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It's the end of Season 8 (what! how!), and we usually celebrate the end of the season with a read along of Sarah's new book, but since there is no new book, we have no choice but to go back to the beginning of “The Casino Series,” which is what Sarah calls The Rules of Scoundrels. We're reading A Rogue By Any Other Name, the first in the series focused on the rakish owners of The Fallen Angel, Sarah's casino. We talk Bourne, turning around big ships, writing sexy stained glass windows, and what it means to look back on the early part of a career.Next week, we're taking a little break, and then we'll be back with Season Nine of Fated Mates. As ever, we're so grateful to you for listening, reading and being a part of this community. We're nothing without you.If you'd like to spend more time talking about romance novels, join our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.NotesThe jellyfish thing is a myth, you don't have to pee on a jellyfish sting.All about the amygdala, or Amy for short if you think of her as that messy friend who will definitely lead you astray.JB Pritzker talked about the colors of school folders, and it's A MESS. Feel free to report back on your preferences for folder colors if you, like Sarah, are outraged.New York Times hosted a conversation with Tressie McMillam Cottom, Nadja Spiegelman, and Mary HK Choi called “Have We Turned Personality into a Diagnosis?” It's worth the listen!Is it true that Gen Z is this puritanical (the Puriteens!), or are they just worried that everything is cringe?JK Rowling is a piece of shit.Gambling has always been bad, but it's especially bad on your phone. Please talk to your kids about sports betting and make sure these apps are not on their phones.Crockfords moved a lot of money in the Regency.One of the big influences for Bourne & Penelope was Alfred de Vigny's poem Éloa, ou La sœur des anges about an angel who falls in love with a stranger who turns out to be Lucifer. English translations are tough to find, but here's a website that has part of it in translation.When you think of the The Fallen Angel (the club), you might think of the famous painting by Alexandre Cabanel, but that's from 1847!SponsorsMegan Frampton, author of Demons and Diplomacy, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your books.Madison Score, author of Wild About You, available in print, ebook or audiobook at Amazon.Tracy MacNish, author of Of the Ashes, available in print or ebook, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.Hachette Books, publishers of Jennifer Givhan's The Sleeping Sisters, available in print, ebook or audiobook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your books.The RestFor even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2026/8/25/s0849-a-rogue-by-any-other-name If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It's so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates. Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough. If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

How can the Fast Drafting method help you finally finish your novel? And how do you make progress when you only have 30 minutes a day to write? Jessica Brody shares her tips for finishing first drafts after 20 years as an author. In the intro, Clive Barker's Kickstarter, The Amazon Tax [Seth Godin]; Trad publisher announces “human-originated, AI-facilitated” book, The Everything Code [PanMacmillan; AI policy; CHAPTR]; Holy relics, churches, and memento mori in Bruges and Brussels. 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 Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy. Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method. You can pre-order with bonus extras at JessicaBrody.com/preorder 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 a small advance can set you up for long-term success Why 97% of first drafts are never finished How to finish a novel writing 30 minutes a day Why drafting and revising are two different jobs How a pre-writing ritual primes your brain for flow Writing a meta murder mystery after 20 years of teaching plot You can find Jessica at JessicaBrody.com and WritingMastery.com. Transcript of the interview with Jessica Brody Jo: Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy. Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method. So welcome to the show, Jessica. Jessica: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so honoured to be here. My writing community speaks so highly of this podcast, so I'm excited. Jo: Oh, well, thank you, and you were requested, so this is going to be a good one. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jessica: Well, I started writing when I was seven. I like to put in air quotes, I wrote my first, quote, “novel” when I was seven. It was about three pages long. I got the bug very early. I didn't realise it was an actual career choice that you could take seriously until way later in life, after I'd already graduated college with a degree in economics and I was working as a financial analyst, and I was just writing on the side for fun. Then, as luck would have it, I got laid off from my job, and I ended up trying to take writing a little bit more seriously in that time. That's when I found the Save the Cat method, which absolutely changed everything for me. Before that, I had loads of rejection letters, and I eventually sold my first novel to St. Martin's Press, and I've been writing and publishing ever since. That was 20 years ago now. Jo: 20 years, wow. It's so interesting. So you were in economics, you were a financial analyst, and you got into writing. Did you have any pushback from either your own brain that was like, “I cannot make money this way,” or your family? Or how did you make that leap? Because we just hear that it's not a career, financially, really. Jessica: I know, and I think I went into it very blindly, using television as my resource of this is how much money I can make writing. Like Sex and the City, she was selling books for lots of money. So I was like, oh, I just have to sell one book, and then I'll be set. That was not the case. My first advance was so much lower than I expected, and what happened, though, was kind of interesting. I sold my first book, way lower advance than I was hoping for. I wasn't making any money anywhere else, so I was taking on all these odd jobs that I could do in my own time. I was doing transcription work, and I was working at a school half the time. I mean, I just had so many really weird jobs. I think what happened was, because I didn't have another financial net to help me, it just pushed me really hard. So once I sold one book, I was like, well, I need to sell another one and another one, and I ended up in this 20-year cycle, which I've slowed down thankfully, since, but of writing so obsessively, I should say. I just kept selling books and selling books. My advances got higher and higher, and eventually I was able to support myself with my writing, but it was not instant at all. Jo: Actually, that's a really good note there, because we often hear so much of these debuts that get paid a ton of money, and then they disappear, and they almost spiral down. Whereas what you've done is spiral up. Which is almost a better way to do it perhaps, with your reputation with traditional publishing. Jessica: It's funny, I tell this story a lot to writers who are looking to get published, that the big advance is not necessarily the end-all be-all. Because I have heard that story before, someone gets a very big advance, and then it doesn't earn out, and they can't sell another book because the publisher's lost money. I had the opposite experience. My advance was so low, and my publisher got worldwide rights. They bought worldwide rights. So they started selling foreign rights of my first book really early on, and I earned out before the book even came out, with just a few foreign sales. That ended up setting me up for success, because I was making money for the publisher from day one, and I was able to sell more books, and so I sort of worked my way up. I really do credit a lot of that to how long I've been able to stay in this game. Jo: No, it's a good way of thinking about it, because people forget the publisher isn't a charity. The publisher has to make money from your book. So it's nice that you make money, but they have to make money, or they're not going to bother, right? Jessica: Yes, exactly. Jo: So let's come back to Save the Cat, because you mentioned that the original method really changed how you write, and then of course you did Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. So I've got that. I imagine a lot of people listening have got that. Tell us a bit about why that methodology made such a difference to you, and why you think it's so useful. Jessica: Well, you'll sense a theme here. I went into this business, like I said, without knowing a lot, and I went into it the way I think a lot of writers do, which is, I had an idea, I sat down, and I tried to write it. I had no guidance, no map, no structure, and I just wrote. I actually finished something, which is surprising, but then I started to get all these rejection letters that basically said similar things, which was, “You're a good writer, you have a good voice, but there's no story here.” I just didn't understand that feedback, because I had finished something. I could print it out and stack it on my desk. Wasn't that a story? Apparently it was not. Then a screenwriter friend of mine that I was talking to about how I was getting all of these rejection letters with the same note said, “You should read this book that recently came out. It's called Save the Cat, and it's for screenwriters, but I think it could work for novels because it just seems to be all about structure and storytelling.” So I read the book cover to cover so quickly, because if anyone's read the original, it's just so readable, and everything started clicking in my mind. I realised, wow, I really don't know how to tell a story. I could plot out everything I had done wrong, and I went back to my book and I started rewriting it from page one with this new structure in mind. When I finished that, I ended up getting an agent for that book, and the agent sold that book. I've been using the method ever since. It just made so much sense to my brain. What I tell writers is, “Use the method that makes sense to your brain.” All storytelling structure methods are basically telling the same story, just with different words, sliced and diced a little bit differently, but structure is structure, and a story is a story. It has to have a beginning, middle, and end. It has to have conflict, it has to have a middle twist, and things like that. So this one worked for my brain, and I started to teach it to other novelists, because at the time there was still just the screenwriting guide. So I started to teach how I was using it to other novelists, and that turned into the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Then I wrote a young adult version of it as well. And I still use it to this day. It's just something that's always made sense to me. Jo: So were you hired by the estate? Blake Snyder died, right? So were you hired to write that, or is that something you arranged? Jessica: It was kind of something that was arranged. I think Blake Snyder Enterprises is the name of the company. Blake Snyder died in 2009, sadly. When I started using the method, I was blogging about it on my blog, and I would share some of my beat sheets of the novels I was writing. The people who had taken over his estate reached out to me and said, “Hey, can you blog for us? Because we don't have a lot of novel content on our blog. We just do screenplay stuff.” And I said, “Of course.” I had a fangirl moment. Oh my gosh, they've reached out to me and this is so exciting. So I started blogging for them, and then that turned into the workshops that I started doing with them. Then we partnered up on the book. I think it was one of those things that felt inevitable, like we were just working toward it. I was living in LA at the time. They're based in LA. And I remember having breakfast with them, and we all just looked at each other and said, “So we need to write a book, right? There has to be a book.” So we ended up sharing the copyright, and, as you see from the title, it says based on the books by Blake Snyder. It's very much his method. Then I brought some of my novel flair and some of my own little tips and tricks that I had picked up over the years and applied it to his method. Jo: I love that. We are going to come to your other book for writers in a minute, but just on that intellectual property sharing, writing in other markets, you also write for Disney Publishing. This is so fascinating to me. Now, there are lots of people who do write for other properties. So how did that come about writing for other properties, and how does that fit into your portfolio of the things that you do? Jessica: Yes, writing for other properties is really fun. It's probably not for everyone. You have to know what you're getting into before you pursue it, because it's very much not your IP. You're writing under someone else's brand, you're in their canon, and there are certain rules you have to follow. So you have guidelines. I found it to be really fun and kind of a break from some of my own stuff, because I didn't have to come up with everything. I didn't have to invent all the new worlds and all the new characters. A lot of them were just given to me, and I could play within the boundaries of that sandbox, and I really found that inspiring. So what happened actually is I was on a writing retreat with a bunch of other writers, and there was a writer at the retreat who already wrote for Disney Press and was supposed to write this new series for them, based on their Descendants series. She said to me, “I really can't do it, but I'd love to recommend someone else to them.” I think we had been talking about how big of a fan I was of Disney or something, and she said, “Do you want me to recommend you?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely.” Another big fangirl moment. So the editor of that series reached out to my agent. They talked to me. They got writing samples from me through my agent, and then before I knew it, I was hired to write, I think the first contract was maybe for two or three of the books, and then we renewed for a few more. It was just really fun. Then I formed a relationship with that editor. We ended up working on another series for younger kids, based on the Disney Princess LEGO series, which was much younger and new for me. It had illustrations. That was a whole new challenge, but I found it really fun. As I said, it was a nice break from writing my own things, because I could write them fairly quickly. They did have very fast turnarounds at the publisher too, but I could use my skills for structure and storytelling and apply it to a world that already existed, and it was a nice pairing. Jo: I love this. So much of what you've done seems to have come from relationships or just putting yourself out there in the world. Jessica: Yes, good observation. I hadn't thought of that. Jo: Whereas I think a lot of people think that it's all about cold pitching. It's not so much, from what you're saying. Jessica: Yes, and I did another IP project with Simon & Schuster called Boys of Summer, which was a young adult novel. That one specifically came from my agent. So a lot of times publishers will reach out to agents and say, “Here's what we're doing. Do you have authors who would fit?” And my agent will often reach out to me and say, “Here's the pitch I got from a publisher. Are you interested in submitting yourself for this?” That's what happened with Boys of Summer. They actually sent out an outline to a bunch of writers who were interested, and I had to write sample chapters to the outline, or I think it was the first couple of chapters or something. I was very gratefully selected to write it. That came about from having an agent, and a lot of times having an agent is a way into IP work. And then those connections can help too. Jo: Fascinating. Right. Well, let's get into your book Page One to Done, which as I said, one of my listeners actually requested to have you on the show to talk about this book, because she said it was absolutely fantastic and helped her finish her book. So why finishing? What is the problem? Why write a book on actually finishing? What are some of the common issues that people have? Jessica: Well, thank you to that listener. I really appreciate it, and here I am because of you. Connections once again. So Page One to Done came out of my own struggle with finishing, and not just finishing, but finishing efficiently and maintaining joy throughout the process of writing a novel. As I said, I was writing very fast and furiously, and my deadlines were piling up, and I started to feel like writing a novel stopped being fun. It started to become a very frustrating process, and I realised that was a lot about how I was approaching the first draft, which, as most writers know, the first draft is very hard. When I started to look further into it, I found this statistic online that's widely accepted in the writing community, which is that 97% of first drafts are not finished. Which is, wow, mind-blowing, but also not that hard to believe once you think about the challenges of writing a first draft. Taking an idea from a seed, developing it into a full plot with character development and arcs and subplots and side characters and themes and all the things that you think a story should have, getting that all onto the page and actually reaching the end. It's very, very difficult, and I never lie about how difficult it is. So I was struggling to finish things quickly, to enjoy the process, and I noticed that other writers were too. I felt like, well, I have this plotting guide that I love, this structure guide, Save the Cat! Shouldn't this be easier once I have an outline? And it wasn't. And that, I think, is because we forget that there's another part of the process. It's not just about developing a compelling character. It's not just about having a well-paced plot. You have to be able to get ideas out of your head and onto the page in a way that doesn't make you want to quit. I think one of the problems with the first draft is most of us write something down, it does not match what's in our head, and we start to get more and more frustrated. The process becomes overwhelming. We're holding too much of the story in our head. We're going back to page one to revise with every new idea we have, so it starts to slow down. The farther we get into the book, the longer that back to page one process takes, and things start to spiral out of control. I think that's essentially what happens to this 97% of first drafts. The writer quits because it's not good enough. It doesn't match what's in their mind, and there's too much to hold, and it starts to become overwhelming. So this is what was happening to me. Even though I was finishing things, the process was still very overwhelming, and I started to experiment with different things. Different mindset shifts that I could make, different ways I could change my writing routine to really enhance the process, to get into flow faster, to stay in flow for longer, things like that. It took me about five years, and I developed this collection of mindset shifts and strategies and routines that I could not only apply to myself, but I turned it into a system that was repeatable, and I started teaching it in my Writing Mastery Academy. I called it the Fast Drafting method, and it's all about letting go of this idea that our first draft has to be perfect or even that good, and just focusing on getting ideas down as quickly as possible, even if that creates a big mess. It's this freeing process of doing that in a way that we don't get in our own way. So I started teaching it to other writers. People were finishing things who had never finished things before. Writers who had taken two years to write a first draft were writing first drafts in weeks. The biggest comment I was getting was, “This is so freeing. This is so liberating. This is so fun.” And it gave people the motivation that they needed to actually sit down and revise the book. Before, either they never finished, so they never got to the revision process, or they were so overwhelmed and bogged down by the two years it took for them to write one draft, they didn't have the energy to revise and get it to the next level. So anyway, all of this is to say it was working for me, it was working for other writers. I turned it into a book called Page One to Done, and it's my three-phase process, mindset, preparation, and drafting, which I equate to running a marathon. You wouldn't run a marathon without proper training and proper nutrition and the right mindset, just like you wouldn't write a novel without the right mindset, the right preparation, and the right skills you need to get to the end. Jo: That's fantastic. You mentioned training there and some of the routine changes. So I hear new writers say, “Oh, I can't write unless I maybe have two hours or three hours to write down stuff, and I never have three hours at a time, so I never have time to write.” I hear that a lot. So what would you say to those people? What is a routine and a mindset shift that might help those people? Jessica: That's great, and I hear that all the time too. I interviewed a handful of authors for this book who had gone through the fast drafting method with me, and I would say the majority of them wrote for 30 minutes to one hour a day and were able to finish their books in a matter of weeks to maybe two months. That's because what I teach in the book is not about the amount of time you have. It's about how you use that time. When you really structure your day and your writing time with intentionality, you do whatever you can to block out distractions, get into flow, stay in flow. I'll give you one amazing tip that basically solves all of these things in a second. But when you really bring intentionality to those 30 minutes, you can write more in 30 minutes than you can in three hours without bringing these kinds of intentional choices. So that's one of the things I teach. You don't need more time. You actually just need to approach the time you have with the right mindsets and the right intentions. So one of the biggest shifts I tell people is just don't write and revise at the same time. For one, it pulls your brain in two different directions and creates the requirement of context switching, because essentially drafting and revising are two different jobs. Drafting is getting ideas out of your head and onto the page. Revising is polishing those ideas. They require very different headspaces and very different skills. So when we try to do both of them at once, we're pulled in two different directions. We're essentially trying to polish something we haven't even figured out yet, so we're polishing in the dark, if you will. It causes our brain to snap back and forth so many times. The term context switching is very big in the zeitgeist today, and that's because it's eating up our brain capacity. So if you spend 30 minutes just getting ideas down without judging them as they're coming out, without trying to revise them as they're coming out, you will get a lot of words down. A lot of that has to do with just what do you expect out of those 30 minutes? If you expect to write a chapter of absolutely brilliant polished prose, you're probably not going to do it, and you're going to feel like you wasted three hours. Then the next time you have three hours, you're like, “Well, no, I'm not going to do that. It's too frustrating, and I don't have three hours to begin with.” But if you sit down with the idea of, “I'm going to get all my ideas down. I'm going to just enjoy this process and live in my story for these 30 minutes,” you will be amazed at how much will come out onto the page. And you can absolutely finish a book that way. So intentionality is how you set up your workspace. Making sure that your phone is on do not disturb, making sure there are no pop-ups on your screen, making sure there are not even windows open behind your document. Every time your mind thinks about something else, you have to bring it back, and that eats brain power. So it's things like that. I have a whole chapter on how to set up a writing routine. One of the biggest tips I give people is to do what I call a pre-writing ritual. This is based in neuroscience, and there are all of these studies that back this up, that our brain does something where it associates an activity with another activity. So let's say right before we sit down to write, every time we do that, we do 10 jumping jacks, just as an example. But we only do 10 jumping jacks before we write. We don't do 10 jumping jacks before we sit down to do our taxes or answer emails. It's just before we write. Your brain starts to create this associative link with jumping jacks and writing. These are ways that we can prime our brain to get into the writing mode, and after doing that a handful of times, you do your jumping jacks, and your brain is literally already in your story before you sit down. It starts to soften that resistance that happens when we think, “Oh, I have to go write now,” or, “I've got to go write a certain amount of words,” or, “I have to work with my story.” It softens that, where it just becomes, “Oh, this is what I'm doing now.” Setting up these pre-writing rituals, which could include jumping jacks, could include something else, a lot of examples we can explore if you want, creates that associative link and allows us to get into the writing zone even faster. So by the time we sit down, we're already primed to go. We're not wasting a lot of that time going, “Oh, should I do it now? Should I do it later? I've got to open my document. Oh, my coffee's a little low.” All the things that we do to delay writing. They start to fall away. Jo: Yes, I mean, I always tell people, you and I turned up on time. We arranged this. We respect each other. We turn up, and we're doing this within a time slot. So I always say to people, “Look, make a calendar entry for your writing,” and do you respect your writing enough to turn up on time and do the work? We had a few minutes of saying hi or whatever, and then we got on with our work, which was this interview. So if you've arranged to start writing for that half an hour, then it is work still, right? You need to turn up and honour that. Jessica: Yes, and actually I have the same tip in the book. I say put it on your calendar, block it off. For the reasons you said, it creates in your brain the idea that this is a serious thing. It's not just a, “Oh, I'll get to it when I get to it,” like folding the laundry. It's like, no, this is what I've decided to do, I'm serious about it, I respect it. Just like any other appointment that you would respect, like lunch with a friend or an important business meeting, you show up for it. You don't go, “I think I'll show up to that business meeting in a few hours when I feel like it.” Also it keeps the routine consistent, because one of the tips I give is to always write at the same time every day if you can, because again, that associative link created in your brain, that habitual routine. So if you put it in your calendar for the days that you're going to write, you won't schedule over it by accident, which is just another logistical thing. I say something similar to what you just said, Joanna, in the book, which is basically, if you booked a massage for an hour, you would stay for the hour, right? Because you paid for this massage. Jo: Hell yes. Jessica: It's important to you. You're not going to get up in the middle and start texting your friends. You want your massage. If you treat your writing like any other thing that's important to you and show up for it consistently, it will show up for you, too. Jo: Yes, and I think the other misconception is that, okay, so that person has made it, and they're at the desk. I listen to rain and thunderstorms in my headphones. That's kind of, I guess, my routine. But that doesn't mean that I can just stream something wonderful. You talked about separating the writing and the editing, but sometimes it really is pretty basic, right? Morgan walked into the room. That will often be my thing, and then I'll be like, “Okay, well, why?” And what was the room like? Or was it even a room? So sometimes you just have to start writing something rather than wait for a perfect sentence. Jessica: Oh, yes, absolutely. Waiting for the perfect sentence, you'll be waiting for a long time. I say waiting for inspiration, you'll be waiting for a long time. My joke is, if I waited to write only when I felt inspired, I'd finish a book about every 20 years, if that. I think that's very important, and I teach a lot of tips and tricks in the book on how to get past that resistance, because of course, we don't want to just sit down and write something that we don't like. We don't want to just write down, “Oh, she stared at her computer for 10 minutes.” But sometimes we have to write that down to get to the next sentence or the next plot point or whatever barrier is in our mind. So one tip I'll tell people is put things you don't like in brackets, the square brackets. It's a really simple tip, and it's one of the tips I share in the book. Just put it in brackets and move on. What the brackets do, at least for people who use it, is it's like scaffolding. It's a reminder to your brain, this isn't permanent. This isn't going to stay. I'm going to come back to this later and fix it once I figure out what the story is and what she's actually doing in the room at this moment. For now, it's there. It's on the page. I can move past it. For me at least, the brackets are just this really nice reminder of the scaffolding. Nope, nope, nope, not perfect, not permanent, moving on. Then you can come back later and flesh it all out. I share a lot of anecdotes from my 20 years of writing novels, and one that I particularly like is I was working on a novel, and I had this scene that was just so awful, where all of my characters were sitting in a room. I had no idea what room it was or what it looked like, and they were talking about their feelings. It was just so awful and boring, but I had to get through this scene because I had to establish certain things that came later. I was complaining and complaining about this scene. I was on a writing retreat at the time, and my writer friends were like, “Let's just do a writing sprint, and we'll all write really fast, and we'll all get through our bad scenes, and we'll move on.” So I did that. I moved past the boring scene. It was still boring all the way to the end, but here's the thing, I couldn't figure out what happened in that scene until I'd figured out the whole story. So I wrote the bad version, and then in the next draft I came back and I was like, “Oh, this scene should take place on this bridge that I wrote in the finale that I didn't even know I needed, and it's this very symbolic bridge, and they can be standing on the bridge, and then they should be talking about this because that's going to pay off in the third act,” and I hadn't even thought of that yet. So all the things were coming together, but I could never have come up with that at the time. If I had just sat there and tried and tried, I probably would have gotten stuck at that scene and quit. So I had to just write the bad version, move past it, and come back later. Jo: Yes, and I think maybe because you're famous for structure, people think that maybe you wouldn't have to do that, because you already came up with that in the plotting. It sounds like you're also putting in those elements and foreshadowing and deepening things in the edit. So that's quite comforting for me as a discovery writer, because I end up doing so much more of that kind of thing in the edits. Jessica: Well, something I like to say is that we're all discovery writers, just different degrees. Because the writing process, no matter how much you plot in advance, is always going to be a discovery process. There are always going to be things you didn't think of. There's always going to be a way to tie things together that you never could have thought of before you started writing. So much of the story evolves and gets processed on the page and in your mind as it's coming out onto the page, and it's delusional to think you can think of all that before you start engaging with the characters. You can come close. I've known writers who have come very close, but almost all writers will discover something that they didn't know in the outline. I would argue that that's actually the fun part of writing. It's not the days when writing goes exactly to plan. They're nice, but they're not necessarily the fun parts. The fun parts are when you sit down to write the scene you thought was going to be the scene, and suddenly this new detail appears, and you go, “Oh my gosh, this totally unlocks everything, and I never even thought of it.” It could be in a text message. It could be on a billboard. It could be something the character just blurts out that you weren't expecting, and suddenly your whole story comes together in that moment, or maybe just the scene comes together. It's those moments, I think, that we write for. So even just expecting the book to come out exactly as you plotted is one of those mindset shifts. If you shift it and think, “This is really fun. I get to discover new things about my story that I wasn't expecting,” that, again, just makes the process a little more fun. So instead of, “Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be,” or, “This isn't what I outlined,” which is focusing on what's wrong with the book, it becomes, “Oh, wow, this is teaching me something I never expected about my story, and that's pretty cool.” Jo: Yes, I think that moment, Carl Jung called it, I guess, synchronicity, the moment when these things come together and it feels just incredible, that's the moment we all look for. It does seem to happen on every book. Everything clicks into place, and I look forward to that moment with every book. I did want to ask you about a novel that you have coming out soon as we record this, called How to Write a Murder. Now, this is a new genre for you, and it's quite meta because it's about writers as well. So talk about writing a brand new genre now at this point in your career. What are the challenges of trying to reach a new audience? Why do this book now? Jessica: Wow, great question. I love challenging myself to do something new. I wrote contemporary for many years and then thought, “I'm going to try a sci-fi.” Or, “I'm going to try middle grade now.” I think I go where the story wants, where I'm inspired to go when it comes to story ideas. However, with mystery, it's been one of those things that's always been on the back of my mind, like a wish list, a bucket list. I want to write a murder mystery. I just never had the right idea. Or I never had the time, or I never had the space. Then I finished my last novel contract, and I took a break, because I had been writing on deadlines for years. I took a very, very much needed break from deadlines. For the first time in I think 15 years, I did not have a book deadline. I just asked myself, “Jessica, what do you want to write?” As opposed to, what's the next book that's due? And the answer was very clear. I want to write that murder mystery. I toyed with a few ideas, and then I started to think about, okay, so I wrote this book on plot that a lot of people know and use. What if someone used that book to plot a literal murder? What would that look like? This meta explosion came to mind, which is that I wanted to write a murder mystery that's structured like a plotting guide for murder mysteries. The characters in the book are all writers who are familiar with this plotting guide, and the events of the story are unfolding like the plot of a murder mystery according to this book. You have no idea which one of them is actually using the book to plot the murder, because they all know the book. So one of the taglines is, “One dead body, seven mystery writers, and they all know how to get away with murder.” It was sort of my culmination of everything I'd done in my career. All the plotting workshops I'd taught, all the revision courses I'd taught, and of course this plotting structure method I'd been teaching for years, and I put it into this book. It's a fictional version of Save the Cat! It's called The Bestseller Formula. The premise of this book is that someone is using a murder mystery plotting guide to plot a literal murder. So the reader is learning how to write a murder as they're reading about the murder on the page. Jo: I love it. I know lots of people are going to want that. It does bring the business side of things into more difficulty, because of course you have readers, like you mentioned middle grade, you've got YA books, and obviously, I guess, the writers that you teach will be interested. How is this going to work for your book marketing and your business? Because it also sounds like this might be a standalone. Jessica: It is a standalone as of now. I have some sequel ideas, but we're not pursuing them yet. It is a different market for me, for sure, and that's become a challenge as I'm marketing, because I'm not in the thriller mystery space yet. I haven't written a novel for adults since the very, very beginning of my career. I've been mostly writing for teens and middle grade. The good news is most of my teen readers are now adults, because it's been so long since I wrote for teens. So there's that. I think the book will appeal to mystery readers just because it's a fun mystery, and there's a fun meta element to it. I think it's going to appeal to writers as well. So I'm very much leaning on that, at least for the launch. I hope my writer community will get behind this book, because it's very much an ode to storytelling. It's an ode to writers. I dedicated it to writers. As a writer, you will understand this book on a level that a reader never will. You will get so many of the little inside jokes that a reader might just skim past. So I did very much write it for writers, with the hope that readers will also enjoy it. I had the most fun writing it I've had, I think, of writing any book. Partly I think that was because I wasn't writing it under deadline. I was just writing it for me, but also just because it felt like the book I'd been destined to write for so long. Jo: Fantastic. So we're out of time. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jessica: How is that possible? I feel like we just started. JessicaBrody.com is the best place to find everything. If you're interested in my writing courses, you can check out WritingMastery.com as well. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jessica. That was brilliant. Jessica: Thank you, Joanna. I had so much fun.The post From Page One To Done: Fast Drafting Your Novel With Jessica Brody first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:59:00 GMT http://relay.fm/designed/0 http://relay.fm/designed/0 Jason Snell and Myke Hurley Apple emerged from the unique environment of the Santa Clara valley suburbs of the '70s thanks to the particular genius of its two co-founders and some surprising help they got along the way. Apple emerged from the unique environment of the Santa Clara valley suburbs of the '70s thanks to the particular genius of its two co-founders and some surprising help they got along the way. clean 5697 Apple emerged from the unique environment of the Santa Clara valley suburbs of the '70s thanks to the particular genius of its two co-founders and some surprising help they got along the way. Links and Show Notes: Presented by Myke Hurley and Jason Snell. Written by Jason Snell. Audio editing by Myke Hurley and Jim Metzendorf. Video production by Jamie Snell. Designed in California theme by Christopher Breen. References: Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone Apple: The First 50 Years (2026) by David Pogue (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books) Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson (Amazon, Used) Get early access to full series, ad-free listening, and bonus episodes by becoming a member. Submit Feedback

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT http://relay.fm/designed/1 http://relay.fm/designed/1 Jason Snell and Myke Hurley We take you back to 1976 and recount Steve Jobs's numerous attempts to sell Apple or, at the very least, get someone to make an investment in the fledgling company. We take you back to 1976 and recount Steve Jobs's numerous attempts to sell Apple or, at the very least, get someone to make an investment in the fledgling company. clean 1953 We take you back to 1976 and recount Steve Jobs's numerous attempts to sell Apple or, at the very least, get someone to make an investment in the fledgling company. Links and Show Notes: Presented by Myke Hurley and Jason Snell. Written by Jason Snell. Audio editing by Myke Hurley and Jim Metzendorf. Video production by Jamie Snell. Designed in California theme by Christopher Breen. References: Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone Apple: The First 50 Years (2026) by David Pogue (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books) Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson (Amazon, Used) Get early access to full series, ad-free listening, and bonus episodes by becoming a member. Submit Feedback

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:01:00 GMT http://relay.fm/designed/2 http://relay.fm/designed/2 Jason Snell and Myke Hurley We travel to the summer of 1976, as Apple travels to Atlantic City for a computer trade show, the Apple II begins to form, and the fellowship between the two Steves shows signs of breaking. We travel to the summer of 1976, as Apple travels to Atlantic City for a computer trade show, the Apple II begins to form, and the fellowship between the two Steves shows signs of breaking. clean 1966 We travel to the summer of 1976, as Apple travels to Atlantic City for a computer trade show, the Apple II begins to form, and the fellowship between the two Steves shows signs of breaking. Links and Show Notes: Presented by Myke Hurley and Jason Snell. Written by Jason Snell. Audio editing by Myke Hurley and Jim Metzendorf. Video production by Jamie Snell. Designed in California theme by Christopher Breen. References: Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone Apple: The First 50 Years (2026) by David Pogue (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books) Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson (Amazon, Used) Get early access to full series, ad-free listening, and bonus episodes by becoming a member. Submit Feedback

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:02:00 GMT http://relay.fm/designed/3 http://relay.fm/designed/3 Jason Snell and Myke Hurley Under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, the Apple II takes form at last. It's an integrated color computer created by Steve Wozniak, powered by a groundbreaking power supply designed by Rod Holt, and wrapped in a plastic shell designed by Jerry Manock. Under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, the Apple II takes form at last. It's an integrated color computer created by Steve Wozniak, powered by a groundbreaking power supply designed by Rod Holt, and wrapped in a plastic shell designed by Jerry Manock. clean 2106 Under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, the Apple II takes form at last. It's an integrated color computer created by Steve Wozniak, powered by a groundbreaking power supply designed by Rod Holt, and wrapped in a plastic shell designed by Jerry Manock. Links and Show Notes: Presented by Myke Hurley and Jason Snell. Written by Jason Snell. Audio editing by Myke Hurley and Jim Metzendorf. Video production by Jamie Snell. Designed in California theme by Christopher Breen. References: Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone Apple: The First 50 Years (2026) by David Pogue (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books) Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson (Amazon, Used) Get early access to full series, ad-free listening, and bonus episodes by becoming a member. Submit Feedback

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:03:00 GMT http://relay.fm/designed/4 http://relay.fm/designed/4 Jason Snell and Myke Hurley The Apple II makes its public debut at a landmark event in the history of personal computers, and Steve Jobs truly comes into his own. The Apple II makes its public debut at a landmark event in the history of personal computers, and Steve Jobs truly comes into his own. clean 1761 The Apple II makes its public debut at a landmark event in the history of personal computers, and Steve Jobs truly comes into his own. Links and Show Notes: Presented by Myke Hurley and Jason Snell. Written by Jason Snell. Audio editing by Myke Hurley and Jim Metzendorf. Video production by Jamie Snell. Designed in California theme by Christopher Breen. References: Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone Apple: The First 50 Years (2026) by David Pogue (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books) Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson (Amazon, Used) Get early access to full series, ad-free listening, and bonus episodes by becoming a member. Submit Feedback

Janet and Isaiah spend almost a whole episode's length diving into the many different sub-genres of "puzzle games”, what are various examples of each sub-genre, and what types of  games they would group together and why (GAMES). Then the gang talks about the new eReaders they each got! While both are cool in their own right, Isaiah can't help but feel left out with his purchase and debates if he should join Janet with the Kobo brand vs his micro-reader (NOT GAMES).Poll of the Show:https://gamesandnotgames.com/pollTimestamps:00:00 Intro00:18 Catching Up00:50 Games / The many genres of puzzle games01:43:54 Not Games / Changing our habits with eReaders02:23:16 Poll of the Show02:32:04 OutroSend your questions and topics to the email address Inbox@GamesAndNotGames.comFor more Games And Not Games:YouTube.com/@GamesAndNotGamesTwitch.tv/GamesAndNotGamesBlueSky: @GamesAndNotGames.comTikTok, Instagram, Threads: @GamesAndNotGamesBackloggd: GamesAndNotGamesFollow the hosts:Janet: @gameonysus.bsky.socialIsaiah: @isaiahsmith.dev

This is a rewind episode - designed to bring new attention to the back catalogue of the podcast. But it's also something else. The audio you'll be hearing is actually a chapter of my audiobook for my book, Bare Bones. I included Meadowbrook Doe's case in that book and thought I'd share that chapter here to help bring some new ears to the case. If you'd like to listen to the whole audiobook you can purchase it on any audiobook platform including at any of the following links: Audible: https://www.amazon.com/Bare-Bones-Cases-Crime-Africa/dp/B0GFB187YL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3B98LQUOAUXCU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.loOTtBIVZgpLGkYVLz2oGQ.om3t0wgPWjRq-dPYXX44zM6RRD0oyZOi0X7AITvyyX0&dib_tag=se&keywords=bare-bones-cold-cases-from-true-crime-south-africa+by+Nicole+Engelbrecht&qid=1768190789&s=audible&sr=1-1 Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/bare-bones-24?sId=c159a2ce-1398-4618-8cab-e1e0eb57b69c&ssId=vTZKEx-JKmbnaetb-XB4g&cPos=1 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5lbceaLDNSgNLLnO3Icfo8 Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/bare-bones-cold-cases-from-true-crime-south-africa/id1857379297?uo=4 - 24-hr trauma helpline 082-821-3447 - Support the show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/truecrimesa - Support the show on PayBru https://paybru.co.za/communities/true-crime-south-africa - Get TCSA and General True Crime Merch on https://sacriminologist.co.za/shop/ 10% off with code TCSA sitewide Buy Bare Bones Audiobook on Audible · Buy Bare Bones Audiobook on Kobo · Instagram · Pinterest · Facebook · YouTube · Twitter · LinkedIn

We are once again celebrating a wide swath of historical romances that are recently published and by authors we've not talked much about on the podcast! Saddle up, because we're talking the Titanic, submissive heroes, heroines against the wall, bodily autonomy and even centaurs! If you're a historical lover, you're going to have a great time finding your next read in here, and if you're not a historical lover, what are you waiting for? We're so excited to be your discoverabilibuddies on this one!Come talk about your favorite recent historical romances over on our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.Our next read along, next week, is Sarah's A Rogue By Any Other Name, the first in her casino series. This is one we've gotten a bunch of requests for, and so, it will be our final read along of the season. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.BooksAcross the Living Infinite by Logan Sage AdamsTo Covet a Countess by Sapna BhogCentaur and Sensibility by Quenby OlsonThe Seduction of Mr Alfred Sainsbury by Lydia LloydThe Magnificent Earl of March by Cecilia ReneYou Had Me at Heist by Christina BrittonI Shall Never Fall in Love by Hari ConnerFavors From a Gentleman by Lauren HayworthMrs. Milner Gets a Kitchen by Jane Hadley His Awful Grace by Anne KnightEarl on Fire by FeNotesListen to our Long Live Historicals, Volume I here.Fill out more about the Romance Novel Collective and fill out their survey.There was a salt water pool on Titanic. The centaur in The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe is not a centaur or a satyr, but a faun, and his name is Mr. Tumnus. Here's a primer on the difference between satyrs and fauns. Apologies to the Greeks, Romans, and CS Lewis fans in the crowd. The OG Centaur books Sarah mentioned are also not centaurs, they are satyrs, but they are Holy Cannoli, Batman and by Elizabeth Amber. Proceed with caution.Some SFW and NSFW images about centaurs.The RestFor even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2026/8/17/s0848-the-new-historicals-volume-iii If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It's so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates. Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough. If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy. In the intro, Expanding Your Book's IP through Merchandising [Wish I'd Known Then]; Guide to writers conferences [Kindlepreneur]; Rick Rubin and Stephen Pressfield on resistance and the muse [Tetragrammaton]; Pulitzer Prize winners disclose AI usage [Nieman Lab]; My new rebuilt fiction site JFPenn.com. 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 Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How AI search actually finds and ranks the books it recommends Why keywords and search volume are disappearing as marketing metrics Building an internet footprint so your book is worth recommending Why Claude leans on Goodreads while ChatGPT and Gemini lean on Reddit Product is more important than marketing, and how to find your comp titles Passion, business sense and resilience in the authors who last You can find Ricardo at Reedsy.com. Transcript of the interview with Ricardo Fayet Jo: Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. It's been a while. Jo: It has been a while. As we were saying, it's been a decade, which is crazy, because you and I see each other at events and things. For anyone who doesn't know you— Tell us a bit more about you, where you're from, and also, what is Reedsy these days and how have things changed? Ricardo: Yes, sure. I think I'm hard to dissociate from Reedsy because my only background really is Reedsy. We started Reedsy right after business school for most of the founders. There are four founders, and I'm one of them. We've been going since 2014, so it's been 12 years. We started around the same time, and you started even earlier than we did, but we've had the chance to meet at quite a few conferences since. I think the main thing we're still known for is our marketplace. Since the very beginning, Reedsy is a curated marketplace where authors can come in and look for editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters, literary translators, author website designers, pretty much any freelancer you would ever need to hire throughout your writing career. That's how we started. That's our main source of revenue and our main business. Since then, as you mentioned, we've also added courses, live events, so we've got a membership under Reedsy Learning. The main thing we're proud of right now is our writing tool, Reedsy Studio, because we've been pouring a lot of engineering talent into it over the past five, six years, and I think it's a really cool writing tool that is 90% free. It also does the formatting, so it's a good alternative to Vellum or Atticus for those who haven't purchased those tools. So there's a lot of things that Reedsy does at this point, which always makes it hard for me to describe what we do. Jo: But you generally serve writers. That's probably the crux of it. Ricardo: Exactly, yes. We're mostly at the production stage. The thing we say is we help authors make beautiful books, right? That's a little bit the tagline that applies to 90% of what we do, though we also help a little bit with the marketing side of things. Jo: And then just tell people where your accent is from. Ricardo: So I'm half French, half Italian from my parents, and I was born in Spain. So depending on my mood and the moment, it might be anywhere from French, Italian, Spanish. It's anyone's guess, really, at this point. Jo: Yes, exactly. You've been part of the indie author ecosystem, as you said, since 2014. You're often at the author conferences, and you stay abreast of everything that's going on. So what are the biggest changes you've seen in the industry since you started out? Like you said, you guys came from business school. You chose to come into the industry at a particular point, and yet things have changed. So what do you think are the biggest changes, and how have you seen authors adapt? Ricardo: It's crazy, the amount of things that happened in the past 10 years. Obviously we came into the industry as a result of Amazon launching Kindle Direct Publishing, and then the Kindle Store becoming one of the number one places where people buy books. That's what enabled self-publishing in the first place as an industry, and obviously we wouldn't exist without self-publishing being a thing. But then I think probably one of the biggest changes that happened was the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and various other subscription models. Perhaps as a response to that, afterwards, I would say direct sales is the other massive change that happened in the industry. The ability for authors to sell direct to their readers via their websites, or running Kickstarters, or basically the ability to reach your customers directly. Now, obviously, artificial intelligence is probably the biggest change of them all, not just in publishing, across every industry, but of course it's going to affect publishing very strongly, or it has already started making big waves. So I would say those are the three main changes that we've seen happening in the industry. Jo: Just interestingly, given that you're French, Italian, Spanish, European— Has the pace of change been the same in mainland Europe? Because you and I have also met up at European conferences, but I just get the sense that each individual European country, the UK included, as I include the UK in Europe, goes at a different speed. Ricardo: No, they definitely do. Our market at Reedsy is all in English. We only have an English website, and I would say 70% of our market is US, then 15% UK, and then Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. We do have clients in continental Europe, but they're mostly going to be American or British expats. A lot of retired people who write books and use Reedsy services. I think the main reason for that is that self-publishing as an industry hasn't really grown in Spain, France, Italy the way that it's grown in the US and the UK, probably because these are countries where book buying habits are a lot more traditional. So all my friends from high school and university in France, they all buy books, they all buy paper books. They all buy from bookstores. They don't really buy from Amazon that much. They love the smell of paper, all these sorts of things. So obviously that makes it harder for indie authors in those countries because they cannot place their books in the places where people buy them, which is traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, or at least it's much harder. So there is an indie movement in those countries, but it's much smaller. I would say Germany is maybe the exception in Europe, where I've seen more and more full-time indie authors, but I don't think it's a market that's comparable even to the UK. Jo: Interesting. Okay, so let's go to marketing, because you love marketing, you have a newsletter about it, and you have a book, How to Market a Book, same title as mine, and we've found each other in our Also Boughts over the years. You have, however, updated yours several times. 2025 was your last update. Mine was 2016, so yours is definitely the most up-to-date one. So what are your thoughts on how authors can reach readers now? And let's split this into two. Let's start with some tips for new authors who just have maybe one book and are really just starting out. Ricardo: Yes, first of all, sorry for stealing your title. Jo: Oh, you know, it's never been a problem. Ricardo: We were trying to come up with something… I know, I know, I know. But still, we wanted something more original, and then we realised that for SEO purposes, that's the title we should really go for. The good thing is, if you search “how to market a book” on pretty much any retailer, you're going to find your book or mine in any order really, but those are going to be the top two books to this day, thankfully, so I'm good with that. I think in terms of marketing tips for new authors who have just the one book, I'd say, despite all the changes in the industry, the basics of marketing still stay the same. One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. Having a great product. By that, I generally don't talk about literary value or prose or anything like that, just because I'm not a book critic. I'm not an editor. My opinion on whether a book is good or not is worth zero. From a marketing standpoint, for me, a good book is one that resonates with its intended audience. So the first step for newer authors is to basically figure out who they wrote this book for, right? Have an idea of who their target market is. A great way to do that, without entering into marketing jargon like proto-personas and stuff like that, is to think in terms of comp titles, comparable titles. I think that's probably the base of any marketing, whether traditional publishing houses or indie authors, to think, “Okay, which other books out there are similar to mine?” If your book is completely unique, you have, I would say, 99.9% chance of not selling, because your market doesn't exist, and 0.01% chance of creating your own market and completely dominating it, right? So being unique is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would say 99% of the time, it is. Obviously being unique within an existing niche, within an existing market, that's completely different, but you need to work on some comparable titles. So I would say that's where I would start, and that's one of the things that AI is great at. If you even just plug in your book into an AI chat that has enough context, if you're comfortable doing that of course, or if you plug in a synopsis, like a long synopsis, you can basically ask the AI chats, “Okay, what would be some comp titles?” Either you'll have heard of those books, and you'll think, “Okay, they're good comps,” or you may not have heard of them, in which case I would really recommend buying them and reading them and seeing whether they're comps or not. I think that's where marketing starts. Jo: Yes, and we might come back to that for book discoverability. Well, let's just talk about it now, because I now pretty much use Claude for discovering books as well. I just find that the Amazon search, for nonfiction it works really well, right? As you said, if you want to learn how to market a book, you just search “how to market a book”, and our books are very well titled for that. But for fiction, it's so difficult to find new books and comp titles, especially if you don't write in a clear genre, which I don't. I know lots of people do. So we're writing cross-genre. So in terms of book discoverability, I know you've been looking into SEO for books and all of that. What are your thoughts on how authors can more effectively have their books surfaced if people are using the AIs for finding books? Ricardo: That's a very big topic. That's one of my favourite topics right now. That's what I talk about in my marketing newsletter, and I want to start a Substack on the topic as well, because I think it is the future of book discoverability. As you say, search on Amazon isn't great, and if it's not great on Amazon, you don't even want to imagine on Google Play, Kobo, all these sorts of places, right? If you search on Kobo or Apple Books or Google Play for witch cozy mysteries, the top 10 books are going to have exactly “witch cozy mystery” in the title or the subtitle or the series title, right? Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Search is very simple on those sites, so it's very easy to game, but it's terrible as an experience for readers. So I do think that a big part of search is going to move to AI, and now you have Rufus within Amazon itself that appears as a chatbot and encourages you to talk with it, to ask for recommendations. In the beginning Rufus was really terrible, but now I recommend authors play with it. In general, I recommend when it comes to AI discoverability that authors play with all the AI search tools. So it's going to be Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Rufus within Amazon. Just like we talked about comp titles, right, ask for something like, “What would you recommend for fans of this book? Which other books would you recommend?” Or if you're looking for something specific that describes your book, what books would you recommend on… I think one of your examples was fiction around masonry or something like that, right? Jo: I always say, for example, if you ask for action adventure thrillers on pretty much anywhere, you're going to get 20 books by male authors. For those of us who are female authors, but also who have female main characters, you can then be far more granular. That's just not something that necessarily works on Amazon. So, action adventure thrillers with female protagonists written by female indie authors, which is very specific. That will work in AI, whereas that definitely won't work on Amazon. Ricardo: Exactly. So one of the great things about AI search, and terrible things at the same time, is that the concept of keyword is lost, right? So we title our books How to Market a Book because the keyword that people would search for is “how to market a book”, or “book marketing for authors”. Those were the two keywords that had the biggest search volume if we looked at Google Keyword Planner, or any search tools that give you keyword volume. When it comes to AI search, since it's conversational, and it's very personalised, and it can go as niche as you want, keywords are going to disappear, and search volume as a metric is going to disappear. The search you just told me about, maybe there are 10 people who are going to run it exactly. Most people are going to run variations of that. Since you can go as granular as you want, it's going to be very long phrases, very long sentences. So the whole concept of keywords, search volume, SEO, is going to disappear in favour of what some people call GEO, generative engine optimisation, AIO, AI optimisation, AI search optimisation. There's a bunch of names for it, but it is a different discipline. It still works on the basis of Google SEO because what most of these search engines will do is they're going to search the internet, right? They've been trained on a lot of information, but not all of that information is current. Most of these models have been trained on documents and web pages before 2021. That's why when you used the very early versions of ChatGPT, and you asked it about current events or current books, it didn't find it. It didn't have that information. Now all these models have the ability to search the web, and they do that really effectively. So the first thing they're going to do if you run a search like that is they're going to run dozens of different searches on Google or a similar search engine. Action thriller books with female protagonists. Action thriller books with female protagonists by indie authors. Action thriller books by indie authors. They're going to create what I call a corpus, so a massive document of information with candidates, books that probably meet those criteria that they have found through regular web searches. Then they're going to go through all those books and determine which are the most relevant to recommend, and they'll return with that. Then they'll usually have a verification layer as well, which is, okay, I have these five books that I want to recommend to this user, but I just want to make sure first that they are written by indie authors, that they do have a female protagonist, et cetera. And if I'm not able to verify that, I'll flag it in my answer to them. So there are these three layers. Web search, then ranking of the book candidates, and finally a verification layer, and then they serve you the answer. Obviously, that's really powerful. If that's the way that search is headed, which I firmly believe, then we as authors need to learn how to get our books in there. Jo: Yes. It's so interesting, and I do this all the time. Really niche stuff, like a thriller about anatomical Venuses, which are these models from anatomy museums and stuff like that, with an edge of the supernatural. What is brilliant is that you can find the books that come up. I actually got one that I read and reviewed, and it was fantastic. So I love the more granular thing, but we're really in the very long tail now, right? It feels like you can write a very nuanced book, and it will be surfaced, but only by a few people. So do we have to write our books and then try to not even retrofit them in the way that we used to? We used to try and figure out the seven keywords and all of that kind of thing, and now I almost feel like we just get to be grownups, where you just get to write the book and put it out there, and these things are more intelligent than the search terms. Ricardo: Yes, absolutely. I think in terms of the variety of books that are going to be read and discovered, that's amazing. A little bit like the whole indie publishing movement was amazing, because if you remove the traditional publishing gatekeepers, then suddenly zombie books aren't dead anymore. Zombies are alive again. They've… Jo: Come to life. Ricardo: They've come alive, and so you get a bunch of zombie books again. It's not a small niche audience. It's actually a pretty big niche audience that loves zombie books, and suddenly they have those to consume. This is a little bit similar on a much, much bigger and more granular scale, because anyone can find exactly the kind of book that they're looking for, with the tropes they want, with the type of characters they want, with the type of author they want, and you can basically use any kind of filter. So for discoverability on the side of the reader, that's great. For the authors, it doesn't mean that you can just write whatever you want and then rest, and readers will find them. Because your books still need to have generated a certain internet footprint and a certain review footprint in order to become interesting or recommendable to AI search engines, right? Unless you're the only book that an AI search engine can recommend for that specific search, and yours was very specific, so it might have been the only one. If there are other candidates, the AI search engines are pretty smart. They're going to recommend the candidates that have more reviews, better reviews, or are more famous, that have more, when I talk about internet footprint, more pages talking about them on the internet. That's for me the big finding I've seen. The more pages you have on the internet talking about your book, so that could be book review sites, that could be Goodreads lists, Listopia lists, anywhere on the internet where your book is mentioned, that creates a footprint for it. The more footprints, the more famous your book looks to AI search engines, and so the more worthy of recommendations it is to them. Jo: Yes, and this is one reason why I now ask people, especially when you sell direct, or say you have a Kickstarter and you want reviews, I ask people if they can review on Goodreads. Obviously Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but it is far more searchable by the bots than Amazon is. I sometimes find that Amazon gets blocked. Or Amazon blocks some of the bots, let's put it that way. They might change over time. They own 15% of Anthropic or something. But Goodreads I feel like does get indexed, and I'm not willing to engage on Reddit. I know Reddit is another popular one. Just be very clear on social media, because some people think, oh, I just need loads of influencers to talk about my book, and that will impact the AIs. But I find that social media just almost isn't even there. Ricardo: It depends on which social media. For me, Reddit is a social medium, right? It's a very weird one, but it's obviously the number one social medium used by AI search engines, and it's pretty dodgy stuff with lots of conflicts of interest, because Google has a paid partnership with Reddit. I think Sam Altman has shares in Reddit. So both OpenAI and Google Gemini heavily rely on Reddit for their AI answers, right? If you ask anything from ChatGPT or Gemini, I'd say there are very high chances that in the sources and the citations of the answer, you're going to find Reddit, right? That goes for books as well. Every time you ask for book recommendations, Reddit is going to be big for those two AI search engines. Claude, it's a little bit different. They do have a little bit of a relationship with Reddit, but I don't think it's as big. I found that Claude relies heavily on Goodreads, not Reddit. To me, Goodreads is another social medium at the end of the day, right? It's not the kind of social medium we think of, like… Jo: It's not TikTok. Ricardo: It's not TikTok. TikTok is surfaced a little bit, but not that much. It might become more surfaced in the future, but right now what I've found is, it's really Reddit and Goodreads. Facebook, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is big for nonfiction topics more than fiction, because there are just not a lot of fiction readers, sorry, talking about their favourite books on LinkedIn. They usually go to other places for that. Jo: Yes, it's really interesting. So obviously TikTok has its own BookTok thing, so some people are finding books on BookTok, and some people like me are finding books through asking Claude, and that's just my overwhelming feeling about the industry. We talked earlier about what's changed. When I started, so 2006, there wasn't even KDP, and then KDP arrives, then you came in 2014, and probably until maybe a few years after that, there was one way to self-publish. Then what's happened since is this kind of splintering. There are so many ways to self-publish. There are so many ways to reach readers. There are so many ways to market. So someone, for example, could sell direct on TikTok Shop, only market through TikTok, and you wouldn't even know that they existed over in another ecosystem, right? So do you feel like that's happened too, this total splintering? Ricardo: Absolutely. I think there are so many different ways in which you can reach your audience now and monetise it as well, that it's absolutely possible. We both know examples of authors who are only visible to their TikTok niche, right? I think the big difference is also monetisation, because earlier you also had different ways of becoming well-known. Like you had Facebook, you had potentially Twitter, back when it was Twitter. Various social media, word of mouth. But where people bought books was Amazon. So that was your monetisation. It was either selling your book on Amazon, or potentially getting KU reads after that when KU launched. Now you can sell on TikTok, you can sell direct, you can run Kickstarters, you can start a Patreon or Substack and make your money through there. There are pretty much infinite ways through which you can monetise your content as a creator. Most of those places will also have a discoverability engine built in, so you can not only sell through there and make money through there, but also grow an audience there. That's probably the biggest competition that Amazon has ever had to face, is this sort of splintering. For us authors and content creators in general, it's amazing, because it's a bunch of different opportunities. Jo: Yes, and I think probably that's circling back to marketing. As we've said, some things have changed, some things stay the same. Is the email list still the number one way to market, do you think, for authors who want a long-term career? Ricardo: I think so. It's just the one thing you really own that allows you to communicate with readers, right? Because even if you build a following on TikTok, TikTok can change. The things we said about Facebook 10 years ago, if you build your Facebook group, Facebook can change, and Facebook changed. Facebook destroyed the reach of pages, and now groups also aren't amazing, et cetera. So the same thing that happened to Facebook can happen to TikTok, can happen to any other social media. Substack is a bit of a hybrid because it is a newsletter, it is a mailing list, but it also has a discoverability engine built in. So I still wouldn't really go all in on Substack. The great advantage there is that you do own the emails, right? So you can move away from it at some point. For me, the email list is the one thing that you are completely in control of. Personally, the main thing I check is my emails every day. I spend more time in my inbox than anywhere else, and I think that's probably the case for most people. So I do think, despite the influx of mails that readers are getting in their inbox, I still think it's one of the most important marketing tools for authors. Jo: Yes, and I still remember when I started my list in December 2008, and I still have people on the list who've been with me that whole time, and have moved email list services several times as well. So I think that's important too. The care of that list too is so important. One of the things that I am annoyed about with Substack, I don't have a Substack, but when I follow some people's, it's always constantly trying to get you to sign up to other people's lists, trying to subscribe you to this or that or the other. I'm like, “That's so annoying.” Now I've found on all these email services they're trying to pair you with other creators and cross-promote and all of this. So it feels like even the email list is becoming a difficult place unless you really protect it. So just protecting your list, I think, and remembering that those are people. Those are people who've bought your books, or people who read your emails. Like people listening to this, these are humans. Sure, some bot might be looking at the transcript, but humans listening to this are individual humans with individual email lists. We tend to forget that, don't we, as you get a bigger list. You think about it as a big number, whereas it's still individual people. Ricardo: Yes, it becomes a number, it becomes metrics, the open rate, the click rate, and all that. But the great thing about email is that you get replies in your inbox. There you remember that they're actual human beings who write you back. I think for readers, the ability to write back to an author and get a response is just amazing, right? If you write to your favourite author and they write back to you, that's the best feeling ever as a reader. So I think email is still one of the best ways to turn your readers into fans and into super fans of your brand, by just interacting with them and answering them. Because yes, you can answer comments on TikTok, Facebook, and all those places, but it doesn't feel the same as an author answering you in your inbox, I feel. So you do get that ability to create a real connection with readers directly through email. Jo: Yes, and I think that trust and the reputation is so important. Just in terms of seeing the authors that you've seen over the years, like I said, you've been going to a lot of the author conferences. You know a lot of the authors in the industry. A lot of people will know you from events. But you've also seen authors come and go, and you've seen vendors come and go. Both of us have seen people arrive, and we'd be like, “Oh, yes, I wonder how long they're going to last.” Then some people do and some people don't. So what are some of the elements that you've noticed about the businesses that last more than a decade? Ricardo: I think they need to solve a genuine problem, or offer a genuinely better solution than one that already exists. I see a lot of businesses come in and they do what another vendor already does, without doing it necessarily better. Those businesses tend to disappear, or linger there, but you don't really hear about them again. When they solve a real need… I still remember when BookFunnel came out, and they've since become massive with one very, very basic thing, which is, “We will take care of delivering your ebook files to readers.” That's how they started, and that's how they became massive. To me at the time, I was like, “That seems like a very small problem,” because I can just email an ebook file. I didn't realise that it was so complicated for a lot of readers to upload files to their Kindle or other devices, and that having a service that takes care of that for you is just massively helpful. I realised that when I published my books, actually. So businesses that solve even micro or apparently very small problems, but they really solve them effectively, they stay. Others that surf on trends, they tend to disappear when the trend disappears. When there's a new marketing trend, and that trend stops working, then those businesses tend to go. Jo: Yes, and what about the authors who last? Because let's face it, most of us don't solve a problem in a different way. Maybe you could say we solve your entertainment problem in a different version to your last book. What about the authors who last long term? What have you noticed about them? Ricardo: Two things. So the first one… Maybe three things. First one is passion. I always say to people who are looking to start self-publishing, I always say that publishing in general is probably one of the worst ways to make money. It's awful. You can pick up any other occupation and it's probably going to be easier to make money. So writers who make a career do it because they need to write, because they have a passion for writing. So a lot of people who come into the industry thinking, “I've heard about all these self-publishing success stories. Surely I can write a book and I can market it. It's not that hard. So that's going to be a great way to make quick bucks,” those generally don't last, because they don't have that genuine passion. The first hurdle they're going to face—and there's going to be a bunch of them along the way—they're going to quit. The second thing is business sense, or business education, the basics of business, right? Thinking in terms of marketing, thinking in terms of who's my reader, unit economics. If I'm selling my books at $3.99, I shouldn't be spending a ton of money. If I just have one book at $3.99, I cannot afford to pay $5 on ads to generate a sale. So those kinds of basic economics or business knowledge, I think, if not a requirement, it's a massive plus. The third thing is resilience. The industry has changed a lot, as you mentioned. There are a bunch of ways now to reach an audience. There are a bunch of ways to make money. It can also be distracting, because you go to one of these conferences and you go back thinking, “Oh, I've got to create my own website, sell direct. I've got to launch my Substack. I have to use Claude Code for my ads,” and three more things, “and I have to set up my TikTok Shop and do TikTok Lives to sell books,” right? Jo: All of those by next week. That's why we go to the conference. Ricardo: Exactly. All those by next week, right? And during that one week after the conference, you have the energy to start implementing all those things, but afterwards you lose that energy and you go back to, “I just want to quit.” So you need to have some sort of resilience, and the business sense of, “Okay, I'm going to try this for the next six months, and I'm going to stick to it, and I'm going to see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm not just going to despair. I'm going to try something else.” That goes for marketing tactics, but also goes for books. Most authors I know who make a living writing, they didn't get there with their first book or even their first series. A lot of times I see authors who write a couple of series, and those series do okay. They sell a little bit, but not much, and it doesn't afford them to quit their day job. Then suddenly, based on what they've learned with those first two series and what they've learned potentially going to conferences or listening to podcasts like this, et cetera, they write a third series that's a hit. That's a hit, and that's instantly much easier to market, and that's when they can afford to go full time and write full time, because they've found that sort of product market fit. And product market fit for me is the main thing for marketing in general and for authors in particular. Until you find that, everything is really difficult from a marketing perspective. But finding it usually requires writing more than one book and more than one series, because you're rarely going to get the big lottery ticket on the first try. Jo: Or ever. I think it's really important. I've never had a breakout book, but I've made good money every year. I think, and Hugh Howey said this, that the real story of self-publishing is not the people who make seven figures a year, it's the people who can go on a holiday once a year, or the people who can just put a bit towards their mortgage or whatever. So you may never have a breakout series. I think that's really important, too. Ricardo: That's true. Jo: That's true. You can just keep writing and make all right money and be what we call in the mid-list. Ricardo: Yes, but you've got to keep going. You've got to have that resilience to keep going, probably because it's your passion. Exactly. You're not chasing that seven figure series. You're writing because you need to write. Jo: Yes, and you can't stop, and you get the bug. I think when you're writing that first book, I'm not sure if people understand that you either get the bug or you don't, I think. You've written a couple of books now. Do you think you have the bug, or is it more about the business? Ricardo: I don't have the bug. I definitely don't have the bug. I would've kept writing otherwise. Jo: You're a technologist, right? Ricardo: Yes. I'm more of a technologist, more of a marketer. To write my first book, How to Market a Book, I actually had to write newsletters, because that I can manage, right? One newsletter a week. Now I don't even manage that. I send it once every two weeks when I can even manage that pace. But back then I did one newsletter a week, and that's how I wrote my first book. I then put all these newsletters together, and that was before the age of AI, so I couldn't just dump all that into ChatGPT and tell it, “Create me a book based on that.” I had to do it myself. Jo: Oh, terrible. Ricardo: Terrible, I know. The days when we had to work. No, but that was a really good experiment. The second book, Amazon Ads for Authors, I actually wrote it from scratch, and I didn't love the experience. I loved the finished product, I'm very proud of it, but I didn't enjoy the experience of writing it. Amazon Ads is not the most exciting topic in the world. Even for people like me, who actually enjoy Amazon Ads, it's not super exciting to write about. The fact of having to write that whole book from scratch, I didn't love the experience. So now I do want to write a third book at some point, but I think it'll probably be in the format of the first one. Like, when I finish my series of newsletters on AI search and AI discoverability, I might do a booklet or something around it, but we'll have to see. It's not my favourite thing. It's a good thing I don't need to. Good thing I'm not an author, basically. Jo: No, but I think that's really great to recognise. You actually have written books that support your business, and that is very common for nonfiction writers. That's completely normal for nonfiction authors. So I think that's another important thing for people to recognise, is that the reasons we write are different, the reasons we market are different, and we all have different approaches. As we wind up, and obviously you talked a bit there about how easy it is to generate books with AI, and that is probably one of the biggest things that people are worried about. Now, those of us like you and I have been talking about AI at conferences and things for years now. Neither of us are afraid of it, I think basically because both of us use it, and we're technologists, so we just get on with it. There is so much fear in the community. There's so much negativity. You mentioned Substack, and now they've integrated Pangram, which is renowned for false positives around what is written with AI, and so people are very worried. If we look forward and we look at the next decade, this is not going away. This is going to change a lot of things. So how should authors be thinking about AI, do you think, if they want to prepare for the next decade? Ricardo: I think they need to play around with it, because you and I know that until you actually use it, you don't realise what it's capable of. We've both had these moments of “Oh my God, I'm going to be out of a job,” or “Oh my God, this is incredible,” the kind of things it's able to do. You also realise by using it the things it's not great at, or the things it can be good at but needing a lot of human input. There are courses out there, there are books, there are a lot of things, but for me, the most important thing is to start playing around with it. So you can pick one specific topic to play around with. Either something that you've been meaning to get into for years and haven't done, or something that really annoys you. Looking at the results of your Facebook ads, for example. If you run Facebook ads in the first place, and when you log into your Meta dashboard you cannot make sense of it, take screenshots or download the data, feed it to an AI chat, and talk with it. One of my biggest tips when talking to AI chats is asking them questions rather than asking them for things to do. Because if you just feed it your advertising data and you tell it, “Tell me what I should do,” the chat has no context about what your ads are about, what your goal is, et cetera, et cetera. If you feed it just a screenshot and you say, “Here are my ads. I would like you to help me make sense of them. What do you need to know from me in order to help me with this?” Then it's going to start asking you questions. “Okay, what are you advertising?” They're books. “Okay, what kind of books? Where are you selling? Are your ads going straight to Amazon or retailers, or are they going to your website? If you sell direct, okay, are these conversion ads?” Et cetera, et cetera. So you build that context, and they can help you with it. So that's just one example, but I would pick one thing that you want to test AI with, with zero expectations. Don't expect that by the end of the week you'll have a full system for understanding your Meta ads thanks to AI. You might get to that or you might not, but at least you'll play with it and you'll understand its capabilities, and have a sort of understanding of how it works and how you can potentially use it for other things. I think that's the best way to adapt, because once you play with it, you start thinking. You're walking the dog and you're just thinking, “Ha, I could maybe use it for this thing or that other thing,” and that's how you progressively become more familiar with it. I think there are a lot of worries around AI, but as you say, it's there to stay. So far, I think I was looking at data this morning, and the unemployment rate in the US has stayed stable ever since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago. So there are a lot of narratives out there around how it's going to replace humans, it's going to replace jobs, et cetera, which it might do. I'm not great at predictions usually, but so far it hasn't. What it will definitely do, however, is completely change the way we work. Obviously AI was one of our big reckonings at Reedsy, because we run a marketplace. Our main business model is the marketplace, where authors come in and look for editors, for marketers, for cover designers, for translators, and some of these domains and services are being transformed by AI, right? AI translations are massive right now. We haven't really seen a decline at all on the Reedsy marketplace, but we're prepared for it. It might very well happen, but what we think is happening, or is going to happen, is professionals using AI tools to provide a better output or a faster output or a cheaper output, or all three of these things. So for example, we now have literary translators who say they're open to editing AI translations, right? So you can come in, you can have your book translated with AI, whichever tool or method you choose for that. Then if you want a set of human eyes on it, you can hire a literary translator who's open to working on an AI-translated manuscript, and that's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than paying 10 cents per word from scratch for a literary translator. I'm not necessarily recommending you completely bypass literary translators, or that you go this way, but you have options, right? You have options for different sets of budgets. I think all these human editors, narrators, translators, designers, et cetera, they're not going to disappear, but they might have to reinvent the way they work in the future. Jo: As we all are doing. As you say, for me mostly it's the business side, getting Claude to help me with business stuff. Like even bookkeeping. There are bills that we've all been paying for years that we can now maybe reduce, and reducing costs as well as increasing profit is obviously good business sense. So, interesting times. But just as we wrap up, what are you excited about in what's coming? How do you see Reedsy shaping up in the next decade? What is coming for you and Reedsy? Ricardo: We're really excited about the decade to come, because obviously 10 years for a startup is a long time. I think most startups after 10 years, the founders are gone. Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Or they've exited or they've sold or whatever. We've stayed, we're the same founders, and we're still as excited because I think we have new products, right? We're working on new things. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Reedsy Studio, our writing tool, is probably one of the things we're most excited about, because first, it's getting adopted very fast. It has startup-like growth that we hadn't seen for other products in a long time, and it has very cool technology built in. We probably have a team of 10, 15 engineers now working full time on it and adding a lot of things. So we've added templates for plotting your book, with relationships within different characters and places and magic systems and things like that. We've added writing goals and writing statistics. We still have the free exports. One very cool thing we've added is real time collaboration. So just like Google Docs, you can write in real time with a co-author, or you can get an editor to work in there live with track changes. So you could have an editor working on chapter one while you're writing chapter three, for example. That kind of thing. It's really powerful technology, and that's one of the things we're really excited about for the future. A business, just like authors, we've got to reinvent ourselves. We've got to find ways to keep things exciting and keep motivated, and that is definitely one of them. When adoption goes along with it, then that's obviously super satisfying. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and Reedsy online? Ricardo: So Reedsy you can find at reedsy.com, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com. And there you'll find the whole suite of tools and services. For me, you can find me mostly by email, as I mentioned. That's the one place I check consistently every day, and my email address is ricardo@reedsy.com. So again, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com and ricardo@reedsy.com. You can email me any questions you have about this episode, about AI book discoverability, about marketing, about Reedsy. I always try to answer every email I get, because I think when we started Reedsy, I really appreciated people like you, and some other agents and editors and authors we contacted who were influential in the industry, who actually answered us and took the time to do that. So now I try to answer every email I get, because I feel like we've been very lucky in the beginning to have those people answering our emails, so we should do the same. Jo: Oh, well, thanks so much for your time, Ricardo. That was great. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. Thanks for having me again.The post Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Kathryn talks with Beth about her more than two-decade struggle with bulimia and how she ultimately found freedom. Beth shares how the Brain over Binge approach changed the way she understood her urges, and how her Christian faith gave her additional meaning and conviction, which strengthened her ability to put what she was learning into practice. This is Beth's personal experience, and although faith and spirituality may play very different roles—or no role at all—in each person's recovery, there are broader lessons in her story about separating from harmful thoughts and connecting with what matters most to you. Join the Brain over Binge Group Beth's email address: bduggan7@gmail.com  Episode 101: Recovery Stories, Part I Episode 102: Recovery Stories, Part II Episode 103: Recovery Stories, Part III Episode 104: Recovery Stories, Part IV Episode 106: Recovery Stories, Part V Episode 107: Recovery Stories, Part VI Episode 120: Recovery Stories, Part VII Episode 132: Recovery Stories, Part VIII Ep. 148: Recovery Stories Part IX Brain over Binge resources: Get the FREE 30-day Inspiration Booklet Get personalized support from Kathryn with one-on-one coaching Subscribe to the Brain over Binge Course for only $18.99 per month Get the Second Edition of Brain over Binge on Amazon and Audible, BarnesandNoble.com, Apple iBooks, or Kobo. Get the Brain over Binge Recovery Guide   Disclaimer: *The Brain over Binge Podcast is produced and recorded by Brain over Binge Recovery Coaching, LLC. All work is copyrighted by Brain over Binge Recovery Coaching, LLC, and all rights are reserved. As a disclaimer, the hosts of the Brain over Binge Podcast are not professional counselors or licensed healthcare providers, and this podcast is not a substitute for medical advice or any form of professional therapy. Eating disorders can have serious health consequences and you are strongly advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health. Please get help when you need it, and good luck on your journey.

當七成新書首刷賠錢，全球第二大電子書平台樂天Kobo來台十週年，擴編搬進信義區。它如何後來居上成為龍頭？加拿大小鎮出身的書癡CEO透露4祕訣。 文：張方毓 製作團隊：錢玉紘、鄭子鴻 ＊閱讀零時差，點這看全文

We're talking tattoos and body art this week! You might not have a tattoo, but odds are you've read a few thousand of them, as romance novels love a main character with a message…right on their skin. We talk about some of our favorite tattoo romances, about what tattoos represent, why they're so sexy, and why romance loves a tattoo artist. Every one of these books is a banger…enjoy filling your end of summer TBR with them.Come talk about your favorite romances with tattoos or about romance in general over on our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.Our next read along, in two weeks, is Sarah's A Rogue By Any Other Name, the first in her casino series. This is one we've gotten a bunch of requests for, and so, it will be our final read along of the season. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.BooksThe Montgomery Ink series by Carrie Ann RyanThe Duke with the Dragon Tattoo by Kerrigan ByrneTo Desire a Devil by Elizabeth HoytThe Magpie Lord by KJ CharlesDaring and the Duke by Sarah MacLeanThese Summer Storms by Sarah MacLeanMerry Inkmas by Talia HibbertRepeat by Kylie ScottWritten on his Skin by Simone StarkThree Dirty Secrets by Nikki SloaneUnder Her Skin by Adriana AndersPermanent Ink by Avon Gale and Piper VaughnSin & Ink by Naima SimoneReaper's Legacy by Joanna WyldeHard as it Gets by Laura KayeNotesTattoos have a long history tangled up with colonization, which is why for a long time they were thought to be stigmatizing. They are definitely more mainstream now, which means tattoo culture is changing which has caused its own clashes, but they also aren't thought of as class markers anymore.All about sextants.Merry Inkmas is actually Talia's second book, her first was Bad for the Boss, which is no longer in print. Jen reviewed both of those for The Book Queen when they were released.Check out the secret tattoos collection on our website.SponsorsEllie Devine, author of The Survival Guide to Alexander McBryde, available in print or ebook, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.E. Kennedy, author of Thornbird, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your books.Harpercollins, publishers of Spellfire by Agatha WIllow, available in print or ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your books.The RestFor even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2026/8/10/0847-romance-tattoo If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It's so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates. Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough. If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

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

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. I tend to prefer Ebook and Audiobooks to physical books, and these are some of the apps I use, and some of the sources I go to to find Ebooks or Audiobooks. These can be inexpensive, or in the case of Public Domain, free. Ebooks and Audiobooks I no longer wish to devote space to accumulating and storing physical books. As a former college professor I had more of them than most people, and tended to fill the house with bookcases and shelves. That made a certain sense in the pre-Internet years since I would often want to go back to them to look up things. But now I have more information at my fingertips than I ever had in those days, and I find it more convenient to just look up anything I need to know. And with Ebooks I can take my library with me anywhere I go. This means if I am sitting in a waiting room for a Doctor's appointment (and at my age that happens often enough) I can just pull out my phone and open up a book. I always have at least one. Right now on my phone I have apps for Kindle , Google Play , Barnes & Noble Nook , Kobo Cantook (successor to Aldiko), Bookshop.org , and Calibre . As for devices other than my phone, I own a kindle, I once owned a Nook, and I will buy a Kobo reader when Trump is gone. Kobo is Canadian, and last time I looked Trump had put on a tariff that was twice what the device costs. And finally I have the Bookshop.org app and Calibre. I started collecting Ebooks some years back, and at first the only option seemed to be buying them from large corporations. That has changed now, but I still have collections On Kindle, Google Play, Nook, and Kobo. I have all four because it seemed prudent to not put all my eggs in one basket. But now there are other options. One I like to use when possible is Bookshop.org. It is group of independent bookstores and I would rather support them than some giant corporation. And they seem to have all of the popular titles. Another similar site is Books-a-Million , which lets you order online and pick up at a local store if you need a physical book. Cantook and Calibre are both good for holding any miscellaneous Ebooks you have, and you can give them your Ebooks from the other sellers, though I have found that the native apps tend to work better. These days I rarely purchase books on Kindle, etc. But sometimes they have a special deals. If you want to build your library, there are some good places to try. One is BookBub which will send you emails with deals on books. On any one e-mail you may not see anything you want, but I found that once or twice a month I did see books I wanted and at good prices. And Books-a-Million has 99 cent deals to check out. But if you want to get free books, you have several options. If you want a chance to read a popular Ebook but don't need to own it, see what your local Library offers. Mine offers Hoopla which is good for Ebooks, Audiobooks, and streaming music. What you can find depends on what your library has in its collection, but my wife uses it almost daily for audiobooks. Then there are the works that have become part of the Public Domain. This varies somewhat by your country, but you might be surprised to learn how much is available. For Ebooks one of the biggest sites is Project Gutenberg . They follow US Copyright law for their collection, and they are a non-profit that can always use some support, so if you use them, give them a few Dollars or Euros. They tend to be the source for many or most other sites for Public Domain Ebooks They have over 75,000 free Ebooks. A newer site is Faded Page which is much smaller but focused on Canadian works. Standard Ebooks is a site that pulls from Project Gutenberg but does some additional formatting and is very easy to read online in your browser. For Audiobooks a good source is Open Culture , which advertises it has 1,000 free Audiobooks. We should also mention LibriVox , which also pulls from Project Gutenberg for its texts, but then turns them into Public Domain Audiobooks. They are always looking for volunteers who have a microphone and a computer to record Public Domain audiobooks. And last but not least the Internet Archive has tons of Ebooks and Audiobooks that are free. Links https://www.amazon.com/kindle/ https://play.google.com/store/books?hl=en_US&pli=1 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/ebooks-nook/_/N-8qa https://www.kobo.com/us/en?srsltid=AfmBOoquJmiNH_aVTUx22AIRlBH8CF4iir4H8qpTKjQ4dZ-fSMCDAaD7 https://market.cantook.com/ https://bookshop.org/ebooks https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://www.booksamillion.com/ https://www.bookbub.com/ https://www.hoopladigital.com/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.fadedpage.com/ https://standardebooks.org/ https://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks https://librivox.org/ https://archive.org/ https://www.palain.com/ebooks-and-audiobooks/ Provide feedback on this episode.

In this episode, we spoke to bestselling author Ruth Ware about one of her latest releases, Zero Days. Ruth's novels have been translated into over 40 languages as well as optioned for film and TV, and she has garnered numerous bestsellers internationally. Zero Days is a tech-based, fast-paced thriller wherein the protagonist finds that there is nowhere to hide, and enemies are everywhere. We are very excited for everyone to read Ruth's latest! We discussed Ruth's journey to becoming a full-time writer, how she develops the plots for her thrillers, what her writing process looks like, the difference between a "twist" and a "reveal" in storytelling, and, of course, her latest, Zero Days. Ruth also offered some great advice for aspiring thriller authors, and provided us with an amazing reading list of mysteries and thrillers – from old classics to brand new hits. Ready to start your own publishing career? Publish your book today with Kobo Writing Life.

The social extremes of the Oil Shock Period ranged from radical terrorism, ahistorical revision of the Pacific War, the emergence of several new genres of anime, and the birth of the video games industry.Support the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms! 

In this week's episode, I share a few tips for writing effectively and politely in a public space like a coffee shop, library, waiting room, or similar location. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Exile series at my Payhip store: SUMMEREXILE The coupon code is valid through August 24, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 315 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 7th, 2026 and today I am sharing tips for writing while in public in places such as a coffee shop, a waiting room, or a library. We will also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First off, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Exile series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SUMMEREXILE and this coupon code will be valid through August the 24th, 2026, so if you need a new ebook to read this summer, we have got you covered. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am very nearly done with Cloak of Frost. In fact, I'm so close to being done with Cloak of Frost, I am hoping (if all goes well and the creek doesn't rise), to finish it this afternoon after I finish recording this episode. So after you finish listening to this episode when it goes live, go check out your nearest ebook store for Cloak of Frost because hopefully it should be working its way through the platforms and be available then. Once Cloak of Frost is finished and published, my next main project will be Blade of Visions, the sixth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I am currently 17,000 words into that. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that book out sometime in September. I'll need a new secondary project since Blade of Visions is getting promoted from secondary project. So my new secondary project will be Elven-Warlock, the seventh book in the Half-Elven Thief series. That hopefully will be out sometime in October, again, if all goes well. In audiobook news, we have a couple different audiobook things to discuss. Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series (as narrated by Leanne Woodward) should now be available at all audiobook stores. Stealth & Spells Online: Final Quest (as narrated by C.J. McAllister) should be at my Payhip store, Google Play, and Kobo as of right now, and it should be working its way through the other audiobook platforms before too much longer. Cloak Mage: Omnibus Four, which is a three-book bundle containing Cloak of Illusion, Cloak of Dragonfire, and Cloak of Embers (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available in audio as well. It's 38 hours [long] and you can get that at Audible, Apple, and Amazon. As for upcoming books, Brad Wills is working on Blade of Thieves and as of this recording, he's about halfway through it. Hollis McCarthy is working on Cloak of Worlds and I believe she's done with main recording and doing edits right now. So before too much longer, if all goes well, we'll have a bunch of new audiobooks for you. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:57 Tips for Writing in Public Spaces Now let's move on to our main topic this week, writing or working in a coffee shop, waiting room, library, or other public space. People often romanticize the process of writing and imagine that writers spend all day in a cozy cafe with a leather notebook and a fountain pen, sipping espresso with [chuckles] acoustic guitar music playing faintly in the background. In reality, most full-time writers don't regularly work that way. For myself, I don't generally like working in public, and I prefer either to work in my office at home or with my laptop on my couch (also at home). I only work in public spaces like coffee shops, libraries, and waiting rooms when I'm waiting for someone or don't have any other option. Because of course, real life has its demands, I do that a fair bit. I've written large chunks of most of my books in various waiting rooms while waiting on various appointments. But again, it's not my first choice. If I had total freedom to pick where I was going to work today, I would not pick a coffee shop. I would not pick the library. I would probably pick either my office or my couch with my laptop, depending on how hot the day happened to be. However, just because I don't like working in a public space doesn't mean that other people do not, and many people do love to work in public spaces like coffee shops or find it a necessity for a variety of reasons. So today we're going to go over what you should consider when working in these kinds of spaces. For many people, the benefits of working in a space like a coffee shop or a library are significant. Let's go over a few of the reasons that people might benefit from this working arrangement. Some people don't have much control over the noise or activity levels in their home environment or are experiencing a temporary issue like a power outage or home renovations. For example, this morning at about seven o'clock, a tree trimming truck pulled up directly in front of my house, so I was worried that I would not be able to record this podcast today due to chainsaw noise, but for whatever reason, they haven't started yet, so I'm hoping I can actually finish recording this episode before any chainsaw noise begins. Many people also like having a change of scenery or like getting out of the house if they primarily work from home. Some people find this helps them to feel more creative or interested in their work or feels like a reward for doing the work. Another reason is that some people also miss the social aspect of working in person and enjoying making small talk or working alongside a friend in these types of spaces. Some people, especially those who've been diagnosed with ADHD, benefit from being in a space where others are also working, even if they're not interacting with those people. It actually helps them to focus and be more productive when they can see others working. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can read about the concept of body doubling, which describes this in more detail. So with those reasons in mind, let's go over some of the appropriate etiquette for working in a public place. You might think these etiquette tips about working in an American public space are obvious, but after you spend a fair amount of time in a coffee shop, you'll see that many people never get this advice or blatantly ignore it. So let's spend some time stating what feels like the obvious, especially for people who might not be familiar with American customs and behaviors. First, if you're spending time in a business, you need to order, and if you're in America, you should at least leave a small tip. If you're staying more than an hour or so, you should probably order more than once. For example, if you're spending an afternoon working in a coffee shop, you can start with a plain coffee and then after a couple of hours order another cup or a snack. You're essentially renting their space at their expense, so you shouldn't be there all day after buying only a $2 cup of coffee (or worse yet, nothing at all). Another important factor is to have realistic expectations. Coffee shops are primarily places for people to eat and gather, so you can't be upset when people do just that. These spaces are not designed to be workspaces and you have to adjust your expectations about the noise and activity level. It might be tempting to ask that table of high school girls to be quieter or the toddler across the room to stop running about, but that's not your job and it's not appropriate of you to ask that of strangers in a place where people come for conversation. If you truly need quiet space, many libraries have designated quiet areas and larger cities usually have rentable coworking spaces designated for just working. And if you are going to the library, remember that the library doesn't cost you anything as opposed to a coffee shop or a coworking space. Also, don't hog space. If the establishment is absolutely packed and there are no available tables, it's not good etiquette to take up an entire table for hours on end. Try to choose a lower traffic shop if this is something that you regularly observe happening in your preferred one or come in outside of peak hours. Likewise, it's generally considered impolite in America to use your belongings to hold the table more than a minute or two. And if, depending on where you are in the country, if you leave your belongings at the table for too long without being there to attend them, there's a fair chance that something's going to get stolen. It's also a good idea to have some situational awareness about cords and not being a tripping hazard. If you're using a charger, make sure the cord isn't going into an employee space like the condiment bar or causing a tripping hazard for others. Likewise, make sure that your bags are also situated on the floor in such a way that others won't easily trip on them or have to step over them. Another point is no pacing. Many of us like to pace while working or thinking, but that's generally considered annoying or even unsettling and threatening in a public space like a coffee shop or a library or a waiting room. [As for] making noise, how appropriate it is to take a video or a phone call will depend greatly on your environment. Some coffee shops have many people working and it's normal there. In a small town coffee shop where the locals gather to talk about the forecast or local news or the local parade at great length, it's most likely going to be inappropriate or annoy other people. If you're taking calls or on video meetings, be sure to learn what settings on your devices and software minimize background noise and amplify your speaking voice so those on the other side of the line can hear you more clearly and not be bothered by all the noise in the background. This will also minimize how loudly you need to talk in order to be heard clearly, and a good headset can definitely help you with that. Another seemingly obvious thing that needs to be said is that you should bring headphones if you're going to be listening to music or watching videos. At my last gym (before I left for another, better gym), there was an elderly man who frequently would come to use the elliptical, put his phone on the console, and then watch various Facebook AI slop videos at maximum volume. It was really quite annoying and is part of the reason I no longer go to that gym. So don't be that person and make sure if you're listening to music while you're working in public, bring headphones. And finally, be nice. If you're spending a significant amount of time in a space like a coffee shop, it's important to be a good customer and to maintain a positive relationship with those people working there. Be polite, but don't take up the workers' time with excessive conversation. Of course, what is excessive is wholly subjective. If you're the only one there and they're totally bored, it's polite to have a little conversation but if there's 15 people in line behind you, it's probably best to move along. Clean up your messes and leave a few minutes before closing time so they don't have to kick you out. I used to work in retail many years ago, and I'm sure many of you either have worked or continue to work in retail or some form of food service and we all know that one of the most annoying things is a customer who refuses to leave when it's closing time or the guy who comes in five minutes before closing time and orders a huge meal. Don't be that guy. Now with all those etiquette points out of the way, you're ready to work. Here are some other considerations for working in this space like a coffee shop. Supplies [like] noise canceling headphones or noise reducing earplugs might be helpful for you, especially if you're sensitive to loud noises like an espresso machine being cleaned or as we mentioned before, loud conversations. A good headset if you are taking video calls might be invaluable. A privacy screen is a good idea for a laptop if you're working with sensitive information or don't want people reading over your shoulder. The most common ones are fairly inexpensive and are easy to remove when you no longer need to use it. For myself, I've never used that one, but I never look at sensitive information on my laptop in public, which we'll get to later. I suppose the only awkward thing is if someone's reading over my shoulder and I'm writing a scene like where Talembur beheads an orc with a two-handed blow and the head rolls away in a fountain of gore. That might be off-putting to people, but they shouldn't be reading my laptop screen anyway. A portable charger for your laptop and other devices might be a good idea to invest in if you're frequently working in these spaces, especially since outlet availability can be very limited. We should also talk about Wi-Fi safety. If you connect to the Wi-Fi in a public place like a coffee shop or a library, there are risks associated with that. Here are some basic things you can do to minimize your risks. Turn off auto connect to Wi-Fi and disable network discovery. That way if there are any malicious actors or devices on that network that will make it slightly harder for them to get to your laptop. Consider using a VPN to encrypt data sent from your device. Finally, more potentially sensitive tasks like shopping and online banking should wait until you're back on a more secure network. If you have a Gmail account with a two-factor authentication set up, checking your Gmail on a public Wi-Fi is probably okay. I would strongly recommend avoiding visiting any banking sites, financial sites, retirement investment sites, or shopping sites while you are on a public Wi-Fi network since there's always at least a chance someone would be able to pick up details about that from the public Wi-Fi. Another thing to consider might be groups or events where some coffee shops and libraries and other places will have events specifically for working together with a large group. If you're interested in finding like-minded people in your area, keep an eye on local events. One of the local coffee shops in my area has a writer's hour where writers are encouraged to come in and work. It also has a group that meets in the evenings during the winter to talk about writing. I mean, I've never done this myself personally, but I approve of the idea. A large city in my area frequently has occasional free silent working time meetups in a community center to accommodate people who need a quiet space to work that has free snacks and social time afterwards. So what specifically do I personally do when I need to work in public? When I work in public, I usually bring my cheapest laptop or my oldest laptop. Since I used to be an IT guy and I've been a full-time writer for a while now, I have a fair collection of older computer hardware that I really need to get rid of. One of the ones I keep around is my oldest laptop that I take out with me when I need to write in a public space. So that way, if for some reason the laptop is stolen or somehow it's damaged, like say a toddler is throwing a football in the waiting room and hits my screen dead center and shatters it. Well, annoying, but that will not be such a serious loss because it's my oldest laptop. And that way if it's stolen also, it would not be that great of a loss because it's my oldest laptop. For my concerns I mentioned earlier about Wi-Fi, I never actually connect to public Wi-Fi unless there's some sort of a pressing need like my phone isn't working, I need to look up directions for where I need to go next, that kind of thing. That's partly for security reasons like I mentioned above, and partly because having no Wi-Fi to distract me also turns out to be an excellent way to dial in and get work done. I never listen to music when I'm in public. I always listen to music or something while I'm working at home or in my home office, but I never listen to music in public just because I dislike the lack of situational awareness this brings. I mean, I don't want to be paranoid. The fact is for the most part, the United States is a very safe country. During the World Cup, you saw all these news stories about European tourists who were coming to the US for the World Cup and were worried about getting shot or getting robbed or getting blown up and then that they found that the experience was very pleasantly different from what they expected because for the most part, Americans are generally a very generous and very welcoming people. What you see on the news with the shootings and the violence and the mayhem and so forth tends to be the extreme outlier that gets exaggerated for effect for news views and news clicks. So for the most part, the United States is a very safe country. That said, mostly safe is not the same as perfectly safe, and there is still crime. The best way to avoid trouble is to make sure you're not involved or anywhere near trouble by maintaining situational awareness. So that's one reason I don't like to listen to music when I'm in a waiting room or in a coffee shop or something is because even though I'm focused on my work, I can still maintain a degree of situational awareness. So if I see something going south, I can react to it and clear the area or pay attention to a potential situation that's going on. Not that that's happened more than a few times in the decades I've been doing this, but it's still a good idea in my opinion to have a good deal of situational awareness whenever possible. Depending on the length of the wait, I usually bring my smallest laptop case I can fit my oldest laptop into, a couple of Clif bars (which are a brand of energy bar in the US, so if I'm waiting a long time and I know I'm not getting to lunch, then I can have a quick snack), and then if I need to use the restroom, I won't leave my stuff out. What I usually do is close the laptop, put it in the bag, and then take it with me to the restroom and then come back out and either take my old seat if it hasn't been taken or find a new one. That way it just minimizes the risk of theft of leaving a laptop unattended. Despite all that, I have written a fair chunk of many of my books in waiting rooms. I remember once I had to take my car in for a fairly serious repair, and I wrote something like 9,000 words of Ghost in the Winds while I was waiting for that repair. So that was a major productivity leap, and I got my car repaired and then [laughs] publishing Ghost in the Winds helped pay for that very serious car repair. So although you might not be elegantly writing poetry in a beautiful notebook like you imagined, writing in a coffee shop or a similar space can be pleasant and help you to feel a greater enjoyment or even productivity in your work. If you keep all these tips in mind, hopefully you have an enjoyable and productive experience. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.

For more than 300 years, Charleston has whispered the same warning: don't look into the rainwater on Water Street after dark. They say the flooded gutters sometimes reveal pale, waterlogged faces staring back from beneath the surface. According to local legend, they're the ghosts of pirates whose bodies were never buried after the infamous hanging season of 1718. Tonight, we uncover the true story of Blackbeard's blockade, the disastrous career of the Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet, and the executions that transformed Charleston Harbor into one of America's most haunted waterfronts.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm   YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com     Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠   LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH   Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334 AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1         KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316   !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast       www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why is photography so hot? We're tackling this question this week, talking about why romance novels featuring photographers work so well and push so many sexy buttons. We're talking about characters who notice, about characters who are patient, and about characters who carry sexy bags around the world. We've got storm chasers, nature photographers, CSI photographers, about darkrooms on boats and even historical nudes! You're going to have a great time.If you want to talk more about your favorite romances that feature photographers, or about romance in general, come join our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.Our next read along is Sarah's A Rogue By Any Other Name, the first in her casino series. This is one we've gotten a bunch of requests for, and so, it will be our final read along of the season. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.BooksA Duke Worth Falling For by Sarah MacLeanBest of Luck by Kate ClaybornChase me if You Can by Heather FrancesLay it Down by Cara McKennaMy Dirty Duke by Joanna ShupeTo The Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth LowellTaming Teddy by Lucy LennoxFlight by Laura GriffinThree Dirty Secrets by Nikki SloanManaged by KristeNotesThe WNBA all star game was pretty fun, and Sky player Sydney Taylor is both very beautiful and very good at basketball.Wicker the movie trailer, and our Sentient Object episode.Jen had a throwaway line about how “AI has ruined everything” in photography, but just like with everything else, that's a real concern. Up Close and Personal (1996) is a movie with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer about television journalists.According to this timeline from Harvard about the history of photography, the first surviving permanent photograph dates back to the 1820s, but most people probably think of the daguerreotype, invented by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1839.Um, in case you need to know what a darkroom is.There is a chain of 7 barrier islands in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, Padre is probably the most well-known.The RestFor even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2026/8/3/s0846-photographers-in-romance-books If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It's so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates. Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough. If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

Charleston's Battery is one of the most photographed streets in America, lined with elegant mansions overlooking the harbor. But hidden behind one of those grand homes is a carriage house where guests have spent decades reporting encounters they can't explain. A headless Civil War soldier that growls when touched. A lonely Victorian gentleman who slips into bed beside sleeping women. Floating orbs, phantom footsteps, and rooms with reputations so infamous that visitors request them by number. Tonight, we uncover the haunted history of 20 South Battery and explore the centuries of war, execution, heartbreak, and folklore that may still linger behind its doors.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm   YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com     Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠   LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH   Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334 AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1         KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316   !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast       www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Magnolia Plantation is often celebrated as one of the most beautiful gardens in America. Couples marry beneath its moss-draped oaks, tourists wander its famous bridges, and photographers capture its breathtaking blooms. But beneath that beauty lies a far darker history. Built by enslaved hands, shaped by Gullah Geechee traditions, and layered with generations of suffering, Magnolia has become a place where visitors report crushing sensations, phantom voices, shadow figures, and unexplained encounters that refuse to be ignored. Tonight, we explore the haunted history of Magnolia Plantation and ask whether some places can ever truly escape the past they were built upon.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris       TikTok - @hah_podcast       hauntedamericanhistory.com               Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH   Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334       AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook       GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1               KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_               SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316           !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ       YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast       www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Charleston's Old City Jail is one of the most haunted buildings in America—or so the ghost tours claim. Nearly every story begins with Lavinia Fisher, the beautiful innkeeper who supposedly poisoned travelers with oleander tea before dropping them through a trapdoor to their deaths. It's a chilling tale... and almost entirely fictional. Tonight, we separate two centuries of myth from documented history, uncover the real crimes of John and Lavinia Fisher, and explore the darker truth behind a jail that witnessed piracy, rebellion, war, disease, and thousands of forgotten deaths. HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris       TikTok - @hah_podcast       hauntedamericanhistory.com               Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH   Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334       AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook       GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1               KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_               SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316           !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ       YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast       www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

To help mitigate the damage to Japan's economy during the Oil Shock period, its government would engage in global economic forums, encourage conservation among consumers, and expand into new energy sources.Support the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms! 

Elaine Ellinger returns to the show to discuss her new book, which reviews grade 1–12 Islamic school curricula and supplementary texts used in English-speaking countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Ellinger, who has spent years researching this material, argues that the textbooks present a version of Islamic teaching and history that differs significantly from how it's commonly described to non-Muslim audiences, and walks through specific passages and translations she says support that claim. Bryce and Elaine also discuss her broader argument, laid out in her previous book, that Islamic law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and what she believes policymakers should do about it.

The most famous ghost ship in history never had steaming cups of tea, half-eaten meals, or a ticking clock left behind. Those details were invented by a young Arthur Conan Doyle years after the fact. The real mystery is stranger. In 1872, the Mary Celeste was discovered adrift in the Atlantic Ocean—her cargo intact, her provisions untouched, and every member of her crew, including the captain's wife and two-year-old daughter, gone without a trace. Tonight, we separate myth from history and uncover what likely happened aboard one of the greatest maritime mysteries ever recorded.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm   YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris   TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠   LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1       KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_       SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316     !! DISTURB ME !! APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In 1990, archaeologists uncovered a colonial grave in Connecticut unlike anything they had ever seen. The skeleton had been carefully rearranged—its skull placed atop its ribs and its crossed leg bones forming a macabre skull-and-crossbones. Someone had dug this man up decades after his death, cut open his chest, and burned his heart because they believed he was a vampire. But this wasn't the story of one corpse. It was part of a forgotten epidemic that swept across New England, where grieving families fought an invisible killer with shovels, fire, and desperate hope. Tonight, we uncover the true story of the New England Vampire Panic...and the disease that inspired one of history's greatest horror novels.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm   YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris   TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com   Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠   LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_       SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316     !! DISTURB ME !! APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On New Year's Eve 1843, Rhode Island's most powerful industrialist was found brutally beaten to death along the Pocasset River. His pockets were still full of cash, making one thing immediately clear: this wasn't robbery... it was revenge. What followed became one of the darkest chapters in American legal history, as prejudice, political influence, and a corrupt court system sent an innocent Irish immigrant to the gallows. Tonight, we unravel the murder of Amasa Sprague, the execution of John Gordon, and the wrongful conviction that ultimately led Rhode Island to abolish the death penalty forever.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm   YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris   TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠   LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1       KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_       SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316     !! DISTURB ME !! APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you care about leveling up your reading life, don't miss this deep dive into the most powerful and lesser-known iOS apps that turn your device into a book-lover's playground. Discover why your iPhone might just be the ultimate reading companion, from audiobooks to custom libraries and beyond. Apple Books app features, usability, audiobooks, and reading goals Refining ebook library organization, user guides, and personal reading habits Customizing reading experience: themes, fonts, line guides, and accessibility Apple Books for audiobooks versus dedicated apps like Audible Audible app exploration: usage stats, features, series tracking, and purchase changes Prologue app connects to the Plex library for personal audiobook streaming Spotify for audiobooks and comparison with Audible exclusives Storygraph tracks reading progress and integrates with Kobo eReaders Libby app for digital library borrowing of ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines App Caps: Make-roscope keychain microscope Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Contact iOS Today at iOSToday@twit.tv. Download or subscribe to iOS Today at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

Hidden deep in the forests of Rhode Island stood one of America's largest institutions for people with developmental disabilities. For decades, the Ladd School promised care, education, and hope... but behind its doors were overcrowding, neglect, scandal, and heartbreaking loss. After the campus closed, abandoned buildings gave rise to ghost stories of shadowy figures, crying children, and haunted hospital halls. Tonight, we separate urban legend from documented history and uncover the tragic legacy of the Ladd School, where the real horror was never the ghosts...it was the system itself.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm               YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris       TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com               Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠               LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH               Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334       AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S       Ebook       GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1       KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_       SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316               !! DISTURB ME !!       APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090       SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ       YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast       www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you care about leveling up your reading life, don't miss this deep dive into the most powerful and lesser-known iOS apps that turn your device into a book-lover's playground. Discover why your iPhone might just be the ultimate reading companion, from audiobooks to custom libraries and beyond. Apple Books app features, usability, audiobooks, and reading goals Refining ebook library organization, user guides, and personal reading habits Customizing reading experience: themes, fonts, line guides, and accessibility Apple Books for audiobooks versus dedicated apps like Audible Audible app exploration: usage stats, features, series tracking, and purchase changes Prologue app connects to the Plex library for personal audiobook streaming Spotify for audiobooks and comparison with Audible exclusives Storygraph tracks reading progress and integrates with Kobo eReaders Libby app for digital library borrowing of ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines App Caps: Make-roscope keychain microscope Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Contact iOS Today at iOSToday@twit.tv. Download or subscribe to iOS Today at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

If you care about leveling up your reading life, don't miss this deep dive into the most powerful and lesser-known iOS apps that turn your device into a book-lover's playground. Discover why your iPhone might just be the ultimate reading companion, from audiobooks to custom libraries and beyond. Apple Books app features, usability, audiobooks, and reading goals Refining ebook library organization, user guides, and personal reading habits Customizing reading experience: themes, fonts, line guides, and accessibility Apple Books for audiobooks versus dedicated apps like Audible Audible app exploration: usage stats, features, series tracking, and purchase changes Prologue app connects to the Plex library for personal audiobook streaming Spotify for audiobooks and comparison with Audible exclusives Storygraph tracks reading progress and integrates with Kobo eReaders Libby app for digital library borrowing of ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines App Caps: Make-roscope keychain microscope Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Contact iOS Today at iOSToday@twit.tv. Download or subscribe to iOS Today at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord. Sponsor: cirasync.com/ios

If you care about leveling up your reading life, don't miss this deep dive into the most powerful and lesser-known iOS apps that turn your device into a book-lover's playground. Discover why your iPhone might just be the ultimate reading companion, from audiobooks to custom libraries and beyond. Apple Books app features, usability, audiobooks, and reading goals Refining ebook library organization, user guides, and personal reading habits Customizing reading experience: themes, fonts, line guides, and accessibility Apple Books for audiobooks versus dedicated apps like Audible Audible app exploration: usage stats, features, series tracking, and purchase changes Prologue app connects to the Plex library for personal audiobook streaming Spotify for audiobooks and comparison with Audible exclusives Storygraph tracks reading progress and integrates with Kobo eReaders Libby app for digital library borrowing of ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines App Caps: Make-roscope keychain microscope Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Contact iOS Today at iOSToday@twit.tv. Download or subscribe to iOS Today at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

If you care about leveling up your reading life, don't miss this deep dive into the most powerful and lesser-known iOS apps that turn your device into a book-lover's playground. Discover why your iPhone might just be the ultimate reading companion, from audiobooks to custom libraries and beyond. Apple Books app features, usability, audiobooks, and reading goals Refining ebook library organization, user guides, and personal reading habits Customizing reading experience: themes, fonts, line guides, and accessibility Apple Books for audiobooks versus dedicated apps like Audible Audible app exploration: usage stats, features, series tracking, and purchase changes Prologue app connects to the Plex library for personal audiobook streaming Spotify for audiobooks and comparison with Audible exclusives Storygraph tracks reading progress and integrates with Kobo eReaders Libby app for digital library borrowing of ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines App Caps: Make-roscope keychain microscope Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Contact iOS Today at iOSToday@twit.tv. Download or subscribe to iOS Today at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord. Sponsor: cirasync.com/ios

We've been talking about the end (almost end) of this one since we started the podcast, so it seemed high time we did a deep dive on it! Judith McNaught's Perfect is the most 90s thing we've ever read, so gird your loins for both the best all-is-lost scene in romance, and also Zach, Julie, prison breaks, illiteracy, the Coors corporation, Romance Cashmere, and so so many references to Kevin Costner. It's the most 90s thing we've ever read, without question.If you want to talk more about Perfect or Judith McNaught, or about romance in general, come join our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.Our next read along is Sarah's A Rogue By Any Other Name, the first in her casino series. This is one we've gotten a bunch of requests for, and so, it will be our final read along of the season. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.BooksPerfect by Judith McNaughtA Kingdom of Dreams by Judith McNaughtRemember When by Judith McNaughtDouble Standards by Judith McNaughtTender Triumph by Judith McNaughtNotesJen said Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead but she meant Adventures in Babysitting, which was a 1987 movie where suburban kids go on a terrifying adventure in the terrifying big city of Chicago.We did a deep dive of A Kingdom of Dreams in Season 2.Kelly Faircloth sent Sarah an ad for the book from People Magazine. In print versions of the book, there was a letter from Judith McNaught explaining the literacy plot in the book.Interestingly, the Coors literacy push was covered by the New York Times in 1992, discussing the push by big companies to adopt a cause and use it to burnish their image.Okay, apparently fleece also had a bellwether year in 1993, but let's be honest, it was Old Navy who made performance fleece happen for most of us and that was 1998.In America, our access to Abortion is much worse than it was in 1993 and America still has a devastating epidemic of suicide among queer teenagers, as The Trevor Project explains “LGBTQ+ young people are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.”SponsorsFrayed Pages by Wattpad Books, publishers of EM Wilson's Breakup for Two, available in print or ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your books.Meghan Quinn, author of Just for the Plot, available in print, ebook and audiobook, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.Kylie Scott, author of Runaway Rockstar, available in print or ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or your local independent bookstore.Emily Andersen, author of the Midnights on the Square series. Available in print or ebook at at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or wherever you get your books.The RestFor even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2026/7/28/0845-judith-mcnaughts-perfect-content-warning-the-90s If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It's so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates. Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough. If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there's demand for your book or screenplay before you've written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter. In the intro, what doesn't work for book marketing and what does [Amy Chan SubStack; Unsingle; Rephonic]; Goodreads giveaway for Bones of the Deep; FutureVision XPrize. 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 Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. 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 see the opportunity in AI when others only see the threat How to test a story with samples, and what a 16-second movie can do Building the trailer before you write the screenplay Letting your audience finance the film once they have validated the idea Why Hollywood still wants existing IP, and what makes them pay attention Feeling safe enough to write the truth, and finding a concrete path forward You can find Brooks on LinkedIn or email him at brooks@brookselms.com. Transcript of the interview with Brooks Elms Jo: Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. So welcome to the show, Brooks. Brooks: Thank you. It's awesome to be here. Jo: Fantastic. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting. Brooks: I started filmmaking first. A buddy came up to me in high school and said, “Hey, we're making a karate movie, do you want to help us?” I was like, “Oh my God, yes, that sounds amazing.” So next thing I know, I had this karate outfit on, and we were just making this completely ridiculous and totally fun movie, and it was amazing. It was so fun. Then it went to a whole other level when we shared it with a friend, this guy Jay Sharon, and he watched the movie and he laughed so hard he literally fell out of his chair. I was like, “Oh my God,” the fun I had making it could actually transfer to somebody else. I was hooked. So from there I went to NYU film school, and then made a few independent feature films which were good but not great in terms of how they were received. They were great for me in terms of enjoyment, but I knew I needed to iterate faster at that point. So then I was like, “Well, it's expensive and it takes a long time to make a movie,” at least back then. So I pivoted to screenwriting, and pumped out two, three scripts a year, got signed at UTA, got writing assignments, and basically launched a screenwriting career. Then I still tried to get some stuff going, but it's hard when movies are so expensive. It's not hard, it's just that it takes a lot of precision in the marketing, and a lot of conversations to find the right matches to finance something, and you're either interested in doing that or you're not. I just was like, “Well, I'll just mostly write screenplays.” Then I started teaching at UCLA Extension and then coaching after that, along with writing. Then all the way up to the future. What's great about moving forward is that with AI, shot-making is becoming very close to cinematic quality. You can actually match cinematic quality in moments in some genres, but probably by next year. Right now you could actually do a really good horror movie all AI for 10, 20,000 bucks, depending on how much you're doing yourself or getting other people to do. So the economics are going to absolutely explode. So I'm sitting on dozens of scripts that didn't get through the Hollywood packaging bottleneck because they're too expensive, and I now have this giant slate that's ready to go, and I'm just absolutely thrilled. It's been a lifelong dream for me. Jo: Oh, so much to come back on there. Where to start? I do want to talk about what you just said there, sitting on dozens of scripts and now seeing the opportunity. I actually wrote down in my journal about a year ago, I see what's coming with AI, and I think that the best thing I can do is create as much original IP as possible, so that I can make the most of the opportunity ahead. So let's just get into the AI, because a lot of people feel it's a super bad thing. Talk about the opportunities and the attitude that you've got [around AI], and that you've seen others have around this, for what is ahead in a positive way. Brooks: It's fascinating to see how people respond to AI. I wonder, when the printing press rolled around, if there was some sort of backlash. Books must be handwritten. They can't be mass-produced. Here's one of my theories. At a deep psychological level, it's so profoundly powerful that I think the default setting is, “Oh, crap.” When I was a kid, some things were hard, and that power imbalance, when something big, new and powerful comes along: I'm going to get screwed, and so this is somehow a bad thing. I think that's the base psychological thing going on with most of the noise. Obviously there are some legit problems, in terms of copyright infringement from learning models, or from some of the environmental situation. So I'm not saying it's all rainbows and butterflies, but I think 90% of the noise around it comes from a fear of change. Here's the other one—a fear of, “Oh, yikes, I'm going to get taken advantage of somehow by either robots, or the corporations are going to use the robots against me,” or something like that. I have real empathy for me when I feel that way a little bit, but I don't feel it much, and for other people that do feel it. The other thing is, you know what it is? I think they fear their own empowerment even more. I had a therapist who was really good. He said, people aren't so much afraid of failing as they are afraid of succeeding. Because if we fail, we're stuck in act one and we don't go anywhere. The fear is answering the call and going to act two, when everything effing changes in the new world. So I think people are afraid of how goddamn powerful they're going to be when they can have a team of AI agents helping them do everything they want in business or life or whatever. I think it's the same thing with the internet. People are like, “Oh, I don't like social media, blah, blah, blah.” And I get it. There's a lot of noise and a lot of crap. Yet we have access to billions of people, and the algorithms in social media right now I think are level three out of 10. They're just going to get better and better. Even as it is now, if I do a post about something and it gets ignored, that's on me. The algorithms are trying to match me to my people. So if I'm not unique enough and authentic enough and aware enough of how virality works, that's on me, and it's a learnable skill that I can embrace and then change and then get better at. So I think people then resist that change. They resist the empowerment of learning the art of virality, or learning the art of some sort of social media stuff or whatever. The last thing I'll say about this rant is, I don't want to act like I'm the guru on the hill that has all the answers. I refuse calls all the time. I'm scared about all sorts of things. I'm certainly not perfect. I feel frustrated when I'm trying to put my big ideas into action and I can't get this technology thing to work or that one, and I throw tantrums. I'm trying to come at it from a real human perspective, but by and large, I've got stars in my eyes. I'm like, “This is amazing. This is going to be so powerful.” For so many people, you just have to be ready to embrace it and just go along for the ride, because there's going to be some big-ass changes. There already are, and that's going to accelerate. Jo: You mentioned there learning the art of whatever it is. One of the things is, I've spent 20 years, and so have you, learning our craft and our art, and now it can be done very easily. I'm generating video, as you mentioned, which is a craft I haven't spent 20 years on, but now I can generate. So things have definitely changed in that way. Just coming to the screenwriting side. Probably about a decade ago now, I did my first screenwriting course. I've written screenplays. Then I looked at the game you have to play and, like you said, the conversations you have to have, the events you have to go and network at, all the things that you have to do to put a screenplay in front of the right person at the right time. I was like, “I cannot do that. It's just not going to happen. I can't do that along with everything else.” So I put it aside, but now I feel maybe it's time to bring it back because things are changing. So can you maybe talk about, if someone has a screenplay now that they've written, or some IP like a book that they have now— What would you recommend people do in terms of wanting to get that [IP] in front of somebody, or doing something with it themselves? Brooks: It's such a good question. By the way, not even a screenplay—you could do the same things with a novel. Let me try to be succinct here, which is a good challenge for me. A simple way to look at it is, you're giving samples. Let's say it's a lemonade stand, and you give out a little shot of your… maybe you have cayenne pepper lemonade, some sort of fun lemonade. If you give out a sample and people are into it, they're going to come back and they're going to tell friends. If you give a sample of the lemonade and they're not into it, then you go back to the kitchen and you mix up a different flavour. So that's some basic business, but the internet allows us to do that at scale. So what I like to encourage people to do when I coach them is come up with the minimum viable material. It can be a 10-second clip. There's a writer in my community who made a really beautiful 16-second movie. It's one shot. I love it so much. It's two wine glasses. There's a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. They're half full, and it's just that shot. It's sitting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thundering, thumping down these stairs, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Then you see out of the corner of the frame one person runs by, and then the other person behind her runs by and goes, “Wait.” That's it. That's the whole movie. It's 16 seconds. He did that with his phone. So there's so much going on. There's a couple of basic elements, but he just did it with his phone, and you can evoke enormous emotional impact on people through social media, whether it's just words. You guys have a big advantage as novelists because you're so good with words. Whether it's a little bit longer, like sudden fiction, that's a couple of pages or whatever. Even just copywriters are really in a good position for the future because they're super potent with two words or three words or 10 words. Then novelists are probably really advantageous because it doesn't cost anything to just put some words out on the internet. The point is, if you put something out, it's a signal, and you're talking about billions of people who could find that signal. If you do it and then you look at the response, and then you try again, you look at the response, we can do this iteration infinitely for free. So you can do it already. You've been able to do it for 10, 15, 20 years, just with words. But now you're going to basically be able to do that with movies or clips or trailers. So the thing that I'm leading in my community of writers is having people build trailers in advance, or clips. When a book or a movie is done, how the heck do we get people to see it? One way is a trailer or some sort of behind-the-scenes material. You can just do that stuff now before even writing the screenplay. I saw that you were doing this project, a trailer for this competition. And then you mentioned, “Oh, I've got to write the screenplay.” Not really. You have to develop the story enough to know what you're referring to, and then it's about studying the craft of either trailer construction, or whatever the clips are, or viral clips. They all have a structure, and then you just test it. If you enjoy that testing process, which I find absolutely thrilling, it feels like the filmmaking version of a stand-up comedian. If I did stand-up, I say a joke, they laugh or they don't laugh. It's really beautiful feedback from the universe. Nerve-wracking, right? But we can do that now as storytellers. We put a story out there in any format, and the audience responds. Just like you have to read any room, you have to learn how to read the engagement on social media. What do likes mean? What do shares mean? What do comments mean? How do you deal with trolls? All that is just part of the new art. Once you get good at it, holy smokes, that's the key to the kingdom. You can build audiences in advance, and for movies you could even have them finance your movie in advance, if you've built an email list of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people because you kept putting out all these viral clips around your story, novel, or screenplay. Then you go, “Okay, now 30,000 people are on my email list and I tell them about me and my perspective and my world. We're going to make this darn thing with AI for 20,000 bucks. You guys have got to pony up some money. Put in a dollar, five, 10, or you get the VIP $500 experience.” It's like crowdfunding, but much more sophisticated, because most crowdfunding was like begging friends and family to donate to your crazy dream. What I'm talking about is going to the audience directly, developing enough of the story, then going to the audience second, and then only when they validate the idea, to the extent that you're happy with. You could do a crazy idea that's going to have a small audience, and you don't have to have a blockbuster audience. You get to pick the audience size that you want, and then put the samples out there and see if you have a relevant audience size for this next project. Once the audience tells you, “Yes, we want this,” then you go make it. So you're ultimately reducing risk to almost zero. It takes time and you have to learn how to do this stuff, but it's thrilling to me because we just have the capacity to test the material and listen to the audience upfront. The last thing I'll say, and I've rambled a lot, I'm sorry. When I made a movie in 1994, a feature film right out of NYU, it took me three years to find out what the audience thought about that movie. I had to make the damn thing, and then I ran out of money, and that took me years to edit it, and I finally got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, I loved it. I loved every facet of it, and it was fine, but it was super inefficient. Today, I could take those same elements, create an AI trailer this weekend, put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and they could tell me right away, “This sucks,” or, “This is interesting,” or, “Holy smokes, this is amazing. I want this.” If it's not, “Holy smokes, this is amazing, I want it,” I can go ahead and re-edit the whole damn trailer, and just keep reiterating at almost no cost. Then once the demand is there, I can take that demand and that audience and go to Hollywood, and that's when they're going to want to work with me. Then it doesn't take a million conversations and finding the needle in the haystack, because Hollywood sees the numbers and they go, “Oh, you're the people we do want to do business with. You've proven demand. We want to do business with you.” Jo: Yes, it's so interesting. I can hear people listening and they're like, “Easier said than done, getting an email list of 40,000 people.” And in fact— It's exactly the same as building up a career as an independent author. This is as a filmmaker, as a visual person, and the industry is visual, so doing a visual trailer is the obvious thing. And as you say, the tools I use just to do this one, I use Midjourney, and I've used Seedance as the main video model. It does take a while, but it is pretty fast now, if you have a visual image of what you want in your head, which obviously you're a visual person as well. But is it… Brooks: Hold on. I want to push back on that a little bit, because I think it's really important. So yes, that's true, but underneath that, my friend, it's a relationship. It's the relationship, and the media is secondary. You have been prolific in connecting with your audience, and that's why I think a lot of people like you, because you share and they get to know you in that sort of cadence. I saw you in another podcast, you mentioned Seth Godin, who just said, “Hey, I want to be the type of person that has this relationship with my audience. I'm going to share some of my thoughts every day.” He happened to do it with words, with his background in marketing, but you could do the same thing with still images. You could do the same thing with a five-second movie clip once a week. It's the relationship you want with your fans. I'm not saying you snap your fingers and you have 50,000 people on your email list. What I'm saying is, what else are you doing? If we're artists and our impulse is to create and share, and if you do it in this way, if I can create and share and inspire trust in this relationship with a stranger because they like my genre thing and they like the way they felt when they experienced my media, words, images, movies, it doesn't matter. They just like the feeling, and they go, “Ooh, I want more of that feeling. How do I get more of that? Oh, this person has this email list or community.” If I can do it with one, then I can scale it out. So getting the first one, or the first 5 or 10 samples, that is a whole process. But then once you do that, scaling up is more of a mechanical thing. It's not even that hard, especially when you can do paid ads. So you can scale up very quickly if you have the sauce. If you don't have the sauce, it doesn't matter who you're related to, you've got to get the sauce right. Jo: Yes, and again, it's so parallel to the indie author community. I've just got to ask you, in the olden days, an author might write a screenplay, or a screenwriter write a screenplay, and then they would send it. They'd find an agent. They'd pitch an agent, and I guess then they'd hope that someone would turn that into a movie. So is that just dead now? Is it realistically that you need to get yourself out there, build the audience in the same way that it often is for authors? Brooks: So, no. I've got two screenplay deals going right now. So here's how it's going to work. Think about Broadway, or the theatre district in Britain. It's like West End or East End or whatever… Jo: The West End. Brooks: Sorry for my American ignorance. West End, okay. So every town on the planet has a stage, but there's only one Broadway, there's only one West End, right? And every town has its own festival, but there are a few significant tastemakers. There's Cannes, there's Sundance, there's Toronto. Hollywood is always going to be a tastemaker in our lifetime, for sure. What they don't have anymore, what they enjoyed for the first 100 years of the industry, is that they had a stranglehold on basically the equipment, the financing, and the audience, and that's all going away. Do you want to hear a fun story about the birth of cinema? Do you know why Hollywood started in Hollywood? Jo: No. Brooks: So Thomas Edison invented the camera, or the type of model camera that they were using in, I don't know, 1910 or something around there. They didn't want to pay his patent. They didn't want to pay the patent to make these movies, so they went all the way across the country, a bunch of outlaws, and they set up shop in California because he couldn't enforce his patent that they were basically stealing. And reason number two, LA enjoys amazing weather almost all year round. The weather here is either nice or really nice. You have mountains, you have beach, you have desert, you have all these different locales. So when it was really important to be on location, LA was the perfect place. Anyway, that is all going away. For many decades, more people could make movies. In the early '90s, Robert Rodriguez made a movie for 9,000 bucks. There was a book in the '80s that I bought that I loved, it was Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. This guy, Rick Schmidt, I think his name was. There were the independent filmmakers really in the '60s and the '70s. So the cost has been going down and down and down, and now it's less than ever. Once social media came along, now you have access to the audience, so why do you even need Hollywood? That being said, there are tons of people. There are 400,000 people already working in the movie and the TV industry here. And they're voracious. We have a voracious demand. Humans need stories. We need big stories, long stories. We need stories, and Hollywood is so good at giving them stories. And so they have a need for these things, and they're still spending a lot of money on those budgets. So yes, there's still a demand for turning books and optioning them and turning them into movies. Books are great. Any sort of existing IP is great because there are marketing efficiencies there. People already know that stuff, know the vibe of it, and so it's easier to market than something that's totally creative and new. When you're spending that much money, you want those marketing efficiencies. They're really important. So the point being, the power is shifting away from Hollywood. Hollywood will still be a tastemaker, but you and me can reach anybody on the planet now. Almost. Billions of people. If it's making a movie, right now you could make a movie that most people wouldn't realise is an AI movie. If it was a horror film, I know a handful of people that could make a feature-length horror film right now with AI and 99% of the audience couldn't tell, if it was professionally written. Jo: I think the point here though is, I'm an author, the people listening are authors, and we don't want to make movies. We want to license our IP to people who want to make movies. Brooks: Yes. Great. Okay, good. So then you could, if you wanted, build an audience. Hollywood loves when something's already proven, so that's that IP thing, right? So if you just have a great book, then it's all about the sales. You guys have Dragons' Den, we have Shark Tank here. And what's amazing about that show is these are people or entrepreneurs pitching an idea, and there's an amazing rhythm that happens. They say, “We've got this great idea. It's this sort of company.” And the sharks, or the dragons, will listen. And there's a huge turning point when they reveal sales. They're either really excited about the idea and then they go, “Well, how are the sales?” And the person goes, “Well, we don't have any sales yet.” And they go, “Uh,” and they're not interested. Or they might even be like, “Eh, it doesn't seem like a good idea.” And they're like, “Well, how are the sales?” And they're like, “Oh, well, we've sold through the roof.” And then all of a sudden they perk up. So it's all about the sales. So step one is writing something that you want. Step two is making sure other people in your target audience are also loving it as much as you do. Step three is proving in some way at scale that there's real demand for it. So you could do that with trailers, you could do that with clips, you can do that as an indie publisher. There's all sorts of things that you can do. Humans are much more persuaded by concrete data than they are by just vibes. So if you can bring Hollywood concrete data of any type, like viral videos, like audience, like obviously bestsellers. Awards mean something, but not quite as much as sales. Then you're going to get Hollywood's attention because that reduces risk for them. So even now, when Hollywood's definitely shrinking and contracting, there's still very significant money being spent because it's a huge demand. If you ever walk around a studio lot, those things are opulent places. It's stunning. Like, how are they paying for all this stuff? These lots are enormous. It's because humanity is voracious for stories, and movies are one premium type of storytelling. The demand for stories is steady if not going up. It's just that we have a wider variety of types of stories that we can do, whether we're an indie author. So anyway, did I answer the question? You get me too excited with these questions, Jo. It's a problem. Jo: Yes. I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of ways in, but the parallels with being an indie author I think are quite clear. One of the things I found interesting about your profile and what you do is that you help clients who are already accomplished but not quite breaking through, and that sounds like a lot of mid-list indie authors, probably a lot of mid-list screenwriters, mid-list filmmakers. This is a hard place to be because, on the one hand, we are grateful for what we have achieved and what we can do, and yet wanting more, wanting that big Hollywood deal or the Netflix deal, or wanting the massive bestseller or whatever. So if someone wants to get to that next level, what are some of the ways that they can perhaps try and get there? Brooks: It's a great question. Coaching is a really wonderful way to learn anything of this sort of complexity and challenge, especially if it's a hyper-competitive business. We need two things, I think, to write a great novel or screenplay or both. A, we need to feel profoundly safe in our space. If we can't really feel deeply authentic about the things that are embarrassing, or that we feel shame about, or just our shadows, or anything that we don't feel completely comfortable saying and sharing in public usually. We need to be able to touch those things, and be articulate about those things, and that's one part of it. Then we need a concrete path forward. Maybe you're thinking about some tragedy that you had in childhood, and how you dealt with it and how difficult that was. So you need to be able to be real precise in those observations about what it felt like, and how you tried to compensate for it, and that didn't work and it made it worse. Whatever your observations are about your life journey, you need to be really specific and really deeply felt. A good coaching relationship allows you to be in that space, to be really honest with yourself and authentic. g Aood coach will push you back and say, “You know what? That sounds interesting, but maybe not quite as true to you deeply.” So that's one piece of it. Then there's a concrete path forward. You need to have the emotional access to that truth, and then you need to know what to do with that truth in a step-by-step way. Because most people, the ones that you're talking about, they're accomplished in something else. What happens is when we first start writing, and maybe this happens with novelists, but for sure it happens to screenwriters, you just start typing words. But you haven't really thought through the theme, the concept, the structure, the character, all the deeper questions that really matter. The milestones, like a North Star: winning a major award, or getting a publisher. That's the direction that we're heading towards, and then you set it and forget it, but you want to keep checking it every week, every month or whatever. But you want it very specific. “I would like to sell a book, or sell a book to Hollywood, or write a screenplay, or get a producer attached to a screenplay.” Whatever the milestone is, make it really specific, really concrete, and then reverse engineer. This is what I do on the concrete path. I reverse engineer every step to get there, starting with a really tiny one we can do today, and I make sure they feel really safe, and then we just walk through. Then what happens is, if you do that, if you feel safe, if you're showing up authentically and you have a process that's repeatable, not just willy-nilly, it's got to be something that's proven to work. It wasn't an accident I wrote 45 scripts. I've got a whole system. But by the way, the first five scripts took me forever. The last movie that I made took me three years to write that script. I can write a better script with those same elements in three months now, because I know I have a concrete path. So if you want to do something new, whether it's playing the piano or getting six-pack abs or writing a screenplay, work with somebody who's got a system that's already proven, and make sure you relate to them, and then just follow the system. Then when the doubts come up, and they will, that's where the feeling safe is really important. Because, oh, I want the six-pack abs, but I don't feel like going to the gym. I want the extra donut. If I'm working with a really good trainer, they go, “Dude, do you want the six-pack abs or not?” And then you go back and forth, and I go, “Okay, now I can make peace with myself and say I can take one tiny bite of the donut and then still do my workout,” and then I'm moving towards that North Star. Does that make sense? Jo: Yes. I think, like many independents, I resist anything that is systematised. I'm a discovery writer, and I follow the muse, and all of that kind of thing. I think I would say something in a similar vein, which is sustainable creativity for the long term, because your 45 scripts are also years of work, and my books are years of work, and we get better at what we do. So my system, I do have a system really, because— My system is that I do the work, and I write my stories, and I get them out there, and I do the marketing. So even if it's not as systematised as such, it's still a process that I have repeated over and over again. Brooks: That's fascinating to me. Would you consider yourself a pantser? You're like, “I've got an idea,” and you just start writing? Jo: I don't use the word pantser. I guess I call it discovery writing, which is… Brooks: That's a better term. Jo: Yes. What I'm writing for this prize, for example, I know the characters, I know now what's happening. When I had the idea, it was very much a vision and a theme, and the competition has a theme: a positive future with AI and technology. But the things that came around that, I then started playing with ideas around the treatment. I haven't written the screenplay yet. I don't do a plot, or I don't follow Save the Cat or any of that kind of thing. When I write a novel, I just explore and I never write in order. Then at some point I stop and then I have to think about the structure and putting it all together, so the edits are quite big. But my fun is in that discovery, really. Brooks: Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so let me ask, that's really fascinating. And by the way, that doesn't, to me, negate the system that I use. The one that I use is ultimately… the thing is, these questions, the audience is wanting your unique answers to. You don't necessarily need to do it in a certain order. I think that's actually really cool that you write out of order and you have a few elements in mind. All that stuff sounds awesome. The only thing that then makes me curious is, how's your pace? Are you actually completing novels at a pace that feels good, or do you feel like you go too fast, too slow? Jo: I do one or two a year at the moment. Well, two a year, really. But I would say I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, so I'm not saying that my system is the best. I'm saying I want to be better. It's just that my fun is this sort of creative chaos, which I then try and control later. One of the things I really like about screenplays and treatments and doing this kind of thing for film is that it is much more structured, I think, than a 70,000-word novel. You can go in all kinds of directions, whereas with screenwriting you do have to be more disciplined really. Brooks: Yes, so this is going to be fun probably, to hear my view for your audience, and the differences as I see them. For starters, you're talking about what, 10, 20, 30 hours reading a novel sometimes, or maybe less, whereas a movie's a 90-minute experience, right? So that's different. Or if it's a TV series, you might see an hour and then an hour. So that's a very different experience. What happens is when it's condensed like that, you're loading up layers. So every scene is stacked with exposition beneath the drama, and done in a certain way. So specifically, movies are only what you can see and only what you hear. Whereas novels, if you can think it, you can write it, it can be in there. So you don't need to have a plot, but if you want to sell your book to Hollywood, it helps. So I was very resistant about structure. I went to NYU film school, where we really just made short films. It was funny, I had friends that were in the dramatic writing department, and I was like, “You guys are wasting your money. You're just learning to write scripts. We learn to write the scripts and make the movies.” What I hadn't realised is it's a different skill set to hold somebody's attention across an hour-long play, or a 90-minute movie, than it is to make a movie that holds their attention for two minutes or five minutes. I found out years later when I made a feature that was like a lot of shorts patched together, and people were not… They liked it, but they didn't love it. I was like, “Well, what's going on?” And so then I learned to really love Save the Cat in particular. It completely changed me. What happened was, I got a big old slice of humble pie. I had made my second feature, and I put everything I had into it, and it had loose structural beginning, middle, end, blah, blah, blah. But I was still, “Eh, Hollywood BS. What do they know? It's all fake.” So I was very anti-Hollywood structure. Then I was like, now I've got two independent films out there, people saw them, liked them, whatever, but it wasn't getting me consistent work. It wasn't really advancing my career in the way that I wanted. And I was like, “Well, maybe there is something to the Save the Cat.” So I went to the Save the Cat workshop with Blake when he was still alive, and he was delightful, a really awesome guy. He's got this kind of cutesy style, for people that don't know. For context, Blake Snyder was a working Hollywood screenwriter, and he had this system called Save the Cat, which actually has some really interesting ideas. He's got this very light, breezy sort of style. A lot of people don't like him and some people really love him, and everything in between. But I took his weekend seminar, and it completely changed me, because at that point, like I said, I took three years to write a script. Then once he had a process and he had a way of thinking about craft that was just much more screenwriter-friendly, I was like, “Oh my God.” It was so much easier, because I was just focused on the right thing at the right time. So it just sped everything up. After that, I was banging out two to three scripts a year, and better and better quality. So for me, because I went from winging it and wrote five scripts in 13 years, and then wrote two to three scripts every year, I became a huge proponent of system and process. Then my own system really came from that, but it's modular. I have a nine-step system, but you don't necessarily have to go in that order, other than the last three steps, but I won't get into the details. Sometimes you kind of jump from two to three and then back to two and then back and forth. So I love that you get the feel for those elements, and then you just felt your way through. But writing screenplay pages doesn't make sense until you really understand concept, you get a deep sense of beginning, middle, end, character arcs, and these other threads. There are just way better tools for those jobs than screenplay format, because it's a really weird format. It's got these weird slug lines at the top that are all in caps, because a screenplay is a blueprint for somebody else to make the movie. It's not an end-user document like a novel. I don't let my clients even go to that format because it just gets them focused on the wrong things. What they really need to know is, what is your perspective about this theme? What happened in your life that you're fascinated with, that you'd even want to write about this? And tell me what your real life lessons are. So we go into… again, I go back to relationship. What's your relationship to the universe? And what's your relationship to your best friends, or where you got your heart broken, or whatever you want to write about. And then we get that clarity, and then I show you how to express it in terms of developing a screenplay. It's really long-form storytelling, and then the structure just makes it build on itself. But with the structure, because you're talking about so much money and people involved to make it, at least traditionally, what ended up happening was narrative structure that was not so much rigid. Because here's the thing, you can look at 50, 100 years of European cinema and you can look at Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood laps them. When I taught at UCLA Extension, I had lots of foreign students. Let's say there'd be two or three students… if there were 12 people in the class, two or three people would be from America, and everybody else would be from other countries. I would go around, I'd be like, “What movies and TV shows have you been watching?” Almost in every single country, they watch half from their own country, half from Hollywood. So Hollywood storytelling works, that's just the data, and they're dominant. The reason it works is what Aristotle was saying thousands of years ago.. There's a way of thinking about beginning, middle, end that just deeply speaks to the psyche, and you can ignore it if you want. I think Godard said, “You need beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order,” right? Which is great. Just the way we experience life, there's a beginning, a middle, an end to this podcast interview. There's a beginning, middle, end to the day, a beginning, middle, end to me eating lunch. So if you don't lean into the beginning, middle, end psychological aspect of your story, you're going to bore your reader. But to your point, you don't necessarily have to sort that out in the beginning. It's more efficient probably if you do, but you don't have to. Go into it wherever the muse tells you to go, and then at some point, like you do, then you go, “Okay, now I go back and I edit.” If you're saying there's another level, you have another gear in you, then yes, I'd be curious to slowly go through how you're making those decisions. Because what's happening probably is there are ways you're holding back a little bit. There's maybe something you're afraid of being vulnerable about. That's usually where me or other writers are holding themselves back, and we can take a look at that. There are different ways I show writers to do it. Then you can go, “Oh, I was doing it here, and now I can do it there.” And it could be with process, or just a certain creative choice. With story, it's clear and compelling. Those are the simple things. So, is this clear enough? Is it compelling enough? And there are almost always ways to up-level on any facet, whether it's one sentence, or a sentence that describes the whole concept of the book, or a chapter. Each one of those can be looked at with that lens and we can just say, “Hey, this is 70%, 80%,” whatever, and then we say, “Well, how do we get a little bit more?” And then when you do that enough, it piles up. Then especially if you bring in an audience and people are flipping out for your work, they'll tell you. Jo: Yes, I love a challenge, so thank you for everything you've shared today. So where can people find you and everything you do online? Brooks: Well, one way you can find me—if anything I said seemed helpful for you, if you have questions about Hollywood or you have a screenplay in your heart—you can just email me, brooks@brookselms.com. You could look me up on LinkedIn. I'm at Brooks Elms. I also have a Skool community called Screenwriter Marketing, but it's really for any sort of storyteller, and it talks about my favourite way to engage an audience and get through it. So anybody can jump into that if you like my vibe. If you really think anything I've said, or the way I said it, seems like it could be helpful for you, just reach out. Let me know what you're up to, and maybe there's a way I can help you. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Brooks. That was great. Brooks: You're welcome. It was a total pleasure. It was lots of fun, and I really appreciate you.The post How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Deep in the forests of western Rhode Island lies the forgotten site of the Ramtail Mill, where locals once claimed a dead night watchman refused to leave his post. They said the factory bell rang by itself, machinery roared to life after midnight, and a lone lantern drifted through the darkness long after its keeper was buried. The legend became so widespread that, in 1885, a Rhode Island state census officially listed the abandoned mill as simply: "Ram Tail Factory (haunted)." Tonight, we uncover the true story behind America's only government-recognized haunted location... and the family tragedy that inspired one of New England's strangest ghost stories.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For nearly three centuries, sailors have reported a mysterious flame rising from the waters off Block Island... a ghostly ship said to burn without ever being consumed. Legend blames murderous wreckers, a doomed immigrant vessel, and a restless spirit forever searching the sea. But the real history is far more tragic. Tonight, we uncover the true story of the Princess Augusta, the infamous Palatine Light, a towering woman accused of witchcraft, and how one of New England's greatest ghost stories grew from history, folklore, and the unforgiving Atlantic.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Kobo ReWriting Life Podcast! Alongside your regularly scheduled Kobo Writing Life podcast episode releases, we will also be featuring some highlights from our backlist. In this episode, we spoke with best-selling author of over 30 romantic comedies, Lauren Layne! Lauren is also a proficient marketer and expert at author branding. We are excited to share her great advice on author branding yet again. Lauren Layne is a New York Times bestselling author and branding superstar. She shares her secrets on cultivating an author brand and mastering trickier social media platforms, specifically Instagram and Pinterest. Lauren demystifies author branding and explains how authors can find their own aesthetic. She also discusses why she chose to limit her social media presence to two platforms and how she has made these platforms work for her. Further we discuss the evolution of her newsletter and how it has changed throughout the years. Publish on Kobo Writing Life.

The 1973 Oil Crisis had a devastating effect on Japan's economy and led to a period of rapid political turmoil as the ruling LDP, for the first time in the party's history, failed to obtain a simple majority of seats in the diet.Support the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms! 

On Toronto's quiet islands stands Canada's oldest lighthouse... and one of its most haunted. For more than two centuries, visitors have reported a ghostly keeper pacing the tower after dark, searching for justice that never came. But behind the legend lies a true story of colonial violence, a respected Bavarian immigrant beaten to death by drunken soldiers, a mysterious grave hidden beneath shifting sand dunes, and a sacred Indigenous landscape forever changed by war.  Tonight, we separate folklore from history and uncover the chilling mystery of the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@HAHChris   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For centuries, the people of eastern Pennsylvania believed there was a hill where you could leave your sickness behind. Not cure it... leave it. Powwowers cast illness into an ancient rock, convinced it could absorb disease, curses, and human misery until the mountain itself became something to fear. But Hexenkopf is more than a haunted hill. It is a place where Native American spirituality, Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, witchcraft trials, tax rebellions, and modern pagan traditions all converge on the same billion-year-old outcrop of stone. Tonight, we explore one of the strangest, and oldest, sacred places in Pennsylvania.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube -  https://www.youtube.com/@HauntedAmericanHistory   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm sharing a collection of brief excerpts of guidance I've given to Brain over Binge Group members during our live calls (only my voice is included). The coaching clips cover a variety of topics that come up in recovery, and my goal is to give you insights that can help you in your own life. As you listen, I hope you'll feel supported and encouraged! Join the Brain over Binge Group! Get the Brain over Binge Course for only $18.99 per month Episode mentioned in this show: Ep. 200: Coaching Notes: Recovery Reminders from My 1:1 Sessions Other Brain over Binge resources: Get the FREE 30-day Inspiration Booklet Get personalized support with one-on-one coaching Get the Second Edition of Brain over Binge on Amazon and Audible, BarnesandNoble.com, Apple iBooks, or Kobo. Get the Brain over Binge Recovery Guide Disclaimer: *The Brain over Binge Podcast is produced and recorded by Brain over Binge Recovery Coaching, LLC. All work is copyrighted by Brain over Binge Recovery Coaching, LLC, and all rights are reserved. As a disclaimer, the hosts of the Brain over Binge Podcast are not professional counselors or licensed healthcare providers, and this podcast is not a substitute for medical advice or any form of professional therapy. Eating disorders can have serious health consequences and you are strongly advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health. Please get help when you need it, and good luck on your journey.

For sixty-five years, America knew him by only one name: The Boy in the Box. A brutally abused little boy, abandoned in a cardboard bassinet box in a vacant Philadelphia lot, with no name, no family, and no one to claim him. Detectives chased psychics, carnival workers, and heartbreaking confessions that led nowhere, while one investigator devoted his entire life to giving the child back his identity. Then, in 2022, advances in forensic genealogy finally accomplished what generations of detectives could not. Tonight, we tell the tragic story of the child the world refused to forget.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube -  https://www.youtube.com/@HauntedAmericanHistory   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The last few years have brought a wave of romances with magical elements—not really paranormal, not really witches, not really contemporary — books where something is just slightly ✨magic✨. Today, we're talking about those books, how they work, what they're saying, and how they work in terms of character, plot and POV. We're also discussing how the books exist on the outer edges of the romance pool.If you want to talk more about these speculative romance novels, or about romance in general, come join our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.Our next read along is an old school contemporary, Perfect by Judith McNaught. Sarah says it has the greatest all-is-lost moment in romance history. Read it to find out if she's right. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.BooksA Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia WilliamsMy Date with a Pair of Gray Sweatpants by Cassie O. PeiaThe House of Now and Then by Edward UnderhillDo Your Worst by Rosie DananEvery Version of You by Natalie MessierThe Night Island by Jayne Ann KrentzThe Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston The Someday Garden by Ashley PostonLosing Sight by Tati RichardsonStruck Speechless by Tati RichardsonNotesThis year's men's World Cup actually broke the Own Goal record with 14 of them. Get ready for the Women's World Cup in Brazil next year in 2027! So these English fans made up a bunch of chants for a regular player, which is very charming. Speaking of soccer, Mamdani continues to show us all that politicians can just…help make people's lives better?Here's a handout Jen uses to teach the three genres that fall under the speculative fiction umbrella, and why magical realism isn't a catch-all or synonym for any writing with speculative elements.The pink dress question: how do you decide if your characters need to heal themselves in order to fall in love, or if falling in love is what heals them?Matthew Rhys and Matthew Macfadyen are in fact different people, but everyone's watching Widow's Bay.SponsorsLumi Gummies. Go to lumigummies.com and use code FATEDMATES for 30% off your order.Lucy Score author of The Dead Guy Next Door, the first in the Riley Thorn series, available in print, ebook and audiobook, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.Harpercollins, publishers of Sleuths, by Samantha Moody, available in print, ebook and audiobook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or your local independent bookstore.The RestFor even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2026/7/5/s0843 If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It's so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates. Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough. If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

Deep in the forests overlooking Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, hikers still whisper about a small, hairy creature that watches from the treetops, steals apples, and pelts trespassers with the cores. It's called the Albatwitch, a bizarre cryptid unlike Bigfoot or any other creature in American folklore. But is it really a monster? Or is it the last surviving echo of German folklore carried across the Atlantic by homesick immigrants more than three centuries ago? Tonight, we trace the remarkable evolution of one of Pennsylvania's strangest legends, from medieval Europe to modern eyewitness sightings at Chickies Rock.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm       YouTube -  https://www.youtube.com/@HauntedAmericanHistory   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Long before the curtain rose on one of America's oldest continuously operating theaters, the land beneath the Fulton Theatre ran red with blood. It was here, in 1763, that the last surviving members of the peaceful Conestoga people were slaughtered inside the walls of the Lancaster jail. Centuries later, actors, stagehands, and bartenders report phantom footsteps, ghostly applause, disembodied whistles, and apparitions wandering the galleries. Is the Fulton Theatre simply haunted—or are its ghosts keeping alive a history too painful to forget? Tonight, we uncover the tragic past and enduring legends of one of Pennsylvania's most haunted landmarks.   HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm           YouTube -  https://www.youtube.com/@HauntedAmericanHistory       TikTok - @hah_podcast   hauntedamericanhistory.com               Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠               LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH               Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334       AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S       Ebook       GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1       KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_       SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316               !! DISTURB ME !!       APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090       SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ       YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast       www.disturbmepodcast.com   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the summer of 1518, the people of Strasbourg watched in horror as a woman stepped into the street and began to dance. She didn't stop for days. Then dozens joined her. Then hundreds. Men, women, and children danced until their feet bled, their bodies collapsed, and some died from exhaustion. The city responded by building stages, hiring musicians, and forcing the victims to dance even more—turning a public health crisis into one of history's most surreal disasters. Tonight, we unravel the mystery of the Dancing Plague of 1518 and ask the unsettling question: what if the deadliest epidemic wasn't a disease of the body, but of the mind? HAH DISCORD - https://discord.com/invite/bJdbpH3hQm   An AI model of my voice was used in this episode to patch around a summer cold. No episode means Chrissy boy doesn't eat. Please forgive me.   YouTube -  https://www.youtube.com/@HauntedAmericanHistory   TikTok - @hah_podcast hauntedamericanhistory.com       Patreon- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hauntedamericanhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠       LINKS FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL, THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH       Barnes and Noble -   https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-forgotten-borough-christopher-feinstein/1148274794?ean=9798319693334   AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQPQD68S   Ebook   GOOGLE: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S5WCEQAAQBAJ&pli=1   KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-forgotten-borough-2?sId=a10cf8af-5fbd-475e-97c4-76966ec87994&ssId=DX3jihH_5_2bUeP1xoje_   SMASHWORD: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1853316       !! DISTURB ME !!   APPLE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disturb-me/id1841532090   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3eFv2CKKGwdQa3X2CkwkZ5?si=faOUZ54fT_KG-BaZOBiTiQ   YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@DisturbMePodcast   www.disturbmepodcast.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Once upon a time, Sarah went to Sweden and met a thriller writer who likes talking about the rules of writing in genre as much as we do. We're so excited that to be able to bring Anders de la Motte's brilliant thoughts about thrillers and mysteries to Fated Mates in this far-reaching conversation on romance's sister genres—thrillers & mysteries. We talk about Anders's path to writing, about the rules of writing thrillers and mysteries, about the covenant mysteries and thrillers have with readers, and about Mystery Reasons™️. We had the best time with this one — you're going to love it.Learn more about Anders's books at his English language publishers, Simon & Schuster and HarpercollinsIf you want to talk more about Genre Carrying the Myth, Jayne Ann Krentz's genius way of thinking about the work of genre fiction, or about mysteries and thrillers, come join our Patreon! You'll get an extra monthly episode from us and access to the incredible readers and brilliant people on the Fated Mates Discord. Learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.Our next read along is an old school contemporary, Perfect by Judith McNaught. Sarah says it has the greatest all-is-lost moment in romance history. Read it to find out if she's right. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.Thrillers and Mysteries Mentioned in This EpisodeThe Mountain King by Anders De la MotteThe Glass Man by Anders De la MotteThe Rust Forest by Anders De la MotteShutter Island by Denis LehaneThe Usual SuspectsWidow's BayMurder on the Orient Express by Agatha ChristieColumboPoker FaceMurder, She WroteKnives OutThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg LarssonKilling Floor by Lee ChildOrphan X by Gregg HurwitzSmall Mercies by Dennis LehaneThe DaVinci Code by Dan BrownJames BondEvil Under the Sun by Agatha ChristieDeath on the Nile by Agatha ChristieAnd Then There Were None by Agatha ChristieOne of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManusThe Thursday Murder Club by Richard OsmanThe WireMemoRandom by Anders De la MotteEnd of Summer by Anders De la MotteGame by Anders De la MotteNotesWelcome Anders de la Motte, author of mysteries and thrillers. Many of his books have been translated to English, most recently The Asker series.Many of the most famous fictional detectives we mentioned are on this list.In fiction, unreliability is a narrative device meant to purposefully confuse or lie to the reader for the purposes of the story. We've argued that it's more or less impossible to have an unreliable narrator in romance. A good explainer on the difference between close 3rd (used in romance) and limited 3rd (used in mysteries/thrillers)MacGuffins and other mystery and thriller tropes and vocabulary.SponsorsJill Shalvis author of Falling Into You, available in print, ebook, audiobook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent bookstore.Jess Turner, author of The Only Catch, available in print, ebook or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.Hachette, publishers of In the Wake of the Ruined, by Kalie Cassidy, available in print, ebook and audiobook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or your local independent bookstore.Oliver Heber Books, publishers of The Forbidden Duke, by Darcy Burke, available in print, ebook and audiobook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books. Support the special 10th...