The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can you use AI to research, edit and handle admin and marketing tasks while still writing every single word yourself? How can you double down on being human and reach readers on a personal level? Anna McPhee shares her perspective as a software engineer, author and creative technologist.

In the intro, How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories out now.

This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human.

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

Show Notes

Why writing code is creative work, and what it shares with writing books

How AI changed Anna's job as a software engineer without taking her employment

The difference between AI assistance and generation

How to use custom skills for editing reports, research and repeatable tasks

Why the rise of AI makes us crave slow, imperfect, physical things

Responding to a negative review by showing up as a human

You can find Anna at Anna.kiwi and her new book at WhatMachinesCantReplace.com.

Transcript of the interview with Anna McPhee

Jo: Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human. So welcome to the show, Anna.

Anna: Hi, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me.

Jo: Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and your background in technology, as well as how you got into writing.

Anna: I have been in all of these things my whole life, as long as I can remember. When I was just a little girl, writing was my favourite thing, writing stories. It was the whole reason I went to school, to be honest. I always pictured myself as a writer before anything else.

My dad was a lecturer in software development, so when I was little, he would teach me how to code. So I've always done both, for as long as I can remember, and my mum is an artist. That's been my upbringing, at the intersection of technology and art, and then writing is my own personal passion.

It's naturally flowed throughout my life. I've been in and out of some other careers and chased all the things that have made me feel interested and passionate, but writing has always been there in the background. It's something I do, whether it's been for a hobby or for a profession, so it's always been there.

Jo: But you work in software, right?

Anna: I do. I work in software, which came to me by chance. I set out as a digital nomad about 15 years ago now. I sold everything I owned and started travelling.

The way I thought I was going to fund this was through freelance writing, which I was very optimistic about. We all know now that's a very challenging way to make an income, especially when you don't have a background in it or a portfolio.

I did have this childhood background in software engineering and coding. So I set out to be a writer and travel the world as a writer, and actually what I ended up doing was building websites and writing software, because that's what people would pay me to do. So I fell into both at the same time through this chance I took.

Jo: I think sometimes people think that programming and software development and these more technical fields are not creative. My husband was a programmer for a long time, and essentially programming is a language.

Well, there are lots of languages, but you are creating in a language with computers, right? So is there that much difference?

How do you fix these two things in your mind separately, or are they the same thing?

Anna: They're so related. Many people might put writing into more of an art, and computer development and programming more into a maths or a science, but I just think there's so much creativity in writing code, in how you choose to structure things, in the language you select for something, the way you approach it.

It's very similar to writing a book, I think. I've found a lot of things that are very similar about it, to do with architecture even. When you look at the basics, some people might write a book with no idea where it's going and see where it ends.

It's the same with software. People might go into it and not have a plan. Most people will architect their software, or they'll architect their story in the same way. I think there's a lot of crossover between the two.

Jo: And there's editing, and doing the “does this do what I want it to do?” I think with software perhaps it's more obvious when something doesn't do what you want it to do than with a book.

Anna: Perhaps. Although with AI now, it's becoming a little more vague, because you can think your software's doing what you want it to, but it might not be. It might just look like it is. I think those lines are getting a bit blurrier as technology changes.

There's a lot of things in software development that are very similar to writing. We don't have an editor, but we will have unit tests or code reviews, and maybe the CI tests, and we've got all these structures in place that are very similar to writing.

Jo: I also think what's interesting, and this has been in the last maybe decade really, is that it used to be you would get a job in the old way, but—

Now it seems like your GitHub page, which is almost like your author platform, your programmer platform, can make a real difference in how people find you and your work.

So maybe talk a bit about that, because you have a GitHub page, don't you?

Anna: I do have a GitHub page, and I've spent a lot of time on it, because you can set up your README file and make it a bit like a website, and introduce all of your projects and what you're working on.

Just to combine it a little bit, actually, I use GitHub for my writing. I use it for version control so that I can go back and see the changes that I've made to the things that I'm writing.

Even with my book, I had a copy of it backed up in a private repository on GitHub where I could track changes and never lose a backup. I have so much faith in GitHub that it extends beyond the software I write and into everything I do. I keep a copy backed up in GitHub.

Jo: That's actually quite funny because, coming into AI in the author community, one of the things that's now talked about is how do you prove that your book is not a one-click generated book? And what you've actually got there is evidence of your process.

Anna: Exactly.

Jo: Which is kind of hilarious in many ways. Well, let's get into this, because there's so much fear and witch hunting right now and negativity in the author community.

As somebody who's grown up with both art and the software side, where do you think those attitudes come from, and how have they changed in different ways?

Anna: Oh, people are really afraid. I've got a very moderate perspective, and I think I sit in a very similar position to you.

A large number of people that I hear from are either incredibly pro-AI, let it do everything for them, everything, everything, do it for absolutely everything you can think of. Or they're completely terrified and very, very negative about it, and won't use it for anything at all.

I can only assume this is going to stabilise with time. There's been a huge amount of outrage against other technologies in the past, even calculators. All technology has come with scepticism and people scared that it's going to take their jobs.

I think there's a lot of misinformation out there as well, people who think that AI is trained on books, which it is, and that's a totally valid concern with the copyright and things.

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around what training an AI model actually means in that regard. It's not taking someone's prose and reusing it. It's looking at the underlying mathematical probability of, if you have this word, what is the probability of the next word being this? It's broken down into numbers.

I'm not 100 percent sure, but from my perspective of seeing it, the witch hunt comes from a place of fear.

I saw an author in a group I'm in recently who said, “Oh, I've written so many novels, and I've run out of ideas for names for my characters. I've used every person I've ever met, I've used their name. That's how many books I've written. How do I get more names?”

Someone suggested, “Well, why don't you ask AI for some other names?” “Oh, no, no, no. I could never let AI take over my work like that.” And it was just over the idea of using it to ask a question.

So I think there's a feeling that if you let it do one thing, next thing it's going to be doing everything, and it's going to erase you, and your ideas, and your way of doing things.

Jo: Just on that, it is interesting, though, isn't it? Because I am trying to use it, like I use Claude Code, and I'm trying to use it for more, and more, and more.

I started off using ChatGPT the day it came out in 2022, and have increasingly tried to give the AI tools all the things that will free me up to do the things I love to do. Making lists of names is not on my list of things I love to do.

Anna: Yes, exactly. I feel the same way.

Jo: So that's the thing, isn't it? The fear is really interesting because we all have fear.

One very visceral time I remember feeling very scared was in the pandemic, in those early days when there wasn't a vaccine. That's really the only reference I think I have for it, because like you, I feel like I've grown up with technology, and so I've never felt it that way.

I'm hoping that as with COVID, as with things developing over time, and obviously again, misinformation is rampant, but—

I guess we got used to it. Is that the best we can hope for with AI?

Anna: I hope it's better than that. I hope we can hope for better, that people can learn how to use it in a way that supports them.

As people become less fearful, like with COVID, they experiment a little bit here or there and start to see that there are ways to not let it take over.

In general, people are really bad at identifying AI-generated content. There are so many studies done on it, and it's 50/50 at best. Good AI now produces stuff that a lot of people don't recognise. So it's more about the idea than the reality of it.

There's this whole idea around it that AI will take our jobs, and I get asked all the time, “Well, when do you think AI's going to take your job? You work on a computer.”

Well, it can take my job, and it has. I used to write code all the time, and now I write almost no code. I work for a very large software company, and we use a lot of AI in our development protocols, and I don't write any code now, more or less, and a few years ago I did all day.

So my job has changed completely, and AI has taken my job, but it hasn't taken my employment. I found a new way of being, which is I'm more of a project manager. I review code. I make sure nothing bad gets put out into the world. My role has changed, but it hasn't been taken away.

I hope that as people start to see that this new technology is not taking their jobs, it's taking the parts of their jobs off them that are so repeatable, and giving them more room to do more with the things that they are uniquely good at.

Jo: Absolutely. So let's get into that, because you did just say there that you're not writing any code, which is different to your writing for books. In your book, What Machines Can't Replace, you talk about how you used AI assistance and how you did things in different ways.

I've been explicit about being AI-assisted since May 2023, so I absolutely am on board with the difference between what is assistance and what is generation. One-click generation of a complete book, while some people might choose to do that, that's not what you and I are talking about. So tell us—

How did you use AI tools and these assisted processes for this book?

Anna: Right. So I used AI extensively for this book. However, I wrote every single word. I don't want AI to take over my voice, and that is one area where it differs from writing code in a big way.

One-click generation, maybe one day AI will actually be very good at it, and we won't be able to tell the difference. But currently, I definitely can. If I start reading something that is one-click generated, it becomes very obvious to me very quickly.

I use AI extensively in my day. I use a Claude plan which is the Max 20x, the biggest allowance plan, and I run out of limit every week. So I spend a lot of time seeing how it forms sentences and the kind of thing it says, so I think I'm quite sensitive to when I see it.

So for now, it's not good for that, and I don't think I ever want it to be. When I put something out in the world that is software, the thing that's uniquely me is the concepts behind it or the way it functions. It's not the code itself.

When I put writing out there, when I put a book out there, the words are the thing that's me. They're my signature, they're my style.

So I used AI assistance for everything else. I used it to help me research, but then I would verify the sources myself, but it was so good at finding things.

I used it to transcribe my words. I would go out for long walks, and my ideas come to me when I'm out walking, like so many people.

So I'd just pick up my phone and voice record, “Oh, hey, I was thinking, years ago I heard about this study, and I think that would be really interesting, but I don't really know the details of it. Can you make a note of this?”

Then my AI could go and research it, come back and say, “Oh, I think you're talking about this research paper, and here's a link to it.” It could add it into my notes, and I could still verify it and read it, but it saved me hours of manual trawling through Google Scholar looking for things.

So as a first step I used it for research, but I also used it all the way through the writing process. I've set up a lot of custom skills for all the different editor types. I've got a developmental editor, a line editor, a copy editor.

None of them are allowed to make any changes. They are only allowed to create reports of what they find. So I could check for consistency, or did I reference the right thing for this chapter? Does this flow okay? I could ask it questions about my work without it actually touching the words.

Another way I used it is I'd make more voice recordings, and then it would transcribe them and suggest where in my book they would fit best, and then copy and paste my exact words, word for word, into the right spot, and then I could edit it in.

So I used it for almost everything except the actual words, which remain mine, and the design as well. I value designers a lot, so I paid a cover designer to design my cover.

Jo: Yes, and all those things you were talking about, I also do.

How do you explain skills? Because I have like 100 skills now.

I do skills for everything. I'm struggling to explain what that is to people who don't really understand.

Anna: Yes, skills are amazing, and it is difficult to explain. It's like a little package, and it can contain prompts, it can contain scripts, it can contain information, and it can be called only when needed.

So if I created, for example, my developmental editor skill, it might be a folder that's consumed by Claude and Claude Code, and only when it's asked for, then it uses all of the stuff in its context and follows a set of instructions.

They're just more powerful than a prompt because they're reusable, and they live there, and it can be clever and know when to use ones without you invoking them directly as well.

I have another skill that's just me, about me, and I keep it up to date with information about what I'm working on and who I am. If I'm doing something, I can say, “Well, don't forget, check the About Me before you answer this.”

Or, “I'm working on this project I haven't worked on in a while, but I created a skill to reference it. Before we start work on this, can you go and check in with the skill?” Kind of like a library.

Jo: It's interesting, you're talking about quite expansive skills, and I do have some of those, but a lot of my skills are really quite specific. Like, do a Shopify product in the way that we did Shopify products last time.

Or, this is how Joanna Penn wants the sales description for Amazon, so write the Amazon sales description for this. And then, say, on ChatGPT it'll be like, right, do A+ content for this book. That kind of thing.

So it can be really, really specific, almost like a little program, right?

Then it can be, as you say, with memory and all this different stuff. Anything you want to do more than once, I think.

Anna: That's a really good way to describe it. Also, because of my technical background, I trust code a lot more than I trust AI at the moment.

I really love AI, but the results vary, and you can run the same thing five times and get five different results, whereas if you run a code function five times, you will always get the same result if it's a well-written function.

So for anything like that, I add code into my skills so that I can say, “When this is called, run this script,” and I know it's always run the same way. You can get quite complex with skills and build some real programs inside them, or it can be just a few lines. Do this, this way.

I've got one I really enjoy at the moment I created called Research Me. I have so many ideas, always hundreds of ideas. So many of them are terrible. Some of them are good, and some of them are already done.

I just type Research Me, and then I just put my thought. It might be a word. It might be a line. It might be more than that.

Then it goes away and looks it up and sees if someone's done this thing, and if it's valid to me, and then creates a report and saves it in my knowledge base for me to look at another time.

Jo: I guess it's not really a skill, but it's more like part of the memory. I just say, put that in the backlog and bring it back in a month.

Anna: Oh, that's so nice, too, being able to set schedules and reminders. Like, right now is not a good time, but I don't want to let this idea go, so can you bring it back to me at this time? And it will. It's wonderful for that.

Jo: It is good. Oh, and we should also say, you don't have to write a skill. If you do something with Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, you can then say, “Create a skill for this,” and it will write it, and you can have a look at it, but you don't have to sit there typing out how to do stuff.

I think often people think that you have to drive it a lot more, where it's just so much of a conversation now, isn't it?

Anna: Yes, it can be done completely with conversation. You don't need to write out any instructions or any code, anything at all.

You could have a really positive experience doing something with Claude Cowork and then get to the end of that process and think, “Oh, that was wonderful. I definitely think I'll do that again.”

So you just say, “Oh, that was great. Can you make that a skill so we can do it again the same way next time?” And it'll create it, and you just click a button, say Add the Skill once it's done, and that's it.

Jo: There are so many things. Now, just coming back to your book, you do have at the end of each chapter some prompts, although I don't like the word prompt anymore, because I feel like prompt is from the old way, when you would type in a certain prompt and then something would come back and that would be done.

Whereas now it's much more of a conversation. So a prompt is almost a starting point. So you've used questions, I guess.

What are your recommendations for authors who want to get more into this but are still apprehensive and are worried about getting it wrong somehow?

Anna: Okay. Yes, I agree with you on prompting. That was a real buzzword for a while there. Everyone was going to be a prompt engineer, and the future of AI was prompting, prompt design. The systems are so much more capable now that it's not what it was. It is definitely more of a conversation.

I think that is the good place to start, to just have a conversation with the AI about your work. It doesn't have to touch your work. You could just ask for its opinion on something.

If you don't want it to consume your whole book, there are privacy settings, and you can stop it from training on your material if that's the concern, or you could use a local model. You could give it some of your writing and ask its opinion and start a conversation.

One thing about AI is that people forget you can just say to it, “What's the best way to use you? Hi, I'm new here. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm a writer. How can you help me?” And it will tell you.

Jo: I think one of the other ways, if people don't even want to use it for creative stuff… This morning, as we record this, I've been delving into the back end of my YouTube channel, which I've just ignored for years, actually, and Google Search Console, and there are all these errors everywhere.

I'm like, “I don't understand that message.” Or I had an error on one of my files on Draft2Digital, and I was like, “Okay, ugh.” So now I just put those errors into Claude and say, “Right, how do I fix this?” Or, “Maybe you could fix this.”

That helps so much, because as author publishers or self-published authors, we do have a lot of technical things to do. Sometimes, well, all the time now, I think, getting help with it rather than ignoring it can be great.

Anna: Absolutely. It's so good for that administrative stuff as well, especially with the addition of being able to use Claude, and a lot of the other ones as well, in your web browser now. So it can do things for you. It can fill out forms. There's a lot of repetition in publishing a book.

You have to enter your ISBN in five million places, and you want to make sure that your information is aligned and that you have the same data in numerous different places, and you can ask it to check.

You can ask it to check your metadata on your website and say, “Does the author information for me align with what you're seeing on Goodreads, or what you're seeing on StoryGraph, or in Wikidata? Do you see any gaps that I need to address?” It's really good at that stuff.

Or you can open a form and say, “Can you fill it out for me? I'm sick of typing.” And it will. It's so good for the admin. Just amazing.

Jo: So good for admin, exactly. This is the thing, this whole “AI's going to take my job.” Yes, please take 95% of my job and leave me with the bit I want to do.

Let's get back into the book, because—

You also say in the book, “The more I worked with AI, the more I wanted the slow, imperfect physical things.” So tell us about that.

Anna: Yes. So AI swept me up. I've been, also like you, an early adopter, and absolutely obsessed with it right from day one. I just started to notice I needed more and more breaks, and I was valuing different things than I used to, and I was consuming and purchasing different things than I used to.

I started to see this changing, and I would spend more and more time out in the garden. I love my garden anyway, I'm a gardener.

I was just starting to recognise this feeling, and at first I couldn't really put a name to it. What is this? Why am I searching out these things? Why do I want to create more than I did even before with my hands?

So I started looking into it, and it was very much a global phenomenon. Everyone seems to be doing this.

There's been a really strong link between the introduction of AI into the world and things like record sales or sourdough baking, although that one also came during COVID, so that one's a bit tricky to measure. But lots of other things are just getting more and more popular as the market gets saturated with AI-generated content.

People want to see things that a human has touched. The harder it becomes to actually see that in AI-generated content, the more people want other signs. If you can't just read a piece of writing and know 100 percent sure a human wrote it or an AI wrote it, you start looking for other ways to tell.

So I really felt that in myself, and it was a very unsettling feeling, as someone who's been very, very technology-forward all my life, to start valuing more and more things that weren't technology.

Jo: Yes, I absolutely get this, and I think there's also another aspect, which I feel you must feel too.

There are some days, if I use AI a lot, I almost feel like a hangover.

Because the speed at which I can now work means that my human wetware brain is overloaded. That feeling is both exhilarating and amazing, but also totally exhausting.

Anna: Yes. There's a huge comedown from it. To me, in the beginning, it started feeling like eating a lot of sugar. Really, really great eating all these lollies. “Oh, this is amazing. These are so good.” And then afterwards, “Oh, I still feel hungry. I don't feel fulfilled. I'm surrounded by lolly wrappers. What is this?”

It felt a lot like that to me, where it's just creating all this stuff, and it felt like I was the master of the universe. Wow, I can create anything and everything, and let me do this and that and this and that.

Then I'm like, well, but all of the stuff I've created isn't that great, because it doesn't feel that good, and I didn't really make it. I just pushed buttons and said yes. It's a weird disconnect kind of hangover feeling if you spend too much time and create too much that way.

Jo: It makes me think of the BCI, the brain-computer interface. With Neuralink now, there are people who are paraplegic for whom it is absolutely amazing, but the thought of plugging something into my brain that would try and make my brain go even faster, I'm like, I don't think that our human brains are designed to go this fast. I just can't.

Anna: That's fair.

Jo: I can't see that happening.

Anna: It's a tough one. Personally, I have ADHD, so already the distractions are something I have to rein in, and then with this ability to create so many things all at once, it's hard to have some self-control.

I think with time that, for me, has gotten much easier, but in the early days it was a lot. It was very overstimulating to have so many things happening so quickly, all at the same time.

Jo: Yes, and actually I'm quite grateful for the usage limits. I primarily use Claude Fable, which I just love, but I keep an eye on my usage limits, and then I almost use that as a way to stop myself from using it too much at once, and that is actually very freeing.

The other thing, I mean, you mentioned it there, creating all the things and then realising, you said, they're not that good. I think that they are becoming incredibly excellent, but for me it was like, okay, well, now, for example, I could do TikTok.

I could get AI to do loads of TikTok videos and pump them out every day, but I don't want to do that. So why would I?

Anna: Yes. I really want things that go out to feel like me, and I feel when I generate anything, whether it's content, whether it's pictures, or software as well, that AI will very quickly get me 80 to 90% of the way there, and very well these days. But the last 10 to 20%, I really put so much of myself into, and that's a really active choice.

So I end up with all these other things that I've gotten to that 80% very quickly and then thought, “I don't know if I really want to invest myself in this and what I need to get it to a place where I would put it into the world.”

So I end up with a sort of graveyard of these mostly finished projects that I'm not quite happy enough with to put out there, but I don't really want to put in the work myself, because I have limited time, and you choose your things. No human can really polish up 100 things. You have to prioritise what you want to.

Jo: That is exactly it, and this is what I want people to understand. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying, we are talking about feeling a lot. We're excited on the one hand and we're doing stuff, and then there are other things we're not excited about.

You can feel the difference in your body, in your mind, when what you are working on excites you, and I think we just have to trust that.

So people listening, what excites you to do with these tools, and what doesn't excite you?

Just trust that feeling and put things in the world where you're like, “Wow, this is fantastic,” or, “I love that it's helping me with that.” I mean, you can just tell the difference in our conversation, right?

Anna: Right, and you don't have to put everything out there as well. Just because you build something with AI, or you use it to help you in something, it's an experiment. Treat it as an experiment.

If you get to 80%, 90% and think, “I don't want to put my name to this,” then don't. Move on. It was an experiment, and you learned something from it.

Jo: So I guess on that then, if we do put things out in the world, like we've talked about, we're happily AI-assisted, and the things we do put out we're really proud of—

How can we communicate these aspects of imperfection, the story behind the object, this real person with a real history, so that people know our humanity, basically?

Anna: I really encourage people to share their humanness behind everything they're creating. If you're writing a book, you can share the process on socials, for example. It's becoming very desired to see the not-polished, everyday videos of someone's creative process. That's just one really small way.

I think just by nature, by creating it, by not letting AI do the creation work for you, you will show through in the work that you're doing. You can use AI to support you and to do the admin and to take away all the stuff that's boring or repetitive, but if you are doing the work, it is going to be visible to people.

I know we're not very good as humans right now at necessarily distinguishing AI-generated content against not, but you can tell when someone is writing about a human experience. AI has not had a human experience. It has not had a body. It doesn't have this embodiment that leads to so much of human creativity and ideas.

It is a very clever predictive text tool, and it is very, very good at it, but it does lack true human creativity.

So I think what all creatives can keep in mind is that if they're putting themselves into it and creating new things and following their passions and their interests and their art in what they're putting out there, it will show through.

Jo: Also, I think just on the marketing side, you mentioned your garden, for example. Now, I know you're a mum, but anyone can share pictures of their garden without privacy issues for their children or their family or anything.

So I think sharing human, even like your hand in the dirt with some flowers or something, is still a very human image.

So people can share more human elements around their life.

I mean, I almost have in my Instagram a sort of proof of humanity at this point.

Anna: Yes, I think that's becoming more and more important. A few weeks ago, I got a horrible review on my book, and I know everyone has to face this, but it was someone who clearly hadn't read my book.

They just said it was all AI-generated crap, pretty much. It was a waste of time, and it should've come with a warning that it was entirely AI-generated, which is so far from the truth. I put so much time into that book that I was really quite hurt by it.

My first thought was, “I need to get rid of this. I need this review to go away. I need to complain. I need to report this review because it is false.” And once I recovered from those feelings, instead what I did was I emailed my mailing list and said, “Hey, this person reviewed this, and this is why it hurt me, because I'm a person.”

I got a really nice response. I got a lot of people writing to me like, “That person is an idiot. You're great. Your book's wonderful.” And it was so nice.

It was quite challenging to be vulnerable, and instead of trying to sweep this thing under the rug, I just showed up with my humanness to my list and said, “Hey, this is me, and this hurts because I'm a person.” It was really validating in the end to just put some humanness out there.

Jo: This is what I really hate about all this witch hunting, is that people seem to have forgotten that there are actual humans behind this, and I know how you feel. I remember, in fact, it was 2023, I was in New Zealand. We should have said, you're in Australia, if people are wondering about your accent.

Anna: I am. I'm from New Zealand originally. I'm a New Zealander, but I'm living in Australia.

Jo: But I remember walking along the waterfront from the Viaduct. I still remember it, because I was being absolutely hammered on social media and comments and all this, and I said to my husband, “I think I have to leave the internet.”

I felt like people just don't understand this, and I was getting so much hate. But as you say, it was about communicating that with my community, who are listening, and basically changing my Patreon to put a lot of it behind the Patreon paywall.

I also topped doing a lot of interviews like this because of the negativity. Now, I'm hoping that we've moved on enough that people can be more open. Doing this interview, for example, is a way of showing people your humanity and mine.

I'm just so determined that people understand the difference between assistance and generation.

As you said at the beginning, it seems to be all or nothing, but that's just not true.

Anna: Right, and there's a huge spectrum of what AI support is. A huge, huge spectrum, and I don't think they're understanding. I think it will get there, but right now people say, “Well, that was AI-generated,” or it wasn't. That's just not how it is.

Maybe it was partially AI-generated. Maybe it was fully AI-assisted, but not at all AI-generated. Maybe you decide to use AI to make your book cover, but you just make components with AI, and then you assemble it using Adobe Illustrator into a cover.

Is that AI-generated? It's a very grey area. No, it's definitely assisted. Pieces of it might be AI-generated, but it as a whole conceptually fully came from your creativity and from your mind.

It's the same with writing. If you use Grammarly to autocorrect any spelling errors in your book, it would now get flagged as AI-assisted content. But some people see that as AI-generated, and they're two very, very different things.

Jo: Well, I think your book is great. It gives some very grounded advice on things, but also you do share, like you mentioned, a lot about being a mum, about being a gardener, about life, about the human aspect. So I highly recommend What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human.

Where can people find you and the book online?

Anna: Thank you so much. My book should be just about everywhere books are sold online, and if not, WhatMachinesCantReplace.com is the website for my book.

My personal website is Anna.kiwi, A-N-N-A dot kiwi, because I'm a Kiwi, and I am very happy with that domain. I have a blog and general contact information there.

I'm also all around the internet on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, everywhere. So I'm really happy to chat to anyone anytime about all things engineering, software, AI, books, toddlers, gardens, everything.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Anna. That was great.

Anna: Thank you so much.

The post What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human With Anna McPhee first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you redesign your author business for the publishing environment that actually exists, rather than the one you wish you had? And how do you decide which marketing efforts will still bring readers to your books in ten years' time? Tracy Cooper-Posey shares her solar sail theory after more than 25 years as an author.

In the intro, reviving your backlist [The Indy Author]; AI as a medium [Tim O'Reilly]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn.

ProWritingAid Storyteller sale: Thursday, 3rd September until September 13th 2026 — 25% off all annual licenses as well as Story Critique credits.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

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

Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer.

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

Show Notes

Learning to write again after chemo, one sentence at a time

What enshittification means, and why it is the environment rather than you

The hallmarks of an indie author business that persists over time

The solar sail theory of long-term discoverability

Why social media and paid ads have such a short half-life

How to find and reduce the operational drag on your business

You can find Tracy at ProductiveIndieFictionWriter.com or StoriesRulePress.com.

Transcript of the interview with Tracy Cooper-Posey

Jo: Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. So welcome back to the show, Tracy.

Tracy: Hi, Jo. It's great to be back.

Jo: Yes. So you were last on the show in October 2023 talking about The Productive Indie Fiction Writer, and we went into depth then.

So give us a bit of an update on your author business and also your life.

Because it has been a bit of an up and down.

Tracy: Yes, it's been a very interesting three years, because I had just gone into remission with cancer when we were talking last. Now I'm out of remission again and facing treatment in the next few weeks. My husband got cancer and went through treatment, and he's cured.

So life has been pretty interesting. All that has made me do a lot of deep thinking about the indie author business and my own business and writing in general.

So I'm still here. I'm still publishing, 200 plus books now. I had to learn how to write again. But the writing has shifted a lot towards science fiction and fantasy, including cosy science fiction now, which is the new genre that's just creeping in.

All three pen names have been Aurealis Award finalists, which is nice. I'm still continuing the nonfiction work, which is something that you said the last time that we spoke. You said, “Now that you've written one, it's likely you'll write more nonfiction.” And I did.

Jo: You did. They're excellent books. Just on that, you mentioned cosy sci-fi. For anyone who might not know, where is that genre?

What's in that genre of cosy sci-fi?

Tracy: It's not really officially a genre yet. It started off with cosy fantasy, which was where the cosy started.

Actually, technically it started with cosy mystery, and everyone understands cosy mystery. The body and the murder are off stage. There's a lot of tea drinking. There's lots of friends, and it's all very polite and mannered.

You're focusing more on the emotions and the feel, and they've picked up that cosy aspect of mystery and put it on fantasy.

So you get books like, I think the primary one is Legends and Lattes. It's about an orc that's running a coffee shop because they got sick of fighting, and the adventures that they have trying to run their coffee shop.

So if you pick up that same cosy sensation and put it on science fiction, that's cosy science fiction. But it's so new that it doesn't have a category on Amazon or anything like that.

Cosy fantasy does now. Amazon just created a cosy fantasy category a while ago. But cosy science fiction is so new that people are still arguing over which books are cosy science fiction and which are not.

Jo: Oh, that's interesting. You're incredibly prolific. You always have been.

You mentioned there that you had to learn how to write again after cancer.

What do you think happened, and how did you relearn? Because there are people listening who go through these similar things.

Tracy: I think a lot of what happened was, well, life just became incredibly complex and challenging, and just getting through a day of pain took a lot of the energy, what they call the spoons. I didn't have the spoons to write anymore.

Also you get chemo brain, which is the really interesting one. When I was going through chemo, I would look at a spreadsheet and just couldn't figure out how it worked. It just didn't make sense to me, so I had to hand over the finances and everything to Mark, which was rather interesting.

The way I got myself back into writing again was, it was such an alien idea that writing wasn't even on my radar from day to day. I just didn't have the energy or the concentration to do it.

So I started off really, really small. The first thing I did was read a lot of favourite books from other authors just to remember why I loved reading. Then I started reading my own books that I had written, just to remind myself of what I used to love about my own work.

Then I just cracked the manuscript one day and read as far as I had written and thought, “Okay, what's the next sentence?” And that's the only thing that I would let myself do, was just write the next sentence. That's it. So I wrote the next sentence, and sat there and thought, “Do I want to write the next sentence?”

On that particular day, no, I didn't. But I just kept opening the manuscript and looking and thinking about the next sentence, and eventually I wrote a few more. I think it was that coming back to the manuscript over and over with no pressure, just look at it, can you get the next sentence written?

Very slowly I started building up, and now I'm pretty much back to the speed that I was at before the diagnosis.

Jo: So I guess we could think about it in the same way that your body is physically recovering, your mind is also recovering.

It almost feels like people want to disconnect the two.

If you get a physical injury, that shouldn't affect your brain. But as you mentioned, having chemo, that in itself is difficult and has impacts on your brain. So if people think about it more as an injury you have to come back from, rather than day one you're back in, I guess.

Tracy: Yes. It's really a rehabilitation-style process, and I think the key is you've got to take all pressure off yourself. I know that, for me in particular, because I was such a workhorse, I could feel this stress because I just wasn't getting things done.

Once I gave myself permission to just take as long as it takes and just keep coming back to it, that helped enormously. It still took time for that rehabilitation process to actually work.

There's a lot of forgiving yourself, and it has to be a gentle process, I think, because situations like cancer and chemo and whatever the situation is that's pulled you away from your manuscript, they're big life events, and there is a lot of stress involved with them both physically and mentally.

So you have to give yourself time.

Jo: Yes, it's so important. Okay, well, also in these last three years, as you said, you've got back to writing, and one of the books you have also written is The Anti-Enshittification Field Manual for Indie Authors. You also use Cory Doctorow's enshittification concept around the mature indie author industry.

So just talk about what that term [enshittification] means?

We think it is now established in the industry, in terms of what is going on there. How do we recognise it and adjust?

Tracy: It's a very interesting term. The first time I heard it I raised my brows a bit. I was thinking, “Well, that's a bit cheeky.” The more you think about it, the more appropriate the name is.

Basically, Cory Doctorow's idea is that any platform, so for the sake of this discussion, let's say Amazon, starts out serving its users extremely well because it needs them.

When everyone first got into indie publishing, Amazon was open doors and you could just publish a book and it would sell, because they would push the book and they would do everything they could to make sure that readers saw your book.

Then slowly and increasingly, the platform extracts value from those users for somebody else's benefit, usually shareholders, and ultimately for itself. You can track this process where it starts off really great for the users and then slowly shifts so that it becomes a less than stellar experience for the users.

For indie authors, we're particularly exposed because our business sits on top of these platforms. So recognising that a lot of the platforms that we use now have enshittified, excuse me, or are in the process of doing that, that really helps. Because I think for years we were treating everything as a separate problem.

We were worrying about organic reach, we were worrying about advertising becoming more expensive. There's subscription creep, there's deteriorating customer service, algorithm changes. Visibility was increasingly pay to play, and it's so much more than that now. The platforms keep removing features or changing the terms.

Individually it just looks like a mess, but as soon as you put them together and say, “Oh, I understand now. The platform is enshittifying,” you can see the structural pattern.

It actually applies to so many platforms and services. Once you see it, well, for me in particular, that was an enormously positive realisation, because until I saw the pattern, I thought I was failing, and nothing I was doing seemed to work anymore.

Once I understood the environment itself had changed, I could stop trying to fix myself and start redesigning the business for the environment that actually exists.

Jo: Yes, and that is the point.

Redesigning your business for the environment that exists.

Because what you mentioned there, I feel like some people still think that organic reach exists.

I guess some people will say, “Oh, well, at the moment you can still put a video on, say, TikTok, and it might find an audience there.” Are people still building an audience in these newer platforms? But I think that's the point, isn't it?

I guess Substack would be another one. Although we already see that heading in the same direction, with various things. As soon as you go in there thinking, “Yes, I'm going to get organic reach,” even if there is any, it follows this way, doesn't it?

Tracy: It does. And this is what's so great about it, is once you recognise this pattern, you see it everywhere, and you can actually track a new platform through that process, and you can anticipate that, okay, maybe we're going to get organic discovery right now, but that's going to diminish.

That way you're not disappointed, and you're all set up for when that happens. That means that you can reduce your dependency on these platforms and not expect them to behave like they did in 2011.

Jo: It's interesting, though, with Amazon, for example, we've definitely seen that as authors. But on the other side, as a customer, as a reader particularly, I used to find a lot of books on Amazon directly. I'm almost entirely now finding books elsewhere, often through AI, actually, often through Claude.

Tracy: Yes, exactly.

Jo: And then going on Amazon to maybe get the book.

It feels like for readers it's changed too, right?

Tracy: Exactly. I mean, indie authors are particularly vulnerable because their entire business is built on these platforms, but this applies to everyone. It's not just indie authors. As you say, it's readers. They're noticing too that the decay of these platforms is starting to impact them as users.

I'm exactly like you. I tend to buy my books from Kobo, but I will buy my books from anywhere, and I learn about those books from a dozen different places. I don't rely on just one platform anymore.

It's really great once you understand this because then you can build an independent mindset that lets you flex around issues.

Jo: Yes, and obviously we like to dwell on the positives here. So given that this is just a reality of the market and various platforms—

What are the hallmarks of an indie author business that is more likely to persist over time given the reality of this?

Tracy: Okay. Well, I think that the biggest part of it is, as I mentioned before, it's the mindset. Recognising these patterns is really a big one, recognising where a platform is in the process.

Also developing a very independent mindset. I mean, we've been saying we're indie authors since 2011, but we were still really relying on those platforms to provide most of our business.

I think these days the new indie author is much more independently minded. Even though you're using the platforms, and we're all using them, you develop a flexibility. You understand the industry, and you're making plans ahead of it, so you've got the flexibility there, and the business thinking, which really helps.

You deal with any problems that come up. Every time there's an algorithm change, you're not going to wake up in the morning and just go through mourning because half your income has disappeared.

You're ready with alternatives, and you've got different things that you can try. So that mindset, that thinking about and recognising patterns and how the industry is going, is critical. Once you've got that in place, then there's a huge number of strategies that you might want to incorporate.

This is the thing, every indie author's business is different. We're all in different situations. I have health challenges, someone else may have a day job. I write a lot of books. Someone may be only able to produce a couple of books a year.

We're writing in different genres. If you're writing literature, that's different from the sort of science fiction that I write.

So the business and how it responds to the conditions out there is going to be different as well. So what you do as an author and for your business will be different.

There's a lot of strategies that you can try and see which are most effective for you. One of the biggest, for instance, is something that you say a lot too, diversify your income. Have a durable backlist. Work to get your backlist built up.

Direct sales is another strategy that I would say is almost mandatory for every indie author these days. I know a lot of indie authors are going, “Oh, but I've only got two books.” Doesn't matter. If you can sell from your site using just a PayPal link, that's direct sales, and that works. That gives you a lot more independence and agency.

Owning your reader relationships, making sure that you keep the readers close, I think that's another critical one. Making sure that you're resilient for the platform so you can adjust when there's changes. And on and on. There's a lot of things that you can do to adapt.

Jo: Yes. I think it's interesting just thinking about when you said, for example, direct sales is good for every indie author.

I would say every indie author who wants to have a long-term business—and I think that's a really key thing. Because I feel like it's still important to have a difference between people who are writing primarily as a hobby or are not looking for the financial income that you and I think about. So I think that's one thing.

I totally agree with you that just having a PayPal button or even selling some physical copies at a local fair or something, that all counts. I think it almost proves something and gives you that more independent mindset. It's like, “Yes, I can actually do this.”

That is such a powerful reframe rather than, “I cannot do anything except upload my book on Amazon.”

Tracy: Yes. And actually, funny you should mention the live markets, because we experimented over the last year with attending a few live markets and selling books, and there is a genuine power, a little thrill that you get when you sell a book, and you can sign it on the spot for them, and the reader is right there and you're face to face.

That process is suddenly not this anonymous process, where you find that you've sold a book overnight and you've got no idea who it is that bought it. That person's right there in front of you, so you can sign the book for them and you have a little exchange.

It's really empowering to build that independence into your business.

Jo: Yes, and then you also mentioned the durable backlist. Do you think that having books in multiple genres, including nonfiction, is part of how you can make a living?

As in, I think people often think, “Oh, maybe if I just write 20 books in one series.” I mean, maybe that works in some genres. I guess thrillers, actually, that can sometimes work, but you do so many things.

Is it the 80/20 rule, that 20% of your books make 80% of the income, or does it literally vary from year to year?

Tracy: Well, it does swing from year to year. But yes, generally the 80/20 rule holds. It's different from year to year, which 20% is making the 80% of the money.

As I mentioned, I'm moving into science fiction and fantasy more, because that's actually more successful for me right now than the romance is.

The other thing is, I think it really comes down to the individual author too. Some authors do very well just doing the one genre or even just the one series, and for them it's great.

I always worry that that's putting all your eggs in one basket. I think, though, to counter that vulnerability, if you're just doing one series or one genre, go wide. Sell as wide as you can, and that gives you a bit of a hedge against vulnerability.

It's a different situation for every author, and it's very hard for me to say, “Well, here's a 15-step list that'll give you all the answers,” because that 15-step list doesn't exist anymore, if it ever did. Just because everyone's business is so different.

You need to do a lot of experimenting, I think, and find what works for you. That sounds like I'm waving off the answer, but I'm really not. You really do have to figure it out for yourself.

If you do adopt that experimental mindset and say, “Okay, I'm going to do this for six months and track my statistics and see if there's any results there worth pursuing.”

Jo: See what happens. Yes, and it's interesting you've also moved more into the nonfiction. Let's get into your solar sail theory, because I've followed you on and off since we met, like a decade ago.

Tracy: It was 10 years ago.

Jo: I know. It's crazy. It's really crazy. For those listening, we met in Oregon, at the Oregon Workshops with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I've been reading your blog pretty avidly around this solar sail theory, which I love, and now you're talking about writing science fiction, I can appreciate it more.

What is your solar sail theory and some of the ways to build it?

Tracy: Okay, so solar sail theory is a theory in science. Well, I was going to say science fiction, but there's solid science behind it. Solar sails are a way, they think, because it's never been proven yet, of propelling a spacecraft.

You have this huge sail, like kilometres wide, and what it does is it captures photons. Photons are basically light. So when the light hits the solar sail, it gives it a minuscule amount of push, but there's no friction in space, so that push just keeps the ship going and going.

So when you've got kilometres of sail, all the photons hitting that can bring a ship up to enormous speeds, like a fraction of light speed, which sounds small if you're not used to science, but a fraction of light speed is enormously fast, and these solar sails can bring a ship up to those sorts of speeds.

So you can cross to the next star without needing faster-than-light travel or warp speed or something like that. Put that theory over the top of the indie publishing industry and you suddenly get a very interesting way of thinking about the industry, and it helps you make decisions.

So it's not a prescription. Again, it's not a 15-step, here's how to conquer the universe. It's a decision matrix. It helps you figure out what's going to work for you.

Whatever strategy or tactic it is that you're thinking about doing, you can ask the question, does this extend my sail?

So does it leave something behind that can continue to make me discoverable? So for instance, a 30-second radio advertisement probably is not going to leave anything behind that'll let readers discover you, because once it's aired, it's gone.

On the other hand, a podcast interview like this. The podcast interview that I did with you three years ago, I'm still getting people finding me and finding The Productive Indie Fiction Writer three years later because of that.

So that's extending the sail, and it's just a little tiny push, like a photon. Blog posts also, they surface indefinitely, so readers can find them 10 years later. And because you're the host of your own podcast, all your podcast interviews and the website, they're also creating surface area, so people keep finding you years later.

Also guest articles, and a book in a library. Your entire back catalogue is all part of the solar sail.

Jo: I know people listening are going, “But what about social media?”

Tracy: Yes. Social media is a tricky one because it's such a short half-life. I think on Facebook, if anyone sees your post at all, after two hours it's basically gone.

They never see it unless they actually go to your account, and they need to have heard of you in order to go to your account and see the post. So that makes social media not really a good solar sail builder.

It has other uses, and as long as you understand that it does have this very short half-life, then you can use it for the things that it's good at.

Jo: Yes, the same with paid ads, for example. Paid ads are the same as social media. Perhaps a quicker push, but as you say, the half-life is quicker.

Tracy: Yes. Exactly. Paid ads come and go. There's nothing out there that'll let the reader find you in a couple of years' time. So they're very short term.

A lot of people can build their business on these short-term things. They spend thousands of dollars on paid ads each month, and that works for them, but if they stop doing it, then their business halts. It comes to a grinding halt.

Whereas if you're building your solar sail, it's a long-term way of setting up your business, so it just keeps ticking on.

Jo: Your series of posts on the solar sail, which are also in The Indie Author Survival Guide, they are nonfiction, useful things.

So what about for the fiction side? What do you suggest people do around content marketing?

Tracy: Well, it all applies to both fiction and nonfiction. I usually write, because The Productive Indie Fiction Writer is addressing fiction authors, this does all apply to fiction as well.

As I was saying, your book catalogue, because you're on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, and Apple, and maybe Google as well, all of those pages are part of your sail. Your own site, all the book pages on your own site are part of the sail.

There's different ways to do it, but the common one is you have this standard sail out there that helps readers find you. You coax them to come to your site, and there you try to capture them as readers.

So that usually means your email list. Some people use Substack now. There are other alternatives I'm sure I haven't thought of, but email seems to be the principal one. Then you can build that relationship with the readers over the long term.

The solar sail just brings all those readers to you so that you can develop that relationship and keep the readers close. For fiction authors, I think this is critical. This helps you build independence from the retail platforms.

Jo: Yes, it is interesting. I would put podcasting and YouTube in particular. So I had someone, they were in my Patreon, and they said, “I'm no longer subscribed to your email list because I hear from you in Patreon and on the podcast.”

I was thinking about my own behaviour, and for the podcast that I am a hardcore fan of, I'm not on their email list. I was thinking it is because my relationship with those people is more auditory, I guess. The same with YouTubers. People end up subscribing to your YouTube channel.

Then the problem still is, if I stop podcasting today, then I can't contact those people again.

Except that I know lots of podcasters who stop podcasting and then maybe two years later they just pop on with an update episode. And people are like, “Oh, I never unsubscribed from you on my feed.” So that can appear years later.

I definitely still agree that the email list is primary.

But if you're somebody listening and you're a more audio or video person, I think we can probably think about the relationship with people on these different dimensions.

Tracy: Yes, and some people definitely prefer the audio. I'm utterly text-based myself. I prefer to read. But yes, podcasting, apart from anything else, is a way of keeping contact with the readers, and they can email you in return.

So it is a two-way process, so you can develop that relationship. So if that works for you, that is a good alternative.

The other thing is too, of course, every episode that you've recorded and put on a webpage is also building your sail. So more and more people are finding you. So podcasting is interesting. If you're guest posting on someone else's blog, that's a somewhat time-consuming way, but it does build up your sail as well.

Jo: The only problem with that, I would say, as someone who used to have guest posts, is it's still my website.

When it came to auditing my website, about five years ago—and the thing is, because my website's been around since 2008, I had some people guest posting in the early days—and I was like, “This should not be here anymore.”

So I am able to get rid of people's things when they're on my site, in the same way that Amazon can take down your book or whatever.

Tracy: Yes, and that's where the anti-enshittification process comes in. That's where developing that independent mindset comes in. One of the questions that you need to ask is, how permanent is this? What happens if it goes away?

Tat's why blogging on your own site is probably a stronger and better decision than guest blogging on other people's sites, because they have control of that.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. So there's so much in these books. These are all excellent books. I feel like you know so much after decades in the trenches, and I love that you're putting out everything in these books.

I did want to ask you one specific thing, because obviously we're increasing the size of our sail. But if we have massive amounts of drag, so we have sea anchors or whatever we want to call it in our metaphor, we have to sort that out too. So in The Indie Author Survival Guide, you have a section on protecting the margins.

So I wondered if you would talk about the specific ways to think about what is operational drag and how can we reduce it?

Tracy: Well, we just actually hit the perfect example. Guest blogging has more drag than blogging on your own site does, because you don't have control over it, so it can disappear.

It requires maintenance. It takes your time. So drag is basically anything that is going to slow you down once you've built up speed, coming back to the solar sail theory. The sail will keep you moving, but because we're not working in a vacuum anymore, we're not in space, there are things that can slow you down.

Particularly for mature author businesses, we accumulate all this cruft. For instance, Barnes & Noble recently changed their website so that all the URLs for a book changed, and that doesn't sound like a big deal, but I've got 200 books. So suddenly the links didn't work pointing to Barnes & Noble for every book.

So the Books2Read universal book links had to be changed for all 200 books.

Jo: Oh, I did know that and I haven't done it.

Tracy: This is the thing, is when you've only got five books, it's like 10 minutes' worth of work, no problems, and you just move on. When you've got 200 books, that's suddenly a big deal.

I only found out accidentally that they had changed them, and once I had confirmed that every single link no longer worked, it was suddenly a massive project.

There's also the money drag. Everything these days is software as a subscription. Even Microsoft Office, you've got to pay the fee every year.

It works well in theory, because you're getting updated software all the time, but you have a dozen of those or two dozen, suddenly you're spending a lot of money every year for software that once upon a time we used to pay a flat fee for and that was it.

So it pays to go through and figure out what expenses you can get rid of or diminish, or can you find a cheaper version.

There's advertising. Some advertising just isn't worth spending the money on. If you're doing pay-per-click advertising, you need to monitor it all the time, so that's a time sink that you're blowing money on, technically, because your time is money.

There's also, you may not be managing it quite as well as you could, so you're actually burning more money because the ads are not working as effectively as they could. More drag. You need to go through every aspect.

There's time drag, repetitive tasks. For instance, Mark and I have, for about, I think we're coming up on 11 years now, we track our sales.

Every morning we sit down and go through every platform and record the sales for that day in a spreadsheet so that we can do analysis. It's a good way to spend time because it's got extreme uses.

There's a lot of little tasks that you might do, especially if you've been working in the business as long as I have. All these little tasks will build up, and suddenly you forget why you're doing them. Or the conditions have changed and it's not worth doing them anymore. They may not be providing the value that they once used to.

So you have to go through and make sure that you're reducing the drag on your business as much as possible so that you can keep moving.

Jo: Yes. I had two more extra ones there.

You mentioned the things that we do that perhaps we don't need to do anymore. If people are outsourcing, if you have virtual assistants, if you are paying for some kind of service outside your own time, sometimes you can have that going and then when you think, do I need that anymore?

So I know some people still do pay for turning posts into social media or making book trailers. That's a good one. Or there's things that people are paying for, and then you might realise that you don't need that service anymore, or you don't need everything that that social media manager is doing anymore.

So realistically looking at the benefits of what you're getting.

Tracy: Yes, constant review.

Jo: Yes. Constant review. Then the other thing I was thinking is a mindset drag. So right now, as we're recording this, in the author community, there's this witch hunting going on around AI usage.

Tracy: Yes.

Jo: It's the latest thing that's causing massive drama.

I feel like it's almost mindset drag to get dragged into some of this drama, and it saps the energy.

That can really pull on your boat, on your solar boat.

Tracy: Well, actually, I've found that, and this is all part of the indie author mindset, and it's also part of the anti-enshittification process too.

I did a lot of research on AI. I did a lot of reading. I listened to a lot of different discussions about it, and then I formed my own policy. What's my policy for AI? What's my policy around AI and its use and so forth?

I find that once I had developed that policy for myself, suddenly there's not as much mental drag with all the AI discussions and the witch hunts and all the drama that's going on around it, because I know where I'm sitting and I'm quite comfortable with my position.

So I think for a lot of people, it can become very emotional and draining if you still haven't figured out where you sit on the spectrum of AI use. But that's actually how I tackled it, because I was getting very tired of all the dramas. It is draining, and it worries you.

So I deliberately went out and did a lot of research and reading, and figured out where I stood, and that made a huge difference for me.

Jo: Yes. And again, that's something to look at on your schedule. So maybe in a year's time you re-look at things again and change your decision. I think the same thing with the traditional versus self-publishing versus wide versus KU, and you could just go on.

There are pros and cons in every single direction, right? At the end of the day, it's almost the decision fatigue that's stopping you. Or you could say, again, our solar boat has to go in a particular direction. You can't go in every direction at the same time. You just have to make a decision, right?

Tracy: Yes. I think being as informed as possible about the industry is one of the big ones. I've spent a lot of time doing a lot of reading, not just about indie publishing over the last few years, but everything to do with publishing and also everything to do with business, because we are in business.

That's a bit of a cliché, that a lot of indie authors, their eyes just glaze over when they hear that you're in business. There are aspects of running a business that we just don't get taught as indie authors or as creatives that I think we should be teaching each other or getting each other to learn, because it's basic business survival.

Things like pricing, that is an enormously complex business topic, pricing. Most of us are, “Well, what's everyone else doing? Okay, I'll do that.” That's how they make their decisions. There's a lot more to it than that, and it's very complex.

We don't have to get a PhD in business management, but I think a little bit more awareness about basic business principles would serve all of us much better.

Jo: Yes, there's always so much to learn, but I actually think you've done a really good job with your books. I mean, The Indie Author Survival Guide is a great place to start. They're super, super useful.

I do want to talk about—as we come to an end—you've been doing this a long time, as have I, and we've both got some battle scars along the way.

You do end your books with hopeful realism, which I like. Now, I'm definitely more of an optimist than you, but I feel like hopeful realism is a good place.

So how can people cultivate that feeling of hopeful realism around the business?

Tracy: I don't know. Are you more of an optimist than me? Anyway. Well, let's see, because for me, all the book writing and all the research and all the reading that I've been doing over the last few years have given me back a lot of optimism that I didn't have.

As I was saying, it was feeling as though I couldn't do anything right. So learning that it wasn't just me that's the problem gave me back my confidence. So that's where the hopeful realism and the optimism came in.

So hopeful realism, okay, it comes from understanding, from agency, and from choice. If you understand the industry as it actually exists, not the way you wish it did, and you understand the forces acting on your business and where you sit within them, that helps enormously.

Just having that knowledge there, you can see what's going on, you understand what's going on. It's not all a mystery, and you're not scratching your head wondering what to do next. Because of that understanding, you get agency. You're not helpless. When circumstances change, you can respond.

You can make decisions instead of simply having things happen to you, and all of that gives you choice. You can go out and research and find out what your options are, and you can choose the best option for you.

If that doesn't work, you can go and try something else. So you've got a lot of choices, and you've got things that you can do. You're not helpless. So hopeful realism, I think, is pretty optimistic.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Tracy: If you're interested in my nonfiction, the best place to find me is at The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. If you want to find out more about my fiction, the best place to find that is to go to StoriesRulePress.com.

My three pen names are there, and also Mark, my husband, who is a writer as well. And shortly, I think, another member of the family's going to be joining us as well. So it's a very family affair on Stories Rule Press.

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

Tracy: Thank you very much. I'm thrilled I was able to come back and talk again. Thanks, Joanna.

The post How To Redesign Your Author Business For The Environment That Actually Exists, With Tracy Cooper-Posey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can the Fast Drafting method help you finally finish your novel? And how do you make progress when you only have 30 minutes a day to write? Jessica Brody shares her tips for finishing first drafts after 20 years as an author.

In the intro, Clive Barker's Kickstarter, The Amazon Tax [Seth Godin]; Trad publisher announces “human-originated, AI-facilitated” book, The Everything Code [PanMacmillan; AI policy; CHAPTR]; Holy relics, churches, and memento mori in Bruges and Brussels.

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

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

Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy. Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method.

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

Show Notes

Why a small advance can set you up for long-term success

Why 97% of first drafts are never finished

How to finish a novel writing 30 minutes a day

Why drafting and revising are two different jobs

How a pre-writing ritual primes your brain for flow

Writing a meta murder mystery after 20 years of teaching plot. You can pre-order How to Write a Murder with bonus extras at JessicaBrody.com/preorder

You can find Jessica at JessicaBrody.com and WritingMastery.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jessica Brody

Jo: Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy.

Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method. So welcome to the show, Jessica.

Jessica: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so honoured to be here. My writing community speaks so highly of this podcast, so I'm excited.

Jo: Oh, well, thank you, and you were requested, so this is going to be a good one. First up—

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

Jessica: Well, I started writing when I was seven. I like to put in air quotes, I wrote my first, quote, “novel” when I was seven. It was about three pages long. I got the bug very early.

I didn't realise it was an actual career choice that you could take seriously until way later in life, after I'd already graduated college with a degree in economics and I was working as a financial analyst, and I was just writing on the side for fun.

Then, as luck would have it, I got laid off from my job, and I ended up trying to take writing a little bit more seriously in that time.

That's when I found the Save the Cat method, which absolutely changed everything for me. Before that, I had loads of rejection letters, and I eventually sold my first novel to St. Martin's Press, and I've been writing and publishing ever since. That was 20 years ago now.

Jo: 20 years, wow. It's so interesting. So you were in economics, you were a financial analyst, and you got into writing.

Did you have any pushback from either your own brain that was like, “I cannot make money this way,” or your family?

Or how did you make that leap? Because we just hear that it's not a career, financially, really.

Jessica: I know, and I think I went into it very blindly, using television as my resource of this is how much money I can make writing. Like Sex and the City, she was selling books for lots of money. So I was like, oh, I just have to sell one book, and then I'll be set.

That was not the case. My first advance was so much lower than I expected, and what happened, though, was kind of interesting. I sold my first book, way lower advance than I was hoping for. I wasn't making any money anywhere else, so I was taking on all these odd jobs that I could do in my own time.

I was doing transcription work, and I was working at a school half the time. I mean, I just had so many really weird jobs. I think what happened was, because I didn't have another financial net to help me, it just pushed me really hard.

So once I sold one book, I was like, well, I need to sell another one and another one, and I ended up in this 20-year cycle, which I've slowed down thankfully, since, but of writing so obsessively, I should say.

I just kept selling books and selling books. My advances got higher and higher, and eventually I was able to support myself with my writing, but it was not instant at all.

Jo: Actually, that's a really good note there, because we often hear so much of these debuts that get paid a ton of money, and then they disappear, and they almost spiral down.

Whereas what you've done is spiral up.

Which is almost a better way to do it perhaps, with your reputation with traditional publishing.

Jessica: It's funny, I tell this story a lot to writers who are looking to get published, that the big advance is not necessarily the end-all be-all. Because I have heard that story before, someone gets a very big advance, and then it doesn't earn out, and they can't sell another book because the publisher's lost money.

I had the opposite experience. My advance was so low, and my publisher got worldwide rights. They bought worldwide rights. So they started selling foreign rights of my first book really early on, and I earned out before the book even came out, with just a few foreign sales.

That ended up setting me up for success, because I was making money for the publisher from day one, and I was able to sell more books, and so I sort of worked my way up. I really do credit a lot of that to how long I've been able to stay in this game.

Jo: No, it's a good way of thinking about it, because people forget the publisher isn't a charity. The publisher has to make money from your book. So it's nice that you make money, but they have to make money, or they're not going to bother, right?

Jessica: Yes, exactly.

Jo: So let's come back to Save the Cat, because you mentioned that the original method really changed how you write, and then of course you did Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. So I've got that. I imagine a lot of people listening have got that.

Tell us a bit about why that methodology made such a difference to you, and why you think it's so useful.

Jessica: Well, you'll sense a theme here. I went into this business, like I said, without knowing a lot, and I went into it the way I think a lot of writers do, which is, I had an idea, I sat down, and I tried to write it. I had no guidance, no map, no structure, and I just wrote.

I actually finished something, which is surprising, but then I started to get all these rejection letters that basically said similar things, which was, “You're a good writer, you have a good voice, but there's no story here.” I just didn't understand that feedback, because I had finished something.

I could print it out and stack it on my desk. Wasn't that a story? Apparently it was not.

Then a screenwriter friend of mine that I was talking to about how I was getting all of these rejection letters with the same note said, “You should read this book that recently came out.

It's called Save the Cat, and it's for screenwriters, but I think it could work for novels because it just seems to be all about structure and storytelling.” So I read the book cover to cover so quickly, because if anyone's read the original, it's just so readable, and everything started clicking in my mind.

I realised, wow, I really don't know how to tell a story. I could plot out everything I had done wrong, and I went back to my book and I started rewriting it from page one with this new structure in mind. When I finished that, I ended up getting an agent for that book, and the agent sold that book.

I've been using the method ever since. It just made so much sense to my brain. What I tell writers is, “Use the method that makes sense to your brain.”

All storytelling structure methods are basically telling the same story, just with different words, sliced and diced a little bit differently, but structure is structure, and a story is a story.

It has to have a beginning, middle, and end. It has to have conflict, it has to have a middle twist, and things like that. So this one worked for my brain, and I started to teach it to other novelists, because at the time there was still just the screenwriting guide.

So I started to teach how I was using it to other novelists, and that turned into the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Then I wrote a young adult version of it as well. And I still use it to this day. It's just something that's always made sense to me.

Jo: So were you hired by the estate? Blake Snyder died, right?

So were you hired to write that, or is that something you arranged?

Jessica: It was kind of something that was arranged. I think Blake Snyder Enterprises is the name of the company. Blake Snyder died in 2009, sadly. When I started using the method, I was blogging about it on my blog, and I would share some of my beat sheets of the novels I was writing.

The people who had taken over his estate reached out to me and said, “Hey, can you blog for us? Because we don't have a lot of novel content on our blog. We just do screenplay stuff.” And I said, “Of course.”

I had a fangirl moment. Oh my gosh, they've reached out to me and this is so exciting. So I started blogging for them, and then that turned into the workshops that I started doing with them. Then we partnered up on the book.

I think it was one of those things that felt inevitable, like we were just working toward it. I was living in LA at the time. They're based in LA. And I remember having breakfast with them, and we all just looked at each other and said, “So we need to write a book, right? There has to be a book.”

So we ended up sharing the copyright, and, as you see from the title, it says based on the books by Blake Snyder. It's very much his method. Then I brought some of my novel flair and some of my own little tips and tricks that I had picked up over the years and applied it to his method.

Jo: I love that. We are going to come to your other book for writers in a minute, but just on that intellectual property sharing, writing in other markets, you also write for Disney Publishing. This is so fascinating to me. Now, there are lots of people who do write for other properties.

So how did that come about writing for other properties, and how does that fit into your portfolio of the things that you do?

Jessica: Yes, writing for other properties is really fun. It's probably not for everyone. You have to know what you're getting into before you pursue it, because it's very much not your IP.

You're writing under someone else's brand, you're in their canon, and there are certain rules you have to follow. So you have guidelines.

I found it to be really fun and kind of a break from some of my own stuff, because I didn't have to come up with everything. I didn't have to invent all the new worlds and all the new characters. A lot of them were just given to me, and I could play within the boundaries of that sandbox, and I really found that inspiring.

So what happened actually is I was on a writing retreat with a bunch of other writers, and there was a writer at the retreat who already wrote for Disney Press and was supposed to write this new series for them, based on their Descendants series.

She said to me, “I really can't do it, but I'd love to recommend someone else to them.” I think we had been talking about how big of a fan I was of Disney or something, and she said, “Do you want me to recommend you?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely.” Another big fangirl moment.

So the editor of that series reached out to my agent. They talked to me. They got writing samples from me through my agent, and then before I knew it, I was hired to write, I think the first contract was maybe for two or three of the books, and then we renewed for a few more. It was just really fun.

Then I formed a relationship with that editor. We ended up working on another series for younger kids, based on the Disney Princess LEGO series, which was much younger and new for me.

It had illustrations. That was a whole new challenge, but I found it really fun. As I said, it was a nice break from writing my own things, because I could write them fairly quickly.

They did have very fast turnarounds at the publisher too, but I could use my skills for structure and storytelling and apply it to a world that already existed, and it was a nice pairing.

Jo: I love this.

So much of what you've done seems to have come from relationships or just putting yourself out there in the world.

Jessica: Yes, good observation. I hadn't thought of that.

Jo: Whereas I think a lot of people think that it's all about cold pitching. It's not so much, from what you're saying.

Jessica: Yes, and I did another IP project with Simon & Schuster called Boys of Summer, which was a young adult novel.

That one specifically came from my agent. So a lot of times publishers will reach out to agents and say, “Here's what we're doing. Do you have authors who would fit?” And my agent will often reach out to me and say, “Here's the pitch I got from a publisher. Are you interested in submitting yourself for this?”

That's what happened with Boys of Summer. They actually sent out an outline to a bunch of writers who were interested, and I had to write sample chapters to the outline, or I think it was the first couple of chapters or something. I was very gratefully selected to write it.

That came about from having an agent, and a lot of times having an agent is a way into IP work. And then those connections can help too.

Jo: Fascinating. Right. Well, let's get into your book Page One to Done, which as I said, one of my listeners actually requested to have you on the show to talk about this book, because she said it was absolutely fantastic and helped her finish her book. So why finishing? What is the problem?

Why write a book on actually finishing? What are some of the common issues that people have?

Jessica: Well, thank you to that listener. I really appreciate it, and here I am because of you. Connections once again.

So Page One to Done came out of my own struggle with finishing, and not just finishing, but finishing efficiently and maintaining joy throughout the process of writing a novel.

As I said, I was writing very fast and furiously, and my deadlines were piling up, and I started to feel like writing a novel stopped being fun. It started to become a very frustrating process, and I realised that was a lot about how I was approaching the first draft, which, as most writers know, the first draft is very hard.

When I started to look further into it, I found this statistic online that's widely accepted in the writing community, which is that 97% of first drafts are not finished. Which is, wow, mind-blowing, but also not that hard to believe once you think about the challenges of writing a first draft.

Taking an idea from a seed, developing it into a full plot with character development and arcs and subplots and side characters and themes and all the things that you think a story should have, getting that all onto the page and actually reaching the end.

It's very, very difficult, and I never lie about how difficult it is. So I was struggling to finish things quickly, to enjoy the process, and I noticed that other writers were too. I felt like, well, I have this plotting guide that I love, this structure guide, Save the Cat! Shouldn't this be easier once I have an outline?

And it wasn't. And that, I think, is because we forget that there's another part of the process. It's not just about developing a compelling character. It's not just about having a well-paced plot. You have to be able to get ideas out of your head and onto the page in a way that doesn't make you want to quit.

I think one of the problems with the first draft is most of us write something down, it does not match what's in our head, and we start to get more and more frustrated. The process becomes overwhelming. We're holding too much of the story in our head.

We're going back to page one to revise with every new idea we have, so it starts to slow down. The farther we get into the book, the longer that back to page one process takes, and things start to spiral out of control.

I think that's essentially what happens to this 97% of first drafts. The writer quits because it's not good enough. It doesn't match what's in their mind, and there's too much to hold, and it starts to become overwhelming. So this is what was happening to me.

Even though I was finishing things, the process was still very overwhelming, and I started to experiment with different things. Different mindset shifts that I could make, different ways I could change my writing routine to really enhance the process, to get into flow faster, to stay in flow for longer, things like that.

It took me about five years, and I developed this collection of mindset shifts and strategies and routines that I could not only apply to myself, but I turned it into a system that was repeatable, and I started teaching it in my Writing Mastery Academy.

I called it the Fast Drafting method, and it's all about letting go of this idea that our first draft has to be perfect or even that good, and just focusing on getting ideas down as quickly as possible, even if that creates a big mess.

It's this freeing process of doing that in a way that we don't get in our own way. So I started teaching it to other writers. People were finishing things who had never finished things before. Writers who had taken two years to write a first draft were writing first drafts in weeks.

The biggest comment I was getting was, “This is so freeing. This is so liberating. This is so fun.” And it gave people the motivation that they needed to actually sit down and revise the book.

Before, either they never finished, so they never got to the revision process, or they were so overwhelmed and bogged down by the two years it took for them to write one draft, they didn't have the energy to revise and get it to the next level.

So anyway, all of this is to say it was working for me, it was working for other writers. I turned it into a book called Page One to Done, and it's my three-phase process, mindset, preparation, and drafting, which I equate to running a marathon.

You wouldn't run a marathon without proper training and proper nutrition and the right mindset, just like you wouldn't write a novel without the right mindset, the right preparation, and the right skills you need to get to the end.

Jo: That's fantastic. You mentioned training there and some of the routine changes. So I hear new writers say, “Oh, I can't write unless I maybe have two hours or three hours to write down stuff, and I never have three hours at a time, so I never have time to write.” I hear that a lot. So what would you say to those people?

What is a routine and a mindset shift that might help those people?

Jessica: That's great, and I hear that all the time too. I interviewed a handful of authors for this book who had gone through the fast drafting method with me, and I would say the majority of them wrote for 30 minutes to one hour a day and were able to finish their books in a matter of weeks to maybe two months.

That's because what I teach in the book is not about the amount of time you have. It's about how you use that time. When you really structure your day and your writing time with intentionality, you do whatever you can to block out distractions, get into flow, stay in flow.

I'll give you one amazing tip that basically solves all of these things in a second. But when you really bring intentionality to those 30 minutes, you can write more in 30 minutes than you can in three hours without bringing these kinds of intentional choices. So that's one of the things I teach. You don't need more time.

You actually just need to approach the time you have with the right mindsets and the right intentions.

So one of the biggest shifts I tell people is just don't write and revise at the same time.

For one, it pulls your brain in two different directions and creates the requirement of context switching, because essentially drafting and revising are two different jobs.

Drafting is getting ideas out of your head and onto the page. Revising is polishing those ideas. They require very different headspaces and very different skills. So when we try to do both of them at once, we're pulled in two different directions.

We're essentially trying to polish something we haven't even figured out yet, so we're polishing in the dark, if you will. It causes our brain to snap back and forth so many times.

The term context switching is very big in the zeitgeist today, and that's because it's eating up our brain capacity. So if you spend 30 minutes just getting ideas down without judging them as they're coming out, without trying to revise them as they're coming out, you will get a lot of words down.

A lot of that has to do with just what do you expect out of those 30 minutes? If you expect to write a chapter of absolutely brilliant polished prose, you're probably not going to do it, and you're going to feel like you wasted three hours.

Then the next time you have three hours, you're like, “Well, no, I'm not going to do that. It's too frustrating, and I don't have three hours to begin with.”

But if you sit down with the idea of, “I'm going to get all my ideas down. I'm going to just enjoy this process and live in my story for these 30 minutes,” you will be amazed at how much will come out onto the page. And you can absolutely finish a book that way.

So intentionality is how you set up your workspace. Making sure that your phone is on do not disturb, making sure there are no pop-ups on your screen, making sure there are not even windows open behind your document. Every time your mind thinks about something else, you have to bring it back, and that eats brain power.

So it's things like that. I have a whole chapter on how to set up a writing routine. One of the biggest tips I give people is to do what I call a pre-writing ritual. This is based in neuroscience, and there are all of these studies that back this up, that our brain does something where it associates an activity with another activity.

So let's say right before we sit down to write, every time we do that, we do 10 jumping jacks, just as an example. But we only do 10 jumping jacks before we write.

We don't do 10 jumping jacks before we sit down to do our taxes or answer emails. It's just before we write. Your brain starts to create this associative link with jumping jacks and writing.

These are ways that we can prime our brain to get into the writing mode, and after doing that a handful of times, you do your jumping jacks, and your brain is literally already in your story before you sit down.

It starts to soften that resistance that happens when we think, “Oh, I have to go write now,” or, “I've got to go write a certain amount of words,” or, “I have to work with my story.”

It softens that, where it just becomes, “Oh, this is what I'm doing now.” Setting up these pre-writing rituals, which could include jumping jacks, could include something else, a lot of examples we can explore if you want, creates that associative link and allows us to get into the writing zone even faster.

So by the time we sit down, we're already primed to go. We're not wasting a lot of that time going, “Oh, should I do it now? Should I do it later? I've got to open my document. Oh, my coffee's a little low.” All the things that we do to delay writing. They start to fall away.

Jo: Yes, I mean, I always tell people, you and I turned up on time. We arranged this. We respect each other. We turn up, and we're doing this within a time slot.

So I always say to people, “Look, make a calendar entry for your writing,” and do you respect your writing enough to turn up on time and do the work? We had a few minutes of saying hi or whatever, and then we got on with our work, which was this interview.

So if you've arranged to start writing for that half an hour, then it is work still, right? You need to turn up and honour that.

Jessica: Yes, and actually I have the same tip in the book. I say put it on your calendar, block it off. For the reasons you said, it creates in your brain the idea that this is a serious thing.

It's not just a, “Oh, I'll get to it when I get to it,” like folding the laundry. It's like, no, this is what I've decided to do, I'm serious about it, I respect it. Just like any other appointment that you would respect, like lunch with a friend or an important business meeting, you show up for it.

You don't go, “I think I'll show up to that business meeting in a few hours when I feel like it.” Also it keeps the routine consistent, because one of the tips I give is to always write at the same time every day if you can, because again, that associative link created in your brain, that habitual routine.

So if you put it in your calendar for the days that you're going to write, you won't schedule over it by accident, which is just another logistical thing.

I say something similar to what you just said, Joanna, in the book, which is basically, if you booked a massage for an hour, you would stay for the hour, right? Because you paid for this massage.

Jo: Hell yes.

Jessica: It's important to you. You're not going to get up in the middle and start texting your friends. You want your massage. If you treat your writing like any other thing that's important to you and show up for it consistently, it will show up for you, too.

Jo: Yes, and I think the other misconception is that, okay, so that person has made it, and they're at the desk. I listen to rain and thunderstorms in my headphones. That's kind of, I guess, my routine. But that doesn't mean that I can just stream something wonderful.

You talked about separating the writing and the editing, but sometimes it really is pretty basic, right? Morgan walked into the room. That will often be my thing, and then I'll be like, “Okay, well, why?” And what was the room like? Or was it even a room?

So sometimes you just have to start writing something rather than wait for a perfect sentence.

Jessica: Oh, yes, absolutely. Waiting for the perfect sentence, you'll be waiting for a long time. I say waiting for inspiration, you'll be waiting for a long time.

My joke is, if I waited to write only when I felt inspired, I'd finish a book about every 20 years, if that. I think that's very important, and I teach a lot of tips and tricks in the book on how to get past that resistance, because of course, we don't want to just sit down and write something that we don't like.

We don't want to just write down, “Oh, she stared at her computer for 10 minutes.” But sometimes we have to write that down to get to the next sentence or the next plot point or whatever barrier is in our mind.

So one tip I'll tell people is put things you don't like in brackets, the square brackets. It's a really simple tip, and it's one of the tips I share in the book. Just put it in brackets and move on.

What the brackets do, at least for people who use it, is it's like scaffolding. It's a reminder to your brain, this isn't permanent. This isn't going to stay. I'm going to come back to this later and fix it once I figure out what the story is and what she's actually doing in the room at this moment.

For now, it's there. It's on the page. I can move past it. For me at least, the brackets are just this really nice reminder of the scaffolding. Nope, nope, nope, not perfect, not permanent, moving on. Then you can come back later and flesh it all out.

I share a lot of anecdotes from my 20 years of writing novels, and one that I particularly like is I was working on a novel, and I had this scene that was just so awful, where all of my characters were sitting in a room.

I had no idea what room it was or what it looked like, and they were talking about their feelings. It was just so awful and boring, but I had to get through this scene because I had to establish certain things that came later.

I was complaining and complaining about this scene. I was on a writing retreat at the time, and my writer friends were like, “Let's just do a writing sprint, and we'll all write really fast, and we'll all get through our bad scenes, and we'll move on.” So I did that. I moved past the boring scene.

It was still boring all the way to the end, but here's the thing, I couldn't figure out what happened in that scene until I'd figured out the whole story.

So I wrote the bad version, and then in the next draft I came back and I was like, “Oh, this scene should take place on this bridge that I wrote in the finale that I didn't even know I needed, and it's this very symbolic bridge, and they can be standing on the bridge, and then they should be talking about this because that's going to pay off in the third act,” and I hadn't even thought of that yet.

So all the things were coming together, but I could never have come up with that at the time. If I had just sat there and tried and tried, I probably would have gotten stuck at that scene and quit. So I had to just write the bad version, move past it, and come back later.

Jo: Yes, and I think maybe because you're famous for structure, people think that maybe you wouldn't have to do that, because you already came up with that in the plotting.

It sounds like you're also putting in those elements and foreshadowing and deepening things in the edit.

So that's quite comforting for me as a discovery writer, because I end up doing so much more of that kind of thing in the edits.

Jessica: Well, something I like to say is that we're all discovery writers, just different degrees. Because the writing process, no matter how much you plot in advance, is always going to be a discovery process.

There are always going to be things you didn't think of. There's always going to be a way to tie things together that you never could have thought of before you started writing.

So much of the story evolves and gets processed on the page and in your mind as it's coming out onto the page, and it's delusional to think you can think of all that before you start engaging with the characters.

You can come close. I've known writers who have come very close, but almost all writers will discover something that they didn't know in the outline. I would argue that that's actually the fun part of writing. It's not the days when writing goes exactly to plan. They're nice, but they're not necessarily the fun parts.

The fun parts are when you sit down to write the scene you thought was going to be the scene, and suddenly this new detail appears, and you go, “Oh my gosh, this totally unlocks everything, and I never even thought of it.”

It could be in a text message. It could be on a billboard. It could be something the character just blurts out that you weren't expecting, and suddenly your whole story comes together in that moment, or maybe just the scene comes together. It's those moments, I think, that we write for.

So even just expecting the book to come out exactly as you plotted is one of those mindset shifts. If you shift it and think, “This is really fun. I get to discover new things about my story that I wasn't expecting,” that, again, just makes the process a little more fun.

So instead of, “Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be,” or, “This isn't what I outlined,” which is focusing on what's wrong with the book, it becomes, “Oh, wow, this is teaching me something I never expected about my story, and that's pretty cool.”

Jo: Yes, I think that moment, Carl Jung called it, I guess, synchronicity, the moment when these things come together and it feels just incredible, that's the moment we all look for. It does seem to happen on every book. Everything clicks into place, and I look forward to that moment with every book.

I did want to ask you about a novel that you have coming out soon as we record this, called How to Write a Murder. Now, this is a new genre for you, and it's quite meta because it's about writers as well. So talk about writing a brand new genre now at this point in your career.

What are the challenges of trying to reach a new audience? Why do this book now?

Jessica: Wow, great question. I love challenging myself to do something new. I wrote contemporary for many years and then thought, “I'm going to try a sci-fi.” Or, “I'm going to try middle grade now.”

I think I go where the story wants, where I'm inspired to go when it comes to story ideas. However, with mystery, it's been one of those things that's always been on the back of my mind, like a wish list, a bucket list. I want to write a murder mystery. I just never had the right idea. Or I never had the time, or I never had the space.

Then I finished my last novel contract, and I took a break, because I had been writing on deadlines for years. I took a very, very much needed break from deadlines. For the first time in I think 15 years, I did not have a book deadline.

I just asked myself, “Jessica, what do you want to write?” As opposed to, what's the next book that's due? And the answer was very clear. I want to write that murder mystery.

I toyed with a few ideas, and then I started to think about, okay, so I wrote this book on plot that a lot of people know and use. What if someone used that book to plot a literal murder? What would that look like?

This meta explosion came to mind, which is that I wanted to write a murder mystery that's structured like a plotting guide for murder mysteries. The characters in the book are all writers who are familiar with this plotting guide, and the events of the story are unfolding like the plot of a murder mystery according to this book.

You have no idea which one of them is actually using the book to plot the murder, because they all know the book. So one of the taglines is, “One dead body, seven mystery writers, and they all know how to get away with murder.”

It was sort of my culmination of everything I'd done in my career. All the plotting workshops I'd taught, all the revision courses I'd taught, and of course this plotting structure method I'd been teaching for years, and I put it into this book.

It's a fictional version of Save the Cat! It's called The Bestseller Formula. The premise of this book is that someone is using a murder mystery plotting guide to plot a literal murder. So the reader is learning how to write a murder as they're reading about the murder on the page.

Jo: I love it. I know lots of people are going to want that. It does bring the business side of things into more difficulty, because of course you have readers, like you mentioned middle grade, you've got YA books, and obviously, I guess, the writers that you teach will be interested.

How is this going to work for your book marketing and your business?

Because it also sounds like this might be a standalone.

Jessica: It is a standalone as of now. I have some sequel ideas, but we're not pursuing them yet.

It is a different market for me, for sure, and that's become a challenge as I'm marketing, because I'm not in the thriller mystery space yet.

I haven't written a novel for adults since the very, very beginning of my career. I've been mostly writing for teens and middle grade. The good news is most of my teen readers are now adults, because it's been so long since I wrote for teens. So there's that.

I think the book will appeal to mystery readers just because it's a fun mystery, and there's a fun meta element to it. I think it's going to appeal to writers as well. So I'm very much leaning on that, at least for the launch. I hope my writer community will get behind this book, because it's very much an ode to storytelling.

It's an ode to writers. I dedicated it to writers. As a writer, you will understand this book on a level that a reader never will. You will get so many of the little inside jokes that a reader might just skim past. So I did very much write it for writers, with the hope that readers will also enjoy it.

I had the most fun writing it I've had, I think, of writing any book. Partly I think that was because I wasn't writing it under deadline. I was just writing it for me, but also just because it felt like the book I'd been destined to write for so long.

Jo: Fantastic. So we're out of time.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

Jessica: How is that possible? I feel like we just started. JessicaBrody.com is the best place to find everything. If you're interested in my writing courses, you can check out WritingMastery.com as well.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jessica. That was brilliant.

Jessica: Thank you, Joanna. I had so much fun.
The post From Page One To Done: Fast Drafting Your Novel With Jessica Brody first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy.

In the intro, Expanding Your Book’s IP through Merchandising [Wish I'd Known Then]; Guide to writers conferences [Kindlepreneur]; Rick Rubin and Stephen Pressfield on resistance and the muse [Tetragrammaton]; Pulitzer Prize winners disclose AI usage [Nieman Lab]; My new rebuilt fiction site JFPenn.com.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

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

Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors.

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

Show Notes

How AI search actually finds and ranks the books it recommends

Why keywords and search volume are disappearing as marketing metrics

Building an internet footprint so your book is worth recommending

Why Claude leans on Goodreads while ChatGPT and Gemini lean on Reddit

Product is more important than marketing, and how to find your comp titles

Passion, business sense and resilience in the authors who last

You can find Ricardo at Reedsy.com.

Transcript of the interview with Ricardo Fayet

Jo: Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo.

Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. It's been a while.

Jo: It has been a while. As we were saying, it's been a decade, which is crazy, because you and I see each other at events and things. For anyone who doesn't know you—

Tell us a bit more about you, where you're from, and also, what is Reedsy these days and how have things changed?

Ricardo: Yes, sure. I think I'm hard to dissociate from Reedsy because my only background really is Reedsy.

We started Reedsy right after business school for most of the founders. There are four founders, and I'm one of them. We've been going since 2014, so it's been 12 years. We started around the same time, and you started even earlier than we did, but we've had the chance to meet at quite a few conferences since.

I think the main thing we're still known for is our marketplace.

Since the very beginning, Reedsy is a curated marketplace where authors can come in and look for editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters, literary translators, author website designers, pretty much any freelancer you would ever need to hire throughout your writing career.

That's how we started. That's our main source of revenue and our main business. Since then, as you mentioned, we've also added courses, live events, so we've got a membership under Reedsy Learning.

The main thing we're proud of right now is our writing tool, Reedsy Studio, because we've been pouring a lot of engineering talent into it over the past five, six years, and I think it's a really cool writing tool that is 90% free.

It also does the formatting, so it's a good alternative to Vellum or Atticus for those who haven't purchased those tools. So there's a lot of things that Reedsy does at this point, which always makes it hard for me to describe what we do.

Jo: But you generally serve writers. That's probably the crux of it.

Ricardo: Exactly, yes. We're mostly at the production stage. The thing we say is we help authors make beautiful books, right? That's a little bit the tagline that applies to 90% of what we do, though we also help a little bit with the marketing side of things.

Jo: And then just tell people where your accent is from.

Ricardo: So I'm half French, half Italian from my parents, and I was born in Spain. So depending on my mood and the moment, it might be anywhere from French, Italian, Spanish. It's anyone's guess, really, at this point.

Jo: Yes, exactly.

You've been part of the indie author ecosystem, as you said, since 2014. You're often at the author conferences, and you stay abreast of everything that's going on.

So what are the biggest changes you've seen in the industry since you started out? Like you said, you guys came from business school. You chose to come into the industry at a particular point, and yet things have changed.

So what do you think are the biggest changes, and how have you seen authors adapt?

Ricardo: It's crazy, the amount of things that happened in the past 10 years. Obviously we came into the industry as a result of Amazon launching Kindle Direct Publishing, and then the Kindle Store becoming one of the number one places where people buy books.

That's what enabled self-publishing in the first place as an industry, and obviously we wouldn't exist without self-publishing being a thing. But then I think probably one of the biggest changes that happened was the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and various other subscription models.

Perhaps as a response to that, afterwards, I would say direct sales is the other massive change that happened in the industry. The ability for authors to sell direct to their readers via their websites, or running Kickstarters, or basically the ability to reach your customers directly.

Now, obviously, artificial intelligence is probably the biggest change of them all, not just in publishing, across every industry, but of course it's going to affect publishing very strongly, or it has already started making big waves. So I would say those are the three main changes that we've seen happening in the industry.

Jo: Just interestingly, given that you're French, Italian, Spanish, European—

Has the pace of change been the same in mainland Europe?

Because you and I have also met up at European conferences, but I just get the sense that each individual European country, the UK included, as I include the UK in Europe, goes at a different speed.

Ricardo: No, they definitely do. Our market at Reedsy is all in English. We only have an English website, and I would say 70% of our market is US, then 15% UK, and then Australia, New Zealand, et cetera.

We do have clients in continental Europe, but they're mostly going to be American or British expats. A lot of retired people who write books and use Reedsy services.

I think the main reason for that is that self-publishing as an industry hasn't really grown in Spain, France, Italy the way that it's grown in the US and the UK, probably because these are countries where book buying habits are a lot more traditional.

So all my friends from high school and university in France, they all buy books, they all buy paper books. They all buy from bookstores. They don't really buy from Amazon that much. They love the smell of paper, all these sorts of things.

So obviously that makes it harder for indie authors in those countries because they cannot place their books in the places where people buy them, which is traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, or at least it's much harder.

So there is an indie movement in those countries, but it's much smaller. I would say Germany is maybe the exception in Europe, where I've seen more and more full-time indie authors, but I don't think it's a market that's comparable even to the UK.

Jo: Interesting. Okay, so let's go to marketing, because you love marketing, you have a newsletter about it, and you have a book, How to Market a Book, same title as mine, and we've found each other in our Also Boughts over the years.

You have, however, updated yours several times. 2025 was your last update. Mine was 2016, so yours is definitely the most up-to-date one. So what are your thoughts on how authors can reach readers now? And let's split this into two.

Let's start with some tips for new authors who just have maybe one book and are really just starting out.

Ricardo: Yes, first of all, sorry for stealing your title.

Jo: Oh, you know, it's never been a problem.

Ricardo: We were trying to come up with something… I know, I know, I know. But still, we wanted something more original, and then we realised that for SEO purposes, that's the title we should really go for.

The good thing is, if you search “how to market a book” on pretty much any retailer, you're going to find your book or mine in any order really, but those are going to be the top two books to this day, thankfully, so I'm good with that.

I think in terms of marketing tips for new authors who have just the one book, I'd say, despite all the changes in the industry, the basics of marketing still stay the same.

One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. Having a great product.

By that, I generally don't talk about literary value or prose or anything like that, just because I'm not a book critic. I'm not an editor. My opinion on whether a book is good or not is worth zero.

From a marketing standpoint, for me, a good book is one that resonates with its intended audience. So the first step for newer authors is to basically figure out who they wrote this book for, right? Have an idea of who their target market is.

A great way to do that, without entering into marketing jargon like proto-personas and stuff like that, is to think in terms of comp titles, comparable titles. I think that's probably the base of any marketing, whether traditional publishing houses or indie authors, to think, “Okay, which other books out there are similar to mine?”

If your book is completely unique, you have, I would say, 99.9% chance of not selling, because your market doesn't exist, and 0.01% chance of creating your own market and completely dominating it, right? So being unique is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would say 99% of the time, it is.

Obviously being unique within an existing niche, within an existing market, that's completely different, but you need to work on some comparable titles. So I would say that's where I would start, and that's one of the things that AI is great at.

If you even just plug in your book into an AI chat that has enough context, if you're comfortable doing that of course, or if you plug in a synopsis, like a long synopsis, you can basically ask the AI chats, “Okay, what would be some comp titles?”

Either you'll have heard of those books, and you'll think, “Okay, they're good comps,” or you may not have heard of them, in which case I would really recommend buying them and reading them and seeing whether they're comps or not. I think that's where marketing starts.

Jo: Yes, and we might come back to that for book discoverability. Well, let's just talk about it now, because I now pretty much use Claude for discovering books as well.

I just find that the Amazon search, for nonfiction it works really well, right? As you said, if you want to learn how to market a book, you just search “how to market a book”, and our books are very well titled for that.

But for fiction, it's so difficult to find new books and comp titles, especially if you don't write in a clear genre, which I don't. I know lots of people do. So we're writing cross-genre. So in terms of book discoverability, I know you've been looking into SEO for books and all of that.

What are your thoughts on how authors can more effectively have their books surfaced if people are using the AIs for finding books?

Ricardo: That's a very big topic. That's one of my favourite topics right now. That's what I talk about in my marketing newsletter, and I want to start a Substack on the topic as well, because I think it is the future of book discoverability.

As you say, search on Amazon isn't great, and if it's not great on Amazon, you don't even want to imagine on Google Play, Kobo, all these sorts of places, right?

If you search on Kobo or Apple Books or Google Play for witch cozy mysteries, the top 10 books are going to have exactly “witch cozy mystery” in the title or the subtitle or the series title, right?

Jo: Yes.

Ricardo: Search is very simple on those sites, so it's very easy to game, but it's terrible as an experience for readers.

So I do think that a big part of search is going to move to AI, and now you have Rufus within Amazon itself that appears as a chatbot and encourages you to talk with it, to ask for recommendations. In the beginning Rufus was really terrible, but now I recommend authors play with it.

In general, I recommend when it comes to AI discoverability that authors play with all the AI search tools. So it's going to be Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Rufus within Amazon.

Just like we talked about comp titles, right, ask for something like, “What would you recommend for fans of this book? Which other books would you recommend?”

Or if you're looking for something specific that describes your book, what books would you recommend on… I think one of your examples was fiction around masonry or something like that, right?

Jo: I always say, for example, if you ask for action adventure thrillers on pretty much anywhere, you're going to get 20 books by male authors. For those of us who are female authors, but also who have female main characters, you can then be far more granular. That's just not something that necessarily works on Amazon.

So, action adventure thrillers with female protagonists written by female indie authors, which is very specific.

That will work in AI, whereas that definitely won't work on Amazon.

Ricardo: Exactly. So one of the great things about AI search, and terrible things at the same time, is that the concept of keyword is lost, right?

So we title our books How to Market a Book because the keyword that people would search for is “how to market a book”, or “book marketing for authors”. Those were the two keywords that had the biggest search volume if we looked at Google Keyword Planner, or any search tools that give you keyword volume.

When it comes to AI search, since it's conversational, and it's very personalised, and it can go as niche as you want, keywords are going to disappear, and search volume as a metric is going to disappear.

The search you just told me about, maybe there are 10 people who are going to run it exactly. Most people are going to run variations of that. Since you can go as granular as you want, it's going to be very long phrases, very long sentences.

So the whole concept of keywords, search volume, SEO, is going to disappear in favour of what some people call GEO, generative engine optimisation, AIO, AI optimisation, AI search optimisation.

There's a bunch of names for it, but it is a different discipline. It still works on the basis of Google SEO because what most of these search engines will do is they're going to search the internet, right? They've been trained on a lot of information, but not all of that information is current.

Most of these models have been trained on documents and web pages before 2021. That's why when you used the very early versions of ChatGPT, and you asked it about current events or current books, it didn't find it. It didn't have that information.

Now all these models have the ability to search the web, and they do that really effectively. So the first thing they're going to do if you run a search like that is they're going to run dozens of different searches on Google or a similar search engine.

Action thriller books with female protagonists. Action thriller books with female protagonists by indie authors. Action thriller books by indie authors.

They're going to create what I call a corpus, so a massive document of information with candidates, books that probably meet those criteria that they have found through regular web searches.

Then they're going to go through all those books and determine which are the most relevant to recommend, and they'll return with that.

Then they'll usually have a verification layer as well, which is, okay, I have these five books that I want to recommend to this user, but I just want to make sure first that they are written by indie authors, that they do have a female protagonist, et cetera. And if I'm not able to verify that, I'll flag it in my answer to them.

So there are these three layers. Web search, then ranking of the book candidates, and finally a verification layer, and then they serve you the answer. Obviously, that's really powerful.

If that's the way that search is headed, which I firmly believe, then we as authors need to learn how to get our books in there.

Jo: Yes. It's so interesting, and I do this all the time. Really niche stuff, like a thriller about anatomical Venuses, which are these models from anatomy museums and stuff like that, with an edge of the supernatural. What is brilliant is that you can find the books that come up.

I actually got one that I read and reviewed, and it was fantastic. So I love the more granular thing, but we're really in the very long tail now, right? It feels like you can write a very nuanced book, and it will be surfaced, but only by a few people.

So do we have to write our books and then try to not even retrofit them in the way that we used to?

We used to try and figure out the seven keywords and all of that kind of thing, and now I almost feel like we just get to be grownups, where you just get to write the book and put it out there, and these things are more intelligent than the search terms.

Ricardo: Yes, absolutely. I think in terms of the variety of books that are going to be read and discovered, that's amazing.

A little bit like the whole indie publishing movement was amazing, because if you remove the traditional publishing gatekeepers, then suddenly zombie books aren't dead anymore. Zombies are alive again. They've…

Jo: Come to life.

Ricardo: They've come alive, and so you get a bunch of zombie books again. It's not a small niche audience. It's actually a pretty big niche audience that loves zombie books, and suddenly they have those to consume.

This is a little bit similar on a much, much bigger and more granular scale, because anyone can find exactly the kind of book that they're looking for, with the tropes they want, with the type of characters they want, with the type of author they want, and you can basically use any kind of filter.

So for discoverability on the side of the reader, that's great.

For the authors, it doesn't mean that you can just write whatever you want and then rest, and readers will find them. Because your books still need to have generated a certain internet footprint and a certain review footprint in order to become interesting or recommendable to AI search engines, right?

Unless you're the only book that an AI search engine can recommend for that specific search, and yours was very specific, so it might have been the only one.

If there are other candidates, the AI search engines are pretty smart. They're going to recommend the candidates that have more reviews, better reviews, or are more famous, that have more, when I talk about internet footprint, more pages talking about them on the internet.

That's for me the big finding I've seen. The more pages you have on the internet talking about your book, so that could be book review sites, that could be Goodreads lists, Listopia lists, anywhere on the internet where your book is mentioned, that creates a footprint for it.

The more footprints, the more famous your book looks to AI search engines, and so the more worthy of recommendations it is to them.

Jo: Yes, and this is one reason why I now ask people, especially when you sell direct, or say you have a Kickstarter and you want reviews, I ask people if they can review on Goodreads.

Obviously Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but it is far more searchable by the bots than Amazon is.

I sometimes find that Amazon gets blocked. Or Amazon blocks some of the bots, let's put it that way.

They might change over time. They own 15% of Anthropic or something. But Goodreads I feel like does get indexed, and I'm not willing to engage on Reddit. I know Reddit is another popular one.

Just be very clear on social media, because some people think, oh, I just need loads of influencers to talk about my book, and that will impact the AIs. But I find that social media just almost isn't even there.

Ricardo: It depends on which social media. For me, Reddit is a social medium, right? It's a very weird one, but it's obviously the number one social medium used by AI search engines, and it's pretty dodgy stuff with lots of conflicts of interest, because Google has a paid partnership with Reddit.

I think Sam Altman has shares in Reddit. So both OpenAI and Google Gemini heavily rely on Reddit for their AI answers, right? If you ask anything from ChatGPT or Gemini, I'd say there are very high chances that in the sources and the citations of the answer, you're going to find Reddit, right?

That goes for books as well. Every time you ask for book recommendations, Reddit is going to be big for those two AI search engines. Claude, it's a little bit different. They do have a little bit of a relationship with Reddit, but I don't think it's as big. I found that Claude relies heavily on Goodreads, not Reddit.

To me, Goodreads is another social medium at the end of the day, right? It's not the kind of social medium we think of, like…

Jo: It's not TikTok.

Ricardo: It's not TikTok. TikTok is surfaced a little bit, but not that much. It might become more surfaced in the future, but right now what I've found is, it's really Reddit and Goodreads.

Facebook, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is big for nonfiction topics more than fiction, because there are just not a lot of fiction readers, sorry, talking about their favourite books on LinkedIn. They usually go to other places for that.

Jo: Yes, it's really interesting. So obviously TikTok has its own BookTok thing, so some people are finding books on BookTok, and some people like me are finding books through asking Claude, and that's just my overwhelming feeling about the industry.

We talked earlier about what's changed. When I started, so 2006, there wasn't even KDP, and then KDP arrives, then you came in 2014, and probably until maybe a few years after that, there was one way to self-publish.

Then what's happened since is this kind of splintering. There are so many ways to self-publish.

There are so many ways to reach readers. There are so many ways to market. So someone, for example, could sell direct on TikTok Shop, only market through TikTok, and you wouldn't even know that they existed over in another ecosystem, right? So do you feel like that's happened too, this total splintering?

Ricardo: Absolutely. I think there are so many different ways in which you can reach your audience now and monetise it as well, that it's absolutely possible. We both know examples of authors who are only visible to their TikTok niche, right?

I think the big difference is also monetisation, because earlier you also had different ways of becoming well-known.

Like you had Facebook, you had potentially Twitter, back when it was Twitter. Various social media, word of mouth. But where people bought books was Amazon. So that was your monetisation. It was either selling your book on Amazon, or potentially getting KU reads after that when KU launched.

Now you can sell on TikTok, you can sell direct, you can run Kickstarters, you can start a Patreon or Substack and make your money through there. There are pretty much infinite ways through which you can monetise your content as a creator.

Most of those places will also have a discoverability engine built in, so you can not only sell through there and make money through there, but also grow an audience there. That's probably the biggest competition that Amazon has ever had to face, is this sort of splintering.

For us authors and content creators in general, it's amazing, because it's a bunch of different opportunities.

Jo: Yes, and I think probably that's circling back to marketing. As we've said, some things have changed, some things stay the same.

Is the email list still the number one way to market, do you think, for authors who want a long-term career?

Ricardo: I think so. It's just the one thing you really own that allows you to communicate with readers, right? Because even if you build a following on TikTok, TikTok can change.

The things we said about Facebook 10 years ago, if you build your Facebook group, Facebook can change, and Facebook changed. Facebook destroyed the reach of pages, and now groups also aren't amazing, et cetera.

So the same thing that happened to Facebook can happen to TikTok, can happen to any other social media.

Substack is a bit of a hybrid because it is a newsletter, it is a mailing list, but it also has a discoverability engine built in. So I still wouldn't really go all in on Substack. The great advantage there is that you do own the emails, right? So you can move away from it at some point.

For me, the email list is the one thing that you are completely in control of. Personally, the main thing I check is my emails every day. I spend more time in my inbox than anywhere else, and I think that's probably the case for most people.

So I do think, despite the influx of mails that readers are getting in their inbox, I still think it's one of the most important marketing tools for authors.

Jo: Yes, and I still remember when I started my list in December 2008, and I still have people on the list who've been with me that whole time, and have moved email list services several times as well. So I think that's important too. The care of that list too is so important.

One of the things that I am annoyed about with Substack, I don't have a Substack, but when I follow some people's, it's always constantly trying to get you to sign up to other people's lists, trying to subscribe you to this or that or the other.

I'm like, “That's so annoying.” Now I've found on all these email services they're trying to pair you with other creators and cross-promote and all of this. So it feels like even the email list is becoming a difficult place unless you really protect it.

So just protecting your list, I think, and remembering that those are people.

Those are people who've bought your books, or people who read your emails.

Like people listening to this, these are humans. Sure, some bot might be looking at the transcript, but humans listening to this are individual humans with individual email lists.

We tend to forget that, don't we, as you get a bigger list. You think about it as a big number, whereas it's still individual people.

Ricardo: Yes, it becomes a number, it becomes metrics, the open rate, the click rate, and all that. But the great thing about email is that you get replies in your inbox. There you remember that they're actual human beings who write you back.

I think for readers, the ability to write back to an author and get a response is just amazing, right? If you write to your favourite author and they write back to you, that's the best feeling ever as a reader.

So I think email is still one of the best ways to turn your readers into fans and into super fans of your brand, by just interacting with them and answering them. Because yes, you can answer comments on TikTok, Facebook, and all those places, but it doesn't feel the same as an author answering you in your inbox, I feel.

So you do get that ability to create a real connection with readers directly through email.

Jo: Yes, and I think that trust and the reputation is so important.

Just in terms of seeing the authors that you've seen over the years, like I said, you've been going to a lot of the author conferences. You know a lot of the authors in the industry. A lot of people will know you from events. But you've also seen authors come and go, and you've seen vendors come and go.

Both of us have seen people arrive, and we'd be like, “Oh, yes, I wonder how long they're going to last.” Then some people do and some people don't.

So what are some of the elements that you've noticed about the businesses that last more than a decade?

Ricardo: I think they need to solve a genuine problem, or offer a genuinely better solution than one that already exists.

I see a lot of businesses come in and they do what another vendor already does, without doing it necessarily better. Those businesses tend to disappear, or linger there, but you don't really hear about them again.

When they solve a real need… I still remember when BookFunnel came out, and they've since become massive with one very, very basic thing, which is, “We will take care of delivering your ebook files to readers.” That's how they started, and that's how they became massive.

To me at the time, I was like, “That seems like a very small problem,” because I can just email an ebook file.

I didn't realise that it was so complicated for a lot of readers to upload files to their Kindle or other devices, and that having a service that takes care of that for you is just massively helpful. I realised that when I published my books, actually.

So businesses that solve even micro or apparently very small problems, but they really solve them effectively, they stay. Others that surf on trends, they tend to disappear when the trend disappears. When there's a new marketing trend, and that trend stops working, then those businesses tend to go.

Jo: Yes, and what about the authors who last? Because let's face it, most of us don't solve a problem in a different way. Maybe you could say we solve your entertainment problem in a different version to your last book.

What about the authors who last long term? What have you noticed about them?

Ricardo: Two things. So the first one… Maybe three things. First one is passion. I always say to people who are looking to start self-publishing, I always say that publishing in general is probably one of the worst ways to make money. It's awful.

You can pick up any other occupation and it's probably going to be easier to make money. So writers who make a career do it because they need to write, because they have a passion for writing.

So a lot of people who come into the industry thinking, “I've heard about all these self-publishing success stories. Surely I can write a book and I can market it. It's not that hard. So that's going to be a great way to make quick bucks,” those generally don't last, because they don't have that genuine passion.

The first hurdle they're going to face—and there's going to be a bunch of them along the way—they're going to quit.

The second thing is business sense, or business education, the basics of business, right? Thinking in terms of marketing, thinking in terms of who's my reader, unit economics.

If I'm selling my books at $3.99, I shouldn't be spending a ton of money. If I just have one book at $3.99, I cannot afford to pay $5 on ads to generate a sale.

So those kinds of basic economics or business knowledge, I think, if not a requirement, it's a massive plus.

The third thing is resilience. The industry has changed a lot, as you mentioned. There are a bunch of ways now to reach an audience. There are a bunch of ways to make money.

It can also be distracting, because you go to one of these conferences and you go back thinking, “Oh, I've got to create my own website, sell direct. I've got to launch my Substack. I have to use Claude Code for my ads,” and three more things, “and I have to set up my TikTok Shop and do TikTok Lives to sell books,” right?

Jo: All of those by next week. That's why we go to the conference.

Ricardo: Exactly. All those by next week, right? And during that one week after the conference, you have the energy to start implementing all those things, but afterwards you lose that energy and you go back to, “I just want to quit.”

So you need to have some sort of resilience, and the business sense of, “Okay, I'm going to try this for the next six months, and I'm going to stick to it, and I'm going to see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm not just going to despair. I'm going to try something else.” That goes for marketing tactics, but also goes for books.

Most authors I know who make a living writing, they didn't get there with their first book or even their first series. A lot of times I see authors who write a couple of series, and those series do okay. They sell a little bit, but not much, and it doesn't afford them to quit their day job.

Then suddenly, based on what they've learned with those first two series and what they've learned potentially going to conferences or listening to podcasts like this, et cetera, they write a third series that's a hit.

That's a hit, and that's instantly much easier to market, and that's when they can afford to go full time and write full time, because they've found that sort of product market fit. And product market fit for me is the main thing for marketing in general and for authors in particular.

Until you find that, everything is really difficult from a marketing perspective. But finding it usually requires writing more than one book and more than one series, because you're rarely going to get the big lottery ticket on the first try.

Jo: Or ever. I think it's really important. I've never had a breakout book, but I've made good money every year.

I think, and Hugh Howey said this, that the real story of self-publishing is not the people who make seven figures a year, it's the people who can go on a holiday once a year, or the people who can just put a bit towards their mortgage or whatever.

So you may never have a breakout series. I think that's really important, too.

Ricardo: That's true.

Jo: That's true. You can just keep writing and make all right money and be what we call in the mid-list.

Ricardo: Yes, but you've got to keep going. You've got to have that resilience to keep going, probably because it's your passion. Exactly. You're not chasing that seven figure series. You're writing because you need to write.

Jo: Yes, and you can't stop, and you get the bug. I think when you're writing that first book, I'm not sure if people understand that you either get the bug or you don't, I think.

You've written a couple of books now. Do you think you have the bug, or is it more about the business?

Ricardo: I don't have the bug. I definitely don't have the bug. I would've kept writing otherwise.

Jo: You're a technologist, right?

Ricardo: Yes. I'm more of a technologist, more of a marketer. To write my first book, How to Market a Book, I actually had to write newsletters, because that I can manage, right? One newsletter a week.

Now I don't even manage that. I send it once every two weeks when I can even manage that pace. But back then I did one newsletter a week, and that's how I wrote my first book.

I then put all these newsletters together, and that was before the age of AI, so I couldn't just dump all that into ChatGPT and tell it, “Create me a book based on that.” I had to do it myself.

Jo: Oh, terrible.

Ricardo: Terrible, I know. The days when we had to work. No, but that was a really good experiment.

The second book, Amazon Ads for Authors, I actually wrote it from scratch, and I didn't love the experience. I loved the finished product, I'm very proud of it, but I didn't enjoy the experience of writing it.

Amazon Ads is not the most exciting topic in the world. Even for people like me, who actually enjoy Amazon Ads, it's not super exciting to write about. The fact of having to write that whole book from scratch, I didn't love the experience.

So now I do want to write a third book at some point, but I think it'll probably be in the format of the first one. Like, when I finish my series of newsletters on AI search and AI discoverability, I might do a booklet or something around it, but we'll have to see.

It's not my favourite thing. It's a good thing I don't need to. Good thing I'm not an author, basically.

Jo: No, but I think that's really great to recognise. You actually have written books that support your business, and that is very common for nonfiction writers. That's completely normal for nonfiction authors.

So I think that's another important thing for people to recognise, is that the reasons we write are different, the reasons we market are different, and we all have different approaches.

As we wind up, and obviously you talked a bit there about how easy it is to generate books with AI, and that is probably one of the biggest things that people are worried about.

Now, those of us like you and I have been talking about AI at conferences and things for years now. Neither of us are afraid of it, I think basically because both of us use it, and we're technologists, so we just get on with it.

There is so much fear in the community. There's so much negativity. You mentioned Substack, and now they've integrated Pangram, which is renowned for false positives around what is written with AI, and so people are very worried.

If we look forward and we look at the next decade, this is not going away. This is going to change a lot of things.

So how should authors be thinking about AI, do you think, if they want to prepare for the next decade?

Ricardo: I think they need to play around with it, because you and I know that until you actually use it, you don't realise what it's capable of. We've both had these moments of “Oh my God, I'm going to be out of a job,” or “Oh my God, this is incredible,” the kind of things it's able to do.

You also realise by using it the things it's not great at, or the things it can be good at but needing a lot of human input. There are courses out there, there are books, there are a lot of things, but for me, the most important thing is to start playing around with it.

So you can pick one specific topic to play around with. Either something that you've been meaning to get into for years and haven't done, or something that really annoys you. Looking at the results of your Facebook ads, for example.

If you run Facebook ads in the first place, and when you log into your Meta dashboard you cannot make sense of it, take screenshots or download the data, feed it to an AI chat, and talk with it.

One of my biggest tips when talking to AI chats is asking them questions rather than asking them for things to do. Because if you just feed it your advertising data and you tell it, “Tell me what I should do,” the chat has no context about what your ads are about, what your goal is, et cetera, et cetera.

If you feed it just a screenshot and you say, “Here are my ads. I would like you to help me make sense of them. What do you need to know from me in order to help me with this?”

Then it's going to start asking you questions. “Okay, what are you advertising?” They're books. “Okay, what kind of books? Where are you selling? Are your ads going straight to Amazon or retailers, or are they going to your website? If you sell direct, okay, are these conversion ads?” Et cetera, et cetera.

So you build that context, and they can help you with it. So that's just one example, but I would pick one thing that you want to test AI with, with zero expectations. Don't expect that by the end of the week you'll have a full system for understanding your Meta ads thanks to AI.

You might get to that or you might not, but at least you'll play with it and you'll understand its capabilities, and have a sort of understanding of how it works and how you can potentially use it for other things.

I think that's the best way to adapt, because once you play with it, you start thinking.

You're walking the dog and you're just thinking, “Ha, I could maybe use it for this thing or that other thing,” and that's how you progressively become more familiar with it.

I think there are a lot of worries around AI, but as you say, it's there to stay. So far, I think I was looking at data this morning, and the unemployment rate in the US has stayed stable ever since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago.

So there are a lot of narratives out there around how it's going to replace humans, it's going to replace jobs, et cetera, which it might do. I'm not great at predictions usually, but so far it hasn't. What it will definitely do, however, is completely change the way we work.

Obviously AI was one of our big reckonings at Reedsy, because we run a marketplace. Our main business model is the marketplace, where authors come in and look for editors, for marketers, for cover designers, for translators, and some of these domains and services are being transformed by AI, right?

AI translations are massive right now. We haven't really seen a decline at all on the Reedsy marketplace, but we're prepared for it.

It might very well happen, but what we think is happening, or is going to happen, is professionals using AI tools to provide a better output or a faster output or a cheaper output, or all three of these things.

So for example, we now have literary translators who say they're open to editing AI translations, right? So you can come in, you can have your book translated with AI, whichever tool or method you choose for that.

Then if you want a set of human eyes on it, you can hire a literary translator who's open to working on an AI-translated manuscript, and that's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than paying 10 cents per word from scratch for a literary translator.

I'm not necessarily recommending you completely bypass literary translators, or that you go this way, but you have options, right? You have options for different sets of budgets.

I think all these human editors, narrators, translators, designers, et cetera, they're not going to disappear, but they might have to reinvent the way they work in the future.

Jo: As we all are doing. As you say, for me mostly it's the business side, getting Claude to help me with business stuff. Like even bookkeeping. There are bills that we've all been paying for years that we can now maybe reduce, and reducing costs as well as increasing profit is obviously good business sense.

So, interesting times. But just as we wrap up, what are you excited about in what's coming?

How do you see Reedsy shaping up in the next decade? What is coming for you and Reedsy?

Ricardo: We're really excited about the decade to come, because obviously 10 years for a startup is a long time. I think most startups after 10 years, the founders are gone.

Jo: Yes.

Ricardo: Or they've exited or they've sold or whatever. We've stayed, we're the same founders, and we're still as excited because I think we have new products, right? We're working on new things.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Reedsy Studio, our writing tool, is probably one of the things we're most excited about, because first, it's getting adopted very fast.

It has startup-like growth that we hadn't seen for other products in a long time, and it has very cool technology built in. We probably have a team of 10, 15 engineers now working full time on it and adding a lot of things.

So we've added templates for plotting your book, with relationships within different characters and places and magic systems and things like that. We've added writing goals and writing statistics. We still have the free exports.

One very cool thing we've added is real time collaboration. So just like Google Docs, you can write in real time with a co-author, or you can get an editor to work in there live with track changes.

So you could have an editor working on chapter one while you're writing chapter three, for example. That kind of thing. It's really powerful technology, and that's one of the things we're really excited about for the future.

A business, just like authors, we've got to reinvent ourselves. We've got to find ways to keep things exciting and keep motivated, and that is definitely one of them. When adoption goes along with it, then that's obviously super satisfying.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and Reedsy online?

Ricardo: So Reedsy you can find at reedsy.com, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com. And there you'll find the whole suite of tools and services.

For me, you can find me mostly by email, as I mentioned. That's the one place I check consistently every day, and my email address is ricardo@reedsy.com. So again, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com and ricardo@reedsy.com.

You can email me any questions you have about this episode, about AI book discoverability, about marketing, about Reedsy.

I always try to answer every email I get, because I think when we started Reedsy, I really appreciated people like you, and some other agents and editors and authors we contacted who were influential in the industry, who actually answered us and took the time to do that.

So now I try to answer every email I get, because I feel like we've been very lucky in the beginning to have those people answering our emails, so we should do the same.

Jo: Oh, well, thanks so much for your time, Ricardo. That was great.

Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. Thanks for having me again.
The post Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last.

In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris;

Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn

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

John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver.

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

Show Notes

Why 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK

Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone

How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula

The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book

The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures

The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career

You can find John at wearewhitefox.com.

Transcript of the interview with John Bond

Jo: John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver.

So welcome back to the show, John.

John: Thank you, Jo. Thanks so much for having me.

Jo: You were last on the show in 2022. You've been on a couple of times, but just set the scene.

Tell people a bit more about you and your long background in publishing.

John: I suppose I could say I started as a marketing manager at Penguin back in the early 1990s in London, and that role eventually evolved into running sales and marketing, as it often does. I did that at Penguin and at HarperCollins.

Then I ran one of the publishing divisions at HarperCollins, including 4th Estate, and published Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others.

I left that in 2011 and set up Whitefox in 2012, and it's a classic startup story. It was somebody I worked with at HarperCollins. We sat around a kitchen table, came up with an idea for a business, which was Whitefox, and that's grown into the creative agency that it is today.

Jo: So back then, did you think, “I can do this better”?

Was that the impetus, “I can do publishing better than Penguin and HarperCollins”?

John: No, I thought we would solve a problem. There's something very attractive about that whole startup mentality and beginning something from scratch.

I mean, I was in my early 50s. I'd had a long career in traditional publishing. On the plus side, I knew a lot of people, and I thought I could get meetings, people would reply to my phone calls or my emails. On the downside, I didn't necessarily have the energy of a 20 to 25-year-old.

I knew a lot of people and I knew quite a lot of things, and I also knew what problems something like Whitefox could solve.

We set up with this idea that if we could galvanise and organise the diaspora of freelancers in the publishing space and make them available to anybody that wanted to make a book, that that would be quite a powerful thing.

These incredibly creative, wonderful people who were below the radar and were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly.

I thought if we could access that and make that available not just to traditional publishing people who know about these people, but to individual authors, businesses, brands, people that wanted to make a book, and if you added a layer of our expertise from traditional publishing, that could be quite powerful, I suppose.

That's what I was thinking back then.

Jo: It's funny, though. You said these wonderful freelancers who were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. That could also apply to a lot of authors in traditional publishing.

John: Totally. Totally. But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about that.

What's really evolved since we started, even in that 2011, 2012 period, is so much has happened to independent writers, indie authors. The whole ecosystem has become much more vibrant, and what is accessible to those writers is much greater.

I'd like to think we've played a part in that. What that's done is put power back into writers' hands, and that quickly became apparent in the business as a byproduct of what we'd set up.

Jo: Yes, and 2012 I do think in the UK was a pivot point, because I got into self-publishing in 2006/2007 when the Americans did with the beginning of the Kindle and the iPhone. Really the American ecosystem grew first.

I happened to be in Australia, and so I think I was able to escape the negativity of the vortex in the UK, which took a number more years to embrace self-publishing as a force to be reckoned with as opposed to an embarrassing thing in the corner for vanity press.

Do you see 2012 as a changing point in UK publishing?

John: I think we'd just come out of the Kindle moment, hadn't we? There were all sorts of conversations going on about how that was going to change things forever. I think no one quite knew what the upshot of that was going to be, but we knew that it was incredibly disruptive.

In 2012, Penguin, as it was then, before Penguin Random House, had offered to buy Author Solutions for $115 million, presumably seen as some kind of defensive measure as to what the market was going to evolve into.

I think it felt like a real period of change. In the UK, James Daunt took over running Waterstones, and he was then ultimately going to run Barnes & Noble.

It felt like a bit of a watershed. I think we were lucky in that sense, that maybe in the UK and in London, what we were creating coincided with an opening up of opportunity and creativity, and people wanting access to more tools to be able to do things themselves.

Getting this idea that you invest in your own talent and what that could mean for your ability to do things quicker, better. Some of it was happenstance, but lucky for us.

As you say, we then became aware that in a sense a lot of these things had come to fruition earlier on the US side.

In London, that whole idea of setting up something that wasn't a traditional rights-owning model, but where you wanted to be working with people creatively, felt actually really exciting and timely.

Jo: And when you started to work with independent authors, probably a couple of years after that, you started to work with a lot more indie authors and things really started to change in terms of the business side.

Did you feel any of the snobbery from the traditional industry?

Like you mentioned, you have a lot of contacts, a lot of connections. I came to your wonderful launch party and there were just people from all over the industry. I wondered if you got any kickback, or if anyone raised their eyebrows a little bit at who you were choosing to work with?

John: Oh, definitely. And I would say I really think that's gone.

You may think differently, Jo, but from my perspective, I think there has been such an evolution in the nearly 15 years that we've been going. So any of that residual snobbery, looking down your nose at people that were going DIY, producing multiple books, learning from every single publication.

We've spoken about this before. I remember you sat on the panel of a FutureBook conference in the UK, which was run by a trade magazine, with this idea of looking at the, in quotes, “digital future of the business.” It felt like there were a lot of things being talked about, but not a lot of action on the traditional side.

I suppose some sort of awe that there was some magic going on with people who were making a success of self-publishing. But then quite a lot of people looking down their noses at things that shouldn't get through the gatekeepers.

I do think that's gone. Or if it's not completely gone, I can see it on the way out of the door, because there's no room for that when agents are struggling to sell books to publishers because publishers are looking at the next indie author, the next Freida McFadden, the next Sarah J. Maas, the next Rebecca Yarros.

So whoever it may be, or wherever they're publishing, whatever they're doing now, wherever they may be, knowing that a lot of those people will already be publishing and be on not their first, second, third or fourth, but potentially their 10th or 11th book.

It's a race to see who can help those authors, as a traditional publisher would see it, amplify what they're doing. I think the idea that there's an us and them, if it did exist then, which it certainly did in certain publishing quarters, is gone.

I used to go to those conferences, like the FutureBook Conference, and certain publishers would talk about publishing, and when they meant publishing, they meant a really tiny area of quite literary, traditional imprints. That's what publishing meant.

They didn't even mean publishing to mean educational publishing, or children's publishing, or academic publishing, and certainly not Kindle or POD or whatever. So I think that's had to change for very good, sound, commercial, economic reasons.

Jo: Yes, you're right. I definitely have heard, as we go to similar events sometimes, and you do hear agents used to talk a lot more about finding books very occasionally in a slush pile, or doing courses so you could meet people and do pitch events and all this.

Now it's often build an audience on BookTok or whatever, and sell lots of books, and traditional publishing as an amplifier, as you said. That's how I always hear them pitch it now, the question of—

What can traditional publishing still do when indie authors can do so much?

It does seem to be, well, we can amplify you, we can get you into traditional press, we can get you in traditional bookstores, we can help you with film and movie deals, that kind of thing. So that's really interesting, because that's actually changed quite a lot.

They don't now seem to say, “Oh, well, we can make sure we pay you,” or, “We are editorial success as such.”

John: I think they don't say editorial success or quality or indeed marketing, because that was what used to be said.

I think there's an understanding that a lot of indie writers are better marketeers of their own books than traditional publishers, and if you go into the publishing machine, then you'll get your slot. It lasts for a certain period of time and then that moves on to another book.

Whereas obviously if you're writing your own book and you're marketing your own book, you're able to do that yourself 24/7 wherever you are in the world, and you will know more about your readers and your audience and how that evolves than a traditional publisher would.

What they probably mean now is, as you said, as much as anything, distribution, or even physical distribution.

Because to be part of that process, I think that is still where a large conglomerate is able to wield some muscle, with this idea that if you physically want to see your book in bricks and mortar retailers in X outlets around the world, that's potentially easier to do if that is your aim, via a traditional publisher.

So it is constantly evolving, because it used to be that marketing was the silver bullet, and I don't think that's the case anymore.

Jo: No. We'll come back to marketing, shall we? Struggling with marketing.

So let's get into your book. You recently co-wrote Going Indie with James Silver, Publishing Your Book Your Way. Obviously you already knew a lot about indie authors, so I wonder, what did you discover in the process of researching the book and the interviews you did? And I was one of your interviews.

Did anything come up that surprised you, since you're already pretty embedded in the world?

John: I would say some of it was reinforcing what I knew. So how everything is so intertwined, how in some ways unlinear everything is.

People are doing lots of things in a different order to the way that traditionally writers would perceive this relay race of a manuscript gets passed to an editor, an editor passes on. That's just not how it is or needs to be anymore.

I still think there is—not even a misconception—but I think there's a received wisdom that when you're talking about self-publishing, you're talking about fiction.

The majority of books that Whitefox produces are not fiction, they're non-fiction. Some of them are quite mainstream, some of them are quite niche.

That idea of connecting to your audience and your followers, and being slightly more scientific about how you find readers in your non-fiction niche, I think is still unspoken about in a way, in that genre fiction tends to be what people automatically assume the conversation is about.

This probably doesn't surprise you, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it confirmed to me quite how much swapping and sharing there is of skills and knowledge in that space.

I'm not saying indie writing is egoless at all, but there's quite a lot of sharing of knowledge and what works, and collaboration, which I think is great to see.

Again, if you've, as I did many years ago, come out of corporate conglomerate publishing, traditional publishing, there's less of that by the very nature of the kind of organisation.

And look, we just talked about marketing a little while ago. I do think this whole idea that the cutting edge of experimentation, it's not traditional publishing, it's indie writers.

They are looking at not just how to find readers, but how to fulfil orders, how to make commercial sense of what they're doing from the absolute outset and get-go of what they're doing.

And just how now the lines are blurring between what would be classified as traditional digital publishers and the writers who are doing their own thing, or doing their own thing on behalf of a few other writers. Those lines have completely blurred.

There used to be this traditional hardback, paperback, X number of books a year, a year after hardback there's a paperback. This is the model we have been doing for centuries, and people doing things on their own.

I think that's blurring massively, and the Venn diagrams of people's areas of expertise are just overlapping massively.

Jo: Well, I think you're right there, and certainly the hardback special editions with sprayed edges and foil. A lot of us now are doing that first and not putting out the other, or putting out the rest of it at the same time.

I dare say probably there are more indie authors with sprayed edge hardbacks than there are traditionally published authors.

John: I'm sure that's right. And what's interesting is if you go to a traditional book printer, they are loving the direct communication with writers, that's not coming through traditional channels and traditional relationships. It's great business, it's interesting.

I think that's something that's even developed in the last couple of years, that cutting out of some of the middle men required.

Jo: Yes, and in terms of supporting freelancers and small publishing houses and printers and stuff, the other thing I've heard is that indie authors pay upfront, or they pay quickly, compared to some of these big publishers who are asking for long lead times and steep discounting.

So actually a lot of these independent businesses are doing better under indie author work than they were under traditional.

John: I think that's right, and that's what I mean also about the sharing of information and this collaborative idea of sharing creative knowledge. I mean, I'm making it sound like a kind of 19th century cooperative, which it isn't. I'm not suggesting that for a second.

It's this idea that there's a lot of people learning a lot of things and there's a keenness to share some of that information, because if you've developed your own readership for your unique creative product, some of those learnings are very exciting.

The printers I've spoken to love working on those kinds of things, because they are also being challenged to come up with new ways of developing ever more innovative physical product.

Jo: Yes, I think it's a fun, creative time for sure. Things like Kickstarter, which you came on and talked about crowdfunding years ago, and I've obviously done. I think, what am I on now? Seven? I've just done my seventh.

John: Wow.

Jo: It's so much fun. But now what's happening is traditional publishers are arriving on Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. So we really see a blurring.

Let's come back to your book, so Going Indie. You co-wrote it. Now obviously there are lots of positive sides of collaboration, but in terms of any challenges with collaboration and co-writing and the writing process of doing this? Because I've done this several times and I've found it very challenging.

So tell us about the collaborative writing process.

John: We thought a lot about it before we took it on. What I would say, having done it, is I am assuming there is no formula for how you do this.

At Penguin I worked with a married couple who were crime writers, and they wrote books together. They merged their names so it appeared to be one name. I could not tell you, and they didn't share what that process was, whether they were writing different chapters or … I don't know. So I can only speak from my own experience.

James is an established journalist. He's great with deadlines. He was very good at chivvying me along when I needed to be persuaded to hit the deadlines that I'd promised.

I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write content for our website, but this is my first book. I've never written anything of this length. So in a way it started with the structure. It started with this idea that we would play to what we perceived as our respective strengths in terms of writing.

We absolutely were not each writing every third word or anything like that. It was a process of trust in different parts. I thought, James had done some research and will be better at writing that. He deferred to me on areas that he took to be my areas of expertise.

We did every interview for the book together. We went over the notes from those before they became part of the interviews for the book. And some of the book's elements are diagrammatic, so those are very easy to collaborate on.

I think we tried to be professionally, creatively constructive with each other. So it was raising an eyebrow rather than shouting at each other if we didn't agree about something.

A lot of it was down to the editing, and I don't know what your experience was like with a co-writer, but a lot of it came down to: here is something which is quite baggy. How do we, between us, make this as tight as we possibly can?

I don't mean copy editing or proofreading. I mean the actual sort of, how do we get this into a pithy, usable, practical but discursive book? We didn't ever set out for this to be a pure reference book at all. We wanted to take a snapshot of what was going on.

So a lot of it was genuinely trying to do some research and get people to feed into what was going on from lots of different perspectives, which is why we wanted to get mainstream traditional publishers, we wanted to get agents, we wanted to get indie writers, we wanted to get people who have all sorts of experiences and perspectives.

That's what makes it what it is, which is, here's what we think are some of the interesting discussion points of what's going on now.

Jo: It is a fantastic snapshot. I think it's really interesting—and obviously you also have seen my book, Successful Self-Publishing, which is on its fourth edition—this is one of the difficult things with snapshot type books. So have you already thought about that?

I know this one has just come out, but have you thought, “Oh no, in five years we have to do it again”?

John: Well, I think we thought we're going to have to address AI, which we do in the book, and we really tried to caveat that with saying, look, so much may change so quickly, and here we are talking about what we know now.

We obviously tried to set the context for where we are now, and we tried as much as possible to make something which would last as long as we can.

I think what we did think was, we have tried to make it as international a perspective as possible. But at the same time, we are a London-based agency, and a lot of the views will be from people based in the UK.

So I think what I would like to explore is something that looks at potentially somewhere like the US, where I think there'll be different people that would perhaps have different perspectives on different things.

So I think we thought about potentially there being future iterations of the book, but not yet.

Jo: Not yet. This is the challenge with non-fiction, of course.

On that, I would say what you just said around the US and stuff, the successful UK authors all use the same systems as the US. So I wouldn't say that the US … I mean, we all have the US companies we all use.

I say Kobo is obviously Canadian, but I would say that we use the same ways of doing things. Obviously you might interview a different author, but …

John: That was all I meant. I meant interviewing. Because we've interviewed agents and authors and publishers and they are largely UK based. So it was the idea that maybe there are some perspectives on things rather than systemic.

Jo: Differences.

John: Yes. Just that.

Jo: So then I guess another challenge, we've kind of nodded to it so far, is marketing.

So let's talk about the challenges of getting this book out in terms of publishing and marketing.

Because you've been on the inner circle side, trying to do that for other people's books, but your own book, this is a whole nother thing. So tell us about that.

John: Well, how do you do it, Jo? I mean, honestly, I've loved some of it. I get how you become completely obsessed with your book and trying to make sure that you can get it into the hands of the people that you want to get it into the hands of.

We've got some great endorsement quotes, which was a task that, how can I say this? I would call it pride swallowing. The idea that you really try and get people to say nice things about your book and, if they don't reply, you think, “How much do I pester them? How much do I annoy them by asking them again nicely?”

And the absolute sheer unadulterated joy when they come back with something positive that you can use and utilise in some way. So that whole process of waiting for feedback, I suppose, and hoping that people are going to like what you've done and help you spread the word for it.

We had a launch event, we've given books away. We've published the book as ebook and POD. I think one of the great things about that is it's enabled us to be completely adaptable and make changes right up until the last minute.

That drove everybody in my team completely crazy because we were making changes up until the last minute. So, is the book definitely going to be available on publication date? What's it going to do? You know, all of that kind of stuff.

Also, just getting this idea that I suppose you can never stop. Is that a very obvious thing to say to a writer? It probably is. You just can't stop, because if you go, “Right, well, I've done it,” complacency is the enemy.

Just as soon as you've got that quote, or someone said that they're going to give you an opportunity to talk about it on a platform, it's just another day and you've got to keep thinking about how you can spread the word and tell people that it exists.

Jo: Yes, well, I think that's right, and particularly non-fiction, which unless it's very timely and you must get it out right now. But other than that—

Most books you just have to keep marketing for years.

Then just as you say, when do you stop? Well, you kind of never stop unless you want to, unless you want to retire and just give up, basically.

Dean Wesley Smith, who's a big writer in the US and a kind of a mentor of mine in past years, he talks about it as this massive sea of books. And when a book arrives, he pictures it coming down and landing on the water. So the day you launch, it's landed on the water, and then it begins to sink.

Then there are all these other books coming down. It's like this rain of books, and your book is sinking as soon as it lands. And your job is to keep it afloat somehow.

John: Keep it afloat.

Jo: Yes.

John: I think you're right, and it's such an interesting perspective for us, who work with a lot of people who have one book. You know, they've spent 10 years writing it. It's their life story. It's their memoir. It's their self-help book. It's their book that accompanies them on their speaking journey, or whatever.

Then there are the people who are writing constantly and can't stop writing because they're exercising that creative muscle all the time and wanting to get better, and wanting to improve and learn and understand why this works and why that hasn't worked.

Just getting a glimpse into what it must be like for that person for whom writing is not a hobby. I kept saying to myself, “This is not something you're doing as a hobby.”

I want this book to be of value to people, and if I'm investing that time and effort into something that I want to get out there, you've got to commit to whatever it is you need to do to make sure you're not sinking.

Jo: Yes.

John: I will now not be able to get that image out of my head.

Jo: Yes. I know there's people listening who don't have a mind's eye, which I always find fascinating, but for those of us with a mind's eye, you can now picture that and you will never forget it.

The other thing, I guess, is that, having done a lot, over 40 books now, the inevitable thing is you cannot keep pushing all of those books back up to the surface.

So when you do get the bug as such of writing, the most interesting thing for all of us is always the next book. It's always like, ooh, the next thing I'm doing, I'm very excited about. So you do have to pick your battles on marketing.

So have you got the bug, do you think? Are you thinking of other books in general?

Because as you said, you must be, I guess, in your 60s.

John: I am.

Jo: You could retire.

John: I am. You were talking about that long career. I could. I mean, I really love doing it, and I would love to do more.

I think one of the things that surprised me was just how many ideas came up while we were doing the book about tangents that one could take it.

I have no desire to write a novel. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't be very good at that.

I do think there are some interesting spaces around where there's a kind of intersection of creativity and learning, and how you can develop books that would help people who are trying to achieve different things in different sectors of publishing.

So without getting too granular about it, this book doesn't really address brands who want to become publishers, and I think that is something that our business has developed into working with, not just individuals, but businesses and brands.

I think there's definitely spin-offs of this book which are not about repeating what we've done so far. And this whole idea of what you've been doing for a long time, what we've been doing since 2011, 2012, it's evolving now at such a speed.

I mean, who would have known what was going to come out of TikTok? As you talk about TikTok to Shopify, that whole kind of new ways of finding readers, of taking books to market. As you said, Kickstarter, crowdfunding.

There's all sorts of things that I think will emerge, because in a funny sort of way traditional publishing at the moment feels quite conservative with a small c.

I mean, the bestsellers. Dan Brown is number one in the bestseller list this week in the UK as I speak, who has been a bestseller forever. And obviously new writers come along the whole time, but the market feels a little bit as if it's waiting now for innovation.

I think if that innovation's going to happen, it's probably going to happen in the indie space before it happens in mainstream publishing. So people are coming to us and thinking, does that represent a trend?

Does that represent something which could be a way of looking at something a little bit deeper, doing some research around and creating something which is not a long book, not a massive thesis, but something which is indicative of something which could be useful for people.

Jo: Just coming back on the Dan Brown is in the bestseller list.

I think this is completely to do with the way that traditional publishing measures things.

For many years, more than a decade, probably since the beginning of Kindle, certainly the beginning of Kindle Unlimited, there is a shadow economy, I call it, or a parallel economy.

I would say that almost zero of my own personal sales are measured by any industry standards. Anyone who makes any money from Kindle Unlimited or Kickstarter or Shopify, or selling direct in any form, or selling books at conventions, none of this is measured by any traditional things.

As you know, the New York Times list, for example, does not include Amazon sales in their bestseller list.

So you've got indie authors in the UK who are incredibly successful who have to decide, say, someone like LJ Ross, for example, decides, “Okay, I'm going to set up a proper imprint with Gardners or whatever so that I can get in bookstores so that I can hit a Sunday Times list or something.”

So I would say that seeing things like Dan Brown on a bestseller list has almost no meaning in the shadow indie economy.

John: No, you're absolutely right. We're not even able to see audiobook sales.

Jo: Yes, audio. Any kind of borrows, like Spotify.

John: No, you're completely right. I suppose I was making a broader cultural point, that it doesn't feel like there's an enormous amount of innovation going on or risk taking within what I would call mainstream trade publishing.

And there doesn't seem to be the need to be, because there will be more consolidation. Small companies will be bought by big companies, so there's growth through acquisition.

There's still a hope that something will take off that is a surprise, and there's still an enormous reliance on established brands who, even through the traditional metrics of how you measure them, are probably selling less, but still at the top of the pile. I suppose that's what I was meaning.

Jo: Yes, and I agree with what the industry looks at as signals. It's just, as we said, a lot of these signals are invisible.

So coming onto innovation, at London Book Fair this year there were a lot of sessions on AI, and you mentioned AI briefly, and there is a chapter in Going Indie on generative AI. And of course there's a lot of negativity and drama and lawsuits and this, that and the other.

But at the same time, at London Book Fair, a lot of traditional publishers talking about using it, and of course they always say, “Oh, we use AI only in marketing and business, not with the creative or editorial.” Everyone makes this distinction.

What are your thoughts on what's happening and where's it going with AI? Is a lot of this stuff not happening in public and just going on behind closed doors?

John: I think so. We do have a chapter in the book on AI. We've generated summaries of every chapter using AI, which we explicitly said in the book as well. We've got our Ten Commandments of what we think are useful guidelines.

I think that there has to be an enormous amount being done, whether it's experimentation or speeding up for efficiency's sake, or things that slow you down, within mainstream publishing.

There has to be more than just the guardrails around the creative process. And clearly when we're talking about metadata, book description, cover copy, presumably royalty calculations, presumably if you're trying to grow your newsletters. There has to be an enormous amount of activity going on.

We're driven by the market, so we do not commission. Writers come to us and they either want to work with us and we want to work with them, or that doesn't happen. So we're in a sense seeing what the market is seeing, and that is a whole range of things.

As I've said before, there's a lot of sweeping generalisations out there, which if you look back to that Kindle moment, we were talking a little while ago about what was going on in 2010/2011, about the enormous broad brush strokes that were being perceived as a result of Kindle.

Kindle has affected some areas of publishing, it's affected some not at all.

I think it will be absolutely fascinating when the sweeping generalisations stop and there becomes, I suppose, even more transparency. The thing that people are looking for, isn't it? A little bit less opaqueness as to what is really being done.

Because everybody's being so careful about what they say they're doing and what they're not doing. I suppose ElevenLabs is the one where people are openly engaging on the audio side. I mean, everyone is being so careful and cautious.

Jo: Me too.

John: What do you think? We spoke a bit about AI within the book, and I'm interested to know what you think.

Jo: Well, I've obviously been openly talking about it since 2016. I openly talk about using it, and I've got my Patreon community where we talk about how we're using it, and tips on how to use it.

But then, because I have been writing and publishing since 2007, 2008, I'm very strong in my creative voice. I'm very strong in my understanding of what I consider to be my level of output, and what I publish under my own name is what I publish under my own name.

John: Totally.

Jo: So the problem is for people who are less confident, I think, in what they're doing creatively perhaps. I know some people feel like they're scared it will take over or something.

When you're as strong-minded as me, it's not taking over anything.

John: It's not going to take over anything. And the other side of the coin is how many people are finding Whitefox using ChatGPT.

Jo: Mm.

John: I'm thrilled that we are emerging, through very detailed briefing of AI, as something that is worth engaging with.

Jo: Positive marketing.

John: Yes, exactly. As you say, I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think it will settle down eventually. I think less hysteria.

Jo: Yes, hopefully sooner rather than later.

So as we come to an end, you've been in the publishing industry a long time and seen a lot of people who have disappeared, but also those who've lasted. I wondered if maybe you could comment on those who last, because I definitely feel like I'm in my 50s now, and I want to keep doing this. I'm pretty obsessed with—

What are the hallmarks of people who have a long-term career?

So reflections on that.

John: Oh, that's such a good question. I think there's some common characteristics and themes. So I think authenticity, I think this idea of being continually curious.

I think there are people who can't help but create, and this idea that once you've sort of expelled once, that's enough. I think there's people that just can't stop creating, whatever you do with it. But this idea that the more you do, the better you get, the more you evolve and keep an open mind.

I think there's definitely entrepreneurial writers who love this idea of keeping their readers engaged, and how that conversation is something that evolves and that collaboration evolves, is fascinating. I think if you love that, and you listen, there's always an opportunity to keep building on what you do.

I love the writers who we work with. I can think of a writer who we're working on his fourth novel at the moment, and he is a bundle of positivity. No matter the trials and tribulations, the things that have gone wrong, his expectations definitely not being met with his first book.

He definitely has this idea that he wants to keep writing, he wants to get better, and he is getting better. It isn't a journey that has a beginning and an end. It's something that will continue for as long as he wants to write.

Every single book that he has published, he has learned and gained confidence, gained a network of connections that he's utilised himself now to not make the first half a dozen mistakes he made on the first book.

Who knows where it will end up? But certainly the satisfaction he's getting, and the sales he's getting, are growing as he becomes savvier and quicker to make the right choices and decisions.

So I think that's my honest answer to that. I think there are definitely people who think, “Phew, I have really wanted to do this book. Now I can rest easy. I've done my book.”

Then there are people who really, whatever their objective, whatever the definition of success is from the get-go, just can't help creating. I do love that and respect that.

I don't think our book falls quite into that category, because I think it's a slightly different thing. I think there are people who are still making a success of what they do and redefining that as they go on, and who are really open to ideas and input from different people and are not closed off. I love working with those people.

Jo: So where can people find Going Indie and everything you do online?

John: Well, Going Indie is available online at all good bookshops. It's available at Amazon and anywhere you buy books online as ebook and POD. Our website is wearewhitefox.com, and you'll find information about not just our book there, but a lot of other things that we're doing on that site.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, John. That was great.

John: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure.

The post Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond first appeared on The Creative Penn.