This week, Crys and JP discuss the new format of their upcoming season and what they are hoping to get out of it for their listeners and for themselves.
Show Notes
Transcript
JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 113 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is October 7th, 2022 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my co-host…
Crys: Crys Cain. And as you said the date, I just realized I literally have eight days to make my kids Halloween costume. So that’s going on my to-do list.
Crys: Because I’m extra and I don’t buy anything off the rack. I did last year, we were in New Orleans, and I didn’t actually do it, my friend did. She like scraped the empty shelves of the New Orleans Walmart for the last remaining costume things, which is how the kid became a pirate and I became a cat.
JP: This is amazing and I love it. How has your writing week been, other than realizing that you now have a deadline?
Crys: Yes. I have a deadline. I have eight days — seven– like it’s been creeping on my mind, like you gotta do this. But I have been focusing on work, and I actually had a pretty good work week. I was catching up from basically three weeks, I think I mentioned last week, of not doing things.
I don’t really remember what I did the first few days. I know I did stuff, but I think it was a lot of admin, and catching up, and like making sure communications were back in line. But the last few days have been more writing focused. I have been handwriting the fantasy because my brain looks at the computer and goes, ew. And I was like you gotta write anyways.
So I printed out the three chapters I had, handwrote the first chapter into the book to get me back into the notebook and to get me back in the flow, then started writing on chapter four. And my goal is to write four pages a day, which is about 800 words. I managed two pages and then three pages, so we’re moving up to that four page.
And also, one of the things I was supposed to do the weekend that I got sick was write the extra scenes for the romance book that didn’t make it into the actual book because of time. And so I started that yesterday.
I took myself to coffee shops the last two days, which has been more productive for me. Even though I thought that having the house to myself — my friend who lives me, she’s off traveling — and I thought that having the house to myself would be super productive, and it is for home stuff, but it’s the same fight I have with my brain about work stuff.
And I used to go out to my favorite coffee shop all the time. It was literally like at the end of my road. And the problem I have here in San Jose area, in the Costa Rica area, is not a lot of places are early morning open. Like anything before 10 is considered like early morning for coffee.
Um, so like you have little restaurants, but they’re like little eating restaurants, like family restaurants. Like people don’t really go there to work. So I could go to the one right next door to be, but one, it’s too close to home, so I still feel the house looming Literally, like my house looks over their parking lot. So I need to go a little bit further away to get the mindset and that really helped.
So yesterday I wrote the first of the scenes that I needed to send out to my newsletter. And I just immediately plopped it in the newsletter, told them like, hey, this is unedited, but I wanna email them to you as I write them, and then I will bundle them up nicely. And they’ll probably get put into the book at a later date, but I wanna get them to you as quickly as I can. Also, it just gives me more chances to email my group and have them respond happily. That’s a win, right? So that’s what I did.
How about you?
JP: I traveled for the day job, and I was in Eastern time zone. And you know how I normally write at 5:30 in the morning? That’s 4: 30 in the morning Eastern. Or is it the backwards way?
Crys: It would be 6:30. Yeah.
JP: You’re right, it would be 6:30. I don’t know what happened. But regardless, I was just exhausted the whole time I was there. So I instead was focusing on editing for the Vella series. I’m almost done editing the six episodes. I have the seventh episode looming over me to write. But travel for work, I don’t know, like I’ve accepted the fact that sometimes it just doesn’t work out, and that’s okay. It sucks, but at the same time, I got something done.
I also, you know how — I don’t know if this was ever recorded or if we just complained about it off — but you know how I have this thing about writing on an airplane because I can’t. I opened Google Docs on my phone and I was able to edit on my phone, which was okay. I was okay doing that.
Crys: The short version of that conversation for folks if we did not have it on air, is that JP is really anxious about writing something that might be like, you know, not blah, and someone reading it over his shoulder. While I will write full on lurid sex scenes on purpose because if someone looks over it’s their own damn fault.
JP: Yeah. It can be anything, honestly. I just cannot write with someone with the knowledge that someone could see the screen. It’s just some weird barrier. But I was like, Screw it, it’s on a phone. So I don’t know what that was about, but it worked.
Crys: Yeah, I can’t dictate out loud for that reason. If there’s anyone who could possibly hear me, I can’t do it. But writing on a screen where no one should be watching me, and if they’re watching, they’re just being creepers. Like I’m totally a creeper, I’m not saying that is anything against laptop screen creepers, I am one. But then it’s their fault, not mine.
JP: That’s fair, very fair. So yeah, it wasn’t a wash of a week, but I really wanted to get more scenes done than I did.
Crys: I also wanna say that right before we recorded, I harassed JP. Because for this Vella, I have not seen anything other than the pre-work for it. Like, Here’s the Pixar pitch, here’s the blurb. And I was like, okay, that’s fine. but then one of our friends in the mastermind group were in with the Author Life community was like, oh, I’ve read some, it’s good. And I didn’t call him out in front of everybody, but right before we recorded, I was like, AHEM. He was like, oh, I said, I was gonna send it to you, I’ll send it. I think he already did. I just haven’t checked my email
JP: It’s sent, I sent five of the six edited, because the six ones almost edited.
Crys: Excellent. All right, so this week we are going to talk about our new upcoming season format, and what it’s gonna look like, and what we are hoping to get out of it for both ourselves and you.
So we are focusing on marketing, and one of the reasons this came up is, one, JP’s just launched and so he’s in the midst of learning the marketing in real time. I, you know, lost my coworker earlier the year. She did so much of the marketing, so I’m having to revamp my marketing for romance.
And as I prepare to launch fantasy, whenever that happens because I don’t know if I’m gonna be a good girl and stock things up or what. Probably not, my impatience gets ahead of me. But I am hoping to attempt to get ahead of my impatience and get a different plan in place for the fantasy because it’s a very different market than the romance, I’ve been writing.
So those are like my personal plans or personal hopes for this season, is to have this chance to restructure how I do things for the romance and pre structure how I want to do things for the fantasy. How about you?
JP: Structure. So really big thing is structure. And I really wanna approach this from the mindset of someone with a day job, because I do have one, but trying to figure out what’s the most ideal and or effective way to market while in the midst of a day job and writing. So most effective things, least effort things, those are the things that I’m really looking for.
Newsletters are not something I’m consistent with. However, I know that like for the podcast every week, I generally make the same thing in Canva and usually release it on the same day. So getting myself into some type of like, what’s the thing I can do every week? What’s the thing I can do every other week that kind of pushes the marketing forward with the least amount of sit down and write kind of things? If that makes sense.
Crys: Yes, that is very much how I thrive with my marketing. what I didn’t do this last time for my release, what I normally do because I really like consistency and having a system, if I don’t do it ahead of time, then it all falls apart if I have to do things last minute, is I like scheduling things ahead.
I like making things ahead, where it feels like it’s not important because the timeframe, it doesn’t matter. And then I schedule it and then I literally can forget about everything. Like I’m at the point where I will realize at like 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning after I’ve done like a full days of work, that it’s a release day and I forgot because I prescheduled everything. I didn’t have to be present for my release.
I didn’t do that with this last one, for chaos reasons, and I think it definitely shows. But other issue with this release has been that this is the first one without my co-writer, and without access to her list and like her connections. So that has also affected it.
So it’s really hard to tell like how much it is, like I fell off the bandwagon. How much of it is this is just new pattern and what I have to work with moving forward.
For our listeners, I think a lot of people who listen to us are like us, in that they are not marketing gurus, they don’t get excited about marketing, but we know we have to do it.
So I think my goal for the next, it’ll probably be around about four months based on number of topics that we’ve written down. It might go a little longer or shorter depending on how many people we’re able to bring in to talk to us about their expertise, but we’re gonna try and group topics together.
Next week it will still just be JP and I, and we will be talking about specifically writing with an eye toward marketing. And so this is a little bit of the write to market talk, but not so much that as what is super helpful to keep in mind that will make your marketing life easier if you are thinking about it while you’re writing. So we’ll talk about that next week. We’ll have some tips and tricks about that because it’s something that I’ve tried to do, not succeeded. I could easily just go off on that topic now and I won’t.
My goal for everyone listening is that you can also build a system that works for you and doesn’t drain you. There might be like small tasks that you’re like, this is terrible and drain you, and you have to do them until you make enough money to hire somebody to do them. But right now I’m doing all of my own marketing. I don’t have anybody hired out to do anything, though I might do one thing, I can talk about that another time. It was something my co-writer used to do for our back list, and I just realized that’s gone and by the wayside. Any who, that is where we are.
I know that a lot of folks are like, I’m not ready for marketing yet. That’s totally fine. There are gonna be some episodes that I think will be quite useful for you, even if you feel like you’re not at the marketing stage yet. In particular, our next episode about writing with an eye toward your marketing. so feel free to pick and choose as we go through the next few months. And we’re so happy you’re here, and we will talk to you again next week.
JP: Yeah, talk to you later. Goodbye
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