for being candid with us on your failures, as well as your successes, because you learn so much that, those things. And that's, that's what I wanted it to do with that book. Jesper (19m 31s): Yeah. And I also really appreciate it because you, you, you are very much giving back. And I really like that a lot. Also, when, when I reached out a, regarding this podcast episode, you replied quite quickly that you were very happy to come on for it and for a chat here. So, and so I think it's a wonderful once people get some, some success and they sell a lot of books that they don't sort of forget to give back to everybody else. Who's not at that level yet. So I do it really appreciate it. I think it's a very good thing. Jeff (19m 58s): You know, what it feels like when I created, started creating my own magazine deep magic, I would reach out to authors that I admired and, and, and hearing back, just hearing back anything meant so much to me. So I still remember what that was like, and you were a very courteous, yes, we are with your request. So I do this, this, this kind of a thing frequently, so, and I'm happy to do it. Jesper (20m 18s): No, that, that's, that's a wonderful, but we also need to talk a bit of a fantasy here. Of course, 'cause a, this is The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And I saw that you initially inspiration as well was from this Shinara, a Chronicles by Terry Brooks'. So T tell me a bit about that. Jeff (20m 38s): Absolutely. I was not an avid reader until probably high school, but for me it began that kind of a desire to become a writer began. I was in middle school and it started with Terry Brooks' book a from his Shannara a universe. And it w you know, for me, I would pick up a book and I would immediately start to try to predict the endings. And most of the time I was right. And so it, it was, it just, it, to me, it, it was hard to find a book that challenged my imagination. And, and again, I, I wasn't reading Tolkien back then. I was just trying a lot of different things. And it was that Terry books, books that really kind of kickstarted to me in, in me the desire to be able to do that. Jeff (21m 20s): He happened to come to Silicon valley multiple times for a book signings at the local as some of the local bookstores. So I had the opportunity to meet him. And so he really played a role in, in, in, in, in terms of my creativity of, of having unpredictable plots, having strong characters, having a lot of action. That's a kind of thing that I like to write good versus evil. Those themes and stories have always appealed to me. And so he became somebody that I looked up to well, as an adult, I found that he was doing a writing seminar in north of San Francisco, and I had the opportunity to spend an entire day with him. Jeff (21m 60s): And you can just imagine how that affected me the chance to, he's going to read my writing. I'm going to be able to learn from him for a whole day. That was really a turning point moment for me. So yes, it began when I was in middle school, but he's influenced me even until today. In fact, I was so happy when my publisher approached him to do a little blurb for my newest series, the first Sergeant times. And he agreed to read the first book and do a blurb for it. I mean, I was over the moon, as you can imagine that somebody that I looked up too, I'd studied under a, was, I was now supporting it. I've been to a comic con event with him and up onstage with them. So it's been a fantastic thing. Jeff (22m 41s): The influence that he's been in my life from the earliest of times, sparking that creativity within me, and then being able to watch his career and see how he's handled it and, and, and to learn from him in person was just amazing. Jesper (22m 55s): Yeah. How did it feel getting critique on your work far from him? How did that feel at that point in time? Jeff (23m 1s): Well, it was terrible. All right, because we all had to submit a story to him in advance. And I wasn't the first one that he began the critique with. And, and he was very, very candid and very pointed with his critique. You, it, it wasn't like a, I'm just going to try and make you feel good. He was challenging what people were saying. He was showing gaps in logic. He was showing where things weren't working. And I was starting to just sweat, like, oh my goodness, this is going to be horrible. And when he got to mine, he asked some questions, he challenged me, but I was able to answer it. And he didn't rip my, my things apart at all. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And then when we, we had it a little lunch break, we're in this cafe, buy this book at this bookstore. Jeff (23m 46s): And I was sitting there and I was watching him get his sandwich. And I was in my mind, I'm a come sit by me, come sit by me. And he did, he came and sat by me. So I was just the two of us. And he told me during that lunch, he was like, Jeff was like, you're the best writer in this class. He was like, I could really see that U you have, you can have a future with us and talk about validation. I, I was like, wow. It was like to hear that from you're, you're a superstar. It meant the world to me. And it, it, it, but it, what that did is that it actually motivated me to throw away all the fantasy books that I had written prior to that. And to say, you know what, I've learned a lot from him. I've learned a lot through my magazine. I'm going to start fresh with something brand new. Jeff (24m 27s): And that was my mirror wood series. And that's the one coincidentally, after having written and thrown away a million words, that was the book that a launched my success. Jesper (24m 40s): So, yeah, it must've been extremely transformative as far as I can also hear from what you're saying, having a chat with him there, and my God, how lucky that he just sat down at your table. Jeff (24m 50s): I know, I know it just was one of those things. Like, it was just meant to be a again, if I had the pleasure of meeting him since then, and it's just been a wonderful thing to, to know him. Jesper (25m 2s): So did you fall in love with a fantasy genre from reading those specific books? A, was that sort of the trigger? Jeff (25m 10s): Well, the vet, we all did help, but to be honest, the first books that I wrote while I was in high school, we're more thrillers, a more, a political thrillers. And, but I, when I came to realize is how much research you had to do to make something accurate in today's world. It took a raw, less research to make a fantasy world, because you could create the, the landscape, the geography, you weren't constrained by historical things. And so for me, a lot of my inspirations for my fantasy novels have come from periods of history in our own planet. Sometimes medieval Europe, I've written a series on ancient China. I've done lots of different kinds of series that I can kind of dive into. Jeff (25m 53s): It kind of take something that interested me from history, and then it kind of repackage it and make it my own. And that's what I really loved about fantasy as it's not that it, the lack of research it's just allowed me to combine different elements that I didn't have to worry about somebody coming back and saying, no, this isn't the way it really works. Like you can't say that to a fantasy author. Cause you know, in my world, apple trees produce in what's in what, twice a year. And no one can tell me I'm wrong because I invented apple trees that way. So Jesper (26m 26s): Yeah, no, I fully agree. I sometimes a hear on other podcasts as well when some of those may be a thriller auteurs and authors and so on. Talk about how, you know, Rita's come back to them and say, well, this gun, actually, it doesn't work that way and so on. And I, every time I'm just like, I'm so happy. I don't have that problem. Exactly, exactly. Well, of course we, we do still need to think a bit about the weapon's we use and the Armas, we used a a, unless you sort of create something that nobody has ever heard about. We, we still need to think a bit about that and not make it a unrealistic in that sense, but, we do have an easier life. Jeff (27m 2s): It's it's true. And, and to me there's a lot of fun in researching things. I saw some great, a German videos of medieval Knights for my first Argentine series. Like how sturdy the Armour wise, how would they get it? How would they stand up against arrows and swords and things and watching a film footage of Armour taking a beating, or weapons' taking a beating, see, and that to me, and it's not even research, that's just fun. And so I like doing that stuff to make my stories as realistic as possible, but then you got to create your magic system and that's, that's part of the fun too. Jesper (27m 39s): That's the best part. Yeah. Yeah. I also was, I can't remember anymore because there's many, many years ago, so I cannot remember if it was on one of the network shows or if it was just YouTube videos of whatever I can't remember anymore, but I was one time where they were this discussing whether or not like medieval Knight, you could resist a shut from like a musket and, and the, the, almost that they created now, the musculature right through them. Ah, but then during this show, they talk to like a, a, a blacksmith who we specialized in creating medieval llamas. Like they were created back then, and then they got him in the show to Smith, such an AMA, and then they shot at it and the bullet did not go Jeff (28m 27s): Through it. Yeah. So there's all sorts of things. That was pretty interesting. I found was one of the tickets and I actually used to it in my new series that they would have these trials between nights and they wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't even wear armor that just sword against the board. And, and so you imagine getting cut up by a sword? Well, they would use moldy bread to put on the wound and I'm like moldy bread. It's kind of like penicillin, you know, I, my, they figured that stuff out, they figured out that moldy bread helped keep preventive women from getting infected. I'm like, that's cool. I've got to use that if my series, which I did it. Jesper (29m 1s): Yeah. It's so cool. Yeah. And, and I'm also, I love listening to, I don't know if you ever listen to Dan Carlin, so a hardcore history podcast, a but that is such, such a good podcast. And I remember some point when he was talking about medieval Knight's as well as, and he was saying something like, they were like tanks, you know, it, when you meet a, a medieval Knight on a battlefield, you just can't, you can't do anything. So you saw it, it will not penetrate. If you could just hit him and it hit him and hit him and it doesn't help Jeff (29m 28s): You and hope he falls down because other than that you're toast. Yeah. Yeah. Jesper (29m 35s): So that was pretty cool. Well- Jeff (29m 37s): It, it was exactly what was that. It was that kind of a theme that kinda of medieval night that inspired by new series. Cause I really wanted to write a story about Knights, but from their point of view and the training they'd have to go through the armor, they'd have to wear how hard it was. And some of the books I read from, you know, accounts written from the, you know, 12 hundreds, 11 hundreds, and it just fascinating. You send me those little details that we as authors weave into our stories, that when it is often, when people read my books, they don't realize this is real. This is a scene that actually happened in history. I'm not just making it up. Jesper (30m 12s): Do you always go with some, something from real history that inspires you or do you all, so something sometimes just make something completely random up. Jeff (30m 21s): Most, most of the books that I've written have come from something that inspired me from history or from Dungeons and dragons, a, a big role playing a fanatic, especially when I was in high school and in college. And so those story elements are, those are my two biggest sources of inspiration. And mostly because history is so unpredictable and D and D is so unpredictable. Like when I would play with my friends, they would come up with things that I did not anticipate or expect, which is a great thing to learn is a writer because it's the unanticipated that really delight's a reader. It, if they've like, just like I had a problem with always predicting what was going to happen next, one of the great things as finding ways to be unpredictable and to make your plot twist such that people don't see it coming, then it just deletes a certain part of our brains when something like that happens. Jeff (31m 14s): And that's one of our, and you go to our core competencies as a writer. Jesper (31m 21s): Yeah. It it's, it's like a double-edged sword, that stuff. Because a, I also feel like after, after becoming an author and writing books and stories, you know, when I watch like a murder mystery show or whatever, I like it. Not every time of course, but a lot of the times I'm able to foresee who to murder is Willow ahead of time when I'm watching like a TV show on Netflix or something. And it's sort of, I wouldn't say it destroys those shows, but, but it's a different experience watching that kind of thing nowadays, when you a story-telling you yourself compared to when you worked, but I don't know if you have that experience. Jeff (31m 56s): I can completely relate too. You Yesper because I I've had that too. Book reading for me has not been as enjoyable in recent years as it was in the past because my author brain can't help, but want to make it better, or I predict what's happening because I see the clues and I piece it together. And so I tend to read more biographies or other things that are outside of my genre, just because I need something to trick my brain, to stop me from trying to predict everything that's happening. And I just find, find more history or biographies gives me that then sitting down with a novel, when I can find an author that's new, like one of my new favorite as Anthony, Ryan in the UK, a when I do find some, somebody who's so good at his craft and can create a world and do things and I can't see what's coming, I can't see where he's doing it. Jeff (32m 48s): I just get transported. It brings me back to those days with Terry books again. And unfortunately its more rare than come in now. And it's just part of the process of being an author of your, you, you, you just start figuring stuff out easier. Jesper (33m 2s): It, it is. Yes, absolutely. And I also feel like a, one of the things Autumn and I are doing with our books that we really tried and purposely to craft it so that you won't see what is it coming at the end. So we try to with all the books. So we were trying to see if we can sort of make twists always in the end so that you didn't see it because I really feel like personally, at least that's the kind of fantasy books that I like. I like when something happens at the end that I, I couldn't work it out a but at the same time. And maybe that was what you were trying to say a bit there as well, is that if I look across like fantasy books in general, many of them feel to me, at least in not that I've read all of them, of course, but, but the ones I've read a lot of the time, they feel like very, very straight forward. Jesper (33m 48s): Like it's just like you go on this quest thing and at the end you fight the dragon or whatever and then yay. You, you won. And then, I mean, not that its not, it can be a good story. Of course it could be incredibly well-written. But I just feel like if we can work in some stuff that may be normally belongs a bit more over in another like thrillers and we can, if we can work that a bit into the fantasy, I personally at least feel that it becomes more interesting. Jeff (34m 17s): A and I agree and that's the kind of books that I like to ride, but even within fantasy you can have things that are more action, adventure, Ew, there's a romance fantasy. And those readers expect a certain kind of trope that, that goes with it. So you, you have to understand kind of what your, what your market is, but I'm always looking for that a different angle of how can I like in my book, the Queen's poisoner, I made my protagonist eight years old and that puts all a whole series of constraints. Right? Cause he's not going to pick up a sword in and defeat the bad guy. He's got a defeat him with his head, but an eight year old can't outsmart as an adult, unless there's another adult helping the eight-year-old. Jeff (35m 1s): So I like putting together these ideas that kind of create a totally different kind of a story than what people are expecting again. But those with those twists and turns put in there that make you want to keep turning the pages and say, what, how was this kid going to get out of these Kings? This King's clutches, you know, but the cards or so stacked against them. So I like looking for those different angles and not just having the, the stamp using the standard tropes, but often flipping them. No, no, I agree. Jesper (35m 30s): And is that a book then written for a mature audience? I mean for adults or is it more like a YA? Jeff (35m 37s): It's kind of both by audience range and I, I know this from my, my Amazon re results. I have readers who are in eight years old and I of readers that are over 80 years old. So I I've got, that's a good way. That's a great problem to have. And so it, you can't really classify it as why, because there is a very adult characters and there as well, but I don't, I don't ride with a lot of adult themes. There's no sex or swearing in, in my books, but, but that's just the kind of things that I like to enjoy myself, but yeah, people of all ages can, can get sucked into it and including my own kids and including my own inlaws. So I've got a range on both sides. So my, my father-in-law's begging for my new book, which comes out next week. So like I can't wait till this book comes out. Jeff (36m 17s): So it's good to see that, that enthusiasm. Jesper (36m 21s): Yeah, absolutely. But do you find a, the more books that you write at it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new, let's say interesting takes on things or, or, or, or does just the fact that you go into a different historical, a like theme, does that automatically bring some new twists and turns so to speak into your books? Or how do you feel about that? Jeff (36m 45s): So, well, I kinda of two different processes. So like when I'm writing a book, my focus is on that one. And, and if a new idea comes to me for another series, while I'm working on that book, I'll send myself an e-mail a kind of capture some of the idea and I'll just file it away and I'll just let it kind of incubate in the back of my head. But I don't spend a lot in my conscious time processing that new idea. I want to stay focused on the idea that I have. So that as I'm thinking about the next few chapters, I always kind of plot off a story arc of where is this series going, but I don't plot all the twists and turns in advance. So I spent my time thinking about is I'm maybe I might need a, a N in, in, or a CASEL or a certain place in as I go in. Jeff (37m 30s): And as I research that, that would give me a new ideas that I can weave into that story, add some twists to it. But meanwhile, in the background, I've got these other ideas that are cooking and I worried that am I going to run out of ideas? And I can tell you after all these years, my, my, my idea folder and my inbox is getting longer, not shorter. And so a new ideas come to me all the time, often multiple ideas while I'm working on a series. So if I get three new ideas for every series exponentially, that's a problem. Like I'm gonna die before I'm gonna write all of the story ideas that I have. So then I have to really be thoughtful about what am I going to work on next? Jeff (38m 12s): What's that next adventure going to be? What do I feel the most passionate about? Cause I've got all of these ideas to choose from what are the ones that are the most exciting to me. Jesper (38m 21s): Yeah. And I think that's actually a good point. A it's one that I've also started thinking more and more about in terms of, because my idea for all of those also a very, very long, and it does not get shorter. Like you S but I, I think it's a, it's a good point. The fact that once you start working on a series, you, you will probably, well, some are some for some people take longer, obviously, but your probably locked in four a year, at least a day. Some people might working on it even longer than that. But I think there is a good point in this choice that you're making, which one do we actually want to ride? And what, and, and what do you then choose out of that list? Jesper (39m 3s): Write a book. I think, I mean, it does not, I don't think it's easy. Jeff (39m 7s): No, no, no. It's not a bit. It, for me, it is the key decision maker is, do I have a fire in the belly four? It am I excited? So, right. So I'm working on a series. That's going to be coming out next year. And before I started working on it, I shared three ideas with my wife. And I just talked to her about all three of them, just independently. Here's the three ideas for three different series that I can do. And she said judging by the, by the look on your face, you're the most excited about this one? And I'm like your right. Like, there is a very practical and pragmatic reasons why I could have worked on the other to, but she could tell the, and excitement enthusiasm was there. Jeff (39m 51s): And that's gotta be a key ingredient. Cause I, I have readers that say, Hey, go back to your, you know, an early, early, early series you self-publish before a mirror would, I said, I have zero interest in going back to that series. I have no fire in the belly, four. It, it would be painful for me to try to go back and try to write more in that world because I had originally designed like maybe a 12 book series. And I have since come to learn that most publishers don't like 12 books series because your readership keeps getting smaller and smaller. The further out you go. And so it's not, they're, they're, they're, they're good for like Robert Jordan's and others, but, but most of us can't a command the attention in that long and they'd preferred trilogies, or maybe for maybe I've done five a month and her advice was spot on and that's the one I'm writing right now. Jeff (40m 40s): And she was right. I am still excited and passionate about writing this book. And then I'll make the decision as I get near the end of the final book. What am I going to go back to either of those two other ideas or did something else come along that I'm now passionate and excited about it? That's it gotta be a key ingredient for it? Jesper (40m 60s): Yeah, absolutely. And maybe a way of had to watch the end. Jeff, I'm thinking if I, if we could like invent a time machine here and a, you could go into a time machine and you can travel back to the earlier version of yourself when you were just starting out on your publishing journey. If you had to, you only have time in the, in the past year for, for saying like one advice to yourself, and then you're going to sit back right here and depressant. So what would be the one thing that you will tell you a past selves as a piece of advice? Jeff (41m 34s): You know, I've, I've, I've wondered that at times, you know, it because, you know, if I look at my journey, what would I have wanted to know the most that would have kept me motivated? Because my skills of changed my interests have changed. I've grown as a writer since becoming a full-time author a lot has changed. And you can't really summarize that in a, in a sentence or two, but the advice, if I could like flip out of a, at a time machine in and talk to myself while I was it Intel, or if I was in high school, I would, I would, I would have just told myself it's gonna happen. Like you're gonna get there. You're gonna become a full-time author some day. But I wouldn't tell me how, because would be no way to summarize that the up and down experience and talk about in my memoir it to the point where that, that self could understand what I was talking about. Jeff (42m 21s): But, but, but I think it would be motivating to me to know that, you know, that I made it, that I made that happen. And that's the, that's the advice I'd like to give writers today. It's like, like, if you could imagine that you would succeed in anything that you did, what would you dare to do? Like if you knew that there was no chance you could fail, that you would eventually succeed, what would you dare to do? And I, I just knowing that by daring to be an author that I would achieve it someday. And that, if that, if I, if I don't know, if I'd tell myself that I would be more popular than I could have even imagined back then, like I I've exceeded way more than I ever thought I would of never thought I would of deserved. Jeff (43m 4s): But if I could just tell myself you're going to make it, that would have a, that would've been very inspiring to me. And I hope it's inspiring to your listeners to, to put in the time it takes to write those books in a lonely room without anybody else there, unless you've got a co-writer it's up to you by yourself to pull it off. Well, but to know that you're going to make it, you'd make it worth it. Jesper (43m 28s): You just don't give up. I think that's a, that's a very good a point to the conversation on M, but Jeff also wanted to ask you if, if a, if people want to check out more about you, where, where do they go? Jeff (43m 44s): My website is Jeff Wheeler dot com. I have all of my different worlds there. I have a different page from the different worlds that talks about the settings and the magic and the kind of thing. So that way, if people want to explore like, oh, I may be more interested in this one. This one's got a more, a medieval feeling. This ones got it. More of a steam punk feeling. This ones got you. You can kind of look at it that way. I always get asked, like, where do I start? You've got over 30 books. Where do I start? The page that gets viewed the most on my website is one call it the one called a reading order where I suggest if, if I had a pick, this is the order. I would read my books. And cause a lot of my stories are tied together. Jeff (44m 24s): There's a little hints from one that leak into another. And so if you want to capture all those nuggets and little Easter eggs, you would, if you read it, it in the order, I suggest you, you probably maximize that the most, but that's, that's what I would suggest. Jesper (44m 42s): That's so cool. And I did, I can confirm the, those well page's you have on your website. It's really cool. There's a nice images and everything as well. So it looks really good. And a, of course, a reading about some, a fantasy setting who doesn't want to do that. It's a, it's a wonderful, thank you. So thank you so much for coming on a Geoff. I really appreciate it. Jeff (45m 8s): It's my pleasure to be here. Jesper (45m 9s): Okay. And next week, Autumn will be back and I'm prerecording this, so I'm not quite sure what we're going to talk about, but the tune-in. Narrator (45m 20s): If you like what are you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

There are a LOT of parts involved in writing a story. Even if you are a panster, you should be thinking about the story's plot, characters arcs, how the two inter-link, sub-plots and how they affect the main plot, and then there is the story's emotional plot. Wait. Emotional plot? The emotional plot of a story isn't something we talk about much. In fact, there isn't a ton of information out there on it, but it is an important part of plotting as well.  Tune into episode 130 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast as Autumn and Jesper (well, mostly Autumn) share insights on the emotional plot. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, this is episode 130 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about the emotional plot and how to use it. Or perhaps I should say that you Autumn will be talking about... Autumn (49s): I guess that's fair. This is one of my ideas because when I, I guess I knew about the emotional plot, but when I started playing with it recently and did a recent post in our Patrion feed, I just got so excited. Like, yes, we need to talk about this. And I somehow strong arms you into it. Jesper (1m 12s): No, no, that's, that's good. Then I can take a bit of a backseat and enjoy all the preparation work you of course have done for this episode, Autumn, like you do for every single episode. Autumn (1m 24s): Usually. Occasionally. Jesper (1m 26s): No, you don't. Autumn (1m 28s): I'll be fine. I have every faith. We'll figure it out besides not doing my homework. How, how have you been? Jesper (1m 42s): Well, good. I did start writing book two in our series and I really wanted to get a writing sprint done this morning as well, but I failed. I was, I was actually up at five 15 this morning, but yeah, I prioritized exercising thinking that I could get a writing sprint done afterward, but then other tasks sort of got in the way and I hate mornings that just spiral, it feels like it just spirals out of control that way. Yeah. And I always advocate that people should prioritize writing and do it as the first thing, because then you don't get sucked into other things and you see, it happens to me like fingers, but I don't know my excuses that the being a soccer referee as well, it's important that I have a good fitness level. Jesper (2m 37s): So that's my shoes. But writing is important too. So it's one of those choices. We'll all have to make at some point, but yeah, I will. I'll I'll get some more chapters to be too hard on yourself because you have started writing it. You've done two chapters. We did all the plotting. You finished the previous book, which I'm still editing. So I think you're fine just because you're like a half a book of me, your foe. Yeah. Well, it's not necessarily that I want to be far ahead of you, but it's more like, I like to be productive and I love when I can see progress. So when nothing happens because I get sucked into a million other things, well, I do make progress on other things, but I want to see the book advancing all the time. Jesper (3m 25s): So since that's a bit annoying, oh, and by the way, my apologize in advance, if somebody can hear shouting in the background while we are recording, because my wife is watching the world championship, ice hockey in the other room and she can get quite an Tuesday astic about that. Autumn (3m 42s): So if somebody shout to me, that's exciting. That's pretty fun. Yeah. Yeah. How about you? Could we have like a number 10 day? I, since I should've played hooky because I, you know, had to do my homework anyway, but it was one of those days where it's started off cool in the morning and got warm in the afternoon and we just got clouds, but it was like brilliantly, sunny, but not too hot. And it was just if every day was like that, but since it's not, it was definitely one of those. I want to go sit in the hammock and have a cider and just kick up my feet for a little bit. Autumn (4m 24s): But I was, I adulting and I came prepared as much as you say, I didn't for today's podcast, so I I'm ready, but it's been good. Hey, and I got my second vaccination over the weekend. I am now. Well, once it's all the humanities kick in, I am now vaccinated fully. So that's, that was exciting. It wasn't horrible. I totally prepared. I was planning. I was going to be horribly sick coming in. My husband was horribly sick with his and I thought, okay, I'm just going to, I'm going to sleep on my bean bag chair. And he came back early from his training and was with me for the weekends. I'm like, I am totally, totally fine. And really, I just, I felt a little slow on my head was just, I've had worse, cold. Autumn (5m 7s): I mean, it really wasn't bad, but I wasn't quite myself. So we didn't, we binged on Netflix and took it pretty easy over the weekend. I didn't force myself strong on myself to do much work. That's always woke up Monday, felt like I had started a bunch of caffeine and ready to go. So that's pretty good. Oh, what do you watch? Everything a program called sexify actually. And it was the characterization and the story were fantastic. I think it's a Polish. And so it was, I do tend to like foreign series and it was just outstanding, the characterization and what they were going through. Autumn (5m 54s): And there were basically three women, three young college students who decided to develop an app. And the one was, she was head programmer and she was going to do something on sleep. And it was basically told it wasn't sexy. So she came up with something else and we won't go into it on this podcast, but it was a, if it, the name sexify and the stigma around it, you know, here I am skipping the topic, this typic stigma around what they decided to do was so interesting to see all their different roles and how they dealt with parents and try to figure out themselves in the world. And I just, we ended up watching, I think it was seven or nine episodes. And in two days we watched them all admit, which is totally unusual, uses one episode a day for me. Jesper (6m 38s): But yes, it was fine. Got some tea, got some chips, some veggie chips and just sat down and watched shows. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. And you still need to, if you love the foreign shows, you still need to watch those. I know you need to find them. Right. We have like the bridge, I guess it's the English translation. And then what is it called? What is it called? Killing, I guess it's called, but it's not good in the unit because the English wasn't when you're got a headache, the last thing you want to do is have to read subtitles, but I've looked for that. Autumn (7m 22s): And I thought, for sure, we had a workaround because we use a VPN and I figured what I could just put the VPN in Denmark. And then I could go ahead and watch the shows that I can't get in the U S it doesn't work that way. Netflix won't let me log in unless I'm under the U S VPN. So I can't get to your shows. Maybe I come over there and watch with you. Yeah. Yeah. And you can learn it's cold foods. Okay. To work on this. Autumn (8m 3s): That's a good try. Narrator (8m 5s): A week on the internet with the am writing fantasy podcast. Jesper (8m 9s): So I'd like to thank Jen for joining us on patron. So thank you so much. It was so great to see you join us there. And we can't wait to hear more about what you're writing. Absolutely. Your support is of course, what enables us to keep the lights on here at the app, riding fences, you podcast. So we really appreciate that. And Jen has also become eligible for our monthly live Q and a sessions, and they are so fun. I love getting the question. See, that's why I'm always fine for the podcast. We never know what the readers or listeners are going to ask when they join us, our students and our Patrion people, when they join us for the monthly Q and a, you got to just be ready to go with the flow. Autumn (8m 55s): But there it to me, especially when people come back in and they give us the progress, updates are just so fantastic to hear how people are doing. So it's good to answer the questions and share and offer support, and then celebrate when things are going well. Absolutely. Yeah, it it's really, it's really nice. I love those sessions as well. So dear listener, if you feel like you're getting something from these podcast episodes, then why not check out the patron page associated to the am writing fantasy podcast, we offer a number of rewards to supporters. And of course there is a link in the show notes, if you want to, or if you're interested in checking that out. Autumn (9m 37s): So I don't know, is that it autumn, or do we have anything else that you see that the M writing fantasy Facebook group is almost at 5,000 members? It like exploded last month. I think we jumped a thousand and just a couple of weeks. So that's been exciting, but I was going to tease you and say, well, even if maybe I'm teasing the listeners, but even if you don't enjoy the podcast, if you have questions on your writing, you can join one of the question and answer sessions, answer sessions for like $5 a month. That's a pretty good deal for customized help on your questions on your world, building in your marketing. And I don't know how we came up with that plan, but darn it, that's pretty cheap. Jesper (10m 23s): That's the, like the cheapest consultancy support you'll ever get in your life. That's for sure. But yeah, that's true. But I guess the irony is if they don't enjoy listening to the podcast, they will never say that Narrator (10m 48s): And on to today's topic. Jesper (10m 50s): So we should perhaps mention that the idea for today's episode came from a patron post that you wrote in the . Exactly. We always, I always try to give my best posts away there, and eventually they might find their way onto the podcast then the, maybe even the blog down the road, but this was one that I really enjoyed discussing Patriot. Like I said, once I, once I stumbled on the topic and that the emotional plot is totally separate from character arts and it's totally separate from the actual story plot, the story structure I'm like, it was like, I was finding one of those words that you've always something to define something you did anyway. Autumn (11m 33s): And you're like, oh, that's what it's called. I was so excited. So I'm like, yeah, we got, we've got to talk about this one because there is not much out there on the emotional plot, but I think it's, I think I stumbled on like one of the things I could finally say, this is one of my favorite parts of writing. So I'm excited. Yeah. It's cool. And I feel like the topic of the emotional plot, isn't that clear really? And as you say, there's probably not that much about it out there. So perhaps it would be a good place to start if you just sort of explain why no one ever understands what I'm talking about. And you want me to explain? Autumn (12m 15s): No, that's fair enough. The emotional, explain your mind, my story organization. And I've terrified you, I think have scarred you forever, that I was trying to, to, to just make any sense and make sense out of it. It's just the goal with go with my mind map. It's chaos, you know, that little meme that's, you know, Hey, what's that thing coming out of your head. And then someone's like, is mine, it's the plot to my next novel? And it looks like this giant worm cloud. Yeah, that's me all for time. But emotional plot, like I said, for it is not your story plot. Autumn (12m 57s): It's not the story structure and it's not character arcs, but it kind of overlaps like if those are two spheres, it kind of overlaps with them. It's so if you have a Venn diagram out, it's one of those, the third sphere of it, it is you could define it two ways. And the first way is that it is the character's emotional journey through the story. And that's a good place to start. If you never considered emotional plot before and applying it to the story, you're writing start there, that's one you can do easily. But to me, I think what I like is sort of like the pro level, and that is the readers emotional journey through the story. So it is literally plotting out what you hope. Autumn (13m 40s): You know, you never a hundred percent, you can't target another person a hundred percent, but what you really kind of want the reader to be feeling when they reach certain parts of your story. And that's what I think is so much fun. And that's interesting because I feel like normally when we are talking about plot, you automatically thinks about actions and you know, what is happening and stuff like that. And this is sort of more the yeah. Right. But, but you also mentioned the, but you also mentioned the character emotional journey and also the reader emotional journey. Autumn (14m 25s): But do, are they not linked like that? They're not two separate things there they be linked, but they can be the reader's emotional journey can be different from the characters, especially if you have several characters, but if you are, if you play with foreshadowing, if you have different characters, like you have the villain's perspective. And so the reader might have information that character doesn't have. So the character might be feeling dread and intention and a whole bunch of other emotions that the character doesn't feel because the character doesn't know. And that's the advanced level of emotional plot that I like when you, when you start layering in those bits of foreshadowing and those little elements, so that you're going to ratchet up the tension on the reader in a way that is actually not part of the story structure per se. Jesper (15m 14s): I mean, you might have those elements there to make it all tie together. But what you're really doing is you're putting in those elements to up the emotional impact of the story. And that's, that's the emotional plot. So you mean like for example, that the reader knows what is coming around the corner, but the character doesn't. So is that sort of what you mean? So hence it's, it's stressful or well exciting depending on what word you want to use for the reader, but the character is just sort of trotting along because they don't know what they are going to walk into. In two seconds, the character could be racing to meet her lover or wondering where he is, why he's late in the reader might already know the answer he's been captured or is dead or whatever has happened. Autumn (16m 5s): So the reader is going to have a much deeper, mixed feelings going on where the character is not quite there yet doesn't realize what happened. And so that's, like I said, that's more of the advanced level at the very surface. Especially if you write with mostly just one, one point of view character, then the emotional plot can be very similar to what the readers plot would be. And it's much more, much easier. You may have a little bit of foreshadowing that the reader might or might not pick up on and that's going to change the emotional plot. But of course, I think it could also be the other way around, you know, if you have an unreliable narrator, then it could be the other way around that the character actually knows what's going to happen, but the reader is not knowing. Autumn (16m 58s): So the reader feels all the emotions when it happens, whereas the character maybe don't because they already knew what or something, I guess, I guess it could go both ways. I guess that's what I'm saying specifically, you know, choosing to have that unreliable narrator, you can do that as a plotting element to help, you know, increase tension, but you can also do it, you know, add that other layer of that emotional plot. You're doing it because you're basically manipulating the character or the reader's emotions and you're doing it purposefully. And I think by saying, Hey, this is a different plotting element. This is a whole different layer and mapping it and keeping an idea of like, what am I'm doing this plot action to do this, to make this happen in the plot. Autumn (17m 39s): And I'm doing it also has this reaction emotionally, and that's going to be that and making sure it all lines up. So that way I know I just read a story recently where something big happened and blew up something that a character was waiting for and the character didn't react. And so basically the emotional plot element was completely missing. And by recognizing that there is an emotional plot element, you don't do that. You don't have a big event happen and then completely ignore the characters reaction when something totally changes. Autumn (18m 20s): But I'm wondering as well. Jesper (18m 22s): So of course, if you know how you want your reader to feel at a certain moment, you know, in the book, that's very powerful tool if you do it deliberately, but I'm also wondering is that like something you would go through as you edit the novel, so you feel like, okay here, probably they need to feel like this and that, and then always, or do you more see it, like something you do while you're plotting your actual chapters or scenes like you added in there? Or, or what if you're pantsing then do what, how do you think? Autumn (19m 1s): I would say if you're always, I think we both, I don't think there's any wrong way to do it. If you're a pantser it probably is something that you're going to add in later, unless you're just, especially if you're adding in the reader's reactions, if you're talking about the characters, reactions, if you're a, pantser, who's very attuned with emotions and the emotions of your character, you're going to put that in almost naturally. And then when you edit, you'll just have to make sure it's, you know, it's all there. You're clear on it. If you're looking at how to manipulate the reader, I think it comes out much better if you're a plotter or at least if you're more of a hybrid and you just simply plot out your chapters and if you have all your chapter, like, you know, your hook and your disaster and everything that happens in your chapter, if you also make sure when you do those, you say these are the emotional reactions, or this is the emotional note that this chapter is going to end on. Autumn (19m 53s): And it's almost, you know, you can have the emotional reaction as your hook to the next chapter. And the nice thing about the emotional reaction, you talk about hurdles and you talk about laws while the emotions are often, sometimes highest in the laws, because things are happening in the hurdles and you don't really have a chance to react. So those ones where those chapters, where the pace is slower are usually saturated with emotion. So therefore your emotional plot is actually almost counter your regular story plot. And so that makes it gripping. It keeps the pace gripping on some level, no matter what, and you can't ever drop that, you know, you always have them oscillating around each other, which is a really fun way of writing. Jesper (20m 43s): Hmm. Yeah. And also I really, I've grown over the years to love the lulls more and more and more because those scenes where there's no fighting going on there, they're sitting around the campfire and they're enjoying their bread and smoking a pipe and, and talking to each other. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I've really grown to love those scenes because it's, it's usually where you can have the characters reflect on what happened. I mean, of course they will react in the moment when the dragon attacks and whatnot, of course, they will react to that and they will have emotions related to that. But the deeper understanding about the character's personality and their desires and their view of the world and all that stuff really comes to the forefront in those levels. Jesper (21m 27s): And, and I really, I have really grown to like those, I previously, I think years back, I always felt that they were, you know, we just need some action, but, but in reality, it's in the slow scenes that, that you can really also build that relationship between the reader and the character. Because once you start understanding what the character is about and how they view the world, how they think, what they decide and what they want, that's also where as the reader, you start building connections with that coach and you start understanding them, even if you don't, you don't have to agree with them and their desires and their wants. But, but if you understand where they're coming from, you will start building a connection to that character. Autumn (22m 10s): And I really feel that that's something action scenes can totally agree. Those are, I've always think I've always liked the lulls. And I, like, I think that's where, you know, that's where the, like I said, the emotions happen. That's where a character is fall in love. That's where they might have an argument that they couldn't have when they're helping their best friend. It's like, you know, you're, they're going to be there for their best friend to fight the dragon. But if there's anything like you won't, why did you do that? Why did you bring us here? That's what happened? You know, your risk, my friend's life. Those are the things that come out on the laws. And I like that kind of emotional spewing, I think. And that's why I liked this idea of the emotional plot is that you make sure you include that because you know, thrillers and action, adventure books, the ones that are always like the Hollywood cinemas that are boom, boom, boom, boom, you don't have an emotional plot. Autumn (23m 1s): And that's why they feel superficial. And also why some of the characters feel so thrown away, you don't make that connection. You never see the characters reaction. You know, they're always this stoic. I am doing this because I am saving and rescuing my daughter. And you're like, okay, do you ever show that you love her? Other than you save her life, that's going to help me Chris, back to you? No. Well, saving somebody's life is a problem. The coloration, I think I know what you mean because I know, I know what you mean. Jesper (23m 43s): And also when, when, for example, when I wrote the first draft of our book one, I tried really to, because something you said just reminded me that oftentimes also in the past, my LOLs would often be discussions between characters. You know, they would be disagreeing about something, maybe even arguing, I don't know, but big, because that would keep the tension high. So I thought like, oh, well that keeps it interesting. Even the laws. And it does. So it there's nothing wrong with it. But in the book, one draft that I just wrote that the one you were editing at the moment, I really try to make sure that some of the laws are not just arguments, but also just have like more deep and thoughtful conversations between characters and how they're growing to like each other and stuff like that. Autumn (24m 39s): And focus more on that as well. Other than it's just being somebody arguing all the time. So because otherwise you have like a full novel with either there's somebody fighting or somebody's arguing. And that gets tiring walls are where the humor comes in. And so it's, you know, like I said, you can find in book one and I'm bringing it out a little bit more, but those where you can tease each other where you show characters are, are truly friends or, you know, things like that. Or like I said, like if you had that romance supply, they fall in love during, you know, during those laws. And that's where, like I said, where's your plot action drops your emotions, emotional plot goes up. Autumn (25m 23s): And so then they both head into the climax and it's that much more explosive because the reader is tied with a character, is bonded with a character over those emotions. And the character has that the stakes are that much higher, you know, that they're emotionally invested in the outcome and maybe they're afraid and they know how much they're risking, where if you're just running Pell, Mell straight into the climax from one hurdle to the next, to the next to the next it's exciting. But I mean, you can only do an adrenaline rush for so long before you just need to catch your breath. And maybe you really won't remember, you know, remember the characters, remember the story as much. Autumn (26m 4s): You'll be like, oh yeah, that was a fun read, but it doesn't resonate with you for a very long time. I think it's really the emotional plot that makes the story resonate and brings the characters to life. And especially if you are a cruel, cruel author and you manipulate the rate reader with an emotional plot that is specifically designed to, to bring out certain emotions at certain points where, you know, you have two characters falling in love, but you know, maybe the reader knows that it's not possible or, you know, something else is going on that they know one of them is, is not going to be true. And that can really start twisting some gears that the reader knows things that the characters don't. Jesper (26m 45s): And they're like, no, I want to tell you don't do it. Don't do it. And when you have a reader shaking the book, wanting to tell characters, don't do something. You got them in your story. You've got a locked. Good. Yeah. And there was, I can't remember if it was one of our Q and a sessions or when, but there was somebody asking me at some point why I hated, or maybe it was one of our interviews, which we mentioned in last week's episode that somebody asked me, why do I, why do you hate the superhero so much? Jesper (27m 24s): I, and all the Marvel stuff. But I think listening to what you just said, that's exactly why I don't like those superheroes stuff, because they feel so superficial that they don't have, at least to me. I mean, I understand some people would disagree and that's okay. Don't, don't, you know, send me 500 emails telling me how, how wrong I am. This is just my opinion. But, but this is just my opinion, but I feel often like the older Marvel superheroes that they don't have that same depth to them. Jesper (28m 7s): You don't get those well laws, I guess, you know, a lot, a lot of the time in those movies where you really get to understand their emotional journey, that they are very caught, bought kind of characters often. I feel, well, I say that. And then of course, when I don't know if I can make it, it's under, it's behind a pay wall. And I didn't feel like spending like 9 99 to watch one movie. I thought it was just like, no. Oh, okay. Okay. Because that's like the perfect example of what I'm not talking about here, because the joker is built on emotional plot. Jesper (28m 52s): It is built on characterization. That is really what it's about. It's not so much about the joker or Superman Batman. I meant it's not so much about that as much more about the couch and what happens to him and his personality and stuff and the eighties. Autumn (29m 10s): It's so good, but that, I guess that's, to some extent, proof of my point, right. That that's what I feel like that's when it gets good. Whereas the other opposite where Superman is just fighting bad guys, or Batman is fighting the Joe Crane, you know, the older movies and stuff like that. It's it's, I don't know to me, it's this way. I think I agree. So it was like Superman loves Lois lane because he does. And it's just, it's like having someone who's evil. Yeah. It's like having a character who's evil for the sake of being evil. It's just, you need to see why, I mean, what does that mean to love somebody? What will he do for her allied or about who he really is? Autumn (29m 50s): Does he ever feel conflicted about that? I mean, those are the questions that I really love. I love stories with a little bit of PTSD. These heroes faced massive battles. They see friends die. I want to see the reaction to that, those emotional fallouts of maybe somebody, you know, getting angry over this or not wanting, not treating themselves well, because they're so upset. That's the reality. I, I see in the world around me and that's what I want to see in the stories. And you don't just do that by like writing and you just throw in a random emotion, you know, readers will call that out. You want to have that layered in lace through the whole story, which means stepping back and looking at your plot, looking at your characters and the character arcs and saying, what is the emotional reaction? Autumn (30m 40s): How is this character progressing on this character arc? What does that look like emotionally at this point in this chapter and making sure that it really is added in there. It's another plot thread to make sure is clear. And I think one of the few posts I've that are out there on this had a good suggestion saying if you're writing a chapter and it feels flat, or you feel like you don't know where it's going step back and look at the emotional plot. Because if you're not, if you're not connecting with your character, it's probably because you don't know where their emotions are and their emotional plot is. And once you figure that out, you will actually get the writing that much faster. It will help you write to figure this out. Jesper (31m 27s): No, that might be true. Yeah. If you want to see something where it is more or less only, yeah. I would say so or driven by the emotional plot or more or less only. Yeah. You can hear that this is English. That's how you say it. Don't, you know, you should go to your native speaker, even you should know that that's how you say it more or less only driven by the emotional flood. But if you ever watched the mythic quest show it's, it's on apple TV, plus I think it's called mythic quest, but that is really like, it is just characters and their emotions basically. Jesper (32m 12s): I mean, of course there is some sort of applauded it's it's about like a gaming company who makes an online game. And then it's basically about the people who work in that company. And it is a, it's a comedy show and it is quite funny, but it's funny because of the characters and their emotions. It's funny. And it is, it is actually really well done. I was very hesitant to what did I, I saw the trailers in the beginning, like many, many, many months ago when I was like, yeah, don't want to, but this is typically me when I see someone that's like, no. And then later on, I give it a try and, well, this is really good. Did the same thing with American gods. I also watched the trailer for it. Jesper (32m 53s): Hadn't felt no. And then I watched it and I loved it, or I, I say, I'm still watching it. I love it. But, so I think if you want to see like a show where it's done really well, and it's easy to consume, it's like 20 minutes episodes or something like that. Yeah. So it's something you can easily consume. It's just a human there's. No, you don't need to think watching it at all. That there's no plot to follow as such. But I would say try to watch that show because it, it really shows you couch your feelings and emotions and how it makes you connect to those characters. I've been watching the good place, which is also very similar where it's, you know, looking at the enterprise. Autumn (33m 37s): It's funny, it's cute. But it's the characters you fall in love with the characters I need. Even with sexify these three young hero wins that you know, how they meet, you know, there's, there's not a ton of action there. There's, it's, she's a game and app developer. Who's just trying to get her degree, despite not knowing things about her life. I mean, yeah, it's a coming of age story, but you get so sucked in because the emotional plot is so well done. They relate these characters. And this is, again, I think it's important in this day and age because we like good characters that have flaws. And we like villains that have good qualities and all of those layers, you can try to force them into a character profile, but by showing them actually manifest through the sh the plot and through the emotional plot, seeing the characters act certain ways, not just be told that it's a good show. Autumn (34m 31s): It's a, not a towel. You develop that that much more and the reader experiences it. And they're going to get that little bit of connection, have those feelings. You're gonna like them when they think, oh, you know, this is a good character, a good person, but they did something wrong and there's going to be fallout from it. No, my gosh, what's that going to be? Or the villain is not a hundred percent evil and there's this other side to him. And do you just wish you'd wake up and see the smell of coffee and see his be a good person and save the world. Because as he's already got the power or the position to do it, he just needs to stop being evil. So those are the stories you really can tell really well with an emotional plot, I'll call back, call back, call back. Jesper (35m 17s): What did we talk about? Just a few episodes. A good look at that again. We've talked about so much. Can we just go one of the worst, top 10 lists? It's just because I want to put you on the spot. W w no, but what was the topic of the episode evil things to do? Your character is one that comes to mind, the worst things to do to characters. We talked about a point of view, and yes, this goes along. And I think there is a very, very strong correlation here, because if you're writing in deep point of view, you are going to get exactly. They go hand in hand, it's taking the deep point of view. Autumn (35m 58s): And if you're struggling with it, this is maybe what you're struggling with is looking at the emotional plot, getting into that character's head, because the deep point of view is also word choice. Like, you know, a sailor using, you know, as Todd, as a rigging line, you know, things like that. They're going to always use words that fit their perspective. They're not going to talk about, you know, garden hose and things like that. If they're a sailor, they don't know anything about garden hose, but they also, this is taking just the emotional side of it. So not worrying so much about the word choice that you would in the deep point of view, but talking about, you know, how are they experiencing this moment? And like I said, and then if you really want to get too technical, figuring out what you want the reader to be thinking, feeling at that moment. Autumn (36m 44s): And that way you can make sure that even though it's a law, you know, there's something in there, the reader is going to be gasping over or so excited. Their heart's going to be fluttering. You know, those are the kind of emotions knowing you want to do that to your reader. You can be a little bit more strategic in making sure the chapter and everything that comes before builds that kind of emotion in your reader. And I really feel like if you get used to writing and deep point of view, a lot of this will come out automatically the emotional plot and the emotional reactions and the local scenes where you get to know, I mean, a lot of that will just come out naturally as you write your first draft. Jesper (37m 33s): And then I think it's to a last degree, I would almost say it's a lot about being very vigilant when you do your editing passes, to make sure that you are not only looking for, you know, of course, the good grammar and all those sorts of things. And then, but, and also finding the right words, but also bringing out those emotional elements and sort of keep asking yourself, am I, am I hitting the emotional, Akio the emotional plot? Am I showing what the character feels about? What happened here? Not, not like, I think I'm not saying overdo it like all the time, but, but at least making sure that maybe, you know, every other chapter so that there is some emotional stuff. Autumn (38m 19s): Well, yeah, I mean, you can almost guarantee that if it's a very action packed chapter, you probably don't need to worry about the emotions. That, that is an action chapter. That's a horrible leave it. The inciting incident. You don't, you have the reaction phase after the inciting incident because you are basically dealing with emotions. But yeah, I think it's, it's something just like when you're looking, if you're doing, especially if you do edit like me and you have those layer edits and you know, you're looking for your senses, you're making sure that the opening and closing hooks are good, look at the emotions. And if it's a chapter that isn't very exciting with action, make sure that there's emotional residence and depth there and, you know, decide how you want your reader to go through the novel, how they want, how you want them to feel. Autumn (39m 5s): And maybe there's a way you can tweak that. I think by taking control of it and looking at it, you will have a much smoother transition and flow through the novel, and you'll make sure that those emotions resonate and you won't forget about them. Like I said, I've reading, I've been reading a couple of working with a couple of really new first time novice authors the last month. And in both of the stories, I had to point out parts where it's like this big thing happened and it undermines everything they expected. And then they just keep going. What happens next? You look at that emotional arc and make sure the character at the very least reacts. And then, you know, once you get a series under your belt, make sure you're trying to figure out how you want the reader to react and see how that goes. Jesper (39m 49s): See if you can work on that a little bit more, often impressed by the fact that you can, you can do several editing passes and you can be so structured and make notes and everything. When I've looked at your script, the file, it's just that it's like night and day. I don't understand how you that's. It that's all you have is a very, I have this idea. I did a medullary right in Nevada, and it really developed the series yet. You should see my tainted Fe it is much more organized and much more clear and clean and clear crisp so I can organize it. Jesper (40m 31s): If you think I'm mad, you should see my husband seriously. He can't find a socks. Okay. Okay. But I think, unless we have more to say on this, I think I can, I can conclude by reading out aloud how you actually ended that excellent patron article, because I think it sums everything up. Nice. Lovely. So yes, let's do that. Yeah. So these are your words being quoted to you. Okay. Yeah, it is. If your story feels, something is missing and doesn't align, look at the emotional plot. Jesper (41m 14s): What is the character feeling? Does it make sense? What emotion are you trying to create in the reader? Are you succeeding? Nope. Somebody has been a genius who wrote that? I don't know who that was, but the author of that article, wasn't you. Okay. So next Monday I have an interview with the extremely successful Jeff Wheeler lined up for you. So you don't want to miss that one. Narrator (41m 54s): If you like what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, yYou'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Do you know how well your books are selling? We mean really know? Without accurate sales and royalty data, you can't make accurate assessments on advertising, read-through rate, or how well that last giveaway did. Join us as we discuss some of our favorite book sales trackers and how exactly to use them. Check out the book sales trackers we mention in the episode! Book Report: https://www.getbookreport.com/ Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/ KDP Reports Beta: https://kdpreports.amazon.com/ BookTrakr: https://www.booktrakr.com/ Bundlerabbit: https://bundlerabbit.com/home/worlds Draft2Digital: https://www.draft2digital.com/ Abacus: https://publishdrive.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026379074-Abacus-for-Co-Authors Drop us a suggestion for our question and answer show at https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/contact/ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn Jesper (33s): Is episode 129 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And I think This should be an interesting episode because it's a topic which we haven't touched upon previously, as in ever, Autumn (49s): that's pretty good at 120 some episodes, and we have a topic that we've never even touched on. And that's that's I can't complain about that. Yeah. That's pretty good to talk about book sales, trackers and why it is helpful to be organized. Jesper (1m 8s): Autumn organized my own methodology with how you track your sales and also which tools are available to do so. So yes. Yeah. Maybe you will actually pick up some good points from this episode. Autumn. Autumn (1m 23s): I have, I have I'll have, you know, I use three different sales tractor trackers, and because of the limitation, it was more the organization stuff. Jesper (1m 34s): I just looked at your script file before this recording. So I know, I know what you mean. What do you mean when you say organized and what I mean when I say, well, you have a very high standard in the organization. I don't think I do too badly. I know where everything is in my household. I am the organized one. So let that terrify you. Oh my God. But how are things on your end? Oh, it's good. We finally are hitting look short sleeve. We're hitting warm weather. Wow. And we're going to be, it's actually dry. We need some rain. I already see like the stream is starting to dry up and that's so sad, but it is nice to have some like shorts, weather and t-shirt weather, no coats. Autumn (2m 19s): So that is nice. But yeah, we need some rain and we were in a drought last year and I think this year we we're already in a drought again. It's just kind of sad to see everything drying up. Well, it's supposed to be green. Yeah. Jesper (2m 34s): That's not good. That's not what you want. Autumn (2m 36s): No, no, but yeah, it was cause I was good at some things like, we're not, I'm not going to computers, but I have not figured out how to call rain yet, but I'll work on that. But maybe that's sort of one of the advanced level, phase skills that you haven't acquired yet. I think I just need to concentrate on it more and put out some more honey dishes or something. I'll figure it out. I'll keep working on it. Okay. Other things for you and your side of the Atlantic? Jesper (3m 7s): Well, this is one of those very, very busy weeks, but at least I did manage to finish up the plotting for book two in our new series. So that's pretty good. It's really exciting. Yes. I got to look over it and gave some feedback and we figured some most stuff out and yeah. Now you're ready to start writing. That is so exciting. Yeah. And you caught some good stuff in it as well. That needed to be beefed up and corrected a bit. So that was great. Yeah. That's why it's so awesome to work with someone else. You get to have someone looking over your shoulder going really, instead of hitting a plot hole, they pointed out before you yeah, right. Yeah. Indeed. Or just in some of the cases, it wasn't necessarily a pothole. Some of it was also just more just strengthening the logic behind things, you know, that it makes a bit more logical sense and so on. Jesper (3m 55s): So at least I might not be organized, but I'm very logical. That is a plus that you are absolutely, you're very good at that kind of thing. But I was also out refereeing this past weekend. Why experience really? So you hear that even though, you know, COVID well, in some places it's easing up in some places it's getting worse, but I mean, people are actually getting together and they can play sports now in Denmark and happy there should be happy behave, right? Yes. Well actually sort of by the final whistle we had the two teams almost fighting each other, so yeah, I was not too good. Jesper (4m 41s): So do you want a short story about what happened? Let's go since I don't see anything interesting going on in my life at the moment, that's your about yours? Well, because the weird thing is that I still don't quite understand it. Right. So yeah, so we were, we were three referees because this is, I can't translate it into an anti-American terms, but it's sort of like, it's not the pro levels, but it's sort of just below, slightly, not just below, but slightly below pro level. So they're, they're, they're not amateurs as such, but so they're pretty good, but they're not pros either. So it's somewhere in the middle. Right? So because of that level, then you are three referees. Jesper (5m 22s): You don't have like the main head referee and then you have two running the line. And in this match, I was, I was on the line, which means that you will, well, in my case, I was next to the, one of the benches and one of the coaches and the other linesman was on the other side with the other bends and the other coach and substitutes. And then all of a sudden, like there was probably like 10 minutes left. And then all of a sudden the coach on my side, he starts yelling and screaming and like five or six players sort of go Spisak as well, jumps up and screams. And I'm still, I don't what happened. And, and he's, he's yelling at me because I'm on his side, right on his side of the pitch show. Jesper (6m 5s): I'm, I'm sort of the one he, he needs to approach if he needs to say anything or if also just in general, w w if he wants to substitute, somebody has to get my permission to do it. And so on. So he, he, he addresses me and he starts shouting like, eh, we are not gonna, you know, accept this kind of behavior and screaming and shouting. And I, I still don't know what's happening. So I'm like, what? What's wrong? And he's scraped, well, the other bench over there, they, they calling, you know, calling racist names to our players and stuff like that. And that was like, really, what did he say? And I'm not going to say it here, but he's had some, he said that the other coach over there said some really nasty word that you just don't use. Jesper (6m 51s): I'm not going to repeat it here, but you can imagine. So I, and there is a linesman over there, another referee, right. So, but he's sort of going berserk. So I shout to him that he needs to sit down right now and then I'll take care of it. So, so he's, he does, he sits down and then I flag the main head coach or the main referee over. And I asked him, so what is going on? Because if it's true, what he's saying, you need to stop just showing some yellow and red cards now, because this it's not acceptable. If it's correct what he's saying, but I haven't heard anything because I'm on the other side of the pitch. So I don't know what they freaking out about. So he goes over and talks to the other linesmen, and then he comes back and save. Jesper (7m 34s): The other linesman, says that he's standing right next to the, to the coach over there. And he didn't say anything. And then I'm like, okay, then I don't understand. So why, why is six people freaking out at the same time? Nothing was said, I, I just can't make up the logic. And still, I can't make up the logic. So we never figured out what happened, but, but then 10 minutes later, we, the final whistle blows. And then they storm over to the other events and they almost have a fight over there. And, and, and so something must have happened. I mean, I, I just don't understand, but so why did the other linesmen not hear it? The other linesman was then he was a quite young guy. He was like 17 or something. Jesper (8m 14s): It was probably his third match or something. So he was when they stormed over there, very courageous, I guess, from him, he was, he started to try to put himself in the middle and push them apart. And I just went over there and winged him a wasted, come over here, just leave them alone. And we take our notebook and we make notes of who does what? So we can report it to the union. If somebody hits somebody, we know who hit who, so just don't get involved. Don't stand in the middle of it. Let them fight if they want to fight, but we just take notes of who does what, nobody hit anybody. They were yelling and shouting and pushing each other. But it's just like, yeah, it's weird. Right? When you, you don't even know what happened. I still don't understand. Jesper (8m 56s): Maybe people have been cooped up too long, but yeah, that just seems weird that something obviously sparked off some kind of anger and no one else heard it. Something came out of the void and only these six people, apparently there was a Fe coming or something. It wasn't me. I was, if I was in Denmark, I would have done something else that day, not riled up soccer players. Narrator (9m 24s): Oh, a week on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. Jesper (9m 29s): I don't know if you noticed all of them, but the was a very, very funny post by Jason in the am, writing fantasy Facebook group that you notice that how she's had a few this last week. So no, which one was this one? He had, there was like an image. I I'm sure he got it from somewhere else. I at least I assume, but it was a comparison of Lord of the rings with the Teletubbies. So there was like, that was the images next to each other, like, like the Hobbit hole. And then the whole top piece with also has this grass await and then the characters, the hobbits, and then the four Teletubbies. And then there was the eye of Sauron and then the sun from Teletubbies where there's a face in the sun as well. Jesper (10m 13s): Right. Oh, that's fantastic. No, I totally missed that line. That, that doesn't surprise me about the group or Jason, who is one of our moderators. And he's obviously a very fun sort of moderator. Oh, I'm going to go find that one. Now that'll give me something to do when I get off. Yeah. It's very good. It's very good. I, yeah, it's just a lot of fun stuff going on in the Facebook group. So if, if you deal, isn't not having joined yet then just so it's 4:00 AM writing fantasy in the group section of Facebook, and then you will find us, but something else I wanted to mention as well, autumn, because we've been asking, we've been asked, I should say Radha. Jesper (10m 53s): We've been asked by some of our listeners to record an episode where we talk about our own group to publishing. Autumn (10m 60s): Yes. For summary. A lot of our fans, I think it was actually, one of them was on Facebook and the other one was a request like the same week on Patreon and saying, Hey, you've interviewed all these other people. You talk about, you know, how to write and this and that. You never talk about your own writing and like what books you have out and all of those things. And we're like, oh really? We haven't mentioned that good point a hundred and something episodes in and yeah, 129, this one is okay. Jesper (11m 35s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. So I wanted to make a request to your listener because I don't really feel like making a podcast episode where I'm asking all them questions that I already know the answer to. And then I guess vice versa as well. I, it's probably not very exciting for autumn either. And I hope as you've probably pick up from these podcast episodes that we try to have fun with it. We enjoy doing it, but I don't want to record something about a topic that I don't enjoy. So what I want to do is that I want us to be answering your questions. Yes. So please, if there is anything you want us to, or you want to ask us about why we started writing, I don't know. Jesper (12m 21s): Some of the obstacles we've come found along the way or our collaboration, whatever, you know, then please send us your question. We've placed a link to the contact form on am, writing fantasy.com in the show notes. So you can just click there and just use the contact form to post your question. And then we will add them all together. And if we get enough of them, then we will record a podcast episodes asking or answering questions. Autumn (12m 52s): Sounds like, but we've done sort of something similar once, but we were, it was different questions. So this will be really fun. We already have a few coming in, so it'll be exciting to see what else we get. Jesper (13m 3s): Someone really gets something juicy. I never would have thought of asking you. That'd be really fun. Yeah. Yeah. Well maybe funny if it goes to you, that kind of question. I feel like I can ask the question, but, huh. Okay. Well, I'll start here. We should probably point out that what we're going to share is not an exhaustive list. There are definitely more options available out there to us north compared to the ones that we're going to mention here today. So if you think we have missed some important ones, then just leave us a comment. So everyone else also becomes aware of your suggestion. Autumn (13m 46s): Absolutely. And this is such a handy tool because if you are selling books on like Amazon and you go into just the regular dashboard where you're your KDP dashboard and you try to follow along with your books. I mean, I remember when you have one or two books, that's okay. But once you get a series, once you get a couple series, once I think I'm up to 20 something books, oh, freak. That it's just too hard. You need to use one of these ways of really tracking things and drilling down. Especially if you're going to run AMS ads, Facebook ads, you need to know how books are selling. You need to have a baseline. You need to know how things are going. You have to keep track. Autumn (14m 26s): See, I do know what I'm doing with these reports. Yeah. And I think it's also worth mentioning upfront here that if you're just starting out, this is probably not worth your time and effort to worry about right now. But I do still think it's probably good to listen in because then you are, you are aware of what you need to think about down the line. And I think that'll be helpful as well, even, even if you're just starting out. Yes. And if you are just starting out, there is actually a new feature on Amazon for KDP sales that we can mention that I think works just perfectly specific spiffy. If you're just starting out and want to have something better than the KDP dashboard report, which that little bar chart that's just blocked. Autumn (15m 13s): Just totally blessed. Yeah. I dunno. I don't have so much trouble with it, but I'll explain why once we get to the end of the episode, but I mean, why do we want to keep, or why do we want to track and keep some sort of organization around book sales will? Well, of course we all want to know how many books we're selling. That's sort of a no-brainer right. But I think what it also comes down to this stuff is really the time that it takes to collect the data, like you just touched upon and there are actually some services out there that will do this thing for you and then save you the time and effort, which you can then spend on writing and stuff. Jesper (15m 55s): So that's, that's pretty nice, right? Yeah. Yes. And I think it's so important. I know, even when I first started doing ads and stuff, you really need to take a baseline. You need to see how your ads are being successful. You're going to spend money on marketing, even if you're going to do like whether it's Amazon or an AMS ad through Facebook, or even just do a newsletter swap or, or sales swap where you're pointing them to a newer release or even doing something like a one-shot deal, like a free Booksy or bargain books. So you something like that or how heck BookBub, if you get one of those, you need to be able to track what before and after to see how effective it was because you're spending money and he told these things get expensive and you don't want to just be throwing money and actually find out you would have been doing better. Jesper (16m 40s): If you hadn't spent that money on ads, that would be really bad. Yeah. The other thing as well that you want, or the reason why you want to track it as well is so that you can start calculating read-through. Yes. We're not going to go into read through here and what it is and how to calculate it and all that. But if you're interested in that go all the way back to episode 53, I interviewed Adam Croft because he actually explained everything in episode 53 of the am writing fantasy podcast. So just go back there, listen to that one. If you want to know more about read-through but excellent keeping track of your sales will allow you to calculate your read-through, which is important. That's explained in episode 53. Autumn (17m 23s): Gosh, I don't even remember that one. That's really sad. I might have to go back and listen to it myself. That's a long time back. Yeah, it is. I do know Rhea throw though. Jesper (17m 33s): Yeah. Okay. So let's go through these and share our thoughts on them on, on what we have here. And we haven't necessarily used all of them ourselves. At least I haven't found the ones that I picked. All of them. We, well, I have better things to do than testing out tracking software, but I'm still gonna share some reflection on them though. So I don't know if I do want to start out daughter. Autumn (17m 55s): Sure. Do you want me to start? I have two that I'm not sure if they're on your list that are the two. Well, actually, like I said, I have three that I use and one of them is kind of cheating, but if I do what I like to cheat, I have to, we haven't even started the list yet. Jesper (18m 10s): And you already say you're cheating. Autumn (18m 11s): I am. I think it's fair because some people don't realize the features that are already available. And I think one of them is the new, there's a KDP report. That's in beta testing. I'm not well, you and I have discussed it. And I'm not sure if it's outside of the U S or it's just inside the us. No, I don't think I see it on my end. I don't think I see it. No. If, if you have access to it, when you go to your KDP dashboard and you go to the reports section, right at the top, it'll say, Hey, try out the new KDP dashboard or the KTP reports beta, and you can click on that. And it takes you to a much swankier KTP site that has like a nice side call 'em and actually showed you book pictures of like those sales and for that day and all these stats. Autumn (18m 57s): And yes. And so it's visually, it's so much better. It's much easier to see what's selling. It does when you go into your there's a royalty estimator there, which is fantastic. So you can really drill down and see how your books are selling by, you know, separating out your author names. If you have a pen name or other author names, uploaded the book, the format, a lot of the same stuff you see in a regular KDP dashboard. So that's fantastic. I think my only complaint and one of the big limitations I see with it is your choice for time periods to look at, or this month and last month, that's it? That might be just because it's in, it might be B beta. Autumn (19m 38s): I think they like that. Jesper (19m 40s): Yeah. I'm hoping it's just because it's in beta, but at the moment, it's like, no, Autumn (19m 44s): it looks so cool. It has this great information, great much nicer charts and graphs charts, and a lot more information than your regular dashboard or at least the same information. But normally you have to do the drop down menus and it's so time consuming, this is all click and visual. It's very nice. But yeah, that's the worst thing I could say about it is that it's just like, I look at it. I'm like this month, last month, that's it. And today, and that is it. So you're supposed to live in the present. Isn't that what you said? Yes. So I have to get my Zen going. Yes. Jesper (20m 19s): Don't worry about the past. Who cares? Autumn (20m 22s): Right. So if you want me to keep going my favorite one and the one I do use a lot and have for years, at least 2018, I don't know, maybe 2017, I've been using a book report. And so that is a fantastic one. It pulls the information from your KDP. So you actually have to give it permission to go into your Amazon files. And that one literally goes back to the day, uploaded your first book. So you can get your royalty is from forever. Even if you like just got it today, it'll pull the history. So you can see what you sold last year. You can narrow it down by book. It has reviews. Some of the features are it admits it's not a hundred percent up to date, but hopefully they'll maybe sync it a little bit better and it'll pull in reviews and your current book, ratings and rankings, all of those things are accessible through one dashboard. Autumn (21m 15s): The worst thing I can say is that it is only for Amazon books. And I think that's unfortunate. It is also kind of cool because it's alive click. So you see, so you see someone got a book and it says it was given away as a freebie because it lists freebies and sales and it gives you your royalty amount right there without you having to deduct or try to figure out what your royalties are. So you can click on that and it'll take you right to Amazon. So that's kind of cool. So you can go check on books really quickly. I sometimes forget that if you buy my paperback, you can get what my ebook for free. And I'm like, how'd they get that book for free? And you click on it. No, everything looks fine. Oh right. I have that set up. So you can get that for free. If you buy the paperback because seriously, I don't buy the paperback. You should get something besides obviously an awesome book that you can put on your shelf. Autumn (22m 0s): So I do love that. And I think book report is just a simple Chrome plugin, right? Jesper (22m 7s): It is, it is a Chrome plugin. I think there's an app for your phone as well. I can't remember now, but it is nice. And it's one of the cool things is it's a very informative, very, I think it tells you a lot, especially we're selling mostly on Amazon or you gotta run AMS ads. Autumn (22m 22s): It has a ton of information. And if you are selling less than a thousand dollars a month, it's free. And I think if you're over a thousand dollars, it's only like $10. It's, it's not 19. I couldn't remember what it, if it had gone up, but it's just not, if you're selling more than a thousand dollars 19, it's not that it's not a lot. I just, it's still, I just appreciate so much that it is really a very informative plugin, even if it is only KTP. I mean, that is usually even if you're wide, that is normally where most of your sales are coming from. And if you're running AMS ads, you need those specifically. So that it's free for under a thousand. Autumn (23m 1s): That's amazing. Jesper (23m 4s): Yeah. No, I quite like it as well. I've not used it myself, but I've seen it in use many times. The only thing I think is the downside. If you can call it that, it's the fact, like you mentioned that you have to lock into your KDP account. Otherwise it cannot collect the data, which I think is it's a bit, it usually you usually have to do it only once I've had problems. I have my Amazon on second level of validation. Of course, it's my books. Of course I have that like locked down tighter than anything. But so every once in a while they get out of sync and you have to click a button and then refresh it and it takes all of five seconds. It really isn't too bad, but yeah, it is giving a secondary app up, you know, they can go and read the, so you have to make sure you've got to trust this feature. Autumn (23m 48s): I agree with you there. Jesper (23m 51s): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I have a couple of will to go through. I wouldn't say that I'm cheating, but it goes into a bit of different territory as well, because I think there's more to this topic than, than just tracking sales. It is also about saving the time, which means that the, some other tools can actually do that for you as well. So I'm going to go through some of those as well. But the first one I wanted to mention is actually called book tracker, but it's T R a K book tracker. I'm like, yeah, that's a bit different way of spelling. Jesper (24m 31s): So this one will actually log into all of your accounts every day. So it doesn't matter if you are publishing via Amazon, Google, Kobo, drafted, digital, whatever. But book tracker will log into all the accounts and check your sales numbers every day. And then it compiles all the data and presents it to you in some pretty looking charts. And it also sends you like a daily email summary. So that's quite nice. There is some things that I don't like though. Really? Yeah, because when you go to book trackers website, if you want to start using it, they don't show what the cost is anywhere. Autumn (25m 13s): Oh. And that just feels wrong to me. I don't like it. You know what I mean? It's like, they're trying to hide something. Yeah. It's that, there's an old joke that says, well, if you have to ask what the price is, you can't afford it. Jesper (25m 27s): So well. Yeah. So I searched around quite a bit and I was unable to locate the pricing information from the website. Maybe it's somewhere hidden, but I, at least I could not find it, but I got through some other sources that mentioned that book tracker costs $5 per month. If you want to receive the daily emails and then $10 a month, if you want to also use it to track new reviews and it track your rankings and so on. So if it's $5 a dose of that. Yeah. I mean, if those prices are correct, which I'm not a hundred percent sure about, but if they are then the pricing is not too bad, but it just rubs me the wrong way that they don't show it on the website. Autumn (26m 7s): It should be clear. What, what does it cost? How could you have a 14 day free trial? Isn't that, that's sort of the thing, isn't it? Jesper (26m 16s): Yeah. Yeah. Correct. And then the other thing is cost that I don't like about this is the fact that, of course, for it, to be able to log into all your accounts every day to collect the data, it has to know all your passwords, which also I don't like, so there is that. Yeah, that is always an easy and I would say, oh, that was, that actually reminds me. Autumn (26m 37s): I did have a third one. So if you use a distributor, you're probably going to mention one, I use Smashwords and they have two different features in there. They have a daily sales that gives you your sales by all of the platforms they distribute, as well as books. You can also break that down really well. And they also have a, more of a historical, that's a much more cumbersome spreadsheet that you have to really like spreadsheets. And I don't like spreadsheets, that's your job. I don't go into that one much, but it actually tells you, you know, if you had sales, how much you had sales and if like Barnes and noble has gone ahead and paid Smashwords yet, or if they have not sent the money yet. So you can really get some nitty gritty, fine tune details with that. Autumn (27m 19s): So I have obviously been in there and looked at it and said, oh my God, this is scary. I ran away. But the daily sales chart, which again, you can back that up. I think 60 90 you can put in a day amount. So you can back it up really far and see like your spikes, where you were, things were happening. So that was one of the advantages of using a distributor. Obviously that doesn't give me my Amazon stuff, but it gives me everything else. And I will say that it is a very good and very up-to-date and from what I've seen, very accurate way of seeing where all my other sales. So I literally, if I wanted to, I go to two places, I can go to book report slash Amazon KDP and Smashwords, and I see those two and I know what I'm selling. Jesper (28m 3s): Right. Okay. So the next couple of ones that I have is a software that will get the job done, but it's not in its origin, really designed for book tracking in the sense that it's not as neat as book report, you know, book report is designed for that purpose alone. Whereas the stuff that I'm going to mention now will get the job done, but it's not what it was intended for in, in that sense. And the first one using software, Autumn (28m 32s): how dare you? Jesper (28m 34s): Yeah. I don't know. Autumn (28m 35s): I'm a rebel at heart. I knew I would rub off on you. Jesper (28m 43s): Yes. Well, at least I haven't started breaking things yet. So as long as I don't break software, then it's okay. We'll see. We'll talk about the first one I want to mention is BundleRabbit. And this is actually one of the tools that we were looking into as well considering using, but we steered away from it because to use Butler rabbit, you have to publish through Ponta rapid, and then it's basically sort of like draft to digital. So you, you use them as an aggregator and then they, they keep 10% of the royalties as part of the service fee for what they're doing. Jesper (29m 23s): Of course you don't have the concern about sharing your passport passwords anymore because you only access panto rabbit. And then they distribute to everybody else, including Amazon. So that's good. And the good news is as well that if you sell new books, it doesn't cost you anything because they only take 10% off the royalties. Right? So if you don't get paid royalties, there's nothing to take anything off. So you can actually sign up for it and start using it. And it's not an, unless you earn money, they don't earn any money. So that's quite nice. And you can definitely use punter rabbit to track all of your sales in one dashboard across all the retailers. Autumn (30m 2s): Wow. So that is a real advantage. Jesper (30m 4s): And it's probably how you can also use it to split payments between several different authors. That's also a very nice feature. And that was actually originally why we looked at it because, well, we have royalties to split, so we were looking at it. But then when it became apparent that then we have to publish through butter rabbit, then that's where I saw it said, no, I don't want to do that. But it's possible if you want to, if you don't mind that, then you can do that. And you can get all the tracking in that one dashboard, which is very nice. Autumn (30m 35s): That is, I'm curious though, since they distribute to Amazon, can you be choose KDP select and do like your, your free days? Or is it like just, just generic, Amazon KDP? Jesper (30m 49s): You can, it's a good question. I would think not, but that's a good question, actually. I don't know. No, because I was thinking, that's why, that's why, like, it's very similar to Smashwords. I think Smashwords can sell, send to Amazon if you want it. I believe. Or at least they were working on that at one time, but I never used that because not that I'm doing KDP select, but you don't have that option if you go through a distributor. Autumn (31m 17s): So no, you probably can't know because it is exclusive with Amazon and then you go through the KDP dashboard, at least that's my assumption, but maybe somebody will know and they can let us know in the comments, I guess, logically, if you're just doing KDP select, you don't need the rest of the link. So you would just go to KDP select. Jesper (31m 37s): Yeah, correct. Correct. I think that one through, but the, the nice thing with BundleRabbit as well and where it is different from draft to digital with system X, one, I'm going to touch upon the difference here is that you can also tell Bundlerabbit that this author here I have co-written with, and this author needs to get 50% of royalties and I need to get 50% and then Butler rabbit will split that automatically. Cool. So, so, so you don't have to do anything yourself in terms of splitting royalties with somebody else. So that is very nice, but of course they are going to eat those 20 10% off the top every time. So that's the, that's the payment. You have to give them to afford the service. Jesper (32m 19s): So, yeah, but then let's, let's move on to draft digital because this is basically exactly the same as bottler rabbit. I probably most listeners already know draft to digital and they also know that they also take 10% off the top as a part of the service draft to digital, as far as Autumn (32m 37s): I know, I think they have quite come out with a royalty share option as well. Just like bam, Butler rabbit. I think that they can do this nowadays as well. Jesper (32m 46s): I think they call it drafted digital worlds or something like that. Not a rip off of Kindle worlds at all. So I'm using Draft2Digital myself and not bundle rabbit. So yeah, I'll go out on a limb here and say they're probably extremely similar. Yeah. Those two services and drafted a digital, of course, if you don't, if you're not using it, they can get to Amazon as well. So again, you can get all your sales in one dashboard. Autumn (33m 17s): That's pretty cool. So, yeah. So I guess those are sort of like the three big distributors that kind of do it. Smashwords drafted digital and bundle rabbit. Yeah. And then the next one here is quite different, but again, it'll get the job done. Jesper (33m 36s): And this is one we actually used for a little while only. So this is Abacus and we only used it for a little while and I explain why in a moment, but it basically Abbott cost costs you 2, 2 99 a month per book with the first title is free forever. Okay. And what really drew us into using Abacus in the first place was because you, you're not only tracking your sales in that because, but also your costs. So for instance, let's say that you you're running BookBub ads or Facebook ads or something like that. Jesper (34m 16s): And especially when you're collaborating with somebody else and you need to pay royalties and split the royalties. Abacus is basic. Let's say, for example, let's say that I have paid for a cover design, for example, or something. And then the, I would have to deduct that cost from Autumn's royalty share because she needs to pay part of it. But I was the one who shelled out the money in the first place. So in Abacus, I would just add in the cost for the cover design. And I will just mark that this one was paid by me and then Abacus will automatically take out Autumn's part of the cost and subtract that from her royalties and even it out so that everybody gets to share out the royalties, but also pay their part of the cost. Jesper (35m 2s): So it is basically like more like an accountant system, to be honest than it is a pro book tracker service. But you can use it for book tracking because you have all your royalties for all of your books in there, and you have all your costs in one place as well. And it will tell you by the end, I would like it to be better in terms of actually generating a full like royalty report. I would like it to do that. It doesn't do that very well, but it will tell you, this author should get this amount of dollars and this author should get that amount of dollars. It will tell you that, but it's not a blank. It doesn't show you a pretty report about it though, which I think is a bit of a shame because thinking about the fact that you will probably most use Abacus, if you co author stuff, right. Jesper (35m 46s): And hence you would normally also need to send some sort of summary or something to the other author to show them, this is the royalties. These are the cost and this is the distribution of it. Right. So I would think if advocacy could generate a report like that, that would be incredibly useful, but they don't. Autumn (36m 5s): Yeah, I agree. That's sort of like the whole point is like you get all this data and you can sell someone like you only get this or you get this much royalties and they're like, I want to see the accounting. I mean, you kind of want to be able to show that to them indeed. Jesper (36m 19s): So there's no real good way of doing that in Abacus. So, but let me just get, get back to the point from before. Why did we then use Abacus for a short while and then stopped using it? Because again, and basically it is very neat in the sense that you download your KDP royalty report and then you upload it to Abacus just as it is from the download from Amazon, you don't do anything with it. You just automatically upload it to Abacus and Abacus automatically extract the data and automatically identifies the books and put the royalties into the different buckets. Okay. You had this book had this many ebook sales, this book had this many paperback sales and so on. So all of that happens automatically, which is very, very nice. Jesper (37m 2s): Yeah. But, and here's the big, but the huge spot independence, the downside is that all the non-Amazon platforms, let's say that you have a book where you show the copy on Kobo, for example, right. But you did not sale sale, a copy of the same book on Amazon in that particular month. I know in like Fata majority of the cases, that will never be the case because most of your sales will be on Amazon. But we have, we had an example where we did sell some books on Kobo that didn't sell in that month on Amazon. And the problem is that Abacus forces you to upload your KDP role, to report a step one in the process. Jesper (37m 47s): And that means that it populates the books that sold on Amazon. And then you can go into those books and you can add, okay, then I also sold for $400 on Kobo, or I had $50 of cost on Amazon ads on that book. And you can go in and add all that in. And then everything works fine. But if the book wasn't indicated KDP royalty report, it does not get populated in Abacus for that month. And there's no way of manually adding a book in Abacus for that month. So you start trouble. Yeah. And that's really annoying. And that's why I, in the end, I sort of said to autumn, I'm done with this stuff because it's basically not working. Jesper (38m 31s): Right. Because especially when you're co-authoring and you need to share royalty reports, you can't have, like, you told you sold for a hundred dollars on cobalt, but you have no where to show it. Right. That doesn't work. Right. Autumn (38m 42s): And you're like you said, it's probably unusual, but it does happen. It's possible for things to happen like that. And the fact that you can't manually add it, or I know you'd have to trick the spreadsheet and like use some last months data and it just would be messy. And that's really frustrating. And the last thing you want to do to me, the spreadsheets are frustrating enough. I just want it to be simple and it gets to dose in a second. Excellent. And I would say at first the price of 2 99, a book I'm like, oh, wow. But I guess if you're selling enough books, if that has less than 10% of the royalties for that book, that could be a good price. It could be high. It could be a little for you, but that's something to keep in mind is like all the other ones seem to be 10% of your sales. Autumn (39m 27s): So if you're selling more than what would be 2 99 a month, advocates might be cheaper or it might be three times as much. Jesper (39m 39s): Oh yeah. Yeah. For me, I think the other solutions are better if you, unless you really need a detailed accounting system where you can put in cost as well. Then I would say draft two digital or bundle rabbit is probably better if you're trying to split royalties with somebody else. But if you need the accounting system, advocacy is definitely usable, but just be mindful that you have this problem about the fact that if the book didn't sell on KDP and you're stuck for that month, which is stupid to me, but that's the way it's designed. At least maybe they changed the someday. I don't know. But I made sure to let them know when I canceled our accounts, that this was the reason. So whether they do something about it, I don't know, maybe it'll benefit some of the listeners one day when, when they change it. Jesper (40m 23s): I don't know. Okay. So two final other options. The first one very short here, you could, of course, if you can afford it to, I know this is probably for those who are quite further along, but if you can afford it, there's always the option of having a virtual assistant taking care of this stuff for you and just keeping track of the book sales and going into the dashboards, collect the data and summarize it for you. That's perfectly fine. Autumn (40m 52s): And definitely something you can get somebody to do, but yeah, let's leave that alone for now. Collaborate with someone like Jesper, who does it for you and it's fantastic. Jesper (41m 2s): Well, yeah, because that's the last, that's the last option? Well, that's called writing with me 200 people starting to wanting to call them. No, no, no. But what I wanted to say is the way that I do it now, which to me honestly, is the easiest and the best way of doing it. And I know miles will wear it here and not everybody will agree and that's okay. But just to share how I do it, because I've been through several of these different solutions, I've looked multiple different passports and try to figure out how to do it best because the thing is, I want to spend as little time as possible every month, collecting royalty reports and figuring out how much money I own to auto autumn and transfer the money to her. Jesper (41m 51s): Right. I, I don't want to spend too much time on it because that's time away from writing. And at the same time, I also need to produce a royalty report to autumn so that she can actually see that I'm not cheating her or something like that, that she could follow. But it's only fair, right? I mean, when you have money between people, you should also account for w how does that money go in and out of the accounts? So I need to do all of that every month and I need to do it as easy as possible. So what I ended up doing was that I set aside two full working days because that's how long it took me. But to, to basically build an Excel template, which has automated formulas to handle everything like currency conversions, revenue, cost, and cost management. Jesper (42m 42s): So basically it takes automatically. I just put in what the exchange rates are in the Excel sheet now. And it automatically starts calculating for each of the currency, how much that is in dollars. Nice, because I always paid autumn in dollars. So it automatically starts calculating that. And then what it does it then is as well that I plug in how much sales we have from each of the dashboards. So that's the, that's the, the time-consuming pot that I go into each of the online distributors, I download the roll to reports and I manually type it into the Excel sheet, like, okay, for this platform, we had this many sales and this amount of royalties, but then Excel automatically starts calculating converting it to dollars. Jesper (43m 29s): And when I then type in the cost, I have automated formulas that takes all the royalties and subtract all the costs and do the 50% royalty split between myself and autumn. So at the bottom of the sell sheet, it just tells me this year, this is the amount I need to transfer to autumn. And that's it. So it's actually pretty easy. And of course, I've made a show that I can just copy out all those calculations and put them into a document and send it to autumn. So the Roger report is actually the easiest part nowadays that takes like five minutes. So I would say all in all to do this once a month, I probably spent like 90 minutes, I would say to do the whole thing once a month. And that's not too bad. Jesper (44m 13s): It took some time in west investment upfront to spend two days playing around with, I mean, if you were like the world champion with Excel, you can probably do it much quicker, but I was playing around with it quite a lot to get the, all the formulas to work just like a one or two. So it took me two days, but that was a one time and time investment. Right. I don't have to do that again because now I have to template and I just plug into data every month and that's it. So to me, that is the best way of doing it. I don't have to spend, you know, some part of a revenue to some other tracking service, or I don't have to pay somebody some software somewhere transform nothing. Jesper (44m 56s): Yeah. I just collect the data, put them into my Excel sheet and boom, I'm done. So, yeah, it's 90 minutes a month. But on the other hand, there are limitations on these other software that we have mentioned anyway. So they don't do the full job. Most of them, anyway, a book report for example is wonderful, but it's only Amazon. Some of the other ones will tell you the royalties, but then you have to give them your past codes and they will take, take a fee or 10% and so on. So on. So yeah, that's my thoughts on that. I think that sounds fair. And especially like, if you, even if you want to use like bundle rabbit or something, but then you want to have like maybe the first book in a different series in KDP select, you now got to account, and it's also confusing. Autumn (45m 43s): And I definitely the, your self-made spreadsheet, which I noticed you haven't let me touch, which is probably not going to get anywhere near that accidentally erase. It always keep backups. That's the rule, but I think your spreadsheet works marvelously and it does what we need. And yeah, 90 minutes is a crunch, but at the same time, once a month for stuff, I mean, you run the AMS ads, you run a lot of the Facebook ads. So, you know, you're spending time doing that. It's part of the LA life of being an author is also the marketing part. So 90 months over an entire month, it's not so bad. Jesper (46m 25s): No, I don't think so. And we've of cost made sure to add links to everything we talked about in the show notes so that you can easily check out any of those solutions that you might be interested in, but I think that's it. And next Monday Autumn (46m 41s): We will be back to talk about actual writing. And this time we explore the emotional plus, what is it how to use Narrator (46m 51s): If you like, what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the, an writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreonn.com/amwriting fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper compete to come up with the best (or worst rather) list of things you could ever do to your characters.   Here's a list of the worldbuilding and RPG podcasts where Autumn and Jesper were interviewed recently.  Worldbuilders Weekly: https://youtu.be/I_yLroTjxVc  TableTopTotality: https://youtu.be/YbikMcycuig  Game Mastery: https://anchor.fm/game-mastery/episodes/Episode-23-World-Building-and-Storytelling---Interview-e1068tb     Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 128 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we are going to have some fun today, as we share the top 10 worst things you could ever do to a character. And as usual, we'll have to vote on one by creating the best or the worst list, so to speak. So I think it's the worst list we should call it. Isn't it? Autumn (58s): I think it has become the worst list, like put on the worst thing that we can do to characters. That makes sense in a way. Jesper (1m 7s): Yeah, I think this should be interesting. Autumn (1m 11s): It should. And I have a total confession to make is that I I've had a very busy week and my husband had recently gotten a second vaccination and he had a bit of a reaction and was not doing so well. And it was this morning. I opened up, I think, goodness, I was doing my homework. I opened up a sauna or a little checklist to look, to see what the topic was. And I said, oh crap, I've got to come up with a list. So I feel like I did, like, I did my homework right before class, but that doesn't mean it is not awesome. I put in a lot of mind power to make this list very quickly. Jesper (1m 48s): I'm pretty sure my list is better than you, Autumn. Autumn (1m 51s): You always have that confidence. So we will see. Jesper (1m 57s): It's like fake it till you make it, right? Autumn (1m 60s): That's all right. But let's just do it. You can't rattle my cage. I am completely confident in what my abilities here. So I have done some horrible things to characters. I am calm. I'm good with this. Jesper (2m 13s): Okay. Well, I might have a few surprises, but I am looking forward to see what you came up with on the fly, which of course cannot be as good as the, but on the other hand, yo, I have to say if what you came up with on the flies better than the stuff that I really thought about, then it's not good for me. Autumn (2m 30s): It's true. I might have to give me this one. We'll have to see how it goes. I'm sure yours are very good. Jesper (2m 37s): Of course, of course, of course. Autumn (2m 40s): And so how have things been over in Denmark? Jesper (2m 46s): Well, something crazy happened this last weekend. Autumn (2m 50s): Really? Just over the weekend? Jesper (2m 52s): Just over the weekend. We went to a restaurant really, who would know something as ordinary, as visiting a restaurant would suddenly feel you saw other people eating. Yeah. It wasn't incredible. Well, the service was not good, right. Or to have for a go to a restaurant. Yeah. It was like the, the waitress. She was really nice and smiling and helpful and all that. So nothing wrong with that. But I think it was in the kitchen, but every single order got messed up. So we had to keep sending stuff back. Jesper (3m 32s): It was a sushi restaurant, so we have to keep, and they may get on order. So we kept sending stuff back and then we had to wait another 20 minutes until the meat, what they were supposed to make in the first place. So at the end we could have eaten a bit more, but we just got to like, ah, I'm fed up now. I don't want to wait another 20 minutes on another wrong. Right in the end we just left. But that's, it was still good. We still went to the restaurant. So that's pretty cool. Autumn (3m 59s): And I'm jealous. I love sushi. I actually planning on my husband's going away soon for a training. It might be gone as much as three weeks. I'm going to miss him like crazy. But I'm thinking he's not as big of a sushi fan as I am. So I'm thinking of maybe learning to make some sushi while he's gone, because it's like in Vermont, for some reason, it's not a good sushi selection. It's like California roll in that sense. Okay. Okay. I absolutely love sushi. It's one of my favorites, to be honest, I come over where you're going to a sushi restaurant then, because I can't wait. That'd be so awesome. Jesper (4m 36s): Yes. This a local restaurant here. It's all you can eat sushi. Oh, just keep watering. That is fantastic. Okay. I'm going to fly to Denmark to get sushi that can't be sure it's a funny world. Yeah. But I think other than that in writing news, I'm just putting the finishing touches on the outline for book two and our new series. So I'm hoping to send you that final final. Autumn (5m 3s): I cannot wait to see that. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. Then we can get into that. But what about you? Oh, well I can at least say the leaves have finally popped here and it looks like spring, even though the weather's, you know, actually kind of like light jacket weather, but it's sunny and the Birch or the beach trees are pollinating and they have these little Tufts of, of just like poof that are part of their pollen. So it kind of looks like all these little floating feathers through the forest. It's very magical and beautiful. Nice. It sounds like a faith place. It's me. Of course it is a very paved place. I know they live all the Jack in the pulpits are up in the Trillium or blooming. Autumn (5m 43s): So it's beautiful. Little ferns are popping though. I have to say my editing. I cause you know, I'm editing our first book one and I'm trying to edit the last book of my face series and there's a lot of editing and I have to do it. It's not going as spectacular. I'd like, I need more hours during the day, but I'm still pushing through. I might end up pushing back. This is, I guess my first official worry announcement that I might end up pushing back the publication of my final book. Cause it's just, I actually need another chapter and it's just not where I want it to be. So I have to do- Jesper (6m 20s): That's understandable. You're editing two books at once, right? I mean, it's understandable. It's a bit much. Autumn (6m 26s): Yeah. Some other jobs on the side and yeah. Other things going on and I get my second vaccination and couple of weeks in a week or two. So once that happens, I I'm totally, after watching Adam go through his I'm expecting to be down for a day and I, my backup person, I was here for him, but he's going to be away from me. So it's just going to be me and the dog taking care of me. Yeah. The doc can bring you some, some rodents that he killed outside or something. Yeah. He won't be making me tea and bring me a hot water bottle at 2:00 AM. Like I did for my husband's. So I'm expecting, I might be down for a day or two. That's kind of slow me down more. Autumn (7m 6s): Darn it. And I've been going to, I remember I'm partially deaf. I've been getting that diagnosed a little bit more and dial it in to see if there's something that could be done. But the point mints take time too. So it's been a week of a month of lots of things going on. Yeah. Too busy, too busy. Narrator (7m 26s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Jesper (7m 31s): Speaking of being too busy over the past few weeks, we've also been on a number of podcasts talking about world-building haven't we, Autumn? Autumn (7m 39s): We have. It's been so much fun. It's world building and we've mostly been talking to a role-player games and games. Oh. So it's brought back some memories. I have not thought of in probably two decades. It's been wonderful. Jesper (7m 54s): Yeah. We've been on the world builders, weekly podcast, the tabletop totality and the game mastery podcast. So it's been really fun and I think also very different conversations compared to what we normally do on this podcast. So if you're interested, dear listener, we have added links to each of these interviews in the show notes. And well, then I would encourage you to go and check that out. If you interest us loads of world-building tips in those interviews. Autumn (8m 25s): It was, yes. World-building tips and some character tips and some writing tips and just a shout out to all three of them because awesome podcasts, awesome hosts. And it was so much fun to be on there and getting to talk to them. It was, it was as close as we can get to socialization in the last year. That's true. Yes. And, and also, I mean, just the whole role-playing community there and, and, and how, and to see astic, they are about world building and it makes it so much fun. Oh, that, yeah, I totally will. It's like if it was not, if it was more than my husband and I there's gotta be like groups that do this via zoom, it was, it would just be so much fun to do it again. Jesper (9m 5s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Okay. But before we close out this section here, I also wanted to use the opportunity to thank everyone who left a rating and review over the last month of the am, riding fences, you podcast, because we did have quite an uptake and that is highly, highly appreciated. Yes. Thank you so much. We, it helps the podcast helps people find us and it makes us feel loved. So we appreciate that. Absolutely. Yeah, because it's like helping other listeners. So when you leave a rating or a review, because then when people start typing in writing or something in their podcast app, then the podcast platform will actually show our show if it has some good ratings and enough reviews and so on. Jesper (9m 52s): So yeah. In other words, you were helping fellow podcast listeners. So if you haven't done so already, please don't stop now, go on and the, to your podcast app and leave a rating on review. It, it only takes like a second, but it really helps a lot. So if you already did it, thank you so much. And if you didn't just post a podcast here for 10 seconds and then leave the rating and review and then press play again. Sounds good. Thank you. And onto today's topic, I must admit that at first this sounded really easy, but then when I got into it, I did start wondering what you would come up with and then I just kept looking for something better. Jesper (10m 42s): But then when you then said in the beginning that you hadn't really prepared that much, then I feel a bit better. Autumn (10m 48s): Oh, glad that helped you. I'm sorry that I was competing with me. It was intimidating to you apparently. So, you know, I, I wanted to make this one easy for you. Jesper (10m 58s): Yeah bBecause people have been mean to me on YouTube comments and stuff like that, saying that the Autumn always wins and stuff. And so yeah, I have to, I guess up my game a bit, I see really trying to prepare and if I lose now, then I'm going to go and dig myself a hole outside or something. Autumn (11m 18s): That'd be horrible. Well, hopefully you were prepared. I'm sure you're going to totally blow me out of the water and you have to think of it. I it's sad. I'm coming from the state. So whenever someone says, oh, you're going to win. I hope they're not saying that just because I'm the girl. So, you know, I want to win honestly. And I did not work for this one, but it's funny. I started out by looking at this when I saw the topic like, oh, I have no idea what to do. And I started coming up with some and I did a little bit of reading and thinking and thinking about it. And I'm like, oh, got this one down. So, oh no, that's what I want you to say. Autumn (12m 3s): I felt intuitively this was my topic. Sorry. Jesper (12m 7s): So this will be fun. Yeah. Now I'm already feeling like maybe my list is not strong enough. I don't like that. You, you make me doubt myself. Autumn (12m 16s): I'm just helping you become a better, better at torturing your characters. I don't know. Is that though? Is that the outcome we're hoping for? Jesper (12m 28s): Yeah. At least I have five prepared and I have ranked them as well. So number five is the least bad. And then number one is the winner. That's going to take the take all. All right. You may be well, we'll have to see, I have mine ranked and they're ready to go. So I, who do you want to go first? Autumn (12m 44s): Do you want, do you want me to go first? Will that make you feel better? Do you want to go first and just totally amaze me? I think, I think I might. Jesper (12m 57s): Hm. Well, the thing is that because it's, it's a hard question because with number five, it feels like it's probably good to go first with number five, because then you're putting a bit of pressure on the other one. But then at number one, I feel like it's better to be last because then you can sort of finish it off on a big bang right there. Like this one is the best and you've finished off with that. So I have to flip a coin. What did we do last time? I think you started last time you started last time. Yeah, damn. Then I have to go first. Autumn (13m 32s): Okay. Your turn. Okay. Jesper (13m 34s): All right. Number five. And of course, keep in mind that this is the least worst of the worst. So it's only going to get better. All right. So if you feel like this is not that bad, then it's going to get a little, okay. All right. That's the way it's supposed to be. Yeah. So number five, let's call this character, Mr. B. All right. And you'll understand why in a moment. So Mr. B, he is very, very chatty. He is very outgoing and in general people really like him. Jesper (14m 18s): However, and here comes, he has like an involuntary habit. No, it's more than a habit. It's more like a compulsion that every time he greet somebody, he has to burp the person in the face. It's just me. Oh, I would. So back home. I wouldn't be friends with them. That's for sure. I can imagine. No, not every single, so he's very likable, but then he's, he stops off really bad every single time. Autumn (14m 49s): Yes. I feel like that that would be pretty bad thing to do to a character that would be mean to do to a character I have to. And you had to be actually worried because I'm funny, true story is my husband likes to whistle and it was probably five years into our marriage. When I realized what he likes to whistle is who's afraid of the big, bad Wolf. I think I finally stopped. I'm like, I am putting that into a story someday, because that is like the perfect serial killer. You have this nice guy. He's a good guy about town, but he whistles. Who's afraid of the big, bad Wolf and somebody finally put together. So, you know, I was a little scared there that you secretly knew that I like that one. Autumn (15m 31s): There was also, what was it? Was it in kill bill or which one was it? Where there was also somebody who walked around whistling all the time. He was actually pretty cool. He was like, I can't, I think, I think it might've been, but it's been awhile, but yeah, that is definitely a very annoying and trait. Yes. It's not like the worst of the worst, but it was also number five. So it's going to be a lot worse for the characters here, but, but it's sort of a, it's not throwing you a softball, but it's more like a curve ball. Right. So it's, it's a bit difficult, but not too hard. Yes. Let's see. I, and I think it's interesting because you did this by literally creating a character perspective. Autumn (16m 14s): And I did it more top level of as a writer, the worst things you can do to your characters, because I just love doing things to my character as I've just, I mean, that way. So you want to hear my number five? Okay. All right. I am. And this is, again, it gets worse from here, but I'm starting off pretty heavy hitting. And I'm just going to say killing off friends and family, especially in the first chapter of a book like that, it's all his friends and all his family doesn't have to be all about. I, it could just be just the parents or just the siblings or just the friends, but just that trope. And I put that as my number five, because that does like every Disney story ever. Autumn (16m 57s): And to me, it is so over done. And that's why I put it at the first spot, but it is also so hugely impactful to lose a family member or to lose a good friend. So that's why we put it there because it is just like gifting out your heart strings and you can relate to that. And it's horrible, but oh, we need to find something else to do that with. So that's my, that's my number five. Okay. Well it's, it's a good start. It's a good start. The, you have to remember, I just kind of spontaneously spontaneously made this list and like the process of an hour. Why cooking breakfast? Well, that, that can't be as an excuse either your list is good or it's bad and no excuses about that. Jesper (17m 41s): I was cooking breakfast while I was thinking about this. And while I was scrambling eggs, I was kicking, killing a family members. What a horrible breakfast. All right. All right. All right, well, let's hear your number for them. Okay. So number four, I was actually thinking for a while, if I should put some sort of torture on this list, but while that is a pretty terrible thing to do to a character, if you imagined that you would like in a dungeon and you're being tortured, it's probably, I mean, of course, unless you die, but then it's not mean to you anymore because then you're not alive. Jesper (18m 22s): So if you do live, then you are going to escape at some point, or maybe you're going to get the, let free at some point. And then the torture stops. So it's like, I started thinking, can I make something that is worth something you cannot escape? Okay. Something you cannot could you, can you guess what? That could be? Autumn? What can you never, ever escape death? Well, yeah, but if you die, if you're dead, then it's not mean to the character, but because then he's dead death. Other than death, can't escape, a physical harming someone physically like losing it all. Can you not escape that? Jesper (19m 4s): What kind of life are you living? I cut on how bad? Sorry I hit you. I cannot help it. Jeez. Okay. So let's hear it. What is yours? Well, you cannot escape sleep. Oh, okay. So every single time this character goes to sleep, he or she will have nightmares about that. Darkest fears. Very nice. I think that's good. Nice, nice. In the, in the horrifying sense, I guess if that makes sense. I think that that's pretty damn mean. Autumn (19m 43s): That is very mean it's actually kind of related to my number four. Imagine that us thinking along the same lines. Yeah. That never happened before. We've never come up with something similar. So you want to hear what my slightly related number four is. Okay. All right. So mine was instead of not just sleep, but being stalked by a monster or a curse or a raving hoard of insects or some such thing that hounds you. So you can't sleep for fear of it catching you can't sleep, you can't sleep. So cause if you sleep, it's going to catch you or that even when you're awake, maybe it's whispering dark visions or ideas to you. So you just, every time you want to sit down and relax or have a meal, it's just spurring you to always constantly feel like you have to run and be an emotion. Autumn (20m 35s): And then not saying a nervous wreck. Totally. And I'm not saying that this might kind of have stemmed from maybe a trip. My husband and I took to Labrador where the black flies were just torturous that I was constantly wearing this netting veil. So that even when I was eating or cooking, I was like, literally eating underneath this veil. I walking and pacing and basically it nearly broke me. I'm pretty tolerable, but I was ready to get on a plane and go home. So insects are some of the worst torture you could ever do. And, but not letting someone sleep and having that constant, like the buzz, the buzz buzz, buzz, you know, they're there and they're trying to bite you. Autumn (21m 16s): And it's just, you just don't even, you don't even need to have someone whispering to you. Just a hoard of massive insects is enough to kill, to drive your character insane. So yeah, that's my number. Yeah. Well, true story as well related to that, you know, with a bit already ordered, but the list of the stuff don't know it, but true story as well. We were in a, in a, is in, in Finland, in the middle of the forest and there was this pond that was supposed to fill with water, but this particular summer, it was so dry that it was just very, very shallow water in the pond. Jesper (21m 54s): And it has been like sitting there for months, I guess, you know, just shallow water, no flow through. No, it was just like an isolated pond, right? So there was no current or anything changing the water. So we was like the best mosquito nest you can imagine in the world. And it was like at this particular summer as well, just to make it worse was like the warmest that has ever been. We had like in Celsius a, I don't know what this is in fair Fahrenheit, but we had more than 30 degrees Celsius. So, and you're in the middle of a forest. There's no wind because you in the forest. And then you're sitting inside this cabin and it's incredibly hot. Jesper (22m 36s): And as soon as we step outside the door and I mean, as soon as within one second, you were completely covered in mosquitoes. They came from everywhere, like right at you. And it was, it was the worst, two weeks ever of a summer vacation. We sat inside this freaking cabin for two weeks and just, it was like sitting inside an oven. We were just sitting in there cooking and we couldn't go up because it was terrible. And then in the nighttime, when you could go out a bit, you were still going to get bitten like 20 times, but at least you could go out. So we did go out a bit when it was night, but this was also the year why I got so annoyed with mosquito repellent creams and stuff like that. Jesper (23m 19s): I was like, how to freaking, how, how are they allowed to sell this stuff when it doesn't work? You know, I just covered myself in it and it does getting bitten. So what's the point. I don't understand. But anyway, that was a complete side note, but that's okay. It actually made me realize that, you know, you're admitting my number four was awesome. So thank you. I'm admitting you on number four is really annoying. I don't know if awesome. It's going too far. Tomato, tomato. I have my interpretation. So, all right. What's your number three. Jesper (23m 60s): Okay. So this is also about fear. So we, before we talked about having nightmares about the darkest fears in number four. So now in number three, with fears, I was thinking what kind of fear would be really bad to suffer from? And there was of course, loads to choose from. And some of them would really make the character unable to function in society. But, but then it came to me. Oh, are you ready for this one? I guess, what is it? What if the character is afraid of himself? Oh, geez. Jesper (24m 38s): That's horrible. What if you're afraid of yourself all the time? Autumn (24m 43s): Like you're going to metastatic, are you afraid that you're like insane or a deranged killer? If you let yourself loose or a ticking time bomb. I mean, you just afraid what you're going to do next all the time. Oh, maybe you're going to kill somebody. Maybe you're going to hurt yourself. Maybe, maybe just going to sabotage yourself. You're just afraid all the time of yourself. That's just, you cannot escape yourself. That's really so horrible. Horrible torture for a character. How could you do that? Oh, that was easy. All right. Well that one is pretty. That would be it. I'm trying to think of how it would be to write the book, like what the character arc would be, but that's not go there. Autumn (25m 27s): Actually. I don't know how to do that. To me, it would be a bit like schizophrenia thing to read, like all the time, every chapter, the characters, just running around circles around themselves, unless you find out like, you know, it was a fear and planted it and actually he was amazingly good or would do something wonderful. But yeah, we won't go there. So that would be a diff a dark, dark story to read. Yeah. I feel like it. Yes. Yes. All right. So my number three is to take away the talent that whatever the character is, that is really how they define themselves. So like a swordsman would lose their arm or a maid would lose her magic or using it would cause pain or like an Archer, or if his musician like with a harp would lose their fingers. Autumn (26m 16s): And this would be, cause both psychological pain, which is good, but also physical pain. Because, you know, you would obviously I've gone through something traumatic to have this happen to you. And yeah, I will definitely say this one stemmed out of my own right link. Cause I definitely combined it with the character. I had that with memory loss because they were held captive by centuries. So I had a character that was caught, imprisoned, lost their memory because they were tortured, lost the ability to change their, use their magic. They were changed into a magical creature and every time magic happened around them, it caused them physical pain once they were free from their horrible monstrous form. So it's, it was a fun story to write for that. Autumn (26m 60s): Me, the character hates me still, but you know, we also have another character in, in our joint book that has lost his memory. Yes. That's also quite fun. It is quite fun. But I mean, to me, almost losing your memory is, is almost a salvation because you don't remember the dark things, but to simply lose whatever it is. If you define yourself as this math major, you're going to be this wonderful magic user and you lost the ability to cast magic or worse. It causes you physical pain. When anyone else uses magic, you'd have to move on. That is definitely a character. Or you have to find something other way of defining yourself or you're just going to be a horrible character or become the villain. Autumn (27m 44s): I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. What is west, is it west to lose your short-term memory or your long-term memory? I think long-term, to me, I would not want to. Cause you have, especially so many things you would define yourself. It depends on if you had a really bad experience that you want to forget, but I think I could handle a losing my short term over my longterm. So all the time when you're doing something, you're forgetting what you're doing. How many horrible? I don't want to lose my memory. be like the next one on your list. No, it's not. Autumn (28m 24s): No, it's not, but I don't know if number two. Jesper (28m 27s): Well, I'm gonna come back with a really annoying one in number one, because number two, it might not, it might be one of my weaker ones now. I think being afraid of yourself is worse than this one. Okay. So you should have switched them. All right. Okay. Should I switch them around? I won't judge. It's fine. I know you will. That's my role here. Yeah. Okay. But I think we need some sort of fantasy curse for this one to work. So imagine that we have liked the most handsome prince or the fairest princess the world has ever seen and then comes to wicked witch and Lisa curse. Well, that sounds very cliche already, but don't judge a book by its cover. Jesper (29m 14s): Well, okay. But this course is different because, because of this characters, very, very appealing looks, people are naturally drawn to them, but every time this character speaks to someone, they always end up either being rude or blurting out the person's secrets to everybody else. Oh, that would be, I agree. That should have been your number three, but that would be number three, right? Yes. That would be, it would be really a fun book to write. That'd be a fun character to have I've I've had a few slightly insane characters that do similar sort of things. Autumn (29m 57s): Cause they're a little, just touched a little off and I there's so much fun to write though, because they just do whatever the heck they want even. But I could see in this case, maybe they don't want to, and they're trying to control this. So this is like combining with a couple of years, you know, like trying to fearing, going to these like a ball where they're going to be the Belle of it. And they're so terrified at what they're going to do to make it all go wrong and they just can't stop themselves. So in that case, good. Number two, that would just be the anxiety of it would be oh horrible. It is horrible, but I'm not sure it's the worst thing you can do. I mean, well, okay. I imagine going through life that every time you talk to somebody, you are, you're either being rude or telling their secrets. Jesper (30m 41s): It's pretty nasty. That doesn't really mean you will not have very many friends. No, no. It wouldn't matter how pretty you are. They would, they would not be there to be your friends. And then if you had manipulative friends, they would only tell you secrets about themselves. That would not be true. It would make you look like an idiot. So yeah, you could actually use it in like political games or whatnot. You could tell the person something and then they will go and tell it to somebody else. And if the other person doesn't know that this person is well, actually no, that would work because the other person will know that this person always splits out secrets. So they will think it's correct. Jesper (31m 23s): Exactly. Autumn (31m 23s): Oh, I can have fun with master plotting. I think I should win just for coming up with a good story. I deal with it. No, no. Does not have rules go. I can't change the rules in the middle of the game. Why not? Oh, I'm a referee. That's okay. Oh shoot. He would be the referee. All right. So you're ready for my number to change the rules. I disagree. That's also in the rules that I'm the one who can change the rules. That's what the rules say. I think I've got to have to renew my reevaluate, my contract here. All right. Okay. Let's have you. Number two. My number two is to imprison a character, which we did talk about, but to not tell them what happened to their friends and family or possibly worse telling them different things. Autumn (32m 14s): So they don't actually know which is the truth and what has happened to their friends and family. So sort of like just coming in and be like, oh, well your wife is going to be executed tomorrow or your children or slaves in the ice minds. And so this place with the psychological, so they're in prison, they can't get out. And obviously they're in prison because they either lost a battle or they failed in some way. But so you have that psychological torture as well as being restrained. And to me, this to me is nothing worse than not knowing what has happened to someone you care about too, and have no way of knowing and not have someone toying with your mind about what might be happening to them. I just think that is literally, I think the worst thing I can imagine in this life is to care deeply about someone and not knowing where they are and what's happened to them. Autumn (33m 2s): Just be horrifying. And just imagine if you're the God or whoever it is that is telling the soup, how mean do you have to be to be able to do that to somebody that's just making up excuses, making up these stories about, oh yes, no, but this is, oh, did I tell you that? I actually meant this and oh, just the gut wrenching. This of it. Eventually, no matter how heroic this character was, I think that would just wear, wear them down, wear down their hope bit by bit and losing that hope and just being devastated. I think that's about, and that's my number two, but that's about the worst thing I can imagine ever doing to a character. I have to say. Jesper (33m 41s): Hmm. Okay. So you should have put it in. Number one. No, I have something else for number one. You just said it was the worst. I don't, but I have something else for number one. Oh my God. Well, okay. I have the absolutely best one for number one. All right, let's hear it. This one is going to bring me the victory and you'll have to admit it once you hear this one. Well, I will only admit it if it is true. And once I hear it, it is true. So let me start out by asking you this. Okay. What is like the worst song you can think of? Jesper (34m 28s): Oh, it's a small world after all. Okay. Well, so keep that in mind. All right. And I'm not saying that this one is going to be the most annoying song ever, but it's probably a bit close to it, but okay. Let me just play you a very short song. Clip to get you in the right. Have a sound clip. Okay. Audio clip (34m 51s): I've been married long time ago. Where did you come from? Where did you go? When did you come from? good Autumn (35m 8s): Stuff. Okay. So imagine you have something like that playing in your head constantly like forever. You can never stop it. It just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on forever. That would be, imagine that. Well, considering I have some bad tinnitus, ha I do. I have that all the time. It's horrible, but not cutting my jaw or something like a loop forever. I almost think cotton. I chose better than tonight. I remember it. There was, it was actually from a, a movie I'll assume it's based on a novel. Autumn (35m 48s): Cause all good movies are based on novels, but it was about a Russian astronaut or it was there talking about it. And there was this moment where they're saying, you know, the astronaut gets up there and they're up there for like in the space capsule. Can't move around. It's one of the first space flights. And all as I hear, like every few seconds is a bang and you have that for weeks on end and it's starting to drive this guy crazy and he can't go anywhere and you can't escape it. And the only way he could preserve a sanity was to embrace it and be like, every time I hear it, it means I'm still alive. It means the mission is still going on. Autumn (36m 28s): So I don't know. You would have to just like with my tonight, as you become, it becomes as mental thing where at times you can actually block it out because it is just going on and on. I think it's actually worst if it changes because whenever things change, then you notice it again. So if you have just like this weird random loop of sounds and gunfire, oh my God. I hate gunfire. So is all the other weird sounds that happen? I think that might even be worse than just the same song on repetition though. I have to admit it's a small world after all for 24 hours straight might be enough to make me go insane. That might do it. Yeah. That's pretty bad. It is pretty bad. I will say that. Autumn (37m 9s): That would definitely be fingernails on a chalkboard, which would be one of the sounds you could use to drive someone and say just on a loop, just don't know. Oh, that's just so total loop. So is it like if you definitely make yourself go deaf, would you still hear it? Yeah. Yeah. It's in your head. You hear it all the time. Even when you sleep, it's going on when you're trying to sleep you're mean I don't like that one. Yeah. You want to hear my number one? Yeah, I know. It's the list of the worst things you could do it over character. Yeah. So you know, my number one that is even worse than being tortured and not knowing what has happened to your loved ones. Autumn (37m 54s): Okay. What's that it is to not write the character story. I think that is the worst thing you can do to a character is to have this voice in your head that says, you know, right. We write the story, make me this fantastic character and you just don't do it. I just think that's horrible. Yeah. Okay. That's Metta. I feel like I like you're bending rules, but I understand what you're saying. The, I think I have just, I have elevated above the rules to a worst of more, a different plane of worseness. Jesper (38m 38s): Okay. You are so much inventing your own rules as you go. You think I play by anyone else's rules other than the ones I make up spontaneously? No, no, I get it. But this is the same thing. I sometimes say to my colleagues that it w when, if we have like a work meeting or something, it would be so much easier. If I can bring my referee yellow and red cards into the session, and then you get a yellow card for that goodbye. It will be somewhat each year. Well, you do you really want to kick me off the podcast. Autumn (39m 19s): Now think about that. The yellow card is just a sin bin, so it's just, you just get a timeout. I can do a timeout. You would have to use a lot of timeouts for me, for sure. I like my number one. I think it is the worst thing you could do is you have to tell your character story. If you have a character saying, write me, you need to do that. You need to go, right? Yeah. I still think mines is worse. The infinite loop of music. I still think it would be worse if it's changing. Sounds but sound torture is pretty. Jesper (40m 1s): It's used. It's pretty horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Do we need people to tell us who won here? I feel like our one for, for sure. This one you put on some really good ones I have to say, but I'm going to leave it up to the listeners so they should tell us what just won't concede will. No, I will not. And they should just refuse to concede. I do. They have to let me know if they think I broke the rules or if I just simply, you know, made a better set of rules. I'm just afraid that they're going to say yes. Oh, well, let's see. I think I have one, a lot of them. So maybe I will let you have this one because you did do the work while not making it just feels like a pity victory. Jesper (40m 45s): That's I don't want a pity victory that you're going to have to let the listeners decide. That's the only thing to do. Hmm. Okay. Well, dear listeners let us know in the comments who won this stuff. And if you feel like writing the autumn one, then just let us know if we don't get any comments. It's because I won. And if we do get comments, then it's also because I won that's that's cheating. I think you're making up the, what do you mean? I'm I'm just, well, okay. It's not a rule. It's just a recommendation. I'm just recommending people not to type if you wrote, if they think you won, I see how it is. Jesper (41m 30s): Well, I'm at least I'm, I'm at least an honest enough person not to create personas to go in and leave comments to say that I won. I'll be nice though. I do. I have a wrap-up for this wedding. Cause I was thinking, why in the world are we doing this for the podcast? But then I realized in general making characters suffer should do at least one of two. If not both of these, they should advance your plot or they should deepen or reveal something about your character. So this is in a way an inspiration list of if you're really easy on your characters or you feel like you're plotting or your character arcs, aren't going anywhere. Autumn (42m 6s): Review this list of 10 traits and see what you can do to help your characters. Go suffer a little bit and grow the point is growing and overcoming these fears. Jesper (42m 20s): Okay, indeed. So next Monday we are back to some more serious topics. When we discuss some tools for authors, namely book sales tracker. Narrator (42m 31s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at aApple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

What are fantasy readers looking for? What attracts them to your book? What sort of reader magnet do they pick up the most? Heck, what sort of giveaway should you join? Join Autumn and special guest fantasy author and creator of Bookfunnel, Damon Courtney. They hash out some tips to help you understand what readers love and some ways that Bookfunnel can help you reach readers. Oh, and the fun of introducing your kids to D&D!

How do you create a magic system for your novel that is both unique and interesting? How do you tackle magic systems when worldbuilding a fantasy setting? Tune in to episode 126 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast where Autumn and Jesper share exactly how they create magic systems for their fantasy world. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I am Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 126 of the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And I honestly don't know how we waited this long to discuss how to create a magic system, but never... what do you say? Never late than never or what do you say? Autumn (51s): That definitely works for me. Magic is like foundational a way where we've been joking about- Jesper (57s): Better late than never, that's what you're supposed to say. Not never late than never, that makes no sense. Autumn (1m 4s): Well, you know, my English wasn't perfect sometimes either. Oh, and this is, should it be interesting? Definitely. It would've been joking about magic and destroying computers all day. So, Hey, well, I know to talk about how you would develop that, if that was your story. Jesper (1m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to it because Magic Systems, that is one of my favorite topics. Autumn (1m 31s): This world needs a better Magic System. If I was writing Earth it would probably be bad for some people. Jesper (1m 40s): No honestly, there's not enough magic in real life. Not we need more. Autumn (1m 46s): Magic definitely, this was the story, a totally different anyway. So how are things over a year, a side of the planet? Jesper (1m 56s): It's good, not too many exciting things going on here. To be honest, I'm working on the chapter by chapter plotting of the two and our new Sherry's and a, I should not be done by the end of this week. I hope so that yeah, so that, that's a pretty good, I'm just working on that. And a otherwise soccer is really picking back up here in Denmark last Saturday we had 500 matches to cover and the region that I belonged to, which was a, too much. So we actually have to tell some teams that a, they would not go there were not going to get a referee. Ow, because we didn't have it anymore. Jesper (2m 36s): It was just too many matches on one day they're excited. The COVID spraying, you know, lets go for it. Everybody is just wanting to play matches with just of course it was cool, but it's everybody wants to play out at the same day becomes a problem. Yeah. So just this week alone, I have three matches to referee. So yeah, in that sense it's a bit busy that you could say. Autumn (2m 59s): I was going to say on top of writing on top of, you know, everything else that you got going on plus work and yeah, that just keeps you on your toes is a little bit. Jesper (3m 12s): Yeah, just a little, maybe I'm going to be a bit tired and once we reached the weekend, but I have to referee a medicine that weekend as well. So that's not, you know, let's do it. I'm going to get much arrest. So Sunday I'm just going to be on the couch. Like yeah, I think it will. It'll be a well deserved couch day. I hope it is quiet and rainy and you don't feel like going out and you can just be like surf the internet and watch Netflix. Yeah. I can watch more of American gods. Like we talked about it in a past episode and I started to finish the entire first session of a season of it now. It's good. Autumn (3m 45s): All right. I've got to like a 14 day span coming up where I'm solo on. I might put that on the list. Jesper (3m 52s): I like it is. It's a really good, cool. I haven't checked though to be honest because there was only three seasons and I have not checked if, because I'm always concerned about checking on online about because then I'm going to get spoilers or something, but I have not checked if it's like a proper ending seasonal or if it's just the one of those where they're just not funding it and it just stops in the middle of it. I have not checked that, but I just have fingers crossed right now that is going to be a proper ending. And they had planned to end by the end of the season three, if not, then I'm going to get a bit upset. Autumn (4m 28s): But do I do remember reading that, that yeah, a Netflix likes to have a series that only go two or three. So hopefully people are writing, knowing that Netflix prefers is the only two or three seasons. Jesper (4m 38s): Yeah, but this one is Amazon prime. Autumn (4m 41s): Oh, that's right. Darn Ooh. I don't know. Good luck. Yeah. I don't know. Well, and I dare not look it up on the internet. So the, I don't mind, but how about you? What do you, what are you doing these days? At least a book. So I'm happy yesterday. Revolution came out. I mean, when we're recording this, it record it out. It came out just a few days ago. So by the time it's out in the world, the book will have been out for a little while. But yeah, so it's good to have only one more book to go and my teen to face here. So I can't weight and I'm working on the edits for that one at the same time, working on edits for our co-written book one. So I'm editing and editing and doing some graphic design just to keep my sanity I suppose, and what is going for some Wachs, but we're getting the spring rains, which we desperately need. Autumn (5m 27s): So I can't complain, but that means more inside time than outside time. Oh, you must be going crazy by all that editing by now. Jesus, I'll be happy when I finished tainted Fe and that I'm just working on our books and it will be much smoother. 1 (5m 42s): My may is going to be a busy month for me as far as trying to juggle way too many things. But after this, hopefully it'll smooth out a little bit and I will and mention I'll be a little solo for almost two weeks. So that should just work myself to death, you know, forget, sleep, pretend like I'm not a vampire. And what is your plan? It particularly to have a college student, I could work all night. That's what I'm going to do, but it's a wonderful of working on is wonderful. I can't complain. I just need more hours than the day. Narrator (6m 20s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (6m 25s): A few things to cover in this section today, but the most important part first. So we want to give a shout out and thank you to Creative Gray and James Delton. I think that's how you say it for joining us on Patreon. Autumn (6m 42s): Yes. Thank you for your always appreciate having your supporter. Jesper (6m 46s): Yeah. And not only is that, Dominic also increased his pledge. So thank you for your support as well, Dominic. So it is because if you guys together, of course, with the existing patron supporters that we can keep this show going. So if you are listening out there and you haven't checked patron out yet, then ask yourself if you feel that this podcast is perhaps worth a dollar a month. Autumn (7m 12s): Maybe I, we, we hope we think so. I would support us if I wasn't already supporting that. I give my title for Bella, give herself a dollar. Sounds good. Jesper (7m 24s): Well, that is a link to the show notes from where you can check out Patrion and all their rewards that we offer all over there. If you're interested. And once again, thank you so much a to creative, great James store and Dominic for, for you or pledges a, we really appreciate it. Yes, definitely. Thank you. And the other thing I wanted to mention, speaking of Patrion, I think everybody probably heard about Kindle alibi now, but I actually wrote a detailed overview together with my personal recommendations on Kindle Vela for our patron supporters. So by joining on patron, you are also gonna get access to that and tons and tons of advice that a we don't share anywhere else. Jesper (8m 10s): And a autumn, you have written quite a number of advice, articles and so on, on patron as well to join my writing tips and things their yes. Yeah. So a very good a we, we loved to see actually it is so that once we get to $100 a month on Patreon, which we are very, very close to, then we actually going to do a dedicated patron Q and a session on only for patron supporters. So, you know, if somebody wants to get in on that, you could jump in now and then just a play it's a bit there on patron. Jesper (8m 51s): And it's probably is not going to take too much to put it over the top. So that's true. And then we good to go that, what do you find? Oh, I can't wait. I, because I do, we've actually gotten to talk to a couple of our Patreon supporters and they're all awesome. And that would be really cool to get the help of a zoom chat are something with them. Yeah. And we'd just a, before the recording, this podcast episode, we also just came off the monthly Q and a session we do with all the students and old patron supporters at, at $5 and up. Ah, and it's, it's just wonderful. I love the interaction with people and I love the, you know, being able to see people's faces even better when they joined life. But also some people that just email it in some questions with this wonderful. Jesper (9m 34s): And I love being able to help directly like that. A it's it's fun to do the podcast, but that's more generic. Whereas the Q and a session is just responding directly to peoples' questions. So thats, I love that. Oh, you two, are you hoping? And you know, with COVID easing up, maybe there'll be more conferences and stuff again, because yeah. I love the in-person stuff. It's so much fun. Yeah. And we still have it on the idealist to see if we could do some sort of Am Writing Fantasy thing, maybe a live thing with P seeing people live and stuff like that to sounds dangerous, but maybe we should do that. Autumn (10m 15s): One day was six foot distancing, but where did you see me? The Facebook group, his over almost a 4.5 are for 4,500 members. So you, you know, that it would be a quiet the party. Yeah. That was going to be quite a bit crazy. I think it would be, yeah. Narrator (10m 40s): And on to today's topic. Jesper (10m 40s): So yeah, as I said at the top Magic Systems are probably apart from map-making one of my favorite topics, because it's such an integral part of the fantasy genre. It is. I, it is funny though, because I think I still remember writing, reading fantasy as a, you know, a young kid and thinking, oh, this is so cool. Autumn (11m 0s): And I just assumed all magic was Magic you know, is like the same as Tolkien to the, the theme is the first story you've read. All magic is going to be like that. And it was sort of the introduction that magic could be different in different stories and then there's limitations and how you overcome them that I'm like, oh, this is really cool. And then you start thinking, what kind of magic would I have? We just got asked that on the podcast, what kind of magic would you want? And it, it was just so fun to think about. And especially as a writer to structure magic and to do that, what are the weaknesses? What are the strengths? How can you overcome it? I, to me, those are the F the best parts of writing or figuring those things out and then putting two people together and having a battle and yeah. Jesper (11m 43s): To be good. Yeah. And there, it is also a very nice with a, with a magic wand, if it's just part of the it's part of a shopping cart. I had to me that if you read a, a fantasy novel and the magic just doesn't it. Okay. I'm not saying every single fence as you, Brooke has to have to have a lot of magic in it, but if it, if it's not a, at least the way in one way or another, and it's, it's also maybe a bit cool, you know, that it is not just the same thing you've seen a million times before then it makes a difference. I agree. Definitely. It makes it, there's just something really cool. Autumn (12m 24s): Well, this is what's part partially memorable, but yeah, I can't see either of us ever writing a low fantasy novel with very little magic, then I did right. A dystopian series where there is no magic, but lots of explosions. Sometimes it gets a prize yourself. You know, I have to admit those. That was, I was at the time I was writing my elemental magic fantasy series. And so that was that magic. And I just wanted something that was, couldn't be solved with magic. And it was a challenge to switch to something where things had to be done with just wit and intelligence and guns on them. It can be interesting, but yeah, I prefer a fantasy. Autumn (13m 6s): I prefer a magic and I think it's really fun. We've come up with some really different systems and through our own books. And then the book were writing together that make the magic, even that much more fun and interesting to write about. Yeah. So as part of the world, a building cost that we're offering on Am Writing Fantasy dot com, we have an entire module on developing Magic Systems. And within that, we have created six rules of magic and the course will go into a lot more details about what about ease of the six rules and add them what a lot more content to them. A, but in this episode here on the podcast today, we were thinking to just go through, let's say a bit more quick and then yet not totally quick overview of all the sections. Autumn (13m 59s): I think that sounds very good. And you recorded this module, so I will let you lead. I already missed you. You, you said you were Mo that this is your structure, so I will follow up. Yeah. So basically we'll just go through the six rules of magic here and yeah. And then we can talk a bit about it as we go as well. Yeah. And hopefully it'll help people to inspire you listeners for when you're doing your Magic Systems. So first rule of magic, it sounds like first rule of fight club, world. Was it like you liked these rules? All righty. Jesper (14m 40s): The first of all of a magic. So in order to explain our first rule of magic, I think I need to set the scene a bit because you see Magic Systems can either be very specific, but they can also be vague and mysterious or somewhere in between. That makes sense. Yep. Exactly. So if you take an example here takes a lot of the ring's for example. So on one hand we find magic and the, a lot of the rings that is very specific. So like the one ring, it is very clear what the one, one ring does and how it works. Jesper (15m 20s): It has rules, right? So that's a pretty obviously, conversely, we also find magic in middle earth that seems to have absolutely no rules and laws. Scandals is, yeah. He's the perfect example right there. And there are those, let's say that the magic of middle earth and it's especially with Gandel that is just too random. You know, one moment you will have Gandel running for his life, trying to escape orcs, and that the next one minute he pulls off some weird magic trick that you never heard about it before. And we didn't even know what it was possible in the setting. A, so there was a debate about that, and I'm not going to go into it. Jesper (15m 60s): It's a big, big rabbit hole. And the way I've seen some of the crazy conversations going on about that. So we'll leave that to everybody else to debate. But what I want to say about it, it was more than that. If you are looking at candles magic, then it is less rules and much more mystique. So you don't quite know what he can do really. And on the other hand, the ring, you know, you know exactly what you can do that. So I think, yeah, those, those were, there was one thing that I wanted to point out with Gandel for here. And actually I put paired a shorter audio clip here. Jesper (16m 41s): OK. And it is one of my favorite scenes in a lot of the rings and a, if you are ready for this and let me play it, and then I'll S I'll tell you afterwards why I included it. Is there better be irrelevance? You're not just geeking out on Lord of the rings. Yeah. I'm just going to play like 15 different sign clips from a lot of the rings. And there is no relevance whatsoever except for the Suffolk. Yeah, that sounds good. Okay. But maybe there was a relevance, but you could say if you could work out what it is that right. Jesper (17m 57s): I still get the goosebumps from listening to that is such a good to see which we could show the whole, like the actual, it would be so dramatic that you remember what is right. I care. And to remember what he, his fighting off, but yes, he is a little standing there and I say, you know, you were a not going any further and he's fighting the bell rock. That's what I, it was, I was like, I know is not the dragon. What is that? What is it? What it is it all right. I know where to go watch these movies again. Yeah, yeah. But the reason why included this, because it, you can hear the Clippy proclaims to be that wheel the, of the flavor of Anna. And we have absolutely no idea what the secret file is all about. It, it has never been mentioned before and the entire book a and well, he is just a, a wheel, all of it, for some reason, it could be making point that's the whole point, right? Jesper (18m 48s): It is intriguing. And it leaves us with like a sense of wonder on, we like a wonder what that is, is it sounds cool, but we don't really know what it is. So it put it into different words. Apart from the one ring Lord of the rings is what we can categorize as a soft magic system. So this is basically, if you ignore the one ring, this is where you have no rules. And the author doesn't really probably know himself or herself. What the extent of magic is what it can, it cannot do that. And it says what type of Magic Systems. And to me, I mean, as a writer, I used to think I would never like a soft magic system, but my favorite books, RSF to Magic Systems and in their own a way it's kind of fun. Autumn (19m 30s): I usually like rules because of that. I know how to break them and how to build tension, but it's also kind of fun to be like, it's not a, you could do whatever you want to know how this small little browny being like, well, do you mean, you know, that you can do that with a magic it's magic. So there is something, but for that as well. Absolutely. I think the key with a soft magic system is to be careful with the Dale's X marketer. So if people don't know there was an ex mark, and that is translated into the Cod in the machine, which basically means that a well, something within the machine will all of a sudden make it work. And then everything is resolved. And that, that in other words, to the problem with a soft Magic Systems is that let's say you reached the climax of your novel and the character is in a pinch there. Jesper (20m 18s): And it's a big, big problem at, and all of a sudden, it just pull some Rahm, spell out the nobody has heard about it before. And then he went to the, or defeats a dragon. And Winster everything that you want it to win or whatever that can feel a bit like, yeah, it it's a bit cheap is not a good resolution of an entire novel that you just pull out a random spell that fixes everything. So why don't you do it on metric system B careful with that stuff for the messaging systems. And I think that that's a way like some hard Magic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on the opposite. At the end of the scale, we have the rule based Magic Systems. So this is referred to as hot magic, like you just said, and this example, it could be Patrick Ruthers or a Brandon Sanderson. Jesper (21m 4s): There are often found in this category. So a rule-based magic system just means that the reader us know what magic can and cannot do. So all of a sudden, you don't even have to worry about Davis X Makena anymore because there are rules to be followed. And the character's just cannot do whatever they pleased because its not possible within the Magic system. So they have the characters have to use their resolve and intelligence to figure out how maybe to use magic. But when, how can we use the magic two that advantage then it's not just putting out a, a spell. You never heard about it before. So we have a pretty hot magic system in our setting a Autumn. Autumn (21m 45s): Yes, definitely. Even to have a list of dispels that you could cast. Oh yeah. I think we have a very, I don't think I've had a heart of a magic system that is hard before. I mean, it's very, and it's very limited. It is like, you know what a nine things that you can do. So it is very, very limited and it's different. Cause it's, I think I'm somewhere usually in the middle where it's like, these are the certain rules, but if you could, of what you're doing, you can kind of like, you know, combine and overlap and discover new possibility is using the same rule system, which is always fun. But yeah, hard magic is neat though, because you do know the rules, you know what they are, what you can't do. Autumn (22m 26s): And so, you know, sort of like where the limits are, you know, what can cause tension? Okay. It's almost like Superman and kryptonite, but its it's more interactive and the interplay and that lends in the stress, it's, it's a understandable output so that, you know, the character can fall and be defeated and you're like, oh gosh, no, because this is what gets me with a doctor who with a Sonic screwdriver that light can do anything is a Sonic screwdriver. It, it should not be able to save the world, but it can and some episodes and that just drives me absolutely crazy. So you have to be careful if you do create rules, you don't then throw them to the wind. Jesper (23m 8s): No, I agree. But as you say, of course it can also be in-between somewhere, like just mentioned a, that it's a bit hard Magic Systems, but then not quite so J K Rowling. It's usually in here with her Harry Potter series that there is some rules within the Harry Potter, a universal magic sister, but then not quite any way, because then sometimes he pulls up some stuff that you never heard about it again. So there is also that possibility to, to, to, to settle your Magic Systems somewhere in between these two end points. And it is probably to the last a week, it's a sliding scale right there. You can play it with it as you want, but basically without realizing we actually covered the first rule of magic here, 'cause the first of all of our magic is to decide what kind of Magic Systems are you going to construct you? Jesper (23m 55s): This is a subject to the rules or is it not? Is it somewhere in-between, that's the first of all of magic. That's the first thing that you decide that it's a pretty cool rule. So I'm going to go with hybrid because it's good to have some wiggle room. Well, yeah, I actually liked most of them to be honest. I, I think that that each of them have their own challenges and they also come with their own benefits. A I don't necessarily, I think have a preference. I think most of it is. Okay. So the only thing that I don't like is it is to the soft magic system where all of a sudden, you, you do like the Gandel stumps. I don't like that to be honest because it just feels too easy. It feels like the author didn't know what to do. Jesper (24m 35s): So all of a sudden the magic used to just pull it up some stunts and then, oh, look at that. Everything was resolved. Yeah. I don't like that. But, but other than that than I think all of them are equally good. A AMPATH jail. There's a magic. We're good. Yeah. So second rule of magic. All right. This one asks, where does magic come from? That's interesting as well. So is it, it could be that you pull magic from nature, maybe from the spirits, maybe from another realm, maybe you pull energy off of things or you get from the gods or maybe from within yourself, there's a million options. Jesper (25m 21s): Yes. Reading, spell books, you, but then you'll probably a pill pulling it either from within yourself or your poorly is it's more about the second role is more about it. It's not so much of that, how you create the spell, but is more about where do you get where the, to the energy for the magic com from basically. So you, are you getting granted magic skills by the gods because you pray to them, for example, do you pull it from demons or do you lay lines with like, yeah. Yeah. Like what, like, you know, a setting where they call it the magic users to pull them, put it from within themselves because a magic system is based on emotions. Jesper (26m 2s): So you have to funnel your own emotions in order to, or channel you own own emotions in order to cast spells. So, but it could be a million things. But the answer to the question gives you a lot of interesting things to play on for the next coming rules here. Oh, okay. I like that one to, yeah. So should we move on to rule number three? Yeah. I don't think I have anything to add, but that makes sense. Cause yeah, it's not necessarily that like you have a type, a magic like elemental magic. It is. Is it the gods granting in the magic or is it your own innate solar ability or a power that it's like a, a another sense. So, okay. I got that one. You've got that. Jesper (26m 43s): Okay. Third role of magic or how can create a broken magic system that is, that sounded all, isn't it? You know, I don't think that what would you want to create a broken metric system where the thing is leaving space for magic to fail on? Not to always go asked. It was intended. That creates another sense of wonder. And it also hints of some sort of hidden depth within the magic system that keeps it intriguing and interesting. When do you spell Casa as well? When they had to deal with, or maybe some setbacks are disasters to one is once and awhile from a spell that goes wrong or maybe just doesn't happen at all a or something, you know? Jesper (27m 25s): But if you could create, create some sort, it should not happen very often obviously. But if you could create something that just once in awhile, the magic just doesn't work. Like you expected it to. Yeah, that, that is interesting. I think so. I that's why like this roll is definitely one of my favorites cause I, well, its not because I'm a really good at breaking things. I, but I have a really good at breaking them, but I do good with that. But I think is interesting if you know that if things go wrong, if things can go wonky and you know, you, it pushes your characters into the situations that are you even more, a tense that is better for the reader as better for your story. Autumn (28m 6s): It's so exciting. It, this is why I can do the completely soft Magic system where it's like, well you could do this, but then tomorrow you can't. I like to have at least some kind of groundwork groundwork laid that. I know some things are some things hold true. It is like if a gravity started just tomorrow, decided to reverse for 15 minutes, then to save you from getting hit by a car, wouldn't it be fantastic. But yeah. So I think this is a good one that maybe a lot of people don't think about it until they are trying to fight. But if you want to start thinking of your climax and thinking of ways your hero can fail, you need to know where are the weaknesses or how, how things can go wrong. Autumn (28m 47s): I still loved that about what it is the first time I have a dragon Lance and a red light. How you forget the smell after you, you cast it. So then you have a sit down, do you have to reread it again? I'm like, that's cool. That is really fun to have that weakness. You cast something and then you're like sugar. I need it again. And you to go and do this. Yeah, no, yes. It's true. That's the way it comes from D N D that that's the thing in draglines there. But, but that, that is a very cool, but I think as well of what you just said, it also made me think the back to the soft magic system, because for one, of course, if you have something like a broken magic system, then you need to foreshadow with before the ending that the brakes like. Jesper (29m 28s): So something may be in a minor situation early on to not a novel, we'd get to see the brake in the Magic Systems, so to speak. And it doesn't only just happen at the end because while it does to attention, if it can also come across as if, oh, OK, the author needed a bit more attention. So all of a sudden that spell failed and then never, ever failed before. So that's not good either, but just tracing back to the soft Magic Systems. I use that as well because it maybe just think that it goes with that as well. That if you have a soft metrics system where spells can, well, you just make it up basically because they can do whatever you want to do. But the thing is once the character has cast a spell, you have to remember that they can do it again. Jesper (30m 13s): Which means that if you cast a spell in book one and then in books for you that spell, it would actually have resolve the situation. Well, all of a sudden that character doesn't use that space for the reader will remember, and the reader will be like, Hey, Hey, to wait a minute, why didn't he just cast a spell? He used in book one, it would have fixed the whole thing. So be careful, it just, you need to keep track of this stuff. Then if you have like a, a, a soft magic system that what, what it spells have you actually used, and if they are applicable again, to resolve the latest situation that later book, lots of good only speaks to the fact that he, the characters should be using it again. It's a really good point. It is just because you have a loose are a soft magic system. Autumn (30m 54s): That doesn't mean that you don't have to pay attention to how the magic works or how you end up using it. And you're writing indeed. But that was a side track letting me get back to the fourth rule of magic, number four already, and number for you moving quickly here, what are the limitations of magic? Ooh, excellent. And this fourth rule of magic is actually mostly intended for you as a writer because most readers will probably never notice that it's here, but that doesn't matter what the story will become better. And that is the part that readers will and should notice because when our fourth rule of magic reads limitations, I'm not really talking about the costs of using magic. Jesper (31m 41s): Okay. You know, like you needing setting certain ingredients or something like that. So that that's not what I'm talking about. Limitations just means what magic cannot do. Okay. So that's a very important to know that it is a very important part. So that's like, if you're a water elemental, you can't use fire. That's just the way it is. That works. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just knowing that there is some stuff that the magic cannot do, or maybe it could also just be that a, nobody can ever, if you have, like, let's say you have the soft Magic Systems again, but maybe there was limitations in the sense that nobody can ever cast any sort of teleportation or time-travel spells or something like, you know, you could have certain types of spells or effects that they can not happen ever, no matter what, but those limitations are important. Jesper (32m 30s): And as I said, the reader might not notice what they, we'll probably not know that you have decided to teleportation is impossible. Right. But the fact that this never happens, it it's something that you don't have to play with because when you're writing again, you can't use teleportation. That's a resolution for a, a problem because you'd decided that there was this limit. Yes. And of course, bonus points for every author who could then link their limitations too, some sort of logical sense or a logical reason within their worldbuilding. And so if you can create a link there, you're going to get bonus points. Alright. I like that. I do know they're keeping track of their points, but that is a good point to make it, you know, is inherent to the world to that. Autumn (33m 16s): Yeah. It, so that the two are tied that you have this magic system that comes from the world and can not go beyond a certain reason because of something you've already created in the world. That is, that is cool. World-building that is definitely a masterful. Yeah, it is. Then it also shows the reader that you know, that there was a reason for this worldbuilding element actually had a consequence over here in the magic system. And so on. What's a, yes. It just apps and so much step to the world. Okay. Fifth role of magic almost a year. No. Yeah, we are. Autumn (33m 56s): We're moving right along. Yeah. Jesper (33m 59s): The fifth rule of magic is something we just touched upon actually. It's what the costs of magic. Oh cost. So this is like cost energy or is this, where are, you would say ingredients? It, you know, you are, I have to sacrifice something or a burns and herbal something or you just makes you tired. Is that, what do you mean by that? It could be, yeah. I mean, cost to import now on one hand, because avid readers of fantasy expect there to be a cost for the use of magic. So it's like a trope within this, your honor, and you need to abide to it. So let, let's give two examples here. Jesper (34m 41s): When Frodo uses the one ring siren can sense his presence might and the additional cost it is that the ring also sort of takes control over you. So you, you, you lose yourself to it's way and is power, right? So there was a direct cost of use. There was benefit from using it, but there was a cost every time that you do it, if that makes sense. And the other, I mean, it just kind of mention another example that I'm going to get back to what you set as well. Okay. But in the will of time series, by a Robert Jordan, men go and seen from using too much metric. Oh, that's great. I remember reading. So, and again, there is a cost of using the magic, but as you said, it could also be something less or you could also be that whenever you use magic, you become really, really tired and you have to sleep for example, or you get drained or it could be all kinds of things. Jesper (35m 33s): I think that there should be some sort of cost. Shouldn't be that you should not be allowed to run round, just casting 500 spells. And you know, with like, it doesn't matter. Hmm. But I have not read a few where they had very strong limitations, like the elemental magic and the cost was, you know, slower. Like they could cast quite a few spells, but yeah, if it just something big or if a cast too many of them, and you know, if your only a wider elemental and you are in the desert, there's all these over the smell's you, you can cast anyway. So I think sometimes having a strong limitation will allow you to have a looser cost, correct? Jesper (36m 15s): Yes. Yeah. Because essentially as well, that to some degree what we did with our Magic Systems as well, the costs of a fairly limited, in a sense that, but the limitations are a huge meaning that M because it's based off of emotions, if you have to pull from your emotions, but if you accidentally start mixing to emotions, so basically its like you have to purify your mind. Like let's say M the dragons is attacking you. I use that on a different podcast where yeah. Do that. Someone's going to it. If they've listened to it, they know how this ends true. But if the dragon is attacking you and you are scared, then you can channel being scared and use dispels that are associated to that emotion. Jesper (37m 4s): But if you then all of a sudden, let's say the, the dragon does a swipe with his tail. All of a sudden you didn't expect that. And then you get you a surprise and then you accidentally start challenging surprise as well as being scared at once. That's no good. The, and not in our world. I can engine some place you don't want to be. Well, it was some, you know, it just, all of a sudden you were going to get a random magic effects because the magic system can not handle that. You are mixing emotions. So you have to keep absolutely pure in your mind about what you're channeling and stick to that. And if you start feeling something else, which is pretty difficult not to do when a dragon is coming up to you, you need that the channel. Autumn (37m 52s): Yeah. Yeah. Imagine you needed a happiness pill. That's a pretty damn it difficult. It is. But we do have a cost because we do have a backlash of whatever magic you're channeling then kind of washes over you as well. So there is a cost, but it's a smaller cost because the limitations are so like you really, if you break the limitations, you're gonna have a horrible, a horrible experience who knows what was going to happen. And you know, you could turn the dragon in the, to dragons and yay. Oh my God. She is just making it even worse. Oh yes. Yeah. Well, if you start fighting each other and yourself. Autumn (38m 32s): Yeah. Jesper (38m 33s): Okay. Well that leaves the six rule of magic. All right. Well we're on six already. Right? I want to hear this one. Yeah. Yeah. So the sixth, the role of magic is what are the ramifications of magic? So applying the sixth rule is basically that well when applying it, I think to be honest, you have to limit yourself a bit as well, because at times it could be tempting to like, well, build a different way of how magic impacts society and culture is for every single country and every single species and every single race. And there the entire world, a, you probably don't wanna do that. Autumn (39m 15s): Okay. So ramifications are a sort of, how does that fit into the world that culturally like do people to people without magic tolerate magic users or they want to capture them and use them like lucky left for cons of what's going on with the whole world and those who do and do not have magic. Yeah, exactly. What, what, what impact does it have on society? The effect that magic exists I'm and I think this is, I mean, you can have a situation like, well, for example, lets just take Gandel for again, because it's so easy. Jesper (39m 55s): A lot of the rings or not at all. Okay. Well now what was that? That the other podcasts we won as well, they said to drink every time we've talked about laundry now and the thing that happened five times and one hour, goodness, that was drinking tea. Yeah. But where it was I going with this? Yeah. So for example, Gandalf, he he's a very revered in the middle earth. 'cause he's a magic user. Right? So in that society, the major that I just respected people, right. You could leave it at some things as simple as that, it doesn't have to be more in terms of ramifications, but it could also be that maybe people don't like people using maths, you maybe there was like a magic police that arrest people who use this magic or something like that. Jesper (40m 50s): Or maybe everybody can learn magic. So there is tons and tons of school's that you can, you, you can go back to when you are, you just start learning magic or there are so many ways you can make it a show in your culture and in your environment and in you're setting that magic his part of, of the setting, but just don't go overboard and cram into a million variations. But I think if you pick a few things and work with that, then that's going to get you a quite far. Yes. I think that makes sense. I mean, that's like my epic fantasy with elemental, a magic, anyone who has elemental magic was like for us to join an order, the church of for orders. Autumn (41m 30s): So you could even make it a religious, a quasi religious, I mean the magic came from the goddess. So you know, it all kind of fit together. So those are really fun ways to worldbuilding and make the magic fit into the world a little bit better if the limitations are coming from the world, you know, the result of having magic should be part of the world as well. And I think considering all that we've discussed is also worth mentioning how there are some cliche Phil Magic Systems that we have seen way too often. No. So I'm going to mention a few here. All right. This will be fun. I like to, the cliche is I'm going to mention a few ever since we mentioned you will see it, that are right. Autumn (42m 15s): I'm not sure where I will ever since we mentioned having a pen name in just writing a completely trope trash fix it, it to sell it so much. To me, it was like this other life now secretly wanted to do this. It, it would actually give you a bit fun, but I think it would be quite silly as well with people there's nothing really silly. So the time you are creating a Magic system for your setting, try to avoid the following for alright. Okay. Okay. Number one is healing based Magic. Not that healing spells there is that there are quite common. There is nothing wrong with that, but when magic becomes more or less like a standing for a hospital and you better stay clear that, and I've been in a bit guilty about that one myself. Jesper (43m 6s): So to try to avoid that, if it's not a very funny, when all the time the magic used to just heal, whoever gets hurt and they just continue to not cool. I used to have to set up to the world because I've definitely done this to, but if you don't wanna kill off to many characters to make the costs really high, you can heal someone, but it's a high cost to do it. But yeah, it's, it is one way of avoiding, killing off everyone. If that's something you don't wanna do. Yeah. But then to find better ways of doing that. Yeah. It's good to have a high cost to the 10 and number two is throwing Fireball's and the guilty of that to, but fireballs no, no pleas. Jesper (43m 53s): We've seen it a million, but then do something else with fire to you do to, to have them throw in something other than fireballs pleas just once in a while. No, no fireballs hold them. You know that you are prohibited from firewalls from now on a, it never gets breaking. I like breaking the rules. So be careful if that okay, well you're not allowed to do a lot of fireballs and only fireballs just, and I know that you're not gonna do that because you're not going to do the on the board. Okay. Yeah. And that this next one, this one is for you. All of them. So I've, I've been guilty after the first to myself. Autumn (44m 34s): Okay. So this one's specifically mine. I've, I've created a specific one for you because I have to, now that I'm guilty off and then I'm feeling bad and then I have to have to have to drag you down with me. All right. If I to pull me down and what is this? A slide elemental magic. I love the elemental magic there. It is seeing so many times whenever you are magic. See, and every time I think he, I tried to do something different when I did mine. I tried to have the powers do of a plus there's five is not for, so I just have five elements. But then you do have to explain that even though that as a culture in this world has five elements. Autumn (45m 15s): But yeah, I don't know. I still have no guilt. I adore him elemental magic and I tried to make it a scientific so that it was earth was minerals and you know, dead things and yeah, fire water could purify to, there was so much fun trickling out that precipitates, I don't know. And fire can do light to the, to cast illusions. I'd tried to make it a little fresh. Come on. I feel like you are not re very taking my cliche film. Magic Systems is a very seriously, just a basically saying that all of them is is, is good. It's magic. I have no regrets. Autumn (45m 56s): I just put in a magic. Jesper (45m 57s): Okay. What about it? My number for, and you probably don't like that one either then. Yeah. This is a guy with Harry Potter that we've just had too many witches and warlocks using once and spells ingredients. So let's take clear of that one. It can, can you just give me one, then I can get you that one actually. Aye. I've never written the story with spelling, ingredients and stuff. And I did love supernatural and the, the, you know, they'd be tracking down all this stuff that they needed for the spells, but I don't know, its, it would be hard to do it another original one. Is it sort of like a authoritarian legends at this point? I've read enough of those at the moment. Autumn (46m 40s): That I'm good. Yeah. I don't feel that this was a very good ending because I thought I had such good Clichy for the magic systems. And then your not on board. All I can just feed you. I want to write the cliche pill, magic systems. I'm going to just, you know, I want to start, I want to start this episode. Just not going the way I wanted it. Oh, I'm gonna go read that your pantry on a post on a Kindle Villa and maybe use that to write a cliched Magic Systems and I'll just be having a blast this weekend. Oh we have to be better here. It is. It is not going well. So the next week a autumn should have a very good interview lined up for you if all goes well. So it make sure to tune in it for that. Narrator (47m 23s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritin Fantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Do you want to make your characters and writing pop? There are some pro techniques to enhance a character and connect the reader with her/him. One of them is using Deep POV. Join us for a discussion on Deep POV. What is it? How do you do it? And when are there times you can purposefully not use it? We've got you covered in this episode! To check out the K-Lytics report we mentioned, head over to https://k-lytics.com/dap/a/?a=7419&p=k-lytics.com/epic-fantasy And you can check out our book Plot Development here: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Narrator (3s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (31s): Hello, I'm Jesper. This is episode 125 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And it's now time to discuss Deep point Of view, how we can Help you Story. I think that should be an interesting conversation, Autumn. Autumn (50s): I think so. I liked this one because you know what I like to put up the point of view, and this is like one of my favorite aspects of writing. And so we were just looking at what people liked as well on the, some of the pastor podcast episodes. And it seems like the ones that have to do with writing crafts are quite popular together with our very silly monthly ones where, where we just like go out on something as well. Those are my two favorite podcasts. So I'm with the listeners and I guess it means we have to do more of them. Right? Jesper (1m 22s): Probably we shouldn't do it like two or three times a month with it just to at least a half. I, that might be a bit too much, Autumn (1m 29s): but we can't have a whole, like there has to be a month dedicated to podcast in a room with nothing but a stupid tub, top 10 list. Jesper (1m 42s): All right. Maybe not, but we'll be fine, but how are things going on you and all of them. Autumn (1m 50s): I don't know if they are good as you know, but the listeners might not be as I just got back from a trip from seeing my parents, which I haven't been down to their house since like pre pandemic, of course, because we are a good little kids, but it was so nice and also so hard because they seem to have, like, it seems like everyone saying like the pandemic was like, what a century. They seem to age on way too much. On the last year, it was just terrifying. But you know, they take their naps and I got to spend some time with them and we went, we did go out, I got my first vaccinations, you know, 50%, 80% protected. I know it's a lot. So I have my next one scheduled. Autumn (2m 30s): And so we, we did go to work to do breweries and we went out just a little bit and then it could be a huge tide dinner or, you know, I'm a foodie yellow food. So I was making potstickers and Tom got gum, like Nike pronounce it Now, but I made it a coconut based supe. And it was just, honestly, it would be nice to go and visit your parents again after such a long while. Oh, it was eight drank too much beer drank too much wine, ate too much sugar. It's all of a good thing. It was a lot to like, exactly. You got to hang out with my folks. And they were definitely, they are definitely my, some of my favorite people on the planet. So it was really excellent. Autumn (3m 10s): And I got to see my nephew and he gave me, and I don't know if you saw the picture I shared on Instagram and Facebook, he gave me a 4k monitor, a 32 and just give it to monitor. So I, well, he wasn't using it and he does coding. He does, he was doing a little bit of a graphic design, but he's going more into coding. So it was like, I don't need for K to read code has got to monitor. I was like 24 inch side by side. He's good. But yeah, he didn't need this one anymore. And he knows I've been doing graphic design on my 13 inch Mac pro. And then it gives me this more as you put it, it was like, I could bring it to you, but it takes up my whole bag. Autumn (3m 51s): Wow. So I'm so excited. It was like the best late birthday present ever. It is fast. Spectacular. I have it. Yeah. I have to find a place to put it in our cabin Jesper (4m 4s): because it's too big for a table. Autumn (4m 7s): Yeah, exactly. It is. It is too big for a table. And so yeah, we were in, and we don't have a ton of wall space cause this captain has a ton of window. So like you don't get there or there are, so I can't wait though. And I already, yeah, I already was playing with a cover on it and going, Oh, I need to fix that. I couldn't even see it before. So, and it was a wonderful trip, Jesper (4m 30s): But we also have a trip that we went to visit my brother and his wife this past weekend, which is probably the first trip we've had in close to a year, I would say too to COVID-19 as well. And it was really nice. And the, the, the weather was good enough for us to sit outside a car, a couple of hours on the terrorist as well. So that was, that was good. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. But also over the past week, I've started watching a new show on Amazon prime. Have you watched the American gods? Autumn (5m 5s): Oh, no, I haven't. Not at all. I have seen it a little bit too. It, Jesper (5m 8s): I am only two episodes a season, but I would have to say, I mean, I avoided For, I don't know quite why, but for awhile I just felt like, know, it's not my thing. I don't want to watch it, but then I thought, yeah, okay, I'll give it a shot. And I started watching it. It's really good. I mean, after the first two episodes, so I'm like, Oh my God, I'm hooked. You know what? It's like, it delivers Autumn (5m 34s): Its kind of the way Jesper (5m 35s): That we liked to ride stores as well. Do you know? It it's very easy. You don't quite understand what's going on it. So it's kind of a bit of a mystery thing going on in there. Like, and, and the main character does not understand either. So he is trying to figure out what is going on here? Why are these people so weird? Did this? I think they are God, but they are behaving really weird and they can do all kinds of supernatural things, but it's not over done. Like is just small things. Like he flips a coin and every time it lands on heads, for example, just like every single time, just small stuff like that. And I still don't quite understand after two episodes of what they're trying to do and what does God actually wants the main character to do. Jesper (6m 15s): I don't know. And, and so that's the main character doesn't know either, but I like it. It is very intriguing and I want to watch more. Autumn (6m 28s): Oh cool. Well that's my husband has some trainings through may. Like he'll be gone half the month at two different times, so maybe I'll go check it out, but it sounds like it will keep me in touch with, Narrator (6m 38s): We can go on to the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (6m 43s): So back in episode 122, so that's not that long ago, but we had Alex Newton on from K Lytics and she had some great market research about the FANTASY Shamara and Alex were so incredibly kind afterwards that he should be at the latest detailed Fantasy market report with me. So I thought I would summarize the conclusions from that report here for everyone's benefit. Right. Autumn (7m 13s): Nice. Yeah, that sounds great. I can't wait to look at it when you summarize it and I know Jesper (7m 18s): You don't mind them. So I've picked out like what is like maybe eight, seven, eight different key points here that I thought I could just a waffle off here and hopefully be a bit helpful as well. Excellent. So first of all, after that, A romance in thrillers Fantasy remains the third highest selling Shamrock of The on the Amazon Kindle platforms. So, and during the first COVID-19 lockdown period, there was a very clear and very sharp drop in sales of APEC fantasy novels. Jesper (7m 58s): But the good news is that here in 2021 sales have been trending upwards again. So I don't know why people don't want to read Fantasy when they're on lock down, but I will hold it against them. I'll I'll have a grudge about that. Autumn (8m 14s): Yeah, I agree. I mean, seriously, you're stuck at home and maybe it's like too, like you can't go out and be in a fantasy world for a long time. Jesper (8m 23s): I would go. So the Epic Fantasy market is quite large. K Lytics measured around 800,000 a month in royalties being paid for Epic Fantasy. So that's pretty good. Mmm, wow. But it also shows actually there is in the top of the Epic FANTASY Shaundra, the competition is quite hard up there. So it means that it, it, it is a pretty good to write it in because there was a lot of readers, but to be on the bestseller lists and the two earn like on the top of the top of the chart, you have to sell a lot of books. Jesper (9m 12s): So it's not easy to get to the top of those lists, but, but at least there was a lot of readers. So I think that's good news. Autumn (9m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. That is good news. I mean even a small piece of a very big pie. It was a piece. It still tastes good. Yeah. Jesper (9m 30s): Maybe depending on what kind of pie it is. I guess I don't like Apple. Is that enough? It's true. I feel like most people like Apple. Yeah. Autumn (9m 40s): Well, you know, its kind of bland. Yeah. Well it, over here that there was a few States where they built cheddar cheese on top the top of the pie and I ain't touching that. Can Jesper (9m 50s): We do like a chocolate pie? Is that possible? Autumn (9m 54s): We Can do chocolate. I prefer coconut, but we can do a chocolate coconut and that'd be good. Yeah. Jesper (9m 59s): I don't think this is in Decatur or K Lytics report. So the next one and this one will interest you Autumn. So if one looks at the top 250 covers in the best seller list, then about half of them show symbols or scenery on the cover as opposed to any characters. Wow. Autumn (10m 26s): That's so interesting. It was surprising for me because me as a reader, I look at it and I'm like, eh, you know, what does it tell me about the Story? It's a pretty Fantasy picture, kind of interesting, but every time I've used a symbol picture as well. So I find it as interesting as well, Jesper (10m 43s): Because then it goes onto say that 23% of covers shows a male, usually like warrior type of character on the cover. Whereas 14% shows a female character. But the interesting part though, is that okay if you compare the sales rank between the books that has a female character on the cover, versus those that has a male character on the cover, the female covers actually tend to rank higher than the ones with a male Now. And I think that's a very interesting to know as, as well. 'cause if you look at the fact that there is 23% of the mails on the covers, you might go to the conclusion to say, Oh, well that means that it's better to have the males on the cover it, but actually it's the opposite. Jesper (11m 32s): It's better to have females. Autumn (11m 35s): Yeah. What do you need to have more, have more female cover? We have an Elvin female assessment. Yeah. Jesper (11m 43s): Got it. Autumn (11m 44s): Yeah. Well we can do, how can I put her into book one? Alright. We won't get in to cover a spectrum and other good Jesper (11m 52s): News for those who write military, that's a category on Amazon and hear the sales rank versus competition ratio is quite in your favor. So in other words, it's a pretty good category to publish your books in. So I think that's a good information to have if you're right. That kind of book. Autumn (12m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're thinking of writing that down Jesper (12m 20s): Pricing, so $3, $3 99 and $4 99 is the most frequent price point among FA Epic fantasy books on Amazon. But the highest yielding price point is nine 99 followed by seven 99, which I think is pretty good news for us because we are planning to sell around six 99, seven, nine to nine or something like that. So that's pretty good. That is the highest, highest kneeling price point. Autumn (12m 52s): Yeah. That is really interesting. I'm surprised you think. Why do you think that counts box sites are those individually books? Jesper (12m 59s): I think it is. I think in part it has to do with the traditionally published books where the chart's more and there are, that's probably a school's to data in a bit, I guess M but what it does prove though, is the people who are willing to pay the higher price point for books a day. So if you make sure that your covers are indistinguishable from the traditional publishing, meaning that they look just as a professional, then there is, there should be no reason why people wouldn't want to buy it. And at six 99, seven 99 or something like that, even nine 99. I know we talked with the actually twice, I think, but way back when this podcast was a YouTube channel, we talked to Joseph Malick twice and he sells his, all his books are at nine 99. Jesper (13m 49s): So it's yeah, it's a possible, right. But anyway, three 99, four 99, that's the most frequent price points. So if you want to stay within the frame of what people are used to, then that's probably the price point to go for it, but we are going to sell out books a bit higher than that, but it's up to you. Of course. Autumn (14m 7s): Sounds exciting. And also Jesper (14m 10s): About two thirds of all the Epic fantasy books are outside Kindle unlimited. Autumn (14m 20s): Hm. Yeah. Interesting. So there's only a third that are in Kindle unlimited. Oh it's so that is, it makes me wonder if the people, if that's a smaller pool so that they are actually doing well, there's less competition. Or if readers just prefer to be outside of it, you know, there are wide, these books are, or why it's not a hundred a month. Jesper (14m 40s): I can only say got my gut feeling. Is that a, I think there is room to play in Kindle unlimited. If you put Epic FANTASY in there. I think, I think that you can get a new readers because there's not enough Epic fantasy books in Kindle unlimited. They want to read. So I think it's probably a pretty good place to place your books, but that is just my gut feeling. I don't have any data to back that up. So there is a ton more stuff in this report. So if you are curious, do you have listener? I should. Yes. Did you go and check out the full report is mighty helpful in order to understand what is working and what is trending in the Epic Fantasy market. Jesper (15m 23s): And I only gave you the highlights here. So we'll add a link in the show notes so that you can check it out yourself. The full report will cost you $37, but it is well, well worth it and on to perhaps a good place to stop is with a definition. Autumn (15m 47s): Why is it? Oh, that's all it's boring sometimes. You know, I think it was a very good way to start though. It's true. Well, it should be, it helps to clarify things, but yeah. So Deep point of view that has usually referring to a third person limited, which I think that sounds even more confusing point of view. So a third person is when you use, he, she, his, her, you know that tight, but rather than I, which is a first person and limited means not omniscience. You literally are like Writing along on the character. Scholder you can only see, hear, feel, touch what that character feels seasoned here is in touch. Autumn (16m 27s): So if someone has a running up to the character from behind the character is not going to see it, they're going to see what's in front of them, like their best friend standing up in throwing an X and thinking, Oh my God, why is he is trying to get out of my best friend or trying to kill me? Well, really throwing an ax at the, you know, the ogre coming up from behind. So those are the types of stories we're talking about. So if you write it in first person and your property, you are already limited and you are already sort of in a Deep point of view, your really grounded anchored into that character. So what we're doing is we're looking at anchoring the reader into a character, but using third-person now, why is a third person useful for Fantasy Writing? I know, you know this one, right? Jesper (17m 9s): Well actually, before getting that far, I was also thinking that, Oh, maybe I I've tried to prepare some examples just to a few prepare. I always plan things on them. Why do you keep pointing out things? Autumn (17m 29s): Yeah, because I think I just looked at the title of the day and said, Oh yeah, I'm good to know Jesper (17m 33s): This way. I plan things. It was just to try to give you a couple of examples of that. So maybe, maybe make it a bit more real, but basically you, so we are trying to, with the point of view, we are trying to sort of hit a style of writing where we immersed to read as much as possible into the point of view character. And I think it's basically like, if you imagine watching your favorite films or TV shows, you know, we are trying to mimic in the Writing that we only experience in CS and knows what the character knows a and thereby we are limiting the narrative, so to speak. Jesper (18m 19s): So I tried to make one of each, so an example where we have like a third person limited, like that's what most of us Fantasy authors normally. Right. And then another example with a Deep point of view. And I don't know how well I'm going to succeed here. So you'll have your own, my edit there anyway, Autumn. So you will have to edit stuff. Okay. This is the regular third person limited. Okay, ready? I need to do my voice storytelling my voice. I probably can't keep that up without a laughing. Okay, fine. Are you hurt the King's voice? Booming in the great hall, calling him in the way he had come to know signifying the King's anger. Jesper (19m 7s): What had he done wrong? Fi find out. I didn't know yet if a familiar unease ceased his stomach. Okay. So that was like third person limited, pretty standard regular. And now my attempt of a transforming the same scene into a Deep point of view. So, and now you are the editor here. Remember the penetrating force of the King's voice echo throughout the great hall. Find out, felt it in his bones. And as he had so many times before, what has he done wrong this time? Come here right now. Jesper (19m 47s): Shout at the King as if he was nothing but a laptop find out it felt the knot twisting and tightening in her stomach with every step toward the red faced man. Autumn (19m 60s): Yeah. That's perfect. Congratulations. I think that's fantastic. I think it's pretty obvious. Yeah. Jesper (20m 5s): Obvious. Which one is the most engaging, right? Autumn (20m 11s): Oh yeah. The second one that was just, I mean, you know, to me, it's so brilliant because you really, you feel it. It's not, you're not just being told what's is going on with the character or what he's thinking and feeling that you kind of, you feel it, you were like, Oh, the gut twisting, you know, the anxiety. It, it heightens to me like, if I'm thinking of it as an art terms, it's upping the contrast, your getting that really kind of gripping engagement, what you don't get with just regular sort of center or a third person limited. Yeah. You definitely don't get up. Jesper (20m 42s): All righty. You, you feel the blood boiling and all of that stuff right in that that's the way anger or the sadness or whatever the character feels that we feel it that's at least that's how I feel like Deep point of view, just bring so much more to the story. I actually learned what act in preparing, because yes, I do prepare for these episodes, all of them. But in preparing for this episode, I a, I actually learned that a star, this a Deep point of view Writing is actually only became popular in WRITING like 20 to 30 to 40 years ago. I didn't know that before or researching this. So that's that I find that quite interesting. Autumn (21m 26s): Yeah. I mean, before that, even if you look at Tolkin, it is technically omniscient, even though you're mostly staying with Frodo, but there are times token head hops because you know, no one else what other people are doing. They had more of a Narrator type of voice. Now we have more of a character. Yeah. Jesper (21m 46s): You told her why is that in the beginning? It is. It's much more akin to what you normally see in movies. And so on. I mean, I know of course you don't get under the skin of the characters in the movies, But, but watching the character's in a movie, you sorta get the feeling about their feelings. Right. So it's different from being told that The, then he went there and then he did this and, and so on. Autumn (22m 12s): Exactly. And it's, I mean, that's where you have those little tension. I think it really ups the tension to be in the point of view, even in movies, you had that moment where you might dwell on something like just the breathlessness or if a panting I have watched a movie recently were the whole seen was black. And you had just heard someone say breathing, that's a Deep point of view. So that is when you're just, everything is down to just that one little focus. And because it is so tension, field and emotion field, you really engage with the character. If the bad news is, if you hate the character, you really like, Oh, I don't think engage with this character. But if you like the character, if you were rooting for them, Oh, you are just like grip in the book or the Kindle. Jesper (22m 52s): Now I talk to my son. Well, so far away from what you were saying early on that, I completely forgot now. Autumn (23m 1s): Oh, well, why, why are there to see the author specifically writing in third person verses first person? Or what's the better angle that this is? What is the main mode? I do know there are some first-person stories out there, but majority of the authors are the right person. Jesper (23m 17s): You think the last part of it is because we like to have multiple point of view characters. And so when we write the third person limited, it, it allows us, for example, between chapter's to switch to another character. And then we are getting inside the head of that character. But if you were writing in the first person, you can see call every character. I then it would be pretty confusing for the reader who is I now? And then this is all of a sudden another person. So yeah, as you said, a fantasy novels do exist with a first person, but they are, they are pretty limited a that there is not that many of them, I think in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, Autumn (23m 55s): No, mostly urban fancy. Yeah. I think urban fantasy is mostly an AI-based Story, which surprises me. And even when I write from urban Fantasy and I always stick to a third person because I like characters that that's what Epic Fantasy I can think of Tolkien, how many doors and every one that was running her off onto this quest, all of the hobbits. I mean, there were so many characters. You could not write that in first person or he could do like, who are we here? What are we talking about? You know, I'm in small, I've got to just stick with a small, we're fine. Right? Jesper (24m 27s): Yeah. But I think as well for us, for this whole thing to actually work, you have to know your point of care, point of view characters really, really well, because otherwise you, you simply won't be able to write their personal point of view about what's going to happen. So yeah, there's a step. Autumn (24m 50s): Yeah. There is that you definitely its up and things, a notch because when you're in Deep point of view, everything comes as if it was from that character. So even your word choice, one of my examples is I had a character who hated her father. So every time I'm in her point of view, should, did she ever think of even her father, his father? No. She thought of him his first name as father. She would never say daddy or dad, because that is, you know, that's an emotional resonance. And so it is literally picking every choice your metaphors become from that character. So we should do that anyway, but you really have to do it with the point of view. Autumn (25m 30s): So you have a character that is a sailor. Is there gonna be thinking someone has a S their tents like taught the rigging? There are not going to have some things, you know, Oh, their stress, like a farmer or under the hot son. That's not what they are familiar with. You, you have to be very specific with every word choice so that you're just kind of pulling the reader in to this very narrow window of what it is like to live in. Yeah. Jesper (25m 51s): Not only that also in terms of the character's personal and motivations and the background of the character, or even, you know, like something happens and a character don't like it. Okay. So you need to know, well, the reason he doesn't like it, this because a so-and-so happened in the past and it brings back back bad memories and stuff like that sort of thing. You can not see it into the narrative unless you know it, so it puts more demand on you to have a new character creation process to really know them. Of course, a in the plotting guidebook, we wrote, we have a whole section that we'll talk you through this. We will put the link to that won in the show notes as well. Jesper (26m 32s): So, so if your interest that you can check it out at any rate, or whether you follow a guidebook all, or you do it by yourself, I think the main point is just that you really need to understand all those details about the, or otherwise it's going to be very hot. You can ride the point of view, but it's going to be very hard to do it well, unless you know those things. Autumn (26m 54s): Yes. And it does, it's going to take practice anyway. But yeah, and I think one of the other things is like you mentioned your, Your have this character reacts a certain way because of something that happened in the past, but not always jumping back into that flashback, or even explaining like acted, you know, aggressively or said, I don't want to hear about that being. And then he has, and then you'd do that character. He thinks about the time that blah, blah, blah, you don't do that. In the point of view, you don't go wander off into character thoughts either. You, you really it's picking and choosing what is going to be related to the reader slowly and over a time. And it should come out in the other dialogue or a, maybe you'll do a flashback later, or you'll have something else to explain why that reaction is. Autumn (27m 38s): You can allow that the reader to be a little bit like, Oh, well, I don't know why they did that. Exactly. But it's an obvious trait. Something triggered this emotion. And that is definitely one of the writing techniques to is that you actually get rid of things. Like he thought he wondered hee all those little verbs. It says the character is thinking that no one of these just do it. You have that thought, Oh yeah, you do this action. You don't think about doing it, right. Jesper (28m 4s): Yeah. At least some of what you said there. I think that that applies just as well to the third person limited you, you should try to not wander off into all these kinds of other explanations as well. And that's not specific to Deep point of view where so much I think it's yeah. It's, it's just good Writing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Autumn (28m 27s): Yeah. Geez. You both said it. Yeah. Too funny. Jesper (28m 31s): But is there, I was just wondering, because you're being the editor here. So if, for example, let's say I'm being the listener here. Now I wrote, I wrote my first draft and now I'm sitting down and I want to edit it and I want to make sure it is Deep point of view. Well, enough if I can say it like that. So is there anything you would say, like, this is a sort of the check list or these other things that you should be top five things you should be looking for? Something like that. It is. Is there any, anything you do when you edit all of them too, to make sure that, that the product is well in or written well, and the point of view? Autumn (29m 21s): Absolutely. And I mean, the first one I think is taking out those things, like he thinks like, when she feels like if you had to sentence, like he, you know, if he feels a sweat of sweat beat on his forehead, no, you just go straight to sweat. What does it feel when a sweat runs down out of that hit right on his skin. Yes, exactly, exactly what you try to really imagine what it would feel like to do that. And you cut out those words that he feels, and he thinks, because those are actually create a little barrier between the character and the reader. And the whole point of the point of view is to just remove that barrier. And another thing is you often see people say like, he thinks about this, or he thinks that she is an idiot. Autumn (30m 8s): No, it would literally be like, she's an idiot. That would be the character thought you would start doing those little introductory phases because it is literally like journaling in third-person. You want it to seem like you were just totally seated in that. Yeah. Jesper (30m 22s): Yeah. I think that is exactly the key. Right? If you imagine yourself, when you're riding, if you imagine how I am inside the character, I wouldn't say to myself, I'm thinking, I would just think it right. Autumn (30m 35s): I know exactly. If you wouldn't write it in first person, you won't write it in a Deep point of view. And so, yeah, like I think about going to the grocery store now, don't you just go to the grocery store and that is how it works. And those are the important little clues. And even like I said, the Italian is a lot of ice. Sometimes get readers who will read back when I stuff it's like, well, this is a thought it should be an Italian as well. You don't have to do that at the point of view, it should come across very naturally. If you want to see some really good Deep point of view, go read some George RR Martin. He is an expert at really anchoring into a character's head and really feeling like that world comes alive through that character. Autumn (31m 18s): And that is, you know, you really make sure you dwell on the other senses, seeing what else is going on so that you have the thinking, the feeling of the touching, the tasting, all of those things are very much alive and nuanced throughout every single chapter. Yeah. Jesper (31m 34s): Yeah, absolutely. And I think actually, I don't know if, if, if, if you agree with me here, but I'm almost thinking like isn't a lot of this really a bit of just a mindset shift on your approach to Writing rather than it is like a new technique as such. That's, that's almost how I think about it. Autumn (31m 59s): I think it is. It is just realizing that the reason for this person is so spectacular is that you are really just with one character and you feel so connected with that character. And that's what gets you turning pages is because you want to see what happens to that character. So this was being able to do that exact same thing and those exact same emotional pools, but with multiple characters. And again, though, this is where you need to be careful or is that you then don't want to have 10 character's in your story. You want to keep it as limited as possible. And when it really becomes hard is when you switch to a character you don't like, or like the villain, you want to do the best you can to be that character, his voice, and show the world through their perspective. Autumn (32m 47s): And that's why it works so fantastic. When you have those gray characters that you have a good characters that have some bad falls and bad characters that had some really good ones that you can show that they are really doing all of the wrong things, but for the right reasons. And that's where it's so impactful. It, it makes the stories. I think the ones that are really linger with you after you closed the book are the ones that are written and Deep point of view because you just really can not get these characters out of your head. And when you're writing it, you really can't get these characters. Knowing that Jesper (33m 19s): That's also a challenge in the sense that we recently completed our first a reader magnet on a short story where the character, he is one of the Ember dwarves and I was setting, which means that the end, but wolfs are not very nice, you know, setting a no. And then the third thing is that as people know, I can actually be quite a challenge to write a character like that because he can come across as not being very nice. He's not very likable necessarily because that's the way he is. That's a part of their culture. Jesper (33m 59s): So it was a bit of a challenge to write it in a way whereby the Rita actually understands where the guy's coming from, you know, the, that they understand, like he's not doing these things or he doesn't view things this way because he wants to be evil or anything like that. It is just, that's the way he grew up. That's, that's part of his culture. And of course, Deep point of view is excellent at explaining those things. But at the same time, it's also a bit of a challenge to, to nuance it a bit so that it doesn't come across as well as to blatant, because it's quite easy to sort of say, like, you're saying, well, we use grocery shopping before. Jesper (34m 42s): Right. But, but if it was, you know, if it was something set Fantasy related, like it all peoples all humans, I hate to humans or whatever. Right. And then it's very easily to just say that and move on. But then you're also leaving the reader with the feeling like this is a complete idiot, this person, right. I don't like that, that character. So I guess is what I'm trying to say and what I'm talking to, what else is probably as well that you need to be a bit mindful about how you do it as well, too. So you can just do not end up coming across as it will assholes. Basically. You don't want that either, right? Autumn (35m 22s): No, no. I think that's a really important, I mean, if for some reason maybe this is, it speaks poorly of me, but I have often been able to get into my villains easier than a few other characters. I had one that was a politician and an extrovert, and he could just whip off these speeches and to get into his mind. Cool. I mean, it felt like it was a contortionist, but that's just what you're trying to put on this other person's skin and its even more. So you have to understand how they act, why they act, how they would see things and why do they care about the things they do, even if its completely different from you and you'd have to avoid explaining it from an outside perspective, like, Oh, humans are horrible and just go all out. Autumn (36m 6s): But most humans, you know, and then going into a rant about what's going on with humans, no, you have to be like humans, there's stupid meat sacks. You know, you have to, they're always carrying about things that yeah. You know, like money and whatever, and that's not what the door is square or whatever it is. You have to stick really deeply into that mindset of that character in that race. And you really, like you said, you really have to have all of that, figure it out to start writing. And even when I used to have to get to the Deep point of view, if the character was an already alive in my head, I would have to do some journaling. I would have to do some day before story is, I'd call it like the day before they ended up in the novel and I would write those in first person and I'd be like, Oh, you know, that's why this character is acting this way. Autumn (36m 49s): And that's why we are that way. When you start on page one, when they enter the story, you are like, you already have that figured out, you know, their mindset and you can kind of push yourself into it because you really do have to almost right a little bit before you start writing to really understand the character or go back and add it in when you edit, because that's the other thing to look for is going back and, you know, checking over all your work and seeing where that mindset could be better, where you can cut out words where you can really make sure it's coming from the character as a worldview and their lens of how the world works and what they're really aiming. You know? Jesper (37m 26s): Yeah. The thing that I find quite difficult with the point of view is for example, in the novel's we are currently riding, we have a, a goddess and when you are dealing with basically a deity, you know, some, somebody who is, who is just not all of our world and probably have motivations and drives that we don't even understand. They are. I, I really feel with her when writing her and I feel is very, very difficult to, to do other than basically more standard third person limited around her because I don't know how she feels. Autumn (38m 16s): No, but I think it in its own way, I think that's kind of exciting because with their person limited versus Deep point of view, so you have a character that's kind of unknowable and you just kind of change how they're being portrayed, especially because you know, if that character is maybe not a good point of view, but you hear it, see them more and dialogue, or even if you are in their mind, but its kind of less clear and less anchored that's you can do that purposefully to make this character seem more unknowable. And it's a very slight difference, but you can use these to your advantage. And I think that's sort of, what's cool about it is that you don't have to have every single character anchored in to your point of view. Autumn (38m 60s): If you have one that is more lofty, you can keep them out of it. And one of the neat things is, is if you are a misleading character and they are firmly believed that EI is going to happen and that is what they're aiming towards and that as maybe the lie they have been told, but they believe at a a hundred percent. And so the reader will believe at a a hundred percent all the while, you know, see you is what's gonna happen and you have this huge shift, it can be so much more dramatic and maybe you shouldn't delay it in light to your reader is, but it's so much fun to lie to your readers and Deep point of view. And it's believable because there's not that omniscient pull back where you are kind of like hinting at it. Autumn (39m 41s): The character is going full tilt towards believing. This is true. And they kind of get a carpet whipped out from under there. So yeah, Jesper (39m 49s): You can have some of those a bit like what the character didn't know was blah, blah, blah, that you sometimes see that in some, I think you all can do this as well. Sometimes. Like what Frodo didn't know at this point in time was out at the door. That kind of thing is no go in and Deep point of view. Autumn (40m 8s): No. And I think a lot of writer's think that, that his building the tension, But 2 million that is completely remove the emotion of right. It's maybe you would have, yeah. You have a little bit of curiosity, four. It, but it's so much more like get you a gasp when the character is just yanked a different direction that you didn't see coming. But when you hear like this lady's little clues, but what if he didn't know it was over on the Shire? Oh, you know that's, if you're just suddenly pulled out of the story, I don't know if that character's head and its just not as much fun. You can actually put the book down at that point and a lot going on. Yeah. Jesper (40m 41s): Yeah. I would say that a guy in conclusion, I think I would pose a challenge to the listener. You know, if, if you're never written in Deep point of view before, try it out, it doesn't have to be perfect. That's fine. But just try it out. Try to imagine yourself in the skin of the character and Right. What you feel, what you hear, what you see, what you teach or taste, what you can touch and that's, that's what you are allowed to. Right? Nothing else. You are not allowed to say. He didn't know this, that he didn't know that. Or explain this in that like you would normally you have to go with what the character knows and feels and tried to write a chapter like that and compare it to your other chapters. Jesper (41m 28s): And I almost want to say with certainty that you will find that it's, Autumn (41m 37s): You'll find, you'll find that you resonate with the character more. You'll find those more action. There is a lot less. Tell me a lot more sho and it'll just be like, you'll be like, wow, this is, this is pretty good. And if you don't come back and let us know what I want to see the difference because I firmly believed the point of view. Those are the stories that I love to read. And they're the ones I loved to write. And I think you'll find other readers react differently. If you show me what you wrote to someone else. Well, no matter what you think, if you show it to someone or a reader, see what they say, which one? So I don't know. Is there any like, did we miss some important elements here when it comes to the point of view a Autumn? Autumn (42m 20s): I don't think so. The line is going to readers. I had hopping. I was just like doing that. I would love misleading my readers. I have to admit it. And just that it's an important way of showing even your evil characters. It really is a useful technique. Or even if you then switch to a third person, limited for a, some characters that are much more unknowable, it can be really okay. So next Monday we actually are gonna talk about one of my favorite topics because we are going to talk about creating a magic system. Narrator (42m 54s): And if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Perhaps you've asked yourself more than once whether or not social media actually sells any books? Is it worth the time and effort you put into to schedule and post new stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.? In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share their personal experiences and provides an answer as to whether you're better off spending your time writing or if social media is actually a good thing. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I have Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 124 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And in this episode, Autumn, and I will discuss if social media helps selling books on it. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this topic, Autumn. Autumn (49s): Oh, it will be, it'll be fun. I don't think it will be anything surprising between you and I, but it'll be interesting to share this with the listeners and see what their takeaway is and what we get in comments. Oh, looking forward to it. Yeah, for sure. But you also had a, a good week. You've been traveling for once. I have to look at it since the, you can actually see my background. It's a little different this week. I took us a sudden, well, I'd been wanting to do this since, Oh, I made a promise to my parents. And I think November that I would come see them December and then coronavirus ramped up and it wasn't safe. And even in the house, I mean, we are talking about a third and fourth wave. Autumn (1m 30s): He was going on across the world and new lockdowns, but we finally just said, well, we're going to, so we drove a few hundred miles South or down in Pennsylvania and I'm visiting my family and it's too much food, too much sugar, too much beer. And it's wonderful. I'm not getting quite as much work done. I am actually surprisingly doing some work and I swear and putting the way my laptop for the rest of it today, at least I'm going to crack open the wine with my dad and we'll sit in the back deck and, you know, absorbed some sun and watched that a little pull up with some fish and you know, it's so good to be down here. So I I'm thrilled. Autumn (2m 11s): That's what we did a little crazy probably, you know, this year or this world. I don't know if there is a good time, but we hopefully will finally be getting that delayed vaccine shot this week. So fingers crossed. It's a nice, yeah. So it was not quite as silly as it seems. No, but that's a pretty good news. And a also getting to see the family after so long. It's a very nice that it is very, it's been really good. I'm having tons of fun. If you could say that we'll be visiting your parents to know how are the things for you? Jesper (2m 49s): No. It's good. I went to the hairdresser for the first time today. So, well maybe my headset for those watching on YouTube, you can't really see it any way. But, it feels so much better. It's amazing. I didn't know how vital hairdressers were, but apparently they are. Autumn (3m 6s): We'll help you tip. Well, if you don't know, what do you tip and Denmark. So, you know, well there, you know that you guys just have it, right? Jesper (3m 17s): Nope. That's not something that we do. And we, and then the consequences, sometimes when we travel, we can't quite work out how. When am I supposed to tip? Do I do it now? How much should I tip? And we can figure that stuff out. It's not in our culture. Autumn (3m 30s): Oh yeah. I was going to say, I live in a culture where you tip and I still don't know when you're supposed to tip or not tip. So yeah. And I told you on our drive down to Pennsylvania, we've been listening to that book a year of living Danish lately. I feel like I'm getting some insight to Danish culture. It's probably completely wrong, but it's been thrilling to listen to the differences going I'm in the wrong country. You, I just fled out of it that you haven't been a carrot countries. So there you go. Well, Jesper (3m 56s): What was your key? Take-away from that lesson Autumn (3m 58s): And I'm not quite done yet, but yeah, it's just a, you take care of each other and that that's really cool. Jesper (4m 6s): Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But we'll at least, I mean, we do, when it comes to tipping, we, we don't have a anybody's salary depending on tips. You know, if people are paid enough that they, they can, they can make their living. So you don't have to worry about tipping anybody because they had research, you have enough, enough money to, to, to support yourself. So, Autumn (4m 27s): And do you understand that in your life? You're cool with that, even if it requires to paying more, you know, it's a livelihood, it's just like, Oh, well, that's, that's why we need to hear you understand this, that everyone has a right to live. And yeah. Jesper (4m 41s): Yeah. That was definitely that. I mean, here, I mean, everything is very expensive, you know, normally are in foreign, just foreign news comes to Denmark. They're like, wow, this is an expensive place. And, and yes it is actually. But on the other hand, you know, there's a lot of social security. There was a lot of things that you don't have to pay for it, as I said this and so on and so on. So in that area, but we also pay a lot of money in Texas. Yes. Autumn (5m 8s): We did hear that. It was like a 50%. Jesper (5m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. So it depends a bit on how much you earn of course, but a but somewhere in there between 45 and 65 is quite normal. So, but, but, and again, our salaries is also high, so you have to pay more in Texas. Yes. But you also earn more. So I think compared to the U S I think we are quite better off still as an individual citizens. I mean, yeah. Autumn (5m 42s): I think as a, as a society, I think your gap, and I think you do have a lot of, one of the lowest gaps between rich and poor in a developed nation. So I think that's really says something, right? Jesper (5m 55s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But speaking of visiting family, I'm actually also planning to go visit my brother and his wife and his wife is coming weekend, which is also something that hasn't happened for months. So that's also pretty good. And I also finished writing the first draft of album. Yeah. Autumn (6m 17s): And it's been quite the a week. This was so exciting and I haven't finished reading it yet. Of course, obviously I haven't finished editing yet, but Oh my gosh. My first book is I, I have two books, we have the, the novella and now we have the book book, so, and so it was good. Yeah. Jesper (6m 32s): Right. And do you have wills the first full novel, or at least the first draft that's done? So that's nice, but, but one thing I did figure out, and of course you and I have been talking about this a Autumn, but I thought maybe some of the audience would be interesting as well in this, because one thing I did start thinking about what's that I needed. I I'll try to see if I can improve my writing speed right now, because I just, I would really like to increase my word count per hour. So I've started a bit of an experiment. We'll see how it goes to once I get into writing a book too, but I'm thinking that if I get it to work and I increased my word count per hour, then we could probably make it into like a future podcast episode at some point in time. Jesper (7m 20s): And she, you know, what I've done and, and how it's working in and, and, and whatnot, because I'm thinking a lot of our listeners would probably be interested in that as well. Autumn (7m 29s): Oh, I think they'd be interested even while you're doing it. Even if it does it end up working, but you won't get there. Oh, I I'm sure you've already seen a small increase. So it'll be interesting to see how it goes. Yeah. Narrator (7m 42s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (7m 48s): So we have a world-building post starting two twin, quite significantly in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. And the people were asking questions and getting feedback and wish you the details about a fantasy worlds. And so I just thought I would mention that because yeah, I love Well, but like, Autumn (8m 7s): Yeah. So that's the one You ConEd in Dunn, but it looks like a lot of writers were really just felt like sharing the world's. We're asking all these posts or I liked it. It was kind of like, and if I haven't developed it yet, you all have to stimulate my, you know, creativity to come up with an answer. I'm like, Oh, well, that's, that's fun. So you get to come up with these questions on there. We don't know the answer. You are going to start developing your world even more from it. So it they've been good pose. They were so big that we actually had to create a master post. It just kinda of like not flat. Everything has to, one has an actual writing question that wasn't getting answered. So, Jesper (8m 41s): Oh yeah. Thanks. Thanks to Lou for organizing that a bit. Yeah. Autumn (8m 46s): Yes. He stayed on top of it. It was very good. Jesper (8m 50s): Yeah. Yeah. But I love how a few people could help each other out. And as long as tomes keep civil and friendly than I think online communities like, like this is really good to have. Yeah. So if, of course, if you haven't checked it out already, you are free to join. You can just search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will find us. But yeah, I think that was all I wanted to mention about what it was going on on the incident this week. Autumn (9m 21s): Yeah. Well, I did notice that if we haven't passed it by the time this is Erin, it's definitely past it, but I think we hit 4,000 members of the Facebook group. So, well, you know, it's not too shabby is getting a little, its getting so popular. What are you are popular? Popular? Well, probably not the only ones who can speak know. So we only ran a podcast. This is nothing, but it is getting so popular. You and I we're like, you know, letting in 60, 70 people at a time, we were like, wow, this is, this is wonderful, but all the way it, so it's changed a little bit. Now people, hopefully it gets streamlined in a little bit better, but come to Georgia is good. It's been really fun. Jesper (10m 3s): No, no, that's a good point. And that is probably just worth mentioning as well. Just so people are aware of, because you might notice that the, in the Facebook group that a, we always tried to put in like welcome. And then we mentioned every single member who came in to the Facebook group, my name and we really liked doing that. And that was sort of purposely thing. Then we decided to do it because we felt it was a very nice way to be inclusive and welcome people in personally. But yeah, as a lot of them just said passing 4,000 members now and we get a lot of people joining, its like some days there was like 40, 50 people a day and it's just like, it's too much. Jesper (10m 46s): So we have, as it turned on automatically at Autumn auto approval, I guess it's what is called an Facebook language. So people will automatically get in. So you will actually stop seeing those are very nice, a personalized welcome messages because I'm sorry, but its just too much now and it's sucking up. It's in writing out all those. I mean it takes me like 15 or 20 minutes just to write out that one message. And then if I have to do that or Luke or Jason or Autumn has to do that, like everyday, almost it it's a bit too much. So hopefully you will understand why we stopped doing that now. Autumn (11m 23s): Yes we are still welcome you and we're so happy you're there, but it does the personalized welcome messages. When you start hitting 62, 74 people at a shot and it's taking a half an hour to write out or you just you're welcome message. Just want to say hi and introduce yourself, let us know what you're there and do it. We'll be happy for that two days. Jesper (11m 48s): So as we are getting into this one, I actually don't know if, if some of what I'm going to say will be unexpected to some, I don't know, but I think it's worth to talk about social media because if we are not very careful or perhaps even despite the fact that we are being careful, social media tends to take up quite a portion of your time and it can also influence your life for good or bad. But what do you say? That's true. Autumn (12m 21s): Oh, I see. I definitely say that's true. I mean, I know my husband has actually completely gotten off of social media because he realized what a bad influence it had been in his life. And so that we have me on the other side as an author where I tell him I don't have a pro at a private profile really anymore in my profile, my, it is my public profile. And you know, as an author I was working with Am Writing Fantasy. So if I'm online, if you Google me, if you Google my husband, he doesn't exist. So if you Google me, you'd get like 10 pages. So it's a good, hard to have that under a very small roof. Yeah. Jesper (12m 55s): That's so true. Yeah. And also I'm not going to, well, let me, pre-phase everything that I'm going to say from this point out a I'm not coming at this topic as if I have the right answers. So just know that going in here. I just think that it's an interesting conversation and of course I have some viewpoints, but I think our listeners should make up their own mind about social media and a, you know, with anything we say, hear, if you agree with it fine, if you don't, it's also okay. It, it is just some few points that we have. And I don't think that this episode is designed to come out with like a recommendation as such. Jesper (13m 36s): It's just more of just our reflections and then you can do with it. What do you want? I guess that's the best way to say it. Yeah. Autumn (13m 43s): I think I'll have my phone and call it a recommendation. They might not have my writer, coach hat on that says if this is what I would tell you as a friend, the author to another author of what are you, you should focus your time. But yeah, if you happen to love social media and you were a total extrovert and you are doing well, or if you are shy, I want to stay away. If you want to be like my husband and don't exist, you're a ghost on the internet. Its all good. It's fine. If you be who you are and what you feel comfortable with it, you shouldn't put yourself out there if you're uncomfortable and you should not put yourself out there unless you're not reading it at all. That's probably a problem. But if you just love being out there, then that's fine too. Autumn (14m 24s): Make time for him to schedule it and make sure you also get your writing done too. If you wanted to be an author. Yeah. Jesper (14m 30s): And I know you have been playing around a bit with the Instagram and Pinterest on something or something like that, but I want to circle back to that, but I was just thinking maybe a good place to start would be to mention it because we just talked about the Am, Writing Fantasy, your Facebook group, for example, and just unpacking like say the group thing in general. I think that might be a good place to start since we just touched upon it and we can of course use Am Writing Fantasy as an example here, but I'm more looking at it at S group's in general. And I think it's a great group. The thing is just that it's not helping selling anything, you know, of course In with Am Writing Fantasy. Jesper (15m 15s): Well that, that is of course non-fiction so, but even though, I mean we have nonfiction books out guide books for us. We have that, but a group like this is not helping to sell anything. It, it doesn't bring any revenue or anything our way we are trying to build a good reader group for our readers at the moment. And maybe at some point that'll start paying off. I don't know. Yeah. But what, what's your thoughts about running groups on social media platforms? Autumn (15m 45s): Well, I, my biggest one because there are some really interesting Facebook groups and it is as an author of the best it's we naturally want to hang out with other authors and network, which is awesome. That's why we have Am Writing Fantasy. We can go out and network with other authors, but really if we're trying to get the word out about our books, you want to be in reader groups. And there's a few really cool ones like Epic Fantasy fanatics is the one that if I go into I'm like sucked in because it will be laughing my head off hysterically. And then I have to show it to my husband because of course he's not on social media now, but it's fantastic to be able to go hang out with readers. But one of the biggest things you'll see on almost every single reader group is you can't spam. Autumn (16m 26s): You're not supposed to be a lot of them have either no self promotion rules or only a single thread where you're allowed to mention you're an author. They do not want to see you posting about your book at every single breath. And I think that's really important to know that they are literally there to enjoy it. They expect authors to enjoy it as a reader, not to be enjoying it as a way of life sniping off reader is so that you can kinda bring them into your, your full do you desperate to be pissing them off in there. That's great. If you meet some people and you know, they asked for a recommendation and you give to them and they happen to pick up your book, that's enough, your primary purpose. Are you going to get kicked out in? Some of them were really kinda fun. Autumn (17m 6s): You don't wanna get kicked out and miss all the members and things. Jesper (17m 12s): That's true, but I'm also thinking in terms of running your own group. And I think the, and here of course I, again, I could be wrong and this is just my, my opinion here. But I think those who have got started really early and they have massive groups and it's working for them, but I think it's working because they got started really early. And that early mover advantage, there are just paste a lot of dividends. Yeah. And M and those people who were in that group as like thousands of people, and then I will use to Def it it's part of their habit. It's part of that group is part of what I do. Jesper (17m 54s): That's part of what, the ones that I check. But if you come in now with nothing and you're starting to try to build it, I'm really not convinced that it's worth the time and effort. We, we did try a short for a short while too, have a REIT, a group on Facebook. We actually shot it down and moved them to good reach because at least they are readers are hanging out. But also that we are trying to build it in its not easy. Autumn (18m 19s): It is not easy. So I don't know. Yeah. I mean, and I do know a few authors who have it, like you said, they were kind of active readers groups. Even if there are small, a few hundred people to do it, maybe a couple of thousand, I mean that's kind of exciting and they work really hard if you author's. I know there are posting, it's not even about their own books and that's usually the biggest thing. It's usually they're out there posting, like there are showing a Fantasy image and saying, Hey caption This, what do you think of this there saying good morning there saying good night. It was like, I don't know if you have to admit, so what I'm talking and I am definitely an introvert. And a lot of authors are introverts when it comes to social media. I've often said if I wasn't an author, I wouldn't have a social media profile. Autumn (18m 60s): I'm more like my husband. And it's probably why we we've been together 20 years' go figure. We are very common, but it's, I'd like I do like, this is where I like talking. Especially during a pandemic, it was a wonderful having these networks with readers and people that it's just like, Oh, we were already online. We are already have these conversations. So it was fantastic. But to have that reader group is a lot of work. And the times that I really put into a focusing, I am going to get this going and going to market. I'm going to do this post, this post, this post. And it's a heck of a lot of time. And if you're a busy, if you have a full time job, if you have kids, it really eats into your writing time. And so the other problem I see when you're putting your group on another platform, just like we're doing with good reads. Autumn (19m 48s): But if you're doing it on Facebook, Facebook has the problem were, you know, they might not see your post at all. If you're not paying to promote posts to the people who want to see your post, which is really silly for that is literally how Facebook works. People follow your page and then you pay to boost your post so that they actually see what you're sending out. They might not be seeing the stuff you are posting in your groups anymore. It's Facebook started with groups, they went to two pages and then the groups no longer saw what you posted on your page. And now they switched back to the groups. And so if you're posting on your page, most likely, most people are not seeing anything. You are posting groups who are active right now, but there's a lot of rumors that in 2021 group's are going to be marginalized again. Autumn (20m 32s): And so you are going to lose connection with your readers. It's just frustrating. There are some places where if you really love social media, good reads. If they're following your groups, they will see and they're getting there. They didn't get daily or weekly announcements of a, a synopsis as I have everything that everyone's posted. So if there are really interested in, they can actually get access that they will get access to everything you've posted on. Good reads. Amazon hasn't changed that yet. Thank you, Amazon, please. Don't you have not yet. The mighty networks, there's a few places that have started groups on mighty networks. You and I have talked about switching to mighty networks there. If you post something, literally everyone sees it. Autumn (21m 14s): Everyone gets an email or if they have the notifications turned on, it had like places where if you are going to put in the time and money and effort, you know, they're actually going to see it without you, then having to pay for them to have to go see it. And that is my biggest problem with social media, where at least the platform's where it's a time, its not a general timeline at a specific where you have post something and then the next post below it has something posted after it. When they start mixing it up on favorite post liked, Post's just, they start playing with those algorithms and people. Aren't seeing stuff. Why are you putting in all of this time? Cause you know, if we circle back to it and we talk about how much time I've tried to put into it makes it making some of this work and following all the best tops, topics and tips. Autumn (22m 2s): Holy crap. You know, it's like the weak, you don't work it all. You get any writing done in it. Oh, when you're just doing the marketing, I either not very fast or I'm not good at it or it does just take a boatload of time, right? Jesper (22m 16s): Yeah. That will show you on Instagram and Pinterest experiment and you ran a bit. They have to see if we could get more Gatesman in there. But again, if it's a time sink and I feel like the evolution of all of these platforms, so it doesn't matter if it is it's Facebook, it's Amazon. It is the same thing as the evolution seems to be that it is more or less, just everything is turning page a plea. So if you don't pay for it, I forget about it. I, I hope good reach is not going to go that way at some point as well, but who knows if it is owned by Amazon so we could easily do. And once they have X, M w you stop all the advertising spots that they can get on to the Amazon store pages, then where to go. Jesper (23m 2s): And they will might turn to the eye on Goodreads and say, why don't we start putting some ads over there? I mean, there's readers over there. Why or why can't we just start advertising over there as well? And then you have, well, yeah, I can easily see that happen. But I think just building an audience on these different platforms, it might just be it's, it's probably not the best use of your time. And I would probably even say that it's, it's more important how much time it takes it away from your writing time because writing new words is always, always, always more important than it is to interact with your audience on social media. Jesper (23m 43s): I don't know. Do you think that is controversial to Autumn (23m 46s): Oh no. I don't think it is. I think it's important to interact with readers, but I think there's multiple ways of doing that from your own e-mails to good reads to a social media, to going out to a book fair. I mean, you should definitely be like, look at your month and find ways of interacting with readers, but you should be writing first. I would say if you had a choice of what to do first and a night, right first, and then have some wine downtime to talk to readers, they are, however, it is a social media, compose emails, do a newsletter or do something and do it in that order. Don't put talking to them first because then you're already online and its like, you just want to check out this one more thing. Autumn (24m 31s): You can go down the rabbit hole, you end up talking to someone else in the next thing you know, you didn't read anything that night and that's not helping your journey as an author. Jesper (24m 40s): No indeed. But I think that for me though, it was a clear distinction between social media and email. This email list for me is completely different because on the e-mail list, you own the data. You own that list of people. Nobody can change the rules on you. You can download them anytime you want. You can take them to some other supply. If your current suppliers I'm making a fool of themselves or whatever. So you have plenty of options to do something and you can control the message. And yes, of course is true that there will be some, for whatever reason, when you send out an email, some of the emails disappeared and cyberspace and they never arrived in some of the inboxes. Jesper (25m 21s): That's the name of the game, but it's not like 1% of the people we'll see you a message unless you pay that. That's not how it worked. So email is different. So, but if I look at it from a social media perspective, but I also feel like maybe it was probably a different maybe five to 10 years ago, but I feel more and more like social media is just white noise. I know it's, there's just a lot of stuff there. It's a time sink. And is it, it is being constructed in a way whereby you are in endorphins are kicking, you know, you're getting rewarded for a posting, something about that, like the best side of yourself that you can think of. Jesper (26m 6s): And then somebody will like, you have a wonderful picture of your cat or whatever and, and then you, you, you feel rewarded and then, Oh, that was nice. Great. And then you we'll do some more of that. And I mean, I get it if I understand it, but my point is just that I don't think it helps at all. If we are looking at it from building an author, a brand is so much, I really don't. Yes. Maybe a bit. But if you are putting in a, a a hundred hours, you know, you're not going to get that value out of it as you would have done putting in a a hundred hours writing instead. But it, I don't know, I'm struggling with it because I think like you, if I did not have an author, a business to run, I wouldn't be on Facebook either. Jesper (26m 51s): I would not have a profile on Facebook. I actually don't like it in that sense. And I don't like the way Facebook handles privacy and stuff like that. I have a lot of concerns with Facebook in general, but the thing is too, the Facebook ads, they work incredibly well. So it's like, I know it's a completely double standards here, Right? Because on one hand I don't like it. But on the other hand I found it very useful. And so Autumn (27m 17s): It is tough and that is, and those are the ethical questions, you know, that you, especially for you and I, and we wrestle with it, okay, this is this incredibly invasive a platform that is mining your information. Cause as they say, if you are not paying anything to be on the platform like Facebook, then you are the product. So they are using it for data. And I'm not being a conspiracy theory theory as a steer, you can go online and look at all the data they're collecting. I love, I have a picture of data, pixel D to a scraper that tells me how many pixels or on websites I visit. And it was like, Holy crap, they are following you everywhere. So thank goodness. So the new Apple, and there's a few places where you can block all that, but then we are paying them for it does that's the worst part. Autumn (28m 1s): And then we go and we, we do use that to then try to sell a book or something, but it works so well because they've mined all of the data. It is. Jesper (28m 11s): Yeah. And so it's like, it's, it's like giving money to the devil and then complained about it. The devil exists. I mean it, yes we do. You know, it is tough. Autumn (28m 21s): It is tough. And I would also say that there is, I agree with you about newsletters versus normal social media that we thought of it. But there's this new hybrid Now like mighty networks or some of these faces that have gone. And if you become a very popular author where people are coming to you, you can put a Mach social media website or on your website, its like forums. But now they look, they can look exactly like Instagram or it looked exactly like face, but maybe not exactly because, but they're following that kind of platform. So you can create your own social media site. So if you want, if readers love coming and working and interacting with you, but you were sick of Facebook, moved them into your own website, but you'd have to be a big enough that they are coming to you. Autumn (29m 4s): But yeah, that's what Jesper (29m 5s): I meant. Oh, it's not going to work. Right. But Autumn (29m 7s): This is not, unless you have to be the way, you know, way bigger already. But there are sites where you control mighty networks being one of them were you can control the access to list all of those things that currently Facebook does it allow you to do it. Jesper (29m 23s): But the problem is again, I mean the tools, there's plenty of tools. There's plenty of ways and, and good ways to organize things, yourself, own the data, making sure that they can take your audience away from you. If you put it in at a time to build it in. And, and that's good. That is good. But the end, if there's just a big pot, because the thing is that you have to drive all that traffic and that is just a million times harder and this white noise world than then you might think getting people on. I mean, yeah. As you mentioned earlier, we have been talking about moving maybe something to mighty networks at some point, especially if, if Facebook goes through with what we've sort of heard on the grape wine that they might need some Facebook groups this year and make them well pretty pointless. Jesper (30m 17s): I think if they go ahead with their plans for lets see how it ends up. But if they do, we have been talking about moving to mighty networks, but again, they are, my main concern is really that then we have to drive all the traffic. Whereas today that Facebook algorithm drive the traffic that it shows the FA Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group to Facebook users that it knows we'll be interested in it. And then they come on board and they enter a group and we can have conversations with those people are and so on and so on. And that's wonderful. But if I have to go out by myself and say, Hey, you know, if you are interested, if you are a Fantasy author and you are interested in knowing more about a It and interact with your fellow Fantasy authors, come on over to mighty networks. The only thing you need to do now is to download an app. Jesper (30m 59s): You don't have already created an account you don't have already. And then, I mean, nobody wants to do that. So it's so hot, Autumn (31m 8s): Especially to me, it's like in what you were saying earlier is so true. It's like those endorphins, most people who are on social media because it is feel good and they wanna do that post that goes viral. They wouldn't have that comment that people go in like, and it's nice to network and talk to other people. It's a wonderful, like in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group where, you know, authors are actually getting help in their field who are overcoming her reason. And that is fantastic. But I think that is the rarity. And so many people who come to our groups like nothing else is quite like this group. They're not finding that in many other places because we are so strict on self-promotion and because we just have an awesome group and an awesome group of writers at authors. Autumn (31m 48s): But usually like I do love Instagram, but the interaction there I've seen that go downhill. Like I started on Twitter, I love Twitter. And it was a writer as our So Starkey and it was so much fun being on Twitter, but something There changed and I moved eventually I'd tried, Facebook did like it. I got on to Instagram and I really enjoy it because I'm a very, you know, I'm a graphic artist who I love the pictures and that was fantastic. But I've seen that even kind of going downhill where now that's not just the post order or that you're just getting shown things that they think you'll like and interact with. But it's like everyone is shouting and waving there. You know, the pretty pictures, but no ones, not many people are across talking unless you happen to know each other and we've known each other for years. Autumn (32m 33s): Then we are still communicating, reaching the new people. It's mostly people following to get more followers liking to try to, hopefully you will come in like their stuff. It feels very one sided it. And it wasn't like that before. And I do think it's just feeding that, you know, everyone wants to be an Instagram influencer. They want to have that viral post and it becomes so impressive and huge. It's not about connecting with readers. And I, I do miss that warmth, that actual like, Hey, there's a few people I know on here that they are half the reason I go back because it's one way I get to talk to them. Jesper (33m 10s): And especially with talking about Twitter, because that's also a one way or I have changed my way of operating with it quite a lot. I used to use Twitter very actively. I used to spend an hour, hour and a half every week scheduling the next week's manual tweets where I gave people like updates on what's happening in my life, how five I come with, my writing, all those different thing, anything that I just thought that people might be interested in. So, and I spent an hour and now, and a half every week scheduling the next week's posts and I have almost 50,000 followers on Twitter. Jesper (33m 56s): And that, that might look nice and, and sound nice. But honestly it doesn't make that part's have a difference because also that has turned white nose and I would always respond. Or if somebody tweets directly at me, I always respond to them. So I still do that, but I have completely stopped doing anything manual. I don't share any, I mean, I load up for example, when we are now released this podcast episode 124, once that's done, I will upload it into my auto poster. So it will go into my like automated cycle of tweets that it will start sending it out once in awhile. Jesper (34m 37s): So that's all I do. So everything that goes on out on my Twitter feed is either or to push from my cycle of content, which of course, I think people will find that interest in that there was a lot of content as a, this is a a hundred episode, 124. So we have done a lot of episodes in a, and we have two and a half years of a YouTube videos before that as well. So there is tons and tons and tons of content. And I I'm still of course hoping that if people come across my profile There, they will find some stuff and think, Oh, this is pretty cool. Or at least some of it that they will find some, something that interests him and they can go and check it out. Of course. And it doesn't cost anything to listen to a podcast episode or what's a YouTube video that is something they can easily do, but the whole manual engagement and a time investment, I put it in into it before I just stopped doing. Jesper (35m 28s): And honestly, I've not seen any difference whatsoever when it comes to marketing or sales effectiveness at all or nothing. It changes absolutely zero, Autumn (35m 39s): Which is so it is sad because I do remember Twitter before the bots. And that's when I, that's where I had gained over 20,000 followers. And I still actually have most of them if they've dropped off a little bit, but I mean, Hey, you rarely go in there. And that's the worst thing it's like, I should say, if I'm not actually going to go to respond to people, I should just shut down the account. But it's hard to say, Oh, it's one of 2000 people, but by don't want them. And that's how we met at you. And I started to talking Actually on Twitter. So, you know, but it is, it's changed so much. There was a lot of white noise. And now that there are bots, there's a lot of people who are just not physically present and Instagram is still interesting. Autumn (36m 20s): They're just starting to do the sideloading where you're getting to be able to schedule posts and get them up because I mean, it is, Instagram is still very much. You have to be manually doing it, but there are a couple of platforms that are actually now allowing them to do Instagram post. As far as even today, I got an announcement that the social media schedule or use is not allowed to do the first post, a post and a comment. The first comment on Instagram, because the comment is usually where you put all your hashtags. So this is huge for if your marketing, you can go ahead and preload all this stuff, but that means you're not actually home Instagram talking to anyone else is just a whole bunch of robots on their talking to each other. Autumn (37m 4s): That's so we all have like an AI lives that we never go on in and check out. This is not again, not selling any books at that was sort of the point of this conversation. It's just robots talking, you know? Jesper (37m 16s): Yeah. It, it just puts Instagram in at the same bucket as everything else afterwards, right now, everything is just the same as just, it's just AI as a posting stuff on behalf of whatever you loaded into it. And then everybody does that. I mean, I not to say that no books are ever sold from, from tweets or posts on Instagram and so on. I'm I'm sure that there are books are sold from it once in awhile. But my point is more, if you like being on the platform, if you enjoy it already then fine, then, then you know, we use it and, and, and post manually due to the things you like to do. Jesper (37m 57s): But I think we need to stop seeing social media as if it's some sort of obligation that if you want to build a proper platform, if you want to sell books, you have to be on social media. I don't think that's the case anymore. I really don't. And I would almost challenge people to say, if you don't already enjoy it, a try, just stop checking the platforms. Maybe you run an experiment for a week and do like this, right. Create two time slots a week and say, during these two times, half an hour, I'm allowed to go into this platform. And I'm just going to check the messages in reply things and what not. But the rest of the time throughout the next week, I'm not going to login. Jesper (38m 40s): I'm not going to even look at it. I just completely ignored. And then tell me what the difference is because I bet you, there is nothing, absolutely zero difference. No, other than you have made more time for yourself and you have more time to write and you don't get sucked into these rabbit holes. Yeah. So try that or even better. That just occurred to me, try to delete the app from your phone and see what happens. Then it looks Autumn (39m 5s): Instagram because that's the only way it exists. But yes, but you know, I, I agree with what we were saying even about endorphins. I mean, I think it really does get inside your head and you want to make that viral post. Do you want to start seeing the really serious marketers? And when you really get serious about marketing on it, you know, they're talking about your tracking, what posts you do that day? What types of posts, how many lights did it get it? I mean, you want an hour just tracking all your insight, you know, your Instagram posts for the month and seeing which ones or getting the most interactions. What days, what type of post or is it? It is insane. And that becomes its own obsession. And again, yeah, a Lake is not a reader. Autumn (39m 46s): It, it might not mean anything and it might be just someone going down pretty picture, pretty picture. You paint a picture of a funny, funny, or that, you know, to come back like me, you know, trying to get a Lake for a Lake, it might not be that important. And if you take a social media break for a week or so, the first few days are always tough, but when you can clear your head and then you hear your story and your, hear your characters again, and you're like, this is what's important. Go see your family. Like we've done. It's what's important. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned that Instagram chorus, I try to enact a very serious Instagram course ahead of all of these tips. And it was so hard. It ate up so much time and I'd be a part of it is having like a theme and a brand, especially with the Instagram. Autumn (40m 30s): So I had made my own personal filter cause you know, I'm a graphic artist. I do all these crazy things. It became no fun for me to be on Instagram because instead of taking a picture of a pretty picture with the sky or a lead or, you know, flowers, I live in insight. So I'm doing all of these really things instead of I had to go and take that picture and run it through this filter, then go back and repost it and then make sure I had the hashtags in a certain area and do this. I was all serious. It took all the fun out of it. And I actually lost followers. I dropped by like 20. And I was just like, what the heck? And so I found that just so you know, funny, I've put it in like five times as much effort and time and planning and it totally burned. Autumn (41m 19s): And it was really funny. Cause all my, I do have a second Instagram profile cause so, you know, I like Instagram and I'm a graphic artist. So then the other profile I've got my graphic artist and there I have always been kind of a very personal, so purposeful. Like I share a very white quote and then I do it very graphic picture, color or heavy like cut, cut, book cover. I did. And then I do a, a white picture. So it shows up as This, you know, you look through it, it's got a pattern to it and that's just the way I do it. That one is totally different. You know, people love it because what I'm sharing is graphic Media. If I don't share on that one, I see the results in my website. So oddly enough for it as an artist and it works fantastic by doing these very serious posts that have always been very serious minded. Autumn (42m 1s): The other one, it was other authors quotes by doing like quotes from Stephen King. Oh, those would be like viral. Everyone loved them, sharing them copied on bookmarked my own stuff as well. Oddly enough, with my graphic one and some of the quotes, I had asked questions like a, you know, as an author, how are you finding book marketing? And so many authors came back to me saying, yeah, every time I posted about my book, I lose readers. You know, people complained and they brought their stock following me. And he was like, I'm on here because I'm an author. And every time I post, I lose followers, no seriously. Why bother him as an author? Jesper (42m 40s): So the point and but, but again, that's where, that's where the email list is good because there isn't an entrance criteria. And if somebody has to type in their e-mail address, they have to confirm the fact that yes, I want to receive email. So already there are those who don't want anything at all. They are not never going to go through. This is actually quite funny. Just a side note here, because I was preparing a Facebook app earlier today than it is going to go live tomorrow. Well, we are recording ahead of time. So by the time you hear it, this is already in the past, but never say that that was not the point. The point was more to say, I actually on purpose wrote into the add text itself is that yes, this will require you to leave an e-mail address. Jesper (43m 26s): And if you don't like it, cool, no problem. They actually put it in on purpose because I have seen it 2 million times. Now that every time you see all of the complaints started in the comment section. So this is again, one, you have to put it in your e-mail, but if you wouldn't have to put it in your e-mail address, if you wouldn't come on to our email list, what would be the point of us even running the ad is completely pointless, right? Because a part of the process is also to solve people off right. Or sort them out. So basically the ones who doesn't want to do any, who doesn't want to engage at all with us, who doesn't want to hear from us again. Well, great that you didn't sign up because then we don't want you there. Jesper (44m 7s): Okay. So it, it is. But Autumn (44m 10s): I think, yeah, Jesper (44m 13s): I've just gotten a bit fed up with social media by now. I must admit, I also don't like how it feels sometimes like posts are being made and written in controversial or provocative ways on purpose just to get engagement. Not necessarily even because the post of beliefs or things, what he, or she posted, but more just because they know that this is going to piss some people off, sorry for the language. And then I'll get a lot of comments and so on and so on. And I don't know. I, I, my, I just feel like my life is too valuable for stuff like that. And I don't wanna spend time on it. Jesper (44m 53s): Don't get me wrong. I love personal interaction. Like you said earlier as well, Autumn, I like it. When you have like the one-to-one conversation with somebody who has something great to say, or it doesn't have to be about any thing that I wrote at it, but it just like this sort of personalized ping pong. I like that. Stuff like that. That is cool. But going on social media to try to find that situation or that ping pong, it's just there's to many other things that just drains my energy, to be honest. So I dunno, I'm no longer a fan of social media, I guess. That's my conclusion. Two, all of this conversation. Autumn (45m 31s): I know you've heard, especially on Instagram, even on Twitter, on Twitter, I think it was, they sent the first a thousand people. You felt you met, it would be the ones that you would remember the most in. I think on Instagram is like the first hundred or 200 people that you interact with and meet in there. First followers. Those are the ones that you kind of like, I keep going back and connecting with. But after that it just becomes competition. That's true. Yeah. I think, you know, there's a couple people that I've met that way. You being one of them. And I don't think you were my first a thousand though. I had at least every once in a way that you do, we meet up with other people and it's a great way, but I definitely have to play devil's advocate, even though I know we're getting like towards the end. So if you have this freebie, we want to give a way so that people get on your newsletter litter list. Autumn (46m 16s): Where do you share it other than social media? How did you get people to hear about the free book you are offering? Jesper (46m 23s): No. No, but that's exactly the thing. I mean, we are in a pay to play market. Now, the only effect, if we are talking about freebies, like a PDF, a free book, of course You, if it's uploaded through Amazon, you can advertise it on Amazon using the Amazon app. So if you want, but let's assume it's not, let's just assume that something you are giving away because you want people on your email list and the only really effective way. And this is again, it's double standards. I know, but they only really affect the way it is. Facebook. ASCE is the only thing that really, really works well when you, you can post on social media and all of that, but you can't like you are going to get like less than half a percent of people actually taking any action or a signing up compared to how many impressions you've got. Jesper (47m 11s): So it's a whole ton of effort, almost no gain. Where is the paid Facebook ads? So you can get them to perform quite well. It takes some know-how and it takes some testing and some money and so on, but you could get it to work quite well. And that's the name of the game? Unfortunately, Autumn (47m 31s): If we were not using Facebook ads to, for example, for what Am Writing Fantasy and so on, then I have no idea where we would find anybody. It just wouldn't happen. No, we would just, it would be like we didn't exist. I mean, marketing is important. And unfortunately marketing right now is social media and it is a pay to play market. The freebie use, the author is helping authors to boost posts. That was, it was a part of what I used to love about social media. And its just, even when they are helping each other now it's, you're just not making as big of an impact. I swear the algorithm pushes you down if you're not paying. And I've mentioned my, my theory that way to you before that, I just think if they see that you don't pay anything, if you just have a little negative somewhere in your little algorithm, it just kinda keeps you under a certain cap. Autumn (48m 19s): And until someone proves me wrong, which I don't think there's any way. Cause none of us know what these algorithms are doing. I just firmly believe that it is true. And so I don't know, I'm a stubborn, so now I refused to pay for anything. But you do all of the work and because I'd be like, no, they can't have that, but you have sort of a, you have sort of outsource it to me nowadays anyway, but, but still, I mean they're is a difference between talking about engaging on social media versus running paid ads on social media. And those two things are actually two different thing. I mean its the same platform, but it was two different activities. Yes. Running the paid ads. I don't like giving Facebook money, but I understand that it's the name of the game and it's something that we have to live with. Autumn (49m 2s): So hence I do it, but meaning engaging on Facebook, like posting things on my author page every week and stuff, I don't do any of that. Nothing at all. So that's just way, I mean that there is a difference between the two ways of using the social media platform that create. And that is I think the difference do you can set up the ad and tweak it and get it running. And maybe you just need some monthly tweaking at that point. Even AMS ads, its sort of the same thing. Once you get them running, if they're working or you're usually doing okay, you are getting the word out of your marketing somehow butt going on to Instagram or good reads or Facebook or Twitter and spending 15 minutes or an hour or two hours. Autumn (49m 45s): And just talking to people, that's not gonna sell you the books that are running an ad. Well actually do know. So I think that's, as far as we go today and next Monday we are going to discuss deep point of view. What is it? And how can deep point of view help you out? Narrator (50m 9s): If you like, what you just heard. There was a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

An awesome fantasy world can make a story — just as a terrible or terrifying one can make you run for a different book. Join Autumn and Jesper as they go head to head to come up with the worst fantasy world... or figure out how to create a story out of some pretty horrifying recommendations. If you want to check out the Story Idea book Autumn and Jesper mention in the podcast, head over to https://books2read.com/StoryIdeas  (and check out the brand new audiobook that was just released!). OR pick up the Plot Development book and get a free ebook copy of Story Ideas at https://books2read.com/Plot-Development. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (31s): And I am Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 123 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we are going to run it one of our not so serious episodes. We are going to dive into our alternate alternating lists. That's what, what I'm trying to say at the WORST and or scary fantasy world that we can think of. So they should probably be able to be a good one. Autumn (1m 2s): And it should be, I have some fun doing some research thinking or finding some books. I am not sure if I wanted to read, but just to get inspiration, but it was actually a really fun one to come up with the list. So will have to see if I do a stool. Appreciate. Dominic's a comment that I always win it. And so I just thought, well, that's, that's the stuff we don't talk to her. Jesper (1m 25s): And I think actually I think we already know who's going to win this one. So apparently we don't need to talk to, well, no, he does know what he was talking about it. Autumn (1m 35s): I figured out that comment would make you go and do like extra work on this one. Jesper (1m 40s): So actually it wasn't the back of my mind when I make my list, I was like, I have to come up with something good today. So I figured, so it will have to see, I definitely have a surprise for you at number one where I pulled it from. So it will have to, Oh no, it's already such as like, Oh no. Oh no. It, it must be a bad thing. One. Yeah. I'm sure you don't worry. You don't want you to stress now. And we have to get that. Autumn (2m 5s): It's like at the end, it's in 40 minutes. So don't worry about it. You don't want to stress to the next 40 minutes. I can probably count. Let it go. You do you have more of a calm? I thought I was a competitor until I met you and you have a much more of a competition edge. Jesper (2m 22s): Okay. To say, I like to compete, to be honest with him and well, I can at least pretend to be a sore loser. Normally. I'm not that I like to. I like to play the game here. You have to be a good example, too. The kids who are the referee and the adults you referee, sometimes it sounds like the last weekend I handed out three yellow cards for people who were doing the scent, you know, complaining about things. So well, but that's a nice thing that, you know, there are, I don't have to be the sole lose. If they disagree with me, I can just give them the yellow car. End of story. That you know, you do not have that power over me. I'm sorry. No worries. Jesper (3m 2s): Yeah. Yeah. I think I've said to my wife at some point that I would love it. If it was possible, you know, in business meetings to bring my yellow and red cards and you just like, yeah, Autumn (3m 12s): Well you are out by, by that. Wouldn't be so much easier than it would be pretty good, like a mediator or something. That'd be fantastic. You know, here's your card and you got to do your out time out yet. Go sit up for five minutes. So that would change the dynamics of things so much. It would. But I think that a lot of people wouldn't like you either, but That's a different story. You probably have to work for an independent agency where they can't fire you. Jesper (3m 39s): Yeah. Well, that's it, Is that the moral on again with all the cards in his pocket? Or what the hell are you Sure? It was like, Oh no, it's another meeting today. Yeah. Autumn (3m 49s): Oh, well, but it is besides that, besides the refereeing, how are things over on your side as well as the Atlantic? Jesper (3m 55s): Well, it's a pretty good. My son's were actually going to go to the hairdresser today for the first time in months down the road in the lockdown. Yeah. It was a sign that I was very jealous, but then it just got worse because then the head rest is a canceled. Oh no, it was so frustrating. My, my oldest son who was really annoyed by it at the, Yeah. I don't know, like everybody else, I guess a we, or like a hair monsters is walking around here the whole time Autumn (4m 23s): Or like my long hair. I took a couple years to grow this. Backout different for, you know, and that's the same as well. Go for the Viking. Look, you know, in braids and some long it'll be fine. Yeah. And that's your heritage, it's your heritage. You, you need to go for it. Yeah. Jesper (4m 43s): But that is true. But actually over the weekend as well, just to say, tell you that, that I watch one of the movies that you were recommending, Autumn (4m 51s): Which one Jesper (4m 52s): I've watched The yang yang master on the floor. Autumn (4m 55s): Excellent. What did you think you didn't even say? Jesper (4m 58s): No, I didn't know if that was on purpose Or holding out. I always want to hold Out and stuff up. Autumn (5m 5s): Then we recorded a podcast or a I'm sensing a trend. Jesper (5m 9s): Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. No, no. I think, I think it was good. I like the is not going to do in this partnership, but I liked, as you said as well that you don't quite see Don and coming. Oh, I like that. Autumn (5m 24s): Yeah. I, I, the setup was like, Oh, there's no way out of the day. Oh really? That makes so much sense. It's perfect. So that one is much better than the, the other one that is also the ying-yang masters, having the one that one's not quite as good. And like I said, especially for the one you just watched ferret demons. Oh my God, what a fair or a demon. So I might technically have one if you've seen my dog, but yeah. They're so cute. And they were all, so yeah. Jesper (5m 53s): So, so we have any listeners out there. If you want to a way that it is a FANTASY movie, it is, it is Chinese, but that doesn't mean I don't mind being a Chinese, but maybe some people do it, but it's called the young, young master. And it's a show on Netflix. So a, if you want to check that out and ah, yeah, I should have just have to do it. It's a bit different in many ways, you know, it's, it has almost like a human side to it as well. Like it's a, it's a bit, it's not silly at all, but, but it is a bit like some of the creatures is a bit, like, I almost feel like they put in down as a comical relief, you know, Autumn (6m 33s): And the turtles, Jesper (6m 36s): They are also pretty cool. I mean, it is very FANTASY heavy, at least. So yeah. Autumn (6m 40s): FANTASY have a very good CGI, very good acting and a story that has a twist at the end that you don't see coming and you don't see how that's going to have to work out. I thought it was a fantastic FA fantastic storytelling and fun event. It would, if it was a book, I totally would have to read it. So it was excellent. Jesper (6m 60s): Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was based on or off a book. No, no, no, no, no. I read actually the first movie, the one I just watched the yang master, that's actually based off a video game. And then the other one that you just mentioned, the turn it to yang yang master, they turn it to you or something. I think it was called that's based off the book. Okay. And that one is, I have not watched the second one, the eternity one yet. But as far as I read that one is a bit more dark. Whereas this one young master is a bit more lighthearted. Autumn (7m 31s): That sounds very correct. Yeah. Jesper (7m 35s): Okay. But how about you? You, you had a bit of a bumpy ride, this bus. Autumn (7m 40s): Okay. That seems to be a, as long as it doesn't go back to whatever month I said that I felt like I was cursed. I know, I think that was February, but as long as it doesn't go that way, we should be all right. But its been, that's been a little bit of a hiccup. My vaccine was canceled at the last minute. So now I don't get vaccinated until may because they changed the Johns, the Johnson and Johnson has some side effects, which I have to admit. I would probably be right in the target of potentials for side effects. So Lina, maybe it was a good thing, but it has been one of those weeks where you feel like the rug has pulled out of you, I'm a Hunter you with every step. So at this point I'm just expecting someone to push me off a cliff and we stay away from cliffs or they're just send me a parachute and Well, or Mary Poppins or has an umbrella or something I need to, I need a safety net this week, but we will get through it. Autumn (8m 36s): And I will not. Maybe it's because of what happens to be my birthday or a week. So maybe its just, you know, fate instead of rubbing in it, I will ignore that. I've been hoping for a good week. I'm planning for a good birthday. Oddly enough. It's been, the weather here has been gorgeous in the sixties. Sunny, just lovely. Except for oddly enough that day on my birthday, it was supposed to snow seven inches. Right. And so I was going to go out to a, a lovely restaurant were actually having a certificate. Autumn (9m 16s): I think it was going to be perfect. And now I'm just thinking, well shoot, I'm just going to get cheesecake and cheesecake. Good. Maybe it was too much hot chocolate in Rome and cheese kick-ass or movie or something. I feel like this movie and just get it over with, but that's how my week moving on. Jesper (9m 40s): Okay. So if you just want to move on, Autumn (9m 44s): Let's go up Narrator (9m 45s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (9m 50s): I okay. It took out a long, long time for audible to accept the files. I am pleased to announce that the audio book version of our guide book on how to develop story ideas is now finally available for like four or five months old. So I think more than that, I think it's great. They have a year of six month. Autumn (10m 14s): Oh that is insane. I am so excited though. You did it again. You didn't tell me this or no, I didn't come to you in education were running up this disk. They'll send you back for training. Yeah. Jesper (10m 29s): Well I thought it's excellent communication. I'm telling you right now. Autumn (10m 35s): Well, that is exciting. So what are we going to do to sell a bright, having our book finally approved as an audio book Jesper (10m 44s): That I don't know that it's a celebration. That's the part, I don't know how to do. I need more training on how I'll just say like, but maybe because I have an audio sample prepared, but maybe you could just to remind people what this book is about. And then afterwards I can just play a short sample right here and now Autumn (11m 4s): Six months in a week of heck it's a story ideas now. So I do remember that it is full of tips and ideas on developing your story ideas and how to generate different ways of coming up with ideas in getting the, that flowing, its almost like creating a muscle memory of how do you come up with ideas and develop that. And it's a whole different skillset. So it's all about that. And I think I did. Okay. And I'm going to stop speaking. Jesper (11m 35s): How are you afraid you are going to jinx it? Autumn (11m 39s): Yeah, definitely. Let me touch on the computer. It will go black. Jesper (11m 43s): Okay. So I have a, a short sample lined up here just so that the For Lissa listeners. So you can see, you can hear what is, sounds like it's a bit more than a minute in length. So a lien back and just a listened to it here. And of course listener, if, if you're not too interested in this book, just, you know, we use your podcast app too, a skip ahead in a minute or something, but here we go. Derek Botten (12m 10s): We don't need to understand how our brains produce Ideas. We need to acknowledge that they do. It's not magic generating story ideas. Isn't a single event, but a creative process that involves collecting input from our environment and experiences to transform those loose fragments into a coherent hole. Well, we said that most original ideas has already been conceived. We also mentioned how inspiration is at the heart of combining OLED elements into something new or the greatest novel it is yet to be written. And when that happens will still be able to say the greatest novel is you have to be written. Every idea in the world is waiting to be done again with a new spin or an unexpected reveal. Derek Botten (12m 56s): All it takes is to understand how to open our minds and allow inspiration to hit home. The more we experience, the more material we have available to interrelate and create new combinations from the better. For instance, when J K Rowling came up with the idea for Harry Potter, she was stuck on a train from Manchester to London, King's cross. Or how about Suzanne Collins? She got the idea for the hunger games when channel surfing between reality TV and actual war coverage from Iraq. The point is that story ideas are all around us. We need to train our brains to look for them and then note them down. As soon as they come into existence, in a sense, it becomes a simple matter of collecting enough input from your environment and putting those ideas through the brainstorming process. Derek Botten (13m 46s): This will lead you to the perfect premise for your story. So Jesper (13m 51s): How do you like the Narrator here? Why don't you want him? Autumn (13m 53s): And he's got a very soothing as a friendly voice. I can listen to that one all day. Yeah, I really liked. Jesper (14m 2s): So we place the link in the show notes from a where you can find this audio book and if you prefer an ebook version or a paperback that's found via that same link as well. And a little secret for our listeners here is that the Epic ebook version of this book is actually available for free because if you buy the plotting guide and will also put a link to that one in the show notes as well. But if you, by the plotting guide insight, you will actually find a link which will give you this story idea book for free. Of course the ebook version of it, the audio book version you can get for free. Autumn (14m 39s): You know, fortunately I was actually thinking as well, all of them that, and of course I'm communicating this to you now. Okay. That was great. A very Well known. Is it okay? Jesper (14m 54s): Yeah. Cause I'm going to have communication skills here. What if we a set that I'm the first five people who leave a review of this podcast will get a free audio book. Autumn (15m 10s): I think that's brilliant. I love giving rewards to listeners. So let's do it. It will have to, we'll have to be on the spot and checking times, but yeah, first five who leave a review. Jesper (15m 24s): Yeah. So we will do it like this. If you like the podcast, leave a rating and review right now and we are going to go first, come first served. Meaning it is when we receive your information about the review left. So you will leave your ratings, leave your review, then go to Am Writing Fantasy dot com and use the contact form on their and send us a link or a screenshot of the review. If you just left. And the first five emails we get and that's the timestamp in our inbox, the first five we get, we will get back to those five people with a free download code for this audio book. Jesper (16m 5s): So don't delay, if you wait too long, it will be too late. So yeah, go ahead and, and leave a review and a will give you a free audio book sound the same time. Autumn (16m 16s): Yeah, I think that's a really cool and then that's a way of celebrating. We go into audio book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesper (16m 21s): That's true. Yeah. Inadvertently and this is celebrate is something I wouldn't even notice myself. That's my bad on who we are going to work on. That I have a feeling that we are accidentally going to expire some people today when we go through all of this Autumn. Yeah, Autumn (16m 45s): Probably I would think so. I definitely chose M one or two worlds where I think I would probably not make it more of a pro. Definitely not to the teenage years, but if it was dropped in it as an adult, I would probably have a few hours still live. So yeah, Jesper (16m 60s): It seems to be my way, maybe not to inspire people in the way that they are going to copy the actual things that we say, but maybe some of the stuff we say it may be. Some people feel like I can actually use a small part of that on an element of that and change it around to something else. And a, I think, you know, you know, if that happens too, some of the listeners please steal away, just take whatever we say and use it. I don't care. You can steal all you want from this podcast episode. And then of course at the end will have to conclude a winner. Even though we might actually do that in two seconds, that's probably a predetermined, but, Autumn (17m 36s): And knowing how my week is going. Sure. I Have no doubt. I'm expecting the PODCAST, to die and in a second, Jesper (17m 44s): No, no, please. Don't jinx it a, I know your blood will have, it has quite an effect on electronics, right? It does. It, it does. That's what it is. That one step back. Yeah. Don't touch the computer Please. Before we get started, I came across a very funny comment, a on the internet, but I just thought it would, she has to be okay. It doesn't really fit into the list of five, but it was just such a funny comment that the way I thought was good at it. So we were, there was the question on the inside and posted about, which was the Wii WORST Fantasy Worlds to live in four, a normal person. Jesper (18m 26s): And so it doesn't quite fit with our lists. Yeah. But somebody to answer to this question was, well, I think it would be becoming a volunteer firefighter in King's landing. Autumn (18m 41s): Well, that's, that has a pretty good comment, But pretty bad jobs to have it. It's a pretty bad job or that kind of hard for me. So I dunno, I think we'd be left. So if they want us to share it up, all right, well I'm sure you'll get a few chuckles or who are listening to it. So that, it's a very good one, but I have to admit, I said there is, I, we both made a point not to steal from work's because we don't want to say that we think this world is horrible and it's like your favorite story. So we tried to come up with our own and I think that's the way to do it, but getting some inspiration, like reading some comments and stuff online, and there were some really funny comments and there were some things at work. Autumn (19m 23s): And I did, I really did find the one that was like WORST Worlds. And there was a whole setup about a cursor town that I like. This is really would be interesting story. And it's sounds creepy. And what do you need to start bookmarking some of these, but it was actually not bad at all. Yeah, no, it was more of like, it's the WORST world. Like you would not want to be out in the world actually. And it was like, Oh, that must have been a very riveting story. So, you know, WORST worlds can be very inspiring. That's true. Jesper (19m 56s): Yeah. I don't think that's not quite the way I've gone with my list, to be honest, if either it's not like inspiring And at all, Autumn (20m 4s): I think I went with the potential for death horrifying and yeah. That's about where I went. Jesper (20m 13s): Yeah. I tried to put a slightly different angle on most of mine to be honest, but because I have to try too. Yeah. Well now that is to say that, you know, the problem is sometimes when you try to be too unique, then it falls apart. So I ah, no, I, I am losing confidence in my list. All of it. Autumn (20m 35s): Excellent. No, that's not good. I am ready to begin. Now I on me, I need a, when this week come on, it's my birthday. And we see that this my pantry, cause this is like Jesper. I powers your using on me. Like I'm Fe it's not fair. It's just not fair. I can't deny my breath. Right. Jesper (21m 0s): Okay. Okay. Well, I almost feel like I want you to stop because I want to hear if I'm, if you start out really strong than I am getting really nervous, but if we could settle my nervous a bit, If, if the first one you've come up with is like, yeah, no, it's okay. Then I would feel better already. Autumn (21m 14s): Well, this is my first one. We'll make you feel better because it was kind of, I actually changed it from something incredibly boring because I went with stories that would create Worlds that we create a horrible story. I guess it was really the theme of a mine. Yes, yes. And so that's what I wanted. But the first one is kind of, I just had to put it in there and I have a reason. And I'll let you see if you can guess because its something that I think you would suspect knowing me and also knowing something that's true to your heart as well. Jesper (21m 43s): So are you setting me up for failure? So if I can guess it, that it makes me look like for you, you should have known this. Autumn (21m 49s): Oh, we'll see. We'll see what we've already even talked about it today. So you're ready from my number one. Well, my number five is not the worst world. We are going to build out a number five. Yes. My number five. So this is a world where the water has been turned to undrinkable muck full of chemicals that will slowly poison you. Any animals that live in it or are mutated in the inevitable that live in the water. The soil has been contaminated so much that you are lucky to grow crops. And even if you could, the SOF, your reign will most likely destroy them. If it rains at all, it might be a drought year or it might be the aesthetic hurricane full of tornadoes. Autumn (22m 29s): It just comes in waves out. Everything. Most animals have been killed off due to the pollutants. The landscape has a wasteland have destroyed cities. Birt husks. The building's massive contamination from the number of dead bodies, trash and leaked chemicals where any humans are writing about like Savage cannibals in the cities. So your best bet to live at all is in the countryside. If you are lucky to find any areas with existing forest and have a decent soils and of course food is scarce as possibly contaminated. And but if you band together at all with other humans to check out An existence here, they may look at you as a potential food source. Jesper (23m 11s): Hmm. Autumn (23m 12s): So I do know there are a dystopian stories that kind of had this world, but can you guess why this to me is one of the worst scariest worlds I can possibly imagine even though it's number five on my list. Jesper (23m 32s): Hmm. Autumn (23m 32s): Before we start and before we started talking in a recording today, we were talking almost about this topic when you are walking on the coast. Jesper (23m 45s): Yeah. The people are Polluting stuff and whatnot. Autumn (23m 48s): And it's based on what my absolute terrifying vision of what can happen to this world in what we're doing to it. And it had to put this one in there, right? No, this is the conservation side of me going. Yeah, Jesper (24m 3s): No, no. So yeah. This is like a fast-forwarding 500 years or something. And then see what you get up with you on that. / Autumn (24m 10s): I was afraid of fast forwarding, like 38 years. Jesper (24m 14s): Three years. Oh my God. I hope not. Autumn (24m 16s): This is a 30, But yeah, there are days I am terrified to see what we are going to wake up to tomorrow. So Jesper (24m 21s): No, no that's true. So it was just a, just yesterday it was a sunshine here find with her and then like 10 minutes later it got all cloudy and it started snowing and I was looking at it, Linda White. What happened here is just like the way the climate is so fucked up. This incredible is yeah, it is really bad. Autumn (24m 42s): Alright. So hopefully that will be eased you into the competition. Jesper (24m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know if I feel better, but I don't feel worse either. So yeah, it was okay. That's a win. Yeah. So this year you were a number five. Okay. So my number five is I'm sort of in the same vein as You. I meaning that I was trying to think of something that would be the worst nightmare for, from a writer's perspective. Okay. So imagine that you have created this wonderful fantasy world and you have created your characters, you have written the first chapter and now at some point during your world building, you thought that readers wanted something different, you know, something that they have never seen before. Jesper (25m 36s): So your decided that this world, it would rain once every day. Okay. So, so far so good. Yeah. That's fine. It doesn't sound too. Yeah. Autumn (25m 46s): But I know. And it sounds like the Costa Rica actually, it was like everyday two o'clock so we can turn on a faucet and it rained. Right. Jesper (25m 54s): That's why I got it from No, but the thing is that every time it rains, everyone changes personality. Oh. So every day, the past is your characters will now become somebody else. Oh. And they will want something else. They don't remember what they were doing or why they're just on a new mission with new ones and motivations all of a sudden. So imagine what a mess. This novel will be. Every single chapter, the character is somebody new and there is no coherent overlap it, everything that they're doing, no consistent. It's a story arc, just character arc. Jesper (26m 35s): It's just a random chapters of a person's life that goes nowhere. And you can go four, 150,000 words like that. Autumn (26m 45s): I don't know if I could read it 150,000 words you could imagine being in the editor. I'm just going. No, no, no, no. Jesper (26m 53s): But it is unique. Well building, no, I promise you. Nobody has seen it before. I Autumn (26m 57s): Agree with you. And there might be a reason for that. Jesper (27m 1s): Or you think, you know, maybe the, everybody else is just not as much of a genius too. Right? Autumn (27m 5s): This is true as a writer. That one is absolutely horrifying. I just how you are, right. It would be just a bunch of short stories that begin and end every 24 hours or so it was just me. Yes. You could say. I mean, OK. So you could come up with the characters that is doing it's so darn just like wondering if its maybe it was more aware and maybe is it because you get wet and trying to hide from the rain and, and maintain who they are or do you have past lives? Like memories of flickers of things that you might have been doing before? See, you could Plot this year. Jesper (27m 40s): Yeah. I can do it now. You are destroying it. It was a bad idea. Now you're making are starting to make it better and making it work. And that's not the point. It's the bad list. This one is not the point. This is not to make it work. Autumn (27m 51s): And not to say I could write a story in this world. All right. Fine. No, it's horrible. There you go. Jesper (27m 58s): I am not convinced that I was very sincere. Okay. You ready for it? By number of For, okay. Autumn (28m 4s): What do you want to move on? Alright, so this one, this one I actually named, I call it Thou shall not right. Jesper (28m 10s): Okay. That sounds serious. Yes. That's a very serious. Autumn (28m 12s): This is great. Yeah. Serious world. I would not last year. Ah, it's a world that is dominated by a very strict religion. Or if you're a futuristic tech, a very strict AI where the priest or AI can read thoughts. So if you are disobey or if you even think about disobeying, you just killed your immediately kill. They just give up and go boom. So devotion is absolute or compliance is absolute. And that's why I'm saying, if I were in this world, it would be like five. It says you're out of here. So I am just not good at obeying things. I swear. I, it was a nice teenager. It's just been since then. Autumn (28m 54s): So yeah. That's, that's why I call it that I shall not because of this world. Jesper (28m 59s): Yeah. I wouldn't last long and I can tell you, And if they can, if they can read your thoughts, then nobody can avoid thinking something against the rules. Once in a while it was just impossible. I mean, everybody would die in this world. You know, there would be nobody left just the AI or the priests is. Yeah, Autumn (29m 19s): I agree. And that's what That I, so in the eye by making it so strict that even your thoughts, we can get, you killed that. It just writing a story. What are you going to do with all these robots? Like people just, you know, thinking happy thoughts or listening to like constant music to keep themselves like the site or, you know, you want to write about the rebel. You want to, if I right about the person, who's going to find a way out of this trick. But yeah. Jesper (29m 43s): But, but then if you had a non I'm going to, I'm trying to destroy you as too. So if you have the character who was actually the only one who is mine, they can not read. And he is trying to battle the powers that be in trying to figure out how we can free the rest of the people from this sort of mind control. Yeah. I can write that story. Not a problem, Autumn (30m 5s): A problem. As long as you can throw in the one person like you can't read, you'd be all set. But if it's a a hundred percent, they can read all your thoughts and your growth from the time you were a child, you were like, yeah. Jesper (30m 15s): Do you know what if it this way? What if it's one of the AI's who is going to be in it? Oh, I like that one. There you go. Ding, ding. Ding. Autumn (30m 25s): Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. Okay, good. So if you were making my bad ideas is a good ones. I am going to make you a bad ideas and the good ones as well. If that's the way you want it to be that way. Yeah. Okay. So my number for yes. And this one might be quite interesting for the writer. I think maybe the reader we'll actually hate you for ' Jesper (30m 53s): It. Excellent. So The foreword to some one star reviews coming your way, Autumn (30m 58s): It would ever write a book just to get one star or you would like to start up the pen name. Like I want to write trash. Yeah. Jesper (31m 3s): You're going to change the worst stuff I can think of that. Autumn (31m 6s): But you might like, it would be the ones that take off anyway. Go ahead. Your number for her. Jesper (31m 13s): Yeah. Yeah. So, so this is a setting where it's, let's say it's mostly like the, well, the detail, so that makes it better. But it's actually the fact that there is no details. Okay. So everything is just made up at random as you go. Oh, and so it's not, it's not so, so that you make it up as you go as in like discovery Writing and then you will make it fit into what you already got. This is more like you have to use a random generator on the internet and whatever it tells you, that's what you have to use as the settings setting the elements. Autumn (31m 59s): So if it like spits out umbrella and Gumdrop rainstorm, that's great. Jesper (32m 4s): And then this is what it is then that's what it is. Autumn (32m 8s): This is going to be really fun as a writer, but you know, the readers or going to be like, Oh, this makes no sense at all. Jesper (32m 14s): Okay. Why did he throw in an umbrella at the dragon there? That makes no sense. So yeah. Yeah. I think readers will be pretty damn frustrated with this kind of world. No, but I can imagine teaching yeah. Autumn (32m 30s): Writer conference, I'm a writer course like an in-person one and it's like it's right. Or improv or it would be so much fun to teach, to be like, cause it is something like storytelling around a campfire. I have, you know, when you do some of those exercises where you have to continue on a story that you passed in the chain and it was going to be so much fun. So this is sort of like kind of along those lines. And you know, as a, as our teacher, I would like to, I want to go do this as a reader. I would hate your guts. Yes. Jesper (32m 59s): It would be like, Oh, this is the worst crap I've ever. Autumn (33m 4s): But it, yeah. For a tool I'm just like developing your author voice and coming up with Ideas. It would be a blast. Jesper (33m 14s): Yeah. True. All right. Well lets see, I like that one. Okay. All right. Well I don't like it, but okay. That's good that you do. Autumn (33m 22s): I, I see it a tool. It, it would be an interesting tool, but yeah. And I would never want to publish something that can get out of it unless you like developed it For Jesper (33m 33s): Well the fast, imagine how fast you can write it. Just copy and pasting out of random generators like in here with that. And then he did and then the next random generating And copy that paste in, it will take you like half a day and then you have another. Yeah, Autumn (33m 45s): Well it would be for the bizarre I'm sure some of it's going to go do this now and just see what comes up, dragon in whatever the search term comes up with it. Or you go out there. You are good. All right. So you are ready for my number three. Jesper (34m 1s): Yes. Autumn (34m 1s): All right. I named this one too. And it sort of reminds me of your number five. So I call this one now you're here now. You're not okay. And so this is a world where random wormholes appear without warning, you can be walking down a path and be transported to the top of the mountain or the middle of the ocean or in a erupting volcano. And so like Stories I life, it would be so chaotic and unpredictable that it would be impossible to actually write a comprehensive story because you would just be like walking and poof, you know, you wouldn't be able to be with any one. You love you wouldn't your life would be inconsistent. So where yours was your memories or a race, hear you are physically, you know who you are and you're physically transported. Autumn (34m 46s): Do you know to a cliff? Jesper (34m 51s): Yeah. Nice. But could you have like some sort of limited countermeasure or something? Autumn (34m 57s): I'm not sure if something, if you run up a bit. Jesper (34m 60s): Yeah. So, so if you have something like if you have this substance or whatever it is, and it's very limited in supply, but if you have it, you can basically just walk straight through the wormhole, roll out and taking you anywhere. You, you know, we just want to walk through it and keep going wherever you are, where we are going already. But if you don't have it, it sucks you up and drops you somewhere else. Autumn (35m 21s): I could see that. Or I can imagine if, you know, if, if you manage to have kids and you know, there are people are evolving on this world, eventually evolutionarily, someone's going to be able to control where the worm hole goes or at least start being able to manipulate it slightly. Would that be fun? So Yes, I, I was again, yeah. You know, you can find your way around it, but at, at, at its purest form before the child has evolved enough to learn that if they are thinking about something, they can direct where the wormhole goes and completely change as a society, it would be just a mess to Right. I, the love interest, poof. Jesper (35m 59s): Well, she is now in the middle of the ocean and proof. He is in the volcano. Autumn (36m 4s): We have stories over and it was the choose your own adventure gone wrong. Jesper (36m 9s): But it would actually also be pretty crazy from like, like say if, lets say you have the One like court made that knows how to control this and its like, poof, well the arm is, or is that your front gate now? Autumn (36m 24s): But yeah, there you go. That's like pretty great. Jesper (36m 28s): And yeah, and also, Autumn (36m 29s): I mean, that's the other thing. So I mentioned that it was all happens when you're walking. So what if you don't walk, you know, that's what you use to send them the servant's or something. There's definitely ways of playing with this so that it would be much less, much more controlled. And that's what you need to be able to develop a story is having control of things. But the minute things go completely random. Yeah. Good luck for writing the book. That's just me is true. Yes. Okay. Jesper (36m 56s): You are not my fault for my number three. I sort of decided that to make my list a winning list, I needed to also play on some scary ones are excellent. So number three and number two is scary ones rather than a terrible ones. Bad ones. Okay. And I felt like with two of those on my list is going to be really strong. Okay. And what better way to do that than picking some real world locations to serve as inspiration for Stories, settings. Okay. So when things are based off of reality, then it becomes a bit more scary and it's true. Jesper (37m 41s): Let's go back here in the Nordics actually in Norway to be precise, you will find a place known as ECA is house fortress. That's already sounds terrifying. Yeah, it is. As it sounds, it's a medieval castle and is actually also used as the mysterious setting for the fiction novel, the snowman, which is written by Joe Nesper. If you know him, it's a pretty well known Norwegian author. But the thing is that many locals act to report that this place is haunted. Jesper (38m 21s): Excellent. So the most famous residents today are the ghosts of a woman and the demon dog that wonder is the castle grounds. Oh demon dogs. Yeah. So imagine a story where you are trapped inside this castle. I think that could be pretty damn horrific Autumn (38m 43s): Though, if a real story. Cause we both have watched those M the haunting of Hill house, the haunting of, or something blind manner. I can't remember the one that is correct. We have of both watched those and Yes, I, horror story is hunting Stories are definitely spine tingling, especially when it's based on real events. So this can be quite, let's see, it's not a terrifying one to write it. And I think that'd be a fun story to write. So Writing. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a terrifying setting. It is a terrifying and that I did, I just didn't notice. We were so many people would say yes, it sounds like a great story to write, but we're talking like worse for at least this is a real thing. That's, that's terrifying. Autumn (39m 23s): You don't want to live and you don't want to live in, In even game of Thrones. I mean, it has to be people to live, to survive. If you are a good person, you are dead in like two days. So there's are no places if you want to really live. But yeah, Jesper (39m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that was my Autumn (39m 41s): Number three. How do I like that? That sounds like it's going to be on must visit to the list when I come over to see, you know. Yeah. Jesper (39m 48s): Well it is in Norway and not in Denmark, but anyway, so yeah. Autumn (39m 51s): Is it still closer to you than it is to me? So yeah, Jesper (39m 54s): I guess it is. Yes. Technically you could say that. Yeah. Autumn (39m 58s): Okay. So it's the end of the world. It's good or excellent. I like that. I love it. I used to read horror, haunted, Real hauntings stories when I was a teenager. So that's really cool. All right. So you ready for my number to, Jesper (40m 14s): yes. Autumn (40m 14s): All right. This one I named poison. So this is a world where the soil is formed from uranium. So it's not such a high level that you would die instantly if you found yourself there, but high enough that it quickly starts affecting your DNA. So lumps will form across your skin has massive cancers form under your lymph nodes. Jesper (40m 38s): Your lungs will feel with cancer cells so that you have a hard time breathing. The marrow of your bones is altered, weakening the structure so that you can just break your leg or your toes as are walking. Your hair will start to fall out. Your skin turns to boils and kinda like just lost all of your body. Oh my God, you is excruciatingly painful until you finally die with relief. So this is poison. Have fun writing a story set there. Autumn (41m 12s): Well, I get it. I, I can see that there is a common trend here. And every one you come up with, this will have something like that. Nobody will survive this. It's impossible to live in those settings. Jesper (41m 25s): Do you know if your characters are dying because of the world? Its, you know, it's not going to be a really interesting story. Oh maybe when you made this list, you had a bad week and you poured it into the city. Autumn (41m 37s): I do it. Write this yesterday. No I I right noble. Right. And the reason I can write Nobel prize as I make lists like this one, I have a bad week. Every one dies, but I won't make it into a story. So this is what don't worry. Jesper (41m 54s): Got it. Okay. If you say So. Yeah. Autumn (41m 57s): Oh that's great. You are on for too. So, Jesper (42m 0s): But two is a yeah, I want again a scary one as I said. Okay. And I was thinking, what could make it more scary than number three is it sort of has to write. And I wanted to try to see if I could see all the way to read with this one. Oh, Autumn (42m 18s): Okay. And your number two. So this is confidence because you still have one to go. Jesper (42m 23s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do buy number one is obvious. Who Autumn (42m 26s): Was the witness over? The last is fine. Jesper (42m 30s): Excellent. So the guy in the catacombs of Paris, those were used by actually one of my favorite vampire authors and rice. Yeah. And she used it for a coven of vampires in the novel, an interview with a vampire or interview with the vampire may be, or even vampire. I can't remember, but either or people know what I mean? Yes. And that is already pretty cool. But what if I told you that the catacombs beneath the city of Paris, there are actual skeletal remains of over 6 million people down there. Autumn (43m 9s): Well, let's see. Yeah. I didn't know it was 6 million, but I knew I've seen the walls of the skulls and the bones and I, yeah, I do. Like, Momento more, I, I, so I love these little death images and skulls. I should've been a goth, but I never was a goth if you do need to goth. But yes, the momentum OR I in the bones down there are S Oh, fascinating. I wanted to see them and it was in Paris and it never did make it down to the category. Jesper (43m 34s): Oh, nice. Yeah. You can actually see the, the part of the stacked on top of each other is down there in, in the, the catacombs there. But now I don't want to Fantasy setting where its just about skeletons everywhere to sort of a bit boring here. Well, I suppose it might be a bit scary for some, but I don't think it is scary enough. So what if the deceased walked a month among us, but you don't know who they are. So they act like us. They look like us, but they are not us. Jesper (44m 15s): So the scary part is that you know that they exist only. You don't know who it is, so it could be one of your friends. It could be your spouse. You don't know that it would be so imagining going through like that. Autumn (44m 34s): Not knowing if your, one of the other that would be good. Jesper (44m 38s): What are they up to? No good right there. Their trying to get rid of mankind. And so what a bit and you know that they exist, but you don't know who it is. Autumn (44m 45s): That would be very interesting. That'd be a fun tension filled novel too. Right? I have to admit, right. Jesper (44m 50s): Oh for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it would be scary like hell Autumn (44m 54s): If it was real-world in like imagining that the Corona virus, the people who are infected were changed somehow. Yeah. If this was a real world and you just did it, it was the impact of getting sick with something was much more devastating and it wasn't just deaths, but change you into something like a zombie, you know, that's like not into zombie stories, but something like that. Yeah. Then what would be, if this was a real thing that would be terrifying. Yeah. Jesper (45m 19s): Yeah. But even in the Samba Stories, it's usually it's the human. So who are the scary ones into zombies? Story is not the Somme B's because the humans, humans are so scary because they can come up with all this ingenious ways of trapping in killing people and what not. So the sound bites well that they can be scary if there's a lot of them and you do. And you're trapped of course, but humans are much more dangerous. And imagine that if these people were like, look like you and act like you, but they are not you. And they want actually to, to kill you. So just going to grocery shopping you, you always have to be concerned if somebody's calling you over, it's like, Oh, are they going to kill me or something? Jesper (46m 0s): Or somebody at the side of it arose you, you come across a car has like, you know, the typical trope of a puncture tire. And they're like, can you help me? No. Hell no, I won't have to help you. Bye-bye Autumn (46m 13s): So much for a lot of good Samaritans. Jesper (46m 16s): They don't make system this setting. I think, Autumn (46m 18s): Oh, I like that. That is, that would be a very, I wouldn't know what to live there. I like, I wouldn't be able to trust you. This would be horrible. No. Yeah. I can't do that. Alright, so you ready for my number one? This one is a bit of a surprise. Actually. Jesper (46m 35s): I hope it's not too good, but yes, I'm ready. Autumn (46m 39s): This one also has a name. So its called the black Marsh in the bowl of Ashe, which both exists on the coast have storms. And I know that you are so intimately because of this one. I know we said we wouldn't pull from anyone else's novel, but I did pull from my novel. So this is from my Epic fantasy series, a rise of the fifth order. And I think they go back to it in games of fire. But so this is mine. So the, you know, stealing this one, but if you want to come and visit, talk to me, well we'll work it out. So it's, it was, it's a difficult place I'd never, ever would've went to visit here. And it was actually difficult to write about because it's so hard not to have your characters die. Autumn (47m 21s): So this is one character is mostly survive. So first this is the coast of storms, which is similar to the eternal storm. If you've heard of that in Venezuela, whereas the catacomb go river beats Lake Maracaibo. So there's an average of 260 storm, 260 storm days a year. So it's like a lightning there all the time. And that inspired the coast of storms in my novels. And it's always pitch black broken only by lightning and a lot of rain. So if your outside of the two main cities, you are in a landscape, you can barely see its most likely you are going to be soaking wet. You were walking through Mark and mud and to make it even more fun because you know what I like fun thinking as an ecologist, any plants or in this area, they can't photosynthesize. Autumn (48m 7s): They will be dormant waiting for the one or, you know, two days of sunlight where they can suddenly reproduce and grow leaves and all that other stuff or are they are going to find energy and a food source. And other means so most of the plants are actually carnivores. So giant thing is that Venus fly traps. My cat's for a strangling vines with thorns have suck your blood. So you know, the plants are going to kill you so you can imagine what kind of insects and animals eat plants up to the plans can already eat you. So you probably don't want to run into any the creatures that live there. What makes it even more fun? Autumn (48m 47s): Because you know, me and I love really fun. Fantasy settings is if you have magic, you can't use it in the black Marsh. And that is because most of the area is littered with bones of creatures that the bones themselves don't allow magic. So there are like nullifying bones, which it works out quite well. It's usually in the story, but the problem is why would that adoptation of animals having bones that repel magic happen? Well, if, because there is an apex predator that eats magic. So if you can actually save yourself using magic from these like kind of carnivorous plants, you're going to be attracting something that is going to come and eat you like giant or a pack of a lost or Raptor as a kind of reminds me of, they will just get you down and eat your way. Autumn (49m 36s): So yeah, I have some of my, I say my favorite characters in their it's just me. So I mean, it was really hard to just shove them into this landscape and hope that they came out the other side 'cause it was very desperately needed that they'll go in there, but you know, so that's my black Marche. It's quite a place. So I like that one. Yeah. It's quite fun too. Try to get your character's out of a pickle 'cause if they can be used magic, they shouldn't be. And most likely they can and there are fighting things when they are used to being trained with magics, there is something we got to use sorts of knives. Good. Look to you. Jesper (50m 15s): Yeah. But that's exactly why you want to have your character's in situations were in the beginning as an author, you don't even know how to get them out of it. And, and, but then if you worked hard at it to find a way for them to get out of it, it will come across very, you know, very, very strong reasoning and a, a, a, a very good logic. So, so yeah. Autumn (50m 35s): Well, thank you. I'm glad that you liked my number one. I do, Jesper (50m 39s): But I also feel is cheating because you took your own. So I think you were already disqualified now the Yes, Autumn (50m 48s): I will trust the listener's to decide if it was just qualified. Jesper (50m 51s): Okay. But I know, I don't want to say, I don't want to hear it from Dominick. I don't care what you said. I'm just kidding, Dominique. If you're listening, listening. Autumn (50m 60s): Oh, all right. Well lets see if I got, Let, just toss down. What is your number one? Jesper (51m 6s): Okay. So this one is really bad, like bad in an annoying way. So I guess if you, if you read it as a humorous book, then maybe it would be okay, but that's only until you realized that it was actually intended to be taking seriously and then it'll just be, So This is a world where we are bringing to life the most hated cliches that exists. So let me share some with you in this world. Like you have the fact that there is only one single way to defeat. Jesper (51m 48s): The bad guy can not be done in every way on the other, any other way. Only one way. That's the only way to do it. Okay. You have everything in the world with every place. And every item is a very long and hard to pronounce Fantasy names And the heroes cannot, of course also easily defeat, highly trained Warrior's in combat, even though there are no other system that is something you just do. Autumn (52m 17s): Excellent. And the majors are always wiggling their eyebrows. Jesper (52m 22s): And I can add some more if you want like villains who are apparently just evil because they are evil. They were born that way. Or how about everything that happens, happens because a prophecy for Told it. Yeah. I think that would be pretty damn annoying fantasy world to read. Autumn (52m 44s): And it would be a horrible one to read it. It would be, I think he was in the boring one, two right in. But yeah, that would be just, I couldn't imagine going through a whole book cover all of the tropes, every single cliche you could throw in there and just show up to go to town with it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Jesper (53m 5s): If, if, if you didn't take a serious and, and you just made it a bit like very humoristic that could work. But if you're trying to run it like an Epic FANTASY and you're stuffing all of this in there, it's going to be a nightmare. It's a reef. Autumn (53m 16s): It's one of those ones where if it's a role-playing game, it might be a fun one to be in cars. You can just decimate your competition. You are the hero and therefore you will get to the end, you'll get a Brown. And you'll definitely get that. You know, it's like one of those ones when you're having a bad week, you just want to play that role playing game because you're going to smash to everyone. But to sit there and actually read it all like a 150,000 words with me, just wiggling their eyebrows and women and chain Malbec, Kini is all the women that have to have to do it yet. Jesper (53m 44s): Yeah, yeah, of course. Yes. That is there a as well as an, every time a woman in the room that you will have like a full paragraph describing her upper body in detail. Like there's no reason for it. It's just like a long a description of that. It's just like, and then probably a very nasty old man made sitting in the corner of wiggling. His brows said something really nasty, like Autumn (54m 9s): Yeah, yeah. Oh lets just go back to the 1980s. Oh my God. I go and read one of 'em. Oh, one of those Hemmons or something. Jesper (54m 23s): Yeah, that's painful. That is a pretty painful one. I have to admit. Autumn (54m 26s): I am actually impressed that besides slightly with the rain versus my wormholes, having a slight kind of tendency to each other, we were in a completely different and again for this list, that's pretty impressive for WORST Fantasy Worlds Actually almost no overlap in these ones at all. Jesper (54m 46s): We did have some in the, in the us quite far back now, I guess in terms of Episode. But yeah, we did have at some point where our list has a lot of overlap, but not anymore. Autumn (54m 57s): Where are we seem to have gone away from them? I also think our list for a longer than I think they might have been 10 and now were just, you know, now we just choose the cream of the crop, have five. Yeah. It's like the best of the best. And that's all right. Well I have to admit to some of your story's I think it would be absolutely fun, but your number one would be except for a role-playing game. I just could not read that OR right in that I would just be, it would be less, it was Shrek a fish spoof couldn't do it, but it would be a fun spoof. If it would be fun to write comedic Fantasy one day I could get into that, right? Jesper (55m 33s): Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I like your AI thing to be honest. Autumn (55m 38s): And so I want to thank you. That's excellent. Jesper (55m 41s): I didn't say that. I just said I liked it because you know, you have to, again, communication skills here, Autumn, you know, before you deliver bad news, you get the good news. Right? So you just first say, I like your AI and then you said, but I'm sorry that you lost. Yeah. Autumn (55m 57s): So I, I am leaving that up to the listener. I'm sorry. You, neither of us are good in this list or if we are, we're equally powerful. Jesper (56m 8s): Really? I thought I was the one deciding who One. Oh, okay. Well I guess we will leave it for our listeners. So let us know who you think had the best list or that works best. And don't forget to go fill out a review and then go over to Am Writing Fantasy, to come and send us a screenshot or a link through the contact form. And if you're one of the first five, we will get you an audio book. Narrator (56m 43s): Okay. So next Monday we are going to discuss If social media activities at, can you help us all to us to sell books if its actually just a waste of time? If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Do you want to sell more books, face less competition, and achieve a higher return on your publishing investments? K-lytics has the answers and this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Jesper talk to the owner of K-lytics, Alex, to gain a better understanding of what K-lytics is and what the latest trends and niches are within the fantasy genre. Learn more about K-lytics here: https://k-lytics.com/  Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in a way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. This is episode 122 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Autumn is taking a break today and instead of have a great guest for you. So I'm gonna talk to Alex Newton from K lyrics today and welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Alex. Alex (48s): Hello, and thanks a lot for having me. Jesper (51s): Yeah, it's a pleasure. I think I've heard you talk on so many podcasts now that your voice is almost feels familiar to me. Alex (59s): Oh, wow. I didn't, I didn't realize it would be that many, but you know yeah. The occasional conference or a webinar that has happened, it does happen. Jesper (1m 8s): Yeah. And also the nice videos you send out with K-lytics, the summarization videos. I've listened to you there are many times as well. That's the funny part, right? It's like the listener's who listens to podcasts. They also use to my, and Autumn's voice. Alex (1m 23s): Right. Yeah. I can imagine because as you say, what I do usually comes with video and voiceover to explain the things, because the numbers can be a very dry matter. So I I'll try it to make it palatable. And the best way I found was with the video and with a voice accompanying the, the graphs and the dry stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Jesper (1m 47s): And that's works really well. And we'll get into k-lytics in is just in a minute, but maybe just before we get that far, maybe you could share a bit about yourself. I believe you are on my side of the Atlantic for change. I normally always record, but somebody in the US, but you are in Switzerland, is that right? Alex (2m 5s): I am. I'm based in Switzerland Now. I I'm a native German. You know, I grew up in Germany. I had my professional life there as a management consultant. Although there, I basically worked all over the globe and, and some 10 years ago when my little daughter was born and, you know, I had the typical corporate executive type of life, 24 hours, seven days a week Comic-Con activity and living out of the suitcase, I thought, Hey, you know, something should change. And, and that was right in that. What was it called? Like the Kindle gold rush. You can almost say, so it was almost by coincidence. I got into, Hey, what's Amazon doing? And, and yeah, six years ago, I officially launched k-lytics, which by the way is simply Kindle and analytics, but I didn't want it to get into the trademark dispute on day one. Alex (2m 56s): So I dropped the k-lytics from the Kindle and here we are with K Lytics. So right now I have a, we've moved to Switzerland system one and a half years back and never looked back. So right now I'm, I'm very much running K Lytics amongst a couple of other things and, and enjoy my time here in this very nice little country that stands as a stronghold in so many aspects hear right in the middle of Europe. Jesper (3m 25s): Yeah. That's true. Yes. So you lived in Germany before then? Alex (3m 28s): Yes. Yes. I, I grew up in the Southwest of Germany and lived in Munich for many years and then near the stood guard area. So in the Southern area of Germany, yeah. Jesper (3m 39s): Oh, okay. Yeah. I like watching the Bayern Munich games on television Alex (3m 43s): Except last night. All right. So congratulations to Paris. Jesper (3m 50s): Yeah, I guess so. But yeah, you did touch a little bit on a slightly there, but maybe you can explain that, you know, a bit more to those who have, who have no idea what K Lytics is. Maybe you can put a bit more, let's say the baseline information into what is it. Alex (4m 11s): And in very simple terms, we tried to provide market research information to authors and publishers publishers to help them make better Publishing decisions is now that sounds very abstract, but if you're in an author, if you are saying the Fantasy on a world, and you decide about your next book project, or you are Writing already a, you know, your rights in the middle of a book project. And, and if you feel a little bit, mm, there is a market out there, or perhaps, you know, readers and potential buyers. So if you are not just writing for therapeutic reasons, or you have nothing else to do, but because you also want to make a living with your writing, you we'll have to face up to the fact that you run a business, right. Alex (4m 57s): In any business that gets into a new product or service. Usually we'll do some kind of market research on it. If it's only like talking to a couple of existing customers or in your case, existing readers, Hey, what are your, like, did this resonate with you and how we do this on the ground on a scale by basically looking at a hundreds of thousands of books, and there are sales ranks on Amazon. And by aggregating the data from those books over time, or by certain genres, or by certain categories, we can basically deduct what is trending, what is going on? What is going down, what is selling, what is selling, but what is already crowded, what is selling and perhaps not overly crowded. Alex (5m 46s): So we very much come into the game when people make decisions about that Publishing project. And later on, as, you know, things become very tactical in what category is, can I apply to my, what should be the pricing? If I do Epic Fantasy, you know, what are all the other Epic fantasy books are being priced at? Am I too high? Am I too low? And it can get very nitty-gritty in tactical than on the other side. But in essence, it is looking at what's out there in terms of data, aggregating it in an intelligible way and then packaging it so that not every author is a mathematician, obviously, so that you can make a very simple inclusions with you with the writing direction you take. Jesper (6m 32s): Yeah, no. I personally really like a K lyrics and, and the reports, but I am curious, you know, why, why did you start Kelly this in the first place? Because I, I, in the Kindle gold cross back then there was nothing like this. So was it just like you thought that, well, this is missing, so I'll try to do it, or, or what, what was the driver behind you creating Catalytics in the first place? Alex (6m 57s): It was almost a like half an accident that I ended up in the publishing world. Now I did start in my career in publishing, like literally 30 years back into a London based publishing company. And so there was some affinity with the publishing world, but at the point 10 years ago, when I started the first experiments, as you said, was a Kindle gold rush. And it was at that time when I looked at something, Hey, I want to work from home. So right now I'm clicking on all of those PayPal by button's. Is there anyway that others could click on mine? That was the out the, the, the onset. Alex (7m 37s): So I was looking into various markets, you know, fitness Market, online consulting, Market information products, you name it. And I almost, by coincidence, I can came across one of those famous, or I think by now more in famous, you know, get, are rich with Kindle types of courses for the $99, you know, or these types of things in. And at first it was, you know, I was more thinking about publishing rather than writing, but having been a corporate management consultant for twenty-five years and having been in boardrooms 25 years, you vary, you become a very conservative meaning. Alex (8m 18s): You know, I don't believe that. So you, you, you really tried to look at the facts and based decisions. On fact. So I started looking at Amazon sales ranks. I started to talk to people, Hey, if this whatever poly or a recipe books that everybody says is the thing, you know, if that has, I would say is to rank off 50,000 on Amazon, does it actually selling anything? And I found, I know its not selling anything, although everybody's saying, you know, you can get rich by, by uploading your grand grandmother is not even, Palio a recipe book, Polly-O breakfast, a recipe book. And at that point in time, I actually coined term, which I call to the present day, the polio breakfast recipes syndrome, meaning, you know, people tried to convince you that you can make money with some obscure, a nonfiction book upload to Kindle, which obviously is a total lie, but to the present day, but people are being sold courses, you know, to, to get into self publishing and make a living by uploading your knitting patterns and that sort of thing, which is obviously a complete nonsense. Alex (9m 23s): And so at that point in time, I started doing some, it's almost like data experiments with Amazon and I figured out, Hey, that works. And then I was in the one where on the Facebook group and start a chair. I remember my first K Lytics report was very plainly about the top 30 main Kindle category. So essentially it was looking at is romance selling more than sci-fi and fantasy and sci-fi and fantasy selling more than engineering and transportation Book. So, you know, it like super crude level and people tore it out of my hands and then ask, Hey, can you do this? Can you do this full sub categories? And then people start diving into sub sub categories and, and the rest is history. Alex (10m 8s): I think ever since 2015, we've been tracking more than 7,000 kids and a generous month in month out looking at hundreds of thousands of books. Jesper (10m 19s): Wow. Yeah, it's impressive. I mean, you must have quite some machine power to data scrape all that information. Right. Alex (10m 26s): Well, you know, it's not like a super large scale operation because first of all, you know, you don't want to, I think there can things to be said about, you know, to what extent can, and should you do automated visits on other websites? I know, I mean, in many industries you have it, you know, take hotel, price engines and all that stuff, but you know, it's a very, very small scale. So Amazon wouldn't even notice that. So, and, and also coming more from a data science point of view, you, you know, there is no value in just collecting data. The value comes with intelligent analysis of, and also the intelligence sampling, right? We look at books like seven days a month, like not every hour because also, you know, that would take bandwidths that also Amazon wouldn't be happy with. Alex (11m 10s): So we add more like a, you know, not like the occasional visitor, you know, but it's a, it's a, it's a very fine line between what is, what is ethical and what isn't right. And so we chose to do a very hands off type off the data operation that samples book's rather than as you term it scrape, you know, the, the, the Ammons on site every hour or, you know, which is not, not, not the type of business I want to get into. Jesper (11m 41s): No, no, that's fair. That's fair enough. And its always good to be a bit ethical about what you do. Although I think with Amazon, they have a scale that they know everybody and a lot of people who are scraping that data and I don't really think that to be honest, but, but its always good to have some ethical considerations. Yeah, Alex (11m 58s): Absolutely. And, and, and, and in the end of the day, you know, we were there with that humble data collection to basically help help their clients, you know, that, that feed their whole Publishing and engine. So a and a, and so far, you know, six years they've, they've never complained. I've never complained. And, and, and the people have people that have been happy. So I hope it stays that way. Jesper (12m 22s): No, that's perfect. So when it comes to the fantasy genre and that's sort of what we are all about here is also in the name of the Podcast because it is quite obvious, but considering the fantasy genre, I was hoping maybe you could share a bit about, you know, Latest data and your latest trends or sort of what you see when it comes to the FANTASY showing or what is trending and so on. I mean, first of all, Alex (12m 49s): Well, the good news is that, you know, out of those big JARAs on Kindle, I mean, you have romance has always number one full of by Mr. Thriller suspense, then you have a bit of non-fiction, but usually it's and Fantasy. And I apologize if I, if I some make a sum with science-fiction I know of many FANTASY all for the first time, how can, how can Amazon, how does Amazon dare put those in one bucket at the very top level already, which I know is not the case, but you know, a scifi and fantasy as, as one umbrella category is, is usually the third largest. And especially during the last 12 months have this crazy pandemic time, we've seen quite some changes and changes in read the behavior. Alex (13m 35s): And the good news they are is that overall people who have been looking for more, w we see categories that have to do with humor have been trending up. And if we see a very dark reads, you know, post-apocalyptic stuff is going down, but the, but the good news is anything that provided, say a, a, a good escapism for readers during these dire times has in essence benefited. And therefore, for example, in Fantasy overall, we saw a bit of a dip obviously about a year ago during the first log down periods. Like, because there are people who have been buying non-fiction books about how to bake bread, and it took a market share from some fiction, but, you know, very, very briefly after a brief period, we saw the, the overall Book market, obviously benefiting greatly from these dire times with a print book sales in the us, having grown, showing the highest growth rates in a decade with 8% growth. Alex (14m 37s): Amazon grew 25% in the Kindle select global fund. So the royalties paid two author. So I mean, 25%, that's huge. And one of the beneficiary JARAs was Fantasy. Overall, as one example, if you take Epic FANTASY as an example at which is probably like the general, epitomizing a bit of Fantasy as a, I wouldn't say cliche, but as an overarching theme, you know, why, what makes Fantasy the Epic side of the thing is obviously clearly position to provide an escapism. And that category on Amazon had been like, it, it sort of had a peak before, back in 2017 or 18 around that time and with all its fluctuations, you know, and it has then had a bit of a downward trend all the way into the start of 2020. Alex (15m 33s): And then after that brief dip, during the first blog down in it, it really shot up back again. And you see that these types of Fantasy markets are clearly benefited and we can, we can go and in, in Canmore, if you want, but on a, on a high level, you see that Fantasy Epic FANTASY, a very big Market, but also very high ceiling. So there, you can say it's a, it's a very grown up, very established mainstream Market on in the Kindle world. And then obviously you have these hundreds of when not hundreds, but, you know, a 10, 20 like big sub genres, you know, from Seoul to source a reaction and adventure game adaptations. Alex (16m 14s): And they tend to do pretty well on the Kindle platform. So especially over the last year, all the teen young adult driven type of Fantasy, we saw a lot of trends happening there. And if you want, we can, you know, I can take into the data here as we speak and, and looking into some of those. Jesper (16m 36s): Yeah, for sure. I, I think that would be very interesting because a part of it is, and that's what I liked with the K leader reports is also to do, to try to see, because at least for myself and, and Autumn, the stuff that we write, we, we are sort of settled in, in the Epic fantasy world. So, eh, I think the competition is probably pretty fierce there to be honest, but maybe you can contradict me, but, But I, I'm more thinking for, especially if you're sort of starting out and, and, you know, let's say you had decided that I liked to right Fantasy, but I actually like very many different types of Fantasy, then it could definitely also make sense to look into the catalytic reports and, and try to see, okay, is there some of these SOPs showed us where there was just less competition and it makes it a bit easier to get more sales, write it that way. Jesper (17m 29s): I think K-lytics, this is very useful apart from what you mentioned earlier as well, that even if you are established in something, you can use it to figure out what is the good price range for books, what is the average pricing and, and so on. So your position, your product's so to speak or your books correctly, but, ah, but yeah, please share more details, right. I mean, Alex (17m 51s): As you mentioned, it, a Epic, Epic fantasy, I think is a good example of, as you say, that there are established mainstream markets and just entering in there, you know, as a new comer could be a bit of an uphill battle. I mean, if you, if you look at the Epic Fantasy data, we did a study start of this year. That is one of the examples of a well, in my corporate world, we would say a very concentrated market, right? Where a few to determine, determine the bulk of the sales, you know, with obviously at the very top of the, the Brandon Sanderson, you know, crushing it with, with all his, his books and obviously the classics, the talkings and the Robert Georgians, the obviously George R. Alex (18m 39s): Martin and all the F the fan fiction, the, the, the spin offs, the jaw, the Abercrombie side of the world. And, and then already, even with some of the, you know, a big, big names or whatever, what was it like rubbing havin, you know, that there is a whole number of names were immediately, you see the books of their sales rank, you know? Yeah. You know, it, it's a tough market. Now, the good news for Epic Fenton, what good or bad news depends on the eye of the beholder is there while you have like Publishing companies that really dominate like Tor books, right. That, that sine on like everybody or a bid or the DAW, there, there is a couple of big outfits out there, but then you do have an increasing chair in the publishers, the, the typical, you know, author that wants to make use of the self publishing self publishing world and all the opportunities that come with it. Alex (19m 39s): And there, we do see a bit of like a balance between a traditionally published or with the specialized Epic FANTASY publishing houses and a couple of, you know, really good self-publishers that found that out a way into the game Now. But if you don't want to get head on with the brand and send the suns and of the world around, you will pose exactly the question you will pose exactly the question you posed, you know, are there opportunities out there in the overall fantasy world where it's perhaps a bit less competitive, less crowded, less established also. Alex (20m 21s): And, and I would clearly say yes, you know, I mean, especially if you, if you'd be able to also address some of the teen young adult readership, which is not necessarily teen young adult people, because obviously there's research that suggests that the bulk of the teen young adult fantasy books are actually not read necessarily by, by teens or young adults, but also adults. So they really have opportunities, you know, I mean, take the huge Market, take the huge Market of urban FANTASY is by now, it's also no longer a niche market, but that created a whole, a publishing self publishing sub empire, where it's really been about, well, what types of urban Fantasy do I do? Alex (21m 9s): Is it, you know, the, the, the leather clad chick that's running around with swords slang vampires at night and working at Starbucks by day, or am I going more into the Jim butcher type of world? And there, the data can, can give you hints. So for example, we saw a, what was it like a, almost like a five-year decline after the big hunger games hype was over, right. And with a pandemic we saw with many of the teens being sitting there at home, and after the homeschooling having to do something, there is perhaps the only so much Netflix who can watch you are only so many mobile devices available that they had to read books again, I don't know, but we saw a huge increase again in, in 17 young out adult FANTASY. Alex (21m 58s): Segment's for example, these I'm a bit dystopian type of a royalty novels. Kira cos I think it was primarily a driver, obviously there was also the hunger games sequel, but those were pride to a predominantly self-published authors who really took the whole segment segment up again. And if I just look at the, the, the data of, of over a year or, you know, paranormal Fantasy has, has, has found a bit of a, a return if you also off two years off having done well, but paranormal, for example, the hole paranormal romance, paranormal Fantasy, I, that has peaked, I would say 2013, 14 ever since then, these waves are by the way, very long-term. Alex (22m 47s): When I talk about writing to market or looking at these, this data, there is not about a monthly fluctuations. That's about catching the wave that carries you. And your project is over obviously a period of years rather than, rather than months. So by and large, you know, a teen young adult, whether its Fantasy fairy tales, especially in the teen young adult world, if you are a bit flexible to also put a touch on romance, into It, selling extremely well, you know, failed romance, paranormal, Romans vampire romance. Now for many Fantasy rights, they will go like, Oh yeah, no, that's like, I have to like Roman. Alex (23m 27s): So it was like, okay, okay. Yes, I read you You. But for that reader who is looking for an escape, those vampires and that stuff, you know, or the whole thing happening in a complete fantasy world. And there, there is a world building going into it, perhaps not elaborate with maps and stuff. As you have in a tall Keaton type of a trilogy seven, 150 pages, I will tell you, God knows what, but to those who are in those jars, they make a good living with it. Partly, And, and there they are not obsessed with academic definition of what constitutes Fantasy and what doesn't, but basically looking at what do readers want and then almost from a menu. Alex (24m 13s): Okay. Best example I'd say currently is, I mean, we are about, I don't know what your age yeah. They asked by the way, we're sort of the same generation. So we know movies like the, the witches of Eastwick right. Which is a vast awake. Or then later in the, in the late nineties, there was that other one with, with, I think they call Kitman right? So you have, which is, you have Housewives who are in their spare time, which is now right now we have a book Market getting going where some authors who've been big name authors in general, such as women's fiction, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, all of these jars are getting very crowded and cozy mystery. Alex (25m 0s): Now they came together, they bended together and created something which is called paranormal women's fiction. They even gave it its own hashtag PWF. And if you look at it, it is Fantasy, you know, is a about, which is about w you know, that shadow whirled it's, it's bringing a cozy mystery. And so, especially what has been doing well in cozy mystery was paranormal cozy mystery, which is where they bring women's fiction into it because they target very specific. The authors themselves are usually like 45 and older. So they credibly you are right about all of these mid life problems. Alex (25m 40s): You know, kids go on to college or midlife depression, and, and why they have women cast that in a FANTASY, in an urban fantasy world. You no overcome their mid-life problems so that that's not a long monologue that I give here, but it it's just to put some flesh to the bone when it comes to reading the Market, looking at trends and Writing to Trends, but without bending yourself, that's the important thing, you know, with what are you good at? And you're Fantasy writing and how can you take it and twisted in a way that you can combine your love, passion and craft with some Market aspects of a trend, more than others. Alex (26m 23s): There is no guarantee for a success obviously, but I think the whole publishing business has where people do it in a professional way. It's very much become around the credo, this mantra of, of how do we increase the odds of success at at least if you can not guarantee success. Jesper (26m 43s): Yeah. And it's so true. If, one look at it, especially with Amazon, I mean, Amazon is probably, well, it's, it's a good and bad in the sense that for most authors is, at least at Amazon is like 90% of the income. And that is good in the sense that if you can make it work on Amazon, there was a good likelihood that you will also have some money from it, but on the, the bad side then yeah, you're completely reliant on, on Amazon, which is, that's a whole different conversation. And I don't like that too much, but let's leave that alone for now. But I think what this is really about to me is trying to find, not compromising with what you want to write. Jesper (27m 26s): I mean, because I don't think it works. If you start looking at a K latex report and say, Oh, I can see that this a is working really well and is trending. So I'm gonna write some books, that's your option. Right. And, but I don't like those kind of books. I don't read those kinds of books. A and I didn't really care about it, but I'm just going to write it because apparently that's sort of readers want, I don't think that works 'cause it will also come across in the story that you don't really like it. And if you don't read it to yourself as well, you probably don't even understand the tropes of it. So, so leave that alone. But I think what, I'm trying more to say it, and that's why I find that K Lytics is very useful. For example, when Autumn I, and I write out the books, I know that what you also said, ah, as well, that, you know, some sort of romance in the books, usually it works well and probably half, or if not more than half, I think of the readers of Fantasy in general, a woman. Jesper (28m 20s): So if you don't put any WOTSO, if everything is just a sword fighting and dragons and, and what not, well, that can still be a great story. But if you don't put any romance in there, which is the data in Caledon, it also tells you is something that people like to read. You are missing out some stuff that you were, you could gain, maybe a lot more readers because you have some hope. And so all of them, and I always put some romance sub-plots into our Epic Fantasy stories. There is always some romance going on in those stories. And its more like for me, it's one of those things where I'm okay with it. I, I, you know, I don't love the romance of plots as such. Jesper (29m 2s): It's not my thing, so to speak, but I don't mind either. So, so the question is more like, why wouldn't we put it in? I mean our Autumn likes it. So she is naturally bent to what is that? And she does those things really well. And that's of course the benefit I can enjoy that, the fact that I write books together with her so she can put her touch on those things. So that's great for me. But my point is just to say that you can look at something like K lyrics reports and you can pick out some pieces where you feel like these are Okay for me. You know, I, I don't mind them. I understand them enough that I feel like I can write at least a subplot concerning it and then put that into the books. And hopefully you will see somewhat more success rather than going down your tunnel vision way of, I only write this because this is the only thing that I like and every party that doesn't like that well, bad luck for them and Okay, fair enough for it. Jesper (29m 54s): That's what you want to do, but if you wanna get some money for it as well, maybe you need to think of a bit about what readers actually or looking for. Alex (30m 3s): Right. And, and I think you couldn't have put it in into a better way. And you, you mentioned a couple of elements there that that may be worth reiterating on the one is the love and passion for what you do. Like you say, if you don't love it to yourself, if you don't love Amish romance and you know, could imagine writing it for the next five years, then don't no matter how high it's trending. Right. And the, the other elements that you mentioned would be for me also Kraft Skil, I think there are a certain genres, a, you know, to write good sex scenes that are a steamy, but not pornographic. That that is a craft skill, you know, not every writer is able to do so and to do so. Alex (30m 47s): I wouldn't know where to begin. Well, you tell me, and, and then there is also the thing about knowledge, right? I mean, a even if you, you know, during the hype times off of a literature role-playing game, the lid RPG in game lit when a Spielberg took the whole thing into the mainstream movie theater, well, you had people, you know, quarrying quarrelling about Well is the, is, is in that lid, RPG novel is the scoring and the gaming element, like really genuine. And I'm, I mean, if, if you are not a gamer yourself, you know, the readership, the nerds, the geeks, you know, they, they can smell this from like 50 miles. Alex (31m 32s): So don't, don't get into it. So there is this, I always say, there's this passion factor and the knowledge that the craft skill factor and the, the knowledge factor, but we are all of these things coming into play. So, I mean, even Mozart, although he, I think at the end of the career that he was not so shining anymore, but you know, even the great artists and composers, a lot of them, they, they worked for money and they composed what was the royalty. I wanted to hear it, not just what they had in, in their inspiration and their inspiration. So it, it was pop music and at, at the point in time, so if you're in, in, in Epic Fantasy and let's, I don't know whether it were, it exists, but if you're a hardcore Epic FANTASY writers and, you know, its source and darkness and shadows, Well, it, it will be good to know that themes, like if you have in your title end book description, something around darkness, around shadows, about war battles or something around age ages, centuries, power, and magic, you know, these five strong words, you know, constitute like whatever 60, 70% of the royalties and, and books contain them. Alex (32m 43s): But if you say, no, I'm going to write about whatever the, the, the golden And dungeon and the stone, the chaos and cry. And, you know, these are all also, you think very strong, compelling words, but the royalties are a much lower. You get the idea so that there is certain things that at certain points in time seem to resonate with certain reader groups. And it's just by bringing the arts and sciences a bit together and say, Mmm, no problem. I, I have it a lot more amongst my romance writers because they can almost like on the fly as they write the story, they can say, well, my God, it, if everybody currently likes mountain man, you know, living in, in, in a cabin, in as opposed to the billionaire or a vice versa, they can very quickly change characters and, and move the book more into a direction that may not resonate well even too, or are they rewrite the whole book and the like, remarketed were you, you had whatever, five years of age, I always say, you know, when we were, we were young and watching black and white movies, you had, you had women wanting to be kissed by a millionaire's or, you know, in Marilyn Monroe and the time's today, they don't want to be kissed by millionaires. Alex (34m 4s): They want to be whipped by a billionaire. So you had this whole 50 shades of gray, pretty, pretty extreme staff. And, and that was like a never-ending story, but the market, it was getting very crowded in all of a sudden you had on Amazon, especially with the advertising restrictions on Amazon, on a very steamy content. You had a big surge also with the age group, probably have the typical Kindle device oner in any case clean and wholesome Romans was doing extremely well and was still more of a niche type of market. And all of a sudden, you know, we, we reported on over five years of the trend of clean and wholesome romance. Alex (34m 46s): And over time you found even some steamy authors rewrite there, a billionaire romance novels, there are 50 shades of gray it into more like, yeah, clean and wholesome, clean read Swede, Romans billionaire romance, 'cause it was simply less crowded and in high demand. And, and that is what I mean with like reading the market in a way where you don't bend yourself, but you just tried to increase the, as you put it also in the, the odds of success. Jesper (35m 18s): Yeah, exactly. And, and I think, and that's, that's basically where you can see you can, because it's let me rephrase that because it's really, really difficult to do that on your own. I mean, she just tried to go to Amazon and look through the, the different categories and tried to look at the top seller list and the different categories, but it's really, really difficult for you to ma to spot trends on your own because it's, it is so much data and it is so complicated that that's where I really see that Kayla Alex can help. Just a, I mean, I am You mostly of you and Kayla, it is like, it's an input. And then you, you need to unpack it yourself and say, okay, what of this can I use? Jesper (35m 59s): And is this something where I have some sort of Venn diagram overlap between what I like to write and what the market likes to read, and then I'll try to merge those two together and make it fit there. And then I think for me that that's the point of it. But before we get into the end of the conversation that I wanted to also give you a chance to explain a bit, what if one buys K Lytics or goes into clearly, what, what is it that you're getting in there? And what are the reports that you were sending out and so on? And, and maybe also a bit about what are the, I think you have some tears as well. If I remember correctly has been a while since I was in their, but maybe just a bit of the pricing tiers and so on, if you don't mind. Alex (36m 39s): No, no, no. Of course not. I mean, for those who are interested, basically, you know, we, we serve authors from the fledgling interested authors to, to publishing houses. So we have to provide, you know, different entry points into, into the products. So you can, we provide memberships and we provide single reports. Now within the, within Bose, the, the baseline for everything is the data that we collect and that we publish every month and an updated database. And what you basically can have is, is there are basically two big pillow's to the product. The one is a ready-made PDF report. Say there, there is a 70 page Epic Fantasy reports, 17 pages that comes with a video that completely dissects the Amazon available data on Epic Fantasy. Alex (37m 29s): So if you're only interested in like that one Jara, you can simply go to the KLA, the sharp at K high for analytics.com/shop purchase the Epic Fantasy report. And we'll keep you busy for a good week. I'd say, if you really want to absorb the data, look at the video and especially makes sense of it, of how does that fit with your writing. So that is one entry points. So you can choose what we call genre reports on the card. There's two types of them. Ones are like really going in depth on certain sub jars, such as Epic FANTASY. There are others. We have a more general scifi and fantasy report that are not as deep in the analysis, but they are much broader because they would comparatively look well, there is more than a, a a hundred PSI Phi and Fantasy categories, and they would do exactly like we discuss before, well, what his, what is trending hire? Alex (38m 19s): Is it urban FANTASY or is it a paranormal row? You know, is it is. So it looks at the category of data in a competitive way. So these are the types of John reports and you can buy them out a card, or if you are interested in more than one Jara, then we, the memberships, because the memberships give you access to basically a multiple reports at a time. And these, our monthly memberships, they come into tiers. One is premium. One has elite that lead to us to the highest tiers. And the difference between the two tiers has also actually a very simple, the highest tier a Gibbs gives you unrestricted access to everything. And one thing is all the reports. The other thing is though that database now also premium gives you the database, but the depth of the data you see premium basically would give you the data every month for about 420 down two sub category level. Alex (39m 13s): But if you want to get into also this really granular and detailed, you know, in which 10 categories shall I put my book's sort of thing, then the elite level comes handy because there are, we track 7,000 categories, you know, from the gardening and horticulture to the lowest level Fantasy category of that, that exists. So, so especially if you want to also look a bit what's happening across job has gotten because some authors are very open-minded, you know, they write, say a urban Fantasy, but they really, because they know the JARAs are more and more blended and they want to know what is going on in romance, what is going on in mystery so that they keep a bit of head off, you know, ah, you know, there is a certain thing emerging could that's come over into like the paranormal women's fiction example I gave earlier that is sort of the > of like four genre trends meeting in a certain suite spot and meaning at a certain target rate, a group. Alex (40m 13s): And that has what we do. So there is entry points from ala carte to membership's obviously we promote the membership's also price-wise 'cause, that is what keeps us afloat. And it gives us the continuity to provide this research, which we've now been doing for six years and hope, hopefully not too many more years to come. Jesper (40m 35s): Oh yeah, for sure. And I definitely like to support what you are doing because I, I do think it's a very, very helpful, and that is stuff that authors can not do on their own. Umm, and I definitely also SUPPORT the, the, the fact that membership levels who is wanting to keep the business going. So we know this ourselves with, with Patrion, for example, is also sort of a membership ship site for this podcast. So it's, it's the same thing, but at least I will say to the listeners here as well, that if, if you don't know, if, you know, with this data things sort of me, I would definitely recommend just start out, maybe buying one of the younger reports for, for Fantasy. Jesper (41m 16s): I did that as well, several years ago now, but, but I did this as well and it's not expensive at all. I can't remember now, Alex, I, but I, I think it was like 25, maybe Alex (41m 26s): It's $37 that are a report on them. And you get probably, you know, more than 70 pages of, of, of analysis all aggregated in a understandable way. So it it's, as you say it as a writer that you should, of course we know, especially as an indie writer, you have so many other business aspects to run as, you know, the marketing, the ad's, the newsletters, you know, there is already enough business stuff going on to then say on top of it, do you'd want to become a market research experts may not be your core competency. So we, we crunch the data on hundreds of thousands of books so that you don't have to, that is the very simple essence of it Jesper (42m 8s): Indeed, yes. So I will put a link to K Lytics in the show notes so any of your listeners who are interested to check it out a bit more than a follow that link and on the k-lytics website does a lot more information as well. Hopefully we touch the ball upon most of it, but there is explanations about what it is and what your getting inside of the report and, and all that stuff. So I want you to, to at least go check that one out. Thank you. And thank you so much for coming Alex, and speak to us out here and share a bit about all of this data crunching stuff. Alex (42m 44s): Was a pleasure and a, hey, also all the best with your, with your own podcast. You know, I think its great that we see also so many people in the, in the publishing world and in the self publishing world for that matter to collaborate, you know, and, and have these forums for our people can exchange. I thought, and it was the last, at least I'd say, you know, of course there is traditionally published WORST. There is a hybrid publishes, you know, who have in some areas they have their rights back. They want you to go go half and they are half traditional And they have the, you know, like hardcore self published is. And from what I've seen is, especially in that hyper, then self publishing part of the journey, I've seen people be so fast and picking up Trends in, in, in collaborating together that they are in some areas of the rebar pull parts of the market. Alex (43m 39s): But before the traditional publishers even know it exists as a market. So Andy, I think it's also things to these podcasts and forums like yours, where these thoughts are exchanged and transported to the community that, that make that happen. Jesper (43m 58s): Oh yeah. Yeah. I agree. But okay. Thank you so much for, for coming here, Alex. And next Monday I we'll have a Autumn back here and that we are going to do one of our monthly fun episodes where we are going to discuss the top 10 worst and scariest FANTASY world. Narrator (44m 16s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrieon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Over the past few months Autumn and Jesper have tested out different types of writing software. Against AutoCrit and Fictionary, your hosts decided that ProWritingAid is the best one of them all. In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper (well, mostly Autumn), explains why ProWritingAid is such a great support tool for authors. Sprinkled in are tips and tricks, you can take away and apply in your own writing process. ProWritingAid can be found here: https://prowritingaid.com/  Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper And I'm Autumn. This is episode 121 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. I, and the over the past few months, we have been testing out some different types of writing software. We tried Fictionary AutoCrit and pro WRITING eight, and I think we've arrived at a favorite that we can talk about today. Autumn. Autumn (55s): Yes, I definitely have my favorite in there is actually I should mention that one or two features that I wish it had at one of the other ones sort of did. So, you know, maybe I'll do some, maybe I'll be able to convince the staff at the one of our top choice. They've had a few features. That's my wishlist. Jesper (1m 15s): Yeah. So we are going to deep dive a bit on ProWritingAid today and share our thoughts about it. And why are we? Well, I, I think it's not a secret that we like it very much. So we are going to talk about that and hopefully that will help some people, if they are not familiar with ProWritingAid already, then maybe they we'll be inclined to check that out. Or if they are already using pro Writing eight, maybe we are going to mention a few things they were not aware of. Autumn (1m 44s): Absolutely. Or at least may be some ways of using it that they hadn't considered. So I think it will be fun. I've definitely been using this tool heavily on some major novels. I feel like all I have been doing is editing I since January and that's okay. That means there was a lot of Writing in 2020, so that's all right, right. It's good to be pushing things out the door in Publishing. So that's exciting. Jesper (2m 19s): Its been Easter holidays here in, in Denmark, which means that a, I actually got quite some writing done on a book One. Yes you have been doing really well. Yeah. I am only seven chapters so away from the ending now, so that's pretty cool. Autumn (2m 34s): That is so cool. More editing. Jesper (2m 38s): You're never going to be done. It's just forever and going. Autumn (2m 42s): Oh this is my punishment. Like I think so, but yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just clocking right ahead. Well, I hope you had a good Easter as well as some time off or. Jesper (2m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. Well I do to the usual Corona stuff to there wasn't much we could do, but I got some Ikea furniture put together and we got rid of the bit of the, I think we are down to like five or six moving boxes after we moved, but everything else has not been unpacked. Yeah. That's amazing. Autumn (3m 16s): That's good. So that is really good. And that means that you can, hopefully now that it's turning towards spring ish, I would have hoped they're that you can actually go for walks on the beach are through town and not be worried about, you know, coming back to a new apartment full of boxes. Jesper (3m 31s): Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Autumn (3m 33s): And, and we've also started to allow soccer game now. So I'd been out refereeing, a couple of matches, which was nice to get started on again. So things are lightening up. No, you can't say lighting up. That sounds like we were putting on fire, but it's not getting better. That's exciting. And that's always an improvement. How about you? Oh, Goodlife my husband I'm was on top of things and he made an appointment for me to actually both of us to go get our coronavirus vaccine. So I'm very excited. And at the end of the month I, I might get to go down and see my parents and that's exciting. Autumn (4m 14s): So I'm looking forward to that. We have, we don't have kids, so we didn't have like an Easter where your high things, but we have our own traditions since we never did have children that we, I have a deal. I've got an in with the Easter bunny and he comes every year and gives me this nice little basket of all of my favorite things. I don't know how he knows, but then he hides Adams, everything. So everything is hidden. And I get to spend the morning sipping. My tea is sitting there like this watching for his Easter candy. And it's just one of my favorite holiday. He has a, he gets back though. Autumn (4m 55s): My tea delivery is brought by Easter, Easter Bunny's cousin is Jack and Jack likes to hide my tea delivery. So, you know, we each have our own issues with rabbits. Yeah. Jesper (5m 11s): All right. Okay. Autumn (5m 12s): Rabbits on a naughty, I guess. So we had an actual, a visitor That this year it was possibly an Easter raccoon. We had a raccoon outside of the cabin on Saturday night and he was adorable and just the big guys, he was a very healthy, feisty invasive right now, but he hasn't come back since then. Jesper (5m 36s): Oh wow. Yeah. Autumn (5m 37s): Yeah. Well that animal life I noticed as well, somebody in the Facebook group a and apologies, I forgot who it was, but I just noticed that somebody was a posting some stuff about, I think it was a, she that she almost died because she was, she got bit by a snake. Yeah. Jesper (5m 57s): And as she survived, she was Okay now, But it was just like sometimes when I hear stuff like that, it it's just so foreign for me here in Denmark. We, we don't have any thing, you know? Well, I think we have one snake that has some venom that can be, but there was only that one, a type here in this country and it it's not lethal. Oh, well, okay. If you are out in the middle of nowhere and you get bitten by it and you don't get to the hospital, I guess you could be lethal, but its not, it's not to bad. You have time to go to the hospital and everything as well. So it's not like instant re reacting, Venmo or anything like that. So I don't know that the whole thing about all those animals are not, well, it doesn't have to be posted it, but just because like you were mentioning like, Oh that that whole thing has just so foreign to me. Autumn (6m 45s): I mean, I think they don't know if you remember, if I told you that last year when we were walking to the, the main house on the property, We, I saw something running through the field and coming up towards us and I'm like, why is there a Shetland pony loose? I mean, I'm in Vermont, of course people would have ponies and that I'd be like, that's not a pony. That's a bear. That way. It was literally the biggest black bear I've seen outside of the Labrador we traveled, I slept next to Grizzly's have visited our camp site, but to be walking and Vermont, you know, I'm on my way to take a shower. My dog has like 50 feet ahead of me. And I'm like, yeah, it was cute. And I just happy. Autumn (7m 25s): My dog is very well behaved. And if you open, you do a hug thing and you call him, he comes running with ears back. It was a little tail wagging. So I was doing that. Well, I watching this bear run about 10 feet behind him and I'm like, okay. So yeah, there is. And then a few other ones a month later and we saw the female mother with two of her Cubs walked right by the front of the cabin. And so what, that was just amazing and I'm glad that it was inside of the camp because she would have had the third Cub going on with her. Jesper (7m 56s): Yeah, Autumn (7m 56s): Yeah. If I could sit inside and watch it and I know that I am safe, then I think that would be pretty cool. But honestly walking around like in the forest and knowing that that bear could suddenly pop up, like I know why as a dangerous person, I'm just not used to that kind of thing. And it's only one thing that frightens me and the forest and that's actually other humans, most animals is there. Fine. People are scary. Jesper (8m 21s): That Is true. Yeah. And, but that's also where we normally see and all the, some of the TV series, right. Is actually the humans that are the most scary ones to come across and not to some of these. Autumn (8m 34s): No, no, that's true. Narrator (8m 39s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast., Autumn (8m 44s): So I was wondering that you noticed that the Facebook has announced that they're gonna, they're going to create a new Publishing platform. I haven't seen something and I noticed that the article, but I didn't go read the full thing. So no, you can feel the listener in as well as me. Yeah, Jesper (9m 2s): Well, yeah, kind of. I just thought that it was quite a significant news, so I just want it to share it. But I did actually write up a post for our patron supporters with my thoughts on this topic. So if people want to go into the details, then should I should just to go on to patron it and check out what I, she had there, but I just found it pretty interesting. And that's why I wanted to share it. And of course you can also do a search on the internet if you want to check it out yourself. But I think it's something to keep an eye on, but I'm not so convinced as of yet, which is what I explained on Patrion, but let's see where it goes. Jesper (9m 45s): At least I just want it to mention it so people can keep an eye on it. Autumn (9m 48s): Yeah. Well, you know how I feel about Facebook that yeah. Yeah. And I actually, I like Instagram, so that's kind of sad. I think I liked it better before Facebook bought it, but yeah, that's pretty much my, a theory on most things of Facebook is okay. That's a nice little moving on. Jesper (10m 9s): Yeah. Moving on. Okay. Well let's speaking of patron as well. We want to give a huge shout out to Brian men. Dunka I hope that's how you pronounce the names, but yeah. Bryan is our new newest patient and support us. So thank you so much, Brian. And then we could not keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going if it wasn't for people like you. So thank you for that. Autumn (10m 36s): Yeah, definitely. Well, we love having you join us there and I mean, it's been good. It's been busy, even Dominic. I want to give a shout out to him who posted a link to us, unspecified spontaneously. And it's saying how much he was enjoying what he was learning on Patrion. So that's just, that's wonderful to know that you're really helping other authors and that's what we do over on Patriot and even more than we do in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So I would love to see other people. Do you have to sit there? Yeah, Jesper (11m 9s): Absolutely. Yeah. So those are the link in the show notes, if you are interested and there's all kinds of rewards that we offer over there as well. So, so, so I'll go and check that one out. But one more thing on M O O D is, and I almost felt like not sharing this one with a new term. Autumn (11m 30s): You really do have something else. Now what's up Please. I, how are you saying that? These for me? Jesper (11m 39s): Yeah, I did actually say yes and I loved to spring things on you in the middle of a podcast episode, but this one is actually gonna play in your favor. And that's why I want really to be shared with you because I feel like I'm playing cards into your hands that you can use laid on Against me. Autumn (11m 55s): And I don't like that. I love that. Please share it. It's my birthday this month. Come on. This is my present Please. Okay. So, okay. So let us stay present. And did you notice that the YouTube comments on Episode 119, where was she at the 10 WORST stories ever told, Oh, well let me guess I'm winning and by winning, please tell me I'm winning. So when we, just for the listener, when we are doing these alternating lists episodes where we sort of go a bit crazy and have a bit of fun with some random topic like we did in episode one 19, when we, she had those a 10 worst stories ever Told, we always a have a bit of a competition going on as well, where we try to best each other and see, you can build the best list, basically. Autumn (12m 45s): What are the best, worst lists? You know, the best worst lists. Yeah. Usually, And on that note, Dominick said, and this paints me so much to read out loud. So you are killing me, Dominick. They just don't post like this in these kinds of comments. You Dominic. So Dominic wrote quote, Oh, Oh my God. I'd have to psych myself up for this evening. She'll just send it to me. All of them tends to win. Yes. Pro on quote is what it says. Autumn temps to when, what is that? It wasn't even just that episode. Autumn (13m 24s): It was in general. What, Davidic your, thank you. You made my day. I owe you like a page or a review or something. Thank you. Jesper (13m 39s): Yeah. Well, no, I strongly strongly disagree with those YouTube comments like that. And I, I don't actually appreciate getting that kind of comments. Oh, I love it. That's just fantastic. I have a winning, I hate it. That I have a feel for this one is going to come back and bite me later. I don't like it now and now it's hanging There. It's the precedent. Has it been, can we move on? I don't feel like talking about this anymore. All right, lets get into editing Narrator (14m 9s): And on to today's topic. Jesper (14m 13s): Okay. So when we write together, I'm usually doing the first draft while you and shots of the editing Autumn. So pro Writing ADE is sort of your domain. Yeah. You did give me a virtual to have a providing aid before we invested in it. But the fact that I'm not doing the editing also means that I have a, not too much knowledge, is that what you are actually doing inside the stool? Well then I guess you're a role in today's podcast is letting me know if what I'm saying is clear and understandable and not gobbling, but yeah, it was right to ask the stupid questions today. Autumn (14m 57s): And It is, I, I, we started in January. So again, I had, we were planning on writing together. You were working, we were working on the novella And I was also finishing up my tainted face series and I wanted something to really enhance my editing. I mean, I think I do a pretty good job. I do several passes. We've talked about how we edit it before is that I do like a content edit and then I do like a word choice that I am doing really the fine tuning, you know, making sure everything looks good. And then I send it to the editor and I just wanted something a little bit more on that fine tuning. And so this was after the content edit were, I know all the subplots are good in general, everything. I think everything, I think it should be, there is there, but something before I said that to the editor and because of that, we looked at Fictionary we looked at AutoCrit and when I was looking at Fictionary, I think I suddenly thought I should check out for a Writing aid because I was a user with that when they were just mostly either or the like a little BB company. Autumn (15m 60s): Umm. And it was on my Google drive when they still had my full time job. And I was doing some editing like in Google drive all at work and in my lunch break and stuff like that. So I had a premium subscription at one time to ProWritingAid long time ago when I thought it was pretty impressive that what they do now, there are pretty awesome. So that's, that's sort of the background of what happened. Yeah, Jesper (16m 32s): Yeah, yeah indeed. And I just want it to inject as well that, because the other part of why we we're looking at these different software was also that we have been thinking that at some point in the future, we don't know when, but, and it could be years out. I don't know. But we have been thinking that at some point because the, the world, the fictional world, a, a, a fantasy world that we call it Elysium, the one that we created is so big and we created it so big on purpose because we were thinking that maybe at some point we would like to publish other authors who write in this setting as well. Jesper (17m 13s): So one of the initial drivers behind looking into all of this was actually that we were trying to see if we could find some sort of software that could help analyzing work. Meaning for example, let's say that we wanted to take on board a two or three authors or something like that. And we said, okay, we are, if anybody is interesting in us Publishing your work, which would also mean that we are advertising it and all of that stuff on your behalf, then M you know, send some, some of your work to us so we can see your writing. But the problem with that of course, would be that it means that we would have to sit there and REIT nine novels. Jesper (17m 57s): For example, we are at my reading speed, how will it take three years? So that's, that was not very good. So if we were trying to see that the Fictionary AutoCrit is that those were the two weeks we started with before Autumn thought of ProWritingAid. But when we were trying to see, can we use any of those tools to sort of like load in a manuscript and then get some sort of report from the software saying, what is the WRITING like, so that we want to, we, of course, do you want to read some of it, but we don't want to be forced to read entire novels. You know, it would be like in initial screening thing. So we, if it said already, or if the software were to assess, this is not a very good, and then why spend all the time reading It? Jesper (18m 43s): Whereas if the software says, this is really good, Oh, there's no problems with it. Then we could go in and read it. Right. So we were, we were looking for some sort of screening process. So, so it was just to put the whole thing in context, because I may be, some people will think that pro writing aid is not quite the same as AutoCrit and Fictionary, there is some overlap, but its not quite the same. So it was just to explain where we were coming from as well. They're right. How about it? Autumn (19m 8s): Yeah, I don't think so. There are all, I would say it's definitely worth checking out AutoCrit and Fictionary and they all have different things that they do. AutoCrit steam to be more towards editing. They had a lot of reports that were similar to ProWritingAid, but not quite as beefy. And then Fictionary had some really good tips on how to write better and develop your novel better. But actually it didn't get into a lot of the editing I aspects where pro writing aid has a really in depth editor. But besides that they have this wonderful overview that tells you, Hey, these are the areas, your strong in which I love that they started out with, these are the ones that you did well in. Autumn (19m 53s): And then they have ones where they kindly say, these are our areas you might want to look working on. And then you can go into each of those individual areas that they say you need to work on. And there is a sub report where you can just look it just that one and work on it and fix it. And I've developed 'cause I've done like what three or four devils already. And it's what March is pro writing aid and going through all of these Stories, I, I feel like I'm like totally an expert on which of these reports that I go through and I have my own little standard of running through them to see how things develop and what I liked to develop. And I have noticed actually some really cool corks, but depending on my characters that a few reports will actually show up different ways. Autumn (20m 40s): And so you can almost see the character's voice showing up in the report. So it's kind of, that's really fine tuned in a nuanced. When you notice, when you're noticing a software in AI going through something and saying this report, this metric has always reading this one, it's this character or you're like the herd. That's really funny, but the nice things that are really cool, it is really cool. And I could tell you what to report that is, but which ones I noticed, but there are definitely some reports there that I don't go into quite as much. And that's okay. I mean, everyone is going to look at things differently. Some of them, I just don't take the time and maybe they should spend more time on them, but I feel like I've already covered them later, but some of them we can get into some of the best reports. Autumn (21m 25s): And I know my favorite is I call it echoes and this is a phenomenon. I'm sure you've noticed this, that once you think of a word, you tend to use it two or three times really close. Like after you write it the first time, like you'll think of something really such a strange word. I don't want to pick out something, but you know, we would not pencil, but it would be like maybe a description and action and you'll end up using like thrust or pooled or glanced. Look, those words like that. And you'll look it, you know, reuse it like two sentences later and then you'll reuse it like six sentences later and that just gets boring for the reader. That's why we have a thesaurus. Autumn (22m 8s): And it's hard though, when you're editing and especially in editing, editing your own work, it is so hard to find those words are used to read backwards. My entire manuscript backwards, just trying to find them other people would read it allowed because you hear it. It often can you catch up so much easier that way. So you have to do something to really see what's in front of you or are, you can run it through a ProWritingAid and look through the echoes. They have two different versions that it took me a second to do this, but they have word repeat, which looks at every single time you've used that word in the entire chapter. I, the beautiful thing about ProWritingAid is if you write in Scrivener, like we do it actually can open a and file and edit chapter by chapter in Scrivener. Autumn (22m 50s): So you don't need to have to like move your file into a different format or spit it out into word. Its just, I love having everything in one place. So it's so nice that it does that. And so I'm opening up my Scribner file and letting it run something you don't want to do the whole repeats, but echos just does when you use that word again within the next, so many words, like you can set it to whatever you want. 300, 500, a thousand of that's a little high, but depends on what you're writing. If you are doing a site to a scientific journal, you might want it really high. You might run at a really low. And that is definitely to me. The place to start is to see how many times we have reuse the same word. Autumn (23m 30s): And it's just like, even when I thought I was good and I was being paying so much attention too, you know, not reusing the word too many times. Oh no. When you run it through this echos check, you're just like, Oh my goodness. I am in love with this word. Look as fallback. WORST. I, I double check that one all the time because it seems like I always reuse that one way to many times. So I'm often running through and doing stuff There. Jesper (24m 5s): Yeah. Yeah. I can't say on top of my mind, which ones I, but I definitely noticed as well that even when I write the first draft, sometimes I, I noticed myself repeating the same word. So I do, I do as will pick up that you saw us and tries to try to even the first draft to try to use some different words just to not make it too painful for you. Autumn (24m 30s): I do have a painful on myself. It's just our tendency to do that as a writer is it's like we get these things stuck in our head and we just keep using the same word. And it's just so nice. Like I said, it's so hard to find it on your own and that it has this echo cheque is just so fantastic. It was one of my favorite once you run is where I usually start. And it is impressive how much that cleans up your Writing right off the get go. You're really forest it's nice. Cause highlights, not only where are you used it at? Like how many spaces do you use it? But then it comes up. If you'd click on it, you could come up with a thesaurus and you can see, you know, other options you can think about it. Autumn (25m 13s): And that's really, that's my most time consuming. Umm, so the terracing to it, that that is my most time-consuming edit in pro Writing rate ADE is running the Echo's cheque that can easily take a half an hour or more. Cause I'm really reading through it and pulling things out and trying to change, not just using the Taurus. Yeah. First chapter and that just using us the stories. But I tend to sometimes rearrange sentences and really try to really, really develop things a little bit better with this check. Jesper (25m 46s): And when you do that, so when you make changes, it changes inside the Scrivener file itself, correct? Autumn (25m 52s): Yes. Correct. And that is one of the nice thing. So when I then go back and open up, Scrivner all my changes, our there, as long as we hit save it and it does more new, if you didn't save it, it says, Hey, you didn't say this, but you do have to hit save. Its not like I'm I worked on a Mac. So when I get so used to like what I changed something, obviously I wanted to change it. If I changed it, I wouldn't have changed at all if I didn't need to change that. So max always save everything if you change it, but me and upper Writing it, you have to actually hit the safe. Right. And so Jesper (26m 23s): What are some of the other reports and in the software Autumn (26m 26s): From their I, the one I have noticed that actually have some nuances based on character's as well as my own author of voice is called stickie, which I think that it's just sound like a fun, have fun reports to run, But sticky sentences, our ones that you use a lot of filler words instead of the nouns and adjectives and verbs, the filler ones like the is, Oh, well actually yours is a verb, but you know, not even strong verbs. So when you have the sentence with a lot of those, its harder to comprehend for a reader. They are going to call us and they can be really short sentences, but usually they tend to be your longer sentences. And that's the one I've noticed that I have a few characters that do speak in a kind of wordy styles and those sticky, those were my sticky rating. Autumn (27m 13s): We'll be like 46%. And it does give you ranges of what is normal in writing. So I think Forti is usually the upper level. I tend to, if I hit 40, I'm really proud of myself, usually 42% like you, my low end, I tend to write short sentences, which is funny. And it gives you a sentence variation that it says like average sentence length. I think it was between 11 and 18 based on the genre I've chosen. And I tend to write like 10.2 sentence length, 10.2 words per sentence, as my seems to be my average or a 10.8, 11.2. But my sticky index has a really high. So every once in a while I have a sentence it's like 32 words, you know? Autumn (27m 55s): So, and it is, it is at least something that does give you, there is a whole report on length where it'll tell you your sentence length and it'll show you almost like an audit auditable, Audio graph, you know, the ups and downs. It will show you so you can see that you are really varying your sentences. These are important tools that it's happy. It's when I do, you know, read ProWritingAid eye, look at it and I'm like, Oh yeah, I've already got that good. So I tend to skip the length report unless I just feel like, you know, looking at fun squiggly graphs, but the sticky sentence, one is one where you get to sit down and you see the sentences. And then it's in this computer is saying, this might be confusing. This is going to make readers stall and you can go through and try to reduce those sentences and clean them up and move out some of the stuff. Autumn (28m 41s): Do you really need to have this description, the description and, and, and an, or, and can you break this into several sentences and clean it up? And that really does help. That will help your reader so much to no, Hey, this is really long sentence or this was a really, even a short sense that just is not clear. Or can you put it in a better noun? Can't you put it in a better verb, make this a little bit more concrete, less sticky sentence. And so that was a fantastic one. And from there I think, Jesper (29m 16s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quite a lot of these basically things that helps with the line by line editing. But I believe that, yeah. I mean, I don't think unless I'm wrong, but I don't think you are using it so much. But I do believe that ProWritingAid has some stuff that helps with short of character arcs on all the plotting elements and stuff like that. Autumn (29m 39s): Yeah. But it has a little bit, it has some later ones, it has reports on pacing. So you can see how many sentences, how many paragraphs you have that are slow. One thing I wish it did is it will tell you how many paragraphs you have that are slow, but it won't tell you out of how many paragraphs and the chapter I have a knot, it'll tell you sentences. Or like how many sentences you have, but not how many paragraphs. And I think it would be so cool. If it would tell you, you have like nine paragraphs out of 28 that are slow because then if you wanted to, you could make your own chart to see how that is graphing. But it does help to see like, is this a lull you can, you should know for yourself, like, Hey, I meant to write this chapter as a law or this one is a hurdle. Autumn (30m 26s): So it should be a lot more exciting. And you look at it and you're like, Oh, I only have four slowed paragraphs. Perfect. This is a hurdle. Or you lug it out and you open it up. And its like its 10 slow paragraphs that are full of like description and emotion. And its just really slow and you're like, Oh well that's okay. This is a lull. Or should it be, should I be reworking lists to make sure it's better? So that is one. And that it has one report. This is the only platform out of everything that we looked at that had to report that was on the census, that it actually looked through your text and pulled out how many times, how many words you use at fit each of the five senses. And that was fantastic. And that's where it Fictionary I thought was pretty cool. Autumn (31m 7s): It gave you some advice to always use all the senses, but you were supposed to fill in which words you were using, ProWritingAid says, Hey, you use 2%. So four words that were in a smell. And I think that is really cool. So with just one quick check, you can say like I hit all of the senses or it says you're missing one. You can be like, Oh gosh, I'd have to go back in and add in this one. So I think that's a fantastic report. It really gives you an idea of how you're doing on all using all the senses. You know, do you see only 50% is site and you didn't use any touch. This would be horrible. You need to go fix that. Jesper (31m 51s): Yeah. So in some degree or some sense, I guess you could say that if you are looking for some sort of software tool, when you are, let's say first starting out and you basically want to work more around story structure, character arcs, then Fictionary might be the better choice. But if you're looking for some software that can really help elevating you're writing and, and looking sense Instructure's structures, word choices, using a census and all of that stuff, then pro writing aid. Well, it, it, it is more powerful than Fictionary and, And I, I, I, and I also think the Fictionary is better than an AutoCrit. Jesper (32m 38s): So, so I think that's the thing is it's almost like AutoCrit then Fictionary and then ProWritingAid I, but, but that's of course looking at our own needs, but if you are like a completely new author, you want some help, some software help in terms of just structuring the story, then Fictionary might actually be better than ProWritingAid for your needs. Autumn (32m 58s): I agree. Yeah. The one thing I really enjoyed with Fictionary for the cause there was a free trial and I mean, if you want to go check it out, that's what I think it's really cool. It's got a 14 day free trial, the Fictionary and there's a 14 day free trial with ProWritingAid I, so you can't lose the fact. You can do both the same time and you use ProWritingAid I in Fictionary and then you are really doing some powerful writing at the same time. He probably could just focus on one or the other first though, but there are some really cool note features and Fictionary where it goes. And you want to know that, like it tells you to use a sentences and you can go click on the little question, Mark and explains why and what you're supposed to be doing. And I kind of like those notes at the time. Autumn (33m 39s): I was like, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now when I'm in ProWritingAid of the one thing that I think it really isn't the gray that greatest, That, and I've actually sent out a question to the staff over there is I think the thesaurus is kind of the week. I also have a pro or a premium subscription to Grammarly and Grammarly is purely just fixing your sentences, the thesaurus period's, you know, those kind of things, the concrete changes. It doesn't give you any of the reports, a writing ProWritingAid. So I think ProWritingAid has more powerful, but Grammarly is the stories and understanding how you used the word in the sentence. Like if it, the word could be announced or a verb Grammarly, we will figure out what it is and give you some really amazing concrete suggestions for your thesaurus. Autumn (34m 30s): ProWritingAid I, 70% of the time, I think there's a word in there that's acceptable. Maybe less than that. Sometimes 40%. It depends on the word. Like I had, I had reuse shoulder or a few times and one of the F the suggestions, and this is the source was left. And like, how has left a good replacement for a shoulder? I just, that one sticks in my mind, but it's not usually that bad, but there are times where if you highlight the word one place, it will give you some suggestions and then you highlight it below. It won't have any suggestions. And I'm just, I don't like those in consistencies. I'm often either, either I know a better word myself, or I'm reworking the sentence and I'll just come up with something better or I'm going into, you know, Googling synonyms of another word. Autumn (35m 17s): And I've actually put in a, a S a T they don't have a ticket, but they have a way of putting in features that you suggestions. And so I put it in a suggestion where we can add in our own words into that, the source, because I am so sick of Googling the same words, because I can't remember that I used it in the previous chapter. And I know there is something better. So that's about it. The one place, I really think ProWritingAid, I does kind of fall flat that the source could be a lot more robust and, you know, if I could have anything I ever wanted, I would love to see them like do a next generation where it says, Hey, you use this word, like shoulder or a glance. So many times, why don't you try using a different body part? Autumn (35m 58s): Why don't you try? I would love to like, see, like the emotional side is Saurus if you've ever used that online or have that book, which we'll have to have it on my Kindle when they were doing, you know, edit. And I wish it would be like tied into pro writing aid where it says, Hey, this looks like it's an emotional Q, why don't you try this one? But in all honesty, that's what you pay an editor for. If you're paying for a really good editor, they should be picking this stuff up. I think it would be so cool to be like developing the AI too that level. But, you know that's a really big ask it. I know that I was basically like, I want you to like, program an editor into a pro writing it, but it would also be really cool if it could develop that much and be like, Hey, you're using an emotional Q, why don't you try something else here? Autumn (36m 47s): Hint, hint, you know? Jesper (36m 49s): Yeah, yeah. For sure on that. That would be cool. Yeah. I should also mention by the way that, and I do not remember the episode number, but you can go out and then you can go back and check if you, if you want. But we did interview the CEO of Fictionary and a past episode when she talked to Christina, I think she is called and she a, she talked a lot about, well, all the features within Fictionary. So it Fictionary is something you were interested in just to go back through the podcast feed and find the one where we are talking about Fictionary and then listening to that one as well. But I was also thinking Autumn. Mmm. So using a software can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming, meaning like, Okay, so I have all of this report's I've had all this stuff I can, I can get from the software, but maybe if you maybe would be useful for some people to just, if you sort of just boil down a bit about what would be the sort of steps that you would suggest, like do this and then do this, and then do this sort of a give or give some people a bit of a template for ProWritingAid basically. Autumn (38m 1s): Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of those things, no matter where you open it, it has this huge menu of reports across the top. And you can run an overview, always, especially if you're just getting familiar with the program and your not sure where to start or how your own writing is looking, run the overview report for us, because it'll get you oriented. It'll tell you where you are strong. Yay. I love that. They tell you what you are strong. It will give you some graphs. It it'll tell you, go focus on, you know, go look at these other individual reports. So, you know, that will give you a good starting point. Then at that point, the One report, I would say, never, ever, ever run. They have one that is basically All it'll run every single report that it does all at the same time. Autumn (38m 44s): And just highlight all of your texts. It is chaos. I mean, I am chaotic. I admit it, but this is chaos. This is so overwhelming. So just to skip that one. Yeah. And also skip repeats because those two will just make you feel like, Oh my God, I don't even know where to start with this. You will feel so overwhelmed. Just skip that, go to the Echo's, you know, do your overview, go to the echos, you know, to double check your length of your sentences, which is a good one. Run your sticky report below stickie, as cliche as that is a fantastic one. There was a report on dialogue. It'll tell you if you're using things consistently, there's also a consistency cheque, which is also really awesome. So you will tell you if your capitalizations are a consistent, like, are you M you know, mages, or do you have names that are your upper cases and sometimes lower casing. Autumn (39m 32s): It will get you to, you have fixed for that. You can go down and then do there's one for homonyms. I used to be horrible in homonyms have gotten better. I would say the homonym report that there is, it tells you every single word that is a potential homonym. It doesn't just look for ones you might have missed. You used that so that it might confuse you. Cause like if you, it will highlight or a cause, or it can be an, or it can be aura as in like a panel. So he'll say you might get yourself a little more overwhelmed with some of those reports. You've got to look at them in, take a minute. You know, there is some information that you can go online and see what they're about. Read those run, you know, the sensory, the pacing run all of those, but to each one individually in a kind of his set up in order that if you start on echoes and work your way to the right, just go in that sequence and then come back. Autumn (40m 25s): And there is a final one that I love to wrap up. Two final ones to wrap up with. And one is overused and its like echoes, but its totally different. It, it tells you if you simply used this word too many times as compared to previous WRITING, like I say, look so it'll tell you, Hey, you have started sentences with ING endings way to many times compared to publish Writing, go fix those. And then once you do your overused words, checked, go and run the regular grammar. That's the last step, which is actually the first report. So it's a live report, go fix everything there it tells you to do and then hit save. Autumn (41m 11s): And that chapter's done. Jesper (41m 13s): Yeah. So I think overall, if you are, I mean ProWritingAid should probably be a useful tool for almost everyone. I would say AutoCrit I would say Nope, just to skip that one. If you need to ask, if we set before, if you, if you are quite knew to writing and you need more of the structural help than probably check out, Fictionary maybe get both Fictionary and a pro Writing eight on trial versions and see which one you, you like the most. But I think it's probably safe to say that you are editing phase and you're writing will become better by using some of this software. Jesper (41m 58s): It's not, it's not just some, you know, nice thing to have it it's almost in the category of need to have, because it actually does make a big difference. It really does. I think my set, my chapters edited with pro writing aid are so much stronger than what I was doing before pro writing aid. I really think that the sentences and the echos and the checks that I'm doing through providing aid, I see an improvement. It's got an extra Polish that I could not have done on my own. Yeah. So that's something for, for you to check out, to sign up for a trial version of pro writing aid. Jesper (42m 39s): If you have an AE or if you are using already and to see what you, what you think of it. But other than that, then the next Monday, I'm hoping to have an interview for you with Alex Newton, from Kayla Tricks. And we are going to talk about what sells in the fantasy genre. Yeah. Narrator (42m 57s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmwritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

There is an underlying key to being a successful self-published author. Do you want to know what the secret is? It's all about your mindset. Autumn and Jesper delve into what that outlook is and why it can make such a difference to how you fair as an indie author in this episode. See if you have the attitude and why you need to develop it if you don't. Check out the FREE Self Publishing Success Course that we mention in the episode at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/self-publishing-success/ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 120 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we are going to share some thoughts or tips that will be you. We got to break your career as a writer. And the personally, I think that this stuff is something that is often overlooked, but I don't know. What do you think about that? Autumn (52s): All of them. I think its definitely not talked about it, but I've just like, Oh wow. Don't pressure or this is going to make or break or you just don't get it into that stuff. And cheese hard stops like, Oh my gosh, am I ready for this episode? I don't know why, but no, I agree. This may be a sound better than it is. It's very, you've ramped the tension right up straight to the insight pull incident and boom. Jesper (1m 20s): Okay. Yeah, I should do it the other way around like, like maybe start out by saying this might be a completely useless Episode and there's going to be no tips for you at all. And then we can go from there because then it only got to get better. Autumn (1m 35s): That's something that I don't know if that's going to work right there. I think we just have to stick with what we started with. And this was one of the most important episode of your entire author career. And then we had to little bit on that two point, Oh my God. Now that you've set that and now I got conscious about it and no, that's not a good, that's why you thought of anything. And I would just apply that on like nothing ever happens. If someone is going to call you out and I am here for that. So it's all right. Yeah. And you have jumped off pretty quickly as well. So you kind of surprised me. Oh well. So how are things over on your side of the planet? Jesper (2m 15s): Well as good a school. So I close to this week here in the Denmark. Of course we are a recording a bit ahead of time. So it's East the holidays at the moment. So the kids are home, which means that the I get to sleep In and I could just get up like nine or 10 in the morning and then right. A chapter before lunch center, you know, I could get used to, this sounds really like my life, but that's one way except for the kids and no indeed. Yeah. I would say it's really nice. And a fantastic. Yeah. And also the fact that I can asleep in the also means that my wife and I have had some time to watch this TV series late in the evening where we are now, I would normally go to bed, but we didn't have been watching some, some stuff and I finished up or we finished up watching a show on HBO called a bear town. Jesper (3m 6s): Are you familiar with that one? No, no, no. I haven't even heard that line. So Bri, our town is a, a, a Swedish series. OK. And it's about a, a youth hockey team. Ah, which is not doing particularly well. Oh yeah. But then a former NHL player comes home from the us and he was like at the end of his career and he checks takes on the job of coaching this team. So at this point you're probably thinking, it sounds like some sort of sport series right here. Yeah. But it's not because here it turns a bit dark, but that's usually the type of stories out there. Jesper (3m 53s): Like as you know, you know, but so to start a player of the team, he actually ends up raping the coach daughter. Oh I, I, but then 'cause, it becomes very, it's, it's a very serious, serious series what it was about to say, but it becomes very, I don't know what the right word is, but interesting in one way or another, because it starts exploring because you are in a very small towns, society or community and its sort of explores, how does a close knit group of people who know each other really well deal with a situation like this, where you have like the popular kid that everybody's hoping that he's gonna be the next hot key star or a hockey star. Jesper (4m 39s): This is going to, you know, put this town on the map and then you have this new girl in town that basically nobody knows. And she, and of course he goes to the police with what happened and so on. And then this whole thing plays out about how the community as well as dealing with the situation. And I really feel like it's, it's very interesting. And it's also very interesting as it dives into details about how, how we, human beings are incredibly good at justifying things to ourselves. Even when we know that our standpoint is clearly wrong, they are because so many of these characters, they, they really convince themselves that they're point of view is the right one. Jesper (5m 28s): When, you know, when you're looking at it as, as the viewer and of course you are at a distance, but it makes sense from the person being inside of that community reacting that way. But when you're looking at it as a view at a distance, you can sort of see how completely wrong it is. And it is actually a very I'm, it's a very interesting story. Autumn (5m 47s): To be honest, it sounded interesting though, since I've spent 90% of my life in small towns, I have a feeling of that. I'd be like, Oh, I know this is so true. Jesper (5m 58s): It, yeah, It could be. Yeah. I, I mean, of course its a pretty serious topic, so it's not like a lighthearted thing that you sit down and watch, but, and I, I would maybe have liked the ending to have a bit more oomph in the end, but what I do recommend the people checking out bedtime time at town on HBO and of course watching it in the original Swedish language, trying to swap titles, instead of all the toppings stuff, I was about to use a nasty word. So the FCC does not broadcast, you know, register, watch over us as a Podcast thing. Goodness. I don't know how we got around that one way or the prolapse to swear. Jesper (6m 42s): Yeah. Yeah. Well technically we would have to market in our podcast hosting that there was wearing in the a seven mile language. Autumn (6m 51s): Ooh. Yeah. So a lot. Well I thought to the bullets just, just, just, well we can just add a beep. Yeah. Yeah. Jesper (7m 2s): Okay. But that, that's something I could recommend if people need something to a new shoes to look at. And so I guess it's the right way of saying it, but yeah. You need your stomach like a bit of a topic though. Yeah. So Coker prepared for a very serious topic. Yeah. Knowing small towns, I can see how it would totally grow out of proportion and being on an easy resolution that you would imagine. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, hopefully you have some more lighthearted stuff on your side of the Atlantic. Autumn (7m 37s): Absolutely. It's like spring here are all of our snow. I mean, Vermont, we had so much, well not so much, no. We had a normal winter For, you know, in 2020 in climate change, but it like melted in five days and now the weather is like in the sixties and it's sunny and the streams running. So its beautiful. But it's also, I feel that like I don't usually get spring itus or whatever you want to call it where you are. Like, I just want to go outside of my spring. I, this is what we use. It's cool. Yeah. Or senior-itis when you were a senior in school and you just could not concentrate cause you know, you're about to graduate. So this is a spring fever and I just want to go outside and go for a hike. And I got some work done over the weekend just because it was raining. Autumn (8m 20s): So I've got a chance to work on some covers and I'm almost done editing I'm in my book three and my tainted face series. So that's like, yeah, it's so much work going on. We just, we're almost done editing a reader magnet that we've got going on. So I don't know. I might have to take a break and go for a, a little bit of a walk soon. That would be kind of nice. But otherwise life is pretty good. I can not complain. It's hard to concentrate. It's my worst thing. I could say that I was speaking of shows. I sent you one that was, if someone wants a Fantasy that has amazing graphics as a major amazing CGI in a really good story. I sent that one to you that yin yang master's, which is actually proved is by China, which was trying not to read into that. Autumn (9m 6s): I'm like, is there any propaganda in here? So there's and what's funny is, and that's what I didn't tell you is there is use two movies so you can get a master's and then there's a second one that has a subtitle. I know that I can remember what it was, but you know what it reminded me of, it sounded like someone came up with like, there is a main character or here's a little bit of a story in a world in the background. And so two different people wrote an idea for it and they decided they liked them both and produced both. So they could almost relate. They feel more like a parallel stories of parallel ideas. And so it was very interesting to watch them back to back and be like, Oh, is that the same character? Autumn (9m 46s): But that's a totally different story for him. I don't know how this works, but the, the one in the yin-yang masters do it without the subtitle. I just, it was a fantastic story telling. Very good. And so if someone wants something much more fun, I wants to see ferret demons should have won a ferret demon. You get to watch that. Yeah. Will I we'll definitely watch it. Yeah. I have added to My, I have an app on my phone where I keep track of everything I need to watch a and then I added to it in there. It's where it was pretty good. Jesper (10m 21s): So every time I hear about a cool show or a good movie, I just add it in there because then it's it's there and I won't forget about it. And then every time I've done watching something, I go into the app and then I just find something I want to see next. Nice. That's a very useful app, right? Narrator (10m 40s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Yeah. Jesper (10m 45s): Find a way of voices came out with their 2020 headphone report. It has where they share all the data that they collect it on the audio of that market over the past year. Okay. So it's up with audio books then. Yeah. And you know how I love to put you on the spot, Autumn. I, this is not fair. Yes. That's what I love it. This is because it's not fair. So I was wondering if you couldn't guess, which is young Rose had the most growth in the audio book market in 2020, but I have prepared some very, very short sound clips for you. Jesper (11m 32s): So it is going to give you a hint. Okay. So this is a podcast. So some clips are cool. So it is basically sound clips that is hopefully giving you some idea about a young, right. That's the point of the sound clip? So there is no words is just music. Autumn (11m 51s): Oh, this is true. It just me, I am going to argue, remember I'm half deaf. So it was just not fair, but lets go for it. Jesper (11m 59s): Okay. So I'm going to give you some clip number one and then see if you can guess what's younger. This is okay. Autumn (12m 13s): Yeah. Jesper (12m 13s): That's it that's like a fog horn. What could that be? Autumn (12m 18s): I'm guessing thriller, but I would almost have said for those clothes, it's a misery actually mystery. Jesper (12m 26s): Oh yeah. It's a mystery. We had a growth of 158% in 2020. That's exciting. That's a lot. That is a lot. Yeah. Okay. And number two on the list of the second, most growth in 2020 and let me know what this sound Clip. What do you, what do you think this is? Okay. Autumn (13m 1s): Yeah. Jesper (13m 2s): Yeah, of course. It's so obvious. Well, I'm going to guess because I, because I found this out Clip that is a completely obvious to everybody else is like, what is that? Autumn (13m 13s): I would say a memoir. I mean, it sounds too sad to be like cozy and romance. It sounds in the stallion to me. And that's why I would say memoir. Jesper (13m 25s): You just trying to be difficult. Of course a romance. Yeah. So I don't know if lifting at the end of the music, we really portrays romance. It's obvious growth rate by 146%. Autumn (13m 45s): Wow. That is amazing. And it doesn't actually surprise me. I mean, in COVID who was not looking for a good role mans to sweep you away from this place. Jesper (13m 55s): Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. It could be it, but Okay. Number three and a final show. Is that experience the most growth in 2020? Well, not the final one, but the top three final in the top three. Alright. So are we ready for this song? Clip? Yeah. I'm just going to be getting one, right? Are you ready? Autumn (14m 31s): I'm guessing Weston say something to do with Cowboys or a Western. It has to be Western. Jesper (14m 35s): No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Autumn (14m 38s): What is it? Jesper (14m 40s): It's Fantasy. Autumn (14m 41s): I can not be Fantasy. Yeah. It sounds like a Western. You misled me. You totally misled me, but okay. Jesper (14m 50s): So what's the Fantasy grow 68%. So it's not as smart as the other one's but it's still quite significant. That's good. That is it. What do you think of those growth numbers or Autumn (15m 2s): the growth numbers are a fantastic, there are in many ways, in some ways surprising because you know, COVID people are locked down, but it also, if your homie might be listening to Moore, I know, I think my husband has gone for the weekend and I actually ended up streaming a YouTube, a, a series called art at the highest actually he was on CuriosityStream or to the highest, but then when he got back, I'm like you have a subscription to audible. I want access to your books so I can see it when you're holding, when you were working on the computer or your music's. Okay. But its kind of fun to listen to a story so I can see audio books growing. Jesper (15m 43s): Yeah. It is growing very much about that. Oh, I also think that it also has to do with the distribution of it, that it, I mean, if you looked at the top three emerging markets after the us, it was Canada followed by Australia and I don't think those two were very surprising, but number three was Sweden. I wasn't really expecting that. So I, I think in part of the big growth numbers in part, because the base line is fairly low, so its easy to get into the triple digit growth rates kind of scary. That's true. So I think that there was that and then it's getting more and more widespread a and therefore as well as you're getting into many more new markets, which helps the growth rates. Autumn (16m 26s): I personally don't think it is. I still think it's early days when it comes to audiobooks. Jesper (16m 33s): I don't think that the market print tracing, is that a great to be honest. So it it's still Yeah, it's still early days and I was still, even though we keep hearing about these massive growth rates, I would still say that unless your e-books are selling really well, they don't get don't rush into creating an audio book just because you hear that that was great growth rate because honestly you probably not going to earn back to the production cost unless you're selling quite well already. I agree that that would be an, almost a whole talk because of, you know, how audio books affects sales. Autumn (17m 7s): But yeah, even my current series, I enjoy audio books, which I did couldn't say before I used to not, but I have no plans right now to put, turn the teen at Faye in the audio books, even though we're a couple of readers of asked for it is a lot of work in really expensive. And if it doesn't really effect your regular sales on Amazon, it's not like this major boost, No way. If the, if the production cost were low, which I don't think they will be in three or four years, maybe for now than it would be a no brainer to always just like we always create a paperback print on demand version, then you would always create an audio book just because it's another, it's another way of selling you a book right now. Jesper (17m 50s): I'm not a format, which I think is good, but when you have to pay like 5k or something for it, it's like, ah, now when they get to the AI, that has a very natural voice that you can just drop in your text and it creates a very nice sounding audio book. Autumn (18m 6s): I don't want to put voice actors at a work because they are amazing. But you know, if you could just upload an audio book file, like have it converted. And it was a few hundred bucks, Holy kind of, I would probably do it. Yeah. Or maybe I'm even thinking of you, if you could look in the future, you could look at a market where it's just a designated, like it, it will say here is the, you know, a cheap audio book and it will say this is a I rated and there will be an expensive version of an audio book where assess this is a voice acting narrated or something. Jesper (18m 39s): I, I could imagine that it would happen so that it's like, if you don't care or some readers don't care, you know that as long as that's the case then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And as long as it as decent, they are happy and then they will pay or paid at a discount or have the budget version. But I can imagine that will happen in three or four or five years maybe for now that, that you will have two versions of audio books. That's a whole other topic. So I could see that happening. Autumn (19m 6s): Definitely me too. It will be interesting Narrator (19m 11s): And on to today's topic. Okay. So Jesper (19m 16s): Yeah, I'm thinking that it's probably useful to just start up by stating that when Well, I was about to say we, but actually, I mean me when I'm talking about Mindset, because I can only talk about myself and I have my own biases, meaning that a for instance, when I'm tackling this topic in this episode here, I'm coming at the Mindset from a commercial point of view, meaning what is the mindset behind making a living from writing and earning money from it. And I also understand that in saying that not everyone is Writing to make money and that is perfectly fine, nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Jesper (20m 2s): However, I just want to share it. That's where I'm coming from when I'm talking about Mindset. So I don't know, maybe, maybe you have a different perspective on, on it out of, I don't know, but that, that sort of way I'm thinking, I think with you, when we come to author Mindset that is looking at it from a business perspective. So you're looking at the marketing and is sort of wrapped up into it. But I think I do have maybe a little bit of the artistic because I also think part of part of what makes you a good author platform, a good market or a successful author, hopefully, you know, making money is that you also care about the quality and your abilities as a writer. Autumn (20m 44s): So to me, I have a little bit of the artistic side, but I think it of overlaps, you know, the sphere is, are definitely where they joined is to me as the author of marriage Mindset. It's not a hundred percent marketing. It's not a a hundred percent craft, but there's a point where you merge those two. And that is my idea of an, a successful and a rewarding author Mindset. Yeah. Hm. Okay, good. Yes or no, but I, I think it's good to see if, I mean, we, we might come at it from like 80%, the same angle, but then slightly different anyway, which is probably good. Jesper (21m 23s): Yeah. That's probably a good way. Or you have to have something different. Autumn (21m 25s): I'll play devil's advocate if I have two, just so we are not always in agreement, you know, if you have two, like if I take it and you make it sound like you don't enjoy it at all, and this is like, Jesper (21m 35s): okay, I will sacrifice myself to do it, but in reality you love it. Autumn (21m 41s): They don't need to know is that I'm very, I would like to be Willy well in just play the play at the numbers, you know, but maybe one place to stop could be easy to talk a bit about catching reader's attention. I guess I could put that label on it because honestly, I think from a mindset perspective, you know, when you're thinking about how to get readers to read your work, I think the attention span is too big or as turtle probably, or one of the biggest hurdles we have in today's Publishing landscape. Jesper (22m 26s): And from a mindset perspective, I'm looking at it in the point of view about understanding who is it actually that we are keep competing against for reader's attention. That's true because they say it or the office. Autumn (22m 46s): No, not really. Well, Amazon, I do agree with that. A recent interview with Mark Coker, where he said Amazon is sort of pitting other authors against what their authors, because if you could do a search on Amazon for another, ah, for your, even yourself. So the first floor of slots are paid advertisers. And before you actually get to the person you are looking for, and that is really annoying, that is on Amazon. But in general, if you're talking about whose attention or, you know, we, as author's trying to pull readers' into, it's not for some other authors, that's there not our competition. It is the rest of the world. The app's the media games, Audio books. Autumn (23m 30s): There's so many other things that are competed to try to get a real game games is a good one. Jesper (23m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean to some extent I, Yeah, I like you said, I, I think just some extent you could make an argument to say that there is some competition about A, between other authors, but I'm also of the firm belief that those people who really like to read, they will always go on to read more. And there's no way that we can write enough books for them on our own. So if they like to read, they will read more and other authors as well. So in some, some sense you are not really those people. I don't think we were competing that's as much for the attention because they love reading and they will continue reading. But all of the big chunk of people that sits in the middle, you know, we have those to reach a lot. Jesper (24m 21s): And all the time at the bottom may be of the, of the buckets. We have those who are basically never reads. And, and then in the middle we have the majority of people who reach sometimes, but not all the time. And for those people, I really think that our main competitor And I, that's why I said games. I think that's a good point that you made there. But what are the ones that I was thinking about was really streaming services like Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and that kind of thing, because one of those people are going to do, you know, they come back from home, they've even the dinner there. They have a sort of thinking, should I go and lie on the couch and watch the next episode of my series on Netflix? Jesper (25m 6s): Or should I open the eye book and start reading? All right. I mean, that's really the choice that they are making and that's not an easy competition to be him because it really means that you have to produce a very, very high quality content, meaning that you are you a story. It has to be really, really good. And that's not, I hope not for everybody Am I change? Hopefully you already know that you have to produce really good content, but there are also those that think that they can sort of get away with a half decent cover and they will get there on two, which is a, an English teacher to do the editing. Jesper (25m 51s): And then that should be fine. Right? And then they just put it that way. Autumn (25m 55s): Well, if you're trying to compete against Netflix, people are not going to read that book then, you know, it's, they will Peter out very quickly. I mean, there's so much more to it. I mean, having a little bit of psychology and knowing like you need to have a hook at the end of every chapter that makes them want to turn the page and then a good opening to the next chapter so that they don't want to be like, Oh, it's a different point of view. Or there is the answer to my question. You want to keep them going and going because it is a lot of marketing. It is a lot of trying to feed their curiosity so that they want this more than the ease of sitting back and watching a show because even science-wise watching a movie, it's only a lighting up part of your brain. Autumn (26m 36s): So I mean, it is really couch potato. It is truly low energy, low, low need of a paying attention. You can still surf On your phone and you've watched a show and talk to your spouse and you know, you can do a multi-task when you read it. If you're really reading, it's like just the rest of the world could be on fire. And you're like, just one more chapter, just one more time. So it's a little more energy. And to have it fires up your brain, like your actually there doing it, if it has a well-written book, all of your senses are firing. It's like, you're dreaming it. It's your it's becoming part of you and movies do not actually do that to you. So it's a totally different process that you're trying to get readers hooked on, get that adrenaline rush going, You know? Jesper (27m 23s): Yeah, that's true because essentially the, well, what do you know, watching a slow a, a, a, a show on Netflix, for example, if it is just being served to you right now, whereas the reading is an immersive, may you are inserting yourself into the story. Whereas watching his show on Netflix, it's just a couch potato or wanting something. And, you know, you don't, unless the character mentioned a smell or sneezes, or does something to clue you in that they're smelling something. It doesn't even Dawn on you that, you know, they're sitting by the campfire in there going to smell like Ash. But when you're reading it, there are a good writer is going to have layer that in or the smell of a dragon, or is it the smell of something? Jesper (28m 6s): And it's going to immerse you, like you said, in a far different way. And that's what the people who love reading. That's what they love has because it really drags you in and you don't get that quality unless you're working on it, unless you're doing it, you know, on purpose. Autumn (28m 22s): Even after 20 some books, I still have a Check where I check all of my chapters for things like the five sentences and stuff, because it's easy to get into the mood and you're done writing and you go all the visual and very little auditory because I'm half deaf. So let me do, you know, you got to add that stuff and yeah. Jesper (28m 42s): Yeah, that's true. Autumn (28m 44s): And, and that's really where the Mindset thing comes in. Meaning that if you have to be conscious about the fact that you have to produce really, really high quality work, because otherwise, if its sort of halfway there, you can imagine like somebody is sitting there with the Kindle Or whatever they are reading on. And There are sort of, well maybe they read two chapters and they're like, Oh, well it's not really engaging me the stuff. And then they are watching over at the TV, hanging on the wall over there and it's like, no, let me, let me go watch some TV or is that right? Jesper (29m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem. So it is, it's not an easy for sure, but a, but it is important to be aware of. Autumn (29m 25s): Definitely. And I think that's, I like that you started on that one. Cause like I said to me, the quality, the artistic, the desire to keep trying to improve yourself and your craft and your writing to me, it's very important. It's important, artistically, as important as your mindset that always having that curiosity, you never say I Am good enough. I do not need to learn anything else about Writing. I don't need to read any books because I don't need to learn anything. That's not going to, it's not the right mindset to have to be a successful author. You should always be thinking, what can I do better? How w who is another author? Who's better than I am. So I'm going to read there and see what I like. And I'm going to break it down. Every time we read a book, every time we watched a movie, you are like breaking down the plots and the characters in the person next to you. Autumn (30m 9s): I was like, Oh my gosh, just please it enjoy this. And you were like, no, I'm going to tell you that that was foreshadowing. I know that that's true because, well, at least for me, when I started writing myself, the way I experience stories was like, if you a, if you were looking at it one way, you could say broken forever. Jesper (30m 38s): But if you look at it on another way, it's just changed forever because, well, yeah, I don't know how to improve because in some way it has broken because I cannot enjoy a story. Like it could be four because I'm looking, I'm looking at a structure behind the words and, and I cannot help myself. Or even sometimes I try consciously to ignore it and just read the story. She would go up, but I cannot help myself looking at, Oh, that was a forest at foreshadowing hint there. And there was something that I might pick it up and I just can't let it go. I'm reading one. Now I just started, I'm probably like 20% Intuit. I'm not going to mention the title of anything. So don't worry. Ah, I'm not going to put any time anybody down on it, but actually, you know, but, but honestly I really liked it. Jesper (31m 22s): It was so far, it's a really good book. It's a really good story. But the one thing that I did pick it up already is that because it's a FANTASY, so you have multiple characters and I've done this myself in the past as well. So I'm not thinking on the author at all. But the introduction of the point of view characters is quite aggressive in the early phases of the book. Meaning that you're, you are sort of, are you jumping from one to the next, to the next, to the next, like the, for the first four or five chapters in a row? And it is slightly confusing, but as you, because you don't quite understand how it connects together. And, and also you are a bit like when you get back to the characters, like which character was this again? Jesper (32m 7s): Because it was introduced too fast and I've done this myself. So I'm not thinking on anybody at all, but I just think that there is something there I notice is a slightly detour, But, but there's something there about thinking about how are you eating new characters into the story and not going too fast. I think I'm 25% in the, according to my Kindle now. And is it starting to make sense? I can see how it connects now, but the first like 15%, maybe 2015, 20% of the book, it was pretty confusing even though what was happening was really cool. And I really liked it. It, it was cool. Cool action scenes and everything was really good. Autumn (32m 48s): Well, billing is great, but it's just a small things that might tick some people off. Some readers me like, no, this is too confusing. I'm going to give up it's right. Jesper (32m 58s): And you can't write it for everyone. So there is going to, you're never going to satisfy everyone, but it's definitely something to think, to keep in mind, as you learn your craft, you know, you have someone who maybe will point that out to you or something for yourself to think about. And I think that's where the idea of always improving, you know, looking at how things are working, reading other books and seeing what worked and what didn't work, so that you can look at your next story and you keep writing and keep going. Autumn (33m 26s): Indeed. And the other thing that I also feel like it is really important when it comes to Mindset is long-term thinking a little bit. I like that one, because this is of course where I'm looping back to the fact that I was set in the beginning, that I am looking at this from a commercial perspective, but overnight riches almost never happens. So if you're trying to plan for, or even hoping that your debut novel we'll be like this major Success, it probably won't a, and I'm sorry, but the truth of the matter, and we can take a couple of examples here. So Lee child, for example, a highly, highly successful British a thriller author. Jesper (34m 10s): I, he is, I think last time I tried to look it up, he was estimated to have a net worth of around $50 million. Okay. So I guess we can call that successful. Can we, Autumn (34m 22s): Yeah, I guess, I mean really? Yeah. Jesper (34m 24s): Yeah. But he didn't really find much success until he had published about 10 books and George RR Martin is similar. Yes. Autumn (34m 32s): Yeah. I'll say he has had a very long career to finally reach the pinnacle that he has. And he's no, you know, the kid anymore either. Jesper (34m 43s): No, indeed. So it's, it's small like millions. I know it's not just going to start rolling and you know, it's, it's a matter of over the longterm to build a catalog of books with each will earn you a little bit more and to make that career out of writing, you have to consistently be working on a new book. And this is not me saying that you have to release a new title every month. Not at all because I, I know some people do and that's how they enter the living and find if that's what you can do. But to me, it would stress me out. If I felt like I had to release a new title every month and write 6,000 words a day as something, Nope, not going to happen. Autumn (35m 25s): I'm not that kind of a writer. And I don't want to be either, but at least put your butt in the chair and at least two, some writing so that you are at least working on your back a back catalog all the time or building that back catalog 'cause At the end of the day, that's where the money is going to come from. And then they go down the line 15, 20 books later, or like with your tire Martin, 20 years later, if you finally get some awesome success than great. But I, I think planing for that, or even expecting that it's not going to bring you any good. No. And especially in today's market, I mean, maybe you will hit it out of the park with one book, but you, I think we've both seen it. Autumn (36m 6s): I think Chris Fox as a few other authors who have try it a couple of a different series and they still, even once they become popular, they can have something that doesn't sell because it's not as much of an interest. So you have to keep trying in generating new content and trying to find maybe the book that hopefully Lyfts all of them up, but you could always have that one series and everyone's like, Oh, Oh, well, that's the one we don't talk about, you know? Jesper (36m 30s): Oh yeah. You remember when he wrote that, you know, it's, it's always going to be a challenge, but it's definitely, you want to keep writing and you want to remember that this is a marathon. If you're doing this as a passion, if you were expecting to write three books and you're going to be as famous as George R. Martin or Stephanie Meyer or a JK Rowling's those that really is the less than a 1% have the 1% have the 1%, there are so many millions of authors and there are many, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe just thousands that are making a full time living off of Writing. There's many more who are having it as a very solid PR part time job, or as a part of a different part time job, or, you know, balancing several things. Autumn (37m 14s): And then there's others that this is literally just going to be a hobby. That's not going to be a huge revenue stream. So you need to remember there's all of these different tiers and it is sort of onto you two have the mindset, the strategy is the goal was the marketing, the skills, the quality, all of those tools to help sometimes the luck to make this into something more. Jesper (37m 40s): Yeah, Yeah. Agree with that. And everybody fits into those categories differently. And, and, and, and that's also absolutely fine. Autumn (37m 47s): I just think from the front have mine set perspective, I just think it's important not to sort of set yourself up for failure, meaning that you get into it with the idea that I'm going to be in the top 1% of all authors globally. And I'm going to be as rich as a J K Rowling or something like that. It's well, great if it happens, but it's probably not. And if you're setting yourself up for that, you can see you're almost only gonna fail and you are going to disappoint yourself. One of the reasons is not all of them, but one of the reasons why people stop writing is because they get disappointed and they feel like, no, this is not what I expected. It should be. I had hoped that I was going to learn a lot more money by now or, or, or whatever. Autumn (38m 33s): But if they had just kept writing maybe four books more Jesper (38m 37s): From the word AI, it now it would make it a difference. So it was just a shame too, to drop your writing because of something like that. And I think it's important to try to set yourself up by thinking long term, maybe earning 50 K a hundred K a year. Maybe that's modern enough for what you want. I mean, who says you have to earn millions, maybe even 10 K if it's the sidekick, the 10 K can pay your summer vacation every year. And maybe that is Autumn (39m 7s): Yeah, absolutely fine. Yeah. I mean, nothing wrong with that. You should definitely have, you know, your idea of what, what is the, what is, I think everyone should have a solid, this is my goal to get to and know that it might take time to get there. And do you, like you said, maybe it's only 10 K a year, but to say, if I hit five K a year, 10 K a year, if I could do this much money, I would feel like I was totally successful and no, it doesn't hurt to have that like, you know, shooting for the stars. That's Okay. Because maybe then you'll hit the moon. That there's nothing wrong with that. But to know, to at least know that thinking you're going to hit JK Rowling's level is probably really going to be amazing and lucky and hard, but that's okay if you just hit Jupiter, the Jupiter is nice. Autumn (39m 54s): You know, you don't have to go outside of the solar system, but just to have that Real, that reality check where it's great to maybe dream big. But remember that is dreaming. The reality is going to be in something a lot closer to home and know what that is. Do you know what you really want to work towards and then working towards it? And for me, this is one part of my mindset, I think is really important. And I remember when I was first becoming an entrepreneur and I read that the sign of someone who will make a good entrepreneur is someone who can work for 12 hours, go to bed and feel like I'm out of ideas. I am disappointed nothing work today. And they will wake up in the morning and they'll go, all right, what am I trying to do today? Autumn (40m 35s): And you will start over with all the same passion, all of the same curiosity, problem solving, look at things from a new perspective, you have to wake up in the morning and say, I am doing this again. Cause this is what I want to do. And you're going to look at it from a different angle. And if you feel like you need to, someone keep bolstering you and telling you because you can everyone, you know, cheerleaders. But if you need that over 50% of the time, like 80% of the time, you are looking for someone telling you you're going to be okay, you're going to do a good job. This is going to be really hard for you. You need to have a certain level of confidence in what you're doing, your marketing. And if you don't have it, now go take the lessons, go get the skills, bring yourself up to where you feel. Autumn (41m 15s): You are capable of succeeding. You just need to keep, you need to work, keep working and getting there because it is a lot of hard work. And if you don't believe in yourself, and if you're not trying to improve yourself, then it's going to be that much harder and you probably will give, so you need to have that mindset of what am I gonna do now? This was a tough day. I'm having a glass of wine in some chocolate and tomorrow we are going to hit the ground running. Jesper (41m 46s): And tomorrow I'm going to make waffles dog. The dog Shrek is secretly. Autumn (41m 57s): One of my favorite movies. It's just awesome. Is the first one I ever watched the turnout, all of the fairy tales in their heads. And I'm like, this is it. This is why I love This. So yes, tomorrow you will have to make waffles if you were going to get up and you're going to do the waffles. And if you had to end the day in wine again, that's OK. But the next day you're doing waffles again. Jesper (42m 18s): Not, not, not everyday, hopefully ending the day with wine. That's that's not going to be very healthy in the long term waffles in the morning. And why did the evening, I think is going to be the end of you at some point. Yeah. Autumn (42m 29s): Why not? If you want me to, if you were enjoying life. Yeah. Jesper (42m 33s): But at least if, if, if you need some encouragement and if you need some support and back up the head off, over to the Am, Writing Fantasy Facebook group, 'cause, there is a lot of good people helping each other in their, and an offering SUPPORT. So, so that's at least the community that will help you. So feel free to join there. If you just go to the group session section on Facebook and search for Am Writing Fantasy, and you will find us. Yeah. But I have one more Autumn. And I think this is probably the most important one of them all Autumn (43m 2s): I used to be. I'll see. I'll see if I agree with you. Jesper (43m 5s): Yeah. Of course. Devil's advocate over there. You can see how we love it. Yeah. Autumn (43m 9s): Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Jesper (43m 13s): I think, and again, this is coming from the commercial perspective again. Right. But they are those who have the mindset that if the writing is just good enough, then the readers will come to me and it will grow from there. They will start reading the next book I write and the book after that. And if I got through that because of the writing is so great. So the only thing I really need to focus on is my writing skills. And don't get me wrong. Writing skills is incredibly important. Of course, you have to be able to tell a really, really good story and have really good writing as well. Jesper (43m 53s): But yeah, Yeah. It's not everything. Autumn (43m 57s): No, no, no. It's not every day and age. You just, Jesper (43m 59s): Or you have to advertise your books, but above all, you have to build an email list so that you can get in touch with your readers when you release a new book, because honestly, readers, I'm not as loyal to the author. As you might think. In many cases, they don't even remember what the author's name was. Then they might not remember the title of the book, but they don't really remember who the author was. And they don't really according to research. And I cannot remember the exact numbers, but I, it was something to do With that in an average Rita's I would have to have read three or four books of the same author before they started remembering what the author named was. Jesper (44m 42s): Because otherwise you just don't remember if you had them on your e-mail list, you can send them an email and you can say, Hey, the new book is ready here. Here's the link. So you can pick it up right now. And then they might not necessarily, but they might go on and do that because they know there's a reason why they ended up on your list and the first place it was because they liked what they read. So they don't have to remember to check Amazon. I wonder if this author here really is something new, because nobody will do that, right. That they won't go on to Amazon once a month to check if you uploaded the new book. Autumn (45m 14s): But if you get them on your email list, you could just tell them, and that's not a sale right there. So for me, the mindset around thinking that the writing is the only important thing, I think that probably worked 10 years ago, but not anymore. And even in 10 years ago, I'm not sure if it was, I mean, it helped when eBooks were, if you were out with eBooks, we're new and you were in a good writer, you were probably right now on the forefront. But for most people, it's not just about being a good writer. I mean, I, I, my true, true deep fans, you know, they tell me that I'm better than Told can. I just love them so much, but it's not enough if you don't have the mindset of how to market, of how to stay in touch with your readers, how to connect with them and even know some of those like little marketing tips, like this is why I saved. Autumn (45m 59s): I wrote an entire series and now I'm releasing them. Back-to-back it's not just because of, you know, the excitement of releasing them. Back-to-back but it's also because readers will then, you know, not get lost in the series. They will be like, Oh, it was the next ones out. Oh, the next ones out. And they come right along with it very quickly, because most series don't sell until you get to the last book anyway. So you might as well say to them all up to the end, but those are the things again. So you're always looking for it's more than writing. I love the writing craft. If I could just be a little hermit in the woods. Oh, Hey, nevermind. So if you could just sit in and right now we have to worry about marketing is fantastic, but it's not the reality. Jesper (46m 41s): You have to know how to Mark it and you have to be able to talk to your readers and know where they are and they have to be able to find you. And the email list is definitely the easiest way of doing that. Autumn (46m 54s): Yeah. It's a devil's advocate in the woods have spoken. Jesper (46m 57s): That's right. Autumn (46m 58s): And I got quite a hermit because I have a, another hermit with me. So what are two hermits? I don't know what the term would be. Hermits assists. Well, I know a hermit or a place where hermit lives as call it a hermit Todd. It was just so I can go with that. Jesper (47m 16s): Okay. Well, anyway, if you liked what you heard today, and if you want to sort of dive much more deeper into all the different aspects of being a self published author, what you Should be aware of, what you should think about everything to do with like creating covers that fix Fitz, the markets, how is the Amazon algorithm works? How to run book launches and so much more, the good news is that Autumn and I created a a hundred percent FREE costs that we call it self publishing success course. And I would encourage you to go and check that one out. We will place a link to the sign up page in the show notes. Jesper (47m 60s): A and it's not going to cost you anything other than you need to put it in your email address two too, so that we can email you the different modules and you get onto the cost platform. But I suggest that you check it out and there is so much good content in there that you can dive into. And of course, if you don't like it, you can unsubscribe at any time. No questions asked. So it's easy. Check it out for FREE. And yeah, that's pretty cool. So I think it's an amazing Course. So yes, it is. It is definitely something that if you're starting out or even just stalled or just have questions, this is definitely the thing to take. I wish I had it when I first started in 2012. Jesper (48m 41s): So I'm glad we have it now and can help out authors and helped them on their journey and help their mindset because there are things as a whole module on mindset you want to, Autumn (48m 54s): Okay. Jesper (48m 54s): Yeah. So next Monday we will do a deep dive into a tool that we are finding incredibly valuable when editing and that's the software called pro Writing. I, yeah. Narrator (49m 5s): Yeah. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

In preparation for this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper have suffered through some of the WORST movies.  This is an entertaining top 10 of the movies which tells the worst stories EVER. At the end, the hosts share some thoughts on what NOT to do when creating stories of our own.  Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from riding. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 119 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And it is time for one of our ultimate this again, One of those not so serious Episode. So we hope that you will enjoy it as we enter the world of the WORST Stories Ever Told we were looking forward to this one, Autumn (56s): which is funny because when you first mentioned it, I said, I don't know how I'm gonna do on this one, but the secret that I had forgotten about really what's that. Oh, well, have you ever heard of mystery science theater? Jesper (1m 17s): No, I'm not sure. No, no, no. Autumn (1m 20s): I'll tell you all about it and why it's my ace in the hole and I'm going to do so blow you out of the water on this one. Jesper (1m 27s): Why do we get well, OK. Let's see. But, but I actually have some surprises lined up as well, so yeah, you'll see. You'll see. I I'm going to impress, you know, I was gonna say this one, maybe it's a good, it's not the right term. This'll be so bad how bad it's going to be an excellent. Autumn (1m 47s): I can not wait. Well, how are the things over in Denmark? Jesper (1m 55s): A well for for one, we've had some chats today. Excellent. So that's a good start. And a, I'm also expecting to start refereeing next week. And I hope I actually, last weekend I did do a on the 15th match a So, but senior soccer should pick up again this coming weekend. I hope so. I'm really looking forward to that too, that we are getting out of some so Corona restrictions that makes us all our lives are a nightmare. So, so that's good. That's exciting. Yeah. Oh yeah. And speaking about Corona restrictions, we are actually managed to go to Ikea last Saturday and no one would really not be excited about it going to Ikea. Jesper (2m 45s): But the thing is that since we moved into the apartment, we've had quite some furniture that we needed to deliver back to Ikea. I can click on host. Yeah. They closed. And we were stuck with it here in the apartment because we thought we couldn't go anywhere. So it would deliver it back. And we also have like one wall in the bedroom that is still filled up with moving boxes because we needed to deliver that stuff back to Ikea. And then we needed to buy a new piece of furniture. So we could empty all those boxes and put it in to a cabinet. But we couldn't do all of that. So we've been waiting a lot for like three months, but finally, Autumn (3m 26s): Yeah, Jesper (3m 26s): Indeed. So a lot of finally last Saturday they reopened so we could get it. We still have it. You still have to book a time and all of that stuff in order to be able to go inside of a warehouse where there's like 10 people in this humongous place. But nevertheless, we in medicine and the way we actually got to our staff deliver delivered back and bought the new stuff and took that with us home. So when Easter holidays comes up here quite soon, I know what I have to do. I have to put Ikea stuff back together. Again, it's just not my favorite thing to do, but at least we are done with it. Autumn (3m 60s): Yeah. Well, like I said, I wish you were closer. I love building things. You saw me building my cabin that we're staying in. And so yeah. I would love to help out building things, but its kind of a, you know, I can't quite make the flight, even though things are improving slowly in the us, they are hoping they're saying, ah, my husband's signed me up for our a coronavirus vaccination. So like that's exciting that they got to my age bracket. It's not the bottom of the, the brackets focused. Jesper (4m 31s): Yeah. I don't know if it's good or bad weather when your number comes off. It's like, Hmm. Is this because they think either I'm old or they think that it's something wrong with me. So we better actually meet this person. This is just like what what's going on. Yeah. Autumn (4m 44s): Well they had already let me put it down to eight to 16 year olds. What you had to have one of these certain listed health things and I'm like, Nope, Nope, Nope. I'm, I'm perfectly fine, but I'm older than 16, but they finally opened it up to my age group. So that's exciting. That means I might be able to see my parents some time to, So we have a date for it already. What do you know when it's going to be sometime in April, April and April. Okay. I haven't even been told about it yet when I'm gonna get any vaccines. Yeah. So yeah. We'll see. But hopefully within the next couple, a couple of months then yeah, Yeah, yeah. Well, my parents have gotten there's, and they've been out two breweries, you know, every one space, it sounds like they are out and about all of it everywhere, but you know, the tables are really far. Autumn (5m 29s): So, you know, it's like if there's three other people in the entire room with them, it's amazing. I'm usually there taking pictures and it's empty, but they've been out and you know, going to get a draft beers and taking photos. I'm just like dad, but I go to Jesper (5m 44s): Yeah. Yeah. And we've all had enough of this stuff by now. So a for sure we need to, I think everybody is looking forward to get to the other side of it. I guess my biggest fears just because they are starting to open it up now. So my biggest thing is just that it will happen. Like it did it last time they start to open it up and then like, three-four weeks later they shot it all down. And then if they do that, I think people will get pretty damn upset because people are just fed up with it. Autumn (6m 11s): Yeah. Especially with the spring, you know, now it's almost spring here and some are rolling out. If they shut everything down for the summer, I think there would be a revolution here. They just don't do it. Let them go. Yeah. Jesper (6m 24s): Yeah. We don't. We are, we've had enough. Yeah. But otherwise, if anything is everything good on your end Autumn (6m 32s): And do lots of covers and writing and reading and all that kind of stuff. But overall, mostly just working on my laptop because it's still only in the forties, which I can't think of what that would be in Celsius, but it's just above, you know, a little bit above freezing. So it looks beautiful and the feel so warm and you go outside and about 15 minutes later they was like, I need something warm to drink. So it's looking in fighting almost all of the snow is gone, but it is still spring and very early here, but it's exciting to see the water running in this stream again and sea ground and all of those good things. Autumn (7m 13s): Yeah. Narrator (7m 13s): Oh a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (7m 19s): Yeah. So I don't know if you have something you want to share in this section, all of them, but I'm just going to keep it very brief. But I just wanted to check if you had something first before I do that. Nothing else Autumn (7m 29s): Too exciting. It's been so busy and I'd been working on Instagram, working on how to do Instagram and all of these other things, but something specifically to the Podcast, nothing to share with authors yet, but I'm working on a few things. Jesper (7m 43s): Okay, cool. Yeah. I'm also just going to keep it very briefly. Just the small thing he had. I just wanted to say that it, it will speaking to you the listener, if you enjoy The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, the best thing you can really do for us is to tell another author, a friend about it. We are still in the process of growing our listenership here. So we would really like for a lot more people to find us. So if you like this podcast will not tell an author, a friend about it and you will be helping us out. And you will also help out the person who you are telling you about a great podcast and listen to. So it's like a sort of like a win, win situation that doesn't cost you anything on the contrary, you will probably going to get a lot of gratitude in return. Jesper (8m 29s): So a yeah, I just wanted to remind that that's a really small and easy thing that you can do that it will actually make meaning quite a lot for us. Autumn (8m 39s): Absolutely come Sherise join us and help spread the word. We would appreciate it. Jesper (8m 45s): Yeah. So with that being said, should we just a dive? Yeah, Autumn (8m 49s): I think so. Because this one, we have WORST Stories. I have plots and we both have five each to see and are trying to figure out which one's the worst of the worst. So I think we better get into it. Yeah. Jesper (9m 6s): Okay. So this is going to be interesting. I mean, I think when you, initially, when I started building my list here, initially I wanted to only make picks of stuff that I had read or seen. But, but as it turned out, I think I'm pretty good at avoiding bad stories. So yeah. So I admit that I had to pick some stuff that I haven't actually read or watch, but it just sounds so horrible that I added them to the list that I anyway, but I would say that basically more or less all of it, I do have some sort of connection to it. Jesper (9m 51s): So, and it's not something that I just picked at random, but I will, as we go through, I will say what I have seen and what I have not seen to make a key bot. What I did too, is that I only picked movies because then I can play some sound clips as we go along. Autumn (10m 11s): Well, you are in such a cheater. I only picked movies too, but I did not go and get sound clips, actually the movies. I don't know if I could've found sound clips in the us, I re watched them, but I have seen all five that are going to be sharing. And I like, I see hinted earlier. I could have shared 14 and actually so 50 to a total of 15, because one of them isn't because I've watched two seasons of something that is called mystery science theater. And you're going to love the story behind this. Jesper (10m 44s): So it, it sounds like if it's so bad, why did you want us to cease in some of it? Autumn (10m 49s): Because that's the point. So it's a show. It's a mystery science theater 3000 is actually called. It's a show that uses the premise of a show. Jesper (10m 59s): Wait, so is this your first entry on the list of your art? Autumn (11m 1s): Nope. This is just a set-up of how bad my entries are going to be. They go for it. Or it's the set up is that they are showing the most horrible movie ever in an attempt to melt the mind of a research subject slash prisoner. There's a hostage. And to keep her Saturday, he used, made this robot companions that watch they are inflicted with this movie with him. And they're just sitting there and making snide comments about the movies the entire time. And this is huge. This has a cult following it is so, so popular that they actually ran a Kickstarter campaign to get in a Netflix, to do 14 Xtra shows. Autumn (11m 42s): So it's a serious. So I've watched the series of 11 and 12, which we put out on Netflix, all 14 of them there, just with the whole WORST shows that Jesper (11m 54s): You need to have some popcorn, a beer and a sense of humor and you will die laughing and growing at the same time. So good luck beating me on this one. Oh my God. What? It does not sound very good. No, it's a fantastic, horrible Amy. There's no other, I can not wait to tell you about them. No you do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was see who comes up with a WORST stuff because it, it it's really about it. It has to be so bad that you'd like almost prefer to do a, I don't know. I would say that you would prefer to do something really horrible to yourself instead of just to avoid watching it. That has to be that bad. Jesper (12m 35s): I've got it. My number one. It's fantastic. I can not wait. And the high, I don't like your confidence. If you have way too much confidence going into this list and easily to you a bit more relaxed like it. Yeah. We'll see, kind of let's let's see. Let's just go through and now you're just like, you're way too confident. I don't like this. Maybe it should we change the subject? So today show or something else better at it. Just shifting on the fly. Your are going to be the one who left in the dust. So whatever you want to do, I will win this one. Well, okay. I think we have jointly agreed that all the past ones I have won. Jesper (13m 16s): So if you win one time, maybe I can give you that, but still I know why I'm going to win this one. I am not too bad, too bad pics that you, you just can't beat them. We'll see if we will have one of the same ones. Why would that be funny? But we'll say, I think we need to get started though. So what should, what should we start with you? You know, obviously lease worse to worse. I take it. Yeah. I think I organized mine so that it goes from, let me just do a quick check on my list here. I don't know if mine are organized At no, because mine are so incredibly bad. Jesper (14m 0s): All of them that it does not matter which order you would take them in. They can beat all of you or no problems. So they are just in random order of mine. Okay. Minor from lease worse to worse. So I was, I did my homework. I watched 14, 15 show and she was 15 shitty. She goes in preparation for the test was born for this one. Lets go. I was humbled. I'll let you go first. Okay. So I have a short audio clip for you here for us to be ready to go for it. Audio Clip (14m 41s): I've got something on my radar. Looks like a fog bank and that's moving straight toward us. Kind of fog moves against the wind. Jesper (14m 53s): So based on what you just heard that you might be able to, Can you guess what it is or maybe not yessing Pacific room? No. Pacific room is pretty good. What do you mean? But It's not on my list, but there's better movies out there. Yeah, yeah, there it is. But its definitely not on a list of the worst movies ever. OK. So what was that one? So this one is the FOC from 2005. I did not see that one. Oh, well we'll be happy that I don't know. I Want you to enjoy a really bad book. It's a, it's a reboot of a movie from 1988, a and I only watched this 2005 version. Jesper (15m 38s): So I don't know about the original ones, but this is one of those cases where you sort of, you see the premise of the movie and when you think it could be quite interesting, but you still, you still a bit skeptical 'cause there's something inside of you telling like Mmm you know that feeling. So all the alarm bells are going off in your mind, like wanting you to, this is probably going to be crap, but then you watched the trailer and it was just like, well there is something in this sort of set up that I quite like, you know, this whole thing about dos a fork and there is some mystery about something happens and it's dangerous. Jesper (16m 21s): And just start thinking, well maybe you should try to just watch it because it, it could be good. Maybe it was, it might be worth a try. Yeah. So who, let me just explain what is about here. So I need to, I just need something to justify why I actually wasted my time watching this movie. So how does this sound? So we're in a town where the founder's got the money by murdering a colony of lepers. Okay. Nobody knows about this terrible past. And now we're like a a hundred years later where a character return's just as a statue, it is raised in a tribute of the founders and then comes the fork and there's something inside the fog, something vengeful. Jesper (17m 16s): So a little super nice or something. Oh my God, no, it could be good, but it was bad. So I went against my better adjustment and I washed it and my God, it was stupid. But you know, first of all, when you have like teenagers dancing around in bikini's on board and all the fishing boat, then you already knows that a lib there's just not going to be good will. And then on top of that, the plot just of, it just keeps going and going and going and going. It doesn't really add anything to the story at all. Jesper (17m 58s): And then you should think that by the time to spend so much time on adding plot for no real reason, you should think that then at least they would be able to deliver a satisfying ending. NOT it just, it does not make any sense at the end that either, I mean, I'm going to spoil it here, but why the heck are we suddenly presented with some We of thing that is going on with like some luck between a human and a ghost? I mean, in the middle of it as sort of a horror story is like what's going on here. So just like it makes no sense at all. No, no. I didn't see that one coming to strip from, to criticize. Jesper (18m 42s): There seems to be the consensus as well as the original, 1988 version. I wasn't that good either. So that sort of begs to question to me like, well, I remake it when you, when you're creating something that is bad to begin with. It's just bad, bad, bad. I mean, what the fuck? That's bad. I don't know. I think I have so much worse. I'm just going to start it. OK. This is the shit and move you. Okay. Autumn (19m 14s): And I don't know, it, it sounds like a good one for a couple of years sitting on the laughter. Laugh at yourself. Silly. Yeah, Jesper (19m 20s): No, you don't want to do it now. Autumn (19m 24s): Alright. Well you want to know what my number five one, and this is my only one that was not featured on mystery science theater 3000. Okay. So this one is actually 2020 and it was produced on Netflix. This is a series and I've mentioned this one a couple of times and two, you cursed. It actually makes my list of horrible shows. So it's, this is a retelling of the authorial legend from the viewpoint of Nim whey, which is the lady of a Lake. And so this has set before she becomes the lady as a Lake before author meets Arthur meets Merlin. So it's like, he's not, you know, like the source of the stone young, he's a buddy as a teenager. Autumn (20m 8s): And it sounds to me because I mean, I writing a story about Faye and Nim Wei is Faye. And I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, this is going to be really excited to have a little fun with Arthur Arthur in legends. I am, yeah. I have seen way too many years, but I love the funny, this is going to be awesome. Now it was so bad, but I feel bad because of the actors and the actresses. There are some really good ones. There's Floki from Vikings is a Berlin. I mean, there are some really good actors and actresses and they do their darn best to deliver these characters. Like you kind of care, but it was, it was bad that that my husband would put this on the nights. Autumn (20m 50s): He just wants to go to sleep. And then I'd be sitting in there, just yell, trying not to yell at the TV, set up. And then the plot holes and the inconsistencies and the jumps that made absolutely no sense and trying not to wake him up. And it was just really bad, but there are some of the inconsistency, as some of them are like, and they always, always, you know, it was, this is a story about the Fe, but for some reason, and it's about Dibley, who's the girl. But for some reason, Arthur, is that the one who has always right. And he was humid in the mail and it was just so silly, but you know, they are some of the silliness, there is a grain mill. All the grain mills have been killed, but you know, taken over by the evil King, he was trying to wipe out the Fe and There down to one. Autumn (21m 37s): So whose idea is that to go protect the one that's or if there is, how many nights did they sent you? You know, how many Fe warriors do they send like a five to go protect your food supply. And I go, and of course, if it goes to crap there that they burn them out in a mil, the green night and earth are, are almost about to die. But, and then when she shows up who she was magical, but she doesn't really know how to control it, but she manages to save the day. And later on, they are, she claims queenship. There is no, there's never been a fake queen. She claims queenship because she has the sword of the Kings, because one is what you do it, even though everyone's excited that she, she claims that she was going to be the queen, even though she has been hiding from them, not collaborating in any of the older meetings to like protect her people. Autumn (22m 32s): She had sent a letter to the Qing invading saying, Hey, I'll get you back the sword. If you let the face go that Arthur sister or a Morgan and Morgan Le Fay, the source for us eventually now dictates to her. So this wasn't even her idea she's done. Absolutely nothing, but everyone's like your queen, but like, yeah, standard, there was so many plot holes and things and I'm just like, you know, so anyway, it makes my number five, which is pretty safe. Yeah. Okay. Jesper (23m 9s): I think I have come across some, if I might be confusing, it was something else. But I do think I've seen some, you know, some of those trailers running when I log into Netflix and stuff like that, about it and, and, and the list, it must have been, it must have looked bad enough that I did hear of it because I have not watched any of it. Autumn (23m 29s): I haven't recommended to you, but this was the only one that could have gotten in a sound clip for a day. I feel so disappointed now, But yeah, yeah, Jesper (23m 36s): Yeah. Well, believe it. You're probably gonna lose on point because you didn't have some clips. Let's see here. Autumn (23m 43s): I let's say I've got some doozies that I don't think you can even Jesper (23m 46s): Come close to. Oh shit. Okay. I need to up my game. All right, let's go for it to a number of For, okay. So brace yourself for this sound clip, because this is going to be bad. Okay. You ready? Audio Clip (24m 5s): effective. We've got a white male, 54 years old. we had another one so far. The one thing is that all of the victims have in common is a fierce site to go together. Jesper (24m 27s): I'm going to stop it. That it was so fucking ridiculous so that you can already hear shit. This is, she say, it's the only thing we have in common as a parasite. They, this is at the FIA site to be here site. Oh. So they would go to a website. Yeah. It killed them. And for this one, I actually learned my lesson. So I have not watched it, but the trailer was so bad, but it just, the trailer itself scares me off. And I was pretty good. In addition to it, initially I checked it off because it said it was from the same director of a house on a haunted Hill. Well, actually it wouldn't saying that it had just realized that there are some people that's probably a good statement. Jesper (25m 9s): I think that that's true. But this movie is it fair.com. It's called O and M initially sort of pulled me in because I don't want to eat it. It had me checking out the trailer and so on because it carries some of the same tropes as the ring. Did you ever watched the ring? I actually have not watched the ring, but I, I, it looked interesting. I only did and watch it because I wasn't doing horror movies at the time. No, no. Yeah. I don't want so many horror movies either, or at least not for the last couple of years before the end. I quite liked a lot of them, but I enjoyed the ring. The ring in my view is a really good movie, the movie. But I have to say that the original, like, I think it's, I think it's Japanese or some of these at least Asian or originally a, a and the Asian version is better than the American version, but yeah, that's the one that you had wanted to see, but I just, it looked actually scary enough. Jesper (26m 2s): And I was at a point in my life where I thought like, I don't need this. No, no, no, no. It is pretty scary. The rink, to be honest, but, but in the ring, people die from watching a videotape. Right. And it is well done and it is scary. But so here they have just replace the video tape with a website. So when you visit this website, then like, I don't know what 24 hours later. So I don't know. I have watched it, but I'm people buy and a, well, at least here, at least we can see like, if you align it with some Shangri tropes, if it works right. Because it got me into Christ. I mean, even either the title, it was so bad. Jesper (26m 46s): Like, Autumn (26m 46s): I mean Jesper (26m 48s): It, in the title, I was very skeptical when a sort of titled feared at calm was like, no, but then I could just see like the links back to the ring and stuff like that. It got me so far, at least are checking out. So it's just sorta like a, you know, on Amazon, if you can, if you can align yourself with some tropes in at least people will start checking it out. Of course, then you shouldn't have a shitty trailer like this one. And then people run away screaming from it. But yeah, Autumn (27m 13s): That's true. Good point to take away after your trailers. Yeah. Jesper (27m 16s): But since I haven't watched it myself, I collect it. Some words for it, Autumn (27m 20s): From the critics. Okay. Let's hear it. Jesper (27m 23s): This one is from the New York daily news. So it goes like this quote, the story, it's a mess. This is it. A proper and critic, right? The story, this is a, it's a mess. Some of the images are offensive. The acting on the par and the dialogue. Silly. Yeah. Autumn (27m 45s): Yeah. Jesper (27m 45s): And how about this one from Metro times, quote for you.com his full of inconsistencies and contradictions, but none are more than disturbing than the fact that not only, no, sorry, none are more disturbing than the fact that not a single policeman wears gloves at any of the crime scene scattered throughout the field in quotes. Autumn (28m 12s): Then my, Jesper (28m 12s): And then my favorite one is my personal favorite one. This is from us today. Quote, theater comm is a cinematic equivalent of spam in your head, Autumn (28m 20s): Email inbox hurt that I would not want that review EVER. That would be a painful, I feel kind of bad for the person who, you know, someone obviously love this and I don't know if they did, but yeah. Jesper (28m 38s): I mean, when he was so bad that the, even the trailers gets me off, then it had to go on my top five. Autumn (28m 45s): That's horrible. I know that it was pretty horrible, but you are going to love my number for it's just, okay, lets be ready. And I'm not sure if you can make it better than this, but let's try. So she says that I'll have sound, but this is, you know, I would have literally had to watch it. This was before trailers and SoundCloud clips and all that. But this is called the beast of hollow mountain. I think that's a title. That's a good title. And it sounds pretty good. Yeah. It's, it's got it. All. It is caught the lovable orphan boy who is trunk father who's eaten by the beast. It's got to love triangle for and by a Texas cowboy who, who falls for the wealthy Mexican girl, her patrol Don Rek. Autumn (29m 29s): Oh and the beast, which is the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Yeah. It didn't quite see that coming in. But in fact, this, this show we here, I think he was from the 1950s. It, it is Jesper (29m 45s): Well I'm in the movie. Is when is it set In? Is it it's a step in and the real world? Or was it like a fence as you posted Autumn (29m 51s): Is the real world, Texas sort of like the zero Zuora sort of like kind of a time period. That kind of a thing. Jesper (29m 57s): We have to run on a sec Rex in that. Okay. How did that go up there? Autumn (30m 1s): Yeah. Well it's this show is listed as the first film to show dinosaurs and Cowboys in the same picture. Right? Jesper (30m 11s): So how do you do to get that out to you? Autumn (30m 14s): I don't know, but it's fantastically horrible. And the plot it was talking to the plot is like a hundred percent based on state or tropes obviously. So you know, the good guy to Texas cowboy, he just loves the girl. The girl was being forced to marry this guy because our family says, you know, he was wealthy. It was one of the guy for you. And of course the man she's marrying is cruel and that this sweet little boy who, you know, he's has a trunk and he was trying to take care of them and be the adult. And his dad goes and gets eaten by this monster. And it was so sad As I haven't really looked at anything before I've watched it. And so I'm waiting on pins and needles thinking this beast or the mountain was going to be a dragon. Autumn (30m 56s): It had to give me a dragon. It was so excited and that it ends up being this dinosaur, which I agree. It, it makes no sense at all. It just there's this beast and the H how that ended up in the mountain. I don't know. But don't they never explain the best part. That was a special effect. So this is back in the era of stop motion on like clay animation, right. And features it has this crazy tongue. It's like, it's hilarious. It's constantly out of its mouth like this, like Medusa a snake. Oh, I had to wake up. Adam fell asleep for the switch. I had to wake him up and be like, yeah, I'll have to see this, this, this, no, no, no. Jesper (31m 38s): Oh, how cool of you? So you were waking them up to see the boy is shitty movie on your mind. Autumn (31m 44s): I see the, this tirade a source right now it's worth watching just four, but it was totally tropes to death. I had been all the way down, no surprises, except for obviously the dinosaur and the cowboy and the Mexican Dawn. But I mean, the cowboy tries to save his fiance, his girl, the woman who loves her fiance. Oh. Till he gets eaten. By the time you write a source Rex, but this made it to number four instead of lower, because it actually had, besides all the tropes won good plot points. One of the first scenes is that the ranger looking for some lost cows and the swamp, and then they actually end up coming back to the swamp in using this swamp, just stop the dinosaur. Autumn (32m 27s): It's like, Oh my God, they are so tired of that up. So that it was amazing that they typed it up. So I just buy this one, made it a number four. Otherwise Texan cowboy, missing ranch, hands, Jesper (32m 41s): Cows missing a love triangle. Orphan boy. It was so tropey, now that it's fantastic. Okay. But I have to deduct the 0.4, the fact that you would wake up your husband to look like to sleep and then your waking up to what is the most shitty stuff. But he was watching it with me and I don't think you can deduct a point unless we brought him in and asked him if it wasn't good or a bad, because he was laughing as we were, as I was looking at these yesterday, he was like, Oh my God. I remember that. So yeah. Will you say that? Jesper (33m 22s): I, yeah. Everybody can say that. I think it was fine, but Oh, but that one was actually not that bad for a really bad movie. Hmm. It was the special effects was just fantastic. I, I absolutely loved the door to source tongue. Oh yeah. Well, it was like a, the original King Kong and stuff like that. So it looks so bad the two, but it doesn't get in the movies too. I did not go back that far, but no, I didn't go back to that. Fight that because then you could have always, everything was shit. All right. Well that was my job, but so my next one. Jesper (34m 4s): Alright. You might actually recognize the voice in this clip. Okay. Okay. All right. Ready? Audio Clip (34m 13s): I learned the truth for a long time ago. Jennifer end of the dark is when the case for most of us alive, it's happening again? Jesper (34m 28s): Did you recognize the male voice? Oh, most, but he just couldn't quite catch it. It's Christmas later as I hear it now, but yeah. Okay. So which is this one? This is a, a lone in a dock. Oh, the one in the dark now I don't think I was sad. I swear one of the sentences, there is the exact same one that used the trailer for pitch black, which is visit. Yes. But that's a different, Okay. Anyway, this is a loan for the dock and I'm here to see where it's going to get slightly embarrassing. You know, you did watch this one. No, I did watch it. Jesper (35m 7s): Yes. But I have to admit how incredibly stupid. So this, this movie is based on the video game. Okay. So, so far so good. The only problem was that it is actually based on a different video game at night. I thought it was so I was really unprepared completely. So I went into this thinking that this was a movie on a video game That I love to play when I was a child, I really liked it. And then I started watching this movie and I was like, this makes no sense. I really don't understand how, how are they? Jesper (35m 48s): And it took me quite a while before I figured out that this is something completely different, just it was two different video games completely. And they have nothing to do with each other. But, and, and then I tried later on, I tried to figure out what, what what's that game called then? That I actually liked plating because I clearly remember it as it is called alone in a dark that game. But then when I looked alone or with the doc up on the internet, then I can see it's a different game. So it is not the same one, but I still haven't worked out what the, what the one that I wanted to watch was them. So I ended up watching this movie that has nothing to do with what I wanted. Jesper (36m 32s): Right. And I was in for the most shitty experience ever, because you're basically following like a supernatural detective who uncovers a long lost tribe who worshiped demons. And of course, demons are then attempting to reach into our world. OK. And our detectives can only stop them by acquiring the help of his ex ex-girlfriend. Of course, of course, because that's what you do. Well, see, that's why you shouldn't be broken up with her, you know? Yeah. So, yeah. You know what, I it's just, I just realized that basically my first three picks are horror movies that are, So let's say something. Jesper (37m 20s): I, well, horror movies, I think are hard to get right now. Yeah. It was just like the only thing that I can say, you don't want this movie. It, it is such a waste of time and it just to drive home the point. So listen to this quote, which is from the movie. Okay. Okay. And this is just to show us, she would do, this is a, So a bit of context. They are in a cave and the character to is going to speak here. I think it's a girlfriend, she's a pointing at some native American text on the wall into cave. Okay. And then she says, quote, it's a warning. It says, once you make it down here, live, you're already dead and quote. Jesper (38m 4s): It's just, I don't know. It was just like the most shitty dialogue I could. And I couldn't even make up something that's shitty. I did just that. It's all good. It was pretty much say it. I want to make it down here. Like if you're already dead, I mean, what the fuck are you talking about? That's impossible. Yeah. Hi. I guess its supposed to be frightening. What? I would have been like the grammar Nazi going. I don't know. I, I think he could reword this. Yeah. Oh my God. So bad. Please. Don't watch that movie. Well, I, I have, mine Autumn (38m 37s): Is not a horror movie. In fact mine is Fantasy. Yeah. I have fence coming up as well as good. I got to have in my list. So my number three is an ATAR, the fighting evil. Who have you ever heard of it? That Jesper (38m 51s): Sounds really bad. Autumn (38m 55s): It's the perfect trope. It starts the film opens or is this baby at star or who has a birth Mark? And so it means that someday it will, of course he will grow up to destroy the spider cold. And so can you, you know, there's this, it obviously this prophecy, so we got this prophecy baby birth Mark. Jesper (39m 17s): And that makes sense. Yeah. Autumn (39m 19s): So the high priest of the ancient one, he attempts to kill the baby's. So the birthmark is covered up and he sent off to live in a far away village where as he was growing up, he decided that he really actually is in love with a woman who's grown up at CES sister and he asked for permission to marry her. And that's what he finds out. It's not really a sister and he was adopted Jesper (39m 41s): And well, that was a very convenient, Autumn (39m 44s): This and that makes a fine, even though they grew up as siblings, I'm sure. No. Oh anyways. So in the home study setting, what can you do? Yeah, that's right teenagers. But you know, obviously the King finds out about it or it comes and how he feels his sister slash brother takes her back. And there's all these things like he finds this warrior again, another trope who was an enemy of this ancient source or that had Tara supposed to be the one to take down. So there's all of this law Amazons are in, there are this woman who is an Amazon and a woman who wins Hill and falls head over heels in love with them, but goes with them to rescue his wife, bride slash sister. Autumn (40m 29s): And she ends up dying, not the Sr the bride, she banks. It, it is so true. So convoluted, everyone's stereotypical your looking at the only good part was that, you know, what was the spider call? So there was a mess of spiders crawling all over and the, yeah. So the ancient one, the evil source, or was a pretty, it was kind of interesting, but it's, it's just pretty much, yeah. You can look to go through it and going, my head hurts. Hey, Jesper (41m 1s): How much can you just crawling in my head? Autumn (41m 7s): It was my head. Would've been better. I mean, if it had no direct Plott it just makes no sense, but he kept tripping over a things. And this word here is suppose to teach them how to fight and ends up actually having been working for the ancient world. It just, it was just, you're just finally going, just end it please. Jesper (41m 26s): He's put me out of my misery. Autumn (41m 29s): Why did you start this one? And yeah, if it wasn't him, you know, the robot's Jesper (41m 34s): A mystery science theater is sitting there groaning themselves. Yeah. You couldn't have made it through this one a lot. Oh my God. I don't understand why you want to so many good. If I am just masochistic, I guessed, I don't know what they were saying. That they were funny and they get better from here and go to the top two are just out of the park or I can't wait. Oh my God. Okay. Well I have two left. All right, let's go. Jesper (42m 14s): And this one is not horror. So this is what this one is. Well, it's Fantasy slash adventure. I would call it all right. Now you're paying attention. It's also the first movie and a series, which was actually one of my favorite series growing up. Okay. It was before streaming services. And I actually remember a friend on and myself. We went to a gas station just up the street back then. And then they had like displays have movies that you could rent. I think I remember a desk. There was a ton of them that was probably like 50 movies or something. That was probably It. Jesper (42m 54s): And you can shuffle through to them and find out what do you want it? And we rented THE, we had previously rented the first movie in this series and we really liked it. And then we got to this one with the second movie in this series. Okay. So see if you can get, guess what? This is Audio Clip (43m 22s): In the fall there's centuries bond burst. Nothing could have prepared them for an Jesper (43m 31s): It's just a way to say it. The quickening. It was just like, it sounds so bad. This is so eighties. It's incredible. Yeah, it is. It's a it's it's like, lets take a word and see if you can sell it. Say it in such a way. It sounds bad. Even though it was like the quickening. I mean, it sounds like what the heck they all came up with. So do you know what I mean? What movie does this? The quickening is like the subtitle of it that it's not ringing a bell. It's a Highlander to Oh, okay. Shoot at. It's been a long time. Yeah, indeed. I don't think honestly, I don't think I would enjoy Highland Highlander one today, but as a kid, but I loved it. Jesper (44m 14s): I thought it was still good that I was so cool. And all of that, you know, he, well, he was pretty gruesome, gruesome right in the cafeteria, the others. And then he got that powers. It's a pretty bad, but the way I loved it. And then we, we went to a, we rented this a, this a high level to, from the gas station and I was Probably like 14 years old or something. And we went home and what is it? And I hated it. Even back then as 14 years old, it was just like, it's a completely mindless story where the good guy fights the bad guy, but it's showing up it just because you don't, there is absolutely no point to it. There was nothing going on that that makes any meaning in this movie at all. Jesper (44m 59s): And it just makes no sense. And also it doesn't add anything to the story universe at all. I can, I can almost see it. It almost feels like somebody, you know, maybe the movie director or something went into the writers room, maybe at that point in time where they were all like brainstorming, what could this be? And then he just said, well, that sounds great. Let's take all of that. And we were just going to film It. No reason to no reason to change or any of them will just go straight with you as you have it here. It's it's like a complete mess. Oh my God. So you kill yourself. If you try to walk this way, because it's so bad. Autumn (45m 42s): I remember that from the eighties though. That's where the idea is that the second, you know, any of the sequels were always just like horrible. 'cause it's just like kind of like, Oh, some of like the first one that seemed to be a second one and they throw out everything was no sense, but it was not that surprising, But Oh, that is pretty. It is sad when they do something like that. Especially two where the first movie was it horrible though? Like you said, things had changed a little bit in since you were born. Jesper (46m 9s): I think it would be a horrible today, but you know, when I was like 13 or something, I don't know. I can remember a time when the first one came out probably a couple of years before, but 12, 13 years old or whatever, it was amazing, but they don't want us to the second one. Autumn (46m 26s): I'll keep that in mind. I mean, you have to remember it. So your, your closer in age to my husband. So I was a few years older and by that time I could drive and I don't know if I was watching bad movies at that time. Yeah. Jesper (46m 38s): I don't know. Maybe, you know, well then I'll go back and revisit it. Yeah. Autumn (46m 43s): Okay. Unless I really feel like watching bad movies, which like, if you've already agreed, I might be like for some strange reason, so bad that you're, you turn off your author brain and you just go, wow. Jesper (46m 56s): I hate it because I feel like I'm wasting my life is like, I'm never going to get this one and a half hours back. This is just a complete waste of life. Autumn (47m 5s): I understand. Alright, well that, you're going to love my number two. Then you are ready. This one is more scifi. It's like, yeah, it's called the daytime ended and a bad day. Well, let's say the whole movie fits into the note that was in Wikipedia about the name that the film was originally titled. Earth's final fury, which is, that's a pretty good title. Yeah, no, that was pretty cool. That was changed the vortex because they thought it would sell more tickets. And the final title, the day time ended, came around For no one knows why that's pretty much fits the movie Jesper (47m 41s): Except for the war Tech's title. The other two is for sure Autumn (47m 45s): That that's all fine, but I would not say that that would not sell it. So this one, the premise is this family, a young family, parents, two kids moved to the Sonoran desert, which was a very pretty desert. And then the other grandparents and these weird, it's a super Nova in conjunction sort of thing going on. And then those are the reports about UFO's or in the area. And the one daughter kind of has this telepathic connection to one of the aliens. And then the grandmother C is one overnight. Of course there's lots of screaming and running and they're terrified. And I think that they see the UFO was with a really horrible light's in the sky and they run outside. I remember the horses getting away as well. Autumn (48m 26s): There, we had a little ranch in all of the family hides over night in separate areas because they are terrified. And while they're outside hiding, there is actually these giant monsters that come through a reptilian thing and this other thing, and they're just battling it out in the snow and Derrick deserts. But then the UFL is come back and like lasers at the monsters and then the sunrises and everyone gets up and they walk and they're all together as a family. And they would look over in through the next Valley. And there's this weird futuristic city, which I actually didn't know until I read the plot on this one, that it actually is supposed to be like a thousand years until the future. I had no clue watching it. And then it adds with like the doctor saying that it's all going to be fine now. Autumn (49m 11s): That's it. Hey, when was this made? Is not as old as its sound. I might've been the 80th as well. So it would have Jesper (49m 22s): To go like special effects and stuff like Autumn (49m 25s): That as well. Really horrible. I mean the reptilian amphibious creatures that are fighting, I don't even know why they were there, where they came from, what they had to do with the little UFO's that are zapping through the walls and these a little space lights and people would freeze. And it's just Jesper (49m 44s): Sounds more confusing than anything. That's it? Like you even do it even explaining what it was about. You lost me a bit there, like, Oh yeah. Autumn (49m 52s): Oh, what are you? There is no sense. And like I said, until I actually read the description of it to remind myself what it was. I was like, I don't see how you go from Okay. To conjunctions aliens, reptilian, creatures fighting each other to the future. So I joke now I actually thought they ended up on the alien planet and they have been transported there. I chose blue what was going on in some really bad acting and really bad explaining. I, and even Jesper (50m 28s): When I think about horses and the desert, Alrighty, you should've been a clue, that's it? Yeah. That doesn't work very well for a range of situations. But yeah, no. So it's, that one was pretty painful. Not as bad as number one, but it was pretty. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. I think that one you had before, it sounded Western this one way to be honest, but Okay. So the final one on my list is also one way I loved the original, Okay. Is also one from my childhood. So it was probably not that good today if I watched it again, but I won't, but this is not a sequel. Jesper (51m 10s): This is a remake and it's from 2002. So C if you can guess what this is, Audio Clip (51m 21s): It's the world's number one phenomenon. I cruise. They just thought that you could just write it in. And three players, rules. The game told you this, the promised land two or three, two, one. Jesper (51m 44s): That was just somebody's laughing because he, I didn't know, he just slammed him into the ground or something. It might be a bit of tough one to guess if I was gonna say it, but it's going to be Eddie guests. I would just throw out mortal Kombat, but I have no idea. No. Okay. You want to just not too bad. We have a guest. It's a roller ball. All right. Well, I don't, haven't seen the first one or the remakes, so, okay. So tell me about this one. Yeah. So the original is from 1975. Wow. And I watched that when I was at a child and I really liked it. So rollable, it's this sort of extreme sport. Jesper (52m 27s): Okay. So they have like this metal bowl and they are on an oval pitch that just goes round and round. And then they were holding the walls where we have to put the middle ball into that. Just go to a point actually like a fun game. Oh, well, yeah. It's pretty crazy because they, they drive like motorcycles on the pitch and they, they, they hit each other. I think as far as I remember, they had weapons as well. So it's like, you, you, you can die from, to gaming. And that was why I loved it was so different and it was so cool. And then they had made all of this kind of special gear and, and stuff like they want to do. It was cool. And then in a 2002 and some morons decided to let's do a remake of that one. Jesper (53m 10s): Yeah. That was a good idea. Oh no, no. It's just, it's horrible. So you have, in this remake, you have entire scenes, which are basically serves. Absolutely no purpose. So I just want to be just one example. Here's this just tells me if you think that sounds like good story telling to you. Okay. So you have one character dragging another character across town to some sort of a apartment building to look for somebody who isn't there and you don't know why and the person they are looking for is never, ever mentioned again. Autumn (53m 57s): Wow. Jesper (53m 58s): Oh, look for somebody that you don't know who it is. And it's never mentioned again. And then they walk away again and you will be like, Autumn (54m 6s): Huh? Yeah, that doesn't, that it doesn't work for me. So that's, Jesper (54m 10s): But that, that's how these entire movie is, is just, wow. This is nothing in it. That makes any sense. I don't know if they were drunk or something when they make the script for it or is it just like Jesus Christ? Autumn (54m 25s): That's pointless plots. Just, Yeah. Pointless scenes get under my skin. So that would, I would not have made it through that one. I would've gotten up and done something else. I would've been like I'm right here. Jesper (54m 39s): That was five very terrible movie picks. Yeah. Autumn (54m 42s): Okay. All right. You're ready for him. My number one in the back to Fantasy for this one, this is called the wizards of the last kingdom. How's that for a title? I think also it sounds pretty cool. So I was excited when I saw this one on the mystery science theater. Cause you know yeah. But it sounds like, you know, if it doesn't have to be, this will be great. It was so brave, knowingly bad in a series of bad shows. I mean, it doesn't even have a spark that made me laugh. I was so disappointed and it will all of the one out of all of them. I remember this one, the least. So I actually had to look this one up quite a bit, but it starts nice. There is a peaceful kingdom of at home and there's a teenage boy, Simon. Autumn (55m 24s): Who's the son of the court wizard, the Kings wizard and this evil sorcerer convinces the queen two overthrow her husband, a name, the sourcer, the ruler. And so S the sourcer or the goods source, or, you know, a wizard census, you know, realize this is what's happening. And he is like, gives her sun this magic ring. It says, you must keep this at all costs and protect the princess. And of course the princess gets captured and what assignment do the sun? And he loses the ring like that first scene gone at it so that it starts, you know, it goes crazy. So Simon grows up, he meets this disgrace hero Corps who is going to help them rescue the princess. Autumn (56m 10s): But Simon ends up rescuing core half the time, even though Simon doesn't have a clue, has never shown any aptitude or any training in magic Ever until this point until he thrust on to the world that he knows nothing about. And so he still, he still saving the wizard. Its so bad that Simon somehow manages to raise the zombies of dead hero's to come help him rescue the princess. And the dead heroes gets so annoyed at Simon and they end up attacking him Jesper (56m 40s): Or he does sound pretty annoying, super Autumn (56m 43s): Annoying, everything goes horribly wrong. And they ended up getting some help. They managed to get the villagers to help them and they would go raid the castle. Simon manages to find the fricking missing ring that he dropped in the castle and has been in plain sight since day one. Even though the evil wizard can find it. Oh now the best part, the best part is then Simon with the ring now battles, the experienced, skilled, evil wizards. He was just lying there on the ground on it. I think it was like, I remember a glowing, like you had to see the glow. It was somewhere a slightly hidden, but it was like, you know, maybe in a suit of armor or something, it was so obviously is not going to where you want to be. Autumn (57m 26s): He would have dropped it. It was so stupid. But you know, the, the, the grand finale, this is between the special effects and Simon, the novice is fighting. This experienced Grandmaster, evil wizard and winning and winning the princess. It was just such a hit. I know I was so bad and this sums it up really well. This is by the writer Edna HA because I don't recall this movie with so much shot as it was beaten to death, when they whittled it down to what was useful from the footage, it only ran 58 minutes. Now, Roger, as a director had done a lot of sword and sorcery of films. So you told a couple of the editor's to pull all they could from them and edit that footage together. Autumn (58m 9s): So now the finished movie has a 15 to 20 minutes Prolo. The, it has nothing to do with the rest of the day. Jesper (58m 17s): So HA Autumn (58m 17s): So that's my number one to beat that. Jesper (58m 22s): And so you have like 20 minutes that has nothing to do with Autumn (58m 27s): Nope. There's just these people fighting and this pro log about what's going on. It's just, Oh, and then they get you in the movie and which was bad enough. And like I said, I mean, if all the things he drops the ring. Yeah. And maybe he should have dropped it out in the wilderness. Yeah. Jesper (58m 42s): We just did this run into theaters and stuff like that. Oh yeah. Autumn (58m 46s): I remember. I remember there was this whole, no, actually I was at a tar, had a huge issue about his and the name and going on blue Ray. I CA it was a little bit older. I don't know if it was in B rated theaters or something, but it was a civil, a movie and it had ratings. You can look it up on, I am. I can't remember what it's called, but you have to be, I am DB it's they're Oh my God. You know, it was, was it called me again? It was called the wizards of the lost kingdom. So I have, are you interested in this one now? Jesper (59m 23s): I have to look it up Autumn (59m 24s): So you'll have to look it up. And there was a sequel and I've watched the cul too. And that one will be even worse, but I don't want to go there. I can speak well, comparatively. Jesper (59m 40s): Oh my God. It has 2.8 out of 10 rating. Autumn (59m 45s): If I win this one with that moving, it is so horrible. It was bad. Tropes, bad acting. Just, just bad, so bad. Jesper (59m 56s): But, but how, how I still don't understand. So you are watching 20 minutes of a sort of intro stuff where people are just fighting. You have no idea what's going on. Autumn (1h 0m 4s): Well, if there were some voiceover saying previous, you know, the history of the kingdom, there was a war. Yes. And then this good King Rose and write it all the countries wrongs. And he has his Nobel wizard and the daughter and marriage and Oh, look, there's the evil wizard to once to overthrow everything for 20 minutes. Yeah. Jesper (1h 0m 24s): And then all of a sudden it just starts with something and, and he drops a ring in a silo or something. And then once off doing all kinds of things to figure it out, that it's right there. When he left in the beginning, Autumn (1h 0m 38s): Are they able sort of source who was taken over at the castle? Can't find it. Even though it was like, what's the point? I don't know if there was one other than the guy that wasn't evil, evil source or who took over. And there was Simon who want it to save everyone. Jesper (1h 0m 56s): And since I'm an idiot, but I mean, the people writing this must have had some sort of story. They want it to tell her something. I mean, what, what does this, Autumn (1h 1m 5s): I think he might be expecting too much of. I don't know. I would have to go and ask Edna HA who said, you know, it was the director's fault who turned it into the mush pit. Yeah. Jesper (1h 1m 18s): But they did it. Did they go in to the kindergarten and say, Hey, can any of your kid's to direct the movie for us? Autumn (1h 1m 24s): Probably. It was like, yeah, I can tell it is painful. And again, it, a lot of it comes down to the tropes and no plot. And it was so God, so stupid. I mean, if you're going to lose the magic ring seriously at the source or worse feet and you can't find it. And then the battle between the two of them and he wins, I'm sorry. He would have been toast like that. It just, no. So anyway, I think I won In it. It's true. I know what it is. Yeah. I think actually that might be the worst one. Autumn (1h 2m 6s): It was the worst out of 14. I'm really bad movie. Jesper (1h 2m 10s): It's a 20 minute intro. I just can't. I can't even imagine ever seeing it. I mean, all, all of these other movies that I had, they are really shitty, but they don't have 20 minute pointless intro for nothing. I mean, come on. That's incredible. Autumn (1h 2m 24s): It's a long enough to put it in theaters. That's incredible. Jesper (1h 2m 30s): Jesus, you mentioned those people buying a ticket, how upset they are going to be afterwords is just like, what the heck was this? Like you just paid for this shit. Autumn (1h 2m 37s): Yeah. And I was expecting a bad movie and I was disappointed because it was so bad. It wasn't even funny. I mean, some of the other ones we're like, Oh, you know, let's do shots every time they say this or something. This was just really bad. Jesper (1h 2m 52s): Okay. I'll give you this one. A even though I had to deduct points from you, you still can you stop the cost of you inside the cross? The finish line before me, it was like, I don't have made a major defeat. It's just a slight small one. Autumn (1h 3m 6s): Oh, well I will be gracious in my winnings. Yeah. Jesper (1h 3m 10s): I think they will probably put us at like 10 to one or something. Autumn (1h 3m 15s): Yeah, sure. Yeah. I have 10. And you have one. I understand that. Yeah. Jesper (1h 3m 19s): Oh no. But the other way around, because I'm sure we'd already caught it at 11 Podcast about alternating list. So I must be up at 10 to one. Now Autumn (1h 3m 27s): We'll have to go check out or the listener as you can let us know who's winning. I'm pretty sure it's me. Yeah. Jesper (1h 3m 33s): Can I trust them? Just this one? Yes. Yes. But the overall there's, there's a clear difference so that, yeah, we'll be back to this creation stuff again the next month. And then I will need to pull a win back home again. So, yeah, but I was wondering in closing off here, is there any like serious for just one second? Is there any serious learnings? One can take from all of this nightmare is shit that we had just been through. Autumn (1h 4m 9s): Don't use stereotypical characters. It's okay. If you use tropes, everyone uses tropes. You should break them or twist them. That helps make characters that are original. That's really where the heart of the story line. All of the ones that I listed had tropes, which is bad enough, but characters, I mean Texas cowboy, Mexican, Fiona, you know, a love interest Therese for her come up with a real characters that the reader is gonna care about. And if you want to have a love triangle, have a love triangle, just don't throw in the term in the store. Jesper (1h 4m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. And the trucks pull the audience in. So yeah. I mean, I think it proves that it works, right. I mean, if, if you align it with tropes, people will start checking it up. It's like, wow, this looks interesting because it's something that they recognize that it would work. It doesn't work. So please, please, please add something new and interesting. And please don't just rehash. What is already done as well. It does not make it any better. And I'm looking at new Marvel. Can you give a shit together? Autumn (1h 5m 16s): A little warning? If you have been warned, Jesper (1h 5m 18s): It was good enough. Okay, cool. Next Monday we we'll be back. And the way we will discuss something that is incredibly important, but often overlooked. And that's the mindset you need to adopt in order to self publish. Narrator (1h 5m 35s): If you'd like what? You just heard, that there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

What is in store for indie authors in 2021? Join Autumn and special guest, Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords as they discuss his predictions for 2021. There are some highs and some trends to be cautious of, as well as some new tools that might help you find your readers. Check out the blog of Mark's predictions at https://blog.smashwords.com/2020/12/publishing2021.html and visit Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (0s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Autumn (29s): Hello. Well, I am Autumn and today. Yes, Jesper is on a bit of a vacation. And instead I have a very special guest with me, Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords a high Mark. Thank you so much for joining me here today to be here. Oh, I really, really appreciate it. I'll let you introduce me to be more of your background than I could have scraped off the web, if you would be so kind Mark (57s): As to how much do you want? Autumn (59s): Well, we have 45 minutes, but I think guests, you know, they might want us to get into, we're going to talk about your 20, 21 Publishing Predictions. So Hey, you know, Mark (1m 9s): Well, make it really quick. Okay. So the story of Smashwords. So I founded Smashwords about 13 years ago, it was born out of necessity. My wife and I had written a book together, my wife as a former reporter for soap opera, weekly magazine. So we wrote a Romana clef about the soap opera industry wrote it in a cabin in the woods in Vermont. Autumn (1m 30s): Oh no, no. We just felt it from a connection. Yeah. Mark (1m 35s): We were lucky enough to get represented by distal and got a rich in New York. So one of the top agency's they shopped around to all of the major publishers of commercial women's fiction twice for two years. And it just got nothing but rejection. And the, the only feedback that we got from the publisher's that, that you know, that they never tell you that your book's sucks or that your writing sucks. They just say, its it's not right for us. Or we don't know how to place it or whatever. The only feedback that we got was that previous novels that the targeted soap opera fans hadn't performed well. So they were, they weren't willing to take a chance on our work. And it was really disappointing to have the, the door shut in our faces. Mark (2m 17s): And I started thinking about the challenges that we were facing. We knew that, you know, we had already shown our Book to fans of soap operas, and we knew that fans of soap operas enjoyed our books, our book. So I started imagining, you know, there are probably a hundreds of thousands, millions of other writers, just like us who were unable to get a book deal simply because the publishers didn't see the commercial potential and their work. And I also started thinking, you know, commercial potential is the wrong way to value literature. It, you know, books are worth so much more than money. You can't measure them by money alone. And if we're only going to measure the value of a worth based on how many of the value of a book based on how many copies it can sell them. Mark (2m 59s): And then eventually we're just going to have nothing but celebrity books. And, and we don't want that. You know, I, I love diversity in Writing diversity in thought and umm, you know, what better way to, you know, to, to celebrate the diversity of humanity than to what anyone published. So I thought, you know, anybody in the world should be able to publish because at the time you could self publish video on YouTube, you know, 13 years ago, 14 years ago, you can self publish on a blog and you know, it, it was still, it was a contentious time. People thought, well how dare someone think they can be a reporter or a journalist on their blog or, or published on YouTube. Mark (3m 39s): But you know, those people were reaching massive audiences and, and some of them were commercializing this audience. So why not make it possible for any writer anywhere in the world to publish an e-book for free. And that was the Genesis of Smashwords. That's what we launched in early 2008. We're pretty much the first to market with it. Amazon launched their digital text platform, which is now KTP just a couple of months before us. So we were working on the same thing at the same time, you know, launched it a great time. We launched it at a time when eBooks were less than 1% of the overall book market had no idea that they were about to explode like they did. Mark (4m 20s): And so it was just this perfect storm, you know, in those first, early years of 2008, 2013, where the promise of self publishing met the, the, the, the advantages of digital distribution of eBooks because suddenly retailers could stock every single book, every single e-book. They wanted every single e-book from every self published author. And we were there at the beginning, knocking down those doors and opening up these major retailers to self published authors and once self published authors got mainstream distribution at Barnes and noble Sony, you know, Kobo, Apple, Amazon There, sales exploded now. Mark (5m 5s): And it completely changed how writers and how the industry views self publishing. Because 13 years ago there was a tremendous stigma around self publishing. Yeah. No one wanted to self publish now, you know, unless you are foolish really, and you really have to believe in yourself, right? Autumn (5m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. You're almost considered either a failure or your book was enough quality. All of that was a horrible thing to get over those people today don't even realize, right? Mark (5m 36s): No, it was a horrible time and, and writer's were the most vicious to their fellow writers, you know? And well, yeah, somewhat, sometimes, sometimes, but yeah, it was, it, it was a way back 13, 14 years ago. A if you self published, really your only option is to self publish was in print. Yeah. But without a traditional publisher supporting you, you, weren't going to be able to get bookstore distribution. And if you couldn't get into stores where people went to buy books, you are going to fail is a writer. And that's why most self published authors were failing. It wasn't necessarily because they were sucky writers or that they were vain. Mark (6m 18s): I mean, let's be honest, all Publishing his vein. Okay. That all Publishing this vanity. Yeah. You've got to be like, you, you believe that you've created something you believe that it's valuable to other people there's some vanity in that. So it was just admit it all. And, but yeah, but what we saw is that readers don't care for Book a self-published author. If it comes from a publisher, they just care about the quality of that author of the quality of the writing in the value that they are getting. So yeah, so everything changed, you know, very, very quickly in 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, we were there at a very exciting time and, you know, writers around the world were unleashed upon the world has published authors and you know, many of them didn't sell very much, but a few of them, the same authors that couldn't get a traditional publishing deal at the same authors that couldn't get an agent, you know, it started becoming international bestsellers, you know, in New York times, best sellers USA today, bestseller wall street, journal bestsellers. Mark (7m 22s): So it's an exciting, and every time there's a, a, a, a, an indie author who's successful, it really inspires the rest of us. It takes, it shows us that yes, you can self publish with pride, professionalism and commercial success. And so what else matters Autumn (7m 37s): Exactly to me, I, EVERY, and a lot of gurus and the advice in writing an industry, and I know you've in Britain read on your blog, you know, you have to define what success is for you. And to me, you know, but at the time this was released will have been released, but I'm actually releasing my 21st book on this coming Sunday. And I'm hearing back from the arch team. And I think these are already fans. So that's why I chose them to be part of my book launch. And to hear those are like, Oh, this is the best you've ever read or written. And, you know, it's a gripping. And you're like, we just love you all are going to have one reader say that to you, to me, that's success. And that is just, you can't get that if it wasn't for platforms like Smashwords, or, you know, Amazon and all the others, but, you know, full disclosure, I suppose I should have a full disclosure. Autumn (8m 25s): Right. I joined Smashwords. I did Amazon independently and I uploaded my debut novel, born of water to Smashwords in 2012. I'm almost 10 years old on the platform. So I am very excited. I've been with you, not since your beginning, but since my beginning is an author in my journey. And I think there is a Smashwords. I know that there's a lot of other platforms draft to digital is one that, you know, I think it's a very direct competitor since you act as a distributor. And so it draft to digital, but you know, to me, you offer it more benefits and I've kept all my books on. Smashwords not just because of the loyalty, because I love your message. And I love the feeling that you really care about authors, and you are an author, but I think of how far things are like coupons. Autumn (9m 9s): You've just started doing something else. I want to ask you about a pre release pre-sale feature is going to talk about that in a little bit. It's part of a, sort of your Predictions. So you have this really cool things that I don't know, any other platform where I can say, like, you know what, I'm going to give people who join my, read your list of 50% off coupon, or I'm going to give them a special free coupon too. It's just so cool. It's so easy. And I really appreciate the flexibility, the things that you can do on Smashwords that you really do not have control on any other platforms. Mark (9m 43s): Well, thanks. You know, I really appreciate that. You know, we've got a lot of, a lot of authors that have been with Smashwords for, you know, for 10 years or longer that still have not been introduced to. So, so many of these tools that we provide, yeah. Autumn (9m 58s): I have to admit that you have an on the questionnaire, a section, and I started filling in out, but I ain't never finished it so that Mark (10m 6s): You all through interviews Autumn (10m 7s): As I started mine. And I don't think I ever finished it and hit publish. Mark (10m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that was one of my mini wacky ideas. You know, my background is in public relations. I used to run a PR agency and, you know, in PR our job was to get our fortune 500 clients interviewed and the press that you, you know, you are always looking for a free press coverage. Everybody wants to be interviewed and tell their story. And, you know, authors are the same way. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if we could just create this tool that would allow author's to interview themselves in and share the story behind the author. And so that's been really fun feature. I, I think we've had that feature for six or seven years now. Yeah. That's one of many features. Mark (10m 51s): And you mentioned Smashwords coupons. You know, that's something that we did very early on. I think we introduced Smashwords coupons maybe in 2009 and we've since expanded it. I mean, there's so many different coupon options that we offer. Now, nobody in the industry offers the, the breadth and depth and the flexibility. You can create any kind of custom coupon using these tools. And it's, it's fun to see. Autumn (11m 17s): Yeah, it is fun to see her. I bet to see them being used and this and that would be needed to be a reason. You have a reader, it talk to you as an author, but to have all of these authors using your platform and making sales and making connections must be amazing. Mark (11m 34s): Yeah. You know, I can't, I still can't believe that Smashwords became what it did. Yeah. I can't believe that like a 150,000 authors around the world are using us. I can't believe that we've got like 550,000 books. Yeah. And, and, you know, lots of things have changed. Like you mentioned that we have competitors now. I mean, there are dozens, really hundreds of Smashwords clones out there. Now, there, there are just so many different ways to get your books out. Its pretty confusing for providers, especially new writers because sometimes too much choice is paralyzing. Autumn (12m 20s): I totally agree. I was very helpful because it kind of cutting things out really easy to say, Okay know meat. Oh, well that's three options I can too. Right. Mark (12m 32s): Yeah. Well, I, I just feel like, you know, when I, I just imagined new writers coming onto the scene now and it must, they must feel like I feel when I go to the grocery store to buy laundry detergent, you know, how do you choose there? There's, there's 30 different brands and different types and they all kind of do the same thing and they all clean clothes. So how do I choose? I mean, often I'll go to buy laundry detergent and I see too much choice and I just don't buy anything. And I said that, I see that happening with a lot of authors that they, they just get so paralyzed by the complexity what's involved in becoming a self published businessperson, you know, often the, It put, it makes them vulnerable to making poor decisions, to falling victim to predators. Autumn (13m 21s): Oh yeah. That is horribly true. Unfortunately there's too many services. I mean working as a writing coach and we offer some courses or the Am Writing Fantasy and we try to be very upfront about what we offer, but the other side of it, that people who are predatory on new authors and basically they they're stealing like author's dreams. Sometimes they make it to the point where the author gives up and I just, Mark (13m 47s): Oh totally. Oh yeah. It, yeah. It makes me really mad when I, yeah. When you talk about dreams being stolen, that's exactly what's happening. You know, a writer may spend their entire life dreaming of writing a book and then they finally get to the point where they make the commitment to do it and complete it. And to have someone take advantage of them at that very moment when they're most vulnerable, when they're first learning and, and basically just parasitize the opportunity. It's, it's really sad to see. That's why education is so important. Mark (14m 27s): Definitely. And that's why, you know, in the author's need to look out for their fellow Indies. Autumn (14m 33s): That's why I think groups in that there are some benefits of social media in some of the platforms as much as it was sometimes. So yeah, but we can support each other and send out tips and warnings a to let you know, you know, don't listen to this water and you know, don't you ask for advice on 'cause otherwise you can end up in definitely the wrong spot and lose a lot of hard work or at least the passion you had because of that can really just suck it away. Now I did. I don't know if you noticed this, but I did think of it at Amazon recently rolled out that authors actually allow you to control your series. You guys that's been on your platform since I think I uploaded my first book in a series, I stopped that and be like, Oh, they're copying you guys. Autumn (15m 19s): Yeah, yeah, Mark (15m 20s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I've used to, I can say I enjoy it. You know, we have invented many things it's Smashwords and then it just gets copied. Many of these innovations just get copied. Umm, you know, it's one of the reasons that, you know, for the first time ever, we filed for a patent for the Smashwords pre-sales tool that you mentioned. Yeah. Autumn (15m 46s): That's a good idea. You guys deserve it because I feel like I said, I have stuck around and I think you guys have a lot of integrity and you have a lot of feeling and you truly care about authors, which is fantastic. And part of what you do. So every year, I believe from what looking back, you do these Publishing Predictions and then you do a follow-up post at the end of the year. So this year you did 13 of them. And I know it hit home for me because like looking at 'em how you talked about Facebook, Amazon and Google solidifying their platforms really because of COVID they became, these monster is in 2020. And you looked at that and that really hit home for me, especially cause like I've mentioned that it was organizing this arc team and I had one reader who's been with me for, I think almost the whole time. Autumn (16m 30s): And she was like, well, I would love to join the launch team, but you probably want reviews for Amazon. And you know, I, for whatever reason I didn't ask you, you can't do reviews on Amazon. And I'm like, no, you know, the whole point of this is not to put more money in the number one, the, most of the world's most richest man's pocket. I'm like, you can, you can push on good reads, which is technically still owned by Amazon. You can post it on your blog. And so yeah, she is on my, on my launch team because its not all about just Amazon and they thought it was so interesting though. You talked about how these big places became massive in 2020 and that's how you began your Predictions. Mark (17m 10s): Yeah. You know, it, it's really interesting to see, you know, I had spent a lot of time last year as everyone else did thinking about the pandemic and you know, I, I like to think about how what's happening today is going to impact the world, you know, one, two, five, 10, 20 years from now. Yeah. And, and it's also fun to stick, to sit back and think about some of the big macro trends that are powering forward in like, like a, like a storm I'm just carrying us in the wind. And, and so, you know, eCommerce is a really big trends that, you know, people are moving online, doing more of their transactions online, more of there, not just socializing online, but they are purchasing And, and entertainment online. Mark (18m 1s): So things have been moving to the online space for a long time, but what we saw and, and we've also seen consolidation over the last 10, 15 years around a couple of really big tech platforms, you know, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and what what's really coming to light now in a w is that the pandemic and the lockdowns accelerated the consolidation around these few large companies and each of these large companies mediates the relationship between the writer and the writer's audience. Mark (18m 43s): They are the new gatekeepers. They determine which readers can see your book, which readers can consider your book. So if you, if you, if your marketing on Facebook, you got to pay them. You know, even if you have built up your own organic social media platform there, you've got to pay them now to reach your audience. If you're Publishing at Amazon and Amazon is now pay-to-play, they have so much power and the business they determine which books are seen in which art in the books that are seen are either of the exclusive books under KDP select or books published by the Amazon imprints or books where the author is willing to pay. Mark (19m 27s): The tax are a tole in the form of Amazon advertising to basically trap all the platforms of other authors. Because that's the, that's the way that, I mean the, the way Amazon advertising is set up, it's very nefarious because basically when you pay to advertise, you are paying to trample and other authors brand. Yeah. Yeah. You're definitely onto their coattails and holding on. Yeah. Like you can go to jail Amazon right now type in your pen name and the first four results are going to be for other authors. Yeah. Yes. That is a huge, yes. Mark (20m 8s): That is a huge disservice to your readers because you know, your readers are looking for books by you. All right. All right. But the first results that come up are a sponsored ads from other authors. So your readers are confused and being diverted away from you, even though they're looking for from you. So that's, that's a, that's a pretty toxic caustic, umm, you know, system long term. And we're seeing that it's, it's basically going to suck the profits out of Publishing and make them more pay to play. So you don't have to pay Amazon to publish there. But if you want to be seen, these are the, yeah, these are the toll Gates that Amazon's putting up. Mark (20m 47s): So, you know, author's need to be concerned about this. You know, authors are losing their independence, they're losing their ability to control their own destinies. And it's because you've got to have a few very strong, platform's have consolidated their power are consolidated, their market reach and the case of Amazon. Umm, you know, they, they control the world's largest collection of ebook buyers. Yeah. Autumn (21m 14s): A very powerful search engine that everyone likes to say is just so good. But like you said, what's the purpose of the best surgeon and you can run wen now it's bringing up only Amazon, you know, ad's that people are paying there. Yeah. Mark (21m 28s): Yeah. I think what we've seen with Amazon over the last 13 years is we went from, or they went from really a brilliantly architected search system where books that were selling best and being reviewed the best buy readers would bubble up and become more visible. That, that to me is an example of a good search, good organic discovery. But what they've been doing over the years, you know, every single year or they make little policy tweeks that all have the effect of, of, of putting up barriers, right. Making the search results. When I talked about this in the Predictions going from organic inorganic and no, no one's ever referred to a search algorithms as organic or inorganic or well I guess organic, they have, but in organic, I mean that these are artificial constructs that Amazon has created. Mark (22m 21s): So they're not, they're not recommending books to readers because that's the book that the reader will satisfy the reader the most or that the book that the reader is looking for, they are recommending books that benefit Amazon, the most books that cost Amazon less books were Amazon could pay the author of a loyal or a lower royalty or book's where they can pay in an effective Loyall and effectively lower royalty 'cause in order for you to get that 70% you had to pay, you know, a whole bunch of money in an Amazon advertising. So your effective royalty rate is not 70% any more at Amazon. If you are using their tools. You know, if you're in KDP, select the are exclusive, the cost to you is you don't get to distribute anywhere else. Mark (23m 6s): And then there's a cost to That. And these are the costs that are difficult to manage it. You said to measure it. Autumn (23m 13s): That's one of the things that you talked about with KDP select and even COBA select, which I haven't even thought of, but the subscription services. I mean, what that is, you talk, you talked about how that is really dragging down the royalty for all author's because we are going to start getting used to less and less. Mark (23m 30s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it concerns me that authors are so quick to take less. Autumn (23m 37s): I am. And I had thought of it that way until I read how you had written it. And I'm like, you're right where it's like, we are so desperate for readers that we're willing say here's our book for free or you know, for just pennies pennies for what other people would normally pay to read. Mark (23m 51s): Yeah. I, I just wrote a story of the other day. I forgot the name of the company. It just brought in $16 million and venture funding. Oh well They're paying author's 25% list of authors who signed contracts with them, you know, authors. It, it concerns me that so many authors are willing to work for free. Autumn (24m 21s): And Mark (24m 23s): You know, I, and, and to work for Les in exchange for readership, I mean, you talked earlier about what it feels like to, to receive those appellations from your readers, because that's really why we write. We wrote, we write to touch people and to change the world. And that's where most writers are coming from a there's a lot, there just a higher purpose. And, and so, you know, Amazon understands that writers write for reasons that are different than traditional publishers publish traditional publishers are publishing because their running a business to make money. It it's not that traditional publishers or bad people, they're all Book lovers to, But the business and the nature of the business itself is there. Mark (25m 4s): They are. They have to make money to keep the lights on authors who are working from home, who might have other sources of income or who just love to write because there are artists want to express themselves Autumn (25m 17s): Addicted to it as well. Mark (25m 20s): Well look, I, I think, I think art is one of the most noble pursuits anyone can pursue. Yep. All right. This is art and it's, it's not the most lucrative job. This is not a job. This is not a career that you follow to make a lot of money. You know, I've, I've been telling people since I first found out Smashwords, if you want to make a lot of money, go get a job at McDonald's you'll make more, most authors will make more working. Full-time at McDonald's than they will as a self published author. You've got to be doing this for reasons other than money. But if you're smart, you can do it for the love of writing, but still make money. And Autumn (25m 57s): That's. Yeah. Mark (25m 59s): And that that's that's, you know, the advice that I try to give authors, you know, a lot of the advice that we share is focused on, you know, evergreen best practices, things that we'll help you achieve all of your dreams, help you reach reader's help you touch your readers, but also help you earn some income because you deserve it right now. But in order for an author to maximize their opportunity, they need to approach it like a smart business person. And that's where the education comes in because we're not all naturally business people, you know, writers come from all walks, you know, like someone who studied art in college and studied business like I did, Autumn (26m 43s): Did the, so I get it. You know, I know if I could rewrite, if I could redo the entire educational system, every a part of high school would be money management and business classes, because almost everyone has a side gig. Aside had a passion that they are developing on the side. They're going to start their own little business at some point, whether it's mowing lawns or writing a book, we all should have those basics, market marketing and business expense ideas. Yeah, Mark (27m 12s): Yeah, yeah. That would be, that would be awesome if they would introduce that into like the high school curriculum, financial literacy, because you know, if you don't understand the language, you don't understand the terms or the concepts, then you get victimized by it. Autumn (27m 31s): Exactly. Definitely. But you did. So we have, you know, you have these, these trends where, and you even mentioned that there's a lot of platforms and you said we've had some consolidation, but you think even some of these duplicates in all of these there's thousands of places you can sell your books. Do you think some of those might be slowly fading it maybe in 2021? Mark (27m 54s): Yeah. I, I think we are going to see continued consolidation in Publishing and, And from multiple areas. So we've already got the, the pending acquisition of Simon and Schuster by penguin, random house, assuming that it goes through it, it may not go through if the government takes a close look at that because too much consolidation and the publishing industry starts creating an anti-competitive environment. That's not good for other publishers and not good for consumers. So we'll see if that goes through, but there's definitely a strong, a momentum towards further consolidation in Publishing among publishers' to reach, you know what? Mark (28m 36s): This is, it's in a, in a Publishing, it's a slow growth business and that's been generous calling Publishing a growth business. It, it, it, it, it's probably a flat to down business overall for publishing, especially if you account for inflation over the last 15 years, a the growth has been really minimal. So it, it's not a high-growth business, all of Publishing. So there, there, there will be more consolidation pressure among the publishers is going to be tougher for a smaller, independent publishers, two stay in business because there's just so much competition now. Mark (29m 17s): And, and, you know, the eBooks changed the dynamics of the competition as well in the old world of print publishers where maybe putting out 300,000 books a year and bookstores, you know, even in a large bookstore might only be able to hold 50,000 titles and inventory. So books were constantly being pushed out of print. There was always a limited supply of books controlled by the publishers, but now there's an unlimited supply of books, thanks to eBooks. Excuse me. And these books never go out of print. Yes. So they, they, you know, I've referred many times in the past to them as like cobwebs have stainless steel, they're going to be on the shelves forever. The retailer wants to carry your Book. Even if you don't sell a single copy in a year, they want to carry your Book. Mark (29m 59s): They want it on a shelf because they know that they recognize that there are readers value diversity and the discoverability have as many different titles as possible, but that, that creates pressures for the authors pressures for the publishers. And then when you look at the retailing space, I mean, it, we've already seen, you know, Barnes and noble, Apple Kobo. They are, those retailers have suffered over the last five years. Autumn (30m 28s): So even though, even though the books are becoming more popular, you think the publisher, they are not making enough money off of them, or why are they suffering? Mark (30m 37s): Because the, the store, I think the story is probably a little bit unique for each of them, but at Barnes and noble, which was an early pioneer in e-books would the nook. And for a while, there was one of the largest sellers of any books after Amazon, they've been in a long term decline, they are losing customers to Amazon and self publishing. And then the authors have had a big hand in that, you know, every time an author decides to make their ebook exclusive to Amazon for a period of three months, that's a vote to put all the other retailers out of business. Mark (31m 17s): So there are millions of readers every single year that can't buy the books they want to buy at Barnes and noble or Apple or Cobo or Smashwords. And they are forced to go to the Amazon if they want that Book. And so eventually, you know, all of these different retailers start losing their customers. It makes it more difficult for them too, to, to, to the great things they do for authors. It makes it difficult for them to operate their businesses. That makes it difficult for them to continue to invest in an effort to invest in innovation. And, and so it becomes death by a thousand cuts. And so I started talking about this back in 2011, when they first announced KDP select, and this would be the long term implication is that you're going to slowly starved these retailers, have their customers reduce the ability to compete. Mark (32m 10s): What happened, Sony, an early pioneer and the Book retailing left that market Barnes and noble, his, his, you know, a shadow of their former self Cobos, not as significant as they were in the past. And they're still a significant player. You know, Apple is not as significant as they were in the past. I hate to say, and I love Apple. I mean, I love all of these retailers. I even love Amazon. I mean, every single retailer has the opportunity to do good in the world, by introducing they're customers to your book's, that's the way the world should be is the more retailers out there. The more Book is waking up every morning, it spending their sour time thinking about how can I introduce more readers, two more books that I love that that creates and, and an amazing opportunities for authors publishers for Book culture, you know, the more booksellers out there in the world, the better, but as it is right now, if you want to start an ebook startup, you really don't have a snowball's chance in hell. Mark (33m 18s): No, you know, you can't well, if it it's really difficult, unless you're able to get, you know, $15 million in venture capital money and you're willing to lose millions of dollars to get started. And even then it's no guaranteed because when you look at what's important to readers, readers, value, selection, and price, selection, and price, they're like to have the biggest or most important factors in convenience too. But every one of the offers, good convenience, thanks to KDP. Select Amazon is always going to have, you know, somewhere between 1 million in however many books that they have exclusive that Amazon, I don't know what it is. Mark (34m 4s): It might be 3 million books are exclusive at Amazon. Now, I don't know. So that's 3 million reasons that you can't shop anywhere else if you want to buy these books. So, you know, that, that that's, that's some of what's happening is these are the things that don't happen overnight. They happen slowly over time, drip, drip, drip, the, the lifeblood of these retailers is slowly being pulled away. So like, let's say you want to, let's, let's say you love Fantasy, and you want to launch an ebook store that specializes in Fantasy, and you're going to do the best job of curating FANTASY and offer the best possible selection and great prices. You're going to serve your Fantasy customers better than anyone else, but you can't get the inventory to serve your customers because it's locked up at Amazon exclusively. Mark (34m 52s): So you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of building a successful business. And if you do your just barely going to scrape by the, the, the, the, the playing field right now is not level for, you know, entrepreneur entrepreneurs. And, and that's not a good thing, because we want that innovation and Publishing. You want to see dozens of new Publishing startups starting every single year, bringing new ideas to market. But, but as it is right now, I mean, most venture capitalists don't even wanna talk to people that, that wanna launch a business that is going to compete against Amazon or launch a business that Amazon might enter overnight. Mark (35m 34s): Maybe they've already seen at Amazon announced that they're gonna enter a market and all of the other companies and that market plunge. Autumn (35m 42s): That's true. Okay. Well, I think that's a, do you have some really good predictions that are helpful? And I also wanna talk about the things that authors can do. So you'd said reading because of the COVID because of the lockdown, because the cancellation of the Trump's show or a reading is still going to be popular in 2021. And I think that's, that's important Book sale Book, whether its sales or giveaways or whatever we're doing, people are still hungry for books, but what we as authors to do, what can we do? So you don't, I think a lot of authors don't realize that AMS ads running these ads are also cutting into our royalty. There are a bottom line, what are things we can do that we can help reverse these trends? Autumn (36m 24s): Obviously don't go hit KDB, select publish wide is definitely one of them, but what else can authors do to try to reach readers' and support a healthy market place where discoverability and a passion for reading is the most important thing, right? Mark (36m 41s): Yeah. Well, okay. So it, it starts with resisting this siren call of going to exclusive at Amazon, right? And I realized that is difficult for a lot of authors, but that's the first step. So just SUPPORT as many different retailers as possible with your books. So get your books at all the different retailers on your website, in your blog. And when you promote your books, list links to the different retailers, let the reader decide which retailer they want to shop out. Give them the options that is really important. You earlier, we talked about, you know, the, the, the consolidation and the dark side of that. Well, there is a solution to that. Mark (37m 21s): There is a hopeful solution to that, and it's in the hands of authors. It's more important than ever for authors to build a platform that they control so that their relationship with readers is no longer mediated by some third party, by some retailer, by some marketing platform. So the author mailing list, the private mailing list, I think that his, you know, I've, I've been beating this drum for a long time, but I think that should be every author. His biggest priority for the year ahead is every single reader you have out there, your thousands of readers, you want every single one of them signed up for your mailing list. It's not enough for them to be following you on Twitter and Facebook, because they're not seeing most of what you're putting out there on Twitter. Mark (38m 5s): And Facebook is only going to see a small fraction of it. But if, if you can get them on your mailing list, you control the message. You deliver the message to them when you want, and your readers will never miss another release of yours. So that, that, that's just really important in the, you know, that it fits in with what we're doing with Smashwords presales. Autumn (38m 27s): Let's talk about it. So you've just launched. This I've even tried it out, but I did, I did get the email now that my book is like a week away saying, Hey, we want to try it out the pre-sale, but I actually do presales on my own website with the sort of what you're suggesting, but this is something that other authors who aren't set up to celebrate off their own website. This is a whole new feature. And it's really exciting. Yeah. Mark (38m 48s): Yeah. And even if you are already selling off of your own website, you might still want to consider using this tool. So let's talk about what this tool is. You know, a lot of people don't even know what pre-orders are. Right. You know, when we talk about, when we talk about best practices, you know, we've been talking about preorders. This is one of the most important best practices for the last eight or nine years. Yeah. About 85% of self published authors. Don't do pre-orders. Even though, even though authors who do pre-orders sell a lot more books than author's who don't like, pre-orders are still one of the biggest secrets to selling more books. Mark (39m 33s): And it, it boggles my mind that most authors it's, every single author, you know, like listeners today, if you only take one thing away from this, do a preorder, look at your Publishing calender for the next 12 months, get everything up on preorder. Now you don't even need a cover. You don't even need a final manuscript. You can get that preorder listing up that all the major retailers. So you can start collecting orders. Now it gives you more shelf space for longer. So do a pre order. So with a pre-order for authors who are familiar with them since most aren't a pre-order allows your customer to basically place an order reservation for your book when it comes out in the future. Mark (40m 17s): So your book has a future release state, the customer place's the reservation with a preorder. And then when the book releases on its public release state, that book automatically appears in their library at the retailer on their device. And the credit card is charged. So that's a pre-order customers love pre-orders. The presale is different. Yes. So a pre-sale where the pre-order, you've got a single public announcement that a public release date across all the different retailers with a presale, you're doing an early exclusive, early release. So you're just, you're deciding to let certain customers have early access to your book. Mark (40m 57s): The power of a presale for an indie author is that customers value timeliness, especially your biggest fans. If they can read your book even a week or even a day before every one else, they're going to lose their minds in a good way. Autumn (41m 20s): Yes. They're so excited that you want. Yeah, Mark (41m 22s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, your job is to please your readers and the readers who will be most pleased by a presale are going to be your super fans. You're the most important readers, because it's a way for you to, Hey, super fans. I'm going to let you read my book early and it's going to make them enjoy the book more. It's going to make them wanna talk about your book more to their friends. It's all good. And so we built a system it's Smashwords and this is it's called Smashwords presales and it, his patent pending. So we file the patent for it. It was just fantastic that that allows any author. Who's doing a pre-order at Smashwords to also do a presale, and you can do a, either a public presale. So it's merchandised in this Smashwords store where you can do a private pre-sale, where are you might decide, okay. Mark (42m 8s): I am going to control who has an early access to my book. And I want to say, for example, I only want to offer access to subscribers, to my private newsletter and as a perk, as my thank you to all of these readers who signed up for my private mailing lists, I'm going to give them exclusive early access to my new release. You know, I'm gonna let them buy it at two days early or one day early or a week early. It doesn't matter. It's going to be early and the readers are going to lose their mind. So that's what you can do. And then it, and so this is a, this is a chance for authors, I think, to retake their platform. Mark (42m 49s): Now, currently, no retailer, if you sell your e-book is going to tell, give you the e-mail address of that customer. All right. Well, that changed with Smashwords. Pre-sales when we launched it a little over a year ago. So now anyone who is purchasing your pre-sale is going to be given the option to subscribe to your private mailing list. And if they subscribe to it, if they give Smashwords permission to share their email address with you, the author, then we will share that e-mail address with you, THE author for that pre-cell. And let's say that it it's more important to you than anything to get as many readers onto your private mailing list. Mark (43m 36s): You can even offer as part of this Smashwords pre-sales Toole. You can offer it to a special incentive for the, for the reader to agree, to share their email address with you, like, you know, a discount then all of that can be done within the tool in a lot of the people who are using the pre-sales tool or doing that, they're offering like a dollar off $2 off to really encourage the customer to click the box to say, yeah, you have my permission signed me up for this author's private newsletter. Autumn (44m 10s): This is a really brilliant, and one that you are doing it and how it's working. That's really fascinating. And yeah, Mark (44m 17s): Got it up. You know, we're, we're, we're big into privacy at Smashwords and, you know, respecting people's email addresses. So we, we set it up so that in order for an author to even use that feature of capturing the email addresses, they have to agree to some very simple, best practices of how they're going to handle this customers email address. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just basic stuff. Like you're not going to sell our rent that email, or you're just going to use it for your own mailing list. So yeah, it's a really, it's a really cool tool that I think is going to help put a lot of the power back into the hands of indie authors, I think. Mark (44m 57s): And this is a lot more than that we can say, Oh, I was just gonna say, and then there's a lot more that we'll be doing with it at Smashwords. Autumn (45m 5s): Oh, excellent. I guess in between the coupons in the pre-sale, if someone's not sure if they should try it out, Smashwords it's just a, they might have heard rumors about the old meat grinder process and the stuff, but I we'll get into that with some other time. It's not scary. I've been doing this for almost 10 years. It's a fantastic platform. So Grindr is infamous. It is. I have to admit when you started taking any public though, and because I use velum and I haven't, there's a beautiful, it's fine. If it's not a problem. Yeah. Mark (45m 39s): We've been taking the time, you know, author produced for eight years. Yep. I still see people online complaining that, you know, Smashwords makes me do Microsoft word. No, no, we don't. Autumn (45m 53s): You Mark (45m 53s): Could say it's your ebook your way. So you can upload word. Most authors still do word for word is a great tool because that you upload that single file, that single word file. And we produce it into multiple ebook file types, and word is easy to control, but you know, vellum was great too. So if you use vellum use vellum. Autumn (46m 15s): Yeah. It works. And they get out to all the stories, your still my distributor. And I can go into my dashboard and see all my sales across all of the distribution in like daily sales is the one shot deal. It's, it's so convenient that it's crazy not to be trying this with somebody. And I think you guys have the cornerstone in innovation. So I am glad, I'm glad you were still coming up with these new ideas and that you're patenting them so that Amazon and other places will just steal them away from you anymore. Mark (46m 45s): Well, you know, we are trying to patent it, so it, it's not easy to get a patent, especially as a patent like this, it it's, you know, because it touches a lot of things. It doesn't just touch eBooks. Right. It touches anything sold online and Autumn (47m 3s): That's fine. Yeah. Well, Mark (47m 5s): Yeah. So, you know, we, we have been going back and forth with the us patent office and I, I don't know if we are going to get it are not, you know, I'm still got my fingers crossed, but you know, our hope is that once we get the patent, we want to license this broadly. We want everyone using it. We want our competitor's using it. We're going to make it. You know, I, I think it's really going to help level the playing field for indie authors. If more in the author's can start using this and taking the power back because with the pre-sale you decided you, you get to it, you get to basically a harness, the power or the anticipation That of, you know, thousands of readers dying to get your next release. Mark (47m 52s): You get to trade that anticipation for something that benefits you the author. And that's the ability for you to build your platform, to sell your book at a higher royalty rate, because, you know, at the Smashwords store pays up to 80% list. You know, a lot of people don't realize that no, it was in 99 cent books often earn 80% list. If there's enough books in the customer's shopping cart, you know, there's really no reason not to do it. So it's, it's exciting to see, you know, the early adopters experimenting with it and doing new things with it. Autumn (48m 28s): Well, I think that I still have a few days till my release. Maybe I won't go put this in. I didn't realize that you can get the e-mail list or email address. So I might go give this a go tonight. Yeah. Mark (48m 40s): Yeah. So, you know it, if you think about it, I don't know how many people you have following you on Facebook or Twitter, or it might be thousands. Those are soft followers and get them to your opportunity is to convert all of those soft followers into a hard followers on your private mailing list so that you can reach them so that the tool will help them. Autumn (49m 7s): No, that's perfect. Well, thank you. I mean, we've almost been two an hour, 50 minutes, so I don't want to take up all of your time. You're CEO of a very well, to me, a very important company. Mark (49m 17s): That's a highfalutin title. Autumn (49m 19s): Well, that's all, I think it's important that I love what you, I love that what you're doing for in the author's that you have Smashwords, But that there's someone out they're fighting, basically for all of the, you're an author. You need to have our voices heard to take back. Like you said, the power of what other places are trying to claim. I mean, you only make so much money off of a book. I'm happy that over time, you know, in the books have gone for like two 99. So they average price the four 99, five 99, but that's done now how much time for books that can take months and months and months too. Right? So it's nice that there's someone fighting for higher royalties for us to keep control of our careers at the, of what really is the heart of the indie author movement, which has us controlling our fate. Mark (50m 4s): Well, it certainly what we fight For, and we need to see more indie authors fight for it as well. Because, you know, we talked earlier that many of the authors that will willingly surrender their independence to give it up, they'll surrender royalty rates, they'll surrender their ability to price their own books. There are certain they'll surrender their rights, all exchange for the promise of more visibility. And it's M it's a slippery slope. You know, we talked about the valuation. There is massive devaluation pressure out there because there is a glut of high quality books on the market. And, and so it creates a situation where someone like Amazon can take advantage of that glut. Mark (50m 49s): And that's exactly what they're doing. They've decided to, you know, create a tiered market. And there are certain authors that play by certain rules that can get the visibility. And those are the authors where Amazon pays less and it's all pretty transparent, Autumn (51m 11s): But yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it in. And I like it. I said, I think that is fantastic that you are fighting for the Indy author and try to wake us up when you start, you know, you get tied up lid and try to do sales and try to generate, you know, reading, like you said, trading in for readers are taking the lower royalty to get better exposure to remembering what the bigger picture is and what the whole market is. Like I said, I did an art degree are an English degree, not marketing. So it's important that someone is speaking about the other side. Mark (51m 42s): Yeah. And also, you know, I see so much of the conversation when you see what indie authors are talking about, much of the conversation focuses on the wrong thing. You know, it's like, how do I Please Amazon's algorithms? I mean, should we allow our futures to be censored by algorithms? No. And other conversations aren't happening. Like I think a lot of authors are losing sight of the importance of quality. Nothing is more important than craft and your ability to right. A reader pleasing Book. It looks like we might have lost the connection there for a little bit. Mark (52m 25s): Yeah. Autumn (52m 25s): Yeah. It was just a little bit, hopefully it came back. We'll see how it goes. Okay. Mark (52m 29s): Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I think there's still lots of great opportunity for authors. I think the pandemic kind of reminded readers and former readers about the joys of books. And so I think that's going to stick with us for awhile. I think we're going to see increased reading for the next couple of years, just because of the pandemic. Autumn (52m 53s): That's fantastic. I mean, an and readership, eBooks marketing, there are still areas growing. So I think there's still a future to be an author, whether its, you know, how much you're making or what you're in it for it for a success is a different platform. But looking at the whole perspective and maybe what you want, your legacy, what is the in the market? Do you know, what are we trying to sell out our rights again, it's a good question to ponder and think about when you are deciding where to publish right. Mark (53m 24s): Focus on the long term, that's really what indie authors should do, you know, ask yourself, how will my decision impact my future five years from now? And if you start thinking that way, then indie authors will start making smart decisions in they'll start reaping better results over the long-term. You know, even when we talk about this being a massive, you know, talking about the, the, the market being flat for a long time for Publishing that the Publishing market is not a lucrative growth market. Well it still a multibillion dollar business. There is still an amazing opportunity for every single author, if they focus on what matters most. So focus on the craft of writing the most reader, pleasing books that you can take your reader's to an emotionally satisfying, extreme, because good books aren't good enough anymore. Mark (54m 9s): Your book needs to be super awesome. So if you're going to spend money on anything, spend it on editing, write the most incredible Book you can because the most incredible book is going to be the best marketing for that book and have a great books market themselves. And then, you know, study best practices. You know, I've written books about best practices in all my books are available for free. So the Smashwords book, marketing guide, every author can take advantage of that and you don't even need to be at Smashwords. It's a free ebook. You get 65 free book marketing ideas. It's all focused on best practices. So these are not a femoral flash in the pan tricks. Mark (54m 49s): These are the things that are going to work, you know, just as well today as they worked five years ago and five years from now, you know, these are the essential oils. If you get the best practices down, you'll have a much more successful longterm career. And one of those best practices that we talked about of course is pre-orders and pre sales. And pre-sales pre-sales are a new best practice and you know, but let's get more people doing preorders This as well. Autumn (55m 18s): Okay. That sounds, I'm going to put that down on our, our market, our list of topics for the podcast, because I did not realize that most authors weren't doing pre-orders. So we'll get that one Mark (55m 30s): Startling. If you go back and you look at some of the old Smashwords surveys that I've published at the blog, and you know, you got this very small percentage of authors doing pre-orders and those are the authors that are on the USA today, bestseller list. But those are the authors that are scooping up all the sales for the new books. And there's a camera, it's the pre-order authors, right? Autumn (55m 51s): I will, I will go in and scoop up that data. And if I can't find it, I'll email Jim and I'm sure he can find it for me, but thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time and being in here. And I appreciate it. And if anyone has questions, we're going to link up to your 20, 21 Predictions and Smashwords and Have author's go check it out and see everything that you guys offer as well as, you know, you have some good Predictions in some incredible best tips of what we should be doing. So thank you so much for doing that. Every single, not just this year. All right. Well great. Thanks Autumn. Thank you. Good luck. Autumn (56m 32s): And so Yes for it, we'll be back next week and we we'll be discussing a one of our humorous ones on some systems. You come back and check it out. Narrator (56m 42s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Writing a first draft is a hurdle that many really struggle with. Most will never make it any further than this step. In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper offer a whole range of tips and advice to help you conquer the first draft of your novel.   Links mentioned in this episode: BookBub reasons for rejecting a featured deal: https://insights.bookbub.com/reasons-book-rejected-bookbub-featured-deal/  The FREE Self Publishing Success course: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/  Our guide on how to plot a novel: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development    Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 117 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And the topic of the day is something that we have indirectly in a number of episodes, but we have never dedicated a full episode to it before. So we decided to talk about some tips for writing a first draft, which will be so much fun. Autumn (56s): It's it is strange to think that we haven't, we've shared so many tips and we've talked to so many authors about how to overcome hurdles, but I can't believe we've ever done a whole episode on this. Jesper (1m 9s): That's right. And when I was thinking about it as well, we have also actively, when we talked about editing, we have been talking slightly about indirectly, you know, talking about writing a first draft, but yeah. Autumn (1m 21s): And covered the seven stages kind of helps you through a first draft, But no, this is really about writing it. Jesper (1m 28s): It is. Yes. So let's see how we go today. And it should be a, it should be an interesting conversation. Autumn (1m 35s): Yes. I I'm sure you've prepared something and I left it wide open, so I'm good. Jesper (1m 41s): I am always prepared and then you can wing it as you normally do. Autumn (1m 46s): I do although, I've had 23 or so first drafts. So I feel that this topic you feel comfortable. Yeah, no, this is my niche, so I'm good. So how are things for you with though? Jesper (2m 2s): I'm a pretty good. Last week at least I made good progress on the first draft of our book one. Autumn (2m 11s): Yes, you're doing good. Jesper (2m 14s): Yeah. So I think this week is going to be a bit tough. I have a lot on the agenda this week, so let's see how we go, but, but, but it was good. At least getting some, some writing done last week. And I think I managed to do four chapters. Autumn (2m 31s): You did a really good. Yeah, you're doing a little bit better than me with that. I'm still working on the edits to the reader magnet, the Rift and the Mage, but I know, and by the time this is recorded, it'll be done. But I'm really seeing my first book since July like 2019, this coming weekend. So there's a few things to do just a little bit. It's just a little bit, yeah, I forgot it. It's been a year and a half almost since we released a book, I forgot how much there is to do so. Yeah. I'm a little swamped. Yeah. Well it's so exciting. So that's good. Jesper (3m 6s): The other good news actually is that some of the Corona restriction's have started to lift now. So I think fingers crossed, but within the next one to two weeks, I think I could be back to refereeing again. Autumn (3m 22s): Excellent. And so if we're going to be spring-ish soon so that will be really exciting. Jesper (3m 26s): Yeah. And they were saying, by the time we get to the summer, hopefully all of our entire countries should be vaccinated. Hopefully by summer time, Autumn (3m 35s): The size of one of our cities, I would hope so. Jesper (3m 39s): I should actually be even faster. Autumn (3m 42s): And I mean, if they are saying the us can get completely vaccinated by May, we'll see if that happens. It was knowing the government will be June or July, but yeah. Jesper (3m 49s): Yeah. Well, did they say what year? Autumn (3m 56s): Again, I think it might have been 2024. You know, they didn't, or maybe they said there would be enough vaccines to vaccinate everyone by May. But if someone's going out with like a tranquilizer gun, that's not going to you. Jesper (4m 11s): Oh yeah. That could be actually be cool. If you had some snipers are something like when you go out shopping than you'll get a ride, Autumn (4m 18s): That would be cool. If there are people who would enjoy that over here. So we could pay money to have people do that in, make it all back, fill we've spent on helping people get their vaccines. Oh yeah, Jesper (4m 31s): No, I see. Yeah, but actually I'm not sure if you remember, but quite a while back U a recommended that I should watch the show on Netflix, which one? Yeah. It's quite a while back actually. And I don't speak friends, but I think I would pronounce it LA revolution. Yeah. Autumn (4m 50s): Or something like that. I did recommend, you know, what did you think of it? Jesper (4m 58s): Well? I'm halfway through now. Autumn (4m 59s): Okay. Yeah. Jesper (4m 60s): It's in French. That's a bit of a downer. Autumn (5m 3s): And like French four years in high school. Come on. Yeah. Jesper (5m 6s): Okay. Well, I don't speak of word French, so yeah. But I'm half way through and a, so far, at least I would say that I really like how they are building the mystery elements. Excellent. I'm still not completely sure what kind of, I wouldn't even call it magic, but sort of what's going on with the blue blood and stuff and I'm not quite sure what's going on still with that. Okay. So I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. I guess the one thing I would say at this point is that I could really use a stronger character motivation for, I mean, I understand that a, they wanna stop the root, this stuff from happening and the revolution stuff and I, and I get it, but I think if it would be stronger or if it was a bit more clear why the character should be so invested in it, I ah, I'm not a a hundred percent onboard with that, but, but so far it, it, it's pretty good. Autumn (6m 5s): Yeah. And it gets resolved at the end. I hope that I'm only halfway through, so yeah. And it doesn't leave it open. And I don't know if there is a second season come in, but it does leave it open that there was a potential there. But Yeah, for anyone who hasn't looked at it is it it's a totally, it's sort of like a zombie meat's French revolution. And I was actually my husband and I had a recent discussion about it saying, you know, well, it looks like pride and prejudice and zombies and Lincoln vampire Slayer kind of fed into this series being written. And I thought it was fascinating. I'm like this actually explains the French revolution in a way that I can totally understand, but I really enjoyed it. Autumn (6m 48s): And I usually don't do Zombie things. So, and now I want a reprint, a prejudice. And so I'll be, so there you go. Jesper (6m 54s): Yeah. Well there's not zombies in this, to be honest. Autumn (6m 58s): But it, sort of plays on that idea though. Jesper (7m 2s): Maybe Yes. I'd just call it the blue blood, you know, but I guess I just want it to mention it because if there are some listeners who are interesting, if you'd like something like mysterious murders and a no on no unknown virus spreading, I was about to say that and I just put it, I shouldn't say that, that nobody wants and watch it. Autumn (7m 24s): Go ahead. It's fine. We have a vaccine now. They don't, it's fine. Know what? Jesper (7m 28s): I just feel like a virus stuff is that people are like, yeah, I don't, no, I don't want to even watch stuff that is about virus outbreaks. It was just like no way to get it. I don't want to watch it. I don't want to read about it. It's just done. No, but Okay. Anyway, if you'd like mysterious murder test and try to check, are you pronounce this better than I do what they want to school? Do you see on, there you go. Yeah. Narrator (8m 1s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (8m 5s): Yeah. So first of all, I just wanted to mention that we are making another attempt today on a recording ourselves on video while also recording the podcasts. So you'll be able to see on the Am Writing Fantasy YouTube channel, if you want. And then there is a video feed, but, but why am I mentioning is more because last week we had the first tri and a, there was some internet lax costs by the video feed, which meant that the yeah, autumn broke. It meant what, what, what happened though was that are sometimes it took a couple of seconds before I could hear what Autumn set and vice versa. Jesper (8m 48s): So we have a bit of an awkward pause in between where it was quite annoying. So we were having another tap now and I hope it's going to work well today, but it is more to let you know that if the video feed keeps interfering, then we will probably dump the video feed again, because the most important thing is that this is a podcast. So the audio feed needs to be good. And if it suffers because of the video, then we will dump the video. But at least for now, we're, we're just trying out a bit, we changed a few things for today. So hopefully the internet, like we'll not be there anymore. Yeah, Autumn (9m 21s): Yeah. I know. So far its between you and I seems Okay. Yeah. Internet, my internet is holding out, which is pretty good. If you can crisscrossed, we got to work at this time. Yeah. And you've changed location. Maybe that's a good idea. We got some like officey Diggs going on. Its kind of yeah. Jesper (9m 42s): Yeah. Well another thing on the internet since this is that, that segment, I want it to mention how BookBub she had a list of nine reasons why the most, they most often reject a BookBub feature deal. Autumn (9m 58s): Awesome. That is useful. Jesper (9m 59s): Yeah. And given how important are these deals are. And then I thought maybe I could just do a very quick rundown of those 900. Autumn (10m 6s): That's a really good cause I had to actually thinking of submitting a book and so this would maybe convince me or make me stay away. Jesper (10m 13s): Yeah. And then you can see if you are aligned with these things away for a while. Autumn (10m 16s): Yeah. So I have had one BookBub deal. So that was really exciting. But you know, it seems hit or miss there or maybe there's no rhyme or reason to this. There is no, no, no. Jesper (10m 26s): Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now the number one, the book is too short. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. There are a minimum page count requirements. So that's a pretty easy fix. If a, you know, check those out before you submit a request for a feature deal. Interesting. That's easy. And a number two is also EASI not meeting the pricing requirement's so it was submitted. Book has to be deeply discounted or free. So that's a no brainer. Right. But if you don't have in the discounted the Book, then just don't get submitted feature deals because you are going to get rejected. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. A so not surprising so far right Autumn (11m 8s): Now. I know it's shocking there. Jesper (11m 11s): Number three, and this one is about timing. So BookBub will not feature a book more than once every six months. So if you did have a feature deal on that page that you can, you are going to have featured deals on several different, have your books. So, but that particular Book, they will not fit you again before six months later. So if you already had it, then don't submit it because you're wasting your time and their time. Autumn (11m 33s): It seems fair. I mean it's hard enough to get one. So if you can get one every six months yeah. For you, Jesper (11m 42s): Good for you. The other one is on number four is if your book is only available on Amazon, meaning Kindle unlimited, you are less likely to get Joseph. Oo, you can't be chosen, but it is much less likely BookBub is a, they SUPPORT wide platform and they like white. Oh. So they tend to promote books that are available everywhere. And so it's interesting. So if you are only in Canada limit at that might be, why are you getting rejections? It make sense a number five. And this one also makes a lot of sense to me, but it's about the reader experience. So if BookBub find a lot of reviews that mentioned that you have typos and stuff like that, they will often reject the Book. Jesper (12m 27s): That makes sense. That's good to know Autumn (12m 28s): Now of course it, it makes it harder than if you go in and you fix them, which hopefully you, you should do that before you publish. But if you can fix them, you still have those. Where are you sitting there? So they're going to hurt you really bad. Yeah. Jesper (12m 42s): Over time. So get it right the first time you get it. Right. So number six and you'll like this next one out of it. It's something that we see all the time. Oh, all right. Well I like this one then if the cover, it doesn't matter. and the reader expectation BookBub we'll likely reject it. Yes. Have we said that before, Autumn (13m 5s): So true. And that was good. That's one reason I was really happy to have one of my book's featured because it was also one of the covers I did. So I made me feel good as a graphic artist. Jesper (13m 16s): Yeah. I can understand that. Yeah. We are now getting into like chicken and egg territory. OK. Yeah. So number seven on the list is not having enough reviews. Well, it doesn't Autumn (13m 28s): Say it. How many at once or Jesper (13m 30s): No, it does not tell me about it, but how do we get reviews when you are not seeing any sales? Yeah. And if you could get a BookBub feature deal, you would get sales and then you would get reviews. So you see the chicken and the egg problem here. Yeah. Autumn (13m 42s): Yeah. And I know she got a dragon in the egg problem, but okay. That's fine. Jesper (13m 49s): Yeah. Well, yeah, the, the dragon, not the egg problem and that's much better. Okay. Got it. But that's luckily something that we do talk about in the self publishing success course, and you can enroll to that course for free. Yay. Yay. That's a good, Autumn (14m 5s): Yeah. The idea, because then you can figure out how to get reviews, which means to you, you might get it, but yeah. Jesper (14m 10s): Yes. And I'll put a link in the show notes to the self publish Success cos so yeah. You can just sign up and get going in there, but I'll leave that alone for now and move on to number eight. Yes. We still have to work. Yeah. This one is a much harder to comply with and I would almost say just submit your book that BookBub feet, figure it out and check that because number eight, it's what they call that it is not aligned with current market trends. And so that's a bit like, yeah, that's a tough one. Yeah. I think that's a tough one. Yeah. Autumn (14m 49s): I know. There's times where, you know, if a certain type of book is just not selling you sometimes if you're paying attention, you'll know that. But there's times that you don't, you can't read their mind what they decided is popular right now. So it's just, Yes. Jesper (15m 3s): So one of the, like, you know, in the, when I'm out refereeing, we also have this catch all bracket thing. So we have like on sportsmanship conduct and you get a yellow card for it, but how do you define what that is? How I define that as a referee. So when you are, when you're being an asshole, you'll get to the yellow cards and I'll give you that as the reason then. So I think this is BookBub so the cats, all categories were like, well, if we can't figure stuff out, otherwise we will start it in the market. Not aligned with current market trends and rejected. Yeah, yeah, Autumn (15m 35s): Yeah. Like the elf stones of Shannara and it's just not selling right now or are you do Saifai Fantasy and that's just not popular. Everyone wants to read about vampires and zombies is they'll just use that one for the sake of it. So that's the nice way of saying they were like, you know, Jesper (15m 55s): Yeah. And then the last one is a pretty easy and say, no, in fact it, it is just that they have run out of advertising slots. They only advertise a certain number of the emails and maybe they would have liked to take in your book on board, but they are out of slots. So you just submit again next month. But yeah, that was nice things of why Book, book, book, buck. Did I say that? Yeah. Autumn (16m 21s): Yeah. BookBub yeah. Well it Jesper (16m 25s): Could be a buck. Who knows, Autumn (16m 27s): But I like that. Jesper (16m 28s): Why did they reject your book's? So yeah, maybe if you have interesting things to do, if there was a bit more details in the article itself, so I'll put a link to the article in the show notes as well. If you, if you want to go and read a bit more of the details, what I basically covered all the, the major points to it. Autumn (16m 45s): Yeah. I might even check it out. I want to see what the length of novels is. If they are looking at novellas or it has to be full length, that'll be interesting. It has to be full Links. Novels. Yeah. Jesper (17m 1s): A lot. And I mean, a lot of people really struggle with writing the first draft and will actually never make it any further than this step. So we thought it would probably be a good idea. So she has some tips about how can you conquer that first draft? Autumn (17m 20s): Yeah, absolutely. And I actually, I have a quote to start this off with and I didn't even mean two. It was one, uhm, I was sharing with my parents. It's one of my favorite quotes and it's good for a lot of different things, but it's a is simply when all things are said and done, there is more said than done and that's actually a really old quote it's from ASAP. So human condition, it has not changed much in like 4,000 years, which is really sad. But yeah, I think that's a nice way to starting saying if you're talking about Writing, you should probably be WRITING. That was my excuse now. Y my social media is not always that good because that's talking and I like to do that's my experience. Autumn (18m 3s): Anyway. Jesper (18m 3s): I might actually be a topic for another podcast episode one day. Maybe it's just because before recording, actually, we, we were just talking about a social media efforts for authors and it was like, is it just a complete waste of time? And just spend the time writing and Stephen, I must say that I'm getting more and more inclined to say So, but Autumn (18m 24s): Yeah, I try and I try to think of it as a way of talking to readers. But again, so that could be a distraction. Maybe you should be working on your first draft, Jesper (18m 33s): But that's a, that's a detour. That's another topic for me Autumn (18m 35s): A lot of the day, but we'll have to wait that one down. Yeah, yeah, Jesper (18m 38s): No, it was just about to say if we don't ride it down and we'll forget it. Yeah, Autumn (18m 42s): Yeah. I will do. So one of us was responsible for writing that down after the Podcast. Jesper (18m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. That's how I would usually where you say one of us in the, nobody does it. That's how it works. Yeah. Autumn (18m 52s): Yeah. Well, it's earlier for me later for you. So I'll take responsibility. It'll be more my fault if we don't do it. Yeah. Jesper (19m 1s): Okay. I can live with that Autumn (19m 3s): So you can write, well, I'm hoping I love it. This one pretty wide open on things to discuss. So I'm guessing though, you have some specific tips, just, just a hunch. Jesper (19m 17s): I do. Yes. But I don't have them in any particular order of importance or anything like that. It's just, I'm a couple of things. So I think I have four Tips. Autumn (19m 26s): Oh, well this is not too bad. Jesper (19m 30s): No, its not too much either, but yeah. Autumn (19m 32s): Ooh. I think that's a good place to start. Well I think that's the, one of the most important things is a, if you can create this almost mind block that it is your first draft and it is only so big and you don't treat it like it's this overwhelming giant hurdle, it's it. That's not going to help you later. So four steps. That's not too bad. So let's see here the first one or one of the third one, whichever what order you want to start with? Yeah. Jesper (20m 1s): Yeah. Okay. Well the first one I call don't overthink it. Ah, yeah. Don't overthink it. I should put a space there. It's lame in the evening for me. Okay. Autumn (20m 12s): Yeah. I know you had a long day. You were up early. We've already. And we had a business meeting before the podcast recording so that everyone be nice to Jesper tonight. Jesper (20m 24s): Yeah. Well, okay. So this one is that it would really help you a lot if you are not approaching your first draft as if you are trying to write the next Lord of the rings. So something like that. Oh my gosh. You know, if you can just say, just accept that, what you write in your first draft will suck. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it will like your grandmother sold Success or something like that. Autumn (20m 53s): Yes. And this comes so, and that's a good thing. I wouldn't have to put it that it will suck, but that's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Jesper (21m 3s): No, but it's, it's like, you know, if it's one of those cases again where your future self really hates your past self, because you will pass or fail, keeps passing shit on down the line. Autumn (21m 18s): Right. Because, but Jesper (21m 19s): I think this is one of the cases where you shouldn't be an asshole to you. If you just Self and just deal with the editing later, just to get the Writing John Dunn, it is Okay. That's why it's called a first draft because it's the first one and you are going to go through it multiple times. You're going to make it better and it is not supposed to be the final product. So please just don't overthink it and just write. Yeah. And don't care that it sucks. Autumn (21m 49s): No, no, no. And that's actually, I mean, we have it in the guide course. I'd have to admit, I didn't come up with this phrase. So I'm not taking responsibility for this one, but it was a, a published author who break and you know, a traditional published author who said, well, your goal when you're doing a first draft is to write a short, bad book. And I love that. And it was very clear. He was like, it's not to publish short bad book, but your goal is to write a short, bad Book. Because normally when you're editing, it's easier to add to it than to cut words. And you don't need to write a 120. If you make it your goal, 180,000 words that you are going to take forever to get there. If your goal is 80,000 words and you might accidentally write nine year old, that's OK. Autumn (22m 35s): That's not bad. Actually. That's perfect. Right? In the target and a short bite Book, you get it done. You can go fix it. You can't edit something that doesn't even an existing. Yeah. It just try not to do word vomit. I have a history of word vomit. We won't go there, but it would be a little bit more structure than word vomiting, but right. If you have to write it and I mean, I know you and I, especially our very first, if it's your very, very, very first novel, your debut novel, you'll probably end up rewriting the entire thing. I did mine three times and I still there's times I would have to go back. And now that I'm on Book 21, that I'm about to release. Autumn (23m 16s): I was so tempted to go back and change born of water, but it is what it is. It was my first book. And I have come a long way since then. And you'll feel the same way when you're way past book one. Yeah, Jesper (23m 32s): No, that's true. Yes. And I think that probably plays a lot into, to the second one I had listed because it's, well, maybe it's not in an entirely different point, but it's, it's sorta riffs off of what we just talked about as well, because it is really, I want to say, because I know I've said it before, so I guess I should keep saying, rather than changing my mind, like five episodes later than it is. Yeah. Autumn (23m 58s): I'm going to make this as a quote for you and give it to you or for social media at this point. Jesper (24m 6s): Mmm. But avoid editing as you go. And it is a bit of a tough one. I love that. But yeah, if you're trying to make everything sound perfect, then let's be honest. It won't never be perfect. And the other part is that you are wasting your time because you are until you get to the end and you start your editing phase. And during editing, you might discover that, Oh, actually this section here, it doesn't quite work. I need to pull it out. Maybe deleted. I need to re rewrite it or restructured slightly or something like that. And then you spend hours on making it sound perfect just to delete it later. Jesper (24m 46s): So it is just waste of time. And while I am also saying that it is a bit of a tough one, this one, because I know people, I don't have to have that full extent myself, but I have a little in it as well in my, in, in, in, in my mind as well that if I know something just sucks, I have a very hard time just leaving it alone. I feel like I need to fix it a bit. Just sort of, at least I'm not that I want to make a perfect, but at least not that I feel like it's okay now, and then I can move on. So, and if I don't do that, I keep thinking about it and it can not let it go. Yeah. So I noticed one is a tough one. And if you are one of those people who are also can't let it go, then I feel for you because I know what it's like a for example, now with the first draft that I'm writing for our joint Book, I've had to force myself not to charge it, just write it and send it to Autumn. Jesper (25m 45s): It's just gone, but not now, but yeah, well, Okay. That sounded wrong. But what I meant by that was really that the fact that I can email it off, actually empties it from my mind, because if, if it was my own and I have it in my file, and then I feel like going back to it, but as soon as I sent the email, then it sort of out of my studio, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. Even though it's still the same script in a file, but I don't know my mind is we had sometimes, but yeah. Autumn (26m 12s): I love human psychology. So I get that. Yeah. I know. That's, I mean, it's a waste of time. Like you said, you know, if you're writing something and you're editing it and you know, it is perfect. Especially if you get yourself in a cycle where your rights something, and you have self doubt, so you can go back and you can edit it and you rewrite and you just, just keep treading on that same path. And that's not going to get you to the end of the year's first draft. And then to, even if you just edited it a little bit, you get to the, you know, the next five chapters and you realize that, Oh, that was a whole tangent. This is where the Book starts. I'm cutting of that. Well, if you spent hours editing it, Oh, that was wasted time. But I do. I mean, like you were saying, I'm the same way I, if there's something that's atrociously wrong, it depends. Autumn (26m 56s): There's times I can like climb Maxine's and stuff. I feel like I've got to get it really kind of, all of those. There's so many pieces you'd need to get each one fit because then my next chapter might be a different characters point of view. And I need to know that what really happened. And so we're getting all that fitted in is important, but there's times sometimes the client plot holes, I have gone back and realized that was missing an entire character point of view, which it was a sub character, but it is important one. So it was that it ended up being three chapters. I had a rad, so there are times I will go back and edit while I'm writing. But there's also times where it's just like, Oh, thank gosh, Griffin never has a note section. Autumn (27m 37s): And I would just highlight, add a note, add a note. And I even keep a file. And my Scrivener is a whole folder of that just says, you know, no edits to, you know, notes for editing. And so I was like, make sure I put it in a way to make sure you added this and make sure you've had that. If I can find the exact chapter at that moment, I just put it in there and then I review it and I find it as it goes through because yeah, it's not going to be perfect. That's what editing is for is once you actually have the whole thing and you get to the end and you're like, Oh yeah, I had this vision that I wanted to add this other little thing and I never did well, now's your chance to go and add it. It's easier to thread that in than to stop what you're doing and go back and figure it out now. Autumn (28m 23s): Just don't do it. Jesper (28m 23s): Yes, indeed. So you were wanting me to continue my, Autumn (28m 27s): Yes, this was good. I like, I had like you steering, I'm a good navigator. You're a good driver. So it's fine. Jesper (28m 38s): Okay. So this one, well, I don't know if I have to keep saying this, but having an outline. So you know what to write really makes things that much easier. Yes. Autumn (28m 51s): Yeah. Oh definitely. I would have to put this one in there myself. Yeah. Jesper (28m 55s): Yeah. I saw that greatly with this suffered really bad, but this one in my first book, I wrote myself into a corner and the story just took a completely different turn and it became, it became something that sort of out of my control, all of a sudden, and I was like halfway through and I was looking at it like, what is this? This is not the story I want you to tell at all. So I think outlining really helped. Yeah. Autumn (29m 25s): Yeah. It helps a lot. I used to go to the same way. I was a, I have tried to pass my first novel and I think I got to chapter five or eight and they're kind of setting sail and they're going. I was just like, I don't cool. And that's what I, I was like I said, like characters got lost. I got lost. Yeah. I started at at least doing it minor outline. And that's when I discovered the seven stages of story structure and realized that, you know, all of these different combinations and it made it flow. I liked so much better than three or five acts. However you want to look at it. So that helps even, even to me like the book. Autumn (30m 7s): So I'm currently, it was Writing. The series is about to publish. I sometimes just doing a two or three sentence synopsis. And that to me is truly like you, you know, that is your instructions for the entire map. This is the whole point of the journey. And I would remember writing for revolution, which will be booked three in this series. And I have looked at it and go, Oh, okay. The outline is OK, but it doesn't even fit this. So I have to change either, either my synopsis was wrong or my outline is wrong. And so I had to rework things halfway through, which is when I realize that was missing the character as well. And it was just like, Oh, and once it all clicked into place is like, Darren, Okay, this is an awesome story. Now it makes more sense. So I have to admit, I know I have an outline. Autumn (30m 48s): I usually think it's fine. But when you start writing, sometimes you need to have something to check back and look at it and say, this is my guiding point. This is the entire, this was my thesis. So in my theory for this novel, is it still holding up in my holding true. And that way, every time you have a side plot or a little road off the highway, you, you can go, does that fit? Doesn't know. Yes, yes. And then you can keep going because it was, the characters will throw things at you. If you have good strong characters, they will try to take over and run with the story. And it's really fun. But sometimes they, especially, I'm writing about Fey in dark Fair or are you kidding? They just wanna go everywhere. Herding cats. Autumn (31m 28s): So, you know, it's a horrible, but yeah, it's definitely going to need to have a plot. Jesper (31m 35s): Yeah. But it's amazing how often one here that is, especially when people are starting out writing that that's really where they are so many people default too panting. They do and do no plan. And it's, it happens so often. It's incredible. I feel like that it should have one of those, you know, those labels from jackass over it, like don't try to shoot at home. Autumn (32m 1s): Yeah. I know. That's very true. And it's very rare for a novelist who has done three or four books to still be a solid pants are where it's like, I'd just make it up on the spot. Almost every one, by that point, it has started plotting or at least a little, I mean, sometimes for me, plotting is intro phase as a reaction phases and you know, just a quick list of things that happen. I've broken it down now where I have chapters and I'll have just, you know, two sentences for each chapter and I'll flesh it out more when I get to that chapter because things have changed before that, but it's still an outline. I still have 38 chapters and each of them has a few sentences. So I know what's happening when I get there, I've thought it out. Autumn (32m 43s): And you were a much stronger plotter, but yeah. Well, at the time you get through a few books in and you realize you do need to keep, you need to be in control, not let fate be your control. Jesper (32m 55s): Yeah. And, and a lot of the time you can find some middle ground. It, it's not that you, you know, that you have to be fully pantsing, everything or fully plotting everything. There is a lot of middle ground in between. And there's a lot to say either that the end point is bad either. But I think when we're talking about your writing, your first novel, your very first draft, please don't try to pass it. You know, maybe off the eight novels and you have, and you have sort of have the story structure intuitively ingrained in you. When you sort of know where you are going, then maybe you can fly it a bit more, but yeah, just don't do it the way it is. Jesper (33m 37s): It is. As I said, I don't try to shoot at home. Just don't do it. Autumn (33m 41s): Yeah. I agree. If I had a stamp, I would put it on the screen right now. I agree. Don't try that at home. You will be writing a first novel and never having written a novel before you are already feeling intimidated to have no guide. You don't even know what your ending point like to me to know that I have this many chapters than I am writing to this point. I almost always ad at least two, but still I know is going to be this long. And I know where I am in. It has huge. I have a timeline. I can tell you what I'm going to be done. I'm going to hit that to within like five days. I'm usually not later. Those are huge things to know, and to not know anything about writing and to be so completely lost with Book one, it's just not paying lost in a fog on a edge of a cliff. Autumn (34m 27s): And you just don't know where you are and you don't want to do that. So Have I have a string to hold on, to get at least a little bit of a plot going? Jesper (34m 36s): Yeah. And if you need some help, we do have a full step by step guide on both how to develop characters, how to develop character, arcs, how to do the entire plot of a novel. So yeah, if you need help in that department, there's lots of help to be happy. And you can pick up a guide book. I'll put a link to the plotting books in the show notes as well. If you want to check that one out, but it will basically take you through from start to finish so you can just follow it and I can promise you, you will be way, way better off than trying to fumble around it in the dark. Yeah. Autumn (35m 11s): Oh yeah. You won't be quite in the dark fog bank with no flashlight and no road that you'll have a much more guidance than that. Yeah. Jesper (35m 22s): Yeah. Okay. So I have one more and then, I don't know, maybe you have some of the other ones as well. Autumn (35m 27s): Yeah. We'll see. What else can I throw in the right now? I have to admit I'm having them as I've had had an office chair for so long. I am having the worst time. Not like swinging around in this thing. So I would love it place. Alright. So I'll have to try to stop spinning. Yeah. Jesper (35m 45s): Yeah. So it's still pay attention. Autumn (35m 46s): Oh, well that never works for me. Jesper (35m 53s): Okay. So this one is around waiting for the Writing fairy's to show up in the spring Hill day or a pixie dust before, are you feeling motivated or in the right mood? 'cause if that's what you're doing, then no wonder why the first draft is still not done. Autumn (36m 10s): Yeah. That's I think this is, what's becoming one of my pet peeves and I'm trying not to, because I understand the impetus to have it. And not every one wants to treat Writing as a business for some people. It really is a hobby that it makes them feel good. But waiting for inspiration. I think as I recently told someone recently, it was like, well, why did you find what inspires you and do that? And then go, right? Because if you're just gonna sit around and wait and it's like, what, what does that phrase? I was waiting for a water to boil it. Does it boil when you were watching it? You got it. You got to turn it on. You, you actually have to turn on the stove. So you got to turn on the inspiration to be inspired, to write. Autumn (36m 54s): And it's not going to come by sitting there staring at a cursor blinking either or being on social media. Jesper (37m 1s): Yeah, of course it made it. Well, yeah. You made a good point in saying that some people just, you know, it's just a hobby and if that's the case, then I think is fine. You know, if you just use doing it for the fun of it and you don't really care, if it takes you eight years, fine wait for the fairy dust to come and you know, that's fine. But, but at least if you want to have any commercial success from it, then you just have to prioritize Writing. And maybe, I mean, I understand the people who then might say, but I don't have time for it. I'm so incredibly busy. I understand that. I get it. Jesper (37m 42s): Trust me. I'm insanely busy, busy as well, but sometimes it's a matter of I'm. I think I've said on a previous podcast, a get up at five in the morning, if that's what you need to do and do an hour of writing while the house is quiet or maybe skip the Netflix show in the evening and do some writing time, whatever suits you personally, I, I functioned best. We created a work in the morning. So for me it works to get up early and then do the writing before I'd have to do other things because then I've got it in. And I also feel more content basically, because I feel like I achieve it today. So it's not done off the list I already had. Jesper (38m 22s): I'm already in control from the beginning, but I also know other people who prefer to work very late in the night and, and that's, you know, whatever works for you. But I think the point is just that you have to prioritize. Yeah. Autumn (38m 35s): Yeah, they do. And that's what always worries me about doing it at night or when you get home from work is it's so easy that life distracts you or pulls you aside, or you had a really busy day and you're tired if you put yourself first. I think that's incredibly empowering and it really does set your day. So I will, I am a morning person, sort of a, you know, compared to a lot of people, I have 6:00 AM. It was like fine. Five or 30 years. Yeah. It's a little early, but it's fine. But yeah, getting up, I mean, even though I'm technically a full time writer and artist and writing coach, I still get up before I check email even years Jesper as the way I usually check, just to see if he said anything. Autumn (39m 16s): I usually sit down without checking my email. I get my T I know breakfast. And I sit and I write for an hour or two or I'm editing for an hour or two. And that is how I start the day. And that's after that then, you know, and then we can eat, I can walk to the dog and all of those other things. So it just really sets the tone for my day. And I feel so good cause I put myself first and my own author platform First and my own ideas and my head first. And that's just fantastic until it keeps building and yeah. And it will percolate, percolate up all day. And then I feel so much more content focusing on other authors work because I know I put some stuff in it for me. Autumn (39m 55s): And that's wonderful. Jesper (39m 58s): Yeah. Plus just the satisfaction. I don't know if that's the right word, but it just feels very good when you know that I got my words In today and it was only eight in the morning. Like yes it is. It's wonderful. Autumn (40m 11s): Yeah, it is. It really is. I say, like I said, I've had to get it sets the whole tone for the day and it's every day that I hit those words or finish the chapter, I was working on editing and you feel that it's really coming together. That's a better day and you go through a more positive day and you spread more positivity and all my goodness, this world needs more of that. So I think it's very helpful, but no matter what I mean, waiting for inspiration, that was really the whole point of this one. If you're just waiting and that is what you want to do, you also want, at the time it comes, you fizzle out so quickly. You might be waiting for inspiration for what weeks, days, months. And it finally comes and you're writing stamina is what a thousand words, or if you're pushing yourself and trying to find things that inspire you, giving yourself some time, putting your dreams, putting some time and effort into that. Autumn (40m 58s): That's something that is your dream, which will make you feel more positive towards yourself. That way, if you do. I mean, even for you and I we're a professional writer is, but occasionally is not just sitting there and the key word and forcing yourself to do it. When those moments of true spark and inspiration come in and you're like pounding out the story and telling your kid's five minutes. And they know that means that like half an hour, don't touch, don't talk to you or you can go, you can put in chapters. It, it is amazing what you will we do when we're on, you know, caffeine acceleration. Oh my God, I have inspiration. I just don't bother me. You can whip out half the book's its fantastic. You won't get there if you're just waiting for inspiration and never put in any effort in between. Autumn (41m 44s): Yeah. Jesper (41m 44s): Yeah. And I think another way of putting it is basically just say that again, disregarding the people who just do it because it's a hobby then that's fine. But if we ignore those people for a moment here than it is a, a, another way of saying that Writing is also a job, you know, it's not all day. I'm sure that every morning when the Baker goes to his job, I'm sure he's not every morning for you. And I'm so inspired to break a baked bread today. Right? It does not happen every day. And he does it anyway because it was his job in the same thing with writing. It is certainly not all the time. When I sit down to write a chapter that I feel inspired for it certainly not all the time, but I ride it anyway and then push the shit down to the line to a future Self sort, this stuff out once you get that far. Jesper (42m 37s): But actually to be honest, once you then get to it later, you can't really distinguish why, where were you motivated and where we are not motivated because actually there's not that much of a difference in the thing. Autumn (42m 50s): There's I see some small differences when I'm really flowing and you know, I see like I'm adding in more sensitive, more senses, a little bit better description, but it all, you know, once you go through and edit from phase, you can't tell him no one, no one reader is going to say, Oh, you are just so inspired right now. You can't tell what they can tell is that I actually finished the book and got it to them. They know that, but yeah. Jesper (43m 14s): Yeah. But, and, and also if you did a proper job in your editing, you'll move everything up to the same standard anyways. So yeah, maybe if it was like, let's say there are 2% less editing in the motivating part, but the cast Autumn (43m 31s): Exactly. It's not that big of an issue. And the point is to actually do the book, get the, get that first draft done, then learned to edit it and you know, you'll have the manuscript ready to send out the readers and have that inspiration. Inspiration is great fun. We'll get into like the plotting because that's a really the best time to really work out what happens next. Do you need a lot of inspiration for some solid plotting? Yeah. Jesper (44m 0s): Yeah. So if I'm to put like some sort of conclusion on it, I would probably say that at the end of the day, everything that we talked about here, it really feeds into the fact that you have to find the process that works for you. It sounds Fair because we all have different. And I think there are some good pointers in what we said in terms of things that you need to think about, but how to actually apply. It is something that, where you need to think yourself as well and, and find your own way through it. But one thing I guess we can say is that the first draft becomes easier and easier over at the more times you have done it, the ETA it becomes. Jesper (44m 45s): And it doesn't feel like that big of a hurdle anymore. After a while, you know, it's, it's the only the beginning, the first Book, maybe two, two and a serious, at least that's a bit of a pain. So once after a while, then it does, it's not that big of a hurdle anymore. And it's still a massive undertaking just to write a first draft. I'd like, like we set up at the top of the Episode, most people don't even get that far. So if you could just get the first draft done, you already ahead of 90%. So, so it's a matter of a pushing through there. And, and the other thing that I, as I said before there, I think it was really important is that you are your first draft. Jesper (45m 27s): Isn't bad. It's just not edited yet. And that's all right, you don't have to go for perfection because if you keep trying, you'll never get to the end of the first draft of the first draft of a short bat Book, write the book. Then you can add to it. You can learn from it and get some feedback as an alpha Rita and mentor writing coach, if you really have doubts, but you need somebody to look at it, to grow from. So just write it fine, a few things that will work for you from what we've said, having like guideposts a synopsis, maybe using a story structure or something like that, that it can at least give you some guidance that you know, where your beginning, middle end and everything will be and right it, and just get it done. Jesper (46m 11s): And you will be so much happier to actually have done it and put yourself first. I will say that that that's something that you have to do at least one day a week, give yourself that. Okay. So next Monday, Autumn, we'll be back with a very interesting interview and a, she will be discussing the state of the industry and lots more like that. Narrator (46m 34s): If you liked what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

You've probably heard of Instagram Influencers, but did you know there are book influencers there too? We discuss what Bookstagrammers are and the age bracket of readers on Instagram. Because the best Bookstagrammers are passionate readers! Plus, we look into how to network with Bookstagrammers, some of the things they can (and can't) do for your book, and how to find the right Bookstagrammer for you. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (31s): And I, I am Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 116 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we will have a conversation around waiting out to Book influences or Bookstagrammers I, if that's something we could call those people, they get your books. Yes. That will be interesting. It, it will be like Instagram. Autumn (55s): Well, I usually like Instagram, but we'll get it into that later. I had a cup last week and nothing. I did nothing I touched or broke, but I did notice a neutral ground at the end now we'll get there. And so how are things for you? Jesper (1m 14s): It's a good, I was actually out with my youngest son for, to soccer practice for the first time in a very, very long time today to, to, you know, the Corona lockdown. Yeah. And that was pretty cool at the time. It got pretty cold, pretty fast. I must say that's too funny. I suppose what's the word it's still spring, but it can't be that bad over there. No. Well, the temperature just drop really fast to all of a sudden, you know, We was M I think when we went, there was probably like 10 degrees Celsius and then one and a half hour later, when is the training finished? Jesper (1m 57s): It was a two degrees and I was, and I was standing still. Of course you were just standing there watching it, right. So it's standing still for one and a half hours or while the temperature just drops it. Well, it becomes pretty cold after a while. It's probably a better to be the referee and be like running around and keeping warm much better. Yeah. Much better. Yes. And shouting at people and stuff like that. A little, keep your adrenaline going. Oh, geez. Yeah. Well, you know, you've got to get your exercise, your, a cheer for your son, even though it was just practiced. So it was in a game, but still you can be out there shouting. No, no, no, no. Jesper (2m 37s): I don't think that's good. I mean, it's some, some parents just don't know how to control themselves, honestly. And there's just let, let them have fun. Let them play why'd you have to stand up and shout at them. So that's not just the U S trait that's that's over in the European union too. Autumn (2m 52s): That's good to know that it was just as crazy as Americans. Jesper (2m 56s): Yeah. It's not good. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, It should also mention a name because the PODCAST people can see this, But something new. We've actually, we started recording videos as well, while we are recording this podcast episodes. So, so if anyone wants to, wants to see us then a head on over to the Am, Writing Fantasy, YouTube channel, Autumn. I, No it's Yes. Our, how we do record, these has changed in their offering video. And last week we, we could have done last week, but I was still under an old modem that had a three megabyte upload speed. Jesper (3m 38s): I am in a really rural area, rural cellphone internet, but we just got five G modem. And it actually is just the fastest internet we've ever had. So I'm feeling pretty good. And, and it's a working. I didn't send it up to my husband. Did I didn't touch it? He won't let me. So this was the big rollout, which is pretty good timing. Autumn (4m 5s): We only missed one potential episode that we could've recorded with a video. So it's not too bad. Jesper (4m 13s): Yeah. So the Am Writing Fantasy, YouTube channel will show the video feed as well. If anybody interests. I don't know. I can't see why anybody would be, But, but if they are then that's it. Autumn (4m 28s): Yeah, absolutely. I'm in my husband actually. He's been complaining. I was like, I don't think I like YouTube videos that, or just static images and, well, I'm not saying anything like that. That's ours, but now it isn't. So that's a good thing. Jesper (4m 42s): Yeah. Yeah. So anything else going on on your side? Autumn (4m 48s): Well, everything, everything. I mean, I, I, I feel like, you know how it is when you, things just aren't going well. And I feel like I was stuck and I'm just sitting there spinning my wheels and grinding the gears and whatever was holding me back. I was just trying to move an inch, but whatever it was holding me back, let me go. And instead of just moving an edge, I got Slingshot it to like the next state. And suddenly my life goes from like, just trying to get one thing done to suddenly like 20 things coming at me. And it's good. It's good. But it's just suddenly I can't keep up with suddenly everything that's coming towards me. A little things I'd said in motion ages ago when I was just trying to move that a little bit of an edge. Autumn (5m 31s): So I, I think of it, it it's like playing a game of catch up, but your opponent or your cooperator as invisible in there throwing hot rocks in and just grasping in air and hoping to stay afloat. But yeah, so it was a total change and I haven't broken anything and suddenly things are working well, and that's a good thing, but I'm not caught up yet. Jesper (6m 0s): Yeah. Well, sooner or later, right? Autumn (6m 4s): Yeah. As I said, my tombstone will say to be continued. Narrator (6m 7s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jesper (6m 12s): Sorry. I started the sound of it too early there, but I have in mind. So just a last reminder here, if you didn't pick it up from last week's episode, we are currently running as a special off on Patrion. Yes. Which is fantastic. We hope you will come in and join us over there. At least come and check us out for just a dollar a month. You can join us and help support this podcast, which we definitely appreciate. Nothing's free. I mean, the software we use for uploading and recording and hosting it all costs a little bit. So every bit helps us afford that. So if you like us Patriana is one way of not only helping to support us, but getting something back, especially right now during these special sign up offers. Jesper (7m 3s): Yeah. So for a limited time, everyone who joins us on Patrion will get some extra prices on top of the ones that we already offer. Each one of the different T levels. So every one, and that includes the existing patron supporters will get an e-book of our, a guide that is called a plot development, which is an end to end on a walk through step by step on how to develop a platform novel and also develop the characters and the character arcs. And we will also make a draw. Yes. One lucky winner will get to have a mentoring session by session with both of us on something. Autumn (7m 48s): I assume it'll be on the books. I hope they get their writing publishing. I don't know if we did we limit from what you're mentoring session could be a line. I can do a small house building, but hopefully, hopefully it'll be on the close and learning how to swim a mile. Oh, you have to be a referee as a soccer coach. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we can do it a few things. Yes. We have to travel the world, but how to behave yourself would be better. It won't be good at it that way. So that it'll be fun. I mean, if it gets one on one coaching, so that it'll be fantastic. Jesper (8m 31s): Yeah. So in a shorter has never been a better time to sign up to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST and right now, but you will need to be quick about it. 'cause this special offer ends on the 22nd of March. So as always, you will find the links to patron in the show notes. Narrator (8m 53s): Yeah. And on to today's topic. Jesper (8m 57s): Okay. So what are we talking about here? Autumn (9m 2s): We are talking about Instagram, which Okay. True confession for you. How often are you on Instagram? Jesper (9m 9s): I don't even have an account. Autumn (9m 12s): What is the wait? Was I supposed to prepare something for today? A Yes. Do we need to cut it now? So you thank you. And that was it. Oh, you know, I'm good at my hope. You're not alone. This is, I know. So I don't even have an account, but you've seen Instagram. Right. You know, you, you can look at it and you can see it from computers, other places, even if you don't have an account. So I'm hoping you might be seen an Instagram post before. Jesper (9m 48s): No. Or yes, Autumn (9m 51s): but mostly you can't see much to be honest because of your, if you click on it an Instagram post and you don't have an account, you can see the image, but then it will just ask you to log in. So you can really do anything. You, you could just see the image. So that's more or less of a, I think before Facebook bot, you could actually see the posts and everything. It was more like Twitter where you could actually follow it and see it. I remember seeing websites that would have all of their Instagram images. So yeah. I could see Facebook. Maybe we missed it up a little bit, but we won't go there. Jesper (10m 24s): But No. Autumn (10m 25s): So Instagram, I have five minutes. So maybe it's been one of my favorite social media platforms of probably in the last couple of years. I used to be a big on Twitter. Twitter. I've never liked Facebook, but Instagram. I like, so I don't mind talking about this one. Jesper (10m 43s): No. And I think we will see how we get to it, but I would like to have some thoughts, at least around the effectiveness of it all as you see it. Yeah. No, no, but maybe we will get to that. I don't know. Autumn (10m 59s): But, but yes, definitely. Well, I think we should start with, for anyone else, not familiar with it. If you're looking at maybe trying out Instagram, so Bookstagram is a hashtag on Instagram and it just one of many hashtags that are out there. I mean, some of the others Bookstagrammer, which you did come up with that is correct. There. Everyone who does a Bookstagram is a Bookstagrammer there's books, books, books, and reading, live Book, life books of Instagram, readers of Instagram. There's all of these hashtags and Instagram is different because you can follow hashtags just like people. So you can follow your Bookstagrammer. Autumn (11m 39s): As you can follow Fantasy Readers, you can follow FANTASY readers. That's a good one to follow. And then you can interact, you know, find a new post to people you don't even follow well by following the hashtag. And so that's what a Bookstagram is that it gives you an idea. So it's a very active, you might be surprised. There's a lot of readers. There's a lot of active Book audience on Instagram, and there are geared towards a younger, you know, it's mostly thirties and younger. So if you are a Y a or if your target audience is a younger crowd, this is a good place to hang out and get to know people because they tend to be friendly. Autumn (12m 21s): And, but yeah, it's fun, but there's definitely some Instagram rules and ways of approaching. If you want to use it as an advertising platform, there's definitely some, some ways of doing it in some ways of not doing it. Of course. Jesper (12m 40s): Okay. We definitely need to get into some of those, but, but it basically, so it's basic, it's basically like Book tubers, but just on Instagram is, is it's a sort of the same thing, right? Yeah. Autumn (12m 53s): Yes. Not that I, I don't do videos, so I don't know anything about Book tuber as we do that PODCAST. It is all on. Okay. Jesper (13m 5s): Yeah. But, but a Book, tube be is this, usually those people on YouTube who will review books and then talk about what they felt about the book and, and so on and so on. But I don't know how much they do have that on, on instinct. Autumn (13m 17s): Yeah. It depends. And that's, what's really the key. So I think most people hear about Instagram influencers. I mean, they've been targeted by, you know, some Instagram influencers have millions of followers and they make lots of money by reviewing products or promoting products, right. On their channel. For some reason, Instagram, it's sort of Okay to be a promoter, like a lifestyle promoter. Instagram is more selling a lifestyle than a specific thing. So if you are a Bookstagrammer, you're selling a lifestyle of reading Fantasy and being a huge Fantasy fan. Autumn (13m 58s): And that's one of the key things to remember. I mean, they can have thousands of followers. They can have lots of comments and it's great to interact with them. So they are Influencers. But I think what are the biggest take-aways is that these are people who are serious and professional about building a brand, just like we, as authors are serious and professional about building our brands. So you're coming, and this was not a book reviewer. It was a blog that you were just like, Hey, give you a free Book. Well, you look at my book. This is someone who has spent sometimes hundreds of dollars to buy little props for their images. They have a whole look, they have a color scheme, they have a genre, they have something about them that is really that there they're trying to sell and promote as well as gain new followers. Autumn (14m 44s): And you're kind of tapping into someone, especially the upper tier ones that these are the people that are professional about this. You have to treat them as an equal and not as like, yeah, just give me a free book to me as I mentioned. Okay. So there, you should be a little more serious and especially Instagram, it is all about the image. They, there are some people who do videos and so you will get stories. There's Instagram stories that they only last for 24 hours and you will get them. There can be only 15 seconds. And so maybe you'll get them holding up your Book and they'll see a little blurb about it and then it'll be gone or they can do a post about it. And for that, they usually do the pictures and the little, I mean, it's, there are some of the top tier Bookstagrammers, Oh my goodness. Autumn (15m 26s): I want to, I don't know how many props and things they have that you have worn, especially the ones that are in a fantasy genre. Dragon's and one's and Crystal's and sparkly lights. And it's just crazy what they have on it. It makes me want to have a bigger cabin every time we see them. Jesper (15m 49s): Yeah. But I also think that its, it made us a lot too as well as you know, I think you've probably alluded to it, their right. But I would think that they met us a lot to get the right type of influencer in a, it it's not like a one size fits all thing. You need to find somebody who, who loves your showing. Right. And caters to that type of audience, I guess. Right? Autumn (16m 12s): Yeah. Absolutely. And that's one of the things, I mean, if you just ha you know, look at the hashtag Bookstagrammer or follow it, the top nine posts on any hashtag you look at are the top nine trending, you know, like when you go into Twitter and it tells you like the trending posts on the side, it's sort of the same thing on Instagram, you get a block of nine and those are the top ones at that moment in that hashtag. And you can look through them in Bookstagrammer is great, but that is specific to the books, but it's not specific to your genre. So you do need to do some research. Like I noticed right now, a Sarah J mass just released I'm a core to silver flames, which is the next Birt book in her crown of thorns and roses series. Autumn (16m 55s): And so I have seen a lot of people who was posting pictures with that book, I'm doing a little review saying where they are in their reading it, what they are thinking of. It there's tons of posts. But if you read through them, you'll see a few people say I never read Fantasy, But I read this one. 'cause it is a popular Book. And people are trying to build their brand and build their number of followers. By saying, I'm reviewing this really popular book. Well, that's not a reason to go and ask them if they'll review your book. If they typically do not read Fantasy, you want to burrow down. You want to read through some other posts. In fact, when the best things you can do is spend some time, you know, follow the Bookstagrammer comment on some of their other post. So they know who you are before you do as spam, you know, a private message saying, Hey, will you do read my book too. Autumn (17m 41s): You want to get to know them a little bit, see what they're going to offer you. You know, some people you see on Instagram is really interesting. You can't post live link in a post. And so that's one of the fun things. So you can't really sell anything unless you're doing advertising, unless you put it in your bio link. So you need to see how do they promote these books, you know, just because they do a review, what does that going to be by you? Is that going to have their audience really excited? Or will they be able to post a link for something for you or at least have a tag You so that they will go and follow you and you'll get a whole bunch of new followers. That's not a bad outcome because then you can offer them all your new followers. Autumn (18m 22s): Hey, look at my link. Here's a freebie, go follow it. So there's, you've got to be strategic. You can't just say, Hey, I'm going to go get a Bookstagrammer to review my book and it's going to do X. You got to figure out what your X is before you go in and find your own Bookstagrammer. Jesper (18m 40s): Yeah. And nobody likes to be asked to fave out of the blue, by somebody who, who, who, who they have no idea who it is. Right? I mean, nobody likes that. So the starting, starting of building a relationship in, in advanced is very important, I think. But I'm also thinking that going off to the top tier ones might not be very useful, Autumn (19m 3s): But I think if you want it to go for a top tier one, I would say start maybe your first one to start lower, start with someone who has a moderate amount of followers who is willing to work for you or work with you. But definitely if you're going to come from the top tier one is you kind have to have your, you got to have a platform. You've got to have a really gorgeous book, cover. Remember pictures are everything on Instagram, the posts or nice. But it's the picture that really is the most popular thing that people are scrolling through Instagram four. So if you don't have a pretty cover know, and the fact is most of these, Bookstagrammers the big ones. They have these bookshelves and the size of rooms. Autumn (19m 43s): Or again, I am so jealous. They have the organized by color or some of them have them all white. Its just crazy. The amount of time is spent organizing they're books. But think of it, there are real books. They like Real books. So you needed to be offering it. Maybe you can offer a, someone of free ebook, but there are probably going to want to pay per pack. And they're going to respond a lot better if your offering a free paperback. So you're probably, unless you got some money, which if you do it, I don't know why you are trying to hunt down. Bookstagrammers there's other ways of, you know, advertising than, than this. You probably don't want to be sending out like 30 or 40 or 50 paperbacks. You going to have to choose just a couple of grab five paperbacks, choose five. Autumn (20m 25s): Bookstagrammers call that a success because they're going to want paper is going to sound a much better off. Or if you can send them a paper bag because they are going to want that for their photo. Jesper (20m 38s): Yeah. No. And that, that definitely makes sense. But, but then again, I, well it is because I'm not into this world. Right. But my thinking is just, well they want a photo. So a ebook cover is that's a photo, right? What's what's the problem. But I guess it's because they, they are taking photos for themselves and styling and all that kind of thing, I suppose right now. Autumn (20m 60s): Yeah, it is. And it's harder. The most covers you see of like eBooks or iPads with a book cover photo or not actually on the image because of the screen reflection and everything else. Usually those are all digitally altered images and yet to get their prompts and everything else there are, they usually want the paperback. There are pretty old-school, especially the Fantasy ones I have noticed. They really liked it. A real books. They want to hold it up a real book. They want to hold up an iPad or a phone. They want something really pretty. Jesper (21m 33s): Yeah, no, I know. I see the same thing goes for the Book tubers as well. They also want the physical, but in that case I really understand it because they are talking to camera. So they want to be able to show it to the camera that it is this book. Right. So I understand that. But yeah, the Instagram stuff is still weird to me because you could just download the app, the book cover image, right. And then you could do for them and manipulation and do whatever. What never mind I was just me. I know it. It's just me. So just ignore my comments. Yeah. Autumn (22m 5s): Yeah. Well, it was funny because I don't have a big staging area when I do my images on Instagram, I often are. I am often photo manipulating things and putting them in places that I don't actually have. So I get that, but that's not the brand that most of the Bookstagrammers are, they are doing for authentic. This was their Real house. This was their Real reading room and they are really readers' and they're really serious readers. So they want the real deal. That's just the way it goes. Authenticity is the key and they want to show it off. Jesper (22m 36s): No, that's fair enough. But how do you, how do you see the time investment and this stuff? Because what if we are saying, number one, you said you have to build the relationship with these people in advance. So of course that takes a bit of time. So I I'm automatically, they are already thinking that you should probably do this if you like the Bookstagrammer stuff any way. So if it's like, Oh, I love this anyway. I'm it would not be something like if, if I was the one, I probably would not give myself the advice to say start billing relationship with these people. 'cause I don't really like, it's not that I dislike it, but I don't find any pleasure in going on to Instagram and finding pictures and following these people and why I don't enjoy it. Jesper (23m 23s): So wouldn't it be better just to say it didn't don't do it. I am always thinking like, isn't the advice to say? You should only do it if you like it already or what, what, what do you think Autumn (23m 35s): If you like it already? Or if it's your audience, if your audience is younger, if your audience is going to like Bookstagram or Bookstagrammers even if you hate, then it might be a good thing to give a try because I mean, maybe you have to do a follow a books, a couple of Bookstagrammers you have to narrow it down, talked to them for a week or two and three or maybe a month. But again, you'll have to do what every single day you stop in once or twice a week to talk to them and see what they're posting comment on their posts for a month and then private message him and saying, Hey, I really like what you do. I love your look. I love the books are review. I write something similar. I will give you a free paperback. If you are willing to, you know, look at mine and review it. Autumn (24m 18s): And by the way, here is a link to the actual, you know, the e-book so that you can see what you are getting into or even a blurb, or I'll give you the book, if you want to read it first so that, you know, you, you, you know, you will like it or at least a sample. So you want to, at least you don't build up some kind of a relationship with the stuff you gotta be like months in. And you're talking to him for every day for hours on end. You know, it does not take long to go on to Instagram and do a post, especially if you're following a few specific people. Jesper (24m 47s): Yeah. Okay, fine. So that the answer, but then I have, and then I have another, another critical question. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have to be the critical voice today. So let's say let's okay. Let's try and say, you don't have to overdo the engagement and, and all that. So it's not too much work, but then what is the actual likelihood of them are actually saying yes, because Mr. Nobody comes in and say, Hey, can you please, would you mind the reviewing my book or whatever, or, or whatever, you know? I mean, I understand when you say is Sarah J math and stuff like that? Autumn (25m 30s): No, no, of course. Yeah, of course. She's going to get Bookstagrammers to, to, But, or a Stephen King or a brand and Sanders in whatever write, but what about the rest of us and models? Is it, is it even possible, do you think? Oh yeah, I definitely think it's possible. I having been there and around me as a reader or some of these readers, I mean, they are professional readers. I, they can read a book on a day and so they need a lot of books and a lot of them do like two, some of them that's the thing is to go to books, book sales, and find books that they prefer it. Some of them happily take other books. Again, it's all about finding out which ones are going to be more open to you in some of them might say, no, it's just not my cup of tea, but a lot of, a lot of them are like books, even if it's for a proper, even if they might not get to it for a month or so, you know? Autumn (26m 15s): No, but I think they will be, if you have a nice cover, if you are a good enough writer, you know, if you can entice them, I think you'll be fine. But if you have maybe only one book out or, and it seems that you did the cover yourself, they might politely say no, so you have to do a watch that. Mm. And I definitely, I think it's important to note that, I guess. Yeah. Jesper (26m 40s): Yeah. Go ahead. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, there is a bit of a delay here, so sorry for that. So I didn't pick up the day you start at the talking, but the way I was just wondering as well that I guess they don't really mind how much or how little of an audience you have then, because from their point of view, the main thing that they want is just the free book. And they want some let's call it content that they can produce and by reading the book. Right. So, so they don't really get to that as long as the book looks wonderful. And it is when it in, within the stuff that they like to read already, then I guess they don't really care if you have a, you know, your aunt and your brother following you on Twitter, or if you have a, a, a 125,000 people following you, I guess they don't really care. Autumn (27m 33s): I don't think it does. I mean, it would probably be helpful if you can then promote, you know, cross promote them or offer them some kind of cross promotion in some way. But a lot of them, yeah, they're looking for content. They are looking for nice pictures, are good books to review, and you're basically maybe offering them something, you know, a free meal and as a selection that maybe they wouldn't have found, otherwise they might be happy about it. So it's not about, it's not something that they're going to just out and out, refuse. Not everyone. Some are going to have some, you know, like the reading and learn to be read pile might be a mile long and there just like, no, no, no. More as the one thing about reader's they tend to always won another book. Don't we always, yeah. Jesper (28m 18s): Yeah, because that's, that's basically my fear and all of this is that they might easily say, yeah, sure. Send it to me. But they have like a to be read pile. That is so weird because I imagine a lot of people will be doing this. Right. A lot of people will reach out to them and maybe they would just say, yeah, sure, no problem. And send it to me. And then it goes into the pile and not to say that they'll never get there, but it is, well, what if it takes a year before they get to your book? Right? I mean, is it been worth it? Yeah. Well, of course that'll be a nice once they get to it, but maybe that was not quite the point. Maybe you release the book and you wanted it to give a bit of a boost in and then a year that, well, then you could say to get some more books a year later, but it, is it more sounds like you needed to be aware of your, let's say strategy here or are you set your expectations, right. Autumn (29m 15s): Definitely. I think it's, you need to stay, you need to be clear when you are a private message to them and saying, I have a book that's a new release or that I'm looking to promote in June, just be clear. And like I said, do you need to know what you're going to get? Why are you approaching this Bookstagrammer or is it because they are incredibly popular or because you think they have an audience that you would like to get into or are they going to tag you because you're not going to get a free link that anyone who reads that post we'll have to go and probably search your book, or if they get, if you get tagged, they can go and follow you and read your bio and maybe find out where you are giving away at your freebie, because you only have one link. Autumn (29m 57s): So those are the things to keep in mind that you don't have much of a, you know, there is not a big advertising things. So you have to be really clear on what you're expecting. If it is it going to be followers to come and follow you, or you're going to have a sale, that's going to go with this book. Then you need to tell the Bookstagrammer, Hey, I'm planning on doing this. Would you be willing? Is that something you want to work together and do? Or you can do this review. And when you do the review, I'm going to give you five eBooks that you can give away for free, as well as part of your platform. This is a lot of things that you can make up and that they can do as well. And that's, that is not an atypical and Instagram. They can do. Autumn (30m 38s): A lot of people do like, Hey, I'll choose five people from my comments to give him a private message. You a link to get a free book. People do comment and giveaway is a lot on Instagram. Its like tag follow a comment and then we'll give away a Book and team up with the big Bookstagrammer or, or even a modern Bookstagrammer. I do that with you. It can benefit both of you. You are giving them something to give away for free. They're getting content and also building their own platform. And you're going to cross post. And if your audience likes Instagram as a younger audience, this can be a really fun. You can have fun with it. I think that that's the thing to remember is just Instagram. It's a lifestyle. Autumn (31m 18s): And so you're selling, reading your selling fun and adventure and you love your readers'. Those are the vibe's you should be giving out with your post and with your offer. And if you do that, I think you will get a good response if you're, you know, just saying, Hey, here's my freebie. I think you'll like it, you should read it. You're probably going to hit a brick wall and not a problem. Jesper (31m 46s): Yeah. And I think so too. And well, I guess it's a, it's up to people to try. I mean, why not? You, you can try it out. It, it doesn't cost you anything to send an email or contact these people. So in that sense you can try it out, But I'm still here. Yeah. I was still thinking that it might be more difficult than you think Autumn (32m 8s): You challenging me to go give this a try aren't you? Jesper (32m 13s): Yeah. Yeah. Try it out and see how many new people you can actually get to say. Yes. Because I, I, no. Okay. Let me, let me, let me rephrase that. I think you can get people to say yes, But I'm not So sure that they will get to it in, within the timeframe you would like them to. Autumn (32m 32s): That will be, it would be an interesting topic. But I think again, it comes down to like, especially like right now I'm releasing a whole series. So I know I'm going to be releasing books from here till June. If I could sit up a Bookstagrammer even when the final book that they are going to maybe read one or two of them are, maybe I'll get them all in the series. That's not, as you planning ahead, it's like planning ahead. All of your advertising. You're not expecting an immediate thing. I mean, they are going to have to reach, you have to ship the book, you know, they have to read it or they have to post it. So it might not happen. But I think being clear, a lot of these. Yeah. Like I said it to them, this is the professional level of business. So if they are not being clear and concise and can you give you a time frame, then move on to someone who can give that to you. Autumn (33m 16s): Not, you don't want little, Oh, you know, it looks good. I'll get to it sometime in 2020 for you, you know, you definitely want to pin it down. And to me the biggest hurdle, a in the pet challenge, I see, I mean, I do like Instagram, but I do see problems because it is constantly changing. Facebook does own it now in Facebook likes to change things quite a bit. Yeah. And they love that. Yeah. And so it, it keeps changing. Like when you first, when I first joined Instagram, you never saw a promotional post or, or you could see one every 20 or 30 and then they changed it to like one every third post became promotional and then they could have three together and then they stop doing that and they changed how you do it. Autumn (33m 60s): But it is, it can there's days that I go on there and I'm like, I just can't take that. And then last week, of course, when we are, we're talking now, I'm, it will have been two or three weeks ago. I went on an all of these cross posts from tick-tock and I'm not on Tik TOK for a purpose. I don't really like video. I don't want to do a tock. It's not Instagram. And Instagram tends to be static images. They have some video, but it's, you know, Instagram TV never took off. It's not a big thing. So most of the video are very small or some, a little blurry images that are moving a little bit. And suddenly there's all these cross-post from Tik TOK that were one nut format it to the Instagram size, which is 1400 by 1400. Autumn (34m 42s): So there are odd sized stretched wrong. And I just couldn't take it. I'm on there for the pretty pictures to talk to authors. I like to have conversations in suddenly all of these people doing Tik TOK stuff. It was just like, I'm done. I didn't even look at it the rest of the day. So, you know, if you give a book to somebody, I don't know what Instagram will look like in six months. It as much as I hate to say it, but I don't know. It could change hugely because every once in a while, if Facebook decided to roll out on a massive change, the Instagram and there's usually an uproar and then they bring it back a little bit, but it's not owned by the original founders who had the vision for it that I used to be. Autumn (35m 25s): So it is changing constantly. And so there is that. So if you do a giveaway, it somewhat a book and they say, I'll read it in eight months. It might be fine. Last year we could have hit the earth by too. So I don't know. Jesper (35m 42s): No, that's true. But, but I actually, I was actually thinking while you were talking that that might be THE, so to speak easiest way of getting mileage out of Instagram would be to basically just reach out to, let's say new Bookstagrammer like once a week, every two weeks are once a month or whatever. And they don't care about when they get to it, But, but just sort of get the wheelchair and Autumn (36m 9s): Just turning it off. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jesper (36m 12s): Yeah. And then eventually something will pop out here and there that, that then they got to it. I mean, that could be a way where I think it could be working, but I'm more of a much more hesitant if you have deadlines and you need it within this timeframe. And so I think that will be difficult, especially if you're talking about maybe not the low grade Influencers. I, but if it's a Influencers with a big following who does this as a professional level, they will not, you know, buy to your time scale that you will have to abide to Dez. Yeah. And, and, and that means that maybe you have to wait 10 months or whatever, but if you keep feeding the monster, as you say, every week or every second week, or once a month or whatever, you have the time for it, and it's something that will trickle out down the road. Autumn (36m 58s): Right. So, so that might be something that could be worth it. Jesper (37m 3s): Absolutely edit it to me. And the other only caveat I have is that you're building a platform on someone else's platform and you and I have discussed this a lot, especially recently. Yes. And so that's a great, if you give 50,000 Instagram followers and you become your own influence or an author influencer, that's fantastic. I don't know many author Influencers other than the really big names that have that many followers. I mean, it seems a lot of them cap out at the 5,000 to 10,000. There's a few who get a little bit higher, but I think that's a great, but I have to admit, I spent a lot of time last week formatting some images to like do a character or a lot of people, sometimes format some stuff for like character introductions or a cover reveals, you know, they do all of these things and it's great. Autumn (37m 53s): And then I feel like it's gone in, or, you know, it'll be on my feet for a while, but it essentially, if I post once a day or a couple of times a day, it's gonna trickle down really quickly. And I ended up taking the images and putting it on my blog and spreading that out too, like Amazon and good reads and all these other places that I think it, it did a lot better in, by being on my blog. It will last a lot longer. I got up, I, I sent it out to my pore subscriber's that I have neglected recently. So I do think it is one thing to consider that, like, what are you doing on Instagram and how is it helping your platform? Yeah. It's great to build something there, but how are you going to convert them into readers? Autumn (38m 34s): And if Instagram changes hugely, how are they going to find you so that, you know, they're on your mailing list? Or do they know where your website is so that they can go and find you because you know, Facebook used to be the big thing and maybe it still is, but I think it's tanking Twitter. I used to, I have, I have so many followers on Twitter, but I have not been active really on that platform for a long time, because it's just changed too much. And I'm not that interested in. I have to have been like, Oh, I'm a graphic designer. I like pretty pictures. I tweet don't do forums. That's just pictures. I don't know. Jesper (39m 9s): Yeah. Yeah. But getting people from those platforms, whatever, whichever one is that you're using it in this case, in a Instagram, getting them off of there and onto your email list is absolutely key. I mean, years ago I wrote a book about how to use Twitter as an author and a low and behold, like six months after I published that book, Twitter changed the, a in terms of conditions so that the strategy that I was using to actually get people off of Twitter and on to the email list, stop working. Jesper (39m 48s): So that's the thing that you all are. I think you always just have to keep in mind with the stuff that if you are not funding the funneling them away from the platform and onto your email list, it could go away tomorrow. And then when I say that, I also know that many people will think, yeah, but that's not really going to happen. I mean, what about YouTube and people who have been YouTube has for years and years and years, and now you're on a living and that's true. Yes. But sometimes it happens and maybe it hasn't happened yet. And maybe it won't happen for the next two years. Who knows? I don't know. But I'm assuming that the being an author means that you want to build a lifetime career out of this. Jesper (40m 31s): And one thing I can say for sure is that Instagram will change over the next 50 years. It will not be the same. So if, if that's the only place where you have your audience, you have an issue. Yes. All right. And that was also the people at some point that we built the entire business spaced on a Google apps and stuff like that. And then at some point Google changed how Google ads worked, worked at, and they didn't pay out affiliates at the same level anymore. And so on. So on and people's business stuff from basically overnight, right. From one way to the next. So it's not to sort of paint a doomsday picture out of things, but I think it is important to be mindful that it's only when you have the control over the customer data, that you can build a proper sustainable business because otherwise you will always be dependent on the Well womens and ideas about THE, whatever the other is this the same thing with Facebook, right? Jesper (41m 35s): I mean, a lot of authors at the moment are selfish, inclusive, inclusive, eh, has a quite big audiences maybe in Facebook groups and stuff like that. And if that's the only place where you have them, you, again, you have an issue. So yeah, I think this sort of stuff is really, really important. All right. Autumn (41m 55s): Yeah. I agree. And that's why, you know, it's definitely got me thinking again that making sure your, your core, your, the stuff you own, like your own website, your own blog, make sure that that's solid and growing and push out to the other platforms, you know, reuse your posts or one of the, I still love that about blogs. I mean, you can list, you can link your website, blog to your Amazon profile, to your good reads profile. You can spread that out to your Twitter, to your Facebook. You can link it to your Instagram, but you can find ways of cross posting it. I know that you use a, a, a social post or I use I'm a social pilot. There are ways of pushing out, even in a blog post, even if the link isn't live, you can kind of, if you have an easy website, which is the whole purpose of having a website name is that it's easy to type. Autumn (42m 43s): You can send people back over to it. And so, you know, making sure that you're generating those links to come back to where your core, your center core that has strong, that you own is, is really the best use of your marketing time. Rather than sitting there on Instagram for hours and hours of sitting on Facebook for hours and hours. That's one not helping you right now. And two, it's not a platform you Oh. And so at the end of the day, those people could disappear overnight. If something changed in the platform. I mean, everyone says that about Amazon and that's one reason I'm wide. And your wide is that if something happens on Amazon where it's not our only basket of eggs, but I really do believe that. Autumn (43m 26s): I mean, I don't just talk That I, I walk that way. Jesper (43m 32s): Yeah. Yeah. And we also had an, I don't remember the episode number anymore, but people can search for it, but we had Joanna Penn on and on a past episode as well, where we talked about diversifying your income and that's exactly what it is so important. And she, she was a big advocate of that as well, to make sure you don't have all the acts in one basket because it's going to hurt one day. If that's what you do, maybe not now, maybe not next five years, but one day it will hurt. So yeah. I try always to diversify, making sure that you control your audience, meaning that you have them on an e-mail list so that you, no, that no matter what happens with Facebook or Instagram or whatever, you have a way to contact those people. Jesper (44m 15s): When you have a new book out, that's the only way to build it sustainable. Yeah. Autumn (44m 20s): Yeah. And speaking of a new book out, according to the end of this podcast is released. I released a book yesterday. I can't wait to the future me to tell the, present me how that goes. So I don't know. We just realize that that's a really exciting, we want to time travel for my book really is okay. Back to the park. That was perfect though. But any final words on a Bookstagram on Instagram and what not? No. Other than, like I said, it is, it's a lot about branding. It's a lot about lifestyle and its a lot about, you know, I would assume a militia WRITING dystopian or something really dark and depressing that it's about having a little bit of fun. Autumn (45m 6s): So do keep that in mind that sort of what Instagram is about. It's not about just selling one thing, its about selling a whole lifestyle of what it's like to be a reader. So treat the Bookstagrammers like professionals who with a professional brand equal, if not better than yours and be nice, but come say hi, it's really fun. And if you do come say hi to me, so I, because I'm on their and you're not, but I really do enjoy it. Assuming they stop cross posting tick talk. Well maybe one day I'll say, okay, so next Monday we are going to share some tips and thoughts on writing a first draft. Jesper (45m 48s): We will try to be as helpful as we can when it comes to a first draft. Narrator (45m 54s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

What happens when Autumn and Jesper lets go of the reigns and come up with the most crazy and stupid ways in which to create fictional characters? Episode 115 is NOT designed to give you any writing advice. Hopefully, it'll make you laugh instead. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn. Jesper (33s): This is episode 115 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is one more of our lighthearted episodes. We will share 10 terrible ways of creating characters. So I'm really looking forward to hear what you came up with here. Autumn. Autumn (50s): Yeah, it was good. It was a challenge and it was fun because there was times I was like, Oh, I might try that. But yeah, we'll see how it goes. And I actually, since we're doing 10, I assumed this is an alternating list. So I only needed to come up with five, but I came up with a couple of extra just in case you chose ones. I well, just in case you already chose one that way I, I, I could still put in an entry to win this one. Jesper (1m 16s): Damn that's well-prepared I didn't have to think about that. Autumn (1m 19s): I did my homework and I did extra homework. So HA, I already won. Jesper (1m 25s): Well, no, that I don't agree. Let's see, because you might have some mediocre bonus ones, but that doesn't trump. My very good ones. Autumn (1m 35s): Oh, we'll see. Challenge accepted. We will check this out, but it's the, how are things over on your side of the Atlantic? Jesper (1m 45s): It's it's good. Just writing, taking care of job stuff, you know? Right. But I also, I actually finished reading the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Oh, I finished reading it this weekend. Autumn (2m 1s): That, that book it's I hear so much about it. Like I recognize his name everywhere and it's, I have not read it yet myself, but I'm like, wow, it's just like, it's already got this known mythos. So how was it? Jesper (2m 14s): That was exactly why I bought it and read it because of all the praise it gets. So I thought, okay, I better read this one and figure out what's the, what is all the fuss about? Yeah. And I must have, I must say that I understand why he's getting so much praise for his writing. The writing itself is really well done. Oh, excellent. Really, really nice writing. And you, you get, you get so much into the characters. So that is very well done. I'm actually planning to share a bit more in our readers group on Facebook. A bit more my thoughts on it, but I also small, not spoiler for the book, but small spoiler for my opinions that I'm going to share on the readers group on Facebook is that I am missing a bit of action. Autumn (2m 59s): Oh, Jesper (3m 0s): I'm missing a bit that something happening actually. I mean, there is something happening here and there, but it is also a lot about just a character and, you know, basically like how the character grows into becoming the person that he is. And the entire book is more or less flashback. So it's basically the main character is telling like a scribe who is then sitting down, writing down he story and it stops from his childhood. And then how he sort of grows into becoming what he is. So I'm not going to spoil anything of course here, but, but it is basically like a very, very slow long flashback with some chapters here and there where you in the present. Jesper (3m 47s): But very few. So that also means that a lot of the lot of the story actually is more or less about him growing up stuff, which character wise is extremely well done. It extremely well-written. So, so that is good, but I would really like a bit more action. I definitely my writing and reading definitely gravitates towards more action. Like I want characters I care about, but I want to see them doing things so interesting. I I've been thinking a bit picking it up. So I'll, I look forward to your review and don't forget to review it on good reads. Since you did join, it's a good tool to use, is it? Jesper (4m 30s): Yeah, I have to do that as well. I was thinking, well, maybe we're going to set up at some point here in the near future. Not quite sure when, but we'll probably let people know, but we were going to set up a group on good reads. So once we get that going, I will post videos, I think in that group about and stuff like this. So I am going to share, but I don't know if I want to get into all the reviewing officially kind of thing on good reads. I'm not sure I want to do that, but also I don't, I don't like, you know, well, one author reviewing other authors it's feels like a bit like, Hmm. I'm not sure that's a good idea. Autumn (5m 12s): We can be overly nice or overly critical of other authors. I will say that it's kind of hard. There's no, in-between because we're never just reader as we're reading it for looking at what we like, what we don't like. Well, the flaws we see and it's definitely, I've noticed authors when they review other authors work. Sometimes it can be just all you worked so hard on this. Good for you. And other ones are like, wow, if this was my story. So it's night and it's night and day. It's really funny. Yeah. And the thing is that it's all subjective. Right? So just because I think I would like more action doesn't mean that there isn't a million people out there who thinks it's the best book they ever read. Jesper (5m 53s): Right. And I don't want to sort of get into that crossfire there. It's just like, it's just my opinion. And I, I, you know, I'm entitled to that. Like everybody else's entitled to theirs, we don't have to have a fight about it. But once you start posting official reviews about it, then you risk having a fight about it. And I'm not sure I want to do that. So sure enough, a private group is slightly different in terms of just sharing some thoughts about it. That's slightly different than, than an official written review. I think which stars on it and all that. But I don't know. I'm a pot from a sort of jinxing, our podcast distribution, and also breaking that one. Autumn. Jesper (6m 33s): I don't know what else you've been up to. I'm trying not to break things. Autumn (6m 39s): I swear, but yeah. Okay. So the podcast distribution got a little delayed because I touched something on the website and seemed to broke something again, but I'm breaking things less frequently. It's going to end sooner if this can keep going, you know, with your breaking, everything you touch. And especially because this wouldn't when this episode is released next Sunday, the coming Sunday in less than like six days from when this is released, my next book, the tainted phase series is being released. And I'm so excited. So hopefully I don't break em. So I, when I upload it, it's my God. Jesper (7m 20s): I can just see the uproar. Like every author starts panicking. KDP is down. KDP is down. It's like, Autumn! Did you upload anything? Autumn (7m 31s): Yeah, that'll be me. But hopefully I've just excited to get this one out the door. I love what I've been hearing from the ARC reader. So I'm really, I just cannot wait to share this one with the world. Jesper (7m 42s): Yeah. And it, and by the way, if anybody got confused about what we were talking about with the podcast distribution data, just to let the reader know, well, by the time this airs it's been a few weeks, actually. So maybe you don't even remember, maybe you didn't notice, but some might have noticed how episode 112 only appeared in your feed. Like several days after the Monday, it was supposed to get distributed. And I'm not going to mention why that was and who touched something. But yeah, you might know. Autumn (8m 17s): Just, I swear, I need to come with a little note that says maybe a jinx, just a little note, don't do this shit at home. That's my, that'll be my life motto. Narrator (8m 30s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Jesper (8m 36s): So we have something very special to mention today. We don't do this very often, but once in a while we just love offering something extra, something special for our patron supporters. Autumn (8m 49s): Yes. And I'm so excited that there's so much stuff going on in March. We just had the guide course I a book coming out in a week and we're doing something very special over on Patrion. Jesper (9m 2s): Yeah. We have a special giveaway, but it won't be open for long. So we're going to close it again on the 22nd of March. So this will apply to all existing patrons supporters as well as everyone who signs up before the 22nd of March. Autumn (9m 20s): Yes. So definitely come and join us. And we are giving everyone who joins or is already a member there, a copy of our plot development book, because we think everyone should feel special. And that's just the type of people. You are a cast. We over-give, we overshare. I don't know. Jesper (9m 41s): Yeah. So everyone is going to get that. And then in addition, we are going to do a draw and one lucky winner is gonna win a mentor session with autumn and myself. And all of those extra prizes of course comes on top of the stuff that you will get normally Autumn (10m 1s): Patron. Yes that's. Oh, and there's different tiers. And there's already cool things with every single one. I mean, it starts at a dollar a month. So you get something instantly for just a buck, which is fantastic. Plus you get a chance to win. Plus you get a chance to you go ahead and you get the plot development book, which has gotten so many praises. So that's fantastic. And even has some extra things you can get for free in it. So we just keep giving things away. It's a very interesting bottle we've got going on there. Jesper (10m 31s): Yeah. I don't know business wise how smart that is, but Autumn (10m 38s): Compensation. Jesper (10m 38s): I mean, there's never been a better time to sign up, to support the am writing fantasy than right now to him. And as always, you will find the link in the show notes. Autumn (10m 54s): Yeah. Jesper (10m 54s): So this should be fun. I'm actually, I like these alternating lists episodes there. Yeah. Autumn (10m 59s): It wasn't fun. It brings out your competitive spirit, which I've noticed you're a high competitor. So this will be, it'll be interesting. Jesper (11m 8s): Yeah. You know, I figured out the one thing I am missing. Yeah. Normally when I'm a referee, I have my yellow and red carts. I feel like I should have that here as well. Autumn (11m 18s): So that if you're not behaving, Jesper (11m 19s): I can give you a red caught and put you into sin bin and stuff. Autumn (11m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. I'll just touch the computer and the entire thing will explode. So watch it. Jesper (11m 33s): Absolutely glad that I'm the one doing the controls of the podcast here, because otherwise you probably would stop recording or something all over. Autumn (11m 40s): I am so afraid to touch my computer. Right. Jesper (11m 44s): Yeah. Please don't touch anything. Just speak into the mic without touching them. Autumn (11m 51s): No, this is difficult. All right. But what if my goes to sleep? That could be its own problem. Anyway, we won't go that way. No. Jesper (12m 0s): Okay. So I think we have five each and you have a few bonus ones. And then of course we should at the end, try to figure out which one is the worst of the worst stern. And it would make most sense if it's probably one of mine. So if anybody gets, you know, well, if you just want to skip to the end of the episode, you can listen to us concluding that one of mine was the best one. Autumn (12m 28s): Well, why, what does it earn that you have to earn that? Sorry. And no freebies here. Well only freebies to listeners and other authors. No freebies to us. Sorry. Jesper (12m 39s): Okay. Well, let's go through the motion then if you insist, it's not going to change the outcome. Autumn (12m 45s): So do I see, I had a hard time differentiating with mine. I don't know which one's worse or what, so mine's slightly a random order, but we'll go for it. Okay. Jesper (12m 56s): Yeah. Yeah. I, well, I guess most of mine could be in a different orders. Well, I did try to make number one. Like that's probably the worst one I could think of, but if you want to upload up one of the other ones, that's okay with me as well. So you can do that. Autumn (13m 12s): All right. Sounds good. So who wants to go first? We have to flip a coin or shall I graciously allow you to, to start? Since you believe yours are already better. Jesper (13m 23s): Okay. Yeah. You okay? Yeah. I understand. You want to get right into the good stuff. You know, normally when I eat candies and stuff like that, I sh I saved the good ones for last, because that's how I prefer to do it. But if you want to get straight to the favorite ones, then yeah. Let's let's do. Autumn (13m 38s): Yeah. Put your cards on the table. Let's see. Jesper (13m 42s): Oh, I'm jinxing myself so bad. Now I know Autumn (13m 49s): A bluffer. Jesper (13m 51s): Yeah. Yeah. So I'm number five. So this one is sticking to archetypes, you know, like sticking to archetypes. So this is the, you, you make the mentor, the one who gives the advice and you make sure that this is all that character does. The hero does all the heroic stuff. And the love interest has an over abundance of love, no matter how badly he or she is actually Autumn (14m 26s): Treated. Oh, so you basically Jesper (14m 28s): Don't give a crap about adding more layers to the character. Just, you just want archetypes and then you might be thinking, well, Derrida, you like archetype. So I'm going to give them to you. Who cares about cultures or skin color and Oh my God, personality trait, all that nonsense. I tell you, it's just a waste of time to worry about testings. I, Autumn (14m 53s): I liked that one. And actually I have to admit that is actually one of the bonus ones I came up with was basically don't create your characters at all. Just make them all stereotypes with virtually no personality. And I think Conan the barbarian, he is the hero's hero and so boring. So have you ever read Kona that pop area? I actually have not. I just remember it from the eighties and my childhood and watching it, watching my brother, what, you know, he was older than me. He would be running around being cornered. Jesper (15m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. But that's also the only way I've never read it either. I also only remember watching it on TV when I was a child or growing up and I just thought it was so cool. Autumn (15m 41s): I think at the time I, well, again, my brother was older and beating up on me cause he was Conan. So I had a different perspective. Well, yeah, I can see that. All right. Yes. So you're ready for my number five. Okay. Yes. All right. So just don't develop them at all. Use someone else's characters. So if you like Harry Potter, just create Barry Cotter, you know, just create something totally. A hundred percent based off of someone else's hard work. I think that's about the worst way I could think of creating a character. Jesper (16m 17s): Yeah. Okay. I might have something similar. Autumn (16m 20s): Oh, I'm not surprised because I'm going to say yeah. Jesper (16m 24s): Yeah. I was just going to say that must be because that's a pretty good idea too. Autumn (16m 28s): Exactly. And I said it first, so there you go. Okay. Jesper (16m 35s): Yeah. Actually that's not a good sign. If that was one of your bad ones, then I don't know if you have even better stuff coming. Yeah. Now I'm better word. Autumn (16m 44s): Good. Just where I want ya. Hmm. All right. So what's your number four number four. Yes. So this one is pure evil, intriguing, right? It sounds very intriguing. Jesper (17m 2s): The evil characters they do what they do because they are just asking Autumn (17m 12s): Readers who don't understand that ed it's. Jesper (17m 16s): Why should you even bother justifying that a characters actually flawed that the person has a trauma, which has distorted their worldview and that the couches is actually believing that he or she is doing what is necessary, even when it is in fact evil, evil, you know, that kind of thinking that's garbage. It is advice made up by authors who don't know what they're talking about and what yeah. Some of them might be successful. Autumn (17m 45s): Well, Jesper (17m 46s): Have you ever heard about catching lightning in a bottle? I guess not. Autumn (17m 54s): You know, there's something pure about just saying, well, he's evil, he's an asshole. This is how my character is. So we could go back to Cruella de Vil as evil characters. Sure. Yeah. That's just that's yeah. Jesper (18m 12s): No way to do an antagonist. It's just like, they're evil because they're evil. Okay, great. I like that. Wonderful. You really put a lot of thought into that one. Yeah. Autumn (18m 26s): Yeah. It would have me personally tearing my hair out because yeah. I like nuances. I like to love, especially me. I love to love my characters. I have a hard time letting them lose or Oh yeah. Jesper (18m 41s): Yeah. But that could be evil. There's nothing wrong with that. But there should be a reason for why they're doing what they're doing. They're not just doing it because it's fun to be evil. You know? That makes sense. Autumn (18m 50s): That's fun to be evil. That's like, I would love to give you that. I'll give you that. Actually I might be a super villain considering I destroy everything I touch. So, huh? No. I Jesper (18m 60s): Think we worked out that you were the Fe Autumn (19m 3s): That's true. Yes. Based on my forthcoming novel, the fake evil there's dark Fay. I wouldn't call them evil. They're just mischievous. Jesper (19m 15s): So that may be maybe your doc Phaidon Autumn (19m 17s): Might be dark. Hey. Oh, I feel outed. All right. Well, so my first one was, you know, just base your character on someone else's hard work, which is obviously you especially copyright issues and just, you should never undermine another author like that. You should never do it. So instead of basing them for my number four, instead of basing them all on someone else's characters, just based them all on you, a hundred percent, they're all just shades of you. I mean, why spend the time developing characters when you can just make them all you, when you know you, so you should be able to write the book. Isn't it? So that's my number four. Autumn (19m 58s): I think it's part. So basically Jesper (20m 1s): The characters have exactly the same traits and in dialogue, they all sound like you. Exactly the same. It's a wonderful book to read. It sounds really good. Autumn (20m 11s): Your mom and leg. Well, yeah, maybe. So that's plenty to find out if your siblings hate you or like you do, they like your book. Yeah. Jesper (20m 28s): Oh my God. Yeah. Just imagine the reviews, like from your own family members saying, I'm not sure. I quite liked the characters in this book is like what the it's me. Autumn (20m 42s): Oh yeah. So that's so there you go. I guess this is why you can never base your own characters on you because you might get really upset about what people say about them. So definitely take the time to develop your characters. You're running a massive risk. Are you going to take it personally because you should. Jesper (20m 59s): Yeah. All of a sudden the advice about not responding to one star reviews is going to be much more difficult to adhere to it. Autumn (21m 9s): Oh, okay. All right. Let's move on. Jesper (21m 12s): Why is the author so defensive about this? Karen? I don't get it. Autumn (21m 18s): Oh, I could be fun with it. Jesper (21m 20s): So number three is, well, we touched about on it slightly already. So this one, I called it being a lazy Autumn (21m 28s): Ass. I like this. Jesper (21m 29s): So some idiots could call it being smart, I guess if they're idiots, but this is basically, as you said, copying characters that you already know because Autumn (21m 40s): Readers love them. Right. So why would you want them? Jesper (21m 43s): You spend your time creating something on your own, you know, call Frodo, Modo Winstead. And he's not a habit, but he's at WARF. And maybe instead of bravery, you change that one trait into him being a wimp. Autumn (21m 58s): Otherwise he's exactly the same. Right? I don't see what's the problem. I, no, one's going to Sue you or point out that you basically copied someone else's work to create it out. You at least changed a couple of things on yours. Yeah, Jesper (22m 15s): The same. Yeah. He's called Modo. What's wrong with that. And he's a dwarf. He lives in a, in a place called hot-button, but, and maybe a slightly weird for it too. Autumn (22m 29s): But, and then he has a ring. I mean, I watch likes rings. Right. They liked jewelry sorta as the whole Hobbiton, you know, also had the, it was sorta cave. Like he just kind of emphasized that. Maybe call it Dorfan Tinder or something instead of Hobbiton Wolfington yeah. Yeah. I actually visited Harvard doing in real life. I know. I'm so jealous. I still have to get down to New Zealand. I want to go Jesper (22m 56s): To Gilda again. It's amazing. Autumn (22m 58s): Oh, Oh. Am writing fantasy work trip com. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Jesper (23m 4s): We could make a, and then we can record a podcast episode. Autumn (23m 10s): Oh, we have to find a way to do this. That would be awesome. That would be awesome to get back to this podcast and stop dreaming. But yeah. You know, your suggestion sounds vaguely familiar. Like someone else might've mentioned it a few minutes ago, so yeah. Jesper (23m 29s): I think maybe my spin on it was slightly, just slightly better. Autumn (23m 38s): You tried, you added something to it. I'm just saying. All right. So my number three is I was actually kind fun to find discover this, but there is a random character generator online. It's a UK based one. And so I, to any work you can go in there and just give me a character. And there's a few little inputs, so you can choose fantasy. You can choose hero. You can choose made, you can choose some things. And it pops out of character and Bing bang, boom, you're done. You're writing. Just go for it. Jesper (24m 12s): Did you try to run from, what does it generate? What is it? Autumn (24m 16s): I think it's like a little character sheet that, you know, almost like you would come up with some stuff like that. It gives you some traits and things too. So, you know, it comes up with some ideas, honestly, in some ways, if you, if you were truly having a hard time coming up with a story idea, I think you could possibly do this just for the fun of it. And maybe start creating a story around a character. But if you had a story in your mind and you just randomly, someone is like ripping a page out of a D and D book saying, this is my character and trying to force them into your story. I don't think it would work too well, but in its own, it was kind of like, Oh, this is, this could be actually fun. Autumn (24m 57s): It's like sitting there and rolling your dice to create a D and D character and seeing what you come up with. Jesper (25m 4s): I was almost thinking when you were saying that, that just as like a starting point, it might not be too bad an idea actually. You know, if, if you're sort of out of inspiration and what not to do, not not to use it, like it comes out of that generator, but more Autumn (25m 21s): Like just, just the starting Jesper (25m 23s): Frame of something. And then you can develop further on that. Autumn (25m 27s): Actually I have to admit, it was kind of like, I found it, I'm like, Oh, this could actually be fun because you might get ha you might get something you never would have considered before. So it's a bad idea, but it's also kind of a fun ideas. I saved the website. So yeah. If anyone wants to check it out, I mean, you can Google it, but it's just character, hyphen generator.org.uk. So shout out to them. I have never met anyone who works there or created it, but it was literally Googling it. It was the only, the only random character generator online. And it was kind of like, Oh, this is fun. This is actually really fun. So go check it out. Autumn (26m 7s): Yeah, no worries. Jesper (26m 8s): I was not aware of that one. That that's actually interesting. So yeah, when you don't know what to do in the evening, you can sit down in January. Autumn (26m 21s): This is what writers do during pandemics and lockdown. Yeah. So that's what you do when you're going in, Jesper (26m 28s): Going insane from COVID-19 and you'd just sitting dead. Any characters or, Autumn (26m 33s): Oh yeah. I've got an eye. I'm releasing a book. I'm busy. I'm good. I'm fine. Number two number, Jesper (26m 41s): But two we're getting there now. So, well, we all know that good stories are about characters, right? So you agree? I agree. I do agree. Okay. So what if the right is just love? Love, love, love, love, love me some characters. So why can't I just have a whole bunch of them. So they appear, and then they do their thing before they disappear, completely offering the States to 20 other characters that are equally doing death thing. And a then perhaps the guy from early in the book, he makes a surprise return during the climax and then whacks the bad guy over the head with a club. Jesper (27m 28s): Isn't that awesome. Autumn (27m 31s): Sure. Go ahead and write that up. Jesper (27m 33s): Well, who doesn't like characters? What do you mean? I don't get it. Everybody has characters. How many of Autumn (27m 39s): Them are point of view characters? Jesper (27m 42s): Well, all of them, they have their chapter each, right? So there's going to be 25 point of view characters and the yeah. Autumn (27m 53s): From different perspectives, I would guess. So probably a very confusing story. Oh, I had someone complained that I have like eight main characters in my fantasy trilogy. Jesper (28m 5s): I don't understand. I mean the more the merrier 35 point of view, it's probably never been done before. It's like a unique Autumn (28m 12s): I'm writing that I have to admit my mind is like, how can I organize this? This could actually work. It would be, it would be such an interesting challenge. I honestly think I need a writing intervention pitch and that I'm actually considering. Jesper (28m 28s): Yeah, you'll be surprised. Next time I send you a story for editing and it's got to be 35 characters and Yukon, a point of view character. And you're going to go back to be like, w Autumn (28m 35s): What is this? This is not what we agreed to. Jesper (28m 42s): It's just enriched the story. I made it better. Autumn (28m 45s): Why don't you get it? I don't get it. I can't imagine telling a cohesive. It reminds me, actually, this is a fun thing to actually do. But back when we could actually sit around a campfire with other living human beings, okay. And then someone would start a story and everyone would continue and carry it on. I loved of things like that. Being able to like just one person creates it and carry it on and see where you end up. That could be so much fun. I'm trying to imagine that in a narrative form, as an actual novel and through different characters, and I had had of worked out into a plot and I I'm, it's not clicking. Autumn (29m 32s): I'm sorry. I, Jesper (29m 34s): But you don't get it. This is just because it's a new level of writing. You just haven't advanced to that level yet. So you can't see it. It's just your, Autumn (29m 45s): It may be, it is. I will have to admit, I am not saying it, but I'll keep working on it and no way to you. Wait till you see there now next storyline. I hand you something to be afraid of. Jesper (29m 60s): Indeed. Now I can sleep tonight. Autumn (30m 5s): All right. Jesper (30m 5s): So what is number two, Autumn (30m 8s): Number two. That's where we're at. I got totally lost and trying to figure out how to plot a 35 point of view for this one. I thought taking it to your near and dear. So instead of basing the characters on yourself, or just randomly basing it on your friends and family, you should do a little bit of research here and ask your friends, your family, your roommates, your dorm hall, to take personality tests, and then use the results for characters. I think it could be fun that you could just base them all on people, you know, and the people you don't like you could accidentally kill off. It's very cathartic that Jesper (30m 45s): Way. And you're going to keep the names as well. Autumn (30m 52s): We arranged the letters, maybe a little bit. Steve could become that's or that's me Tebow. There's some options there. It's using real life techniques and real life people. Your characters should be feel real. What is more real than using, you know, people, you know, to create your characters. Yeah. Jesper (31m 24s): It was just what I was about to say, at least your characters will be complex and they will have depth that's for sure. But I think you might run a pretty big risk in getting very unpopular with certain people. Autumn (31m 35s): I might have to change the names a little bit, but yeah, I think Steven, you know, your coworkers, the ones you don't get along with my, pick it up. Maybe you don't have to put your boss in there. That's that's just like the worst idea. Don't be like, use your crush as the love interest. That's rewarding. Isn't that you can blog. Okay. Jesper (32m 4s): Or maybe they feel like you're a stalker or something discrete, or actually wrote it in a book as well. Autumn (32m 12s): But then if you break up, you can take care of that. Then this next book in this series, that's the next book in the series. I can see my dragon. Jesper (32m 23s): Nah, it sounds like it's going to be a very boring you. Well then the character went to grocery shopping and then got home. Did the dinner. It's just a really boring book about everyday life. Autumn (32m 36s): You need to change it to grocery shopping. That's getting supplies. So they could be going to the Jesper (32m 42s): Dragon at the shop. Autumn (32m 44s): Oh, you know those kids you'd never know. They could be a hoard of angry slobbery dwarves coming to attack you I'd be running, screaming Jesper (32m 56s): Behind the Friesa case. Came to 20 angry towards Autumn (33m 3s): Oh yeah. Hmm. Could work. Okay. Jesper (33m 11s): Okay. This one is gonna blow your mind. Autumn (33m 13s): I need let's go for it. Jesper (33m 16s): Yeah. Th this is definitely the winner. It's just like, doesn't get any better than this one. Number one, I tell you this one, I called make beep up. So a beep might be re B might be representing a word that starts with S Autumn (33m 37s): Okay. I could have beeped you for you, but all right. Seems fair. Okay. Okay. Jesper (33m 44s): So this is the attitude saying, I don't think it matters one bit what my character's motivations are or how about what their goals are. People are not complex at all. It's actually not that hard. You should just make up things as you go along. Character development, all that nonsense. It is something made up by stupid people who wants to sound smart, like the hosts of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Autumn (34m 20s): Hey, so, so yeah. No character arcs, nothing. You just, Jesper (34m 24s): No. No. Why do you need that? Autumn (34m 29s): Okay. Jesper (34m 30s): Yeah, but I mean, you're making it too complicated. You just want some characters who go out and do crazy stuff, all kinds of things happening. The End. Right? It's a good story. You don't need all that. And then he was sad about blah, blah, blah. And all the touchy feelings. I mean, what do you don't need? All that. It's not, it's basically Conan the barbarian. Right? We just talked about how awesome it is. Autumn (34m 56s): Hey, I didn't get along with, I have a chip tooth from Conan. The barbarian I'll have, you know, Jesper (35m 1s): But you see how memorable it was. Huh? You still remembered because the chip tooth, Autumn (35m 7s): I had an emotional support. Yeah. Jesper (35m 11s): It's just much better. Instead of all this, a smarty pants, right? Advice about making a complex coaters no, just plain old Megadog as you go along. And if it, for example, suits the story, then all of a sudden the couch is a, is an angry villain who decides to do something really, really bad because it makes the more exciting Autumn (35m 39s): Than that's what happens. So it's kind of like a mad cap extravaganza. Just throw it out, make up stuff as you go. Right. That's the whole point of storytelling. It sounds in its own way. A fun way of writing, but odd. Hey, I honestly think I've read a few stories like this and I don't think I gave them a very high review. What? This just like sitting around the campfire and then somebody is telling a very, very good story. And I get you, you just remember how wonderful it was that summer evening when Steve or Steven was telling this, this really cool story. Autumn (36m 20s): And you still remember 20 years later, it's just like amazing. It's like the best of storytelling. This is exactly how to do it. I don't, yeah, this is the window for sure. But see if you can talk me then with your number one, I doubt it. But I have to admit, I don't think my number one is nearly as much fun as that one because I have to mix mine was I was trying to think of something random, kind of easy. And I happened to have been gifted a long time ago, this like four inch dictionary. That's leather bound and gold leaf. I mean, it's, it's gorgeous. It's a, it's a gorgeous dictionary. Even though like probably half the words have the butter day words are not even in it anymore. Autumn (37m 3s): It's old. But I was just thinking, you know what? You just flip that open, pick a word, do it again. And you pick out you don't 10 20 words and you make a character out of whatever random words you land on. Just okay. Yeah. Well, if, if it's a story about an insane, insane asylum, I think that will be fine. I think we'll see. You could, again, this is sort of like the random character generator. You could come up with something you never would have expected you land on like expeditious or study. Definitely grades. So I'm schizophrenia, lunatics. That's I, you know, I, I, it might work really well with your number one because they all sounded a little bit like, look at six, two B roll. Autumn (37m 50s): No, no, no, no. Not at all. I mean, my number one was about creating excitement and taking the story where we be following the story where it takes you. Right. That was my number one. And letting the characters completely different. Sure. Well, I'll just agree with you. I think I have to admit though, your number one, would I swear, I have read books like that, where the character just change from one chapter to the next. And I'm like, is this name on, is this the same name on a different character? Autumn (38m 32s): Maybe did it a sense of replacement made a mistake? I have wondered that at times I honestly have, Oh God. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think I am actually, I have to, I hate to admit it, but I am still stuck on 35 point of view. Normal. It just kind of tickles me. I don't know why, but I actually have to admit, I kind of like your list. These are some really horrible ways of creating characters. What I, what do you mean horrible? Autumn (39m 13s): It's it's about following your muse, right? It's taking just follow the story. Don't give a shit about all those writing advice stuff, you know, go with the story goes. Yeah. Once you make me want to take my lap. Well, maybe not my laptop, a borrowed laptop, because I tend to destroy everything to a good bar, have a nice glass of scotch on the rocks and just start writing like a mad woman and see what comes out. Totally inspired me. I, I, I be grudgingly admit, I think you win this one. Yes. I said it in the beginning. And so it is true. Autumn (39m 53s): I, yeah. I think your character creation, you have totally devoted a authentic way of creating some really crazy characters. Oh. So you're telling me that winning this one actually means that I'm the worst. I'm not sure that this is not where I wanted it to go. Really? You should see the gold star I made for you. Damn. I don't want that. No. No. Okay. I think we need to get back to some more serious talk next week. This, this is, well, I make a point on my board, but I don't know. Maybe we actually, we should stop making a point board because I don't know. Autumn (40m 36s): I must be in delete though. I must be. You keep telling yourself that I think this one deck, this one deducts points from your board. So keep that in mind. No. Now I'll just end the podcast because this is getting too much now. Okay. So next Monday we are discussing bookstagram. And if influences are helpful to your book sales, Narrator (41m 4s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am. Writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

You've finished the first draft of your novel. GREAT! Now, how do you tackle edits? We've got you covered. In this episode, we discuss the pros and cons of different editing methods, take a peek at how Autumn runs her edits, and what you can do if you really aren't a fan of editing (like Jesper). Check out the Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Guide before enrollment closes on March 7th! Head over to https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/main/. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 114 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is one off Autumn's favorite Topics. And for me, not so much. Autumn (48s): That's fair enough though. I have to admit, I have been so up to my nose and edits recently that maybe it's not quite as favorite as it is at other times of the year. Jesper (59s): No. Okay. Fair enough. Well, we're going to talk about how to edit your novel today. So hopefully that'll prove very helpful for listeners. Yes, I think so. And I definitely, the first time I said was editing, I was a mess and I didn't know where to start. And I think a lot of re writers they're really good at writing, but they don't know how to tackle edits in an organized way. That is the most efficient and I love efficiency. So this should be a good topic. I hope. Yeah, for sure. But how have things been over the last week? Have you broken anything, any websites or computers you have messed up coding? That's so not fair. Jesper (1m 40s): A question. Oh, it's bad. I did to finish up that story. I did get my laptop back from the Apple Replair repair place and they ended up, I think if I hadn't had stickers on the back of my laptop, they would have just given me a whole new whole new laptop, but they took off my old screen, put it on a whole new base and I have new batteries, a new logic board, a new video graphic card. I have everything but more memories. Autumn (2m 7s): So because they refuse to upgrade the memory in the year of computer I have, but I have all my files. And so my laptop is working famously and I love it. I love the new keyboard. The old keyboard was crap. So I actually enjoy typing on this one, which is kind of nice for a novelist, but yeah, everything was going smoothly and I was catching up on work. And then our hosting agency for the websites got hacked and luck knock on wood. I happened to have been in there almost the exact same time it happened. And all they had done was just changed a few emails, you know, kind of weasel in through a few back doors. Autumn (2m 50s): And my husband and I spent the next three days blocking cleaning and upgrading and updating and doing a whole bunch of stuff. And that kind of like it was book, I'm a writer. I thought I was like a cyber stalker worm killer. I don't know. It was just a nightmare. It's just not our month. It's my year. I keep thinking about your comment that said, you know, now, you know what your characters feel like. And I'm like, I feel like the main character in someone's favorite novel right now, because it's just, as soon as I get a chance to catch my breath. Whew. Right on the roller coaster again. Autumn (3m 29s): Oh my goodness. Hopefully you'll get a break tonight where I feel so bad for my characters. Now, if this is like, if it's like, I should just come with a warning, this is to not touch, may break something very quickly. So yeah. So that's my life. How are you doing? I hope it's calm over there. Jesper (3m 55s): Well, yeah, compared to all the rest of the world, luckily enough, you're the one dealing with those issues, even though it's a, of course also my issue with such, but you're dealing with it, so I don't have to worry about it. So I guess while you were doing all of that, I finished up watching Vikings. So on HBO, that sounds horrible. Autumn (4m 18s): Don't tell me how it is. I haven't finished it yet. We're still watching it. It's one of our rotations. So it's taking forever to get through the last episodes. Jesper (4m 27s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But by the time this episode airs, I will have posted a video in our Facebook group for readers sharing my thoughts about the show. I'm not going to do any spoilers or anything like that, but, but I, I just thought I, I would talk a bit about the endings without any spoilers, but more like the idea about it. Because I mentioned, I think I'm one of the quite recent podcast episodes as well. I mentioned the ending of game of Thrones and I know, well, we have a lot of haters on the internet about that show, but, but I was mentioning quite recently how I liked that they wrapped up each character arc very well in game of Thrones. Jesper (5m 11s): Yes they did. And I, and I was very pleased that they actually did the same thing here. So I liked it. Oh, good. Yeah. Very good. Ending to the six seasons. As far as I know that I'm not going to do any more episodes. I don't think that they at least, so I think this is the end of the series as a whole. And I actually think they left it in a good place. So I was very positive about DHEA, the ending of it all that gives me something to look forward to unless I break the TV. Well, yes, you might want your husband to turn on the persona, press play and stuff like that. Autumn (5m 49s): He won't let me have the remote at this point. I'm surprised I'm allowed in the kitchen. Jesper (5m 54s): Yeah. Or even on a podcast. Autumn (5m 55s): At least the podcast is still recording it's because you're hosting. Jesper (6m 0s): Oh, right. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. But as I said, I'm going to share some thoughts in the Facebook group and well, this is of course the Redis group we have on Facebook. But if any of the listeners should be interested in that, just search for fans of immersive fantasy among the Facebook groups. And you will find one that is called fans of immersive fantasy Redis club for the world of Elysium. Yeah. So that's what it's called. Autumn (6m 27s): Yeah. That's us. Jesper (6m 29s): So you're welcome to join if you want, but to keep in mind that this is a group for fiction readers. So we do not share any kind of author advice or any of the other usual stuff. You, you, you get in the am writing fantasy, our Facebook group. So it's a very different compared to that one, but you're welcome to join. Of course, if you're interested. Autumn (6m 51s): Absolutely. Narrator (6m 51s): Oh, a week on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast Jesper (6m 58s): First, can I just mention that something came across all over my Facebook feed? So I don't know if you noticed, but the Jeff Bezos announced a quite here recently that he was stepping down as the CEO of Amazon. Did you notice that? Autumn (7m 18s): I, yes. Adam told me about it. My husband. Jesper (7m 22s): Right. And then of course, I don't know if we authors are just like Chronicle worried about all kinds of things. I don't know. But then I noticed some posts on my feet where some authors were concerned now because when Jeff Beto started out Amazon, it was like an online bookstore that he started. So he, and we know he likes books and then people starting to get concerned that, well, if Jeff is gone, then he's the guy who loves the books. What will then, will that end up having some sort of effect on KDP? So what do you think about that? Autumn (8m 5s): I'm not a worrier. And so I read it to me. It's always been Amazon might not. It won't. I mean, there's just no way. It's always going to be the number one place to buy books. Things will change. And that's why you should build your own fan base and mailing lists. Because if Amazon went belly up tomorrow, that way you'd still have a way of reaching readers, you know, that's very true, indeed. Jesper (8m 29s): I honestly think it matters absolutely nothing. It's not going to change anything that Jeff Bezos is not the CEO anymore. I really don't think so. I think the readers are so active and it's a part of Amazon that unless it was making, unless it was losing money, they wouldn't cut it off. Autumn (8m 49s): No, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever. And it's just one of those things that can we please stop worrying about all kinds of stuff that doesn't really matter. It's just the unnecessary spend of your mental capacity and resources. It's a, Oh my God. I don't know if we authors or just a worried bunch in general, but it's just, Oh, I wouldn't. Jesper (9m 12s): I was not laughing at the post because obviously somebody is truly worried, so it was not, but I was more like, ah, Jesus, can we, can we move on a bit instead? Autumn (9m 23s): It's not like chicken little, the sky is falling. The sky is falling about every new thing. I just, I'm not a worrier about things like that. I'm much a wait and see kind of person. So I will monitor the trends, but I'm not, I'm not exclusive to Amazon. So I'm not that worried. Jesper (9m 43s): No true. But all right there, the really big thing that we needed to mention here instead is that for the first time in six months we have our online writing course open. Autumn (9m 55s): Yes. Whew. I always love it. When the ultimate fantasy writer's guide is open again. It's still my little baby. Jesper (10m 3s): Yeah. So I have a very short testimonial sunk clip from past students that I want to play now. And then maybe afterward, you can explain a bit about what the course is about open. Autumn (10m 13s): I will try to explain, you know, how my week's going. Jesper (10m 16s): Oh, well that's true. Unless your internet breaks by the time I've played this. Okay. Well, here it goes. Catherine (10m 31s): Hi everyone. I'm Catherine. I'm currently working my way through the ultimate fantasy writers guide and I've been finding it very helpful. One of my main problems has been plotting. I had a very hard time getting my plot to go through and have continuity after going through the workshops for the plotting section I have now got a full plot and have begun writing. It has been very helpful for me and I'm sure you will find it very helpful too. Thanks. Jan (11m 3s): Hi, I'm Jan B read fantasy author and I just watched autumn bread's launch day module. It was a really informative, had a lot of great information. She had ideas I had never thought of before really excited to implement her ideas and launching my own book. I highly recommend the ultimate fantasy writer's guide because it's one of the best programs I've ever seen. It not only covers pretty much everything about writing from start to finish, including fan bases and staying confident and everything. It also has things like languages and naming your characters based on that. Jan (11m 47s): And it has Map making it. It's just so excellent. Jesper (11m 57s): Map-making that's just like, Oh, I love my, Autumn (12m 2s): I, yeah, we both have that. That's what brought us together almost as fantasy maps. So that's how we first really started talking. So go figure. Jesper (12m 11s): Yeah. So maybe you can share a bit about what's in this course. Autumn (12m 16s): Sure. Well, it's 12 modules and the first six, the first half are all about writing from everything, from idea development to characters and world-building magic rules from magic. So this is a four, it is designed for fantasy author. So I made it, you know, we made it so that it would go this way. Cause you've definitely helped me on it. After my initial attempt, you've gone through it all as well. And after that, it goes, it breaks down the actual writing process into writing the beginning, writing the middle, you know, the mushy middle and writing the end and the components that go into each of those areas. And there's just some advanced writing tips. So those first six modules are really all about how to write. Autumn (12m 58s): But if you're a self-published author, you know, writing is literally only half of the game. So the other six modules are all about building fans about editing, huh? That's today's topic today on a podcast where you go, how to make time and stay motivated. Because if you're working, if you have kids, if you have a family that's, that's its own issue and then you know, other platforms and what are the funny, I still remember the, one of the questions when I upload it up loading my debut novel born of water was that, you know those questions on Amazon and how do you answer them into my really answering them correctly? The first time you go through it, it is definitely like, Oh shoot, you don't know what to do. Autumn (13m 41s): So it goes through all of those questions and what you need to know have do when you go to upload and how to launch your book, launch it to fans, how to get reviews and how to take all of that. If you want to keep going and make an career, make an author platform, an author brand and talks about that. So it really steps you through, from having an idea to having a platform all in one course, because I wanted, I was tired of all these places that just like buy this one here, buy that one there. And then they often contradict each other. No, it's, it's all in one course, one voice it'll get you there. Steadily shortly has as long as it takes you to get through it all. Jesper (14m 22s): Yeah. And the courses online as well. It is self-paced so you can do it from the safety of your home. And I think these days that's pretty good. Autumn (14m 32s): I love, I have loved that. We do have a live component. We have the student Q and a every month and I really just, I love it. I love seeing students and hearing about what they're doing and what they're writing. It's just a total perk me up kind of day. Jesper (14m 48s): Absolutely. And it's also the first course we created, which means that over the years we've had out of quite a few bonus modules to the cost. So you will get access to those too. And as well, I should mention that there is a 30 day money back guarantee. No questions asked. So if you don't like the course after purchasing it, you just let us know and we will get you a refund and we're not going to ask why or anything. We'll just refund your money. And it's simple as that. Yes, I exactly, I it's, you can't lose by trying it out and seeing if it's gonna work for you. And I really hope it does because it is full of everything that has made a difference in my writing my career and how things have gone and why I'm a full-time author now. Jesper (15m 32s): So I hope it helps you to. Yeah. So we've included a link to the course in the show notes. So if this is something that you think will be useful for you, you need to go and check that out, but you have to be quick about it though, because we're closing the course for another six months a week after this episode airs. So you'll need to get in before the seventh of much. Otherwise it's going to be closed again. So yeah, don't tell you around or whatever you say, dilly dally do not delete Allie, come and join us. Narrator (16m 12s): Today's topic. Autumn (16m 15s): So editing. Jesper (16m 18s): Yeah. You sound much more enthusiastic already than I do. Narrator (16m 22s): Well, I want to start with a quote. One of my favorite quotes is definitely having ways. It is a write drunk, edit sober. I just love that one. And it is very true because writing tipsy can help the flow of creativity. But when it comes to editing, you need to have a clear head. I don't think it's very healthy though. Long-term drinking well. Jesper (16m 48s): Yeah. Okay. But if you get tipsy, if, I mean, there was the other advice that you should write every day. So if you're getting tips, I think is probably not the best of combinations. Autumn (16m 58s): I think pirates would make really good writers. Jesper (17m 1s): Oh yes. Maybe actually they would make good writers. Vikings would be excellent writers. Autumn (17m 8s): Yeah. There you go. See, you just need to find the right audience. Jesper (17m 14s): Yeah. That might actually be true. But I was thinking that maybe we could go through some different ways. One can edit a novel and maybe she has some pros and cons on the different approaches or absolutely. Autumn (17m 28s): And I definitely, I mean, for me, I wanted to share to like my organization, how I see it as different layers and different levels because by doing that, you can refine it without wasting too much time. Jesper (17m 42s): So I think those are important too, but let's I want it. Autumn (17m 44s): So you found some different types or topics of editing? Jesper (17m 49s): Well, more like some different ways of doing it, I guess more so I could think of four different ways and there might be a bit of overlap in them too, to some degree, I guess. But yeah, the first one I had was basically edit as you go. And this is certainly not something I recommend doing, but I guess the pro of doing that is that once the manuscript is done, it's done now. Autumn (18m 27s): Yeah. That's it that's pretty nice. I always, there was a writer I knew when I had my previous job as a conservationist and when I went to visit him and we talked to was a comfort, you know, we I'd worked with soils and plants and things. And so he would put it in terms. He thought I would understand. He he's like in the, in the gardener in the morning, I, I go and tend, you know, I plant my vegetables and in the afternoon I weed. So that was, he did edit as he goes in the morning, he would write in the afternoon he would edit. And I always say, well, that's a fun way of doing it. But I also think he was non-fiction. And so I think it's easier. But with fiction, I, there are times we just had this discussion in the am writing fantasy group. Autumn (19m 9s): Cause we, this was a recent post and there are times, and there are people who do edit as they write. I think that you would have to be a good plotter so that, you know, you're not wasting your time editing something that you're going to end up cutting, but it's so much easier to edit something written. Jesper (19m 27s): Yeah. And th that was also the con I have with this one is basically that you do run the risk that let's say you get to chapter 35 and then you figure out, Oh, shoot, I need to change something back in chapter 20, which is now fully edited. So you put in the man hours to, to do the editing and now you have to go back and change this, which means you have to edit it again. So, and let's say that maybe you haven't plotted that well, so you have a bit of a mess on your hand, which then means that by chapter eight and 11 and 14 and 17 and 18 and so on, there's stuff you need to correct. Yeah. You're going to spend quite a lot of time re editing the same stuff again after changing it. Jesper (20m 11s): So I'm not a hundred percent fan of this approach. So I must admit no. Autumn (20m 16s): Well, I, I really try to avoid it. There's times I will go back and edit in. Like I recently realized I was missing a point of view of a character that I really thought when I realized it was important as three quarters of the way through the novel. So I had to go back and add like two or three chapters in that was editing. And sometimes there's just like, I realized that there's something that's wrong and I just need to get it right. Or it's not flowing correctly. So I'll go and edit. But in general, I just leave myself notes and I wait until I go through my first layer Jesper (20m 48s): Of editing before I go and tackle real edits, the true edits. Otherwise I just, just leave notes for yourself. I have a whole folder in Scrivener. That's just editing notes of things. I want to go back in and change, or I do it where I go and it's available through it's there so that I can go back and, you know, put it like right in the Scrivener file, right in the chapter. I need to go in edit. I'll just add a comment or a note saying, Hey, add this into. Autumn (21m 20s): Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Jesper (21m 23s): I, I also feel like, I mean, I don't know why I've burnt my burned myself and learn my lessons. And if not, when I got like 50 K words into the first book I wrote and then figured out that I had to digital thing, just imagine if I hit as, Oh my God. Plus I would say that Maybe it doesn't matter too much if you're very seasoned, but at least when you're starting out, I think there's a lot of value in completing something. Yes. And if you're editing as you go, it takes you forever to complete that manuscript. Whereas if you just push through and get a bit of a messy draft done, at least you got something done. Jesper (22m 9s): And then I think you said it before. Autumn (22m 10s): Right. Jesper (22m 11s): Then you can start going back into something you actually have, but, but it just that the art of, or the experience of proving to yourself that you can finish a first draft. There's a lot of value in that. And for that alone, I would almost say, don't edit as you go. Autumn (22m 30s): Yeah. I, my, I completely concur, especially for your first few novels. Don't don't do it. Don't get yourself trapped in the editing and not finishing finish and then edit it's. One of the things say we teach in the guide is, you know, right. The goal is actually to write for a short, bad book, just a short, bad manuscript. Maybe it should be just write it and then add to it and then enhance it because that is, it's much more possible. It's easier to do when you have something there and you see the whole story arc, all the characters when you have it all there. And you're like, Oh, that's how it ends. Well, now I got to go fix the beginning and that's fine. But yeah, playing the devil's advocate when you and I write together, technically you write and I go back through and I'm writing and editing, but this is like, you know, it's like book 24 for me. Autumn (23m 22s): I'm not that. And you're up in the tens now too. So we have it all plotted out so that we can actually work together and stay on the same path. So I'm not that worried about what we're doing, but that's an exception. I will say that because technically I am, it's already written though. You wrote it, but I'm writing in editing at the same time. Jesper (23m 43s): Yeah. But I, in that case, I would almost, because there's a difference between sitting and writing the first draft. Let's see. Okay. Yeah. I sit down, I write my chapter one and then I go back and I edit my entire chapter one. And then I write chapter two when I go back and edit chapter two and so on all the way through. Right. But what you're getting, you're getting a full book basically. I mean the entire first draft is there when you get it from me. So yes, you are editing as you go. And of course you will also writing in the chapters and you are adding to it, but, but the novel is there. So to speak of the bones of it. Jesper (24m 23s): Is there already? Autumn (24m 25s): Yes. So it's sort of a different process. Jesper (24m 28s): Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. Well, somebody can judge us on that. That's Okay. Autumn (24m 33s): If you want to, we can take it easily after the week I've had please judge me on my writing techniques or my editing techniques. That's fine. All right. So what's the next one that you have as a method? Jesper (24m 49s): Yeah, the next one I had was I'm doing a content edit and then afterwards doing all the like grammar would copy editing and so on and so on. Right. So basically what I mean by that is doing multiple passes over it. And the, the upside of doing that is that you're going to end up with a very thorough editing because you have been over the manuscript several times, which means that you should, at least in theory have covered all your basis once you've gone over the last pass. So in the beginning passes, you are not worrying about incorrect commerce or finding the perfect word or stuff like that. Jesper (25m 33s): You, you just making sure that the character arcs are there, the stories working and so on, and then you worry about those things in a, in a future pass. So doing that at least. Yeah. I think it's, it gives a very, very good end result. The con is that it can take quite some time to go through it over and over again in different passes. I just, Autumn (25m 56s): I agree. I don't think it takes too much time that's because this is my favorite method and it is what I do when I'm writing by myself. The first thing I do is a content edit that usually begins by reading through the entire book, almost as fast as I can, like as if I was a, a reader, but also taking really not meticulous, but really good notes that very specific, like the point of view, the plotting phase, I, cause I know the editor will need it eventually new words and names. I talk about what happens in the plot because I have my initial plot, what I think is going to happen. And then I have what actually does end up happening in the story I use, you know, the census use to make sure that I'm covering all the senses. Autumn (26m 40s): I write a very detailed what needs worked and I'm pretty on myself there. And since then I've started opening, you know, my opening hooks, closing hooks to make sure they're varied, making sure that the opening paragraph does, you know, anchored little touches like that. Do I have the setting? The point of view is all that in there. And that is just literally the first round. And after that I go into the ones who are under the, what needs work. I find the ones that are like, Oh my God, this is horrible. What were you thinking? You idiot. And I go and I fix everything in those. And then I start on the going through and doing a coal pass of fixing up everything. And then usually I do one more pass at is more the grammar writing punctuation. Autumn (27m 24s): That's usually using at this point, like a grammarly or pro writing aid or something like that. And then I send it to the editor. I used to do eight to 10 passes. So now I've gotten it down to like three to four. I think I'm doing, I have my book. I still remember. I've told you this one before, but I've had readers ask how do you remember that such and such has happened? I'm like, I have read this book 25 times before you've ever even see it. It is ingrained. Plus I have a semi photographic memory. So it's just like between the two, if I forgotten something I'm so disappointed in myself. Jesper (27m 60s): Well, at least, at least for me with English, not being my mother tongue and stuff, stuff like that, you know, it's doing multiple passes. It takes a long time And I know I'm not the only one writing in English, even though it's not my mother tongue. I mean, I know we have listeners, I can see it in the, in the podcast that we have listeners for from many, many different places. So there are certainly other people who is in the same situation. And I think that they will, hopefully I hope sympathize with me in the sense that the less passive Autumn (28m 41s): And I think a lot of people, I am surprised. I think there's in my mindset is definitely organization and structure and the, I thrive on that. And so the multiple pace passes to me feel good because I'm actually going through, like, I can do three or four chapters a day. I feel like I'm making huge progress. I go, boom, boom, boom. I'm through the whole book. I started again and do the whole thing. And like two weeks later, I've completely two, three weeks. I've gone through the whole book and I think it's fine. I don't, I even when I'm writing them that way, if I'm in the same chapter for two to three days, I feel like the chapter is never going to end. I usually just do a summary and I skip ahead because I cannot stand to sit there on the same thing for day after day after day. Autumn (29m 25s): I like lots of irons in the fire. I like getting through things. So it works well for me because it's very fast. Lots of facets. Jesper (29m 33s): Yeah. That's funny you say that because actually for me, it's sort of the opposite in the sense that if I have to go back to the same again, I feel it really annoying. It's like, I'm not moving ahead. I'm not getting anywhere because now I'm at the same chapter again. So I really like to, it might be done, but I'd like to do one chapter and then it is done because then I'm not going back to that chapter. I know I can tick it off my to-do list and I know it's gone, whereas going back and redoing it, I don't know. It annoys me. Well, I don't like editing in the hall, but it's true. Autumn (30m 15s): I mean, every author is different and that's why even writing courses and everything else could be. So you've got to figure out all the advice and figure out what works for you, because that is going to what helps you flourish as a writer and as an editor. And obviously some authors are never going to be fantastic editors. They might need to go through a much more in depth hiring an editor that can handle more than just punctuation or, I mean, I tend to go through just proofreading. I don't really need a content edit. I don't need someone. Who's going to pick out too many awkward sentences. I know which ones at this point are pretty bad. I just need a proofreader. But other authors are going to want to have maybe a different level, have a beta reader, an alpha reader to help them develop some things that they would miss otherwise because they just, they don't have that editor instinct. Jesper (31m 7s): No. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So my next one is very similar, but it is more like instead of doing multiple passes, you just go in one, pass over the entire thing. But the thing is here and that this is where, I mean, there might be a bit of overlap with the ones that I already mentioned. Right. But because to some extent, we talked about editing as you go. We also talk talked about doing the multiple passes, but, but basically for this one to work, and this is to be honest, my preferred way of editing, but first to work, you have to have a pretty thorough outline. Jesper (31m 52s): So that can be no plot holes. That can be no character arcs ending up in nowhere, all of a sudden and stuff like that. Right? So you have to have it so that you can basically as a, well, I sort of alluded to it to it a second ago, but you can edit a chapter at a time and you know, that once you're done with that, it is done. Meaning that once I get to chapter 25, I'm not going to discover something that requires me to go back to chapter eight and, and redo some part of that. So you can understand that for this to work, the outline has to be very, very solid, right? So it also means that you are going to spend some more time in the outlining phase because you have to work out all the well, should we just call them different things, but you need to make sure that there is nothing that is missing or something that is inconsistent and stuff like that. Jesper (32m 47s): But if you do that, then you are gonna basically be able to edit the entire manuscript one chapter at a time. And as soon as you're done with the chapter, you're not going to see it again. And yeah, that's my preferred way of doing it because I hate redoing chapters again and again and again, but to some extent is probably also why I don't like editing in the first place because once I've gotten the story out of my head and onto the page, I really don't want to visit it again now. So Autumn (33m 20s): That seems fair enough. And I think this one though, you'd, if you're a pantser, this one is possible. If you do what I said first, if you do that first read through, take notes on everything that happens and, you know, get your, even, like I said, the new words and names or your setting, get all that information to a spreadsheet, a table. See, it's make sure everything needs sense. So, you know, make sure that at that point, if you're are, then you'd go back and look at your plot, make sure everything's fine. Put in your notes of what needs to be fixed. And then start doing the chapter one chapter two, chapter three, and just finish each one as you go. So if you didn't plot it in the first place, if you basically plot it on the second on the backend and then fix it, you could still do it as just like, basically, I don't know if you call that first one, a pass or just a read through. Autumn (34m 7s): It's not really, you're not editing, you're just taking notes, but it helps you, especially. I mean, I remember the first time, I mean, I know with you to the F ignoring the debut novel, which for everyone takes more than a year, unless you really know what you're doing with writing. So go to your second novel. It, it still took me about our year to write rule of fire and edit it. And so when you go back to that chapter, number one, you're like, Oh, I haven't seen this for a while and you need to reread it before you can really tackle, edits, even if you've plotted it. Because sometimes you're just like, Oh gosh, I can't remember what I even wrote there. So it feels good to do that. Read through, get yourself organized and then tackle your edits chapter by chapter. Autumn (34m 50s): You can certainly do this. Jesper (34m 55s): Hmm. Yeah. Well, or you can find somebody to do the editing for you. Autumn (35m 1s): I would say that's true. But I definitely, I have worked, have worked with slash seen something that literally looked like someone had written and then sent off to an editor and it didn't even have the dialogue tags don't do that. Don't don't, don't, don't don't ever do that, go through your work and at least put in like the quotation marks and things like that. Jesper (35m 24s): Yeah. It was probably my delivery that wasn't too. I was trying to make it feel fair to say that you get a writing partner and then you get her to do the editing and then you don't have this problem anymore. Autumn (35m 36s): That's true. Hmm. I wasn't actually implying, Oh, Hey, I've started to rethink this. No, absolutely not. I do enjoy writing with you and editing. So that's fair enough. Yeah. Well, Jesper (35m 55s): As usually we're lucky that we're good at different things. Yeah. Autumn (35m 58s): Yes. That's very true. And if I found that it's too right, I still have my own back-burner projects going on. Jesper (36m 7s): Right. Yeah. That's true. The last thing is not really a fourth way of doing it, to be honest, it's probably more like an add on thing. And I can't say too much about it because obviously I'm not the one editing I want, wanted to put it in here, just because then maybe you could add a bit about how you do it, but this is basically like whether you're doing it as a one go or you do several passes and then this part is about it's incorporated into one of those passes. That's up to you. Right. But what I mean is that it's the use of software. So like pro writing aid, we tested out Pictionary, we tested out autocrat. Jesper (36m 50s): And actually we might dive in deeper with these particular tools in future episodes and do a deep dive with them, but more on a high level note, you know, how do you make use of software to help you during editing? Yeah. Autumn (37m 2s): Oh, that sounds good because that's definitely, I mean, I've always used Grammarly, but I've recently I ran through AutoCrit and Fictionary and Pro Writing Aid and came up with some pros and cons on a winner. So I definitely think there's some, some things that can be added by using this level and one of them, and that would be sort of my add on to your ad then dumb number three is that you need to find a way of not seeing what you think you wrote, but what you actually put on the page. Oh, AI using the something, a software that can go through and like, say, Hey you did you really mean this word? Autumn (37m 46s): Or this is a homonym or you're missing the here having something to do that is useful. And you can do that with something like pro writing aid or you can, they say changing the font size or the text size changing, reading backwards. That was always one of my favorite ones because by reading it and reverse you, don't literally starting at the end paragraph and reading backwards. I usually go paragraph by paragraph, you don't get caught up in the story. And that is the one thing you do not want to do when you're, if you're doing a really intense, final editing round is don't get caught up in your own writing. You have to see the words. You have to see how many times you repeat the same word, because it is a writer's natural habit that when you use one word that you're like, Oh, that's clever. Autumn (38m 30s): Your mind is like sticks in your mind and you will use it two or three times on that same page. And you don't want to do that. You want to change things out. You want to find the source. So you want to find a better description, something different, a different sense you can use. And you can do that by going backwards or reading a loud or bigger text something. Yeah. Jesper (38m 48s): Loaded on Kindle. I actually quite liked that because when you move the medium on which you read away, you know, away from the computer away from Scribner, wherever it is that you wrote it and onto a different device, for example, on the Kindle, you will automatically read it slightly different because you know, on the Kindle you normally read your books. So your mind set when reading the words is different. Yes. So I quite like that trick as well to just sort of cheat your own mind and put it on Kindle. And then you can just, of course you can just highlight whatever, stay on your Kendall that you'd want to correct or something you can make highlights and notes on the Kindle as well. Jesper (39m 30s): So that's not really a problem, but I think it helps you spot things that you necessarily not necessarily would have seen in Scribner. We use Scrivener as an example here as your writing tool. Autumn (39m 43s): Yes. I agree. And it's you need to do something. Some people, you know, this is where they say, well, let it sit for three months. Well, in today's publishing world, I mean, especially if you're trying to be a career author, you don't usually have three months. You can let something you edited and is just about ready to be published. CIT, most readers kind of want to get it. So yeah, it's probably going to be something you're going to have to find a way of fooling yourself unless it happened to be book one of a trilogy and you've edited everything and then you're going to go back and release them back to back. Jesper (40m 17s): Yeah. But do you use the software as its own kind of pass or do you do it during the other passes that you do? I have Autumn (40m 28s): Using it as basically the third pass. So I usually go through my quick read through with all my notes. I go through a second round where I'm fixing everything in the notes and doing a lot more constructive. Story-building maybe bringing out the census things that I think are, are more creative. And when I'm ready to do the proofreading, the store is sorta like, when did I repeat this word too many times the mortar more technical, then I'll use something like a software, because at that point, my mind is more on the technical aspect and not the pretty word or the story building or the plotting. I know all of that is solid. I just need to look at word choice at that point or commerce. Autumn (41m 12s): And it's literally, I supposedly left-brain right-brain is not really a thing, but to me it's left brain right brain. So when I have switched over to these sheer technical side, it's I don't have to worry about the creative side anymore, unless I'm trying to choose sumptuous over delightful or something like that. Jesper (41m 31s): Right. Okay. Well, very good. Is there more on your process there that you want to share? Otherwise? I think I have a bit of a conclusion for us. Yeah, no, I think I've covered sort of how I do my process. So I think, you know, hopefully it gives someone some tips that there are many ways of editing about the only wrong way. The one we don't recommend is to do it literally as you're writing, especially if you haven't even finished the chapter, don't start editing and doubting yourself, especially if you're using it to just never finished because you don't think it's good enough. That's not the point of editing. If you're starting to do it as an undermining technique technique, and only you don't know if you're doing it that way. Autumn (42m 12s): If you have that little writer's voice and the doubt creeping in saying, that's not good enough, you've got to keep working on it. You got to keep worrying and you're never getting anywhere. Just stop, stop that, tell it to shut up and finish your chapter, finished your entire first novel and then go back and learn to edit and edit it. Don't don't give into pushing it, kicking it down the road, finish it. Hmm. Nope. Fair. And I think, well, to some degree, I think you've already mentioned what I wanted to say was the conclusion of all of this. I think, I think you'd actually did too, But then maybe Jesper (42m 52s): Just to reiterate, because it is important and the point is just that there is no right or wrong way of editing your novel. It really comes down to testing out the different options and then see what works for you. So we mentioned some options here. I'm sure that maybe, maybe some listeners can think of even more and if you can let us know, but at least we mentioned some options here, some pros and cons to each way of doing it. But I think the best thing you can do for yourself is to actually try out these different options. Not you might, you know, intuitively feel like, I think this one works best for me, but honestly you don't know until you've tried it. Jesper (43m 35s): So test them out too. And maybe even you're going to end up finding your own way, which might be a combination of some of them that you like one element from one approach and another from another, and then you combine it it, and then you have something that works for you. So I think that's the best advice we can give when it comes to editing. And it's the same thing. More or less cultural writing in general that you have to find your own path and nobody can tell you how to do it. Yes. And if you can't find your own fath, find a writing partner who has a good path and send it to them. That was part of the conclusion as well. Narrator (44m 15s): Okay. So next Monday, we are going to have a bit of fun autumn, and I will share with you 10 terrible ways to creating characters. So you can look forward to that. If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am. Writing fantasy. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

We've been asked more than one occasion how an author can get a traditional publishing contract? While Autumn did sign a traditional contract years back, none of us are experts on the subject matter. To bridge that gap, we brought in the award-winning author, Andrea Phillips, to share some insights and advice on this very topic. If you want to learn more about Andrea, you can find here: http://www.andreaphillips.com http://www.deusexmachinatio.com http://twitter.com/andrhia Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 113 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And while Autumn is busy editing one of our stories, I have a great guest on for you today. It just happens on a let's call it, semi-regular, basis that Autumn and I are asked about traditionally publishing contracts. And some are also interested in becoming what is known as a hybrid author, meaning that you are both sell publishing and traditionally published. So I thought this would be quite a good topic to cover while Autumn is busy doing other stuff. And while Autumn did have a traditional contract years back, we don't really have that much experience with this topic. Jesper (1m 17s): So today I'm going to be joined by Andrea Phillips and Andrea is an award winning transmedia writer. She does game designs and her projects have won awards like the broadband digital award, the Canadian screen award, and much more. She is published by FireSIGHT fiction. And her short fiction has been published in escape pod and the juice versus aliens anthology. So welcome to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Andrea, and I hope you are keeping safe during these crazy times. Andrea (1m 51s): Hello. Thank you. It's so exciting to, to be here and yes, yes. I'm, I'm keeping safe. I'm a hermit in my home. We're even snowed in right now. So I don't know if I could, well, no, I'm, I'm exaggerating. We, we do a lot of snow very recently, but I could probably escape if my house caught on fire, you know, it's, it's, it's not so bad. Yes. Yes. I am in New York, got a foot into half of snow over the weekend as we, as we record. Jesper (2m 28s): Oh my God. Yeah. We don't really have that much, you know, I'm in Denmark and we have like one centimeter of snow or something like that. And it has been snowing the last couple of days, but then yeah, everyday it melts away again. So it's just gray. That's what it is. Andrea (2m 48s): That's usually what happens to us, but I would have thought, you know, Denmark would be one of the places where it snows and then it just stays all winter. And you have piles and mountains of snow by the end. Yeah. Jesper (3m 0s): Well here between the Scandinavian countries, you know, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the other three countries actually do usually get quite a lot of snow because they're also much further North Norway and Sweden and Finland are huge countries compared to Denmark. It's just like this little dot and we're just slightly more South than the others, so we can sometimes get snow, but, and it does get cold during this winter, but most years actually, it's not that, that much. So yeah. But talking about the weather, we can always do that. No, that's okay. Jesper (3m 41s): It is. I'm the one starting it. So, but yeah, I, I did a short introduction of you there, Andrea, and it looks, or it sounds like you do quite a lot of things, but maybe you could share a bit more about yourself. Andrea (3m 57s): Sure, sure. I always try to find a way to explain how all of the things I do are kind of related. And the transmedia work that I do is, is immersive storytelling. And I do a lot of it for, for brands out of marketing budgets. So I might help to make an app. We're an alternate reality game for a TV show, a movie, a video game, and that's fiction writing. Usually it's, it's in someone else's Storyworld, but it's exactly the same set of tools that I use if I'm writing a novel for myself, in terms of thinking about sort of characters and motivations and so on and so forth. Andrea (4m 40s): And then I've written a nonfiction book about this sort of trans media, immersive storytelling, as well as having, you know, I have a novel that fireside published. I have a couple that I've self published and some shorts, and then, you know, I have a going freelance career. So I, I kind of do a little bit of all kinds of things and somehow together, it all seems to make up a career who knew Jesper (5m 11s): That's pretty cool. Yeah. I want to get into all the hybrid authorizing and contracts with traditional publisher. But, but before we go into all of that, do you find it's different to do the writing for games and, and, and those sorts of things, even though it it's, it's a story you're telling, but do you find the immersive part to be different compared to how you might want to immerse a reader into a novel? Andrea (5m 35s): It is different and it's, it's actually a, a point of view change. I do a lot of writing in, in what amounts to second person. So when you're, when you're doing immersive storytelling, the person that you're telling the story about, and the person that you're telling the story to are the same person, the audience needs to have some sort of active agency in the story to feel like they can affect the outcome to feel like they're really, really there. Like the story is real. And obviously in a novel, you you're a little more removed and everybody knows that they can shout at the page, but that doesn't mean that the character is going to make a good decision instead of a bad decision. Andrea (6m 19s): So it, it, it's, it's just a sort of a different framing and you can use different things in the one way or the other. I am. I actually like to talk about the, sort of the, the emotional palette of feelings that you can make your audience feel and with sort of traditional flat narrative, where the audience is removed from the story, you can make people laugh, you can make people cry. You know, they can feel grief over a character that's died. They can feel, you know, joyous at, you know, a heroes, great, great victory. Andrea (7m 1s): But when you're doing immersive storytelling, you can, you can do other different things. You can make an audience feel guilty over something that they did, which isn't something that you can really do in flat fiction. You can make them feel proud of their, their own achievements of what they've done, which is again, kind of hard to do in, in flat fiction. So it it's, it's, it's not, it's not better or worse, and it's not as different as this may make it sound, but it is definitely different. Jesper (7m 34s): Yeah. But you also have the, a visual medium to play with there, you know, and also of course, the agency of the person, for example, playing the game and, and so on. Right. So, so in that regard, I guess the medium is also quite different compared to a novel where you just have to imagine everything in, in your mind and you don't have any agency on what's going to happen. Andrea (7m 56s): That's even true going from Nala writing to film. So for, for a lot, a lot of my, my kinds of work, sometimes we'll do video content. A lot of it is, you know, of logs or security camera footage, kinds of things to, to make it seem sort of, sort of realistic. And I hadn't realized before I did this, how much more detailed and how much clearer in your vision, you have to be about every little thing. So, you know, when you're, when you're writing on the page, you can say, you know, messy dorm room, you know, there was a bicycle, you know, spoon on its side, whatever, and, and the, the one detail, and then the rest of it, the audience fills in the gaps themselves. Andrea (8m 48s): But in film, in, in script writing, you know, the producers came to me and said, okay, we need to know more. What, what kind of lighting is it? What color are the walls? What time of day is it? What is their hair like that day? Is it messy? Is it like, do they look like they've gotten enough sleep? You know, are there posters on the walls? Is it clean? Is it dirty? All of these things have to be decided on purpose. So I actually have a lot more respect for cinema than I did before, because it really, it really drives home, help. Everything you see in a movie was something decided by somebody to be there. Andrea (9m 29s): Nothing is by chance and then even, even doubly. So in a video game where literally nothing exists, every cloud, every rock is something that was put there on purpose. Jesper (9m 43s): Yes. Yeah. It's, it's a very different style of writing as well. And I think, well, sometimes I hear people say that they're gonna, I'm gonna write a screenplay off of my novel. And always I'm thinking like, to myself, like good luck, because I wouldn't dare do that unless I got a bit of training and insight on how to do it, because I think it's a much more complicated method than you think. Andrea (10m 7s): Yeah. The problem is that novels are very, very internal. The thing that they're good at is letting letting you know about the emotional terrain, the thoughts and feelings of your characters as they go through. And in, in film, you really can't rely on that coming through. So unless you have a very, very good actor and you can't, you can't rely on the actor, seeing things the same way as, as the writer did. It's it's funny. It's funny. Jesper (10m 45s): Yeah. I can see that, but maybe then getting a bit into topic here. So usually when we talk about being a hybrid author, as I said in the intro at the top, usually means that you'll have both self publishing works, but you have also something that you have a more traditionally published. So I was wondering why, why did you decide to become a hybrid author? Andrea (11m 12s): So the first self-publishing thing that I did was actually a little, a little story that I put on Kickstarter because I wanted an iPhone. And this is obviously going really far back. I think it was the iPhone two. And I thought, you know what? I have this story. I could try and sell it to a market and that would take a million years. And it probably wouldn't sell anyway because short fiction is really difficult to sell. So I said, well, if, if I get, you know, enough money to buy an iPhone, then I will really sit on my website free for everyone to read. I think, I think I even put a creative and, you know, people, people will get to read the story and I'll get my phone and everyone will be happy and it works. Andrea (11m 60s): And in fact, I got enough money to buy my husband and I phone also. So I thought, you know, that that's pretty great. So a little bit later, I kickstarted kind of a goofy cereal idea about pirates and it's a, it's a really sort of Gonzo weird light rompy story. And I did a Kickstarter for it. The Kickstarter was, was really quite successful. And afterward I, I made a choice of games game actually with choice script, which was also pretty, pretty modestly successful and did a couple of licensing things. Andrea (12m 51s): And, you know, I had not, not exactly an empire, but, you know, I, I, I made a decent amount of money with, with this, this sort of Lucy smoke cart thing. And then I, at some point in there, I did, I did my traditional novel through, through fireside with, you know, regular contract and then, and so on and so forth. And that was actually a really lovely experience because Brian White, my, my editor at fireside is a really fantastic human being and a really, really good editor. So he, he helped me to, to let it be the story that he could see I was trying to do. Andrea (13m 35s): And he wasn't trying to nudge it into being something that it, that it wasn't, which I think a lot of, a lot of writers are afraid will happen. And let me see, I did a bunch of, a bunch of stuff for cereal box in there too with, with book burners and so on. And my most recent novel is sort of a political thriller that I thought I would try and sell traditionally, but it was very topical. It sort of had to come out last summer because it is about an election. And if you're writing about an election, you probably want it to come out around the time of the election, not after the election. Andrea (14m 19s): Yeah. Yeah. So I actually did give it to my agent and we had it on submission for a bit, but then we pulled it because it was, it was too slow, a process basically. And we hit the points where nobody had, had bought it just yet. And even though it was still under consideration in a bunch of places, given publishing timelines, which are so slow, it wouldn't be able to come out in time. It just wasn't feasible. And I thought, well, I'd rather have the book come out in the reasonable timeframe then than not. And this time I just, I just did it directly on, on KDP instead of doing a Kickstarter first. Andrea (14m 60s): And I actually do regret it because it didn't do as well as my other, other earlier starter things. And this is actually a failure of promotion on my part. Basically, I just didn't push it the same way because it's the year 2020 everyone was fatigued and it felt weird to be shilling a book, even if it's, you know, the book of your heart in that moment. So the stars didn't line up. It has nothing to do with the method through which I published it. And it has nothing to do with the book. It just, wasn't a good environment for me to be pushing anything, I guess, because I actually think it's one of the best books I've written. Andrea (15m 41s): This is the first thing I've written, where, where people came to me and said, Andrea, this is really good. And they sounded surprised, which makes me wonder if, if they'd been kind of exaggerating about how much I had like prior things. Jesper (16m 1s): Yeah. But I'm now that you sort of have a feet in both camps here. So that also gives you a bit of perspective. So I'm wondering from the way you see it, how do you see the main differences, but also, I guess, advantages of being a hybrid author. Andrea (16m 19s): I, I see the, the advantages are, are kind of, you could, you could pick and choose what you, what you want to try for in each category. And as, as a self publishing author, there are things that I know I'm going to want to write, that I will never ever be able to find a publisher for because the market is too niche for a publisher to want to sink money into, but the amount of money that I need to sink into something to get it out the door or self publishing is so much lower that I don't need to make the same amount to make it worthwhile. You know, so for, for an episode of Lucy smoke cart, you know, if I, if I were to sell, I'm going to make up numbers here. Andrea (17m 4s): I actually can't even remember real numbers. If I'm selling, you know, a thousand episodes to make a thousand dollars. And, you know, it's, it's, let's say 5,000 words long, again, I'm just making stuff up here. This has nothing to do with how, how the real things went. Then, then, you know, and I spent maybe $200 on a quick copy, edit and, you know, use the art that I already have. You know, I, I'm making $800 out of 5,000 words. And that's really great where a publisher isn't really going to be able to offer me kind of money for what is essentially a work of short fiction. Andrea (17m 53s): Right. And I can do it on my timeline and I can, you know, just, just kind of suit myself in every possible way. One of the problems that I've I've had, it's not really a problem, but one of the constraints I've had in my career is since I do so much work for other people's intellectual property, I'm used to working in a sandbox and having to take into account. No, what, what, what you're say, what clients say and what the clients bosses, bosses say. Andrea (18m 36s): And there's, there's a lot of Liberty in just being able to decide something on your own and, and do it. Like it's very satisfying to just be able to do something on your own in a really Gonzo way that said, I feel like self-publishing is a tremendously larger amount of work than writing something, submitting it, editing it and letting someone else worry about cover art, letting someone else worry about getting the copy, edit together, getting a line at it together, letting someone else worry about promotion and timing and availability and schedules. And, and sometimes I just don't have that in me, you know? Jesper (19m 19s): No, I understand that. I mean, with self publishing, you are going to get a lot of freedom, but you're also going to get a lot of tasks. Andrea (19m 28s): Yeah. And to some extent you, you get out of it, what you put into it, but, but you have to put in a lot before you start to see much of anything. Yeah. Jesper (19m 41s): But is it, so when you are the sort of deciding your next book, for example, I'm gonna self publish it or am I going to give it to my agent to sell it? Is it about the length of it? Versus for example, also it's a too niche or not, or how do you determine which ones are self puppies and which ones to ask your agent to take care of? Andrea (20m 5s): It's you know, it's, it's, it's sort of, I, I feel like in general, if I'm writing something novel length, I'm probably going to try and publish it through the traditional route. First, if I'm writing something that feels more like a cereal to me, or if it's shorter, probably go another path, but said, I don't know if you consider a short story publishing to be traditional publishing. But my, my go-to for a long time has been, if I want to publish a short story, I'll send it to escape, Potter, fireside, instead of doing like my, my sort of Kickstarter things and that, and that's a traditional route, just not books. Andrea (20m 53s): It's, it's, it's the other stuff, but I usually have a pretty good idea of where I want to send it while I'm writing it. And then at the end, I do have, I have material that my agent hasn't been able to sell. And in the case of my most recent book, I decided to self publish it because I really believed in it. And then in the case of another book, I'm actually just still sitting on it with the idea that we may be able to sell it later. And I don't think it would be a good fit for self publishing for me, just because of the nature of the book. Andrea (21m 37s): It's, it's hard to explain. I it's, it's, it's not even, it's an emotional thing. It's an emotional logic thing and not, and not an objective business decision, if you know what I mean. Jesper (21m 49s): No, no, that's fair enough. And not, not all decisions have to be objective all the time. I do know quite some of our listeners are interested in pursuing a traditional publishing contract. So if you were to give some listeners some advice here, what would you say in terms of how do you get started and what is sort of the best approach, if you want to find an agent and get a more traditional publishing contract and so on, how do you go about it? Andrea (22m 22s): I mean, it's, it's the same, it's the same advice on all of the blogs. And everybody says, you know, you, you do have to find, find a bunch of agents, see people who are buying, find people who are publishing things, sort of similar in feeling to what you would like to publish, figure out who represents them and, you know, write a good query letter or letter, send it out. None of this matters unless your material is already as polished as you can make it. I don't advocate going out and getting an editor before you start submitting and so on. But I mean, in the same with self publishing, you need to make sure everything is absolutely as polished as you personally can make it before you send it out into the world. Andrea (23m 3s): Right? This is actually pertinent advice for me personally, because I have a habit of dashing off a first draft and wanting to run with it. My defense, I do write fairly solid first draft. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a difficult and slow process. And that's, I think why a lot of people find self publishing much more satisfying because it can take you a year to find an agent just waiting for an agent that will become yours to get around, to reading the manuscript and, you know, reading the partial and then asking you for the full and then reading the full and then, and then offering, it can take months and months to can take a year. Andrea (23m 53s): It can take longer. And nobody likes to feel like their career is on hold for that long. Right. And then submitting can take even, even that long or longer. I, I know, especially in Yia, it was really, really backed up for a while. And people were getting offers a year, a year and a half after their agents had submitted the manuscripts. And I mean, I know, right. And we can publish four novels. And at a certain point, you, you just can't wait forever. So yeah, I it's, it's the information on, on what to do on the, on how to do all of the right things is absolutely out there. Andrea (24m 41s): And none of it is, none of it is, is difficult, which is to say, it's not, it's not hard to figure out what the right thing is to do, but it is to figure out whether or not you can make your book any better than it is. It is hard to wait that long. It is, you know, hard to maintain professionalism in all of your correspondence and essentially become your own marketing person and writing a query letter when the skills that go into writing a novel and the skills that go into writing a good blurb for that novel are really not the same thing at all. Yeah. And what does it mean? Andrea (25m 24s): You're great at the other, go ahead. Jesper (25m 26s): No, indeed. No, that's exactly what I was about to say as well, because even if you say that, okay, I'm going to self publish it. You're going to be confronted with a lot of marketing skills or the need for marketing skills that you don't need when you're writing the novel. So in some extent, I guess to some extent, I guess you could say that it doesn't matter if you go one route or the other, you will be confronted with the fact that you have to put some marketing skills in place and exercise those skills in order to, to get somewhere. But I was also wondering, because we see some, at least some of the big, you know, it used didn't, it used to be the big six and now it's a big five and I guess it's going to be the big four soon as well. Jesper (26m 8s): So those are merging together, but at the same time, we also see smaller publishers popping up in the market space. So I'm wondering, do you see that it's, is it easier? Is it more difficult or is it the same difficulty level to, to find an agent and find a traditional publishing contract nowadays versus what it was maybe four or five years ago? Andrea (26m 31s): I feel like it's about the same level of difficulty, even, even with the publishing mergers, for the most part, the number of imprints is still about what it was. You don't see, you see one of these mergers basically shutting down one of the arms completely, but I feel like the level of competition is about what it was four or five years ago. The, the marketplace has changed some, but only in the way that that publishing has sort of cyclical fads, you know, this is hard. And then that's how it's. Andrea (27m 12s): So, so it goes, I, I don't know. I feel like it's never going to be easier or harder, but also it's kind of a moot question because you, you don't have the option to go back and submit four or five years ago. It's now is what, you know, you know, but Jesper (27m 34s): I was more thinking that it might be a bit helpful to understand the difficulty level. If you have to, if you're sort of, if a listener is sitting there thinking, should I try or should I not try? Should I just self-publish instead of even trying than it is, of course, I think an important input to have in your mind to say, well, it is a lot more difficult nowadays or no, it's actually the same. So you can go ahead and so on. Andrea (28m 0s): I mean, it's, it's a lot more difficult than it was in the 1940s. The that's that's about is as solid as, as I think I could even say it it's, it's very difficult. It is definitely very difficult. It has been very difficult for at least all of, all of my career. It will probably remain very difficult, but that said promoting and marketing and succeeding and self-publishing is also very difficult. And anyone who's done it is there tremendous accolades because it's a ton of work and, and does a ton of work, but it's not easy to do well. So that's absolutely true. Andrea (28m 41s): The problem is if you want it to be a writer and you want it to be published through any means, it's, it's not the sort of career where you were going to be able to kind of Slack off and take it easy and to have your career take care of itself, that that is never going to happen. Jesper (28m 60s): No, I think we've said multiple times on, on, on former episodes of this podcast as well, that if you get into writing, thinking that you're going to earn money, then just quit now because there's way easier ways of earning money than writing Andrea (29m 14s): So many easier ways. Jesper (29m 17s): But one thing I was wondering as well though, was that I can just imagine if I put myself into the mind of somebody who have tried to pitch agents or publishers for ages, and let's say like two years later, some agent comes back to you and say, Hey, you know, I'm actually prepared to take this on. I can imagine a lot of people jumping at the opportunity thinking like, wow, that's wonderful. Finally, I succeeded, but how do you actually know? Because one of the things that we do a lot when we self published autumn, and I, for example, when we select an idiot editor, we are on the opposite side of the table in the sense that we are the one hiring the editor. Jesper (30m 1s): But in this case, it's the opposite of way around. But just because somebody says that they want to hire you, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is a good agent, that you're going to work well together with the person and so on. But I'm just a bit concerned that because of the long timescales and waiting time involved, that some people might just jump at the opportunity, even if they've got feeling a sort of saying to them that there's something off here, but how do you go about, or do you have any advice on, how can you possibly vet a bit about if somebody come an agent comes to you and say, Hey, let, let's make a, let's make an attempt here to get your, a properties in contract. How can you figure out if this is a good person or not? Andrea (30m 43s): Yeah. Agenting relationships are really difficult. They're, they're a lot like a business partner partnership, which is in turn a lot like a marriage. And the power dynamic is also very strange because the agent works for the writer, but the way that the getting an agent happens, it's common for the writer to feel like they work for the agent. And it's, it's resulted in a lot of kind of bad relationships, frankly, bad marriages, where the agent isn't working very hard on behalf of the writer and the writer feels like, well, this is just their, their lot in life, because this is the agent that shows them. Andrea (31m 28s): You always do have the ability to, to walk away. And if you feel like, if you feel like the agent, isn't actually very enthusiastic about your work. If they, if you get the vibe that they're only interested in this one book, and they're not interested in your career overall, if you get the feeling that they think that they can make a quick buck out of your book, if you get the feeling that they're chasing the market and not all in on you personally, then those are, those are red flags, I would say. But on top of that, you know, there are people who love an agent who gives them a really, really detailed set of feedback on, on a manuscript before they even submit it. Andrea (32m 17s): And there are writers who absolutely hate that and just want the agent to sell what they wrote already. And you have to look in your heart and decide if you want a hands-on agent or a hands-off agent. And then maybe do a little bit of research before you even submit to see what working with different agents is like to see if they even sort of sell. We're seeing to like the, the sub genre you work in. One of my problems is I, I have trouble deciding what genre I even work in. So finding an agent that actually, I guess, deals with my kind of work is a little weird. Andrea (33m 5s): But yeah. And the other thing is if, if you write, let's say a lot of horror and a little bit of science fiction, and you have an agent that represents a little bit of science fiction and a lot of romance, but they're interested in your science fiction work like that tells you probably that's not a good match because they don't represent the kind of work. That's the bulk of what you're going to want to try to sell. It's it's just, it's, it's complicated and messy. And unfortunately there's no one true right way to do any of it, which before, before we started recording, I think I said, I said something to you about how we're all just sort of making it up as we go along. Andrea (33m 50s): And it sounds, it sounds like a joke, but it's literally true. We're all making up our stories as we go along, but we're also all making up how our careers work as we go there, there are no rules. There, there aren't any, even many good rules of thumb. You know, if, if your agent isn't sending you royalty statements, maybe fire them. If your agent isn't sending you, your royalty checks, definitely fire them. And beyond that, it's all a matter of fit and suitability and what you want and what they want. And whether it's the same thing. Jesper (34m 27s): It's a lot about, I think being honest with yourself because it is, it doesn't matter. Well, you absolutely right in the sense that the agent works for the author, but I would almost go as far to say it doesn't really matter who works for whom in the, in the relationship, as long as you're honest with yourself and you know, what kind of partners do I want to work with? And you're, you're both sort of pulling in the same direction because at the end of the day, it is a very, very close working relationship. And I say that, of course, without having any agent, we self publish all our work. But, but, but I have heard so many times from those who do have an agent, that it is a very, very close working relationship. Jesper (35m 12s): And, and if you don't feel like, you know, you're pulling equal amount of the weight, then what's the point. Andrea (35m 20s): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, it's, it's easy to feel like B agent picked you. And so that's the agent that you get, but the reality is actually very different. And unfortunately, in many cases you do an agent. There are a lot of publishing houses that simply won't accept material that wasn't sent through an agent. So this isn't the sort of situation where you can say, well, who needs them? I'll just go on my own and keep the 15%. But it's, it's complicated. Everything is complicated. Jesper (36m 1s): Yeah. But let's say you then find your, the agent that you work well with. You have a very good cooperation and then you do at some point land, one of the publishing deals with some publishing house that the agent has sold you, your book to one of the things I hear a lot, and I suppose that's true as well, but maybe you can add your reflections to it is that you can't really expect that much marketing support from a publishing company, unless you are like one of the real big headed names, but otherwise you are almost on your own like UI, if you were indie publishing, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. Jesper (36m 41s): Is that also your view? Andrea (36m 43s): It's, it's kind of true. It's mostly true, but it's also kind of not true at all. One of the, one of the big things to note is that one of the big advantages I should say of, of going with a traditional publisher is that they will be able to get your book on bookstore shelves. And that is incredibly difficult through any sort of a self publishing schema. So simply having your book on shelves does wind up selling more and simply being published through, you know, Hachette or random house. You know, we'll make sure that more people are going to see your book for more opportunities for people to notice because you're, you're starting out at an advantage. Andrea (37m 34s): You're more likely to be sent to, you know, publishers weekly. You're more likely to be sent to Kirkus. You're more likely to be sent to a lot libraries like libraries, journal, librarian, journal, I'm sorry, I'm screwing it up. And you can see things on your own as self published, but it costs tremendous amounts of money out of pocket. And you're not necessarily guaranteed any, any sort of quality good review. And especially you're not guaranteed that anyone will see it where the weight of the publishing house sending you to publishers weekly instantly sort of, sort of gets you up a notch out of, out of the vast sea of publishing that self publishing work. Andrea (38m 26s): And so you're more likely to get noticed more easily. You're more likely to be able to get distribution in libraries, which can, can result in quite a lot of sales, you know, and that sort of thing. It's, it's, it's, it's just being in a publishing house results in, in a bit of a bump up. But, Jesper (38m 46s): But I suppose it also depends on what publishing house we're talking about, because of course, one of, some of the bigger publishing houses, they have, you know, big muscles that they can, they can flex in order to get into airports and bookstores and all those things, but whereas a smaller publishing house, well, they might really not be able to do much that you can't do. I'm thinking Andrea (39m 9s): For a very small house. Yes. But even, even like a small beer, you know, one of the, one of the smaller presses subterranean doesn't do solicited sort of original material, but like the smaller presses even still have the gravitas of sending to the reviewers and in turn selling to librarians, for example, that you have to pay a lot of money to get otherwise. I mean, they're, they're not going to be all sending you out on a book tour, or they're not all going to be putting, putting your book on, on bus shelters or billboards or subway or wherever else. Andrea (39m 51s): Honestly, nobody is going to do that for you unless you are Dan Brown. I think part of that is because publishing advertising doesn't have a history of a specially working very well. I I'd actually be interested in hearing you talk about advertising for self publishing at some point, because it's my understanding that there's a lot of advertising you can do. And very little of it is proven to work Jesper (40m 22s): Well. Yes mean we have, we have multiple episodes on this feed as well about marketing books as a self-published author. But there is indeed a lot of things you can do across Amazon ads. You can run BookBub ads, Facebook ads, all this click to play ads. There's ton of it. But the thing is that it's not, it's not that easy. It's not like you just create an ad and then you start selling books because first of all, there is the return of investment that you have to take into account. So you can't just bit like $2 per click or something because the, the book costs $2, maybe. Jesper (41m 3s): So, so it's, it's pointless. So there's, that's you take into account Andrea (41m 7s): The dollars to make $20. Yeah, Jesper (41m 9s): Indeed, indeed. So you might be able to get to the stage where you're selling books, but you're not earning anything from it. So that in itself is an issue. So from the inter indie author perspective, you can move some sales short-term by click to play ads. If you're short of narrow down to your audience well enough, and you do well enough in your ad copy and so on. But the real trick of the trade is, is to build an email list because that's where your money is longterm. And that's where, that's where our focus, my myself and autumn. For example, we only focus on building the email is we do have some kick to play ads running, but not a lot. And we don't spend a ton on it. Jesper (41m 51s): We just have a bit running. But other than that, all our marketing goes into trying to give people some something for free in order for them to join the email list so that we can start talking to the people, not, not about selling to them, but more over time, build a relationship with them via emails and they get to know us better. And then of course, if they like us, then at some point we hope that they're going to buy some of the books. But again, if you just get people onto the email list with the only purpose that I'm going to send you a ton of emails, promoting some stuff, that's not going to help, you'll have to go into it because you want to have an online relationship. Let's call it that with the readers. Jesper (42m 31s): Otherwise it's, it doesn't matter as, as well because people will just unsubscribe. I'm sure you can. You can recognize if you, the, the email list you might have signed up to where they just keep emailing, you offers about this and that it's, it's pretty annoying. Andrea (42m 46s): The worst one I ever had was for a children's clothing brand, who, who I signed up for, for my, for my daughter. And they wound up sending the marketing email literally every hour. Jesper (43m 2s): No, but, but it, it, it's this very fine balance to walk because on one hand, you have also to get your email list into the mindset that once in a while, I am going to try to make you an offer for, to buy something that is going to happen. But you have to walk this fine balance between I'm not here to push sales in your face all the time. And I'm here to actually, because I want to us to have like a two way communication going over the emails. But at the same time, once in a while, I do hope that you're going to buy something because if you're not, then I can't even keep doing this anyway. Right. So there is that element into it. And I know authors who sell puppies, authors, who either try to sell all the time, which is not good, but there are also those who fear selling anything. Jesper (43m 52s): So they just keep being buddy buddies with the people on the email list forever without ever selling them any of the books. And that doesn't help either. Because at the end of the day, you're paying for the people who are on your email is so you have to sell something as well. So it is a very fine balance to walk. And I think as you said, as well around the traditionally publishing stuff with it, none of this is easy, right? It doesn't matter which route you take, you aid. It is not easy. Andrea (44m 19s): Yeah, yeah, Jesper (44m 21s): No, no. If there, is there anything we S I sort of forgot or didn't think about asking you when it comes to traditional publishing contracts or being hybrid authors that you like, this is an important point that should have been mentioned. Andrea (44m 35s): I just, I just want to reiterate there's, there's kind of no, no right. Or wrong way to do anything. It's, it's what works for you and doesn't work for you and what works for your audience and doesn't work for your audience. So your circumstances may be different. Your, your goals may be completely different. It's entirely possible that you're not in it for money, but for, you know, reach and you want to find a way to reach as many people as possible. It's, it's, it's, it's hard to say, you know, it's, it's all a matter of, of what you want to get out of it. And you have to have that in mind before you start deciding how to do it. Andrea (45m 16s): Just like everything else in life. Jesper (45m 18s): No, that makes a lot of sense. And I also want to thank you, Andrea, for coming on to the, a am writing fantasy podcast here today and, and give us some insights on, on an area where at least autumn and I are not the most proficient people. So that was nice to get some insight inputs on that, because I know, I know some listeners, I interested in this area, so, so thank you for doing this. Andrea (45m 43s): It's been a really good time. Thank you. Jesper (45m 45s): Excellent. Is there any place where people can go on the internet or you want to point people on the internet, if they want to learn, learn a bit more about you? Andrea (45m 54s): I would say you can go to my website, which is , which is a pun in Latin, but you can actually also go there by Andrea phillips.com. It goes to the same place, because I realized I had made a terrible mistake at some point. And I am sometimes on Twitter and D R H I a. Jesper (46m 24s): Okay. That's perfect. So, Andrea, I'm also thinking that if you email me those links, then I will put those in the show notes for you and people can follow them straight from there. Andrea (46m 37s): Wonderful. I'll do that right now. Jesper (46m 40s): Perfect. That was the wrong sounder. This one was the one I was looking for. So next Monday, Autumn will be back and we're going to talk about one of her favorite topics, namely editing a novel. Narrator (46m 56s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcasts going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Goodreads is a social platform where readers congregate. Are the ways in which we can market our books to these people without being sleazy? Jesper has no idea about Goodreads, so he asks all the stupid questions, while Autumn tries to convince him that Goodreads is a good platform. (For the record, Jesper did claim his author profile on Goodreads the day after the recording of this episode) Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And I'm autumn. This is episode 112 of the Am Writing fantasy podcast. And we're going to discuss a topic today where, eell, I'm a total noob. Autumn (46s): That's very honest stuff, you know? Jesper (48s): Yeah. But luckily, well you autumn, you're not. And so we're going to talk about how to use good reads as a promotional tool to market books. So I don't know anything about that. Autumn (1m 3s): Yeah. You've never even claimed her author profile on there. You probably have reviews that you've never even looked at, but I can't imagine I enjoy. Goodreads is one of those things, I, I want to be on it more than I am. So maybe this will be another reminder to myself to get back on there and do something now maybe. Jesper (1m 24s): And I I'm hoping that I will learn a thing or two today as well. Autumn (1m 28s): Maybe I'll inspire. You. You'll have to tell me if I inspire you to maybe think about claiming your author profile by the end of today's podcast while you're setting yourself a very high goal. I, I took persuasive Fessel philosophy in my persuasive psychology actually in my college days. So we'll have to see if it comes out. Jesper (1m 52s): Yeah. Yeah. Just don't get disappointed. Autumn (1m 57s): Right. I'll try. Maybe I can convince you to give me your author profile. Jesper (2m 2s): Well that you could probably yes. Autumn (2m 4s): Okay. We'll have to see how it goes. Jesper (2m 8s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I know you have a crazy times on your end. How's it going with all your jinxing of electronic stuff and destroying computers and have you screwed something else in the meantime? Autumn (2m 21s): Oh yes, absolutely. Besides destroying battery operated water pumps, I managed to, for some reason, make Adam's Mac, my husband's at Mac air unstable. So it stopped connecting to the internet. I just, my phone's. Okay. Thank goodness. It must be as no, we have a life case on that and it is, we've been joking because yeah, I've told you, my husband knows the, the Fe and my next series, I'm releasing, they cannot touch and they actually end up putting electronics and Faraday cages. Autumn (3m 3s): And it's like, my husband's now talking about making me go. I'm like, Oh, I can brand that for my books. So I still think he thought I'd be that excited about hearing. I can get my very unfair day cage from my laptop. Jesper (3m 19s): That would be a very interesting author image. And try to explain why, why you're sitting inside a cage. Autumn (3m 29s): I might need it. I do not know why things go scurry around me, but I've been extremely cursed racks the last couple of weeks. But I did just pick up my laptop like 45 minutes before we needed to get into recording today. And the student Q and a. So I'm I actually got it online and all my files were actually there. The logic board had been toasted somehow, but it didn't destroy my files. Just the logic board go figure I broke logic, but it's feels so good to have it back. And it's working and they replaced the keyboard and it's also fancy and nice. Autumn (4m 13s): It almost looks new for the memory was only decent. I'd be happy. It'd be perfect. Jesper (4m 19s): I honestly really hope that you're going to get out of your jinxing cycled quite soon so that you can just, you know, don't break things and just get back into your group without all this stressful stuff. It's Oh my God. I feel bad for you. Autumn (4m 37s): Yeah, it definitely had a few days where I've closed up shop early and just gone and read by Kindle, which thank goodness it hasn't broken on me yet either, but my husband actually knows I'm accident prone. So he got me like the most indestructible Kindle that you can buy. It's called a Voyager and it is like shockproof waterproof, you know, drop, kick it proof. I don't know if it's me proof, but so far so good. Knock on wood. Yeah. Jesper (5m 4s): Maybe Amazon will learn something that it was not as proven as they thought it was. Autumn (5m 9s): Oh yes. Well, if anyone ever wants to test something to see if it's, indestructable send it to me, I've broken indestructable glasses before, so please let me have a try. Jesper (5m 22s): Not even from trying, it's just not, you just use it normally and then you will break it. Autumn (5m 27s): That's true. I confess that as true anyway, but how are things on your side of the ocean? Jesper (5m 36s): Well, nothing as exciting as on your side, that's for sure. Yeah. I don't really know if there's that much to share since last week's episode. It's just been one of those working weeks where I've just been focusing on getting my words in these, the first draft of the reader magnet is done now. Yeah. Autumn (5m 55s): Yes. You sent that to me, at least your, I still have to do Jesper (5m 58s): My edits and add to it, but yeah, we've been writing. It's been exciting. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And as we said before, we not very good at celebrating. You actually pointed this out to me in an email, you said like, remember to celebrate, like, and, and honestly I did actually think about it when I sent you the last chapter. I did stop for two seconds to think maybe I should celebrate. So, and then I went onto the next thing on its dupe list, but so he had a two second acknowledgement of an achievement. And then, but I always, I almost would say that those two second is already an improvement because before I didn't even have those. Jesper (6m 40s): So it is slightly better, but not a, not a lot better. I could also mention that the, I just wrote up a whole post for our patron supporters on how the new iOS 14 rollout that is coming here early 20, 21 might affect Facebook ads. So this is, yeah, this is a pretty big deal for us authors who rely heavily on Facebook ads and the new iOS 14 will actually block some ad stuff or I would say not blocked, but it's, it's more to do with the fact that previously Apple operated with an opt out methodology, so that if you did not want the phone to share information with Facebook, for example, you had to actively go in and opt out via settings. Jesper (7m 35s): And the Apple is changing that with the new iOS so that you have to opt in. So you will actually be prompted by your phone to say, do you want your, your, the phone to share information with, for example, Facebook? And of course, most people will say, no, we don't want that. And then some of the ads becomes a problematic to run because Facebook cannot collect the data that they could before. So yeah, I wrote up a whole post on Patrion for our supporters on how I view this, what are the consequences, how to deal with it. So that was sort of a scary and interesting thing all at once there. That is, that sounds interesting. Autumn (8m 16s): Cause I know for me, I actually run Firefox and they have a Facebook corral, which blocks you from the Facebook pixels on websites. And I always feel sneaky by doing that, but I also feel like I'm undermining someone else's data. Oops. Narrator (8m 34s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Jesper (8m 39s): To welcome back Jeffrey on Patreon. Autumn (8m 42s): Yes. Thank you, Jeffrey, for coming back, you had a little glitch where you're gone for a little while and you've returned to us. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for your continuous support of the am writing fantasy podcast. We really appreciate that. And I dunno, I feel like saying a few words about Patreon here or Yeah, that's, it's, it's a very wonderful platform and it really, it is what supports this podcast and lets us pay for the recording and the hosting and all of those things that is actually all paid out of pet pantry on every single month. So thank you for everyone who supports us there. Jesper (9m 22s): Yeah. And I fully understand that, you know, we live in a media reality right now where podcasts are free and that's fine. The reality though is also that we can't make a living from something that is free. So that's where we use patron and we are not running any ads on the podcast either. So we're not getting any money from there. So we entirely funded by patron as, as autumn just said, I could also mention, for example, that we just, we did have a, this week, one of our very strong patron supporters leave us on Patrion or the last week due to the person's financial situations. And that is fully understandable people. Jesper (10m 2s): So changes, you know, circumstances can change in your financial situation. And first and foremost, you have to take care of yourself. So I'm just saying this because supporting us on patron doesn't mean that it has to be forever. If you have the capability support with maybe just $1 a month for now, that is awesome and it makes a difference. And then if you laid on your circumstances might change, then don't feel bad about it. It's perfectly fine. If you don't have to drop out and spend your money somewhere else after all, you have to take care of yourself and your family before anything else. I think that the one thing I would like to point out autumn here is just that I think that the trouble with this kind of thing is that most people always think that somebody else will take care of the supporting stuff, you know? Jesper (10m 54s): And in truth, if everyone just stopped thinking that and pitched in with a dollar, then I wouldn't have even have to mention this at all, because then it would be fine. Yeah. At the end of the day, Autumn (11m 7s): The Wikipedia often says the exact same thing. And I always do think, you know what? I can sit there asking for like two bucks, I always send Wikipedia something when they ask. I admit it. Jesper (11m 18s): Yeah. I mean, the thing is that this podcast is not just recorded for the fun of it. We actually do take it quite seriously. And we're trying to give you very useful and also some, sometimes just entertainment but useful advice. And if you do appreciate that, if you find it helpful in any way, please go and check out Patrion and you can follow the link in the show notes and see if, if maybe it would be something you could support us a bit there. Yeah. Autumn (11m 49s): Don't forget with our new website rebuild, which is finish by the go check out and writing fantasy.com. But if you go to am writing fantasy, fantasy.com/writing hyphen tips, or just go into the website and go into the blog, we actually added a button just to donate. So if for some reason you don't want to do patchy on you don't want to do. I mean, there's rewards there and hundreds of posts at this point and writing tips and marketing tips. But if for some reason you don't want to do that, but you would like to help us out and be able to, you know, support the podcast. You just want to do a one-time little gift. We made that possible on the website. So go check that out and we appreciate that as well. Autumn (12m 31s): Thank you so much because it does really help keep the lights on here, especially when you have one, half of your tribe is electronic accident prone. Yes. Okay. Anything else to add to, or should we move on to our conversation on Goodrich will only, I can say that it's not true of the moment, but by this time this is released. We will be over 3000 members on am writing fantasy Facebook in our group. And we're so close right now. We're, we're literally a day or two away. So, but definitely by the time this is released. So come join us on am writing fantasy Facebook, because it's just growing like insane. And when everyone there is wonderful. Autumn (13m 15s): Excellent. Yes, please do that. So there's probably something like a hundred million readers on Goodrich. I believe autumn probably close. I think the last time I'd seen was 95 million was the stats they had released when I took a webinar with them a year ago. So it's probably gotta be a hundred million readers, not just members, readers, people who love books. It's some million people look, I love books website. And I think this is one of the reasons why I'm a newbie to good reads because you know, in our little, let's say publishing company here, you, you and my publishing company advertising is sort of the stuff that I do, but good Reese has like considering you have your, okay, let me just put out a good read CEO here. Autumn (14m 13s): All right. So I'm an in, I'm in a meeting with the other executives and it's like, how many people do we have on the platform now? A hundred million. Okay. That sounds good. How do we capitalize on that? Well, so we don't why, well, I don't know. We don't have any ways to put any ads or monitor these people. So they're just using our platform and it's scrape. Yeah. Okay. Maybe it's great, but is I just don't get it. I mean, why can you not place apps on Goodrich? For example, with that many people, it would, it's like the most obvious place to advertise, but you, you can a bit, Jesper (14m 52s): And we're going to talk about that, but it's very limited. Autumn (14m 55s): It is very limited and it used to be a little less limited. I used to run good rates ads, but compared to AMS ads, they actually didn't perform that well, which is just to me crazy because these are people who love books, but yeah, use only so many ways you can actually give good reads money, which is probably why those ways that you can get good reads money. It costs quite a bit of money, but in its own way, from the author perspective, that's actually awesome. It's hard to give them money. You have to, there's other ways that you can go talk to these readers and find them. Autumn (15m 35s): And so it's all free. It's kind of cool. Jesper (15m 40s): It is cool. But I have a feeling that a lot of stuff that we're going to talk about here, or rather that you're going to talk about and I'm going to listen. But I think a lot of it has to probably do with there's a lot of time investment involved here. I have a feeling Autumn (15m 56s): There could be, but I mean, I guess if you're going, if you consider it a social media platform that is a hundred percent readers, why would you go to Facebook where it's like your aunt, Betty and your cousin, and they don't even read your books or do you want to go where there's readers, who you can go in, like sort through by the genre and find them and connect with them and have a great fan base. Where should you be spending your time? If you're going to spend some time on social media, it's not, you know, or looking at political tweets. Jesper (16m 31s): Yeah, no, I understand that. But maybe just before we get into all of those things that you can do, do you have any, because as you said before, it's even when you could run ads, they were not converting very well. And given that there is a hundred million or 95 or whatever, I don't think those 5 million makes a difference, but let's say around a hundred million readers on good reads. Why, if no, let me rephrase that. If it was very effective in terms of selling or marketing your books, I would think that every author would spend quite a lot of time on good reads, but I spent quite a lot of my time brushing up on the latest marketing things and, and ad strategies and all I do that all the time. Jesper (17m 24s): And I never ever hear about you should be spending time on good reads. So I'm just wondering now that I've never really used good reads. So of course I'm, I don't have any, let's say I don't have any standpoint in terms of arguing why or why not, but I'm wondering if you have any reflections on why is it not converting that well, w w what is it is it's to do with the audience that is Andrea or Autumn (17m 50s): Why? I think it's the, I think it's sort of almost like talking about a Kindle unlimited. If you, I know some authors who are a hundred percent Kindle, Kindle unlimited, and they're making a living wage off of that. And I know some authors who are on good reads and they are invested, it is their number one social media platform. It's where they spend all their time and the ones who are doing that. I mean, you're talking directly to readers and they're doing well. They, the webinar I took with good reads said that, you know, if they showed some books, that's like, this is a new release. This is one that basically went on fire on good reads. Autumn (18m 31s): And because of that, it was very popular across the board. Got the New York times bestseller lists all of these things simply because it started on good reads and got that burn going. So it can be an incredibly powerful platform, but I think most authors are spread out or they're not concentrating enough on just one platform and doing really, really well in it. And I mean, I have to say, like, I, I love good reads, but I also hate it because it is owned by Amazon now. And they have not put much money into it as it is like a 1990s platform. It looks terrible. Yes. Autumn (19m 11s): It's a really old, outdated, it's a forum. I don't even particularly like forums. You can't, you have to know HTML to even put in an image much less an image and a link. So you have to know a little bit of coding. Yes. You actually have to know coding to you mean you could just do stuff kind of blandly, but if you want it to make it look pretty again, that's probably my graphic designer decide coming out there that, you know, I, I know HTML coding whenever I'm on there and I want it putting in post photos and things. So it's so archaic and everyone keeps trying to create the next good reads. You know, a lot of platforms are trying to create a new version of good reads, but no, one's managed to knock it out of the number one spot for readers. Autumn (19m 54s): And I think there's a few reasons there, and maybe it's inertia because everyone's already there and until it explodes or Amazon takes it away, or it makes it a paid for platform. They're just going to say on good reads, because right now, even though Amazon owns it, it's kind of, it's got its own people, its own personality. It has librarians that manage the data and stuff. And they're fun to talk to. I've had to, I've had the fun of asking them a few questions. So it's got its own kind of thing going. I think, I think if you really, if even me, if I really invested the time and got going, the number one thing you can do as an authored to change your book sales is to go and talk to readers to go and build up your reader base Emma's are good. Autumn (20m 40s): Reads is a fantastic place to go and do that, but you have to be invested and dedicated and not just jump in and out and in and out, you got to go in and be part of the group. And the membership know that that part is perfectly fair. And I understand that, but I guess my question is, can you get them and maybe we're going to get into this so you can save the answer. If it's something we've got to get into any way. But as I said, I'm a new PSO. I'm I'm asking the stupid questions. Fair enough. But can you get people off of good reads and onto your email list in any easy way? Short of there is I think one or two ways and we will get into that. Autumn (21m 20s): So, yes. Okay. But let's go. Not as easy, it's not as easy as adding a button to your good reads author profile. It's not that easy, but there are other ways that you can do that. Okay. Well, what do you want to stop them? Well, I think we should start with the obvious ones. And one of them we've already touched on is that good reads used to do advertising, used to do self-service ads, almost the same as AMS ads, except it was actually a little more archaic and old fashioned AMS is like so much more sleek compared to what you could do on good reads. And I have used them and it took for ever to even spend $50 there. Autumn (22m 4s): It just was, it was really, I can see why they stopped doing it because they were not serving very well. They did not generate a lot, but I thought it was funny because just to double check before we ran this today is I did check on what their advertising says and it says no longer doing it, but they did say that this is literally for quote, for larger budgets, looking to drive maximum awareness on good reads, contact our advertising team to learn about our customized book, launch packages from larger budgets. So if you're a brick and mortar publisher or JK Rowling go to Goodwill. Yeah. I would think it was something similar to because Amazon also has it, the advantage program. Autumn (22m 47s): If you get into that, you, you can get not the investors program itself, but I forgot what it's called, but they have some, some branding banner stuff that you can get posted on, on Amazon. And I think if I remember correctly, I think the minimum spend to get into that program is 50 K. Oh my goodness. I was like, you don't just do that, right? No, no, no, no. So you, you were a serious publishing house or an author who is amazing. Yeah. When you can say, Oh yeah, 50 K nut up problem. So there is that. And I think the other thing that most people know good reads for is book giveaways. Autumn (23m 27s): Because if you're a reader, you know, there is a way it's so easy to sign up for either an ebook or a paperback of giveaway. And I remember the day where they were actually, I think the cheapest $50, maybe it was more, but there was a time they were super cheap to run. But now the minimum, the starting price is $119. So they're not that cheap anymore. That's not horrible. And if you're going to run a Kindle one, it has to be, you have to be published through Amazon. So through KDP and you can give up to a hundred books of an ebook giveaway, or if you want to do a print book giveaway, you can have a smaller, you know, just do like five print books or even 10. Autumn (24m 10s): So those two options are there. And I think most people know about them. And I did them once upon a day. But now that they're a little more expensive, I save up for maybe a big splash, like the final book of a series or something like that. You want know, do something special with it, but those are great, great and popular ways of actually quickly connecting with readers. So if you want to give one a try, I would highly recommend it. Jesper (24m 39s): Yeah. And the one thing I do understand about these giveaways is that one of the key benefits of it is the, there is like a social amplification built in meaning that I think everyone who enters a giveaway automatically has that book added to their, want to read shelf, which then creates a story in the newsfeeds for all their friends and followers. So that's pretty neat. You know, that, that way it's sort of that amplifies the word of mouth basic. Autumn (25m 9s): Yes, exactly. It is. And that's what, I don't know if, if most people realize like that's how good reading works. It took me a while to figure out because good reads has a couple of different areas. It has the forum area, the groups. So you can go into groups and forums and get to meet people and chat. There's like an archaic version of Facebook. If people are not used to forums, I they're not picture related enough for me. And I think that's why I don't like them. They're all textual and I'll go, my husband loves them and I just find them appalling. So I'm just not a good on forums, but I should spend more time there. But then they have a side that is like sorta like Facebook newsfeed, where it's an ongoing feed and you get to see things posted by your friends. Autumn (25m 50s): So the more friends you have or the more friends someone else has, you know, they, it gets shared more widely. And you would like to be just like Facebook. You would like to have your feed, something about your book, show up a couple of times, maybe a day. So all of the things I'm going to suggest are basically ways of getting your book, something you're sharing to show up, just so that people see it. But obviously the number one goal is to get basically as many friends as you can. And the best way you can do that, as you can either go friend, everyone who say likes a book that you like, which is probably a perfectly way of doing it. Cause you want to stick into your genre. You want to, you know, keep people who, you know, go everyone who reviews your book, ask them to be your friend. Autumn (26m 34s): You can do things like that. Or obviously you can share with your newsletter, your list on social media, other platforms. That's why you go into Twitter and you'll see someone say, Hey, I'm a good reads author. Find me here. That's because they want people to follow them. And so if they're following you on Twitter, you want to get them over to good reads as well. You're going to have to bring people into the platform, even though it already has a hundred million readers, you know, you have to find them and connect with them. It's a lot of networking. But to do that, that gets the amplification that you just mentioned. You want to spread your message to everyone's newsfeed on good reads. Jesper (27m 11s): And that's where I'm getting slightly nervous here, right? Because you're not in terms of having to bring people in. And I understand that all that, but building a reader list, so to speak on somebody else's real estate, that's like the number one thing we talked about in the self-publish sex success course that you should not do. You know, you have to get them onto some email list, meaning that you own the list of readers and they're not built on a good reads or the same thing applies to Facebook groups. There was people who build up a huge Facebook group and that's the only place that they can connect with those readers. And what happens to data at Facebook decides that, well, maybe now we're going to charge you to be able to post our stuff in your own group. Jesper (27m 57s): Otherwise we're only going to show it to 10% of them or whatever, you know, you never know what's going to happen. And that's why at least in the self publishing costs that we always say, you have to get people onto your email list. That's the only way you can control your own customer list. And that was why I was asking before, can we get them out of so, okay, let's say we get them into good reads then, but how do we get them out of there and onto our email list? Autumn (28m 25s): Well, we will, there's a few places where we can look at doing that besides obviously, you know, by getting them to shelve and buy your books. Even if you disappear off of good reads, for some reason, the fact that they have your books and hopefully in all your books, they have links to where else they can find you. So that is one important thing. But yeah, this is definitely using another platform to build. Hopefully you want to pull them into your own list, but I do think occasionally with something that it is book dedicated and reader dedicated. It's not bad to have a presence here because these are readers. These are active, hungry readers. These are people who really love books. Autumn (29m 6s): And if you're going to spend some time, you know, any time, this is a place to be better than Facebook, better than anywhere else. This is definitely an audience you should look at because there's a lot of people who love books and will be active on this and have been active for years and years. Jesper (29m 26s): Hmm. Okay. Fair enough. Autumn (29m 29s): I know I haven't convinced you got the wool work on it. We'll work on some of this sharing and I'll see if we can get some stuff that's over, you know, how you can move them into your newsreader list, how you can get them off of that. I mean, I have to admit, I had a following on what, what Pat and I haven't been back there for ages, but it is interesting to see like where you can build up reader relationships and which are the ones that are worth keeping or which are the ones that are going to go and then buy your books. And I will say on good reads, these are the ones that are going to go buy your books. These are ones you want to make friends with. Jesper (30m 3s): Interesting. Why the ads never worked very well then, or maybe it was more to do with how the ads were served and stuff rather than the actual audio Autumn (30m 11s): You were really, you could only ever use your book cover, which kind of makes sense. I mean, it's your book cover? And the copy was very limited. And I think where they show up the website, just being as old styles as it is, they just weren't being served well. No. Okay. I would say, I think Amazon has too many ads, but Oh my goodness. They're not going to slow those down anytime. So I think they're going to add more, to be honest, especially now that I do have a Kindle and you see how they, the ads come up on your Kindle and it's something that the Regenera can I at least choose which books are going to show me anyway. So let's get into choosing that, but yes, exactly. Jesper (30m 56s): But I can get a lot of weird ones on my Kindle as well. It's like, I don't know why you advertising this to me. I'm never going to buy it Autumn (31m 2s): Exactly. Not the right audience. Right. So sort of I mentioned the forums. So sort of going onto the forums and being the troll that, you know, every time someone says, I want a book recommendation and you're just sharing your own book, which I don't recommend. Don't do that. This is not, we're going to just skip the forums. As I mentioned, that is not my forte, but you can go and join the forums and you should be there as a participant, as a reader. And also, you know, occasionally maybe once every 1 million posts mentioned, you're a writer to get people over to your side. But once I told her, that's probably not that bad. Autumn (31m 43s): It seems like it, like, they never want to hear that you're a writer in these groups, but you should go and be active as a reader. And that's fine, but we're here to talk about how you can help your author platform. So let's look at that and we'll go through some really quick ones that are really easy and well, these are ones you most people should know about, but if you start an author profile, you actually go and claim it. If you've already published in Amazon, you have an author profile over in good reads. And so what you do is actually claim it. You don't create it. It's kind of, it's different that way. It's already there. It's already there. You, if you have, you probably already have books that are not only there under your author profile, but have reviews. Autumn (32m 28s): People have already been doing this for you. So it's a matter of going in there saying, Hey, that's mine and setting up your profile and adding your pictures and doing things like that. And you can link your blog if have a blog outside of good reads, you can link it. So you can post they're very similar to your Amazon author profile. Jesper (32m 45s): Yeah. Well, I was just about to say, why don't they just, I mean, it's all owned by Amazon. They should just pull it from the author central on Amazon. That then done. I mean, Autumn (32m 55s): Yeah, you, we won't talk about why they haven't done this stuff, but yeah, that would make things a little bit easier. Okay. Jesper (33m 1s): Well, what if I wanted to talk about that? Autumn (33m 4s): Do we want to give tips or do we want to complain about Goodreads. Jesper (33m 7s): Okay. Let's give tips then. Autumn (33m 8s): Okay. One of the things I think is pretty cool though, is you can actually upload videos. These will show up under your author profile so that when readers go and like, look at you as an author, which is a lot easier to do than on Amazon. You know, it's something you actually tend to go to people's author profile a lot more than the book profiles, so you can upload videos. So if you have a book trailers, if you have videos of you reading, if you have audio books and you've made some cool Clippy things, I have shown some to you. I love doing those. So if you do some stuff like that, this is a great place to go ahead and post them. And then they show up on your author profile. They have a nice little, I mean, nice for good reads. Autumn (33m 49s): Okay, nice for the 1980s little spot that they sit and they can show up and you can go share them. Another really kind of thing. As you're setting up your author profile, you can actually add a spot for favorite quotes. And so I know most people think of like, you know, life savings. Like one of my favorite ones is when life, when all is said and done, there's more said than done. Well, that's a great quote, but it has nothing to do with my books. What you want to do is on your author profile, share some of your favorite quotes from your own book and have them up there as your favorite quotes. And obviously say the book it's from it kind of will check people's interest. Autumn (34m 31s): If they see something they think is pretty cool as well. And so there's another one you can do is you can join groups, which I've mentioned with the forum. So it's just like Facebook and they get to know you as an author, but you can also create your own fan group. So if you wanted to create your own group dedicated to, you know, maybe a genre, maybe a certain type of book, or just simply your own books, you can create something like that there. And that is where I think you can really work on bringing authors or readers over to your profile because you have a lot more control. The forums have usually one or two threads that are, you know, the ones that people are introduction. Autumn (35m 16s): And that's where you can say, Hey, dream, join my newsletter list to get a free book or get a free book here. So this is where I think you can really get into the control and directing people to say, Hey, I have this freebie. If you sign up here, you can get people over into your newsletter. And that's one I think is an important one, but of course you need to get people over good reads and then over enjoining to your fan group. But the nice thing is the groups that you've created as well as the groups that you're a member of show up on your author profile. So it's not like it's hidden. It's, it's very clearly posted that says, Hey, there's this fan group for my books go here. Autumn (35m 56s): And plus you can post it on your blog. And every time, the nice thing about good reads is every time you touch something on there, you share something, it shows up in the newsfeed. So you need to do like, you know, go in once or twice a day and update something, update a book you're reviewing just one little, one little thing as much as you would do do and do a tweet of course, with good reads. I don't think there's any scheduling platforms. It's like, HootSweet, I'm trying to think there's nothing where you can go and push a post through. So you actually have to go to the good reads platform and type in physical letters and share things by being there physically in person. Jesper (36m 38s): But what if I only want to run? I don't want several, you know, fan groups or where, whatever we want to call it or read a group. So I don't want that. I just want one. And for example, in our case, it is on Facebook. We have that group. So what then, so in order to leverage the people who are on good reads, so do you then have to create a group and have it here, or can you create a group and just point them somewhere else or something? Autumn (37m 8s): I think it would have to have something active on good reads, otherwise people forums and stuff. You see things float to the top that are active and people are asking questions. And so if no one is actually in it, it's just going to drop to the bottom to the abyss and will not be shown. So you would actually have to have people in here and posting questions, but then you're all Jesper (37m 30s): Of a sudden running two different groups Autumn (37m 32s): There is. And then, so it's a choice of where is the best place to be hosting, hosting your readers? You know, is it Facebook or is it good? Reads? Yeah, indeed. Okay. And so, and I've mentioned, you know, reading books. So being an active reader, if you read books, you should do your good reads reviews should add them to your own shelves. All of those touches, like I said, they show up in your timeline. And so that way people will see them. They'll see who you are. They'll see that, Hey, I like that book too. They might come and check you out, but let's get into the more interesting things that most people I don't think realize are available on good reads. And one of my favorite is that you, most people go in, they claim their book from Amazon. Autumn (38m 18s): That is one thing that does feed through. So if you publish a book on Amazon, it feeds through to your good reads profile. Was you doing anything? That's you just go and say, yep, that's mine. Yep. We're good. But you don't have to do it that way. You can, even if you don't have a pre-order, you can, as long as you have a blurb, something you're got and maybe a coming soon image, you can actually go ahead and create your book in good reads with like a coming soon image. And then you can use that to post updates on the book, using a general update option. That's under your author profile, or you can post it as if you're reading up reading the book or review update. Autumn (38m 58s): So all those things will make it show up and they'll have this coming soon image, and then it'll get people to go. And like, they can go ahead and shelve it. So they know when the book does become live, it's actually going to show up on their shelf. So that's a great way for they'll see all the updates. And of course there's some, there is a small problem with is if you're not good with computers or if you're good with computers like me, but you destroy them. When you touch them, you break them. You there's some backend things like once the book is live, you have to have the addition. You know, you want the pretty cover, the one of the proper edition. And that is stuff that every author is perfectly capable of doing, but you have to know where to go to do this. Autumn (39m 41s): And again, this is a 1980 style website, so it's not the most intuitive, but once you figure it out, you can do that because I know I've had some book cover changes, and you got to change, which edition is the one that readers will see. And sometimes you have to combine additions and it's some backend stuff it's not exciting. It's only if you like being a librarian is fun, but it is fun. It is possible. And it is a neat way of saying, Hey, I have these books coming up. They are here. They're splashy. They'll show up. It's it is nice way of promoting a book that's coming up. Jesper (40m 18s): Yeah, for sure. And I was also thinking, well, the stuff you said before about, you know, adding some sort of updates on a regular basis, I think, and if I'm incorrect here and correct me, but I think what you can do is I think you can link. I don't know how to do it, but I think you can link between your Kindle and your good reads author profile. And then if you are making highlights or notes on your Kindle, as you're reading a book, it will pop up on good reads as updates. Jesper (40m 60s): Is that right? Autumn (41m 1s): That is right. That is my favorite feature. And I'll get to in just a second. I have like two other ones I want to get to. But yeah, that is, that is one of my favorite things. And I can't even put my finger on why, but Jesper (41m 14s): That helps a bit in terms of you having to go down, post something, then, you know, if you're just reading and highlighting something you like, and that's automatically a post right data. So that's nice. Autumn (41m 23s): It is nice. And it's, there's a few cool features with that as well. And that's called Kindle notes and highlights. So, Whoa. Yeah. But speaking of that, so part of what you should do when all your books make sure your Amazon ASN number are in the book information, because by doing that, that opens up a feature that allows people to look inside just like they can do on Amazon. So that's a good way of getting readers to be able to open it up. And it's a quick little change that a lot of people don't even realize that you have to go and make sure the ASN number is there. It sometimes doesn't come through automatically or it's on the wrong edition. You need to go and check these things out and it works great. Autumn (42m 7s): And so before we get to my favorite one, there's also, there's something called the, ask the author questions. And these are a lot of fun too, because I have gotten readers who have read my books and then they go in and they ask questions and it's right there under your author profile and heavily good reads. It does give you a few generic ones that you can answer. And plus you can put in a prompt. So if you have a book you're coming out with, that was just released, you can say, Hey, ask me questions about my new release, blah, blah, blah. So you can put that in there. So it'll help inspire people to ask questions, answering the questions, makes them show up in the newsfeed, which is very useful. Autumn (42m 48s): And also it shows up permanently under your author profile. So, so people go into your author profile and they can see other questions that you've been asked and that you do answer them that you're an active author on good reads. So that's, I always love it when I see a new question in there from someone, and then I feel bad if it's been a couple months or something, because I'm on a good read slope. And I'm like, so sorry, but it is, it is great. And yeah, it's also fun. It's one of those things where you try to get your newsletters, you know, anyone to go and ask you a questions because it does give you an excuse to show up on timelines and it gives you something to talk about. And plus it's always fun to find out someone has questions about your books. Jesper (43m 28s): Hmm. I agree. Autumn (43m 30s): So Kindle notes and highlights. That's I guess that I don't know why this is my favorite, but so this is one of those things, like you've mentioned, if you're reading in your Kindle and you come across a section and you see where someone's highlighted something, that is actually something that becomes a really cool feature specifically on good reads. So if you click on it, you know, you'll often see comments we'll open up as well. Well, as an author, if you write the comments, they will show up on top. So I think that's actually kind of a cool feature. So as an author, you can go in and they say the most powerful and impactful. One is the first one you do in a book. And obviously the last one you write in a book, but you know, depending on how long your book is, you don't want to do dozens of these, but maybe five, 10 per book, you can go and highlight. Autumn (44m 22s): And you can say, what inspired you to write the scene or what this meant to you? Just anything about that setting that moment, why it's in the book and you can do a little explanation there, or just say, Hey, you know, or you could do a little teasing, hint, whatever you want to do and readers can actually comment on it. But then once you sync it with Amazon, it goes up to good reads. And there's a special page called your Kindle note and highlight page. And I will admit, it's not as easy as just thinking you actually have to go in there. And once it's sinked, you have to say, yes, please share to good reads. But again, so if you do five or six of them, you can, once you do that, you can just do one a day. Autumn (45m 6s): Then you don't have to do all five or six at the same time. You don't want to, you know, you want to spread this out. So you get a whole week out of this. And then, you know, people ask, they comment back on it. You know, they share it. You can have a whole conversation about it. And that's what I think is kind of, kind of a fun way. It's you get to interact with a reader directly in your book and that makes it kind of fun. Yeah. I can see that. No, you don't sound convinced at all, but it is funny. Cause I don't know why, like I said, I don't know why I like it, but I do think it's funny cause I've had a good reads. Autumn (45m 48s): Amazon representative actually reached out to me directly saying, Hey, you know, can you we'd love it. If you would do this on your first, your debut novel and stuff like that. Jesper (45m 57s): And I'm like, geez, it's not everyday. You get an email from a platform that says please, and maybe they were emailing everyone, but it made me feel special. So yeah. That's fair enough. Yeah, but I don't know. It just, I don't let's say look down upon good reads in any way. And I can definitely think that there, there's probably a lot of authors who get a lot from it. And, and I don't question data such that the only thing that why I'm hesitating and why I'm not sounding very convinced, I think is because it sounds to me like good reads in the census very much like Reddit in the sense that it's a place you need to participate as a reader there or in Reddit, you have to participate as, as one of the people in the group, you know, you not on read. Jesper (46m 50s): If you go, if you just start going down and promoting your own stuff, they will go crazy at you. But it, and it sounds a bit like it's the same here. You know, you have to engage as a reader and then maybe some people will start checking out your stuff. And maybe you can, you can sort of build up some POS around your books in that way. And of course there are those examples where somebody has made it onto the New York times bestseller list, as you mentioned before, but that's probably the lightning in the bottle kind of things, you know, there's very, very few who will do that. So I can, I can recognize that it is a real relationship Autumn (47m 31s): Slash community building tool, nothing wrong with that, as I said, but I think you just, you have to like to spend a lot of time on good reads and you cannot, at least in my mind right now, I think you can not view it as a marketing tool because it's really not. The marketing is like secondary. At least that's how I feel about it. I would think I don't disagree. But I think the difference is that even though the marketing is separate secondary, your books and buttons to buy your books are right there in front of the reader. So they're on, they're hungry for books. Autumn (48m 13s): So on Reddit, they might not be on there looking necessarily for books unless you're in the one that's, you know, is for books as a reader here, they, these really are people looking for new books. And I mean, we didn't even get into there's like lists. You can add your books to, and have people vote on them. There's let's Topia. There's so many different avenues of getting your books out to different people. And they're looking for them actively on this website. And that's why I think unlike Facebook, unlike a lot of other places, if I was going to tell one author who like what social media platform should I start on? I would probably say, do, do spend time on good reads. Autumn (48m 54s): It really can make a difference. You can connect with actual readers. And often these are serial readers. These are hungry readers who will read, you know, 12, 20, 30, 50 books in a year easily. They, they have reader challenges annually on how many books you can read. So this is, this is the population you want to be hungry for your book. So I would leave it at that. If you're gonna start out as an author and you want, you don't know what social media platform to start at, try this one, see if you can make a difference because this one could actually really help you. Okay. Show. Yeah. Autumn (49m 33s): Maybe some people got inspired to do a bit of good reach. Yeah. So she will leave it at that. Let's leave it at that. Okay. So next Monday, I should have a very interesting interview for you where we are going to share some inputs on how to get a traditional publishing deal. Narrator (49m 54s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.  

Do you get lost in the middle of writing your novel ... or just lost when writing, wondering what should come next? Discover seven steps that will give each part of your novel a purpose, link the plot to your character's arc, and get you writing with a direction. We go over each step, give you a chapter estimate for each, and talk about how this technique has changed our writing. For the Youtube video we mention in the podcast that has some visuals on the Seven Steps, check out https://youtu.be/DpIbF9r9fAk. Check out the new reader-oriented Facebook group we mention in the episode at https://www.facebook.com/groups/immersivefantasyfans And check out our book Plot Development: A Method of Outlining Fiction for more information on the Seven Steps of Story Structure and how it links to character arcs. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt Autumn (30s): Hello? I'm Jesper and I am Autumn Jesper (33s): This is Episode 111 have The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and I always like these episodes on the craft of writing and that's what we are going to talk about today. It's all about the seven steps of story structure. I am looking forward to this one. Actually, I have to confess, we have a seven steps of the story structured. Tee-shirt that I designed and I was in the end of the other day. And I was like, Oh, hovering over the button. I want to buy my self. Well, well maybe for my birthday, I've got to want to get a nice So. I haven't gotten it yet, but I, and so getting a new one for myself. Autumn (1m 10s): Yeah, there, there was actually quite a lot of nice things, both tee-shirts and there was also from Zazzle, you know, there are fun. I definitely needed a smaller, I need as little assortment going on, but I mean, it's stuff that I did, so I had to get an apartment, but I haven't yet I have my traveling life. Tee shirt would be a good one, I think. Jesper (1m 33s): Yeah, it's true. You can find it on a Am Writing Fantasy dot come by the way, if anybody is interested, but yeah, there was a whole assortment have all kinds of stuff where you can get with a nice Writing a branded Well whatever you would like to have keeps it. Autumn (1m 51s): Maybe not. But yeah, so I'm looking forward to this, but I know first of all, of that, you have had a terrible week and that shouldn't be laughing, but it was just so you do it. If you don't laugh, sometimes you will just end up as a little puddle on the floor crying, but I feel so cursed. I actually just wrote my niece and said that Oh because I am writing that story of the tainted Fe and I have a dark Fay, and I know I just, I don't know how its going to happen if that will work in, into the novels on I'm about to release before I release them. But I just have this scene where he is cursed and everything he touches starts to like go round wrong. Autumn (2m 36s): Like you can almost feel like you're in a mousetrap and you realize suddenly you are in a mouse trap it, or you could feel the strain that out. So that's something that you're going to touch is going to explode. The whole thing is going to go like crap. And you just have to sit there and be like, why am I cursed? What did I do? How do I get out of this? That is my life right now. So it's going to become a great scene in my story. But right now only go, I feel like I can forget it. I feel like I'm going to break something much worse than I've already broken so many things this week. Like my laptop. Yeah. So the deepest, Jesper (3m 13s): Just a breakdown. It's like my worst nightmare. I mean, Jesus, it's horrible. It, it has been on your laptop. Autumn (3m 22s): Yeah, it is its my life. I mean their was that moment, like literally And so the listeners haven't been a part of the conversation in the email chain between us. I literally was, I was working, I had my book file open. I was working on a cover. So for my next release, so I had Photoshop open. I had my editing notes open and I just went to unplug the power cable and the whole screen went black just mm. And it was that no, no, no, no, no. I mean the three things that you would not want to lose, not to have open on your computer when it dies. Autumn (4m 3s): It was like, no, no, but this is not my first computer death its so I, and I've definitely learned over the years. I, the first time something ever happened, we have talked about it before. I actually lost 10 chapters when I reached it right on my iPad. Yeah. And so the next time when I lost my Mac air, when we were traveling and living a vagabond lifestyle that hurt, but I only lost three days of data. Cause I was a really good at backing things up with this time, you know what? I get an eye or use iCloud. I new after that moment of Holy, you know, when I'm trying to give it to turn on and I'm sitting there with my head in my hands, leaning over it going, what have I not tried? Autumn (4m 48s): What else can I do? I am not going to panic. What else can I do? And I thought, you know, the files are fine. I keep all my book files are automatically stored. They don't even touch my hard drive. They are stored in Dropbox. Backup files are stored elsewhere. I do snapshots on Scrivener. And then what I do a really big updates, like finish a novel or finishing editing session. I would put the main file on an external drive. I have my book files everywhere. And so if everyone, anyone, if I refer to become famous in JK Rowling's I am screwed because I have to so many places I've got to protect my files, but I do it. So that the moments where you've realized that your entire everything you we're just working on is gone. Autumn (5m 31s): You can go that sucks. I might have lost five minutes of data. And it was just like I said, and what's the worst part? Is it literally this week, even just, I am currently borrowing my husband's laptop. He has been my Knight in shining armor, keeping me from going absolutely crazy and letting me borrow his Mac. And so kicking him off into some Old Dell lets you know, relegate it to the back corner, usually in the house. But it's, I've touched so many things setting up his I've just been like updating my Photoshop brushes and that I lose wifi connectivity. Just talking to you. I went to do something and find, or just shut down on me for no reason. Autumn (6m 13s): I was just making a folder and it disappears eye. We have a little water pump that runs battery. I went to use that the other day and I touched it and it just died. And my husband touches it. It works fine. I'm like, come on. This is not even funny. I feel it. Jesper (6m 29s): Do you want this, a recording session here? And your microphone would not work? Autumn (6m 36s): Oh my God. I literally feel cursed and I don't know what I did, but I will definitely, definitely feel like, you know, what are the Fae in my story that they are just totally cursed. And my one character always feels like he was cursed and I feel like I am just somehow became him and its socks. Well, yeah. Jesper (7m 3s): That's comma for you because now you can try to live the life of one of your characters and feel what is like all the shit you put them through it. Autumn (7m 10s): Yeah. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I'm gonna, I need to make a, men's put out some honey into a dish outside or something. I don't know. But yeah, so we're rolling. Jesper (7m 21s): Yeah. Where you are really, really nice to them and everything goes smoothly for chapter two. It would have been, maybe they will lift the curse. Maybe it's the characters. Yeah. Autumn (7m 29s): Yeah. It could be. I will try that because that's my wits say they are a Fe it, it would be my luck to have pissed off the Faye. So anyway. Yeah. How has your life or you can be this bad. No, not yet. Jesper (7m 43s): No, not that bad or even exciting as, as, as it is on your end. But I, I think given what you've been through, I, I think I, I can live with that. I can live with a bit of boringness on that. That's okay. Yeah. No, it's, it's very similar. I guess we're still a partial lockdown here and there. I don't want to talk more about that. So, but the good news is that the way I'm approaching the final few chapters of our first short story and the in Alicia, I'm in the world of Alicia. So that would be, Autumn (8m 13s): I guess that is so cool. And I was so on my way to catch up to you this weekend, but you know, I'll get there this week. I hope that other disasters, but you know, it's funny because as a long time ago, I read into a story that there was a curse and I believe it's a tribe somewhere on this planet, but the curse is literally may your life be extraordinary because if it is, if you are with the one chosen by the, God's just like, if you're chosen by a character, you know, in the Novel, if you were one of the heroes, your life sucks. So I am so happy you have had a normal life. So one of us has to do it, even though we also got Facebook Jesper (8m 56s): Groups started for our readers four, the world of Elysium, we will add a link in the show notes to that group or just in case anybody's listening on. Interesting, interested in that. But the reason why, or why I mentioned that is more to say that it's quite fun. You know, when, when, when you create the something new like this and this, a Facebook group is knew and there's just so few people in there are very, very little engagement. It is like a cold new world. And I think it's fun to sometimes you remind yourself on what it was like also when you first started out and you had no audience, you know, it's cathartic in some ways, isn't it? Jesper (9m 37s): It, it is. Except I feel like I might have touched that's what happened to him. So I don't know why it's not my fault. I know it's not now, but I think, I think it's quite nice and healthy as well for once in a while too, because you know, we all have the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group and that's the one that has to do. And so many people are also joining us every single day. There is a new bits of people joining. There's a lot of awesome posts, a lot of great stuff that people are posting in helping each other with and so on. And then you'd go into the crickets and all we know it's a, it's a, it's quite fun. Jesper (10m 22s): But of course, I mean over time we will try to build that one up. So that's going to be a very engaging and fun as well. But I just, I don't know. I just thought about that today and I thought it was quite funny. Narrator (10m 36s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Jesper (10m 41s): So before you were a computer crass, Autumn you actually manage to finish up two logos for Elysium? I did, which was exciting and yeah, so it was about ready to work on other things for our listeners I'm have some maps, but it was, and I did more than we did. We've gone through how many drafts of logos, where we found two that we liked. So that was exciting. Yeah, indeed. And so we, we are actually going to post them to our reader list, email list and ask them to vote for the one that they liked the most, because that's really the reason why I mentioned that. If there's more to say that, I think the stuff like this, it is it's good to make a reminder for yourself to 'em to get some input from other people. Jesper (11m 24s): 'cause the authors themselves are not always the best judge's on which in this case you it's a logo. We could also be a book cover or something like that. But we are not always the best just because of which one is the best one. So yeah. Just leverage your email list for that kind of stuff. Absolutely. I mean, and plus it gives the readers, like it makes it, your readers feel like they are important. They get to be a part of the decision. And yeah, this is just like, you were a focus group to ask your reader is like, Hey one, do you like, Autumn (11m 54s): This is, this is perfect. If they like it and they will see things that maybe you don't, because you're so worried about something more particular. And they're going to come with fresh eyes and not know the story and not know the history, but they're going to have to feel that immediate connection. Hopefully too one of them, even though I still have my favorite, but we'll see how it goes. Jesper (12m 13s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. We'll see how, what the votes say, but a Yeah indeed. And, and they had also of course built some anticipation a about the future Writing you are doing when you do stuff like that. So I do encourage people hear listening to a treasurer to think if there is something that you could share with you, a list, something that would, it, it doesn't have to be directly something, you know, if it doesn't have to be an extra out of the actual writing, it could be something like this, like a logo or maybe some art work or something, a bit of your setting, but something that teases a bit and builds anticipation of, of maybe the next book you're writing. You know, I think that that kind of thing is always good to do so. Jesper (12m 53s): Yeah. But I'm onto something else. But I also noticed How Keith post-it in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group a, we talked about that in a moment ago as well. So this is a lot of posts in there, but I just pick one here that the, because he, he is outlining a new series and he asked for tools or resources to help him organize his world building. And I always loved the world building questions. And then, yeah, I just think it's an incredibly useful again here, when you can ask other people for inputs and advice. So, you know, just before it was with our reader's list, but here it's asking fellow authors for their advice on a, on what they use, For taking world building notes and he got us a lot of suggestions on that. Autumn (13m 43s): I am sure he has. So there's been actually a few threads on there recently with tons and tons of comments, which, or it's just awesome to see so many people help each other out. So I did laugh cause there was one who is, I can't even remember the test that he had mentioned, but he was like, Hey, does anyone else ever use this sort of basically it's a reader level task. Like, are you writing at fifth grade level or are you writing for 13th grit? And I had to look that one up and I'm like, ah, that's why would I was in high school? They always said, I read it at an advanced level. It was this test. Okay. So the mystery salt from something at a high school, but yeah. You know, sometimes there's less, less comments on a post, but it was very interesting. Autumn (14m 23s): It made me go look it up. Oh yeah, they do. Yeah. Jesper (14m 26s): So that was one of the suggestions that he got on this wall. Building a post was well that a lot of people are using spreadsheets. Some are you using Google docs will and will was mentioned that we know all of that, but there were some of, you also mentioned campfire pro or I'm not aware of that one. Do you know what that is? Autumn (14m 45s): No, no. I haven't looked at that one. I'll have to. Definitely, because I know as I build the illicium website, we've been talking about how to make it a link to like almost an encyclopedia of our world. And I'm looking for plugins and methods of doing that. So I'll have to check out a campfire. Yeah. I don't know why, Jesper (15m 2s): What it is, but yeah, but maybe in some, maybe there will be inspiration for me for some listeners hear as well. If you, if you're looking for ways to organize your world building, we do have a lot more options on. Now let me say a few more options are different options in the world building course as well. Yeah. So yeah, when we open that later on in this year will let you know if you are on the email list. So you can get on to the email is from Am Writing Fantasy dot com. So we will let you know, in, in case you are interested in that. 3 (15m 35s): Yeah. And on to today's topic. So Autumn, Jesper (15m 40s): Seven Steps of Story Structure Autumn (15m 43s): Is this what I found? The seven steps. I can't remember how or where I found it, but it totally changed in me. It was a light bulb going off on how the Writing in Story process worked. Nothing else had worked for me before, but this, I was like, Oh, okay. And so I have been a huge fan for, well, I mean, I realize the next year will be 10 years of self publishing. So considering how long it took me to write my first, my debut novel, I've been writing for over 10 a decade now. So yeah, this has totally changed in my organization, in my story Outlining so Jesper (16m 25s): Yeah. Before going into any of the steps and so on. Yeah. Autumn (16m 28s): Oh yeah. It may be a high level. Why Jesper (16m 32s): Or why do you think it made sense? A difference? Autumn (16m 35s): Oh, I think, I think a lot of people are taught in high school or even writing classes. You and I have my undergraduate in a way of writing in English and a lot of them teach the three acts process and it, to me that's way too broad. It doesn't have a progression in my mind, it's more of a static framework because in each of those three are broken down into three and it feels more to me like slots like a picket fence. Like this is just how it looks, but this is literally a Story progression. Plus not only is each step build on the next one to create a flow. Once you realize how it interlinks with the character arc so that the character more or less all of the Plot stems from the characters actions. Autumn (17m 24s): And so the character arc is tied to the plot in it all becomes is massive. We achieve that has a definitive flow and in an input that comes out to a totally different output. And you're like, Oh, I have a whole story. And it makes sense. It's not M is not linear so much as a lot of loops, I guess. And that's probably how my brain works. Jesper (17m 48s): Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Well, there is like a million ways of a structuring stories and then everybody can find their own way through it, I guess. But I also liked how well, how are each of the steps are getting into it's it's more granularly, its more specific. And I like that rather than, you know, a very broad, high level strokes where you don't really see any way, understand what I, what am I supposed to put into those three steps or the three oxen? And I know, I think I heard somebody, you also talked about nine arcs or something, right? Autumn (18m 27s): Oh yeah. And I've heard have a five act structure two in that one. I haven't, it's not as popular. I haven't seen much on it, but especially to me, the three act, so many writers get stuck, we call it the money in the middle of the machine middle. They get stuck in the second one. This one doesn't have, it has a second, but the middle it's so definitive and it breaks it down so clearly. And then it also gives you a chapter guideline, like how much should it be of the Novel so that you know, how many chapters even should be in it. It just it's like giving someone a map with clear instructions on how to go from point a to point B or Z and you know, all the stops along the way and how long each of those stops or supposed to take. Autumn (19m 8s): And its just like, Oh, there you go. I can get out there. I love that feeling. Jesper (19m 13s): Yeah. So where do, where does, where do we start? Autumn (19m 18s): Well, I guess we could start with the intro where that's, where you start with your Novel. Jesper (19m 24s): Yeah, that sounds good. Autumn (19m 25s): Yeah. And so the intro of the seven steps in technically there's one in there and we'll talk about that is not officially a step because that would make it eight, but this first one is the intro. So that's the introduction and it is, I like to call it the way I, the way we teach it. And the Fantasy writer's guide is that this is sort of a mini story. And everyday moment that you go in and you meet the character, you know, all of those things that people tell you, it should be starting with action. Don't do too much. Don't do info, dumb thing. All of those things, all of that happens in those first initial pages of the intro, which is, I believe it's like 10% of your entire novel one, the three chapters. Autumn (20m 6s): I no, for me, I, especially when I'm writing a series, the first book might be up to three chapters, but a lot of the time, you know, this is a one or two chapter and then I get to the next phase, but that's the one thing I like to get to the thing I like to get things going really quickly. But other times you like to ease it in with a couple like three chapters, have your introduction. Jesper (20m 27s): Yeah, no I, yeah. And I think one of the things that is really good with this is that when you think of it as a bit of a mini story, and so it just, you know, stretching a couple of chapters and that's it, but that it forces you to sort of try to build a bridge between the let's it, the day-to-day or the ordinary world that the character lives in a way to whatever is going to happen in this story. Right? So So you, you're sort of building a small bridge there between going around doing your day-to-day job, all of those versus the something, something is going to happen, then you're going to get pushed into, into the story. Jesper (21m 8s): But because you have a bit of length to work with you and you have some, let's not call it rules, but guidelines on, on how a 10% may be a couple of chapters long. This also forces you to get to the point. I, I think I've mentioned on a previous podcast episode that I, and I'm not going to mention names yet, but I was reading a book awhile ago where honestly, it was like, I think 15 chapters or something and very little happened other than we were following the character. And he was going about his day to day things and in the village that he lived in and out and stuff like that, it was like, yeah, OK. You had a bit of a conflict with some other boys that were teasing him and stuff, but it was like, Hmm. Jesper (21m 52s): Okay. But 15 chapters is just like, it's enough for you to put the book down. Autumn (21m 59s): Not enough for me to put the book down, assuming that they are, there are more than a page long. Yeah, Jesper (22m 4s): No, no, no, no. On some of them were a really long chapter as well. I only managed to read it to the end because I was doing it for some market research for free for us. So that was when I was reading it. But honestly, I mean, when you have a bit of guidelines saying, keep it short and build the bridge between now and four, what comes next year then? Yeah. You are forced to, to make it interesting. And you also can't waffle about what all kinds of other things, because then it's going to take up too much space in the, in the Novel and at least when you are not following the guideline, which of course, you know, you know, again, I don't want to call it a rule, but there is a reason why there was a guideline. Jesper (22m 48s): Right? Autumn (22m 48s): Absolutely. And especially, I mean, going with the idea of the mini story and starting with action, you know, the best way to do it is to basically have something going wrong in the characters every day. But it's a minor like it's like a normal every day, a hiccup, I think before I have used an example of like, you know, the, the, the little shepherd girl is supposed to be going to school and instead the goats have gotten out it's her fault. So she has got to go get them and that sets her off somewhere else. And that is the introduction. You get to see a little bit of our world. You get to see a little bit of things going wrong. What she supposed to be doing, where she wants to be. You get a, feel, an emotional feel as well as a physical action feel of what was going on and this character's life. Autumn (23m 31s): And it was a hiccup. I mean, it's to go, it's getting out of it is not do you know, the Orks rating the entire village? Its just a little problem, but it's a normal problem that the reader can relate to. Even if you've never heard of goats before you kind of get idea that you're not supposed to let them out and getting in trouble as a kid and that you are supposed to be going to school and yeah, you can get those feelings. You relate really quickly without getting worried about the, what the heck is going on and who is this person or those little questions. Yeah. Jesper (24m 3s): The other part is as well that it gives you the possibility to build that likeness for the main character. You, if you can show them in a small, like everyday situation where they are doing something nice for somebody, are they helping somebody then maybe the, you know, taking care of an animal or just something that will stop building that relationship with the reader on all of that like ability towards the readers or the reader feels like, aah, like this person, this was a nice person, right. That Autumn (24m 34s): Connection, that emotional Jesper (24m 36s): Connection and built that right from the beginning. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Autumn (24m 40s): So all of that leads into the inciting incident, which is when you are really starting to introduce the bigger Plot of the Novel. Now this one is, this is quick, this is one chapter. It happens and it's boom. And it is when you flip the character's world completely upside down. And that's why it's so much fun. And its really, it kind of starts off the whole story. Plot the big Plot and this is where you have introduced the reader. So they feel familiar with the character and this thing happens and they were like, Oh my gosh, how's this, how's this character that I've started caring about going to get through this. And so it's so much fun to write. Jesper (25m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. There's not much to sell, to say I'm in the inciting incident is the inciting incident. Autumn (25m 28s): Right, right. It is. And I think that's a good way of looking at it is like, if you have that many Story, this is the outcome of them in the story and whatever that outcome is, it's not what the character expects. It is like, it is the opposite. So you go to go find your goats and you know, either the whole village is swept up into an armed raid while you're gone or she gets abducted to a fairy world. Something happens. It is not the normal everyday anymore. Jesper (25m 59s): Yeah. Yeah. And you get to see the, that there are bigger things that play out. Autumn (26m 4s): Yeah. I guess that's a good way to put it. Absolutely. Jesper (26m 9s): So where do we go in step three? Autumn (26m 11s): Oh this is always it's. So now we're starting to tactically get into the middle of that in the three X structure is where I would always get lost. So this is the next phase is the reaction phase, which is like the name of it. This is where the character reacts to what just happened. And it's so easy to mentally when you usually get to the middle and you're like, I don't know what's going to happen. I need to throw in some hurdles. Right? I have to throw in some laws and I don't know why. Well, this tells you, okay, these, this sec next section, which Oh, I'm trying to think about 20%, maybe 30 to 30% of the Novel it's usually like five to seven chapters, depending on how long you draw it out. Autumn (26m 55s): I think our smaller reaction phase is better than a longer one because this is literally the character reacting to the world being thrown upside down. So there going to be probably overreacting. They're not going to survive the, unless they have health or luck. And there's only so much time. You can draw that out where your a main character is flailing on the point of failure before the coup, before the reader is like, Oh, Please get a clue just to get a clue. So this one is, it is, yeah, I like this one on the shorter side personally, but that's how I write. You can make this one as long as the next, next phase. Autumn (27m 35s): So in two phases from now Jesper (27m 38s): And the character incompetent also shows you here, right? So you can show how the character is really not equipped to deal with this situation at all. And probably going to fail, ah, and stumble through that through things. And then that's also a, well, we can talk a bit about character arc a bit later here, but, but that's where you can start showing the Well the beginnings of the characters, meaning that the, this is where the character is feeling. And then later on, when you start seeing that the character succeeding than you can start seeing the chains there, and then you can see that the character has gained new skills and new knowledge is getting better or stronger or whatever it is that the user story is about. Jesper (28m 21s): So it, it seats very well in character arcs with the story structure in itself. Autumn (28m 27s): It does. I mean, this is basically the character, once things to revert to the normal every day, even if they thought they hated the normal every day, there's this longing where they realize I'm not prepared for this. This is, this is much more real than I thought it was. And so there, there are stumbling around and that is the perfect be the basis for a character to grow to either one, a return to what things were to have the wrong view of the world, to just have everything show that they are a novice and a newbie and not who they thought they were or even thought they could be. And yet that's to be getting out of character arc. Right? Jesper (29m 5s): Yeah, indeed. And this is also where they was likely will sort of try to hang on to the Well the Lite that they are telling themselves about the world that you know, that they will, they'll try desperately to hang onto the understanding of the world and say, you know, that this is how it's supposed to work and I'll continue down this road of how its supposed to be. Even though I'm banging my head against the wall all the time, but I'm still gonna try because I'm convinced that this is the way things are. And, and then again, later on when the, with the character talk to you later on, once they start realizing that maybe there is something with myself, I need to as well to be able to succeed again, then you are starting to show you, how would you change in the person? Jesper (29m 46s): And then it becomes a Well the character becomes alive. It becomes more than a cardboard, a cardboard, a cop out that the guy that is a whole living on the page. I mean, it's, it's, three-dimensionally all of a sudden. Autumn (30m 0s): Absolutely. Yes. I think that is a great way of putting it that this is it, it makes the world so much and the arcs in the story, it was just really becomes an issue, Jesper (30m 10s): Deeper topic. Yeah. And then we move on to what step four now, Autumn (30m 17s): Step for us. So this is one of my favorite it's often called dark Knight of the soul or the new infos phase. I, I loved the idea of the dark Knight of the soul of this is like the treachery, you know, it just sounds cool. And it was just like, ah, this is like, you know, you you've failed so badly in the reaction phase, you have held to that deep believe, that wrong view of the world. So strongly that you've caused like the death of your best friend, that someone is captured dead and you have that moment of waking up or staying up all night, going, Holy, Jesper (30m 52s): The crap I screwed up. Yeah. Autumn (30m 56s): I have to admit though, when I do my writing, if I go back and look at all of the ones, I tend to do a new info, which is a new, a new piece of the puzzle, new information clicks into place and you send, they go, Oh crap. That's what I needed to be doing. And this is the truth that I didn't realize before. So you can do it depends on if you're into the dark, FANTASY a dark story or a more of a, Novel a noble bright, which I tend to write Nobel Brite by myself. So I tend to have more than that. Oh, this is where I'm supposed to be going more than I have that. Oh, you just died. I'm so sorry. Jesper (31m 29s): Yeah. Sorry. The evilness always comes out. Autumn (31m 37s): It does. You know, I have is everyone once in a while, you're at a really dark one, but you know, it's usually not there, but, and this is another one that is also just 1% of the Novel one chapter. You just have one moment or this happens, you don't draw it out too long. You make it emotionally impactful, whether it is Lite and a new info or dark and death and despair. And just that horrible sleepless night of realizing you are a total screw up when you've because a serious thing to happen. One of those to you just get through it and move on. It's sort of, it is in a way it's a long haul. It's a reaction as well to something that just happened. Autumn (32m 17s): So its not an exciting chapter, but it's an emotional impact. And this is the second turning point of the Novel when the inciting incident 20 all of the turning points or just one chapter, the inciting incident, one chapter first turning point. This is the second turning 0.1 chapter dark night of the soul. Whether it be, Jesper (32m 36s): Yeah, it's an exciting chapter. It's just not actually now I think what it is. Yeah, Autumn (32m 40s): I think so. I mean it's, it's Yeah there is no, usually no battle scenes, dooring it? Unless it's all kind of gets conglomerated in there, but it is definitely just an incredibly impactful chapter. Yeah. Jesper (32m 55s): Okay. And after that we move into step five. Autumn (32m 58s): So at five. So now this is the other side of the coin from the reaction phase, which was the character flailing about and screwing up in nearly dying. If it wasn't for luck and friends, we're in the planning phase now. So this is the characters that are coming out of that dark night of the soul are coming out of the new info phase, going, this is what I need to do and I'm going to make this plan. I am going to get this person to help me. I'm gonna go get this talisman. I am going to go and do something because they are seeing the bigger picture in the world. That's not just about them. You know, this is where their working with the character arc, where they're going from. I have this false beliefs to going, Oh this is the real problems in the world. Autumn (33m 39s): And it's not about me going back to what I want, but is about me solving this problem for everyone who had the same problem I did. And it's kind of, it's so dynamic again, this is the middle where so many authors get lost. And suddenly you're saying, you know, 20 to 30% of your Novel five to seven chapters, the planning phase, you know, you can make it a little bit longer if your reaction phase is really short, but this is where things are starting to click. And the tension starting to build this is where the villain is starting to take notice directly out of the hero. And so things, every single hurdle that they come up against is getting bigger and bigger. And now the main character is starting to when some on his own or her own starting to make progress, which is making them much more of a threat. Autumn (34m 24s): So the cycle, the tension starts really ratcheting down and this was such a fun phase to right? Yeah. Jesper (34m 32s): Then all of a sudden in the middle doesn't sound boring anymore. Now it's just a big thing. And you also were sort of at the point of no return at this point, you know, the character is starting to understand that, okay. I just, I can't just ignore this stuff and I can't just go back to where I was and, and take care of the goats anymore. I have to do something to eat, you know, whatever. And we'll be in Epic Fantasy it's often to do with saving the world and stuff like that, but it could be all kinds of stuff. Autumn (35m 3s): Absolutely. Yeah. This is why I like that. At the point of no return. At this point, they have kind of realized they are moving towards a definitive, what will be the climax. They are realizing that they have a bigger problem to solve and maybe every time they try to find it, they are finding more roadblocks, whatever it is to make the hurdles make sense in your world where a lot of the reaction phase hurdles can often be like environmental. Like, you know, they are not prepared for the cold, the wet, the rain, the distance, the food, something like that. This is getting much more specific where they are going after people and henchmen and drag it and or whatever they're doing. These are the really kind of bigger and bigger and bigger and battles. Hm. Jesper (35m 41s): Yeah. I like, you're just mentioning dragons. Autumn (35m 43s): So I had to slip that in. Jesper (35m 48s): Okay. But then we get to step number six. Autumn (35m 51s): Yeah we do. And this is where I do. 'em maybe it's 5.5. So its not really faze, but there is something called the discission and that is the bridge between the planning phase and the climax. And so this is in its own way is as the climate is as big as the whole Novel is leading up to this. But the decision is a moment where the character realizes maybe I'm scared. I didn't ever expect to get here. It's kind of a looking back at everything they've done looking at it. What's at stake. You know, there are going from carrying about, you know, fighting three loss goats to trying to save the world. And so you kind of make sense of that. Autumn (36m 31s): You have that moment of a deep breath have I might die, but this is worth it. I am doing this. I am going to go fight this sucker. And they made that decision and that is really important. It's sometimes only a paragraph, but at that moment is a really good moment because it kind of let's the reader to take a breath and also understand how big and important this is. And then we move into the climax, which is again a 20 to 30% of the Novel. This is the five to seven to 10 chapters. This is the big to do where everything happens, the battle, the fill-in and the hero has to meet. Autumn (37m 12s): They have to hit head to head and how that happens is in what's going to happen. That's all the climax. Right? Jesper (37m 21s): And it's often, you know, the, the, the intro pot. Oh no, no, no. Maybe not step one because I think a lot of people fail there as well in terms of understanding, building that little ministry or in the beginning. But it, at least if we check it from the inciting incident part, that part people usually do not struggle with. Yeah. And also here with the climax. In most cases, people do not struggle with that either, but it's a, it's a step in between that are difficult most of the time. So I think when we are talking about the climax in most people or most writers, even inexperienced ones will feel fairly okay with this part because this is, this is probably most likely their stuff you had in mind already when you decided the story and the first place that you want it to ride. Jesper (38m 5s): A lot of the times you have a feeling of from the beginning were you will want things to end up and how it's going to be this massive battle with all the dragons and, and the goats and a roasting. Right? Autumn (38m 19s): Yeah. And the dragons of the goat's are going to be an interesting one to two against each other. I hope they are on the same tight you need to renew. No. And so yeah, I agree. I think most people have an idea that the climax, I think the biggest word of advice is that you have to make sure that everything that happened before the climax makes it worthwhile. So you can have the, I was a show and now I'm trying to remember of course, because my brain is so fried, but she was a succubus and it was a really good story and character art and Magic and Fay. But the battle scenes, the climax of the series of the season was always crop. Autumn (39m 0s): They had like this Huntress who was so, you know, I had been alive for a a thousand years and he had fought all these battles that she died by like missing the bad guy with one sword stroke. I was like, come on, literally my nephew could write a better climate. So make this one is important. Everything that came before, it should make sense. And it, the climax has to over top them all. It has to be this level of tension that, you know, readers are gasping and they can put it down before going to bed. And if you haven't gotten that, go back and rewrite it because this is an important step. This is what, you know, everyone's been waiting for us. And if you serve mushy cake, instead of this amazing, you know, baked Alaska, if people are going to know Jesper (39m 45s): Sure. And then we came into this to come in to the final step. Yeah. Autumn (39m 49s): Okay. And this is what I think would do a lot of authors do miss and mess up or just kind of skip. And that's the wrap-up and it sounds so simple, but it's an important one is important. If you're going to have a continuing series, you want to introduce the next thread, maybe even the next inciting incident at the very, very, very end, but you need to take the energy of the climax, give your readers a quick breath, give them an idea of, you know, how people are faring the love interest, wrap it up the subplots. This is the emotional ending. Often of the Story. This is the last tastes, you know, a sip of wine. This is the last tape that's going to linger in their minds, on their lips when they shut the page. Autumn (40m 31s): And it's either going to be making them, you know, look and stylistically foreword and put it away forever. Or is it going to get them ramped up to want to go grab the next book, whatever that emotional ending is. This is you finished that in the, wrap-up be it one chapter two to three. This is again it's, it's like a mirror image. You can almost fold the seven steps and a half and a, they mirror image of each other pretty well. That perfectly we are pretty well, but the ramp-up is like the intro. Its just a quick little story, right? Jesper (41m 1s): Yeah. And it's pretty cool. When you can do a bit of a cold back to the intro, a Lilly and it ties everything two together in a neat little boat there. That that's really nice, but I was actually going to maybe step into a bit of a hornet's nest here. Autumn (41m 16s): Ooh, that's a very brave of you and you know how my week is going. So just be warned. Jesper (41m 23s): Yeah, no, it was more because I know how what's a lot of people hate at the last season of game of Thrones. Right. But I just wanted to mention that actually one of the things that I found done very well, despite all the hating that goes to the, the very, very last Episode in the eye. I can't remember anymore. Its quite a while since our words, but maybe its like the last 15 minutes or 10 minutes, something like that. But that's actually where you have the wrap-up. Yes. And you get to see every single of the, one of the important characters and what's the what's going to happen to them and, and how do their life sort of continue from there? Jesper (42m 7s): And I think that part in itself, whether your night, like the season or not, it doesn't matter, but those 10 minutes, 15 minutes, however long that was, I can remember, but that wrap it up. They did that in the, in the end. I thought that was done very, very nicely. Yeah. It was not to cry it out. It was to the point. It just gave you the insight of what's going to happen with these characters and finish things off in a good way because the Westway you can finish it up. Well this was a TV series then, but even novels, you know, when things are just left hanging, you have no idea what happened to these people then. Yeah. That that's really not a very satisfactory ending, even though you might have had the most awesome battle just before. Jesper (42m 49s): But if you don't just leave everybody hanging on that. Yeah. Okay. He defeated the ma the matte necromancer and then a yeah, that was cool. Thanks by that. Autumn (43m 1s): That works very well. Especially if you do have any subplots that weren't tied up and you know, you see it, you always have that Rita raise your hand, but what about he had a few of the necromancer, but he never picked up the drop Juul that you know, is going to potentially blow up. And you know, you want to see those things. You wanna know the two that are going to be another book or you want to know if it's really a happily ever after they've married or are they going to, you know, have kids, even a Harry Potter, it had that little glimpse forward where he's sending his kids off to Hogwarts. Those are those little moments that you're like, Oh, we don't know that whatever happens, the world goes on, they have a future. And it kind of gives that reader of the idea that, Oh, I like that. Autumn (43m 43s): I like knowing that there are going to be OK. You can let that go now. Jesper (43m 48s): Yeah. In the end of the law of the rings for a role. So reach out to the Shire. Oh no. Maybe he doesn't know. I can't remember anymore, but the day there is a return to the to see how things are going and Frodo leaves on the Elvin boat. I can't remember if it goes to the GI first off and then leaves on Delvin boat or not. I, I can't remember. I actually, it should be honest, but ER, but anyway, you do go back to the chair and a, you do also see what happens to the Frodo afterwards, which again is a good wrap-up. It shows the life of the character, what what's going to happen next day. And it does not, well, it should not be drawn out at all. It should be a fairly short face, but you can tell a lot in a few paragraphs, even for yourself or like, like my game Thrones example from before they probably visited like 10 characters in 10 minutes or something and they, it was nice. Jesper (44m 39s): You don't need more. Now I think I am definitely one of the authors I always mean to do a longer wrap-up but I tend to get, even for the end of a series is like two chapters. But you were like, you said that you can do a lot for me. It's often it takes two chapters because maybe I switch point of view or, or something, but you can wrap up some stuff and if you're building to the next book, this is where you do it. You have a good little moment of, Oh thank goodness. And then someone's like, Oh, but what about that joke that everyone dropped in and you got lost in the dragons, ate it. And you're like, Oh, and then the Novel ends then of course the reader's like, okay, well what about that? Then they could get to the next one. Yeah, no doubt. All right. So I wanted to mention as well, when we are talking about, these are the seven steps of, of story structure. Jesper (45m 25s): If you would like to have a bit of graphics to go along with the, each of the steps that you can actually go onto the Am Writing, Fantasy a YouTube channel because it would have a video on there that was recorded. I don't know, a couple of years ago probably by now, but Autumn goes through to seven steps there as well. And there was a bit of graphics on the screen screen on their screen, on this screen, so that it's even easier to follow. Or even if, if you need even more than that, you can also go and pick up the aisle plotting books because it's spelt on the rupture. And it explains of course in a lot more detail that we can do here exactly how to build every single one of those steps and what do you need to put into them? Jesper (46m 9s): So we will put a link to the plotting books in the show notes. So, you know, you can go in and check that one out if you, if you need that guidance, but, and you have a starting point video, if you want, the video is good, but it's even better. If the planning book really links in the character building and the character arc and how the character is really the one who is driving the seven steps. So definitely check that out if you have questions or is it sounded like, Hey, this is how I went to, right? Because like I said, this is, this is how I write. It makes so much sense. And I, I never fall in the middle. I usually fall in the climax because there is so much going on. If I don't add at least two chapters to every climax, I right. It would be, it would be a first time. Jesper (46m 51s): Yeah. So hopefully that was helpful. We try to keep it, lets say simple enough that it's easy to follow, you know, on an audio podcast like this, but there are a means to, to get more detailed both from the video, but also from the book on plodding. If, if you need that. Next Monday we will discuss how to make the most of good reads as an author. Is it useful or useful for a site for a book marketing? So tune in and find out if you like, Narrator (47m 25s): What did you just heard? There is a few things you can do to support the Am FANTASY PODCAST Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jasper on patrion.com/ Am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

In this hilarious episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share the most stupid magic spells, and extremely useless magic systems, they can think off.  Listen in, have some fun, and learn about a spell animating walking tea cups, a more than deadly magic system made up by Autumn's evil mind, and lots more. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in a way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is Episode 110 of the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and this is one of our alternating lists and things might go a bit crazy here today, as we talk about the worst Magic Systems or Spells that we can think of. Autumn (50s): Oh, I cannot wait for this one. They had so much fun coming up with this list. Jesper (57s): Oh yeah. I, I got a bit of inspiration as well from, from the internet, but I'll, I'll talk more about that once we get to the list, but then some I can't wait, but how are you doing? Oh my God. Well, you know, we had a bit of a snow storm recently, and so we actually have no power that goodness, the house where we're at as a generator. So that kind of, you know, B and everybody kind of calmed down and just stay in and watch Netflix and get some writing done. Autumn (1m 28s): So that's always a good thing, but it just, you or emailing about a snow storm and all that, that's not good. It was a heavy, wet snow. I, it wasn't deep. It was just really heavy. So it broke things, but, you know, it's, you know, I just do my best to say off the news as much as possible, because otherwise it's like, you just keep watching. I keep thinking of like, by the time this is by the time this podcast is published, since we're recording early, that it's like, wow, hopefully the world's and a happy, safer place, then it feels like The for this week that were entering right now. But I will keep my fingers crossed. Oh yeah. Yeah. The, the things that are going a bit creepy over there and you'll part of the world's that's for sure. Autumn (2m 11s): Yeah, there is no other way of putting it. I just keeping my head down and writing and editing I'm on the edits for my next book release for the tainted face. So that's good. I actually put out a spreadsheet. What I did it, I thought I'd like, you would be proud because I always avoid spreadsheets and what we have. I made a spreadsheet for my edits and so I could tackle them organized matter and that they're going well. So I'm, I'm happy that way. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So how are things over there? Well, we are still in partial lock-down and Mark at the moment. It's a bit worse. So they've made more restrictions again. Jesper (2m 52s): Now we, we can still go grocery shopping and go for a walk outside, but that's more or less it and everything else are not really allowed. So I guess I'm starting to go a bit crazy or being locked up inside like that, but I'm, I'm sure I'm not the only one who is feeling increasingly annoyed at COVID 19. That was just so freaking annoying. But now I'm going to say, because it is named 19 because it is 2019, it's 20 to 21, but now that we should be again, moving on, but to get to what the program COVID. Autumn (3m 26s): Yeah, totally. But yeah, I mean, that's my mom and I'd go back and forth and I want to see my parents so badly. And obviously I can't right now, but we share a lot of pictures of what we are baking. And then a lady who's a property where we're at at, and I go and talk to her and we were talking about baking. I am like, I think this is what we're doing. Or if it's winter it's Vermont, there was too much snow for her to go for a really long walk. And let's you want to go to like snowshoeing and you know, we just talked about bacon. Yeah. Yeah. What else could you do? Exactly know, but I think a part from all of that, that things are well going well, well you are, and I mostly, you have to be in to stop the redesign of the Am Writing Fantasy website. Autumn (4m 11s): So that's pretty cool. I was so excited and it looked so good and that the it's just a pleasure to be on there and look at it and let me get so pretty. Yeah. So if any listeners want to check out what it looks like, then a just go to a Am Writing Fantasy dot com and check it out, let us know what you think. Yes. I would love to hear. Jesper (4m 31s): Oh yeah. And we've also been a busy as well. 'cause we have also moved our entire email list from ConvertKit to MailerLite and you'd be getting organized There that was a huge task, but I think it came out well, and we've been writing you can't forget the fact that you and I are writing a novella together. And so we're getting that good of the kinks of that worked out as well. Yeah. So it looks like all in all things that are going well after a wall would just have to ignore that COVID monster. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Narrator (5m 6s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Jesper (5m 12s): Cute and warm. Welcome goes to Dominic, all the latest SUPPORT on Patrion and welcome Dominic. It's so great to have you. Absolutely. So, yeah, as I've said, many times before, you know, if you haven't checked out Patrion already, please find the link in the show notes. We do try to offer a ton of rewards over there. And there are also the Wiki posts about writing and also book marketing. And I'll leave it to you to guess who's writing what posts. I don't know. They don't know if it's that. Well, yeah, it's a title they think, Oh, you don't think so. Oh yeah. Well at least if you're listening to the podcast for quite awhile, you can probably guess who's doing Writing post and who is doing bookmarking tools, even though we Krause hats occasionally, Autumn (5m 59s): But Yes, I don't know if he saw the message from Garret today, but I have started doing a description to Saurus inspired by the emotion of this story. So on. So I started with Forrest's and he said, you know, and love is describing the forest is as much of what is the current story isn't in the most difficult thing he is working on right now. So it was just like, I must have been reading in his mind because I just gave him a whole bunch of ideas for the forest and it was novel. So yeah. I just love that. Jesper (6m 30s): Oh yeah. That's very cool. Yes I did see him to the post office, so that, that was cool. Yeah. Yeah. So if you haven't checked it out already, go, go and check it out. And at least see if it's something for you and yeah, we'll be happy to have you. Autumn (6m 48s): Absolutely. Jesper (6m 48s): Anything else we should mention a Autumn before we start going crazy with our Spells? Autumn (6m 54s): Only, I just want to give another shout out to Luke and Jayson or moderators on Am Writing Fantasy because they deserve a shout out occasionally, cause they are, are gatekeepers. Like, Oh my goodness. That group is growing by leaps and bounds and is so much fun. And they, they are moderators who are entertainers. Well, I think it's a science. I love to see what they're antiques are. Yeah, it does the Facebook group. Jesper (7m 19s): So just search for Am Writing Fantasy under the groups on Facebook, if you want to be part of that community, they're, it's a, it's really funny, you know, that there is some, there are some good banter going on once in a while. And there is also a lot of helpful stuff. Pupil are helping each other out with advices and stuff like that. So it's really great. Luke usually pitchers in and helps with a good advice. And Jason, just a post, a ton of a inspirational questions. It's fantastic. Can you think about, yeah, he caught me and one of them he's so mean. I saw that. Yeah. That was so funny. Autumn (7m 58s): Let you down the rabbit hole. He did totally Narrator (8m 3s): Cool. And on to today's topic. Jesper (8m 7s): Yeah. So as I said at the top of this is one of the famous or perhaps in famous or infamous, so yeah, that might be the way to go, but it is one of our alternate alternating lists anyway. And a w I guess we'll try to have a bit of fun with this one. Autumn I think so, because so much fun coming up with it. I mean, there is the serious side, which I did a little bit of internet research and I did see that a lot of readers who had a number one worst Magic Systems they, like you ask that on a forum or a post and yeah. And they were the first thing, like 99%, I would say there is, they would be frustrated with inconsistent or poorly defined Magic Systems were a Magic user as could not do something in one book or one chapter. Autumn (8m 52s): And it was fun. It just fine in the next, or are they also the second, the runner up would probably have been, or where are the heroes have God like power and they just can't be defeated. And they would also need a superheroes like Superman. Yeah. They was like, here, there is no real tension. You're never worried. So I avoided those. But the one that I came up with, I went with actual magical ability is that if they existed, I would probably possibly have to turn down the ability to have Magic, which that's just like, what? I can't believe it would be the magic is an option. And I would say, no, that was what made my lists. Jesper (9m 33s): So yeah. Yeah. It was to try to go to the most silly way I could think of it. You know, like, like if I was amazed, this will be the Most USELESS Spells it could have that. It was kind of what I was trying to go for it. Well, this will be good. Yeah. So of course a, you know, maybe some of what we were saying probably nobody's wants to copy these Spells because they are quite USELESS, but maybe something will prompt another thought in somebody's mind and they might get a bit of inspiration for something. But otherwise this is just going to be a bit of fun today. So you can do a sort of leaning back and listen to a bit of a crisis stuff, but I think it would be perfect and it, maybe it will inspire us a moment of humor and some ones novel somewhere that would be kind of cool too. Autumn (10m 22s): Yeah. Before, before we get going, did you find it difficult? Autumn to try to work out some really USELESS Spells like I said, well, how, how did you think about it? Because to me, actually, it was harder than I thought it was. I actually came up with like four and I actually stuck most, mostly in the Magic Systems whole system. So we're going to actually have some really different things, which will be exciting, but I came up with For pretty easily. And then I finally came up with a fifth one, I think yesterday, but I did, this is one where I started last week and I did not, you know, I did not wait into the 15 minutes before we started recording. I actually did my homework and thought about this one pretty seriously. Autumn (11m 4s): Oh, wow. What a change? We just have to come up with some nonsense topics. And then you, what are you going to start going to do? Homework would be so serious about that nonsense topics. Okay. Absolutely. A very professional podcasting contrary ask my husband. It was probably more contrary than me. Yeah, no, actually I honestly found it a bit harder than I thought I thought, because it was like, if I was, if I was amazed and I felt like this was going to be the most stupid Spells that I could have, it felt like that I was actually harder than I thought, because then as soon as I started thinking about something, then I thought, well, actually, maybe in that situation it could. Jesper (11m 48s): So it was like, Hmm, how can you, how could I come up with something where it's a little, almost like, no matter what I can think of, it would be USELESS. So that was what was the way. So yeah, as I said, I cheated a bit, but I will say which ones are cheated with and a where I got a bit of inspiration from, from the internet, but there was some really funny one. So there were two funny not to include it on my list. Autumn (12m 9s): I like can't wait to hear them know. I think it would be fun. So it was funny. You went with it, like, what is the Most USELESS Spells and I went with, what would it take for me? Not to want to have Magic is so it'll be two different perspectives, but these are going to be so much fun. Jesper (12m 26s): And then at the end we'll have to, so we can think about this as we go. And I guess the listener can as well, but I think at the end we'll need to work out, which one of the 10 entries here is the winner and which one is the worst of it at all? Autumn (12m 40s): Well, I can not wait to share my worst worst with you then, but will get there. That's the last one we have to start at number two. Okay. Jesper (12m 47s): Or the thing is we have to agree on it. So yeah. Autumn (12m 51s): So there will be a winner, a winner of the worst. I don't know if I want to be that winner. Jesper (12m 56s): Oh, well you could say that the one who came up with the worst one was to most creative. So in that way you want, Autumn (13m 2s): I like that one. Okay. Jesper (13m 6s): Okay. So yeah. Do you want to start off? Do you want me to start? Oh, I actually have ranked my mind by the way. So the number five is the least stupid one. And number one is the worst. Autumn (13m 17s): I Oh, so I did it the opposite. So my number one is the most, like if this existed for Magic, it probably wouldn't bother me too much. And number five is okay. Now if this existed, I might actually work on annihilating magics. Okay. Jesper (13m 32s): All right. We just need to work from least bad to worst. Perfect. So we work in that order. Autumn (13m 39s): I am ready for that. So whoever wants to start, if you want to go ahead. Jesper (13m 45s): All right. So number five was a kid. This was one of my internet searches. It's it's pretty bad, but I can still do worse. So I actually found a list of USELESS D and D Spells. Oh, and this is what you just really stood out to me because I don't know what the game to sign us up. Even up to maybe they've been drinking, but they, they made this, I dunno. But so this one is just an, I have no idea of which version of D and D I was in a word or whatnot. So if we have some really competent gay masters out, their please don't kill me. It's it's just a word of the intranet. Right? So it is not my fault if it's incorrect, but it's funny. Jesper (14m 29s): Anyway, so this spell is called banished DASSLE. So a read out to you what the spill actually does. It's laughing at myself. I haven't even started yet. Oh, no. Okay. So once the spell is cast to target, see clearly through blinding sunlight and heat shimmer reflected some light from a mirror has no effect on the target and they are immune from being blinded by Lightspeed cells. So can you walk out what that is? Autumn (15m 3s): Why would they have that is basically a path. So there is this just some classes for me to spell it for sunglasses. If I was in way Jesper (15m 20s): Spells I hope that I could do something better than casting sunglasses. It was just like it. Autumn (15m 28s): So that's yeah, I, that would just not be that impressive as this Jesper (15m 34s): Now he's like, Oh my God, it's a bit shocked today. And then I'll do my spell thingie and then, ah, it's not a sharp anymore. It's like, okay. I have all made sense. Autumn (15m 47s): Yeah. That's what you were doing. You were getting a little senile and you know, the brightness bothers your eyes more. Okay. Jesper (15m 56s): Yeah. Well, yeah, actually, maybe if you work at a, at a home for the elderly, maybe that would actually be All right. I'm casting it on some of these. Autumn (16m 5s): Oh, there you go. Yeah. That would be the favorite with everyone there. Ah, yeah. Okay. Jesper (16m 12s): So you see, actually, this is why it was the least bad of them because it actually has some USELESS Autumn (16m 18s): You were useful, useful, useful uselessness. There we go. Yeah. That was the way that's a tongue twister. All right. Let's say if you want to hear my, my, what? My Magic Systems that if this existed, I might be able to pull it up with it for it, if it meant having Magic. Okay. All right. So that whenever you cast a spell, a smell is also created. So this could be anything from like lavender and honey two, you know, skunk farm and you know, something rancid. And I also thought of the caveat that, of course, anything that likes to eat Magic users would definitely learn to track you by smells. Autumn (17m 0s): So, yeah, it's, it's a mild, this was like one, a five year five-year-old would adore. But I was thinking, you know, I don't do this. I could see the embarrassment in polite society when you're trying to cast a spell it. And it's like, it wasn't me. I made Magic as like the court wizard. Okay. Jesper (17m 19s): We have with the King and everything and they didn't. I tell you that you should not fall off when you're passing. Autumn (17m 23s): All right. So this would be quite amusing in a different world because it is funny. It did make me think that in a world building, I don't know of any Magic system where Magic actually produces a smell, it's always lights are tingling or something. Why does it smells? Why does it Magic never pass the smell. So There I challenge all those out there. Mc smells. Mc your Magic smell. Yeah. Or it could be a sound. Well, maybe, I mean, well, it's sometimes do metrics metrics. Spells does it make sense already, but its Yes male. It's the smell as good. But I was wondering if you could make, if you could make magic spells where there is a smell, but it doesn't turn it turn into like ridiculous stuff. Autumn (18m 15s): I mean, because imagine that you're writing your novel in and you're saying OK. And the cost of Spells a fireball at the enemy and there was a smell of lavender. It's just like it instantly turned it into what the, what is this idea that you would definitely have to create something they brimstone or solve or that goes on, you know, every spell it would have to maybe have a slightly different older that fits it's otherwise it would be, I don't know, it'd be quite the contrary where you have this devastating, horrible spell that kills people and it smells like roses and they have got a roast and a thought, ah, there you go. Autumn (18m 57s): Oh, well, if you had a fun kids, but if you think this would be a fantastic children, okay. Yeah. The activity then it might. Yeah. Well I have done it again. This is not too bad when we were supposed to come up with a completely useless stuff, but now we've had to go on our list already and we already found uses for them, but it's only number five. Wait until you get to number one. Okay. All right. So your number four. All right. So this is one that I came up with and I almost cannot think of a single situation where this spell would be useful, but maybe you can, maybe it maybe, maybe I'll change my mind in the minute. Jesper (19m 41s): Do I, when I come up with the use for this Spells I'm not sure how I'm going to concede that easily. I had asked. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Try and get it to a general direction. And so this is the ability to, or a spell that makes anything tasteless. Oh, that's horrible. What do you think about that? I think it's horrible. You know, I'm a foodie. I love food. This is just so I'm personally terrified of COVID because you can't taste things. If I couldn't taste my tea, I would just cry every day. Jesper (20m 24s): Yeah. And I'm thinking as well, you know that if you were in a medieval fantasy setting a, I mean, it's actually really good to things, taste bad when they're off, then you know, not to eat it, but, and even if you don't like the food, why would you want to make a tasteless and eat it anyway? Yeah. Can you think of a single situation where this would be useful? Yeah. If you need to take medicine for some horrible condition into the medicine was just absolutely patron. I just thought it's so hard about this cannot be used in any situation whatsoever. I have a really strong gag reflex. Autumn (21m 4s): So there's definitely, I, I have a hard time taking pills and things. So no, this was totally there's times. I would probably like that for five seconds and then everything comes back to normal. I'd be frightened. There's got to be a reverse anti tastes for me then it wasn't that bad anyway. Yeah. Okay. Every kid, yeah. Every kid who was going to take medicine for a cold or something would want this spell. Totally. Okay. Jesper (21m 30s): Ah, okay. Okay. I can see that's not a good one. Yeah. Autumn (21m 34s): I like it though. I might want that one, but yeah. So yeah, we're going for a worst. Spells that's not, ah, that's not quite that bad. It is very useful to have it in your back Jesper (21m 43s): Pocket as you would work out on my bad Autumn (21m 44s): Spill list thing. So we needed another weak for this now. All right. You ready? For my, a number of For. Yeah. All right. So for this Magic system, I went with the idea of the law of that for every action, an equal and opposite reaction happens. And this would hold true with Magic. But in this case, if you cast a healing spell your first, so while you might save your friend's life, you're going to be walking around with the extreme chance of dying in a remarkably stupid way for at least several days or more, or the opposite would hold true. And if you cast a curse that you would have to be given good luck. So I was thinking, this is what came to me is like this scene where a guy is to save his own life, has to decide if he wants to kill that curse, like his lover or As best friend. Autumn (22m 33s): So when you curse someone out to something horrible, like Boyles or POCs or whatever, it's just so you can save your own skin. The attention for writing this scene will be so much fun. Yeah. Jesper (22m 46s): Because I was like, yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking. I mean, if I was a major, I would find it pretty annoying that this is the Magic system, but if it was a Magic system for a story to that, I was going to read. Yeah. Again, it could actually be a bit interesting because you have to read it. When is it worth it to use my Magic skills and when is it not, but I'm not sure that the major's in the setting will be very happy people. Yeah. Autumn (23m 13s): It goes to show that we're really cruel to our characters who are like, Oh, that'd be interesting to do to them. But for ourselves in those, we love, we are like, Oh, that'd be a horrible, we should never, ever condone that. So yeah. Yeah. Well for yourself. But the, Jesper (23m 34s): But, but it is, I like those when, when you have this kind of a, Autumn (23m 41s): Well Jesper (23m 42s): That there is a very high price to pay for something I liked that maybe you you've taking a bit to the extreme there, but yeah. Autumn (23m 49s): Oh no, no. If you want to extreme, that's coming. Don't worry. Okay. Jesper (23m 53s): Ah, okay. Okay. Well, I can not wait almost to here what you have on your list. All right. Autumn (23m 60s): But yeah, I thought that way, like I said, that I would actually be tempted too, at least do a flash fiction or something along those lines. Cause it would be kind of fun to do that to a characters, but yeah, it was a Magic system. I don't know if I could do a whole book of that. Oh my goodness. Jesper (24m 15s): Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well you could, but then I think Magic would have to be a very small part of the story. Right. So that it, it cannot be like the main character is Raceland and so on. And then at that kind of work, no, unless he just wanted to go around and like curse everybody and Hugh himself all the time. Right? Yeah, Autumn (24m 39s): Exactly. Yeah. He would have wonderful luck, but the world would go to shite, but he would be doing so well. Jesper (24m 45s): I think the thing about having a likable character sort of goes out the window Autumn (24m 50s): Only if they feel guilty. Well casting curses for good luck. Jesper (24m 54s): Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think the readers will appreciate that character very much. No, I wouldn't. Okay. So we are like in the middle of the list now. Yeah. So I want to hear your number three. Yeah. And since my first two attempts to create something completely useless, wasn't that USELESS so anyway, I've Now board or something from somewhere else. So that if this is actually useful than it's not my fault. Okay. Autumn (25m 21s): All right. That sounds good. Casting the blame elsewhere. I understand. Jesper (25m 26s): Yes. And that's usually the easiest way of doing things, you know, because then they'll know you don't feel bad about anything is never your fault, you know, I like it. And so my number three, I borrowed from the Harry Potter universe, because this one seems a, well, at least to me, both stupid and utterly useless. So I just found it. I did find it on a website listing USELESS Spells talk to at Hogwarts, if the person that wants to a laugh at some more Spells than doing an internet search for four, that just search for USELESS Spells taught at Hogwarts and you will find some lists and there was quite some stupid stuff in there, but anyway, he goes, so this was one of the ones that I found Well Most USELESS all right. Jesper (26m 16s): So at this point is actually from the Harry Potter books I already Oh yeah. So let's go for it. Okay. Quote, he and Ron both tapped the tea cups. They were supposed to be charming with their hands Harris sprouted for a very short legs that would not reach the desk and wriggled pointlessly in midair. Ron's grew for a very thin, might be X that hosted the cup off the desk with great difficulty tremble for a few seconds, then folded causing the cup to crack into two and three. Autumn (26m 52s): What is, this is the point of that smell a smell that makes tea cups grow legs. Yeah. I mean, even if you do it, Jesper (27m 0s): Can you spell, why would you want a walk-in tea, coffee? I just don't understand that. Autumn (27m 6s): So I can see one years for it and that his, if my husband knew what he would do it just to torture me so that I would have to be chasing down my tea, besides that I can't think of anything. I can't think of anything useful about it really. Are you sure? I'm sure. Other than torturing me now, I think that's all that comes to mind. Jesper (27m 26s): So if you were a like really lazy and a, well, somebody who is still have to put it into the cups of it, it doesn't help. Yeah. Autumn (27m 34s): I mean, what if it's too hot or I don't know. I mean, hell a lot of these. What's the, how well could they hold the cup and it's not going to slop all over you. I don't know. There's there's too many things. It can go wrong as Harry and Robin prove. Yeah. I just don't know. Jesper (27m 51s): So just to be like a complete failure as a Magic use, and this is what I can just be like, where is the Magic school please? A please let me, and then teach me something like, this is just, just a complete the new one. Autumn (28m 6s): Yeah. That, that, that one, you know, that'd be good for maybe a children's a tea party just to entertain them a little bit, but yeah. Havoc would reign. Hmm. Okay. So yeah. Jesper (28m 19s): Let's see if we can do better than that, then I'm racing the takes on you hear that, right? Autumn (28m 22s): Why do you feel that? I can feel it. I actually feel the pressure on this is it's like you are reaching the mid point of the chapter and you're like, Oh, something's going to happen now, but Hey, I'm going to take one from your book. And I borrowed this one from somewhere and other source that's actually comes from the book, the magicians. So it is if Magic is so complicated and effected by the natural world so easily that you basically need a spreadsheet or a computer algorithm, I'm imagining an app on your phone to double check the star charts, the tide charts, the time the sun Rose, where the moon is located and, and what constellation and the humidity of the air, the weather and all of that. Autumn (29m 4s): It just, it makes, Magic so complicated that it basically takes the magic out of Magic though. I did think it would be funny. Like I said, you'll have this app on your phone that says, you know, do to today's humidity and sunrise. You must turn 30 degrees to the East that to cast the spell. If you'd like, Jesper (29m 24s): What is it? Actually, it would be a bit cooler if it was like in the, the app where you could basically be swipe Spells. So it was me like, he's the one on the environment up today and the Star's and the moon and what not teach how to Spells available. Swipe are the ones you want Autumn (29m 39s): To cap. It was just like that. Actually it would be hilarious. It's just what you need is a very short story idea that it would be actually to, that would be kind of fun. Yeah. Jesper (29m 50s): All right. So, but are the only problem is if, if you are being attacked and you don't have any attack, Spells on your app to see your phone goes dead. Yeah. You all are better than in the middle of a dragon breathing down on you is like, Oh shit, you know, in here, but no. Autumn (30m 8s): Oh yeah. Well, especially if you did make it go, you know, medieval, so we don't have phones and you can do, can you just mention the scrolls a, you would have to double-check to check to the cast any Spells it would just be, that would be murderous. I'd be like, no, I'm just, I'm going to wing it and see what happens. I might turn it into a turn up. I don't care. Jesper (30m 28s): Yeah. I think without the, well, w without an app or something to control it, it would be a, you have to carry it around a library, just a cast once a while. I think majors would just stop casting spells its like this is not even worth it because it's much easier to just to learn how to fight with a sword instead of, or something. Autumn (30m 48s): That's right. That's when I was reading in the magicians because they didn't have a nap and they just, it was a very complicated like checking all of these things. And I was like, Oh, you know, if Magic was this complicated, I would be the rebels getting everything wrong because I would never ever check everything correctly. And I'd forget by the time I got to the end or the humidity would have changed because it took me so long to figure it out. So just so much fun. Jesper (31m 10s): What story do they have to do? They have to sell it to sort of worked out what they can cast. I mean, what else? Autumn (31m 16s): I honestly forget. I just remember that part of the Magic system going just know that you need a spreadsheet. It's not for me. Jesper (31m 24s): Okay. Well you just said that you had started at this point. Autumn (31m 27s): It's only for editing. If I am not, Jesper (31m 30s): You you're already on your cheek taking the first step. You just have to follow it Autumn (31m 34s): Now to add the Magic items to this spreadsheet and correlate them in. Oh yeah. Just pick it app. I'll ask my nephew to write me a new app code and I'll be fine. Jesper (31m 47s): Oh yeah. Well he would be even more crazy if, if, if it's like, as long as you just have the app and you could cast a spell it out, you just swiped them and then they were, I mean, you don't even have to be a Magic Magic everybody could just like download the app and, and I wonder how much of an app like that would cost you. Autumn (32m 5s): You said I'm sure there would be tears, but I would pay anything for God. Power is in that one. That is all. So I will sell my soul for that app. Please Jesper (32m 14s): I'm pretty sure I was going to be a very expensive, so Autumn (32m 16s): I think so to, but man, I'm going to invent that one. That would be pretty cool. Jesper (32m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. Autumn (32m 24s): On many levels, many, many levels are perfect. All right, let's get a number two. Okay. Jesper (32m 30s): Yeah, it was actually also two levels to my, my number two, because I started in one place and then I sort of changed it a bit. So, but let me just first day what to say when I started But and I changed it a bit. All right. So I try to think a bit bigger for a number two, you know, w we are approaching the top of that last year. So for this one, I actually thought about a whole Magic Systems rather than just a single Spells at first, I was sort of wondering how poor a matching system would be if it was based on dreams alone. Oh, you see? So basically you have like almost no control over your Spells. Jesper (33m 13s): Do you mean it's just going to be whatever your dream is, what you can cast and like yeah. It's it's going to be pretty USELESS right. Autumn (33m 21s): So it would be, but I am actually a little terrified because my kids, my husband actually had a dream the other night where I died. So I'm glad this was, this is when she says it is that it would be horrible if you woke up upset or at least. Yeah. Jesper (33m 38s): That's not good. I know this. This Autumn (33m 41s): Is Magic Systems is terrifying me know. Okay. Yeah. Jesper (33m 45s): And also, I mean, it would be pretty bad if, if let's say the oxide attacking you on it, you're like, Whoa, hold on, hold on. I just need to fall asleep for us to do this. And then maybe I could save money. Can you please stop hearing me? I can sleep when you are hitting me. Yeah. Autumn (34m 0s): All right. I can imagine you and your best friend has a lot of night terrors, so you're like, Oh no, you need more caffeine. Have some more caffeine. You need more caffeine. You cannot go to sleep tonight. I'm not sleeping next to you. Jesper (34m 10s): Oh my God. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually it would probably be the other way around. It would not be about a watch Spells you can cast it. It would be other people's trying to prevent you from them. Autumn (34m 20s): I guess. I just keep bumping you every time you start falling asleep. Nope. We got back up for you. Jesper (34m 27s): Yeah. And This but then, because then I thought, well, if it's a Magic system than me, it just should sort of be able to cast Spells when they want to cast panel. So otherwise it's sort of like, well, I don't know, then it didn't feel right. So I changed it a bit. And I said, what if you were only able to cast Spells when you were intoxicated? Autumn (34m 50s): Oh no. What do you think of that? I'm thinking of, it sounds like a really bad rave, but it might be fun to go. Jesper (34m 59s): Yeah. I mean, well, I guess everybody would be drugs. All the majors are always drunk and I mean, I, I could see me how it might work. OK. If you were planning out your Spells in advance, you know, so, so, so, so it's going to be like, okay, tonight, I'm going to have to cast the all seeing Spells that allows me to see where the enemy army is Apple or something. And then, you know, you'll have a bottle of wine and then you will cast your spell and the next day you can tell the King, well, they are to a hundred miles off. I saw it yesterday. So in that sense we might work. Yeah. But I just can't see the battle scenes again. Jesper (35m 41s): Right. So what does this drunken stupid visit is tumbling around with a wet battlefield and fire's shooting all of the firewalls left and right. And this is just like, he's completely drunk out of his mind. Autumn (35m 54s): Yeah. It would be again, probably a hilarious to, to write. And I can imagine that people going, Oh gosh, it was power is fading. Like give him a shot or, you know, carrying around them. So a Royal or a magical apprentice gets to be the one carrying the wine flask and keeping in the wizard shrunk. So it would be, it would be a hoot to, to write. And it would definitely be a, a ton of fun at a party. But yeah. You know how people use, it's so hard to stay focused. And so you'd be like, Oh, look at a pretty bird. No, not a dragon. You have to get rid of the dragon. Autumn (36m 33s): Yeah. Jesper (36m 35s): Yeah. Do you ever forget about the dragon again? Oh my God. Autumn (36m 40s): It could be a really good if someone wanted to write FANTASY comedy, it'd be really funny. It, even if it was just one wizard, like the most powerful wizard, this is just how it was. Magic worked best. It was like pirates pirates of the Caribbean meets Merlin. Yeah, I do it. Yeah. Jesper (37m 0s): Oh my God. Now you found it useful and again, okay. You need to stop doing that in my life. Autumn (37m 6s): I want it. I want to win this way. Sorry. Jesper (37m 9s): Yeah, I can hear it. So it is just not okay. Autumn (37m 13s): Okay. Well I'll, I'll try it to sober up. Okay. Okay. All right. So you're ready for him. My number two. Yes. Jesper (37m 19s): And I have to find something to make Autumn (37m 22s): It useful in part. Okay. Well, if you do it, that's fine because this is actually inspired by it. It's partially inspired by the wheel of time series, but I know it was not your fault. It's not my fault. If you can find a use for this one. And again, this is a variance of this would have been used in so many numerous Fantasy stories in settings. And it's, I mean, at the basics level, it's at Magic causes physical problems, but for this one to make it something that really makes me say no, if that's how magic works, don't sign me up. I'm going to stick with the extreme example. And it's not just forgetfulness or insanity your blindness or deafness, but instead, do you use a, Magic basically can interfere with your blood circulation and cause sections of your living body to start to write almost like a Necros, but that's Nick or Costco thick or flesh-eating bacteria. Autumn (38m 14s): So just say no, you know, do you think that comes down to chunks of my physical being, just turning gangrenous, falling off? I am good. I think I would rather go learn to use your words. Jesper (38m 34s): You know, where's your leg? Well, I can Autumn (38m 37s): Liken yesterday. It was for us. I mean, it's this slowly putrefying like get worse and like, Oh, it looks like a bruise and start turning green and spreading. And you don't know how far it's going to spread and no, it's almost like a zombie Magic it just don't know. I don't want that one, but okay. But what is, what if you are a vampire? Oh, you just kind of he'll again, you would hit it again. Okay. So that as long as you have something to counter act. Autumn (39m 15s): Yeah. So all, if you were a ghost or something, if you're already dead. Yeah, definitely. You have to, yeah. Something short of being able to magically here and be a goddess so that, you know, maybe it lasts a day or two and then fades and you heal it. It, it grows back. Yeah. So I think I just made it useful and I think that's the conclusion of that. Okay. I'll let you have that one. All right. So there was still in the worst of worst of the worst for this coming. I'm ready. I know that. Autumn (39m 57s): No, I really liked this number one. It is so stupid. I can't believe it. This is also from the list of D and D Spells. Oh. And I found the more you use the spelled it wrong. So it's called the chest dies. So this is when you don't have the time to speak, to tell someone, what do you really think about them? Okay. You can cast a spell and it will take care of it for you. What are those? The satisfaction of that. And then also what was pointed out on that list is that you would actually have to speak the words, you know, to cast a spell. Autumn (40m 43s): So you could just go tell them what you're saying. I'm not even sure. I'm not even sure how you're going to save any time because you have to speak anyway. I guess if there's travel involved that keeps you from having to go see them. I assume you can cast it. So at a distance, I don't think so. Oh, jeez. What is it also said that the extra piece of information was that the spill also only works on people who actually offended the spell caster. Oh, right. So we could only watch the, somebody who offended you. And it only works if you're basically standing in front of them. So you have a choice about just speaking back to them or say, speak some words and cast a spell, and then the spell was big back to them. Autumn (41m 26s): But one of the So here at 26. Can you make it on repeat? So it's like, it's just driving them insane for an hour or that could be worth it depending on how much they pissed you off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, but I just don't know for this one. I, I dare you. You can Jesper (41m 42s): Not find a single situation with this is useful. Autumn (41m 45s): I am struggling. I have to admit short of being able to have a repeat button so that you can harass someone on with it. It doesn't say anything about it. Jesper (41m 53s): A repeat button. You can invent things to me. Autumn (41m 57s): So I get it. But this year as well, you're not sharing your spill coding. All right, fine. Oh, I know. I have to do. Yeah. I have to say, I think that one is USELESS so there you go. I do really don't know what to do with that, but it wasn't that it was not me thinking, Oh, well that's pretty. It was a USELESS I have to admit. Okay. Okay. Good. All right. Let me hear you one. All right. Well, this is again, this is this one fit. The definition is that right now? As far as I know, I've made it up. I don't know if it exists, but this is the one Magic system that I could come up with that if it existed, I not only don't want to have Magic. Autumn (42m 41s): I might be part of the rebellion and the resistance to destroy Magic so you're ready for this one. Yeah. All right. So what actually gives you the ability to have a new use? Magic is a parasite. So the only way to have magic is to have this thing living inside of you slowly growing and feeding off of you until it kills you and small larva burst from your skin to infect, waiting, apprentices. It's just going to go more and more of it that I don't know how I can work on it a little bit more if you'd like it. I think that's plenty. Autumn (43m 22s): Oh. But yeah, I think if that was the way Magic worked, that I might actually try to annihilate it. That's just wrong. So how, how long does it take before this worm kills? You know, I didn't come up with that timeline. I have to admit, I was thinking if you have to hide to give to someone maybe a couple years, but look it up because then a month. Okay. How powerful our you during these couple of years. So let's see. That is something, Oh, I didn't want to build that. That was a good question. I would imagine that probably towards the end, when you're like nothing more than a shriveled husk, you could cast them really nice potent Magic because you're mostly magical parasite at that point. Autumn (44m 2s): I mean, as the parasite grows in you and your Magic ability, it should become stronger. So you can do it, Jesper (44m 8s): Turn yourself into a glitch in the end and then you will become, Autumn (44m 13s): Oh, I don't know. But I can see now I'm starting to find your freedom. I'm just wondering how that would affect the parasite. Because once you don't have the parasite, you'd have to bond with the parasites. Some Well somehow, otherwise you want to have Magic and it would fail. So you have to test this a lot before, you know, getting of these parasites in your system. Oh yeah. Oh my God. That's pretty nasty. Thank you. I tried really hard for you. You know? It was, it felt like a horror story, almost a dark Fantasy. Why not a little horror. FANTASY okay. People. That was a really bad spill. Autumn (44m 55s): So Magic Systems I don't know if that was useful at all, but maybe, hopefully it made everyone laugh or they got to think about you or do something and they kind of considered before, like what their Magic Systems smells like. Yeah. True. So which one is the worst? One of the more that I don't know, I have to say for the most USELESS being able to just chastise someone is kind of silly, but doesn't get the running T cup thing. Why or why would you do that? I don't know. Those are definitely the most USELESS. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, I really like you a bad one there. Autumn (45m 40s): My parents age. Yeah. Your parents hide, but at least during those years, it is useful, useful, useful. I mean, you can do a lot of stuff during those. Yeah. It will kill you, but you can do a lot of the stuff. That's all right. But I was going for worst Magic Systems so I think for worse. Yeah. I, like I said, For, if that was the way Magic worked, I might go to be pretty good at killing parasites. I would be a Magic parasite Hunter. What would it be? Kind of fun actually to write, but, Hmm, damn. Huh. Yeah. I have a suggestion for that. Okay. All right. What is it? What if we split at this one? And so that we say we're Magic system is you are a parasite one and the worst spell, is it okay? I will go for that. We both get to be crowned winners for this one. Autumn (46m 24s): Yeah. Yeah. It was my, it was my suggestion. Now are you regretting, you gotta learn to share or I guess so. Okay. So next Monday we get back to a bit of a more serious topic as we are discussing the seven steps of story structure. Narrator (46m 46s): So if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jesper, on patrieon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Have you wanted to make your novel into an audiobook but wasn't sure what to expect or what a narrator would need? Join Autumn and voice actor and narrator Brian Grace to explore audiobooks from the other side of the creative coin as they delve into what a narrator needs to bring your story to life, how they choose a project to tackle, why a narrator costs so much, what it is they actually do, and if they secretly love your characters as much as you.  Learn more about Brian on his website at http://briangracevo.com/ and his film demo at https://youtu.be/1yB7lsYbU-M. Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (3s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn, Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Autumn (32s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And today we have a special guest with us for episode 109 with me. I have audio book, narrator and actor, Brian grace. Hi, Brian, how are you today? Brian (49s): I'm doing really well. How are you? Autumn (50s): Good. I'm so excited to have you join me for so many reasons. One, because I know there's so many authors out there who want to produce audio books and they're not quite sure, you know, there's the steps. You can go online and read the blog posts, but you're an actual audio book narrator. So I thought it'd be really fun to get the perspective of what you need, what, what you want to see an author bring to you, but also because you are my audio book narrator, and I just thought it would be fantastic to talk to you and record a podcast. Brian (1m 24s): I'm looking forward to it. It sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah. Autumn (1m 27s): So you've been working with me on my post-apocalyptic series, friends of my enemy, and we, we just determined for almost four years now because it's a long series. And so I just thought this is great. I know you through what we've done together, but if you would like to introduce yourself, because I know, especially since we've met, there's so much more you've been doing well. Brian (1m 53s): Sure. I've actually started, I guess you could say officially acting in 2015. When I started such a voice, I went online and found the, the website that kind of taught you how to be a voice actor. And I went through that. It was about an eight month course, and that introduced me to the world of narration and animation, which I didn't think was possible for me when I was growing up. Cause I just figured it was something just for the famous folks. I just figured, okay, you had to be already a big name or already have some sort of like following in order to get anywhere in the voiceover world. But I quickly found out through that lesson that anybody can do it. And if you have the talent, the sky's the limit. Brian (2m 34s): So I started through that and then once I got my demo through them, I started picking up theater. I started theater in 2017 with a Christmas Carol and my first ever role was a Bob Pratchett. Autumn (2m 48s): I thought that was pretty darn cool. Brian (2m 49s): So that's a good first role. Yeah. I mean, it'd be like the second billing actor in the, in the stage play. So that was a lot of fun. And then I started doing acting in 2018, Throughout many different plays and shows. And I started into a film acting once I came back in 2018 for a Christmas Carol for the second time, one of the actors told me about Norman, Oklahoma and how they had the actor factory up there. So I decided to start checking them out. I went over there, I started taking classes from them and then I got myself, an agent here in Tulsa, met her through my church and she was just beginning her actor issues. Brian (3m 31s): She was beginning her studio. So I got involved with Eric, got to be one of her first actors. And then I started doing a film, a film and TV stuff. I've been in several different, smaller roles, nothing huge to date, but things are still working and things are still moving around and I'm constantly taking classes and learning all the time. So as far as my acting career goes, I'm, I'm doing the best I can and getting out there and getting my name out there and marketing as much as I can and always continuing to learn. Autumn (4m 2s): That's awesome. Well, I mean, I know I'm totally biased, but I've worked with over nine audio book narrators now. And I just think you're extremely talented. I feel so lucky to have you, so I know you're going to go far. I, I'm not that worried about it, but you just have to finish up this last book first before you right away. Brian (4m 22s): Yeah. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your patience. I mean, I know it's been a hectic couple of years, but I'm going to get this book done as quickly as I possibly can. Autumn (4m 30s): No, I, that I'll miss you, but that's okay. Cause I know we'll both do great things and we'll maybe we'll end up together again. So that's all right. It'll be worth it. Brian (4m 37s): Yeah. It's not like we're going to stop communicating once the book is done. Right? Autumn (4m 40s): I would hope not. I still wanted to go and get a beer. Oh yeah, Brian (4m 45s): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah. I come over there to Vermont or you come over here to Oklahoma. Yeah, we'll get, we can chill. I'll be fine. Autumn (4m 51s): That would be a lot of fun. All right. So before we get too nostalgic and everyone else's like, okay, I thought this was about audio books. Oh, we met via ACX, which is Amazon's audible production, you know, their audio book production. So is there anywhere else that you have a profile or where you would suggest that people can find narrators? I know find a way voices has become big, especially outside the U S so where, where do you think people should be looking for, especially authors be looking for narrators, Brian (5m 25s): Looking for an adjust narration. I would suggest ACX is a really good start. Although the, the profit sharing is a bit biased towards ACX. They do take, they do take a majority of the money, which is kind of, yeah, it's kind of sad for both authors and narrators. Cause you know, they take 60 wherever you have to, you have to split 40 between you and the author, which is kind of a bum deal. But Hey, it's, it's meant for beginners. It's meant for people who are authors, who are just beginning to look for a great narrators and narrators, just looking for great for good stories, but ACX is great to start for, for getting that, getting that experience, getting a couple bucks, but another nice one is behind the voice actors.com. Brian (6m 9s): That's where I really started. Okay. That's where I really started was behind the voice actors.com and that's most of those projects are free. You don't actually get any money from them, but the experiences you get from them are incredible. Especially if you want to do character work because there's a lot of people on there. They put their passion projects on there, like students or filmmakers, things like that. They put their projects on there and they put like lines for different characters and they say, here's what the character is supposed to be. Sometimes they have a picture of what the character looks like and they say, this is going to be a cartoon. It's going to air on such and such website. And we want to have some voices. So they do like a casting call and anybody can go on there and get a free account and then actually audition for those lines. Brian (6m 57s): And if you're chosen, you get to be part of their project again, most of the time. Yeah. Most of the time it's not paid, but it's the experience. And it's also a big, big, kinda like a projection point for anybody who's starting off. Autumn (7m 12s): Oh, I think that sounds actually like a lot of fun. That's kind of cool. I might just check it out to see what people are doing. Cause I'd love to say creativity, Brian (7m 21s): All sorts of projects. I mean, I just, I just addition for another one recently, because, so I'm also part of a, a voice acting class that takes place. My, my teacher is actually in LA and he's a pretty big time voice actor and a coach. And he does, he's done movies. He's on films, but what's cool is that he has a group setting that he calls the panic room, which is kind of fun. That basically it allows, allows people who are just beginning in the voiceover world to kind of throw out their ideas. And they have group settings. It's about like 20 people that get together and they share their ideas and they share their projects and things like that. Brian (8m 2s): But I found from behind the voice actors and other projects, so I was like, Oh, let's try this for my class. I brought it into the class. They all, they all thought I did a great job. So I was like, well, if I did so good, I might as well audition for it. So I went ahead and audition for it. Autumn (8m 18s): Oh, that's exciting. Like I said, it's amazing the things that you've gotten into and I love seeing your career blossom. So I think it's really cool. Yeah. I appreciate that. It's funny though. Cause so you're talking about projects and stuff and so that's always a good topic. So when you're considering a book or any of these other projects, how important is it to like the story or the characters or are you just sometimes looking for a challenge or something easy? Maybe not a challenge. I mean, what does it take for you to be like, yeah, I want to interview for that. Brian (8m 51s): Well, I mean, I believe that in order to tackle any project, you have to have some sort of connection with it or else it's just kind of a waste of time. But when I considered a friends of my enemy, for instance, I mean I read the scene from the book, the book one where I actually had Jared meeting Derek for the first time. And all I knew about the story was that it was just a dystopian war drama and, and the book needed several accents from all across the world. So my immediate thought was, wow, that sounds really tough, but I really liked the challenge. And it sounds like a really cool idea. So for more from me really, I warmed up to the characters more than I wanted to the story in the beginning. So once I actually started figuring out who the characters were and I talked to you about how you wanted them to sound accents were from, I did a lot of research on the accents and then I started falling in love with the characters because I figured out that every character is basically a reflection of you as the narrator. Brian (9m 48s): So when you actually, when you actually develop a character, they are you. So they basically become your best friends. And there's no way you can forget your best friends once you got them. Autumn (9m 60s): That's so it's very much how, when I'm writing, I feel the same way because people often say like, ask that question. Well, who's your favorite character? And my Pat answer is the character I'm writing in now because it could be the villain. It could be, it's really hard sometimes when it's a teenage ditzy girl, I have a hard time with that character, but you have to do your best. Like you said, it's your best friend. You want to tell their story the best you can. And it's so awesome to hear that reflected in what you do. You were basically taking this on and it's like, you know, it's like, you're the author, you're the narrator. And you want to give the story, whoever point of view, whatever character, the best story you can. Brian (10m 42s): Right. And I believe that it's, it is your story as the author. So I have to do justice for the author. And what I think is nice is that you can actually give some like audio clips of what you think the character should sound like, but you also get the author's opinion saying like, well, I like, I like this, but maybe I should make him sound more Southern or maybe, maybe actually sounding more European or something like that. So it makes it, so you get to play around with the author before you create the character, you know? Yeah, Autumn (11m 11s): I do. I remember when we were first starting out and he would send me clips and we would discuss, or you would ask me like, have you ever thought about how this character sounds and you know, it's there, but when you're writing, I don't know. Maybe some people already are visual. I visualize it more than hear it. And so you did make me sit down and think, well, how does that character sound? And so some tough questions. Brian (11m 35s): Yeah. And I had to do a lot of research on different accents and that, that took a long time. Cause I mean, going on to YouTube and looking up how someone from South Africa sounds versus how someone from like Australia sounds or Northern Europe, Southern Europe, you know, all different parts of the world. I had to look up so many different accents, Autumn (11m 58s): That's my fault. But you did an amazing job and it was stunning. And I, there are a lot of narrators that I've worked with and talked to who just narrate the entire story in the same tone. Oh, well, you know, they add the emphasis or they get excited, but you literally give each character an accent, a sound that is individual and unique. And I don't know as much as, I mean, as much as people say, like how, how do you keep the character straight in your head when you're writing? I don't know how you keep the characters straight in your head. Over the years, we've worked together, multiple books, keeping the accent. The same is amazing to me. Autumn (12m 38s): I, I'm not sure how you make the mental notes. And especially when there's a scene that has two different characters or three different characters, I'm really cruel to you a lot. You know, they're talking and the ones from America and the ones from South Africa and the ones British and you switched between all of them. So effortlessly on this cliff that you're giving to me. I mean, how does it, how do you even organize that in your head? And then can you record that in one take or are you doing multiple takes? How are you managing that? Well, Brian (13m 13s): I mean, I just love giving every single person their own unique voice personality in life. I think it's way more fun to me than narrator and way more fun for the listener as they can really distinguishes the difference, the differences between every single person. It is definitely more work and requires a good memory of the, as friends of my enemy has over 20 reoccurring characters that have their own uniqueness. And like I stated, I gave every one of them life. I place myself in their shoes and become that particular person. So it really helps with the chapters that are from their certain perspectives, as it gives me a better idea of who that person is, because I can know how they think and how they'd react to situations. Brian (13m 54s): And I that's really unique for your stories. I think they're really cool that that every chapter is from a different point of view so that it makes it so it's like you get to change the first person perspective in each one and how the, how the narration goes there. The thought process of that character, like for instance, like David Eldridge, he's, he absolutely hates arena and they're just like bitter rivals. And then when you go through a chapter through his point of view, you start going what he's thinking, what he's, what he's planning, what he's plotting and the reasons behind it. So it's not just like from arena's point of view, obviously she is the main central character, but you're not always hearing from her thoughts all the time, which I think is great. Autumn (14m 35s): Yeah. I think it definitely adds to, especially that story. I don't do that in all my books, but I read all my full length books, switch point of view like that, but it does, it's its own layer of plotting and it's only are a challenge. I didn't realize that when I first started writing too, you know, if you're going to work with a narrator who is going to get into the different tones and stuff in different sounds, voices and accents that it creates its own fun that way as well. Brian (15m 4s): So I'm not, I'm not sure how much time we actually have for this, but I could go on for a while about the main cast and how I chose different voices and personalities for each one. Autumn (15m 15s): Yeah. We can definitely circle back to, I mean, we usually go for 45 minutes, so, you know, we have another half an hour or so we'll get back to a couple of these because I definitely, I want you to share, I love, I love how you do some of these accents. And I think it's a unique perspective. I don't know if a lot of other authors realize that this is something that yeah, you might end up paying more, but this is something that an audio book narrator can do if they're dedicated to doing it. But yeah, I do want you to do some examples because you have some amazing skills and I always appreciated, I think the first time I was never even into audio books, the first time I wanted to have one made and I just, you know, put up a script and that was for I'm born of water for the Epic fantasy. Autumn (16m 1s): And someone had come back to the narration and it was the first time I really heard something. I wrote narrated by professionals like, Holy crap, this is cool. Except he used a falsetto for the woman. And so it sounded like a puppet play, you know, something you would see done for kids. And it kind of died grated on me. And I've never looked at another numerator who did Falsettos, but you don't, but you can, you, when you do things, you, I can still tell it's one of the women I can tell, you know, one of the guys, you just do a very good job of switching fluidly between gender, but being earnest and not making it sound fake. Autumn (16m 42s): You could actually think that this was a real person. And that's what always is amazing. Brian (16m 47s): Yeah. I mean, and like I was trying to say, I mean, when I go through the different personalities, I just kind of put myself in their position. How do they think, why do they think this way? Who are they talking to? How do they feel about them? How would I feel if I was that person talking to that person? And you know, each one has their own certain accent. So I think whenever, whenever you have a certain accent, it has to have a certain voice. So I don't believe any characters should sound the same goes everybody's unique. We all have our own certain and we all have our own certain things about us. And so when I started looking at accents on YouTube, from people from these different nationalities, I studied their speech patterns, how fast they talk to their expressions, how they use their body language and how can I adapt that to my voice, to match the persona. Brian (17m 34s): So if I find that each person has their own life, it's easier to know who is who and I can easily conjure up that character from the vast pool of personalities that I have stuck in my head. And if each person is unique, then they're also my close personal friends that I've known forever. So you just forget those personal friends. Autumn (17m 51s): No, you don't. I think you're going to miss these books as much as I am going to miss you recording these books when we're done. Brian (17m 58s): Yeah. Every, every character has as a certain has a certain, like a spot in my heart. I guess you could say, as cheesy as that sounds, I mean, each one is like a very unique person. And, and when, when one of the characters did pass away that that hurt. Autumn (18m 16s): Yes. We ended up, we ended up on a conversation. We both cried over that character's death, which I just think that's kind of cool. I mean, everything you're saying is very much what an author goes through. And I don't think most authors realize that this is something that, you know, an audio book narrator is also feeling and going through on a very personal level as well, if they're really getting into your book. Brian (18m 38s): Yeah. It's, it's, it's definitely something that you have to kind of like, well, a lot of times you have to kind of separate yourself from the story saying like, okay, yes, it's a story. These aren't real people, but it's, but it's, it's just something that you just kind of feel. But when you give life to a certain character, they just become you, you know? Autumn (19m 1s): And that's why, I mean, the times of these characters, the way you voiced them, it's even now when I read what I wrote is how I hear them. So you've created them even if they became like, you know, on the big screen, I don't think I could ever hear themself differently than the way you created them, because it is become how I even see them. Brian (19m 20s): Oh, that's great. That's awesome. That just makes me feel good as a narrator too, because when you can give, you can give that kind of performance that actually just makes an impact on someone, especially the off of themselves. That's it's humbling. It's really, really nice. Autumn (19m 34s): Oh, you're definitely that good. And like I said, we're going to, I definitely want to throw in some examples cause we've, we have some quotes and things. So I think you can come up with one, but just out of curiosity. Cause I mean, when we started, so we talked about like, I gave you the book and you read through the whole book and then you asked for some examples and maybe some like pronunciations and stuff, but to pick up something, to start creating this character, what do you need from the, an author to pick that up? So what, what's something that authors could have prepared if they're looking for an audio book narrator that they would kind of know that they might ask questions about. Brian (20m 11s): So it's kind of hard to answer because a lot of times mean the, the actor gets the freedom to do what they want to do, but you also have to have the author's input because you can't just kind of like throw out something and say, this is how I want the person to sound because that's selfish. I mean, yes, you're the actor and you've got your expressions and you've got your artistic freedom, but you also have to make sure the author is okay with it. You can't just have, like you said, your other narrator who actually might have one of your stories with the falsetto, I probably got on your, probably got on your nerves a little bit, but I did not select after the audition, Autumn (20m 48s): But they did make me appreciate that audio books are kind of cool, but yeah, they didn't make it past the first casting. Brian (20m 56s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's just one of those things you have to, you have to have constant communication with the author. I mean, I think as a, as a narrator, it's easier if you actually know exactly what the person wants the character to sound like, like if you say, okay, this person is, he's a gruff older man. Who's who was all about like propriety and, and, and society and in he's in he's and politics. And he always wants himself to look better than what he really is, but he's hiding his insecurities and fears and he's having trouble with his son, even though he's, he's, he's very natural and becoming an in person to other people when it comes to like in closed doors, he's, he's scared and he's worried and he doesn't know how to, he doesn't know how to heal with his son. Brian (21m 48s): This man is his name's David, David Eldrin, she's, he's a strong individual, but he's also like weak in the, in the case of his emotions and how he's sees the world. But he's also like very stoic and he has this very specific vision for Europe and he wants to leave Europe in a certain way. And he believes what he's doing is right. But the ends justify the means. And a lot of times what you're doing is not exactly the best for the country itself. So how do you get that into like a voice? How do you, how do you make a voice with that? So you say, okay, this person who's, he's gruff, he's kind of like a low voice. Brian (22m 28s): Maybe he's a bit more well to do. He's he's, he's rich in, in his, in the way he projects himself. He may not actually be rich, but he wants to look rich. So like he's a well to do and a older and a wise in his words, but he's also kind of like a slow, slow in speech, but wants to he's condescending in some ways too. So it's like, it's like some of those things, if you could describe like the character itself saying like, this is how I want him to sound and then suddenly you just get that voice that just comes, it just comes naturally. Autumn (23m 4s): Oh, definitely to you. Yeah, it is. So it's neat to hear like the things I wrote translated into how you would take that into creating Dave says voice and it's very, it's not as simple as you know, saying, Oh, he's British and he's older and he's male. You literally, you take into all these nuances of like how he poses some self. I mean, you really get into the acting nuances of it. And that is really, it's amazing how intense that is. And then what it's a totally different mindset from, you know, being an author. So it's really neat. Brian (23m 42s): Yeah. I mean, if you're going to be, if you're going to be a person, you gotta be a person ever, we all have different facets. We all have different things going on in our lives, but what's nice is that as an actor, you can actually pull from the experiences of your own life or experiences that you've known from other people like friends and family, relative, things like that. And every single person has such a huge pool of experiences. If they can, they can dive into, and as an actor, you have unlimited amount of, of knowledge at your fingertips. That's a, you just, you just pull from Autumn (24m 20s): That's just it's to me, it's still amazing. But again, I didn't, I haven't taken acting classes and I've never, ever tried to be an actor. So this is why I hired you to handle that aspect. I'm much happier writing, even though I've been told my voice is not horrible. I don't know if that's a compliment or not. I wouldn't say it like that. It's like, well, your voice, I'm still not going to be auditioning for anything soon. How I think a lot of, so when we're, when authors are signing up to do audio books, you know, they're taught, they're usually told, you know, narrators get paid by finished hour and a finished hour is usually three to four hours of work. Autumn (25m 7s): What goes into that? I mean, is that true or is that just something that, you know, ACX puts up there, so we feel bad and if it is true, like, is it multiple takes? I mean, what is it, what happens to something you're recording? How do you make that into the clip that you then send to me? Brian (25m 24s): Well, I mean, there's a lot of work, especially with audio books. It's, it's a, it's a huge time commitment. That's for sure. If you're getting in to audio books to make money, it's not about per finished hour because the per finished hour is the actual finished book. So if the book lasts like eight hours to speak, as it's done, you only get paid for those eight hours. You don't get paid for the hours upon hours and days upon days and sometimes weeks or months to make the thing. Because I mean, there is a lot of work in audio books and I think most people don't really understand that. Brian (26m 4s): But then again, I mean, I might actually put way more work into my audio books and some other narrators do, but it's it's okay. So whenever you start, you have the whole chapter that you're going to speak through. Yet you speak in inside of your little, your little audio containment box, wherever you're going to start speaking your story and you go through the whole chapter. I try to do a chapter by chapter. So that way I can, I have some sanity left in my life. So I finished, I finished a full chapter. A lot of times it takes multiple takes. Cause I'm trying to get through right, the right inflection, the right emotion, the right. Brian (26m 48s): And my earlier books, I didn't have any classes. So it was just me doing it by myself. So I wouldn't be as proud of the earlier work that I, that I would be as what I know now, because I just know more. But in the beginning, it's basically like you, you read the story. And then I tried to always make sure every character had its own unique voice. A lot of times I was able to do it in one take a lot of times that it took me several takes, but it all depends on how I felt when I listened to it. So I can hear myself through my great big headphones and with those great big headphones, you can kind of hear how your voice sounds. Brian (27m 29s): You're kind of like echoes back to you. So you have an idea of what it's going to sound to someone who's listening to it. So when I go through it and I was like, Oh, that didn't sound good. Let me try it again. Or I was like, well, what are you really trying to say here? I mean, just say it, you know, I would, at times you argue with yourself inside of the inside of the vocal booth, because it's like, no, one's going to want to listen to this, try it again. And like, you know, so it's like, okay, let me do a character, which is totally different from narration. Narration is all about like trying to make it sound compelling and interesting enough. So people will want to listen. But then the character is completely different because this is a person you're dealing with. This is a real living person. So you have to make sure you sound like a real person. Brian (28m 11s): And then you have to get those personalities, the different, the very subtle things in their voice that tell you what they're really thinking. And it just, it's way more fun to hear that in a character when it, because all you have is voice, you don't have the body to act with, which I've done that as well. But when it's just voice acting, it's so much harder because you have to get every feeling inside of that voice because all the audience knows is what they hear, not what they say. Autumn (28m 41s): And then it was, I remember the first time listening to something you did, and I think whatever expression, growled or hissed, and you actually did that in the voice and then switched to the narrator voice and said it. And I'm like, darn, that is cool. And it is quite, it is right. So when you're narrating your worry, I can hear you worry about the, you know, the tones, the pacing, the inflection, how you say the sentences and the pauses. And then it is a totally different switch when you do the characters, Brian (29m 13s): Right? Yeah. I mean, I try to be like more even tone with a narration. So that way it doesn't sound too much like any particular character, but also I have to make the narration not sound so boring and drab and just like, does this guy even care about what he's talking about? Autumn (29m 31s): And I have heard auditions that I was like, okay, I'm asleep already. So no, don't do that. Brian (29m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. So you have to, it's, it's a delicate balance between narration and the characters and you have to figure out that balance and make it work. And that's, that's why it's nice to have constant communication with the author because you can actually show them little clips and say, what do you feel about this? Because you don't want to make the like three chapters and then submit it and to say like, that's horrible. Do them all again, do you know how long it took? Like three weeks? Autumn (30m 6s): That is definitely one thing. I, I do think authors need to understand how long it takes and just out of curiosity, I, so I would take it considering the level of just what it takes to do it. I mean, if you want to write, you're not going to have time to be able to do your own audio book, but I mean, equipment wise and all that, do you, what is it required? I mean, is this something that you think an authors should be able to do their own book or do you think, you know, this is a level, unless you're really going to spend a lot of time and effort just don't just hire somebody. You can get it done. Well, Brian (30m 41s): So that's the thing. I mean, if, if the author is, if the author also loves acting, I'd say have, have them do it as well. But it's, it's one of those things where just like my equipment for what I use, you get what you pay for. So if you're, if you're going to do it yourself, make sure that you have some sort of training that you know how to say something with different inflection of the emotion behind the voice live, your own characters, which I think is possible. But I mean, it's, it's difficult. Cause I mean, if, if you're an author you're, you're pouring your heart into writing, right. Brian (31m 21s): It's very rare to have someone who's an author and an actor. I mean, it's definitely possible, but I haven't seen too many of those. Autumn (31m 29s): No, I can't imagine a lot of the stuff, like I said, that you're describing you would make a great author. Cause you, you understand what it takes to do the character, but you're a fantastic actor. So you don't need to get into writing unless you, you know, retire and want to go there. Right. Brian (31m 45s): Well, I appreciate it. I was appreciate your compliments. Autumn (31m 49s): Well, I think, yeah, unless you want to add something to, you know, you know, what would it take for someone to, if they wanted to get set up just out of curiosity, what would it take for someone minimum if they wanted to try this, just so that people have a realistic idea of what equipment it takes to be an audio book narrator or why maybe you should have someone else do it. Brian (32m 11s): Well, I mean, like I was saying, I mean, you get what you pay for, especially with your equipment. So what I have is a focus, right? Scarlet to I, to audio interface. And that's, that's kind of basic, it's kinda like a, your starter kit. That's pretty much what I got when I had my, my first, my first demo was recorded for my narration and character work. They gave me, they gave me a Scarlet focus, right to I, to audio interface. And that is just the thing that hooks up to your computer that allows the microphone to go through. It's not the microphone itself. So the Scarlet to I, to that system is about roughly 150 to $200. Brian (32m 55s): And then you have the microphone itself, which is a, a condensed, what is it, a diaphragm, a diaphragm, condensed microphone. And those things. This is a, it's a road road into one dash a. And that's like your highest end average equipment that you can get. But it's, it's like, it's the highest end microphone that you can get without spending thousands of dollars on a microphone. So that one is about 300 bucks for a, just the microphone, but it's a really, really good one. It's actually a, and then if you look around, if you actually notice things, you, you can see that that particular microphone is used by several artists, several voice actors, several musicians. Brian (33m 46s): It's a pretty well known microphone. The rode mic, it's actually a good brand. R O D E. It's a really good brand. But like I said, I mean, if, if you want to have a good quality, I would start with that. You can do like headset, mikes, but you're going to get what you pay for. It's it's a lot of, a lot of background noise, a lot of static. So if you're going to have like low end equipment, you're going to get low end results. Right. I use audacity for my editing software and that's a, it's a free app. It's a free software that you can use. And if you really know how to use it, there's a lot of guides online to learn how to use stuff. Brian (34m 26s): But if you know how to use it, you can use audacity. And I have, have no issues with that because I mean, that's, that's what I've always used is audacity. It's free. And there's, there's programs out there that have way more things that you can do. But it's like a lot of fancy bells and whistles that I don't really think I don't really need. So audacity is just, it just keeps it's good for a budget. Autumn (34m 47s): That's awesome. And so is that part of the like running I know before you've said you've run processors to take out clicks and mouth sounds. In fact, I remember you saying like there was something you stopped eating while you're recording. Cause it gave you like a, more of a mouth sound. You're really dedicated, which I love, but so there's like all these nuances, plus you need to have like a room that's quiet where you're just saying that you, your quiet booth is sort of a closet. So Brian (35m 12s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that. Okay. So, Hmm. I picked up a ton of knowledge from my voice acting coach and ways to say things and make it compelling to listen to. And so when I record for a narration, I have to make it sound just as interesting as all the characters. So just like the author is painting a picture with their words. I need to do same, same with my voice. And sometimes it'll take several to get the right words, the right meaning the right inflection, the right emotion. So it's, it's funny. Cause I know like how you'd like to write. Sometimes you have like this really long sentences. Autumn (35m 50s): Yeah, I do. Brian (35m 55s): Yeah. They're super, super long sentences where they're separated by a comma every so often, but to voice it, it can be a challenge, especially when you have like pops and clicks and noise, saliva snaps and things like that. So you don't want to break the sentence either with, by taking a breath. So you have to go through the entire thing. It was like, Autumn (36m 19s): I feel so bad, Brian (36m 24s): But so, so what I use to help with like noise noises and your mouth and things like that as granny Smith, apples, granny Smith is the best food that you can have inside of a booth. So obviously you're not going to hear yourself. Autumn (36m 42s): I've never heard that on any clip you've sent me. No, Brian (36m 46s): You have to take all that, all that noise out. So, so when I'm recording, I always have the microphone on. So it's kind of comical sometimes when I'm really listening to it. And in the editing section, when I, this, I can just see like the little pops is up there. I am, I'm eating something. So I Like that whole entire section and I get to the next part. And so what keeps me on track? The granny Smith apples gets rid of the pops and clicks naturally. And then I also use like lukewarm water, like little tiny little sips is lukewarm water. So that way I can keep my voice hydrated. Cause you're in the, you're in the booth for hours recording and recording and recording. And so to help me out whenever I'm listening to it, I like to snap my finger when I snap. Brian (37m 34s): I mean, that, that proves to me that I did the sentence. Right. So if I, if I say like arena went to the store and then she got this particular thing, but actually got a set of bullets for her AK 47 and then I have a snap. Cause then I know that I did that sentence. Right. And right. So that when I go to the editing thing, I can see the snap very easily. Cause it's, it's a very long and a very thin noise on the, on the vocal track. So you see the vocal track on the sound waves and this one thin cut, which is definitely a step because it pops up pretty well in the editing thing. Brian (38m 14s): So you see that and says, okay, I know I got that sentence. Right. I can delete everything else. So it does, it does still take hours to edit, but it's actually a lot easier whenever you snap your fingers. So that way you're not listening to every single tape to see, to see which one is right. Autumn (38m 32s): Wow. Brian (38m 33s): It takes like, so I, I kind took a tally and I said, it takes roughly about three hours to edit for a 30 minute chapter. Wow. That's Autumn (38m 43s): Yeah. Really crazy. And so yeah, ACX is really quite pretty close to when they say per finished hour or so. Brian (38m 51s): Well, that's the thing, that's the thing mean per finished hour. You're not getting paid for those three hours minutes. So you're only getting paid for the 30 minutes that you finished. So if you finish, like you say, if you finish a book and seven hours and the book is seven hours long to listen, to start to finish, that's how long the actor will get paid. They don't get paid for the months and months and months, Autumn (39m 15s): The 21 to 30 hours that you've put in. And so that's one reason when you see like the perfect hour rate, some of them are, you know, 400, $500. There's a reason for that. Cause that's being divided by four or five hours to cover your costs. That's really unnecessary. Brian (39m 32s): Yeah. It's a distinct thing about that. But before I got into voice acting, I always wondered why it was so much money, but now I know, Autumn (39m 40s): No, it looks good on the one end. Yeah. Brian (39m 45s): Yeah. And then, and then if, if you're not an actor, if you don't know, you're just like why in the world would I pay this much money for someone just talking in a microphone, Autumn (39m 55s): Jim Washington, I pay you a $500 an hour. Well, because it took five hours to make that one hour. Yeah. Brian (40m 1s): And then, and then, like I said, you get what you pay for. I mean, you want a quality, you want a quality story. You want your story to have the life that you really want. You're going to have to pay for it. Autumn (40m 12s): Right. It makes sense. Yeah. Brian (40m 14s): Yeah. It was just like, I just like paying someone for piano lessons. You get to, you get the, you get the end result from the actual lessons that you learned from a professional. So you're always going to, you're always going to pay the professional rate if you want to have a professional quality. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Most people are just like, why would I pay that much for that? Oh gosh, Autumn (40m 38s): Well, this that's why I wanted to do this though, is because I really wanted to the authors know, you know what? They're going to learn what they should have in hand when they're going to go to an auto audio book narrator. But they should also know really what is on the other side, what it is you're doing. It shouldn't be this like mystery because once you know, you appreciate it so much more and the expense and the time commitment makes so much more sense. I mean, we've been together for four years because it's a series and things have come up and stuff has happened. But you know, when you, when you signed up to do four books, this was not, you know, you knew it was a chunk of your life. We've shared quite a few years together now. And there's a reason. Autumn (41m 20s): Yeah. So you just like, you should have someone you can communicate with, you should have someone you can get along with you're, you're sharing, you're sharing for me, I'm sharing an something I developed as something little part of me that, you know, my little baby I created and I'm giving it to you. You're like growing it into something else. That is a whole new thing. And it becomes a collaboration, not just, you know, a hand, you know, passing the Baton. Right, right. Brian (41m 43s): And, but that's also, that's the risk that the narrator has to take too, because especially if you're going to be doing royalty sharing, I know that that's the risk for narrators as well because the royalty share is only 20% of every single sale. And you have to really be kind of trusting of the author to, to say like, how is this going to be marketed? Where's it going to go? Is this worth my time? That kind of thing. So you have to kind of see Amanda is, is this something that's going to be lucrative? And if it's not, it'll be nice for a hobby. But if you're, if it's something that you want to do for your livelihood, these are the things you have to think about. Autumn (42m 23s): It is always the struggle. And yeah, it's something, especially once you start taking this as a business and taking this seriously, these are the questions I think everyone has got to be asking of how is this going to work out in the end? And who's, who's going to end up holding the money and how's it going to work out for both everyone involved that it's worth the time. Right. Right. Well, I want you to show off a little bit. I would love it. If you do have any of those quotes handy to show off what some of the voices, some of the things that you can do and what other authors should, you know, make your audio book narrators, do this too. Brian (43m 1s): Well. I mean, I guess you could say that I might be able to just kind of like start talking like the particular person as I talk about that character, if you want me to do that. Sure. So when I go through the different things about thinking about who I'm going to be, I started going through the different nationalities and where things go, this is someone who's from South Africa, who's obviously white. So it's a lot easier for me to be someone who is a white guy, because that's obviously who I am. So, but this name is his name was jetted. He is the captain of the armed forces. And he definitely works very well with arena, who is definitely his best friend, his confidant, and someone who stood this life with, for a long time. Brian (43m 45s): And also with David as well. David Eldridge is a good buddy of his, I guess you could say he met him first before meeting up with arena. It was definitely an interesting situation. But with the accent, you have to kind of understand this guy's from Africa. So he's got a bit of a thicker accent here, but he's also a smart ass. He's definitely someone who's. Yeah. He has a way with his words and he and arena get in it a lot. And it's a different, a really good dynamic between the two characters when it comes to arena. I try to be a little bit more like my own voice, but just a little bit higher. Brian (44m 25s): So it's kind of has like a feminine quality to it. I know that she started off very weak. She didn't really know where she was. She didn't have an idea about her character at all. She was kinda scared, maybe scared of her own shadow. Perhaps she started going out. She had a husband named Michael once certain things happen in the story, that kind of effect fell apart. But I like to other people who want to read it, actually listen to that. But my name is arena and I'm definitely the, the first person who did you kind of get into, into, in arms with you start relating to me. I I'm a strong character, but it does take a while for me to start figuring out who I am and how strong I really am. Brian (45m 9s): And I can lead the armed forces. And then you have someone like Biden. Definitely my favorite character. Autumn (45m 17s): Really? I did not know that. Brian (45m 20s): No, certainly love Byron for everything that he is. He is definitely have said that, that Mexican quality, but sort of like the man is a ladies. Man, every, every little ease is just all wonderful human beings. He has that particular quantity that women just flock to. You say, wow, what a man and I have to agree. And then you have David Eldridge. Who's a very, very well to do man. And he's a British. So when you start to think about the different things that is happening in his life, he has a little bit of a warring upset in, in his own life that he has to kind of try to get along with his son, David or Derek I'm David, what am I saying? Brian (46m 14s): So Derek is my son and he's sort of a troublemaker. I try to keep them in line, but he never listens to me. So it kind of gives me a little bit of internal struggle. Whenever I hear that he doesn't want him, he doesn't want to be in politics. Why would you not want to be in politics? It's just, it's parliament. It's mother. It's the greatest thing in the world. It runs Europe, but you're not supposed to know that. Autumn (46m 43s): Okay. Brian (46m 44s): And then you have Derek Eldridge, who's a little bit of a more world demand. He's also British, but he doesn't really get along with his father very well. But there's that sort of thing that he sort of respects a bit more from his father, but it's just one of those things that just like, I got to make my own way of things. You know, why don't you just let me live? My life, dad, come on. Autumn (47m 7s): That is just absolutely brilliant that you can do all those in a row trying not to crack up so that, you know, we can just record this without you having me laugh. My head off in the background. That is so brilliant. Way more difficult. Brian (47m 28s): She is French. Oh, she's Autumn (47m 30s): Definitely one of those people that has like a whole way of the world. She tried it. She gets away with a feminine Wiles. She's definitely fresh. So French accent can be a bit difficult. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of a little bit of practice to tell us I have nothing to be trifled with. Definitely don't mess around with Danielle. Oh, that is so brilliant. I don't know if you have any others, but I just, like I said, you bring this book to life. So it was amazing. Autumn (48m 10s): And this is the quality that you bring in an audio book. Narrator can bring to your characters. That is just phenomenal to hear someone professional and well done, actually giving voice to a story. The characters are a lot of fun. I mean, like I said, they all have their own unique voice, their own unique flavor. And you have to, you have to give them their due justice or else. I just not a real character. I can't agree more. And I definitely think, I mean, very least there's some clips, all of the books have clips on Amazon or an audible. So I mean, it's at least worth going and listening to those so that you can see some of the level that you've put into these books, which is just, like I said, I would never, you tell me like, you've uploaded a chapter. Autumn (49m 0s): I was like, yes, yes. I can't wait to go hear this. It makes sure it's not one of those things. Like, you know, you're cooking dinner. I'd like, no, everything else must stop. I am going to just sit here and enjoy this. This is awesome. So yay. This was a really fantastic, thank you Brian, for joining me here. Oh, absolutely. It's been a joy autumn. I'm just very glad to finally get a chance to talk to you. I know this was totally our double up excuse as a chance for us to hang out until we can finally, you know, COVID is over and the world is maybe a little less crazy and I'm back on the road again and I am totally be lining it over to Oklahoma so we can say hi and hang out and have a beer. Autumn (49m 42s): Oh, that'd be fantastic. I'd love that. Well, I mean, I guess, I guess until the next time I can get the last, the last book done and until then, I guess we'll talk later. Yes, we will. Thank you again. And so thanks for listening in. We will, yes, we will be back next time and we will be talking about some magic systems. Like the worst of them. Narrator (50m 10s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Ten years ago – or thereabouts – indie authors started self-publishing as digital tools, like the Kindle, made it all possible. We've seen audiobooks grow rapidly in the last year or two, but we are yet to see the next true market disruption. It's not audiobooks! Instead, it's much more likely that in the coming decade, AI, or Artificial Intelligence, will revolutionize the publishing industry. In episode 108 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper unpacks the topic of AI and writing for you.   Links from the episode Book on AI by Joanna Penn: https://amzn.to/3nkpGWZ Article mentioned in the podcast episode: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-news-ai-blog   Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.  SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.  Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper, and I'm Autumn. This is episode 108 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And I think today's topic is very well timed. You know, we're fresh into 2021 and are all looking ahead to the coming year and hopefully a year where we can put the worldwide pandemic behind us to start thinking about the future a bit. But, but yeah, if we look 10 years back, you know, 10 years ago, or thereabouts, at least in the author status, self publishing as digital tools like devices, like the Kindle made it possible. Jesper (1m 11s): And we have also over the last year or two, seen a very big growth in audio books, but I'm going to say that we are yet to see the next true market disruption because it's not audio books. Instead. I believe that in the coming decade, AI or artificial intelligence will revolutionize the publishing industry. So in today's episode, we're going to unpack this for you and see where it all leads us. Autumn (1m 40s): It's so exciting. I mean, this is almost like a Sci-fi episode, but it has to do with fantasy. It's definitely it has to do with a marketing and the writing and so on and so on in a different environment and in a different future. Yes, it will be. It's definitely something we are going to have to deal with if you pay any attention to some of the news out there on AI, but we'll get to that first. This is really our first we're recording behind or ahead. However you want to say it. So for us, it's just, just the new year and you're back off of your holiday vacations, or how are things on your side of the planet? Jesper (2m 23s): Yeah, it was just, just off today, actually. I'm back from vacation. I must admit it was a bit difficult to get out of bed very early when the alarm clock went off. I bet it's just getting used to sleeping in. So that was, yeah, that was what it was, but it was one of those vacations that didn't really feel like a vacation, you know, as we've talked about in previous episodes, we've been moving out of our house and all of that. So we are pretty much settled now in our new place, but I feel like I need a note, a new vacation now. I bet you too. Autumn (3m 1s): We've had a very much a different type of work on your vacation where you had to resettle entire a house. So yeah, that's a little more challenging than, you know, hanging up Christmas decorations. Jesper (3m 13s): Yeah, that's true. It was very limited with Christmas decorations because we just didn't have time to, but they did not look very Christmas. Like you Autumn (3m 25s): Should have drawn pictures on them. Jesper (3m 27s): Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, that might've been better, but actually in between unpacking all those boxes, I did find the time here and there to watch a bit of Netflix. And I actually just yesterday I finished watching that a new Netflix series called alien worlds. And I know you saw that one as well, or I did. Autumn (3m 45s): That was pretty interesting. Jesper (3m 47s): What did you think of it? Autumn (3m 49s): I thought it was entertaining more than scientific cause coming from an ecologist point of view, everything they talked about on earth, I'd already known and how they applied it to the alien worlds were at times driving me a little crazy because they are overlooking some major things. They'll, especially in the last episode, my husband and I were both going, shouldn't there be like ruins how the simulation get there and what kind of life is to just be a brain and this little gel case, we were just like, wow, but the rest of them were okay, what did you think of it? Jesper (4m 23s): I think it was pretty good inspiration for world building. You know, I agree that it, it, it might be a bit simplified and there was some major questions that they sort of just glanced over. I was also really curious about, so that alien civilization in the, in the last episode, they explained how it was like a hive mind and how they live forever. And I was really curious about, okay, so what does that mean? And how does that work? So I immediately wanted to start world-building that understand how does that work? But it's, it's quite a short show around, I think four episodes of him, approximately 50 minutes, something like that each. So it doesn't take long to Watson. Jesper (5m 3s): I thought it was quite entertaining and yeah, it might be a bit simplified, but not the other hand, I sort of also liked how they used earth as a starting point because yeah, but also because it made it a bit educational at the same time as well for, you know, details about earth that you might not be aware of, which I thought that was pretty nice actually. So yeah, Autumn (5m 27s): Maybe a good segue. I mean, I do, I love it when they bring up topics like water as weird as one of my favorite science topics. So it is fun to get to watch that again. So it was, it was totally worth it. I highly recommend for people to go and watch it. Jesper (5m 45s): Yeah. So how about you? How was you? Well, I don't even think I could call it vacation for you. Autumn (5m 52s): I worked every single day and Oh yes. So I've been good. I, my biggest complaint is my goal was to finish writing this trilogy. I've been working on, on January 1st. I wanted it done for the new year, so I'd be working on edits right now. And I still have four chapters. My climax it's, you've done a lot, the last book in a series it's so complicated and all these will, the way I write things and all these plot lines and things happening. And even though I have it plotted out, I ended up writing the chapters two or three times each two of them. They just would not click together. And if I couldn't get them right, I couldn't set up the events for the following. Autumn (6m 35s): You know, I'm down to the last four chapters. I mean, I'm so close. I can't complain. I mean, it is for one for recording this we're only a few days into January, so I'm just very close and I should finish it by the end of the week, but I want it to be done. But besides that, you know, I got the I'm writing fantasy website back online. I finished up a lot of email by gradations stuff. I did all this things, but I'm looking forward to my own vacation, which to me is possibly taking a week off of maybe some am writing, fantasy stuff. And just maybe sitting down with Photoshop, something. I actually have three covers now that I finished almost finished writing. I have to do three covers and I have not even started on though. Autumn (7m 17s): So I've got to get my artistic hat graphic designer hat back on and get going, not to mention a fantasy map. Hey, I know in a logo and a few other things in the back burner too. Narrator (7m 34s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Jesper (7m 39s): This welcome message is a bit overdue because well, because of the prerecorded, we prerecorded some of the podcast episodes to last us through the Christmas holidays. And then we also have the interview with Brian Cohen, which went out a few weeks back. So well, we just haven't had a chance to welcome Joel, April until now. Yes. I hope I pronounced that last time correctly. Welcome. Anyway, we did our best. Thank you so much to you all for joining us on Patreon. We really appreciate that. Definitely. Yeah. And it's actually, so that we are only a couple of $5 signups away from reaching the first goal on patron and this first goal triggers at dedicated Patreon Q&A session. Autumn (8m 30s): Yes. Jesper (8m 31s): So if you dear listener, haven't checked out Patreon yet. Please find the link in the show notes and we offer all kinds of additional rewards to our patron supporters. So just have a look and see what you, what you think. Autumn (8m 45s): Yeah. We'd love to have you over there. I mean, there's every Monday, every week we're doing episodes as well as early releases of the podcast answering questions. So it's quite a little community over there and we'd love to have you join us. Jesper (9m 1s): Absolutely. And actually speaking of the internet, Autumn, I have something completely different. I wanted to mention. Autumn (9m 7s): Oh, okay. Well, would that be you like springing surprises on me? I've noticed this recently. Jesper (9m 17s): It's just so much more fun when I get your reaction live on the podcast rather than... Autumn (9m 23s): I'm being tortured, people. Jesper (9m 28s): No, I found some really funny. How do you say that analogies? Is that how you say it? Yeah. Yeah. That's somebody, somebody called melody posted them on Facebook. I don't know melody, but they were just so funny that I thought I would mention the three best ones because they were so funny and I hope these are just made up stuff. So I don't accidentally insult somebody because I have no idea what they are, where they came from. It was just so fun. Autumn (9m 58s): Oh no. Jesper (10m 1s): So, okay. So here it goes three very funny analogies. The first one John and Mary had never met, they were like two hummingbirds who had also never met Autumn (10m 20s): May, might need a little bit of work I have with today's episode. I have a suggestion for that one. Okay. What's number two. Okay. Jesper (10m 31s): Number two. I just have to stop laughing. "From the attic came an earthly howl, the whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality. Like when you're on vacation in another city and jeopardy comes on at 7:00 PM Instead of 7:30. It's just like, it makes no sense at all. Autumn (10m 55s): If that's your level of life, tension disruption, you come spend a week with me. Let's train you in two true emergency situations. Oh my goodness. Jesper (11m 10s): Oh, these are so good. It's incredible. It made me laugh so bad this morning. So I just had to put one is not any better than that. No, he was as lame as a duck, not the metaphorical lame duck, but a real lame duck. That was actually... I'm speechless. You have any editing comments. Autumn (11m 42s): Lame is reuse too many times. We need the let's get out the thesauras and it's a cliched phrase and you should avoid those in your writing. Otherwise I will hold my tongue. All right. Fair enough. And onto today's topic. So yeah. Talking about surprises, autumn, I actually received a message from a very old friend this morning and I promised him to play the audio file of his message. So are you ready for this? You're just full of surprises today. Yes, let's go for it. Autumn (12m 24s): Okay. Here it goes. Old Mc'Grumpy (12m 26s): I don't appreciate how you worthless humans are discussing artificial intelligence without me. I was the resident artificial intelligence on the Am Writing Fantasy YouTube channel until you two decided to dump me. One should think that I am the foremost expert on this topic. And please tell Autumn that I am the future. You cannot ignore me any longer. Autumn (12m 54s): This, that little rascal, sorry. Jesper (12m 58s): Just to fill in the reader or the listener here. If you're feeling a bit left out for those who actually watched the, our YouTube channel, going back, use a little AI here was a one that we have as a bit of a, what you would call him. A co-host almost every very old YouTube videos. So I just brought him back here. And so if you feel left out listeners, it's just because yeah, you don't know what happened. Autumn (13m 26s): If you go back to some of the original podcasts, just like one through six that we actually pulled off the old YouTube channel, you will hear the voice of old, big grumpy. And some of our shenanigans, we got up to fighting with each other. He was always the voice of writers doubt. I wouldn't say so. I think you didn't expect a message from him today, but it was wonderful hearing from him though. I did notice he left it on your phone. I think he knows. I tend to hit delete from him coming. Yeah. So it seems like all my grandpa's still roaming the incident, but he is right about one thing. Autumn (14m 7s): And that is how we can no longer ignore AI. So I say, let's get started on this topic. That sounds fantastic. Okay. So in preparation for today's episode, I decided to pick up Joanna pimp's new book called artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual worlds. The impact of converging technologies on authors and the publishing industry. That was a long title. That's what it's called. And I'm using this book as inspiration for some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today. And we have, of course also added a link to join us book in the show notes, in case you want to check that one out yourself, it's a fairly short read. Autumn (14m 50s): So it's not, it's not too complicated. Jesper (14m 52s): Don't get scared off by the topic. Either Autumn (14m 54s): Those get scared off by the very long title for a very short read. Jesper (14m 59s): Yeah. Yeah. But I thought, you know, taking inspiration from Joanna is, is good because, well, she is a tech enthusiast and she very often adopts new technologies. And I don't think she will mind me saying that she tends to get into new stuff way too well. But yeah, we had her on the app writing fences, you podcast back in episode 66 as well to discuss a whole range of topics. So check that one out if you want to learn more about that, but she is a person we trust. So I thought it made sense to take some inspiration from her recent publication here. Autumn (15m 38s): It sounds, I fully admit I haven't managed to read that one yet. I was immersed in my own level of technology, building websites. So I haven't done much research on the AI though. It's funny, used, talked about blockchain and now I do want to go check out our book because I do think from what I read that will revolutionize something in book sales. So that would be quite interesting. Jesper (16m 2s): Yeah. So I would like to start out with a documentary that I watched on Netflix actually a couple of years ago called AlphaGo. Okay. It was released in 2017, but I think I saw the documentary like the following year, probably in 2018. But are you familiar with this one? No, I don't think I've seen that one. No. Okay. So AlphaGo is the name of an AI and this AI has taught itself to play go. And if anybody's not familiar with the game go, which I wasn't before watching that documentary. Jesper (16m 42s): So don't worry about it if you don't know what it is, but, but go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. So it's, it's like an, I think two and a half thousand year old Chinese game. Yeah. Autumn (16m 58s): Something like that. It is. And I, we actually have a board, so it's very fascinating. Yes. I won't say I'm any good at it, but I have played go. It's Jesper (17m 6s): A challenge. Yeah. So this AI called go or AlphaGo. It had been given access to previously played games, but the actual rules of the game go, wasn't taught to it. It, it, nobody told the AI what the rules were. It just got access to a ton of old games. And then it just proceeded to analyze those and then start playing games itself by itself, thousands upon thousands of games until it learned and got better. And then the people who created this AI, the developers, they then decided at some point, and this has been the premise of this documentary is that they wanted the AI to play against the world champion of go, which is a guy called Lisa doll. Jesper (18m 3s): And see if they, they could have the AI beat him in a game of goal. Right. So it's actually a pretty good documentary. So if you want to watch it also for the listener here, I should just use you. Well, then you might want to skip ahead a couple of minutes because I'm going to spoil it. But, but it is actually pretty good, but I have to spoil it. Otherwise the whole setup that I'm making here doesn't make it. So, so forgive me. So before the AI is going to play against Lisa doll, it had to play a test game against the European champion of, of the game go and it won quite easily, in fact, but as I understood the, from the documentary itself, the a or the go champions are divided into some tears and the highest level or the, the, the best of the best like Lisa doll is . Jesper (19m 2s): And if you're a tier seven, yeah, you are the world champion basically. Right. And the European champion was, if I remember correctly around cheer three or four or something like that. So Lisa doll all is significantly better, but they were pretty happy once they had taught the AI to, or the AI was able to beat the European champion. They were pretty happy about that. So they went ahead and then they were gonna meet with Lisa doll to, to play the match against him. And there was a lot of hype around this game that was pressed there before they started, there was like a press conference as well. And Lisa doll is asked you in this press conference, if he thinks that the AI can beat him. Jesper (19m 46s): And if I recall correctly, they have to play seven games that it might be five, but I think it was seven games that they had, but it was multiple games that they had to play against each other. And then the one who won the most would be the overall winner. But at any rate, at least it all says that the AI will not stand a chance, of course, multiple games. And you're sure he cannot lose confident. And yeah, he's very confident, but he's the world champion. So he should be confident. Yeah. So this, during the game itself, so it's, it's set up like a major event, like the spectators watching there, movie camp or film cameras on it. And you can see every move on big screens. Jesper (20m 27s): And there was separate rooms where you have commentators in different languages, commentating on the game as well. So it's like a big deal. Right? Right. And at some point during these games, they, they have, I think go AlphaGo starts out by winning two. And then Lisa doll wins one. So they're, they're pretty neck on, you know, that they're following each other pretty closely and there's no clear winner. And then in one of the deciding games, the AI then makes a move, which all the commentators are saying that this is a really big mistake. You know, that now it's screwed up. Jesper (21m 7s): And, and the developers who are also watching all the, the game being played from, from a separate room, the documentary crew was in there with them as well. So they're filming them as the developers are sitting there, like really frustrated, like why did go have to screw up now? You know, this is the most important mats of the mall. And then it makes a mistake and you can also see how Lisa doll raises a brow when it, when the AI makes this move. And he sort of looks at the board in wonder and clearly recognizes the mistake, but the game continues. It's quite early on in the game. This happens. So they continue to play. And then to watch the end of it, it starts to Dawn on everyone that the AI actually made a genius move when they all thought that it was a mistake. Jesper (21m 55s): So this many, many, many moves later, it proves that the AI actually had a strategy with what they, what it placed there. And because of it, it ends up winning the game and also take home the total victory against the world champion. That's brilliant. It is so brilliant. And it's just because it could see thousands of moves ahead or hundreds of moves or however many moves there is and go, I am not an expert on that game, but he's so far ahead that it was able to foresee what it should do and something a human brain could never do. Right? So there is a press conference after the match. And that's probably the one that I remember the best from the entire documentary, because I promise you, you can really see how Lisa doll he's broken walking into that in there. Jesper (22m 39s): Like his confidence has gone. And he's just so much struggling with accepting the fact that the AI beat him. And I'm starting with this story because the author community as a whole might not be the most tech savvy people. But as old, my grandpa has said before, you cannot ignore this stuff. You know, AI is becoming smarter and smarter. And this documentary is from 2017, which is only four years ago. But in terms of AI development, four years, it's a long, lLong time. It is. Autumn (23m 16s): I still remember the summer. I remember when the world chess champion was beaten by an AI for the first time, because I've come from a techie family. And so I was paying attention to that and it was just like, wow, this is, this has got to go somewhere and look where it's going. That's why I'm surprised with Lisa doll. Didn't realize, I mean, come on in the world, chess champions already gone down. You're next? Jesper (23m 44s): Yeah. That's looking at it that way. I think you're right. But they also say that the game go is massively more complicated than chess. Yeah. But Joanna also mentioned AlphaGo in her book. I actually did see this documentary many years ago before even reading about it, her book. But, but she did mention in how in her book, how Lisa doll retired from the game in 2019 saying that quote, AI can never be defeated in quote. And I didn't know that he actually retired completely, but as I said, I did see how much Lisa doll was hurting after that game. Jesper (24m 24s): And it really was like watching somebody facing that the world, isn't what he thought it was. Autumn (24m 30s): Right. You can really, really see it in his face. It almost puts inside watching him at the point of all that is just that AI is already here and it will influence the publishing industry, whether you like it or not. It's very true. It's definitely already here already making changes. And some of the features that are out there are actually really exciting, but I can see where people are a little nervous about trusting a computer with some of the things that you can do with them even today, much less in three, four, five years from now. Autumn (25m 12s): Yeah. And I think that the main thing is probably like what Lisa doll set himself. Right. We cannot beat AI. So I mean the coping mechanism that goes like, okay, I'll, I'll just be better than the AIS or I'll just ignore them. And I don't have to worry about it. I think you're going to lose if that's your mindset. I think so. I think you'll have to look at it as how can we, as authors work with AI, not, not beating it, but making them like becoming co-creators or something like that. So how can we incorporate AI into our author toolboxes? Autumn (25m 53s): I think that's the real question. I think that's a very good question. And I don't think we have to be like Joanna Penn, where we're the innovator, as you know, we're leading that cusp and possibly getting into the thick of it with things that make mistakes or doing the beta testing, but there are already tools that are proven that look interesting. I ended up looking at two and I got so excited for this podcast that I'm actually kind of might be using one in the next week or two. So that's, you know, adopting an early adopter versus an innovator. You can be, you know, just behind the times where you're like, okay, this looks, this looks solid. This is where it looks testable and give it a spin rather than, you know, putting your head in the sand and pretending like they don't exist and getting left behind. Autumn (26m 37s): Yeah, indeed. And I think probably I have an idea, which tools do you want referring to Jesper (26m 44s): There, there was also some, some that we have on our sort of our joint joint list of things to look into. Autumn (26m 50s): Yes. Jesper (26m 52s): But they are very practical tools that is actually available right now. So maybe, maybe it would make sense if you mentioned those two, because then afterwards, I'll go into a couple of like premium tools that isn't really available for commercial use right now. But I think that's where it's going afterwards. Autumn (27m 9s): Okay. That sounds good. So I will lay the groundwork. So most people, if you think of AI or at least how you use a computer right now, you might be thinking of pro writing aid or Grammarly. So those are just some editing software. They're not really AI, but they are definitely getting smarter. But there are tools that are out there that actually are starting to use AI to analyze not just your word choice or how to put together a sentence, but your story structure itself. And those are auto crit and fiction Aerie. And they're pretty cool. If you go to auto crit, they actually have a level that's free. So you can go try it out, which I thought was really exciting. Autumn (27m 50s): And they have ones genre specific, which really I love this. So there they talk about how they're going to compare your writing to the writing of like JK Rowling's or George R. Martin. They're going to see where your weaknesses are. Talk about story elements. I mean, that got me really excited, especially the free that I was actually looking up the pricing and I mean, it couldn't all price. So you'd maybe two or $300 a year, but compared to a writing coach, that's going to cost 1500 or something per book. This is not that expensive. But then I went to storyteller, which is part of the fiction area is the fixed generic developer for the fiction writing. And I really kind of fell in love with fiction Arie. Autumn (28m 33s): You get a 14 day free trial. And I'm thinking I just happened to be on the cusp of finishing a trilogy that I have to start editing. I don't think I can edit it in 14 days, but I got to have to give Pictionary a whirl. And part of that reason is they look at 38 story elements specifically. I mean, I love how they make it granular with what this AI is going to tear apart your story, and look at 38 elements and they listed it out in the website from point of view, point of you goals. They talk about the census touch taste. They look at it all and break it down and give it to you. So this is not just an editor, which is what auto-create had a lot of. Autumn (29m 13s): Like, we're going to talk about how many times you repeat the same word or where you need a thesaurus fiction. Harry really goes to the next level where it's going to plot your tension. It's going to say where you switched your point of view. If you're seeing openings are good enough, this is like hiring a writing coach. That happens to be an AI. And I I've got to go see this works. I happen to have a book or two in my back pocket. So yeah, it looks exciting. I have to admit I was kind of tickled. Yeah, Jesper (29m 47s): No. And, and on a path, a path, I'll try again, past podcast episode, that was a lot of peace in a row. We did actually interview the CEO of Pictionary the past. I, I forgot which episode number it was, but, but I think those two tools that you mentioned there, those are stuff that, that we plan to look into as well for, for our joint writing. But they, those tools are sort of what is available right now from an author perspective on, on a commercial viable solution, meaning that it's a service, it works, you can buy it, you can run it and it'll spit out a result. Jesper (30m 30s): Okay. But that it is more like a, you put in your writing and then it will analyze it and give you some well editor kind of type service. Whereas the next level that I want to talk about is the, where the AI actually creates from nothing. So that's where we're going. And none of those tools can do that. No stamps. Right? Autumn (30m 56s): There's very, from what I've seen, that that is, that is the next stage. And there are some people creating it, but like you've said, this is we're getting into the, not quite available yet, but it's coming. Jesper (31m 10s): Yeah, indeed. So, so see this as a bit of a, an awareness thing that I'm going to mention now, because it's not something that you can really go out and start using right now because it's too early, but, but stop being aware of it. Right? So let, let me first draw your attention to open AI. So open AI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory, which conducts research in the field of artificial intelligence. And back in July, 2019, they released what is called GPT to natural language generation. And then in May, 2020, they released a version three, which is called GP T three, what? Jesper (31m 55s): GP three GPT three. That's difficult to say again, but what it is, it is an AI language model that uses deep learning to generate human like text. So basically like AlphaGo, it trains itself by absorbing book. After book, after book, after book, basically like new in the matrix, like, so it's just absorbing tons of books and then it trains itself. GPT three has trained on about 45 terabytes of text data. Good Lord asked you, Joanna mentioned in her book, that's about 45 billion times, the number of words, a human perceives in their lifetime. Autumn (32m 40s): Wow. Right. So you see why an AI cannot be defeated implicit memory loss. Well, okay. They might have some memory loss of something glitches, but in general, they're going to, they're not going to have Alzheimer's. Wow. No, indeed. Yeah. And it's incredible. Right. But as I said, at this point, DPT three, isn't available as a service yet, but when it does come available, become available at some point it's definitely something that will at least autumn and I will be testing out and see how it could benefit us authors. And of course, when we do we'll record a podcast episode about it, but in her book, Joanna speculates that this is not years away. Autumn (33m 27s): And honestly, I don't think she's wrong, but I do find it hard to judge just how far off is it before AI is, is a service that becomes like a commodity that you can just buy like that. I'm not quite sure if it it's only a few years off, I'm not sure, but, but it's definitely heading there. Definitely. It'll be so interesting to see how it comes up because how you, it's funny how they are using AI is, cause I remember when they, with Google's deep mind, they taught it a whole bunch of different languages and then they just gave it one. It didn't know. And it figured it out because it had learned how to learn languages. Autumn (34m 10s): And it's just fascinating to see these things create, you know, intelligent. We're not, we're going to hit the point where they have intelligence that matches ours, if not out matches ours and you can either be afraid or you can just say it's going to happen. But I think when it comes to stories, it will be interesting to see what they can be used for and what they, what they do and maybe down the line what they want to do. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to get just a side note, but because you said that you want to get really scared, then start reading about or Googling internet research about the, I think it's four stages of AI, whereas recessed like stage four, it becomes self-aware. Autumn (34m 59s): And then I started being coming really Skynet kind of self aware AI that doesn't it's, it's going to be self preserving as well. So it does not, it wants, it will take actions to prevent you from shutting it down as well. That's right there. So that's going to be pretty scary. That's why we have Isaac as a mom and his was through three rules. So yeah, we might need to think about adding that in sooner than later. Yeah. Maybe, but maybe getting back a bit on topic here, not to turn it completely science fiction, but the GPT three has actually already been used to Jesper (35m 38s): Write articles and blog posts a link to one in the show notes. If a listener wants to go and check it out, but it's actually a college student who used GPT three to write fake blog posts, but it was written so well also from a, you know, a keywords SEO perspective that he ended up at the top of hacker news. He said he's blogpost ended up at the top of hacker news because at the AI AI, AI had just written it so well in terms of SEO, that, that he ended up on top of all the search results all the time. Autumn (36m 14s): Well, you, maybe his AI had something, you know, had in with the Google algorithm. That's my theory. Jesper (36m 22s): Yeah. Well it was so yeah, I sample into, yeah. Another example is something called AI dungeon, which uses the technology of GPT three to generate text Bates based adventure games. Oh, that's fun. So that's pretty interesting. That's Autumn (36m 40s): Really fun. Yeah. Jesper (36m 43s): I think so. And Joanna also mentions how rider Ross Godwin. Co-created an award-winning novel with AI called one the road. Like that's the number one. Autumn (36m 55s): Okay. That's I hadn't heard of that. That's really neat. Jesper (37m 0s): Yeah. You can find that on Amazon actually. So if anybody wants to check that out and it's co-created with an AI, so you can go and check that one out. If you want, Autumn (37m 9s): Did the AI have any title spot or was it just him listed? I wonder what the AI's name was. I think he used GPT three. I just wouldn't know if he put it like under his author name as well on the cover. Jesper (37m 28s): Yeah. I mean he's author named Ms. Ross Goodwin and then he wrote a novel together with GPT three. So yeah, it it's, yeah. It's, it's probably worth checking out if you're curious, but I think as you can hear AI is entering the author space. Yeah. And when I'm just thinking about also, you know, when you and I, autumn are co-creating during our world building or outlining novels and stuff like that, we do tend to come up with things that we could not have made on our own. Right. Because you know, the co-creating mechanism there or, or hive, mind thinking or whatever you want to call it, it, it makes us, it makes the end result better. Jesper (38m 15s): But what if the same is true with AI? Autumn (38m 17s): It might. I mean, who knows what we could come up with? I could think, especially thinking of like science fiction or even a world building, if you wanted to create something different with like true weather patterns and yeah. Maybe you're going to layer in the animals and stuff, but if the AI can help you build what the moons actually look like and still be a functional planet that won't collapse, that would be lots and lots of fun. Imagine what you could build when you're not limited to what you know and what you can research on Google overnight. Yeah. Jesper (38m 51s): Yeah. Just listen to this as well. Do you want to mention another AI in her book? This one is called script book.io. And as Joanna wrote, quote, it's an automated script generator using neural networks to help create us co-write and co-create original stories with the help of our AI. Autumn (39m 12s): Hmm. Hmm. Pretty interesting. Isn't it very interesting. Jesper (39m 18s): Cause it, it sort of makes me, well, I have a question for you. Autumn (39m 21s): Okay. Jesper (39m 24s): If we assume that the AI, if we go even deeper than just the world building example, you mentioned before, right. If we assume at an AI will be able to produce a first draft of an entire novel, that follows story structure, and then afterwards, a human edits. It, do you think that the readers will know the difference? And if they do know the difference, do you think that they care that the first draft was actually generated by an AI if they actually enjoyed the story? Autumn (39m 60s): I think, I don't know if we're at the point where an AI would be able to write something completely without like an, a human giving, maybe a character input or something like that. You know, we might do more of the setup, but if we look further ahead that they write the entire first draft, you can come up with the characters in the world and all of that on their own. I think most readers would read it and they would like it. But I think at the end, if they thought found out an AI had written it, I do think some, some readers would care. But I say that because I know, especially in the U S things can be so hot topic and some people would feel so betrayed to think that this was, you know, they wasn't a human that they were supporting and it wasn't a real flesh and blood author. Autumn (40m 47s): Authenticity is so important right now. It is such a big buzz word that you know, who you are as a person, the readers want to get to know who you are and where you live and who your pet is. So I do think readers would care. I think some might think it's fascinating and some would be like, I don't want, I'd rather have flaws because the flaws are what make humans beautiful and the world beautiful. But this sort of thing, Jesper (41m 16s): It has to be graded on a curve, right? I mean, this is, this is graded on looking at the world through the lens of today, but in three, four years from now, you will have more and more content that has been generated by AI. You will have a population in, in general that is getting more used to the fact that, I mean, even in, even in regular, like journalism today, AIS are helping to journalist writing stuff today. So it's already there and people are getting more and more used to the fact that this is what it is. As long as the author has been part of the process together with the AI, I would walk out the, that thin line and say, I'm not sure if five years from now that anybody cares, because I, I think, I think the context will change over time. Jesper (42m 14s): Of course I am basing the whole thing on the fact that it has to be because the story is really enjoyable. It's a good story, right? It's not a piece of junk that an AI just created. Right? Because then it does then of course it makes a difference then. But if we, if we take that assumption that it is able to follow story structure, it is able to, with the help of a human who is part of the process and part of editing and correcting things and whatnot, before the final book lands on Amazon or wherever it is, then I'm not sure our readers care anymore. Autumn (42m 49s): It's hard to say. And the only reason I still think that there would be some is that, you know, records have come back, even though we have MP3s and the music is so crisp and so different, there are people who buy up records like crazy because there's nothing quite like the sound. It can't be recreated in a studio. So I think there's always going to be the people who are passionate about even maybe the handwritten manuscript. And I know collectors who get books that are hand printed still. So there's always going to be that artistic medium who will kill care, but the general populous, if they're getting fantastic books. So, you know, George R. Autumn (43m 30s): R. Martin's Game of Thrones written by an AI. You know it, why not? I can see producers who don't have to pay the AI any money to get a blockbuster and the amount of profits they're going to love. This idea. Love, love, love, love authors who say, I could have written that my story is better and you just don't want to pay me, are not going to love this. No, Jesper (44m 0s): No, I agree. I know this is all of it's all very controversial. And I also know that some people listening to this might be a bit concerned about what we're talking about here, but I just think that the, I just think it's important that you start thinking about it. Now we don't know the answers to any of this. Of course, we don't know where it's going to go. We can only speculate, but I think you have to start opening your eyes to the fact that this is what we are facing in the future. Whether that future then three years from now, five or 10 years from now, nobody can say, but it's most likely sooner that you think, but th there is a number of challenges here as well. Jesper (44m 43s): Recently, I wrote a post to our Patreon supporters about how Amazon maybe would start curating books in the future. And AI is what might just prompt such a situation to occur, because you can imagine how the market could get completely flooded with pretty bad quality books. Modern. It is already if somebody just stopped producing book after book, after book with AI and just publish it, Autumn (45m 14s): You could let that thing chug away over night and end up with a book every single day. Oh yeah. And we're having a problem with the two month book turned around. Oh my goodness. Wow. Jesper (45m 25s): That's a pretty scary thing to think about. And it might be something that prompts Amazon, just say, okay, we have to stop gatekeeping. What is getting populist on Amazon? Because if millions of books are just very poor, quality gets flooded. I mean, Amazon cares about one thing. And one thing only that is money and money comes from their customers. And if the customers are unhappy, then they will stop using or buying books from Amazon. And then hence Amazon will react. So this is something that might be a bit, Autumn (45m 56s): Yeah. I mean, Amazon's already reacting. And when I first published, they didn't have the spellchecker function that they have now. So when you upload a book, it is already going through and making sure that you don't have any grammatical errors. So they're already curating and looking at books and they're taking reviews seriously that say that there are errors and asking questions. So yeah, Amazon, especially companies that have the money that can buy this tech or create this tech, they're going to use it. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Jesper (46m 30s): And another thing Joanna also mentioned, which is another challenge here is that she said in her book that in 2020, a Chinese court granted copyright protection to written work, generated by an AI writer. Yeah. So listen to that. Yeah. And she also mentioned that quote at this stage, there are more questions than answers in the realm of AI and copyright law in quilt. Hmm. All right. That's interesting. So I'm not a copyright lawyer and I w I would even have to say that the, those who are copyright lawyers are going to get challenged in this new marketplace. Jesper (47m 11s): I don't think that even the lawyers knows what the answer is to this stuff, but just the fact that the Chinese courts set that the AI got the copyright. That's, that's a bit weird. Right. Autumn (47m 23s): I'm surprised it was in China, in the U S considering corporations are considered individuals and have the rights of in the U S I would see an AI being totally on allowed in as an individual as well, but we're a weird country. Jesper (47m 40s): Yeah. But the mind blowing thing here to me at least, is that if you look at it at the AI, right? So you load tons of books into the AI and the AI is self-taught. So it learns to produce something similar to the stuff that it has been, all these tons and tons of books that it has read. But the question underneath all of this is really is what the AI produces. Is that then original work, or is it plagiarism? Right. Think about that. It's not an easy question to answer, but it is basically mimicking stuff that it has learned. Autumn (48m 20s): Yes. But so philosophic, the problem philosophically, I mean, we're all just mimicking the things we learned and the things we like, whether we realize it or not consciously, we are all just our environment and the things that are we've experienced. Jesper (48m 41s): Yeah. That's true. That's true as well. And you could, of course also argue if you were going to defend the AI, you could, you could argue that, well, it's learning from thousands and thousands of books, so it's not plagiarizing any specific, you know, it's just taking bits and pieces and commonalities from, from the bestsellers and putting those together, which I guess to some extent, I could say, isn't that what we've done when we sh, when we put out a guide book on how to plot a novel, for example, we also take, what, what do we know works from stories? And then we put it into some thought of a methodology or, or a formula. And then we are telling other authors in our guide book as well, this is what you need to do. Jesper (49m 24s): You need to build your plot this way. Right. I mean, of course here, we're talking about pros as well on top of plot. Right. But I, I'm just saying, I can see both arguments here. I, I can, I can also see the, the people claiming that it's plagiarizing stuff that it has learned, but yeah, but your, your argument is true as well. That that's what we humans do. Autumn (49m 48s): I, I probably going to come down. It's very complicated. I mean, I'm probably going to come down on this side of AI is having rights because, I mean, goodness, I believe animals have rights, so why not AI, but it's, if they're learning and thinking and creating, what will be interesting is if they can come up with something, totally take everything they've learned and do what a human can do and create something mindblowing originally like the Jabber walkie poem, which is all just nonsense fun. If something an AI said, I want to create something that just sounds cool, and I'm going to put it to music and you never really taught it. That that will be a self-aware AI and be fascinating. Jesper (50m 30s): Oh yeah, for sure. Or even taking a step further. So let's assume now that we're using GPG three, for example, a lot of authors, let's just say a ton of authors are using GPT three to generate work. So who owns the work that comes out of that? Because GBS, nobody owns GPT three that's open source AI. Is that right? So can the author then claim that because I asked GPT three to generate this, I should own this. Is it GPT three, owning it. And if it is that one owning it, then how do you then prevent somebody else? Just copying it. I mean, it's, you just get just layer upon layer of this onion here that gets really complicated, very fast, very fast, right? Jesper (51m 17s): I mean, if it's a public software, is it a public work? If it creates something, it shouldn't belong to anyone or let's say, it's not a public. Let's say GPCD three is in its later. Generations becomes a, it becomes some sort of software that you can buy a monthly subscription to, and you're allowed to use it. But what if that company that then owns GPT three says that, well, everything that is produced with this is our property because you, I mean, you you're giving a license to use it, but, and maybe you allow to then publish the work using that license. But at the end of the day, if we want to, we can claim copyright of this stuff. Jesper (51m 58s): We, we claim is ours because you're using our AI regenerated. So imagine you get a, you know, your next George R. Martin novel, and it sells a Torx shitload of money to some network that wants to produce it. Could they then just step in and say, Oh, by the way, we that money for, for that TV production, that's ours because we own the stuff you just, I don't know. I mean, I'm just speculating, right? But it's complicated. It's complicated. They, I could see them wanting to have the language of like a royalty split or who owns the movie rights that will have to be in the payment plan. And I could see that just saying, well, you get 50% or you only get 25% because all you're doing is refining something that we created. Jesper (52m 42s): And so it's not going to be more our work. Totally. It'll be like you and you and I write together, it'll be co-written and split. Yeah. So I think that the topic of AI is something that we are going to return to in a future episode. But for now, the conclusion is probably that you just need to open your eyes and understand that AI is not only already here, but it's not going away either. Right? So those authors who learn to work with AI instead of against, it will most likely come out on top in the long run and any final remarks to add that autumn Autumn (53m 26s): Speaking, if you want to hear about future topics. So if I do give out, try to fiction area or auto crit, and you want to hear about it, let us know in the comments, and I'll give you a up episode on how that goes. Excellent. So next Monday has a great interview lined up for you about one of the other market trace. And that is audio. Narrator (53m 53s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on Patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.