Podcast appearances and mentions of Dean Wesley Smith

How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last. In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris; Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career You can find John at wearewhitefox.com. Transcript of the interview with John Bond Jo: John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver. So welcome back to the show, John. John: Thank you, Jo. Thanks so much for having me. Jo: You were last on the show in 2022. You've been on a couple of times, but just set the scene. Tell people a bit more about you and your long background in publishing. John: I suppose I could say I started as a marketing manager at Penguin back in the early 1990s in London, and that role eventually evolved into running sales and marketing, as it often does. I did that at Penguin and at HarperCollins. Then I ran one of the publishing divisions at HarperCollins, including 4th Estate, and published Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others. I left that in 2011 and set up Whitefox in 2012, and it's a classic startup story. It was somebody I worked with at HarperCollins. We sat around a kitchen table, came up with an idea for a business, which was Whitefox, and that's grown into the creative agency that it is today. Jo: So back then, did you think, “I can do this better”? Was that the impetus, “I can do publishing better than Penguin and HarperCollins”? John: No, I thought we would solve a problem. There's something very attractive about that whole startup mentality and beginning something from scratch. I mean, I was in my early 50s. I'd had a long career in traditional publishing. On the plus side, I knew a lot of people, and I thought I could get meetings, people would reply to my phone calls or my emails. On the downside, I didn't necessarily have the energy of a 20 to 25-year-old. I knew a lot of people and I knew quite a lot of things, and I also knew what problems something like Whitefox could solve. We set up with this idea that if we could galvanise and organise the diaspora of freelancers in the publishing space and make them available to anybody that wanted to make a book, that that would be quite a powerful thing. These incredibly creative, wonderful people who were below the radar and were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. I thought if we could access that and make that available not just to traditional publishing people who know about these people, but to individual authors, businesses, brands, people that wanted to make a book, and if you added a layer of our expertise from traditional publishing, that could be quite powerful, I suppose. That's what I was thinking back then. Jo: It's funny, though. You said these wonderful freelancers who were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. That could also apply to a lot of authors in traditional publishing. John: Totally. Totally. But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about that. What's really evolved since we started, even in that 2011, 2012 period, is so much has happened to independent writers, indie authors. The whole ecosystem has become much more vibrant, and what is accessible to those writers is much greater. I'd like to think we've played a part in that. What that's done is put power back into writers' hands, and that quickly became apparent in the business as a byproduct of what we'd set up. Jo: Yes, and 2012 I do think in the UK was a pivot point, because I got into self-publishing in 2006/2007 when the Americans did with the beginning of the Kindle and the iPhone. Really the American ecosystem grew first. I happened to be in Australia, and so I think I was able to escape the negativity of the vortex in the UK, which took a number more years to embrace self-publishing as a force to be reckoned with as opposed to an embarrassing thing in the corner for vanity press. Do you see 2012 as a changing point in UK publishing? John: I think we'd just come out of the Kindle moment, hadn't we? There were all sorts of conversations going on about how that was going to change things forever. I think no one quite knew what the upshot of that was going to be, but we knew that it was incredibly disruptive. In 2012, Penguin, as it was then, before Penguin Random House, had offered to buy Author Solutions for $115 million, presumably seen as some kind of defensive measure as to what the market was going to evolve into. I think it felt like a real period of change. In the UK, James Daunt took over running Waterstones, and he was then ultimately going to run Barnes & Noble. It felt like a bit of a watershed. I think we were lucky in that sense, that maybe in the UK and in London, what we were creating coincided with an opening up of opportunity and creativity, and people wanting access to more tools to be able to do things themselves. Getting this idea that you invest in your own talent and what that could mean for your ability to do things quicker, better. Some of it was happenstance, but lucky for us. As you say, we then became aware that in a sense a lot of these things had come to fruition earlier on the US side. In London, that whole idea of setting up something that wasn't a traditional rights-owning model, but where you wanted to be working with people creatively, felt actually really exciting and timely. Jo: And when you started to work with independent authors, probably a couple of years after that, you started to work with a lot more indie authors and things really started to change in terms of the business side. Did you feel any of the snobbery from the traditional industry? Like you mentioned, you have a lot of contacts, a lot of connections. I came to your wonderful launch party and there were just people from all over the industry. I wondered if you got any kickback, or if anyone raised their eyebrows a little bit at who you were choosing to work with? John: Oh, definitely. And I would say I really think that's gone. You may think differently, Jo, but from my perspective, I think there has been such an evolution in the nearly 15 years that we've been going. So any of that residual snobbery, looking down your nose at people that were going DIY, producing multiple books, learning from every single publication. We've spoken about this before. I remember you sat on the panel of a FutureBook conference in the UK, which was run by a trade magazine, with this idea of looking at the, in quotes, “digital future of the business.” It felt like there were a lot of things being talked about, but not a lot of action on the traditional side. I suppose some sort of awe that there was some magic going on with people who were making a success of self-publishing. But then quite a lot of people looking down their noses at things that shouldn't get through the gatekeepers. I do think that's gone. Or if it's not completely gone, I can see it on the way out of the door, because there's no room for that when agents are struggling to sell books to publishers because publishers are looking at the next indie author, the next Freida McFadden, the next Sarah J. Maas, the next Rebecca Yarros. So whoever it may be, or wherever they're publishing, whatever they're doing now, wherever they may be, knowing that a lot of those people will already be publishing and be on not their first, second, third or fourth, but potentially their 10th or 11th book. It's a race to see who can help those authors, as a traditional publisher would see it, amplify what they're doing. I think the idea that there's an us and them, if it did exist then, which it certainly did in certain publishing quarters, is gone. I used to go to those conferences, like the FutureBook Conference, and certain publishers would talk about publishing, and when they meant publishing, they meant a really tiny area of quite literary, traditional imprints. That's what publishing meant. They didn't even mean publishing to mean educational publishing, or children's publishing, or academic publishing, and certainly not Kindle or POD or whatever. So I think that's had to change for very good, sound, commercial, economic reasons. Jo: Yes, you're right. I definitely have heard, as we go to similar events sometimes, and you do hear agents used to talk a lot more about finding books very occasionally in a slush pile, or doing courses so you could meet people and do pitch events and all this. Now it's often build an audience on BookTok or whatever, and sell lots of books, and traditional publishing as an amplifier, as you said. That's how I always hear them pitch it now, the question of— What can traditional publishing still do when indie authors can do so much? It does seem to be, well, we can amplify you, we can get you into traditional press, we can get you in traditional bookstores, we can help you with film and movie deals, that kind of thing. So that's really interesting, because that's actually changed quite a lot. They don't now seem to say, “Oh, well, we can make sure we pay you,” or, “We are editorial success as such.” John: I think they don't say editorial success or quality or indeed marketing, because that was what used to be said. I think there's an understanding that a lot of indie writers are better marketeers of their own books than traditional publishers, and if you go into the publishing machine, then you'll get your slot. It lasts for a certain period of time and then that moves on to another book. Whereas obviously if you're writing your own book and you're marketing your own book, you're able to do that yourself 24/7 wherever you are in the world, and you will know more about your readers and your audience and how that evolves than a traditional publisher would. What they probably mean now is, as you said, as much as anything, distribution, or even physical distribution. Because to be part of that process, I think that is still where a large conglomerate is able to wield some muscle, with this idea that if you physically want to see your book in bricks and mortar retailers in X outlets around the world, that's potentially easier to do if that is your aim, via a traditional publisher. So it is constantly evolving, because it used to be that marketing was the silver bullet, and I don't think that's the case anymore. Jo: No. We'll come back to marketing, shall we? Struggling with marketing. So let's get into your book. You recently co-wrote Going Indie with James Silver, Publishing Your Book Your Way. Obviously you already knew a lot about indie authors, so I wonder, what did you discover in the process of researching the book and the interviews you did? And I was one of your interviews. Did anything come up that surprised you, since you're already pretty embedded in the world? John: I would say some of it was reinforcing what I knew. So how everything is so intertwined, how in some ways unlinear everything is. People are doing lots of things in a different order to the way that traditionally writers would perceive this relay race of a manuscript gets passed to an editor, an editor passes on. That's just not how it is or needs to be anymore. I still think there is—not even a misconception—but I think there's a received wisdom that when you're talking about self-publishing, you're talking about fiction. The majority of books that Whitefox produces are not fiction, they're non-fiction. Some of them are quite mainstream, some of them are quite niche. That idea of connecting to your audience and your followers, and being slightly more scientific about how you find readers in your non-fiction niche, I think is still unspoken about in a way, in that genre fiction tends to be what people automatically assume the conversation is about. This probably doesn't surprise you, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it confirmed to me quite how much swapping and sharing there is of skills and knowledge in that space. I'm not saying indie writing is egoless at all, but there's quite a lot of sharing of knowledge and what works, and collaboration, which I think is great to see. Again, if you've, as I did many years ago, come out of corporate conglomerate publishing, traditional publishing, there's less of that by the very nature of the kind of organisation. And look, we just talked about marketing a little while ago. I do think this whole idea that the cutting edge of experimentation, it's not traditional publishing, it's indie writers. They are looking at not just how to find readers, but how to fulfil orders, how to make commercial sense of what they're doing from the absolute outset and get-go of what they're doing. And just how now the lines are blurring between what would be classified as traditional digital publishers and the writers who are doing their own thing, or doing their own thing on behalf of a few other writers. Those lines have completely blurred. There used to be this traditional hardback, paperback, X number of books a year, a year after hardback there's a paperback. This is the model we have been doing for centuries, and people doing things on their own. I think that's blurring massively, and the Venn diagrams of people's areas of expertise are just overlapping massively. Jo: Well, I think you're right there, and certainly the hardback special editions with sprayed edges and foil. A lot of us now are doing that first and not putting out the other, or putting out the rest of it at the same time. I dare say probably there are more indie authors with sprayed edge hardbacks than there are traditionally published authors. John: I'm sure that's right. And what's interesting is if you go to a traditional book printer, they are loving the direct communication with writers, that's not coming through traditional channels and traditional relationships. It's great business, it's interesting. I think that's something that's even developed in the last couple of years, that cutting out of some of the middle men required. Jo: Yes, and in terms of supporting freelancers and small publishing houses and printers and stuff, the other thing I've heard is that indie authors pay upfront, or they pay quickly, compared to some of these big publishers who are asking for long lead times and steep discounting. So actually a lot of these independent businesses are doing better under indie author work than they were under traditional. John: I think that's right, and that's what I mean also about the sharing of information and this collaborative idea of sharing creative knowledge. I mean, I'm making it sound like a kind of 19th century cooperative, which it isn't. I'm not suggesting that for a second. It's this idea that there's a lot of people learning a lot of things and there's a keenness to share some of that information, because if you've developed your own readership for your unique creative product, some of those learnings are very exciting. The printers I've spoken to love working on those kinds of things, because they are also being challenged to come up with new ways of developing ever more innovative physical product. Jo: Yes, I think it's a fun, creative time for sure. Things like Kickstarter, which you came on and talked about crowdfunding years ago, and I've obviously done. I think, what am I on now? Seven? I've just done my seventh. John: Wow. Jo: It's so much fun. But now what's happening is traditional publishers are arriving on Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. So we really see a blurring. Let's come back to your book, so Going Indie. You co-wrote it. Now obviously there are lots of positive sides of collaboration, but in terms of any challenges with collaboration and co-writing and the writing process of doing this? Because I've done this several times and I've found it very challenging. So tell us about the collaborative writing process. John: We thought a lot about it before we took it on. What I would say, having done it, is I am assuming there is no formula for how you do this. At Penguin I worked with a married couple who were crime writers, and they wrote books together. They merged their names so it appeared to be one name. I could not tell you, and they didn't share what that process was, whether they were writing different chapters or … I don't know. So I can only speak from my own experience. James is an established journalist. He's great with deadlines. He was very good at chivvying me along when I needed to be persuaded to hit the deadlines that I'd promised. I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write content for our website, but this is my first book. I've never written anything of this length. So in a way it started with the structure. It started with this idea that we would play to what we perceived as our respective strengths in terms of writing. We absolutely were not each writing every third word or anything like that. It was a process of trust in different parts. I thought, James had done some research and will be better at writing that. He deferred to me on areas that he took to be my areas of expertise. We did every interview for the book together. We went over the notes from those before they became part of the interviews for the book. And some of the book's elements are diagrammatic, so those are very easy to collaborate on. I think we tried to be professionally, creatively constructive with each other. So it was raising an eyebrow rather than shouting at each other if we didn't agree about something. A lot of it was down to the editing, and I don't know what your experience was like with a co-writer, but a lot of it came down to: here is something which is quite baggy. How do we, between us, make this as tight as we possibly can? I don't mean copy editing or proofreading. I mean the actual sort of, how do we get this into a pithy, usable, practical but discursive book? We didn't ever set out for this to be a pure reference book at all. We wanted to take a snapshot of what was going on. So a lot of it was genuinely trying to do some research and get people to feed into what was going on from lots of different perspectives, which is why we wanted to get mainstream traditional publishers, we wanted to get agents, we wanted to get indie writers, we wanted to get people who have all sorts of experiences and perspectives. That's what makes it what it is, which is, here's what we think are some of the interesting discussion points of what's going on now. Jo: It is a fantastic snapshot. I think it's really interesting—and obviously you also have seen my book, Successful Self-Publishing, which is on its fourth edition—this is one of the difficult things with snapshot type books. So have you already thought about that? I know this one has just come out, but have you thought, “Oh no, in five years we have to do it again”? John: Well, I think we thought we're going to have to address AI, which we do in the book, and we really tried to caveat that with saying, look, so much may change so quickly, and here we are talking about what we know now. We obviously tried to set the context for where we are now, and we tried as much as possible to make something which would last as long as we can. I think what we did think was, we have tried to make it as international a perspective as possible. But at the same time, we are a London-based agency, and a lot of the views will be from people based in the UK. So I think what I would like to explore is something that looks at potentially somewhere like the US, where I think there'll be different people that would perhaps have different perspectives on different things. So I think we thought about potentially there being future iterations of the book, but not yet. Jo: Not yet. This is the challenge with non-fiction, of course. On that, I would say what you just said around the US and stuff, the successful UK authors all use the same systems as the US. So I wouldn't say that the US … I mean, we all have the US companies we all use. I say Kobo is obviously Canadian, but I would say that we use the same ways of doing things. Obviously you might interview a different author, but … John: That was all I meant. I meant interviewing. Because we've interviewed agents and authors and publishers and they are largely UK based. So it was the idea that maybe there are some perspectives on things rather than systemic. Jo: Differences. John: Yes. Just that. Jo: So then I guess another challenge, we've kind of nodded to it so far, is marketing. So let's talk about the challenges of getting this book out in terms of publishing and marketing. Because you've been on the inner circle side, trying to do that for other people's books, but your own book, this is a whole nother thing. So tell us about that. John: Well, how do you do it, Jo? I mean, honestly, I've loved some of it. I get how you become completely obsessed with your book and trying to make sure that you can get it into the hands of the people that you want to get it into the hands of. We've got some great endorsement quotes, which was a task that, how can I say this? I would call it pride swallowing. The idea that you really try and get people to say nice things about your book and, if they don't reply, you think, “How much do I pester them? How much do I annoy them by asking them again nicely?” And the absolute sheer unadulterated joy when they come back with something positive that you can use and utilise in some way. So that whole process of waiting for feedback, I suppose, and hoping that people are going to like what you've done and help you spread the word for it. We had a launch event, we've given books away. We've published the book as ebook and POD. I think one of the great things about that is it's enabled us to be completely adaptable and make changes right up until the last minute. That drove everybody in my team completely crazy because we were making changes up until the last minute. So, is the book definitely going to be available on publication date? What's it going to do? You know, all of that kind of stuff. Also, just getting this idea that I suppose you can never stop. Is that a very obvious thing to say to a writer? It probably is. You just can't stop, because if you go, “Right, well, I've done it,” complacency is the enemy. Just as soon as you've got that quote, or someone said that they're going to give you an opportunity to talk about it on a platform, it's just another day and you've got to keep thinking about how you can spread the word and tell people that it exists. Jo: Yes, well, I think that's right, and particularly non-fiction, which unless it's very timely and you must get it out right now. But other than that— Most books you just have to keep marketing for years. Then just as you say, when do you stop? Well, you kind of never stop unless you want to, unless you want to retire and just give up, basically. Dean Wesley Smith, who's a big writer in the US and a kind of a mentor of mine in past years, he talks about it as this massive sea of books. And when a book arrives, he pictures it coming down and landing on the water. So the day you launch, it's landed on the water, and then it begins to sink. Then there are all these other books coming down. It's like this rain of books, and your book is sinking as soon as it lands. And your job is to keep it afloat somehow. John: Keep it afloat. Jo: Yes. John: I think you're right, and it's such an interesting perspective for us, who work with a lot of people who have one book. You know, they've spent 10 years writing it. It's their life story. It's their memoir. It's their self-help book. It's their book that accompanies them on their speaking journey, or whatever. Then there are the people who are writing constantly and can't stop writing because they're exercising that creative muscle all the time and wanting to get better, and wanting to improve and learn and understand why this works and why that hasn't worked. Just getting a glimpse into what it must be like for that person for whom writing is not a hobby. I kept saying to myself, “This is not something you're doing as a hobby.” I want this book to be of value to people, and if I'm investing that time and effort into something that I want to get out there, you've got to commit to whatever it is you need to do to make sure you're not sinking. Jo: Yes. John: I will now not be able to get that image out of my head. Jo: Yes. I know there's people listening who don't have a mind's eye, which I always find fascinating, but for those of us with a mind's eye, you can now picture that and you will never forget it. The other thing, I guess, is that, having done a lot, over 40 books now, the inevitable thing is you cannot keep pushing all of those books back up to the surface. So when you do get the bug as such of writing, the most interesting thing for all of us is always the next book. It's always like, ooh, the next thing I'm doing, I'm very excited about. So you do have to pick your battles on marketing. So have you got the bug, do you think? Are you thinking of other books in general? Because as you said, you must be, I guess, in your 60s. John: I am. Jo: You could retire. John: I am. You were talking about that long career. I could. I mean, I really love doing it, and I would love to do more. I think one of the things that surprised me was just how many ideas came up while we were doing the book about tangents that one could take it. I have no desire to write a novel. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't be very good at that. I do think there are some interesting spaces around where there's a kind of intersection of creativity and learning, and how you can develop books that would help people who are trying to achieve different things in different sectors of publishing. So without getting too granular about it, this book doesn't really address brands who want to become publishers, and I think that is something that our business has developed into working with, not just individuals, but businesses and brands. I think there's definitely spin-offs of this book which are not about repeating what we've done so far. And this whole idea of what you've been doing for a long time, what we've been doing since 2011, 2012, it's evolving now at such a speed. I mean, who would have known what was going to come out of TikTok? As you talk about TikTok to Shopify, that whole kind of new ways of finding readers, of taking books to market. As you said, Kickstarter, crowdfunding. There's all sorts of things that I think will emerge, because in a funny sort of way traditional publishing at the moment feels quite conservative with a small c. I mean, the bestsellers. Dan Brown is number one in the bestseller list this week in the UK as I speak, who has been a bestseller forever. And obviously new writers come along the whole time, but the market feels a little bit as if it's waiting now for innovation. I think if that innovation's going to happen, it's probably going to happen in the indie space before it happens in mainstream publishing. So people are coming to us and thinking, does that represent a trend? Does that represent something which could be a way of looking at something a little bit deeper, doing some research around and creating something which is not a long book, not a massive thesis, but something which is indicative of something which could be useful for people. Jo: Just coming back on the Dan Brown is in the bestseller list. I think this is completely to do with the way that traditional publishing measures things. For many years, more than a decade, probably since the beginning of Kindle, certainly the beginning of Kindle Unlimited, there is a shadow economy, I call it, or a parallel economy. I would say that almost zero of my own personal sales are measured by any industry standards. Anyone who makes any money from Kindle Unlimited or Kickstarter or Shopify, or selling direct in any form, or selling books at conventions, none of this is measured by any traditional things. As you know, the New York Times list, for example, does not include Amazon sales in their bestseller list. So you've got indie authors in the UK who are incredibly successful who have to decide, say, someone like LJ Ross, for example, decides, “Okay, I'm going to set up a proper imprint with Gardners or whatever so that I can get in bookstores so that I can hit a Sunday Times list or something.” So I would say that seeing things like Dan Brown on a bestseller list has almost no meaning in the shadow indie economy. John: No, you're absolutely right. We're not even able to see audiobook sales. Jo: Yes, audio. Any kind of borrows, like Spotify. John: No, you're completely right. I suppose I was making a broader cultural point, that it doesn't feel like there's an enormous amount of innovation going on or risk taking within what I would call mainstream trade publishing. And there doesn't seem to be the need to be, because there will be more consolidation. Small companies will be bought by big companies, so there's growth through acquisition. There's still a hope that something will take off that is a surprise, and there's still an enormous reliance on established brands who, even through the traditional metrics of how you measure them, are probably selling less, but still at the top of the pile. I suppose that's what I was meaning. Jo: Yes, and I agree with what the industry looks at as signals. It's just, as we said, a lot of these signals are invisible. So coming onto innovation, at London Book Fair this year there were a lot of sessions on AI, and you mentioned AI briefly, and there is a chapter in Going Indie on generative AI. And of course there's a lot of negativity and drama and lawsuits and this, that and the other. But at the same time, at London Book Fair, a lot of traditional publishers talking about using it, and of course they always say, “Oh, we use AI only in marketing and business, not with the creative or editorial.” Everyone makes this distinction. What are your thoughts on what's happening and where's it going with AI? Is a lot of this stuff not happening in public and just going on behind closed doors? John: I think so. We do have a chapter in the book on AI. We've generated summaries of every chapter using AI, which we explicitly said in the book as well. We've got our Ten Commandments of what we think are useful guidelines. I think that there has to be an enormous amount being done, whether it's experimentation or speeding up for efficiency's sake, or things that slow you down, within mainstream publishing. There has to be more than just the guardrails around the creative process. And clearly when we're talking about metadata, book description, cover copy, presumably royalty calculations, presumably if you're trying to grow your newsletters. There has to be an enormous amount of activity going on. We're driven by the market, so we do not commission. Writers come to us and they either want to work with us and we want to work with them, or that doesn't happen. So we're in a sense seeing what the market is seeing, and that is a whole range of things. As I've said before, there's a lot of sweeping generalisations out there, which if you look back to that Kindle moment, we were talking a little while ago about what was going on in 2010/2011, about the enormous broad brush strokes that were being perceived as a result of Kindle. Kindle has affected some areas of publishing, it's affected some not at all. I think it will be absolutely fascinating when the sweeping generalisations stop and there becomes, I suppose, even more transparency. The thing that people are looking for, isn't it? A little bit less opaqueness as to what is really being done. Because everybody's being so careful about what they say they're doing and what they're not doing. I suppose ElevenLabs is the one where people are openly engaging on the audio side. I mean, everyone is being so careful and cautious. Jo: Me too. John: What do you think? We spoke a bit about AI within the book, and I'm interested to know what you think. Jo: Well, I've obviously been openly talking about it since 2016. I openly talk about using it, and I've got my Patreon community where we talk about how we're using it, and tips on how to use it. But then, because I have been writing and publishing since 2007, 2008, I'm very strong in my creative voice. I'm very strong in my understanding of what I consider to be my level of output, and what I publish under my own name is what I publish under my own name. John: Totally. Jo: So the problem is for people who are less confident, I think, in what they're doing creatively perhaps. I know some people feel like they're scared it will take over or something. When you're as strong-minded as me, it's not taking over anything. John: It's not going to take over anything. And the other side of the coin is how many people are finding Whitefox using ChatGPT. Jo: Mm. John: I'm thrilled that we are emerging, through very detailed briefing of AI, as something that is worth engaging with. Jo: Positive marketing. John: Yes, exactly. As you say, I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think it will settle down eventually. I think less hysteria. Jo: Yes, hopefully sooner rather than later. So as we come to an end, you've been in the publishing industry a long time and seen a lot of people who have disappeared, but also those who've lasted. I wondered if maybe you could comment on those who last, because I definitely feel like I'm in my 50s now, and I want to keep doing this. I'm pretty obsessed with— What are the hallmarks of people who have a long-term career? So reflections on that. John: Oh, that's such a good question. I think there's some common characteristics and themes. So I think authenticity, I think this idea of being continually curious. I think there are people who can't help but create, and this idea that once you've sort of expelled once, that's enough. I think there's people that just can't stop creating, whatever you do with it. But this idea that the more you do, the better you get, the more you evolve and keep an open mind. I think there's definitely entrepreneurial writers who love this idea of keeping their readers engaged, and how that conversation is something that evolves and that collaboration evolves, is fascinating. I think if you love that, and you listen, there's always an opportunity to keep building on what you do. I love the writers who we work with. I can think of a writer who we're working on his fourth novel at the moment, and he is a bundle of positivity. No matter the trials and tribulations, the things that have gone wrong, his expectations definitely not being met with his first book. He definitely has this idea that he wants to keep writing, he wants to get better, and he is getting better. It isn't a journey that has a beginning and an end. It's something that will continue for as long as he wants to write. Every single book that he has published, he has learned and gained confidence, gained a network of connections that he's utilised himself now to not make the first half a dozen mistakes he made on the first book. Who knows where it will end up? But certainly the satisfaction he's getting, and the sales he's getting, are growing as he becomes savvier and quicker to make the right choices and decisions. So I think that's my honest answer to that. I think there are definitely people who think, “Phew, I have really wanted to do this book. Now I can rest easy. I've done my book.” Then there are people who really, whatever their objective, whatever the definition of success is from the get-go, just can't help creating. I do love that and respect that. I don't think our book falls quite into that category, because I think it's a slightly different thing. I think there are people who are still making a success of what they do and redefining that as they go on, and who are really open to ideas and input from different people and are not closed off. I love working with those people. Jo: So where can people find Going Indie and everything you do online? John: Well, Going Indie is available online at all good bookshops. It's available at Amazon and anywhere you buy books online as ebook and POD. Our website is wearewhitefox.com, and you'll find information about not just our book there, but a lot of other things that we're doing on that site. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, John. That was great. John: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure. The post Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Cómo Fernando Gamboa vendió millones de libros (sin editoriales) Fernando Gamboa es el autor que más libros ha vendido en la historia de Amazon.es. Ha vendido más de 1 millón de copias en el mundo, está traducido a muchos idiomas y varias de sus novelas también han tenido gran éxito en Italia.Pero este episodio no es solo para quienes escriben libros. Es una conversación sobre cómo se construye un activo creativo, cómo se vende sin esperar el permiso de los intermediarios, y cuánto importa mantener el control sobre aquello que lleva tu nombre.Fernando cuenta que cuando publicaba con editoriales tradicionales, vendió 100.000 copias y no le pagaron. Cuenta que todo el sector le dijo que publicar por su cuenta en Amazon destruiría para siempre su carrera.Y cuenta también que mostró a las editoriales cifras de 2 millones de dólares en libros vendidos en un año, y aun así fue tratado como un autor de segunda categoría por ser independiente. De ahí nace su decisión: apostar por Amazon, KDP, catálogo, traducciones, audiolibros y control de su propia propiedad intelectual.En esta entrevista hablamos de libros, marketing, Amazon Ads, editorial tradicional, autopublicación, traducciones, audiolibros, IA, derechos cinematográficos y libertad personal. Hablamos también del cuidado del producto: porque el marketing puede ayudarte a que te descubran, pero a largo plazo son la calidad, el boca a boca, la experiencia del cliente y el respeto por quien compra los que realmente construyen un catálogo que vende.Fernando cuenta por qué sigue invirtiendo en traducciones profesionales en lugar de confiar solo en la IA, por qué ya no lee las reseñas pero respeta profundamente a sus lectores, y por qué prefiere tardar dos años en escribir una novela antes que publicar rápido algo que no le convence.Hablamos también de por qué rechazó una oferta de 300.000€ de una productora de Los Ángeles por los derechos de una de sus novelas, aun sin tener dinero en ese momento. Si eres marketer, consultor, pequeño empresario, autor o alguien que vende algo ligado a su propio nombre, esta conversación te concierne. Porque el punto no es solo vender libros. El punto es entender cuándo estás construyendo un activo, cuándo lo estás malvendiendo, y cuánto vale realmente seguir siendo libre mientras el mercado intenta convencerte de que necesitas el permiso de otra persona. En este episodio hablamos de:Amazon KDP y autopublicaciónEditorial tradicional y control de los activos100.000 copias vendidas sin recibir pago2M$ en libros vendidos y aun así "fuera del club"Catálogo, boca a boca y calidad del productoPor qué rechazó unos 300.000€ por los derechos cinematográficos de una de sus novelasTraducciones, audiolibros y mercados internacionalesMarketing para libros y Amazon AdsIA, escritura y futuro de la narrativaDerechos cinematográficos y propiedad intelectualLibertad creativa, independencia y negocio personalLos libros de Fernando Gamboa:https://gamboaescritor.com/ Página de Amazon con los libros de Fernando Gamboa:https://www.amazon.es/s?k=Fernando+Gamboa&i=digital-text Audiolibros de Fernando Gamboa en Audible:https://www.audible.es/author/Fernando-Gamboa/B006RTHR9K Otros recursos mencionados:Grupo 20 Books to 50k: https://20booksto50.com/Your Magic Bakery Of Intellectual Property Rights con Dean Wesley Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to1rbDrysswYuval Noah Harari: https://www.ilpost.it/2024/09/30/yuval-noah-harari/La primera novela de Andrew Lisi: https://tatatapublishing.gumroad.com/l/machsom-romanzo-avventuraOtros libros y negocios de Andrea Lisi: https://linktr.ee/copypersuasivo

What's the difference between a bundle, a box set, an anthology, and a collection? How can being part of an anthology be creatively interesting and useful for marketing? With Jamie Ferguson In the intro, Amazon Kindle increases the 70% royalty share; audiobook marketing tips (Voices by InAudio); The Builder's Creed [Seth Godin]; Future Vision XPrize; Researching the dark side of travel [Anna Sayburn Lane]; Photos from Bruges @jfpennauthor; Bones of the Deep: A Thriller – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Jamie Ferguson is a fiction and short story author, editor, and publisher, with over 20 anthologies and multiple ebook bundles through her own press. Her latest book for authors is Bundle Up! A Practical Guide to Anthologies and Box Sets That Sell. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes The difference between bundles, box sets, anthologies, and collections Why a multi-author project means lots of people promoting the same book, not just you How to find and pitch for anthology opportunities, and what editors look for in a contributor Contracts, rights, and royalty splits explained for short fiction Why Kickstarter and special print editions are changing the anthology game Inkwren, the publishing management tool Jamie built for backlists and anthologies You can find Jamie at JamieFerguson.com. Transcript of the interview ith Jamie Ferguson Jo: Jamie Ferguson is a fiction and short story author, editor, and publisher, with over 20 anthologies and multiple ebook bundles through her own press. Her latest book for authors is Bundle Up! A Practical Guide to Anthologies and Box Sets That Sell. Just for context too, one of my short stories, “The Dark Queen”, is in the Amazing Monster Tales: Into the Briny Deep anthology. So I'm excited to talk about this today. Welcome to the show, Jamie. Jamie: Thanks for having me, Jo. Jo: Lots to talk about. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. Jamie: Well, I wanted to be a writer since I was at least six, maybe before then. So it was just something I always wanted to do, but I always did it on the side. I had a year, many years ago, where I was really busy with work, and I just felt like I didn't write anything the entire year, and I thought, “I'm going to give it up.” Then the next year—that was 2011—I started seeing more about self-publishing, and that really invigorated me and made me feel like, “No, why am I giving up something I've wanted to do since before I went to school?” So I got back into a novel I had worked on years before. I went to a writing workshop with Dean Wesley Smith up in Oregon, back in the day, and then I had my energy back. I've been writing ever since. Still on the side, unfortunately, but someday. Jo: Hopefully! Tell us a bit more about what kind of genres you write. Because balancing your own books with also doing these anthologies and things is quite difficult. Jamie: Yes, it definitely is. I'd say I primarily write contemporary fantasy, but I'll write anything in any genre if I'm really excited about it. I also have a soft spot for Westerns. They take a little more time because I like to research all the facts, but those are really fun to write. Creating anthologies on your own is actually quite a bit of work. One of the things I also do is work with two other authors, DeAnna Knippling and Tami Veldura, and create more anthologies with them. That's really fun because then we can each take a different piece. There's also always somebody to talk to, as opposed to doing it on your own. Jo: Let's start with the terminology, because I definitely struggled with this, and I think people still do. We've got bundles, we've got box sets, we've got anthologies, we've got collections—and are these in ebook, audiobook, or print? Can you start by explaining what all of these words actually mean? Jamie: Yes. In my book I actually use the term “multi-author collection” or “multi-author project”, because there are so many different permutations and it does get confusing. From my perspective, I think of a bundle as a collection. It could be a collection of ebooks. Technically it could be a collection of print books, although people generally use “box set” for that—but then a box set can also be a box set that's all ebooks. An anthology, I usually use for something that's a collection of short stories where there's an editor who's actually edited all the stories. I have had stories in anthologies where somebody didn't edit them, and they would technically be called a curator. So it is definitely confusing. I have not done anything with audio collections, but that certainly is another area that I actually think is pretty interesting. Jo: I also think that a single author… so I've done a short story collection, but an anthology is multiple authors. Is that right? Jamie: Yes. Jo: I think when I came into the indie space, there were a lot more multi-author… we all called them box sets back in the day, when it was just ebooks, right? And now we can actually do boxed sets with boxes through things like BookVault. So it feels like the term “box set” has also gone out of fashion. So if people listening are thinking of doing any of this, you do have to figure out what is the thing you might be signing up for. So let's talk about the multi-author projects, as that's where you specialise. What are the benefits for an author to be involved in a multi-author anthology project? Jamie: The biggest benefit is that you are one of multiple people promoting the same project, whether it's print or ebook or whatever. If I put out a short story collection on my own, I'm the one promoting it, and maybe I can get a couple of other people to write about it, but it's really just me. If I'm part of an anthology with 15 other authors, that's 15 other people who are promoting the same project. That's more newsletters, more Facebook posts, maybe something on their Patreons, whatever it is. You get more synergy, and you get more touch points with potential readers. Then hopefully that translates into sales as well. So that's definitely the biggest part of it—the promotion. Then I also personally really enjoy these types of collections because it's just fun to work with other people. There's a nice energy when everybody's like, “Oh, I put this in my newsletter, and I put this here, and I put this here,” and you feel like you're part of something bigger than just your own piece. Jo: What about the creative benefits? Especially with short stories, often people will write them for a collection or for an anthology project. Jamie: Yes. I've definitely written some stories that I never would have thought I'd write, because somebody I knew asked if I would be interested in being in their collection—whether it's an ebook bundle or a print anthology. So at least for me, that's been really fun. One of the ones that stands out is that I was asked to be in a dinosaur collection once, and I was like, “I don't write dinosaur stories.” And then I did. I set a dinosaur story in London, and it was really fun to write, and I never would have come up with that in a million years. Jo: Let's say we've got 12 authors. They've all written short stories, and now it's in this anthology. But what is the market for these kinds of things? Have you found that there is a readership for short story anthologies that carries over to the author's longer work? Jamie: There is. I like to think of it as: if I have a story in a collection or an anthology—whether it's one I'm editing or somebody else is editing—that's one more place for people to find me. A lot of times anthologies will take reprints as well, like your story. “The Dark Queen”—that was a reprint. We asked if you'd be interested in participating in the Amazing Monster Tales series. And I actually really like printing stories again that have already been published, because there are a lot of stories out there that can be hard to find. Or if it's an older book. I have one author I've known for, like, 30 years. I reprinted one of her stories that was originally published in, I think, 1999, and the anthology it was in was out of print. You couldn't find it, and it was a fantastic story. So it's fun to be able to give new life to those stories and give them more opportunities, and also just have more ways for people to find you. Jo: Yes, I definitely think it's a long game. I don't think appearing in a short story anthology in one particular month is going to mean that your whole back collection just sells, right? Jamie: No, definitely not. It's more about avenues to be found. I know there have been some anthologies that have made quite a bit of money, but in general you're probably not going to make as much money, but you will have those extra places for people to find you. Jo: I always feel like yes, there is maybe a small amount of money, but it is more about almost a marketing thing in itself. So let's say an author is listening and they're like, “Do you know, this sounds like a great idea.” How can they pitch for things like this? How do they find out about opportunities, or get noticed to be asked? And what are the expectations for them? Jamie: The biggest thing is networking. There used to be a couple of opportunities where you could make people aware that you had stories that you were interested in potentially having picked up for something. I'm not aware of anything like that now. When I create a collection, I have a mailing list that I send out, and it includes authors I've published before. It includes a couple of extra people who somehow found my mailing list. And I'll publish, like, “Here's what I'm doing.” There are also authors I've met at writing workshops. I've been able to read some of their work, I'll approach them and say, “Hey, I really liked such and such a story. Would you be interested in writing for this?” Then there are a couple of other websites, like Duotrope, and places that advertise markets and calls for submissions. Jo: Yes, I've found them also on small presses that do these kinds of projects. They often put up one call for submission a month or something, and you can write for their particular thing. In general, the short story markets are the places to keep an eye on. Jamie: Yes, definitely. Jo: If an author wants to pitch to have their story as part of an anthology, do you want to know things like platform, or is it just the story itself? Jamie: I personally look at the author's platform. I do make exceptions—there are actually two authors I've worked with a couple of times who don't have websites. They are people I know personally and they are very, very good writers, so I'll make an exception for things like that. But otherwise, if somebody submitted a story to me and I didn't know that person, I would check out their website, I would check out their social media, I would see what else they had done. Part of what you're doing when you're creating a collection is thinking not just about how you, as the person organising this, will promote the collection, but how the authors who are participating will help promote it as well. If it's somebody who has a lot of fans, even if they're not very active on social media, that can help a lot too. There are a lot of different factors, though. Jo: So then talk us through the project timeline. How long do things take, and what sort of involvement do the authors have along the way? Because it's a lot to juggle. Jamie: Yes, it is a lot to juggle. I can give you an example with the Monster Tales series. We'll come up with an idea, and we also like to try to get the artwork done early on in the process. We don't need it that soon, but it's really great to have that taken care of. We'll contact authors. I think for this one we used my mailing list, but we've also contacted a number of people individually that we know who write the style of stories we like. Then, as the submissions come in, we usually wait until we have a nice chunk of them to start going through, and then we'll pick some right away. Sometimes it'll be like, “Oh my gosh, of course we want this story,” and we'll wait to fill out the other slots. Then we'll negotiate sometimes. Sometimes it's like, “I want this story.” “Well, I want this other story.” And we have to figure out how the word count works. Once we finalise the stories, then usually what happens with that anthology is that DeAnna—who is a very, very good editor—will make the first editing pass, and then I'll make the second. And now Tami's involved, so Tami will make the third, and then we'll iterate. Once all three of us have gone through the first time, then we'll send the story back to the author for edits. So the most the author has to do for most of the process is just wait for us to edit their story, and then work on their edits and get them back. Then, once we get closer to launch, we'll give them information about what we're going to do. For example, we're going to launch the next issue with a Kickstarter. So our authors know that we have a Kickstarter coming, and we'll give them more information as we get closer to the actual launch date. Jo: So how long might an author expect before their work is out there? Jamie: It really varies. I've had some collections published very quickly—let's say a couple of months. Some have taken longer just because somebody ends up having some life issue and things get delayed. So I'd say ideally it would be more like three to nine months. Jo: Yes, I think… depending on the— Jamie: —collection and the complexity. Jo: Yes, exactly. Jo: And you did mention word count there. Just give us a range of what word count you like to get. Jamie: So these days I'm shooting for between 75,000 and 80,000 for the total word count for a collection. That includes the stories, but it also includes the opening, the introduction. For one we're working on now, we're going to have some interstitials, where we have little bits of things we're going to write in between each story. So that's the overall size of the collection. I'll keep track of the word count as the stories come in, and then as we edit the stories, sometimes they grow, sometimes they shrink. Sometimes that's a big enough difference where we're like, “Okay, we need one more story to fill it in.” But that's the target. Jo: And how much for each individual story? Jamie: That varies. I've done a bunch of different things. These days, what I'm advertising is between 3,000 and 8,000 words. I also always tell people: if you're outside this range on either side, just check with me, and if it's something that's really an excellent fit for the book, I'll make an exception. The one that's coming out, I think we have a 1,500- or 2,000-word story that was just amazingly perfect for what we wanted. There was another story, actually I think it was the issue that you were in, that was at least 12,000 words, but it also was a perfect fit for the theme. So I will make exceptions, but within reason. I wouldn't put a novella inside an anthology, because then you'd have a 22,000-word story next to a 3,000-word story, and I personally feel like that's really jarring for the reader. You don't want to go from something super short to something super long. It just doesn't feel like it flows well to me. Jo: No, absolutely. Jo: We'll come back to the making of it because you mentioned some really interesting things there. But just on the contractual side—a lot of indie authors don't necessarily do any publishing contracts for their work, unless it's signing the terms and conditions when uploading on Amazon or Kobo. So tell us a bit about the contract side. What rights are we talking about here? Any red lines in contracts around this kind of thing? Jamie: For contracts, I would recommend people read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's posts on this. She is way more informed about this than I ever will be, so when I have questions, I'll look at her posts. I've asked her a couple of questions. What we're doing for the Amazing Monster Tales… this is the first time that I've actually had authors sign contracts. Prior to this, I've used PubShare, which handles royalty splits and all of that, and that was really great. We want to do direct sales and Kickstarters and have lots of other options. So we did put together a contract this time. I'd have to pull it up, but I think we asked for first worldwide rights in English—I'm getting the terminology wrong here—but that was basically it. Jo: Or, I guess, reprint rights if the story's already been licensed. Jamie: Correct. We have two contract templates, one for original stories and one for reprints. We made sure to make that distinction, because it is definitely a distinction. In the book by Kristine Kathryn Rusch—it's called Closing the Deal… on Your Terms—I highly recommend that for anybody interested in learning more about contracts. Jo: Yes, that's great. And just for people listening: when you said you didn't have contracts before, you just used PubShare. So in that way, the author still retained the rights and you just split the royalties—it was more of a co-writing thing. Jamie: Correct. When you publish stories through PubShare, the author signs an agreement with PubShare, and then I, as the editor or organiser, would also sign a separate agreement. So each of us has an agreement with PubShare. We don't have agreements with each other, if that makes sense. Jo: Yes, so it's very different to move into Kickstarter. So tell us about what you're now moving into. Jamie: Well, Kickstarters are a new world for me personally. I have many friends who have had Kickstarters. I've supported Kickstarters. I watch them. But it's something where I'm very happy to have two partners who have done Kickstarters before. I'm not sure how many Tami's done—I think Tami's done the most at this point. So this is all new to me. But it's very exciting. At this point we have a backlist, so part of the plan, for the Monster series, is to offer issues one through four as part of the rewards when we launch issue number five. That's really exciting, because I never had a backlist like that before. Jo: Yes, and in fact the money is in the backlist, as ever, and those add-ons or bundles as part of Kickstarter are great. So are you going to do special print editions, or is it digital only? Jamie: We are talking about special print editions. You mentioned BookVault earlier—we've been looking at BookVault. Our other anthology series that hasn't come out yet will also launch with a Kickstarter. It's dragon-themed, and Tami actually did the cover work, which is beautiful. BookVault just gives you so many options that we never had before, so I'm very excited about that. Jo: Yes, I think it's a really good idea. I did gorgeous hardbacks for my solo author collection, so I think it's a great idea. So from the publisher side, let's come back to that. You've mentioned you have to write things like an introduction and interstitials, and you're trying to balance the stories. What are some of the other things that people might think about if they want to organise their own anthologies? Jamie: Oh gosh, where to start? There's the basic setting up of the anthology, so you have to define the table of contents. You might get a bunch of stories that are really awesome, and you might have to tell somebody who has a wonderful story—and maybe even who's a good friend of yours—that you're going to pass on it because their story doesn't fit with all the other stories. Every time I have to do that, I feel kind of bad. But being on this side, it's really interesting to see how you can tell which stories fit together and which don't. There's also the editing process, which can be a lot of work. Part of what I like about working with Tami and DeAnna is that DeAnna really loves editing. I feel like I'm a good editor, and I can do it, but for me it's more of a job. For DeAnna, she loves it, so she does the bulk of the editing, which is great. When I do it on my own, I feel like it's a task I have to do. There's lots of cat-herding. Sometimes people take a while to get their edits back. Sometimes they have life events, and you have to delay things because you're waiting on them. There are all the little tiny pieces of organising things—like, if you're reprinting stories, you need to make sure you get the copyright attribution correct. A lot of times I'll have to go and look up where something was originally published. An author might say, “Oh, it was published in this year,” and I'm like, “Okay, actually it was published in this other year, by this other publication first.” So I'm trying to be organised there. henT one of the things that very infrequently—I think it's only happened to me twice—every once in a while, you're in the middle of editing a story and you have to pass on it, even though you've already accepted it, because the editorial vision and the author vision for the story are not the same, and you can't reconcile that. Jo: I think that's really interesting, because so much of what you're talking about there—you mentioned vision—it's almost taste. You're saying which stories fit. It's not just a case of, I don't know, a pirate anthology and then picking 10 stories about pirates, right? You seem to be thinking about this in a more artistic way. So can you talk a bit more about that? How do you decide on a theme, and then how do you know that a story doesn't fit? Jamie: In the beginning, I was not this selective. In the beginning I'd say, for example, “Hey, I'm putting out a collection about fairies. Give me a fairy story,” and that was it. As I've edited the stories, it's become easier to see how things fit. So, for example, if I have 10 stories in an anthology and I have an 11th story, and they have different tones—let's say the 11th story is really funny and all the other stories are very serious—then that would be a fit thing. That's not necessarily taste; it's just that you don't want one funny story if everything else is really dark and scary or serious. As far as picking a theme, the theme could be very broad. With this dragon anthology we're working on, we decided we wanted it to be called A Hoard of Books. So the theme was: has to have dragons, has to have books, and that's pretty much it. And then we were like, “Let's just see what we get.” We were very surprised at what we got. We thought we'd have more serious stories, and it turned out most of them were very light-hearted and really fun. And we're like, “You know what? That actually changes the way we're looking at the whole series,” because we did not expect that. With the monster series, we'll pick a theme. So, for example, the next issue is Monsters in Love, and for those it's more like, let's just see what happens. Sometimes I'll have a more specific theme. The next anthology I'm publishing on my own is called Fairy Bargains, and I wanted people to obviously have fairies, but I wanted there to be something related to the mythology and lore of having a bargain with a fairy—and there's a lot of stuff about that. So for some things like that, when I put out a call, I'll provide information. I might say, “Here's a link to a Wikipedia article. Here's some mythology that might be helpful for you,” just because I want things to stick a little bit more to the theme itself. Whereas with Monsters in Love, there's a very wide range of stories, and that was very fun to work through. Jo: Oh, yes. There's a lot of monster, on the spicy side as well. But were you doing a clean Monsters in Love, as opposed to in lust? Jamie: Yes, this is a clean one. That's pretty funny. But boy, when you give authors the room for these types of things, you get all kinds of stories, and it is super fun to work with those collections. Jo: As you're talking, I definitely want to do more short stories. It's really interesting, because you can actually generally get paid more for a first print—first print rights on a short story—but I often want to just publish it myself. Then I was really happy to be in yours, because it was a reprint anyway. So I was like, well, there's absolutely nothing to lose if it goes in as a reprint. So these things can be really interesting. Talking of the finance from your side of things: you have a small press and you're doing this publishing yourself, but you're paying all these authors and doing a lot of work. So how does it work as the publisher, in terms of these anthologies, financially? Jamie: With the ones we've published so far, because we've gone through PubShare, it's been a royalty split. As the editors, we would take a percentage, and then we pay for the artwork, and of course all of our time. I think what we were doing there was saying 70% of the royalties would be split equally between all of the authors and the stories. So, for example, if I had a story as well, I would get part of the author split—the same percentage as everybody else in the collection—in addition to the editor split. For what we're doing now, we've changed this a little bit, and I believe we said 60% goes to the authors, and then we're going to keep a share of the proceeds for the business because we want to be able to pay for the artwork out of the business account. We want to pay for advertising, whatever we need to do—like setting up our store, or if we wanted to invest in anything, we want to be able to do that as the business, as opposed to it just being us doing this on our own. We're just trying to treat it a little bit differently. Jo: And I know it's so much work—a crazy amount of work. How many anthologies and books do you have to do in a year to make it worthwhile financially? Jamie: Oh, I don't know. I would say, unless you get an opportunity—like, for example, to have an anthology in a story bundle or something like that—you may not break even. But if you're going to do this, do it more for the marketing, do it more because you enjoy it. Now, going forward, I think that will change, because we are looking at Kickstarters, we are looking at direct sales. We're very motivated to try to make this more of a business thing than a fun side project. So, ask me in a year. Jo: Yes, hopefully more. I do think Kickstarter is great for short stories. I actually buy quite a few collections on Kickstarter. I think they're actually really hard to discover through, say, Amazon—it's a place that is quite hard to identify short stories. Whereas I've found I've bought collections on Kickstarter because there's so much more of a sales page—there's so much more rich media that tells me how I'm going to feel about the stuff. I've bought short story anthologies and collections from people I don't know. So I think it's a really good thing to do. There is an audience there. Jamie: Yes, definitely. And it does feel like the anthologies on Amazon don't sell as well—you don't make as much as you used to. I've been doing this for, well, gosh, 10 years now, and I feel like the sales numbers on Amazon in the past year were noticeably lower than they would have been six or eight years ago. So I am very excited about Kickstarter. Plus, Kickstarter just feels really fun. You're not just throwing your book up; you also have all the extra stuff with the page, you have the rewards, and it just feels really exciting. Jo: No, I agree. I really love it. I didn't do it for a long time, and now I just love it. Jo: So, staying with the publisher side of things— Any practical formatting and production tips? Because in these types of projects, all kinds of people just send you different stuff. Jamie: I have a style guide. So whether it's me or it's the group project, once all the edits are complete, I'll do a formatting pass, and I'll make sure I use curly quotes and the same em dash format and everything, just so everything in the book is formatted the same way. Every once in a while there's an author who has something particular that they want, and I can work around that, and that's fine. I also work with a lot of Canadian authors, and I'll let them keep their Canadian spellings. I don't think everybody does that, but I feel like that's their voice in a way, so I don't correct those. I might check some things there. I think the formatting is important—it makes things look better if everything has the same style. Then I use Vellum, which makes things really easy. I love Vellum. Because I publish so many authors at this point, I have a Vellum file where I store their biographies and their links, so when I publish a new anthology I'll just go grab, say, Jo's “about the author” page from that collection and put it into the new file. Then I also track when the last time was that I checked with the author about their biography. If it's been more than a year, I'll check in with them and say, “Hey, do you have an updated biography you want me to use? Here are your links—do you have any different links now?” So that makes it a lot easier from the formatting standpoint. Jo: And you mentioned Vellum—having done box sets on Vellum, you can just drag a whole book in there if you want to do a three-book box set, or three short stories, whatever. It's much easier to just drag things in, and it makes it easier to format. So I would say to people: you don't need to worry too much about that. There are lots of things that can help you. But even with doing the print stuff for the Kickstarter—people have opinions, don't they? So in terms of authors' opinions and managing—you mentioned herding cats—how do you manage all of that side of things? Jamie: I haven't actually had a lot of trouble with that. The authors I've worked with seem to feel like they gave me their story, and then once the edits are out of the way… I haven't had anybody have any issues with the covers. Usually they love the covers, especially for the Monster series. So, no problems there. Jo: Oh, that's good. Well, I would say a tip would be to make sure you're communicating, if you're somebody who's organising. So talk a bit about communication. Jamie: Communication is very important. What I try to do is send regular updates, especially if I'm in the middle of edits or working on something and I'm not ready to launch. I'll send an update email out to the authors and just say, “Here's what's going on, here's what the plan is.” Or if the plan has to change, if the launch date has to change for some reason, I'll let the authors know about that. Actually, with the upcoming Monsters in Love issue, we were originally not going to do a Kickstarter. That was a late decision, so I contacted all the authors and said, “We've changed our plans. We're going to launch this with a Kickstarter. Please confirm that you're okay with this.” One author was not comfortable with the Kickstarter idea, so he pulled his story, and then we found a replacement story for that. But I just feel like the communication piece is really essential. It's really important for the authors to know what's going on. Jo: Yes, absolutely. So, we've talked about how marketing is a good thing, in terms of there being lots of people marketing. How are you effectively marketing these kinds of books, as the premise is quite different to a single author project? Jamie: Right. There's the usual—write a release post, write posts on social. I do additional things, so I'll publish what I call a story spotlight for each story in the anthology. That's just where I talk a little bit about the story, I provide an excerpt, and then I provide the author's bio and links to find them. Those are really great, because they're very quick to put together. The hardest part is getting a short excerpt that shows enough about the story to be engaging. But that really isn't that much time, either. Then those are also nicely evergreen. I've actually searched for authors before, when I'm trying to research them for an interview, and I've found my own spotlight posts and my own interview posts with authors come up at the top of the list, which is kind of funny. I also do interviews with as many of the authors in a collection as are willing to participate. Sometimes people just don't have the time—I don't make this required—but I usually get 80 to 90% of the authors participating. So, for example, this year I'm in a couple of bundles on StoryBundle, and I'm doing interviews for people there. It's also really fun, and you're not paying for advertising—you're just creating something that the authors are excited about and they want to share. So it promotes the collection, but it also promotes the author, which I find really nice. It's a nice networking thing too, and I'm happy if someone wants to interview me. It's like free publicity for each person, in addition to the collection. Jo: I love that you've used the word “fun” quite a lot, which I find amazing. You're obviously a super collaborative person. I've co-written a number of books— I've been part of some collections, and I really think that there are two personalities. One is like me, where we really love the creation stuff and the publishing stuff, but we're hyper-controlling. And then someone like you—you're very collaborative, and you're doing such a great job. To people listening, I would say: if you're more like me, don't organise an anthology. What you want is Jamie, or somebody who actually finds it fun to organise a big group of authors. Jamie: Yes. It is definitely interesting working with other partners in this, because when I publish an anthology on my own, I make all the decisions. I pick the artwork, I pick the theme, I do everything, I decide the table of contents. But when you're working with other people, you do need to negotiate. So we've had a couple of times where it's like, “I want this story.” “Well, I want this other story, I don't like the story that you want.” And so we have to barter, in a way. Aside from that, it is nice, because you get to split up the tasks. I could focus on things like the organising—I do the Vellum files, I do the final cover and everything. For the Kickstarters, actually, Tami's got more expertise, so Tami's going to be working on the Kickstarters for our collections together. If I had to do all this on my own, it's a ton of work. It's a ton of work. So it is nice to split it up. Jo: And of course, one of the things is managing so many moving parts—and you've actually built a tool to manage all this. So tell us a bit about that tool, and how it might be useful for people with big backlists as well as anthologies. Jamie: I built what I think of as a publishing management application. The original idea is that, for years and years, I wanted a software tool that would do catalogue management, because I was managing my own catalogue, and I was also managing—at this point I've published at least 20 anthologies, so that's a lot of authors. Then last summer, I had an author who I'd published a number of times, who was going to, I think, WorldCon, and she asked if I could give her covers for five anthologies she'd been in, so that she could make some promotional material. I was like, “Oh, sure, I can do that.” And then I was like, “Well, wait a second—is this in Notion?”—because I started trying to use Notion last year—”or is it in a spreadsheet?” It turned out her information was in, like, three different places, and I had to work to pull it together. And then I was like, “You know what? That's it. I'm just going to finally write this application.” So Inkwren manages your stories. As an author, I can manage my stories—I can track which are published, which are drafts, which are just ideas. I can track my publications. From the publisher standpoint, it's really helpful, because I can track each anthology I've published and what I'm working on. I can track the edits, I can track the contracts. I can upload contract templates—so we talked earlier about the original and reprint contract templates that I use. I upload those, and they have placeholders in them. When I generate the actual contract, the author's name will replace the placeholder—I'll have the text “author name” in the contract template, and it'll get replaced by, like, “Joanna Penn” or whatever. So that saves a lot of time. Then I also added in task tracking, because I started to feel like, well, now all my stuff is in one place, but my tasks are somewhere else. So now I can associate tasks with a publication. For example, for the book I'm working on right now, I know which tasks I need to do for the cover, and which for the interior, and everything. I have a template of tasks. Then I can also track tasks related to promotions. For example, the story bundle I'm promoting right now, I have a task for each interview I'm doing with the authors, and I have a calendar view. I can see when I'm going to publish them and know that they're all spread out. It saves me so much time, and it's so much easier. Jo: I do think building tools when you actually need the tool yourself is very useful. Just say the name again, and spell it out for people. Jamie: It's Inkwren. My own personal publishing company is Blackbird Publishing, and I wanted something related to birds and writing. So I came up with Inkwren, which is I-N-K-W-R-E-N, and it's just inkwren.com. Jo: And it is available for other people to potentially buy and use? Jamie: Yes, it is. Jo: Well, I think that's super useful, because it's very hard when people are starting out and they think, “Oh, I've only got one book—why would I need any kind of tool to manage it?” But over the years, your backlist grows, especially with short stories. So I love that you've built this, and there's probably more that you can add over time as you expand the business yourself. So much potential. So we are at the end. Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jamie: My author website is JamieFerguson.com. And then, obviously, I mentioned Inkwren earlier. My publishing company is BlackbirdPublishing.com. And then the projects I'm doing with Tami and DeAnna—we have a couple of websites, but the easiest way to find us is our press, which is BorogrovePress.com. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great. Jamie: Thanks, Joanna.The post Bundles, Box Sets and Anthologies With Jamie Ferguson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring. In the intro, thoughts on bookstores and Toppings; 20 ways authors can signal humanity and build reader trust [Wish I'd Known Then]; Learning from Silence – Pico Iyer; ProWritingAid spring sale; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How Matt balances a full-time academic career with his creative writing life The ancient concept of the genius, the muse, and the daimon, and why creativity is about collaboration with something beyond yourself Why the silences that come into our creative lives, including writer's block and inertia, might actually be gifts rather than obstacles The stages of the creative process Living into the dark, and embracing uncertainty How Substack and blogging can organically grow into books You can find Matt at MattCardin.com or www.livingdark.net. Transcript of the interview with Matt Cardin Joanna: Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It is a great book. So welcome to the show, Matt. Matt: Well, thank you, Jo. It's really a pleasure to be here, especially since, as you and I were briefly acknowledging before we started recording, we have overlapping interests to a great degree. So it's really great to make official contact with you. Joanna: Indeed. So, first up, before we get into the book itself— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Matt: Well, I'm one of those people whose story is probably typical in some ways, in that I really wanted to do it from the time I was a child. My father was a great writer, although he was an attorney. He wasn't a professional writer. Something about books and reading when I was a child really seriously enchanted me. I was very frustrated when I was so young—and I vividly remember this—that I couldn't read, because I loved the books that were read to me. I craved being able to read them for myself. So as soon as I gained that ability in school, it was off to the races, so to speak, and for some reason, a desire to tell stories myself came along with that. Being a “writer” was one of the earliest life desires, job or career desires, that I expressed. I was one of those young people really into fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So I was reading a lot of it and trying to emulate it and write a lot of it. There was a cinematic component—I was a movie fanatic as well. I won a local Authors' Guild short story writing contest when I was a senior in high school and began trying to write stories seriously in college. Then my interest in horror and religion became dominant over time, and that's what I ended up writing about. Joanna: Has your interest turned into paid work? That's the other thing, because there's an interest and then there's making writing more of your income and your business. Matt: Right. Well, actually, although I have made and do make money from my writing, it has always, always, always remained on the side. My main career, as far as my moneymaking life, first started off in video and media production, which is formally what I got my undergraduate college degree in. Then I switched into education. I taught high school for some years, and then now for the past, good Lord, 18 years, I have been in higher education. First as English faculty who also taught some religion courses, and then now for the past several years in the administration. I'm Vice President of Academic Affairs at a college. My writing has been something that I pursued as an avocation. As far as earning money from it, that didn't happen even with my first publication, which happened on the internet in 1998, I believe, with a horror story titled “Teeth.” It was just free—I didn't get paid. That led to paid publication of that story three or four years later, when it appeared as my very first print publication in a Lovecraftian horror anthology from Del Rey titled The Children of Cthulhu. It appeared as the final story, and that was the first time I had received a paycheck. It was a professional per-word rate. Since then I've had several books published and more stories and essays and that kind of thing. I've had income sometimes from writing and sometimes I haven't. My first book came out of that story. I attended the World Horror Convention in 2001, actually before that Lovecraftian anthology was published, but it had been placed. At the World Horror Convention, which was in Seattle that year, I met one of the two editors of that book, and that led to me having my first short story collection, Divinations of the Deep, which was not for much money, but it attracted a lot of good attention and some good reviews. So it's been like that all along. I mean, I've made a couple of runs at saying I would love to just be an author, as it were, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. And honestly, I'm glad it's not. I have made the most money from some academic editing projects that I've done. I created and edited a two-volume encyclopedia of the history of horror literature, for instance, for a big academic publisher. Those are work-for-hire projects that I get paid for. Making money on my own creative vision and my own creative work has been intermittent. It really has proven over time that not having my primary creative, spiritual, and philosophical drive hooked to what I earn my bread by has been a blessing. I don't want to take this thing I love and make it be how I have to grind to earn my money. I want to keep it in a protected space. That has been spontaneously what's happened with my writing career. Joanna: Yes. I think as you say, there are a lot of benefits of that, especially where you are writing at this convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. Your writing is very deep. I would say it's on the edge of academic. I don't want to say it's completely academic, because a lot of people will find that difficult. But I think Writing at the Wellspring goes very deep while still being open to non-academic readers. As you say, I think if you had wanted to make a living with your books, you would've had to have gone in at a lighter level, perhaps. Do you think that makes sense? Matt: Yes, I know what you mean. I want to specify, I know that neither you nor I are saying anything about this as any kind of criticism or condescension to anyone who does make their living as a writer. I mean, I believe you do. Joanna: Yes, exactly. Matt: And that's fine. There really are people who have had significant commercial success from books or other things they've written that don't appear to be making huge concessions to being commercial. You can make a living as a writer, I think, and really follow your muse and not feel like you have to pander or cater or cheapen it. Then there are people who have perfectly happily decided to commercialise their work and tune it in whatever way is currently popular. That's fine. Every writer, every creative person should do what is right for him or her, in my opinion. In my particular case, I think what you said is right. I do think that I might have needed to change some things, to back off, to word them differently. Whenever I've tried to exert deliberate control like that, it just turns out that it's not something that my creative spirit wants to do. I don't really feel like I'm in contact with the work anymore. I'm fine with that. I don't think I'm doing a sweet lemons type thing. It really is the way it just needs to be. If it ever proves that me doing it strictly the way I want to do it, going however deep I want regardless of trying to appeal to a paying readership—if it turns out that at some point aligns with boatloads of money coming in, that's fine. That's perfectly fine. I'd be open to that. Joanna: Yes. Matt: I would be open to that. Joanna: You mentioned muse there, and with Writing at the Wellspring, the subtitle is “Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.” So I think this is a good place to talk about it. As you mentioned, you are leaning into your muse and your inner genius, and you use other terms—daemon or daimon. I think sometimes people find the word “genius” particularly very difficult because it has the connotation of brilliance in some form. So how can people think about this? How can we lean into this [genius] side of ourselves? Matt: Honestly, one thing that I would suggest people do is I would refer them to the TED Talk that Elizabeth Gilbert gave some years ago—was it 2009, 2010, 2011? It's one of the more popular TED Talks. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about. I think it's sometimes given the title “Your Elusive Creative Genius” or something like that. Her whole talk is about the way in her own creative life, and as she recommends to others, it has been very important for her to seize on the older model that we're talking about. The most clear articulation of it is that it used to be the case—and we're talking about in ancient Western history, back to the Romans and even earlier to the Greeks—that genius was not something that you identified a person as being. It was something that a person had. And I would also say importantly, maybe had them too. In ancient Roman culture surrounding art and poetry and that kind of thing, the genius was the spirit that might, say, live in an artist's studio and would provide the same service to that artist as the Greek muses provided to someone who was writing epic poetry or history or something like that. That understanding of it has continued in various ways down through history. But there was a fateful transition as Western culture went through what we commonly call the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as well. This was where the term “genius,” while it didn't lose all those connotations of being an inspiring spirit—something that a person both has and maybe has hold of them—did become internalised to the point where we speak of people as being geniuses., which is exactly what you're talking about. I agree, some people listening to this probably have some reservations about this. They don't want to call themselves a genius because we tend to mean that's a super brilliant person, some kind of prodigy who is possessed of amazing artistic, creative, or intellectual skills. Again, that is the result of a cultural, philosophical, psychological, historical transition that occurred several centuries ago. And you still see the older meaning of it being attached sometimes. You think of people who we call geniuses being touched by something. Well, the older version—where you think of the genius, which in the way I use it in this book and also in my first book on creativity, A Course in Demonic Creativity—the genius is equivalent to the muse, which is equivalent to that other figure that you mentioned, the daemon or the daimon. It refers to a separate—what seems for all the world to be a separate—centre of intelligence or entity or influence. The thing that gives you both your creative drive and also your ideas, and serves as the source of what comes to you naturally to write. It's more than just ideas. When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow. There are great books written about that. There's a book by the psychologist James Hillman titled The Soul's Code. A lot of people have read it. It lays out the daimon theory and gives it application to modern instances. The idea is that everybody has a genius or has a muse or has a daimon. For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there's really a spirit or something, it doesn't matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else. It's the centre of why you're interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon. I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I'm describing. I don't actually believe it, but I don't disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn't matter. It works and it may as well be true. Joanna: I mean, obviously the book has a whole load of ways we can tap into that, but I did like that you talk about stillness and silence, because I feel like that is actually increasingly difficult as authors. Obviously it's noisy online and we're meant to be doing things like social media or interacting with people online. And then the world is just noisy. The news is noisy. There's lots of things. How can we use this idea of stillness and silence? Also, any other ways we can practically tap into this side? Matt: Sure. One thing that wanted to say itself in this book was some things I had been thinking and feeling about silence for a long time. As you say, it can be difficult these days to find what feels like the silence that we need to even get our work done. We're talking about the muse or the genius. How can we even hear it when it seems like the clamour of all the pulls that we have on our outward attention has become truly a cacophony? We have opted for this in many ways through our engagement with social media or other things, but in other ways seems like it's been thrust upon us. What I want to point out, that has been of extreme importance to me, is that many silences come into our lives as creatives that we resist. It's not just that we can't find the silence and the space that we feel like we need so as not to drown out our creativity. It's that we have unwanted silences come in, like writer's block. Or even if it doesn't feel like a block, just inertia. Just stasis. I don't know about you, but I have many, many times found myself grappling with what, for all the world, feels like a totally natural, organic sense of wanting to slip into complete inertia, just total stillness. And that feels like it has been in conflict with my creative drive. It's like I have this residual desire and also a sense of duty that I really should be writing. Maybe I have an idea in mind and I'm just not working on it. Or maybe I'm in the middle of a project and I feel like I'm abandoning it. Or maybe nothing's coming up, but I feel like it should be. I'm pushing myself, but there's a division in me where I also just want to leave it alone. Whether that means actually just sitting there silently at my writing table or in meditation, or maybe just going about regular daily life and forgetting about trying to fulfil this creative calling. I really think there's a vein of gold to be tapped in the silences that come to all of us. Because as I said, that can be in the middle of daily activity. We have this kind of franticness, some of us, about our creativity. We get wrapped up in it. We feel bound to it. The thing that so much of the time we want to think is a gift—we're proud of it, we cherish it, we like our writing—also becomes a burden. This fantasy of just chucking it all, of just saying, “I would love to be free of it. It's like something that's weighing me down. I'm sorry that I roped myself into it. I would love to just sink into complete silence.” This sort of meditative thing, or just muteness—hey, that is valid to hear. That's valid to heed when it comes up. I mean, sometimes we have gotten ourselves into situations where we have external responsibilities and deadlines, and it's important to try and honour those and not be a bad person on the level of just fulfilling practical obligations. It's also important to recognise you've got silence offering itself to you in all kinds of ways. The more important silence is paradoxically the one that we so often resist if we're creative people and feel like we have to be making. The more important silence is not whether or not your outward conditions seem like they're a clamour and they're chaotic and they're distracting and they're full of pressure. It's that inner silence. So I recommend paying attention to when it comes up. And for practical ways—they are endless. Take advantage of early mornings. A lot of people have found great value in getting up earlier than they are used to and making a practice of that, and either just meditating or free writing. Maybe using, for example, Julia Cameron's famous practice of morning pages, which has been valuable to me sometimes. Or doing things like—as I've said about the muse and the genius and the daimon—personify your unconscious mind and maybe write down a dialogue between yourself and your creative spirit, whether about your current project or just about your life and your creativity as a whole. There are various tricks to get in touch with this unconscious part of you, and I really am convinced out of practical personal experience that it's not necessary to have outer silence and outer spaciousness when you can find it within yourself. You can find it through some of these exercises for getting in alignment with what your creativity wants to do. You can get in touch with it if you're paying attention to what you might not recognise as a gift—offering it to yourself. If things go quiet and you think, “Oh no, I should be doing something”—why not let that be a place where things can germinate? Why not let that be the silence that you might not be able to find on the outside? Joanna: Yes, and I'm feeling guilty here because of course we are producing a podcast episode for people to listen to. I find personally that one of the places I can find silence is when I walk. It's not obviously silent outside, but I am definitely guilty of always listening to podcasts, often at very fast speed as well. Sometimes when I go for a walk, I just deliberately do not listen to anything—don't listen to an audiobook, don't listen to a podcast—and a lot comes up there. I have my phone with me, and when I get back from those walks and jot down things that come up in my mind, I will have so many notes of things that have come up in my brain during the walk. It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I know you also love input. You do a lot of research. As I said, your books have a lot of research in them, and so we both like doing the research. But also I definitely find that has to be balanced with the time for letting it come out again in some form, with that mental silence. You also talk about being uncomfortable, and I feel like sometimes that silence can be uncomfortable as well. Matt: Yes, it can be. There's no telling what might come up when you are faced with silence. Again, it's one of those things—even the outer kind that we think we crave. Sometimes it's a bit frightening when it comes up, which is why we try to fill it with things, like this podcast episode for example. There's a threshold that you can notice you cross sometimes, where what was a natural desire to connect with something that you heard about and found interesting becomes a bit frantic. Where now, really, what might be good is if you shut off—didn't go for the next podcast episode or didn't go for the next click to the website—if you just shut the browser and just sat there and did something else. You're kind of, with a little desperateness, trying to fill the void. What you described about needing to get quiet and let things happen—yes. I love reading and research, but the classic stages of the creative process—first codified, I think, by Graham Wallas, if I remember correctly—they still work. It's really good sometimes to have a model and understand how it works. You have what's sometimes called the preparation stage. All the input, all the research, all the brainstorming, all that kind of thing. Then the incubation stage can be vastly important. That can get frightening, both because the silence seems somehow threatening, like something about you is going to be exposed. Or maybe that you're going to lose the thread of whatever it was and it's never going to come out. But really, if you just stop and let your muse, let your genius do its thing, let your unconscious do its thing, it will suggest itself again. It will come up on its own. Ideas will come back. You'll realise, “Oh, I didn't know what I was going to do with that character. I didn't know how these ideas were going to come together. I didn't even know what this idea for a story, a book, or an essay was going to be.” It comes back up, and with you working with it, it shows what it wanted to be all along. This whole thing about doing the preparation and then allowing it to incubate and germinate and then sprout when it wants to, that still works. Part of the reason that we're scared of the silence, I'm convinced, is because each of us operates in our psychological selves as a closed system. It's like we each comprise our own cosmos, so to speak. I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe. That's the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there's a haunting, threatening presence that's out of the ordinary and it's somehow bound up with the narrator's interior world. Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody's into cosmic horror or not, I think it's pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos. A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self. The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught. You're dealing with something that you might want to think, “Oh, this is great, it's going to be the source of my ideas, it's going to fulfil my creativity.” Well, yes, but it is frightening to think about the fact of something about yourself being beyond yourself and perhaps being out of your conscious control and somehow guiding your destiny. A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There's a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control. We all face that ultimately—when it comes to our death, for example. There are some spiritual traditions that talk about dying before you die, that being basically the way to enlightenment in those traditions. Recognising and coming to terms with the fact that this thing that is you, that you call yourself, is transitory. It is only there by being enclosed within and swamped from without by this thing that is not you, which is a sort of void to which you'll return. In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions. Joanna: Yes. And obviously people know about my book Writing the Shadow, which is how we really connected around this Jungian idea of the shadow and the darkness. I agree with you—there's some really interesting things at the juxtaposition of all of these topics, which we could talk about for a long time. I do want to ask you around your idea of “living into the dark.” Because I feel like you do take things beyond just the writing into this idea of living into it. So maybe talk a bit about that. And obviously synchronicity, which is a Jungian psychology concept. Matt: Living into the dark is the thing that forms the overarching ethos or perspective for me of all this. I got the term from “writing into the dark,” which actually comes from the American science fiction and fantasy author Dean Wesley Smith. He wrote a book titled Writing Into the Dark, subtitled “Writing Without an Outline.” It's a great book. I recommend it to anyone. It is about forsaking and foregoing the felt need to outline writing in advance and trusting your creative mind to be able to make up a story in real time. That draws on the deep nature of storytelling to come out right. Therefore you write into the dark, as if you're walking down a road where you have a lantern and you can only see one step ahead. You haven't mapped out the territory. It was a great metaphor. I had already been thinking in that direction about life and about creativity for some time when I first came across that book. I devoured it and recognised it described how I had already been writing anyway, which is one reason it was so powerful for me. Then it edged out into a broader understanding for me that I had also been coming up with, that I just ended up calling “living into the dark.” None of us knows where anything is going, that much is obvious. But living into the dark goes farther than that, to embrace this understanding. I think of this in connection with what so many people, either personally or because of jobs they have where they're required to think like this. I think of this in terms of the famous five-year plan that so many of us want to draw up. There's nothing wrong with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan or a one-year plan. You can come up with that for practical purposes and try and chart where you're going, but we too often forget that that's just a fantasy exercise. We are not actually thinking into the future, nor are we ever actually thinking into the past. Remembering the past, predicting or projecting the future—both are events that are happening right now, in this moment, which is always now. It's no less now than it was when you and I first started this conversation. Past and future are projections—mental projections right now. And everything is unfolding in the present in real time, which effectively means what's going to come next is coming out of—well, we don't know where it's coming out of. Darkness. Living into the dark is living with full-on contact with, and awareness of, and embrace of this fact that we don't know what's coming up. That encompasses all of life and all of creativity. That same darkness, if it's helpful for you to take on this emotional tenor—which it is for me—can relate to the darkness in cosmic horror fiction, or to some of the rich traditions of darkness, like in Daoism with the yin contrasted with yang. Yin is the dark, moon, feminine aspect of things—the receptive source of the universe. This idea of living into the dark, of just accepting that we're all on this journey on a path where we can only see one step ahead, even if that far, has been meaningful to me. It's been meaningful to my creativity, and I recommend it to anybody to whom it appeals. It takes a lot of pressure off. I think that's a guiding meta-theme for me—trying to take the pressure off us from trying to control things that can't be controlled, and more stepping into that flow of understanding: what's going to come to me is going to come to me, and my posture toward it, whether I align with it or not, is what's going to determine my experience of it. You mentioned synchronicity. It's interesting. It's verifiable. I know a lot of people have verified it for themselves. Maybe some people listening to this have too. It's verifiable that when you really get in tune with this present-moment thing and get in tune with your creativity—and you can tell when you're aligned and not, when you feel blocked or when you feel resistance or not—when these things align on their own sometimes, strange coincidences do happen. Jung talked about synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. That was probably due to the fact that the psyche is not separate from the fabric of the world that gives rise to it, so that we might have subjective things—impressions, fantasies, dreams—that we rather uncannily see mirrored in objective events. Like the famous thing that clarified and coalesced that for him: a psychotherapy session with a patient who was describing a dream she'd been having about a scarab beetle. Then he heard a tapping at the window of his office and he went there and opened it, and there was a European beetle—a kind of scarab beetle, much like the Egyptian scarab—that was there. He held it up and said to the woman, “Is this your beetle? Here is your beetle.” It just blew her mind. It opened new levels of the therapy that she was receiving. Those kinds of things happen. I've had them happen. Joanna: Me too. Matt: If you're a long-time writer or reader, you're familiar with the library genie—the library daemon, we sometimes refer to it as—the book that, just at the moment you think of it and realise, “Oh yes…” You're doing your study, and it doesn't have to be a library, it could be on the web or whatever. You finally realise what it is that you need, what you've been looking for, and in some cases it literally falls off the shelf onto someone's head. What do you make of those when they happen? At the very least, it rattles your cage. You might enter a state of suspended judgement about whether we really are living in a kind of magical cosmos full of real correspondences. It's a bit like the daimon or the muse: is it a metaphor? Is it just an interpretation, or is it something real? Probably the best place is one of profoundly, actively embraced agnosticism, and just take it for what it is. Joanna: Yes, and leaning more into your intuition. I think you definitely demonstrate that in the book as well, really exploring a lot of very interesting topics. Now, we are almost out of time, but you do have a Substack, The Living Dark, where you publish essays, and you've also got all kinds of really interesting books. I want people to go have a look at some of the other stuff you've written, especially if you enjoy horror and religion and all of that kind of thing. So just to ask, how do you decide when something is an essay on The Living Dark, and how do you decide when you are going to put it in a book or in some other way? I feel like a lot of authors are thinking about Substack but don't necessarily know what to put on it. I think I first connected with you on your Substack, where I was like, “Oh, this guy's writing interesting, weird stuff.” How do you use Substack as opposed to writing for your books? Matt: Sure. Let me answer by first talking about what happened previously with that first book on creativity that I mentioned, A Course in Demonic Creativity. I had all kinds of thoughts and ideas coming up, seeded over many years of practice and reading about the daimon and the daemon and the genius and the muse. In 2009 I founded a blog—it was just a WordPress blog—and I titled it Daemon Muse. I attended to it for two to three years. A lot of people ended up reading it. I really did not have any plans, not even any back-burner plans, of taking the material that I published in posts there about this way of creativity and making it a book. I did realise about a year and a half in that essentially I had a book I had already written in those posts. So it took some work, and I spent six months making it all into a coherent book. By the way, that book was only ever published as a PDF, which is still free on my website, MattCardin.com—although plans for the first-ever print edition of it are in motion right now. That was published in 2011. When I went to Substack and started my newsletter there in 2022—and by the way, it wasn't originally called The Living Dark; my first title was “Living Into the Dark,” and then I changed it about a year, year and a half in—I kind of am doing the same thing. It's been a while since I took anything and thought, “I'm writing a book with it.” I write what comes to me to write. You know how Substack Notes is Substack's own version of social media, kind of like Twitter used to be or like X kind of is now. It happens all the time that I write things that just stay in contact with people as a Substack Note—some short thing. And then I realise I wanted to say more about that. Or you have what happened just this morning. Three or four hours before you and I were talking, I started writing a Substack Note and it got so long I realised I had something that could be a post to The Living Dark. So I switched over and finished it that way. The book Writing at the Wellspring came together after I had written things for a couple of years at The Living Dark and realised that I could trace a path through about a third of the posts that I had ever published there, and had the makings of a book. So that, plus other material from earlier in my life—there are things from my private journals from years ago in Writing at the Wellspring—plus some new material, ended up turning into that book. So I'm not thinking about the difference, is what I'm saying. I find writing at my Living Dark newsletter to be a needful and enjoyable creative outlet, partly because I have some 3,800 readers now and it feels good to be in contact with them and to have that audience and to know that there's that eye on what I'm writing. That's partly because I just have the freedom to work it out to my satisfaction and publish it there. I'm already halfway forming another book that will be of a different focus, to come from things that I have published there. So for me, there's an organic relationship between Substack writing, or any kind of blogging, and the writing of books. If people haven't thought about that, they might want to consider it. If you have one already or if you're thinking of starting a blog on Substack or anywhere else, maybe you have things that can guide you to a book that already exists and you just haven't realised it. Joanna: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Matt: Well, The Living Dark that we're talking about is at www.livingdark.net—and it does require the three Ws at the beginning to get there. Then my author website is MattCardin.com, and you can go to the books page there to get a link to all the books I've published and read about them. Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was fantastic. Matt: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate the invitation.The post Writing At The Wellspring: Tapping The Source Of Your Inner Genius With Matt Cardin first appeared on The Creative Penn.

The Authors Quill Larry Elmore Dean Wesley Smith Guest Sean Williams

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith has published over two hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories across many genres.   At the moment he produces novels in five major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and the superhero series starring Poker Boy, and the highly acclaimed puzzle mystery series The Cold Poker Gang.   His monthly magazine called Smith's Monthly, consisting of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and each month has over 60,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month.   During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.   He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.   Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as executive editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. He is now also the editor of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine and Writers of the Future.   https://deanwesleysmit...   Workshops on Teachable…   https://wmg-publishing...   The WMG Writer Store   https://wmgwriterstore...   The WMG Publishing Main Store   https://wmgbooks.com/

#CuentosDelPortal es nuestro club de lectura dedicado a #libros de #StarTrek Hoy leemos el libro de #StarTrekEnterprise "By the book" de Dean Wesley Smith y Kristin Kathryn Rusch ------------------------------------------------- Ayudanos a bancar esta locura comprándonos un cafecito en: ⁠⁠ https://ko-fi.com/remerasrojas⁠⁠ https://cafecito.app/remerasrojas Buscanos nuestras redes: Facebook: ⁠ https://www.facebook.com/remerasrojas Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/remerasrojas Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/remerasrojas TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@remeras.rojas BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/remerasrojas.bsky.social Threads: https://www.threads.net/@remerasrojas ivoox: ⁠⁠https://remerasrojas.ivoox.com⁠⁠ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0JadZRuq4kibyGbkbGrYzk Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/RemerasRojas?sub_confirmation=1 -----------------------------------------------

Join us on this week's podcast as we dive into the process of revising your manuscript, from the rough beginnings of the "dirty draft" to the final, polished version. We've got the expert tips and practical advice to help you tackle each stage with confidence. Tune in to learn how to transform your writing with each pass through your manuscript, ensuring that what you eventually submit or publish is the best possible version of your work.  Sign up for author Nalini Singh's newsletter to receive fan service here: https://nalinisingh.com/ Want the official Psy-Changeling Reading Order? Click here: https://nalinisingh.com/books/psychangeling-series/   THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Holly Lisle's courses: https://hollylisle.com/category/writing-classes/  Writing into the Dark with Dean Wesley Smith: https://deanwesleysmith.com/a-great-take-on-writing-into-the-dark/  Scrivener: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener  Emotion Thesaurus: https://amzn.to/4fMIjhr  Margie Lawson's EDITS System: https://www.margielawson.com/  Holiday in Handcuffs: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0938666/ Leslye's Revision Workshop: https://learn.myimaginaryfriends.net/courses/revise-your-novel   Get ready for Storm Echo, coming in 1 week! Grab your copy to read along: https://amzn.to/41dUro6    Want to learn worldbuilding from Leslye? Sign up here: https://learn.myimaginaryfriends.net/ Want to learn story structure from Ines? Sign up here: https://ineswrites.com/PTP   Find the hosts online at: Leslye Penelope: https://lpenelope.com/  Ines Johnson: https://ineswrites.com/  Credits: "Moonlight Hall" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

The Author Quill Dean Wesley Smith Second Hour Jody Lynn Nye

Tim Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, on Leap Year Day in 1952, but has lived in southern California since 1959. He graduated from California State University at Fullerton with a BA in English in 1976; the same year saw the publication of his first two novels, The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust. Tim's subsequent novels are The Drawing of the Dark, The Anubis Gates (winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and the Prix Apollo), Dinner at Deviant's Palace (winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award), On Stranger Tides (the novel the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, was based on) The Stress of Her Regard, Last Call (winner of the World Fantasy Award), Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, Declare (winner of the World Fantasy Award) and Three Days to Never. His most recent book is Hide Me Among the Graves. The Manchester Guardian called Powers “the best fantasy writer to appear in decades.” Tim has taught at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University six times and currently teaches the annual Writers of the Future workshop. He has been involved with the Contest since its early years, serving as one of the instructors (along with Algis Budrys and Orson Scott Card) at the very first official WotF workshop in Sag Harbor. He was formally inducted as a judge in 1993. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California. “I think I've been a judge for most of the quarters in the past two decades. This means that several times a year I get a stack of manuscript photocopies via next-day mail, and take a day off from my own writing to read them all and evaluate them; this is no chore, since Dave Wolverton or K.D. Wentworth has already culled them from the total volume of submissions, and invariably there is at least one story that I'm grateful to have a chance to read. I send my verdicts in, and usually I hang on to a couple of the photocopies, just because I want to have the chance to read them again before the actual anthology is published. The stories at this point have no provenance beyond their titles—I don't know the genders or ages or addresses of the writers; and not all of them turn out to live in North America, by any means. The only thing I can be fairly sure of is that I have not read anything by any of these writers before. (Over the years, I have read a lot of subsequent books from many of them, with their names right there on the spines and their photos on the dust jacket flap—though since I'm not a very up-to-date reader, I generally don't get around to reading them until they've been nominated for Hugos or Nebulas or World Fantasy Awards.)” — Tim Powers Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published over two hundred novels and over seven hundred books in fifty years, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. He has over thirty million copies of his books in printAt the moment he produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the cold case mystery series, Cold Poker Gang series, and the superhero series starring Poker Boy. During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for “I think this Contest has done more to help new writers achieve their dreams than anything that has come before. I know it gave me a huge push. It's wonderful to return to be a part of it again as a judge.” —Dean Wesley Smith Find out more at: deanwesleysmith.com

Dean Wesley Smith is one of the most prolific writers working today, with over 200 novels, and countless short stories published. He reveals how he has learned how to stop listening to his critical voice, and to stop thinking of the story as a “product”, and how that has unleashed his creativity.

Ever wondered what it takes to complete a writing project from start to finish? Join us as we promise to uncover the secrets behind mastering the art of writing, drawing from personal experiences in both fiction and non-fiction. Discover how starting small and persevering can lead to the satisfying completion of a manuscript. We also share invaluable insights from Dean Wesley Smith on the financial aspects of being an author, providing a comprehensive look at the writing journey and valuable resources like Readsy to help you hone your skills.We'll explore a variety of writing methods and tools that can help you produce more words and ultimately improve as a writer. Whether you prefer the tactile feel of notebooks or the convenience of digital applications like Google Docs, Evernote, and Scrivener, there's something here for everyone. Speech-to-text software and recording devices are also discussed for those who find traditional writing challenging. From plotting versus pantsing to experimenting with various techniques, we emphasize the individuality of the writing process and encourage you to find what works best for you.In this episode, we highlight the writing techniques of well-known authors, including how the writer of the Reacher series tackles writer's block by editing previous sections of his work. Summarizing chapters for story cohesion, Dean Wesley Smith's perspective on letting readers judge the quality of your story, and the emotional impact of writing are key topics we delve into. We also share inspiring words from D.J. Molles, encouraging writers to overcome obstacles and respect readers' experiences. Ultimately, this episode is a treasure trove of tips and encouragement for anyone looking to embark on or complete their writing journey.

In this episode, outgoing Local History Coordinator Cat Shattuck and Ben from Tech Services dish on all things Star Trek--captains and Klingons and Janeway and all things in between! Book Recommendations: Star Trek: New Frontier series by Peter David (Ben) Star Trek Cord of Engineers series by Dean Wesley Smith, Christie Golden, Keith R. A. DeCandido, Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore (Ben) Any books by T. Kingfisher (Cat) The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Mark Leslie Lefebvre is our most recent Writer Contest judge. Dean Wesley Smith, also a judge, has Mark by four decades, being the first person to be awarded by Writers of the Future in that very first year! Together, these two have been at the forefront of the evolution of publishing, now known as indie publishing or self-publishing. Once frowned upon as vanity, self-publishing and indie publishing have proven to be the means for more and more authors to become million-dollar-a-year successful authors. So you will do well to bend an attentive ear to this podcast and listen to what these gents have to say. Mark Leslie Lefebvre: markleslie.ca/ Dean Wesley Smith: deanwesleysmith.com/

Mark Leslie Lefebvre is our most recent Writer Contest judge. Dean Wesley Smith, also a judge, has Mark by four decades, being the first person to be awarded by Writers of the Future in that very first year! Together, these two have been at the forefront of the evolution of publishing, now known as indie publishing or self-publishing. Once frowned upon as vanity, self-publishing and indie publishing have proven to be the means for more and more authors to become million-dollar-a-year successful authors. So you will do well to bend an attentive ear to this podcast and listen to what these gents have to say. Mark Leslie Lefebvre: markleslie.ca/ Dean Wesley Smith: deanwesleysmith.com/

In this episode, Mark interviews Kevin J. Anderson about his writing and the new approach he is taking to incorporate Kickstarter into the launch strategies for some of his indie-published titles. Prior to the interview, Mark shares a personal update, comments from recent episodes, and a word from this episode's sponsor. Learn more about this self-publishing/WIDE-publishing focused cruise.   In their interview Mark and Kevin talk about: How Kickstarter has completely upended (in a good way), Kevin's book release strategies Kevin's first novel coming out in 1988 and all the various publishers he has worked with over the years The "Perfect Storm" that was brewing in the book industry when indie publishing became a realistic and viable option Starting to publish his own books (mostly backlist titles he got the rights back to) in 2009 after founding WordFire Press with his wife Rebecca Moesta Kevin's belief that this is the best time to be a writer How Kevin does a little bit of everything. He has a New York literary agent, he works with several major publishers, he indie publishes, and he continues to explore new opportunities that digital publishing offer The way that Kickstarter didn't just open a new door, it completely blew it down, along with a few walls too Dean Wesley Smith's perspective that helped to change Kevin's mind about what Kickstarter was all about Kevin's "Adams Family meets The Naked Gun" series of Dan Shamble Zombie PI novels, and the history of how it started off as a series with a major publisher, flopped, then Kevin got the rights back and did something truly stunning with it once he applied Kickstarter Kevin's first Dan Shamble Kickstarter which brought in 23 times the intial amount he was asking for, and that it paid him more than 6 times the advance he'd rec'd from a major publisher for the last Dan Shamble book he'd done with them The Dragon Business (The Princess Bride meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) Kickstarter that brought in 20 times what he'd been asking for The Persephone Kickstarter that Kevin did with Writer/Director Jeffrey Morris Kevin's latest Kickstarter which is a 7 Volume Set of over 130 of his published short stories published over 50 years Writing his first short story when he was 8 years old Publishing his very first short story when he was 14 The personal introductions that he wrote for every one of the stories in this 7 book collection The various levels and Kickstarter rewards he is planning for this Kickstarter The remarkable fact that, despite having published 180 novels with 58 of them being international bestsellers, no publisher would ever even consider publishing a 7 volume hardcover set of Kevin's complete short stories. That he can do this via Kickstarter is a significant paradigm shift How Kickstarter can replace the old "advance" model from traditional publishing The special thing Kevin is doing for all the backers of this latest Kickstarter The Kickstarter will be going live on April 30th for 3 weeks and 2 days And more . . .   After the interview Mark reflects on Kevin's use of short, effective and very clear log lines to describe two of his series.   Links of Interest: Kevin J. Anderson's Website Kevin's Short Story Kickstarter EP 130 - Grace Under Pressure with Kevin J. Anderson Mentions of Kevin in other podcast episodes EP 356 - The Midlist Indie Author Mindset with T. Thorn Coyle Thorn's Patreon Site EP 355 - Scribbling Pen Publishing with Melanie Gilbert and Heather Karn Writers of the Future - Blog Post Announcing Mark as a Judge Stark Publishing Support for Authors Via Margins Agency ScribeCount (Mark's Affiliate Link) Mark's YouTube Channel Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections How to Access Patreon RSS Feeds An Author's Guide to Working With Bookstores and Libraries The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon Hex and the City Only Monsters in the Building The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard   Kevin J. Anderson has published more than 180 books, 58 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune universes, as well as the unique Clockwork Angels steampunk trilogy with legendary Rush drummer Neil Peart. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series, the Wake the Dragon and Terra Incognita fantasy trilogies, and humorous Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. series and The Dragon Business series. He has edited numerous anthologies, written comics and games, and the lyrics to two rock CDs. Anderson is the director of the graduate program in Publishing at Western Colorado University, and he and his wife Rebecca Moesta are the publishers or WordFire Press. He worked on the recent films Dune Part One and Part Two from Legendary Entertainment, as well as the forthcoming Dune TV series from MAX, and other films in development, including Persephone and Karousel. He has 24 million copies in print in 34 languages. His most recent novels are Bats in the Belfry, Skeleton in the Closet, Persephone, and Princess of Dune (with Brian Herbert).     The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Mark interviews bestselling writer, editor, and writing instructor, Wulf Moon, who won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards at the age of fifteen, and followed that with winning the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Contest, and Writers of the Future. He leads the Wulf Pack Writers group and is the author of The Illustrated Super Secrets of Writing and How to Write a Howling Good Story.  Prior to the interview, Mark reads comments from previous episodes, shares a personal update, and then says a word about this episode's sponsor. This episode is sponsored by the Stark Publishing book How to Write a Howling Good Story by Wulf Moon. The book is 25% off at the Smashwords store until the end of Jan 2024. Patrons of the Stark Reflections Podcast can get the book for 75% off until the end of Feb 2024. In their conversation Mark and Moon talk about: How Wulf Moon might not have been the name that he was born with and how the name "Moon" which he has been called most of his life came from his Ojibwe grandmother Moonbeam Road, a local road his father named after him when he was growing up Not having a father who was supportive of his writing, and even having to run away from home when he was younger Finding an important positive voice as a youngster in a teacher The additional lengths this one teacher went to support and encourage Moon in his writing Winning the Scholastic Art and Writing Award at the age of 15, among so many other awards that this teacher helped him find Getting beat up so often in high school that the only thing he could do was look down as he walked in the hallways - but how he found his power in writing The importance of finding a way to be who you are and to not allow others to repress you from that Starting up Wulf Moon's Super Secrets Writing Workshop right after winning Writers of the Future - and offering all this support to other writers for free The repeated authors who have gone through Moon's teachings and then ended up winning Writers of the Future The Wulf Pack Writers group that Moon manages Following the concept of "how can I help you with what I know" How writers don't understand proper Manuscript Format The high ranking sales that HOW TO WRITE A HOWLING GOOD STORY has hit since its release in November 2023 Moon's concept of Heart's Desire as the most important principle in a story Caring that happens in the heart of the reader, which can create the Reader/Hero bond Getting to a point in his life that was so low that he took risks and was burning bridges behind him and not writing for 10 years Realizing that he couldn't be happy and couldn't be fulfilled not being a writer Moon's experience meeting Dean Wesley Smith at the Nebula Awards in Eugene Oregon The importance of having both the fundamenals of writing and the belief in yourself The mantra "belief determins reality" that Moon instructs his students to write down The dedication in Moon's HOW TO WRITE A HOWLING GOOD STORY Meeting other people "like me" at writer conferences, etc and the incredible value that can bring Advice Moon would offer to newer writers And more... After the interview, Mark reflects on the importance of not denying who you are and not denying the things that bring you pleasure. He also reflects on the concept of finding your people, your Tribe, and the positive impact we can have on one another if we just take the time to listen, to reach out, to others.   Links of Interest: Wulf Moon's Website How to Write a Howling Good Story Smashwords link Patron Coupon for 75% off EP 340 - Personality, Passion, Presentation, and Persistence with Todd Fahnestock Mark's YouTube Channel Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections Best Book Ever Podcast Lovers Moon Podcast The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon Hex and the City The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard   Wulf Moon is a bestselling writer, editor, and writing instructor. At fifteen, Moon won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and followed that with winning the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Contest, and Writers of the Future. He leads the Wulf Pack Writers group. He's won both Best Author and Best Writers Workshop four years running in the Critters Readers' Choice Awards, and is the author of The Illustrated Super Secrets of Writing and How to Write a Howling Good Story. www.thesupersecrets.com     The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith has published over two hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories across many genres. At the moment he produces novels in five major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and the superhero series starring Poker Boy, and the highly acclaimed puzzle mystery series The Cold Poker Gang. His monthly magazine called Smith's Monthly, consisting of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and each month has over 60,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month. During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown. Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as executive editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. He is now also the editor of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine and Writers of the Future.

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith has published over two hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories across many genres. At the moment he produces novels in five major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and the superhero series starring Poker Boy, and the highly acclaimed puzzle mystery series The Cold Poker Gang. His monthly magazine called Smith's Monthly, consisting of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and each month has over 60,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month. During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown. Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as executive editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. He is now also the editor of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine and Writers of the Future.

Chatting With Sherri welcomes award-winning speculative writer; Desmond Astaire! Desmond Astaire is a speculative fiction storyteller from Central Illinois, where he navigates the journey of life alongside a devoted wife and forever-loved son. In his other life, Astaire is a senior enlisted leader for a military public relations unit, supervising the training, development, and operations of multimedia content creators. Astaire's lifelong obsession with science fiction and fantasy was forged as a child in the halls of local public libraries. The addiction was enabled by reading programs like Accelerated Reader and BOOK IT!, and the revelation to write professionally was born after his discovery of Dean Wesley Smith's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology. For these formative experiences, he is forever grateful. Astaire can be found Saturday mornings in Peoria metro-area coffee shops conducting weekly writing sessions and trying to apply Denzel Washington's adage that “Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment..” Desmond Astaire is the grand prize winner in The Writers of the Future contest earning him the Golden Pen Award and cash prize of $5,000, in addition to having his story, "Gallows," published in the international bestselling anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 38.  

MARQUETTE HEIGHTS RESIDENT CAPTURES GRAND PRIZE IN WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST HONORED AT HOLLYWOOD AWARDS EVENT HOLLYWOOD - Marquette Heights, Illinois resident Desmond Astaire was honored at the L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards Event in Hollywood as the grand prize winner in the Writers of the Future Contest earning him the Golden Pen Award trophy and a cash prize of $5,000 in addition to having his story, "Gallows," published in the international bestselling anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 38. The awards event at the Taglyan Complex on April 8th was a black-tie gala honoring all the writer and illustrator winners as well as announcing the grand prize writer and illustrator winners. In his acceptance speech, Desmond relayed to the nearly five hundred attendees, “Short story anthologies are such a beautiful piece of speculative fiction culture, and for L. Ron Hubbard's estate to continue nurturing emerging writers is a truly special gift. Thanks to all the judges and everyone at Author Services, Inc. and Galaxy Press responsible for anthologies like ‘Writers of the Future' for facilitating the journey of our imaginations to faraway times and places to the solace and escape of the story. My intent with this Golden Pen Award it to someday join your ranks and be able to touch minds and influence lives the way you've influenced mine in this wondrous venture of written storytelling.” Desmond Astaire is a speculative fiction storyteller from Central Illinois, where he navigates the journey of life alongside a devoted wife and forever-loved son. In his other life, Astaire is a senior enlisted leader for a military public relations unit, supervising the training, development, and operations of multimedia content creators. Astaire's lifelong obsession with science fiction and fantasy was forged as a child in the halls of local public libraries. The addiction was enabled by reading programs like Accelerated Reader and BOOK IT!, and the revelation to write professionally was born after his discovery of Dean Wesley Smith's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology. For these formative experiences, he is forever grateful. Astaire can be found Saturday mornings in Peoria metro-area coffee shops conducting weekly writing sessions and trying to apply Denzel Washington's adage that “Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment.” Writers of the Future was Astaire's goal since 2017. The Contest, one of the most prestigious writing competitions in the world, is currently in its 39th year and is judged by some of the premier names in speculative fiction. The Writers of the Future Contest judges include, Tim Powers (author of On Stranger Tides), Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert (Duneprequel series), Robert J. Sawyer (Quantum Night), Brandon Sanderson (Mistbornseries, The Stormlight Archive), Larry Niven (Ringworld), Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), David Farland (Runelords), and Katherine Kurtz (Deryniseries) to name a few. The Illustrators of the Future Contest judges include, Bob Eggleton (11 Chesley Awards and 7 Hugo Awards), Larry Elmore (Dungeons & Dragons book covers), Echo Chernik (graphic designs for major corporations including Celestial Seasonings tea packaging), Rob Prior (art for Spawn, Heavy Metalcomics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ciruelo (Eragon Coloring Book).

MARQUETTE HEIGHTS RESIDENT CAPTURES GRAND PRIZE IN WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST HONORED AT HOLLYWOOD AWARDS EVENT HOLLYWOOD - Marquette Heights, Illinois resident Desmond Astaire was honored at the L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards Event in Hollywood as the grand prize winner in the Writers of the Future Contest earning him the Golden Pen Award trophy and a cash prize of $5,000 in addition to having his story, "Gallows," published in the international bestselling anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 38. The awards event at the Taglyan Complex on April 8th was a black-tie gala honoring all the writer and illustrator winners as well as announcing the grand prize writer and illustrator winners. In his acceptance speech, Desmond relayed to the nearly five hundred attendees, “Short story anthologies are such a beautiful piece of speculative fiction culture, and for L. Ron Hubbard's estate to continue nurturing emerging writers is a truly special gift. Thanks to all the judges and everyone at Author Services, Inc. and Galaxy Press responsible for anthologies like ‘Writers of the Future' for facilitating the journey of our imaginations to faraway times and places to the solace and escape of the story. My intent with this Golden Pen Award it to someday join your ranks and be able to touch minds and influence lives the way you've influenced mine in this wondrous venture of written storytelling.” Desmond Astaire is a speculative fiction storyteller from Central Illinois, where he navigates the journey of life alongside a devoted wife and forever-loved son. In his other life, Astaire is a senior enlisted leader for a military public relations unit, supervising the training, development, and operations of multimedia content creators. Astaire's lifelong obsession with science fiction and fantasy was forged as a child in the halls of local public libraries. The addiction was enabled by reading programs like Accelerated Reader and BOOK IT!, and the revelation to write professionally was born after his discovery of Dean Wesley Smith's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology. For these formative experiences, he is forever grateful. Astaire can be found Saturday mornings in Peoria metro-area coffee shops conducting weekly writing sessions and trying to apply Denzel Washington's adage that “Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment.” Writers of the Future was Astaire's goal since 2017. The Contest, one of the most prestigious writing competitions in the world, is currently in its 39th year and is judged by some of the premier names in speculative fiction. The Writers of the Future Contest judges include, Tim Powers (author of On Stranger Tides), Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert (Duneprequel series), Robert J. Sawyer (Quantum Night), Brandon Sanderson (Mistbornseries, The Stormlight Archive), Larry Niven (Ringworld), Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), David Farland (Runelords), and Katherine Kurtz (Deryniseries) to name a few. The Illustrators of the Future Contest judges include, Bob Eggleton (11 Chesley Awards and 7 Hugo Awards), Larry Elmore (Dungeons & Dragons book covers), Echo Chernik (graphic designs for major corporations including Celestial Seasonings tea packaging), Rob Prior (art for Spawn, Heavy Metalcomics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ciruelo (Eragon Coloring Book).

Honestly, I can't believe I made it this far; it's mind-blowing. I know that's cliche, but it's how I feel when I see that episode number. Let's just say it has been a wild ride, a ride that is not yet over, and I'm glad I stuck with podcasting through those difficult times. And I've dabbled with a few great interviews and had my first-ever guests. It's been both challenging and fun all at once.In the spirit of celebrating the 100th episode milestone, I'm going answer the top questions asked by my Blog Readers, YouTube Subscribers, and Podcast Listeners, and questions asked through my Ask A Question form on my website.The QuestionsHow do I turn a page of notes (637 words) into a story?Should you self-publish an ebook, paperback and audiobook all on the same launch date or separately?Do I need separate ISBNs for a paperback novel published through KDP Print and Ingram Spark?Is it ok to post an unpublished novel on your blog?I've heard that blogging is dead. Is this true, and is it worth doing as a fiction author?Is it better to wait until you have more than one book in a series beforeWhen discovery writing, how do you ensure that all the scenes and chapters you write move the story forward and not end up being wasted words that are deleted during revisions?How do I know when it's time to finish revising and start working with an editor?Can you recommend an editor to me?Do I need developmental editing? It's very expensive, and I'm not sure if I can afford to spend that much money.How long did it take for you to get consistent book sales when publishing-wide?Course, Podcasts, Books, and Tools MentionedCheck Out the Show Notes ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/100th-episode/TAP033, The Case for Outlining, Outlining Pitfalls, and Overcoming Writing Obstacles ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap033/TAP034, From Idea to Outline: How to Outline a Novel (Part 1 of 3) ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap034/TAP035, From Idea to Outline: How to Outline a Novel, (Part 2 of 3) ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap035/TAP036, From Idea to Outline: How to Outline a Novel (Part 3 of 3) ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap036/TAP037, How I Edit the Outline of a Novel Before Writing the First Draft ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap037/TAP043, A Tale of Two Novels: My Experience Writing into the Dark ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap043/Course on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/writing-into-the-darkBook on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith ⇢ https://amzn.to/3LUjkNV *Blogging as an Unpublished Fiction Author ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/blogging-unpublished-fiction-author/ProBlogger ⇢ https://problogger.com/Products I RecommendScrivener ⇢ https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=authorpreneurpod *Grammarly Premium ⇢ https://www.grammarly.com/Pro Writing Aid ⇢ https://prowritingaid.com/?afid=22911*AutoCrit ⇢ https://www.autocrit.com/Marlow/Authors.ai ⇢ https://authors.ai/marlowe/?awref=rt2q4bq7zq*Fiverr ⇢ https://www.fiverr.com/Host Your Author Website with SiteGround ⇢ https://www.siteground.com/go/authorpreneur*Other Useful LinksLooking for an affordable premade book cover? | https://levillainbookcovers.com/shop/ **Be on the Podcast | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/interview/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayWant the podcast straight to your inbox? ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/tap/Got a burning question that you would love me to answer on the podcast ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Answers to Questions on Writing from Previous Shows ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/faq/My Books **My Short Story, the Lawn | https://dl.bookfunnel.com/wi5nh80cx4The Candidate | https://books2read.com/the-candidateSuspicion | https://books2read.com/suspicionDuplicity | https://books2read.com/duplicity-adhay/The Locked Room | https://books2read.com/locked-roomRead Entitled to Murder on my blog | https://ameliadhay.com/entitled-to-murder-001/Read Entitled to Murder on Wattpad | https://www.wattpad.com/story/245779659-entitled-to-murder-a-murder-mystery-book-clubConnect with me on Social MediaTwitter: https://twitter.com/writeradhayFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorpreneurpodcastFacebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/indieauthorpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorpreneurpodcast/YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/authorpreneurpodcast/videosGoodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/authoradhay/RedBubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/WriterADHay/shop ***** This is a service or product offered by me*** My bookish merchandise store

Welcome to the ninety-ninth episode of the Authorpreneur Podcast. Yes, I'm doing the countdown thing—I know, it's super dorky, but I'm embracing it anyway. At present, I'm struggling to sell book two in my amateur sleuth mystery series, and I'm going into detail about my experiments to get this bookselling and my issues with publishing direct to Barnes and Noble upon the advice of going wide webinar. Let's just say that I regret leaving Draft 2 Digital. And I discuss how I've screwed up my amateur sleuth mystery series. Just saying that out loud gives me anxiety.But without further ado, let's get on with the episode.Course, Podcasts, Books, and Tools MentionedCheck Out the Show Notes ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/bts052/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayGot a burning question that you would love me to answer on the 100th episode ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Course on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/writing-into-the-darkBook on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith ⇢ https://amzn.to/3LUjkNV *Course on Writing a Locked Room Mystery by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/pop-up-17Course on Writing with Depth by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/apr-depth23Products I RecommendScrivener ⇢ https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=authorpreneurpod *Grammarly Premium ⇢ https://www.grammarly.com/Pro Writing Aid ⇢ https://prowritingaid.com/?afid=22911*AutoCrit ⇢ https://www.autocrit.com/Marlow/Authors.ai ⇢ https://authors.ai/marlowe/?awref=rt2q4bq7zq*Fiverr ⇢ https://www.fiverr.com/Host Your Author Website with SiteGround ⇢ https://www.siteground.com/go/authorpreneur*Other Useful LinksLooking for an affordable premade book cover? | https://levillainbookcovers.com/shop/ **Be on the Podcast | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/interview/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayWant the podcast straight to your inbox? ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/tap/Got a burning question that you would love me to answer on the podcast ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Answers to Questions on Writing from Previous Shows ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/faq/My BooksMy Short Story, the Lawn | https://dl.bookfunnel.com/wi5nh80cx4The Candidate | https://books2read.com/the-candidateSuspicion | https://books2read.com/suspicionDuplicity | https://books2read.com/duplicity-adhay/The Locked Room | https://books2read.com/locked-roomRead Entitled to Murder on my blog | https://ameliadhay.com/entitled-to-murder-001/Read Entitled to Murder on Wattpad | https://www.wattpad.com/story/245779659-entitled-to-murder-a-murder-mystery-book-clubConnect with me on Social MediaTwitter: https://twitter.com/writeradhayFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorpreneurpodcastFacebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/indieauthorpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorpreneurpodcast/YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/authorpreneurpodcast/videosGoodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/authoradhay/Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/WriterADHay/shop** This is a service or product offered by me*** My bookish merchandise store

Welcome to the ninety-eighth episode of the Authorpreneur Podcast. Honestly, I can't believe that my podcast has come this far. But, back to the matter at hand.Toward the end of March, I started working with my editor on the Locked Room, and in this episode, I share the mistakes that were found in that manuscript in comparison to the previous stories that I've written.So without further ado, let's get into the episode.Course, Podcasts, Books, and Tools MentionedCheck Out the Show Notes ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap043/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayGot a burning question that you would love me to answer on the 100th episode ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Course on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/writing-into-the-darkBook on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith ⇢ https://amzn.to/3LUjkNV *Course on Writing a Locked Room Mystery by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/pop-up-17Course on Writing with Depth by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/apr-depth23Products I RecommendScrivener ⇢ https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=authorpreneurpod *Grammarly Premium ⇢ https://www.grammarly.com/Pro Writing Aid ⇢ https://prowritingaid.com/?afid=22911*AutoCrit ⇢ https://www.autocrit.com/Marlow/Authors.ai ⇢ https://authors.ai/marlowe/?awref=rt2q4bq7zq*Fiverr ⇢ https://www.fiverr.com/Host Your Author Website with SiteGround ⇢ https://www.siteground.com/go/authorpreneur*Other Useful LinksLooking for an affordable premade book cover? | https://levillainbookcovers.com/shop/ **Be on the Podcast | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/interview/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayWant the podcast straight to your inbox? ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/tap/Got a burning question that you would love me to answer on the podcast ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Answers to Questions on Writing from Previous Shows ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/faq/My BooksMy Short Story, the Lawn | https://dl.bookfunnel.com/wi5nh80cx4The Candidate | https://books2read.com/the-candidateSuspicion | https://books2read.com/suspicionDuplicity | https://books2read.com/duplicity-adhay/Read Entitled to Murder on my blog | https://ameliadhay.com/entitled-to-murder-001/Read Entitled to Murder on Wattpad | https://www.wattpad.com/story/245779659-entitled-to-murder-a-murder-mystery-book-clubConnect with me on Social MediaTwitter: https://twitter.com/writeradhayFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorpreneurpodcastFacebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/indieauthorpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorpreneurpodcast/YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/authorpreneurpodcast/videosGoodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/authoradhay/Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/WriterADHay/shop** This is a service or product offered by me*** My bookish merchandise store

In February, I finished writing the Locked Room into the Dark, and I'll discuss how I achieved this, along with the response of my favourite beta reader. As you've come to expect, I will share my writing stats, days, time, word count and the step-by-step process that I used. Now that I've mentioned that, it's crucial that I point out that I'm following Dean Wesley Smith's Writing Into the Dark method, which he teaches in a course and in a book. I highly recommend that you check out both of these options if you're interested in learning how to discovery write.Without further ado, let's get into the episode.Course, Podcasts, Books, and Tools MentionedCheck Out the Show Notes ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/tap043/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayCourse on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/writing-into-the-darkBook on Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith ⇢ https://amzn.to/3LUjkNV *Course on Writing a Locked Room Mystery by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/pop-up-17Course on Writing with Depth by Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing) ⇢ https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/apr-depth23Products I RecommendScrivener ⇢ https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=authorpreneurpod *Grammarly Premium ⇢ https://www.grammarly.com/Pro Writing Aid ⇢ https://prowritingaid.com/?afid=22911*AutoCrit ⇢ https://www.autocrit.com/Marlow/Authors.ai ⇢ https://authors.ai/marlowe/?awref=rt2q4bq7zq*Fiverr ⇢ https://www.fiverr.com/Host Your Author Website with SiteGround ⇢ https://www.siteground.com/go/authorpreneur*Other Useful LinksLooking for an affordable premade book cover? | https://levillainbookcovers.com/shop/ **Be on the Podcast | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/interview/Support the show by buying me a coffee ⇢ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayWant the podcast straight to your inbox? ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/tap/Got a burning question that you would love me to answer on the podcast ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Answers to Questions on Writing from Previous Shows ⇢ https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/faq/My BooksMy Short Story, the Lawn | https://dl.bookfunnel.com/wi5nh80cx4The Candidate | https://books2read.com/the-candidateSuspicion | https://books2read.com/suspicionDuplicity | https://books2read.com/duplicity-adhay/Read Entitled to Murder on my blog | https://ameliadhay.com/entitled-to-murder-001/Read Entitled to Murder on Wattpad | https://www.wattpad.com/story/245779659-entitled-to-murder-a-murder-mystery-book-clubConnect with me on Social MediaTwitter: https://twitter.com/writeradhayFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorpreneurpodcastFacebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/indieauthorpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorpreneurpodcast/YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/authorpreneurpodcast/videosGoodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/authoradhay/Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/WriterADHay/shop** This is a service or product offered by me*** My bookish merchandise store

세상에 내놓지 않을 이유가 없는, 나를 위한 작은 존재적 사치. 에피소드 관련 링크 Seth Godin이 매일 하는 블로그 write.as read.write.as 도자기 사례 Dean Wesley Smith 제가 하는 모든 일은 여기에 정리되어 있습니다. https://hanaim.imaginariumkim.com/ 전체 에피소드 녹취록 https://aimdreaming.imaginariumkim.com/ep-42-매일매일-다른-누가-아닌-나를-위한-기록/

What are the benefits of selling direct? Why might using your face to advertise your books be a good idea? What might be the future of selling direct? Steve Pieper talks about these things and more. In the intro, ACX lowering audiobook prices, Chokepoint Capitalism, Audiblegate, Copyright valuation [Dean Wesley Smith]; courses on copyright; Happy […] The post The Empowerment Of Selling Books Direct To Your Readers With Steve Pieper first appeared on The Creative Penn.

1. BookBaby offers a few different suggestions for speech-to-text software that can be helpful for writers. 2. Dean Wesley Smith argues that caring too much about what others think of your work will only hinder your success as a writer. 3. According to 6 Figure Authors, book sales have been down due to a number of reasons, including the rise in popularity of audiobooks and eBooks. 4. Spotify is in the process of adding 98 million new music titles to its Prime service, which could pose a threat to Apple Music. 5. Amazon's new addition of 98 million music titles to Prime could be cause for worry among publishers. - https://blog.bookbaby.com/how-to-write/writing-tools-and-software/speech-to-text-for-writers - https://deanwesleysmith.com/i-dont-care/ - https://6figureauthors.com/podcast/why-book-sales-are-down/ - https://goodereader.com/blog/audiobooks/spotify-waging-media-war-against-apple - https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2022/11/02/amazon-adds-98-million-music-titles-to-prime-publishers-should-be-worried/

Mike asks:Dean Wesley Smith, Harlan Ellison, and other authors have talked about the quotes they've used to stay motivated and on task. What are some of yours? Resources mentioned:Dreams with Sharp Teeth The post Question 1051: Useful Aphorisms appeared first on The Every Day Novelist.

Dean Wesley Smith is one of the most prolific authors today, a master of selling the first draft of his stories. He was the first Writers of the Future winner to be awarded in the history of the Contest. In this podcast, he covers writing what you want to write, what you have fun with. He discusses what today are called "guidelines." In L. Ron Hubbard's day, these were called taboos, which he discusses in his how-to article called "Boos and Taboos." In addition to creating his own worlds, Dean has written "Star Trek," "Spider-Man," "X-Men," "Iron Man," and "Men in Black" novels and ghostwritten dozens of others.

Dean Wesley Smith is one of the most prolific authors today, a master of selling the first draft of his stories. He was the first Writers of the Future winner to be awarded in the history of the Contest. In this podcast, he covers writing what you want to write, what you have fun with. He discusses what today are called "guidelines." In L. Ron Hubbard's day, these were called taboos, which he discusses in his how-to article called "Boos and Taboos." In addition to creating his own worlds, Dean has written "Star Trek," "Spider-Man," "X-Men," "Iron Man," and "Men in Black" novels and ghostwritten dozens of others.

  Chatting with Sherri welcomes award-winning writer Desmond Astaire! Desmond Astaire is a speculative fiction storyteller from Central Illinois, where he navigates the journey of life alongside a devoted wife and forever-loved son. In his other life, Astaire is a senior enlisted leader for a military public relations unit, supervising the training, development, and operations of multimedia content creators. Astaire's lifelong obsession with science fiction and fantasy was forged as a child in the halls of local public libraries. The addiction was enabled by reading programs like Accelerated Reader and BOOK IT!, and the revelation to write professionally was born after his discovery of Dean Wesley Smith's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology. For these formative experiences, he is forever grateful. Astaire can be found Saturday mornings in Peoria metro-area coffee shops conducting weekly writing sessions and trying to apply Denzel Washington's adage that “Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment.” Writers of the Future was Astaire's goal since 2017. Desmond Astaire is the grand prize winner in The Writers of the Future contest earning him the Golden Pen Award and cash prize of $5,000!  His story is published in the anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 38

Dean Wesley Smith is one of the most prolific writers working today, with over 200 novels, and countless short stories published. He reveals how he has learned how to stop listening to his critical voice, and to stop thinking of the story as a “product”, and how that has unleashed his creativity.

Douglas Smith talks about how you can turn your short fiction into a “magic bakery”—a term Doug borrows from Dean Wesley Smith—earning you money and building your resume over and over with the same content. We discuss the opportunities offered by reprints, foreign markets, and audio markets, and we discuss how writer's groups can—and can't—help you prepare your work for the professional markets. Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author described by Library Journal as "one of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction." His fiction has been published in twenty-six languages and thirty-five countries. His books include the novel THE WOLF AT THE END OF THE WORLD, the collections CHIMERASCOPE and IMPOSSIBILIA, and the writer's guide PLAYING THE SHORT GAME: HOW TO MARKET & SELL SHORT FICTION. Doug is a three-time winner of Canada's Aurora Award and has been a finalist for the Astounding Award, CBC's Bookies Award, Canada's juried Sunburst Award, and France's juried Prix Masterton and Prix Bob Morane.

In their first-ever book club edition of The Expanse, Kris Hill and Kyle West take a close look at 2002's “By the Book,” the first original novel to be released for Star Trek: Enterprise, written by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn…

Coming up in this show, I discuss why I migrated away from MailChimp and the steps involved. And, I also discuss my decision to merge my author and writing tips websites. In terms of writing, I will share where I'm at with Missing, Book Two, and the steps I need to take before I start writing my short story. But, first an update on my favourite cup of tea and what I'm currently reading.Favourite Cup of TeaAs I'm recording this episode of the podcast diary, I'm drinking a cup of Jasmine Tea by Tea2. One of the reasons why I love drinking Jasmine Tea is because of its delicate flavour. It's not too overpowering like some other types of green tea. Today, as I'm recording this episode it's 11:43 am on a Thursday and this is my second cup of green tea of the day. I usually have a cup of Sencha tea with my breakfast.What I'm Currently ReadingWhile I was on holiday, I ended up not doing any reading. The reason for this is I tend to do the majority of my reading while I'm working on my businesses during the week. Because I was on holiday and spending time with my husband, it was hard to squeeze this into my new holiday mode. To avoid this in the future, I need to incorporate reading into my nighttime routine. I'll let you know how I get on with this.Actually, now that I've said that I remember that I did read Killing the Top 10 Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing and Killing the Top 10 Sacred Cows of Publishing by Dean Wesley Smith during the first week on my USA Trip while Roland was working. Nevertheless, at present, I'm three books behind my reading goal for the year.As of last Thursday, I started reading the Temple of the Gods by Andy McDermott while attempting to catch up on my task list for my author and coaching businesses. At the end of last week, I reached the forty-nine percent mark of the story in the Kindle Whisper-sync for Voice edition. I know not everyone loves to be read to, but I obviously do not have that issue. The Temple of the Gods is the eighth book in the Wilde/Chase Series. At this point in the series, the discovery of Atlantis has already occurred, which is starting to encourage me to purchase the previous books in the series. Even as I say this now, there's a part of me that wants to open Amazon and search for those books.What can I say? I'm a sucker for an Archaeological Thriller, which leads me to point out that I'm trying to get familiar with the series, so I can start writing the first book in my Maximilian Nicholls thriller novels. Yes, I want to write two types of thrillers at once.Concluding ThoughtsNext week, I'll let you know about my progress on my short story The Lawn, my revision plans for the short story. And, my decision about whether will hire a professional editor and a professional beta reader for The Lawn.Thanks for listening, and happy reading and writing, everybody.  Mentioned in this EpisodeTime To Ditch MailChimp? by David GaughranSelf Publishing Journeys PodcastCheck out the Show NotesBTS021, Migrating Away from MailChimp and Merging My Two Websites | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/bts021/Tools & ResourcesAsk a Question on Writing | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/Your Questions on writing, editing and Self Publishing Answered | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/question/faq/Support the Podcast by buying me a coffee | https://www.buymeacoffee.com/authoradhayWant podcast episode updates sent straight to your inbox? | https://authorpreneurpodcast.com/podcast/tap/ ** Connect with Me on Social Media **Twitter: @WriterADHayFacebook: www.facebook.com/authorpreneurpodcastFB group: The Authorpreneur Podcast CommunityInstagram: @authorpreneurpodcastYouTube: www.youtube.com/c/authorpreneurpodcast/videosGoodreads: www.goodreads.com/authoradhay

Andrea and Nolan discuss interviews with the Passive Guy, Mark Leslie LeFebvre, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kevin J. Anderson, Dean Wesley Smith, and Damon Courtney on topics such as writing prolifically, staying focused on your career, bookfunnel tips, the passive voice.....

Dean Wesley Smith is a USA Today best selling author with over two hundred novels and short stories. Dean is not new to the writing game and has seen it all. In this interview, Dean unearths the myths of writing and publishing. Things like: Writing fast equals poor quality. You have to type fast to be a prolific writer. Selling books quickly is essential for success. You can't make a living writing fiction. You have to write to market. You have to rewrite your stories. And much, much, more. With humility, humor, and insights from inside the publishing world. Dean offers a ton of  helpful advice for taking your writing to the next level. You can find Dean at: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/ Resources mentioned: Writing a Novel in Seven Days

In this episode, Ryan explores a process for taking your writing and productivity to the next level. Robert A. Heinlein wrote Sci-Fi in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. He believed in five rules for having a successful writing career. Most will ignore this advice, but, the brave who'll follow these principles, will unlock the key for a long and fulfilling writing career. Book Mentioned: Heinlein's Rules by Dean Wesley Smith

Kobo Writing Life Director Mark Lefebvre interviews 6 of the 7 writers who make up the core writers of the Uncollected Anthology project:  Phaedra Weldon, Leslie Clare Walker, Annie Reed, Leah Cutter, Dayle A. Dermatis and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. (Absent from the interview, but a core member is Michele Lang) The Uncollected Anthology of Urban Fantasy, is an ongoing project where, every three months, the authors pick a theme and write a short story for that theme. But instead of bundling the stories together, they each sell their own stories. So you can buy any one of them, or all of them. No fuss, no muss. But the tales are packaged using templates that bring them together thematically, and the authors have found the anthology as helpful for new readers to discover these books. In the interview, Mark and the writers discuss: How they get together annually for a meeting and have planned the themes out until May 2018 How the idea was born out of the Fiction River anthology workshops that Kris runs with her husband Dean. Dayle looked around the room at the talented authors and knew there were enough who wrote urban fantasy to put something like this together The process which includes deadlines for when the stories, the blurbs, the covers are all due each quarter The cross-promotional aspect of marketing each “issue” or theme of this ongoing series that includes the website and links embedded within each author's books How, even though they are calling them “short stories” some of the stories go as long as 20,000 words or novella length The way Allyson Longueira of WMG Publishing designed the cover template for the group for them to have a consistent brand, look and feel (such as the consistent color that each of the themes employ) The inherent trust each writer has to have, above the existing contract which includes terms such as the fact that each author owns all the copyright on each of their respective stories The common request from readers about how they might be able to get all the stories together How every Feb the theme is urban fantasy romance How Leah doesn't enjoy writing romance and yet, facing the challenge of that theme wrote a story that she loves the most – “The Midnight Gardener” How the themes help the writers explore different concepts and stories they never knew they had in them The brilliantly organic meeting that was the genesis of this collective, and the importance of community and an in person presence at writer events. How Kris is sometimes known by the nickname “Tom Hanks” derived from the movie “Big” because of the storm of ideas that she has Emails, yearly meeting and a closed yahoo group they use to communicate and share files A discussion of some of the challenges that have faced the group Some of the guest authors which include Dean Wesley Smith, Anthea Sharp, Rebecca Senese, Ron Cillins May's “out of the woods” theme . . . . The Fiction River workshops, how they originated based upon what used to be called the Dennis Little workshops at conventions The Importance of being with other writers, the support they offer one another, the pep-talks, the understanding . . . . After the interview, Mark talks about the importance of what can happen when writers come together to share, to communicate and to network.   Links of Interest Uncollected Anthology Main Website Uncollected Anthology Books at Kobo Click here to subscribe to the Uncollected Anthology Newsletter

Author Dean Wesley Smith is the guest in this episode of The Author Biz. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of writing sales copy for your new book? For many authors, it's a sense of terror. They'd rather write the next 80,000 word novel than sit down to write sales […] The post TAB059: Writing Sales Copy for Fiction with Dean Wesley Smith appeared first on .

Mark Lefebvre, Kobo Writing Life Director, in conversation with Dean Wesley Smith, a USA Today Bestselling author of books in multiple genres including Science-Fiction, Mystery, Thrillers and Westerns. Currently producing novels in four different series, Smith is also the co-publisher of WMG Publishing along with his partner Kristine Kathryn Rusch and runs a series of workshops designed to help writers become smarter not only about the craft but also about the business of publishing. During their conversation, Dean and Mark talk about: ·         The fact that Dean wasn't born into writing, actually loathed it when he was in college (He has a Masters in Architecture) ·         The various careers and roles that Smith played during his life, including his past as a Pro Golfer and hot dog skier ·         How his goal of being a Golf Course Architect led to writing via an English course that he had to take. ·         The English Professor who told Smith that his writing was too commercial ·         The writing class that forced Smith to submit a poem to a college poetry market (at which he won second place and $300) – at the time, he had to go see the professor to ask about it because he had no idea what it meant ·         After this experience, Smith tried his hand at fiction, wrote a 1000 word short story and mailed it off to a market right away. Then he wrote a second story and mailed that off right away. Both stories sold immediately. ·         How, after these first three successes, Smith started listening to people's advice (AKA myths) about writing, and re-wrote his stories to dead, and for the next 7 years never sold a single thing ·         It wasn't until 1982 that Smith ran across Robert Heinlein's Business Rules of Writing, followed the advice, started selling again and has never looked back  (http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/heinleins-business-rules/)  The RULES  o   1 – You Must Write  o   2 – You Must Finish What You Start  o   3 – You Must Refrain From Rewriting Except to Editorial Order  o   4 – You Must Put It on The Market  o   5 – You Must Keep It on The Market Until Sold ·         Dean's books:  Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing and Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing. ·         The magazine that Dean and Kristine Kathryn Rusch ran for 9 years, called Pulphouse. ·         The Starfleet Corps of Engineers Series that Dean kicked off in the Star Trek Universe – a series about the people who follow up after Captain Kirk, cleaning up his messes (which was originally meant to be an eBook back in 2000 and knocked John Grisham off the eBook bestseller list when it was released) ·         The challenge of writing within an existing restrictive universe, such as Star Trek, such as the reader having to hear Shatner's voice when writing the character Captain Kirk. ·         Smith's lesson for writers creating character voice by paying really close attention to the differences in voice you can easily see created for the Star Trek characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy ·         Regency Romance as one of the only genres that Smith really can't write in ·         How Westerns, (the old West) and Science-Fiction are two of Smith's go-two genres for writing. ·         The FICTION RIVER anthology series that Smith edits with Kristine Kathryn Rusch and how this river of fiction brings in new talent along with some major names from the genre.  (For example, the latest FICTION RIVER property, Pulse Pounders, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, included a previously unpublished sci-fi story by Frank Herbert) ·         The Oregon Coast workshops where the FICTION RIVER anthologies are derived that include a board of 6 Editors critiquing the stories live on stage and how that helps inform writers that what one editor rejects another editor might have bought ·         How the workshops that Dean and Kris started originated as the “Denise Little” short story workshops; because of the similarity to the way that editor/agent Denise Little liked to teach these principles ·         A bit about Smith's Monthly Magazine, which has both a paper and an eBook edition ·         How Smith sees the approximate 80,000 words that he writes each month as still “not enough” ·         Smith's ongoing Blog in which he shares daily insights: Writing in Public ·         How the teaching that Smith does is part of his desire to try to give back or pay forward to the industry in the way that the industry and writers before Smith have given so much to him ·         One of the biggest myths from indie publishing, regarding indie writers not being able to get their indie published books into bookstores and the “fairy dust” that has long been spread regarding that ·         How Smith isn't anti-traditional but is 100% pro smart-writer   Other Links Dean Wesley Smith's Books at Kobo WMG Publishing Workshops WMG Publishing Lectures Fiction River Anthologies (website) Fiction River Anthologies (Kobo)        

KWL Director Mark Lefebvre interviews Kristine Kathryn Rusch, an award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, mystery and romance, at Superstars Writing Seminars. Apart from her decades of writing and editing experience which includes being published in 14 different countries in 13 languages, Rusch co-runs a publishing business (WMG Publishing) with her partner Dean Wesley Smith and provides authors invaluable insights about writing and publishing through her popular blog series: The Business Rusch. During the conversation, Mark and Kris talk about: ·         Her recent book, Discoverability and how it was derived from about 6 months' worth of blog posts outlining a bit about the history of publishing and how it relates to where we are today ·         A disclaimer that, unless you've already published about 10 books, you aren't likely to be able to use the advice from this book ·         The Business Rusch, the blog in which Rusch provides valuable insights that many smart writers ensure they read every week ·         Rusch has been a professional writer since she was sixteen years old and wrote an article for the local newspaper (insert appropriate and in-appropriate age jokes and laughing here) ·         How Rusch and author Kevin J. Anderson met while in college as like-minded writers with similar goals and how that social group expanded into relationships they've both had with writer friends ever since ·         How much Rusch gives back to the writing community and why she feels it's important to pay it forward to other writers the way that she was provided help, insights and support from writers who took the time to help her ·         The selfish reason why Rusch gives back – because she's an avid reader and wants more great books to read ·         The biggest pitfall that writers fall into – that they don't know enough about the business of writing ·         The reason why Rusch stopped editing full-time – how living in that critical space can affect your writing style and writing brain ·         The concept of “reader cookies” – a term that Rusch learned from editor Gardner Dozois – as well as “anti-cookies” and how that can affect an editor ·         Rusch's love of “secret identity” stories ·         The various different pseudonyms that Rusch has written under in various styles and genres, including Kristine Grayson, Kris Nelscott, and Kristine Dexter. ·         How Rusch puts up a free short story on her blog every Monday that people can check out with no strings attached. ·         Rusch's statement of advice to beginning writers        Mark then talks a bit more about the books for writers that Rusch has written and shares a personal experience about how reading the book Deal Breakers helped him in a very significant way when he was negotating a contract for one of his most recent books, Tomes of Terror.   LINKS Rusch's book: Discoverability Rusch's book: Deal Breakers: Contract Terms Writers Should Avoid The Business Rusch    

Mark Lefebvre, KWL Director, interviews Melissa Yuan-Innes, author of the hot-selling Hope Sze Medical Mystery series about...     Melissa's role as an emergency physician and the role this plays in helping develop her fiction and the character of Hope Sze Melissa's latest book, TERMINALLY ILL which is coming out February 1, 2014 (and is available for pre-order) How the beloved yet frustrating city of Montreal is a prominent feature in her fiction How Melissa manages to find time to write on top of her demanding day job (10 to 14 hour shifts) and her family life. Melissa's “secret weapon” otherwise known as her husband The many pseudonyms Melissa uses for the different style of fiction that she writes (sci-fi/fantasy and non-fiction medical humour fiction) under Melissa Yuan-Innes, medical thrillers and mysteries written under Melissa Yi, medical romance written under Melissa Yin, children's books under Melissa Yuan and the reasons behind that (and how it has changed since Melissa first started) The unpredictability and wonderful escape factor as something that drew Melissa to science fiction Melissa won second place in the Writers of the Future when she was in medical school The importance and value of professional workshops, including the long term friendships that were forged at Writers of the Future, and the reason why Melissa has returned to Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's professional workshops for over a decade Some early mistakes that Melissa made when she first started writing and sending submissions to editors (and great tips she learned from Kristine at the pro workshops) Some of the similarities and differences in the electronic age of writing and submitting and writing and publishing Melissa's amazing experience winning Kobo Writing Life's Win your Cover contest (featuring the talented and dedicated cover designer Scarlett Rugers Melissa's traditionally published short story “Burning Beauty” which appears in the anthology Tesseracts Sixteen: Parnassus Unbound, and how writing short fiction can be a refreshing change from writing novel length works, and still be a way of getting a lot of your material in front of a diverse and broad reading audience The CBC commissioned story written under Melissa Yi - No Air Melissa's yoga mystery story being published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and how Dean Wesley Smith calls being published in a market like that being one of the best advertising tools for a writer Melissa's dark humour December 2013 release:  The Italian School for Assassins and the role that humour and dark humour plays in her life and in her writing. Melissa's advice to writers regarding persistence and humour   Mark Lefebvre then talks about the difference between trying to find time to write and making time to write, outlining a few strategies that authors who work day jobs sometimes employ when carving out time in their busy schedules to make time for writing.    

Camille Mofidi, European Manager for Kobo Writing Life interviewed three authors that Kobo sponsored for the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair Author Walk of Fame:  Emily Bold, Kristie Cook and Hugh Howey. This is the third in the series of three interviews and features international bestselling author Hugh Howey.  In the interview, Camille and Hugh discuss: Hugh's start into writing, the multi-faceted journey his life took, including being a ship's captain How Hugh was working as a bookseller when he started on the path of writing a book, publishing it, and then moving on to the next project writing the next book Hugh's perspective on the importance of joining a writing group; in particular the group he joined (the High Country Writers) The critical role that revisions of that first draft play for a writer, whether you are self-publishing or want to send it to an agent or publisher The role being a bookseller played in helping to inform Hugh about the realities of the publishing industry Hugh's belief that we should celebrate the fact that there are so many people out there able and willing to express themselves through literature like they do all other art forms How Europe, often seen to be lagging behind the North American trends is, in Hugh's opinion, actually progressing quite a bit more quickly than the U.S. in terms of accepting self-publishing The meetups that Hugh participates in when he is traveling, as a way to connect directly with readers How Hugh uses social media to make himself available and to interact with his readers and friends How Kobo Writing Life has been a major avenue to international readers for Hugh's eBooks How Hugh sees the KWL interface as the cleanest and most user-friendly platform, presenting data in an interesting format, and how he tells the other platforms they should be copying what Kobo is doing Hugh's 7 week tour through Europe promoting the book, and his embrace of a hybrid approach (Hugh sold the print only rights to WOOL to Simon & Schuster) The incredible innovation that several of Hugh's publishers have demonstrated in promoting WOOL   Mark Lefebvre, Director of Kobo Writing Life, discusses a point that Hugh makes in the interview regarding patience and the strategy of continuing to work on your next book (rather than focusing all your time and attention worrying about your already published title or titles) -- he also references a recent blog post by Dean Wesley Smith entitled "The New World of Publishing: Some Perspectives of 2013" in which Smith notes the importance of building a career over decades rather than giving up after a few books and very little sales (or, as the case used to be with publishing, quitting after 50 rejections)     Other Links: Hugh's website Hugh's books at Kobo The WOOL trilogy (WOOL, SHIFT & DUST)  

Adel arrived at a hospice, and seemed to be like any ordinary patient, but she endlessly tried to flee, and constantly muttered in German about needing to verwandeln.  What could she mean?Also, Big talks a bit about Dean Wesley Smith's "Killing The Sacred Cows Of Publishing," and Rish argues with him about them.  Then, they play a round of "Two Truths & A Lie," with a book by Kevin David Anderson hanging in the balance.Warning: Some of Rish Outfield's statements in this episode are even more (deliberately?) incendiary than usual.  Listen with a grain of salt handy.Special thanks to Lizanne Herd for producing and narrating today's story, and to Julie Hoverson for lending her voice.

We're going to wade into a recent e-brouhaha, but it's not going to be the Amazon vs Macmillan one. No, this is the one where Dean Wesley Smith argued that authors do not need agents. But you don't need to read that to appreciate this 'cast. So... do you need an agent? This depends on the operating definition of "you" and "agent." What kind of contractual experience do you have? What kinds of things will your agent do for you? And if you decide you do need an agent, how do you go about identifying the agent who is right for you? We'll cover all of this and more! Unrelated to agents (but definitely in the "and more" category): Howard reveals deeply personal information in this podcast! Audiobook Plug: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner Writing Prompt: Write a story in which a bestselling recluse author dies, and his agent scrambles to keep the career alive without telling anybody. Skin in the game, baby! This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.