How do you stand out as an author when thousands of books are published every day? What’s the difference between having a logo and having a real brand that sells books? Is it possible to maintain your authentic voice while appealing to genre readers who seem more loyal to categories than authors? With Steve Brock

In the intro, Baker & Taylor shutting down [The Bottom Line]; Holiday promotions for your books [Productive indie fiction writer]; Writing Storybundle; Updating Shopify metadata — Hextom app; Publishing and change [Publishing Perspectives]; Paying AIs to read my books [Kevin Kelly]; signing my special editions at BookVault; The Critically Reflective Practitioner; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale.

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 

Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives.

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

• Brand vs. reputation. Why branding is about perception in readers’ minds, not just visual consistency
• Discovery vs. creation. How to uncover what makes you distinctive
• Standing out in crowded genres. Techniques for differentiating yourself while still satisfying genre expectations
• Multiple pen names. Managing branded houses vs. house of brands when writing across different audiences
• From brand to sales. Converting nebulous brand concepts into practical marketing confidence and clear messaging
• Beautiful book production. Creating workbooks and products that command attention in an AI-saturated market

You can find Steve at BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

Transcript of the interview with Steve Brock

Joanna: Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives, which we are talking about today. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Joanna. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Joanna: So much to talk about. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about how you got into writing and publishing and branding.

Steve: I’ve written all my adult life, but it was more in the realms of school writing and then working in branding and marketing agencies, doing a lot of marketing copy and ad copy.

Then in 2007, I think, I had this sense of wanting to work on a book, which was the one that ended up becoming Hidden Travel. It only took 14 years to get that from idea to publication. Since then, as you mentioned, some other books, so I’ve embraced that.

The branding has come along actually in parallel, and it’s a great point of how one area of your life, particularly your creative life, affects the other. Branding fundamentally is about telling your story well. It’s understanding who you are, what you do, and what makes you different.

There’s a lot of storytelling involved. So the more I focus and spend time on writing, particularly in the fiction realm, which has been mostly just short stories for me lately, the more that it has improved the work of branding.

I find branding interesting because, like we’ve talked about with travel, branding is really about exploration. It’s diving deep into understanding something that is hidden and bringing that to light.

Joanna: Before we get back into branding—

You mentioned short stories there. Are you publishing those?

Steve: No, those have always been a sideline. I have a novel that I started when I got stuck on Hidden Travel, and it’s about maybe a third done, so that’ll be the next effort that I focus on for the fiction realm. But no, the short stories have always just been more for my own craft building and just the enjoyment of it. I’m looking forward to actually reading yours that’s coming out, or is it out?

Joanna: Well, as we record this, the Kickstarter has just finished. So depending on when this comes out, it may be available. The Buried and the Drowned is my short story collection.

I think it’s interesting because you can play with short stories and you can explore, as you mentioned there, exploring and looking at hidden things. I think it’s much easier to play around with short stories because you can just do such different things.

Let’s come to branding, because the word “brand” is really difficult and people are already flinching. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to think about author brand.” So you mentioned a little bit there, but—

How are you defining brand as it relates to authors? And why should we even care about this?

Steve: The word “brand” applies whether you are a major corporation, a nonprofit organization, a single solopreneur, or an author, because it’s all about perception.

A lot of people think of branding as being about your logo or your tagline, or maybe the colors that you use in the background of your Instagram reels and having consistency there. That’s part of it, but it’s such a small part of it.

Branding is fundamentally about the overall perception that people have of you or your creative work. If I say, for example, Stephen King, or James Patterson, or Toni Morrison, there are going to be associations you have with each of those people, and those associations are actually what make up their brand.

The brand is a tricky thing because we think we can control it, but we can’t. The brand exists in the minds of your audiences. So for writers, that means the minds of your readers out there.

Your job is to craft it, to know the story you want people to tell and be able to reinforce that over time so that they’re telling the same story. Because if you do not know the story you want to tell, someone else is going to do it for you, and most likely in a way that’s not going to be helpful to you.

So just think of brand almost like your reputation. What are you doing to build up your reputation? That’s maybe the simplest way to think about brand and branding.

Joanna: For authors, I mean for me, I have Joanna Penn and I have J.F. Penn.

So for anyone who’s writing under two names, are we thinking about two brands?

Steve: Yes and no. Because you show up in a lot of places. For example, on this podcast, you show up as both people, not your products necessarily, but you as a person that represents both of those brands.

When you have an author brand with multiple pen names, there are elements of that you may want to keep discrete and separate. But on the other hand, in your case, the real divide there is—to oversimplify—J.F. Penn for the fiction and Joanna Penn for the nonfiction.

You as the person and the brand that you represent, there’s a lot of consistency between those two. What you don’t want to do is if those two brand names or author names are different and they represent two completely different audiences that you really want to keep separate.

The example I give in the book is if you’re writing both children’s illustrated fiction books and you’re also writing erotica, you do not want those two audiences to even really know that you’re the same person. So you would keep those dramatically separate.

It’s the same in the corporate world where we talk about what the fancy jargony term is “a brand spectrum.” You have, for example, a branded house like BMW, and then a house of brands like Procter & Gamble, which has a whole bunch of sub-brands underneath that, and some people may not even know that Procter & Gamble is behind those.

If your pen names are really different genres, you’re probably more like a house of brands. Whereas if you have a consistent vibe or theme or thing you want to be known for, you would be more like a branded house, even if you have different pen names.

Joanna: I like “branded house” and I like “brand spectrum.” That feels more natural, I think. There are also two angles that potentially we can approach this from. Maybe we can take them separately.

One is new author or author wanting to start a new pen name, wanting to construct a brand from nothing, from scratch—actually control it and build it.

The other way is discovery branding, let’s call it, where you look back at your work and you go, “I guess I’ve somehow created a brand. I just can’t figure out really what it is, but I just keep writing stuff and it kind of gets created.”

Could you tackle those two ends of the spectrum, of creating it from nothing versus discovering it?

Steve: That’s a great question because I would say that discovering it is probably the more common approach.

One of the elements of your brand is your voice or your style, and I define those as three different things. Brand is the overarching perception. Style is the visual representation of the brand. Voice is the verbal or written representation.

I think that part of finding what your style and your voice are comes through discovery almost entirely. If you try to overthink it, it’s really hard.

If you start that journey of discovery, focusing on a consistent and distinctive voice, it kind of emerges naturally and it’s easy to step into that. There’s a point though, even on a discovery brand as you name it, that it becomes intentional.

That’s where you start to identify certain themes that have emerged that you want to be known for, and then you want to elevate those or amplify those. Honestly, that’s like discovery writing. I’m kind of a hybrid myself. I will do an outline, but then I’ll go off of it. Same thing here.

You’re discovering your brand, but once you find, “Okay, that really resonates, that element really resonates with my audiences,” then you want to amplify that and make sure that gets incorporated into everything you’re doing.

Now if you’re just creating from scratch, you can actually define what those elements are. That’s what the book is really about—how to create what we call a brand identity, which is just like a personal identity.

It’s who you are, what are the elements, what are your characteristics, what are your personality traits, what’s the promise that you make to your audiences? If you craft that from scratch, you can be very intentional.

I would say even there, just like a planner writer goes off script sometimes and starts going in directions they find that their characters have a life of their own, the same way here is you can map out that planned brand, but still be able to change it as you start to find things that resonate or that you want to lean into.

Joanna: One thing that I think of when it comes to brand is also book covers. Even if I used exactly the same name, if I used Joanna Penn for all of my books, my fiction would look quite different. Different color palette, different font, different design elements.

How can we relate book covers in particular to our brand?

Steve: It’s consistency. Consistency is the key to all branding, whether it’s for authors or anyone. As long as people can recognize you—think about branding, where it came from. It came from the American West and branding cattle to know that they belonged to a particular ranch.

A brand has evolved, but it is essentially about identification. I want to know what that brand stands for, who is it and who’s behind it, and what does it stand for? On covers, you want consistency, you want a through line.

Really that’s another way of thinking about a brand—what is that through line that you’re going to find?

Now this is a key for authors, which doesn’t exist completely in the same way in other industries: there are many, many readers out there that will always be more loyal to a genre than they are to a brand.

If you have a reader who absolutely loves your thrillers, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to start writing something in the romance category, well, they may still like you and get your books, but they’re not going to necessarily buy your romance because the brand’s not as strong as the loyalty to the genre.

Joanna: It’s interesting also because I feel like authors know publishers and know imprints, but most readers wouldn’t even know. They don’t know HarperCollins or they don’t necessarily know an imprint. Most readers are not loyal to those brand name publishing houses.

Secondarily, they may or may not care about an author brand, and as you say, they’re more likely to be faithful to a genre. Most of us can’t remember the names of the authors whose books we read. It’s a sad truth, but some people will remember, and those are the people who I guess we’re trying to connect with.

Is that right, or—

With our covers and our consistency, are we also appealing to those people who read by genre as well?

Steve: It’s a little bit of both because we’re dealing with that really wacky, crazy inconsistent thing called human beings. We’re all that way. Like Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes and we do contradict ourselves.

What you’re really going after is not really like Kevin Kelly’s thousand true fans, but something close to that. It’s finding that super fan, it’s finding those people that are going to follow you no matter what you put out.

The nicest compliment I ever received was at a travel writer conference. I did a workshop and the head of it said he really liked the particular piece and he said, “You’re on your way to being that person of whom it is said, ‘Whatever Steve Brock writes, I will read it. I will read anything from him.’”

I am nowhere near there. I don’t know if I will ever achieve that, but that’s kind of the goal that you want to be for those particular super fans.

Here’s where the brand kicks in. You can still betray even the most loyal fan if you write something that doesn’t feel true to who you are as an author.

For example, let’s think of Richard Osman. Richard Osman, who wrote The Thursday Murder Club and all those—if he were to go and write a science fiction genre book, there would be a ton of people that would follow him and want to read that book.

If, however, that science fiction book had no humor in it, and the characters were downright mean to each other and it was really violent and graphic, he would not only lose those readers, but they would probably be hesitant to pick up the next book in The Thursday Murder Club series because he’s kind of wrecked his brand.

Joanna: It’s so interesting. I’m going to blame you Americans for this because we’re not so sensitive here in the UK, but swearing is a really interesting thing.

When I wrote my first book, in my private life, I do swear sometimes. In my first book, I had naturally written as a British person, had included some words.

The reaction I had from my American readers, who were not bothered by the violence—and I don’t write graphic violence, but I write thrillers, so there’s some body count—the reaction to the swear words made me decide, this is back in 2009 now, I was like, “Okay, I won’t swear in my books.”

So I don’t use swear words at all. It’s so interesting how there are a lot of different genre elements that might put people off, but—

If you use a swear word that you wouldn’t normally use in your books, that can make readers disappear and never come back.

Steve: Honestly, in today’s world—and again, yes, you can blame America, but it has spread everywhere in terms of just how divided we are and how prickly we are in terms of topics and issues—basically anything you do will upset somebody. So you can’t worry about that.

This is why you have to focus on that persona of that one true fan, your best fan, that you’re writing towards. Because if you try to write towards every possible criticism, you’re going to mess up. Just stick to that. Know that not everyone’s going to be happy.

The example we give in a lot of corporate branding workshops: there’s always a good number of people sitting around in the conference room with a MacBook or some Apple product, and I mention to them, “Do you realize that there are far more people in the world that absolutely rabidly hate Apple than there are people that love Apple?”

Just sheer numbers. If you look at PCs, for example, Apple has maybe an 8% market share. Is Apple a bad brand because so many people hate it? The reality is no, it’s a great brand because those who do love it are even more passionate about it.

You’re not going to be able to please everybody, but if you can please those who are in your tribe, then you’re going to succeed. After all, we’re in a “niches are riches” world. The more you niche down, the more profitable it is in today’s world.

So don’t be afraid of being true to who you are, but also being sensitive to who that audience is.

Joanna: I wasn’t saying don’t swear. I was saying if you decide to swear or not swear, stay consistent. The level of sex and the level of violence—if you’re writing fiction, those three things are things that people’s preferences generally stay pretty similar on within a brand.

So the mainstream thriller niche, those things—you could read a lot of mainstream thrillers and they would obey those rules as well.

You mentioned niching down and thinking about that, but one of the things you had in the book—and you have some really big questions in the book because one that is very difficult is: say you are writing action adventure thrillers.

So my Arcane series, a bit like Dan Brown. Dan Brown has a new book out, The Secret of Secrets, and I’m reading it at the moment and it makes me feel both happy because I write similar books to him, but also, “Oh no, I write similar books to him.”

You tackle this: how do I make my work distinctive and stand out amid all the noise? There is so much noise and I’m not competing with Dan Brown, by the way, but in terms of action adventure thrillers, there’s tons of them.

How do we stand out when we also need to please genre readers?

Steve: I would say by knowing what it is that makes you distinctive. Part of it is your voice, part of it is your interest, part of it is just the way you go about framing sentences and plots and so forth.

Take, going back to Stephen King as an example—part of it, for loyal fans, they know this and they don’t necessarily like it, but part of his brand is he doesn’t end his books well. He’s known in a lot of circles as just having pretty mediocre endings. But people don’t care because they know that the journey to get there was really rewarding.

I would say things like that—being known for just a surprise ending, being known for—you know, the O. Henry Awards, right? We look at O. Henry simply because he was so good at those surprise twists at the end that we actually use his name today associated with that. Or even like Hemingway, his style, the short, curt sentences.

There are elements of your book that are going to be unique to you. For example, your voice, your human voice that comes across in your brand here. That’s the main thing that I think people will identify with—separating out you and your products from you the person.

That can get kind of complex, but one of the key things to me is recognizing that your products are going to have a certain voice to them, and that voice in those genres may be different from genre to genre.

You as the author, as you’re interfacing with the public, will have a consistent voice, but it’s still different from you the person from Joanna Penn the person versus Joanna Penn the brand. Those are two different things, and that’s hard for a lot of people. If you think about like an actor playing a character, it works pretty well.

We as authors, when we’re publicly speaking or talking, there’s a character that represents our brand that is going to be, in some ways the best of our personal characteristics, but it’s not us. And that gives you some padding, some distance from it so that you can separate that out and be able to address it.

But going back to your point: knowing what the distinctives are of your own personality and the brand there, and being able to identify those and call those out—that’s what helps you be distinctive.

If you do not know what those distinctives are, how you’re different from Dan Brown in this particular case, it will be very difficult. And by just reading Dan Brown, it starts to seep in, and you might start writing like Dan Brown and you don’t want to do that.

Joanna: I don’t know, getting banned by the Vatican was the best marketing move he ever made! But on this, like you said there, if you don’t know what makes you distinctive—from the side of many authors listening—

I don’t think we do understand what makes us distinctive.

It is very hard. We have this thing in particularly the fiction community of finding your author voice. The reason we say “finding” it is because it’s so hard, it’s not obvious, and it takes practice writing lots of words and then something kind of emerges from it.

I think the question of what is distinctive—this is where AI can help. I’ve certainly done this: if people are happy uploading their work into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini—read the terms and conditions as I always say—but you can then have a discussion with it as to what makes you distinctive, where do you fit in the spectrum of different authors.

I’ve actually found that the most useful tool, even though I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, because it’s so hard to figure it out yourself.

Steve: I totally agree with your last statement there, and I think that is a really good tactic for doing that. I would just add to it another thing that seems obvious, but I know so many authors who have never done this: You ask your audience. You ask your readers.

You take a dozen readers of any of your series, and you ask them, “Okay, why is this book different? What do you love most about this? What makes it distinctive from others?”

Now, they’re not always going to be able to give you a clear idea, but pretty soon it’s really interesting how themes start to emerge there when you start doing that.

I mentioned Richard Osman, for example. I could just whip off those as just three characteristics that make his books different: he has a really good sense of humor, his characters are all caring about each other, and he addresses age from a fresh perspective.

Many, many other authors address those three type of elements, but not in quite the same way. So in the same way with you, there’s going to be elements that are going to be similar to Dan Brown and others, but that combination of those—that’s something that only you do.

Joanna: I guess we’ve been talking a lot about fiction.

Is there anything that nonfiction authors need to think about differently, or do all the principles apply?

Steve: I think the principles are even clearer and in some ways easier to manage for nonfiction writers because you can talk about the subject. If you’re thinking about nonfiction, it’s like, “How do I become the thought leader expert on this?” And then what are the distinctive ways I’m going to treat things?

I can speak to it. Let’s talk about from the standpoint of this book and from my own branding. I have been told by clients over the years—probably the best compliment I get is that “we’ve hired branding experts before, they come in, they tell us what they think our brand should be, and then we fire them.”

“We don’t like consultants, but you don’t act like a consultant. You came in and you listened and you heard us, and then you didn’t tell us what we should be. You told us what we already knew, but we didn’t have the words to use to explain that.”

So that tells me that my own brand is: there’s a high degree of empathy, there’s a high degree of listening, but there’s also an element of synthesis. I can start to unpack those and say, “Okay, this is why my nonfiction book or works, in particular this book on branding for artists and writers, is going to be different.”

Another element would be simplifying. I’ve seen too many organizations, particularly working with nonprofits, that fail because they’ve tried to take on too much. So a key part of this is making it simple.

You start to understand what those elements—simplicity, empathy, synthesis—those things can become brand points, characteristics, distinctives, that then I could apply to other nonfiction works that I do.

Joanna: So then once we’ve got these, I guess, quite nebulous words around branding, how do we turn that into effective book marketing?

How do we go from this broader idea to specifics that will actually sell books?

Steve: I would say listen to your episode from, I think it was in August, where you read from Marketing for Authors, and you have the entire list of the specifics there. So those are the tactics that you can do in terms of selling more books.

Marketing is downstream from branding. But here’s how branding can help you sell more books—two ways: internal and external.

First is the internal. Branding gives you the clarity of the messages that you want to communicate because it gives you a sense of what it is that you’re really about. There’s almost this idea of mindset that comes and the confidence that comes from having that clarity about what you stand for, what you believe.

One of the examples in the book is this exercise of “I believe… I exist to…” Just that simple sense of knowing what your purpose is and your beliefs and values are—that alone can help provide that clarity. So there’s clarity, there’s mindset, there’s confidence.

Externally, your messaging becomes so much clearer because you know how to talk about yourself. That’s the thing—authors, we are great at telling stories, but we’re terrible at telling our own story.

That’s what branding is about, is helping you to tell your own story better, so it builds the confidence, gives you the story that you want others to tell so that they can in turn tell others about you.

That’s a huge piece of it. It’s like the game of telephone. If you have a very clear and consistent message, they can tell others about you in a way that they couldn’t before.

I think another aspect about this is that quite frankly, most authors can go out there and ask ChatGPT, “Give me 20 tactics that I need to do to market my book,” and you’ll get them right away. There’s no lack of access to information on how to market your book out there. The problem is we don’t do it.

The reason we don’t do it is because usually we’re afraid. We’re either afraid of what might happen, what people might think. We don’t think we know enough to do it. We do all these things where we do not act.

Part of the beauty of the brand—you say it’s nebulous concepts, but I would say that the nebulous concepts, the intangibles of life: trust, relationships, love, friendship, hope, accomplishment. Those are all nebulous concepts, but those are also the most powerful drivers that we have in life.

I think the same thing is here. You get that nebulous concept of knowing what you’re doing and how you’re different and how to tell your story better, and that builds your confidence. So you are far more likely to engage in doing those tactics that are going to help you sell the books.

Joanna: I wonder if it’s also that in book marketing we do rely a lot on things like paid ads where the book cover is the thing that draws people in, and so having this sort of whole-self approach is less used.

Podcasting is a game, I think, where this kind of branding that you are talking about can really come across.

Is that a good way for authors to think about pitching different podcasts around elements of their brand—in terms of their story behind the books, the person behind the books?

Steve: Yes, I think podcast is one channel for that. I mean, your blog, if you have one, even your social media—all of those are ways for the audience to connect with you as the author, and you’re absolutely spot on.

Because the problem a lot of times with author marketing is we confuse the author brand—which is almost like the equivalent of an organizational brand, but you’re just a one-person organization—we confuse that with a product brand. The book itself is a product. It has in some ways its own brand, so it has to relate.

Just like I’m selling products on a shelf in a store, you’re going to have one reaction to the product itself, and you’re going to compare that to other products on the shelf.

Over time, if you find that there is a particular product from a particular manufacturer that you really like, you’re going to be more loyal and you’re going to start looking for other products in that line.

So the podcast, the blog, all these other touchpoints give people a way to engage with you so they know what other products… Here’s a key thing about all this: think in terms of ecosystems.

We tend to think in terms of one-offs, like, “Oh, okay, I’ve got to work on this particular book. I’m launching this particular book. I’m doing the Facebook ads for this particular book,” and not thinking about how it relates back.

To your earlier question or comment about having consistency in the book covers, same type of thing. You want people to know that there is this through line, that there’s this consistent connection back to something more.

If they can connect that to you as a person through the podcast or other ways of having more of the personality of you and everything else, all the better.

Joanna: I did want to also talk to you about the product itself, your book, which is this workbook. It’s more than a workbook though because I think I have called some of my workbooks—they really only just contain the questions, not the full text.

Mine are also not designed and laid out as yours is. It really is a beautiful product in the layout, in the way it’s done, and it makes me want to do better with mine. I wondered if you could maybe—

Talk about this product of a branding workbook because I feel it’s so much more than that. And any other thoughts on multiple streams of income?

Steve: Thank you for that. I would say thank you also because unbeknownst to you, you were actually one of the reasons for this particular format.

It was probably a year or so ago on one of the podcasts where you said, “Amazon’s pulling my workbooks because they’re pulling everybody’s workbooks because they’re finding that people are using AI to say, ‘Hey, Claude, give me 40 different questions about this topic and some exercises,’ and then they add in some fill-in-the-blank lines and publish it on Amazon.”

So the idea of that traditional fill-in-the-blank workbook, I think it made me hesitant to try something like that.

The other thing was I started this off as a course, and so the course creation—I had a lot of the graphics and different things in place, and it just ended up being that this became a hybrid.

So it’s both a workbook and a book, but I think this is key, and I would say for a lot of listeners, if you’re doing something particularly like this in nonfiction, to consider this approach.

It’s not just a hybrid from a formatting standpoint, it’s a hybrid in terms of the outcome or the goal of the book. Here’s the thing I say in the book: The goal of this book is not to make you an expert on branding. The goal of this book is to help you create your own creative brand.

So this book, I do not care. After you’re done with it, you’ve filled it in, it’s an artifact of your learning. Every other book I’ve worked on has always been about educating, and this one is about accomplishment.

I think people today—we have too much information out there. People want to achieve things and get things done, and so the more that you can think of formats that are going to help with that, I think the better.

The other thing about it is breaking it down to smaller bites and takeaways that people can use.

I’m also mindful of just the positioning of it. I think it was Jonah Berger in his book Contagious, who talks about venture capitalists and how when they’re evaluating a company, they look at it and say, “Is this company a vitamin or a painkiller?”

A vitamin is something that’s very good for you and very useful and very healthy, but you can put it off. A painkiller—if you got pain, you need it right away.

My previous book, The Creative Wild on creativity, it was very vitamin-like. I would actually say that even Hidden Travel was more of a vitamin. It’s good for you, it’s interesting, it’s about meaningful travel, all of that. But it’s not a pressing felt need for a lot of people.

I think this book on branding for those who are struggling with marketing and everything—I positioned this one, it really is more of a painkiller. So the question for all of you out there listening is—

How can you make your nonfiction work more of a painkiller?

Then look at other formats that are related to it. Another key aspect of this is that the workbook has a paper and a Kindle version, but then the worksheets—I call them worksheets—I have two versions: a Google Doc version and a fillable or editable PDF version that are on my website that have all the questions.

It doesn’t have all the explanatory text, but it has all the questions and all the fields. But what I’m doing is I’m sending people to my website and they have to sign up for it. So now all of a sudden you’ve got them into the broader ecosystem there. And there could be follow-ups, right?

You’ve already written the marketing book, so I don’t need to do that, but I could take any chapter and go into much more detail about it. I could do this and there’s a tiny element in this thing on choose-your-own-adventure.

There are ways of formatting a book so it’s more of a choose-your-own-adventure or a scavenger hunt, which is more of a guidebook that could help people. You can have additional merchandise that’s related to it. All these different things.

I have a friend, Naomi Kinsman, who has a “creativity in a box” type of thing. So these boxed elements, lots of ancillary products that you can add to that for multiple streams of income as well.

Joanna: Your book also leads to speaking engagements. It really is—it’s beautiful. I do want to emphasize that, but you’ve also made it harder on yourself. So one of the reasons that we as independent authors have done more basic workbooks and have done more basic books is because of the cost of production. I wondered—

Has this made it more complicated for you to sell?

Or are there different versions of the print edition for, say, Amazon print-on-demand versus selling from your website, for example? Because it looks very high quality.

Steve: Yes, but it is the same for all of us, right? The more heavy lifting you do upfront, the easier you make it for others. So yes, it has been a pain. I will not argue about that.

I think the writing of this was the easiest book of all because it’s just 27 years worth of expertise that I could just—I didn’t have to research anything. I just whipped it out. That part was easy.

Formatting it, getting into all that—pain in the ankle. But I think that it makes it more accessible for people, because a lot of people have the same reaction that you have. With the title, like Brand Something Beautiful, you kind of want it to look that way.

That has been actually an allure to people. I don’t think that a lot of the graphics got translated into the Kindle version of it. The tablet version that’s full color works, the Kindle version—I had to scale down a lot. But that’s okay because it still delivers the product as well.

Joanna: I love AI, everybody knows that, and I use it a lot, but I also don’t like the sort of mass-produced books that are coming out. So anyone who puts more effort into physical production of beautiful products is going to stand out.

I mentioned about what is it that makes you distinctive, and I’m at this kind of point in my career where I also want to be known for making beautiful books. So I love that you’ve used the word “beautiful.” We all love beautiful books and we buy stuff because we love covers and we love the foil, and we love all the cool stuff.

Just so people know, on your website, brandsomethingbeautiful.com, you can see examples of the interior pages so people can see how that is done.

Did you do this yourself or did you work with a designer?

Steve: I worked with the designer actually, though the full disclosure is my son is a graphic designer and a brilliant one. So he did all the graphic elements.

What I did was—and this is taking the extra step—I remember there was, I think it was Steve Zaillian, some producer in Hollywood years ago who’s been dramatically successful, and someone said, “How did you become so good at this?” And he said, “Because I looked around at the work that needed to be done and I looked at the level of effort that other people were making, and I just did a little bit more.”

I think on here, I upped my game using Adobe InDesign for the layouts and things like that. I would encourage people that there’s so much you can do in Canva these days. Just dive into it and get competent in it. But I think there are also times when you do want some professional design help on it as well.

Joanna: It’s interesting you mentioned Canva because I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about my gothic cathedral book, and over the summer I was looking at my photos,and obviously you are a photographer as well and you do travel stuff, and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there’s so many ways this book could go in terms of how the beautiful layout is done.”

It almost just opens up a completely different form of creativity, even though that’s not something I’m focusing on right now because it feels like a whole other area. I also feel like it does help set us apart. As you said, it’s that extra effort in terms of making a beautiful interior as well as a beautiful cover.

I think nonfiction, this is easier because, fiction, obviously the inside of a novel is plain text mostly—you can do some extra title pages or maps or whatever, but I think these nonfiction books can have all kinds of elements of design that help people: pull-outs and quotes and diagrams and all this kind of thing.

So it is a really creative process.

Steve: It totally is. I just read a book—we’re about to head off to Portugal soon, just for vacation—but I was reading a book that takes place in Lisbon called The Murderer’s Ape, like ape as in gorilla. It’s about a gorilla who can speak and is an engineer on this guy’s boat.

The long story of it is at the beginning of each chapter are just kind of these beautiful hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations, and just having that makes it such a richer experience. Little things like that.

So there’s a case where, if I had more time in my life and everything, I would be focusing on illustrated adult books, which are fictional like a novel, but that I illustrate.

What is it? The T.S. Spivet by… can’t remember his name. They made it into a movie, but The Life of T.S. Spivet. Anyway, he does that. It’s a brilliant book because of the illustrations that are on the margins of almost every single page. So there are ways of doing that even in fiction.

Joanna: We’ve all got to do more creative stuff in order to stand out, and for ourselves as well as for the readers. It kind of just brings the material alive. So I think that’s really cool.

But you mentioned there heading off to Portugal, and you and I connected around our love of travel. Hidden Travel I think is a wonderful book and you came on my Books and Travel podcast and we talked about that.

This is an interesting thing, right? Even for your brand, because brandsomethingbeautiful.com to me doesn’t look like the same person who did Hidden Travel. The conversation we had around that, to me, is very different conversation to the one we’ve had today.

So how does travel weave into your business? Or do you feel like those two things are quite different?

Steve: Oh, you called me out because it’s like, you know, do what I say, not what I do. Because I totally feel that way. Honestly, from my own brand and what I’m trying to do, I probably should. You know, what is it? The cobbler’s children have no shoes.

Joanna: The cobbler’s children have no shoes or something like that.

Steve: Right, exactly. Well, but the answer to that is, what you’re going to see over time is I start to build out more of particularly some of the social media stuff for Brand Something Beautiful, and this goes back to the idea of confidence.

Once the book is done, I’m into getting it out there. I’m like you, I do not like video, I do not like to be on video, et cetera. So I’ve never done anything, but I decided for this book I’m going to do Instagram reels.

One of the things I did was—I think it was either Gemini or ChatGPT—I just said, “Okay, here are the themes that I want to cover. These are going to be like blog posts and Substack type of things and LinkedIn articles over the next 12 weeks. Give me—and I’m going to be in these places in Portugal. I want to create reels that illustrate these points. Give me some ideas.”

It came out with some really wonderful ideas like the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. It said the point is that one of the points in the book is that the brand is the bridge between the making of something beautiful and the marketing of it.

Most people, artists especially, and writers, we hate marketing, but if you do the branding right, it’s the bridge between it, so it makes the marketing easier. And so then have a shot of me holding the book in front of the bridge and blah, blah, blah.

Joanna: Nice. That is great, actually, that’s a really good prompt. Thank you for that.

Steve: Yes. So those type of things. I’m definitely using those, so you will start to see a connection between the travel and the brand, but it will emerge over time because in a way, I have my brandwallop.com, which is the company, the agency I’ve run for decades.

That’s really more for corporations and nonprofits. So this Brand Something Beautiful is really more the individual brand type of stuff. It is exactly what you were talking about earlier. There’s some intentionality to it. I have not fully lived and leaned into that as much.

The travel and adventure—because the theme of my other book, The Creative Wild, was about what does it mean to create adventurously? It really is like a sequel to Hidden Travel in the sense of what do we learn from travel that we can apply to our creativity?

How do you create adventurously? What does that mean? What does that look like? How does discovery fit into creativity? All of that type of thing.

So that will all get woven in there. But the main thing of all is that even if it never shows up in my external artifacts and manifestation of the brand, it is affecting me as a person, as a creative.

As you know, in fact, one of the quotes—I paraphrase, I should say—from you, I think it was on the St… was it St. Cuthbert, the one you did in the southern part of England?

Joanna: The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury.

Steve: Okay, the Pilgrims Way. You said something after that in one of the podcasts, which I have told so many other people because it is so true. When I heard you, it’s like, “Okay, validation.”

It was this: “I went on this pilgrimage thinking I would have all this time walking and I would have all this time to come up with new ideas. And I had like virtually none on the trip itself.”

Joanna: Hmm.

Steve: But then two weeks later, after I got back, I couldn’t stop the ideas. I was overwhelmed with all the new ideas that came, and to me that’s the benefit of travel for all of us.

Yes, you can use the sites for, if you’re writing a novel, for getting the research. I know you love doing that and that’s a key piece of it, but just the experience of getting out of your comfort zone, being in a foreign place, particularly where your senses are picking up on things.

You notice things better, you pay better attention. All of that is going to help you as a creative.

Joanna: It’s so interesting and I’m glad we kind of finished with your own personal journey of growing into this other side of yourself as well, or trying to knit them together. I think that’s brilliant. It certainly shows that we’re all on this journey. This is a lifetime of experience and we just keep creating.

So people, if you are like, “Oh, I just don’t know,” just keep creating and something will emerge, won’t it?

Steve: It is absolutely true, and that would be one thing I didn’t mention earlier, really quickly, that relates to this in terms of those other streams of income: this idea of combinatorial thinking, where everything you do affects everything else in a good way.

To me in terms of multiple streams of income, the question is, rather than thinking of these one-offs, but this idea of ecosystems—how it all relates to each other and how can I leverage that?

I may do this, but I would say advice to anyone out there is: instead of selling individual courses—not instead of, in addition to selling like individual courses and books—start thinking in terms of membership programs.

There’s a ton of membership programs out there, but most of those memberships, or even like the subscriptions, like if you have a paid subscription on Substack or something like that, or even Patreon, is to treat those less as just like this gathering place for people to get additional content, but to make it more achievement-oriented.

What can I accomplish? Are there steps? Think in terms of the audience’s pathways and their journey through that, so that membership has these elements of like, “I’m gaining something and I’m growing through this.”

Key to that is gamification. Things like levels of rewards, of access, of just status. All these different things we can learn from gamification that you can be applying to that.

Quite frankly, I don’t think you have done this overtly or consciously, Joanna, but I think you do a great job of that. Like with your Patreon, you don’t just say, “Okay, I’m going to give you access to just additional content.”

Yes, you do that, but in addition, there’s a sense of belonging, there’s a sense of participation, there’s a sense of access that you get to you. And all those little elements really are about the key.

The last section of Brand Something Beautiful is all about creating experiences of delight rather than trying to see your audience as someone you want to sell to. It’s someone you want to delight. So what do you do? What can you do with every little touchpoint?

All these little touchpoints add up. So whether it’s travel and how that helps us to learn new things, or it’s intentionally using your multiple streams of income—all the different books, merch, all that stuff coming together. If you focus on it being about delighting your audience, it just changes the whole way you look at them.

Joanna: Fantastic.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Steve: Probably the easiest way for the purposes here would be BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or Substack, brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Steve. That was great.

Steve: Thank you.

The post Brand Something Beautiful: How Authors Can Stand Out In A Crowded Market with Steve Brock first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you know when it’s time to wrap up one phase of your life and move on to the next? What’s the secret to staying connected as a writer when you’re working alone? And if you have multiple passions and endless ideas, how do you actually finish things instead of constantly starting new projects? Pilar Orti gives her tips in this interview.

In the intro, Writing Storybundle; An honest accounting from an extensive self audit of an indie author publishing business [The Author Stack]; Money books; Direct purchases through ChatGPT; Book discovery and GEO; The ultimate guide to AEO [Lenny’s Podcast]; Conversions through Chat [SearchEngineLand]; SORA video app; AI for eCommerce and Amazon Sellers; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Pilar Orti is a nonfiction and memoir author, as well as a voiceover artist, podcaster, and Pilates instructor.

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

• Wrapping up life phases with books. Using writing to process and close chapters of your personal and professional journey
• Connection strategies for remote workers and writers. Understanding your own connection style and respecting others’ preferences
• Co-writing across continents. The practical process of collaborating with someone you’ve never met in person
• Using AI as a writing collaborator. How generative AI helped overcome the blank page and create a unified voice
• Knowing when to end projects. Recognising the signs that it’s time to stop versus push through challenges
• Being a finisher in a world of ideas. Balancing multiple interests while actually completing projects

You can find Pilar at PilarWrites.com or on LinkedIn.

Transcript of interview with Pilar Orti

Jo: Pilar Orti is a nonfiction and memoir author, as well as a voiceover artist, podcaster, and Pilates instructor. So welcome to the show, Pilar.

Pilar: Thank you very much, Jo. Hello everyone. Hello creatives. It’s exciting to talk to you.

Jo: Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing and podcasting, and your multi-passionate career.

Pilar: I’m going to try and give you the bit that’s more related to writing, because if not, we’ll be here for half an hour just with me bubbling on.

I always liked writing, and I was thinking about this, I wrote my first play to be performed when I was seven. I got all my friends together and we did this little show. I think it was about a soldier or something, I don’t know why.

All throughout my teens I kept writing plays and got my friends together to do them, and we put on the shows. Looking back, I think for me writing has always been about sharing. All the writing I’ve done, I’ve always wanted it to be public, so I’ve never journaled or anything like that.

I continued writing plays. Eventually I set up a theater company with a friend and we did some plays. Then I did a translation of a Lorca play, When Five Years Pass. That was the first time that I started to think that my work could be published in some way.

So I looked for literary managers in theaters to see if they were interested in the show. I even sent it to Samuel French and Oberon Books, all these small presses that specialized in theater. They all came back with that same thing: “It’s a great translation, but it’s really niche and nobody’s going to want to see this Lorca play.”

So I started to think about how to put it out there and came across self-publishing. Once I saw that my work could get out there relatively easily—I didn’t have to go through the whole trying to find a publisher process—I started to write a lot more.

I continued doing some stuff for the theater company and then I started blogging as well. We’re talking now about the end of the 90s, 2000s.

Then I wrote a book called The A to Z of Spanish Culture, which was supposed to be a nice project with lots of friends. We would each take a letter of the alphabet and of course, like these projects go, everyone dropped out and I ended up doing the whole thing myself.

Jo: We should just say at this point, you’re Spanish.

Are you writing at this point in English or in both?

Pilar: So I went to an English school. I landed there when I was five, in Madrid. So I’m bilingual. My first written language is English and my first spoken language is Spanish. Unfortunately I’ve dropped writing in Spanish and I really struggle, but my entire academic career has also been in English.

So I think English is the language I feel most comfortable in when I’m writing. Everything I’ve written has been in English.

Looking at The A to Z of Spanish Culture, I was sharing an office with a theater company and a couple of other theater companies at the time. At some point I mentioned this book, and someone said, “Oh, you’re a writer or you want to publish some books. You have to listen to this great podcast called The Creative Penn.”

That was my gateway into the whole world of podcasting. I mean, I knew about podcasting because I’m also a voiceover artist—I’ve been one since ’98—but that really opened up that world.

So I continued writing, and my relationship with writing up to a couple of years ago was just that I wrote mainly nonfiction about things I wanted to write about, looking back at where I was at that time.

Then I published a book on physical theater, a very small book, just as I was leaving the theater company. I also wrote a little book about my life as a voiceover as I saw that work was starting to dry out. I think I’m wrapping up parts of my life with books.

Last year, as I came to the end of my consultancy career talking about working with remote teams, I spent some time just writing, either editing something I was working on or writing. I decided after trying it for a few months that now was the time to write all those books

I wanted to write and to also start looking at my writing as the main thing I was focusing on, because as you said, I always do lots of things. So that’s where I am with the writing.

Jo: I like this idea of wrapping up parts of your life with books. I actually think that’s a really interesting comment and I definitely feel that. I guess I’ve started to do that too. I feel that it’s true for me, for my fiction as well.

My Desecration, Delirium and Deviance series, I wrote when we were in London and they’re about London. When I moved to Bath, I wrote my Matt Walker series, which was set in Bath. Then the Pilgrimage book was about that pilgrimage. So I really like that insight, that sort of wrapping up parts of your life with books.

Just coming back, you said you finished the consulting side. Was that a decision? I really wanted to get your insights on this finishing up things.

Why did you stop doing the consulting side of things?

Pilar: It’s a mixture of things and I think also a great reflection of why do we end things, especially professional ones. I set up a consultancy called “Virtual Not Distant” around maybe nine, ten years ago to help leaders of remote teams and remote teams. Of course that was a different world then.

Then through the pandemic, as we know, it all exploded. So I started to get more work, but maybe not the kind of work I really wanted to do. I was coming into helping remote teams and remote work as an alternative way of working and something that could be embraced and set up carefully and in a sustainable way.

What I found after all the lockdowns and all the remote work—the forced remote work—and as organizations started to adopt maybe a little bit more flexible working, hybrid work, the clients or the people I would end up working with were not the ones that I should be helping.

Or at least I couldn’t help them in the way I wanted to help them because I have my vision. What had been left was a very different world. I just wasn’t comfortable anymore with what I was finding when I was going in.

At the same time, let’s be honest, the work started to dry up. There wasn’t this need anymore for people who needed to work remotel. They’d figured out some version that worked more or less for them. I see it with my peers as well, that the whole cohort, almost everyone has pivoted or shifted.

So it was a mixture of both. I have to say that I don’t think the market wanted me anymore as much, because before the pandemic it was great fun. But also I couldn’t shape that way of working like I wanted to. So I decided to write more instead about it, as you say, to wrap up.

Jo: That’s interesting. So this new book, Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams, this is really, as you’ve said, summing up all your thoughts and what your ideal situation is, I guess. Lots of people listening work their day jobs separately and often write alone.

Writers, we’re often disconnected in many ways and we are not really in teams, but certainly I feel like connection and disconnection are huge themes for writers.

Give us some tips for connecting with other humans when we work disconnected.

Pilar: Unfortunately one of the reasons I left consultancy was because all my answers were “it depends,” and that’s why I moved into Pilates teaching because that is very set and “it depends” very little. A few things—when I’m talking about wrapping up, I think that’s going to be my theme.

In 2019, this season of Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams was a podcast season that I created with a collaborator and with lots of other people actually, to talk about this theme of loneliness in remote teams, because we saw that was something that remote teams were struggling with a lot then.

We created a seven-part episode series around it. For all these years I’ve been looking back at that and thinking there’s a lot of material here which could be useful for a lot of people. We don’t want this loneliness thing of working alone becoming a problem because of loneliness.

What this book shows, what the podcast showed, and my co-author Bree Katy actually led most of those interviews, is that you need a high level of self-awareness to really find how you connect with others and then a level of awareness about how other people like to connect. So that’s why it really “it depends.”

I think that level of self-awareness is:

What does it mean for me to feel like I belong in a community?

Like I belong with other professionals? Like I connect to my collaborators? What is it about it? I came up with three things which you can look at.

Do you connect across the work? So is that where you really get your value of “Yes, we’re doing something together and this is interesting. This makes me want to be with you. We are together in this.” So is it across the work, or is it around the work?

Is it actually the conversations like this one, Joanna, that we’re having, which is around what’s happening? Or is it away from the work? So some people do not connect through the work they do, but they really connect with somebody else’s personal story or personal life or hobbies, etc.

I think work connection has a general meaning that’s out there, but it’s very wide. In understanding how you connect or when you prefer to connect in each way—because that also happens—then you can seek those opportunities, which can be, as you’re saying, in our case, online communities.

But is it enough to be on a forum-type community and that’s enough for you to feel like you belong? Or do you actually need to find people who will go on a Zoom call with you? The technology has opened up lots of avenues and this is what’s exciting and complicated.

If you’re someone who connects through writing and through being okay being a little bit anonymous, you’ve got that. And if you’re someone who likes to have a more interactive experience, seeing people and being real time, you can look for meetups online or in person.

Jo: I think, like you said, it’s understanding yourself and being self-aware and then respecting other people too. For example, we’ve emailed for many years. I was on your podcast years ago, but we’ve not hung out. Right now we’re on audio only. We’re not on video because I prefer audio, especially later in the day.

So we are connected, but we are not closely connected. And yet, I would say we’re aware of each other and we are in a sort of adjoining community. That’s completely different from somebody who wants to be on video talking to people on Slack every day, wanting to be always chatting with other people.

We have to learn how we can do this sustainably because that’s the other thing, isn’t it? I can do video, but it’s so tiring to me that I can’t do it sustainably.

How can people learn more about what works for them in this connection way?

Pilar: And I think you mentioned as well, respecting other people. I would add to that asking people and learning to find out about other people. That’s how we can respect each other.

The learning aspect, there’s something that my friend Lisette Sutherland is very hot on, which are called personal manual. These are things that people in remote teams do where they say how they work best or how they prefer to connect with other people or how they like to spend their day.

Because what happens when you’re away from people is that you’re missing a lot of information and sometimes we have to make this information explicit.

If I’m trying to build a relationship, a professional relationship with someone, or if I want to connect a little bit more around the work, then I can say a little bit more about, “Well, I much prefer an audio conversation next time. Can we do audio?”

Or “Hey, I had a great time doing this video thing. Do you ever meet up with other colleagues?” or “When we talk together, do you prefer email?”

I think questioning how other people want to connect as well will help us then to strengthen those relationships. Sometimes we can maybe try something that we hadn’t tried before or find out how other people are doing it.

For example, I get a lot of pleasure from reading people’s comments on Google Docs when I’m working on something together. So for me, working on a shared document really gives me something more than if an email is coming backwards and forwards because the comments are always there.

In a way, when I go into a Google Doc, it’s like I’m going to see someone else. I’m going to see the people I’m working with in the shared document. So that says to me, okay, if I can, I’ll ask if we can work in this way.

Whereas other people prefer email for whatever reason, or audio as well. Audio recordings. So I think, like you said, being aware of all the different modes of communication and seeing when we go, “Ah, yes, okay. Now I’m really comfortable,” or “I’m really excited now about this.”

Jo: It’s funny, I was just thinking then, a lot of people pitch me by sending a video and I never ever, ever, ever, ever will click on any video if they recorded some Loom or even a personalized YouTube video. I literally will never look at them.

Even people will send me an audio message and then expect me to listen to it. Even though I am generally audio, I’m like, definitely not. So this is about understanding for pitching as well.

Sometimes you just assume something because you might be comfortable with it, but that other person on the other end just might not be.

It’s also fascinating to me that you love Google Doc comments because I hate that too. Is it our age as well, do you think? I’m 50 and I feel like Slack messaging, for example, completely passed me by.

Pilar: I don’t think it’s age because I’m only three years older than you. As you say, I love Slack, but I have a way of using it. That’s another thing, this feels very strange, but when you’re working with someone in remote teams, you have to make explicit things like this.

So if you decide you’re going to use Slack, okay, how are we going to use it? When can I get you urgently? And is it okay to wait two days to reply to your message? It is, by the way, unless it’s urgent. But it’s the use of it. That’s another very important thing, Joanna.

When we are going more into the working together or even in communities, the technology is really widespread, is ubiquitous at the moment, and a lot of people have used either this technology or something similar. We all have our own ways of doing it.

So we need to agree on one or two things so that we use it in the same way, so that we don’t get frustrated. For example, if you prefer to wait three or four days, and I’m the one that wants everything urgently.

I think it’s just being explicit. I don’t really know because I only worked with people who were like 10 years younger or, well, my collaborator Bree is 20 years younger and we got on well with the docs.

Jo: Yes. It’s just not imposing judgment on other people based on how they prefer to do things. It’s just like, well, we have to agree on a way to work together. But as you said, you’ve co-written this book, Connection and Disconnection, with a writer in Australia without meeting in person. So obviously you use Google Docs, but—

Tell us more about that process of co-writing.

Pilar: I love co-writing, and to be honest, I’ve been waiting to co-write a book for ages. I did co-create a book together, which was a collection of blog posts with my colleague Maya Middlemiss, a long time ago.

This has been getting something almost from scratch, so I think the fact that we had done that podcast season is important because we’d already worked together. So there were a couple of things that meant that the book got—as I’m talking to you, it’s not finished yet, but hopefully when this comes out, it will be at least on preorder.

There were a few things: one, we already had the material, but the material needed shaping. That actually took a few years because we started one process that didn’t work and then we started a new process which has worked.

I think that has been finding that we could both hook onto a process that was sustainable and that would get us both onto the computer. That’s been really important.

I’d met Bree more or less a few times working on the season together. We also did do about a monthly catch-up on Zoom or Google Hangouts, whatever, online. I think that was quite important because it just meant that we could just relax a little bit more in the conversation, and the conversation could go anywhere.

Of course we could make faster decisions, so we had that. We didn’t have that as a rule, but it happened and neither of us are very meeting people. So we were fine with that.

You would’ve hated this process—we had so many Google Docs. But what we decided was instead of using a chat-based application or email, we started talking in a Google document. It could be a Word document, so a shared document where we would work a little bit on the book.

Then we’d check out at the end of the day and we just write a few things. Or if something had happened in our personal lives that the other person needed to know, we wrote it there.

What’s really nice about that is, one, we didn’t end up with more chat messages. We always knew our conversation was only there, our written conversation. And now we have a record. We have a whole year of this project from the start, right to the end. We might not do anything with it, but it’s really nice to have.

From the practical point of view of working on the text, we’ve used shared documents. We split up the chapters—we had one person writing the first draft and then we went in and commented, etc.

The one thing I do have to say, and thanks to you, Joanna, because you’ve introduced me to generative AI—I’d been playing a lot with ChatGPT, Claude, feeding into my own writing work, and that’s why I approached Bree again last year in 2024 to start to work on this again.

We’d already tried to put the book together and we’d found it very daunting because we had transcripts from seven episodes plus all the full interviews of about seven or eight guests that Bree had done. We were finding it really difficult to come to the page.

So I ran by her, I said, “What do you feel about generative AI?” I ran some ideas via Claude. I asked it to maybe generate some text based on the transcripts from our interviews. We saw that there could be something there. What Bree was saying was really useful for her was the fact that we created a project in Claude, which had all the transcripts.

So you could say, “Oh, at some point we talked about somebody who had moved to the middle of nowhere and suddenly realized that their career prospects had decreased or something. Who was that? What episode was that in and what did they say?”

Then instead of having to dig through all these transcripts, suddenly we had our own assistant that pulled it out.

The other thing was that for some chunks it started to give us a common voice. It’s not that Claude was writing everything, but it started to smooth the differences in both our voices. So we found one voice for the book without, and you can’t really tell who’s writing which bit, but it’s still us. It’s really still us.

So it’s been interesting. We’ve had technology as an intermediary, not just in the communication process, but also in the writing process.

Jo: I think that’s great. I certainly think these tools are really useful for when you have your own material. I’d also suggest to people listening, Google’s Notebook LM, where you can actually load the transcripts and it will only use those. Whereas the other models will kind of bring insights from the rest of the model. So I think that’s super useful.

You did mention that you basically failed the first time around and the process didn’t work the first time around, so you said it was just too daunting. Was it literally just the volume of stuff and you didn’t know where to start?

What other insights do you have from failing that first time around? Because I feel like a lot of people when they approach any sort of big project, do maybe fail at things and then they don’t come back to it.

Any insights from the failure and getting over that?

Pilar: I think it was the fact that we were always coming to a blank page. So we had the material, and especially Bree, she was closer to the material and she had less time than I had as well. So I think time was definitely a factor, which is why I went back to her and said, “Look, I think this can save us some time,” as well as help us in other ways. So time was really a factor.

The blank page was a factor, whereas this time we felt that we could start with something, even if it was that I prompted the generative AI with this prompt to write, I don’t know, chapter one, and this is what it’s come up with.

“Okay. Well I like this point. I like this point. Yes. Okay. So we can now work on chapter one, but at least we’ve got something that we could both start from as well,” which is quite important.

So I think it was the classic, it was time and it was the blank page, and also this feeling of how we had organized the material. Again, technology, you need to find the right space for you to work in.

We were using Notion, which has a lot of moving parts, and in the end we just went back to transcripts, PDFs, Google Doc, which are nicely set in our folder. So that was another learning—we needed our own office space that worked for us and the first time it didn’t quite work and the second time it helped us.

Jo: I’ve tried Notion several times. I even had like a tutorial with someone and it just didn’t work for me. It didn’t click at all. I think this is really important for people listening.

You can hear people say, “Oh, well this transformed my process. It’s just amazing,” but it doesn’t work for your brain.

You can’t force it into a different way. Try things. I have tried Notion several times and I’m like, no, I just cannot get it. I still use Scrivener for my first drafts and I just paste everything into Scrivener.

When I co-write, I have co-written several times using Google Drive and Google Docs as the sort of beginning place. It is still probably the simplest idea, isn’t it?

Pilar: Yes. I think Google Docs is definitely simple because you’ve got a blank page, but now of course you have to push away the AI that’s trying to do everything.

I think what you said about why—what was it about the first time that didn’t work—is really important because this is something that is often missing, one as individuals and then also definitely as collaborators and in teams, is that we try something, it doesn’t work, and we don’t stop to think why.

It doesn’t mean we go, “Why?” and then we try and make it work again. No. We think, “Okay, why didn’t this work? What else could work?” Or sometimes we’ve got the right technology, but we need to adapt something.

So we ask “Why didn’t this work?” and we went, “Okay, maybe what we need to do is something different.” Or actually, like you say, “Well, this is not going to work, but now we know that when we look for the next thing, it’s got to have this, this, and this.”

But that step, especially because we don’t like to think back, “Why didn’t that work?” It’s quite hard work for the brain. But I think it’s quite important. I feel like some apps, I find them so easy to use and other ones they just…

I mean, technology and humans, they go together. For me, technology, sometimes you have to have that connection with it. It’s easy. You can get your brain around it, you can get your hands around it in a way, metaphorically. I think we should acknowledge that and it’s fine.

Jo: Yes, exactly. Use what works for you.

I wanted to circle back on the sort of ending things, because you have paused and you’ve done the seasons. Like you said, this book was born out of a seven-part season. You’ve paused some of your shows, you’ve ended others. Maybe just talk about how do you know when something is ending? When is it not failure?

Because you’ve just explained how something didn’t work, so that was a failure, but you did decide to end that. Whereas some of your podcasts, and like your consulting, you ended that. It wasn’t a failure. You made a decision to end it.

How do you know when something is finished and end it in a way that feels positive and satisfying?

Pilar: For me it’s when I really don’t want to do something anymore or when something is a bit of a drag. Sometimes there are some signs.

I’ll go back to a very long time ago. I used to teach physical theater and acting a long time ago. I was doing maybe two hours a week only in a drama school around the corner. I went on my way there and every now and then, because this was before lots of email, I would turn up and my class would’ve been canceled.

It was great because I still got paid, but my class would’ve been canceled and no one had told me. I found myself walking one day towards the school going, “I wish, I hope that the class is being canceled” and I went, “Okay. That’s it. This is something I don’t want to do anymore.”

So there are those kinds of signs that I really listen to—when I really don’t want to do something.

Then the podcasts, the podcasts are creative projects, so they’re driven by a curiosity at that moment. Or I have to say, a lot of the shows I’ve done, I’ve done with co-hosts. Sometimes I’ve just done it because I wanted to do something with this person and something has come up.

I think that even with podcasting, because you mentioned the podcasts in particular, I didn’t have anything else to say. I had nothing more to say and I thought, “Well, that’s it.”

So I was doing a show called Management Cafe with Tim Burgess, who is actually the boss of Bree, who I’m writing with. Both of us have left the organizational world. Neither of us lead people anymore. We were like, “What are we doing?”

The show Management Cafe was just like therapy and reminiscing of how it used to be and what happened to this and what happened to that.

I think understanding, especially if it’s a creative project that you keep doing, and suddenly you’re like, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. I have nothing more to say. I’m getting tired of the sound of my own voice” in whatever way.

Then wrapping up, I think especially with creative projects, we need to try so many things to understand what it is we want to do, what it is that we like doing, and I’m being very lucky in that respect that I’ve been able to try lots of different things in my life.

Because of that, I’ve learned to try things that don’t work out without thinking that there’s something wrong with it. Of course some things don’t work out and they have larger consequences than others.

So understanding that, especially in a creative process, whatever you’re doing, you touch on one thing and then that doesn’t work. Well, maybe that’s not the right thing for you right now. You can always come back to those kinds of things.

So I think it’s recognizing that that’s not the right thing to be doing anymore, and just seeing it as something that I’m going to put to one side now because, okay, it might be doing well, but I’m not getting anything out of it.

Jo: It’s funny though. I was thinking there, you mentioned earlier that your voiceover work, that there’s less work there than there used to be. I guess that’s a lot to do with AI, digital voice.

I guess for some people sometimes the decision as to things ending is not necessarily theirs. Or they need to do it for money or something. I think this is probably happening to a lot of people. They’re seeing some streams of income begin to dwindle because of whatever reasons.

How do you pivot into something new? What’s your process?

Do you end something and then learn something new? Or do you make sure these overlap so you have periods where you’re still earning from the old ways?

Pilar: Just going back to the voiceover, because that’s a very good example, as you said. I still work as a voiceover, but not very much. When we’re talking a few years ago, actually, my own work didn’t decrease because of the AI.

It decreased because of the internet, great internet connections that we can now have with voices in Spain. So I’m a Spanish voiceover in London, and before we always did our recordings in London. Whereas as the internet connections got better, they can now beam into Spain and they have a wider talent pool there.

The other thing that happened was the home studios. I don’t have a home studio. My bedroom’s good enough for podcasting, but not for client work.

I started to see it was pre-pandemic that the artificial intelligence was taking all the small jobs, like the “press one for this, press two for that.” That was actually a decision, talking about when to shift.

I saw that coming and I had to make a choice for myself, which was do I set up a home studio? Or do I get out and do something else? Which is why I started the consultancy on the side. Of course, I love voiceover and it still brings some income. So talking of that—

I think starting to do something and trying it out while you’re still doing your income-generating work is a very good idea.

You can start to try it. Like maybe I’m going to do this thing, I don’t know, could be writing.

“I really want to write, but I don’t have the time. I’m going to try and do two hours a day and see if I still like it if I have to do it.” Because I think that when you discover that you can go into a profession is if you have to do something, is it still that joyful?

So finding out how sustainable your new career might be by doing little experiments before you decide to take a big plunge.

Again, you’ve said it many times and your guests have as well, that when we leave something that is a recurring income at the moment, we have to look at our figures. We have to look at how we are going to live before we take that plunge and then start making our plans around that.

Can you work a little bit less at your full-time job, you know, four days a week instead of five, and things like that? And not be afraid of the fact that that might not happen.

We might try it and it’s okay if actually we discover that, “You know what? The stress of thinking that I’m going to have to earn an income with this is making me sick.” That’s fine. Pull right back. It might not be the right moment as well. Again, see what it is bringing up in you.

So I’ve recently trained as a Pilates teacher, which actually, talking of income, it’s going to be a small part of my income, but I just noticed that I was really enjoying the classes that I was taking, getting really curious about it.

That’s how I know that it’s time to move on to something else. I might not leave behind what I’ve already got, but I need to start looking into something else. I find myself listening to podcasts around the subject. I read around the subject. I start to want to know more, and that’s when I know.

When I start to bring in the input from other places, and when I start to really soak in lots of other information, that’s when I know, “Okay, something is shifting. I have to look at this.”

I’ve tried lots of things. At one point, I started doing cartoons, and I’ve got this happy daisy. So I looked into merchandising, could that work? Well, no, because the money coming in from all the print-on-demand merchandising side is really small and also they treat you not very well.

Okay. That won’t do, I’ll put it to one side. It might turn into a comic at some point, but for now I’ve got to do something else.

I’ve had to train myself because you can hear that I can go anywhere, anytime. I’ve had to train myself now to go, “No, that is for later. Write it down, make notes, have a place where you can record your thoughts around that thing you really want to do. But now is not the right moment.”

So now I’m doing this book and I’m doing the Pilates thing. That’s it for now. I’ve got lots of things that are going to come after, but for now, not everything all at once.

Jo: Because you are also a finisher. I think this is really important. It’s interesting because I do talk to a lot of creatives who are similar to both you and me. We have lots and lots of ideas and start lots of things, but a lot of people can’t finish them. So they’ve got too many projects on the go at the same time.

People say to me all the time, “Oh, you must be so busy.” And I’m like, actually, I’m not that busy. It might sound like I work on a ton of things, but I don’t really. I’m kind of launching one book, and then writing another book and doing this show.

I feel like the finishing energy is just as important.

So is that something you’ve had to learn or is that just something you have naturally, which is, I must finish this thing before I move on to the next thing?

Pilar: It’s natural. I’ve always had this. When we first set up the theater company, I remember my friend Philip, who we set it up with, he said, “I’m like an ideas person. You’re a finisher.” Yes, I am. I think it comes naturally. I don’t like open endings and open loops.

It also comes back to this knowing that because you don’t succeed at something, it doesn’t mean you are not a great person. You know what I mean? So finishing for me sometimes is not doing it anymore. It doesn’t mean I’ve completed the project. It doesn’t mean that I’ve made a success of this thing I wanted to do.

It means I’ve gone, “You know what? In one year, how much have I enjoyed this? How successful was it? If it was supposed to bring income, did it bring an income?” You know what? Okay, let’s wrap that up and that’s okay. Put it away.

Sometimes it is about, “Okay. This book, it’s dragging.” My books, Joanna, they take like three or four years. If it’s worth it, then I finish it. I have put some books away. I put some ideas away.

I had some brilliant ideas about things and I thought, “Am I going to be able to do that? It’s going to take me three more years and I have to do all this research.” Put it in the ideas list, and being okay with that.

Jo: I think being okay with it, I mean, I’m the same. I have a massive drive, so I use Dropbox for my main drive. I’ve got this “for later” kind of folder structure. Sometimes I do indulge myself, especially now with like deep research on ChatGPT.

Sometimes I’ll be like, “Do a deep research into this topic,” to just see if I want to go deeper into it. I always say, “Recommend like 20 books on this subject.” Then if I want desperately to kind of get into all that, it’s like you said, if I feel that need to research, then I will dive into that more seriously.

Like right now by my desk, I have about 20 physical books on gothic cathedrals and architecture and beauty and awe and wonder. I just needed to go down that rabbit hole. But a lot of the time I’ll be like, “Okay, I am not quite ready to do that.”

It sounds like we have a similar process on what to spend the time on and projects that are worth spending the time on.

Pilar: Yes, and I think you develop an instinct at some point, or a process, or you trust that the right thing will kind of stay you in the face or something. Because I think that that is also a process and it’ll be different for everyone, is learning to trust how we manage our ideas.

There was something else I was going to say. Oh, the other thing is, of course, that it’s also okay to dream. So sometimes I know I’m not going to do something. I would’ve loved to be a cozy mystery writer. I still have my first novel there waiting for me and sometimes I just dream. I dream I have this series and it’s okay.

I don’t have to then turn it into anything. I wonder sometimes when something we love doing, like writing, can be so close to how we want to earn an income. I think that sometimes we forget that it’s okay to dream about plans and then we let them go and that’s fine.

Jo: I think that’s good. Hold some of them lightly or hold them lightly until you decide to commit. Then if you’re going to commit, then absolutely commit. This has been super useful and we are out of time.

Where can people find you and everything you do online?

Pilar: I have one website that I’m sure will be there for a while, which is PilarWrites.com. That’s P-I-L-A-R-writes, as in writing. Then on LinkedIn, I’m Pilar Orti.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Pilar. That was great.

Pilar: Thanks Joanna. Thank you so much. I’ve been listening to your show forever, so this has been amazing. Thank you everyone for listening too. Thank you, Joanna.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone and key insights shared by both speakers.

The post How to Pivot Careers, Co-Write Books, And Stay Connected As A Remote Creative With Pilar Orti first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note from KMW: I’m taking a short break this week to hang out with my brand-new niece! While I’m off getting cuddles, here’s a quick post you can read in just a couple of minutes. No podcast today, just a bite-sized look at an important storytelling choice.

One of the biggest questions novelists face is whether to use a single narrator or multiple narrators. Multiple POVs can broaden perspective and heighten tension, while a single POV offers intimacy and focus. Today, I’m breaking down the pros and cons of each approach and sharing my own surprising realization about the books I tend to love most.

And don’t forget! To help you dig even deeper into the building blocks of strong stories, you can now pre-order the e-book version of the revised and expanded second edition of the Structuring Your Novel Workbook on Amazon. (The paperback and a deluxe fillable PDF version will become available next week on the official launch day, October 6th—along with an epic giveaway. See you then!)

***

A lively debate among writers and readers often centers on the number of narrators in a novel. Should a story be told through a single narrator’s voice or unfold through the perspectives of multiple narrators? A few years ago, I hosted a discussion on Facebook and Twitter/X where most authors favored two or more narrators. Yet several readers argued their favorite books were those written from the perspective of just one character.

Today, let’s take a quick look at this question: what are the advantages and disadvantages of single-narrator vs. multiple-narrator novels?

The Benefits of Multiple Narrators

At first glance, the benefits of multiple POV characters are obvious. Telling a story through several narrators allows us to give readers a broader perspective. Not only can we share first-hand accounts of different events, but we can also layer contrasting perspectives—such as when characters observe one another and offer commentary we wouldn’t get inside the head of any one character alone.

This approach can also increase tension and suspense, since readers often know more than the characters do. For example, one narrator may walk blindly into a trap that another narrator has already warned us about.

The Benefits of a Single Narrator

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

The advantages of a single POV novel aren’t always as obvious, but they’re powerful. A one-narrator structure tightens the plot focus, prevents unnecessary rambling, and reduces extraneous subplots. More importantly, it provides space to deeply develop the protagonist’s character arc.

A single narrator also creates intimacy. Readers are invited to experience the story through one lens, fostering a strong bond with the main character. That said, the limitations are real: single POV books can feel narrow, and readers may become frustrated if they’re locked out of crucial events happening offstage.

Which POV Is Right for Your Novel?

Ultimately, neither approach is wrong. Writers must analyze the needs of their story structure to decide which technique best serves it. Before making a decision, reflect on your own reading experiences.

For example, although I’ve used multiple POVs in all my novels, I realized most of my favorite books rely on the precision and intimacy of a single narrator (which was one of the reasons I decided to go with a single POV in my most recent novel Wayfarer).

That insight may help you decide which POV strategy best supports your story’s goals.

In Summary

Your choice of POV, whether single or multiple, will completely change the way your story unfolds. By weighing the pros and cons of each narration style, you’ll be better equipped to craft a novel that delivers the exact reading experience you want.

Key Takeaways:

• Multiple narrators broaden perspective, layer tension, and offer contrasting viewpoints.
• Single narrators tighten focus, streamline the plot, and strengthen the protagonist’s development.
• The “right” choice depends on the story you’re telling and the experience you want your readers to have.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Do you prefer reading (or writing) novels with a single narrator or multiple narrators? Why? Tell me in the comments!

The post Single vs. Multiple Narrators: Pros and Cons for Novelists appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

Have you optimized the seven essential elements of your Amazon book page before you even consider marketing? Are you making the most of A+ content, and advertising with Amazon? Amazon Ads expert Geoff Affleck gives his tips.

In the intro, potential TikTok US changes [BBC]; Special editions [Written Word Media]; Self-Publishing with Dale Kickstarter books; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; Egypt beyond the pyramids, an example of fiction-adjacent content marketing [Books and Travel]; British Powerlifting; Starting something new, clearing space, beginner’s mind, and Leuchtturm1917 journals.

This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• The seven essential elements every Amazon book page needs before spending a penny on advertising, from cover design to A+ Content
• Why Amazon ads work like shopping in the soup aisle (targeted intent) versus Facebook ads being like impulse candy purchases at checkout
• How series authors can break even on book one ads while making profits from organic read-through on subsequent books
• The critical difference between automatic ads and manual targeting, and why manual campaigns with specific ASINs get better results
• When new authors should start advertising (even with few reviews) and how established authors should maintain their backlist keywords and categories

You can find Geoff at GeoffAffleck.com.

Transcript of the interview with Geoff Affleck

Joanna: Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada. So welcome to the show, Geoff.

Geoff: Hi Joanna, thanks for having me here. It’s great.

Joanna: Yes, this is an interesting topic. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing and self-publishing, and why you decided to move into author services.

Geoff: Sure. It was about 15 years ago that I started getting involved in this industry. I had always been involved in marketing in more of a corporate job.

I got involved in personal development for myself, just for personal growth, and managed to connect up with some New York Times bestselling authors who appeared in the movie The Secret.

Joanna: Oh yes, wonderful time!

Geoff: Right. So I worked as a marketing director for a couple of these authors who were part of that movie and, as a result, got exposed to the world of traditional publishing because they had New York Times bestselling books.

We started a course where we would invite people to come and learn about—basically the premise was we’ll teach you how to become a bestselling self-help author.

I was the marketing guy, mostly talking about building their author platforms, and became really interested in the self-publishing side of it because that was really the door that most of these authors would come into rather than traditional, and had to learn very quickly about self-publishing.

So this was, as I mentioned, probably now 2012 or thereabouts. As I learned about self-publishing, we decided to self-publish a book ourselves, the four of us. Since then, I’ve just continued to be really enamored by the whole industry.

I realized quickly that I’m not really an author. I’ve co-authored a number of books, but writing’s not my passion, although copywriting is, but not story writing.

I really love the production side of it and the book launches, the marketing, especially with Amazon. So that’s really where I focused in my business over the last eight years or so.

Joanna: That’s so funny with The Secret—it brings back those days. I remember reading that and it’s where I really first learned about affirmations. My first affirmation that really changed my life was “I am creative. I am an author.” And I said that years before it actually happened.

I know it’s funny now, isn’t it? We kind of look back and I don’t think it’s been tarnished, but there’s not so much a halo around the law of attraction stuff. At the time, I feel like that really made such a big hit. A lot of the mindset stuff around it I still feel is valuable.

Let’s get into the advertising stuff, but before we get into that, I feel like a lot of authors jump into ads like they’re some kind of magic bullet.

What are the basic things that an author needs to get right with their Amazon book sales page before they even think about advertising?

We’re going to focus on Amazon today.

Geoff: Right. Yes, absolutely. This is the starting point, and it should be the starting point for anyone who’s looking to publish a book, let alone promote it or spend money on it with Amazon ads.

You have to think about the conversions. What I mean by that is that if you’re going to generate clicks to your book page, you have to be confident that a reasonable percentage of those clicks will turn into orders, or if you’re in Kindle Unlimited, you know, Kindle Unlimited page reads.

The number that we look for is 10%. So if you get 10 clicks from an ad, you want to get one sale or the equivalent of that in page reads.

So it’s really important to optimize your Amazon page—some people call it a product page or a book listing—so that when people land, they’re going to be attracted to buying your book. Just makes sense, doesn’t it?

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Geoff: There are about seven elements that we focus on that you really need to get right, and you need to get all of them right. Sometimes just having one of them a little bit off can skew it. I could do a two-hour talk on this, but I’ll just give you a quick introduction.

Obviously the first one is the book cover.

And that’s the one that actually helps generate ad clicks because people don’t see a lot about your book. They just see the cover, the title, how many reviews you have and so on.

If it looks interesting, they’ll click on it. So if you’ve got a cover that stands out as a little thumbnail on an Amazon ad, you’re more likely to get a higher click-through rate on your ads, which means more traffic. So that’s super important. Of course, the cover has to be aligned with the genre and be legible and all of that.

Here’s one that a lot of people miss, and it’s the attention to keywords.

You probably know that when you self-publish, there’s seven keywords you can put in the metadata when you upload your book to Amazon, right? Most people don’t give a lot of thought to that—just put in some words and hope that’s okay.

Keywords are really important, and it’s a whole thing to learn how to get them right. Finding keywords that are popular yet not too competitive is the key because that’s what Amazon’s algorithm looks at when it’s deciding whether your book’s going to show up or not on a search.

It’s really important to get at least one good keyword phrase into your title or, more often, into your subtitle. I see a lot of authors that they’ll publish a novel with a title and then leave the subtitle blank.

So adding a subtitle that describes a little bit about the genre or a trope—like “A Billionaire Office Romance” could be a subtitle for a romance novel—that tells the reader something, but it also tells the algorithm something. That is one of the most important fields I find.

If you’re only relying on your seven keywords, I think you’re potentially missing out on organic traffic. Beyond that—

Obviously people look at how many reviews you have and what the quality is of the average star rating.

Those are super important. So doing whatever you can to boost the number of reviews and ratings early on will give your conversion rate a big boost.

So beyond that though—

We’ve got to have a strong blurb.

Usually there’s a whole structure for blurbs, but not too long. Back even a few years ago, we were writing longer blurbs. Now it’s around 200 words. A really strong headline with a hook, bolded is nice. Short paragraphs, the right elements, and then a call to action. I won’t go any further than that, but that is key.

But beyond that, a lot of people don’t read blurbs. They kind of skim them. That’s why shorter is often a little bit better.

Increasingly, A+ Content is another way to supplement the blurb.

So it’s kind of like an additional blurb where we can put graphics up on the page that will help the reader understand more about the book and some reasons why they should buy it.

Finally, I think price is really important.

It can’t be too high or even too low—that can sometimes be a disincentive because price and quality are often correlated.

You’ve got to make sure your books are in the right categories, so that’s really important too.

Categories that are relevant. Sometimes I see people, even people who are helping other authors, put their books in categories that just aren’t relevant in order to try to game the system and get a bestseller badge. That just doesn’t work.

Joanna: Yeah, that again feels like a tactic from like 15 years ago.

Geoff: Let’s just put it here in basket weaving, even though it’s a basket weaving romance!

Joanna: That is interesting. Lots of things to come back on here, but the A+ Content—your team helped me do some A+ Content for my How to Write a Novel book. I think as a buyer, like as a reader, I never, ever, ever scroll down that far. So I had some hesitation of, was this worth it?

So talk a bit more about A+ Content and why you think that it is a good idea to have.

Geoff: Well, first of all, for anyone who’s not familiar with A+ Content, it doesn’t say that word anywhere on your book page. But if you notice, as you’re browsing on Amazon, you’ll see the section called “From the Publisher.” So that’s what we’re referring to.

You go below the book description, below the first couple of carousels of ads or suggestions, and then you’ll see it there. It’ll be snuggled in just above the editorial review section. What it is is kind of like a magazine-style layout of banners and images.

You can have up to five rows of them, and you can choose as few as one or as many as five different banners. There are different layouts, and it’s all template-driven on the backend of Amazon through your KDP account. It’s also available to traditional publishers using Amazon Advantage.

So I think the only time you can’t really use it is, let’s say you publish with IngramSpark or Draft2Digital—you won’t be able to apply Amazon A+ Content to your books.

Anyway, lots of different layouts available, including for nonfiction you can do side-by-side charts and this type of thing. You can provide, for a series, a series layout where people can see all the books in your series, or up to six anyway, and then click directly through to the different books.

I think, other than being visually appealing—provided, and this is really important, they must be designed well—you design them outside of Amazon usually, although Amazon does have some sort of an AI image generator.

Last time I checked it wasn’t very good, so I don’t use it. I get a professional graphic designer to design the graphics and then we upload them ourselves.

We find that generally speaking, it will help increase your conversion rate because as people skim the book blurb, maybe don’t take it all in, it gives you another chance to connect with them.

It’s visually appealing, so it tends to stop shoppers from scrolling because it’s a little more interesting. So it’s something they can quickly read and perhaps even get more of an emotional connection to the book.

You can use it to build trust and authority for the author in a way that you can’t really do in the blurb. As I mentioned, you can showcase the series, and it gives you an SEO boost because behind each image you get to input more keywords.

We all know that Amazon is basically just a big search engine. Search engines are driven by keywords. So you can have, in addition to the seven boxes on your book listing, you can add more keywords on the backend of your Amazon A+ Content.

So I think for most authors, it’s worth doing. It can work very well for series authors, children’s authors, because you can show the visuals of the inside of the book. I feel like if you’re not doing it, you’re sort of leaving something on the table that with not much effort you could do.

Joanna: I think another important thing is it is free.

I mean, obviously if you hire someone to make the images that costs money, but actually you can just add it onto your KDP account per book and per country as well. It has to be done per country, which is a bit of a pain, but it’s not a great interface, to be fair.

Geoff: No, no, it’s not.

Joanna: But it’s free.

Geoff: Absolutely. I will say that some authors that I’ve come across have done their own A+ Content using say one of those design tools like Canva or something, which can be great if you are a graphic designer.

I’ve seen some pretty poor A+ Content design, and that can detract from the book and it can actually impact your sales negatively because I think if readers see sort of amateurish graphic design, they subconsciously think, well geez, what’s the writing like?

I’d caution your listeners to get a professional designer. It doesn’t have to be expensive—a hundred dollars or something—and you get some good design.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, so let’s come to the advertising. We’re going to assume now that we’ve got our page sorted with all those things, and I know some people who haven’t heard this before are like, “Goodness me, that’s a lot to do before just clicking on an ad.” But as you say, it’s not just a magic bullet.

Let’s ask a bigger question: do we really have to advertise?

People back in the old days could just upload a book on Amazon and it would sell. Is that possible anymore? Is organic reach a reality?

Geoff: I don’t really think so. For new authors, for most authors who don’t have a platform—say a large email list, social media following and so on—it’s pretty hard to get noticed. I don’t know what you’ve heard. I think it’s something like 5,000 books a day are published on Amazon or something.

Joanna: It is ridiculous. It’s just crazy.

Geoff: Right. So you’ve got all this clutter that you’ve got to cut through. I came across someone last week who’d done nothing. He’d published his book in July and he said, “Oh, I think we’ve done all right. We sold 1,800 copies so far.” I said, “Oh my God, that’s really good.”

Joanna: That’s very good.

Geoff: That’s really good. It’s his first book, and no advertising. “What did you do?” “Oh, well I’ve got a pretty big email list.” “Ah, right.” So we all know that that’s important, but he’s probably tapped out his email list by now.

So now we’re doing the things we just talked about, optimizing the product page, and then starting Amazon ads, because eventually your email list is going to run dry.

So in the absence of a platform or some way to promote your book, Amazon ads are, I think, the best way to have your book put in front of thousands, even millions of shoppers over time.

Usually we see it takes about a thousand impressions to get a click. So in other words, your ads show a thousand times, you get a click—that’s average, sometimes better, sometimes worse. So you’ve got to get lots of impressions of your ads to get a small number of clicks, to get a small number of sales.

So I think it’s important unless you’ve got something else that works for you. Some authors do really well with Facebook ads, and I think that’s great too.

To me, Amazon ads is like you’re going to the supermarket and you’re looking for soup. You go to the soup aisle and you look at the soup, and then another can of soup catches your eye. And you know what? That’s interesting. I think I’ll try that one.

Whereas something like a Facebook ad is more like you’re at the supermarket and you’re looking for corn, and then you’re at the checkout. You happen to see candy or some gum, and so you go, “Oh, impulse buy.” It’s not really what you were on Facebook looking for—it’s sort of a random thing. It does seem to work for some authors, so…

Joanna: Yes, as you say, there’s lots of different options. I mean, even like podcasting—you can’t track clicks from podcasts because it’s more of a brand-building approach and people will go look for stuff. But it’s definitely a way to market. So there’s lots of different options, but as we said, we’re focusing on Amazon ads.

So your team helped me with some nonfiction books, and one of the things that I thought was great about your approach is even on your website, you are really clear about what books ads work best for and what they don’t work well for. So let’s start with the good stuff.

What are Amazon ads good for? What are the kinds of books they work best for?

Geoff: Yes, they work best for series or if perhaps you have multiple standalones. The reason, of course, is read-through. Usually you’re going to spend a little more, perhaps break even, on getting those initial readers. But if they enjoy your books, they’re going to want to read more.

Usually they’re not clicking on an ad for the second, third, fourth, fifth book. They’re going to just find it directly. So that becomes an organic sale with full royalties. So series can work very, very well with Amazon ads.

I think in general, any book where the book page converts from clicks to orders. So that can be the book one in a series, which perhaps has a low price to entice the reader. It can also be a standalone. It could be a standalone nonfiction, could be a standalone novel, as long as it converts.

We’ve got some examples where we just know that for every six clicks that this author gets, there’s a sale. It just happens over and over again, probably because they’ve got the great product page and good reviews.

I think sometimes it doesn’t work as well if you’re in a very low-volume niche, something that’s just really obscure. That’s more because there’s just not much traffic, you know? So I think those are probably the best answers I can give for you.

Joanna: What about KU?

Geoff: Yes, absolutely. Amazon ads will certainly drive up your KU. We’ve got one author in particular is doing 150,000 monthly page reads on KU from her ad clicks, but a million and a half monthly overall. So the ad clicks are just driving people into book one, and then they just keep on reading.

Joanna: You mentioned series, but for example, there are some genres where most of the series in a genre might be in KU, and then if you’re trying to advertise a book that’s not in KU, it might not work so well.

Geoff: Yes, we find it works either way. It really varies from case to case, but Amazon ads on the dashboard, it does track your page reads that you generate from the ads as well as the orders that you generate. So you can really effectively see the impact of the ads—exactly how many page reads came from your ads versus orders.

Joanna: You’ve mentioned reviews briefly. Many authors, who are new to self-publishing especially, think that they should be advertising at launch doing Amazon ads.

You don’t really have any reviews at launch, so when is the best time to be advertising?

Geoff: Well, one thing about advertising at launch—it can help you certainly get your book, your brand out there with all of the different impressions of your ads. And Amazon gives you like a little banner on your ads when your book is new that says “Just Released.” It’s a little gray banner that goes right above the cover.

I think even if you have low reviews, because you have the “Just Released” banner on, shoppers might be a little more forgiving about the low number of reviews because it’s obviously just released.

So when we do book launches, I almost always include Amazon ads in the book launch. It might not be a really high budget, but just to continue to do everything we can to get that initial traffic. Because what we’re trying to do with a launch is really three things:

1. Get the Amazon algorithm to notice your book and figure out how it fits into the Amazon universe
2. Get as many reviews as you can quickly
3. Royalties, because without the first two, long-term royalties are just not going to happen

So I think Amazon ads play an important role in helping the algorithm understand your book.

Joanna: But if someone is brand new, it’s their first book, is that a good fit? Or are we really looking at—

Do you need a couple of books to make advertising worth the money?

Geoff: Yes, it’s a good question. I think with new authors, in a way today, you have to be prepared either to invest in your book, in book marketing. It’s kind of like, I used to often use the analogy of a rocket launch—rockets burn a lot of fuel to get off the ground. Without the fuel, they stay on the ground.

So there’s that consideration that if you want the book to have a chance, you’ve got to invest in marketing somehow, whether it’s Amazon ads or whether it’s paid third-party book promotions through the different book promotion websites, or Facebook or TikTok, or whatever you are able to do. Email, whatever you can do.

A small Amazon ads budget can help. Even if you’re not doing $20 a day, which is what we would normally recommend, you might find that you can start to generate some sales with a much smaller budget and very conservative bids or cost per click.

Perhaps you’re only spending $3 a day and you’re only picking up a couple of sales a week or something. But you’ve just got to do something to get that initial inertia going. Otherwise, the Amazon algorithm will basically drop you like a hot potato.

Joanna: So that’s new authors, but then authors who’ve been around a while, like myself, who have big backlists—and as you are talking about the seven things we need to have, I know there’s people listening in the same place as me. They’re like, “Well, we’ve got 40 books, 50 books, 100 books. This is way too depressing.”

I was in my KDP dashboard like yesterday, and I realized that a whole load of my sales descriptions had reformatted to some old version. I don’t even know when that happened, but it made me laugh. Then I looked down at my keywords and my categories.

So if we want to keep things moving, how often should we be reviewing these fields if we’ve been going a while?

When do we refresh categories? When do we refresh keywords?

Geoff: Yes, good idea. I think it was perhaps a year and a half ago, Amazon changed their category rules where you used to be able to have 10 and now you have three.

So some authors who were grandfathered into the old 10-category system, it may be well enough just to leave that alone because it’s great to have to be across all of those categories.

I think keywords is probably the most important thing to look at. Well, I’ll say book blurb and keywords. Book blurb for sure, because that’s very much customer-facing. Keywords aren’t customer-facing. They’re Amazon algorithm-facing.

I was just listening to Dave Chesson last week with a webinar that he presented on Amazon’s new algorithm. He stressed the importance of finding the right keywords, but also the importance of having the keywords in your book blurb. It must be done in a way that doesn’t sound like it was just written by AI or something, you know?

So that’s probably one area to really take a good look at and republish. Publisher Rocket is a great tool for researching the best keywords. You can look up other books and see what keywords those books are ranking for, and therefore that might be a good set of keywords for you.

So it is something worth doing and spending an hour or two on, as well as book blurb is also worth spending time on for sure.

Joanna: Yes, it’s one of these things that the more you write, the more you publish, and then the backlist becomes this kind of sprawling thing, especially when you’re wide like I am.

Then you have all these different formats and platforms, and you figure how traditional publishers forget to maintain things. It’s kind of obvious when you realize how many books they manage.

Geoff: You mentioned formatting issues with book blurbs, and that’s quite common too. Because Amazon’s little WYSIWYG where you enter your book description isn’t perfect, and it does strange things. So you’ve really got to—

After you publish your book description, make sure you look at it on your Amazon page and check the formatting.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen all bold…

Joanna: Oh yeah, all bold or…

Geoff: All bold or large heading, or all italic, no spaces between the paragraphs or whatever. So you’ve got to really check your output as well. There are tools out there that can generate the HTML so that you could put it in directly that way.

Get some eyeballs on your product pages, whether it’s yours, but better off someone else’s, or even better, someone like me who does this for a living. Get some opinions on what are customers seeing when they come to your product page.

Usually you’re, as an author, too close to it. You can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. So get some other opinions on what do you think about my blurb and the cover? Is it clear? Because it might be clear to you, but it might not be clear to someone who’s never heard of your book before.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. There are so many things, and that’s partly why I wanted to talk to you because I feel like people just say “advertising” or “paid ads” as if it is going to solve all the problems of selling books. And yet so much stuff does go into it.

A lot of it is basics, like it’s basic marketing 101, but it’s still hard, particularly for cross-genre books. A lot of my fiction, I found that many of the standard approaches don’t work on Amazon when you write cross-genre because just in the categories and the keywords, it doesn’t fit the boxes.

Geoff: Yes, cross-genre is a tough one for sure.

Joanna: Yes, it is. So my answer to that is to focus on the books that are more easily marketed. That’s another trick, isn’t it? You don’t have to market every single book.

Geoff: Oh no, you don’t. Absolutely not.

Joanna: Just market the ones that are going to make you the most money and the ones that are more easily marketed on this platform. So for me, Amazon ads work best for my nonfiction because it’s really obvious what it is.

Geoff: Yes, that makes sense. Absolutely.

Joanna: So I did want to ask you, because I’ve used a combination of auto ads and manual targeting.

Can you explain to people what’s the difference between auto ads and manual targeting, and when might auto ads work and when might they not?

Geoff: Oh, absolutely. So with Amazon ads, the way that they work is all about something called targeting. And targeting, you can think of it like this: Which other books on Amazon do you want to piggyback on? Which ones are like yours?

If you can find books that are like yours, then when someone’s browsing that book, they’ll see your ad, they’ll click on it, and they might buy your book. So we want to target, and there’s really two—we call it three ways of targeting your ads.

One is automatic, often just called auto ads.

Amazon decides where it thinks your ads should be displayed, so you have no control over where they show up. You just trust the algorithm understands your book and will put it in the right place.

Now usually it’s going to advertise it on books that are in the same categories as you. That’s sort of the default. That can result in some wasted reach because it might just not be really zeroing in on books that are like yours, especially if you’re in a little bit of a broader category.

The other thing we find with auto ads is that quite often you don’t get that many impressions. Impressions is how many times your ads are displayed. When you have low impressions, you have lower clicks, and when you have lower clicks, you have lower sales.

So while auto ads can be a sort of a time saver—they don’t take much research to set up, you just fill in the boxes and click the button and off they go—usually they don’t have a terrific result until such time as the algorithm really understands your book.

So we don’t set up auto ads at the beginning when we work with authors. We wait until we feel like the algorithm has a better understanding of the book.

So what do we do? We do manual campaigns.

Manual campaigns are, as the name suggests, where you have to tell the algorithm where to display your ads.

And there are two types of manual campaigns:

One’s called a keywords campaign, and as the name implies, you would enter in, let’s say, 50 keywords that you want to use for your ads. They could be author names of comps, they could be other book titles or series titles, and they could be genre or trope-related terms or even character types, et cetera.

So if you have a combination of those things, which you should—which you have to manually research by perhaps looking at the also-boughts for your book that are showing up on your product page, using Publisher Rocket is a great tool. Even AI can help you come up with your keywords.

Then the second kind of manual ad is the product ad. With that ad, we’re targeting specific categories of books and also specific ASINs. ASIN being a product number. So you find the ASIN of a book like yours and you target it, and we might target five categories and 20 ASINs to start with, something like that.

With those ads, we find that we usually get better results because we are in control of where the ads are showing. So it’s one of those things—it’s easier to show than tell.

If you can just remember, there’s auto and manual. There’s two types of manual. When you’re starting out, manual’s the way to go because you will get more traction with manual ads.

Joanna: I think another issue with the manual advertising, certainly for anyone who’s like me, who’s just not that interested in data—this is where it becomes difficult. People are like, “Oh my goodness, this is so difficult.” So if people are manually doing their own ads, should they have to log in every day to check things?

What are the time requirements if you want to do your own ads?

Geoff: Not every day. Although at the beginning, it’s hard to resist the temptation sometimes to log in every day.

It’s a bit like when I first started buying stocks for investments—I’d check the stock price every day, but you drive yourself mad. Every time it would go down, you’d get all stressed out, and then it would go up, you’d get all excited.

So probably once a week is a better timeframe. Maybe a little bit more in the first week, but you can set some parameters to make sure that your ads don’t run away. That’s important. You can set a daily budget, you can set a monthly budget, and then when your ads hit those upper limits, they’ll just stop. So that’s really good.

You don’t want to have that problem where you suddenly get a huge bill that you weren’t expecting. You also want to check on them to make sure that you haven’t perhaps accidentally bid too high on one of your targets.

Every target, you set a dollar or pound or euro amount for how much you’re willing to pay for a click on that target. Sometimes, if you’re a little bit careless, you could accidentally bid too much because they may default to a suggested bid, which might be $2.

Well, imagine you’re paying $2 for a click and you’re making, maybe you’re only making $2 on a sale—you could be really upside down on your advertising. So do take care, make sure nothing’s gone awry.

You also want to be checking to see which of those targets are getting the clicks and the sales, and then adjusting bids up and down accordingly. If one of your targets is really working for you, you might want to increase the amount that you’re willing to bid.

That’ll make your ad show up closer to the top, which is going to get you more clicks. Similarly, if you’ve got targets that are getting clicks but not sales, you may want to turn those off. We usually use a rule of thumb of 20. When we get 20 clicks and we haven’t had any orders, we’ll turn it off.

So you do need to do some adjustments, and usually twice a month or so is enough time between adjustments.

Joanna: Obviously authors can do their own ads. It’s just available. People can log into their KDP dashboard, or there’s just one marketing link for the whole thing. You can go in and manage it all there.

If people want help, what does your team offer?

Geoff: Yes, sure. Everyone can do Amazon ads, even if you self-published, or even if you’re traditionally published, you can still run Amazon ads. That’s just fine.

I should just mention those who are traditionally published won’t have a KDP dashboard, but you can get into Amazon ads through your Author Central account under the Marketing and Reports tab.

We offer a managed Amazon ad service. We’ve been doing that since 2019. Basically, you turn over your ads to us.

We access your ads account through what is known as editor access, which basically is a permission that you grant us so that we can log into your ads account through my account. We don’t need your password. We can’t go shopping and buy anything on your Amazon.

We handle the setup of the ads, including all the keyword and target research, set up the ads, and then monitor, analyze, and optimize regularly. We provide support for authors as well.

In particular, we’ll take a good look at your product page—back to the beginning of our conversation. That’s actually our first step before we even run the ads. We’ll have a session with you.

One of my team will evaluate your product page and make written recommendations about what we recommend that you would improve before you even start advertising. Then we give you the guidance on what to do. If you can’t do it yourself, we can help you with those things usually too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and everything you do online?

Geoff: Thanks. My website has everything there. All our pricing and everything is upfront. It’s GeoffAffleck.com. Or you can go to GeoffAffleck.com/ads. That goes directly to the Amazon Ads page on my website.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Geoff. That was great.

Geoff: Thanks, Joanna. I appreciate you having me on today.

The post Amazon Advertising For Books With Geoff Affleck first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Not every story needs a protagonist who undergoes a sweeping, life-altering transformation. Many memorable tales hinge on smaller, quieter shifts in perspective—or even on characters who stay true to themselves from beginning to end. Writers often hear that character arcs must be dramatic to be meaningful, but the truth is arcs exist on a spectrum. Big character arcs can redefine a protagonist’s entire worldview, while small character arcs can reveal subtle but powerful growth that shapes the story in more understated ways. Understanding when to use a big arc, a small arc, or even a Flat Arc can help you choose the right level of change for your characters and keep readers invested from page one.

When I write about character arcs, I use sweeping terms about overcoming the Lie the Character Believes in pursuit of the thematic Truth. We talk about your character encountering Doorways of No Return, Moments of Truth, and Dark Nights of the Soul. All of these terms sound epic because they are symbolic. This means they can be applied in different stories to varying degrees of intensity. Just as in our own lives, some character arcs will rock the very foundations of the earth, while others may only offer a comparatively tiny realignment of perspective (perhaps as a building block toward one of those earth-shattering changes later on, but perhaps not too).

A while back, Tom Dell’Aringa emailed me with the following observation and query:

I’ve been following your stuff for a while. I was watching one of your videos on beginnings because I write a series, where the main character and his sidekick don’t change (like Jack Reacher or Jack Ryan, etc., although SF). While I always try to have some issue the main character is working through, he can’t go through some amazing transformation each book. Part of the joy of a series is sticking with a character you like, with all their pros/cons…. I wonder if you had thoughts on how to approach a series while living into the structure you have set out….

First of all, it’s important to recognize not every story will feature a Change Arc. Particularly in series, many characters demonstrate Flat Arc characteristics in each episode. This allows the story’s primary structures to remain unchanging, which allows steadfast characters to represent the story’s Truth to other characters—and therefore to be the one who prompts change rather than the one who changes. (If you’d like a hands-on tool for identifying and planning these different types of arcs, take a look at my Character Arc Worksheets.)

Character Arc Quick Guide (Bundle of 5 Worksheets)

It’s also possible to write stories that really don’t present much of an arc at all, although this is trickier since if the characters do not change, then it is difficult to create any true sense of movement or meaning within the plot itself. Most of the time, if you really look for it, even in tricky stories, you can still identify the underlying symbolic landmarks of some kind of arc, either in the protagonist or the supporting characters.

With all of that in mind, it’s important to remember you can feature a Change Arc without it necessarily having to offer tremendous transformation. When we speak of a Change Arc (whether Positive or Negative), we are simply referring to the fact that the character changes perspective in some way. Sometimes this can be a life-changing paradigm shift, but sometimes the change can be quite small (although it must still be consequential to the story). Particularly in plot-forward stories, the thematic Truth a character learns might even be something practical about the plot mechanics (e.g,. whodunit) rather than a deep personal or social insight. (For my money, however, stories are easily upleveled when the two go hand in hand.)

In short, character arcs in different stories won’t all look alike or carry the same weight. From here, we’ll break down the difference between big arcs, small arcs, and Flat Arcs, and explore how you can choose the right degree of change to best serve your story.

In This Article:

• Big Character Arcs and How Transformation Redefines the Protagonist
• Small Character Arcs and How Quiet Shifts Can Still Grip Audiences
• Flat Arcs and How Characters Stay True While Still Driving the Plot

Big Character Arcs and How Transformation Redefines the Protagonist

When we think of “thematic” stories, they are usually ones in which the character arcs are so big they completely redefine the characters’ worldviews and perhaps even the world itself. Like all character arcs, these changes are founded upon the central polarity between a Lie the Character Believes and the opposing Truth. At its simplest, this Lie is a limited perspective, while the Truth acts as a corrective by providing at least a slightly more expanded and functional advancement on that perspective.

In big Change Arcs, this conflict between Lie and Truth tends to be dramatic. This raises the stakes because the transition into the new perspective will all but demolish the character’s previous perspective. This inevitably involves a personal ego death and a transformation of personal identity (i.e., how characters view themselves). Likely, it will also play out in dramatic fashion in the external plot. Characters will have much to gain or much to lose depending on which perspective they end up embracing.

For Example:

A clear example of a dramatic Positive Change Arc can be seen in Schindler’s List. At the beginning, Oskar Schindler believes the Lie that his worth and power come from wealth, status, and self-interest. His identity is bound up in being a profiteer who exploits the war for personal gain. Over the course of the story, he is confronted with the Truth that real value lies in human life and moral responsibility.

Embracing this Truth demolishes his former worldview and forces him through a profound ego death, reshaping how he sees himself and his place in the world. Importantly, this transformation is not just personally dramatic: it also plays out against the larger system of Nazi Germany, where Schindler’s new Truth is in direct conflict with a regime fighting to assert its own destructive “truth” as socially preeminent. His decision to resist this system is not only perilous to him personally, it also highlights how a big Change Arc reverberates outward. The character’s internal shift becomes a force of external opposition in a dangerous world, raising both personal and thematic stakes to their highest pitch.

Oskar Schindler’s transformation in Schindler’s List is a powerful example of a big character arc. (Schindler’s List (1993), Universal Pictures.)

These dramatic personal and social stakes are true whether the character ends up in a Positive Arc from Lie to Truth or in a Negative Arc from Truth to Lie.

For Example:

The Banshees of Inisherin shows a powerful example of how a Negative Change Arc demolishes identity and spirals outward into destruction. At the start, both Pádraic and Colm have perspectives that, while limited, still allow for human connection: Pádraic clings to the Lie that being “nice” and “happy” will guarantee him love and belonging, while Colm seeks significance by isolating himself to pursue art, believing the Lie that human relationships are expendable in the quest for legacy.

As the story progresses, each man is drawn deeper into his respective Lie. Pádraic’s desperation to hold on to friendship corrodes his innocence, while Colm’s rejection of the relationship becomes increasingly violent and self-mutilating. These internal disintegrations don’t remain private. Just as in big Positive Arcs, in which the Truth collides with the larger world, here the embrace of the Lie clashes with the community, escalating conflict and despair. By the end, both characters have been transformed by the loss of whatever humanity and hope they once held. Their Negative Arcs show how a shift from Truth to Lie can unravel not only personal identity but also the fragile social bonds of an entire world.

In The Banshees of Inisherin, Colm and Pádraic’s relationship shows how Negative Change Arcs can unravel both identity and community. The (Banshees of Inisherin (2022), Searchlight Pictures.)

Small Character Arcs and How Quiet Shifts Can Still Grip Audiences

Many stories feature smaller character arcs with lower stakes. In these stories, the Lie/Truth will be less obviously mind-bending and ego-threatening. The thematic premise might span the gamut from “learning a moral lesson” (e.g., “be more loving”) to simply “seeing something in a new light” (e.g., “maybe my life is more interesting than I thought”) to even just “learning a practical lesson” (e.g., “mad scientists shouldn’t play god” or “the dangerous monster can be defeated if we work together” or even “karate makes me powerful”).

In smaller arcs, characters will not necessarily need to experience a dramatic ego death or shift in personal paradigm or identity. They may end the story simply feeling slightly more whole or affirmed. Bigger arcs tend to speak more obviously to our deeper psyches and to the audience’s own inner experience of symbolic life. This is because their scope allows them to draw down bigger and more powerful symbolism, since they often deal with high-stakes situations that are relatively rare in day-to-day life, allowing them to offer important cathartic experiences.

Meanwhile, smaller arcs can be extremely satisfying for audiences in their ability to recreate the sort of relatable situations we all regularly encounter and work through. Major ego deaths are threshold experiences that only happen a few times throughout our lives; smaller perspective shifts, however, happen on a daily basis. The best small arcs are those that intentionally lean into the verisimilitude and reliability of daily evolution.

For Example:

The show Gilmore Girls thrives on micro arcs that bring satisfying movement to each episode without fundamentally altering the characters. Mother and daughter protagonists Lorelai and Rory are defined by strong personalities and consistent worldviews, and the series’ charm lies in watching those traits play out in different circumstances. Most episodes introduce a conflict rooted in family dynamics, town politics, or personal relationships, such as Lorelai needing to smooth things over with her parents or Rory stumbling in balancing academics with friendships. By the end of the episode, the tension is usually resolved with a small shift in outlook: someone apologizes, admits fault, or simply sees a situation from a slightly different angle.

These micro arcs don’t reinvent the characters. Lorelai doesn’t stop being witty and independent, Rory doesn’t stop being studious, their mother/grandmother Emily doesn’t stop being controlling. But the little tweaks in understanding provide the story’s sense of movement while keeping the characters familiar and dependable, which is exactly what makes viewers want to return to the town of Stars Hollow week after week.

In Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Rory show how small character arcs—tiny shifts in perspective or relationships—can carry a story’s emotional heart. (Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), The CW.)

Writing Your Story’s Theme (Amazon affiliate link)

Often, however, small arcs are less advantageous in bigger stories. In neglecting to pair meaty character arcs with the high stakes of plot-driven spectacles, stories often gut their very soul—theme. Theme arises directly from the interplay of external events challenging characters to change—not just on an external, practical level, but on a deep, personal level. When episodic high-tension stories fail to match their plot events with commensurate character evolution, they are not only missing out on their best potential, but also presenting an ultimately dissatisfyingly out-of-sync presentation of reality. They often ring hollow and become all-too-forgettable for the simple reason that their bluff and bluster isn’t allowed to mean anything.

For Example:

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom heightened its spectacle even further than its predecessors, escalating the stakes to include not just an island of dinosaurs but the potential weaponization and global spread of these creatures. Yet despite the apocalyptic implications, the characters’ arcs remain small and underdeveloped. Claire softens slightly from her corporate-minded pragmatism into a more openly compassionate activist, but this shift is incremental compared to the world-shattering events around her. Owen, meanwhile, remains essentially unchanged—an action hero stereotype who doesn’t evolve in any significant way.

The mismatch between the immense external conflict and the modest internal growth means the film struggles to generate any thematic depth whatsoever. Its bluff and bluster never quite land because the story neglects the deeper resonance that comes when characters’ internal journeys rise to meet extraordinary stakes.

By contrast, the original Jurassic Park paired its high-stakes dinosaur spectacle with a heartfelt internal arc: Alan Grant’s begrudging discomfort with children gradually transforms into protectiveness and affection as the high stakes demand he bond with the two children in his care, giving the story an emotional anchor that elevates its thrills into resonance.

Alan Grant’s quiet transformation in Jurassic Park shows how small arcs can give big stories their emotional heart. (Jurassic Park (1993), Universal Pictures.)

Flat Arcs and How Characters Stay True While Driving the Story

A final consideration for your story is the Flat Arc. The Flat Arc represents, basically, the next level a character may reach after a Change Arc. The Flat Arc is a story about a character who already “gets” the Truth. However, because stories still require the engine of internal change in order to generate meaning, these stories will still feature characters who change. The difference is that here, the Flat Arc protagonist acts as an Impact Character who represents the thematic Truth and inspires Change Arcs in the supporting characters—whether those arcs are large or small.

So much can be done with a Flat Arc character. Not only can they be used to create a stable axis for an ongoing series, in which potentially everything changes except the protagonist—they can also develop tremendous complexities in their own right. The most important thing to remember about Flat Arc characters is that just because they’ve figured out the thematic Truth at the center of the story, this doesn’t mean they understand all truths—or even any other truth. In short, they can be wonderfully limited and flawed characters while still acting as catalysts for the changes that need to happen in the external story world.

For Example:

Sherlock Holmes remains firmly grounded in the series’ central Truth that rational observation and logic can uncover reality. He doesn’t need to undergo a sweeping personal transformation from story to story; instead, he acts as the stable axis around which the mystery turns. This doesn’t mean Holmes is perfect or even well-balanced. His arrogance, addiction, and emotional blind spots remind us that a Flat Arc character can be deeply limited.

What makes him fascinating is precisely this tension: he embodies the thematic Truth that reason exposes deception, but he does not grasp (or refuses to engage with) many other truths, such as those of empathy, humility, or human connection. His steadfastness allows him to be a catalyst for the story’s external resolution, while his flaws keep him vivid and complex, preventing him from collapsing into a lifeless stereotype.

Sherlock Holmes demonstrates a Flat Arc: he already embodies the thematic Truth of reason and logic, shaping the story world without undergoing major change himself. (Sherlock Holmes (2009), Warner Bros.)

This makes Flat Arc characters excellent choices for many types of series, especially episodic series, in which the central premise remains the same (e.g., a detective solving a mystery) while the plot details change (e.g., new murderer and new suspects in each installment). Flat Arc characters tend to be particularly archetypal. In their unchangingness, they represent a single symbolic catalyst. While this can create striking depth, it can also become stereotypical and, yes, flat very quickly.

Used with discretion and awareness, Flat Arc characters stand as extremely powerful and inspirational (or cautionary) figures. Fundamentally, they represent characters who are a step ahead on the path. They are characters who have emerged from the comparative ignorance of a previous Positive Change Arc (even if it is never referenced) in order to embody a particular Truth (i.e., a slightly more expanded perspective than that of the surrounding story world). Their seeming simplicity can actually make them quite tricky to write well, but when executed skillfully, they provide all kinds of versatility for the author.

For Example:

Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is a quintessential example of a Flat Arc character used with tremendous discretion and power. He has already moved beyond the ignorance of believing society’s Lie—that prejudice and inequality are acceptable—and now lives firmly in the Truth of justice, empathy, and human dignity. Because he stands a step ahead of the rest of Maycomb, his role is not to transform internally but to act as a moral catalyst, challenging the community and inspiring his daughter Scout.

His apparent simplicity (i.e., he is calm, principled, unwavering) makes him seem almost mythological, which is precisely what gives him his symbolic force. He embodies a Truth others must grapple with, and the drama arises from how his world reacts to his steadfastness rather than from any change within him. Written well, such Flat Arc characters can serve as luminous figures, offering readers a vision of what it looks like to live by a deeper Truth even when it comes at great personal cost.

Atticus Finch shows how Flat Arc characters embody moral truth and inspire growth in others without needing to transform themselves. (To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Universal Pictures.)

Whether you’re writing a sweeping epic or a cozy slice-of-life, remember: the heartbeat of your story lives in the character arcs. Big arcs grip us because they reflect the rare, seismic changes of real life, while small arcs and Flat Arcs resonate because they reflect the daily steps of growth, resistance, and steadfastness we all experience day to day. When writers understand the spectrum of arcs available to them, they gain the power to craft stories that feel meaningful and true while also choosing the approach that makes the most sense for any particular story.

In Summary

Character arcs exist on a spectrum—from dramatic transformations that shatter identity to small but satisfying shifts in perspective,to Flat Arcs that anchor the story’s thematic Truth. Each option brings different opportunities and challenges, and the best choice depends on the kind of story you’re telling.

Key Takeaways

• Big Arcs: Redefine a character’s worldview through dramatic conflict between Lie and Truth.
• Small Arcs: Mirror everyday perspective shifts that create relatability and subtle growth.
• Flat Arcs: Provide a stable axis through embodied experience that inspires change in others.
• Balance matters: The scale of the arc should align with the scale of the story’s stakes to create resonance and theme.

Want More?

Need a fast, reliable roadmap for mapping out your characters’ journeys?

Check out my Character Arc Quick Guide Pack, featuring five fillable worksheets that break down the essential beats of every major arc type (Positive, Flat, Disillusionment, Fall, and Corruption). Whether you’re outlining a brand-new protagonist, testing alternate possibilities for a supporting cast, or just looking for a quick-reference checklist during revisions, I designed these worksheets to give you a streamlined way to develop arcs that work. Instantly downloadable, printable, and reusable, they’re designed to save you time while making sure your characters’ inner journeys stay just as compelling as your plot twists. Grab the Character Arc Quick Guide Worksheets here.

Plan your story with the Character Arc Workbook Quick Guide—5 templates, 45 questions, and a cheat sheet to help you choose the right arc.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What kind of character arcs do you most enjoy writing—or reading? Do you prefer the catharsis of big transformations, the relatability of small shifts, or the steadfast power of Flat Arcs? Tell me in the comments!

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 Big vs. Small Character Arcs: Understanding the Degrees of Change in Storytelling appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

Are you truly procrastinating, or are you protecting yourself from uncomfortable emotions? What if the real reason you’re not finishing your book has nothing to do with laziness or lack of motivation? Colleen Story explores the types of procrastination that keep writers stuck and how you can move past them into success.

In the intro, lessons learned from 14 years as an author entrepreneur; Surprised by Pilgrimage on The Leader’s Way Podcast; Blood Vintage, out now.

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Colleen Story is the award-winning author of historical fantasy, supernatural thrillers and motivational books for writers. Her latest book is Escape the Writer’s Web: Untangle Your Procrastination Type, Discover Personalized Solutions, and Transform Your Writing Life.

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 procrastination is an emotional coping technique that protects your current identity
• How “overthinker” writers use learning and courses to avoid actually writing their own work
• The “guilty type” who feels bad whether they’re writing or not writing
• Why perfectionist writers fear failure so much they endlessly revise the same manuscript for years
• How successful writers still procrastinate on uncomfortable tasks like submissions and marketing
• The power of five-minute timed sessions and small wins to ease into a new writing identity

You can find Colleen at ColleenMStory.com and MasterWriterMindset.com.

Transcript of interview with Colleen M. Story

Joanna: Colleen Story is the award-winning author of historical fantasy, supernatural thrillers and motivational books for writers. Her latest book is Escape the Writer’s Web: Untangle Your Procrastination Type, Discover Personalized Solutions, and Transform Your Writing Life. So welcome to the show, Colleen.

Colleen: Thanks, Joanna. It’s great to be here. I’m really excited to have this chat today.

Joanna: It’s such an interesting topic. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Colleen: Well, you know, I wasn’t one of those people who knew from the time I was in the cradle that I wanted to be a writer. I hear about that a lot, that people seem to know early on. I did not.

I always enjoyed reading. I don’t know if anybody will remember the bookmobile that used to come down the street in our neighborhood. That was a highlight of my week, going out and seeing the books in the bookmobile.

So I was always a big reader, and I enjoyed whenever there was an essay test in school. I was thrilled because I felt like I could do well at those.

I didn’t think about writing until I had actually graduated with my music degree. Music came first for me. I graduated with a music degree and had moved to a different state, which gave me a little time to think.

When you go to a different state, I would have had to have gone back to more classes to have gotten my teaching certificate in that state. So I just kind of took some time to think.

It was during that time that I got bit by the writing bug. It’s just kind of weird how it happened, but it was like out of the blue. I wanted to all of a sudden write stories.

I grabbed a word processor—shows you how long ago this was—and started writing short stories. Within three years I had gotten my first short story published and I got a $10 check for it, which felt so awesome. I had to frame that and put it up. It’s still on my writing desk.

So that kind of changed the whole trajectory of my career because I continued to teach music privately, and I still play in the local symphonies and pit orchestras, but as far as my job went, writing just was the thing.

After I got that publication, it was soon after that a copywriting job opened in my town and I got it. That kind of sent me on this new career. I started out as a corporate copywriter and was promoted to managing editor before I left there. I was there for about three years.

My dream at that point was to write a novel and have it traditionally published. I knew that as long as I worked for the corporation, I wouldn’t have the time to devote to that—that I needed to really learn the craft of writing a novel.

So I went ahead and went freelance so that I could control my schedule a bit more. I worked on the side for about six months and then turned in my notice. I’ve been a freelance writer full-time ever since then.

So that got me into the business side of writing. Then on the side I was working on novels for many, many years and got my first novel published in 2015. As of this year, I’ve now published 10 books, both fiction and nonfiction. That’s kind of how it happened for me. I almost fell into it accidentally, but I’m really glad I did.

Joanna: That’s interesting.

So are they all traditionally published or are you hybrid now?

Colleen: I am hybrid. Yes, my novels were all traditionally published until my very latest series, the historical fantasy series. So my first three were traditionally published.

Then when I started writing for writers, that kind of happened accidentally too. I had never intended to be a nonfiction writer. But when my second novel came out, the publisher—this was back in 2017 when it was released—was wanting you to build more of an online author platform.

The one that I had started, the blog I had started, was not doing very well. So I wanted to try something else. I ended up combining my day job expertise, which was really as a health and wellness writer, with my passion for creativity and I created what was then called Writing and Wellness.

I’ve since morphed that into Master Writer Mindset, but Writing and Wellness kind of took off and was doing very well. I started getting invitations to go speak at conferences and workshops and things. During that time I was really discussing issues with writers and realizing that they needed some help in different areas of productivity.

Time management at that time was what I was looking into, and I decided I wanted to go ahead and write a book on that. But I didn’t want to submit it to a publisher because I knew I would have to create a marketing plan and everything for it, and then I would have to allow them to change it however they felt that they should.

I kind of knew what writers were looking for at that point. I wanted more control over that book so I could really deliver what my writers and my subscribers were telling me they needed. So that’s when I dove into self-publishing, was with my writing books, and I’ve done those that way ever since.

Joanna: That’s interesting. So then this book, which is about procrastination specifically, I mean, to me it’s like, wow, a whole book on procrastination. You were not procrastinating when you decided on this one.

I said to you before we started recording, I personally don’t understand procrastination because I just don’t suffer from it myself, but I know that lots of other writers do. So when you sent this to me, I was like, oh yes, this is something that writers really do need. It was interesting, but—

You don’t sound much like a procrastinator. So why did you decide to pick this topic?

Colleen: It was interesting, and right, I never would have thought of myself as a procrastinator. I typically do surveys of my subscribers and it seems like over the years… I mean, I started the Writing and Wellness, I think it was around 2015. So it’s been about 10 years and I will regularly do these surveys.

Repeatedly the subject of productivity, time management, and procrastination would come back as one of the main things that writers were struggling with every year that I would survey.

So I had done some articles, some blog posts on procrastination. I did a couple of YouTube videos on it, but I kept hearing this come back to me. I also would talk to writers at conferences and things, or even at signings.

I would have people come up and say, “I started this book and I never finished it,” or “I really wanted to write this book, but I just never did.” I would talk to writers over and over again and just see this haunted look in their faces about this dream that was untapped. They just had not been able to find a way to finish it.

Then even those writers who had dove in with lots of enthusiasm and maybe were halfway through and then they got stuck, or maybe they got almost finished, but then they weren’t sure what to do next. So the story would end up sitting there and they would never actually complete that cycle.

That made me feel really badly because I know what a joy it is to actually go through, finish the project, put it out there, get feedback, and then be on that road of actually being a writer.

There are so many benefits to that that it just felt so badly for these people who were struggling with the different steps along the way that would lead to procrastination.

It’s interesting though, as I started doing research for this book, which I did quite a bit, that I did learn that I had procrastinated in the past in certain ways. Because procrastination doesn’t always look like completely avoiding the project or scrolling your TikTok feed while you’re supposed to be writing.

These are the ways we normally think of what procrastination looks like, and I don’t usually do those things. I learned as I was doing the research that I had done some other forms of procrastination that I didn’t realize at the time were procrastination.

Joanna: So what were they? Now I’m writing down a list too. What else?

What are the other ways we can recognize procrastination?

Colleen: Well, it’s kind of like anytime that we avoid doing what we know is the next step, and it’s usually very subtle and devious how procrastination works, this type of procrastination, because even very productive writers can end up procrastinating on things that bring up uncomfortable emotions.

At its core, procrastination is always an emotional coping technique. It is a way to protect us from any sort of uncomfortable emotions we may be feeling around doing a certain task.

So I’ll give you an example. Where I realized it had happened for me was in submitting my work to editors and publishers. So there came a point in my career as I was writing that I had a novel that I felt was potentially good enough to get a traditional publishing contract, but I wasn’t being serious about taking that next step.

I might offhandedly find one publisher, work really hard on the query letter and the synopsis, send it off, get the expected rejection, and then I wouldn’t touch it again for another six months to a year.

I was looking back now—I didn’t know it at the time—but looking back now, I realize I was totally procrastinating on getting serious about submitting my novel because when I’m honest about it, it was because I was afraid of getting rejected, which makes total sense. All of us are afraid of that.

So I was afraid after all this blood, sweat, and tears I put into this novel to put it out there, nobody was going to want it. So my procrastination was protecting me from the reality of potentially being rejected or having this story never be picked up by a traditional publisher.

It wasn’t until I finally got ticked off at myself for not getting serious about this, that I started really making it part of my schedule. So I would make it part of my weekly writing schedule to research publishers, to find their submission guidelines, to create query letters that would go with what they were looking for, to really dig deeper into finding publishers that would fit for my project.

When I finally did that and got serious about it and stopped dancing around it, that’s when I got my first publishing contract. So looking back, I could see, okay, I was procrastinating on the part of the job, so to speak, that I needed to tackle, but that brought up uncomfortable emotions.

I’ve since realized that even very productive writers, I hear this from other writers, perhaps in their marketing side of the work that they do that brings up uncomfortable emotions. So they may avoid that or decide they’re too busy for that, or just, “Well, I’m just going to focus on writing and not worry about that.”

We’re actually procrastinating on this other part of our craft or business that we know we should be doing because it’s uncomfortable for us.

Joanna: Yes. Well, it’s good we’re talking about this because I now think back to when I started writing. So when you are at the beginning of your writing journey—and I did all the course. I love learning. I spent really years doing courses, going to conferences, taking a lot of notes.

So I did a lot of writing, but it was all writing notes on other people’s talks and things like that.

Colleen: That sounds familiar.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. I know this is common. There are people listening who are like, yes, I’m still doing that too. So perhaps I was procrastinating about actually writing my own work by thinking I was doing all the right stuff, you know?

I was going to all the conferences and actually I was going on courses, but I was never writing my own work as such. Or if I did, it was just a tiny piece.

Then I remember going to one course and this guy said, “Okay, before we get started, we’re going to do some writing.” He said, “The time is starting now. Write for five minutes on the moment where you knew something had happened, like the moment you knew this thing had happened.”

I was like, “What? We have to do some writing. This isn’t what I signed up for. You’re meant to tell me more stuff so I can avoid writing.”

So I guess that’s an example from my earlier days. Then after I did that timed writing exercise, that kind of just tipped me over and I’ve never struggled with that since. It literally is, if there’s an issue, do some timed writing exercises.

So if people are listening and they’re like, yes, I recognize myself, how do you get over it? Like, what are some of the things we can do? Timed writing worked for me.

What are some of the things people can do?

Colleen: Well, I think the first thing we have to do is be aware. I mean, because most of us at the time, I certainly wasn’t aware that that’s what I was doing until I finally got ticked off enough that I was like, I need to move forward or I need to forget this.

So I think we have to be aware that what we’re doing is actually procrastinating on the next step we need to take. That can be, I think, the most difficult part because it’s like you said, you didn’t feel like you were avoiding anything. I didn’t feel like I was.

So I think we have to kind of take a step back and say, am I doing what I need to do to progress to the next level I want to get to?

If I’m really serious about whatever your next goal is, whether that be selling your self-published book, or that be trying to get a traditional publishing contract, or that be actually finishing this novel, whatever it might be for you.

Am I really taking the steps I need to take to get to that next place?

What you were speaking of reminded me of one of the types in my book, which is the overthinker. We think that thinking is going to help us progress. I have been guilty of that myself in the past, thinking if I think through things that that’s going to help me move forward.

I’ve since learned that doing is a far better teacher. It’s like you said, once you start doing the writing, that is going to take you a lot farther.

There’s an example in my history that I was leaving a lot of novels half finished because I would get halfway through, I would get stuck, and then I would start thinking about it.

So I would say, “Okay, well this must not be a very good idea, or the idea must not be good enough to carry through a novel, so I need to actually think about a new one and start a new one.” I would do that over and over.

It wasn’t until I had a mentor talk about how important it was to actually finish the story. “You can’t learn how to write a story until you finish this story,” that I realized I was procrastinating, that I was not doing what I needed to do to get to the next level, which for me was learning how to tell the complete story.

The only way that I could learn to do that was to do it. I had to stick with the story I had and go back and study story structure, go get some help from an editor or book coach, or do something to help me take it to the next level, which was to actually finish the book.

So I think the first thing we have to do is be aware of what we’re dancing around or what we’re avoiding because it makes us feel nervous or afraid, or we won’t be up to this next step. That’s often what happens is we don’t feel ready for the next step.

We have to bring that into our awareness and then say, okay, I think the best way to always approach it is in the smallest step possible.

I talk a lot about giving yourself small wins.

So what you said about some timed writing, he asked you to write for five minutes. That’s one of my favorites, is the five minute rule, to sit down and do something for five minutes. That can apply to most anything.

For a lot of writers that are struggling with, “How can I start building my platform?” or “How can I start marketing this book?” Say, “Today I’m going to sit down for five minutes and I’m going to create some graphics for my social media posts,” or “Today I am going to sit down for five minutes and I’m going to start researching places where I might be able to promote my book,” whatever it might be.

Taking little, tiny, small wins is a way to ease yourself into what this is really about, which is building a new identity. Because if we take a look at this seriously, procrastination is a comforting, emotional coping tool that keeps us in the identity we are at right now.

So if I look back at the example I gave, I was the writer who was not yet published. I was the aspiring writer. I was the writer who wanted to be published, and that was my identity at the time. So there was a lot wrapped up into that. You know, I was comfortable being that person.

I was trying to get better at writing. I was trying to finish a good novel. I was trying to create a novel that was good enough to be published, and that was my identity at the time.

What I needed to do was step into a new identity of being a traditionally published author. That is a big step in our brains because we are very used to being who we are. Anything that takes us beyond that feels scary to us. So we have to then take a very small step.

So the small step, anything that has to do with, “I want to get here. So what’s the smallest step I can take to start down that path?” If we take one little tiny step at a time, we can gradually ease our brains and our identities into this new identity we want to create, if that makes sense.

Joanna: Yes, I like that. It’s interesting. I think the five minute thing is also good the other way.

So you mentioned before, are we avoiding things by, for example, scrolling TikTok. Or, for me, I’ll sometimes check X or go and look at my Feedly list of blog posts and things that I’ve got on there. So I give myself five minutes in that direction sometimes.

So it’s like, this isn’t procrastination, this is a break. This is a break. I think these types of behaviors can turn into a way of procrastinating if they go on for an unlimited amount of time. Like people look up and suddenly they’ve actually spent two hours on social media or something instead.

So can we stop that as well?

Colleen: Well, what you said sounds like something that I recommend to people who have a type of brain that seeks out that novelty, that seeks out that occasional distraction. That’s another type of brain I talk about in the book.

There is actually a distracted type of procrastination, and I’ve actually discussed this with several different writers who do struggle with this. They have found success doing that very thing, giving themselves a limited amount of time.

“Okay, so I’m going to do whatever distracted behavior I enjoy,” whatever those various things you mentioned, whatever it might be, “but I’m going to do it for a set amount of time.”

Some people will also trade time, so they’ll say 10 minutes of distraction for 20 minutes of writing. So you might have a half an hour blocked out for writing, and 20 minutes of that time will be writing and 10 minutes will be your chosen form of distraction, whatever that may be.

One of the things I talk about in the book a lot and in my videos too, is this importance of self understanding, being able to understand the kind of creative brains that we have. I’ve learned over the research of this book and just over my experience working with different writers, that we are all so very different.

We all often talk about what we have in common as far as being writers go, but we’re all very different in how our brains work and how our creative selves operate. Knowing how they operate and what they need to operate at their best can really help us improve our productivity and take that next step into the next identity that we want to reach.

So finding out that this is something that you need or that you enjoy or that helps you stay on task, can be a good piece of knowledge that you can then turn around and say, “Okay, how can I use this to help myself be more productive?”

Joanna: Yes, I think that’s so important, this self understanding. I spoke to someone recently and she was almost having guilt over not writing. Guilt seems to be a massive thing in the writing community. “Oh, I didn’t write, therefore I feel guilty,” which is crazy because there are a lot better things to feel guilty about, I think, than not writing.

It’s so interesting that it’s very real though. I think the self understanding is like not beating yourself up over this. It’s trying to figure out who you are and what works for you, and then figuring out a way that will make it work for you if you like.

If you really do want to write a book, for example, then you have to figure out your type as such.

So maybe you could give us a couple more of the common types that you found.

Colleen: Well, let’s talk about the great one that you just brought up there. I do actually have a guilty type in my book because this is so pervasive in the writing community.

I saw this many, many years ago. I did a blog post on writing guilt and just punched it in at Google at the time—”Writer’s Guilt”—and I was shocked about how many posts came back. I was like, “Wow, this is huge in the writing community.” It’s this thing that so many of us writers seem to carry around with us.

It’s like we’re guilty when we’re writing and we’re guilty when we’re not writing. Many people end up in this place so they feel guilty if they don’t get the writing done. But then if they actually set the time aside for themselves to write, then they feel guilty about what they’re not doing when they’re writing.

So it’s this really mean double-edged sword that can just tear a person’s whole motivation for going after this dream down into shreds. So in the book, I talk about guilt as it relates to that, but also as it relates to procrastination.

You procrastinate on your writing for whatever the reason is. There are many different reasons. Then you feel guilty that you procrastinated.

So you come back and try to restart your writing process, but that guilt gets in the way and you’re feeling bad about everything you haven’t done that you should be at this certain point in your book or whatever it might be. That kind of tends to destroy the joy you might have brought to writing for that day.

So there’s all kinds of coping techniques for that. One of them is just that you have to always allow yourself to start fresh. Always allow yourself to start fresh.

Then if you’re someone who tends to feel guilty one way or the other, whether you’re writing or not, I think that often is a case of not allowing yourself to follow your dreams.

There’s a whole thing about people pleasing that I’m going to talk about on YouTube because I was definitely a people pleaser for a long time that we have to reckon ourselves with.

We have to say, “Okay, my dreams matter too.”

This is one of the things I’m really passionate about helping writers with because as you and I know having lived the writing life, we realize all the benefits that come from devoting your life to a craft like writing.

It’s not just about finishing the books or having something to leave behind you. It’s all the ways that it shapes you. There are studies proving that regularly writing helps to shape your brain. It helps you to become smarter in a lot of ways. It increases the connections in your brain.

It makes you more empathetic. Studies have shown that as well, that you tend to overcome difficulties and challenges along the way because we all know how difficult the writing life can be. You become a more resilient and stronger person.

Also, you’re always expressing yourself through writing, which can really be, even if you’re not writing about your own life experiences, it can be really therapeutic.

So people that are robbing themselves of that by not allowing themselves to take their dreams seriously, aren’t just robbing themselves of the book they may write, they’re robbing themselves of the people they could be becoming by going through the process of writing and completing a book and perhaps publishing it.

So I try to emphasize to people that if you have a dream to write, there’s usually a deeper reason for it besides just that you want to write a book. There’s usually, I like a calling to your soul that is asking you to step up and be even more than perhaps you are right now.

If you deny that, if you say, “Well, it’s not that important,” or “What other people want me to do is more important,” or you feel guilty because you’re making room in your life for that.

Imagine if you had a friend who was doing that, and you could see this in this friend wanting to come out, you can see that this is where this friend needs to go in their own personal development and they’re denying themselves that. It’s really a crime because it’s kind of like you’re robbing this person of their ability to self-actualize at an even higher level.

So I try to impress upon people to give your dream the position it needs in your life so that you understand that making it a priority is not about being selfish or self-indulgent. It’s about your own development, about becoming the best person you possibly can be.

If that dream is there and has been there, especially for the person you are talking about for 30 years, that dream has not left, and there’s a reason for that. I believe there’s kind of a soul calling reason for that, whether people believe that or not. It doesn’t matter.

Giving yourself that importance in your dreams and allowing yourself that time is going to make you a happier person. So I would just suggest, again, a small win. Set aside 15, 20 minutes, however many days of the week that you can make it, and start making that a priority. Don’t allow anyone to take that time away from you.

You will start to see how beneficial it is for yourself. How much better you feel, how much more whole as a person you feel because we’ve all experienced it as writers. When we actually make the time and we honor that part of ourselves, how much better people we are.

Once a person starts doing that, they’ll realize that they’re a better person, not only for themselves, but for everyone around them. So that’s a little bit about the guilty type.

Joanna: Yes, I think it’s interesting. I mean, you said there about, think about it as another friend or something, you wouldn’t knock down their dream.

I kind of think that our creative selves are like children.

Like you, there’s the child inside you who wants to write and as you say, this kind of calling, creative calling that we have had for a long time whenever it came up in our lives. You had it for music at the beginning and then it came for writing.

For me it probably was always writing. Like you would never say to like a 6-year-old or an 8-year-old, “No. Go and do some accounting or something.”

Like you encourage—you know, nothing wrong with accounting—but I mean, you wouldn’t say to a little 6-year-old, “No, you can’t go write a story or you can’t go play with words or play music or whatever.” We encourage that behavior in children.

So I think when we squash down that creative self in our own lives, it can almost feel like that growth is stunted somehow, or there’s this kind of sad child inside that just really wants to play with words or play with music. So we want to help that and facilitate that. As you say, find the joy.

Colleen: Exactly. And I think when you become an adult, I would almost say it’s even more important than I think that it is in children because of the many benefits I see that in people and that the studies have found in people when you write and you write regularly.

It’s hard to describe when you’ve gone through a lifetime of writing as you and I have, but it’s kind of like imagining myself not having devoted my life to the craft of writing and everything that entails.

I mean, you go through the process of just writing a story is a huge thing that happens in your brain when you learn how to do that, and that happens with your empathy. Studies have found that we become more empathetic as we write about different characters, and we have to be in their skin as we write about them.

We go through the process of actually completing this story, and then we publish it, and then we get feedback, and then we go back and do it again. This is all very much a personal development thing that happens.

So we are becoming better versions of ourselves through this whole process. Like you say, if we squash it down, then we’re denying ourselves that ability to become that person. It’s almost like we kind of sit there and we stay at the same level rather than growing, which we would hope to do throughout our lives.

Joanna: Absolutely. Okay. So one more type.

Do we have one more type that you’re like, yes, that one I definitely want to talk about?

Colleen: Yes, and that would be the perfectionist, I think. When I was asking writers to complete the questionnaire that I have in the story and making sure that it was all coming out accurate and everything, a great number of them were coming back as the perfectionist types.

In my book, just so people know, there usually isn’t just one type. There usually is maybe one or two primary types. But when I was doing this, checking with writers and having them take this quiz, I often found that many of them were a blend of perhaps two or three more types.

I talk about the blend and how that operates in your writing life, but many of them had the perfectionist in there. It was either their primary type or perhaps their secondary type. The whole thing about perfecting our work. I’ve always known that I was a perfectionist as well, and so many writers came back with that.

So it’s kind of like the guilty type that seems very pervasive among writers as creators. So I looked into that research a little bit more carefully, and what I discovered surprised me and has helped me with my perfectionism as well.

Perfectionism, at its core, is a huge fear of failure.

So we often think when we’re perfectionists we’re like, “Well, I just want this project to be as good as it can be,” and there is a lot of that in there.

I mean, often perfectionists do put out very high quality work, but there’s also something else behind that if we are so perfectionist that we are endlessly tweaking and “here’s draft number 75” and we’re not taking that next step to share our work. What’s really at the core of that is this huge fear of failure.

So in perfectionist writers, I feel like one of the big things they have to help themselves with is to gather the courage to take the risk that they need to take. Because one thing that I’ve learned over my writing career, the more that I risk failure, the less of a big deal it seems to be.

So I’m more willing now to go out and try things that I may fail at or some new marketing technique or some new author platform building thing, or some different type of book or story, because now I realize that failure is not as big a deal. In fact, failure is great. It’s a good way for us to learn.

When you’re in the early stages of being a perfectionist, that can really hold you back because you’re just constantly thinking about it. One example that I hear often from writers is they’re on the same book. They’ve been working on this first book that they wrote for 10 years because they got to make this book just perfect.

They have this belief that this one book is going to kind of be their writing career. I understand that because I did that too. I really focused on that book number one. Book number one was going to be what launched me into my novel writing career, which looking back now to me seems really silly.

Book number one is basically just practice.

After I had written seven half-finished manuscripts and I finally managed to complete one that I felt was good enough for publication, and it did get published. But still looking back at it now, it’s like, “Okay, well that was just practice.”

We start to realize the more we do, and this is going back to that thing, that doing is so much better than thinking. Doing the book and going to the next book and going to the next book.

Perfectionists tend to really get caught up, especially young writers in that first book and not taking the long view of, “Okay, do you want to be a writer for life? Then you want to be thinking about book five, book 10, book 15 down the road. When we think that way, we are less likely to be so nitpicky about that first one.

Yes, make it as high quality as you can, but have a time limit. You know, “I have this book, and I’m going to give myself one year or two years, or whatever it is to finish it, and then I’m going to move on and I’m going to risk failure.”

I’m going to risk perhaps this not being perfect or perhaps it not selling millions of copies or whatever our dreams might be for it, because I know that this is about my experience and getting better and developing my skills as a writer. I do that by writing the next book.

Joanna: Yes, I actually get really annoyed at this kind of “my book is my baby” metaphor. I mean, obviously babies are very precious and special when they’re with you for a long, long time and all of that, and so you attach the kind of emotional language around a book.

People just get obsessed with this one book for years and years and years. I have a lot of books now too, and it’s sort of that they’re employees actually. Once they’re finished and they go out in the world, they’re employees.

Colleen: That’s a great way to think of it. I haven’t thought of it that way.

Joanna: Yes, they’re assets.

They’re intellectual property assets, and they earn me money. So, therefore, they’re employees.

Now, of course, I didn’t think about that at the beginning of my career, but it feels like a much, yes, I do the best job I can on every single book, but I’m not so emotionally attached, you know, to them, I think in the same way.

So as you say, it’s changing the attitude, and I agree with you. There’s so many people who just fixate on one book for a really long time, and also I think you, you don’t think you have any more ideas.

I remember that from the beginning of my career. It was like, “Well, I’ll never have any ideas.” But the truth is, once you clear that pipe—that’s how I call it, it’s like a pipe—you just need to clear that first blockage out the way, and then that pipe just keeps flowing. The ideas keep flowing, but you need to kind of unblock it with that first book.

Colleen: Oh, so very true. I was going to say, even if you do remain emotionally connected, which I think many of us do, I’m emotionally connected to my stories.

The whole thing of finding the courage and risking getting that book out there is such a good skill to develop because once you put it out there and you realize, like you say that the pipe is now open and you’re off working on book number two, suddenly book number one is not as important to you.

You’re now attached to book number two, and it happens that way with every single one that you go on and do next. Your next book is the one that you’re really emotionally invested in.

So I think that’s the other thing we don’t see when we’re just starting out, is that this same sort of investment could apply to a different child, so to speak, if that’s how we look at our work. We could apply to the next story that we’re doing.

We think this is the only one in our lives, which is just a shortsighted way of looking at it. So I try to encourage young writers to try to take that longer view and like you say, to realize that they have a lot more in them than just the one book.

I think the other big problem with that approach is that then when you finally do get it out there, if it doesn’t fulfill all of your dreams, it is so hugely crushing and is so discouraging.

Esepcially for young writers to have put all this stuff in there, maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years on one single book, and then you finally get it to where you think it’s amazing and you put it out there and it doesn’t do everything you wanted it to do.

Then you, instead of realizing this was book number one and I have a lot more in me and I need to keep going and get better and go on and have this writing life, you think, “Oh. Well, this wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, so I guess I better just quit” because it becomes such a crushing defeat, if that makes sense.

So I think trying to reprogram kind of your thinking into “there will be another one that I can be invested in. There will be the next project, and the important thing is to get this out and give myself the time to do these other books that are going to come along afterwards” is going to help you retain much more of your courage and your motivation as you move forward than if you put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Joanna: You’ve used the phrase “young writers” a couple of times. Just to be clear for people, you mean people who have a low writing age, as in people who are still on one book or only started writing last year, whatever their actual age, they might be 65.

Colleen: Right, exactly. Exactly. Still a young writer. I think that’s really important.

Joanna: And then you just said something like, and if that book doesn’t fulfill all the dreams you had for it, then you might be disappointed. I’m thinking—

How likely is it that any book fulfills all the dreams?

Colleen: Right. But I mean, I remember thinking that when I was first starting out that this book was, and I hear that from so many writers. They’re, “Here’s draft number 20 of the first book that they’re working on.”

What really kills me is when it’s book one in a series, and they’ve still got book two and three to write and they’re putting all their eggs in this basket and I can just see this huge fall coming in the future. I don’t want that to happen.

Joanna: Well, I guess we’ve talked about that writing craft side, but I’m also interested around the business side because you said earlier that you did procrastinate around sending out the book and pitching and that kind of thing. I feel like writers also procrastinate on marketing.

So you write fiction and nonfiction, you’re also a freelance writer.

So how do you tackle marketing and the business side? What might people procrastinate in around that?

Colleen: Yes. I feel like that is a huge side of it that I wouldn’t have really thought about procrastinating applying to before I did the research for this book. I am definitely a good candidate for this because I’m more on the creative side. I was not looking at this as a business early on.

This has been something that I’ve tried to then develop later in my career, because I’ve always had my freelance writing job to cover the bills, so to speak. So the writing was my creative outlet on the side.

Then as I’ve grown as a writer and have several books now, and I’ve gotten older and kind of in looking at the future, I’m like, “Boy, I really would like this to be more on the business side of what I do.”

Also, I’m experiencing changes now because as AI comes on, the whole freelance writing industry is going through a lot of big upheavals and changes. So as I look at that, I think, “Okay, well I need to tackle the business side of this as well.”

I’ve always had that along there as far as I have built author platforms that have grown and I’ve got a subscriber list and I’m doing all those things. I find that the marketing things that work change so often that it becomes like this whole other part of what we do as creatives that we need to learn about and get better at as we go.

So for me, it’s become very much a self-education thing, and I’m learning and then I’m doing, and I’m learning and I’m trying something else, and I’m learning and trying something else. I think the whole thing of being willing to risk failure really comes in huge on the marketing side.

So again, it’s like what’s going to work for you personally?

Maybe you are really good at creating a blog and that becomes your platform. Maybe you are better at doing YouTube videos and that becomes your platform. Maybe you do a podcast like you do, and that becomes how you reach people.

At the end of the day, marketing is just about trying to introduce our work to more people. So it’s like, “How do I do that, and what are my natural strengths, and how can I apply those to the marketing side of things?”

I think most writers are uncomfortable with this because we never learned how to do this. Many of us are not natural business people or marketing people. That’s not something we’ve done in our past. We were drawn to the creative side, but the business side seems very foreign to us.

So many writers will come to me at workshops and say, “I’m bad at marketing.” And I don’t think that that’s it necessarily. I think we just didn’t learn how to do this and perhaps we’re not naturally gifted at it, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t educate ourselves and put ourselves out there.

So I think for me, the key has been just trying this and trying that. The more I do that, the more marketing becomes fun because it’s like experimentation and trying different things to get word about my book out there, and then just seeing what works and going back and analyzing the results and then doing more of what does and less of what didn’t.

So for me, I’m definitely not a master marketer by any means, and I’m always listening to The Creative Penn podcast so that I could learn more about all of that. The Novel Marketing podcast and some of those others that I’m always tuning into.

I’ve kind of made it part of my writing life now. I think that’s another key for writers is just to bring that marketing side in more often in what you’re exposing yourself to and working into your weekly timeline of what you’re tackling so that you have writing time, but you also have marketing time.

That’s how I’m tackling it at this point. I don’t know if that really answered your question, but that’s where I’m at.

Joanna: Well, I mean, even that you said you listen to podcasts and here you are on the podcast. I feel like people feel—and I have had this feeling—like I should be doing something like TikTok. TikTok is the obvious one we should be doing, you know, short form video.

I’m like, I did try and literally my friend Sacha Black got on the phone with me, tried to help me do it, and I had a TikTok account for about six hours, and I just hated it. I hate it.

The main thing is, like you said, I don’t consume short form video. Not on Instagram. Not on YouTube, not on TikTok, not anywhere. I don’t really watch video, but I listen to a lot of podcasts.

So whether this has all become one because I’ve been podcasting so long, but the fact is, of course I can do podcasting and I listen to podcasts so I know the medium and it suits me and it’s what I enjoy—the longer form discussions.

Whereas somebody who loves being on TikTok as a consumer would also be better at it as a creator. So we have to think about it that way, don’t we?

You can’t do everything. You just have to find what works for you.

Colleen: You’re exactly right. This comes back to that self-knowledge. What are we? What do we naturally gravitate toward? What are we good at? And what do we enjoy?

Personally, I enjoy doing YouTube videos. I didn’t think I would, but I saw that YouTube was a place where you could connect with people. I started picking that up. I’d had the channel for a while, but I hadn’t done much with it.

Last August, actually, I decided to get serious and start posting once a week, and I found that I really enjoy that format. It seems a little similar to blogging to me, which I did well with my blog on my platform.

Now it seems like video’s kind of becoming even more of an immediate way to reach people, especially in an age of AI. So the long form video, kind of the educational type videos I’ve taken to, and I think people have to decide what is going to work best.

I think often the only way you can figure that out is to try it. You just have to give it a try. The good thing is, I think the biggest thing that’s helped me is most people don’t care. They’re not watching you.

You know, when I was first thinking about getting on video, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, people are going to see me and this is going to be scary and all that.” But you realize after you do it that it’s really hard to build an audience and you have to get serious about it.

You have to have a regular plan for how you’re doing it. It has to be in your writing life regularly. So one video, two videos, three videos is pretty much probably going to be ignored. We can assume that. So that kind of takes some of the fear out of it. It’s like, “Oh, go ahead and try it. See what happens.”

If you have an inclination to do short form video, give it a try, see how it goes. You’re not going to get 50 zillion views on your first or second or third video most likely, but you can determine if you enjoy it.

Do you enjoy this type of creative outlet? Do you enjoy blogging? Do you enjoy creating graphics and things on social media?

Now, one of my writing friends just loves Instagram. Is always creating reels and things for Instagram, not really my cup of tea. I found out that that’s not really where my interests lie, but again, it’s just trying these different things and seeing what works for you and what helps you to connect with new readers.

Joanna: Right.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Colleen: My writing motivational site is MasterWriterMindset.com, and then my author site is just my name, ColleenMStory.com. People always ask me, that is my real name. My dad gifted me with a pen name. It’s cool how often that happens actually.

Those are my two main websites. I am on YouTube at ColleenMStoryteller, and there is actually a free quiz that people can take that’s related to the procrastination book that’s on my website right now. That’s called MasterWriterMindset.com/findyours.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Colleen. That was great.

Colleen: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to be here.

The post Overcoming Procrastination With Colleen M. Story first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Fourteen years ago, in September 2011, I left my day job to become a full-time author-entrepreneur. Every year since, I’ve reflected on the journey and what I learn along the way.

My challenges continue to evolve with the business, and you’ll likely be at a different stage, but I hope you find my lessons learned useful on your own author journey.

You can read all my lessons learned from previous years on my timeline here — and remember, just like everyone else, I started out writing my first book with no audience. But with time and continued effort, everything is possible.

(1) Self-publishing continues to change — and there are more choices than ever 

Earlier this year, I updated Successful Self-Publishing, now in its Fourth Edition, and it was extraordinary to realise how much had changed over the couple of years since the last edition.

There are more choices than ever in terms of how you get your book into the world and how you reach readers, and while that can be daunting, it can also be a liberating ‘choose your own adventure’ experience.

You can still start with an ebook on Amazon and put it into KU, or go wide with ebook and print on all book retailers, or produce an audiobook and a hardback along with the main editions and sell in the usual way on the usual stores.

But you can also do so much more now! 

Direct sales have become an important part of the indie author business model, and personally, I make far more money away from Amazon than from the platform that has been the dominant source of revenue for indie authors for so long.

Indie authors have always been a hidden part of the publishing industry, and our sales and revenue barely acknowledged by media and industry reports, but it’s even more so now. 

Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms, Shopify and other direct sales stores, subscription sites like Patreon and SubStack, and many others are not counted in bestseller lists or industry reports, but as ever, indie authors just keep on creating, enjoying our freedom, and focusing on our readers and fans, rather than industry commentators.

I’ve done three Kickstarter campaigns since last year’s lessons learned — Blood Vintage, a folk horror special hardback, Death Valley, a standalone thriller, and The Buried and the Drowned, a short story collection. None of these fit the model of what sells well on the main retailers, but they are perfect for crowdfunding and selling direct, and also end up on the main stores eventually. 

I have two Shopify stores — JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com and I use BookVault print on demand for my physical books, and Bookfunnel to deliver ebooks and audiobooks, as I prefer the freedom of having no physical stock or shipping. 

But there are indie authors now pushing the boundaries of selling direct. Sacha Black as Ruby Roe, as well as Adam Beswick, are both killing it with Kickstarter and Shopify sales and shipping from their own warehouses, powering sales by TikTok and Instagram rather than paid ads.

David Viergutz started selling horror stories by physical letter in the post and is now expanding into his own epistolary empire! 

There are so many indie authors doing exciting and new things with their writing, publishing and marketing. There is no single business model anymore.

You get to choose your path — or invent a new one, and of course, this is both the opportunity and the challenge at the heart of being an indie author.

(2) Some creative projects are books of the heart, rather than commercial prospects — and that’s okay

My short story collection The Buried and the Drowned is a really personal project. It means a great deal to me, as there is something tangibly important about having my short stories in print after more than a decade of digital-only publication.

The book represents a mind shift, a moment when I started writing in a form that I didn’t even know I wanted to write, but have grown into and now look forward to creating. 

These stories also contain more fragments of my life than my longer fictional works, and more glimpses into my own back story through the Author’s Notes included throughout.

Short stories can make money, for sure, but like poetry, they are written more from a creative drive, than a commercial one. Perhaps that makes them even more precious.

The Buried and the Drowned will be available from my store, JFPennBooks from 1 November and at all the usual stores from 1 December — www.JFPenn.com/buried 

(3) Not everything works out as planned — but that’s okay too, as indie authors have options! 

In October 2024, I did a Kickstarter for the gorgeous hardback edition of my folk horror novel, Blood Vintage, but then, rather than self-publishing it in all formats, the book went out with my agent to major publishers in the US and UK. (I didn’t want a small press deal as I can do what they do myself, so it only went to significant imprints.)

There were many months of waiting, and then some lovely rejections, but mostly silence. The trad pub process is incredibly slow, and that in itself was a reminder that it might not be a good fit for me, at least for this book. 

After nine months, I said that we needed to set a time limit and then I would take it back, and we have now reached that point. 

Blood Vintage is available now in ebook and print editions from my store, JFPennBooks, and I am just working on the audiobook with my voice clone through ElevenLabs, which is a fun project! It’s also on pre-order at the other stores for 15 October 2025 — www.jfpenn.com/bloodvintage 

I’m thrilled to have it back as this book has some very personal elements and it’s set in my home county of Somerset, so if you’d like to try an English folk horror novel set at a biodynamic vineyard, click here to check it out.

Will I try the traditional publishing approach again? 

Yes, at some point, but probably for a more mainstream kind of thriller, or a different kind of book altogether. 

(4) Some books take longer than others 

I’ve learned this lesson before as my Pilgrimage memoir took three years, and my ‘shadow book,’ took almost two decades to emerge as Writing the Shadow, but it’s sometimes hard to figure out which books need more time — and it turns out that I’m working on another one of those!

Over the last 18 months my husband Jonathan has worked on an MBA as well as his day job, so we haven’t traveled as much as usual. I’ve taken the opportunity to work on my ‘gothic cathedral book,’ visiting lots of cities in the UK, researching and taking photos and thinking about how this book might come together.

Originally, it was going to be a purely photo book, which I then abandoned as I discovered the pain of getting photo permissions.

But then ChatGPT became my useful sidekick, and with Deep Research, I was able to get a full list of all the contacts at all the cathedrals, as well as a draft letter and a process for doing that.

Then, during my travels this spring and summer, the book has deepened and shifted. I have thoughts on memento mori, stone and deep time, the nature of change, and so much more. Right now, it is tens of thousands of words of disjointed thoughts and ideas, and tens of thousands of photos! 

I told Kristen Tate, my editor, that I would have a draft to her by the end of the summer, but a few weeks ago, I told her it wasn’t happening. This is not a book I can rush, so it might be 2026, it might be 2027. I don’t know. 

This is another book of my heart. It is about as far as writing to market as you can get! It has taken a lot of time in the last year and it will take a lot more time. 

But I trust the creative process. 

I’ve been in this position before, and I will be so again. The chaos is part of the fun of discovery writing, so I won’t rush it, or try to force the book into shape. I trust emergence, and it will come in its own time. 

You can see my photos and articles about the gothic cathedrals on my Books and Travel site here. These write ups are the first part of the processing phase, or the incubating phase, a necessary part of any kind of travel based research, at least for me. I hope you enjoy the virtual visits! 

(5) Sometimes you need to push into a new trajectory

I turned 50 in March 2025, and so inevitably, thoughts of the next decade flashed into my mind. I’ve also had a need for change for a while, and have started a slow pivot over the last few years.

I started writing seriously for publication in 2005, so it’s been twenty years of focus to get to this point.

I left my job in 2011, so I’ve been a full-time author entrepreneur for 14 years — which is now longer than I was an IT consultant in my previous career.

My work is deepening and I want to think about and write what matters, so in a few weeks time, I’m starting a Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester. It is a full-time online course, so I will be back to having a ‘day job equivalent’ in terms of the time I need to focus on something else other than being an author entrepreneur.

I’m doing this because I need more input and variation in my thinking. I want to dig deeper into the big questions that fascinate me — mortality, meaning, and the sacred. These themes run through my fiction and memoir but I want to explore them more rigorously. 

My Top 5 Clifton Strengths are Learner, Intellection, Strategic, Input, and Futuristic, so it’s not a surprise that I would seek out another degree. My previous degrees are in Theology, and also Psychology, so this builds on those, and potentially gives me a new trajectory and new ideas for my writing.

The academic environment will challenge me in different ways. I’ll read texts I might never have encountered, engage with ideas that stretch my thinking, and defend my arguments in ways that will ultimately make my writing stronger. As authors, we’re always researching, but formal study is a different kind of discipline. Whatever happens, I know this course will generate a whole load of new ideas for my creativity, which will emerge in fiction and non-fiction alike.

Don’t worry! I’m not giving everything up. Not at all!

I’ll continue to share with my author community first on patreon.com/thecreativepenn and also continue to podcast at The Creative Penn, although I will be reducing the number of interviews in 2026 and doing more solo, shorter episodes.

I’m not sure whether I’ll write any new books in the coming year, but the beauty of the backlist is that I can continue to market my other books and still make income that way. 

I also have multiple streams of income through the podcast, Patreon, and also my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. The final one for 2025 is on Sunday 21 September 2025, and I will do a new batch in early 2026.

If you’re feeling stagnant or like you need a fresh perspective or a new trajectory, consider pushing yourself into something new. 

It doesn’t have to be a degree, of course, but perhaps try writing in a new genre, or taking a workshop outside your comfort zone, traveling somewhere new, or attending a live event that you know will be a challenge. I will be at Author Nation in November, so perhaps I will see some of you there.

Conclusion

After 14 years, I’m still here, still writing, still learning, still growing, still sharing.

I’m grateful for this weird, wonderful career that lets me explore whatever fascinates me while sharing the journey with others. From AI to Gothic cathedrals to death studies, it’s quite the ride!

Thank you to everyone on this journey with me — my readers, my Patreon community, podcast listeners, and everyone who backs my Kickstarters and buys my books. You make this possible.

The next year will bring new challenges and discoveries, and I’ll keep sharing what I learn along the way. I hope you’ll join me for whatever comes next.

What about you? What lessons are you learning on your author journey?

I’d love to hear about them, so please leave a comment or question below. 

The post Lessons Learned from 14 Years as a Full-Time Author Entrepreneur first appeared on The Creative Penn.

When it comes to creating memorable, emotionally resonant characters, your character’s personality may seem like it’s just a “flavor,” but in many ways it’s actually the foundation of the story itself. Your character’s personality influences everything: the character arc, the voice in both dialogue and the narrative (if the character has a POV), and the goals that shape your entire plot.

In many ways, your characters’ personalities can determine whether or not the story works. This is most obviously true when it comes that special “it” factor that creates unforgettably quirky or nuanced characters, but it’s even more true when it comes to the cohesion of your story’s deeper workings—where character, plot, and theme all come together.

In short, understanding personality might just be one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s toolbox.

In This Article:

• 3 Reasons Why Personality Is the Secret Ingredient to Strong Characters
• 4 Ways a Character’s Personality Drives Your Storytelling
• 10 Practical Tips for Weaving Personality Into Character Arc, Plot, Dialogue, and More
• FAQs About Character Personality

3 Reasons Why Personality Is the Secret Ingredient to Strong Characters

The concept of personality brings a number of different connotations.

1. Personality Is a Consistent Set of Traits

For starters, we recognize the technical definition of personality as a consistent set of traits, behaviors, emotional patterns, and motivations that shape how someone perceives the world, makes decisions, and interacts with others. Personality influences not just what people do, but why they do it, how they react under pressure, form relationships, pursue goals, and confront internal or external conflict.

2. Personality Is Charisma

There is also a certain sense of je ne sais quoi—that special sauce that makes an individual unique and interesting. When the word “personality” is brought up in a fictional context, we generally tend to think of characters with big, interesting (read: complex), and memorable personalities. They’re not beige; they’re intriguing in their reliability but also because of their unique ways of viewing and responding to the world.

3. Personality Is the Ego or False Self

However, personality can also be understood as the “false” or “egoic self”—a persona honed throughout our lives to allow us to move functionally through society and relationships, but which is ultimately limiting to the bigness of our true selves.

Writers can make good use of all three of these definitions. Thinking intentionally about a character’s personality allows us to craft a container in which we can sift through potential traits, reactions, and goals to find those that offer the most cohesion for the entire story. From there, we can explore ways to create characters with inherently entertaining or intriguing personalities—ones with the potential to join iconic classics such as Michael Corleone, Jo March, Tony Stark, Sarah Connor, Gandalf the Gray, and Hermione Granger (their names are as famous, if not more, than the stories they play in).

4 Ways Personality Drives Storytelling

Most of the time, when writers consider a character’s personality, they focus primarily on outward traits. However, in so many ways, a character’s personality is the story. Here are four key considerations.

1. Personality Shapes the Character Arc

The Complete Enneagram

Although some personality systems offer static descriptions of traits, others like the Enneagram go deeper to point out specific transformational paths that can help people break past the ego-based facades and personas that limit us and create dysfunction. From this perspective, personality is all about the character arc!

Although most personality systems worth their salt (including MBTI, Human Design, Socionics, love languages, attachment styles, even astrology, and more) ultimately offer pathways of growth, the Enneagram is somewhat unique in its focus on specific paths of evolution (or devolution as the case may be) for each type. As I’ve explored before, this makes the Enneagram perhaps the most useful personality system for not just identifying and fleshing out a character’s personality, but for using that personality to create a cohesive character arc and, from that, plot and theme as well.

If you’d like more guidance, I’ve talked here about the Positive Change Arcs inherent in each of the nine Enneagram types and here about the Negative Change Arcs inherent in each type. I’ve also just released a full set of worksheets for each of the nine types. Each bundle includes questions to guide you in planning either a Positive or Negative Arc for each of the types, which will help you ensure your character’s arc, Lie vs. Truth, and Want vs. Need are aligned with the character’s personality, while also helping you brainstorm ways to make your character’s personalized arc consistent with the overall plot and theme.

Enneagram Character Arc Cheat Sheet Bundle – Square for Etsy

2. Personality Informs Voice and Dialogue

Perhaps nothing in your story is more obviously influenced by personality than character voice. When we think of personality on the page, we think about voice more than anything else. How a character communicates—whether in dialogue or directly through the narrative in a tight POV—directly communicates personality. In my own experience, I’ve found that if my narrative is struggling, it’s often because I’m trying to write in the POV of a character whose voice just doesn’t have enough personality.

Personality will also directly influence your character’s dialogue style. This isn’t just about word choice. It’s also about the character’s preferred “style” of arguing or engaging in conflict. For example, a more aggressive personality type like an Enneagram 8 or an MBTI ENTJ will have an entirely different style of attack and defense (aka, initiating desires or responding to others’ desires) than will an Enneagram 9 or a Human Design Reflector.

Writing is all about the words, and nothing influences word choice, tone, emotional reactions, dialogue style, conflict resolution, or argument styles more than personality.

(You can find questions to help you uncover all of this is another of my hot-off-the-presses worksheets—the Character Interview, featuring 113 questions, many of them about personality.)

Character Interview Digital Worksheet for Writers

3. Personality Determines Shadow and Subconscious Goals

“Personality” literally refers to what we see on the surface, and yet personality is formed by what is unseen—by what has been banished to the “shadow” or the unconscious. What we see in a personality is really just what’s left after certain traits, energies, beliefs, and identities have been deemed dysfunctional (usually unconsciously early in childhood) and “cut off” from the conscious personality.

This is important for storytellers because uncovering your character’s shadow will likely be an intrinsic part of the character arc. Character arc, at its simplest, is about expanding a limited perspective. Ultimately, this perspective is always about one’s self. Even if it seems to be a change in perspective regarding others or the world at large, ultimately this new “Truth” reflects upon the self’s place in relationship to others. This means the “limited perspective” (or Lie the Character Believes) is a product of the necessarily always limited personality, while the “expanded perspective” (or thematic Truth) is, at least in part, a restoration of some piece of the self previously lost to the shadow.

From here, we can see how character goals are almost always driven by this deeper subconscious motivation. A character’s personality isn’t just traits. More deeply, personality is what the character fears, represses, and unconsciously chases. Right there, you already have an entire story!

4. Personality Reveals Core Strengths and Weaknesses

Once we recognize personality as not just someone’s (presumably functional) persona, we can see the deeper truth that personality is, in fact, as much about inherent weaknesses as inherent strengths. Understanding this about your character’s personality gives you a fast track to the central internal conflict.

Stories run on the tension points between polarities—between strengths and weaknesses, between Lies and Truths, between delusions and epiphanies, between cowardice and courage, between mistakes and successes. All of these are inherent to your character’s personality. What is a stressful internal dissonance for one personality (e.g., balancing an Enneagram Five’s need for connection against the fear of overwhelm) is already a natural integration for another type (such as a Two, who struggles with different tension points).

A firm understanding of a useful personality type system can help you double-check your character’s development arcs for consistency and realism. When you’re in the early throes of writing, it can be easy to scribble things onto the page that, in the big view, don’t actually create the necessary and realistic tension points that arise from a consistent portrayal of human nature. An understanding of personality can guide you to which arcs are most natural to your characters.

10 Practical Tips for Weaving Personality Into Plot, Dialogue, and Arc

All right, enough theory! Let’s get practical. How can you use personality more intentionally to develop not just a better character, but a more cohesive and resonant plot and theme as well?

Let Personality Shape the Story

1. Choose a Personality Framework Early in Your Planning Process

— Use a system like the Enneagram or MBTI to explore internal motivations and potential arcs.

— I recommend focusing on one primary personality system to avoid overcomplication.

— Once you know your character’s personality, examine the system as a guide to help you find the most resonant growth path.

2. Use Personality to Predict Conflict Style

— Start working on your plot by considering what conflict style (e.g., competing, avoiding, collaborating, etc.) best fits your character’s personality.

— Think about how your character argues, avoids, or escalates conflict based on type.

— This adds nuance to both dialogue and plot tension, while showing you what types of scenes are most likely to emerge when your character’s goals are met with obstacles (i.e., conflict).

— Your character’s conflict style is one of the richest places to mine for entertainment opportunities.

— For example, consider Han Solo’s classically sarcastic but often off-point retorts: “We’re all fine here now… how are you?”

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), 20th Century Fox.

–Ask: How can your character’s conflict style create dynamic, unusual, or larger-than-life scenes?

3. Let the Shadow Reveal the Theme

Writing Your Story’s Theme (Amazon affiliate link)

— Use the subconscious fear or flaw inherent in your character’s personality to point toward the story’s deeper thematic question.

— For example, a character with an avoidant attachment style might prompt thematic explorations of self-isolation or self-sabolage, such as Elsa in Frozen.

Frozen (2013), Walt Disney Pictures.

— If you’re unsure what might be in your character’s personality shadow, remember shadow theory’s simple guideline: “Whatever is visible in a person’s external personality is an indication that the exact opposite resides in the shadow.”

— For example, an MBTI INTP character—who relies most heavily on mental functions—may resonantly create a story about exploring the underworld of grief or the bewilderment of falling in love, such as R in Warm Bodies.

Warm Bodies (2013), Lionsgate.

4. Design Key Plot Beats Around Transformation Points

Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson (affiliate link)

— Personality systems like the Enneagram particularly lend themselves to narrative arcs, since they suggest specific steps on a path to growth (in addition to my worksheets, you can check out Personality Types by Russ Hudson and Don Richard Riso for in-depth studies on this).

— For example, if you know your Enneagram Type Three character’s Lie is “I’m only worthy if I succeed,” you can shape the Midpoint or Third Plot Point to directly challenge that belief.

Let Story Reveal Personality

5. Reverse-Engineer Personality From Your Plot

— If your story idea came to you as a plot instead of a character, you can use what you know about the story’s external events to create the most resonant personality for your character.

— Ask: Based on the choices the plot indicates the character will need to make, what traits or fears will be likely to emerge in the character arc?

— From there, you can identify the most resonant personality type. +However, be sure to use the story events to discover (not dictate) who the character is.

— Character and plot should influence each other, but character should be the more dynamic force. This is to ensure that the plot feels organic and natural rather than contrived.

6. Analyze Plot Points to Discover Your Character’s Internal Values

— Take a look at what your character sacrifices or clings to when the stakes are high. That alone can reveal your character’s personality type or predominant internal struggle.

— For example, as an Enneagram One, Jane Eyre always returns to the central question of right and wrong (as she sees it). When confronted by Rochester’s pre-existing marriage at the Third Plot Point, she decides to leave him less because she feels betrayed and more because she believes it would be morally wrong for her to illegally marry him.

Jane Eyre (2006), WGBH/BBC.

7. Refine Your Character’s Type After Writing the First Draft

— Sometimes, you won’t really know who your character is until after you’ve written the story.

— After finishing the first draft, you can go back to revise voice and dialogue to more clearly reflect a unified personality for your character.

Bonus Implementation Tips

8. Create a Quick-Reference “Personality Snapshot”

— Character personality—like most things in storytelling—can get complicated fast. Not only can relying on a personality system provide shortcuts to identifying and remembering character traits, but so can keeping a sort of “personality outline.”

— You can include your character’s personality type, dominant traits, shadow fear, core desire, communication style, and more.

— When writing, I always try to review at least a small portion of my notes every day before I begin to keep them fresh in my mind.

9. Use a Worksheet or Interview to Stress-Test Alignment

— Although beat sheets and character interviews should only be used to create a flexible guide, they can be helpful for nailing down the big picture of your character’s personality and arc.

— You can find the free version of my character interview here, and you can grab the updated fillable pdf of the worksheet here.

Character Interview Digital Worksheet for Writers

— If you’ve chosen to use the Enneagram as your primary personality typing system, you may also find some help in my brand new Enneagram Character Arc Cheat Sheets to check whether the story beats align with the character’s internal journey. (Each bundle contains both Positive and Negative Change Arcs for each type.)

Enneagram Character Arc Cheat Sheet Full Bundle

10. Treat Personality as Dynamic, Not Fixed

— I’m a big fan of the aphorism (usually attributed to George Box),

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

— This is true of so much in storytelling, and it is certainly true when it comes to personality systems.

— Although incredibly useful in helping writers distil the eminently complex topic that is the human personality, systems such as the Enneagram, MBTI, and more, are ultimately still limited and should only be used insofar as they are useful.

— Growth (or regression) in your character’s arc should always reflect believable changes in personality expression, and you should always listen to your own deep and instinctive understanding of the human ego, shadow, and persona above and beyond any fixed model.

Why Knowing Personality Unlocks Your Whole Story

Your character’s personalities aren’t just one layer of who they are. Personality is the central lens through which characters interpret the world, make decisions, and pursue goals. Personality is also the bridge between plot, theme, and character. Or perhaps we might think of it as the container that holds all three.

Personality shapes not only what your characters want, but why they want it, what’s standing in their way, and how they express that tension through action, voice, and internal conflict. That’s everything you need for your plot right there. When you understand your character’s personality, you gain access to the deeper psychological and thematic forces driving your story forward.

It’s important to remember there is no one “right” framework to use. Whether you gravitate toward the Enneagram, MBTI, Human Design, or something else, the most important step is simply choosing a system that resonates with you and then using it to stress-test your characters and their arcs.

FAQs About Character Personality

What is the best personality system for writers to use?

There’s no single best system, since each offers a different perspective. For instance, the Enneagram is ideal for exploring inner conflict and transformation, while MBTI is great for understanding cognitive wiring and behavior. The only thing that matters is choosing one that complements your writing style.

Can a character’s personality change throughout the story?

Characters won’t change to a different personality, but how they relate from within the containers of their current personalities can dramatically evolve. A well-crafted character arc doesn’t usually change the core personality, but does change how the character expresses it. For example, withdrawn characters might learn to stay connected under pressure, without losing their introspective natures.

How does the Enneagram help with writing character arcs?

The Enneagram maps core fears, desires, and defense mechanisms—all of which tie neatly into a character’s Lie, Want, Need, and Truth. Each Enneagram type also suggests likely growth paths and shadow pitfalls, which makes the system especially useful for writers when building Positive and Negative Change Arcs.

How do I figure out my character’s personality type?

You can start by asking what your characters fear most, how they handle conflict, and what motivates their choices. Consider how they act under stress and in growth. Then compare those traits to personality types in your chosen system and adjust based on what best supports the arc you want to tell.

Want More?

If you’re ready to dive deeper into using personality to guide your character arcs, check out my Enneagram Character Arc Cheat Sheets. Each worksheet bundle walks you through both Positive and Negative Change Arcs for all nine Enneagram types to help you align your character’s internal journey with your story’s external plot beats. You can use these digital worksheets when you’re outlining or revising to create arcs that are psychologically authentic and thematically resonant. Available now in my Etsy shop or via the Store tab above!

Enneagram Character Arc Worksheets

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What role does personality play in how you approach your characters? Do you start with a personality type, or does it emerge from the story? Do you use a system like the Enneagram or MBTI in your process? Tell me in the comments!

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 How a Character’s Personality Shapes Arc, Voice, and Goals appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What are the challenges of writing and publishing books for children? How can you publish high-quality books and still make a profit? How can you market books to children effectively in a scalable manner? Darcy Pattison gives her tips.

In the intro, Novel Writing November; Business models and ethics for authors [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author – my final AI webinar for 2025; Metal-working! with WTF Workshops, Bristol; Blood Vintage, a folk horror novel – out now on my store, coming 15 October everywhere.

Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Darcy Pattison is the multi-award winning bestselling author of more than 70 fiction and non-fiction books for children across multiple age groups. Her book for authors is Publish: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children’s Book.

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 writing children’s picture books is more challenging than you might think
• Why Darcy moved from traditional publishing books to self-publishing for creative freedom and business control
• Working with illustrators through contracts, sketch revisions, and treating them as professional collaborators
• Using multiple print-on-demand services (Ingram, KDP, Lulu) instead of expensive offset printing for 70+ book catalog
• Marketing to educators through state and national conferences rather than individual school visits for scalable reach
• Focusing on STEM narrative nonfiction as a reliable income while still writing fiction passion projects
• Longevity as an author

You can find Darcy at IndieKidsBooks.com and MimsHouseBooks.com. You can find the Kickstarter here.

Transcript of Interview with Darcy Pattison

Joanna: Darcy Pattison is the multi-award winning bestselling author of more than 70 fiction and non-fiction books for children across multiple age groups. Her book for authors is Publish: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children’s Book. So welcome to the show, Darcy.

Darcy: I’m so excited to be here today.

Joanna: This is such a great topic. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Darcy: Well, I have four children and I found myself reading books to them, and at some point I wanted to be on the flip side of that—to write the books that were read to kids. So I started writing.

It took a long time for me to learn the craft of writing children’s books. It’s very different than adult books. Picture books especially are very different than just a novel. So it took me a while, but I finally got an offer on a picture book, and I have eight traditionally published books.

Then at some point I decided that it was better for me to bring books to market myself. We’ll probably talk about that more, but I’m actually a hybrid at this point. I do some pop-up books with a small Christian press, so I’m designing the pop-ups, but I do a lot of nonfiction STEM books for kids. I also do several novel series.

Joanna: I think that’s really interesting. First up, you said that the craft of writing children’s books is different, picture books in particular. So just tell us more about that craft side, because I feel like often people say, “Oh well, it’s only a few thousand words. It must be super easy compared to writing a lot more words.”

Tell us about the craft side of writing children’s books.

Darcy: I do teach writing picture books all the time for the Highlights Foundation and other places. Picture books are a very tight art form. I sort of compare it to writing poetry.

There are 32 pages, and you have a title page, a half title page, a copyright page. It turns out you have about 14 double page spreads, and in those 14 double page spreads, you have to set up a character and a problem.

You have to complicate the story, then resolve it in some satisfying way, in less than 500 words, while leaving room for the illustrator to do their job. So it’s a very demanding process.

Joanna: And it’s not the same now then, because like you say there, the 32 pages and all of this—I mean, this is a very print-heavy issue, I guess—but there are plenty of things now that might be on tablets.

Has that shifted at all or is it still a real print-heavy world?

Darcy: It still is a print-heavy world for children’s books. Most people who independently publish will tell you that 90% of their sales are paperback.

It’s still 32 pages. I can do 27 pages, I can do 36 pages. The problem is if I ever need to offset print—and I’ve needed to several times when I have a large order—then it’s cheaper if it’s 32 pages, because they figured out how to print 32 pages on one piece of paper.

If I go to 37 pages, it’s two pieces of paper, more expensive. If I do 25 pages, you’re wasting paper. So really the 32 pages is because of the requirements of print. I still go with that because children’s books, even for independent people like me, are still by and large paperback or hardcover.

Joanna: Then I guess, talking about a 32-page picture book, that’s not the only thing for children.

What is the range of books for children?

Darcy: You can do board books. That’s for the very young children. Those are hard for self-publishers to do because there’s no one who does print-on-demand for that. You have to do offset printing. So those are more difficult.

Then starting about age four to eight is picture book world. That’s the young readers where the parents are reading to the kid.

Then—and the ages are very fluid here because some kids read faster than others—but maybe about six or seven years old, they’re starting to read more independently. They want these short chapter books.

So those might be 48 pages or 60-page short novels where you’re really paying attention. That’s the only place where you really have to pay attention to the vocabulary levels for kids.

Then after that, you have middle grade, and that would run eight to twelve years old, roughly. Then YA would be—again, the definitions are very fluid—but maybe 14 and up would be young adult.

Joanna: Yes, and that YA category now I feel like has moved very adult. So I think that can probably be quite fluid as well, depending on what you find in the store.

Let’s come back to your journey. You mentioned the hybrid approach. You did eight traditionally published books, but in your book Publish, you said deciding to self-publish was a way to avoid creative death, which I thought was a brilliant line. Maybe you could expand on that and—

Why is self-publishing a great choice?

Darcy: Self-publishing is a very great choice. There was a time period when I had sold eight books. I teach on a very high level—I teach a novel revision retreat. To come, you must bring a full draft of a novel. We talk about how to revise that novel.

One lady came to my retreat, she revised her novel, sent it out for submission. It sold in 11 days flat and went on to win one of the major awards in children’s literature in America, the Newbery Honor. So I know what I’m doing. I know how to write, and yet I could not sell anything. It was so discouraging at that point.

I either decided I would quit—I don’t know what I was going to do, but I was going to quit—or I had to figure out how to bring books to market myself. So I decided, yes, I can do this. I can bring books to market myself.

So I worked. I worked for five years. I just put my head down and worked. I published books that I liked. I did what no one else would accept, but I thought was good writing.

I looked for great illustrators and I found some great illustrators to work with, because children’s picture books have pictures. You have to work with an illustrator.

So I worked for about five years and finally after five years, I kind of lifted my head and looked around and went, “Wow, look at this. I’ve got books out that I love. They’re winning awards. They’re selling, I’m making money. This works.”

So for me, one person asked me recently to talk about this in terms of scarcity and abundance. For me, the traditional publishing world is a place of scarcity. Nobody respected my opinion, nobody respected my writing. As we know from Scheherazade, if you do not have a story, you die.

So self-publishing is a place of abundance for me. I do what I want. I find stories that excite me, and I put them in the hands of kids.

Joanna: So what year was it when you were like, “Oh, I really can’t sell, I am going to try indie”?

Darcy: Thirteen years ago. I’ve been doing this 13 years.

Joanna: So around 2012, I guess.

Darcy: Yes, 2013 I think.

Joanna: 2012, 2013. That really was, I think, a real takeoff time in the self-publishing arena when you could actually start doing this. For example, doing print-on-demand through Amazon. These things weren’t that easy when you started in traditional publishing—it wasn’t easy to do self-publishing.

Darcy: No, no, no. When I first started submitting books, self-publishing was not available. I did a book on writing very early and that taught me how to do the self-publishing process. It was not a book anyone was going to publish because it was revising your novel, which is very niche.

For people who want to write a novel, that’s a fairly big market, but those who finished the novel and want to revise it, it’s even a smaller market. So I self-published that book and that taught me so much about how to set up your files, how to set up the accounts on everything, on KDP and everywhere else.

Joanna: Yes, I do feel like so often actually just doing one—whether it might be maybe a short story or just something, but actually just going through the process gets rid of a lot of the difficulty with it.

Let’s come back to some of the things you have to do. So you mentioned illustrators there, particularly for the picture books. Illustrators are important, but it also might be cover design.

What are your tips for finding and working with illustrators?

Darcy: This is a long topic, but basically I find illustrators through a couple of sources. One is the SCBWI.org, that’s the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

It’s the only professional organization for people who write for children, and they have a gallery that’s available to their illustrators, and it’s not behind a paywall. You can just go look at it.

Most illustrators use the Adobe suite of programs. There are other programs, but they learn on that one at least. Adobe has a social media platform for illustrators called Behance.net. The illustrators from around the world put their portfolios there, and I find people there all the time.

My family has hosted exchange students eight times, so I’m familiar with working with internationals. I’m not afraid of that.

I’ve had illustrators from Colombia, Ukraine, Poland, Canada. So I don’t mind finding an international illustrator to work on my projects and I work well with them. So Behance.net is one of my main ways to find professional illustrators.

And then finally referrals. Just talk to other people. Ask them who they used, were they happy with the process, that kind of thing.

Joanna: Then what do you give them? Do you give them like the story, the text, or—

How do you actually work with an illustrator?

Darcy: Everybody wants to know, can I write notes to the illustrator and tell them that this character must have red hair and white boots? Of course you can do that. If you’re self-publishing, you are the art director and you are in charge.

I prefer not to do that. I prefer to pick out an illustrator that I think has professional skills and an imagination of their own. So I give them my story, then they give me sketches, and when they give me sketches, then I’m very picky about the sketches.

For example, you cannot in a picture book have every page the same. So it can’t always be in the cafeteria. It must move from place to place. You must make sure the character looks consistent from page to page.

There’s a long list of things I go through to make sure that the illustrations are right at that point. So when I get the sketches, they get a long letter and I want a revision of their sketches.

Joanna: So you’ve given them the whole story upfront, then they’ve given you the sketches, then you’ve gone back with a letter.

How many revisions are you looking for in that process, and is this all set out in a contract upfront?

Darcy: Yes. I always do contracts to make sure everything’s understood. Usually the contract will say that I need 14 double-page spreads plus a spread for the cover and a spread for page 32. So I’m asking for about 15 to 16 illustrations and within that, then they must tell the story.

So they get the manuscript. I try not to give them too many directions on where it goes and just see where they take it. Usually they’re much better than I am and usually work well.

Joanna: Yes, we all have different gifts, right? Different interests and different skills. Your skill is in writing as is mine. So that’s what we do.

Darcy: I’ve found I’m actually a pretty good art director though. I really have a vision for what this should look like in a picture book, so I know how the story has to flow well.

The pacing is in the pictures also. So you have to think of all the things you would in a novel, like pacing, characterization. That comes through in the story, so I have to make sure all of that is right in the sketches.

Once the sketches are approved, then it’s not fair to ask them to change. You cannot do those last minute changes and go, “Oh, I want those white boots.” No, no, no. That’s not fair to the illustrator.

Joanna: Yes, so treating them like a professional.

What about copyright assignment? Are you getting that in the contract?

Darcy: Yes, everything’s in the contract. There are different ways to do it. You can do a flat fee where you take all rights or you can negotiate a royalty payment. It’s all in the contract.

Joanna: And if people want templates for those kind of contracts?

Darcy: That’s the difficulty, isn’t it? Because I’m not a lawyer, I don’t give them templates, but there are reasonable literary lawyers.

I’m glad to give them referrals to some literary lawyers who can do it, and usually they have pretty much a boilerplate and for less than $500 US, you can get a template that you can use multiple times.

Joanna: There are also author organizations that have these kind of templates. The most important thing here is you need to sort that out upfront, and absolutely some of the ones I’ve seen, they do also include things like you can have one revision on this type of level or whatever.

It’s the same with covers, right? If you’re doing older children’s books, we are respecting other people’s time and professionalism.

Darcy: Yes, absolutely. You know, you may want one or maybe two or three revisions at that sketches stage, but after that, when they give me final art, there’s almost no changes because we’ve hashed that out early. That’s where they want you to is in the sketches stage, because that’s where they can make the changes the easiest.

Joanna: So another challenge is quality color printing, because as you said, most of your sales are going to be in print.

Talk a bit about printing and distribution and how you manage that.

Darcy: So I use three print-on-demand printers. I use Ingram because that reaches the wide distribution that I need, that goes to the schools and libraries and the education distributors and goes out in the world internationally also.

So Ingram’s quality is what Ingram’s quality is. I think if we go into this and say we’re going to print-on-demand, we need to accept what they do.

I mean, people complain about everybody. Every printer gets complaints, but I think they all do a reasonable job. They correct mistakes when they’re made, I think they do fine.

So Ingram’s print quality is good. It’s not offset printing. It will never be offset printing, but we do print-on-demand because the economic issues make sense.

We don’t have to put a huge investment upfront of ordering 10,000 books. Then your money is tied up in that inventory and you can’t recoup and you can’t move on to the next book until you sell those books.

So I don’t think that’s wise for self-publishers. I think it’s wise to be more nimble. So then the print-on-demand makes a lot of sense.

Then the second one I use is KDP, because I find that Ingram and KDP don’t always work well together. So I just go ahead and upload it to KDP. It’s always available on Amazon. It’s never a problem.

Then the final one is I use Lulu and I love Lulu’s quality. They talk about great looking books. They have a coated paper, 80 pound coated paper that accepts the ink really well. So the books just look much nicer from them. I use them for the back end of my Shopify store, and then anytime I have special orders.

So last year, my book Magnet came out and I got an order of 600 books that would be used for a public television station that was having an event. So they wanted 600 books to give people, and they ordered that. And yes, Lulu is where I print anything like that because the quality is just so much better.

Joanna: So then with that example, the 600 books, I mean, one of the reasons, as you said, we do print-on-demand is because we don’t have to pay for those print runs, but also we do make higher profit because there’s higher price per book.

So how do you manage the profit side of it with such high printing costs when the price of books just hasn’t really gone up? With inflation, people still expect to pay the same thing.

With those 600 books, how did you make a fair profit there?

Darcy: So I price my books high. You cannot compete on price. I can’t sell my picture books for $8.99. They are $11.99 for an eight and a half by eight and a half, full color, 32 page picture book. $11.99 is outrageous, but that’s what I have to charge and they sell. What can I say? They sell.

Joanna: Plus shipping with your Shopify store?

Darcy: Yes, but I charge them shipping. So then you negotiate prices and you just make sure you’re making a profit of $2 or $3 a book just like anybody else. People fight against that too. They go, “Well, I need my little chapter book just to be $6.99.” And I go, “Well, you can’t make a profit.”

You must think as a business person and you must price accordingly and then write a really great book that they will buy anyway.

Joanna: Yes, I mean, this is the whole point. We are not competing on price. We cannot compete on price or shipping. Like people say to me, “Oh, well, but if I order from your Shopify store, it’s going to take like two weeks or something.”

I’m like, “Yes, because I’m a small business. My printer is a small business. It gets printed, it gets sent. I mean, I’m not Amazon.” Literally then people will go, “Oh, right. Yes, I understand,” don’t they? I mean, once you explain it, people understand.

Darcy: So if I have a large order, like 600 books, if I have three months to deliver, then I’ll do an offset run, but I don’t always have that luxury of having three months to deliver. They usually want it in two weeks and then Lulu can deliver. Lulu always delivers well.

Joanna: Right. Okay. So I guess you sort of addressed this a bit with saying, look, the quality is the quality, but I do find children’s authors in particular can be a little bit precious about this, and they’re like, “Oh no, this has to be perfect, so I have to use offset printing.” Given that you have more than 70 books—

I just can’t see how it’s practical to have a business with so many different books and insist on incredible quality every time.

Darcy: I can’t make a profit that way. I can’t have a stock of even 500 books of 70. I can’t even physically, like a physical warehouse, let alone the price. I can’t tie up my money that way.

So for me, print-on-demand is the only way that works. I cannot do the offset printing. Again, I do offset printing if I have large orders and I have plenty of time, but that’s the only time I can get that kind of quality.

So, yes, it is different, but there are printers now who are approaching offset quality with print-on-demand. The newer printers that are coming out are very, very good.

Joanna: They are, but again, we have to look at the pricing there because the price is also higher. The quality of the paper and the ink and all that.

Of course the same is true for anyone. I mean, like for me with 45-plus books, I never have kept stock, but you just don’t know. You don’t know which books people are going to buy on any given day. So having print-on-demand just makes sense.

I think people who are just starting out, they’re like, “Oh, well it’s only one book,” but it’s like, well soon it won’t just be one book.

Darcy: Well, we hope it’s not just going to be one book. I mean, I want a career. I don’t want just a single book out there.

Joanna: Then I guess just circling back on anything that’s different, because of course—

You do nonfiction books for children, as well as fiction. Is the process just exactly the same, but you don’t have a story necessarily?

It’s more like facts and things.

Darcy: Most of mine are narrative nonfiction. So I’m usually telling the story of a scientist making some kind of discovery or an animal. And usually it’s not a species, usually it’s a particular animal that’s done something amazing.

For example, Nefertiti, the Spider-naut is the true story of a spider that went to the International Space Station. She’s a jumping spider. She doesn’t spin webs. She jumps to hunt. And the question was, could she jump in space? Because if you jump, you float away.

So would she starve to death or would she adapt somehow to that microgravity of the International Space Station? She did indeed adapt and she learned to hunt in space and lived long enough to come back to Earth.

Joanna: What did she eat?

Darcy: Well, they had fruit flies, so they had a little habitat she lived in and they raised fruit flies for her. They raised three generations.

Joanna: She wasn’t a stowaway. She was deliberate.

Darcy: No, no, no, no. It was a deliberate experiment on the International Space Station.

Joanna: Oh, that’s really cool. So how did you decide to do that book?

Was that a commission or is that just something you are interested in?

Darcy: I heard something on the radio. Then what I like to do is original primary research. So I contacted the scientist who’s in charge of all of the live animal experiments on the International Space Station.

She lived in Colorado and my daughter lives close, so we went to see my daughter and I set up an appointment, interviewed her, and wrote the book.

Joanna: I love that because like you said, I mean this is creativity, isn’t it? It’s kind of hearing something and then making it. So does that book sell or is that just something that you did and it’s just a passion project?

Darcy: No, no, no. It sells really well. The cover either repulses people because it’s a very close-up of the face of the spider, so they either hate the cover or they love the cover.

For example, I had a school right when COVID hit that ordered 1,400 copies because they wanted to give one copy to each of their fourth graders to read during the summer. That one has licensed other things also, like for reading programs and things.

Joanna: Well, let’s talk about that then, because bulk sales to schools is something that children’s authors often can do very, very well that the rest of us struggle with. So tell us a bit about that and—

How can people can think about things like bulk sales, which is when you sell many books at once?

Darcy: Bulk sales come and go. You can’t necessarily predict them. What I do is I really pay attention to the science curriculum. I make sure that each book I write and produce fits the curriculum some way. So I like to say that teachers don’t just like my book, they need my book to adequately teach sound to their students.

So my book Clang is about a German scientist that went to Napoleon’s court, entertained Napoleon with his sound experiments. Kind of like Bill Nye the Science Guy does—entertained him. Then Napoleon funded his work.

So in the book, there’s everything you need to know about sound, how sound waves are produced, vibrating strings, vibrating air columns, all of that. It’s also a great story about this scientist who goes to Napoleon’s court.

So I think teachers need my book to keep kids interested in that topic. So if it fits a curriculum, then it’s more likely to be picked up for reading programs, for summer programs, for summer camps, that sort of thing.

And so my book on AI, about the story about Lee Sedol playing against AlphaGo, that sold—suddenly I get on Ingram, it sold a thousand copies and I’m sure it was for a summer camp.

Joanna: Yes, that one—we’re going to circle back to AI, but let’s come on to marketing, because I’m sure people listening are going, “Well, I want to do that. How do I sell all of those books?”

How are you getting your information into schools?

I mean, obviously you are in the USA, it’s a massive country, so how are you doing that? Marketing to schools, in particular, and libraries, I guess.

Darcy: Well, everybody says go do school visits. Yes, yes, yes. You can do school visits and you can make money that way, but I prefer to try other avenues because school visits are limited to the length of school year. You might have 150 days possible and I’m not going to go out for 150 days doing school visits.

So instead what I do is reach out to organizations in the United States. Well just this month I’ve been to the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media. That’s the school librarians. At their conference I had an audience of 60 or 70 people and I talked about my 20 STEM books.

Then the next week there was a leadership conference for the Arkansas Literacy Association, and they brought in leaders from the local councils around the state, 20 councils.

So there was about 60 or 70 people. Again, these are the leaders, the opinion makers in their region. They did a “build your stack.” So they bought 90 books and each person got a free copy of the book, courtesy of the organization.

So what you have to do is find those sorts of organizations in your area, in your state, your region, and say, “Can I fill out applications to speak at their conferences?” For me, that’s the audience, not parents.

Parents are a moving target because if their child is seven years old this year, next year they’re going to be eight, and pretty soon they’re going to be 14 and they’ve aged out of my books. But teachers and librarians always have those eight-year-old kids coming through their system.

Joanna: Yes, I think that’s super smart and super scalable. I mean, some people really love going into the schools and they love teaching at that level or whatever. I think that’s a really interesting, but it’s not scalable though.

Darcy: No, it’s not. I feel like there’s other revenue—like some people talk about getting paid for that speaking. It’s basically paid for doing assemblies and stuff like that.

Joanna: But as you say, yours is a more scalable approach.

So is that the same way you hit librarians as well?

Darcy: Yes, yes. I’ll be going to the Arkansas Library Association Conference in October. So that’s just local. Then I also reach out to national organizations. I’ve spoken at the National Science Teachers Association conferences, just went to the American Library Association Conference.

So there are many of those regional and national organizations that focus on kids and kids reading that are my target.

Joanna: So those STEM books, have you really done a lot more of those because those are the types of books that those markets want?

Darcy: Yes, those sell really well. If I find a topic that’s not been covered well with other books, then I can write a book that does pretty well. Then I can still write the fiction that I like, and some of those do well, and some of those don’t do well. The bread and butter is probably my STEM books.

Joanna: Yes, because they, as you say, would be a lot easier to sell if that’s a topic that is covered at that age group.

Then just a broader question about age groups. You mentioned you have four children, and I often meet people and they want to write a kid’s book, and it’s often they’re writing a kid’s book for the age that their child is.

Then sometimes they grow out of the idea because their kid is now a lot older than they were and they’ve changed their mind about the book, or it was the wrong kind of age. Now, obviously your kids are presumably grown.

Darcy: Yes.

Joanna: So what advice would you have for people listening who feel like, “Oh, I want to write a book for my kid,” but are wondering—

How does that turn into a business?

Darcy: Katherine Paterson is a well-known children’s book author. She wrote Bridge to Terabithia, which was a popular movie about 10 or 15 years ago. She once said that when she reads an adult novel, she hears an orchestra, but when she reads her own work, she hears a flute solo.

I just write flute solos. I don’t write the big complicated orchestral pieces. It’s just not the way I write. So you just need to find what’s your strength and what’s your passion.

I like children’s literature. I read it all the time. I’m reading picture books, novels—I’m reading all the time. I just like the genre. So find a genre that you like and dive in.

Joanna: Right. So you can keep writing for an age group if you keep reading in the age group, even if your kids have grown.

Darcy: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Yes, that makes sense. I mean, you have to know the genre and, of course, tastes change as well. I mean, even since you started in like 2012, there’s a lot more diversity now in children’s books and that’s a really important development.

Also I guess, translations—you’ve moved into translations and licensing.

How have translations and licensing worked in terms of the business?

Darcy: Translations—I did a test last year of five Spanish books. They’ve not sold particularly well. I need to find new ways to market them, but it was an experiment and I need to find new ways to market them, frankly.

However, I do have an agent in China, and they just sold a nine-book series to a Chinese publisher. So we’ll see how that goes. They have also sold a six-book series to Korea. So working with a foreign agent has worked for me.

Joanna: Yes. I’ve sold into South Korea as well. They clearly have an interesting book culture.

Okay, and then just coming back on the AI side, because you mentioned your children’s book about AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol in 2016, as part of your Moments in Science series. So I wondered—

How are you using AI tools as part of your creative and business processes?

Darcy: Well, I do use AI sometimes, so I love Google NotebookLM for research. I think the AIs hallucinate too much to let them do my research, but when I do the research myself and I find research reports, I drag them into NotebookLM.

For example, my new book out this year is NOT Extinct. It’s about the Takhi horse, commonly called the Przewalski’s horse, which in the 1960s was considered extinct in the wild, and they have worked for decades to bring them back. Now there’s about 3000 in the world. So the story is about that process of conservation of the species.

So I found tons of research reports and I dragged them into NotebookLM, and then I asked it to give me a timeline and it can go through it, and it annotates the timeline for me.

It says this came from this report so that I know that it’s documented really well and I can trust that the research is there. I really like that one once we get away from, can it do real research and deal with facts?

I do use it sometimes for outlining. I like Claude better than some of the other platforms, and I do use it for book descriptions sometimes.

Joanna: I would say that Gemini Deep Research is, I think, the best in terms of—

Have you used any of the Deep Research?

Darcy: I have not. No.

Joanna: So Gemini Deep Research, I would say is extremely good and has a very, very low hallucination rate. So that would be the one I would suggest for research people.

Like you mentioned earlier that many of the illustrators use Adobe tools and of course Adobe has Firefly, it has generative AI now.

How much generative AI is being used in the illustrators’ work, or is that not even something you worry about?

Darcy: So far it’s not been used very much. Most of the illustrators, I see their sketches at first and then they generally do digital work, but it’s clearly their work. There’s no question on most of them so far. That will come up, I’m sure in the next five or 10 years, but so far it’s not been an issue.

Joanna: But it’s not something you are embracing because, like you said, you know what you want. So you could be doing this yourself, for example.

Darcy: So I have one story. The Kitty Tuber series. It’s about cats who make videos and so they’re kitty tubers. The main character is Angel and she has one blue eye and one copper eye. I can’t tell you how hard it is for ChatGPT to do a cat that has different colored eyes. It’s just almost impossible.

Finally, I think last week I tried it, and it’s finally getting to where it can do it, but it’s a difficult task. The programs just aren’t there yet.

Joanna: Again, I would suggest Midjourney, which is excellent. I know quite a lot of people doing kids books on Midjourney and you can do consistent characters now. So I think there’s a lot of potential, and certainly for marketing, even if you don’t want to use it for actual creation of the books.

Darcy: I think that’s coming. I don’t think you can stop it. I think it will be lovely, but I just haven’t done it yet.

Joanna: No, absolutely. Well, you’ve got your processes for sure. I did want to ask you, because we were saying before we started recording, we’ve kind of known each other online for a really long time now, and you have managed this career now for a long time.

What are your tips for longevity in the market?

Both, I guess, in terms of the business and the mindset and just staying the course? Because both of us have seen a lot of people leave the industry in the time we’ve been doing it.

Darcy: A lot of people do leave, and I’m sad when that happens because that was my impetus for doing this, is to stay in the business. I think that’s one of the reasons I wrote this new book, Publish. I made the mistakes so other people don’t have to.

I think staying in the business just means that you stay excited about your work. You find things that you want to write about and you are passionate about. I mean, why do we write at all? Because there’s some question that we want to answer or there’s some bit of information we want to pass on to kids.

I think you have to keep finding that center and just stay really positive. Keep up with the industry. Don’t think that it can be run the same way all the time for business.

I am not a very good business woman. I started with no information. I’ve never taken even an accounting class. So accounting just killed me at first. It’s really hard for me to do the business, but I think you just have to keep pushing and trying. So I’m very curious, and I research and solve problems.

Joanna: Yes, I think that curiosity is what keeps us going, to be honest. I feel at this point that if there’s still books I want to write, then I’m just going to keep writing them.

Darcy: Absolutely.

Joanna: And yes, we both run businesses, but there are lots of better ways to make money than writing books, especially children’s books.

Darcy: Yes.

Joanna: Which is fascinating. Okay, so tell us—

You have a Kickstarter running right now. Tell us about that and a bit more about the book.

Darcy: So Publish is a book about self-publishing children’s books and making a success at it. I did make all the mistakes so you don’t have to.

I’ve been doing a blog called IndieKidsBooks.com for three years and writing things on there that I thought would eventually wind up in the book. Mostly they’re about what I’m working on right now, what I’m worried about, what the current state of publishing is like. So it’s a great resource for you.

But I wanted to put things together in a book that would explain the process for people who don’t do this, who just come to it with curiosity and go, “Can I do this?” It’s not easy. Self-publishing is never easy. You have to do everything from the creative to the accounting. It’s not easy, but oh my gosh, it’s fun.

I want people to get that. I want them to understand that it’s not a horrible thing. It’s not being put in the ghetto. I submit my books to awards, and I win awards, and I make money. You can do that too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Darcy: So the best place to find my books is MimsHouseBooks.com, M-I-M-S-H-O-U-S-E books.com. And if you’re interested in self-publishing, IndieKidsBooks.com is where I kind of chronicle my journey.

So you can find the Publish book on Kickstarter. Right now it will be live when this recording goes out. It will be also available for pre-order on Amazon, but look for the Kickstarter. I think you’ll find a lot of things on there that are interesting.

Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Darcy. That was great.

Darcy: Oh, thank you so much.

The post Writing, Self-Publishing And Marketing Books For Children With Darcy Pattison first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Stories are more than just entertainment. They’re also more than just reflections of real life. This is because, at its core, narrative is myth. Whether you’re crafting epic fantasy, gritty crime drama, or cozy rom-coms, deep archetypal patterns always echo through your characters, plots, and themes. Story is the theater of the psyche. It is a dream we collectively dream, in which each character and conflict embodies a part of ourselves. When we recognize this hidden foundation, we can tap this archetypal power to access the kind of storytelling that not only captivates readers but also transforms both their inner lives and our own.

A few weeks ago, I shared a post that struck a chord with many of you—about my deep desire to witness the return of “soulful storytelling.” Specifically, I wrote about my personal dissatisfaction and even boredom with contemporary filmmaking. In that post, I talked about wanting to return to stories of subtextual depth, emotional earnestness, and goodheartedness (among other qualities). In pondering on this further via the many thoughtful exchanges I got to have with all of you in the comments section on that post, I realized there are more layers to the shifts we have seen in modern storytelling—and the next shift I believe we will soon see.

One of those layers is the tension we often feel, but perhaps do not always recognize, between hyper-realism in fiction and storytelling’s inherently mythic foundation. I’m talking about the differences between stories that dutifully mimic or even exaggerate the causality of everyday life and those that draw upon the timeless archetypal patterns of the psyche.

When asked to define “story,” we may reach for the convenient answer that story is a replication of real life. But this, I will posit, is not actually true. Throughout history, we have increasingly dressed our stories in the verisimilitude of realistic details and the self-consciousness of our minds’ inner workings. But underneath all the hyper-realism, the true and archetypal shape of story itself remains something quite mythic. It is much less a product of our conscious minds—our conscious and scientific understanding of the world’s workings and our place in it—and much more a product of our unconscious minds—our symbolic and dreaming selves.

Recognizing storytelling (no matter the genre) as inherently mythic allows us, as storytellers, to walk onto a much bigger stage. We exit the relatively small stage of the self we know—the conscious self—and enter the vastness of the self that lives beyond consciousness and therefore beyond the restricted understanding allowed by the ego.

When we approach story as something inherently mythic—an archetype that exists outside and beyond humanity’s “creation” of it as an artform—we regain the capacity to create stories that touch the deepest parts of ourselves to create not just transformation, but initiation.

In This Article:

• Story as a Primordial Force: The Mythic Foundation of Narrative
• The Theater of the Psyche: Every Character Is You
• Archetypes as Living Forces in Storytelling
• Story as a Living Dream: Why All Stories Are Myth

Story as a Primordial Force: The Mythic Foundation of Narrative

From the far depths of human memory, story comes to us as a primordial force. Indeed, human memory itself is a story. Before we packaged stories for $20 mass consumption—before movies, before novels—story came to us as oral myths, ritual dramas, stone etchings, and catalysts of initiation.

Nowadays, storytelling is a highly specialized skill set. We come to sites like this one to study beat sheets and timing. We divide stories into highly specialized genres and check tropes off a list. We come to story as if it is something we can master. But in approaching story like this, we risk missing not just the deeper initiation story wants to offer each of us. We also risk missing out on the best possible stories we could be sharing with our own audiences.

I want to talk about one trend in particular that I see in modern storytelling. In itself, this trend is not problematic. But when too much emphasis is placed on it, it can create a polarized experience of story that can weaken its deeper impact. This trend, as I hinted previously, is hyper-realism. It is the trend—all but ubiquitous now—of faithfully recreating modern life on the page or the screen. In some ways, we might say it is “showing” rather than “telling.”

Again, I’m not saying this approach is wrong. I love detailed fiction that shows me the story world with such dimensionality that I’m there. I love deep POVs that faithfully mine and recreate the complexities of human interiority—everything from memory to motive.

But my feeling is that when this hyper-realism is not founded upon the deeper mythology of story itself, we often risk losing the forest for the trees. I will even go so far as to say this approach is a driving force behind the type of modern storytelling that carries characters and audiences to destinations awash with sophisticated despair or, at best, ambiguous apathy.

This is not to say mythic stories do not confront their fair portion of darkness and despair. But as I continue to study story as an archetype, it is my belief that these old stories (everything from the creation stories to The Odyssey to old folk tales like Little Red Riding Hood) speak to us, first and always, in metaphor and symbol. Certainly, as we explore the continuity with which the shape of story comes to us over the eons, I believe we can see that story itself is much more than simply a mirror of life. It is an initiatory force.

Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza (affiliate link)

At the end of his book Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza defined initiation:

I believe we are on the verge of a great evolutionary jump. Another way to say it is that we are going through an initiation. After all, isn’t an initiation a rite of passage from one level of consciousness to another, and isn’t it designed to challenge the fabric of who we are so we can grow to a greater potential?

Story is a symbolic map of transformation. It is a blueprint for growth and change. I wrote in the previous post about how I will never be satisfied with even more single story that does not challenge me in some way—because, for me, that is what I look for in a story experience. I look for that frisson of electricity, that tinge of awe, as I sense however faintly that I am entering an uncanny space—a wyrd space.

In the old Norse, the concept of “wyrd”—from which we get our word “weird”—indicated not just the uncanny, but the fated. In story, what I seek for myself are fated encounters. I seek shatterpoints of destiny that fracture, however slightly, reality as I know it.

The Theater of the Psyche: Every Character Is You

Every story holds the seed of this transformational power. It doesn’t matter the medium or the genre. This potential is latent in all stories—whether about hellbent mobsters or romantic HEAs or comedic farces or historical reproductions or fantastical allegories. However, whether and how well this potential is realized depends on the author. To some extent, it depends on the author’s conscious awareness of and ability to empower the story’s mythic sub-structure. But I would say, even more perhaps, it depends on the author’s personal touchstone with the mythic subconsciousness that lives within them.

If we think of story as being like a dream, we are not too far from the truth. Story—true, deep, initiatory story—is something that arises from an inner depth existing beneath and beyond  egoic consciousness. We are more likely to find these stories by “channeling” them than by trying to brainstorm them.

Like dreams, stories are innately symbolic—even, and perhaps especially, when we do not realize it. As authors, we cannot always explain where our best work comes from. Often, it may seem it does not come from us. It was given to us. We are the first to be changed by it. Indeed, we may spend the rest of our lives not quite understanding it.

Also like dreams, I believe it is useful to take one more step back from the hyper-detailed and hyper-realistic showing of fiction. Until we do so, we are likely to think our stories are peopled by a varied and dimensional cast, perhaps purposefully created by us to showcase a vast number of perspectives and lifestyles. When we go deeper, we may see instead that the deepest and most mythic stories represent a single psyche—perhaps the author’s, perhaps a bit more specifically the protagonist’s, but ultimately the collective psyche.

Some schools of dream interpretation remind the dreamer to consider that everything that shows up in a dream is you. That is, it is not your father in the dream; it is some aspect of your own psyche wearing the face of your father. The same can be said of a story. Every character in the story—indeed, everything in the story—is an aspect of one psyche. The hero, the antagonist, the love interest, the mentor—all are representations of a unified psychological perspective and experience.

The deep resonance of stories that work—stories that initiate us—is the result of this inner unity. Audiences resonate because they’re watching externalized inner conflicts of the self. If you start examining stories from this perspective, you may be amazed at what you discover.

A quite obvious example is The Lord of the Rings. I particularly remember the first time I saw the scene in Fellowship of the Ring, in which the characters flee underground into the Mines of Moria, where they awaken goblins and trolls in the darkness. In so many ways, this can be seen as a descent into the unconscious and a confrontation with the shadow monsters who reside forgotten there.

The Balrog confrontation symbolizes the psyche’s descent into shadow.” (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), New Line Cinema.)

Another vivid example of this inner-psyche theater can be found in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Nearly every character in Chihiro’s journey can be read as an aspect of the self.

• Her parents’ careless greed is the egoic appetite that abandons her to the unconscious.
• The enormous baby, Boh, is the unruly inner child who must be reparented before growth can occur.
• Yubaba, the domineering mistress of the bathhouse, embodies the controlling authority of the superego.
• Haku functions as the animus—an inner guide and companion who helps Chihiro navigate transformation.
• No-Face represents the shadow self: a ravenous, distorted self that can only be healed through compassion and reintegration.

In this light, Spirited Away becomes not simply a fantastical coming-of-age tale, but a symbolic map of psychological wholeness.

Miyazaki’s Spirited Away shows how every story is myth: each character symbolizes an aspect of the self, from the shadow in No-Face to the inner child in Boh. (Spirited Away (2001), Studio Ghibli.)

And in a more realistic example, we can see how the various characters in Pride & Prejudice represent facets of a single psyche:

• Elizabeth and Darcy embody the central tension between pride and humility, shame and love.
• Jane reflects openness and generosity.
• Lydia personifies unchecked impulse.
• Mr. Collins plays the part of obsequious conformity.
• Lady Catherine stands as rigid authority.

Read this way, Austen’s novel becomes not just a social comedy but an archetypal drama of the self learning to reconcile its contradictions and move toward wholeness.

Lizzie and Darcy reflect the psyche’s struggle with pride, shame, and connection. (Pride & Prejudice (2005), Focus Features.)

Archetypes as Living Forces in Storytelling

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

For writers, one of the most useful tools for enlivening the power of mythic storytelling is to access the innate power of character archetypes.

With all things archetypal, it is crucial to interact with archetypes not as simplistic stereotypes but as living forces. Put simply: we don’t get to dictate what archetypes do. When we have truly accessed them, they tell us what they will do. When we have truly understood them, we feel it all the way down to our bones. Archetypes are dynamic energies peopling initiatory arcs. They surface in different guises but always point to universal human epochs.

As writers, we can access these forces consciously to deepen our character arcs, themes, and story arcs. The most obvious way we can work with these archetypes is to learn about them through the old stories. But they are found everywhere. I would go so far as to say they are found in every story that works. More than that, they are inherent—if perhaps latent—within each of us.

As human beings (and especially as human beings with active imaginations), we already have a deep understanding and recognition of these archetypal forces—if we are brave enough to face them. This cannot be taken for granted. It can often feel much easier to ignore the call of initiation and transformation. Cutting the journey short before we finish the Dark Night of the Soul can often seem wiser. Ironically, remaining cozy and cynical in the affirming arms of despair can feel much safer than daring to keep walking into the unknown of transformation.

What archetypal storytelling—mythic storytelling—demands of us as storytellers is that we face the archetypes themselves with authenticity and with humility. Mythic storytelling demands that we listen to the deepest, loudest, softest truths within us. We know when what we are writing is mythic and archetypal—whether we call it that or not. We know when what we are writing is the truest thing it is possible for us to write. We know in our hearts. And I do not say “hearts” lightly. The heart is a much better storyteller than the head.

The head, however, remains a worthy ally on this journey. It is not, as it so often thinks, the protagonist. But it is a helpful sidekick. To that end, studying the mythic journeys in literature can be extremely helpful—whether the Hero’s Journey or the five further archetypal journeys I discuss in my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs. (Writers can apply these insights practically through my Archetypal Character Arc Worksheets. This worksheet bundle is, in essence, a companion workbook to Writing Archetypal Character Arcs. If you’d like help charting any of the six archetypal character arcs—Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, and Mage—you can check out the worksheets I just released. If you want them all, be sure to check out the discounted bundle.)

Story as a Living Dream: Why All Stories Are Myth

Story is not just “about life.” It’s a dream we dream together. It is a map for transformation. If we look into the past, history tells us our storytellers were our seers, our shamans, our wayshowers, our most respected elders.

Now, we are all storytellers. We all bear this great burden to look beyond what everyone else can see and to hone the transformative truths that are meant to initiate not just us but every member of our tribe.

To do that, we must start by remembering what story really is. It is not just entertainment. It is not just escapism. It is not just pleasure. It is not just a source of income.

What is story? I believe the archetypal shape of story is, fundamentally, a truth. Perhaps even the Truth. It is the power to change the world—over and over and over and over again. It is the power to change us. It is the power to bypass our limited egoic perceptions of ourselves, others, and our world and to show us into the wyrdest depths of what it means to be human. It is a dream we dream that also dreams us. It is initiation. It is transformation. It is change. It is myth.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What does it mean to say all stories are myth?
  It means that beneath every plot and genre lies a universal archetypal pattern. From epic fantasies to contemporary romances, all stories echo mythic structures that reflect the psyche’s journey of transformation.
• Can hyper-realistic stories still be mythic?
  Yes. Even the most realistic fiction carries symbolic depth if the writer taps into archetypal storytelling. A courtroom drama or slice-of-life novel can still follow the mythic blueprint of initiation, transformation, and return.
• Why do archetypes resonate so deeply with readers?
  Because archetypes are not stereotypes. They are living psychological forces. When writers use archetypal character arcs, readers feel as though they are watching their own inner conflicts dramatized on the page.
• How can writers use archetypal character arcs in their stories?
  Writers can use arcs like the Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, or Mage as blueprints for character development. These journeys help ensure stories resonate with mythic power and emotional authenticity.

In Summary

At their core, all stories are myth. No matter the genre or style, narrative always springs from the archetypal blueprint of the psyche. Story is not simply a mirror of everyday life but a symbolic map of transformation—a dream we dream together. When writers embrace this mythic foundation, they create stories that not only entertain but initiate both writer and reader into deeper self-awareness and lasting change.

Key Takeaways

• All stories are myth. Beneath plot and genre lies the archetypal blueprint of transformation.
• Story is psyche. Every character and force reflects a facet of the self.
• Archetypes are alive. They are not tropes but dynamic psychological energies.
• Hyper-realism needs myth. Realism alone risks losing depth; archetypal foundation restores resonance.
• Story transforms. Writers and readers alike undergo initiation through narrative.

Want More?

Archetypal Character Workbook (Full Bundle of 6)

If you’d like to put these insights into practice, explore my Archetypal Character Arc Worksheets—a series of six fillable, downloadable guides designed to help you chart mythic journeys for your characters. Each worksheet breaks down one of the six archetypal arcs—Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, and Mage–into structural beat sheets, reflective questions, and story prompts. Whether you’re writing epic fantasy or modern literary fiction, these tools will help you harness archetypal storytelling, deepen your characters, and unlock the mythic power within your narrative. Find the full set (including the discounted bundle) in my Etsy store.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Do you see your own stories as mythic at their core? How do you think recognizing the archetypal foundation of storytelling might change the way you write? Tell me in the comments!

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 Why All Stories Are Myth—and How They Transform Us appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What if the key to finding your authentic voice as a writer lies in exploring someone else’s fictional world first? How can multi-passionate creators manage multiple brands without losing their sanity? KimBoo York reveals how fanfiction can be a powerful training ground for original fiction, and why being your “weird self” is more valuable than ever in an age of AI.

In the intro, Everything I know about self-publishing [Kevin Kelly; his interview on The Creative Penn]; KU library distribution [Dale Roberts]; Anthropic settlement on piracy [The Verge; Authors Guild; Writer Beware];Selling direct with ElevenReader; I’m talking about Creativity and AI on Brave New Bookshelf; I’m also talking about An Author’s Guide to AI on The Novel Marketing Podcast; My final AI webinar of the year, Sun 21 Sept; The Buried and the Drowned short story collection.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom.

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

• What is fanfiction?
• How to transition from writing fanfiction to original fiction by identifying the aspects you love
• Managing multiple creative brands under one studio umbrella without losing your mind
• The legal landscape of fanfiction
• Why fanfiction has been an innovation hub for story trends
• How AI and generative search create opportunities for cross-genre writers

You can find KimBoo at HouseofYork.info.

Transcript of interview with KimBoo York

Jo: KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom. So welcome back to the show, KimBoo.

KimBoo: Hi, Jo. It’s great to be back. I love talking with you.

Jo: Yes, and we had a good chat last July 2024 when we talked about intuitive discovery writing. So we don’t need to go further back than that, but just give us an update.

What does your writing life and your business look like at the moment?

KimBoo: Well, I think I speak for everybody when I say that 2025 has been a challenging year. So I’ve had to take on a little bit more freelance work as I’ve restructured how I’m doing some of my business. You were an inspiration for that.

I’m kind of separating out my different brands now instead of trying to be one thing to all people, and that’s taking a little bit of work. I’ve launched a new pen name, which I’m not going to talk about here, but it seems to be doing well off the launchpad.

Then, of course, I’m redoing some of my older works, doing the business end. We’re doing new covers, doing some new links, doing some new giveaways. So it’s been a busy year and I look forward to what’s going to be happening in the future for me, especially as I go into 2026. So that’s kind of where I’m at right now.

Jo: Well that’s interesting. Just talk a bit about this separating different brands. Just remind us what are the different personas that you have and the different brands you’ve split into? I feel like a lot of people think about doing this, and I have done myself.

I’ve got my two author names and I felt that they were very different, so it was important to me, but I know how much work it is.

So talk a bit about that process of separating brands.

KimBoo: Well, I flopped back and forth, so for a long time I tried to keep everything very separate and that took so much work and energy, as you know. Then I tried to put everything under one banner, and that just became cluttered.

It became hard to identify my demographics, it became hard to do advertising. You can always do targeting in advertising, but with the more organic stuff, how do I post on social media? How do I talk about all my work?

So I am somebody who is a multiple project starter. I always have multiple things going on. So I have KimBoo York, me, myself, and I, who is the author and the writer, and I do fiction under that name.

I have Cooper West, which is one of my older pen names. That’s gay male romance, romantic thrillers, paranormal romance. I have The Author Alchemist, which is kind of my podcast and my craft writing and writing coaching brand.

I have The Task Mistress, which is my productivity brand. I just published a new book, a collection of essays on holistic productivity under that brand.

I have The Skeptic’s Inspirational, which is daily inspirational posts blog. That’s going to be a book here soon.

Patience & Fortitude, which is my grief blog and mourning blog and book, which is the house where I published my memoir “Grieving Futures: Surviving the Death of My Parents.” And I could go on, but you kind of see what I’m getting at there.

They’re very different things and I realized that what I needed was a studio type of branding. So HouseofYork.info is my studio home. House of York is my studio. It’s the thing that produces all of these different brands, and so I do still have that brand. Everything is a House of York production.

It sounds a little ostentatious when you put it like that, but for me mentally, it’s a great way to keep things separate and yet connected. So they’re all me, they’re all connected, and I can talk about different ones in different places, but they’re also very clearly defined for marketing purposes. So that’s what I really wanted out of that whole thing.

Jo: Yes, it is really hard.

But you don’t have different email lists for all of those things though?

KimBoo: No, I do not. Right now I just have the House of York email list. I’m moving into segmenting them. So I will have some different email lists going down the line, and certainly my newest pen name, the secret one, is going to have its own separate email list.

So eventually, yes, there will be separate email lists, but I’m working on developing a way where I’m not having to do six email lists a week. Cycling is important, right? Planning things out, scheduling. Who would have thought? So I will eventually, and that is the goal, is to have these different segmented lists.

I would also be able to do a full blast to everybody if I had something special coming out that I wanted all my lists to know. So again, that’s one of the reasons why I went with this studio framework of doing all of my brands and putting everything under one umbrella while keeping them branded separately.

Jo: No, I like that. I mean, I often have thought about this, because I have the two main websites—well actually now I have three. The Creative Penn, J.F. Penn, and Books and Travel. And so they’re my main websites. Then I have my Shopify stores and then I have YouTube channels.

I have often thought, oh my goodness, I should have one landing page where I can send people to. Then I thought, well, who do I send to one landing page, because I actually have different people do different things.

I guess this is great to start on actually, because I feel like you are a multi-passionate creator, and so am I.

We have long careers and it’s like, well, you can’t just stay in your lane.

You know, I feel like some people say, “Oh no, you should just stay in your lane.” And we are like, well, it’s not actually possible.

KimBoo: No, no. I’m a seven-lane highway. I can’t.

Jo: Well, it’s interesting though, because it’s not a seven-lane highway. It’s actually like three A-roads, we call them here, like three major roads and then there’s some little back lanes, and then you might have one that’s a bit of a cul-de-sac.

KimBoo: Sadly far more accurate. Yes.

Jo: But I think that’s important too. I mean, I was actually looking at your grief one and the death of your parents, and I mean, that’s like a whole completely different area that perhaps is almost standalone.

Different people may find that book than find your romance or your productivity or whatever, and that’s fine. They don’t need to find anything else. So I think that’s really good too. It’s having all these different things.

So just to make people listening feel better if you are a multi-passionate creator, so are we. You just have to manage it, right?

KimBoo: Figure out what works for you, but you’ve got to just try different things until you land on the system that works. I think that’s the lesson takeaway here.

Jo: Yes. Or the way it works right now, and then you change things. In fact, let’s get into the book because this is another one of these kind of quite random books to be fair, which is Out from Fanfic. I’m fascinated by this because obviously I’ve heard of fanfiction, but it’s not a sort of world I am in at all. So just start by explaining—

What is fanfic? And what are the main sites?

KimBoo: Sure. So I’m going to start actually with the Wikipedia definition, which is “fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction.” And honestly, that is the basis for a thousand different arguments about what exactly fan fiction is.

It became very trendy there for a little while to look back and say Dante’s Inferno, that’s fan fiction. Bible fan fiction. Right? What is fan fiction? It’s one of those, well, you kind of know it when you see it type of things, right?

I consider it to be the interaction of a creative person, whether it’s writing, drawing, painting, creating videos with a property or fiction, a story that they love. It’s them engaging with it on a personal level.

So that’s really what fanfiction is. It’s a hobby. It’s the same kind of hobby as building Lego houses or model trains. You’re taking something that exists and creating your own work, I guess is the word I would use, but creating your own world out of it.

So it’s fun. That’s the bottom line for me is writing fanfiction and reading fanfiction is fun.

Jo: So, yes, it’s fun. Let’s just be clear, you mentioned the word property and that it is fan labor, and it’s unauthorized. Right up front we have to say, this is when it’s not your character. So it might be, I don’t know—

Give me some examples of what people have done.

KimBoo: Okay. So take any show. Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Game of Thrones, movies. The Avengers, that was one I was in for a long time. It’s currently in a lot of Chinese dramas like Nirvana in Fire and The Untamed.

You take those characters and that setting and you write your own version of it. Say, a cut scene or a post scene, or you change some of the canon facts of the story and you say, well, what if this person hadn’t died? Or what if these people had met earlier?

Or what if this one character had left when they were young and then come back 20 years later? And you just add in these elements and have fun with taking it in a new direction. But as you said, they aren’t yours. They aren’t your characters.

It’s not your setting, it’s not your story. You don’t own that, in the sense you own your own writing. Of course, you always own your own writing in a creative sense, but in a legal sense, you do not own it. That’s something people really need to be aware of.

If they’re interested in fanfiction, if they’re going to explore it, if they’re going to use it as a writing tool, you can, but you can’t officially publish. You can’t publish and make money off of this.

This is definitely hobby level stuff, which I don’t say to denigrate. I’ve read some amazing fan fiction that’s truly life transforming, how beautifully and amazingly well done it was. But it’s hobby. You can’t publish it. You can’t do anything with it legally.

Jo: I guess you can publish on a website.

So what are the places that people are publishing their fanfic on?

KimBoo: So they are posting it. The oldest site right now is fanfiction.net. It’s still around, it still looks like it did in like 1998. Truly, I don’t know how people use it.

The one that most people are familiar with is called ArchiveOfOurOwn.org. It is a project of the non-profit organization, Organization for Transformative Works that was started 2008, 2009, I think, for the express purpose of having a place for fanfiction to exist.

They’ve done a lot of work on the legal end to protect people’s rights to write and post fanfiction online. I try to draw the line between saying that they publish fanfiction and they post it for that reason.

That’s just a me thing. I don’t think that that’s really widespread in fandom, but for me mentally when I’m talking about it, you post your fanfiction to AO3, as it’s known colloquially, and you share it and people can read it and comment on it and like it. It’s a great site.

Their tagging system is truly a thing of beauty, but again, it’s not publishing in the sense of you’re publishing a book, you’re publishing something.

There is fanfiction on Wattpad, but they’ve fought against it. They’ve taken down fanfiction in the past. They do allow it, it’s kind of under the table on Wattpad, but there is a lot of fanfiction on Wattpad.

I think, going back a ways, the One Direction fandom really had its moment on Wattpad. That was a long time ago, but there’s still people posting fanfiction on Wattpad. A lot of times people cross post, they post on Wattpad and they post on AO3. So it just depends on where you want to put your work.

Jo: Okay. A few things here. So it would be obvious to me, like if it’s, I don’t know, Captain Kirk from Star Trek.

KimBoo: Oh, classic.

A classic. You know, and a very obvious modern character. But think about Thor for example. So Thor obviously being Norse God, none of that is under copyright, as in anyone can write a Thor story. But then there’s Thor, the movies and the things that are Thor-like in that are movie-based as opposed to the original base.

So how does that kind of work? Like how do you know? Especially when in people’s minds, sometimes things might get mixed up. You know, you might mention Ragnarok now. Ragnarok is in all the ancient stories, but the way they did it in whatever Avengers movie or whatever it might be is specific.

So are there lines here that people need to watch out for?

KimBoo: I would say these days, yes. There’s a little bit of a line you need to watch out for. I mean, if your story’s about Thor being a member of the Avengers, then obviously it’s like, yes. But if it’s just an independent story about Thor and his brother Loki, or Loki himself, there are definitely tells to use to be able to differentiate.

Now, to be clear, on sites like AO3 and Fanfiction.net and Wattpad, people do identify. They say like Thor MCU, which is Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tips you off, or Thor mythology, right? So then, oh, this is based on the Thor lore of the old style myths rather than the new style myths, I guess you might say.

So there are definitely ways to identify that and I think a lot of fan fiction writers take care to make sure of that because you don’t want somebody coming into old school Thor and Loki mythology, thinking that they’re getting the fun Avengers good time, “let’s beat up the bad guy” story, because they’ll just get mad.

They’re like, “Hey, this wasn’t what I wanted to read.” So fanfiction writers are very careful about identifying exactly what they’re writing for and how they’re writing for it.

Oftentimes, yes, you wrote a riff on Little Red Riding Hood. Well, you know, okay. That’s definitely in the public domain. They can post that on AO3. They can also publish that as their own original story because that is public domain that is not owned by somebody. So fanfiction authors are usually generally pretty careful about that.

Jo: Yes. I guess why I am emphasizing all this is because I still feel like many authors don’t really understand what is in the public domain, what is fair use under copyright. Also, it differs. So there are some countries where copyright expires earlier.

I think, is Sherlock Holmes one of these where it’s sort of—don’t quote me on this, people go check it in your country—but it’s like some of the Sherlock Holmes stories might be out of copyright and others are still within.

I think Tolkien’s Universe as well. There’s like different ways that things have been extended when they haven’t in other areas. So I think this is really interesting and you definitely have to check all this before you publish it.

I did have another question. I mean, you mentioned the One Direction thing. Is this just all about having sex with different characters?

Is it all romance and erotica?

KimBoo: It is not, and in fact, gen—general fiction—is one of the most popular tags on AO3. Romance is very popular. They want the characters, their favorite characters to kiss, right? That is a very popular element of fan fiction, but it’s absolutely not what it all is. It’s not all written by 14-year-old girls. That’s another stereotype that comes out.

In fact, if you go back in history, I would say the modern fan fiction era—and a lot of academics would agree with me—began with the Kirk/Spock fandom right out of Star Trek and that like those women were full grown women because this was the late sixties and the seventies. There was no internet.

If you wanted to share your stories, you had to have access to a Xerox machine. Remember Xerox machines, right? You had to have access to a Xerox machine or a mimeograph machine, and then you had to have access to the postage that would be required to mail these magazines out.

So like you couldn’t be a 14-year-old girl and write fan fiction in that era. So it’s always been, I would say, owned by older writers, and not teenagers, as the stereotype goes.

Yes, a lot of the fiction out there is romantic. Some of it’s erotic, but a lot of it is also just general. I was just looking… what was I looking at the other day? Game of Thrones fan fiction. You look at Game of Thrones fan fiction and there’s lots of different pairings that are popular in that. The “Time Travel Fix-It” tag is very popular in that fandom.

Jo: So people are trying to avoid the final series.

KimBoo: Exactly. Like they either want to avoid season eight, six through eight completely, or they just want to redo it, or they want to have something different. So they have one of the characters time travel, you know, the gods step in, whatever, and go back and fix everything.

It’s really popular in The Untamed fandom as well, the “Time Travel Fix-It” tag. So it’s not just about the romance. I have a current Untamed fan fiction in progress right now actually, and it’s very alternative universe. I wanted to see what would happen if one of the main characters was actually given some autonomy and power earlier in her life.

I just wanted to see what would happen if that happened to her and how that would change all the threads of the story going forward. And is there some romance? Yes, there’s some romance. There’s also a war. There’s also magic and killer slaughter turtles. It’s just fun.

Jo: Yes. I think fun is definitely the focus here.

So coming back on the IP side, there are books—like 50 Shades of Gray is supposedly based on, I think, was it Twilight fan fiction? Not supposedly, very much absolutely.

KimBoo: Yes. Yes, it was. It was based on Twilight fanfiction.

Jo: So how did that become a publishable original novel that was basically huge?

KimBoo: So what you’re talking about is what we call in the scene “filing off the serial numbers.” And a lot of authors have done this. E.L. James is not the only one. Cassandra Clare’s done it. Naomi Novik’s done it. Plenty of authors who don’t want to be named have done it. And many I’ve known.

You take a fan fiction of yours that’s very popular or that you just personally like, and you go and you file off the serial numbers. You don’t just change the names. You change the setting, you change some of the dynamics, you change some of the character traits of the main characters.

You have to really file it down enough that if someone was coming after you to say, you based this on our story, versus you stole our story. That’s really where the line has to be drawn. Again, it’s not a clear one, but if you do it enough, you can get away with it. So that’s what E.L. James did.

If you did not know that it was Twilight fan fiction, you would never realize it was Twilight fan fiction. Even if you’ve read Twilight, like most people, they might say, gosh, these characters are kind of similar, but oh, that’s just tropes, right. So exactly. That’s what she did, and that’s what a lot of authors do.

Jo: Yes. So the tropes, I mean, tropes are kind of universal, right? As you said, I mean, the time slip, go back in time and fix things. I mean that could go in any world. It doesn’t have to go in a Game of Thrones world, you know?

I never read the Twilight books or watched the movies, but I have read 50 Shades of Gray. It is obviously it’s set in a modern world. There are no vampires, there’s no werewolves. So a lot of it is different. So I feel like that’s important as well.

So let’s come back to you because I was really interested in the book you wrote. In talking about your own experience in fan fiction, you say, “My sense of shame was very real,” and I was really interested in that because I don’t know you very well, but having talked to you before, I just can’t associate that with you.

You seem very confident. So explain about that.

Why are some people embarrassed or even ashamed of being involved in fan fiction?

KimBoo: Well, you’ve kind of hit on some of the reasons earlier when you asked is it all romance and erotica? And I talked about also it’s not all written by 14-year-old girls. For a very long time, these associations with fan fiction was that it was very similar to romance genre, honestly, not that different.

“Oh, that’s something women enjoy.” “That’s what those horny lonely women in their basements are writing.” You know, “sexy fan fiction,” and “it’s not real,” and “it doesn’t take any effort.”

“It doesn’t take any work. It’s just fake people. They’re riding on the coattails of other people’s work.”

So there was a lot of shame. I mean, there were a couple of people even up into the nineties that—you know, I won’t give out names or anything—but whose careers were almost derailed or completely derailed because it was revealed that they had written fan fiction in the past. Publishers wouldn’t touch them. It was a bad scene all the way around.

It’s hilarious because one of the oldest forms of fan fiction that we have these days is what’s called Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, and Sherlock Holmes Pastiches started appearing in the 1800s, like they started appearing not long after Sherlock Holmes stories were printed by Arthur Conan Doyle.

They were very popular up through the twenties and the thirties, right? They were all written by very educated men. And they weren’t called fan fiction, they were called Pastiches. So those were okay. Those were fine.

Then you get up into the sixties and the seventies and you have women writing Star Trek fan fiction. Yes. A lot of it was Kirk/Spock, and some of it was truly terrible, but again, I’ve read some truly terrible books published by traditional publishers, so I’m not really sure that’s a fan fiction only problem.

You get a lot of new writers coming into fan fiction, so there is a lot of bad writing out there.

I’ll just be upfront about it, and you can see it right away. You’re like, “ooh, that’s not good,” but a lot of these people are writing for the first time.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read an author’s note at the start of a fic that’s like, “This is the first time I’ve tried to write anything, but I was just so inspired. I wanted to do it.” To me that’s beautiful. That’s amazing. That is wonderful.

Even if the work itself is very clearly the first thing they’ve ever written, you’re like, “Hey, you’ve started on an amazing journey,” and that’s the beautiful part.

But the shame, the shame that’s been associated with it. Like when I was first thinking about getting published in the nineties—because I don’t know if anybody’s listening, but I’m an old person—I realized that I would never be able to admit to having written fan fiction when I was younger. I was a Kirk/Spock girl in the eighties. I totally wrote that.

Jo: I’ve got to ask on this. Is this a gay romance thing with Kirk and Spock?

KimBoo: Yes.

Jo: Okay. Right. Yes. I’m checking, yes.

KimBoo: I assume everybody knows that. Yes. No, Kirks/Spock was one of the first, we call them “ships”. It’s slang for relationship that grew out of, I think, X-Files fanfiction in the nineties.

The Kirk/Spock ship is one of the big motherships of fandom. If you go on AO3 and look up how many stories are tagged “Kirk/Spock”, there’s a lot. There’s a lot.

Jo: What about the mixed race? Because wasn’t it the first kiss on screen with Uhura and Kirk? Was it those two that had a Black and a white actor?

KimBoo: Well, first interracial kiss.

Jo: Interracial kiss. Yes. That’s the right terminology. I was like, what is the terminology here? But that kind of thing. Often this kind of fun writing can also push more boundaries.

We’ve seen so many things come out of indie that would never have started in traditional publishing.

I mean you, well, you think about romance, there’s no way traditional publishing would have started this romance trend. It is so big now, and they sucked up all the big ones, haven’t they? So, yes. Interesting.

KimBoo: Reverse harem or “why choose”, I think is what they call it these days, that pretty much came out of the One Direction fandom.

Jo: Of course. That makes sense.

KimBoo: Yes. The Omegaverse, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Omegaverse.

Jo: Some. Okay.

Kimboo: You know what, we don’t have two hours, so I won’t explain it, but look it up. Omegaverse came out of the Supernatural fandom. A lot of people don’t know that they read Omegaverse now.

The gay male, the MM Romance publishing industry, which really got started when indies came on the scene, right? 2008, 2010. Almost all of those authors, you go back to 2010, the MM big names, they all came out of fandom.

One of the brilliant things about writing fan fiction and being in fan fiction is that you can see some of these trends coming. Like I knew reverse harem was going to be big. I knew Omegaverse was going to be big.

I knew romantasy was going to be big long before anything hit because it was being so popularized in fan fiction because in fan fiction you don’t have to worry about whether it’s going to make you money. All you’re doing is you’re having fun, you’re trying out new ideas, you’re throwing things at the wall, you’re seeing what’s interesting.

You’re coming up with new ideas and new stuff, and sometimes it clicks and takes off. You have that freedom as a fan fiction writer because you’re not worried about how much money is this going to be? And is this on market? And is this a niche? None of that concern is there. You’re just writing because you want to write.

Jo: Yes, and it feels like you’re part of a group, you know, if you love the same thing as other people love. Then as you say, it’s part of the fandom for whatever that property is. I mean, your book is called Out from Fanfic, so it’s kind of turning from writing fanfiction into more professional writing, I guess.

I mean, one of the things I was thinking is, of course there are a lot of writers who are commissioned to write within these universes.

So do those sort of companies recruit from fanfiction?

KimBoo: They do now. It was less common in the eighties, like when you had the Star Trek novels really taking off. And in the nineties when you had the Star Wars novels taking off, they still went with a lot of traditional publishers, even though the workhorses of the pulp fiction genres these days, it is a lot more popular and it’s a lot more.

A lot of traditional publishers are looking to popular fan fiction authors to mine for the next big thing. There was a dust up recently. There were three Harry Potter fanfics, Dramione. That’s a ship, that’s a portmanteau of Hermione and Draco. So Hermione and Draco as a couple is actually incredibly popular in fandom.

There were three very, very popular fan fictions that are Dramione fanfic that have recently been taken and filed off—although they didn’t do a good job filing off the serial numbers, everybody knew it right away—and then started being promoted.

They actually used Harry Potter references in their marketing, which of course, the Harry Potter people were just like, “You got to stop that right now, like you stop it.” But the reason the publishers published this is because some of these stories had a million, 2 million readers online.

So they knew this is a popular story. They could file off the serial numbers and make some money off of it. So yes, nowadays it’s a lot more common for traditional publishers and agents to look at fan fiction authors who are very popular, who have a following, and who’ve done a lot of writing. So it is more common these days for sure.

Jo: And then I guess your other thoughts on Out from Fanfic, like for your own journey, it sounds like you are still doing a bit of both, as in you still write some fanfic.

How do people cross over if they’re like, “No, I want to write my own”?

Is it just mainly a case of your own characters? And your own world, I guess?

KimBoo: Absolutely, so it’s easier for some people than for others. I actually wrote the book because I did know quite a few authors who tried to write their own original fiction, and what I noticed in a lot of those cases is that they tried so hard that they went so far out of their lane that they weren’t interested in their stories anymore.

They’re like, “Oh, I just, I get bored by my own writing. I just want to go back and write fanfiction.” And I think, and the whole reason that I wrote the book is to try to help people who are used to writing about characters that they love and writing about settings that they love learn what those things are.

Like dial it down, figure out—well, I call them parameters—like figure out what the parameters are of those characters. You know? Do you just like wacky klutzy characters who are also geniuses? Well, that’s more of a trope that you can put that in any story. It doesn’t have to be Stiles Stilinski from Teen Wolf.

A lot of different things that you love, you can pull into your own writing out of your fan fiction without repurposing your fan fiction, without using other people’s characters.

Learn what you love of those things and use them, because it is a transition. It is definitely not super easy to transition to writing original fiction if all you’ve ever done really is written fan fiction.

I, of course, had a little bit of a lift up because I had been writing original fiction for most of my life. So I was already familiar with some elements of it. I did learn a lot writing fan fiction. In fact, I think I wrote over 1 million words of fan fiction before I think I really found my voice as an author and realized what I really want to write.

So it can be a learning ground if you look at it that way. I also don’t want to take the fun out of it. I don’t want to say, “Oh, you should use this as a training grounds,” but you can, if your goal is to write original fiction and you find that challenging.

Jo: Yes, I think that’s really interesting. I was reflecting then, I mean, I have thought before, I would love to write a Bond book. Which, I think they’ve all been men who’ve written the Bond books. Obviously there’s lots of them written in more modern times.

It’s really interesting because then I think, well, my thriller, my ARKANE series, you could definitely trace a lot of Bond kind of tropes, a lot of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft tropes.

You say it is taking the things that you love about the movies and the books and the TV shows and then picking them out and then creating your own stories where there is still elements like that. I mean, those are not the original things.

It’s how you turn that into your own work, but it’s skating that line, isn’t it?

That remains difficult.

KimBoo: Right, and as we talked about a little bit earlier, tropes are more universal. So if you can kind of dial, like you said, the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft—well, what is that trope or the mummy? Like, oh, it’s the archaeologist going on adventure and running into and finding cursed things and finding cursed items.

That’s a trope, but if you’re not looking for it, you could just say, well, I just like writing in Indiana Jones. I don’t know how I’m going to write my own original story, but if you sit back and look at it like, okay, what is it about Indiana Jones or what is it about Kirk?

Or what is it about Wei Wuxian from The Untamed that I love? What is that? Can I pull on that? Can I introduce it into my own characters and my own stories?

Jo: That’s cool. Then in the book, you have a brief section about how things have changed for indies over the last few years.

Obviously I always have to talk about AI, and you said, quote from the book, “What is the point of churning out repetitive stories written to market when an AI program can do it faster, better, cheaper?”

“What does it mean to be a human creator of anything?”

I love that because then you give people hope and you talk about how this is actually ideal terrain. That’s your words for you. So talk about this. Because I get people emailing me all the time saying, “what is the point?” So respond to that.

KimBoo: What is the point? What is the point of anything? Okay. No, but I think there’s so many moving parts, and Joanna, you talk so well about how AI is impacting our industry, but for me personally, it’s opened the door to allowing me to write what I really want to write and allowing me to put my own humanity into the writing.

This isn’t true for everybody, but for me, trying to write to market, trying to write to narrow down and stay in your lane, as we talked about earlier, felt like trying to turn myself into a machine. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to.

I tried and I tried and I failed abysmally over and over and over again. So the humanity is what we own as humans. Our experiences, our insights.

AI, and specifically LLMs—because I like to be specific when we’re talking about that specifically LLMs—the training that they’ve done has been so broad and across so many genres and across so many types of writing and so many eras of writing that it’s very generic.

Even at the point where you say you can push a button and have it write a book— which we’re definitely not there yet as anyone who’s played around with LLMs knows for sure. It’s going to be median, it’s going to be average, right? Because that’s what AI is really all about.

Taking our own spark of creativity and ingenuity and allowing ourselves to grow into that rather than being worried about churning out the next pulp fiction, I think is an opportunity.

Now, some people who’ve made a lot of money churning out a lot of these books see it as a threat and I understand that, but things change.

Things change in our industry all the time now.

Like we had a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred years of things not changing at all. Then we had self-publishinga, nd indies changed everything. eBooks changed everything. AI is changing everything.

If we invest in ourselves as authors and writers, as creators, as people with creativity, I think it is an ideal terrain because then we can explore the things we love to write.

It’s one of the reasons why I think that cross genre books such as Cozy Fantasy or romantic contemporary can start to bubble up is because people feel more confident that they can reach the readers they want and that they don’t have to try to fit their round peg into a square hole type of situation.

So that’s my thoughts on it. I mean, I know other people have different opinions, but that’s where I’m at.

Jo: I actually think this is a better time for, coming back to where we started, around the sort of multi-passionate creator. For many years it’s been, well, if you write cross genre—which I do—if you write all over the place, if you don’t do series, if you write standalones, if you do this, that and the other, you are not going to make good money.

Many of us have made good money like that, but we’ve certainly felt like, oh, well I should do this. I should go into this one genre, or I should try not to write. Like I’ve got three books in my Brooke and Daniel series, and when I wrote them, I was trying to write a standard British crime and ended up with a male psychic character.

I was like, why isn’t this selling? And I figured out over time that the British crime niche is not supernatural when it certainly doesn’t have a male psychic in. So it’s so funny because I love those books and I’ve always been like, why? Why can’t the people who love this type of thing find these books?

I actually think they have more chance in a world of generative search, for example, where people can get much more granular.

They’re like, “Well, I like this, I like this and this and this and this, and this. Find me something that I might like.” So I feel like that is much going to be much easier for our work to be surfaced than someone who just has one category on Amazon, for example, that they buy in.

KimBoo: Absolutely. I think one of the more hilarious examples of that is the search I did recently for Supernatural Cozy Apocalypse. A cozy apocalypse. That is a nice one, right?

There were books that came up in that search and I was just like, “Oh, this is cool,” because I wanted something that was like the end of the world, but also people coming together and found family and maybe a little supernatural. Like, dragons are coming up out of the earth because of climate change.

I found the book Apocalypse Cow. It’s about a cow at the end of the world, and it’s fun. These are great for us cross genre writers, which I’m leaning into more.

I think my serial Dragon’s Grail is in a lot of ways still very much the epic fantasy Second World type of thing, ut I’m looking at it and it doesn’t really fit into epic fantasy, it doesn’t really fit into romantasy. It doesn’t really fit in.

So I’m having to think of different ways of building up that explanation of it because it is kind of intrinsically cross genre and it’s going to be a challenge, but I think it’s a great challenge to have in this day and age.

As you said, generative search is really going to be a game changer. I don’t think people are ready for how much that’s going to change everything.

Jo: Probably for the last year now, I used ChatGPT to find books. I just find it so much better. I’m like, “Here’s a list of things that I really like. Go find me some books.” I just think it’s so cool to find much more weird stuff that just would not have been surfaced otherwise.

I guess where I’m going with this too is, and what I say to people is—

You need to be your weird self.

KimBoo: Well said. All of what I just said, that was what I meant to say.

Jo: Be your weird self. I can see that with your work across different things, like I bring up your parents’ grief book again. I mean, a lot of people might not have expected a book like that alongside someone who also writes about productivity and this fanfic stuff.

So that breadth of humanity is, I think, what people who might come in one of your books and then they’re like, oh, this person has a whole load of stuff that brings more depth is just a different side of them. I think this being the full human that you are is so important coming into this sort of new world.

KimBoo: I agree, especially coming out of the world where you were supposed to be just one thing, and do that one thing, and be there for only one thing. For me as a reader, I love seeing what other writers are working on.

I love seeing a writer whose romance novels I really love and they’re branching into, you know, space opera. I’m like, I’m all about it. Like I love to read that. It’s more about what I enjoy reading in the author’s own take on those stories less than, “oh, this is space opera genre and that’s all I read.”

I don’t think readers are like that. Some are, you got your whale readers who never leave their niche, but I think a lot of us, we like a lot of different things. I think this is a great time for authors to be able to expand and take advantage of that.

Jo: Absolutely, and maybe realize that, sure—

You might not hit it out the park with every book, but then who ever did?

KimBoo: Like, I know there’s readers out there who love your psychic British crime stories. Absolutely. I don’t have a doubt.

Jo: Well the, what’s so funny is they get the best reviews of all my books. They get the best reviews. It’s just the number of people who actually like that kind of book are quite few and far between. But hey, I didn’t know that when I started writing them.

I am writing this book about gothic cathedrals at the moment. Nobody asked for that.

KimBoo: They didn’t, but I am certainly looking forward to it because I love gothic architecture and so I’m excited about that.

Jo: Oh, fantastic. Well, this is the thing, and I think we need to keep that in mind. So I guess as we close, write what you want to write and hopefully in this new world with AI search people, more people will find us.

KimBoo: The dream.

Jo: The dream. Happy times.

So where can people find you and your books online?

KimBoo: Okay, well I suggest that people go to my main hub studio website, which is HouseofYork.info, and that’s all one word, HouseofYork.info.

That has links to all my sub-brands, including KimBoo York and Cooper West and Patience & Fortitude, the one about grief and mourning where they can read my dog’s obituary as I just lost my pet. I’d love people to love my dog as much as I do.

So go check that out. HouseofYork.info, you can find everything there. If you want to reach out to me, I’d love to hear from people.

Jo: Great. Well thanks so much for your time, KimBoo.

KimBoo: Thank you so much, Jo. It’s been a pleasure as always.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone of the original interview.

The post Writing Fan Fiction, And Multi-Passionate Creativity With KimBoo York first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Hello everyone. I’m Jo Frances (J.F.) Penn, award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, and this is my new short story collection, The Buried and the Drowned. Watch the video below or here on YouTube. .

I’ve been writing short stories for more than a decade and this is the first time many of them have been in print, and there are two new stories for this collection, so if you love dark short stories with a hint of the supernatural, here’s a glimpse into the characters you will find inside: 

• A doubting priest seeks God in the far reaches of Iceland 
• A burned-out coder dives for escape in the depths of the ocean 
• A scientist’s daughter unearths her father’s darkest secret 
• A war photographer chooses sight over sanity 
• A Vatican librarian discovers a hidden tomb under Paris 
• An ambitious glassblower makes a deadly choice 
• An underwater archaeologist gets lost in a sunken Egyptian city 
• A musician awakens something ancient … and hungry 
• A scientist unravels the DNA of a biblical nightmare 
• A brother chooses bloody transformation over his twin 
• An archaeologist discovers an impossible relic at Seahenge

The Buried and the Drowned, a dark short story collection by J.F. Penn, available now.

You can get the collection through the Kickstarter in this exclusive signed hardback edition — with green foil on the dust jacket and interior covers, ribbon, custom end papers and sprayed edges, as well as photos from my research trips. 

You can also get the paperback, and there’s a large-print edition, which, as you can see is a bigger edition with a bigger font size. 

You can also get the ebook and the audiobook read by human me, months earlier than you’ll be able to get them on the other stores, and there are bundle editions of my other books in different formats as well, including all my series books and my previous special edition Kickstarter hardbacks.

If you’re a writer, you can also join me for a webinar on writing short stories, or there are a limited number of consulting sessions available.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join me for The Buried and the Drowned — www.JFPenn.com/buried

The post The Buried And The Drowned. A Short Story Collection By J.F. Penn. first appeared on The Creative Penn.