#AmWriting

Latest Episodes:

Episode 205 How to Create #MarketingMojo Apr 03, 2020

Show notes

Hey writers—super-practical episode this week! Call it part two of the Sarina coaches KJ through her book launch series. This week, it’s the #MarketingMojo page—things you’ll need as you market your book no matter what the book is or when it launches. This is the road to creating things like back-of-the-book or flap copy, ad copy, social media post copy and more, for fiction and non-fiction both.

We go in deep in the podcast, but here’s a quick primer, starting with the easiest and building up to the biggest challenges. Sarina suggests creating a Google doc with the following:

* Praise for the book/General praise for you and your work. Why? People buy things because of the emotions they’re expecting to feel. The praise you get from others—or the praise you’re hoping for, which is another way to approach this—is a shortcut to what emotions people have when reading your work.

* Short quotes from the actual book that say something in a few words that’s really indicative of the theme. Note—they can be shortened, condensed, or made more pithy as needed. You’re allowed to misquote yourself.

* A list of the conflicts, curiosities, tropes or other standout traits of the book. Cliffhangers? Puzzles? Thought-provoking questions? Identical twins, billionaires? Small towns and second chances? These are things that get people to pick up a book. List all you’ve got.

* From there, you’re on your way to creating your taglines and cover copy. We give examples in the episode—or just flip over any book in your genre and take a look.

#AmReading

Sarina: The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kaddish

KJ: Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers

Jess: The Biggest Bluff, Maria Kornikova

No transcript this week, because of … things. All the things. Too many things. But the podcast is there and waiting! Enjoy, and stay safe.

PS: It’s a great time to check out our sponsor, Author Accelerator, where you can launch a career as a book coach or get paired with the right coach to get your project moving.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 204 #HowtoGetPastWritersBlock(slowly) Mar 27, 2020

Show notes

Feeling a wee bit stuck? Struggling to get anything on the page? Well, we all are—and not only does this week’s guest know from writer’s block (her last book came out in 2004), but she gave a raging case of it to her protagonist in her new novel, which allowed her—and us—to really dig in deep into what happens when the words don’t come.Join KJ and Sarina as we talk to Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety (a perfect book for this moment, all about how we’re all, every single last one of us no matter how weird or obnoxious or even put-together-seeming, just doing the best we can with what we’ve got) about writing funny, the edge between humor and empathy, and how life can get in the way of publishing even when it seems like you’re on the right track.#AmReadingJess: The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Eric LarsonGood Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jennifer Finney BoylanPodcast: The Long Form Laura:Weather, Jenny OffillDept. of Speculation, Jenny OffillKJ: Separation Anxiety: A Novel, Laura ZigmanPodcast: Beach Too Sandy, Water Too WetSo, we know it’s rough out there. It’s rough in here, too, but I guess, in a way I’ve personally never experienced before, we really are all in this together. And we’ll come through it together whether we like it or not. As I say in the intro, we recorded this just as the Covid19 shutdown wave was about to crash over us all, and we’ve got a few other episodes we recorded in anticipation of cancelled travel that just take us right back to the olden days—those are coming in weeks ahead, along with more timely episodes.Thanks for listening and for sticking with us. We feel supported by every one of you. If you feel like kicking a little into the production kitty, (and getting #Minisodes and #WriterTopFives) click the button.This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator—training book coaches and matching coaches and writers.Find out more: https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ: Hello it’s KJ here and this is going to be a slightly longer than usual pre-roll announcement. Jess, Sarina, and I want you to know that Sarina and I recorded this episode, an interview with Laura Zigman, just as the covid crisis was just beginning to hit. We do mention it, but probably not in the way that we would now. And on that same note, this week our sponsor Author Accelerator is giving their time over to our effort to encourage you to support your local independent bookstore during this. Remember, Amazon is not going to have any trouble making money while we're all shut up in our houses. But your bookstore is - if you want them to still be there when this is all over and it will be over and we will want them - please do the less convenient thing and support them now. Here's how when you're looking for some new books (for example Laura Zigman’s Separation Anxiety) call your favorite independent bookstore and see if they're offering curbside pickup or home delivery, many of them are. Hopping in your car getting out there and just letting them drop that book in your window is entirely still possible for a lot of us. The mail is at least still coming, or check the website to see if they have an online store. If they don't consider purchasing your books via Bookshop.org. Bookshop is the new site designed to give away 75% of their profit margins to independent bookstores. We have a small presence on Bookshop, I'll try to include that in the show notes for this episode. Profits go to all independents, we’ll have a list of them there. If you listen to audiobooks, try LibroFM. That’s Libro.FM - when you start a membership with the code shopbookstoresnow you get two audiobooks for the price of one and 100% of your payment will go back to the independent bookstore of your choice. Everyone that has an internet connection should be following our favorite bookstores and sharing them all over the place, even if they don't have a social media presence you can talk about them and share how their store is personally important to you. Help your local stores tell their story. Do take a minute to subscribe to Author Accelerator’s weekly emails, a number of their online courses are free to subscribers during this crisis. It's a hard time to keep writing (and more on that in a later episode), but this could help. Is it recording?Jess: Now it’s recording.KJ: Yay. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess: Alright, let's start over.KJ: Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.Jess: Okay.KJ: Now one, two, three. Hey, I’m KJ Dell’Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things - long things, short things, emails, proposals. In short, as I say every week this is the podcast about getting your work done. Jess: I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the upcoming Addiction Inoculation, coming out in 2021, and you can find my work at The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. KJ: I am KJ Dell’Antonia, the author of The Chicken Sisters, which is coming out this summer. well as How To Be a Happier Parent, out now in paperback and coming out in hardback this summer. You can also find my work at the New York Times, and all the things. I’m the same person I am every week. We have a guest today I'm so excited about. We have Laura Zigman she is the author of (as you probably know) the new, and current, and very timely (in a weird way, but we'll get into that shortly) book Separation Anxiety, as well as Animal Husbandry which was made into the movie Someone Like You starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd, Dating Big Bird, Piece of Work, and Her. E2 is a contributor the New York Times, as well as the Washington Post other places. She produced a popular online series of animated videos called Annoying Conversations I know that she pulled some annoying conversations into her own writing. We're so excited to have you here.Laura: I’m thrilled to be here. KJ: So, Separation Anxiety is your first book in how many years? Laura: 14 years has passed since my last novel was published in 2006. It was a completely different world.KJ: Yes, and the amazing thing about that, or one interesting thing is that you gave your protagonist a similar case of writer's block, which unlike you she did not triumphantly overcome before the book was written, because that wouldn't make for a very good book. It’s wonderful that she has that, it works so well, but as a writer myself I feel like I would hesitate to put something autobiographical into my person. I would feel like it was wrong somehow, but it was so great that you did it. Talk about the choice to do it. Laura: You know I've always written what I call semi-autobiographical, which really starts from a place I'm always at. So my first novel was based on my experience of being a single woman living in New York and working. All of my other books sort of followed the starting point where I was, and this was no exception. I couldn't really imagine writing from another place. My experience when I started writing this novel in 2015 was just a point where it felt like the aperture on so many parts of my life had really darkened and shut down. And so that's where I was, I completely had writer's block and had had writer's block for quite a while. And I just had to start there and so I gave that to my character as well.KJ: Well it really works because it becomes a way to approach about life, but before we even get into that I would love to talk about the writer's block itself. Sorry, but we have listeners who are right there in that position whether it's for some of the same reasons like there’s just so much going on in your life or whether it's because the words just aren't coming. Back in 2006, when did you know this was big?Laura: Well, you know what happened was my fourth novel was published in 2006 and very quickly it tanked. Let's be frank, it just didn't do very well. We've all been there. I have often forgotten this little piece of the story in my head because I usually take responsibility for everything that happens to me, my own choices whether I choose to stop writing or wasn't able to overcome a lack of confidence. I forgot that at the time the book came out my agent (when it was clear the book wasn't doing very well) called me at home and said maybe I should take a break from writing fiction for a while. At the time it really crystallized my own lack of confidence so I didn't question the fact that my agent was telling me this and it would have been nice if she would have given me a different message and so I take responsibility for internalizing the message, but it really had an effect on me. It really was like somebody in a position who could have encouraged me was saying why don't you take a break because this isn’t working for you? That very quickly pushed all of my shame buttons, you know I was already embarrassed that the book didn't do very well, it just really shut me down. And then everything else started to happen - I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my parents got sick, a lot of stuff happened in my personal life which just cemented my pre-existing condition of writer’s block. And that lasted a really long time, even though there were things I did along the way that were kind of baby steps. But for the most part, in terms of writing fiction, writing a new novel, I totally shut down.KJ: Yeah, I mean that is exactly what you don't want your agent to say to you. First of all, you don't want your agent to say that and second of all, who says that?Laura: Right, it was unfortunate.KJ: You know, perhaps with the best intentions. I don't know, it’s hard to grant that one. Wow. So, rule number one - no shooting down people’s life work, and saying maybe you should do something else for a while. Now that we've established that, moving on. You may not have been specifically writing a book or working on fiction not shut down creatively. So tell us some of the things you found you could do. And let's just owned that you're time was sucked up by having breast cancer and having your parents as well. This was like all day, every day for a long time.Laura: Right, so it was like “sandwich generation” for many years. What happened was, one of the first things I did was sort of accidentally pivoted to ghostwriting. In 2007 or 2008, I was able to start ghostwriting. And that was something kind of lucky I felt that I had found. I had blogged about a television show I had started watching while I was recuperating from my surgery and then I was contacted by the show's producer and I ended up doing a book for a television matchmaker, which led to a few other projects. That led to some really interesting memoirs that I wrote for people like Wendy Davis and Eddie Azard, who is a British actor and comedian. And those were great projects and that was a great thing to do in terms of earning a living in writing, which was helpful to not have to write my own stuff. It was a relief not to have to come up with ideas for plot or characters, I was just able to use my skills almost like a job.KJ: It's almost as if by using someone else's words you could kind of guarantee that when you sat down there was work. Laura: Exactly. It lowered the pressure.KJ: Whereas if you are relying on yourself and you're feeling blocked, you might sit down and nothing may come out. That must have been terrifying.Laura:Exactly. I was doing that over the years and I think it was 2011 I discovered this platform on the internet called extra-normal. And you could write these little scripts and have these animated characters speak your words. And so I discovered it and thought Oh my God this is the best thing ever, because I would sit down in the morning and just whip out two or three minute scripts that were based on something annoying that happened the day before - either a conversation with my son or couples my husband and I were socializing with, whatever it was there were lots of annoying conversations. And so I would sit down in the morning, whip out a script, and have no writer's block because it wasn't like I was writing a novel.I just sat down, wrote it, and it would take a few minutes to generate the video, and then I would post it on social media. People really loved them. I think I would have still done them if the platform hadn’t shut down back in 2013. But I made 75 of them and I really loved doing them. And I loved that it made writing feel fun again. And then of course, I felt like a failure because I couldn't monetize them. I thought, it's only a matter of time before I have a show with these, but nothing happened. A lot of us feel that if we can't monetize something in some way then we've failed. Or I did, anyway. Then a few years later I tried again and wrote a script from scratch, like a film script, and my agent at the time really loved it and couldn't sell it, and again I felt like a failure. And it wasn't until 2015 that I finally had a break in my writer's block and decided I was going to try to write a novel again. So I went back to that script that was about a couple who couldn’t afford a divorce and had all the same issues that the novel dealt with, but I ok went back to that script, took just a little piece of it and used it to sort of seed the novel. And I went back to some of those old little videos and found little things in there that I used. So in retrospect, nothing that I did was wasted. In fact, they were really useful when I started again. But in the moment I still felt frustrated that I wasn't able to get the flame to catch.KJ: I was waiting to see if Jess might want to weigh in so I wasn't dominating the conversation. Jess: No I'm just listening. I find it fascinating. I always love the idea of you know when I get stuck sometimes and recently I've been stuck on sort of how to move forward with this new thing, so I really have just been going back through David Sedaris's book and my old notes. And so that idea of being able to go back to the script and say well I really like this story why it doesn't necessarily have to exist in this format and finding new inspiration in something you've already put out there. Especially when it's something you've already put out there that didn't come forward in the way you wanted it to. KJ and I talk about this all the time, we both have things in the drawer that didn't see the light of day - some of those I was able to use for articles in magazines. And I love the idea of recycling and repurposing things you love in a new format. I think that's a great way to jump-start yourself out of writer's block.Laura: It was great because I realized I had the script itself and it was sort of a road map, but I had the characters and a few scenes to start with. It was just a great way and if I hadn't done it a few years later I think it would have been so much harder for me to start. Not impossible, but it was such a gift to start with. And that made all the difference.Jess: Actually, can I go back? Since I've never had the writer's block (and I guess it can be described differently for lots of different writers), but for you does that mean literally you sitting there and not having any words to put do…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 203 #HowtoWorkAnyway Mar 20, 2020

Show notes

Well, fellow writers, when we recorded this we were just at the beginning of it all. It’s safe to say things have already changed—all of us have families at home, we’re all shut down, with noisy houses full of people trying in various ways to work online.We went from “trying to work anyway” through “I give up for a few days” and now we’re back to “trying to work anyway.” So this advice still applies—we’re setting small goals, giving ourselves schedules as best we can, and trying to strike that balance between cutting ourselves necessary slack and still trying to be who we want to be as writers. It’s true that this keeps happening: And when it does, we’re trying to find things we CAN do with absolutely zero attention span. Like share our friends’ books on Instagram. Or record a podcast about how crazy we feel. Which we will keep doing. So, same time, next week?Now’s actually a good time to check out our sponsor, Author Accelerator—get matched with a book coach, or send some of your forced isolation time becoming one! Here is a list of great writing-related resources that are all available for FREE. Those marked with F are great for fiction, M for memoir, and NF for nonfiction. Feel free to share them around!* Author Accelerator's Writing Challenge – This mini course introduces you to the first six steps of our Blueprint for a Book process to help kickstart your next book or figure out what might be missing from your draft. F M NF* The Inside Outline course – We're offering our renowned course on how to use an Inside Outline to transform your story for FREE until the end of March. Take your book to the next level and propel your draft forward. Use the coupon code SPRING2020 at checkout. F M* The Outcome Outline course – The Inside Outline equivalent for nonfiction writers is the newest tool in our arsenal – and it can be yours for FREE. Use the coupon code SPRING2020 at checkout between now and April 1. NF* Writing fun for families – Certified book coach Jen Braaksma put together some writing activities that you can download and use for yourself or with your kids.And for the aspiring book coach:* Author Accelerator's The Basics of Book Coaching – This mini course introduces you to the world of book coaching, where it came from, who makes a good coach, and how you can get started, even if you've never edited before. If you've been thinking about dipping your toe in the water, why not now?We create transcripts of the podcast every week with the help of an AI. That means there are always mistakes. We usually try to clean them up, but I won’t lie. This one is particularly bad.Hey, fellow potential carriers. Welcome to our #Howtoworkanyway episode.Will it be the first of many, or outdated and boring in no time at all?We can only hope for the latter and probably do a lot of sighing, but hey, as long as we're all going uber virtual, let me suggest spending some of your screen time at authoraccelerator.com Get matched with a book coach, or look into becoming a book coach. The side gig many of us are perfect for, complete with social distancing. If you've got some unexpected downtime maybe now is a good time to set yourself up to do something new.That recording now it's recording. Yeah, in a... It is the part where I stare blank and so I remember what I supposed to be doing. Alright, let's start out award has...I'm gonna wrestle some papers. Okay, now one to it is a one-to-one OneNote. I'm delete.And this is a hanging Ting-A-team writing is the podcast about writing, all the things under all the circumstances, fiction, non-fiction, proposals, pitches emails. This is in short as I say a very weak the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done, and I'm justly I am the author of The Gift of Failure in the forthcoming addiction inoculation. That'll be out in 2021. and yeah, I write at various places including The New York Times, The oleic and The Washington Post and I'm seeing about the author of 30 old romance novels and my newest one is going to be called sure shot and it comes out in May, is an even number. And you gonna start saying 30, I don't know, or even a... Do you know... What do you know how many Suresh makes by the way, in?Okay, so I think it's amazing. It's an amazing number.Yes, we love it. Well, I am Jess Lahey.Yes, I come on. You guys know who I am, but that you... At the author of "How to Be a happier parent and of the novel, the chicken sisters coming out in June of 2020 and super excited about that one. I also write for a number of other publications occasionally including the New York Times, and we are recording this on a... Oh, I, 5th and the Ides of March indeed 20020, and the world has gone crazy. And so the title of this is so that you guys know because you all are listening is hashtag how to write.Anyway, I quick got a... At first, at first I really resisted this topic because I didn't think that I was a very good advertisement for it, it just took me twice as long to do the final edits on a project because that's what happens when you refresh the New York Times, home page all day long.Yeah, and as we've been talking all week anxiety was a problem, but then, while I sort of settled down and got to this place of...Okay, so this year is not going to go the way that I thought. And as we discussed this in March, we haven't been personally affected by everything that's happening yet, but still it requires a big attitude adjustment, and as we all know, writing through an attitude adjustment is pretty tricky.Actually, I think Jess and I would both differ with the... Haven't been personally effective. Yeah, for me, it's taken me. I'm finally getting to a good place today where I was in a holding pattern until I knew whether or not Is my speaking gigs. Were gonna be cancelled and for me I couldn't plan ahead until that happened, and people were taking really wanted to wait till the last minute to make those announcements. So for me, and because a lot of my travel is a domino effect in then I was scrambling to plan the travel from somewhere else instead of where I was supposed to be, but it's actually been a relief in a way in a... Now everything is cancelled for the most part, because I'm not having to constantly be playing catch up with. Okay, well, so what next? So this week has been really emotionally challenging for me, not only because of the financial problems I make. A large percent of the majority of my income was coming this month, so that's been an adjustment. But for me being able to get myself in the headspace of, of... Okay, well now is gonna be for at home.That really was a big adjustment, right? And when I said we weren't affected I meant we weren't coughing.Right, right, exactly. None of us is coughing but I think we should own here because they are universal and pretty gender neutral. The family challenges that we are dealing with Jess has been struggling to get a family member out of Europe, the struggling, but we are fortunate that we can do these things. I've got a house full of notes, my kids, but extra kids which I recognize is probably not gonna happen for very much longer, because everything major, major sporting events in their lives were cancelled this weekend. And also I, I don't know, I'm coping with parents that are not worried enough about this that are too far away for me to get to so I'm not very happy about that, but yeah, and it's stressful. Is this super, super stressful?So, not null. Wanted to do this so that you guys could help me. But I will say after like RNA refreshing the news constantly. I did finally today, managed to sort get my head background play. It's also the little voices in the my back of my head going. Or am I writing a book about the olden times?That's an interesting opening is it gonna be like, "Is it gonna be super-dated because nobody does anything this way I use, I don't think so. We're gonna get back to normal we are, we are we at a cantus people shake hands in your novel, they don't touch feet. I'm pretty sure they do. Shake is what's really interesting. That was a total game in my novel. People go to a football game. What's also really interesting from my perspective at my house full disclosure is that my husband is helping run the task force in Vermont that's doing incident. There's sort of this thing called Incident command. So, even when he's home, he's feeling these conference calls and his pager going off, constantly, and so my husband will not be able to stay home during this period. And so there's the added sort of thing, where I feel like, "Oh my gosh, I need to keep him as healthy as possible, and so I'm making sure we have healthy meals and making sure he gets enough sleep and the chaos that would be... That would especially once we get our other kid home the chaos that could happen in our house, can't really happen because we do have to keep someone on the straight and narrow, and healthy and going to work every day.So that's been interesting too.It's all... Yeah, interesting. These are the interesting side times for which a Chinese famously put in A, the I and I, because that's the best description for it. I love what you said the other day, Serena. Everything is different, nothing is different.And that's kind of, unfortunately, where we are at least for the moment. So I, through this topic out on our Facebook page a hashtag am writing on Facebook and I'm getting calls for and requests and commentary on basically the real nitty-gritty of this.Like, how are we doing this? If the kids get quarantined how are we moderating our news intake, how are we trying to maintain our focus? So, anybody got Serena? You sound like you kind of pulled it back together, do you have any good... Yeah, so... Or tips, launched something launches off. First of all, we're going to... And we never do this, just shut off the internet at our house for a few hours every day.You heard you say that you and I thought "Oh we're gonna need to do that too.Singapore's gonna be home, which they are sooner or later. I think I got an alert on my phone today, saying that I hit my internet usage had gone way up and I was like, Oh, that was a nice little alert to remind me that I need to keep the lid on that. So I love your idea, Serena.Well, I would just like to remind us because this comes up from time to time that when you're writing a book, there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that happens anyway. There's the world inside your book where you have to put your head and then there's the world of your family and everything else that's going on. And I'm constantly constantly struggling to maintain two realities at once. And now we've got a third one. It's like the life inside my house is actually not changed all that much yet, but... But the world is blowing up in various other ways. So now I feel like the burden just went out. 50% of all the things I have to keep track of and shutting off the internet for a few hours every day helps. It eliminates one of those vectors.I love it, I think that'll be a relief that sort of exhalation, that happens when first you panic and you're like, Wait, where to go and then you go.I-A...Oh, that's, that's kind of nice, yeah, it will also stop what is continually happening, for me, which is that I get my head into the space where I need to be. And then someone bursts in shrinking the nail just suspended its season and then I take a deep breath and I get my head back where it needed to be, and then someone burst in shrieking card against not going back to school until April. 26, literally I just don't you feel like you're just walking through your life carrying a box with a little punching glove, you're like... No, those cartoon punching glove. And every time I turn someone just punches me.And I think we all feel like that it's not and we're punching each other, it's not like I don't immediately grab my phone and text you guys the exact same thing. Somewhat date to me off, I forgot to pay at the grocery store yesterday because while I was paying one of my kids' opened up their phone and said, "Hey sections, I try to walk out. Oh yeah, it was like, "Oh no, I did not mean to do that I... Well, the economy is also gonna hit us a little bit. I feel so bad for anyone who's launching there once a year, once every two year or three year but a great now, yeah, because it's hard to... We have some people like that in the Facebook group. I-E and to get news it's hard to get attention versus stuff.Yeah, and you also feel bad for asking for that attention too. There's the guilt factor. Nobody likes to run around shouting about their own book all the time, but it's even harder when people are sick.Well, we're gonna meet, we need other things to talk about, right?If you've got a non-fiction book on a different topic, we're we need that and we certainly need escapist fiction, so sure if you're in that position, and you've got that book go ahead, you tell it tell us about it thoughtfully acknowledging and we may both be. Well, you're in, you will be 'cause sure shots coming out any minute.No, it's not your once a year thing, but I know well, so here's a thing. I just had to adjust my expectations and that was quite difficult 'cause I have real-time data about what distraction is doing to book sales. So we're recording this on a Sunday. Yesterday was a Saturday which is usually like the second best book selling day in the week for me and I was down 19%. week over week yesterday and the day before that was Friday, and I was down 22% week over week.So those are real numbers that are going to pile up and affect my bottom line eventually, but I'm... As you mentioned, sort of insulated because I have more than one release a year and that short shot is part of a series and the people who are reading that series are gonna probably wake up and see it in so there's some, there's a little less selling I have to do and I, in the book selling curve for me, than for other people, so I feel the most pain for those whose curve is movable. Well, and can I clarify for those who are not as familiar with how Serena cells or books and how we sell ebook? So if I wanted to get the information that Serena has available at our fingertips, I really can't because my publisher holds on to that information and even if I wanted to go through book scan or something, that's not all the information and it's behind, but because series, you could you could not Tortola. It's not necessarily super it accurate, but it's there. But I just wanted to clarify that because Serena is she's got a three is she is the publisher, so she has up-to-date, minute-minute data on her own book sales, which is really interesting to have. And for someone, especially like Serena who loves data, it's a teething to be able to look at... Well, the... There's this other one in yet. Go ahead, in economics called an inferior good and friends. I don't like to refer to us as inferior if I can help it, but an inferior good is something that people buy when they can't buy more expensive things. So the classic example of an inferior good in economics is bus tickets poor people buy more bus tickets than rich people in general, but books could in a pandemic, behave like an inferior good where people buy more of them because they can't buy the more expensive thing they want which is like a trip to Italy.Well, that would be nice.…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 202 #WebsiteRevampHowto Mar 13, 2020

Show notes

Hey listeners! It’s been a mad mad mad week here (all of you in the future, check the date), and I bet there too. Result: there are no shownotes for this episode. We’re talking about revamping my website to get it in gear for my forthcoming second book. Here’s the image we mention—the before—and for the after (which is still in progress), head over to my site and see what you think. Any questions, shoot me an email (kjdellantonia@gmail.com or reply to this.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ (00:00):Hey #AmWriting listeners, this is KJ and this is my seventh time attempting to record this pre-episode discussion of something really cool that's being authored by Author Accelerator, our sponsor. I think you all know that I loved working with Jennie Nash on revising my manuscript for The Chicken Sisters. Well, if you'd be interested in working in a small group with Jennie, she is offering a Rock Your Revision small intensive workshop for fiction writers ready to revise manuscripts this summer, July 16th - 19th of 2020 in Santa Barbara, California. If that interests you, if it sounds like something you'll be ready for, if it sounds like something that having it scheduled might make you get ready for (and I think that will work) head on over to author accelerator.com click on the retreats and summits link, and then scroll on down to Rock Your Revision to learn more. Is it recording now?Jess (01:05):Now it's recording.KJ (01:06):Yay.Jess (01:06):Go ahead.KJ (01:08):This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess (01:12):Alright, let's start over.KJ (01:13):Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three. Hi, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #Am writing the podcast about writing all the things and getting them out into the world. And that's all I'm going to say about that this week.Sarina (01:37):Really? Well, I'm Sarina Bowen and I write long things, primarily genre fiction and I've written 30-odd romances and my newest one is called Sure Shot. If I ever finish it.KJ (01:50):I can't wait for it. Okay. I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the dithering other voice on the other end of the microphone. I am the author of the novel, The Chicken Sisters coming out this summer and the book How To Be a Happier Parent as well as the former editor of the New York Times' Motherlode blog. And those are the things that I do and it's just me and Sarina today.Sarina (02:23):It is. We're here to work on KJ's launch sequence.KJ (02:26):Yes. And if we sound a little odd, we are (as we often are) working in our local libraries. So, yes. Sarina, as we all know, has many, many, many past identities and for all I know is also cat woman when we're not together. But one of those past identities is helping people, specifically authors, with their websites. So that's our plan today. We're going to go over my website and talk about how I can shift it from being a website, primarily designed for a parenting author to a website designed for an author in general. And the way we're going to do this (if you want to take a look) by the time you hear this, I will have changed it. So we're going to take a lot of screenshots. So if you'd like to see what we're talking about and we will describe it cause you're probably in your car. But if you do want to just head over to the show notes at amwritingpodcast.com and there will be pictures, screenshots of this website as it is today before the dramatic changes that I'm going to make to it. I mean, it's a good website somebody made it for me and I can change it and you know, there's nothing wrong with it other than that there is absolutely no mention of my nove,l at all whatsoever.Sarina (03:55):Right.KJ (03:56):Because that's the first thing that's wrong with it. Check.Sarina (03:59):So I usually get involved with an author's website at about this same point. Sometimes I'll get calls earlier before people have cover art for their book and those people have been told that they must have an author website and start building their platform and blah, blah blah, but they don't have a book cover. And that is fine. Like, it's great to be invested in handling your book launch, but if you really do your website before you have cover art, you're wasting your money because it, you know, it would be disappointing to do a website all in purple and to find that your book cover is bright yellow. So, you know, I gently dissuade people from spending their hard earned cash early on, but you're ready to go because you have your cover art.KJ (04:50):I do.Sarina (04:51):And I have to say that I have seen some smashingly beautiful author websites over time, just so original and stunning that angels weep.KJ (05:03):That's not really what I'm going for.Sarina (05:04):Well, that's not really what I go for either. I mean, I think that the most important, pretty much the only important thing is that your website do two things. One is that it helps readers bond with your book before they're ready to click that one-click button. So that means that they're familiar with the cover art. So when your page loads at kjdellantonia.com we should see the new cover art immediately. That's pretty much step one. And the second thing is that most readers, I mean they can learn about us anywhere, right? Like social media, Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, there's so many places. But if they actually take the trouble to find their way all the way to your website, it's probably because they have a question. So we're going to anticipate that question and try to answer it within one to two clicks, two being the absolute maximum. So if you can do those two things, you're doing so, so well.KJ (06:10):Excellent. And one of the reasons I'm leaping on this is that I searched another author somebody that I know because I knew that they had a new book coming out, and I couldn't remember the name, and I needed to know for various reasons. And I went to their website and it wasn't there. And that's exactly what someone could do for me. Although let me just say that author's book is coming out before me. Okay. So that person had better just get on it.Sarina (06:40):And this is sometimes difficult, like not everybody likes noodling with websites. Like I love it, honestly.KJ (06:46):I'm happy to crawl around in there, too. I just want to have a mission.Sarina (06:51):Right. And for some people this is like the hardest partKJ (06:55):And if it is the hardest part, hire someone. You don't have to do this yourself.Sarina (07:01):It doesn't have to be fancy.KJ (07:02):It doesn't. Or you like Squarespace, right?Sarina (07:06):I love Squarespace. But there are even easier things to do. Like did you know that if you join the Author's Guild for approximately $200 a year, you get a free website from them and they will help you set it up?KJ (07:18):I did not.Sarina (07:19):Yeah. And you won't have as much control over it as I like to have over mine. But if you just hate websites, that is not a bad option.KJ (07:27):You know, we don't need blogs anymore. You know, your website is probably (correct me if I'm wrong) a largely static entity.Sarina (07:38):Well, mine is not actually.KJ (07:40):No, I know yours isn't. Because you are a person who puts out many, many books a year. So if you're that, then you're working with a website with probably shopping, and possibly merch, and some other things. I, on the other hand, am a one book every couple of years author at the moment, although I'd like to speed that up. And so I am not really needing to use my website to inform you of immediate developments.Sarina (08:10):Right. So I would like to add a third thing to our little to do list, though. Because I don't want to burden everyone and say that you have to do a million things on your author website. But honestly, this third thing could save your career, which is that you must have a way for people to sign up for your newsletter that is both easy without being irritating.KJ (08:29):That's a challenge.Sarina (08:31):Yeah. Well, I mean, we're all quite used to popups now. There are obnoxious ones and less obnoxious ones. And anyway, I'll leave that to our readers to decide.KJ (08:41):I turned my pop-up off because it was outdated and I could not figure it out. So normally I have a pop-up.Sarina (08:49):I turned my off as well because I didn't like the conversion rate of it. Like I thought, wow, I'm irritating 97 people for every three that type their email address in. But, instead I have many other very useful solicitations for email addresses.KJ (09:10):If you want to sign up for my email, you can go to followkj.com and there you will find my website sign up.Sarina (09:16):That's great.KJ (09:17):I think so, I'm pretty pleased with it. Wait, you'll laugh, I have to show it to Sarina. Because I changed it very on the fly recently I had to come up with an image very quickly and...Sarina (09:34):Oh, you know, that is funny. And I saw this the other day. I don't remember why, but I looked at it.KJ (09:39):It's a Playmobile character barfing into a tiny little Playmobile toliet.Sarina (09:42):Yes, we're going to have to work on this, KJ.KJ (09:44):I know, but I figured it would get attention.Sarina (09:48):It does, but your book cover needs to be right there.KJ (09:49):Let's start with the website and then we'll do the signup in a minute.Sarina (10:00):So right now, KJ's website has a bunch of wonderful parenting pictures on it, which suited her last book perfectly.KJ (10:07):And they're all in a sort of a red - pink theme.Sarina (10:10):Yes. I would quibble with the way that your cover art is not above the fold here. I will just tell you a couple of things about this challenge. So, websites as we design them on a screen are usually horizontal. Books are vertical. This is the main challenge of my life, aside from plotting novels. So KJ also just opened the website on her phone because this is something that I beg people to do and they don't usually listen. But more than half of your website visitors will be on their phones. And that is really hard for authors to figure out when they're struggling to get their hands around their website in the first place, that the phone part is almost more important. You know, people will come and say, 'Could you move my name a half an inch to the right?' And I usually let fly that line from The Matrix. Because most modern web building tools, i(ncluding Squarespace and the better templates at WordPress) now build a website on the fly for every single visitor based on the dimensions of their screen. So there is no one website, you can't design it like a movie poster anymore, you have to make something responsive. And that's why I use Squarespace because they're very good at that. And obviously lots of WordPress themes are too, I just am not as familiar.KJ (11:37):Mine is a WordPress theme, so we're not going to mess with the backend. I'm going to go and do that on my own. We're just going to talk about what it looks like and what it ought to look like. So step one...Sarina (11:48):You have a banner on yours with your name kind of in the middle instead of here above the main navigation. For displaying cover art I actually think that's a little trickier, but you can probably find a way around it or you can just move your name to the top. I know it's boring but it works. Okay? And then your main navigation is terrific. You have a home, you have the book which is going to have to change to books at the top and one of those books will be your new one. You have share the book, which is a great idea, you have blog, the podcast, resources, about KJ Dell'Antonia, and media, which are all great. So I actually wonder if about KJ Dell'Antonia and media couldn't become one thing if you wanted them to be. There's nothing wrong with there being two. So people get tunnel vision and let's say somebody wants to book you on The Today Show for your new book. So one of these things should say contact, because people get tunnel vision and I'm sure your contact information is here. But I've been like half asleep, needing coffee, and not spotting it on a website, and you really don't want that to happen to you. So, contact should always be one of those things. And also, if you did dispense with your pop-up and you're leaving that that way, then the thing on the far right should be subscribe. And that can hop right to that page you showed me a second ago, the follow KJ page, but it should be there. Yeah, so we're doing great. Now, if you scroll down on KJ's front page you do get her most recent book before this new one. Oh, okay, I would've put the bio links right here, but you have them fairly close. So that's all good. And then you could also have, instead of this got a book club thing (not that there's anything wrong with it) an email signup here, as well. So I would like to have one up in the main nav and then here on the scrolly scrolly front page. So the reason that websites got scrolly scrolly is because of phones.KJ (14:01):Let's have a look at it scrolling on my phone. So on the website you see things laid out, like you see the book cover and then to the right you see the text about the book. On the mobile, you see the book cover and then you scroll down and you see the text about the book, and then you scroll down and you'll see the by the book in a vertical list.Sarina (14:25):So the buttons are horizontal on the laptop and they're vertical on the phone. And that's because you have a properly responsive website. Now, there are some authors who had their websites built more than 10 years ago, and the site still looks good when you pull it up on the computer. But if you pull it up on the phone, it's quite broken. And here's the reason that's not good. Google will punish you. They promote (in their search rankings) sites that perform on a mobile device and they sort of demote sites that don't. And you don't want to be demoted by Google. You know that old joke like, where's the best place to hide a dead body? On the seventh page of the Google search result. Okay, so don't be that dead body.KJ (15:21):So, but it's okay to have the scrolly scrolly first page is what I'm hearing. So the fact that if you just keep scrolling, you just get stuff, after stuff, after stuff is fine. It's just that maybe the stuff is not in the right order.Sarina (15:38):Well, your stuff was in a decent order. It's like the New York Times - you know, above the fold, below the fold. So here's the thing, when I'm helping an author with a website, I send a questionnaire. And these are the questions on the questionnaire. Which author websites in your own genre do you like best? Cause that's not a bad place to get inspiration; to take a shortcut to figure out what other people are doing. Right?KJ (16:06):That's how we made our podcast. There's a podcast, it's called Hurry Slowly. I love her and I love the design of her website. And I basically was just like, this really looks great. I'm going to make ours look pretty much just like this and it is. Thank you very much, Jocelyn Keighley.Sarina (16:26):Then the second question, the colors on your site will be…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 201: #Creatinga(Fictional)DysfunctionalFamily Mar 06, 2020

Show notes

And you thought our shelves full of self help books were just to manage our own issues! Nope, there’s another use for them. Our guest this week, Kathleen Smith, is a therapist and writer and the author of Everything Isn't Terrible, a helpful and humorous guide to shedding our anxious habits and building a more solid sense of self in our increasingly anxiety-inducing world. It’s very useful, and we’re valiantly attempting to tame our own anxieties—but that’s not (much of) what we talk about. Instead, we’re focused on what’s really important—and within our control: Creating believable, dysfunctional characters and then helping them to grow and change.We talk about romance dynamics: the pursuer and the pursued, the over-functioner and the slacker—and how important it is that a couple be at a similar level of maturity (or, more likely, immaturity) to be believable. From there, it’s headlong into siblings, birth order and circumstance, family coping mechanisms and some of the ways to develop deeper conflict within our work. It’s such a great conversation. Episode links and a transcript follow. Thanks for being with us! If you love the podcast, tell a friend. Right now. Just drop everything and go sit someone down and make them listen. And if you love the podcast, you can support it! There are perks. #SupporterMini episodes. #WriterTopFives. LINKS FROM THE PODCASTGenograms: Assessment and Intervention Family Constellation, Walter Toman#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Kathleen: Bringing Down the Duke, Evie DunmoreKJ: Ex Libris, Anne FadimanThe Uncommon Reader: A Novella, Alan BennettSarina: 19 Love Songs, David LevithanOur guest for this episode is Kathleen Smith, author of Everything Isn't Terrible: Conquer Your Insecurities, Interrupt Your Anxiety, and Finally Calm Down. For more: Website - KathleenSmith.net Twitter - @fangirltherapy Instagram - @kathleensmithwritesFree Anxiety Newsletter - https://theanxiousoverachiever.substack.com/This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator—training book coaches and matching coaches and writers. Find out more: https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ (00:01):Hey listeners, KJ here, if you're in with us every week, you're what I like to call people of the book. And some of us book people discover somewhere along the way that not only are we writers, we're people with a gift for encouraging other writers. Maybe that comes out in small ways for you, but for some of you it's a calling and an opportunity to build a career doing work you love. Our sponsor, Author Accelerator, provides book coaching to authors like me, but also needs and trains book coaches. And if that's got your ears perked up, head to authoraccelerator.com and click on become a book coach. Is it recording? Now. It's recording.Jess (00:44):Now it's recording.KJ (00:44):Yay!Jess (00:44):Go ahead.KJ (00:46):This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone, trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess (00:50):Alright, let's start over.KJ (00:51):Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things - short things, long things, fictional things, non-fictional things, something in between kinds of things, which I don't know that we really recommend, it depends on where you're writing for. But in any case, as regular listeners know and any new listeners are about to find out, this is the podcast about figuring out how to sit down and get your work done.Sarina (01:30):I'm Sarina Bowen. I only write long things and fictional things. I'm the author of 30-odd romance novels and my newest one is called Heartland. You can find all about it at sarinabowen.com.KJ (01:46):I feel like the things that we write are feeling particularly long this week. I don't know about you, but I feel like I only write really long things that somehow don't have enough words. Yeah, but they sure feel long to me. I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of my first novel, my debut novel, is The Chicken Sisters coming out in June of 2020 and I'm also the former lead editor and columnist for the New York Times of the Motherlode and the author of How To Be a Happier Parent, which is out in hardback now and will be out in paperback this summer.KJ (02:20):And I am delighted to say that we have a guest today. This is going to be a really fun, if somewhat fictionally focused episode. Today we are joined by Kathleen Smith, a therapist and writer and the author of Everything Isn't Terrible: A Helpful and (I can vouch for this) Humorous Guide to Shedding Our Anxious Habits and Building a More Solid Sense of Self in Our Increasingly Anxiety Inducing World, which is brilliant. And we love it. And we are working away at our own anxieties. But we've actually asked Kathleen here today to talk about the anxieties we have more control over - the anxieties of our fictional characters. In other words, we're going to talk about creating believable, dysfunctional characters and families and then helping them to grow, and change, and get better. Welcome.Kathleen (03:12):I'm so excited to talk about this topic with you guys. Thanks for having me.KJ (03:16):Thanks for suggesting it and coming. We think this is fantastic. It's so funny because as I read, Everything Isn't Terrible and I have been, I sort of flick between, Oh wait, I need this. Oh wait, my character needs this. Oh wait, I do this with my mother. Oh wait, does my character? I think I need to read it twice, once in each guise. So how did you think of the idea of using a therapeutic formula, a therapeutic lens to view fictional characters?Kathleen (03:54):First of all, I'm a huge fan girl and I love reading books and watching TV shows with complex families. Right? You know, everyone these days is obsessed with succession, right? Or the crown or these sort of glamorous, dysfunctional families. But as a therapist, I'm a firm believer that everyone's family is just as interesting. You know, if you'd sorta take a dive in and look at the rich sort of emotional history of a family. So I love seeing it in real life and I love seeing it in fiction, too, especially when it's done really well.Sarina (04:30):Which fictional families in print have you enjoyed recently? I was so curious about this.Kathleen (04:36):Yeah. Well one thing I'm reading right now is I'm rereading Emma because you know, the new movie is coming out. So it's interesting to see some of the family dynamics in that. And you know, sibling position. And I think Jane Austen in particular does such a wonderful job bringing out those differences and the dynamics of people. So that's one thing I'm enjoying right now.KJ (05:00):You used another Jane Austen example with us, which was just sort of to get right deep into it, you were talking about how spouses tend to be at the same level of emotional maturity, even though they might express it differently. And you gave the example of the Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice. And that just made me laugh because I've read Pride and Prejudice many times, but also multiple recreations of it, recently. That happens to be a trope that I love and yes, absolutely. I'd never thought of it that way, but they're both equally awful. It's just that one of them is awful in a more appealing kind of way.Kathleen (05:41):Absolutely. You know, and I think we like to think that we're more mature than our spouses, but at least the theory I was trained in, that is not the case. We tend to be attracted to people who are at the same level of emotional maturity. So I think that's important to think about when you're creating characters, and a marriage, or in a relationship. What that kind of reciprocity is and how that sort of fits together. Like just you said though, one person might be seen as the problematic one, right? But that's often not the case.KJ (06:12):We are going to think of this firmly from a fictional perspective and yeah, let's dig into that. So we've got maybe we've got two romantic leads and we're seeing one of them as the problem, you know, one of them is not returning phone calls or is not living up to expectations, but it's important that they both have sort of equal level of flaws is what I'm hearing you saying.Kathleen (06:40):Yeah. I mean you could have, and this is such a classic relationship thing, you could have one person who's the distant one, right. And then one person who is sort of the anxious pursuer and we interpret one as necessarily having the problem, but they're both caught up in this sort of anxious dance of trying to relate to one another. Or trying to get away from the anxiety. Or another classic example is like one person is an over functioner, right? And they take on all the responsibility and do everything and the other person is seen sort of as a slacker, right? Or the lazy one, but they're just responding to the other person's behavior. So, it's definitely a two person dance.Sarina (07:20):This also makes me think of a trope that I see in romance all the time that I'm not a huge great fan of, which is the crazy ex. Sometimes you get sort of cheap conflict in a romantic plot arc because somebody has a crazy ex, but it's really hard to write a good crazy ex without painting your hero or heroine as kind of an idiot for staying with that person in the first place.KJ (07:48):Oh, good point. Yeah.Kathleen (07:51):It doesn't make any sense to have them be sort of at different levels of functioning. They probably wouldn't have been together in the first place if that were the case.Sarina (07:59):Yeah. I mean, you can always make a case for somebody experiencing a lot of growth since they originally got together with that person. But yeah, it's hard. One time I was writing a book three with my collaborators and we already knew from books one and two who the hero and heroine of book three were. And this romance had a lot of potential already. But we realized as we were sitting down to plot it, that both characters came from really wonderful, stable families and we sort of looked at each other and went, 'Oh, we're in so much trouble.'KJ (08:39):Yeah. Let's talk about how that family background matters. I mean, why can't we create a book around two people from wonderful, stable homes who've been supported, and loved, and had only good experiences all of their lives? Besides because they don't exist.Kathleen (08:56):Well, you know, in my book I use that well-known Mary Carr quote that a dysfunctional family is any family with two people in it. Right? Or it's something like that. So I don't know if such a thing exists, first of all. You know, there's always some amount of anxiety and dysfunction in any family, but you know, it's much more interesting and it's much more rich to sort of go back a generation or two and ask yourself what are the processes that work here, you know, is this a family that avoids each other in distances and that's how they deal with everything. Is this a family that cuts people off the second they disagree with them or do something scandalous? Or is this a family who's all in each other's business and is constantly doing things for people that they can do for themselves? You know, it's interesting to think about what some of those patterns might be and then all of a sudden you have kind of set the stage for your character to kind of emerge from that. And that can influence then how they are in their romantic relationships, or in their work, or with their own family. So just by doing that sort of homework ahead of time, you have such a great jumping off point for creating conflict and plot.Sarina (10:08):Sometimes it feels like it's really hard to do that ahead of time and you have to kind of wade in first.Kathleen (10:14):Yeah, I mean I think that's why it's useful to know your own family really well, first of all. It can be an inspiration or other people's to kind of get you curious about that. But you know, just taking the time to kind of draw that out and draw a little diagram or just some, some facts can be really useful.KJ (10:34):Well, you suggested four different sort of family patterns, let's talk about those and how we might be able to use them in fiction.Kathleen (10:42):The first one is distance. That's sort of the most obvious things that we do as humans when we're nervous, or upset, or stressed, right? Like we just get out of there as quickly as possible. But there's also emotional distance, right? So as a family, only talking about the weather, or sports, or very superficial things as a way of managing sort of the underlying anxiety. And then the second one is conflict, which is a little weird because at first glance you don't think, well, conflict doesn't manage anxiety, right? Like doesn't that cause anxiety? But if I'm convinced that someone is wrong all the time, then that calms me down a little bit. It's actually adaptive. So a lot of families use conflict and sort of focus on one person as the problem. To calm them down. And I think that's so useful in fiction because it sort of helps you see that just the person who is identified as having the problem isn't the only player here. Right? Everyone is contributing to that in their own way. And you want me to keep going?KJ (11:49):No, I'm thinking about that. The conflict one. I think it kind of goes back to what we're talking about in a romantic relationship where from a fictional point of view, you can draw a picture that looks like one person is the problem. And what is going to evolve is that the people who are making that person the problem are also the problem.Kathleen (12:16):Exactly. Everyone is contributing. Right? And I think that's a good point is you can't look at a person sort of and tell how mature they actually are. Because you know, everyone is sort of propping up other people and so one person in a family might be doing really well and they might have a stable job and seem like a healthy person, but it's because they're directing all their attention onto fixing a kid. Right? Or a sibling or a parent. It all sort of gets diverted to this one per person who gets identified as the problem. So that's what's so great about humans is we're just such tricky, complex creatures you can't necessarily take at face value, how mature a person is and how they're going to act in crisis people who are actually much less mature than we think we are.KJ (13:10):And how does that dynamic play out on the other side, the person who is sort of constantly being fixed?Kathleen (13:16):Yeah, I mean it's sort of - we're getting into Jess territory with her writing about parents focusing on kids. But you know, the idea is that if you tell a person that there's something wrong with them or there's something to be anxious about, they start to believe it. So it's useful for them to fall into that role and to play that role to kind of keep things stable. But that doesn't mean that they won't have problems, you know, they might develop more of the symptoms or more of the problems because everyone in that fam…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 200 #ShouldYouStartaPodcast Feb 28, 2020

Show notes

It’s our 200th episode! In all that time, we’ve never missed a week and never regretted our choice to spend 40 minutes (ish) together—and with you. We love doing the podcast, so this week we thought we’d answer a few podcast-y questions we get a lot: should you start a podcast? Can a podcast help promote a book? Is there gold in them thare podcast hills? We talk about all that and more—but here’s one thing you won’t find in the episode, in part because it seems so obvious now that we never think about it. The smartest thing we did, when we decided we were going for this podcast thing, was this:We made it about writing.That was not, back in 2016, an obvious choice. Jess had just written a best-selling book on parenting. I was the editor of the New York Times’ parenting section. Sarina wasn’t on board yet, and it was just the two of us. The obvious thing to create would have been a podcast about family life. And we would be so, so sick of doing it by now. Or at least I would. (This is KJ writing.) If you are going to start a podcast, either make it about something you love, and have always loved, and can reasonably figure you will continue to love—or make it so broad that it can encompass your changing interests and experiences. Very very few people really want to spend a lifetime talking about, just to offer a parenting example, breastfeeding. Some absolutely do, and if you are one of them, you know it. But for the rest of us, that’s an interest with an expiration date. Don’t start a podcast with an expiration date.(Note—that’s advice with an asterisk. Some podcasts are meant to end. They follow a single story, or offer a series of interviews around a single topic, and that’s it. We talk more about that in the episode.)To bookmark the best choice we made, I offer some of the worst advice I was ever offered, from a PR advisor who, reviewing my “platform” before the launch of How to Be a Happier Parent, put her finger on the podcast and said, that. That doesn’t match. That has to go.I didn’t listen. Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, if you like the podcast, and this not-even-IN the podcast email, please forward it to a friend and suggest that friend might want to take a listen. And if you’re that friend and would like the backstory for the podcast to drop into your inbox every week, click here.Finally—we could use your help for those next 200 episodes. If you love #AmWriting (and if you’ve read this far, you know you do), kick in if you can. Support us, and get a weekly #WriterTopFive full of actionable advice you can use, access to all the past #WriterTopFives and even the occasional mini podcast. LINKS FROM THE PODCASTThe Tanya Eby #AmWriting episodeMagic Lessons, the Big Magic podcastDani ShapiroChasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad, Nicole Weisensee EganStoryBites Sarina’s podcast#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Jess: Epic, Sarina Bowen, Audio from Pride and PrejudiceKJ: Bunny: A Novel, Mona AwadSarina: This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ (00:00):It's episode 200! Hey fellow writers, it's KJ here at the beginning of episode 200 of #AmWriting. Alright, pat on the back for us. So I have to tell you, normally I write out my promos for our wonderful sponsor, Author Accelerator. So normally what you get is me reading something timely and happy about what Author Accelerator is doing at whatever moment of the week that we're doing our podcast. And I love doing that. But this week for episode 200, you're just getting my off the cuff, impromptu, completely drawn out of the air thoughts about why Author Accelerator is the right sponsor for us and how much I love them. If you need book coaching, if you want to be a book coach, Author Accelerator is undoubtedly the place to go. But even more than that, there is so much great stuff out there on their website. There's the stuff for creating an Inside Outline. And I tell you, I have finally nailed down the Inside Outline, I think. For mostly, oh, okay, I have, I have. For my work in progress, finally. But that is a process that has really helped me out. They've got a whole arc of emails that you can sign up for where you get five projects to work on for your novel. You know, why are you writing it, writing the back of the book copy, that stuff stays useful throughout the process. Author Accelerator has been a wonderful sponsor and they are really a wonderful source of everything you could (well, I mean, not everything, like they're not a source of agents and, okay, I have flaked off here) but they're great. If you have never checked them out, if you have blipped past this promo at every opportunity, this time, this week, maybe just click over and see what's over there because really it's worth it. Is it recording now?Jess (02:31):Now it's recording.KJ (02:31):Yay.Jess (02:32):Go ahead.KJ (02:33):This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess (02:37):Alright, let's start over.KJ (02:38):Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Now, one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. The podcast about writing so cleverly named so that you can probably figure that out. This is the podcast about writing anything and everything - long things, short things, fiction, nonfiction, essays, memoirs, proposals, pitches. This is the podcast for writers who are struggling, or succeeding, at getting their work done.Jess (03:16):I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming book, The Addiction Inoculation out in 2021 and you can find my work at jessicalahey.com.Sarina (03:26):I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 30-odd romance novels. My latest one is called Heartland, and I'm flogging another release in the spring called Sure Shot, which is kicking my butt right now.Jess (03:38):That's the first time I've heard you say the title. That's exciting. I love it. This is like, I get little bits of information sometimes when we podcast. I love that.KJ (03:47):I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of How To Be a Happier Parent as well as my debut novel, The Chicken Sisters coming out in June of 2020, the former editor of the New York Times' Motherlode blog, a contributor to multiple places, although not super recently.Jess (04:14):As you say that thing about not having submitted super recently. I've been having a bit of a crisis about that and maybe we'll talk about that.KJ (04:21):Maybe we should because that's definitely on my list.Jess (04:26):But this is a special episode.KJ (04:27):It's a very special episode.Jess (04:28):What is it, KJ?KJ (04:29):Well, everyone, this is the episode where we learned that Jess and I are secretly identical, separated at birth. No, no. It's a very special episode because it's our 200th episode.Jess (04:46):Yeah, this is the 200th episode. And I made cupcakes for the 100th episode, but that was when we lived close to each other and it was easier for me to transport cupcakes. Today, I'm actually traveling through town on my way out of town for a speaking engagement and we realized it gave us the ability to all be in the same room together, which is just more fun than Skyping, I have to say.KJ (05:10):It's so much more fun. It may sound a little different but it's got so much going for it.Jess (05:16):We're at the library, so it's a little echoey in here, but we're doing our best.Sarina (05:19):We have all of our matching notebook planners open on the table.Jess (05:26):Oh and we also have something super special I have to call out. So, KJ gave us some pretty cool presents recently. She gave us this beautiful Corksikle cup in bright yellow with a #AmWriting logo on it. And it's really special.KJ (05:49):I do have one and we could totally give it away in honor of our 200th episode. We totally could. We've done some giving away lately. So you know, somebody going to have to go to the post office at some point. So, alright. It'll be someone randomly drawn from the people who get our show notes. That's what we're going to do. So if you're on our show notes email by, let's call it a week after you hear these words, we'll draw a name. You could win a #AmWriting commemorative cup.Jess (06:36):200th episode. We have a lot of stuff to talk about today.KJ (06:45):We have a lot of stuff to talk about today.Jess (06:47):You've got your lips pursed, Sarina, like you have something that you would like to start with.Sarina (06:51):Do I? I thought we should talk about why a podcast?Jess (06:55):I think that's a great idea. Especially since, you know, you've been brought in somewhere between 100 and 200, partly because people love the episodes that you're on so much and it felt like you were spiritually a part of the podcast anyway. But KJ, why did we start this podcast in the first place? I started it mainly because I wanted to, and then you said we're doing this, but why a podcast?KJ (07:20):I think we started this podcast for what I think is a very good reason to start a podcast, which is that we wanted to spend an hour together once a week talking about this thing that we both do and love. So that was our primary goal. And because we, especially me, I listen to and love podcasts, love the format, and then it became a way to form a community around the podcast. So, we weren't looking to sell a book, we weren't looking to build an empire. When people talk to me about starting a podcast, I'm always like, you should do it if it's something you really, really, really want to do, if you think it's going to do something for you...Jess (08:13):If it's another task to add to your to do list, like 'Oh crap, I have to record podcast again today.' I don't think it's a good idea.Sarina (08:21):Well, you mentioned the community aspect of it and writing can be so very solitary. If you had a job where you spent your time literally in a crowded room full of other people, you might not lean towards doing a podcast about that. But it is so solitary and writers have always had to form their own groups in order to have somebody to talk to you. I mean, you could be lucky enough to have done this in Paris in 1920 or whatever, but you know, here we are at the library.Jess (09:00):Frankly that's what the salons often were, anyway, was talking about the writing. And it was a different era, but it's very much in the same spirit, which is get together and talk about what it's like to write, and how hard it is to write sometimes, and how great it is to write sometimes. And every single time, especially for me, I love getting notes about the podcast. I love getting notes about sort of things that have been particularly helpful to people, but in the #AmWriting Facebook group, especially recently, we've had a couple of people that have had successes. We've had a couple of people share what's been helpful for them. And that group, as an extension of this podcast is another huge reason (not only the only reason at this point that I stay on Facebook), but the reason that I feel like it's worth it. That there are writers supporting writers and frankly, I'm a hermit up where I live now and it's been hard. I had to move away from you two. And I don't have a lot of friends up there and there are days I don't leave my house. And so having a place to talk about this stuff is increasingly important for me. I know that was a downer. I sound like I'm sad, but partly it's in response to like, you know, today I have to go out for the next 48 hours and be extremely extroverted, and social, and on. And it's a huge relief to be able to be a hermit for a little while here and there, but if I didn't have this outlet to talk about the writing stuff, I don't know where I would get it.KJ (10:33):Well and I love that we really are like you just said, helping people to develop their own careers. I mean, we've done things, we have learned some stuff. I'm so proud of us. We have been together as a trio since before any of us had done anything of any particular writerly successful note. And I think that's awesome. And one of our upcoming guests, Kathleen Smith, the author of Everything Isn't Terrible (which is a title I love) wrote me and said that she started a weekly email sort of in preparation for her book. She has 10,000 people on her email now. And she said, I would never have started it if it hadn't been for you guys really pushing. That's where she started really, and here's how to do it, and here's what to do, and here's the mechanism.Sarina (11:33):Giving advice to other writers - for one thing, you always learn something when you're doing it. I don't really critique a lot of other people's fiction, but sometimes I do. And there's always this moment of terror if you read it and you don't instantly fall in love and it's not perfect, you know, which is pretty much everything ever. And I have this moment of fear like, 'Oh my God, what am I going to say? This needs work. Holy cow.' And then you sort of relax into it and you find the moment where you find the heat and you figure out, 'Oh, here, this is what it's really about. This is the strong thing.' And when I say this, this person is going to realize that this is the focus point. And also, every single time I close, whatever it is, when I'm done, I walk away and I immediately realize how I've made one of those exact same mistakes in my own work. So when we come together and we discuss how to do a thing, that's never just me telling, it's always me thinking deeply about oh right.KJ (12:39):People come into the Facebook group and they say things that they have learned or they send us an email and they say things that they have learned and it's amazing. And we get to invite people that we admire, and respect, and would love to talk to, to come and talk to us about writing. And that is a huge, huge buzz.Jess (13:02):I think one of the things that's been really helpful for me is having this podcast on my brain all the time. So like Sarina said, instead of just reading and saying something like, 'Oh, I hate this', I read something and I say, 'Why don't I like this?' So for example, yesterday I was reading a book that I have in hard copy and I have an audio. And I'd started it in hard copy and it was fine. It was okay. And then I was listening to it in audio yesterday and had to shut it off. And I realized what was happening was the author (and I don't know if it was just because I got halfway through and the author turned in this direction or because it was the author's actual voice on audio) became extremely preachy. She became 'I am the expert. You will do what I say you, I know more than you. I am going to tell you how to do things.' And I realized for me it was an incredibly important moment realizing not just that I didn't like it and it wasn't that I didn't like her, it was that I didn't like the style with which she was delivering what could…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 199 #HowtoLovePromotingYourWork Feb 21, 2020

Show notes

Our guest today, Dan Blank, sure seems like a man who loves his work. On his own podcast, the Creative Shift, he’s a warm and engaged interviewer. In his emails, he’s genuine and engaged. Is he selling his book and his services as an advisor to authors developing their platform and launching their work into the world? Sure, but it never feels like he’s selling. It feels like he’s sharing.Wouldn’t we all like to feel like that, and have our readers see us that way? We were hoping Dan would share his magic sauce and we’d all go skipping off towards easy street down a rainbow path, but it turns out there’s some work involved here. So instead, we talked about process, from the way you manage your personal trolls to the way you manage your emails, and then we talked—buzzword alert—authenticity, and finding the things you genuinely want to share with the people who are a match for your work. (You can download Dan’s free guide, 5 Ways to Immediately Connect with Readers, here.)Episode links and a transcript follow, and that’s it for shownotes, because man has it been a couple of weeks. It’s been February for at least a year, right? And I thought January felt long. A few things you can do to help us out or get more #AmWriting:* Review us in your podcast app.* Join the #AmWriting Facebook Group* Support us with a little cash, and get periodic #SupporterMini episodes (next week: #OutlineShortcut) and weekly #WritersTopFives every Monday that isn’t an unexpected school holiday that kicks my ass. FanFaves include Top Five Details to Flag in Your Publishing Contract and Top Five Ways to Win at Newsletter Subject Lines. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. LINKS FROM THE PODCAST#AmReading (Watching, Listening)KJ: Such a Fun Age, Kiley ReidHow Could She: A Novel, Lauren MechlingRed, White, & Royal Blue: A Novel, Casey McQuistonSarina: The Starless Sea: A Novel, Erin MorgensternDan: Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew RobertsBonus: Clementine, The Life of Mrs. Winston ChurchillOur guest for this episode is Dan Blank, and you can find more about him at We Grow Media.This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ (00:00):Hey listeners, KJ here, if you're in with us every week, you're what I like to call people of the book. And some of us book people discover somewhere along the way that not only are we writers, we're people with a gift for encouraging other writers. Maybe that comes out in small ways for you, but for some of you, it's a calling and an opportunity to build a career doing work you love. Our sponsor, Author Accelerator provides book coaching to authors (like me) but also needs and trains book coaches. And if that's got your ears perked up, head to authoraccelerator.com and click on become a book coach. Is it recording?Jess (00:41):Now it's recording.KJ (00:43):Yay.Jess (00:43):Go ahead.KJ (00:44):This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess (00:48):Alright, let's start over.KJ (00:48):Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Now, one, two, three. I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is our podcast about writing all the things - fiction, nonfiction, essays, book proposals, all the things that I list every week because this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your writing work, whatever that is, done.Sarina (01:20):And I'm Sarina Bowen. I'm the author of 30-odd romance novels and my new one is called Heartland. You can find more about me at sarinabowen.com.KJ (01:31):I'm excited for Heartland. I was just crawling all over your website today for no apparent reason. Anyway, I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of The Chicken Sisters, a novel coming out in June of 2020, as well as How To Be a Happier Parent, which is out in hardback now and in paperback this summer. And I am excited to say that we have a guest today. So let me just introduce him. Our guest is Dan Blank. He's so many things that I don't know what to put first, so don't judge me by how I rank these. But he is the host of The Creative Shift podcast, the author of Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience, the creator and wunderkind behind the We Grow Media Organization, and a man with a true passion for what he likes to call a human centered approach to reaching your audience. And I would have to say that Dan has a human centered approach to everything. So, welcome Dan.Dan (02:32):Thank you for the lovely introduction. I appreciate that.KJ (02:36):You're welcome. A couple of weeks to go. We recorded an episode on what we do all day and you don't have to convince either of us that the most important thing that we do is create. But we both struggle to put that first sometimes because of all the other stuff that feels pressing. And all that other stuff is mostly about marketing, and promoting ourselves and our work, and getting it out in the world and communicating with our editors or agents or audio book recorders or cover designers - just so much stuff. So we are hoping to have kind of a two-part conversation with you: if getting the work out in the world is the second most important thing, how do we do that better and smarter instead of just chasing shiny new opportunities and how can we get it done? And full disclosure here, before I stop talking, I think that you love connecting your work with people or at least it feels that way to me. And Sarina and I both would like to feel that way. So I have dubbed this #HowToLovePromotingYourWork. And that's not a challenge or anything. I did not ask you a question. How can we start? What should be my first question?Dan (03:59):To me, it always starts with clarity. And I totally agree with you, that for a writer it begins with their craft. It begins with what they create, why they create it, and of course their ability to do so. And then from that, it's about the idea of connecting it with people. I find that a lot of people absolutely do what you say, they struggle to create because of all the other important things in life. And sometimes it is distracting. Like going on a co-host website for no reason and just spending time there, which I do all the time. But a lot of times it's critically important things like kids, and job, and to feeding your family, and that sort of thing. So when I think of the idea of productivity and getting writing done, a lot of what I think about is that battle for clarity. Of knowing what is the most important thing, and knowing it in your bones, and having made decisions around it. And I think if you don't have that first, then it's very difficult to start weighing things in your day. Of like, well I should volunteer for that, I should do this, maybe let me just check that out, and someone told me about that book let me check that out, or let me get back to email. So the place I like to start is talking about clarity, but I'm not sure if that's starting too far back for you.Sarina (05:23):I would love to jump in and tell you that you're already saying some things to me that really resonate. Because my relationship to productivity and to my clarity of purpose has changed so much over the last five years and not in a healthy way. And I'm sort of struggling to go back to where I was. Well, I started writing romance novels out of frustration about five years ago, because the things that I had been working on were not working, not finding a market. And so I wrote the first couple just out of joy and just for fun. And I accidentally became a romance novelist because the moment that my first romance came out, then I found success. So everything started to work for me. But the problem is now that my relationship to that work has changed so much because of reader expectations. And now my inbox is full of people who want things from me. Whereas, when I first started writing these stories, they were just for me. I mean, I had the hope that somebody would read them, but now I literally get messages every day from people who are demanding that I do a particular thing next. And it's really messed me up a little bit. You know, when I sit down in front of my computer in the morning now, I have all those voices in my head and they want certain things to happen in my fictional worlds and they want certain books next. But I'm on deadline on this other one. And you know, cry me a river, right? Because I have an engaged audience, but sometimes it's too loud.Dan (07:19):Yeah. I mean, KJ knows this about me. I work in a small studio here in New Jersey and on one of the walls is nothing but photos of artists, and writers, and musicians who inspire me. And I pick photos of them when they are either very young, before they've had success, or when they're sort of in that moment of risk. And I stare at them all day. And you talking about that thing that a lot of people have, which is I don't want to write to an audience, but I want to feel that my life is filled with an audience. And how to navigate that is a tricky thing. And as I look at that wall right now, I think of how all of these other creators had to deal with that, too. You come out with a successful album, or painting, or show, or performance, or book and you're immediately thrilled at the success and then saddled with that success. And you're also talking about not just in your head, you're talking about, it's like infiltrating your day through email, and probably through private messages, and things like that.Sarina (08:20):Yeah.Dan (08:24):Now we will get to the crying. I mean the first thing I think about that, is the ability to compartmentalize it. And sometimes that is a system you create. So you have a virtual assistant who is actually in your inbox and moves things to different places so that you're not always confronting them at a bad moment. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to sort of reframe feedback from readers almost in a community marketing role. So you're expecting this. And the way I like to think about that is to have a process. Because if we think about anyone, JK Rowling, anyone who has a big fan base, and all day long fans come up and tell them about their life there's a real emotional baggage to that. Let alone if they're saying, why don't you do this, why don't you do that? If it's reframed as this is a marketing role, this is a reader connection role, this is a me being there for people role. In a background way that might be a way to compartmentalize it in your mind, but then the service that you're doing of engaging with them, it's a whole different thing. You have a process by which to process that. And again, I think KJ knows this from from my work, but I have this little thing I call creativity cave trolls and it's basically anything that distracts you, takes you off of your clarity. And I imagine that this is one of those cave trolls for you. And the whole concept behind it is not that you want to kill the troll, the troll will always be there. It's sort of this dumb, lumbering thing that will always be a part of your life. And the way that you manage that is that you build a system to manage it. You're always going to get these emails so let's plan for those emails and let's find a way to process them. Again, it could be hiring someone, it could be flagging them in your inbox, and you deal with them only on Mondays from 4:00 to 8:00 PM. Or you have a script that you use, something where if you know they're going to come and take you off track, we find a way to process them. And then hopefully that would give you more mind space to create and then fewer things to take you way off the rails.KJ (10:40):And I think that we all struggle with that inbox full of demand. Whether it's reader demand, like Sarina gets, or editor demand, or school volunteer demand, or just all the things. My inbox right now is full of direct messages from social media and many of them there were, 'Yeah, I sure I would love to be on your podcast, actually.' But they all require sort of a processing time that is very real and that's so annoying. Why can I not just process them in the amount of time that it takes to read them? That's a little crazy, but it's just like, why does it take me 40 minutes to crank through three emails?Dan (11:35):Can I really dig into email? Is that okay? Cause I'm so passionate about this. Okay, so I know this is another thing KJ and I've talked about in the past, which is my philosophy that your inbox is not a to do list. And the problem I think a lot of people have with email is they ask for it to do too many things. And it's one channel. So a number of ways to even think about what you just said. And that's to: one, turn off the notifications. If they're going to go to Instagram, or going to go to Twitter, let them go to Instagram and Twitter. Don't also have them pop into email because then that's a bottleneck for everything. Another way to kind of lighten the load is to think about having different inboxes for different purposes. So one thing that I do is I have almost every newsletter that I get (and I get a ton of newsletters cause I kind of study them) I have an email inbox (a Gmail account) just for newsletters. So the email that I use every day gets almost no newsletters. And I unsubscribe from everything. You know, if I buy something from Guitar Center and they accidentally put me on their newsletter list, I actively unsubscribe from things, I actively route things to different inboxes. And the idea is the fewer things I have to even look at and sort through, the more clarity I have to manage the things that are there. So that's sort of the first thing I would say with email and the second thing is, again to sort of have a process to process the inbox. So I'm one of those really, really, really annoying people who's basically always at inbox zero. And that's because I'm always offloading things from email. So the super quick version of what I do is I don't consider my inbox my inbox. I use Apple mail and they have like a flag folder and Gmail has a star folder. So right then and there when I open up email and they all pop in in the morning, I don't really read them, I flag emails that I have to look at. So everything I don't flag just goes into the endless archive. I don't worry about deleting them, I don't move them into folders and pretend that I'm like a librarian of my inbox cause that takes a lot of time and decision making power. Then I just go to my flagged folder and there are just the 16 emails I flagged let's say that day. And from what I do then is I try to process what I can quickly. Like if I can just do a one word or a one line reply back, I do that. And for anything mor…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 198 #RoomforTwoPrincesses Feb 14, 2020

Show notes

We’re interviewing Julie Lythcott-Haims this week and you won’t want to miss it, because 1) she wrote an amazing, best-selling book called How to Raise an Adult and then followed THAT up with a memoir, Real American, that the New York Times Book Review pretty much thought was amazing and is now drafting the sequel to Adult very much on her own terms; and 2) she could very easily have become Jess’s arch-nemesis, and vice versa.

If they had been totally different people.

If they had been less open, less willing to see possibility in a scary-sounding situation.

If they’d let fear and jealousy win. But they didn’t. So two writers with authority, each releasing a book on raising children to be independent in nearly exactly the same moment turned out to be a recipe for collaboration, not catastrophe. The lesson? In books, it’s really almost never winner-takes-all.

We talk about how they pulled it off, how Julie transcended expectations with her memoir and why it’s so important to resist the call to write something that isn’t what you want to write.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, we’re giving away a set of three LitStarts, little books of writing prompts created by the Writer’s Grotto that Julie talks about during the podcast, to—a subscriber to this weekly shownotes email! Which means you’re very likely already entered to win. If you’re not, just click below, sign up to get our free weekly behind the scenes from the podcast and get your name in that hat.

(and if you know someone who would really LOVE to win those—please forward this email and help a fellow writer out.)

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

Lit Starts

Half a Life, Darin Strauss

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Julie: Wildhood: The Astounding Connections between Human and Animal Adolescents Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Kathryn Bowers

Jess: Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol, Holly Whitaker

KJ: How Could She, Lauren Mechling

Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk Podcast, especially episode 259 - 20 SURPRISING AND SUPER POWERFUL PROMPTS THAT WILL MAKE 2020 THE YEAR YOU DO YOUR BEST WORK EVER!

Our guest for this episode is Julie Lythcott-Haims.

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful. Sometimes. transcripts may appear a few days after an episode has aired.)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 197 #HowtoWinatPR Feb 07, 2020

Show notes

Marika Flatt is the founder of PR By the Book, an independent publicity firm dedicated to working with authors, publishers and books. Their tagline is “from author to influencer,” and we talk about that process—and how your goals as an author (sell books, get speaking gigs, sell earlier books, increase name recognition, even sell products or services) change how you might work with a publicist, and even whether you should work with a publicist at all.

And if your book is still very much a WIP, we’ve got you covered with what writers can do before our books are ready to start establishing the kind of backstory (I refuse to call it platform, because there’s so much more to it) that makes that writer-publicist teaming really work later in the game. Marika even has a DIY program for authors to help us figure these things out without a major investment.

We also got this great reminder: “If your book soars, all those people will be there to buy your next book. If your first book crashes but people connect with you as a person, you still win.”

Episode links and a transcript follow. If you’re excited to listen, please consider supporting the podcast with a small monthly donation. Our sponsor pays for production—but you people pay for our time, and your support is what makes us want to keep coming back every week.

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Marika: My Life in 37 Therapies: From Yoga to Hypnosis and why Voodoo is Never the Answer, Kay Hutchinson

You Are My Brother: Lessons Learned Embracing a Homeless Community, Judith Knotts

KJ: Life and Other Inconveniences, Kristan Higgins (reviewed on #BooksThatWon’tBumYouOut)

Sarina: The Cuckoo’s Egg, Cliff Stoll

Our guest for this episode is Marika Flatt. Find more about her at PRbythebook.com and find her Author-to-Influencer DIY program HERE.

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. So—if you’re struggling to find your way through your book, to get past the soggy middle or chapter three or find the throughline that carries your nonfiction home, check out our sponsor, Author Accelerator, at https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting, where you’ll find everything from exercises to help you hone in on your novel to ideas for creating a nonfiction framework to book coaches who could be your key to making this the year that draft is finally done. Bonus link from the intro: Pat Walsh’s 78 Reasons Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

196 #WhereDoestheTimeGo Jan 31, 2020

Show notes

It started with a question in the #AmWriting Facebook group: How do you get it all done?And the answer was, of course—we don’t, no one does, we push things off until tomorrow or we put out fires all day and then frantically write until late in the evening or we drive our children around for hours while chastising ourselves for not making better choices. But really, you all said. Really truly when do you write? And how d you put it first? And what do you do when you don’t or can’t? This is us, three full time writers and also parents (all of teenagers), talking about the push and pull of looking like you’re at home and available when you’re not, and how the awful truth is that sometimes you are, and how we control what we can and scream hopelessly into the void at what we can’t. (That’s just who we are.) We realized we’re each good at some parts of this and not others, which means we can take a little inspiration. We can protect our time, do the important stuff first and cut ourselves a little slack. And we can always, always recognize that it’s what you do the day after you feel like you really lost momentum that matters most. Episode links and a transcript follow, and that’s pretty much it for this week. Of course, a #WriterTopFive will go out to supporters Monday, and the topic will be a total surprise (heck, it’s a surprise for me too) but we promise it will be practical advice you can use that we probably need too. If you’re a fan of the podcast—if we’re offering, say, two grande mochas worth of advice a month, please consider supporting us for actually less than that. $7 a month, and we promise we’re not coming for your coffee.As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. LINKS FROM THE PODCAST#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Jess: The Wilderness Idiot: Lessons from an Accidental Adventurer, Ted AlvarezA Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Augusten BurroughsDry: A Memoir, Augusten BurroughsKJ: Toil and Trouble: A Memoir, Augusten BurroughsSarina: Great and Precious Things, Rebecca YarrosWe love our sponsor, Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE, and if we were being coached right now we would probably somehow be managing to pull off better time management, because time is money in more ways than one, and when you invest in your writing career, it’s a lot harder to make excuses. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.Follow KJ on Instagram for her #BooksThatWon’tBumYouOut series: short reviews of books that won’t make you hate yourself and all humanity.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.The image in our podcast illustration is by KJ, who totally wants credit.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ: 00:01 Hey fellow writers, KJ here as we launch into an episode that’s ostensibly about how we get all the things done. Spoiler alert, we don’t, and I’m having a really depressing winter on that front. BUT—I can tell you that one thing that can help you shift into really prioritizing your work is to invest in it, and to make a commitment to another person to work through challenges both on the page and in the calendar. Our sponsor, Author Accelerator, matches writers in both fiction and non-fiction with book coaches who can help you go from stuck to done no matter where you are in the process. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com/amwriting. Is it recording?Jess: 00:43 Now it's recording.KJ: 00:44 Yay.Jess: 00:45 Go ahead.KJ: 00:46 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess: 00:50 Alright, let's start over.KJ: 00:51 Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Now, one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things - fiction, nonfiction, pitches, proposals, really as I do say every week. This is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. And oh boy, today is it ever the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done!Jess: 01:28 I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and I write about kids, and I write about substance abuse, and I write about so many fun things at places like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post. And I'm currently editing my next book, which will be out in 2021.Sarina: 01:46 And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 30-odd romance novels. And I have a deadline on March 10th, guys. So this is a great topic for me today.Jess: 01:56 This is so timely because we all have various deadlines that we're working towards right now.KJ: 02:04 Wait, I haven't introduced myself yet, people won't know who I am. I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of The Chicken Sisters, a novel coming out this summer and How to Be a Happier Parent, which is out in hardback now and will be out in paperback this summer. So big summer for me. Mostly at the moment you'll find me on Instagram, but I'm also a pretty regular contributor to the New York Times and a few other places.Jess: 02:30 You've been getting some really fun book talks lately, Missy Instagram.KJ: 02:34 I have been. It's my series called #BooksThatWon'tBumYouOut and it's all books that won't bum you out. Because I felt like I needed someone to recommend those books to me. And one of my things for the year is start the things you wish other people would do. So there we go.Jess: 02:52 I love it, I absolutely love it. So we should talk about what our topic is for today and why it's our topic for today. Do you wanna talk about that, Sarina?Sarina: 03:00 Well, what we really do all day is try to figure out where does the time go. And we all have children and other responsibilities besides writing.KJ: 03:14 And someone asked us...Jess: 03:16 Yes, someone asked about this in the Facebook group, too. Someone said, 'It's all nice and good when you talk about the broad strokes, but we want the nitty gritty, like how you're actually getting the work done with all the other things you have to do.'KJ: 03:31 Right. And we had this great exchange in there in which we sort of all went back to, well, you know, when our kids were little, things were different. And I sort of ended that exchange thinking, well, and that's true when the kids were little it was harder. And yet as I look - I've actually been keeping track of my week and I'm realizing, okay, when the kids were little, I had a babysitter. So I had dedicated work time. And at the moment I have made the mistake of not, and my work time is looking super pitiful at the moment. So yeah. Let's dig into what we actually do all day and when we do it.Jess: 04:15 Since you've been such a good Doobie and kept track of your time, why don't you go ahead and start?KJ: 04:19 It's been really depressing, guys.Jess: 04:20 You informed me on a text the other day that I was a 10 minute time-waster.KJ: 04:27 You did, you did. You sucked my time away with a tempting text, that granted I should never have looked at. No, one of you start and I'm just gonna do a little ugly math.Jess: 04:42 See, here's the thing. I feel really bad about this because my reality is different. We all have kids that overlap, but I only have two of them. One of them is in college and he's actually even away this semester. He studying away from his college so he's even further away than usual. And then I have a 16 year old kid who is so sort of self-directed and doesn't want much to do with me, except for this week he's been really sick. So this week has actually been a busier week than usual because I've had a lot of interviews, I've had a lot of obligations, phone calls. I've got a bunch of travel coming up and before I do that, I have these conference calls with the organizers. And so it's been a lot of that this week. And there's been a few things I've had to move around because I've had to pick him up from school when he's like 'I can't stay, I real feel horrible.' So this week has been, you know, dicier than usual. But for the most part, I'm sickeningly flexible because except for like these three dogs that get bummed out when I leave the house or when I move around the house. I have a ton of time to get my stuff done. So I'm not very helpful. But when I look at what I was doing when my kids were little, you know, again, it was really different. I didn't have a babysitter, but I did have friends that I traded with a lot. I had neighbors close by and my kids would run off to their house. But on a nitty gritty day to day basis, I'm just gonna make people mad. I sleep in, I'm not a good morning person. I get up and shuffle into my office, which is 10-12 steps from my bedroom. I sit down and I work until I'm done working. And then my 16 year old kid doesn't even come through the door until four o'clock in the afternoon when the bus gets home. And at that point he doesn't actually want a ton to do with me until dinner time. So there you go. I'm sorry.Sarina: 06:43 You know what though, Jess...Jess: 06:45 I feel bad that I'm not contributing.KJ: 06:47 You should not feel bad.Sarina: 06:48 No. First of all, you're not allowed to feel bad. But secondly, I actually do hate you, but not for the reasons that you think.Jess: 07:03 Let me say one other thing, which is that, I am very, very lucky in that I work fast. And I credit a lot of that with working with KJ for the couple of years that I did the column at the New York Times because I didn't use to work so fast, but I'm much faster now. And so when I actually sit down and get focused, I work really, really fast and I think that's been one of the saving graces. Even when I was teaching full time, I'd get up crazy early, get home from school and then sit down to do the other work, which was not only the grading, but also the article writing. And when that happened I was working really fast. So I will add that caveat in that I'm a pretty fast writer.Sarina: 07:46 Well also, the boundless energy whereby this week you're editing a book and also removing wallpaper from a room and then painting another one. Like I just want to like weep when I hear about this.Jess: 07:58 That's my fun time. I mean, I've said it before, weeding or gardening and I can't do that in the winter here in Vermont. So I've been removing wallpaper and repainting a room that I promised I would repaint when we first moved in a year and a half ago. I'm finally getting to it. And that's how I relax.KJ: 08:13 Is that your point of hatred, Sarina?Sarina: 08:16 Sort of. I think it's the boundless energy, but it also might just be focus, because I have as many work hours as Jess does probably. I mean, today alone, my husband has made me two meals and a latte worthy of Italy.Jess: 08:51 What KJ is trying to say is that sometimes having people in your space is difficult.Sarina: 08:55 Yes, it's true. I also have a kid home from school today, so you know, good times, but it's not the hours that I'm fighting against so much, as getting my hands around the business itself all the time. I need to like silence everything and write a couple of hours a day, which is hard when my email inbox is like one of Dante's circles of hell and I literally every day don't know what to do first.Jess: 09:25 That's something that mystifies me about your work flow - is you're getting so many words written, but you're also managing the business of self publishing your books, which blows my mind wide open. So I'm actually really curious and I know a lot about your schedule. I'm really curious as to how a daily workflow works for you.Sarina: 09:45 Well, when it works, it's because I do those words first. And that's been really hard for me lately because of that inbox, and I know that if I look, there'll be some fires to put out in there or people who want answers and it's really hard for me to ignore that, as like a pleaser. As my personality type wants to get back to people right away. But if I do, it's just done. So I've actually had to make silly little rules for myself. Like when I'm drinking my Italian worthy cup of coffee in the morning, I can't look at my email right then. I just can't, because I'll get sucked in. And I'm like, 'Oh, it'll just take a second to answer her and then I'll start to wonder like, Oh, I wonder what the numbers looked like after that latest promotion.' And then I'll go look at them. And it's really hard because that's working as well. Like that's work and it arguably needs to be done. So I'm wrestling the writing and the business all the time. And what really does not get done is like painting a room or even maybe vacuuming it, because that's just got to go. Like when this topic came up, you know, how do you guys get it all done? I immediately thought of JK Rowling and her quote, 'You know, but you don't understand I live in squalor.'Jess: 11:10 Well and you know, on the other hand, again I like vacuuming and so there are certain things that for me - well the reason I like painting, and the reason I like vacuuming, and the reason I like cleaning is that when I'm doing those things, I'm plugged into an audio book. Or, even better I'll drag my laptop into the room where I'm painting and I'll watch a television show, or a movie, which is like crazy luxury. So for me, that ability to turn my brain off and listen to something else while I'm actually getting something done for me is incredibly satisfying. And if you think about it, I was talking to someone about this this morning, I can point at that wall and say, 'Look, I did that. It is done.' Whereas with my edits, no one knows, it's this big morass of words and no one knows what was there and I can't point at anything. It can be tough cause my husband's a physician and he's out there saving people's lives, and my son's out there learning things, and I'm sitting here at home. So that's my thing is being able to point to something and say, 'Look, I cleaned that today.' at least makes me feel like I got something done. Especially when the edits aren't going well.KJ: 12:31 Well maybe my reason for hating you will make you feel better because my reason for hating you is that you are so extremely good at protecting your time. And some of that has to do with the number of kids, and where we live, and the flexibility and stuff like that. But you don't let people dump 47 dentist appointments, and extra carpool, and I really want to get my hair red on the bottom can you drive me to Fairley and pick me up again three hours later. And also, the guy is coming to fix the heat in the bedroom and I feel like you're much better about, 'Yeah, no, sorry people, you can't do that today because I'm editing. And my whole week has basically gone to that/health s…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected