In this event presented by Green Apple Books and the Center for the Art of Translation celebrating the launch of Yuri Herrera’s novel Season of the Swamp (Graywolf Press, 2024), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, Herrera and Dillman read from the book and discuss their collaborative approach to translation in a conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
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Author: bphi
Today we’re going to be talking about a topic all writers have questions about at one point or another—and that is POV.
POV stands for “point of view.” It is the perspective through which you tell your story’s narrative. Specifically, we’re going to talk about which “person” you might want to use when choosing your POV. By that, what’s meant is either you’re going to choose to tell the story through first-person, second-person, third-person, or omniscient.
Characters, Emotion, & Viewpoint by Nancy Kress (affiliate link)
There are many other questions that come up around POV, such as which characters’ POVs you should choose to filter story through, but that’s a whole other topic. I recommend the books Characters, Emotions, and Viewpoints by Nancy Kress and Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card.
Today, we will cover the differences and the advantages and the disadvantages of these different approaches to POV.
Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card (affiliate link)
To get us started, let’s go over each one quickly, and then we will talk about some of the reasons you might or might not choose them, depending on the type of story you’re writing. At the end, we’re also going to talk just a little bit about head hopping.
I want to talk about second-person POVs first, since they’re the easiest to cover. Second-person is when you would tell a story using the pronoun “you,” as if telling the story is from the perspective of the reader.
For example, “you are opening the door, you are doing this thing, you are fighting in the battle,” whatever the case may be.
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (affiliate link)`
Obviously, this is quite unusual. You see this very rarely within books, and it’s almost always gimmicky. There are only a couple novels relatively well-known for having used it. One is Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Another is If on a Winter’s Night… by Italo Calvino.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (affiliate link)
Second-person is an interesting approach. It’s kind of like the Choose Your Own Adventure stories you may have read as a kid. It’s highly stylistic and therefore can be quite gimmicky. As a result, it’s used very rarely and isn’t recommended for most fiction, particularly mainstream fiction. However, it’s good to be aware of it because it is out there.
That leaves the two main and most popular points of view you can use. These are the two that are seen and used most often.
The first is first-person, in which you use the pronoun “I,” telling the story from the protagonist’s point of view.
For example, “I went through the door, I bought groceries.”
This is contrast to third-person, in which you’re using pronouns like “he” or “she” or “they” to tell what’s going on/
For example, “he knocked on the door, and she opened the door.”
For all intents and purposes, first- and third-person are actually quite similar to execute. The advantages or disadvantages that you might gain from the way you write the story in a deep third-person POV is very similar to those of a first-person POV. The only major difference is the pronouns. In these POVs, what you’re trying to achieve is the effect that the entire story is more or less being told through the thoughts and the voice of the narrating character.
Again, this can be very stylistic in the sense that the voice you’re trying to create on the page is the character’s voice. It’s the same voice the character would use when speaking dialogue, only you’re in his or her head. You can still share what they’re actually thinking through direct thoughts which are told in present tense and usually italicized or something like that, but in these deep POVs everything that’s coming across the page is from the character’s point of view.
First-person is always deep. It’s always right there inside the character’s head. Every word is intended to be seen as the character’s point of view. Because of this, first-person is the most intimate of all of the POVs. It puts the readers right there in the character’s head. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. That level of intimacy between readers and characters rarely a bad thing. You want readers to identify with the characters and understand what they’re thinking and feeling.
This particular approach is very popular right now in romance, alternating first-person POVs between the two love interests. Just because you’re writing in first-person doesn’t mean the whole story has to be told from the same POV. You just have to make it very clear when you switch—which is usually done chapter by chapter, with a heading on at the beginning of the chapter indicating which character’s POV you’re in.
The more advanced side of the technique is that, ideally, you want readers to be able to tell which POV they’re in just because the characters’ voices are distinct. That can get tricky because ultimately it’s all your voice. The more personalized each of the voices in a multi first-person narrative, then the more characterized those people become. They pop off the page as dimensional and separate people, rather than just kind of facets of same person with the same voice and the same personality.
One of the downsides of first-person is basically too much intimacy. There are stories in which maybe you don’t want readers to be that close to a character. This could be for a number of reasons. It could be because the character is so unsavory, readers won’t enjoy being in this person’s head. That’s not always true because obviously there are stories about horrible people, in which it can be fascinating to explore a dark psyche.
I actually think the most complicated characters for deep or for first-person POVs are characters that in between: they’re not entirely lovable, but they’re also not fascinatingly evil. Their foibles are more along the lines of pride or self-obsession or insecurity. If that’s not handled just right, that can become very grating within a first-person POV, because all the bad things the character may be thinking either about themselves or others is just constantly there in the reader’s face. Sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes that’s part of what the character is working through in the story. But be aware that sometimes first-person can actually have the unintended effect of distancing readers from the character, simply because they don’t like the character that much. In these instances, the character might actually be more likable if there was a little more distance in the narrative.
Another limitation of first-person is that sometimes you don’t want readers to know what’s happening in the character’s head. For example, maybe the character knows something and you don’t want the reader to know it. There are definitely ways to get around this when you’re writing a deep POV.
Generally speaking, you do want readers to know what your character knows, so they can advance through the story with the the characters and identify with them as the story progresses. However, there are definitely stories where you don’t want readers to know. And in those instances, first-person might not be your best choice.
If you don’t have a really good voice for the character-–if it’s flat or monotone—then first person is probably not your best choice. This is not always true. But generally speaking, this can flatline your entire narrative in a way that wouldn’t necessarily happen in a different kind of POV. First-person can sometimes lend itself to staccato prose, which will just be exacerbated by flatness in the narrative voice.
If you’re going to write in first-person, find a character or create a voice for a character that’s really interesting, that is lively and has personality and isn’t a monotone recording of what they see and what they do and how their thoughts are reacting.
Third-person can be quite similar to first-person if you’re doing a deep POV. One of the advantages of third-person is that it’s quite flexible. You can do a lot with third-person. Again, third-person is where you are telling a story about someone else. You’re using third-person pronouns like “he” or “she.” That is how you’re addressing the POV character.
If you’re going deep with a third-person POV, then you’re essentially just as deep in their head as with first-person, reporting what they’re experiencing and what they’re thinking and feeling in pretty much the same way. Again, you can do direct thoughts that are italicized, but you don’t have to because the whole narrative is still in their voice. It’s coming through the character. In contrast to first-person, you’ve just chosen to take that one little step back and use third-person pronouns instead of first-person pronouns.
There’s a whole gamut of depth and shallowness you can play with within third-person POV. You may choose to go really deep and be completely inside a character’s head, or you may choose to draw back to varying degrees and not be so deep in their head. In the latter case, you’d still be using the third-person pronouns and reporting what they’re doing, but you’re not so deep in their head and you can still tell what they’re thinking. You share that with readers, but it becomes more that you are reporting their thoughts rather than that you’re recording them through their voice.
In most stories, you’ll zoom in a little bit here and zoom out a little bit there. You want consistency, but you can think of it in a similar way to what you would see in a movie, in which sometimes there’s close-ups and then sometimes it’s a wide shot. What’s important is that the voice remains consistent, so readers always have a sense of who’s talking to them, that it feels like it fits with the narrative voice that’s been used up until this point.
Again, with third-person, you can totally do multiple POVS. You can go deep within the perspective of any number of characters and show what they’re seeing in different scenes.
One thing to think about with POVs of any type, is that if you’re going to do multiple POVS, really consider why you’re putting them all in. POVs create your narrative; they frame every piece of your narrative. It’s true that putting in random POVs or a POV from a character who’s going to have a POV scene just once (just so you can show something that’s happening that the protagonist isn’t on stage) can be effective. I can definitely help you show information that the reader wouldn’t be able to access through the protagonist’s point of view. But you have to be careful with this because it can easily scatter your narrative.
Generally speaking, the fewer POvs you can get away with, the better. The use of a single POV is really, in my opinion, very underestimated. These days, we tend to want huge sprawling POV stories, but a single POV story, when done well can be unparalleled for the effect it creates.
Again, multiple POVs are great in romance, in which you will generally have two. In other types of story, it’s fine to have dozens. What’s important is that you’re aware of how these POvs are interacting with the story’s overall structure. We talked a few months ago in the video about multiple timelines and plot lines about how it can be really effective to bring minor characters in at the structural moments as kind of a subplot, sewing them in at regular intervals so they don’t just show up once randomly. You want each POV to feels like it was on purpose and that there’s a thematic reason and a structural reason for why these POVs are in here rather than them just being convenient for the author.
That’s always something to think about when you’re choosing how many or which characters are going to get POVs within a story.
H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian (affiliate link)
With third-person, you can zoom all the way out, and when you get all the way out, that is generally what’s called omniscient POV. Omniscient POV is where you’re not really in any one specific character’s head. As the name suggests, the story is being told from an all-knowing point of view—that point of view generally being the author, although it can on occasion be a specific narrator within the story, who knows everything that’s happening and they’re just kind of reporting it back.
The advantage of omniscient POV is that you can go anywhere and tell anything. It isn’t as confined. It doesn’t have to play by as many rules, in a certain sense, as the more limited povs of first-person and deep third. The disadvantage is that it isn’t as intimate. By nature, it’s more distant. Even though you can dip into a character’s head here or report on what they may be thinking there, you aren’t following a character through the entire story and experiencing it from the inside out.
Deep POVs—first-person and deep third—offer an inside-out experience of the story. Omniscient is an outside-in. You’re looking at the story from an outside perspective and sometimes delving into characters’ heads and thoughts. It’s more like you’re reporting what they’re thinking rather than trying to create an experience where readers are equally experiencing it.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (affiliate link)
Omniscient was very popular back in the day. Victorian novels, etc., were almost all told from an omniscient point of view. Omniscient has grown more out of favor to where mainstream fiction is more in a deep POV these days. However, it’s still used and it can be very effective at creating more of a stylistic tone for a story. Particularly if you are trying to give it a historical flavor. Omniscient can be very effective at doing that. In the Aubrey Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian this masterfully. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell comes to mind also as a story that does this really well.
The major downfall is that when omniscient is done poorly, it lacks focus. It feels like an author who doesn’t have control of their narrative, like they’re using omniscient because they just want to tell everything—versus it being a cohesive choice.
Good omniscient story is still limited. It’s still choosing to focus on very specific things for very specific reasons. It’s not just jumping from this character to that character to that character because it’s convenient to tell a bigger story.
I feel like the random omniscient narratives that don’t really work are doing that because they’re more plot-based. They’re just using the characters and jumping from character to character to character as a way to just tell what’s happening. They focus on what’s “out there” and what the characters are seeing rather than the characters themselves and what they’re doing. In contrast, a more controlled and contained omniscient narrative is one that is still focused on the characters. It has a good grasp of how to integrate character, plot, and theme and is using its POV choices to accomplish that.
Part and parcel of omniscient narratives that don’t work and that are just jumping around all over the place is a POV mistake or pitfall that you will often hear called head-hopping. Head-hopping can happen in any of the different POV types that we’ve talked about. Basically, head-hopping is when you’re breaking the rules you have set for your story and your POV use within your story. Instead, you’re jumping out of the established POV into a different character’s head.
This is most obvious if you are writing a deep third-person or first-person. Head-hopping occurs when you’re writing a deep POV, in which you’re telling a scene from within one character’s head, and then all of a sudden there’s a thought or an observation from another character. Maybe this other character is watching your protagonist, or maybe you’re including this other character’s thoughts because you want an outside perspective on your protagonist (e.g., you want somebody to describe how they look or offer a perspective on what they’re doing or why they’re doing it). And so you jump real quick over into this other person’s head and give their thoughts and their perspective, and then you jump back to the original character. That’s head hopping.
This can be very jarring and confusing for readers. At the very least, it does not contribute to a cohesive narrative. The simplest way to avoid head-hopping is to recognize that you can use other characters’ POVs, but you need to do so in a structured way, such as by ending one character’s POV with a scene or a chapter break and then switch to the next character’s. Generally, because this is indicated by scene breaks, each characters’ POV needs to constitute a scene or at least a big chunk of the scene to be worth the break. Jumping to another character’s POV for a paragraph or something generally isn’t a good idea. It can be kind of quirky and funny if that’s the kind of story that you’re writing, but otherwise it’s basically head hopping just sort of disguised.
If you want to include multiple POVs, the best approach is usually to create a scene from one character’s POV, then switch to the next character’s POV and remain consistent with each character within their section.
The topic of head-hopping becomes a little more complicated when you’re writing an omniscient POV that by nature is able to look into any character’s head. The rules do blur a little here. It’s a little harder to be able to say, “Well, that’s omniscient and that’s head hopping.” The basic bottom line is always to ask yourself:
Studying how authors have done this in omniscient narratives and made it work can be very helpful in recognizing the difference between head-hopping and omniscient.
Although not a hard and fast rule, a general way to test whether you are head-hopping versus using an omniscient POV is to ask yourself:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (affiliate link)
Again, you will see exceptions to this, but often that’s going to be a pretty jarring approach to readers versus maintaining a consistent POV. Think about who is telling the story. What is the specific narrative perspective? This creates a unified cohesive perspective, whether that perspective is a specific character within the story or an actual narrator, such as in Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, in which Death narrates the entire story. In this case, Zusak is ultimately the narrator, since he’s the one writing the book, but he uses Death as an omniscient character within the story who can examine everything that’s happening and give a big picture view of what’s going on.
POV is arguably one of the trickiest techniques within narrative fiction. There’s a lot to get your head around and learn. The best way to learn is studying how it’s done. It’s one thing to read it casually, because if you’re not paying attention, a good POV is very seamless. As a reader, you’re not normally thinking about it. You’re not thinking, Oh, that’s in first-person. You want the effect to be so seamless that readers don’t have to think about it.
However, as you’re trying to figure out how to write it, you need to go back and study. Ask, “What is the writer doing to create this cohesion and this seamless effect, whether they’re writing first-person or third- or omniscient.” Always pay attention to how you respond and react to these various POVs, so you can understand which effect you want to convey within your own story.
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Author: K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland
How do you successfully scale an author business? How do you delegate to your team as well as continue to research and write the books you love? With award-winning crime author, Rachel McLean.
In the intro, new Kindle devices [Amazon]; new European markets for Spotify audiobooks [Spotify]; customisable audio with Google NotebookLM;
Amazon Ads launches new AI tools for advertisers;
Enhancing Creativity with AI Tools [ALLi]; My Lessons Learned from 10 Million Downloads of the show; and Blood Vintage Kickstarter wrap-up.
Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.
This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
Rachel McLean is the award-winning author of the Dorset Crime series, as well as other crime books, and has now sold over 2 million copies.
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
You can find Rachel at RachelMcLean.com.
Joanna: Rachel McLean is the award-winning author of the Dorset Crime series, as well as other crime books, and has now sold over 2 million copies. So welcome back to the show, Rachel.
Rachel: Thank you for having me.
Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in November 2022, and we talked about how you pivoted into crime fiction. So we’re just going to jump straight into things today.
You started out with your Dorset Crime series, but you now have five series in total, and you work with multiple authors under your imprint, Ackroyd Publishing.
Rachel: In some ways it hasn’t changed that much, and in other ways, it’s changed massively. So the core of my business, which is about writing crime books that readers want to read, I write in a very similar style. Obviously, my craft has developed over that time.
I’m really like doubling down on engaging with readers, I see that as actually, after the writing, my most important job because that’s the thing that I can do, and my team can’t do for me. So that hasn’t really changed, apart from the fact that it is scaled because I’ve got so many more readers now.
In the sort of day-to-day management of my business, that has changed hugely. I’ve now got a team of seven people who work for me. They’re all freelance. They each work a couple of days a week, and they do various roles.
I’ve got a publishing and production team, and they project manage all the books, do the cover design, pull all the files together, manage the editorial and so forth.
Then I’ve got a marketing team who help me run my shop and do advertising and data for me. I’ve got somebody who liaises with bookshops. I’ve got somebody who does AV work for me.
A lot of my books are co-authored with people who I’ve known for years and who I’ve been working with as part of my writing group for years. That enables me to sort of manage a bigger business, which takes up more of my time, while still producing more books now than I was able to produce without them.
Also, it’s really good fun, particularly on the creative side when you’re generating ideas for a new book or a new series, I get to work with other people.
So we’ll go for a trip to the location that the book’s going to be in, and we’ll walk around, and we’ll sit in cafes and things. We’ll chat about what’s going to be in the book, and we’ll come up with ideas. It’s really enjoyable.
Joanna: Oh, so many follow up questions. The first one I have is—and this is quite a personal thing for me, and also people listening—because I feel like what you have done is you have gone from being an author to essentially being the CEO of a much bigger business.
Like you said, you have seven people you’re co-writing. So at some point, you made the decision, I am going to scale the size of my business and the income, obviously. You decided that there was something you wanted to do around running a bigger publishing company.
Obviously, it is a much bigger deal than, like me, I have not made that choice. It’s something I come up against over and over again, and I always step back from. It’s like I actually don’t want a bigger business. So what was that moment, so other people listening might be able to figure that out for themselves?
Rachel: Yes, it’s interesting because I always thought I didn’t want a bigger business and I didn’t want to manage people. I think that’s because my experience of managing people in the past had been in huge organizations.
I worked for government agencies and all sorts where it was very process driven. You had to do performance management on a certain day, and you had to manage people in a certain way, and you and they didn’t really have all that much freedom over what you did.
Whereas I’m finding that managing people within my own business is very different because A, I get to recruit them, and I get to find people who are a really good fit for my business and have got the skills that I need and skills often that I don’t have.
Then B, I get to work with them in a way that works for us, and it’s really flexible because we’re such a small business. It’s not like one person has a particular job title and they can only do that thing. People end up dipping into other people’s jobs, and we all work really closely together.
I get everybody together on a fairly regular basis. So we’ve got a Christmas lunch planned in December. We have an away event in the spring where we all go down to Dorset and have a couple of days together.
We have a summer lunch where we get all our editors and narrators and everybody, the whole full team together. So I found that I enjoy that much more than I thought I might. I really do enjoy it.
The point at which I had that light bulb moment, I guess in a way, I went to the 20Books Mastermind in Majorca immediately after Self-Publishing Show last year.
I went to that specifically with the goal of talking to people who were very successful, and had been very successful for a long time and were sustaining that. I wanted to learn from them because I was at a point where the Dorset Crime series had taken off.
The Kindle Storyteller Award had a massive impact on my sales, and I didn’t know how to sustain that. I knew that the workload involved in that was more than I could do on my own. At that point, I was thinking, well, I need to sort of clone myself.
I actually offered that job to my wife, and she turned it down.
Joanna: I’m glad she did. Saved your marriage!
Rachel: I’m glad she did now, as well, because we’re much happier having different jobs. She has a job. She works for the University of Birmingham, and she’s very happy doing that. It’s a whole different type of environment from what I do.
I went to the Mastermind in Majorca, and there was a talk on running your publishing business with a team. The light bulb for me with that was the fact that you don’t have to hire one person to do the business management.
You can hire multiple people to each do a part of it and to each work a certain number of hours. I already had a PA, Jane. She’s theoretically a VA, but she lives quite close to me, so she’s not all that virtual. We do see each other.
She was already doing some of the admin for me, but I needed somebody to manage the publishing process for each book. That was the thing that I was finding was a real sticking point for me because I have a terrible memory. I was forgetting what the deadlines were.
I was uploading books to the KDP Dashboard moments before I had to in order to fulfill a pre-order. I was really disorganized. I was thinking, how do I find this person who can manage that process for me?
It just so happens that Rebecca Collins from Hobeck Books, she and I are friends, and she posted something on Facebook about some work that she was doing for another client that was exactly that work. I thought, oh, hang on a minute, I didn’t know Rebecca did that.
So I gave her a call, and we had a chat, and it turned out that she had availability, and she had exactly the skills I need. So it started with Rebecca, and then it slowly grew. So I’ve sort of added one person at a time, and over time people’s roles have grown, so there’s been more work for them to do.
Rebecca’s gone from doing one day a week to doing two days a week. I’ve got Catherine Matthews, who also works for SPS, she’s running my shop.
The great thing is she also runs Clare Lydon’s shop. She learns things when she’s doing each of our shops that she then uses in the other one, which works for both me and Clare. Clare and I are friends as well. She writes LesFic, and I think I recommended Catherine to Clare.
Having people on my team who have got experience and skills in areas that I don’t necessarily have, or who can dedicate a bit more time to learning about something specific.
So the Shopify store, Catherine and I were both quite new to that when we set it up. I said to her, well, I will pay for your time learning how to use Shopify and how to get my store set up. She went away and has been really good at just taking it on board and working things out for herself.
The other real challenge I’ve got is in my personal life, I have an autistic son. He’s not severely affected by his autism, but it does mean that I have to be available for him more than you might do for another teenager, and that can really throw things.
Having people that I can delegate things to, it’s incredibly helpful, because I know that my business isn’t going to just slide if my son needs me. It means that I’ve been able to focus on him and develop my author career at the same time. I’m not sure I would have been able to do both at this level.
Joanna: Yes, I love that. It’s so interesting, because you must be ambitious, because this is an ambitious move.
Rachel: Yes.
Joanna: Do you identify with ambition? Is that a word you identify with?
Rachel: I do.
Joanna: Yes, but you haven’t mentioned, oh, I want to be a seven figure or a multi-seven figure author.
Rachel: Money is a motivation. That’s less about the cash, It’s more about a lifestyle. I have a lifestyle now that I really enjoy. So I spend a lot of time traveling. A lot of my books are based in Dorset, and I have a flat in Dorset now because I spend so much time down there.
It’s right on the beach, and it’s an absolutely wonderful place to go and clear my head, and get fresh air, and go for walks, and write, and take the family down as well. We spent a lot of time down there in the summer.
I’m working on a series, which is a spin off series for one of my characters, and each book will be set in a different European city.
Joanna: Oh, I wonder why?!
Rachel: Oh, let’s travel to those European cities. I listen to you talking about your research trips, and I think, yes, I want a bit of that. I’m going to Dorset, and I’m going to Scotland, and I’m going to Cumbria for those series. It’s great, and they’re wonderful places to visit, but why not go to Paris?
Joanna: Then you’re going to have one set in like a Maldives scuba diving resort!
Rachel: Absolutely. I’ve got a series that I write with Millie Ravensworth, who’s actually two authors, Heide Goody and Iain Grant, that is set in London on a vintage route master London tour bus.
We’ve got two amateur sleuths who, because they’re running these tours, they find themselves in the middle of mysteries in iconic London landmarks. We were thinking, why don’t we get one of them to go and work as a guide on a cruise ship or something so we can do that? So there’s a bit of a debate going on about who gets to do that research trip if we do it.
Joanna: Yes, and I think this is important, too, because —
Like, I never have any problem justifying this. I do want to come back to that I’m fascinated with the ambition to do this because you’ve already grown so much. You’re working with these co-writers, but essentially, what you’re building with Ackroyd Publishing is it’s a publishing imprint that does crime books.
It made me think of Bookouture. If American authors don’t know, Bookouture is an imprint. It started in crime, and it grew, and it got bought for a ton of money. I wondered—
Or that you want to grow much bigger? Or do you have grand plans?
Rachel: I think I’ve toyed with the idea of growing and publishing other authors. So I do have a couple of authors who are Ackroyd Publishing publishers who are not crime authors. One is my wife, Sally Brooks, so that’s kind of cheating, but she writes lesbian rom coms and sapphic rom coms.
She has a day job. She loves the writing, but doesn’t want to do the marketing and business side of it. So I said to her, well, how about if Ackroyd Publishing published you? To be honest, it doesn’t mean we’re working together because it’s actually the team who are doing that. I’m not very heavily involved in the publication of her book.
I’ve also published Hazel Ward, who writes women’s fiction. She is somebody who I’ve known for years, and I’ve been a beta reader for her books since she started. So it’s very much been really, really slowly doing that. Only working with people who I know are really good writers and really good to work with.
I talked to Keshini at Hera, who published my paperbacks, about what it’s like managing a lot of authors. It’s hard work, and you’ve got to juggle a lot of different expectations and a lot of different styles of working in terms of what they expect from the publisher. I’m quite wary of that.
I’m building a really loyal readership. I’ve got thousands of people who will buy my books on the days they come out.
What I do, it’s more like the James Patterson model, in a way. So I’m working with a co-author. They write the first draft and I write the second draft. We plan it together.
So what I do in the second draft is I will add in character detail, because I have characters who move across series, and I will also add in location detail, because we tend to write about locations that I know about. Although the Cumbria Crime ones, Joel Hames is getting to know Cumbria better than I do.
I will also tweak the style so that it’s a style that my readers are familiar with. So that when a reader comes to a book that’s co-written by me and any one of my co-writers, they will be slightly different. They won’t just be exactly the same as a Rachel McLean book that I write on my own, but they will feel familiar.
They’ll have a similar sort of structure, in terms of the number of chapters, the length of chapters, the style of writing, what you can expect from that book, the level of gore that you get in a crime book, the level of humor.
Although that’s different for the cozy mysteries, they’re definitely funnier. That’s why I write with Heide and Iain is because they are comedy writers, and they’re really good at that.
Also, they’re all people who I know and have worked with have known. I mean, Heide and Iain, they were the people who first got me into self-publishing, so it’s really nice to be able to involve them in it and work with them.
They both live fairly close to me, so we’ll do research. One of the series we’re writing is in Birmingham, so we’ll meet up, and we’ll go for a walk around the locations and find the place the body is going to be dumped and that sort of thing, and then go and have lunch and plan the book. So it makes it really enjoyable working. I’m working with friends.
The team in Ackroyd Publishing that I’ve built as well, we’re developing friendships within the team. It was great when I got everybody together last March and we went down to Dorset to see everybody getting on so well and enjoying themselves.
Obviously, that’s important if you’ve got a really small team. So I think it just adds another dimension. It takes a little bit away from that loneliness of being a writer sitting in your room producing words.
Joanna: It doesn’t sound like that’s your life at all.
I love that you mentioned James Patterson because he gets a lot of flak because he is the most read author, the richest author, the guy who sells the most books. As you say, he co-writes with lots and lots of different people, in lots and lots of different series.
He does still have his own, I think that Alex Cross series is just his. I think what’s also interesting is you have Ackroyd, or you mentioned before, “crime books that readers want to read.”
I just want to remind listeners if they don’t know, and I’ll link back to our first interview, but you were not successful with your first books, right?
Rachel: No.
Joanna: And you pivoted to write crime books that readers want to read. So can you maybe just go into that a bit more? As in—
How do you add in this kind of Rachel McLean secret sauce that makes your book sell so much after failing at the beginning?
Rachel: Well, I started out by writing books that crossed genres and found it really hard to market them in any of the genres that they were in. What was useful was that I learned a lot about marketing during that time.
So when I did pivot to crime, I already had a head start there because I already had a mailing list that I’d started to grow. I already knew how to advertise and so forth.
What I did, it was January 2020, and I was at a point in my day job—I was a technical writer, I wrote about WordPress—and WordPress was in the throes of changing the programming language that it used.
I was either going to have to go back and learn JavaScript, or I was going to have to double down on the publishing and make a success of that. I was definitely keener on making a success of my writing than I was on learning JavaScript.
I was inspired by people like JD Kirk, Barry Hutchison and LJ Ross, and looking at what they’d done and the kind of books that they’d written.
Something that was becoming very prominent at the time was, in crime, the idea of the location being a key element and almost being like another character.
So my first series, which I wrote in 2020, was set in Birmingham. Those were the Zoe Finch books. I wrote those in Birmingham because I knew Birmingham like the back of my hand.
It actually turned out quite convenient because it was lock down and I couldn’t have gone on research trips anywhere. I was using Google Maps the whole time. I was probably responsible for half the statistics on people using Google Maps that they do at the government briefings every evening.
What I did was I read authors of crime and thrillers who were very successful. So I read books by some of my comp authors who were published by the smaller digital-first publishers and the big indies. I read books by people like James Patterson and Dan Brown.
I was inspired to do that by, I can’t remember the name of it, but I think it’s Six Figure Author by Chris Fox. He said, don’t read your reviews, read your competitors reviews, and find out what it is that readers love or hate.
Sometimes what readers hate will be exactly the same as what they love because you’ll get some readers who are turned off by the very thing that attracts other readers to the book. So I did that, and the thing that came out was the locations and the characters.
So I spent quite a lot of time identifying what my locations were going to be. Also a lot of time working on my characters and my central team, and I developed them. Then when the Zoe Finch series came to a close, I thought, right, where am I going to go next?
I’d been visiting Dorset since I was a child. I first went there as a baby. My parents had a caravan down there. So I know Dorset really, really well. So I thought, I’ll go down to Dorset.
It felt quite risky moving onto another series, because Zoe Finch books had sold enough for me to be able to give up my day job. They hadn’t been hugely successful, but I was a full time author, which was what I wanted to achieve. So I moved to Dorset, and it turned out to be the best thing I ever did because a lot more people want to read about Dorset than want to read about Birmingham.
Joanna: For Americans who might not know, it’s a lovely coastal area, as opposed to a gritty, massive city.
Rachel: Exactly. Imagine reading about Maine as against reading about Boston, I suppose. The other thing that worked really well was the character that I moved to Dorset, DCI Lesley Clarke, she was Zoe’s boss in the Zoe Finch books. So she was a DCI.
I always enjoy writing sidekicks. I sometimes find sidekicks are a bit more real in my mind because I can see them through the eyes of the protagonist. I loved writing Lesley, so I thought, I’m going to move this grumpy middle-aged Brummie down to Dorset and see how she copes and what they make of her.
People love Lesley. Some people hate her. I’ve sat in author events where people have had arguments over whether they like Lesley or not, but as far as I’m concerned, that means she’s real in their minds whether they like her or not. She is quite grumpy and she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
So, yes, it turned out to be the best decision I ever could have made to write a series in Dorset. I thought I was bringing that series to a close nine books in because there was a series arc. That’s another thing I always do in my books, there is always a series arc.
That might be police corruption or the death of a major character, well, who would have been a major character. So it’s Lesley’s predecessor. That came to a close, and I thought, right, that’s it, I’m done with these books.
I constantly kept having people say, is Lesley coming back? When are you going to write Lesley again? I had about a year of that, so I’m now writing another nine books in that series.
The paperbacks will be published by Hera. So Hera have republished the Dorset Crime existing books in print, but they’ll be publishing them as new books in paperback. So that’ll be really interesting because I’ll be getting new books into bookshops.
Rachel: Yes. So Hera, they are a small publisher, a bit like Bookouture. So Keshini Naidoo, she used to work for Bookouture. She was the woman who discovered Angela Marsons.
What I like about Hera is that they are all about mainstream fiction written by diverse authors. So their authors are not the normal run of the mill people you expect to be published by traditional publishers.
They were interested in my books because Lesley is gay, and I always have gay characters in my books. It’s working really well working with Hera. The way they work, and their ethos and their values fit really well with mine.
Because they’re small, I’m sure I get a lot more attention than I would if I was at a bigger publisher. We just work really well together.
Joanna: So I want to come onto something—
[Press release here on Amazon]
That is astounding. Like, how did that feel, by the way?
Rachel: Oh, it felt amazing. It was really funny because the evening that it happened, JM Dalgliesh was number eight, and I was number nine. He posted a screenshot of it to Facebook where he cut it off under his name, and I thought, oh, I’m not on that list. Then Sally, my wife, she went and found the press release and said, “There you are on the list, you’re just underneath him!” So I joked about it with him afterwards.
That felt like a huge achievement because there’s some really big names there, and also there are people who’ve been writing a lot longer than me.
It’s only been three and a bit years that I’ve been publishing my crime books, and to have sold enough to be one of the most read authors in KU in that time, it felt great.
My readers were lovely about it, because obviously I put in my newsletter and my social media, and readers were so pleased for me.
I refer to my readers as my reader army. I do things like when I’ve got a new edition of a paperback coming out, or a new book coming out, and I want them to buy in bookshops, I’ll say to them, “Right, you’re my reader army. I want you to go into bookshops and ask them to stock it.”
They’ll do it. They want to help me out. So, yes, it was great.
Joanna: I wondered because you’re so big on KU, which is obviously eBook first, you mentioned Shopify earlier, and also now books in bookstores.
Rachel: Yes, that is a process that we’re still working on and experimenting with. So Alex, who works on my advertising, he is experimenting with various ad campaigns that run to the store.
One of the main benefits of running ads to a store, as I know you’ve mentioned on your podcast, is the fact that you can use conversion ads instead of traffic ads in Facebook. So Facebook actually knows if they’re converting, and can therefore run better targeted ads.
It also means that we have access to data. So I know who’s buying books, and I can retarget them, and I can upsell and so forth.
Where I’ve had the most success is in audiobooks because I found that people seem to be less wedded to listen to an audiobook on Audible than they are to getting their eBooks on Amazon. People find it difficult to understand that you can read a book on your Kindle that you haven’t bought from Amazon.
So I’ve been pushing quite hard on audiobooks. I’ve been pushing the fact that I have a release date for my audiobooks on my website, which is the same as the release date for the eBook and the paperback.
It’s a reliable release date. If somebody pre-orders it from me, they will get their file on that date. Whereas Audible, I can’t set a release date, I can’t set a pre order. I found that starting with audiobooks has been quite successful.
My next experiment I’m running, right at the end of this month it starts. I’m running a kind of Kickstarter, but I’m running it on my website instead of on Kickstarter. So it will be a two week period. So I’ve already got a sign up page for people to be notified when it goes live, and it’ll be a two week period.
I’ve produced a coffee table book, which is Rachel McLean’s Dorset Crime Trail. It’s the story of each of the locations from each of the books in the series and why I chose to write there. It gives you information about the location, but it’s told through the lens of me doing research trips to those locations. It’s very anecdotal. There are stories from my childhood in those locations and that kind of thing. Lots of photos, including stock imagery, but also my photos as well.
So that’s going to be exclusive to my website for two weeks, and there’s going to be bundles and so forth, and add ons, just like you would with Kickstarter.
I figured that it was probably easier, because I’m already trying to educate my readers to use my website, to continue doing that than to add another platform in right now. Crime readers tend to be older and tend to be less likely to be on Kickstarter.
I got the idea for doing this from Elana Johnson, who has done the same thing. She writes cozy—well, not cozy—sweet romance, and so the demographic of her readers is quite similar to mine. She has run “Kickstarters” on her website very successfully, so we’ll see how it goes.
I mean, obviously it’s the first one, and there’ll be teething problems and so forth. It’s turning out to be a lot more work than a normal launch. I was on a video call to Rebecca, my publishing manager, yesterday, and we were trying to work out all the dates.
So it was like, right, when does it go live? When do we have to place the orders? When do we send them out? When will they eventually be released? Bookshops want them as well, but I don’t want bookshops getting them until after the Kickstarter.
Joanna: Which is not a Kickstarter.
Rachel: Which is not a Kickstarter. A Kickstarter, non-Kickstarter, yes.
Kickstarter is a brand. It’s a different website. It’s a very different model.
What you’re talking about, and what I think I’m going to do for a book as well next year, is that sort of pre-launch on your website for premium editions that you print after the pre-orders happen. Whereas indies are normally used to you can do a pre-order with an eBook, and it’s done, and it just goes out, and not a big deal.
I think that’s great, and I’m super jealous because I totally want to do a book like that around locations, but I have so many.
Rachel: Oh, and I know the problems that you’ve been having with your photographs of churches.
Joanna: Yes, photo permissions. Oh my goodness. Someone’s just said to me that you just hire someone and they do all of that. It just takes a lot longer than I’m used to, but I think that’s really interesting. On the audiobook—
Rachel: Well, as soon as somebody makes the purchase in Shopify, BookFunnel then sends them the email with the file.
Joanna: Just so people know, this is another app that people have to have. They have to have the BookFunnel app to listen to the audio. It’s fascinating to me that what you’re saying is people are more, I guess, happy to download a new app for audio than they are to consider using BookFunnel to get an eBook onto their Kindle device, which, again, is not difficult at all.
I think the more people like you and me and everyone, the more people who are actually educating people on buying direct, the easier it’s going to be. We have to remember, this is only year one or two of the kind of move into selling direct.
Fast forward five years, 10 years, where will we be then? I think it’ll be a very interesting ecosystem of what we can do with these direct things. I love that you’re doing so much.
So on that, I do want to ask you as well, authors love to use tools. Now, you’re working with a lot of freelancers. You’re working with different publishers. You use different tools. One of the big discussions right now for authors is AI. So I wondered—
Rachel: I use ChatGPT to help with when I’m coming up with ideas for books and when I’m brainstorming. So the first book in my Petra McBride series, the one that’s set in Paris, I had an idea which was around artworks in the Louvre.
So I needed to find artworks with particular themes, and I needed to expand on those themes and think about how those might relate to characters. So I spent a day just on my phone with Chat, just throwing ideas back and forth, and getting it to identify artworks in the Louvre that might fit with this idea.
Then getting it to tell me about areas of Paris that exemplified the kind of people who fit with the themes of these artworks. Then once I’d done that, I sort of shortlisted and came up with a final list of the artworks that I want to use in the book.
So what I then got ChatGPT to do was give me a walking route around the Louvre which will take me to all of those artworks in the most efficient way possible. So that when I go there on my research trip, I don’t have to wander around the Louvre for hours trying to find all these places.
Also, I wanted it to find artworks that would be near the Mona Lisa, for example, but that’s not the Mona Lisa. So nobody’s looking at this other artwork, and that kind of thing. I got it to identify what they were near and what else would be going on in that part of the building.
So it’s really useful for that kind of thing, so I use it at that point. Also, when I’ve got a whole load of ideas for a book and I’m trying to pull them all together into a coherent structure, I’ll put what I’ve got into ChatGPT and get it to help me shuffle all the parts together and put them into a coherent structure.
I do a lot of the start of my location research often on ChatGPT. So I’m currently writing a book set on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. Before I went there, I spent a lot of time on ChatGPT. It’s based around archeology, this book, researching archeological sites, the history of the island and so forth.
Then getting it to give me sources because sometimes it does make things up. You have to be aware of that. So getting it to give me links and sources, and then delving into those, and then finding places I could visit.
I also use Novelcrafter. So I use Novelcrafter with Chat and with Claude to help me with editing. I’ll put a first draft through a pass of a fine tune that I’ve created in Novelcrafter before I then do the second draft. So it cleans it up for me.
I’ve developed a fine tune that is based on my own writing, where I fed that into ChatGPT. I’ll put my first draft in and get it to run that fine tune, so it just tidies up all the messy bits before I do the second draft.
I’ll often dictate a first draft, or I dictate my newsletter quite a lot. So I’ll do my newsletter when I’m sitting in my car waiting to pick my son up from college or something, and I dictate it.
I use Otter.ai to dictate because I find that Otter is really good for the accuracy of picking up the right words, but it doesn’t add punctuation. It doesn’t add speech or anything. It adds punctuation as if you’re in a meeting, and assumes that you’re different speakers, instead of adding dialogue.
ChatGPT, when you give it something in Otter, it’s really good at working out what’s actually going on in terms of what’s dialogue and what’s not, and adding the paragraph breaks in the right place, and punctuation. So I do that as well, and that speeds things up, both with fiction and with the newsletter.
Joanna: I love that. I do think those of us, like you and I, we’re pretty heavy on our research, and we use places. Like you say, if you use places and art, I also have a lot of art history in my books, and archeology and all of that. It does just really help to have a creative collaborator to help you.
I often will do exactly the same as you. I was thinking listening to you, and this is the point with AI to me as well, you are leveraging a tool to make more Rachel. Like Rachel more Rachel, for you to put more stuff out into the world.
You’re also working with other humans who are helping you put more Rachel out into the world. I’ve also been wondering about how many issues people have with AI. I wonder, partly, if it’s to do with creative confidence.
You are a confident writer. You’ve written millions of words at this point, as have I. Your tone of voice, my tone of voice around AI, it has no emotion. Or the only emotion it has is happy and positive. Like this is a great tool, this is really helpful to me, and I can do more with this.
I guess how I’m thinking about this is we’re confident that what we produce is our work. Also, you came out of technical writing, and I was an IT consultant.
Rachel: I think so. I think the fact that I worked in IT before means that my default position with any new tech is to want to explore it and see what it can do for me, rather than to be scared of it.
I also believe very strongly that AI in itself is not good or bad. It is just a tool, and if good or bad things are done with it, that is because of the people who are doing those things. So if people use AI unethically, that’s not the fault of the AI. That’s the fault of the way that those people are either using or configuring the AI.
You talk a lot about doubling down on being human. Obviously, I’m using AI so it’s not the full extent of my creative process, by any means. I’m adding on. I would never release something that had just been written by AI. I always work on it as well.
I also don’t release books that have just been worked on by one of my co-authors. I work on them as well because I’m adding that Rachel. I mean, I actually call it Rachelifying.
So it’s that thing of being visibly human and being yourself. So, interestingly, I’ve been using TikTok, but I hardly ever put videos out on TikTok, but I use TikTok as a video editor. TikTok’s editing tools are really good, and you don’t have to pay for them.
If you download the video that you’ve created before you publish it, you can download it without any TikTok watermarks on it, and then I’ll use it on Instagram or my newsletter or whatever. So I’ve been doing quite a lot of video, like little snippets of me.
A thing that’s becoming quite a part of my brand is me walking along a beach somewhere, talking about what the weather’s doing, and where I’m going today to research the next book. Also, where I’m going to dump a body.
If you ask my readers, what does Rachel do? It would be she finds a beauty spot, and she dumps a body in it.
It’s me, standing in the crime scene, telling people, “Right, this is where this is going to happen. This is where the tents are going to go.” Forensics and all that sort of stuff. It just brings it to life for readers, and I think makes them feel part of that world that I’m creating as well.
Joanna: I love that. I keep thinking, yes, I must do more video, and then I just never do. I was looking at some of yours because they’re on your Shopify store as well on your book pages, and I really think that is great.
I mean, it kept me on your Shopify store page to watch a video, which gives all the signals to the algorithms or whatever. So I think, actually, it’s a really strong thing to do that. So I urge people to go and have a look at one of your videos.
As much as I think you’re amazing, I mean, it’s not like they’re amazing professional videos. They’re pretty human.
Rachel: That’s part of the brand is. So, for example, I recently bought a gimbal, which is a stick thing that you put your phone on and video yourself, and it supposedly self-levels and follows you as you move around. Sometimes it goes wrong, and sometimes I don’t put my phone in it properly, and the balance goes off, and it just goes a bit weird.
Instead of thinking, oh, I need to edit that out, I’ll just laugh about it and say, “Oh, it’s doing it again. I’ve got to work out this gimbal,” and that just becomes part of what readers enjoy, that you’re not trying to create this really polished thing.
I do a lot of video where I’m somewhere where it’s windy, and I’m yelling to try and be heard. I have got little lavalier mics with the little fluffy thing on to stop the wind noise. I’m sure there’s a technical term for it.
Joanna: It’s called the dead cat.
Rachel: The dead cat, that’s it. Oh goodness.
Even so, when you’re standing on top of a mountain in Scotland filming a video of a crime scene, there’s going to be wind noise, and I’m sort of yelling into the camera.
Sometimes I’ll end up just doing a voiceover afterwards, but people quite enjoy that. They find it quite funny that I’m about to get blown into the sea somewhere or something like that. So, yes, I think that lack of professionalism.
I would say to people, if you’re planning on making video, don’t worry at all about it being polished. Just record yourself in a natural way, as if you would if you were sending a video update to one of your friends or family or something like that. Just make it you.
Joanna: Well, I’m excited to talk to you again in like two and a half years. So it’s been two and a half years since we last spoke, and in two and a half years, it’ll be very interesting to see where you are then because your trajectory is looking pretty good.
Rachel: Yes, they can find everything at RachelMclean.com, which is where those videos are. All my books are available for sale there as well, and my newsletter.
Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Rachel. That was great.
Rachel: Thank you.
The post Scaling An Author Business With Rachel McLean first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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Author: Joanna Penn
In this Talking Volumes event with MPR News host Kerri Miller, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Louise Erdrich reads from her latest novel, The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024), and discusses how her upbringing in the Red River Valley in Minnesota shaped her writing.
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Author: bphi
From 2006 to 2010, and again from 2020 to 2022, filmmaker David Lynch recorded daily morning weather reports that were broadcast from Los Angeles-based radio stations, his own website, and on YouTube. In some episodes, the weather report included just the date, temperature, and a couple of words describing what Lynch saw out of his window. Other times, reports included short observations or thoughts about his or others’ creative projects, and what he planned on having for lunch later in the day. “It’s a Saturday. Here in L.A., a sunny morning, a pretty strong breeze blowing right now. 52 degrees Fahrenheit, around 11 degrees Celsius,” says Lynch in a 2022 entry. Write a personal essay that begins with a weather report and then launches into what you’ve been thinking about recently, perhaps in conjunction with a book, film, or other piece of art you’ve encountered. How does a weather report set the tone?
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Author: Writing Prompter
In this installment of the PBS American Masters documentary series Renegades, which highlights the cultural contributions of little-known historical figures with disabilities, the series spotlights the life and career of editor Judy-Lynn del Rey who revolutionized the world of science fiction by editing and publishing books from writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and George Lucas.
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Author: jkashiwabara
“I cannot help but admire Rooney the storyteller, willing to toe that tricky line between the pleasure-read and philosophy, determined to choose cooperation over cynicism,” writes Jessi Jezewska Stevens in her review of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), published in 4Columns. In the article, Stevens considers the task of a work of literature that attempts to be both a novel-of-ideas and a realist romance. This week compose a short story that simultaneously explores a philosophical idea close to your heart and chronicles a romantic relationship’s ups and downs. Do your characters discuss large issues with each other in pages of dialogue or through e-mail correspondences, or do they embody the ideas in another way? Are there additional ways you can think of to accomplish portraying both tasks?
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Author: Writing Prompter
The Creative Penn Podcast just hit 10 million downloads as reported by my audio host, Blubrry!
The podcast is also the main content on my YouTube channel @thecreativepenn, which has had over 3.9 million views, so the total could be closer to 14m. I’m pretty happy with that, so thanks for listening!
Here are some fun stats, and then I share 7 lessons learned that are also applicable for authors and other creatives.
You can find The Creative Penn Podcast on your favourite podcast app, or the backlist and links are here.
My first episode went out on 15 March 2009, and there are now 775 episodes of the podcast. Links to all at TheCreativePenn.com/podcast.
The show has been downloaded in 229 countries with the top three countries being the USA (61%), UK (12%), and Australia (7%), and the most surprising being 2 downloads from Antarctica!
The four most downloaded episodes through Blubrry are as follows:
The four most watched/listened to on YouTube are quite different:
Why are these numbers so different? An audio podcast generally gets a relatively stable number of people listening every week, so there is less variability in listening numbers. YouTube is based on search and algorithms, so some videos get a LOT of views and others get almost nothing.
You don’t need to know everything in advance in order to write a book, or publish, or start a podcast. Just get started and learn and adapt along the way.
I recorded my first podcast interview in March 2009 over a landline, which I put on speakerphone, next to which I placed a handheld digital audio recorder.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, but despite my nerves, I was still able to interview a breakout self-published author in the Australian book scene, Rachael Bermingham. (I lived in Brisbane, Australia at the time.)
I’ve always done extensive research on my guests and provided questions in advance, but my interview skills have definitely improved since then — both as a host and a guest. Everything gets better with practice, and that includes your writing, too!
My tools have also changed. My recording went from a phone to Skype to Zoom and now Riverside.fm, and I’ve upgraded my microphone (and pop filter) several times.
I used to just record in any room with the accompanying echo noises Later, I moved into a padded cupboard, and now I have a home audio booth where I record my solo episodes, weekly introduction, and my audiobooks.
My editing tools went from Audacity to Amadeus Pro, and I now use Descript.com to edit the main audio before mastering with Amadeus Pro and Auphonic.
I still use the same WordPress plugin, Blubrry, which is one of the oldest and most reputable independent podcast hosts. I have always paid for hosting the feed, first on AWS and then on Blubrry itself. As ever, I really love my independence!
If you’re not paying for a product, then question how that company is making money. Is your content actually the product? (as is the case for most social media platforms).
If you try to write a book in a market you don’t read, you will likely get it wrong and readers won’t resonate with the content or buy more from you.
If you start a podcast without an understanding of what the audience want, then you will fail in a similar way. But you can avoid this by BEING the audience you seek to connect with.
When I started The Creative Penn Podcast in 2009, I had self-published a couple of non-fiction books, and I’d learned so much from those initial failures that I wanted to share what I’d learned.
I was also really lonely and I didn’t have any author friends or a community. I wanted a way to virtually meet and talk to other authors so I could learn from those ahead of me on the path— and maybe make some friends.
Over the years since, I’ve continued to interview people who I want to talk to and learn from as well as share my own lessons learned from the author journey.
I never designed a podcast for a target market. I didn’t have to, because I was that market. It’s the same with my books. I don’t write to market. I just write books about what I learn (non-fiction), or stories I would want to read (fiction).
The content of the podcast has changed over time, and these days, I focus much more on the business of being an author as well as the writing craft.
But I’m still an author and a podcaster, and I’m still learning things, so I am still my own audience and the downloads demonstrate the content is clearly still of value, because I am still getting downloads of the show, and still selling books.
Back in 2009, podcasting wasn’t popular, and it didn’t really move into the mainstream until the true crime podcast Serial took off in 2014.
Between 2009 and 2014, it often felt like I was howling into the wind, as tumbleweed rolled past in the empty desert. Those were also the years when self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press’ and when authors who went indie were generally shunned and considered to be desperate wannabes instead of smart business people.
Thankfully, that has mostly changed, and the fights about indie vs trad have dissipated, to be replaced by fights about AI and whatever is the latest drama in Authorlandia!
From 2014, my traffic started to take off and grew for a few years before leveling off and has remained pretty steady over the last 5+ years. Episodes now get between 8000 – 20,000 downloads, depending on the topic.
But like everyone, I started with no audience, no readers, no listeners, no books, no income from my creative work. I just worked steadily for years, producing content in different ways.
Slowly, people discovered the show and my books, mainly through word of mouth and SEO (search engine optimisation) since I have never advertised the podcast.
So take heart if you are just getting started. Create, put your content out there, in whatever medium you choose, and over time, you will attract an audience.
The Creative Penn Podcast really has changed my life in so many ways, and the relationships I’ve built are perhaps the most important part.
It helped me find other indie authors who were doing what I wanted to do, and I was able to meet many of them online and at conferences. Some of those initial conversations on the show turned into IRL friendships, and others turned into business opportunities and collaborations.
There’s also the relationships with you, the listeners of the show, even if I don’t know all of your names.
Audio is such a personal and intimate medium, and long-form audio even more so. You know so much about me — more than my family sometimes! — and when we meet in person, or you email with your thoughts, I know there is more of a connection because you listen to the show.
Thank you for making me part of your weekly listening time!
As an author, you need other writers for a sustainable long-term career. You need people who understand the challenges of the creative life. You need a community, even if you’re an introvert, happy working on your own most of the time.
You don’t need a podcast for this. You can find people through online groups, going to conferences, and social media.
But then take it a step further. We are humans, we need other people!
If you resonate with someone, connect with them for a coffee offline, or have a private zoom call. This is ‘friend dating’ and it’s something you’ll need to do multiple times over your career as you change, your friends change, and maybe you change locations and life circumstances.
(Obviously, this needs to be appropriate to your life and family situation, as well as your stage on the author journey.)
For the first few years of the podcast, I didn’t do an introduction. I just jumped straight into the interview. After all, no one wanted to know about me or my life — but it turned out they did!
A listener emailed and suggested I do an introduction as a way for people to get to know me as well as my guests, and years later, I know many of you come for the introduction and might not stay for the interview.
I’ve changed it up over the years adding the different sections around news and AI updates as well as my personal journey, but it’s a core part of my show now.
As a listener to other podcasts, I also understand that listeners come back each week for the host and their take on whatever the topic is. Guests may borrow part of that attention and may have book sales or a new fan based on the episode, but listeners return again and again to the same show for the host.
To foster this kind of connection, whether it’s as a podcast host or as an author, you have to double down on being human. You have to share personal things, whether that’s the inspiration for your books and stories, or photos from your life, which you can put in your email newsletter, and/or social media.
You need to do this, but you get to set your boundaries. For example, I talk about my husband Jonathan sometimes, but we don’t share a last name and he has his own career, so I respect his privacy and don’t share our personal photos. However, our cats, Cashew and Noisette, and photos from my research trips are all over social media!
Some authors talk about their kids but give them code-names and don’t share pictures for privacy reasons. Some authors with pseudonyms just share pictures from their garden or things they like, giving an insight into them as a person without revealing identifying details.
You have to decide on your boundaries, but do it early, when no one knows who you are. Because if a book takes off or you go viral on social media, or something else happens to bring you attention, you want to have privacy in place to protect yourself.
When I decided to become a full-time author, I always intended it to be a viable business. I was not going to leave my six-figure consulting job to be a poor author in a garret, so I planned my creative business — and then took action towards that goal. [More on this in Your Author Business Plan.]
I started writing seriously in 2006, left my job in 2011, and in 2015, I made six figures, and then the following year, multi-six-figures, which I have sustained ever since across multiple streams of income. Check out my timeline for more details.
The podcast was originally designed as part of that business plan as a marketing channel to being people to my books and courses, which at the time were all non-fiction based.
Podcasting works very well for marketing non-fiction books, and guesting on shows is a great way to reach readers, even if you don’t want to start a show yourself.
The early years of The Creative Penn Podcast did achieve the goal of marketing, but around 2015, the hosting costs were getting expensive, and it was taking more time as I moved from ad hoc to a weekly show.
Amanda Palmer’s book, The Art of Asking came out in 2014, which focused on building genuine connections with her audience and personal stories about crowdfunding and subscriptions. It talks about embracing the discomfort of asking, and highlights how openness can foster deeper relationships and support creativity.
Amanda is VERY open, down to doing nude pics and letting her fans write on her body — not really my style! I’m also (very) British and we are not good at the hard sell, and never want to sound ‘desperate,’ so I struggled with knowing how I could ask for money for the show after years of it being free.
That year, I talked to Jim Kukral about aspects of selling direct through our own stores as well as crowdfunding. The interview is just as current now as it was back then, especially as it seems indie authors are finally embracing the direct model.
Jim: The whole concept of patrons goes back thousands of years. Michelangelo had a patron, right? Patrons are a very important part of the artist/storytelling community, and we’ve gotten away from it, and we’ve gotten into this transaction based hard sticker price world with e-commerce, right?
I guess the whole entire concept of patronage is letting people support you. It doesn’t have to be one wealthy patron who gave you a stipend to do your art for the next 30 years. You could have a thousand people, or fifty people each giving you a little bit of money that can help support you. And I believe that every artist and content creator should be trying this ’cause it’s an amazingly powerful movement.
You need to use words like support. Don’t ask for handouts. Say it’s my content. I’m giving it to you. If you would like to support me and the work that I do, then you can go here.
It’s a little psychological switch in a person’s head when they hear, ‘you can support me,’ as opposed to ‘you can donate to me.’ You have so many fans who love to listen to the podcast. Would 2000 people give you $1 every time you do a podcast?
Jo: And that’s the thing, because I’ve now got transcripts and there’s the time it takes. There is an amount I would want to make just to cover costs, let alone anything else. But I have been thinking about this — let’s talk about the psychology of asking. I’m very British. I want to talk about money, but it is a very difficult thing for many people to even be thinking about these things.
Jim: This is a tough thing, because we’ve been told and taught that it’s like begging, right?
Jo: I don’t wanna do that!
Jim: Yeah, but you have to change your mindset, right?
Jo: It’s interesting because I just wrote down like when I thought, why am I having problem? The problem I have is being independent. And that’s so crazy because that’s what we’re talking about.
I mean, like even my mum, I would never even ask my mum for money. I had a job at 13 and earned the money that I needed to do to for stuff. And I’ve always felt that way but what you’re saying is actually is to be independent, we need to develop that kind of trust.
I mean, this is like an emotional risk though, isn’t it? What if I put myself out there and nobody catches me and I hit the floor?
Jim: I think it’s going to depend on who your true fans are and if you’ve really connected with them or not. This will not work for people who create content that’s not amazing.
People are fans of things that really entertain them or solve their problems. So if you’re not creating something amazing, this will never work for anyone which is why it’s the level playing field, only the people who really are producing something that people want are going to be the ones who are gonna be able to do this.”
Click here for the whole interview with Jim on selling direct. Jim is a professional speaker and non-fiction self-help author and used to co-host the Sell More Books Show with Bryan Cohen. You can still find him at JimKukral.com]
Amanda’s book and the discussion with Jim helped me reframe the podcast.
In 2015, I added corporate sponsor ad reads with the earliest being Kobo Writing Life, Draft2Digital, and ProWritingAid, still sponsors of the show, and companies I use personally and am more than happy to recommend. I later expanded to add Ingram Spark, FindawayVoices, and also Publisher Rocket, and Written Word Media.
I’ve been approached by companies who offer more money in terms of sponsorship, but who aren’t a good fit for the show, and it’s important to me that I only advertise those companies I continue to use and recommend.
THANKS to my corporate sponsors — you are fantastic!
Also in 2015, I started my subscription at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn and this started as a way for listeners to support the show and get an extra solo episode a month where I answered Patron questions.
The top tier of Patrons also get my non-fiction ebooks as part of the subscription. I also occasionally did extra things but the main focus was supporting the show.
At the end of 2023, as part of my 15 year pivot, I changed the Patreon into almost a separate Community where I now share extra weekly content, mainly on using various AI tools, as well as writing craft and author business audio and videos. I’ve also started doing live Office Hours and I still do the monthly Q&A audio.
This has dramatically accelerated growth and I now have over 1200 paid Patrons, some of whom have said they would stick around in that Community even if I ended the podcast (don’t worry, that’s not happening at the moment!)
THANK YOU, Patrons! You are amazing! Come and join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn where you can get everything for less than a coffee a month, or a couple of coffees if you’re feeling generous.
I’m not the only podcaster in the indie author community, but I’m pretty sure I’m the longest running at this point!
Since I started my show in March 2009, there have been many other podcasts that have started and ended — and the same is true of the author community.
There have been authors with breakout successes who disappeared as fast as they arrived. Others stuck around for years, but eventually faded away. There are some who are still here, many who started before me, some who came after me, who have stuck it out through the good times and the bad.
There are many good reasons people end a podcast or decide being an author is not for them. But there is only one reason to keep doing either.
It has to be worth it.
The definition of ‘worth it’ differs for everyone, but for me, there are a couple of reasons I continue to host The Creative Penn Podcast.
(a) Patrons and listeners tell me it is still useful and — even though I am an ‘older’ voice in the industry now — I still have something to contribute to the conversation, especially in the era of generative AI.
Perhaps my longevity even gives me some authority because I’ve seen so much drama rise and fall over the years, and I know ‘this too shall pass.’
(b) I’m also still learning, and my #1 Clifton Strengths is Learner! Every conversation I have that makes me think differently, or helps my craft or business, is worth it, and to be able to help others by recording the conversation is an added bonus!
(c) It makes great money! With corporate sponsors and the Patreon, in addition to affiliate links and marketing my books and other things, The Creative Penn Podcast is a significant business on its own. I love having multiple streams of income, so it’s worth it financially to continue.
Some people might say that ‘loving’ something is enough. That might carry you through for a while, but it’s not sustainable for the long term.
I loved my Books and Travel Podcast and happily did that for a few years. The evergreen episodes are all still on the feed and the transcripts are on my blog.
But as much as I loved the conversations and connection, I could not figure out a decent business model for it, and I learned enough about the travel writing industry to see that it was not a good fit for me.
There’s nothing wrong with ending a show, and there’s nothing wrong with deciding you don’t want to keep pushing in an author career either.
Everyone changes over time, and what is ‘worth it’ for you at one book or the first 20 episodes of a podcast will be quite different by book 10, or a podcast you are still trying to do years later without enough reward.
But if you do stay the course, your time in the market becomes an almost unstoppable force on its own. With time and persistence and continuous creation over years, you gather readers and listeners and income streams, and together, they snowball into something bigger than you ever thought they might be.
I’m not promising I will be here for 20 million downloads — who knows how long that will take! — but for now, The Creative Penn Podcast continues on, Creatives, and I hope you will keep listening as take another step forward on the author journey.
Let me know your thoughts or any questions in the comments. Thanks for listening!
The post 7 Lessons Learned From Over 10 Million Downloads Of The Creative Penn Podcast first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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Author: Joanna Penn
In this episode of the Open Book Broadcast, Suzette Mullen speaks about the publishing process for her debut memoir, The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), and why queer voices and stories matter in a conversation with host Ally Berthiaume. Mullen is featured in “5 Over 50: 2024” in the November/December issue in Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Author: jkashiwabara
In this Columbia Fiction Foundry event, Parul Kapur reads from her debut novel, Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), and discusses how the Partition of India in 1947 informed her story, as well as her work in journalism, criticism, and publishing in a conversation with Tania Moore. Kapur is featured in “5 Over 50: 2024” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Author: bphi
While scientists have long known that spiders can fly across entire oceans on their silk threads by ballooning through strong wind currents, it’s only more recently that research has demonstrated their ability to travel on Earth’s electric field. Unlike humans, spiders can detect the naturally-occurring global electric field known as the ionosphere with the tiny sensory hairs on their bodies and prepare to lift off and take flight. Write a poem that focuses on modes of movement, perhaps imagining the ways in which humans have moved through space and how this has changed over time with new inventions and technology. What might be possible in the future? Try experimenting with rhythm and spacing, and explore what type of diction feels most reflective of the pacing you seek.
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Author: Writing Prompter
The Resolution is a bittersweet moment. You’ve reached the end of the story. You’ve climbed the mountain, and now you can plant your flag of completion at its peak! But as the finale of all your work, this is also the finale of all the fun you’ve experienced in your wonderful world of made-up people and places. The Resolution is where you must now say goodbye to your characters and give readers a chance to also say goodbye.
Your story and its conflict officially ended with your Climax. Most stories require a subsequent scene or two to tie off loose ends and, just as importantly, to guide readers to a final emotion. Like those great ensemble scenes at the ends of the original Star Wars movies, this is the last glimpse readers will have of your story world and its characters. Make it one they’ll remember!
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), 20th Century Fox.
From the book Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)
Conceivably, you could close your story at the Climactic Moment since your story and its conflict officially ended there. But if most stories were to end immediately after the Climax, the result would be some very disgruntled readers.
After all the emotional stress of the Climax, readers want a moment to relax. They want to see the characters rising, dusting off their pants, and moving on with life. They want to glimpse how the ordeals of the previous three acts have changed your characters; they want a preview of the new life your characters will live in the aftermath of the conflict. And if you’ve done your job right, they’ll want this extra scene just to spend a little more time with characters they’ve grown to love.
As its name suggests, the Resolution is where everything is resolved. In the Climax, the protagonist overcame the villain and won the love interest; in the Resolution, readers now get to witness how these actions will make a difference for the characters moving forward.
For Example:
Serenity (2005), Universal Pictures.
The Resolution is not just the ending of this story but also the beginning of the story the characters will live in after readers close the back cover. The Resolution performs its two most significant duties in capping the current story while also promising the characters’ lives will continue. This is true of standalone books and even truer of individual parts in an ongoing series.
For Example:
Empire of the Sun (1987), Warner Bros.
Creating the perfect ending boils down to one essential objective: leave readers satisfied. The Resolution begins directly after the Climax and continues until the last page. Resolutions can vary in length, but shorter is generally better. Your plot is over. You don’t want to test readers’ patience by wasting their time.
The length of your Resolution will depend on a couple of factors, the most important being the number of remaining loose ends. Using the scenes leading up to your Climax to resolve as many subplots as possible will free up your Resolution to take care of essentials.
Another factor to consider is the tone with which you want to leave readers. This is your last chance to influence their perception of your story. How do you want to end things? Should the final emotion be happy? Sad? Thoughtful? Funny?
One of my favorite Resolutions is the final scene in Disney’s The Kid. Its closing scene promises reconciliation between the main character and the woman he loves, indicating the future progression of his transformed life. It strikes the perfect note of happiness, hope, and affirmation. Strive to leave your readers with a similarly powerful and memorable scene.
Disney’s The Kid (2000), Walt Disney Pictures.
Pride and Prejudice: After Darcy and Elizabeth proclaim their love for one another in the Climax, Austen ties up her loose ends in a few tidy scenes that include the Bennet family’s reaction to the engagement. From her perch as an omniscient and distant narrator, Austen caps her story with a final witty scene in which she covers the book’s two culminating weddings and comments on Mr. and Mrs. Darcy’s and Mr. and Mrs. Bingley’s future lives together. Her Resolution is a beautiful example of hitting a tone that sums up the story and leaves readers feeling exactly how she wants them to.
Pride & Prejudice (1995), BBC1.
It’s a Wonderful Life: The closing scene of this classic has viewers crying all over the place every Christmas. The movie wastes no time moving on from the Climax, in which George’s friends bring him above and beyond the $8,000 he needs to replace what was stolen by Mr. Potter. The Resolution immediately fills in the remaining plot holes by bringing the entire cast (sans the antagonist) back for one last round of “Auld Lang Syne” and hinting that the angel Clarence has finally earned his wings. This tour de force of an emotionally resonant closing scene leaves readers wanting more while fulfilling their every desire for the characters.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), Liberty Films.
Ender’s Game: Card takes his time with a lengthy Resolution. In it, we’re given what essentially amounts to both an epilogue explaining some of Ender’s life after his defeat of the aliens (he leaves Earth to try to make peace with both his superstar status and his guilt over his xenocide of the aliens) and an introduction to the sequels that will follow (in which Ender takes charge of finding a new home for the sole remaining alien cocoon).
Ender’s Game (2013), Lionsgate.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World: After tying off all existing loose ends from the plot’s overarching conflict, the story closes with a surprising scene in which Jack realizes the Acheron’s captain masqueraded as the ship’s surgeon in order to attempt a takeover of the ship once it sailed away from the Surprise. The final scene—in which Jack matter-of-factly orders his ship to once again pursue the Acheron, while he and Stephen play a rousing duet—gives us both a sense of continuation and a perfect summation of the movie’s tone.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Miramax Films.
The Resolution takes place directly after the Climax and is the book’s last scene(s).As you write your closing lines, consider all the words that have come before. Dig deep to cap your story with an intellectual and emotional Resolution. Congratulations, you now know how to structure a story!
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And now we’ve come to the end of our series! I hope you’ve enjoyed these last few months’ journey through the exciting landscape of story structure. You now have the tools to identify and understand the important plot points in any story and to consciously apply them to your own books. With the knowledge of story structure in your writing toolbox, you can deliberately craft and tweak your stories to make certain you’re giving readers the rise and fall and ebb and flow that will suck them into your story world and convince them of the credibility of your characters’ strong arcs. Happy writing!
Related Posts:
Part 1: 5 Reasons Story Structure Is Important
Part 6: The First Half of the Second Act
Part 8: The Second Half of the Second Act
Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).
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The post The Resolution (Secrets of Story Structure, Pt. 12 of 12) appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.
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Author: K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland
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