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In this member-first Q&A on the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, ALLi nonfiction adviser Anna Featherstone walks authors through how to write, publish, and promote nonfiction that sells—covering how to test market demand, what makes a book stand out, and the most common pricing and production mistakes. She shares practical, low-cost marketing tactics, from direct outreach and library events to writing ready-made stories that overstretched newsrooms welcome. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of 2,000+ blog posts, and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. We invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally.
Send us Fan MailIt's not every day that a bestselling author invites you into the secret world behind their creative process. In this episode, I sit down with April Henry, acclaimed writer of thirty-two mysteries and thrillers, to discuss how she crafts her gripping stories—making them both intricately plotted and beautifully accessible. Here, we dive into the wisdom and practical strategies April shared about writing, resilience, and reaching all readers.Timestamp:00:00 Finding Inspiration for Story Ideas03:34 Blending Plotting with Pantsing09:12 Tessa's DNA discovery and implications12:56 Ensuring accuracy in medical details15:20 Overcoming writing roadblocks20:04 Persistence leads to publishing success23:10 Writing books with teen protagonists24:43 Making books exciting for readers30:18 Starting a New Book33:05 Writing through challenges and goals37:03 Editing and revising chapters40:21 Collaborating with an editor43:23 Finding writing community and resources47:44 Concerns about book censorship48:55 Where to find April's workFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
Submit to Season 4 Courage Files Here! What happens after the book is finally out in the world—and all the noise starts creeping in? In this conversation, indie MM romance author Alex Cross joins me to talk about emotionally intense storytelling, publishing pressure, writer's block, and the challenge of protecting your creativity once readers, reviews, and big expectations enter the picture.We talk about the Fire Between Us series and its highly anticipated second installment, From Our Ashes, which released May 4th, 2026, as well as her stunning Us duet—Echoes of Us and Becoming Us. We dig into the craft, including keeping track of dual timelines, writing toxic relationships, character psychology, and messy, deeply human love stories. Alex also shares her journey into self-publishing, the realities of revising published work, navigating social media and comparison, and learning how to reconnect to why she writes in the first place.It's an honest conversation about creativity, vulnerability, and continuing to write even when fear and doubt get loud.Timestamps04:04 Meet Alex Cross08:29 Choosing a risky debut11:37 Echoes of Us19:11 Crafting dual timelines24:44 Revising published work29:49 Fire Between Us update33:30 Writing high-angst stories35:53 Writer's block + sequel struggles37:56 Reviews, doubt, and social media41:35 Boundaries and support systems44:48 Protecting the magic of writing47:26 What's next + where to find Alex To connect with Alex and read her books, go to her website and follow her on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.All of Alex's books are available in KU. Have a comment or idea about the show? Send me a direct text! Love to hear from you.Support the show To become a supporter of the show, click here!To get in touch with Stacy:Email: Stacy@writeitscared.cohttps://www.writeitscared.co/wishttps://www.instagram.com/writeitscared/Take advantage of these Free Resources From Write It Scared: Download Your Free Novel Planning and Drafting Quick Start Guide Download Your Free Guide to Remove Creative Blocks and Work Through Fears
I've been digitizing old photos of myself as a kid.What hit me was not the haircut.It was how hard I was on myself even then.By 13 or 14, I had already decided I needed to be perfect to be liked.That belief pushed me through engineering, a PhD, and becoming a professor.It also quietly followed me everywhere.Academia did not create my anxiety.It rewarded it.You learn quickly that you are never quite good enough.Publish more.Work harder.Do better.Repeat.If you stay long enough, you start to believe it.It becomes your normal.Looking at those old photos, I realized something simple.I was already doing well.I was already okay.Nothing about that kid needed fixing.Yet I spent years acting like I was a problem to solve.And here is what scares me.This is not just academia.I see it in medicine, law, tech, everywhere.Smart people slowly absorb the idea that they are never enough.Like a frog in warming water, you do not notice it happening.Until it becomes your identity.So I am reminding myself of something I wish I learned earlier:You might already be doing better than you think.You might already be enough.Do not spend 20 years chasing approval from systems that survive on your doubt.Protect your mind.Protect your confidence.And if needed, distance yourself from voices that only grow by shrinking you.One day you will look back at photos of yourself right now.You will realize you were already pretty incredible.Do not wait that long to believe it.
In Episode 282 of the Defend, Publish, and Lead podcast, host Christine Tulley interviews Dr. Bryan Alexander about how AI is reshaping textbook and academic publishing. Alexander is a futurist, Georgetown senior scholar, and keynote speaker for the TAA Summer Institute. He offers a broad, forward-looking view, beginning with the larger forces already destabilizing higher education: shifting demographics, changing economics, enrollment pressures, and evolving cultural attitudes toward the academy. He then surveys the technological landscape — the maturation of ebooks, the ongoing challenge of mobile-friendly scholarship, extended reality, and open access — before zeroing in on AI's multifaceted impact. Topics include the spectrum of ways authors are using AI to write (from full generation to light assistance), the thorny intellectual property questions surrounding AI training data and publisher licensing deals, the flood of AI-generated or AI-assisted content entering publishing pipelines, and unresolved questions around disclosure and verification. Alexander also highlights tools like NotebookLM as a virtual colleague for writers and acknowledges the deep divide within academia between AI enthusiasts and those who want it kept out of scholarly work entirely. He closes by arguing that academia is uniquely positioned to lead society's broader reckoning with AI by drawing on expertise across psychology, economics, computer science, and history, and that this moment represents both a challenge and an opportunity for scholarly writers and publishers. Resources Mentioned Bryan Alexander's website TAA Summer Institute Register for the TAA Institute for Textbook & Academic Authors, which will be held June 12-13. Get $50 off registration with code DP26. Episodes Mentioned Episode 280 Interview with Greg Lewbart (textbook authoring) Episode 277 Interview with Pat Goodsen (author of Keep Writing) Episode 263 Interview with Brenda Ulrich, Interview with Brenda Ulrich, Academic Publishing Attorney (TAA) Summer Accountability Group Just $25 for entire summer and sessions are recorded - email me if you want to join us every Monday (christine@defendpublishlead.com) and get a FREE summer progress tracker DPL Resources Set your writing goals with us! Try us out in a free consultation. Check out our current and past workshops at Eventbrite for writing support content. A FREE webinar is posted each month. Missed a workshop? Request a workshop or webinar recording from christine@defendandpublish.com Don't forget about the wonderful resources at Textbook and Academic Authors Association. The organization can be found at: https://www.taaonline.net New to TAA? Join for just $25 using discount code DP26! You will also receive a copy of the eBook, Guide to Making Time to Write: 100+ Time & Productivity Management Tips for Textbook and Academic Authors.
The Salvation Army operates in the homeless hub, Houben House on Dublin's Southside and Rachael is joined by the service manager, Anthony Byrne.
HT2636 - Release vs Publish, and Why I was recently watching a YouTuber discuss the "release" of a new photograph he'd just finished. It evidently was time to go public with this new image. I was struck by his term "release" as though the image had been imprisoned until its liberation. Besides the obvious detention metaphor, I questioned whether or not this is a term used specifically with single images rather than projects with multiple images. Considering all the images we now have in our digital assets, why do we "release" one and not the others? Is this a volumetric decision or a marketing one? Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation Thanks!
Send us Fan MailAt the heart of every aspiring author's journey, before outlines are made or words are penned, a gnawing question lingers: Am I enough? On this solo episode of Authors Who Lead, I cut through the noise of writing tips and publishing strategies to spotlight this deeply personal challenge. Drawing on over a decade of coaching writers, I reveal that the greatest barrier to writing isn't a lack of ideas or technical skill—it's self-worth.Timestamp:00:00 Common doubts before writing a book04:11 Embracing your unique perspective09:06 The unpredictability of bestsellers10:34 Confronting book writing fearsFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
Rachel and Simon speak with the novelist Kathryn Stockett. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kathryn moved to New York after university and spent almost a decade working in magazine publishing and marketing. In 2001, reeling from the 9/11 attacks and missing home, Kathryn started writing "The Help". The story of black maids and their white employers in Jackson in the 1960s became a sleeper hit in 2009 - it went on to sell 15 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a film in 2011. (The movie grossed more than $220 million at the box office; Octavia Spencer won an Oscar for her portrayal of Minny, one of the maids.) Kathryn spent over a decade working on her follow-up, "The Calamity Club", set in Oxford, Mississippi, in the 1930s. We spoke to Kathryn about magazine largesse in the 1990s, the huge success of "The Help" and the long road to publication of "The Calamity Club". In addition to the standard audio format, the podcast is now available in video. You can check us out on YouTube under Always Take Notes. We've also made (yet) another update for those who support the podcast on the crowdfunding site Patreon. We've added a further 70 pages of new material to the package of successful article pitches that goes to anyone who supports the show with $5 per month or more, including new pitches to the New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Guardian Long Read. The whole compendium now runs to a magisterial 230 pages. For Patreons who contribute $10/month we're now also releasing bonus mini-episodes. Thanks to our sponsor, Scrivener, the first ten new signs-ups at $10/month will receive a lifelong license to Scrivener worth £55/$59.99 (one is left). This specialist word-processing software helps you organise long writing projects such as novels, academic papers and even scripts. Other Patreon rewards include signed copies of the podcast book and the opportunity to take part in a call with Simon and Rachel. A new edition of “Always Take Notes: Advice From Some Of The World's Greatest Writers” - a book drawing on our podcast interviews - is available now. The updated version now includes insights from over 100 past guests on the podcast, with new contributions from Harlan Coben, Victoria Hislop, Lee Child, Megan Nolan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Philippa Gregory, Jo Nesbø, Paul Theroux, Hisham Matar and Bettany Hughes. You can order it via Amazon or Waterstones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Fiosrú, the office of the police ombudsman, is the statutory body which deals with complaints from members of the public and the Gardai about the Gardaí. Police Ombudsman Emily Logan joined Paul ahead of the publishing of the body's first annual report next week.
In Episode 281 of the Defend, Publish, and Lead podcast, host Christine Tulley shares a practical post-project workflow for academics who have just completed a major writing project — drawing directly from her own experience of turning in a book manuscript days earlier. She outlines five key steps. First, genuinely celebrate and resist the urge to immediately dive into the next project. Second, write closing notes (she uses the free online notebook PenZu) to capture unfinished ideas, figure renaming quirks, missing references, and anything that needs attention when page proofs arrive. Third, save and organize browser tabs into a dedicated bookmarks folder rather than simply closing them, so sources are easy to locate later. Fourth, preserve any unused project bits — such as formatted references that didn't make the final manuscript — as a gift to your future self. And fifth, look ahead to the next project with intention. Tulley also uses the episode to highlight Defend, Publish, and Lead's summer accountability group and to preview her upcoming mid-career writing lab at the TAA Summer Institute, where she'll help veteran academics keep their writing pipelines moving despite increasing administrative and mentorship demands. Slides From This Episode Episodes Mentioned Episode 280: Interview with Dr. Greg Lewbart about Textbook Authoring & TAA Institute Episode 277: Interview with Dr. Pat Goodsen author of "Keep Writing" Episode 263: Interview with Brenda Ulrich, Academic Publishing Attorney Resources Mentioned Summer writing accountability group - just $25 for entire summer and sessions are recorded, email Christine Tulley if you want to join us every Monday (christine@defendpublishlead.com) and get a FREE summer progress tracker TAA Summer Institute Register for the TAA Institute for Textbook & Academic Authors, which will be held June 12-13. Get $50 off registration with code DP26. DPL Resources Set your writing goals with us! Try us out in a free consultation. Check out our current and past workshops at Eventbrite for writing support content. A FREE webinar is posted each month. Missed a workshop? Request a workshop or webinar recording from christine@defendandpublish.com Don't forget about the wonderful resources at Textbook and Academic Authors Association. The organization can be found at: https://www.taaonline.net New to TAA? Join for just $25 using discount code DP26! You will also receive a copy of the eBook, Guide to Making Time to Write: 100+ Time & Productivity Management Tips for Textbook and Academic Authors.
Why do certain spiritual books appear at specific moments in human consciousness?In this one question channeling session, Ameera May asks why she has been guided to publish the collaborative book Between Earth and Eternity, why the timing is happening now, and how spiritually challenging ideas are meant to reach the people they are intended for.This episode explores reincarnation, soul contracts, multidimensional consciousness, spiritual publishing, collective consciousness, and the role of knowledge-sharing in human spiritual evolution.What You'll HearWhy some spiritual projects feel bigger than the individual creating themHow collective consciousness was described during the transmissionWhat “knowledge-bearing” souls and civilizations areWhy reincarnation teachings are re-emerging nowHow spiritually controversial ideas can create transformationWhy different readers resonate with different chapters and teachingsHow channeling and consciousness sharing work through collaborative booksThe role of simplicity when communicating spiritual conceptsThis Episode Is For Listeners Who Are:Exploring reincarnation, soul contracts, or consciousness after deathPublishing, teaching, or sharing spiritual knowledgeCurious about channeling and multidimensional consciousnessFeeling guided toward a larger spiritual purposeInterested in past lives, spiritual awakening, and consciousness studiesThis episode is part of Season 20: One Question Channeling Sessions.Each episode features one guest, one question, and one direct transmission shared exactly as it happened.These are real sessions, not interviews.
Jake Broe is a United States Air Force veteran who served for six years as a Nuclear and Missile Operations Officer. But you may know him better as one of the most prominent voices on YouTube throughout the war, someone with absolute moral clarity about who the victim of the war is – spoilers, it's Ukraine – and who brings direct military experience to his detailed analysis of the unfolding conflict. Do please subscribe to his channel for videos updates on the war in Ukraine as well as conversations with engaging speakers, expert guests, and other YouTubers.----------LINKS: @JakeBroe https://www.youtube.com/@JakeBroe https://twitter.com/RealJakeBroehttps://www.instagram.com/jakebroe/https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jakebroehttps://www.patreon.com/join/jakebroe----------ACTIVE CAMPAIGN:We are raising funds for 5 of 15 Vampire DronesSilicon Curtain for Kupiansk Vampires. Dzyga's Paw, together with Jonathan Fink, is joining forces to raise $40,000 to provide the Khartiia Brigade with Vampire Drones.https://dzygaspaw.com/silicon-curtain-for-kupiansk-vampiresThese heavy bombers are designed to destroy manpower and equipment, as well as for remote mining. The Vampire UAV, manufactured by Skyfall, has proven itself to be one of the most effective weapons in the Kupiansk direction. Skyfall is one of Ukraine's largest defense tech companies, producing Vampire bomber drones, various modifications of Shrike FPV drones, P1-SUN, Shahed drone interceptors, communication systems, and components.----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.gofundme.com/f/scaling-up-campaign-to-fight-authoritarian-disinformation----------DESCRIPTION: ----------CHAPTERS:----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Save Ukrainehttps://www.saveukraineua.org/Superhumans - Hospital for war traumashttps://superhumans.com/en/UNBROKEN - Treatment. Prosthesis. Rehabilitation for Ukrainians in Ukrainehttps://unbroken.org.ua/Come Back Alivehttps://savelife.in.ua/en/Chefs For Ukraine - World Central Kitchenhttps://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraineUNITED24 - An initiative of President Zelenskyyhttps://u24.gov.ua/Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundationhttps://prytulafoundation.org----------
Send us Fan MailWhether you've dreamed of being an author for decades or you're just starting to put pen to paper, there's one constant truth: writing—and finishing—a book is no small feat. On this episode of the Authors Who Lead podcast, I want to dive into the hidden obstacles that prevent most aspiring writers from becoming published authors. Drawing from my own journey (including a 24-year gap between my writing dreams and writing reality!), I lay out three major reasons books go unfinished—and what, exactly, you can do about it.Timestamp:00:00 Why your book won't succeed05:10 Discovering a teaching career07:12 Struggling with writing a manuscript11:32 The impact of a book14:00 Letting go of writing perfection18:02 Understanding intrusive thoughts20:12 Encouragement to subscribe and reviewFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
Meet Amanda Green
In this episode, Jodi explains how business owners can turn scattered ideas into a workable table of contents, and shares why an outline should be viewed as a flexible, living document rather than a restrictive set of rules. If you've been avoiding the outline phase of your book project, this episode will change how you think about the entire writing process. Time Stamps: 00:00 – Welcome to Write.Publish.Market. 01:10 – Why business owners resist outlines 02:15 – The real problem with "figuring it out as you go" 03:35 – Why thinking about writing is not the same as writing 05:00 – Reframing the outline as a working document 07:15 – How outlines reduce decision fatigue and build momentum 09:10 – Introducing the "book brain dump" exercise 11:00 – Finding themes, patterns, and sections in your ideas 13:20 – How your outline evolves into a working table of contents 15:05 – Using your outline to repurpose existing content 17:10 – Why outlines actually fuel creativity 18:35 – Final encouragement to stop fearing the "O word" Keywords: business book outline, book outline for entrepreneurs, writing a business book, book planning process, working outline, working table of contents, business book strategy, book brain dump exercise, how to outline a nonfiction book, writing process for business owners, book coaching for entrepreneurs, writing momentum, repurposing content into a book, nonfiction book structure, overcoming writer overwhelm, book planning for CEOs, author productivity, writing a manuscript, content repurposing for authors, writing your first business book, business owners writing books, book writing for business owners, book writing for leaders, leaders writing books Resources Mentioned: Coffee + Commas signup: https://bit.ly/coffeeandcommassignup Book Brain Dump Exercise: https://bit.ly/bookbraindump LINK TO FULL EPISODE (RAW) TRANSCRIPT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OGnkwVTpzBSY6ryVFFU0M6gn0trGt9Gt957OPsvjuWg/edit?usp=sharing
Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, gave away over 100 million pairs of shoes and built a $700 million company — yet the pain of "not enough" nearly cost him his life. Through his healing journey, he discovered the truth that saved him: he had always been enough. Today, Blake is dedicating his life to ENOUGH, a cultural intervention reminding us all of what's always been true: we are enough. Mark Fujiwara is a Modern Samurai, transformation architect, and conscious wealth advisor. Drawing on the Japanese art of kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold — Mark helps leaders turn their "cracks" into sites of strength by uncovering their ikigai, their highest purpose. In this episode, we'll explore: The fact that suffering doesn't discriminate, and vulnerability can be the antidote to your isolation Why the shame-isolation cycle is what puts lives at risk, and how finding even one person to talk to about your mental health can begin to break that cycle When turning your mess into your message heals you, too How to be your own advocate with medication for your mental health Claim Your Free "We Are Enough" Bracelet Blake is giving away free bracelets to The Big Talk community! Visit https://weareenough.co/bigtalk to claim yours. Normally $30, yours free — because you are enough. 100% of bracelet profits go directly to mental health organizations saving lives every day. When your bracelet arrives, snap a photo and tag @wearenough, @blakemycoskie, @markfujiwara, and @triciabrouk so we can celebrate you! Mental Health & Crisis Resources If you or someone you love is struggling, please reach out. You are never alone. 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — Call or text 988 (US) Crisis Text Line — Text HOME to 741741 International Association for Suicide Prevention — https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/ for global crisis center listings NAMI Helpline (National Alliance on Mental Illness) — 1-800-950-6264 or text NAMI to 741741 Psychology Today Therapist Finder — https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists This episode discusses mental health and suicide. If you are personally affected, please know that help is available, and you deserve support. More from Blake Mycoskie Websites: https://blakemycoskie.com/ and https://weareenough.co/ Instagram: @weareenough and @blakemycoskie More from Mark Fujiwara Website: markfujiwara.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fujiwarapm/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fujfocus More from Tricia Publish your book with The Big Talk Press Join me LIVE for my Complimentary Monthly Workshop Explore my content and follow me on YouTube Follow me on Instagram Connect with me on Facebook Connect with me on LinkedIn Visit my website at TriciaBrouk.com
Craig Unger details his time at Newsweek, where he was hired to lead an investigation into the October Surprise, only to see the magazine eventually publish multiple stories discrediting the entire narrative. Unger describes this shift as a "disgrace" to American journalism, noting that both the media and the House investigation led by Lee Hamiltonparticipated in a "whitewash" of the allegations. Despite congressional findings that the events did not happen, investigative reporter Bob Parry continued the search, eventually discovering a "treasure trove" of documents hidden in an abandoned women's restroom in a House office building. These papers, found under a tampon dispenser, contained 23 gigabytes of evidence that the congressional task force had overlooked. During this period, legendary reporter Seymour Hersh warned Unger that he would be "crushed" if he continued to challenge the powerful national security establishment, a prediction that nearly came true as Unger faced professional ostracization. (4/8)1905
In Episode 279 of Defend, Publish, and Lead, host and Executive Writing Coach Christine Tulley tackles one of the most common struggles for faculty: the summer that gets away from you. With the best intentions but little structure, academic summers often slip by before meaningful writing or scholarship gets done. Christine explains exactly why that happens, from kids home from school to family travel to teaching obligations that bleed right into the new term. To help listeners fight back, she introduces a Summer Project Progress Tracker (given away at a recent free webinar) that uses simple yes/no or time-logged entries to build momentum without relying on judgment of a "good" versus "bad" writing day. She also announces the return of the Summer Faculty Writing Group — a weekly Monday accountability check-in running all summer for just $25 — where participants share progress, troubleshoot challenges, and receive a new writing strategy each week. Christine wraps up with a mention of the Textbook and Academic Authors Association's Summer Writing Institute for those looking to deepen their skills. Whether you're aiming for restoration or project completion this summer, this episode is your nudge to build in the structure you need before the season slips by. Resources Mentioned: Summer writing accountability group - just $25 for entire summer and sessions are recorded TAA Summer Institute Register for the TAA Institute for Textbook & Academic Authors, which will be held June 12-13. Get $50 off registration with code DP26. Summer Writing Season Is Coming! Join us for our annual FREE summer planning workshop Register to attend live or get the recording and tools DPL Resources: Set your writing goals with us! Try us out in a free consultation. Check out our current and past workshops at Eventbrite for writing support content. A FREE webinar is posted each month. Missed a workshop? Request a workshop or webinar recording from christine@defendandpublish.com Don't forget about the wonderful resources at Textbook and Academic Authors Association. The organization can be found at: https://www.taaonline.net New to TAA? Join for just $25 using discount code DP26! You will also receive a copy of the eBook, Guide to Making Time to Write: 100+ Time & Productivity Management Tips for Textbook and Academic Authors.
Send us Fan MailPublishing a book is often seen as a milestone—a badge of honor for accomplished leaders and coaches. But as I reveal in my conversation on the Authors Who Lead podcast, writing a book does more than boost your authority. It can crystallize your message, become a launching pad for new opportunities, and ultimately serve as a powerful legacy that outlives you.Timestamp:00:00 Discussing Mark's leadership book06:01 Impact of publishing a book07:02 Seeking publishing validation12:54 Writing process and early feedback14:11 Discovering my writing passion17:00 Discovering the TED Talk idea22:36 Turning book into Kindle edition25:07 Crafting a clear book message28:27 Writing my first book32:40 Choosing between fame and fortune33:51 Using visual models for writingFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
The publication process for and academic book.
How is the German market different to English speaking markets, and why might it be worth looking into translation? What are the best ways to translate, self-publish and market your books in German? With Skye MacKinnon. In the intro, thoughts on feeling empty after a book, and the benefits of SubStack for authors [Stark Reflections; Wish I'd Known Then]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars 16 and 23 May. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why the German-speaking market is much bigger than just Germany, and which genres sell best there Title protection laws, the Impressum, and translator copyright How to find and vet human translators, and what a quality translation actually costs The current state of AI translation for fiction, and why quality assurance passes are essential Distribution decisions: the Tolino Alliance, Skoobe, libraries, and why IngramSpark doesn't work in Germany Marketing in German: BookDeals, LovelyBooks, ads, BookTok, and why pre-orders matter even more You can find Skye SkyeMacKinnon.com and her children's books at IslaWynter.com. Transcript of the interview with Skye MacKinnon Jo: Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. Welcome, Skye. Skye: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Jo: This is such an interesting topic. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Skye: I've always loved writing, but I was always told, “Well, you can't be an author. Get a proper job.” So I became a journalist and did that for a few years, but there was always that love of creative writing. At some point when I was getting more active on social media, I was following some other indie authors and realised they're just like me. They're not special people. I had always pictured authors as these mythical beings high up above the rest of us. That gave me the courage to put out my own book. I self-published from the start, never even looked into trad publishing, and that was in 2017. I was really lucky because my first series totally hit it off. I was able to quit my job a year later and I have been a full-time author ever since. I started with romance and then, by accident, got into children's books. Which has been great fun. I don't even have children myself, but it's just that palette cleanser in between. Writing about cute animals and unicorns and just bringing some fun into everything. Nowadays I have about five or six pen names, depending on how you count, across genres, although most of it is romance, and that's my bread and butter really. Jo: Yes, I'm certainly one of those people who wish I could write romance. It always just seems to be the most profitable market in any language, I guess. Let's get into the book. It's a fantastic book. I've been through it myself. It's really packed full of everything you need, so we can't cover everything. Let's start by considering the German language in general. Why is German a good language market to consider expanding into? And for anyone who might not realise, why is it more than Germany? Skye: Well, Germans love to read, and depending on the statistic that you look at, they're generally seen as the third largest book market in the world after English and Mandarin Chinese. So it's a huge market, even though you think of Germany as a small little country in Europe. As you said, it's much more than Germany. Yes, you've got about 83 million people in Germany, but then you've also got Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and even Italy. So if you look at the whole footprint on the map, it is much bigger than just the one country. A lot of young people there still read and go to bookshops. There's a huge bookshop culture. You will find, if you go to a high street there, way more bookshops than you do here in the UK, for example. There's demand for quality and for really gorgeous books. They have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to special editions and sprayed edges, and they also like translations. I found one statistic where about two thirds of all newly released titles in German are actual translations. Readers are used to translations, but until a few years ago it was all trad-published translations. So this transition is coming now. It's coming very, very fast, especially with AI. They generally are very open to translations as long as the quality is there. Jo: So what about specific genres then? Obviously we mentioned romance there, and romance is not just one genre anymore. Whatever they're writing— How can somebody tell if it's worth expanding into German? How do we do this? It takes time and effort and money, potentially. Skye: It can take a lot of money, so it is worth doing research. There's one easy way, which is just looking at your current sales and looking at how many books you're selling in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the moment in English. That can give you an indication of which of your books might be already quite popular there. Sometimes it's quite surprising. A lot of my books sell very differently in German than they do in English. I've got one series that did okay in English, and I almost didn't translate it. The German version is, I think, my second bestselling series in German and has completely surprised me. So sometimes it's worth just experimenting a bit. Otherwise, obviously as you said, romance is doing really well. There are a few surprises though. I had a chat with Draft2Digital and they gave me lots of information from their statistics, and they said about 40% of all the western title sales on Draft2Digital are actually in Germany, which is just a huge percentage. Jo: In English? Skye: Across languages. Jo: Mm-hmm. Skye: Germans, to be fair, they love their westerns. My dad in Germany, he has been watching westerns for I don't know how many decades. It is one of those things that is just really popular there. Another thing is anything that is set in other countries and really has the location as almost like a character. There's lots of Cornwall, Scotland, different islands, but also mountains and cities. So if your book is set in, even in New York City, if it has a clear setting—if it's not just that it could be any city—then that's a good one to think about translating. In general, most genres can do well. There's a few where you have to be a bit careful. Second World War books, for example. If you have a book that portrays every single German as a Nazi and as evil, it might not do as well in Germany. So some common sense when it comes to historical books. Otherwise, just look at German retailers, look at what is selling there—and not just Amazon. Places like Thalia, which is part of the Tolino Alliance, and they have about 40% of the market. So it's really important to look at them too, and not just at Amazon. Jo: We'll come back to the distribution in a minute. There are some important differences between the German market and the US/UK market. Obviously we're talking about a different language, but of course there are a few things that are different that some people might not think about. So give us a few of those things that people definitely need to think about. Skye: Okay, so even before you start publishing, you need to be aware that title protection is a thing in Germany. Your book can't have the same title as an already published book. That is a law that is basically there to avoid readers being confused. So if you had five books with the same title, readers might not realise which book is by which author. You have to do your research and check if anyone else is using your title. There are some exceptions—if it's a completely different category, so if there's a children's book with that title but you write spicy romance, then the chance that the reader gets confused is much lower. Quite often you can then contact either the author or the publisher and ask, “Can I get written permission to use that title?” I did that for one of my series and it was totally fine. Just be sure to get it in writing, because if your book suddenly becomes a huge bestseller, they might reconsider. So title protection is an important one. You need to research that before you publish. One thing that people sometimes get confused about is reusing their English title. That's totally fine because it's your own title. So if your English title hasn't been used and you want to keep that same title, that works. It's just about other people's books where you can't use those titles. Another important legal bit is the Impressum. It's the copyright page. To be fair, websites that are targeting German readers or a German audience have to have that Impressum. It's usually on page two of the book, and it has things like your legal name, your address, and then the usual things like the translator's name, cover design, and other things you would usually put on a copyright page. The problem is that technically you need to put your legal name in there unless you have a limited company, in which case you can also put the business name there, and your address. A lot of people obviously don't want to do that for privacy reasons, especially romance authors where it's sometimes a bit sketchy when it comes to some readers who get a bit too obsessed. There are services where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee and then use their address. It's a bit of a legal grey zone, but a lot of German authors are doing it because—especially as indie authors—we don't always want to put our legal address out there. Jo: Just for people listening, I use my accountant's address. That's quite common. I mean, you have to share your address on your email for anti-spam laws and all that kind of thing. As you say, there are ways to use other addresses. That just needs to happen. What else then do we need to think about? Skye: There are things about the translator. A lot of things that people are sometimes scared about is when they hear that there is a copyright issue with translators and they think, “Oh, my translator has the copyright. I can't do anything.” Actually, the translator is seen as an author—almost like a co-author of the translation in German law—because, to be fair, it's not just putting one word into another. Translation is quite a creative job, especially when it's fiction. It is a very creative job where the translator has to put a lot of their own creativity into it. So in German law, they're recognised as the creator of that translation and therefore have certain rights. But you as the author, as soon as you have a contract with your translator—which is why you always, always, always have to have a contract—you get the usage rights. This means it's exactly the same as with your English books. You can do with them what you want. You can get audiobooks, you can do print books, you can do whatever you want in different formats. It just needs to be clear in a contract that the translator is giving you the usage rights of that translation. That's something that people sometimes find a bit scary, but actually it's really simple. Translations have been done for so long. It's a normal thing. It's just called slightly different. It has to be set out in a contract. Jo: Just on that, that's when the translator themselves is in Germany, because if they are based somewhere else, still doing a German translation, that's not necessary. So that's something else for people to consider. Skye: Yes, definitely. To be fair— I would always try to get a translator based in the country. I mean, I'm a native German speaker, but I've been in Scotland for so long now that I am not confident enough to translate my own books anymore because I'm not surrounded by German 24/7 and my grammar is slightly off and I don't have that up-to-date, modern lingo. So if it's a translator who's only just moved somewhere else or a few years, that's fine. But if it's someone who's been in the US or UK or somewhere else for 20 years, I would be a bit more hesitant. That's just a personal perspective on that. One other thing that's different is Sie and du. There are two different kinds of “you” when you talk to someone. There's the formal Sie, which you use basically amongst adults, in business contexts. But even my German grandma—she had a friend and they used the formal Sie for about 10 years as friends because in German etiquette, the older person has to offer the younger person the informal du, and they never did that for some reason. We found it hilarious as kids that they were still using the formal Sie as really good friends. So there's an entire culture there that people who haven't been to Germany or haven't lived there for a while just find a bit difficult, because there are so many different unwritten rules about when you use Sie and when you use the informal du. It's weakened a bit over the years and nowadays even strangers would sometimes use the informal du depending on the context. It really depends. A good translator will usually handle that themselves. They will find a scene where, for example, especially in romance, you meet as strangers in the beginning, so you use the formal Sie, and then at some point that formality turns to informality. The translator will usually choose that moment and add a little extra scene or a sentence where they either offer it to each other or they just naturally switch into it. But then there might be an internal little monologue of, “Oh, he just used the informal du—I guess we're at that stage,” or, “I really appreciate that.” Just to make it more natural, because that's something I quite often see with AI translation where that doesn't happen, and readers get confused. Why did they just switch from Sie to du without any kind of acknowledgement of that? Jo: This is the same in Spanish and other languages, I imagine. Skye: Yes, French as well. Italian too, I think. A lot of European languages have this. Jo: I think that's something that English speakers just don't get. It is a really interesting moment. I guess that might not happen so much in other genres—that really is a thing in romance. I was just thinking about some of my thrillers. They may never have time to get to du. Skye: But then sometimes using du can also be a rude thing. So if you have an antagonist who really doesn't like your protagonist, they might just use du as a rude sort of address. Again, that's something that English speakers just wouldn't understand or even think of because we just have the one “you.” Jo: We just have the one. Jo: It's the tone. Of course, it's the tone. Skye: Exactly, yes. Jo: Okay, well let's get into the actual translation of the books themselves. Over the years I've worked with lots of humans. I've also licensed my rights. I've used different AI tools. I mean, there are tons, but as we record this— What are the options that are available for translations? Give us some tips on working with humans and finding humans. Because it can be super pricey. And of course most of us will never know about the quality until we publish it. Skye: Oh, yes, definitely a note on that. I found that quite often you will already have German people on your newsletter list or on your social media, and most of them will be super happy to give you some feedback on your translation. That's something I've used a lot. Not for German, because I speak the language, but when I did French and Italian translations. My French is—well, it used to be quite okay. It is passable at best now. So I would never feel confident enough to rate a translation. So I asked my newsletter list, “Are there any French people here who would be happy to read the book? I'll send you a free copy at the end, and some swag.” There were a surprising number of people who got back to me. The same applies to German and other languages, because if you don't speak the language, you sometimes lack the confidence of knowing if this is any good. Getting some reader feedback is super helpful. For finding human translators, the easiest of course is word of mouth, and I'm a big fan of that because you get instant feedback on whether someone is good or not and whether it's easy to work with them. Then there are freelancer platforms. Reedsy is one where everyone is vetted, so that's pretty good. But there are tons of other ones like Upwork and Fiverr, though there you have to do all the vetting yourself, so that takes a lot more time and effort. There are also more and more agencies—translator agencies who specialise in doing indie book translations. There's Literary Queens, there's Valentine Translations, there are tons of them. Then there's also, which I think a lot of authors ignore or don't know about, translation databases. There are two databases for German translators, for example, where you can search and you can usually narrow it down to whether you want literary translators, what kind of fiction or nonfiction you want. An important thing is that a literary translator is very different from a standard translator who translates birth certificates or formal documents. You want someone who has experience with fiction if you write fiction. Someone who knows about adding drama through language. Sometimes, for example, when you have an action scene, you might have shorter sentences. If you have someone who doesn't know about stuff like that, they might just think, “Oh, in German it sounds really nice to have this really long sentence.” Those little nuances are where having an experienced literary translator is a big bonus. There are some platforms that do royalty-split translations that have been quite popular in the past. Most of them I wouldn't really recommend because you just don't get those professional translators there. You usually get people who speak the language but don't really have much experience. So you might end up with a pretty bad translation, or people might just be using AI translations without telling you. If you use a human translator, always, always get a sample, because yes, they might have amazing credentials, but until they've actually translated one of your books or a scene from your book, you don't really know how good they are. I like to always use, if I write romance, a slightly sexy scene, because sex seems to show you if someone can translate or not. It's just what I've found, because if it sounds absolutely awkward or more like mechanical rather than an emotional, spicy thing, then that's a clear point for me to say, “No, thank you. I'll look for someone else.” Action scenes, sexy scenes, really emotional ones, dialogue that has a bit of colloquial language or humour—those are good scenes to choose as a sample because that really shows you if a translator can do their job or not. Then, again, have some German people from your list give you feedback on that. Also, if you work with human translators, always try to make sure that they will be available for your entire series. And not even just a series—if you have lots of books, try to grab that translator, lock them in your basement, and never let them go, because you want their style for all your books. Just like you have a style as an author, translators have a style and that will always shine through, as much as they try to be as close to your original. A bit of their style will always come through. It helps to have the same translator for at least the same series, preferably for as many of your books as possible. You really want to tell them in the beginning, “This series has nine books. I want you to do all of these, even if we only do a few of them at the beginning. Are you available to do the rest later?” Because you don't want to end up having to find a new translator in the middle of the series. That gives you a whole lot of extra work with trying to have a world bible that explains which words get translated and which get left as the original, and stuff like that. When it comes to non-human translation, it's very different because of course you don't need to do all that vetting. Tools have different capabilities and abilities, but in the end, if you put your book into a translation tool, you will always get a slightly different output. So it's not quite the same where you need an entire vetting process. Jo: Just on the human translation, I think I'd be right in saying that every single author in the world would love to have the best human translator translating their book, whatever genre it is. That would just be amazing for all of us. But let's face it, that's extremely expensive. So if I've got, let's say, a 70,000-word thriller, how much money are we talking about? An approximate number, so people know what that might be. Skye: Usually it goes by the word, but by the target language word count. Although it depends on the translator, traditional translators usually go by the target language because that's what they actually produce as their output. The average at the moment is anything from about seven to nine euro cents per word as the medium price. You will find cheaper people. You can go up as high as you want really. I have definitely seen translators who charge 15 cents and above per word, but those will usually be the ones who have worked with a lot of trad publishers who are used to being paid like that. Although even in trad publishing, the rates are going down. With more and more authors wanting translations, I think in general rates are going down. Good for us, not so good for the translators. You're definitely looking at thousands, even if you translate novellas. Then it depends—some translators have editing included, sometimes they don't. A lot of them will have arrangements with other translators where they give the translation to another translator for them to edit it. Sometimes that's included in the price, sometimes it's extra. Always make sure it gets edited, because just like when we write a book, it will never be exactly perfect. I say that as someone who writes very clean because I have a journalism background, so I'm used to writing really fast and clean for deadlines, but there will always be a few typos that just wriggle their way in. Typos are evil like that. It's the same with translations. Jo: So we are probably looking at 2,000 to 10,000 pounds, dollars, euros. We are talking about quite a lot, and this is the main reason I think that now, with AI becoming a lot better, people are looking at this. Originally—and I don't even know, probably eight years now since I did my first, might even be a decade or more—I did at some point do a version in DeepL, which was an early AI translation tool. This was nonfiction, and then paid an editor, a German editor, to then edit that in German. Those books still get good reviews. But now people are looking at options like GlobeScribe and ScribeShadow, or even just using Claude or ChatGPT. I'm actually working at the moment on a Claude Code pipeline through lots of different QA passes. That's been really interesting for me, because I can say, “Okay, now you are a reader who likes these kinds of books. Read it for that.” And because we can now put really big books in, I can actually get a lot of really interesting feedback. So I feel like there's a lot of potential with AI—potential for good stuff, potential for bad stuff too. So talk a bit about that and what to watch out for with AI. Skye: Okay, so I'm very much pro-AI and I use AI in lots of different things in my business, just to preface that. However, with translations, I'm still a bit wary, just because I have seen a lot of bad AI translations. To be fair, I've experimented with it myself for one of my other pen names. It was readable. It was definitely readable. It had sometimes beautiful, gorgeous prose. Really. But there were, occasionally—quite often even—bits where I stumbled as a native speaker. It's readable and, if I just need a little quick book in between, I would be mostly happy with that. I would read it. It's the same as some of the early KU days where you found a lot of bad quality writing, but you just wanted to read it because the story was pretty good or because you were reading it in KU and so it didn't really matter that much. There is that spectrum of quality where you have the, “Yes, it's good enough to read,” but, “Is it good enough to be up to your standards?” That's a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. If they want the same quality that they put into their English book, or if they're fine with just offering that book to a new audience because maybe you wouldn't be able to do it otherwise. I totally see that. Translation is so expensive. I don't even know how much I have spent on translations over the past few years. I'm lucky that most of my books make it back within the first weeks or months. I've never had a book that didn't make its money back, but I have heard a lot of people where that's not the case. It is a lot of investment and I would never tell someone to go into debt or anything to do translations. Do it when you're at a time where you can afford it, or where you can also afford the loss if it doesn't work out. Now, AI has changed that slightly because it now opens it up to almost anyone. Some of the AI translation tools are a few hundred pounds, but if you do it in Claude or ChatGPT or something where you already have a subscription, it can actually be quite cheap. You can do it for a few dollars or pounds. I love, by the way, having someone in the UK. I'm so used to automatically saying everything in dollars, but actually I should be using pounds. I think if you know what you're doing—and you clearly do, with your several passes, you know what you're doing with AI—but if someone just puts their book into Claude or ChatGPT or some random tool, it might just not be good enough. Jo: Let's say it won't be good enough if you just do that. We know that. You have to have QA passes—quality assurance. You have to have rules per genre. There are ways of doing it. It's kind of like you have to get to know how translation works. It's a process. It's not just a translation, like you put something in Google Translate or a menu or something, because we do care. I think that's really important. Skye: Yes. I think if you don't know how AI works—that you need detailed prompts, that you need a style guide, that you need all that extra material and not just your book, all those rules—then please don't do it. If you value your German readers—and I think sometimes when I see people just churn out those translations without doing any quality control, using exactly the same cover or even just putting a German flag on it or something—I really feel bad for German readers because they're not being valued as having the same sort of value to us as authors as our English-speaking readers. Maybe I'm a bit biased there because I read in multiple languages. I want to be able to get the same sort of quality in all languages. I want the author to think of me as being special because I'm their reader and I'm their customer. I think we are on the way where AI translation can be almost autonomous. I would personally always have a human look over it. I know what I'm doing, and I'm almost happy with my translation system that I've built now in AI, but it still needs that human touch for a few things. It still needs me to tell the AI, for example, “This is where we switch from Sie to du.” This is where I need to keep certain words in. For example, I write a lot of Scottish books, and so words like “glen” or “loch”—they are words I want to stay the same in my German translation. I don't want to translate it to the German equivalent of “lake” because that just misses that Scottish context. Things like that need instruction. A human translator will usually know that and chat to you about which words you want to keep and which ones you want translated. AI just needs our guidance, our helping hand, and if we don't know enough about the target language, we just miss knowing that. Now, a lot of tools do it all for you basically, and they set up all these rules. I think many of them are at a very advanced stage now. But AI isn't perfect and it likes to hallucinate, it likes to add random things. So I will always still have a human touch at the end, even if it's just a quick edit. A lot of people think that they just need a proofread after an AI translation, but AI doesn't really make typos—or not to an extent that humans do. So proofreading isn't really what's needed for an AI translation. It is actual editing where you go for the style, the phrasing, and sometimes the context. There's one example I always like to give. I have an alien romance where they go on a honeymoon, and because he's an alien and she's human, he misunderstands and thinks she wants to go to an actual moon. So it's a little pun in the book. It doesn't work in German at all because the word “honeymoon” has nothing to do with moons or planets in German. An AI would probably just try to translate that in a way that's quite close to the original. But my German translator, she had to come up with several different ways of fixing that issue, because humour is hard. It's hard even for humans to get the humour translated in a way that is still funny but also culturally appropriate. If you have a book that is full of puns, it gets harder with AI. I am not saying it's impossible, but it needs a lot of handholding. Jo: Yes, I think humour is hard to translate in general, isn't it? Let's move on to the distribution, because again, having done quite a lot of different languages over the years, I do use Amazon KU for my books in German and Italian and Spanish and some French. So I haven't gone wide in terms of ebook and print or audio, in fact, because I have a lot of books and it is hard to go wide in English, let alone in other languages. But you mentioned earlier that Thalia has 40% of the market or something, and that special editions and print books are important. So what are the decisions we have to make around the actual publishing? Skye: In Germany they did a really cool thing, and I wish they'd done that in other countries. When the bookshops saw that Amazon was growing and posing a threat to them—not just with print books but also with ebooks—a lot of the German bookstores got together and they formed the Tolino Alliance. They have big book chains like Thalia, but also I think it was over 1,500 indie bookshops that all got together. They all support this ecosystem for ebooks, which means they all share the same e-readers. They share the same sort of backend for the shops, which made it really easy for them because they didn't all have to develop an ebook system. It saved them a lot of money. It made it really easy to tell readers, “This is the Tolino system. You can get your books at our bookshops, but you can read them on your Tolino e-reader no matter where you get the books from.” The Tolino e-readers are actually the same as Kobo e-readers, just rebranded. They've got that big advantage there—these independent bookshops and book chains all got together. Now it's hard to find numbers because Amazon doesn't really like to share their numbers, but it's about 40% of the German ebook market, which means it rivals Amazon. They have about the same. Then the rest is split by Apple Books, Google Play, and some of the smaller players. So it is a huge chunk of the market. I'm wide with pretty much all my English books. So for me, I looked into KU, but when I saw that I was going to miss out on 60% of the market—even if Amazon has 45%, that's still a big chunk—I decided to go wide. To be fair, I haven't regretted it, because Tolino are amazing to work with. I like to compare them to Kobo because they have a really lovely human team where you can just email them and tell them, “I've got a new release coming up,” and they will put you into different promos and it's all free. Jo: Do you publish direct to Tolino, or do you use Draft2Digital? Skye: Yes, you can publish direct to Tolino and that's actually the best way of doing it. You don't have access to their marketing opportunities if you use a distributor. The Tolino dashboard is annoyingly all in German, but by now every browser has a translating plugin built in. I know lots of authors who don't speak a single word of German who navigate Tolino very successfully. They started with only ebooks in the beginning, and then about two weeks after the first edition of my book on German translations was published, they introduced print books, which meant my book was immediately out of date. I was fuming. But this time they introduced audiobooks a few weeks before my Kickstarter launch for the second edition, so this time the audiobook part is included. I was very happy about that, because it was a pain to just tell everyone, “Well, this book is out now but it's actually missing a big part of how to do print books in Germany.” So Tolino does print, ebooks, and audiobooks. And just because you're in KU with your ebooks doesn't mean you can't publish your print books via Tolino. I highly recommend that, because IngramSpark—which most of us indies use for distribution for print books—doesn't get you into the German bookstores. They used to. Then German stores have fixed price laws where books have to be the same price in all stores, and IngramSpark kept going against that. They kept sending them the wrong prices. So German bookstores at some point just said, “Nope, we've had enough of this. We no longer take books from IngramSpark.” So now Tolino, in my opinion, is the best way of getting your books listed in German online bookstores, but they can also help you get into brick-and-mortar stores. One of my books was featured by them, I think two years ago, and it was in about 300 of their shops all across Germany. It had its own little pedestal and it was amazing. Tolino love working with their indie authors. They also love romance, which is always a bonus because some stores are more prudish than others. It's really easy to work with them. They speak perfect English, so you can do all your communication outside of the dashboard in English. Their audiobooks feature is very new. Until they did that, it was much harder for German audiobook distribution because places like Findaway Voices and other distributors wouldn't get you into the Tolino Alliance stores for audio. That's a big chunk that we were missing out on. I was always looking for ways to get my German audiobooks into those stores, but the German distributors that I found were really difficult to upload to, to be honest. I'm a very technical person, but it challenged even me. I did not like that experience at all. At some point I really just gave up and wanted to throw my computer out of the window. So when Tolino introduced that, I was celebrating internally. The only problem with their distribution at the moment for audio, because it's so new, is that you can't exclude any shops. So it's all or nothing. They will get you into all the different places, including Audible, Spotify—you name it, lots of different streaming services and retailers—but you can't exclude any. So while they don't actually want exclusivity, if you published it yourself at the same time through ACX or Findaway Voices or something else, you would have duplicates, and of course, we try to avoid those. Jo: Is it human narration only, or do they also accept AI narration? Skye: They accept AI narration. The thing with Tolino is that they want everything made very clear. If you publish any books with them that have an AI production aspect, you need to put that into your Impressum. For audiobooks, there's a box to tick to make it clear. Jo: Hmm. Skye: So they are open to it all. You just need to declare it. Jo: Which I think should be true everywhere, to be fair. Skye: Oh, definitely. And a lot of German distributors—while I was researching for this book, one thing I always looked at is, “Do they need you to declare your AI use?” More and more German distributors and retailers now want you to do that. I think that's the way it's going. It's not a judgement thing. I think it's just making it clear to readers. In Germany, it's all about transparency. That's why there are all those laws with GDPR—everyone will have heard about that one by now. But there are lots of other laws where it's all about consumer rights and transparency, and that's one of them. Jo: Is there anything else on the distribution side we need to think about? Skye: One thing I like to highlight is libraries, because that's quite a big thing in Germany too. They love books and bookstores and they love libraries. Some of the ways we get our English books into libraries—like a distributor like Draft2Digital for OverDrive—OverDrive is growing in Germany. There are other systems like Onleihe, just to name one. You can't get into those through, for example, Draft2Digital or PublishDrive or StreetLib. Tolino gets you into those. There are also subscription platforms that are growing. I think it's the same as in the English-speaking market. People love a subscription, and I love them. I just don't like exclusivity. So I very much support any subscription platform that doesn't require me to be exclusive to them. Skoobe is one of them. They used to be an independent platform, and then the Tolino Alliance bought them. So now they're integrated into the Tolino stores. That means it's really prominent. Basically, any time you go to an ebook on, for example, Thalia, it will have a banner there saying, “You can also get this in our subscription.” So it's taken a while to grow, but actually in December I now made more with their subscription programme than I made in book sales. I think three of my books were in their top 10 in December. To be fair, that was a pretty good month. But it definitely shows that it can take a while to grow these subscription platforms, but when you do, it can be really successful and very much worth it. So I highly suggest looking into those sorts of platforms too, not just the standard retailers and the platforms that you're already used to. Jo: Fantastic. So we've now got translations, they're on the various stores, and then just like in English, one of our next challenges is actually marketing the books. Now this becomes another challenge, because one of the reasons I am in KU for foreign languages is because you get the five free days and you can do Amazon ads. I mean, you can do Amazon ads for wide books too, but it's easier to know that there are some options for marketing at all. I don't do email marketing. I don't do social media, so I'm pretty bad at marketing in foreign languages. So what are your suggestions for those who want to do more active marketing in German especially? Or even if we don't speak German, it can't be all the personal stuff. But are there also advertising things like BookBub? What are our options basically? Skye: There are quite a few things. It's not quite as easy as in English, of course, but I think sometimes you have to remember that you already have most of the material for marketing when you've released a book. You will have made graphics in English, you will have written a newsletter, you will have done some social media posts. All that material is already there, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can just translate that, and for that, AI translation is really good because it's very quick. You don't have to bother your translator. You can just get that done. That's what I had to remind myself, because in the beginning I did everything from scratch and it took me forever and I was hating it. Then I realised, well, I could just look at the newsletter I wrote three years ago when that book released in English and translate that. That's done within a minute and I can send that out. So remember that you have a lot of content already. There's no BookBub or nothing as big as BookBub. There is a site called BookDeals, which sends out newsletters for both reduced or free books and also for new releases. I use them for pretty much all my new releases, or at least always the first in series. They're nowhere near as big as BookBub, so don't expect miracles, but I generally always break even or a bit more. It's hard to tell, of course, especially if you do several things for a new release. But my instinctive look on this is that it's worth it. BookDeals is the big one. There are a few other promo sites, but to be honest, I've not really found any of them to give me a positive ROI. I experiment with them occasionally and I listed them all in my book just for completeness, but BookDeals is the big one. Then there is LovelyBooks, which is the German Goodreads. Some Germans also use Goodreads, so always make sure to have all your German books listed there. But LovelyBooks is the big one. I love that place because people are so much kinder than on Goodreads. I avoid Goodreads completely. If I need a review, I send my assistant there to look at reviews. I don't go there. It is scary. LovelyBooks—the name is kind of telling. It is a more lovely place. People are generally more friendly. They are probably a bit more critical when they write reviews than they are on retailers, but I have found it really nice to build a community there. You can do these book clubs where you give away a copy of your book, either as print books—or I always do ebooks because I don't want to send books to Germany. Then people discuss the book as a sort of book club and then they review it at the end. I have had great success with that. I've built up a community of readers who will now buy my books too, even if they don't get them for free. I found some beta readers through that. So I love LovelyBooks. The annoying thing again is it's in German. However, their support all speaks English and you can email them with questions. They're really good. Even if you don't plan to run any book clubs or anything like that because you don't speak the language, I would always advise just setting up an author profile there because it makes it easier for your books to be found. You can track reviews, you can track reads, and that just gives you an extra place to get more visibility for free. Ads—there's not much difference compared to what you do for your English-language books. The one thing is with Facebook ads, now because of EU data protection laws, it's much harder to target because people can opt out of ads and targeting. In general, cost-per-click ads are cheaper than in the US or the UK, so that's a bonus. BookTok is big and only growing there. I don't really do social media for my German books because I just don't have the bandwidth. I wish I could, and I know some people who outsource that. In an ideal world, I would have a social media account for every single language, but it's not an ideal world and I just have limited hours in the day. But even just creating an account so that people can tag you, so that people can find you, can already be a good start. One thing that's not maybe a marketing strategy as such, but something I like to highlight, is pre-orders. If you write in series, always, always make sure that the next books in your series are up for pre-order, because— German readers have been burned so many times by authors or even publishers who just translate book one in a series and then stop. They are quite hesitant sometimes to start a new series when they see it's book one of something and they don't see the next book up for pre-order. To be fair, it's similar in English. I always make sure to have a pre-order up for the next book. Because people would just not read the series until it's complete or until they know it will be complete at some point. So always set up a pre-order if you can. Don't set it up when you don't actually know when your translation is being done, or choose a date far in the future. Just make it very clear to your readers that you are intending to translate the entire series, that you're not going to disappoint them, that they're not just wasting their money on a book one only to never find out what happens next. Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is a big decision for people to make, I think, because there's no point in doing one book in German and then not doing anything else, in the same way as doing one book in English or any language. You have to think about investing in an audience. So lots for people to think about. The book is fantastic. It's called Self-Publishing in German. So where can people find you and your books online? Skye: For my author-facing things, just go to SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors, and there you find the book about German translations. You also find more information on what I do. You can book consultations with me. I love doing those one-to-ones, especially about translations, because you can really dive into someone's catalogue and look at what would be a good strategy for someone, rather than just in general. Otherwise, it's SkyeMacKinnon.com for all my romance. If you want adorable children's books, it's IslaWynter.com. That's Wynter with a Y. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Skye. That was great. Skye: Thank you so much for having me.The post Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon first appeared on The Creative Penn.
Watch this episode ad-free by joining the ITBR Patreon! patreon.com/ivorytowerboilerroom-----Returning guest and friend of the show Laury Egan is back! She always brings such a warm and knowledgeable perspective to the show, and this episode is no different! Laury's a multi-published author, poet and photographer. Laury and I had a great conversation on her latest novel Jenny Kidd and what kind of obstacles authors may face in publication in the modern day.With melting attention spans and political undermining of the arts, who's to say how the literature world will look in just a few years? As Laury and I say in today's episode: there's always hope!Want to get to know more about Laury and check out her expansive collection of work? Check out the link below!LAURY A. EGAN - Home-----Follow ITBR on IG @ivorytowerboilerroom and TikTok @dr.andrewrimbyBe sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch video episodes of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@ivorytowerboilerroomThanks to our following sponsors! To subscribe to The Gay and Lesbian Review visit glreview.org. Click Subscribe and enter promo code ITBRChoice to get a free issue with a subscription purchase. Follow them on IG @theglreview and TikTok @g_and_lrHead to Broadview Press, an independent academic publisher, for all your humanities related books. Use code ivorytower for 20% off your broadviewpress.com order. Follow them on IG @broadviewpress.Thanks to the ITBR team! Dr. Andrew Rimby (Host and Director), Mary DiPipi (Chief Contributor), and Sean Penta (Intern)
In Episode 278 of Defend, Publish, and Lead, host Christine Tulley talks with Dr. Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Dr. Jenna Morton-Aiken about their co-edited book, Parenting While PhDing (Rutgers University Press). The book tackles a topic largely ignored in academic literature — what it's really like to become a parent while pursuing a PhD. Jackie and Jenna speak from personal experience. Their book is designed for two audiences: graduate students balancing parenthood and the administrators who support them. The chapters are short and story-driven, with contributors spanning fields like STEM, medicine, and writing studies. The collection brings in a wide range of voices, including fathers, queer parents, parents of color, and people who have navigated infertility or adoption. The book's core purpose is bigger than logistics. It's about opening up honest conversations on visibility, institutional support, and what it actually looks like when academic life and parenthood intersect. Resources Mentioned: Parenting While PhDing: Surviving and Improving the Working Conditions of Graduate Student Parents. Edited by Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Jenna Morton-Aiken TAA Summer Institute Register for the TAA Institute for Textbook & Academic Authors, which will be held June 12-13. Get $50 off registration with code DP26. Summer Writing Season Is Coming! Join us for our annual FREE summer planning workshop Register to attend live or get the recording and tools DPL Resources: Set your writing goals with us! Try us out in a free consultation. Check out our current and past workshops at Eventbrite for writing support content. A FREE webinar is posted each month. Missed a workshop? Request a workshop or webinar recording from christine@defendandpublish.com Don't forget about the wonderful resources at Textbook and Academic Authors Association. The organization can be found at: https://www.taaonline.net New to TAA? Join for just $25 using discount code DP26! You will also receive a copy of the eBook, Guide to Making Time to Write: 100+ Time & Productivity Management Tips for Textbook and Academic Authors.
Send us Fan MailWriting a memoir is never an easy feat—especially when the story being told explores the deeply personal terrain of trauma, healing, and the reclamation of one's agency. In this episode of the "Authors Who Lead" podcast, I sit down with Chelsey Valeri—licensed clinical social worker, trauma therapist, and debut memoirist—as she offers an honest glimpse into how she crafted her book, Healed Enough. Through our conversation, you'll get a multidimensional understanding of complex trauma—from both clinical and lived perspectives—and what it takes to turn such experiences into a story that resonates.Timestamp:00:00 Deciding to write a memoir05:12 Complex PTSD not in DSM07:08 Understanding trauma's impact on mental health10:29 Discussing personal healing journey14:45 Feeling vulnerable but understood19:34 Writing during health challenges21:29 Navigating a patriarchal society26:06 Healing Foundation and trauma care29:12 Editing process for publishing33:12 Discussing book feedback and approach37:18 Writing a clinician's hand guide39:40 Challenges in trauma therapy training43:36 Discussing a valuable trauma bookFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
EXCLUSIVE: Andrew Windsor and Sarah Ferguson's Relationship 'Shattered by Joint Paranoia They Will Both Publish Tell-All Revenge Memoirs'Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Send us Fan MailDr. Mitchell Goldstein, neonatologist at Loma Linda University and editor-in-chief of Neonatology Today, joins Ben to share the story behind one of neonatology's most accessible and wide-reaching publications — a peer-reviewed, open-access journal with 25,000 monthly readers worldwide, no publication fees, no page limits, and no color charges. He explains the philosophy behind the Academic True Open Model that guides the journal, why author development and rapid peer review turnaround of as little as 72 hours set it apart, and how the journal has used platforms like LinkedIn to find voices that traditional publishing would never have reached. He also highlights the 39th International Gravens Conference on the Physical and Developmental Environment of the High-Risk Infant, taking place June 16-18 in South Bend, Indiana — use code Special10 for 10% off registration.Support the showAs always, feel free to send us questions, comments, or suggestions to our email: nicupodcast@gmail.com. You can also contact the show through Instagram or Twitter, @nicupodcast. Or contact Ben and Daphna directly via their Twitter profiles: @drnicu and @doctordaphnamd. The papers discussed in today's episode are listed and timestamped on the webpage linked below.Enjoy!
“If someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Google's AI features, “Where are great places to work in Chicago if I'm an engineer?” your company does not get considered because you have nice values copy. You get considered because the system can find you, understand you, and trust what it finds.” That was written by employer brand expert James Ellis and he joins me now on the show to talk about how employers should be crafting their career sites to be found inside the new AI ecosystem. Questions Its a new age James when it comes to career site SEO set the stage on where we came from and where we are in 2026? Lets run through your recent post starting with #1 Give your company a real entity home page, what do you mean by that? Make your claims auditable…? Build durable pages, not just disposable job posts..? Publish explicit Q&A pages..? Fresh matters. Fake fresh does not….? Start measuring citation visibility, not just traffic…explain. Where can people go to learn more about you and your services? LINK: https://choosable.ai/how-employer-branding-gets-found-by-chatgpt-claude-and-ai-search Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today, we’re bringing you the best from newsrooms across Washington… First, President Joe Biden announced an executive order that created the first-ever national assessment of nature, but President Donald Trump rescinded the effort on his first day in office. The team that had started the work – led by a professor at the University of Washington – refused to give it up. Read more here. Next, doctors at UW Medicine’s Long Covid Clinic are beginning to see patterns of how Long Covid is impacting various communities, including Latino farmworkers. Read more here. And finally, you heard about it on Casual Friday - The notoriously late number 8 bus in Seattle is finally getting fixed. Read more here. We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. Tap here to make a gift and keep Seattle Now in your feed. Got questions about local news or story ideas to share? We want to hear from you! Email us at seattlenow@kuow.org, leave us a voicemail at (206) 616-6746 or leave us feedback online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Send us Fan MailFor many of you, the journey from idea to manuscript can feel daunting and filled with self-doubt. In this heartfelt solo episode, I share personal insights and experiences from a life devoted to writing, coaching, and the pursuit of dreams. This post explores key takeaways from the episode, offering both encouragement and practical wisdom for anyone standing at the threshold of their own writing journey.Timestamp:00:00 Deciding to write a book03:38 Pursuing travel through writing07:23 Importance of finishing your book11:55 Writing and living in SpainFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
In Episode 277 of Defend, Publish, and Lead, host Christine Tulley sits down with Dr. Pat Goodson, health education professor turned prolific academic writing coach, to explore practical strategies for building a sustainable writing life. Dr. Goodson shares how her journey into academic writing began not from an English background, but from listening to struggling graduate students and eventually developing a university writing support program called POWER (Promoting Outstanding Writing for Excellence in Research). The conversation covers her latest book, Keep Writing: 101 Strategies for Academic Writers, along with favorites like 90 Days, 90 Ways and Becoming an Academic Writer, all designed to help faculty and grad students move past writing blocks, ditch ineffective habits, and develop intentional, personalized systems. Christine also highlights her campus "write and run" sessions — 22-minute focused writing sprints — as a real-world example of fitting writing into a busy schedule. Both guests close with encouragement for listeners to use the approaching summer as a chance to revisit and strengthen their writing routines, and they give a preview of Dr. Goodson's upcoming Learning Lab, "It Takes a System," at the Textbook and Academic Authors Association Institute. Resources Mentioned: TAA Summer Institute Register for the TAA Institute for Textbook & Academic Authors, which will be held June 12-13. Get $50 off registration with code DP26. Related Resources: 90 Days, 90 Ways: Inspiration, Tips & Strategies for Academic Writers by Dr. Patricia Goodson, Dr. Mina Beigi, Dr. Melika Shirmohammadi Keep Writing: 101 Strategies for Academic Writers Paperback – February 14, 2025 by Patricia Goodson and Margarita Huerta Summer Writing Season Is Coming! Join us for our annual FREE summer planning workshop Register to attend live or get the recording and tools DPL Resources: Set your writing goals with us! Try us out in a free consultation. Check out our current and past workshops at Eventbrite for writing support content. A FREE webinar is posted each month. Missed a workshop? Request a workshop or webinar recording from christine@defendandpublish.com Don't forget about the wonderful resources at Textbook and Academic Authors Association. The organization can be found at: https://www.taaonline.net New to TAA? Join for just $25 using discount code DP26! You will also receive a copy of the eBook, Guide to Making Time to Write: 100+ Time & Productivity Management Tips for Textbook and Academic Authors.
Move your AI agents from prototype to production using Microsoft Foundry Agent Service. Deploy directly from your local environment, run with secure identity and scoped permissions, and monitor every interaction so you can debug, improve, and scale without losing control. Publish agents into the tools your team already uses and ensure every action is traceable, governed, and isolated. Ground your agents in real work and business data to generate outputs that are actually useful. Pull from emails, meetings, and operational systems to create personalized insights, documents, and presentations. Build faster with familiar tools and frameworks, then manage performance, cost, and quality across all your agents as they scale. Jeff Hollan, Partner Director, AI Agent Services, shares how to operationalize AI agents across your organization—from deployment to real-world impact. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Build single and multi-agentic workloads 00:44 - Build agents at scale with Foundry 01:33 - Demo: Sales meeting preparation agent 03:32 - How it works 04:48 - Access controls 05:44 - Publish the agent 06:23 - Direct integration with Microsoft 365 07:26 - Work IQ, Foundry IQ, & Fabric IQ 10:24 - Agent creation 11:21 - See what's happening in the code 12:54 - Manage performance 13:56 - Wrap up ► Link References Go to the Microsoft Foundry to build your first project at https://ai.azure.com Check out https://github.com/microsoft-foundry ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics
Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Jena Brown, and Kevin Tumlinson as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including stories about Draft 2 Digital, Spotify, and Entangled Publishing. Then, stick around for a chat with R.M. Caldwell! R.M. Caldwell is based in Hamilton, New Zealand, and writes and directs theatre, as well as being on the board of an independent theatre. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Professor Eric Cline details the dramatic race to acquire the Amarna letters, recounting how Wallace Budge smuggled 81 tablets to the British Museum and competed with Archibald Sayce to publish the first translations. (10)1947
Send us Fan MailPublishing more often can help your podcast stay top of mind, get more downloads, and keep your audience engaged. But if you increase your cadence the wrong way, it can also make podcasting feel heavier, more rushed, and a lot less fun.In this episode, we answer a listener question from Rich (Two Guys on a Plane) about moving from biweekly to weekly episodes and break down what has actually worked for us. We talk about the benefits of adding shorter episodes, why quick wins can sometimes perform just as well as longer releases, and how publishing more often has helped us stay in practice without doubling the workload.We also get into the real risks of pushing your schedule too hard, including burnout, lower-quality episodes, missed deadlines, and losing the energy that makes a podcast worth doing in the first place.Listen for different ways to make a higher publishing frequency sustainable, including lighter episode formats, Q&A episodes, bonus conversations, two-part episodes, and experimenting without feeling locked into a forever commitment.Contact BuzzcastSend us Fan MailTweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPodsThanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!
Send us Fan MailBehind every aspiring author I meet is a burning question: “Does what I have to say really matter?” I want to shine a light on this today, urging you to look beyond the mechanics of writing and toward the deeper reason you write at all. Writing a book is about so much more than perfect prose or bestseller status—it's about sharing your unique message, stepping into leadership, and leaving a mark on the world that only you can.Timestamp:00:00 Discussing the book's narrative style04:02 Navigating medical language barriers09:24 Beginning memoir research process11:02 Crafting an engaging memoir narrative14:52 Balancing honesty in writing18:58 The impact of Blue Fairy19:56 Reader feedback on helpful book details23:06 Teaching 12-year-olds memoir28:10 Discussing future writing ideas30:26 Starting to write a novel36:19 Dealing with a friend's grief39:03 Writing a fictionalized series41:04 Preview of her art journal44:14 Advocating for your messageFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
The I Love CVille Show headlines: I Love CVille Will Publish Daily Real Estate Sales Data Why Governor Spanberger's Approval Rating Floundering? Trump Says Gas Prices May Stay High Beyond Midterms Nikuyah Walker's Conspiracy On Kochis, Platania Walker Suggests Police & District Attorney Pushing SROs Draft Taproom For Rent: $5,250 – $7,875/Month Based On SQF Draft Taproom v Littlejohn's: Which Has More Upside? Need CVille Office & Commercial Space, Contact Jerry Read Viewer & Listener Comments Live On-Air The I Love CVille Show airs live Monday – Friday from 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm on The I Love CVille Network. Watch and listen to The I Love CVille Show on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Fountain, Amazon Music, Audible, Rumble and iLoveCVille.com.
In this episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Ross breaks down how he built a quarter-million-dollar solo consulting business before 30 and how he would engineer that same growth today as a fractional CMO in the AI era. From personal brand foundations to referral flywheels to public speaking as a client acquisition engine, this is a tactical, no-excuses blueprint for building authority and pipeline as a one-person growth operation. Key Takeaways and Insights: 1.From Basement to $270K: The Origin Story -Ross built a quarter-million-dollar solo business before 30 with no elite network and no big-city advantage. Just reps, value creation, and commitment to the long game. -Underdogs win when they stop waiting for permission and start stacking consistent execution. 2.What a Fractional CMO Actually Does -A fractional CMO provides strategic marketing leadership across brand, messaging, content, search, and growth without the full-time cost. Multiple companies. Real equity upside. -It is one of the highest-leverage positions in the market right now for marketers who own outcomes, not just tasks. 3.Personal Brand Is the Foundation -If someone Googles you today, what shows up? Buy your domain. Control your narrative. Publish content aligned to your niche and your ideal client profile. -Your name is an asset. Treat it like one or someone else will define it for you. 4.Consistency Beats Excuses in the AI Era -AI removes friction. It does not replace strategy. If you have no clients and you are not posting daily, that is the problem. -Visibility is engineered through repurposing content across LinkedIn, X, Threads, YouTube, and podcasts. Not hoped for. 5.Build Leverage with Talent and AI -Combine AI systems with high-level human talent. Use tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Fathom, and Superhuman to increase capacity without adding headcount. -Hire globally. Skill beats geography. Layer systems and people and you get agency-level output from a solo operation. 6.Diversify Revenue Without Destroying Focus -Courses, speaking, e-commerce, consulting — multiple income streams are real. But side quests can build skills or kill focus depending on how you sequence them. -Depth compounds faster than scattered effort. Focus accelerates revenue growth. 7.Referral Flywheels as Passive Leverage -Do great work, earn inbound referrals, and build a referral program that earns without direct delivery. Partner with agencies and specialists to expand capability without expanding overhead. -Compounding trust beats cold outreach every time. 8.Public Speaking as a Client Acquisition Engine -Speaking landed Ross publicly traded clients. Reps build confidence. Confidence builds pipeline. Add value on stage and the rest follows. -Most people fear judgment. The reality: few remember you after two hours. Get on stage anyway. 9.Ignore Hype Cycles. Play the Long Game. -"SEO is dead" is a recurring headline. It has been wrong every time. Trends rotate. Fundamentals compound. -Decades of focused reps create unfair advantage. AI matters. Shiny objects do not. 10.Focus Is a Competitive Advantage -Stop doom-scrolling. Start building. Do not argue with trolls. Create instead. -Protect your mindset like you protect revenue. The long game rewards discipline above everything else. Resources & Tools:
A controversial former NFL quarterback is releasing a new book a decade after famously taking a knee. Correspondent Gethin Coolbaugh reports.
CNN had a choice between the official Iran ceasefire statement published by President Trump and an unverified propaganda document from Iran's Supreme National Security Council claiming "great victory" — and they chose the propaganda. Larry O'Connor reads both statements, exposes CNN's editorial choices, and shows how Erin Burnett's three contradictory Iran reports destroyed her own credibility. Larry O'Connor breaks down CNN's Iran ceasefire coverage, the deleted propaganda post, Erin Burnett's contradictory reporting, and Chris Murphy choosing to trust Iran over the President. SHOP OUR MERCH: https://store.townhallmedia.com/ BUY A LARRY MUG: https://store.townhallmedia.com/products/larry-mug Watch LARRY with Larry O'Connor LIVE — Monday-Thursday at 12PM Eastern on YouTube, Facebook, & Rumble! Find LARRY with Larry O'Connor wherever you get your podcasts! SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/7i8F7K4fqIDmqZSIHJNhMh?si=814ce2f8478944c0&nd=1&dlsi=e799ca22e81b456f APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/larry/id1730596733 Become a Townhall VIP Member today and use promo code LARRY for 50% off: https://townhall.com/subscribe?tpcc=poddescription https://townhall.com/ https://rumble.com/c/c-5769468 https://www.facebook.com/townhallcom/ https://www.instagram.com/townhallmedia/ https://twitter.com/townhallcomBecome a Townhall VIP member with promo code "LARRY": https://townhall.com/subscribeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
700 videos. 430 landing pages. 170+ podcast episodes. And a decade of newsletters. So why wasn't anything sticking? In this mini update episode, Shawn gets real about what's been happening behind the scenes, and the common thread he found running through all of it. If you've ever felt like you're putting in the work but not getting the traction, this one's for you. Topics discussed: Where Shawn's been (00:00) The numbers that forced the question (00:00) The common thread — and what it revealed (00:45) What the last five months looked like (01:15) What's coming next to the podcast (01:45) How to co-create the new show (02:00) Listen to Creators That Crush on Apple: https://apple.co/3duh0xG Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPYGHMT5cuFigp3efE8FwNw/ Connect with Shawn Buttner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnbuttner/
When you won't decide, you're still deciding.You're choosing uncertainty.Deferred decisions linger.They drain energy.They force teams to operate in fog.And fog is expensive in multifamily.Here's what happens on real properties.When leaders delay clarity, teams fill the gap with assumptions.They start telling themselves stories.Most of those stories are wrong.And now you're not just managing the original issue.You're managing the anxiety you created by not closing the loop.Ambiguity slows work.Accountability blurs.Frustration rises at every level.Leasing feels it.Maintenance feels it.Residents feel it because service delivery gets inconsistent.This is the question you should be asking.What is the cost of “we'll decide later”?It's lost momentum.It's duplicated effort.It's stalled vendors.It's half-executed initiatives.It's teams hesitating because they don't want to be wrong.Decisiveness does not mean rushing.It means committing once enough information is available.Get density of information.Then get to a call.Clear direction, even if imperfect, almost always beats prolonged ambiguity.Because an imperfect decision can be adjusted.A missing decision just rots in place.Here's the tip.Get to decisions quickly.Then communicate them clearly.And close the loop so your teams don't write their own fiction.Call to ActionPick one decision you've been sitting on. Make the call today. Publish the why behind the what. Your team will move faster the moment the fog lifts.MultifamilyCollective Blog: https://www.multifamilycollective.comThe Daily Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3YI6BDaHosted by: https://www.multifamilymedianetwork.com
Send us Fan MailBehind every aspiring author I meet is a burning question: “Does what I have to say really matter?” I want to shine a light on this today, urging you to look beyond the mechanics of writing and toward the deeper reason you write at all. Writing a book is about so much more than perfect prose or bestseller status—it's about sharing your unique message, stepping into leadership, and leaving a mark on the world that only you can.Timestamp:00:00 Seeking significance through writing04:34 Message beneath the words09:31 Small ideas spark big impact10:54 Small ideas, big impactFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
Megan chats with Martin Glover about building a sustainable food blog when time is limited and the industry feels uncertain. Martin Glover is a dad, home cook, and the main chef in his household who is passionate about proving that anyone can create great food without being overly fancy. Through Dad What Cooks, he shares approachable recipes for BBQ, bread, and pizza while keeping a close eye on the budget, showing families that delicious, satisfying meals don't have to be expensive or complicated. If you are balancing a full time job, family life, and constant industry changes, this episode will show you how to focus, simplify, and keep moving forward without burning out. Martin shares practical systems that help him grow traffic steadily while keeping blogging fun and manageable. Key Topics Discussed: -Work with the time you have, not the time you wish you had. -Focus on what is already working and double down. -Use AI as a strategist and editor, not a replacement. -Refresh and improve old posts before chasing new ones. -Stop chasing every platform and commit to a few core channels. -Publish now, refine later, and let progress beat perfection. Connect with Martin Glover Website | Instagram
Send a textI often feel we take communication for granted, assuming it's just about relaying information. Yet, in my latest conversation, I sat down with Sage Hobbs—author of Naked Communication—to explore how communication rooted in authenticity and curiosity can radically alter our relationships at work, at home, and within ourselves. Our talk was a candid look at what it really takes to write a book, launch it (twice), and confront your own vulnerabilities.Timestamp:00:00 Writing to connect authentically05:28 Reflections on teaching and growth08:18 Writing reveals self-discovery11:30 Loss, reflection, and renewal14:01 Reflections on growth and change17:02 Curiosity can transform the world22:17 Facing fear through writing24:13 Merging grief and professional growth28:57 Connection over job titles30:13 Who is this not for?33:56 Connecting with the authorFull show notesCOMMUNITY PROGRAMS
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