Podcasts about ingramspark

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2026 47:42

Kate Lord Brown is a bestselling historical fiction author. She was a finalist in ITV's 'The People's Author Contest', has been shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year, and is read all over the world. Her books travel fantastically well, that could be because she has travelled far and wide too. She worked as an art consultant across Europe, and was part of the first book club in the Middle East for 2 years. 'The Golden Hour', 'The House of Dreams', 'The Perfume Garden', and many more, have all been loved by readers. Her new one is 'The Silver Thread', it's a globetrotting and history-travelling story.Here's the blurb...London, 1875. Bel has secured a design job at the newly opened Liberty store, where Japonisme is all the rage. When Hiro, a fellow designer, travels with her to Tokyo to source silks and inspiration, little does she know it will be the start of an unforgettable love story. Paris, 1985. Mira, a recently qualified art curator, is hired to catalogue the contents of an apartment which has been closed for decades. As she works through the treasures it reveals, she longs to discover whathappened to famed designer Isobel Bright – and why her apartment has been locked for so many years. . .We discuss writing out of order, how she steers clear of blind alleys and has learned what her characters want, and why its so easy to get lost in research.You can hear about Kate's civilised writing routine, about the online writing club that's changed everything, and how she deals with the battle between historical fact and fiction.Get a copy of the book at uk.bookshop.com/shop/writersroutineRead the newsletter at writersroutine.substack.comThis week's episode is sponsored by IngramSpark, get 15% off your first 15 books with the code ROUTINE15 at ingramspark.comSupport the show - patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutine@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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AI Just Hit More Publishing Platforms | Self-Publishing News (May 28, 2026)

The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2026 13:27

AI tools are showing up across more self-publishing platforms, and authors need to know what is changing. In this Self-Publishing News update, we cover new AI tools from IngramSpark, Laterpress, and Spoken, along with audiobook updates from Audible and Voices by INAudio. We also look at Bookvault pricing changes, author events, and a quick mid-year survey from Written Word Media. Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) ACX: Audible's New Royalty Model - https://help.acx.com/s/article/audible-s-new-royalty-model IngramSpark Assist FAQs (Metadata Assistant) - https://help.ingramspark.com/hc/en-us/articles/41627826665997-IngramSpark-Assist-FAQs-Metadata-Assistant Bookvault - https://bookvault.app Use BVDALE to waive three upload fees Bookvault: Quote Tool - https://quote.bookvault.app/ Laterpress - https://Laterpress.com Voices by INAudio - https://www.voicesbyinaudio.com/ Spoken: Spoken Studio V2 — Magic Mode & Turnkey Full-Cast Audiobook Creation - https://www.spoken.press/the-spoken-chronicle/spoken-studio-v2-magic-mode-amp-turnkey-full-cast-audiobook-creation Rapid-Fire Newsflash Apple Books for Authors - https://authors.apple.com AppSumo: DepositPhotos Deal - https://DaleLinks.com/DepositPhotos (affiliate link) Cooling Tiger Media Podcast w/ W.A. Blinko - https://open.spotify.com/show/4HNUrH8YLI8VpMiof0c4zY?si=0c4dffce16e34f6e&nd=1&dlsi=ac35936844ea4d3d Contact Wayne at info@wayneblinko.com Self-Publishing Made Simple w/ April Cox: The 5 Biggest Mistakes First-Time Authors Make (And How to Avoid Them) - https://selfpubmadesimple.com/why-authors-dont-publish Twin Flames Studios: Pitching Your Book for Film & TV - https://twinflamesstudios.com/pitching-book-film-tv?partnerid=r1249 (affiliate link) Written Word Media Podcast: How Authors Are Winning On YouTube Right Now - https://youtu.be/qJu6uK-Dy2A?si=mKsbjapgX9y0KJfe Written Word Media Mid-Year Survey - https://writtenwordmedia.typeform.com/to/CCvrkXxE Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

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Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams

Play Episode Listen Later May 25, 2026 62:44

How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed. In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi]. 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 Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. 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 ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at contentforeveryone.substack.com Transcript of the interview with Jeff Adams Jo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff. Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back. Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now. Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment. Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point. In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too. Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction. Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time? Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too. Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book? Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey. But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about— How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad? Does that make more space for writing, essentially? Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job. Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone. As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do. It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it. Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction. So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing? Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work. To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be. Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show. Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it. Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again? Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that. Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does. Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff? So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet. Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again. I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic. Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition. What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care? Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it. Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is. If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor. Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera. For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts. Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan. This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front. I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about. I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so that they don't miss people. I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years. Jo: I mean, has it got better? Like we said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around EPUB formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites—labelling images, for example, and that kind of thing. Do you think accessibility has gotten better? Jeff: I think the awareness of it has improved, both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better. There's so much knowledge that needs to go into creating something that is accessible. Sometimes there's so much that you have to think about with colours and alt tags on images and all the little bits and pieces, if it doesn't really come to muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off. There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top one million homepages out in the universe, and they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility, and the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year. Even though there's all these laws around the world—people get sued all the time in the US—the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years. So I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be. Jo: So last time you gave us all those tips. I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in. I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork—now I use Claude Code a lot more—but updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is an absolute nightmare. I was watching the AI do the work and I realised this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. That's when I thought about this accessibility thing. As you mentioned, for example being physically accessible into a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp. I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers because there's a lot of plumbing and clicking for us. So I wondered, starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to— How is AI starting to help people with these accessibility issues? Jeff: Yes, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on 14th April 2026, because who knows what will change, even in an hour from now. I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw, and that's only been out since the very top of this year. Being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up. You mentioned the repetitive stress that you would've had clicking all of those forms on IngramSpark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form. The cognitive energy just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that, or the tasks take them multiple days to do. Someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader—all of that draws energy, draws focus. Now we've got something where, with plain language, we could say something like: here's all my pricing information, I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it. Jo: Hmm. Jeff: And being able to have it go through and do the thing. If it gets stuck, have it come back and say, “Hey, I've got trouble with this. Please help me.” That can just free up so much of the drains that people can have—the things that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business. They can go write the book through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on IngramSpark. Jo: You mentioned writing the book there. I have this real sense of being an able-bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book, a 70,000-word thriller that I write regularly. We're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. It's hard work, but I can do it. I meet people who are now using AI to help them write, to help them organise their work—maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain—there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me. I hear from people who, at this point in time in the community, are almost shamed for using AI to write. So I wanted to bring this up to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. Do you have any thoughts on that? Jeff: I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of, “I don't need to use this thing, and therefore you should not either.” Which is adjacent to indie anti-AI speak that there is out there. Certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been, where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is. I totally respect that people can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera. Not to mention all the other things that are on the more difficult side of AI. To shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business—updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that—I think it can come down to there being some ableism there. Ther is some privilege behind that too, where they're just like, “I don't need this, and you shouldn't have it either.” I want to give people just a sliver of an idea of what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer, and very recently she posted this on LinkedIn. This is a paraphrase of what she said, but: having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI. Here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's the bit that gets lost. We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong—even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. I think that rounds it up. She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of AI when we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it. We may not know that they have a disability because we don't always share that part of ourselves. So I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame. Jo: Yes. It drives me up the wall, actually. But I will also say: you don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally decide is okay—talking to the listeners now. I think Orna Ross from the Alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you, and what you want help with. I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. Again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human-level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. So again, this makes it more accessible. One of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing. So, yes, it is really hard to talk about this, and yet that's why I wanted to talk about it, because— There's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same, really, is there? Jeff: No, not at all. The things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work, is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work. Which is why any kind of blanket statement about “I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either” can just be so problematic, because we have no idea what someone else is going through. Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools. Jo: Yes. Talking about that temporary, I think I really got the first sense of this when I had COVID the first time, which was really bad. I remember I was so sick, the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook. I couldn't think, I couldn't read. It was really probably months of not having my brain back. Then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, is menopause kicks in and the brain fog is a real thing. I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever, an AI tool, to help with the brain fog is so important because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. Again, as you said— Even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point, given ageing, given the potential for injury and disease. I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we? Jeff: Yes, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point. I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired after being in front of a screen all day for work, and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book—when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, much more audio, especially for any long reading project. That can also be like, if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to ElevenReader, let it load itself up, and then listen to it, because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen. Jo: Yes. Jonathan, my husband, now also listens to a lot of academic papers on ElevenReader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from ElevenLabs, or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think about what we can do with ElevenReader. Another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. On NotebookLM, there is a free tier. You can put various things in there and then create a custom audio. So this is something I've been doing as part of research. You can put in, say, 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever, and then you can create a custom audio. Then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio, and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was. It gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level, and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess. Jeff: And it's all about the managing of the energy, I think, too. That is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all. You mentioned a great use there for NotebookLM. That could also be putting your book in there and having it help you build a world bible or something like that. Or building marketing materials off of that. There's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of helping you create FAQs maybe for a newsletter or for your website, and building video stuff off of the material that it has. So there's a lot of options there, and ever-growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business. Jo: Yes. In fact, talking about Claude, there are a lot of Claude plugins now, skills and integrations. Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores. I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations and the metadata. There's so much metadata. And again, I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify. In fact, coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update—the back list of your alt tags on a website. I've now got my Cowork doing EPUBs so I could finally update all my EPUBs with back matter and all of this kind of thing. So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification. All the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered, or it would just be way too much work, that now it's opened up as a possibility because of these tools. Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before. One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will. I'm really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared, with all the metadata and all the backend code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books, branch out to the other areas that it needs to. Doing that through WordPress would've been so much more difficult, even with Claude, that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis. Whatever that thing is, we're now able to do these things. That could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that, that Claude can do and do well. Jo: Yes, I think marketing is just the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing. I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through Cowork or Code, but— ChatGPT with marketing copy is very, very good. So I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing. This is stuff when you have to produce—give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean, we just cannot do it as humans, right? Jeff: Yes, I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get Bargain Booksy and Fussy Librarian promos. Jo: Mm. Jeff: And you have to give it the marketing hook, and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon—it's got to be something fresh, and they each have slightly different requirements. Having GPT—here's the blurb, give me a dozen different options—and then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing I want to give to Bargain Booksy. Jo: Yes, you are right. Or it says write this in 300 characters or less. Jeff: Yes. Jo: I do exactly the same. That kind of transformative work can be really good. In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti-AI for years and then said, “Would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent, so I've got this 100,000-word book and it needs to be a 10-page synopsis. How would I do that with AI?” So I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarise the chapter, and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis once you've actually written a book—that can be super useful. So I think what we're saying is— There are levels of need in terms of both the author and the audience. Then there are levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every area of the business. And in that way, it's just different for everyone. Jeff: Yes, and I think getting to that mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit—it can be so easy to dip your toes in. That one author came to you and said, “Do you think it could do this?” And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone. People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about. But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, “I'm an author, I have X, Y, Z going on in my life”—whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention—”I have these time constraints, I want to do X, Y, and Z in my business. How can you help me with that?” It's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that. I would even say, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude, and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well. That can help you make that mindset shift of, “Well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this?” And then ask it if it could do that. Because I know for me, Jo, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that it's like, “Oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this.” And all of that piles on top of itself. Then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, “Oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.” Jo: Yes, and if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow. Jeff: Right? Because I haven't tested yet its new ability to actually use your computer. Jo: Mm. Jeff: And I'm curious what that might open up. Because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the EPUB that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to. Cowork on its own hasn't been able to cross that barrier, but I wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Like, “here's the EPUB, upload that over there,” be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially. Jo: Yes. I think, well, a little tip for everyone: I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the AI. Jeff: That's a good point too. Jo: Yes. I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there. So if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to help me publish things in German on KDP. Now I can use the browser, so you can actually do that. In terms of uploading the actual file, I know what you mean. These things will change. As we record this, again middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be Claude 4.7 Opus, or also ChatGPT has a new model coming, and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things. So as you say, the very first thing to do is ask it, “I want to do this—what are my options?” And some of them, for example, doing an AI-narrated audiobook, ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want ElevenLabs or one of the other services for that, but they can tell you what your options are. So that's one thing, but I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you are seeing. You mentioned one there around file uploads, but— What do you hope might come and some of the things that might be exciting if they arrive? Because you never know, they might be here already. Jeff: There's certainly some movement in some areas. One of the things I'll share is, in March I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference—CSUN is California State University, Northridge—and they've run this conference for some 40 years now. One of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel—I hope I'm pronouncing her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon, and she was doing a session specifically on readability. She had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable. One of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalised reading. If you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there—font size, colours, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there. She was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimised visual reading experience. She sees a world where AI can perhaps do an analysis of your reading behaviour and then help you find the optimal settings. Maybe even multiple optimal settings for, say, if you were reading in a room that had daylight versus at bedtime, and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, “Which lens is better—this one or that one?” Jo: Oh, sometimes that is very hard. Jeff: Yes. It's that AI could step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading experience in that moment. And then it might even notice, potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page, that it might flag to say, “Hey, do we need to adjust something?” Some other areas that I think are really exciting, for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers. OpenAI's Operator has been out for quite a while now, since sometime I think autumn of last year. Perplexity Comet has been around even longer. Then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available, that can let you just type natural language. You know, “Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site and this size,” and it'll just go do it. Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less, and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and saying, “I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you?” Or, “I found this one thing that you do need and it's waiting for you in your shopping cart.” The ability for that on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone because we can all just shop that way, if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions. The other side of it comes back to basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these types of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own. A great example is something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff. There were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button, because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there are gaps there. It's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities—but again, help everybody too, just manage time better. Jo: I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some collaborative work with Claude Code when it's like, “I can't click the button,” and I'm like, well, I'll click the button—you fill in everything else. Jeff: Exactly. Jo: It's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, coming back to IngramSpark again—these things need APIs. We need better functions. It's funny because I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change. Another thing that I think has also shifted is the use of voice. Voice for dictation—it used to be with dictation that you would have to say “comma,” “open quote,” “new line,” and all of that. And you'd also have to make sense. Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say, “Tidy that up,” and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help. Also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X, and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi-language. So I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English. I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. It has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic “everything is translated into your language” situation. It's really got me thinking about how [automatic translation] might work for eBooks or other things if the rights are there. I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that? Jeff: There's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it—comma, full stop, next line. It was a little mind-bending sometimes, trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability. Even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it. Chronic pain comes to mind, any kind of mobility thing—all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things. At the same time, those translation abilities—I believe AirPods now have the ability, if you've got the right stuff on your phone, that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in your language. Jo: Hmm. Jeff: Google has, I believe, a live captioning app that you can use. I think there's even a split screen—I don't know if that's available now or something in their future—where you could put the phone on the table and tell it who's looking at what side of the screen, and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other. So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people. I'm very interested to see—I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet—but how Amazon's auto-translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak—I think it's only English to other languages right now—but who doesn't speak the language it was written in but wants to read that book. We could never, as indies, or really even big five publishers, wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a win for the reading audience. Jo: Yes, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming, and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else, but for me I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps both the author and the reader. And hopefully the community, to create more and read more and enjoy being human more. Right? Because I find that I do get out more and listen to stuff, or I'm out walking instead of at my desk, and I mean, that's what it's about. I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you? Jeff: I am. I think there are, quite honestly, some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of. But on the other side of it, there are all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science. There's more of that stuff out there, and individually for each of us, spending a little bit of time—and I do have to say, I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of. So if you only drop in, even briefly, to experiment on one of the $20-a-month plans and give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where, on a personal level, AI will help you unlock some things. It can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do. You don't have to use it for everything. You may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jeff: So pretty much everything lives at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jeff. That was great. Jeff: I loved it, Jo. Thanks for having me..The post Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

covid-19 amazon community ai english google voice books french travel german chatgpt code adhd economics seo kickstarter alliance korean substack ebooks kindle chronic gemini openai wordpress accessibility shopify gpt operator airpods faqs mythos apis friction california state university opus geo pdfs epub new tools deepmind drm tidy ther northridge notebooklm opening doors royal blue elevenlabs indie authors kdp alphafold cowork bookbub ingramspark independent authors draft2digital jeff adams creative penn rachel reid jeff it jacob tierney jeff you orna ross jeff no webaim epubs jeff so jeff there jeff thanks jeff yes jeff right fussy librarian

Lucy Ashe, author of 'The Model Patient' - Historical Thriller writer discusses finding control, why a book deal changes things, and unpacking therapy

therapy writer model patients acast unpacking historical thriller daley ashe book deals royal ballet ingramspark

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2026 60:07

This week, we're chatting to Lucy Ashe. Lucy trained at the Royal Ballet school, and now works as a teacher in Brooklyn, whilst writing brilliant books. Her debut, 'Clara and Olivia', was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award. Her follow up, 'The Sleeping Beauties', was also set in the world of ballet. The new novel is 'The Model Patient'. Set in 1960s London, it explores obsession and betrayal. In the quiet hush of her therapists office, Evelyn Westbrook finds herself revealing secrets she'd prefer to stay hidden. When her sessions with the enigmatic Dr. Daley starts to give more questions than answers, she finds her interest in him turn into an obsession. It was inspired by Lucy's own traumatic relationship with a therapist, and it helped her find some control in that strange situation.We talk about Lucy's writing life, after recently having her first child, and how that's changed how much time she thought she'd have to write. Also, hear how a book deal changes how you write... does it add confidence or pressure? And, how it's a slight diversion from her normal historical fiction book - she's found the psychological thriller in this one.Get a copy of the book at uk.bookshop.org/shop/writersroutineThis week's episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Get 15% off your first 15 books when you use the code ROUTINE15 at ingramspark.comAlso, this week we're supported by the Quick Book Reviews podcast with Philippa Hall. Take a listen wherever you've got this show.Support us at patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutine@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Father of Sword and Soul

Imaginary Worlds

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2026 37:32

Charles R. Saunders loved Tarzan as a kid, but he was also repulsed by the racism in those books since Charles was Black. So he created a counter narrative about a warrior named Imaro who lived in a fictionalized version of precolonial Africa. Charles had invented a new subgenre of sword and sorcery that he called sword and soul. His books were groundbreaking in the 1980s, but he was also way ahead of his time. I talk with Milton Davis, Sheree Renée Thomas and Troy Wiggins about a movement among Black fantasy writers today to reclaim Charles and his work. I also talk with journalist Jon Tattrie, who wrote a biography about Charles called To Leave a Warrior Behind. This episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Get 15% off your first order of 15 more books at IngramSpark using the code IMAGINARY15. This offer expires at the end of the year. To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

black father soul africa sword tarzan ingramspark to leave sheree ren milton davis charles r saunders

SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor

The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2026 67:21

How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor. In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market's Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking You can find James at JamesTaylor.me. Transcript of the interview with James Taylor Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James. James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today. Jo: It's going to be really good. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue. Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence. Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me. Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore. Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue. James: Yes. Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things. Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative. How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way? James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books. The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs. If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future. So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm. As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands. So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential. Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence. So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence. For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well. I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI. Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already? Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative. So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative. James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end. Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things. For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways. The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process. The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about. The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage. Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage. This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different. Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing. Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work. Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process. The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage. Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page. It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth. Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.” So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity. Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need. As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried. Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult? I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle— Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things. James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects. The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something. That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play. One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract. Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures. Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions. That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play. The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world. I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable. I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting. For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world. The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do. Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see. Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things. The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book? For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model. I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books. Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first. I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration. So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans. James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings. That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas. We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor. There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different. A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love. Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better. For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors. When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form. The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.” So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”? Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude. James: Yes, yes. Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase. I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that. What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful? As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited. James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today. I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal. Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher. One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader. This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was. So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics. I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to. This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back. So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader. I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew. Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head. Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians. The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years. A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best. So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent. Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book. So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be? What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier. Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?” Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things. Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done. Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved. I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me. It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.” So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work. I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.” For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them. You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers. Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book. Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book. That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together. Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft. Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers. I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing. So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that. James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well. So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into. I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team. I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do? That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign. So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent. There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time. One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made. This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there. So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves. Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important. I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change. But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files. James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense. The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book. So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece. Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales. Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries. There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry. So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience. As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.” That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions. That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors. Jo: No, I think that's great. For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models. Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well? James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book. I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.” I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time. It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content. Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences. For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay— How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do? James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company. They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling. So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience? An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers. See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well. I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers. I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.” So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn. Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development. If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers. Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.” Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year. Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit. I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence. So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers. Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was. James: Yes. Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there— If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them. It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think. James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone. Jo: Mm. James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model. There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well. I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city. He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range. I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing. He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom. He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life. Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing. We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug? Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking? James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking. I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that. In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't. I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work. The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity. My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience. It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see. Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well. If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant. James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

america new york amazon california community ai australia uk france french san francisco innovation german market focus jobs chatgpt artificial intelligence silicon valley thailand ps rolling stones new yorker audible mood buddhist psa introverts openai hungary warren buffett dignity public speaking world economic forum creatives persuasion nsa opus james taylor elizabeth gilbert charlie munger julia cameron national speakers association kobo in english elevenlabs wozniak mp3s fiction books cowork sally hogshead ingramspark acx keynote speaking kindlepreneur creative penn deacon blue professional speakers association nsaa kobo writing life james it james yes james so james well james thank

Jade's story - pregnant with HG and breastfeeding

amazon pov publication ingramspark

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2026 52:19 Transcription Available

Sometimes, our plans for feeding don't work out. That's what happened to my guest this week, Jade Feeney from north west London. Jade had hoped to tandem feed, but ended up weaning her eldest daughter during pregnancy due to hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). She shares a “dream” first breastfeeding experience with her eldest, later identifying cow's milk protein intolerance when weaning solids, but when she conceived again when her daughter was 18 months and developed severe HG, she required escalating anti-sickness medication, GP and triage support and months off work. She stopped feeding at around 22 weeks pregnant, after intense breastfeeding aversion, using a gradual countdown/tapering approach, and discusses the grief she felt alongside a feeling of relief. After an emergency caesarean, breastfeeding her younger daughter began well. Now 17‑months‑old, her youngest feeds very frequently, including overnight feeds and co-sleeping, and Jade has no plans to wean at present. My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com Resources mentionedPregnancy Sickness Support | UK Charity https://pregnancysicknesssupport.org.uk/PANDAS Foundation UK https://pandasfoundation.org.uk/This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

amazon children uk story pregnant gp breastfeeding bookshop hg ingramspark muswell hill jessica kingsley emily crosby media

Episode 226: BTS: My Publication Journey for My Latest Novel

Overflowing Bookshelves

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2026 30:52

In this episode of the Thriving Authors Podcast, I'm giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the timeline of drafting, editing and submitting (and editing and submitting again) that led to finally getting a publication deal for my novel BEFORE & AFTER YOU & ME.It was quite a long journey filled with ups and downs to get there! And I think it's really important to hear the real stories behind others' success. In fact, many times books aren't published in the order in which the writer wrote them (which has certainly been true for me!)In this episode you'll hear:What inspired the idea for this story over 12 years ago.How I played around with the structure, setting and POV.Ways I took feedback to make my book better while staying true to myself and my vision for the book.What I feared would happen if I made any big changes to the book.The discouragement after making it to an acquisitions meeting at a big publisher but not getting an offer… and how I was able to learn from that experience and later get a publication deal with my wonderful publisher Owl Hollow Press.The process of working with amazing editors to get the book to the next level, which helped me grow so much as a writer.So even if it's a long journey to get YOUR book out into the world, who knows what's around the next corner. Just keep moving forward, find that next stepping stone and don't give up on yourself. You never know what opportunities and excitement are waiting for you!BEFORE & AFTER YOU & ME recently turned two!!! I am still so thrilled and honored that it won the 2024 Indies Today Book Award for Best Teen Contemporary, and am eternally grateful to the team at Owl Hollow Press for bringing the best version of my book to life, and to everyone who has supported and spread the word about this story I poured my heart into for twelve years.P.S. If you decide you want to take the reins (and timeline) into your own hands and self-publish your book — but you don't want to worry about getting all the moving pieces coordinated and getting your book up on Amazon and Ingram Spark — you're in luck. I have a Book Publishing Package where I can handle that all for you, in addition to editing and cover/interior design. Just reach out!

Deepa Anappara, author of 'The Last of Earth' - Multi-award-winner discusses dealing with success, writing by hand, and keeping track of characters

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2026 59:41

Deepa Anappara's debut, 'Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line' was a critically-acclaimed bestseller. It was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian and National Public Radio. Time Magazine included it in its list of 'The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time'. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was shortlised for the JCB Prize fo Indian Literature, and has been translated into over 20 languages.Her new one looks set to be an equal smash. 'The Last of Earth', has already been named as one of the BBC's 12 books to read in 2026. It tells the story of an Indian school teacher and a British explorer, attempting to undertake a treacherous journey across Tibet.We discuss why writing by hand helps Deepa unlock an unknown connection. Also, how she wrestles themes and ideas into one plot-driven thread. You can hear her fascination with Tibet, keeping characters on the right path, and her thoughts on AI coming for creativity.This episode is supported by IngramSpark. Get 15% off 15 books or more at ingramspark.com, use the code ROUTINE15.Get a copy of the book at uk.bookshop.com/shop/writersroutineSupport the show -patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutinewritersroutine.com@writerspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

success ai earth british new york times writing bbc indian washington post guardian acast characters time magazine tibet award winners national public radio deepa edgar award keeping track best novel ingramspark multi award purple line best mystery indian literature thriller books

Jessica's story - a breastfeeding police officer

Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2026 52:50 Transcription Available

This week, I'm speaking to the brilliant Jessica, a police officer in Stirling, Scotland, about combining breastfeeding with police work and shift patterns. Jessica shares life with her two daughters, Nora (nearly 10) and Harriet (nearly 2), describing responsive breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and how Harriet settles well for her father and grandmother when Jessica works rotating day shifts and back shifts finishing at 1am. They discuss Jessica's earlier breastfeeding experience with Nora, which ended after a hospital admission and antibiotic treatment, and contrast it with Harriet's birth, a home water birth followed by NICU admission for suspected infection. Jessica describes later tongue-tie issues resolved privately, returning to full-time frontline policing at 14 months without pumping, and reflects on managing risk, trauma, and the value of taking feeding and work transitions step by step. My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

amazon children uk story scotland police officers breastfeeding nicu bookshop stirling ingramspark muswell hill jessica kingsley emily crosby media

ACX Royalty Changes Are Here | Self-Publishing News (May 8, 2026)

Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2026 12:16

Audible is rolling out a new ACX royalty model, and indie authors need to understand what's changing. We'll cover the new audiobook royalty rates, concerns around pooled payouts, Spotify for Authors distribution terms, IngramSpark metadata research, AI audiobook tools, and author scams. Stay informed before you make your next publishing move. Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) Audible's New Royalty Model Screws Authors - https://open.substack.com/pub/selfpub/p/audiblegate2?r=1nx44v&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true ACX: Audible's New Royalty Model - https://help.acx.com/s/article/audible-s-new-royalty-model Spotify for Authors Opt-In Audiobook Distribution Terms - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/spotify-for-authors-opt-in-distribution-terms/ IngramSpark: Study Finds Improved Metadata Could Boost Sales by Up to 9%* - https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/study-finds-improved-metadata-could-boost-sales-by-up-to-9-percent Rapid-Fire Newsflash Apple Books for Authors - https://authors.apple.com Spoken - https://spoken.press Spoken: Become a Producer - https://www.spoken.press/producers GeniusLink - https://DaleLinks.com/Genius (affiliate link) StoryVox (beta) - https://storyvox.app/ D2D's Self-Publishing Insiders: Scammers are Coming for You! - https://www.youtube.com/live/2EPOnKdNNDY?si=VLm5hPmpPA1httTl This Scam Could Cost Authors Real Money - https://youtu.be/pEbnC9PRGgw?si=RUNcHKkoekTMvgf- Electric Lit: Author AI Scams Bingo - https://electricliterature.com/author-ai-scams-bingo/ Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

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Liz Alterman, author of 'A Different Type of Poison' - Thriller writer discusses embracing the meta, always having a listen, and changing how you write depending on how it's read

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Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2026 62:10

Liz Alterman has written all sorts. Young adult fiction, uplit, memoir, and is back with a new psychological, campus thriller, 'A Different Type of Poison'. It's about the author Molly Archer, whose latest novel, 'Birds at Night', is an instant hit. She's invited to a book club, by an incredibly enthusiastic reader who she should remember from her hometown. The problem is, she can't place her... and might be stepping into a very deadly chapter.Liz has also published, 'You Shouldn't Have Done That', 'Claire Casey's Had Enough', 'The House on Cold Creek Lane', 'He'll Be Waiting', 'The Perfect Neighbourhood', and 'Sad Sacked'.We discuss why, after moving through genres, it's psychological thriller that has drawn her in. Also, why stories are written differently, depending on where they're read, why the most vital writing skill is listening, and about her new-found lease of writing life.This week's episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Get 15% off your first 15 books or more at ingramspark.com. Use the code ROUTINE15Get a copy of the book - uk.bookshop.com/shop/writersroutineSupport the show -patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutine@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon

The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2026 68:31

How is the German market different to English speaking markets, and why might it be worth looking into translation? What are the best ways to translate, self-publish and market your books in German? With Skye MacKinnon. In the intro, thoughts on feeling empty after a book, and the benefits of SubStack for authors [Stark Reflections; Wish I'd Known Then]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars 16 and 23 May. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. 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 the German-speaking market is much bigger than just Germany, and which genres sell best there Title protection laws, the Impressum, and translator copyright How to find and vet human translators, and what a quality translation actually costs The current state of AI translation for fiction, and why quality assurance passes are essential Distribution decisions: the Tolino Alliance, Skoobe, libraries, and why IngramSpark doesn't work in Germany Marketing in German: BookDeals, LovelyBooks, ads, BookTok, and why pre-orders matter even more You can find Skye SkyeMacKinnon.com and her children's books at IslaWynter.com. Transcript of the interview with Skye MacKinnon Jo: Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. Welcome, Skye. Skye: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Jo: This is such an interesting topic. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Skye: I've always loved writing, but I was always told, “Well, you can't be an author. Get a proper job.” So I became a journalist and did that for a few years, but there was always that love of creative writing. At some point when I was getting more active on social media, I was following some other indie authors and realised they're just like me. They're not special people. I had always pictured authors as these mythical beings high up above the rest of us. That gave me the courage to put out my own book. I self-published from the start, never even looked into trad publishing, and that was in 2017. I was really lucky because my first series totally hit it off. I was able to quit my job a year later and I have been a full-time author ever since. I started with romance and then, by accident, got into children's books. Which has been great fun. I don't even have children myself, but it's just that palette cleanser in between. Writing about cute animals and unicorns and just bringing some fun into everything. Nowadays I have about five or six pen names, depending on how you count, across genres, although most of it is romance, and that's my bread and butter really. Jo: Yes, I'm certainly one of those people who wish I could write romance. It always just seems to be the most profitable market in any language, I guess. Let's get into the book. It's a fantastic book. I've been through it myself. It's really packed full of everything you need, so we can't cover everything. Let's start by considering the German language in general. Why is German a good language market to consider expanding into? And for anyone who might not realise, why is it more than Germany? Skye: Well, Germans love to read, and depending on the statistic that you look at, they're generally seen as the third largest book market in the world after English and Mandarin Chinese. So it's a huge market, even though you think of Germany as a small little country in Europe. As you said, it's much more than Germany. Yes, you've got about 83 million people in Germany, but then you've also got Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and even Italy. So if you look at the whole footprint on the map, it is much bigger than just the one country. A lot of young people there still read and go to bookshops. There's a huge bookshop culture. You will find, if you go to a high street there, way more bookshops than you do here in the UK, for example. There's demand for quality and for really gorgeous books. They have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to special editions and sprayed edges, and they also like translations. I found one statistic where about two thirds of all newly released titles in German are actual translations. Readers are used to translations, but until a few years ago it was all trad-published translations. So this transition is coming now. It's coming very, very fast, especially with AI. They generally are very open to translations as long as the quality is there. Jo: So what about specific genres then? Obviously we mentioned romance there, and romance is not just one genre anymore. Whatever they're writing— How can somebody tell if it's worth expanding into German? How do we do this? It takes time and effort and money, potentially. Skye: It can take a lot of money, so it is worth doing research. There's one easy way, which is just looking at your current sales and looking at how many books you're selling in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the moment in English. That can give you an indication of which of your books might be already quite popular there. Sometimes it's quite surprising. A lot of my books sell very differently in German than they do in English. I've got one series that did okay in English, and I almost didn't translate it. The German version is, I think, my second bestselling series in German and has completely surprised me. So sometimes it's worth just experimenting a bit. Otherwise, obviously as you said, romance is doing really well. There are a few surprises though. I had a chat with Draft2Digital and they gave me lots of information from their statistics, and they said about 40% of all the western title sales on Draft2Digital are actually in Germany, which is just a huge percentage. Jo: In English? Skye: Across languages. Jo: Mm-hmm. Skye: Germans, to be fair, they love their westerns. My dad in Germany, he has been watching westerns for I don't know how many decades. It is one of those things that is just really popular there. Another thing is anything that is set in other countries and really has the location as almost like a character. There's lots of Cornwall, Scotland, different islands, but also mountains and cities. So if your book is set in, even in New York City, if it has a clear setting—if it's not just that it could be any city—then that's a good one to think about translating. In general, most genres can do well. There's a few where you have to be a bit careful. Second World War books, for example. If you have a book that portrays every single German as a Nazi and as evil, it might not do as well in Germany. So some common sense when it comes to historical books. Otherwise, just look at German retailers, look at what is selling there—and not just Amazon. Places like Thalia, which is part of the Tolino Alliance, and they have about 40% of the market. So it's really important to look at them too, and not just at Amazon. Jo: We'll come back to the distribution in a minute. There are some important differences between the German market and the US/UK market. Obviously we're talking about a different language, but of course there are a few things that are different that some people might not think about. So give us a few of those things that people definitely need to think about. Skye: Okay, so even before you start publishing, you need to be aware that title protection is a thing in Germany. Your book can't have the same title as an already published book. That is a law that is basically there to avoid readers being confused. So if you had five books with the same title, readers might not realise which book is by which author. You have to do your research and check if anyone else is using your title. There are some exceptions—if it's a completely different category, so if there's a children's book with that title but you write spicy romance, then the chance that the reader gets confused is much lower. Quite often you can then contact either the author or the publisher and ask, “Can I get written permission to use that title?” I did that for one of my series and it was totally fine. Just be sure to get it in writing, because if your book suddenly becomes a huge bestseller, they might reconsider. So title protection is an important one. You need to research that before you publish. One thing that people sometimes get confused about is reusing their English title. That's totally fine because it's your own title. So if your English title hasn't been used and you want to keep that same title, that works. It's just about other people's books where you can't use those titles. Another important legal bit is the Impressum. It's the copyright page. To be fair, websites that are targeting German readers or a German audience have to have that Impressum. It's usually on page two of the book, and it has things like your legal name, your address, and then the usual things like the translator's name, cover design, and other things you would usually put on a copyright page. The problem is that technically you need to put your legal name in there unless you have a limited company, in which case you can also put the business name there, and your address. A lot of people obviously don't want to do that for privacy reasons, especially romance authors where it's sometimes a bit sketchy when it comes to some readers who get a bit too obsessed. There are services where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee and then use their address. It's a bit of a legal grey zone, but a lot of German authors are doing it because—especially as indie authors—we don't always want to put our legal address out there. Jo: Just for people listening, I use my accountant's address. That's quite common. I mean, you have to share your address on your email for anti-spam laws and all that kind of thing. As you say, there are ways to use other addresses. That just needs to happen. What else then do we need to think about? Skye: There are things about the translator. A lot of things that people are sometimes scared about is when they hear that there is a copyright issue with translators and they think, “Oh, my translator has the copyright. I can't do anything.” Actually, the translator is seen as an author—almost like a co-author of the translation in German law—because, to be fair, it's not just putting one word into another. Translation is quite a creative job, especially when it's fiction. It is a very creative job where the translator has to put a lot of their own creativity into it. So in German law, they're recognised as the creator of that translation and therefore have certain rights. But you as the author, as soon as you have a contract with your translator—which is why you always, always, always have to have a contract—you get the usage rights. This means it's exactly the same as with your English books. You can do with them what you want. You can get audiobooks, you can do print books, you can do whatever you want in different formats. It just needs to be clear in a contract that the translator is giving you the usage rights of that translation. That's something that people sometimes find a bit scary, but actually it's really simple. Translations have been done for so long. It's a normal thing. It's just called slightly different. It has to be set out in a contract. Jo: Just on that, that's when the translator themselves is in Germany, because if they are based somewhere else, still doing a German translation, that's not necessary. So that's something else for people to consider. Skye: Yes, definitely. To be fair— I would always try to get a translator based in the country. I mean, I'm a native German speaker, but I've been in Scotland for so long now that I am not confident enough to translate my own books anymore because I'm not surrounded by German 24/7 and my grammar is slightly off and I don't have that up-to-date, modern lingo. So if it's a translator who's only just moved somewhere else or a few years, that's fine. But if it's someone who's been in the US or UK or somewhere else for 20 years, I would be a bit more hesitant. That's just a personal perspective on that. One other thing that's different is Sie and du. There are two different kinds of “you” when you talk to someone. There's the formal Sie, which you use basically amongst adults, in business contexts. But even my German grandma—she had a friend and they used the formal Sie for about 10 years as friends because in German etiquette, the older person has to offer the younger person the informal du, and they never did that for some reason. We found it hilarious as kids that they were still using the formal Sie as really good friends. So there's an entire culture there that people who haven't been to Germany or haven't lived there for a while just find a bit difficult, because there are so many different unwritten rules about when you use Sie and when you use the informal du. It's weakened a bit over the years and nowadays even strangers would sometimes use the informal du depending on the context. It really depends. A good translator will usually handle that themselves. They will find a scene where, for example, especially in romance, you meet as strangers in the beginning, so you use the formal Sie, and then at some point that formality turns to informality. The translator will usually choose that moment and add a little extra scene or a sentence where they either offer it to each other or they just naturally switch into it. But then there might be an internal little monologue of, “Oh, he just used the informal du—I guess we're at that stage,” or, “I really appreciate that.” Just to make it more natural, because that's something I quite often see with AI translation where that doesn't happen, and readers get confused. Why did they just switch from Sie to du without any kind of acknowledgement of that? Jo: This is the same in Spanish and other languages, I imagine. Skye: Yes, French as well. Italian too, I think. A lot of European languages have this. Jo: I think that's something that English speakers just don't get. It is a really interesting moment. I guess that might not happen so much in other genres—that really is a thing in romance. I was just thinking about some of my thrillers. They may never have time to get to du. Skye: But then sometimes using du can also be a rude thing. So if you have an antagonist who really doesn't like your protagonist, they might just use du as a rude sort of address. Again, that's something that English speakers just wouldn't understand or even think of because we just have the one “you.” Jo: We just have the one. Jo: It's the tone. Of course, it's the tone. Skye: Exactly, yes. Jo: Okay, well let's get into the actual translation of the books themselves. Over the years I've worked with lots of humans. I've also licensed my rights. I've used different AI tools. I mean, there are tons, but as we record this— What are the options that are available for translations? Give us some tips on working with humans and finding humans. Because it can be super pricey. And of course most of us will never know about the quality until we publish it. Skye: Oh, yes, definitely a note on that. I found that quite often you will already have German people on your newsletter list or on your social media, and most of them will be super happy to give you some feedback on your translation. That's something I've used a lot. Not for German, because I speak the language, but when I did French and Italian translations. My French is—well, it used to be quite okay. It is passable at best now. So I would never feel confident enough to rate a translation. So I asked my newsletter list, “Are there any French people here who would be happy to read the book? I'll send you a free copy at the end, and some swag.” There were a surprising number of people who got back to me. The same applies to German and other languages, because if you don't speak the language, you sometimes lack the confidence of knowing if this is any good. Getting some reader feedback is super helpful. For finding human translators, the easiest of course is word of mouth, and I'm a big fan of that because you get instant feedback on whether someone is good or not and whether it's easy to work with them. Then there are freelancer platforms. Reedsy is one where everyone is vetted, so that's pretty good. But there are tons of other ones like Upwork and Fiverr, though there you have to do all the vetting yourself, so that takes a lot more time and effort. There are also more and more agencies—translator agencies who specialise in doing indie book translations. There's Literary Queens, there's Valentine Translations, there are tons of them. Then there's also, which I think a lot of authors ignore or don't know about, translation databases. There are two databases for German translators, for example, where you can search and you can usually narrow it down to whether you want literary translators, what kind of fiction or nonfiction you want. An important thing is that a literary translator is very different from a standard translator who translates birth certificates or formal documents. You want someone who has experience with fiction if you write fiction. Someone who knows about adding drama through language. Sometimes, for example, when you have an action scene, you might have shorter sentences. If you have someone who doesn't know about stuff like that, they might just think, “Oh, in German it sounds really nice to have this really long sentence.” Those little nuances are where having an experienced literary translator is a big bonus. There are some platforms that do royalty-split translations that have been quite popular in the past. Most of them I wouldn't really recommend because you just don't get those professional translators there. You usually get people who speak the language but don't really have much experience. So you might end up with a pretty bad translation, or people might just be using AI translations without telling you. If you use a human translator, always, always get a sample, because yes, they might have amazing credentials, but until they've actually translated one of your books or a scene from your book, you don't really know how good they are. I like to always use, if I write romance, a slightly sexy scene, because sex seems to show you if someone can translate or not. It's just what I've found, because if it sounds absolutely awkward or more like mechanical rather than an emotional, spicy thing, then that's a clear point for me to say, “No, thank you. I'll look for someone else.” Action scenes, sexy scenes, really emotional ones, dialogue that has a bit of colloquial language or humour—those are good scenes to choose as a sample because that really shows you if a translator can do their job or not. Then, again, have some German people from your list give you feedback on that. Also, if you work with human translators, always try to make sure that they will be available for your entire series. And not even just a series—if you have lots of books, try to grab that translator, lock them in your basement, and never let them go, because you want their style for all your books. Just like you have a style as an author, translators have a style and that will always shine through, as much as they try to be as close to your original. A bit of their style will always come through. It helps to have the same translator for at least the same series, preferably for as many of your books as possible. You really want to tell them in the beginning, “This series has nine books. I want you to do all of these, even if we only do a few of them at the beginning. Are you available to do the rest later?” Because you don't want to end up having to find a new translator in the middle of the series. That gives you a whole lot of extra work with trying to have a world bible that explains which words get translated and which get left as the original, and stuff like that. When it comes to non-human translation, it's very different because of course you don't need to do all that vetting. Tools have different capabilities and abilities, but in the end, if you put your book into a translation tool, you will always get a slightly different output. So it's not quite the same where you need an entire vetting process. Jo: Just on the human translation, I think I'd be right in saying that every single author in the world would love to have the best human translator translating their book, whatever genre it is. That would just be amazing for all of us. But let's face it, that's extremely expensive. So if I've got, let's say, a 70,000-word thriller, how much money are we talking about? An approximate number, so people know what that might be. Skye: Usually it goes by the word, but by the target language word count. Although it depends on the translator, traditional translators usually go by the target language because that's what they actually produce as their output. The average at the moment is anything from about seven to nine euro cents per word as the medium price. You will find cheaper people. You can go up as high as you want really. I have definitely seen translators who charge 15 cents and above per word, but those will usually be the ones who have worked with a lot of trad publishers who are used to being paid like that. Although even in trad publishing, the rates are going down. With more and more authors wanting translations, I think in general rates are going down. Good for us, not so good for the translators. You're definitely looking at thousands, even if you translate novellas. Then it depends—some translators have editing included, sometimes they don't. A lot of them will have arrangements with other translators where they give the translation to another translator for them to edit it. Sometimes that's included in the price, sometimes it's extra. Always make sure it gets edited, because just like when we write a book, it will never be exactly perfect. I say that as someone who writes very clean because I have a journalism background, so I'm used to writing really fast and clean for deadlines, but there will always be a few typos that just wriggle their way in. Typos are evil like that. It's the same with translations. Jo: So we are probably looking at 2,000 to 10,000 pounds, dollars, euros. We are talking about quite a lot, and this is the main reason I think that now, with AI becoming a lot better, people are looking at this. Originally—and I don't even know, probably eight years now since I did my first, might even be a decade or more—I did at some point do a version in DeepL, which was an early AI translation tool. This was nonfiction, and then paid an editor, a German editor, to then edit that in German. Those books still get good reviews. But now people are looking at options like GlobeScribe and ScribeShadow, or even just using Claude or ChatGPT. I'm actually working at the moment on a Claude Code pipeline through lots of different QA passes. That's been really interesting for me, because I can say, “Okay, now you are a reader who likes these kinds of books. Read it for that.” And because we can now put really big books in, I can actually get a lot of really interesting feedback. So I feel like there's a lot of potential with AI—potential for good stuff, potential for bad stuff too. So talk a bit about that and what to watch out for with AI. Skye: Okay, so I'm very much pro-AI and I use AI in lots of different things in my business, just to preface that. However, with translations, I'm still a bit wary, just because I have seen a lot of bad AI translations. To be fair, I've experimented with it myself for one of my other pen names. It was readable. It was definitely readable. It had sometimes beautiful, gorgeous prose. Really. But there were, occasionally—quite often even—bits where I stumbled as a native speaker. It's readable and, if I just need a little quick book in between, I would be mostly happy with that. I would read it. It's the same as some of the early KU days where you found a lot of bad quality writing, but you just wanted to read it because the story was pretty good or because you were reading it in KU and so it didn't really matter that much. There is that spectrum of quality where you have the, “Yes, it's good enough to read,” but, “Is it good enough to be up to your standards?” That's a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. If they want the same quality that they put into their English book, or if they're fine with just offering that book to a new audience because maybe you wouldn't be able to do it otherwise. I totally see that. Translation is so expensive. I don't even know how much I have spent on translations over the past few years. I'm lucky that most of my books make it back within the first weeks or months. I've never had a book that didn't make its money back, but I have heard a lot of people where that's not the case. It is a lot of investment and I would never tell someone to go into debt or anything to do translations. Do it when you're at a time where you can afford it, or where you can also afford the loss if it doesn't work out. Now, AI has changed that slightly because it now opens it up to almost anyone. Some of the AI translation tools are a few hundred pounds, but if you do it in Claude or ChatGPT or something where you already have a subscription, it can actually be quite cheap. You can do it for a few dollars or pounds. I love, by the way, having someone in the UK. I'm so used to automatically saying everything in dollars, but actually I should be using pounds. I think if you know what you're doing—and you clearly do, with your several passes, you know what you're doing with AI—but if someone just puts their book into Claude or ChatGPT or some random tool, it might just not be good enough. Jo: Let's say it won't be good enough if you just do that. We know that. You have to have QA passes—quality assurance. You have to have rules per genre. There are ways of doing it. It's kind of like you have to get to know how translation works. It's a process. It's not just a translation, like you put something in Google Translate or a menu or something, because we do care. I think that's really important. Skye: Yes. I think if you don't know how AI works—that you need detailed prompts, that you need a style guide, that you need all that extra material and not just your book, all those rules—then please don't do it. If you value your German readers—and I think sometimes when I see people just churn out those translations without doing any quality control, using exactly the same cover or even just putting a German flag on it or something—I really feel bad for German readers because they're not being valued as having the same sort of value to us as authors as our English-speaking readers. Maybe I'm a bit biased there because I read in multiple languages. I want to be able to get the same sort of quality in all languages. I want the author to think of me as being special because I'm their reader and I'm their customer. I think we are on the way where AI translation can be almost autonomous. I would personally always have a human look over it. I know what I'm doing, and I'm almost happy with my translation system that I've built now in AI, but it still needs that human touch for a few things. It still needs me to tell the AI, for example, “This is where we switch from Sie to du.” This is where I need to keep certain words in. For example, I write a lot of Scottish books, and so words like “glen” or “loch”—they are words I want to stay the same in my German translation. I don't want to translate it to the German equivalent of “lake” because that just misses that Scottish context. Things like that need instruction. A human translator will usually know that and chat to you about which words you want to keep and which ones you want translated. AI just needs our guidance, our helping hand, and if we don't know enough about the target language, we just miss knowing that. Now, a lot of tools do it all for you basically, and they set up all these rules. I think many of them are at a very advanced stage now. But AI isn't perfect and it likes to hallucinate, it likes to add random things. So I will always still have a human touch at the end, even if it's just a quick edit. A lot of people think that they just need a proofread after an AI translation, but AI doesn't really make typos—or not to an extent that humans do. So proofreading isn't really what's needed for an AI translation. It is actual editing where you go for the style, the phrasing, and sometimes the context. There's one example I always like to give. I have an alien romance where they go on a honeymoon, and because he's an alien and she's human, he misunderstands and thinks she wants to go to an actual moon. So it's a little pun in the book. It doesn't work in German at all because the word “honeymoon” has nothing to do with moons or planets in German. An AI would probably just try to translate that in a way that's quite close to the original. But my German translator, she had to come up with several different ways of fixing that issue, because humour is hard. It's hard even for humans to get the humour translated in a way that is still funny but also culturally appropriate. If you have a book that is full of puns, it gets harder with AI. I am not saying it's impossible, but it needs a lot of handholding. Jo: Yes, I think humour is hard to translate in general, isn't it? Let's move on to the distribution, because again, having done quite a lot of different languages over the years, I do use Amazon KU for my books in German and Italian and Spanish and some French. So I haven't gone wide in terms of ebook and print or audio, in fact, because I have a lot of books and it is hard to go wide in English, let alone in other languages. But you mentioned earlier that Thalia has 40% of the market or something, and that special editions and print books are important. So what are the decisions we have to make around the actual publishing? Skye: In Germany they did a really cool thing, and I wish they'd done that in other countries. When the bookshops saw that Amazon was growing and posing a threat to them—not just with print books but also with ebooks—a lot of the German bookstores got together and they formed the Tolino Alliance. They have big book chains like Thalia, but also I think it was over 1,500 indie bookshops that all got together. They all support this ecosystem for ebooks, which means they all share the same e-readers. They share the same sort of backend for the shops, which made it really easy for them because they didn't all have to develop an ebook system. It saved them a lot of money. It made it really easy to tell readers, “This is the Tolino system. You can get your books at our bookshops, but you can read them on your Tolino e-reader no matter where you get the books from.” The Tolino e-readers are actually the same as Kobo e-readers, just rebranded. They've got that big advantage there—these independent bookshops and book chains all got together. Now it's hard to find numbers because Amazon doesn't really like to share their numbers, but it's about 40% of the German ebook market, which means it rivals Amazon. They have about the same. Then the rest is split by Apple Books, Google Play, and some of the smaller players. So it is a huge chunk of the market. I'm wide with pretty much all my English books. So for me, I looked into KU, but when I saw that I was going to miss out on 60% of the market—even if Amazon has 45%, that's still a big chunk—I decided to go wide. To be fair, I haven't regretted it, because Tolino are amazing to work with. I like to compare them to Kobo because they have a really lovely human team where you can just email them and tell them, “I've got a new release coming up,” and they will put you into different promos and it's all free. Jo: Do you publish direct to Tolino, or do you use Draft2Digital? Skye: Yes, you can publish direct to Tolino and that's actually the best way of doing it. You don't have access to their marketing opportunities if you use a distributor. The Tolino dashboard is annoyingly all in German, but by now every browser has a translating plugin built in. I know lots of authors who don't speak a single word of German who navigate Tolino very successfully. They started with only ebooks in the beginning, and then about two weeks after the first edition of my book on German translations was published, they introduced print books, which meant my book was immediately out of date. I was fuming. But this time they introduced audiobooks a few weeks before my Kickstarter launch for the second edition, so this time the audiobook part is included. I was very happy about that, because it was a pain to just tell everyone, “Well, this book is out now but it's actually missing a big part of how to do print books in Germany.” So Tolino does print, ebooks, and audiobooks. And just because you're in KU with your ebooks doesn't mean you can't publish your print books via Tolino. I highly recommend that, because IngramSpark—which most of us indies use for distribution for print books—doesn't get you into the German bookstores. They used to. Then German stores have fixed price laws where books have to be the same price in all stores, and IngramSpark kept going against that. They kept sending them the wrong prices. So German bookstores at some point just said, “Nope, we've had enough of this. We no longer take books from IngramSpark.” So now Tolino, in my opinion, is the best way of getting your books listed in German online bookstores, but they can also help you get into brick-and-mortar stores. One of my books was featured by them, I think two years ago, and it was in about 300 of their shops all across Germany. It had its own little pedestal and it was amazing. Tolino love working with their indie authors. They also love romance, which is always a bonus because some stores are more prudish than others. It's really easy to work with them. They speak perfect English, so you can do all your communication outside of the dashboard in English. Their audiobooks feature is very new. Until they did that, it was much harder for German audiobook distribution because places like Findaway Voices and other distributors wouldn't get you into the Tolino Alliance stores for audio. That's a big chunk that we were missing out on. I was always looking for ways to get my German audiobooks into those stores, but the German distributors that I found were really difficult to upload to, to be honest. I'm a very technical person, but it challenged even me. I did not like that experience at all. At some point I really just gave up and wanted to throw my computer out of the window. So when Tolino introduced that, I was celebrating internally. The only problem with their distribution at the moment for audio, because it's so new, is that you can't exclude any shops. So it's all or nothing. They will get you into all the different places, including Audible, Spotify—you name it, lots of different streaming services and retailers—but you can't exclude any. So while they don't actually want exclusivity, if you published it yourself at the same time through ACX or Findaway Voices or something else, you would have duplicates, and of course, we try to avoid those. Jo: Is it human narration only, or do they also accept AI narration? Skye: They accept AI narration. The thing with Tolino is that they want everything made very clear. If you publish any books with them that have an AI production aspect, you need to put that into your Impressum. For audiobooks, there's a box to tick to make it clear. Jo: Hmm. Skye: So they are open to it all. You just need to declare it. Jo: Which I think should be true everywhere, to be fair. Skye: Oh, definitely. And a lot of German distributors—while I was researching for this book, one thing I always looked at is, “Do they need you to declare your AI use?” More and more German distributors and retailers now want you to do that. I think that's the way it's going. It's not a judgement thing. I think it's just making it clear to readers. In Germany, it's all about transparency. That's why there are all those laws with GDPR—everyone will have heard about that one by now. But there are lots of other laws where it's all about consumer rights and transparency, and that's one of them. Jo: Is there anything else on the distribution side we need to think about? Skye: One thing I like to highlight is libraries, because that's quite a big thing in Germany too. They love books and bookstores and they love libraries. Some of the ways we get our English books into libraries—like a distributor like Draft2Digital for OverDrive—OverDrive is growing in Germany. There are other systems like Onleihe, just to name one. You can't get into those through, for example, Draft2Digital or PublishDrive or StreetLib. Tolino gets you into those. There are also subscription platforms that are growing. I think it's the same as in the English-speaking market. People love a subscription, and I love them. I just don't like exclusivity. So I very much support any subscription platform that doesn't require me to be exclusive to them. Skoobe is one of them. They used to be an independent platform, and then the Tolino Alliance bought them. So now they're integrated into the Tolino stores. That means it's really prominent. Basically, any time you go to an ebook on, for example, Thalia, it will have a banner there saying, “You can also get this in our subscription.” So it's taken a while to grow, but actually in December I now made more with their subscription programme than I made in book sales. I think three of my books were in their top 10 in December. To be fair, that was a pretty good month. But it definitely shows that it can take a while to grow these subscription platforms, but when you do, it can be really successful and very much worth it. So I highly suggest looking into those sorts of platforms too, not just the standard retailers and the platforms that you're already used to. Jo: Fantastic. So we've now got translations, they're on the various stores, and then just like in English, one of our next challenges is actually marketing the books. Now this becomes another challenge, because one of the reasons I am in KU for foreign languages is because you get the five free days and you can do Amazon ads. I mean, you can do Amazon ads for wide books too, but it's easier to know that there are some options for marketing at all. I don't do email marketing. I don't do social media, so I'm pretty bad at marketing in foreign languages. So what are your suggestions for those who want to do more active marketing in German especially? Or even if we don't speak German, it can't be all the personal stuff. But are there also advertising things like BookBub? What are our options basically? Skye: There are quite a few things. It's not quite as easy as in English, of course, but I think sometimes you have to remember that you already have most of the material for marketing when you've released a book. You will have made graphics in English, you will have written a newsletter, you will have done some social media posts. All that material is already there, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can just translate that, and for that, AI translation is really good because it's very quick. You don't have to bother your translator. You can just get that done. That's what I had to remind myself, because in the beginning I did everything from scratch and it took me forever and I was hating it. Then I realised, well, I could just look at the newsletter I wrote three years ago when that book released in English and translate that. That's done within a minute and I can send that out. So remember that you have a lot of content already. There's no BookBub or nothing as big as BookBub. There is a site called BookDeals, which sends out newsletters for both reduced or free books and also for new releases. I use them for pretty much all my new releases, or at least always the first in series. They're nowhere near as big as BookBub, so don't expect miracles, but I generally always break even or a bit more. It's hard to tell, of course, especially if you do several things for a new release. But my instinctive look on this is that it's worth it. BookDeals is the big one. There are a few other promo sites, but to be honest, I've not really found any of them to give me a positive ROI. I experiment with them occasionally and I listed them all in my book just for completeness, but BookDeals is the big one. Then there is LovelyBooks, which is the German Goodreads. Some Germans also use Goodreads, so always make sure to have all your German books listed there. But LovelyBooks is the big one. I love that place because people are so much kinder than on Goodreads. I avoid Goodreads completely. If I need a review, I send my assistant there to look at reviews. I don't go there. It is scary. LovelyBooks—the name is kind of telling. It is a more lovely place. People are generally more friendly. They are probably a bit more critical when they write reviews than they are on retailers, but I have found it really nice to build a community there. You can do these book clubs where you give away a copy of your book, either as print books—or I always do ebooks because I don't want to send books to Germany. Then people discuss the book as a sort of book club and then they review it at the end. I have had great success with that. I've built up a community of readers who will now buy my books too, even if they don't get them for free. I found some beta readers through that. So I love LovelyBooks. The annoying thing again is it's in German. However, their support all speaks English and you can email them with questions. They're really good. Even if you don't plan to run any book clubs or anything like that because you don't speak the language, I would always advise just setting up an author profile there because it makes it easier for your books to be found. You can track reviews, you can track reads, and that just gives you an extra place to get more visibility for free. Ads—there's not much difference compared to what you do for your English-language books. The one thing is with Facebook ads, now because of EU data protection laws, it's much harder to target because people can opt out of ads and targeting. In general, cost-per-click ads are cheaper than in the US or the UK, so that's a bonus. BookTok is big and only growing there. I don't really do social media for my German books because I just don't have the bandwidth. I wish I could, and I know some people who outsource that. In an ideal world, I would have a social media account for every single language, but it's not an ideal world and I just have limited hours in the day. But even just creating an account so that people can tag you, so that people can find you, can already be a good start. One thing that's not maybe a marketing strategy as such, but something I like to highlight, is pre-orders. If you write in series, always, always make sure that the next books in your series are up for pre-order, because— German readers have been burned so many times by authors or even publishers who just translate book one in a series and then stop. They are quite hesitant sometimes to start a new series when they see it's book one of something and they don't see the next book up for pre-order. To be fair, it's similar in English. I always make sure to have a pre-order up for the next book. Because people would just not read the series until it's complete or until they know it will be complete at some point. So always set up a pre-order if you can. Don't set it up when you don't actually know when your translation is being done, or choose a date far in the future. Just make it very clear to your readers that you are intending to translate the entire series, that you're not going to disappoint them, that they're not just wasting their money on a book one only to never find out what happens next. Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is a big decision for people to make, I think, because there's no point in doing one book in German and then not doing anything else, in the same way as doing one book in English or any language. You have to think about investing in an audience. So lots for people to think about. The book is fantastic. It's called Self-Publishing in German. So where can people find you and your books online? Skye: For my author-facing things, just go to SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors, and there you find the book about German translations. You also find more information on what I do. You can book consultations with me. I love doing those one-to-ones, especially about translations, because you can really dive into someone's catalogue and look at what would be a good strategy for someone, rather than just in general. Otherwise, it's SkyeMacKinnon.com for all my romance. If you want adorable children's books, it's IslaWynter.com. That's Wynter with a Y. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Skye. That was great. Skye: Thank you so much for having me.The post Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Isabella's story - tandem feeding and tandem weaning

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2026 58:26 Transcription Available

Today I'm talking to the lovely Isabella from near Vienna, Austria, about breastfeeding her two sons, Jonathan (2½) and Valentin (1). Isabella describes generally good breastfeeding support and mixed feeding norms in Austria, and how her early postpartum pain settled with midwife help. She became pregnant unexpectedly when Jonathan was 10 months old while using natural family planning, and assumed she should wean. She made several attempts but didn't feel committed to a process that was complicated by bottle refusal and a lack of weaning information. After hearing positive tandem-feeding stories from this podcast, she resumed breastfeeding late in pregnancy when Jonathan was distressed and ill, then tandem fed after Valentin's birth. This time lactation started easily and she managed nights with family bed-sharing and support from her husband. Isabella eventually weaned Jonathan gradually at 2, starting with night weaning and dropping “set” feeds, while continuing to breastfeed Valentin to this day.My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com Resources mentioned - Loving Comfort book in English (und auf Deutsch) https://www.juliedillemuth.com/loving-comfort This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

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Mark Frost, co-creator of 'Twin Peaks' - Thriller author and screenwriter discusses working with David Lynch super-agents, and his new novel, 'The Yankee Sphinx'

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2026 63:35

Ever since Mark Frost saw his actor father prepare all day for work, having to leave every evening to jump on stage, he knew he wanted to get his work done early in the morning. A life as a writer came calling. He's worked on all sorts, writing on 'Hill Street Blues', the 'Fantastic Four' movies, sports books, thriller novels, and it's his work with David Lynch, as the co-creator of the cult series, 'Twin Peaks', that he's most loved for.'Twin Peaks' was a show like no-other. A surreal, ethereal, chilling couple of series, that was a ratings win, a critical hit, and now has a cult-following. We discuss how the show, and working with Lynch, has influenced his writing since.His new novel is, 'The Yankee Sphinx', inspired by his great-uncle's diaries, it tells the story of Will Hassett, a close confidence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States.We talk about how this idea met his fine criteria for working on a project. Also you can hear why, inspired by script-writing, he splits an idea into 3 parts, how he knows when something is done, and we get stories of working with a literary super agent.Get a copy of the novel - uk.bookshop.com/shop/writersroutineThis week's episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Get 15% off your first order of 15 or more books, with the code ROUTINE1 - get to ingramspark.com to make the most of the offer.Support us -patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutine@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sam's story - natural term feeding, tandem feeding and breastfeeding advocacy

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2026 57:29 Transcription Available

This week, I'm talking to the brilliant Sam Kennedy Christian from Herne Bay, Kent, about her breastfeeding journey while 29 weeks pregnant and feeding her three-year-old. We discuss gentle night weaning using a clock and flexibility during illness or distress, co-sleeping changes ahead of a new baby, and Sam's previous tandem feeding experience when her eldest breastfed until six years old, including boundaries and supporting sibling feelings about fairness. Sam talks about pelvic girdle pain and nipple sensitivity in pregnancy. We also cover Sam's work with Save the Children on formula marketing, volunteering with the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers, and her coaching work helping parents navigate breastfeeding alongside returning to paid work, flexible working, and shared parental leave.My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com You can follow Sam on Instagram @‌thefloat.spaceResources mentioned - Breastfeeding at Work UK: Your Rights, Pumping Breaks & Employer Duties The Float Space https://www.thefloat.space/latest/breastfeeding-at-work-in-the-uk-your-rights-pumping-breaks-and-how-to-ask-for-proper-supportTigers (2014 film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigers_(2014_film)Baby Milk Action https://www.babymilkaction.org/AIMS https://www.aims.org.uk/journal/item/breastfeeding-politics-businessMaternity Action https://maternityaction.org.uk/This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

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Holmes and Watson: True Crime Podcasters

Imaginary Worlds

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2026 43:01

John Watson is a former army doctor who became a true crime podcaster when he met a consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes. You can hear about the cases they've solved in the podcast Sherlock & Co. Sound familiar? Holmes and Watson may have been enshrined in pop culture for over 130 years. But their adventures feel fresh and relevant in the audio drama Sherlock & Co – which masquerades as a true crime podcast. I talked with the creators of the show, Joel Emery and Adam Jarrell, who set out to adapt and modernize the entire Sherlock Holmes canon written by Arthur Conan Doyle, except not in its original chronological order. We discuss the challenge of reimagining these characters in the 21st century (and not being the first to do so), and why the bromance between Holmes and Watson plays into timeless questions around masculinity and how guys express their emotions. This episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Get 15% off your first order of 15 more books at IngramSpark using the code IMAGINARY15. To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds. You can also buy Imaginary Worlds merchandise at our online store. My most recent Between imaginary Worlds episode, I interviewed the creator of the larp Acheron IV. You can sign up here to play the larp in Philadelphia over Memorial Day weekend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Georgina's story - slow to solids

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2026 60:16 Transcription Available

Today, I'm joined by the lovely Georgina Gregor from Devon to talk about her breastfeeding journeys with her two children, three-year-old Amaya and nine-month-old Lucas. Georgina recounts early breastfeeding pain, mastitis, hospital readmission for Amaya's 13.7% weight loss, and a later tongue-tie diagnosis and release at 10 months linked to solids difficulties. Amaya's disinterest in food and love of breastfeeding meant that her start with solids was slow, and Georgina had to carry on with patience. She shares weaning Amaya while pregnant: a significant supply drop around nine weeks, night weaning using the Booby Moon story, partner support, and a gradual daytime fade, alongside nausea and breastfeeding aversion in pregnancy. Lucas's tongue tie was treated promptly. He is feeding on demand and co-sleeping with frequent night feeds. He is much more keen on food than his sister was at this age.Georgina also discusses family pressure, helpful resources, and her new role as an infant feeding peer support volunteer.My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com Resources mentioned - @‌drgreerkirshenbaum on InstagramCharlotte Stirling-Reed https://www.srnutrition.co.uk/plymouth-latchon.org.ukThis podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

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Breastfeeding in palliative care with Dr Laura Thomas

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2026 53:43 Transcription Available

This week, I'm honoured to be joined by Dr. Laura Thomas, a community pediatrician from Reading, La Leche League leader, and breastfeeding peer supporter, to talk about breastfeeding in pediatric palliative care. Laura explains her day-to-day work with neurodiversity and neurodisability, her training and her own breastfeeding experiences. We discuss Laura's masters project using a questionnaire for palliative care and pediatric staff, which found breastfeeding is often not considered unless families request support, and that staff want simple guidance and signposting. We explore why breastfeeding and milk donation can matter at end of life and after bereavement, highlight resources like the Memory Milk Bank and Herts Milk Bank, and consider practical hospice support and future research into lactation supporters' preparedness.My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com Resources mentioned - The Milk Bank at Chester https://www.milkbankatchester.org.uk/donationafterloss/memorymilkgift/The Human Milk Foundation https://humanmilkfoundation.org/hearts-milk-bank/donating-after-bereavement/Breastfeeding the Brave https://breastfeedingthebrave.com/Framework for Practice: Lactation and loss | British Association of Perinatal Medicine https://www.bapm.org/resources/lactation-and-loss-management-of-lactation-following-the-death-of-a-babyTogether for Short Lives: Children's Charities - Children Hospices https://www.togetherforshortlives.org.uk/This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

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Michele DeFilippo: Self-Publishing Books for Rights, Royalties & Consistent Revenue [S13 Premiere]

We Don't PLAY

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2026 23:32

Michele DeFilippo is the founder and driving force behind 1106 Design, a full-service book publishing company based in Phoenix, Arizona. With more than 50 years of experience in the book publishing industry — spanning traditional publishing, the rise of indie publishing, and the self-publishing revolution catalyzed by Amazon — Michele is one of the most respected voices in author services today.She founded 1106 Design in 2001 after the publishing industry was disrupted by technology, with a singular mission: to help independent authors publish professionally, keep 100% of their rights and royalties, and produce books that compete on equal footing with traditionally published titles. Her company provides a complete "manuscript to market" solution, including editorial evaluations, copyediting, custom book cover design, interior typesetting, eBook conversion, audiobook production, author websites, and publishing support.Michele is also the author of Publish Like the Pros: A Brief Guide to Quality Self-Publishing, an 88-page guide available as a free download at 1106design.com. She has been featured across numerous podcasts, YouTube channels, and industry publications, and contributes regularly to IngramSpark's blog on self-publishing best practices.Schedule a call with Michele today >>WHO IS THIS FOR?Aspiring authors who want to publish without giving up their rights. Self-publishing authors who suspect they're leaving royalty money on the table. Business owners, coaches, and consultants who want a book as a credibility tool. Anyone pitched a "bestseller package" who wants to know if it's legitimate. Podcasters and content creators exploring long-form publishing as a brand extension.Episode SummaryIn this interview on the We Don't PLAY!™ podcast, Favour Obasi-ike, MBA, MS sits down with Michele DeFilippo to unpack one of the most misunderstood and financially consequential decisions an author can make: who to trust with your book. Over 22 minutes, Michele delivers a masterclass on the difference between traditional publishers, hybrid publishers, and true service providers — and why that distinction can mean the difference between earning $0.90 per book sold versus $6–$8.The conversation covers the full publishing landscape: how self-publishing emerged alongside Amazon, why so many "publishers" are actually double-dipping on author revenue, how to use KDP and IngramSpark to distribute without a middleman, what makes a book cover convert (and why it matters more than most authors realize), the truth about Amazon "bestseller" badges, the art of professional typesetting, and how to set realistic expectations before publishing.Michele closes with a transparent overview of how 1106 Design works, what authors should prepare before reaching out, and why the best way to make money with a book is often not through retail sales at all.TIMESTAMPS[00:00] — Intro: Michele DeFilippo, founder of 1106 Design, 50 years in publishing[03:20] — Publisher vs. service provider: the distinction that determines your royalties[06:12] — The hybrid publisher double-dip: earning $0.90/book instead of $6–$8[09:11] — KDP and IngramSpark: the two platforms every self-publishing author must know[10:01] — "Pump and dump" publishing: the automated book trap[11:00] — Book covers as the #1 conversion driver: the job interview analogy[12:48] — A/B testing covers the right way: "liking vs. buying"[14:34] — The Amazon bestseller badge: how it's manufactured in 45 minutes[17:08] — Professional typesetting vs. basic formatting: why it matters[20:49] — Using a book as a business development tool, not a retail productMEMORABLE QUOTES"If you have no investment in my book, what entitles you to any portion of my profits?" — Michele [06:45]"There's retail sales, and then there's making money with your book another way — and that other way is usually better." — Michele [20:49]"The question isn't which cover do you like. It's which cover would you spend money on." — Michele [12:48]"A book that earns $2,000 in royalties but generates $50,000 in consulting revenue is not a modest success. It's a high-ROI asset." — Favour [21:10]"Typesetting is working on every line, every word, every paragraph — it's not just formatting." — Michele [17:08]FAQsWhat is the difference between a publisher and a service provider?A publisher acquires your rights and pays a royalty. A service provider charges once and steps away — you keep 100% of all future revenue.What makes hybrid publishers problematic?They charge upfront fees and also take a cut of every book sold — reducing per-book earnings from $6–$8 down to $0.90 on a $19.99 title.Which platforms should every author use?KDP for Amazon and IngramSpark for bookstores and libraries. Both have royalty calculators so you know exactly what you'll earn.Are Amazon bestseller badges legitimate?Most are manufactured in 45 minutes by selecting a low-competition subcategory. A genuine Nielsen bestseller is an entirely different credential.How do authors actually make money with a book?Treat it as a business development tool. Speaking fees and consulting revenue typically far exceed retail royalty income.GLOSSARYService Provider — Charges a one-time fee; takes no ongoing royalties. The author retains 100% of rights and revenue.Hybrid Publisher — Charges upfront fees and also takes a percentage of sales. Double-dips on author revenue.KDP — Amazon's self-publishing platform for print-on-demand paperbacks and Kindle ebooks.IngramSpark — Distributes to independent bookstores, libraries, and international retailers.Typesetting — Professional design of a book's interior: fonts, spacing, margins, and chapter breaks.Print-on-Demand — Books printed individually as orders are placed. No inventory risk.Ready to Rank? Book Your SEO & Web Dev Services Today

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Auden's story - a non-binary nursing journey

AskAlli: Self-Publishing Advice Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2026 70:54 Transcription Available

This week, I'm pleased to be joined by Auden Krauska, a non-binary parent of two originally from Wisconsin now living near Copenhagen, to talk about their nursing journeys and the complexities of lactation alongside gender dysphoria and healthcare systems. Auden describes binding, being misgendered, considering top surgery but delaying it to lactate, and stopping testosterone to conceive. Their first pregnancy involved hyperemesis, followed by a home birth, sidelying nursing, a newborn hospitalisation for enterovirus meningitis, and recurrent mastitis linked to oversupply and outdated advice, which improved with the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine's updated protocol and ibuprofen. Auden shares experience of parent-led weaning at 14 weeks pregnant, using a personalised storybook, and discusses nursing-friendly and pregnancy clothing, working remotely, Denmark's health care, and evidence and monitoring around resuming testosterone while lactating. If Auden does return to taking testosterone, they will do blood testing to check their daughter's liver function and hormone levels, and that decision is a way off.My picture book on how breastfeeding journeys end, The Story of Jessie's Milkies, is available from Amazon here - The Story of Jessie's Milkies. In the UK, you can also buy it from The Children's Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London. Other book shops and libraries can source a copy from Ingram Spark publishing.You can also get 10% off my books on supporting breastfeeding beyond six months and supporting the transition from breastfeeding at the Jessica Kingsley press website, by going to https://bit.ly/JKPbooks and using the code MMPE10 at checkout.Follow me on Instagram @emmapickettibclc or find out more on my website www.emmapickettbreastfeedingsupport.com Find out more about Auden on their blog https://thepregnantpapa.wordpress.com/Resources mentioned -Where's the Mother? - a book by Trevor MacDonald https://www.queerlit.co.uk/products/wheres-the-mother?srsltid=AfmBOorXJK6ekxR3phw_y4N2NWXZ4vKNfrwshyJ9XpzXWTcom_fQCunfTrevor's Facebook group - Birthing and Breast or Chestfeeding Trans People and Allies https://www.facebook.com/share/g/183Qi5ryX9/Angela Marchant in Madison, WI https://www.tallgrassosteopathy.com/Trans Fertility Co https://transfertility.co/Trystan Reese https://www.trystanreese.com/Being You: A First Conversation About Gender – Early Pride Matters https://earlypridematters.org/teaching-guide/being-you-a-first-conversation-about-gender/ This podcast is presented by Emma Pickett IBCLC, and produced by Emily Crosby Media.

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When Amazon Closes Your Account: Member Q&A with Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2026 38:52

In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast, hosts Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black discuss what happens when Amazon or Google Play suddenly terminates author accounts, including how ALLi can help advocate on members' behalf. Other questions include: Should authors distribute through Gardners or IngramSpark, and what sales volume is required for Gardners How can authors verify whether a publisher or publishing service is legitimate before working with them What is ALLi's position on Kindle's controversial "Ask This Book" AI feature How should authors respond to unsolicited phone calls from people claiming to be literary agents What options exist for getting publishing rights back from a traditional publisher who refuses to return them And more! Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-Publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. About the Hosts Michael La Ronn is ALLi's Outreach Manager. He is the author of over 80 science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has managed to write while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings (now graduated!). You can find his fiction at www.michaellaronn.com and his videos and books for writers at www.authorlevelup.com. Sacha Black is a bestselling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, speaker and casual rule breaker. She writes fiction under a secret pen name and other books about the art of writing. When Sacha isn't writing, she runs ALLi's blog. She lives in England, with her wife and genius, giant of a son. You can find her on her website, her podcast, and on Instagram.

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Puppeteering Project Hail Mary

Imaginary Worlds

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2026 38:48

When I interviewed Andy Weir in 2021 about his novel Project Hail Mary, he told me that the movie adaptation was already being planned starring Ryan Gosling. The big question was how would they bring the alien character of Rocky to life. Would they use CGI or practical effects? Now that the film is in theaters, we have the answer. While there is some use of digital effects, Rocky is mostly performed by the puppeteer James Ortiz. James has a deep background in theater but he had never worked on a film before, let alone a sci-fi blockbuster. I talked with James about the delicate balance of operating an incredibly sophisticated five-legged puppet while giving Rocky a distinct personality and building a rapport with Ryan Gosling, who relies heavily on improvisation. This episode is sponsored by IngramSpark and Audible. Get 15% off your first order of 15 more books at IngramSpark using the code IMAGINARY15. This offer expires at the end of the year. Listen to the audiobook of Project Hail Mary at Audible.com/hailmary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Cozy Mysteries, Pet Grooming, And The Journey To Audible

The Traveling Groomers Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2026 77:55

**** New Pet edge coupon code is TRAVELER10*****Welcome aboard to another lively episode of the Traveling Groomers Podcast! Today, Chris Anthony, Mary Oquendo, and their special guest, Barkleigh Award-winning author Angie Coates, dive into the world of pet grooming, creative writing, and all the hilarious pitfalls and triumphs along the way. We're kicking things off with a behind-the-scenes peek into Anjie Coates's motivation for her latest book, "The Grooming Witch of the Iron Ledge"—spoiler alert: it was sparked by frustration over poorly portrayed groomers in popular media. The hosts swap stories about writing styles—from structured outlines to composing whole chapters in the shower—and how neurodiversity shapes their creative processes. You'll also get the inside scoop on the realities of self-publishing, from formatting woes and choosing between KDP and IngramSpark, to the unique challenges of creating audiobooks and selecting the perfect narrator. Plus, the conversation meanders through the importance of readable print size (shoutout to Miss Betty!), website tips for pet professionals, and the supportive, tight-knit nature of the grooming community. With plenty of laughs, lessons learned, and a few candid stories about trade show bloopers, this episode is packed with advice, encouragement, and real talk for both the grooming industry and aspiring authors alike. So grab your travel mug, settle in, and let's roll into today's episode—where the pets are loved, the stories are heartfelt, and the laughter is contagious!

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Ep 162: From Academic to Fiction Author with Jennifer Brown

AskAlli: Self-Publishing Advice Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2026 37:21

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!Ever wonder what happens when an academic specializing in medieval women's visions suddenly writes her first novel? In this episode, Jennifer Brown shares her unexpected leap from dusty manuscripts to publishing with St. Martin's Press and how a canceled conference sparked her fiction journey—without a soul telling her she should.In this episode:How Jennifer's fascination with medieval women and their visions inspired her novel, The Lost Book of Elizabeth BartonThe serendipitous week in London that kickstarted her writing processScrapping outlines and embracing the messy, fun process of discoveryThe unexpected ease of her path to publicationInsights into marketing a traditionally published book when the house does some of the heavy lifting (emphases on "some")Her thoughts on the complexity of writing multiple timelines and switching points of viewThe importance of embracing revision as part of the creative process

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Beyond the Book — New Pathways to Readers with IngramSpark: Self-Publishing Advice Conference Highlight

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2026 49:44

In this Self-Publishing Advice Conference highlight, Ben Hughes, senior manager for UK and AU at IngramSpark, leads a panel discussion with bestselling authors Adam Beswick and Samantha Young, along with indie publisher Will Dady, on how independent authors are reaching readers beyond traditional retail channels. While the IngramSpark platform enables distribution to more than 80,000 bookstores worldwide and supports direct sales through author websites, the panel focuses on how authors are building global brands, connecting with reader communities, and driving sales through social media and other strategies. Together, they offer practical insight into expanding visibility and readership through the IngramSpark platform. This session is proudly sponsored by Ingram Spark. This is a post from SelfPubCon (The Self-Publishing Advice Conference), an online author event run free twice yearly in association with the Alliance of Independent Authors. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. You can do that at http://allianceindependentauthors.org.

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Self-Publishing in the Modern Age: From Garage Stacks to Amazon's Print-on-Demand

Ask The Garden Geek with Michael Crose

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2026 26:53

Ever dreamed of writing a book but had no idea where to start? In this episode of The Daily Grateful, Michael takes you on a fascinating journey through the evolution of self-publishing — from a neighbor who hand-collated 5,000 books and painted glue on spines in her living room, to today's print-on-demand revolution with Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. Michael shares personal stories, insider tips on editing, ISBNs, and audiobooks, and explains why publishing is actually the easy part. The real game? Building an audience and marketing your book. Whether you're a first-time author or a seasoned storyteller, this episode will inspire you to finally get that manuscript off your hard drive.#TheDailyGrateful #SelfPublishing #AuthorLife #IndieAuthor #BookMarketing #AmazonKDP #PrintOnDemand #PodcastLife #WritingCommunity #PublishYourBook

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Ep 161: How to Avoid Getting Banned on Amazon: 5 Essential Tips for Indie Authors

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 18, 2026 32:24

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!Many indie authors lose sleep over the idea of getting banned on Amazon. Honestly? That fear makes sense. It's not possible to guarantee that your account would be suspended or deactivated, but if it is, there are steps you can take to rectify the situation.In this episode, I'm breaking down what actually causes account suspensions (things you can absolutely control), the tactics some authors use to game visibility that end up backfiring spectacularly, and what to do if you find yourself on the wrong end of Amazon's AI-based decisions.We'll cover keyword stuffing, category gaming, review-related red flags, and the not-so-obvious mistakes that put accounts at risk. Plus, what a real appeal process looks like and when it might be worth diversifying your distribution altogether.Because here's the thing: There's almost always a way forward. If you're self-publishing and want to stay legit, steady, and sane, this one's for you.

Ep 160: The Hidden Struggles of TV and Book Success with Liz Astrof

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2026 80:24

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!Creative careers look glamorous from the outside. The inside is usually…a little messier.In episode 160, I sit down with Liz Astrof, TV writer ("Stumble," "King of Queens," "Pivoting," etc.) and author of Stay-At-Work Mom, to talk about the real mechanics of building a career in entertainment and publishing. Not the highlight reel. The actual process.Liz shares what it's like to write for television while also stepping into the world of books. Different mediums. Different pressures. Same core truth: Good work takes time to find its footing.We talk about the long stretch between idea and green light. The pitches that don't land. The projects that stall. And why collaboration is both the magic and the madness of working in TV (and being an author!).She also shares a candid look at her version of resilience. Not the motivational-poster version but the practical version, where you keep showing up, keep refining, and keep creating—even when the timeline isn't cooperating (which, let's face it, is the one constant).If you've ever wondered how creative careers actually unfold—or questioned whether persistence alone is enough—this conversation will feel familiar and encouraging in the best possible ways.***** This episode is sponsored by Atticus, the all-in-one writing and book formatting software for self-publishing authors. From drafting to professional ebook and print layout, Atticus makes it easy to format your manuscript for KDP, IngramSpark, and beyond. Learn more at Atticus.io. WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy.

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Ep 159: Start at the End with Emma Grey

Read and Write with Natasha

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2026 48:13

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!In this episode, I'm joined by Emma Grey, whose newest novel, Start at the End, publishes on April 7, 2026. We talk about writing brave stories and building a creative life that can withstand rejection.Emma shares how vulnerability fuels her fiction. Not for shock value, but how honest emotions earn their place on the page. We talk about how she approaches structure, how she stays grounded in character, and why the process of storytelling keeps evolving right alongside the writer.We also get into rejection. The real kind, the kind that stings. Emma's take? It's part of the path, and it's not a verdict on your talent.And then there's what's next for Emma—TV adaptation plans and the shift from prose to screen. What changes? What stays? And how do you protect the emotional core of a story when new collaborators step in?If you're writing something that feels personal—or wondering whether you're resilient enough to keep going—this conversation is a must-listen. *****This episode is sponsored by Atticus, the all-in-one writing and book formatting software for self-publishing authors. From drafting to professional ebook and print layout, Atticus makes it easy to format your manuscript for KDP, IngramSpark, and beyond. Learn more at Atticus.io. WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy.

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2026 Book Update with Professor Jennifer Beilis

Author On Wheels Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2026 4:45

Bio- Jennifer Beilis teaches ASL on the college level. She has her MA in Deafness Rehabilitation from NYU, BA, Psychology, Rowan University, and her AA, Brookdale Community College in Social Sciences. She is an author of 2 books; Hear I Am and Making Positive Changes. Jennifer also has an audiobook, Making Positive Changes.Here are links etc. I published Hear I Am & Making Positive Changes to show people that my thesis, at NYU, graduate program was and still is "People with disabilities can go to work, school and live in their homes with the proper accommodations. "Books are in eBook, soft and hard copies online as well. Audiobook Making Positive Changes. They can email me Jenny08520@aol.com or contact me on FB or LinkedIn for private sales for the audiobook/books. The books are about the following: education, self-help, goal setting, journalization, mental health and disability advocacy. I also published Making Positive Changes audiobook in addition so people with all disabilities such as the Blind low vision or others can listen, or some can listen and read along as well! Jennifer performs author talks on Motivational & Disability Awareness to schools, libraries and businesses. She talks about her struggles with hearing loss, Depression & Anxiety and other issues. Then, she talks about how to overcome things and set goals. Through her books, you will see her experiences and journalize to formulate your own goals! She teaches basic American Sign Language in NJ. Jennifer is seeking employment either remotely or in person near her home in NJ. She can teach basic ASL, Education or Student Success on the college level. Jennifer has her practice Jenny's Tutoring and can help you in basic ASL, ESL, Psychology, disabilities, Career Services, basic skills and essays etc. My books are on TroveMarket.com it is a website for people with disabilities who make products to sell.Hear I Am book cover is white background, blue letters, blue butterfly and title Hear I Am in blue. $18.00 Hear I Amhttps://www.trovemarket.com/heariam-85Making Positive Changes$18.00Making Positive ChangesIt is also on Amazon, B&N, Ingram, Ingram Spark etc. If they are in the US it is $25 delivered soft copy or $18 in person for soft copy. Hard copy is $38 delivered in the US for Hear I Am. Audiobook is on Spotify and others or through me $18. Making Positive Changes | Audiobook on Spotifybook cover has mountains, blue, red and yellow rainbow, birds, butterflies and blue water on the front and the title Making Positive Changes.

424: How to Write Your First Health Book (Q&A)

Health Coach Success

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2026 28:14

In this episode, we break down exactly how health coaches are using short, targeted books to grow their audience, attract aligned clients, and open doors without burning months (or years) doing it the hard way. We cover what actually works right now: How AI tools can speed up writing and audiobooks without losing your voice Amazon vs. IngramSpark—what's easier, cheaper, and better for real reach Whether you truly need a book coach or editor for a first 100-page book How bonuses (audiobooks, PDFs, guides) dramatically increase lead conversion What most coaches wish they knew before publishing their first book Tune into today's Integrative #HealthCoachSuccess episode 424 to learn how to write your first health book - Enjoy the show and let us know what you thought! - - - Listen or Watch At: IHP.Coach/424 - - - Dr. Cabral's Book, The Rain Barrel Effect: https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Become an Integrative Health Practitioner: https://integrativehealthpractitioner.org

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Neoliberalism Chapter 11: Cinema and Neoliberal Globalization

The NeoLiberal Round

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2026 176:14

The Caribbean is a paradise, but for who... the locals or tourists? In this episode Renaldo McKenzie discusses the question raised in Chapter 11: Cinema and Neoliberal Globalization: Can Cinematic film be an effective tool in creating change in light of neoliberal Globalization, probably the answers lies in film. Page 262 in the book "Neoliberalism, Globalization, Income Inequality, Poverty and Resistance" is where he begins by saying one of man's basic drives is the pursuit and discovery of truth... Renaldo discusses this with students in a Caribbean Thought class, a course he teaches at Jamaica Theological Seminary via the zoom platform. Rev. Renaldo McKenzie uses the film "Life and Debt"by Stephanie Black based on a book about St. Antigua entitles "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid to explore the concept that he highlights and espouse in his book which also inspired the study he undertook at the University of Pennsylvania between 2010 and 2013. Prof. Renaldo highlights the uniqueness of documentary films which are almost anthropological. The book is available in various formats: Audible, Hardback and Paperback at Amazon, Barnes and Noble Walmart and at The Neoliberal Store and our IngramSpark partners.Check out my #books "Neoliberalism, Globalization, Income Inequality, Poverty And Resistance": #Neoliberalism Written by #RenaldoMcKenzie Available in Paperback: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=63KgyNK5lXctb5ySudh5FFtuQ63V0WvEJVeHDvOhN4M Available in Hardback: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?gJwW8cSq7SZsl6qT8BrXTrFGcnfliuTQX0dRyNyKtdA Available via the Audible https://audible.com/pd/B099LFCD79/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-267926&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_267926_rh_usRenaldo is a graduate of University of Pennsylvania and is currently Georgetown University and is a Professor Jamaica Theological Seminary and President of The Neoliberal Corporation in #Philadelphia, Creator of The Neoliberal Round Podcast on Spotify for Creators, Spotify or any stream and The Neoliberal Round YouTube Channel. Visit us at https:/theneoliberal.com or https://renaldocmckenzie.com.Email us at info@theneoliberal.comDonate to us at $renaldomckenzie or via the Stripe Link:https://donate.stripe.com/7sYcN48uybAA2OEb9V93y06

#216: Rodney Miles: Self-Publish Your First Book in Just 30 Days

Play Big Faster Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2026 148:47

Self-publishing expert Rodney Miles reveals proven strategies for entrepreneurs ready to publish their first book without traditional gatekeepers. After helping create 300+ books over 14 years, Rodney shares insider knowledge on Amazon KDP, realistic publishing costs, and critical launch mistakes that kill book success before it starts. Busy entrepreneurs can complete professional business books in weeks instead of years using strategic interview methods and content repurposing. Rodney breaks down the complete self-publishing process: choosing between ghostwriters and collaboration models, navigating ISBN requirements, copyright registration, and Library of Congress cataloging. You'll understand why your email list matters more than social media followers, how to generate authentic Amazon reviews without violating terms of service, and the psychology behind book covers that convert browsers into buyers. This episode covers essential publishing infrastructure including Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark for wide distribution, and audiobook production economics. Perfect for entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants who recognize that business books open doors to speaking engagements, premium client acquisition, and industry authority. Rodney addresses beta reader strategies, advance review coordination, forward selection for credibility, and modern book launch strategies that work in the digital age.

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How This Author Turned a Subway Moment Into a Book That Redesigns Your Day

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2026 35:52 Transcription Available

A single moment on a New York subway platform can flip a life. That's where author and coach Deborah Mallow decided to stop living by default and design days that actually felt good. We invited her to share how that choice turned into a practical, design-forward guide: Six Steps to Fewer Days That Suck.We walk through each step with real-world examples. Start with the decision to change, then strip away the habits that feed worry and fear. Feed your mindset with bravery, not doubt. Take action with balance so your progress is sustainable, and choose an attitude that reflects the self you want to project. Finally, make the commitment to stay the course when results wobble. Deborah grounds every step in accessible brain science, how cortisol shapes mornings, why negativity bias traps our focus, and how small rituals like a self-hug, a smile, and a one-line affirmation can trigger endorphins and set a positive pattern for the day.As a designer, Deborah built her book for how we actually consume content: fast, visual, and memorable. Double-page spreads deliver quotes, questions, mantras, and start-now activities you can use in minutes. She also pulls back the curtain on her self-publishing strategy, from combining Amazon with IngramSpark to sourcing a cover from Big Five talent and planning bulk sales that bring positivity into workplaces. It's a masterclass in aligning creative vision with smart distribution, all while protecting your voice.If you're ready to enjoy more and worry less, you'll leave with a morning micro-ritual, a clearer sense of purpose, and a repeatable way to reduce the days that drain you. Have a comment? Text me! Support the show

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Should Authors Copyright Their Audiobook Performances? Member Q&A with Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black

AskAlli: Self-Publishing Advice Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2026 50:31

In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast, hosts Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black discuss whether authors who narrate their own audiobooks should file for copyright registration of the performance rights in addition to registering the text. Other questions include: What affordable alternatives exist to expensive PO boxes for UK authors who need a postal address for their newsletter Should authors delay book publication if they cannot obtain a Library of Congress control number during a government shutdown How can middle-grade authors market their books while complying with laws around children and content What should authors do when experiencing quality control problems with Ingram Spark orders Should authors enable or disable DRM on Amazon in light of new policies allowing readers to download epub files And more! Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-Publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. About the Hosts Michael La Ronn is ALLi's Outreach Manager. He is the author of over 80 science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has managed to write while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings (now graduated!). You can find his fiction at www.michaellaronn.com and his videos and books for writers at www.authorlevelup.com. Sacha Black is a bestselling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, speaker and casual rule breaker. She writes fiction under a secret pen name and other books about the art of writing. When Sacha isn't writing, she runs ALLi's blog. She lives in England, with her wife and genius, giant of a son. You can find her on her website, her podcast, and on Instagram.

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Draft2Digital Raises Print Costs for 2026 | Self-Publishing News (Jan. 6, 2026)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 6, 2026 11:46

Draft2Digital has confirmed a print cost increase starting February 1, 2026, following similar changes across the print industry. IngramSpark confirms free revisions are coming, while platform risk, Amazon KDP, audio growth, and new author opportunities round out the first Self-Publishing News of the year. Here is what authors need to know. Author Nation After Party (digital replay) - https://AuthorNation.live/AfterParty Authors Guild Raises Concerns About Kindle's New "Ask This Book" AI Feature - https://authorsguild.org/news/statement-on-amazon-kindle-ask-this-book-ai-feature/ Draft2Digital (D2D) - https://DaleLinks.com/D2D (referral link) D2D Print Price Calculator - https://draft2digital.com/podcalc IngramSpark - https://IngramSpark.com - use FIXIT to waive revision fees through January 2026 - https://www.ingramspark.com/free-revisions-fixit IngramSpark: A Letter from the Director - https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/a-letter-from-the-director-1 PublishDrive 2025: The Year We Turned AI Promises Into Publishing Reality - https://publishdrive.com/publishdrive-2025-the-year-we-turned-ai-promises-into-publishing-reality.html PublishDrive - https://DaleLinks.com/PublishDrive (affiliate link) - 25% off all annual plans until January 7, 2026 GetCovers: Is Amazon KDP Worth It In 2026? - https://getcovers.com/blog/is-amazon-kdp-worth-it-in-2026 Spoken: "Your Story" Competition - https://www.spoken.press/yourstory Booklinker: The Strategic Author - https://booklinker.mykajabi.com/Strategic-Author Booklinker: From Book Cover to Brand Story: Building an Author Identity That Sells - https://booklinker.mykajabi.com/Build-author-identity 2025 Digital Book Today Literary Awards - https://digitalbooktoday.com/?s=Dale YouTube for Authors - https://DaleLinks.com/YouTubeBook Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

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Episode 339-An Autistic Author's Journey From Blog To Book- with Michael Tanzer

THE SJ CHILDS SHOW

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2025 24:16 Transcription Available

Send us a textA blog that almost stalled. A book that took shape anyway. And a voice that keeps getting louder. We sit down with Michael, an autistic author from Ontario, to trace how “Michaelism: My POV on Life with Autism” went from idea to self-published reality—and why persistence beat perfection at every turn.Michael opens up about the early days when the word autism felt abstract, while picture-based learning made the world click. That contrast sets the tone for an honest look at communication, school, and the moments that defy low expectations—like a cherished trip to Ottawa and friendships that still carry into his weekly routine. We unpack the power of special interests, from J-pop and K-pop to EDM and dance, and reframe them not as obsessions but as engines for joy, structure, and community. If you're searching for real stories about autism acceptance, sensory choices, and everyday advocacy, this conversation meets you where you are.We also dive into the nuts and bolts of self-publishing with IngramSpark, why Michael chose that path, and how book signings and autism conferences in Toronto helped him connect with readers. He walks through key themes from his book—anxiety, emotions, making friends, money and math, communication, volunteering—and shows how each chapter anchors practical skills in lived experience. Through family support, grief, and growth, Michael models what it looks like to claim identity, wear it proudly, and keep moving forward with compassion.Hit play to meet a writer who leads with heart and clarity. If his mantra—stay strong, never give up—resonates with you, share this episode with someone who needs it. Subscribe for more stories from autistic advocates, leave a review to help others find the show, and tell us: which special interest has shaped your life?Happily Ever After CourseManifest your dreams with Happily Ever After: a cosmic toolkit for real life change.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showSJ CHILDS - SOCIALS & WEBSITE MASTER LIST WEBSITES - Stream-Able Live — https://www.streamable.live-COMING SOON - The SJ Childs Global Network — https://www.sjchilds.org - The SJ Childs Show Podcast Page — https://www.sjchildsshow.com YOUTUBE - The SJ Childs Show — https://www.youtube.com/@sjchildsshow - Louie Lou (Cats Channel) — https://www.youtube.com/@2catslouielou FACEBOOK - Personal Profile — https://www.facebook.com/sara.gullihur.bradford - Business Page — https://www.facebook.com/sjchildsllc - The SJ Childs Global Network — https://www.facebook.com/sjchildsglobalnetwork - The SJ Childs Show — https://www.facebook.com/SJChildsShow INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/sjchildsllc/ TIKTOK - https://www.tiktok.com/@sjchildsllc LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjchilds/ PODCAST PLATFORMS - Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/4qgD3ZMOB2unfPxqacu3cC - Apple Podcasts — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sj-childs-show/id1548143291 CONTACT EMAIL - sjchildsllc@gmail.com

Mainstream Media is Misleading which fuels Ethnocentric Ideas about the Other

The NeoLiberal Round

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2025 9:40

The American Media continues to mislead us about the truth about everything. Example, is it true that Hurricane Melissa devastated the island of Jamaica? NO. Yet they report that. Is it true that Somalia is a dirty country? No... Yet the President reports that and the public believes it because that is what the American media shows about the other... which continues to create false narratives about people and places. What if we were to say that Hurricane devatated the US? Would that be true? No for it only affected the people in New Orleans. They seem to be mixing up the whole with the part and the mathematical idea of subsets.Renaldo discussed this on this Podcast brief.Renaldo is the author of Neoliberalism, available at https://store.theneoliberal.com and worldwide on Amazon, Ingramspark and Barnes and Noble etc. Visit us at https://theneoliberal.com

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IngramSpark Raises Costs Again | Self-Publishing News (Dec. 9, 2025)

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2025 16:47

IngramSpark announced new pricing and a higher market access fee that affects every author using their platform. Draft2Digital revealed a major shift in Smashwords royalties, especially for lower priced ebooks. Written Word Media released new survey data showing what separates hobbyists from the authors earning real money. All that and more in the self-publishing news this week. YouTube Channel Memberships (podcast) – https://DaleLinks.com/Membership YouTube Channel Memberships (main channel) – https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships IngramSpark - https://IngramSpark.com IngramSpark Rate Card 2026 - https://www.ingramspark.com/hubfs/Rate%20Card_IngramSpark_2026.pdf IngramSpark December 2025 Newsletter - https://www.ingramspark.com/newsletter-december2025 Draft2Digital - https://DaleLinks.com/D2D (referral link) Draft2Digital Royalty Rates - https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/royalty-rates/ Smashwords End of Year Sale - https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos Written Word Media: 2025 Indie Author Survey Results - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2025-indie-author-survey-results-insights-into-self-publishing-for-authors/ Authors Guild: What Authors Need to Know About the Baker & Taylor Closure and How It Affects Library Access to Your Book - https://authorsguild.org/news/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-baker-and-taylor-closure/ Booklinker - https://Booklinker.com Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Twin Flames Studios: The Ghostwriting of Christmas Past, Present, and Future - https://twinflamesstudios.com/ghostwriting/ Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

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Draft2Digital Drops a Surprise Update | Self-Publishing News (Nov. 24, 2025)

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2025 14:06

Draft2Digital made another move this week, and it has authors talking. Also, find out about the latest shift in their distribution landscape along with industry updates from Spotify, Bookvault, ALLi, and more. We also revisit the Share and Sell spotlight from IngramSpark and update authors on several new opportunities heading into the holiday season. YouTube for Authors (paperback) – https://DaleLinks.com/YouTubeForAuthors Authors Guild: Predatory Opt-Out Scheme ClaimsHero Targets Anthropic Settlement Participants: What Authors Need to Know - https://authorsguild.org/news/claimshero-and-anthropic-settlement-what-authors-need-to-know/ Draft2Digital – https://DaleLinks.com/D2D (referral link) Draft2Digital: The Indie Advantage (Nov. 2025) - https://authoremail.com/email/campaigns/jl895x7j8m0c9/web-version/lg0604x35fb97 Draft2Digital: Smashwords 2025 End of Year Sale - https://draft2digital.com/smashwords-sale/ Bookvault: WooCommerce Integration Upgrade - https://bookvault.app/woocommerce-integration-upgrade/ Spotify for Authors: Spotify Expands Audiobook Access for Premium Subscribers in Five More European Countries - https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-11-18/audiobooks-in-premium-sweden-denmark-finland-iceland-monaco/ ALLi: Inside the Judges' Minds: What Award Panels Really Look For - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/award-panels/ Spoken: Digitally-Narrated Audiobooks with Spoken – Bring Your Backlist to Life in 2026 - https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Hlp1wQBYR-ebipBiVUuc7g#/registration Kerrie Flanagan presents The Book Business Collective - https://geni.us/DaleTBBC IngramSpark: Share & Sell Giveaway - https://www.ingramspark.com/create-your-link-and-be-entered-to-win IngramSpark: Share & Sell Users Feedback - https://www.ingramspark.com/sell-my-book-feedback YouTube for Authors (hardcover) – https://DaleLinks.com/YouTubeHardcover Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

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KDP Drops a Feature NOBODY Expected | Self-Publishing News (Nov. 11, 2025)

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2025 19:18

Amazon rolled out a new KDP feature that could change how authors reach global readers. This roundup walks through what happened and why it matters without spoiling anything. If you publish through KDP or go wide, you need to know what just launched. Stay sharp and stay informed. KDP: Introducing Kindle Translate in Beta - https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Introducing-Kindle-Translate-in-Beta-Translate-eBooks-into-multiple-languages?language=en_US KDP: Kindle Translate FAQs - https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/question/0D5at00000VrSMkCAN/kindle-translate-faqs?language=en_US&topicId=0TOat0000001UnFGAU&count=3 Amazon: Simple tips to spot impersonation scams - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=206290002011&ref_=pe_158999060_1300845330 Draft2Digital – https://DaleLinks.com/D2D (referral link) Draft2Digital: Clean Up Your D2D Account with Merge Tools - https://authoremail.com/email/campaigns/mt7177wad57c8/ Draft2Digital Content Guidelines - https://draft2digital.com/content-guidelines/ IngramSpark – https://IngramSpark.com IngramSpark's Share & Sell Giveaway - https://www.ingramspark.com/share-sell-giveaway Bookvault – https://Bookvault.app Apple Books for Authors – https://authors.apple.com Spotify for Authors: Introducing Audiobook Recaps - https://authors.spotify.com/blog/recaps The Bottom Line (subscription required): A Deep Divide Emerges between AI Users and Nonusers – https://DaleLinks.com/TheBottomLine Spoken.Press – https://spoken.press Twin Flames Studios: The State of AI Audiobooks in 2025 - https://twinflamesstudios.com/the-state-of-ai-audiobooks-in-2025 Dibbly Create – https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) Dibbly Create: Book Layout Studio Webinar - https://dibbly.com/join-free-webinar/ Dibbly – https://DaleLinks.com/Dibbly (affiliate link) ProWritingAid: Novel November – https://DaleLinks.com/NovNov (affiliate link) ProWritingAid Black Friday Deal – https://DaleLinks.com/ProWritingAid (affiliate link) Book Award Pro – https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Get Authentic Book Reviews – https://GetAuthenticBookReviews.com DropCap Marketplace - https://dropcapmarketplace.com/pricing Behind the Scenes at Author Nation 2025 - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2121723/episodes/18169217 Author Nation 2025: My Honest Review - https://youtu.be/AmmElopRJJY?si=xG915vwoZ1hf_q-q Amazon Ads Insights with Dale L. Roberts - https://booklinker.mykajabi.com/AmazonAdsDale The First 2 YEARS Sucked! Self-Publishing Secrets with Dale L. Roberts - https://youtu.be/K8iSpCkV4C0?si=Yk1q8Z9MDpTeh5r5 Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

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#168: Anne Ditmeyer and Martin Lake – Self-publishing, Platforms, and the Real Costs of Going Indie

London Writers' Salon

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2025 52:30

Self-published authors Anne Ditmeyer and Martin Lake share what it really takes to go indie, from choosing platforms and budgeting for editing, design, and ISBNs to redefining success, avoiding scams, and playing the long game of finding readers and building a sustainable writing life. You'll learn:Why Anne and Martin chose self-publishing over traditional routes and how they framed readers as their gatekeepers.How both authors define success beyond bestseller lists, from “book as business card” to improving the craft across 25 books.The real timelines of an indie career, including slow early sales, backlist effects, and why self-publishing is a marathon, not a sprint.What a realistic budget looks like for editing, design, typesetting, audiobooks, and print on demand, plus where they chose to DIY or outsource.How they use platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, and Shopify, and why most sales still come through Amazon.Practical approaches to marketing that do not require a huge following, including series, mailing lists, events, workshops, and using your existing communities.The role of ISBNs, imprints, metadata, and print on demand for getting into libraries and bookstores, and why in-store placement is harder than it looks.Red flags to watch for with third-party “publishing services” and why due diligence can save you thousands in fees and frustration. Resources and Links:

Writers, Ink Podcast: Episode 316 - The art of storytelling with international bestseller, A.G. Riddle.

Writers, Ink

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2025 62:30

Join hosts J.D. Barker, Jena Brown, Kevin Tumlinson, and Jena Brown as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including stories about B&T, Ingram Spark, confusing books, and TikTok. Then, stick around for a chat with A.G. Riddle! A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting internet companies before retiring to pursue his true passion: writing fiction. His novels have sold over six million copies worldwide and been translated in twenty-four languages. Several of his works are in development for feature films. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and an eccentric dog. No matter where he is, or what's going on, he tries his best to set aside time every day to answer emails and messages from readers. You can reach him at: ag@agriddle.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Nicholas Binge, author of 'Extremity' - Speculative Fiction writer discusses whether the idea dictates the form, the tricky switch to being full-time, and his path to publication

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2025 59:48

Nicholas Binge has lectured in creative writing, co-hosts the 'Binge Reading Book Club' podcast, and has just published his 4th book. It's called 'Extremity'.It follows up the success of 'Professor Everywhere', which won the Proverse Prize for Literature, 'Dissolution', and the bestselling, 'Ascension'. 'Extremity' is a time-travelling police procedural. It follows Julia Torgrimsen, brought out of retirement to investigate the murder of a billionaire she once worked with. When she finds the body... there's an identical one right next to it.We discuss how this book came to be a novella - does the idea dictate the form? Also, you can hear why he found it tricky becoming a full-time writer, why he always tries to celebrate the small wins, and about his winding path to publication.This episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Try it now at ingramspark.com/learnmoreSupport the show at - patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutineGet a copy of the book - uk.bookshop.org/shop/writersroutineGet the newsletter - writersroutine.substack.com@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kelly Mullen, author of 'This Is Not a Game' - Hollywood Producer and Writer discusses tricking yourself to write, reinventing the wheel, and getting characters to your end

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2025 48:48

Kelly Mullen is a creative powerhouse who has just released her debut novel, 'This Is Not a Game'. Previously, Kelly has produced in Hollywood, working on the movie 'Trumbo', and the series 'Dads' for Apple TV+. She works as a marketing consultant, helping brands achieve their creative potential, and now she's trying to realise her own. She's been named by Cosmopolitan, The Bookseller, and the Daily Mail as 'One to Watch', and the rights to her new novel have already been snapped up in the USA and Germany.'This Is Not a Game' is about the hard-drinking, crossword solving Mimi, who enlists her stranged granddaughter Addie to help solve a murder. It was inspired by a summer taking care of her own grandma, and dreaming of the strange scrapes they could get into.We talk about why she wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel, what she learned from working in Hollywood, and how she made sure her characters got to her ending. You can hear Kelly's path to publication, what she's taken from her writing career so far, and whether she's taking on too much.Get a copy of the book, and NOW find ebooks to support your local independent book store, at uk.bookshop.org/shop/writersroutineSupport the show - patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutineThis week's episode is sponsored by IngramSpark, who let you publish like a pro. Try it for free at ingramspark.com/learnmore@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kate Kemp, author of 'The Grapevine' - Debut author discusses preparing for disappointment, trusting the process, and her winding path to publication

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2025 40:14

This week we're joined by Kate Kemp, occupational therapist, psychotherapist and now, author. Her debut novel, 'The Grapevine', is out now. It started life as a manuscript called 'Warrah Place', which won the Stylist Prize for Feminist Fiction, and landed her a publishing deal.It's a gripping mystery set in 1970s Australia, about a murder in a close-kint community, and the rumours that spread like wildfire afterwards.We discuss why her bed is so crucial for her work, and how she edits on the move. Also, you can hear how pressured she feels to make time to write when she's not really feeling it, why you should be prepared for the disappointments along the way, and her winding path to publication.This week's episode is sponsored by IngramSpark, who let you publish like a pro. Also, this week's episode is sponsored by Quick Book Reviews Podcast. You can support the show -patreon.com/writersroutineko-fi.com/writersroutineGet a copy of the book - uk.bookshop.org/shop/writersroutine@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sebastian Faulks, author of 'Birdsong' - Bestselling literary writer discusses editing help, being around at the right time, and thinking about each sentence