Episode 35: How do I set up for success with self publishing?

In this weeks episode, Crys and JP talk all about setting yourself up for success with self publishing. They discuss how to connect with other authors, successfully use social media, and the importance of mailing lists.

Show Notes

Episode 27: How Do I Build an Audience?

The Author Success Mastermind Podcast

Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque

Transcript

JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 35 of the Write Away Podcast and it is the 18th of March, 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: Hello. How was your week?

Crys: It was good. I had my yearly crisis this morning of “when the fuck is my sister’s birthday?” Because you would think that after 20- some years of life, I would know whether it is the 18th of March or the 19th of March, but every year I will know up until the 18th, and then I’ll freak out that I have it wrong. That it’s actually the 18th. Is St. Patty’s Day always the 18th?

JP: 17th I think.

Crys: Yes, it’s not today. It was yesterday. All right. So I should just know that there’s one day between St. Patty’s Day and her birthday, I’ll be good. And then I also know that my best friend’s birthday is the same day as my sister’s birthday, so I just have everybody all lined up. Boom, boom, boom. Take care of it.

JP: You could just put those in a Google calendar.

Crys: I know! I went to my Google calendar to look for her birthday to confirm and I don’t have her in my calendar, apparently. And even after looking at Facebook to confirm her birthday, I did not yet put it in my calendar. So I’ll do that after this call.

JP: I definitely… one year I felt bad because I was like, I don’t remember anyone’s birthday. And then I realized, oh, I don’t have to remember anyone’s birthday. I just put it in Google and it can remember.

Crys: I’ve been really good about putting everybody’s birthdays in this year and putting it on like the recurring everything. As soon as I learn someone’s birthday, it goes in my calendar, just on the off chance that I’m feeling generous and want to buy them a present.

JP: That’s fair.

Crys: Yeah. I like buying presents.

JP: Yes.

Crys: AKA having excuses to give people things that I find and be like, “Oh my gosh, this would be perfect for so-and-so!” But it’d be really weird if I just gave them a present out of the blue and then I will hold it for eight months until it is the right time.

JP: I’ve held onto things for several years, so yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Crys: Anyways, writing. I have not done excellently on my write 1000 every day, but I’ve done it some days. I dunno, it was a weird week. I don’t know where the week went. I’ve been angsting over our tarot stories and reading Sacha Black’s villain book.

And I think you and I are both struggling with writing a villain as a protagonist.

JP: 100%.

Crys: I am not normally a person who enjoys pain. Like personal pain, other people’s pain is fine. My personal pain, not so much fun. But this I am enjoying and I don’t know what that says about me.

JP: I’m in the same boat. I’m really excited to write this. It’s taking longer than it should, but I think that it’s like a fun realization that what I thought I had on my villains may not have been enough, because now I’m realizing when I put them in the spotlight, there’s so much more that needed fleshed out and I’m like, “Oh, this is fun.”

Crys: Yeah. It’s easy to write an antagonist. I have no problem writing an antagonist. I mean, we’ve had definitions of what makes a villain a villain, and getting way too philosophical, but that’s what writers do; about what is evil levels of angst here. Which is not what I was looking at when were going to do the episode on using tarot to write a story, JP.

JP: I know!

Crys: Questioning the meaning of life!

JP: But I think needless to say, obviously this episode, suggests that we are not having a tarot episode.

And I think that it’s just, it will come when it is ready. Which may be next week, may not be, but it will come.

Crys: Yes, we are moving forward on the story. We’re just making it hard on ourselves. And that’s fine. Other than angsting about evil, how has your writing week been, JP?

JP: Good. Just on the revising train, like the last couple of weeks. It’s been picking up momentum, like I said, which is great. I also got a standing elliptical, which sounds like a normal person elliptical, except it’s not. It’s tiny and it fits under your desk. And it’s the same thing that people use when they sit and they want to do the little bicycling, but this one you can also stand on. And since I’ve had it, I’ve gone 10,000 steps a day. Which is way more than I have been while working at home and not moving. So highly recommend 10 out of 10.

Crys: Do you bounce like a Muppet? Is that what you look like if you’re standing on it and at your desk? Do you just like… muppeting?

JP: Yeah. I mean, you can’t write while doing it, but I have the day job and I’m right here in my attic. And so when I have like meetings where I just have to listen, then I’m just jogging. They don’t know. I’m on mute.

Crys: Excellent. You said we had a comment this week?

JP: Yes, we did. It was from episode 32: Surviving Versus Thriving from Ran. She just wanted to say thanks for doing the episode, great reminder. And that she compartmentalizes her day job and her writer life so much that she forgets that one influences the other. And then was completely doing the what’s wrong with me track cause she was low on motivation. So it was just a nice thank you for the episode.

Crys: I sometimes compartmentalize like that where I’m– actually, I do that a lot– where I’m like, why am I so exhausted?

But I just also, I just forget anything that isn’t happening in the moment. The other day I did 15 lunges on either leg because I haven’t been moving enough. And so I was like I’m just going to do this tiny exercise just to be like, hey, I did a movement today. And then all day yesterday, I was wondering why my butt muscles hurt.

Cause I’m an out of shape bitch. It’s just another example of not realizing how many things are just so connected in our lives.

JP: Yeah.

Crys: Influencing each other.

JP: Yeah. We’re unfortunately we’re not robots.

Crys: I rail against this fact all the time. All the time.

JP: Well, I’m sorry.

Crys: I just want to be able to plug in and recharge. I’m here for the cyborg upgrade.

JP: Switch task queries, you know, whatever. That’s not going to happen. I’m sorry. It is a good reminder just for everyone that everything you do influences one another, regardless of if you want it to or not. So just be mindful of that and move on or don’t move on and talk about it.

Crys: I would just yell about it like I do.

So what is our topic for this week, JP?

JP: Are you ready? Let’s talk about how to get started self publishing and how we can set ourselves up for success.

Crys: Okay. So number one, of course, is write your book. That’s where we always start. There’s honestly, no sense getting started on anything else in your writer journey until you have at least a rough draft, you have to prove to yourself that you can finish a book first.

We’re going to assume that most of the people listening have done that, or at least are on the path to completing that.

Other things… the second thing I tell anybody is to start your mailing list, which we have covered a little bit in a previous episode. We’ll link to that below.

JP: A number one for me would be finding a community. Because yes, the book is number one, but this is like number one A. I feel like I made so much more progression once I actually joined a community, and I don’t mean listening to a handful of podcasts.

I think it was 2019 when I went to RockApoc, I met a core group of authors, joined the Slack group, was able to communicate back and forth. Back in 2010, I was listening to podcasts and it took like nine years and I wasn’t really going any direction. But once I found that core author community and began to expand it, that’s just like when madness ensued.

So I definitely think that that should be like high on the priority list.

Crys: I will 1000% agree with this. I have never been able to maintain a writing practice when I haven’t actively had writing friends in my life. When I was in college, besides the fact that college just drains you of creativity, none of the people that I was close friends with were fiction writers.

When I moved to Nashville, I joined a… what is the website? It’s one of the meetup website groups… for a writers group. And I attended that for 2-3 years, I think. Maybe the whole four years I was in Nashville. And that got me writing more than anything else.

Then I moved to Costa Rica. Didn’t have my writing group. Didn’t write a lot for years.

And now we’re both members of The Author Success Mastermind.

I forgot to mention in things that have happened in the last couple of weeks–J Thorn and I have started a podcast for The Author Success Mastermind. We will link that in the show notes. So if you just can’t get enough of my delightful rambliness, you can get more there.

It isn’t even that there’s any kind of formal accountability, which all the groups I’ve had have had that option. People will willingly be a formal accountability system with you. But just hearing what other writers are doing, it energizes me. When we talk about craft, it energizes me. It sparks ideas in my head in ways that I just don’t get talking to non-writers.

JP: Yeah. And I’ve been able to find services through the community. I’ll talk with people, ask them who they use for cover design. And even though that may lead to either a cheaper cover, or it may lead to a cover that you really, really enjoy.

But I feel like if I had done it on my own, I may not have found what I was looking for because I’m doing it by myself. So you have this collective mind group mindset? Mind group, whatever you want to call it. And then it was the same with editing services too. I just kinda like reached out to the author community, asked who they used and then figured it out from there.

But I think having that community builds a better network and it helps build the foundation for your writing career.

Crys: This is something, and you’re honestly probably not the right person to ask about this because I think we’re similar in this and so you won’t give me a different answer than I give, but where do you feel like craft learning fits in and what kind of craft learning fits in when you’re starting out?

JP: So I excelled most with craft learning when I was in a group. So the first thing was RockApoc. When we world built I was able to figure out from that portion of it, what was important and what wasn’t to a story. But that was very broad band. And then we used a framework. It was Story Levels at the time, but it’s Three Story Method now.

That’s J Thorn’s and Zach Bohannon’s method for crafting a book. And then also just learning craft, I worked really well with the whole scene analysis stuff that we’ve been doing in the Platinum group for Author Success Mastermind. That kind of framework just helps me with repetition.

Crys: But you are the kind of person who needs a class or wants a class or a framework. You don’t just throw yourself at the thing and do the thing and never read anything about doing the thing?

That was a lot of words.

JP: I do love reading books on craft, a hundred percent. I do that as well.

But I think that I learned the most when what I am doing is being critiqued or when I am watching what other people have done is being critiqued. It’s those like real world examples that really drive home like the direction I want to go.

Crys: Interesting. Yeah, you actually did end up being a fun person to talk to you about this because I am a little bit different in that I want the book learning first. I want to be able to process through it on my own before I have to engage with other humans on it.

If I’m in a class, one-on-one, particularly something that’s very time limited, like you’re in a weekend or a week long class and you don’t have time to digest, then I feel like I don’t comprehend well and I do poorly, like I need the learning portion before I have the practice portion. But they need to go back and forth pretty regularly.

My co-writer never reads craft books, ever. Does not do classes. And how she learns is she writes, and then she listens to the reader responses and she listens to her editors.

I think she has done some sessions at conferences. But for the most part, I think she goes there for business elements and not craft elements. She’s a different kind of learner entirely.

So to people who are starting out, one of the things I would say is simply be aware of how you learn best and don’t force yourself to try and learn other ways.

Focus on the work first, and when you get to a place where you feel like you need to level up with the work, then know how you learn best and seek that way out. So if you are a hundred percent experiential learner, like my co-writer, you’re going to want to seek out an editor. And paying an editor, a really good editor, for a really in depth response is probably going to be extremely worth it to you.

It’s worth it for everyone, but you more than anyone else, because you aren’t as maybe self-analytical and that’s not something you enjoy. Then your editor’s going to be one of the strongest elements of your toolbox.

JP: Yeah.

We went with a dev editor, because with it being like our first in series, that would be my first full novel. We wanted to make sure that every piece fit together. It was really nice going through the dev editor, which happened to be J cause we use the same framework.

I’ve learned off of Story Levels and Three Story Method. And then I brought in these other methods, but it’s this language that him and I can share. And so as we’re going through the edits, I can see where, what he saw and I can see what the things that I missed. And it’s almost like obvious things that click together.

So definitely having that other set of eyes on it. It’s fantastic

Crys: So much of it is really mental.

I think that you need to expect your first book to sell zero copies. And that is not a reflection on you. That is not a reflection on the quality of your work, on the quality of your cover.

Set yourself up for success. Expect nothing but prepare for success.

When I released my first book, and I think we’ve talked about this before, I did everything wrong because I didn’t expect it to sell, and it unexpectedly did. So a few of the things that you do need to have in place, you need to have your mailing list in place. You need to have that in the back of your book.

You probably want at least a basic website. I really recommend having a paid for website. And that doesn’t mean you have to spend hundreds of dollars on having someone create you a website. I just mean having someone install WordPress on a server that you pay a fee for versus going to WordPress.com and using a free WordPress or any of the other website options. Is Blogspot even a thing still? Probably.

I don’t recommend doing those, but if that’s where you have to start, if you don’t have any money and you just need a place to tell people like, “Hey, here’s a list of my books.” Those are fine. You can always upgrade later.

JP: What you said reminded me, Joanna Penn has on her website thecreativepenn.com, if you go to thecreativepenn.com/author website, she has a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up your author website. I believe she uses the Author Pro Theme which I use as well. It’s really nice, really easy.

All right. So pricing.

Say you’re a first time author. How do you know what to sell your book for? Do you aim low? And what’s the risk of valuing your product at a low end of the scale?

Crys: This is genre and platform dependent. If you are in KU as a contemporary romance author, in heterosexual romance, I know that at least a couple of years ago, if you weren’t pricing at 99 cents, no matter how long your book was, you just weren’t going to get attention because everyone was pricing at 99 cents. So you pretty much had to.

If you were wide, you had far more leeway because the wide platforms tend to support a higher price.

I think it’s fine to start out a little lower on the normal scale. In my genre, $2.99 was like the standard if you weren’t doing 99 cent releases. People would do like 99 cent releases and then they’d pop it up to $2.99.

I refused to do 99 cents because you get a much lower percentage from Amazon. So I started at $2.99 with novellas and all my books were under 40k at this point. Or maybe just a little bit over 40k. So these aren’t long books. Once I established myself, I raised my novellas to $3.99 and then novels got $4.99 to $5.99.

So it is a genre issue. Look and see what is the normal price for your genre for books like yours, where you are selling your book. Just don’t stress out too much about this because you can change it. And here’s another mindset thing, accept that you’re gonna fuck up and that’s okay. Because at this point in time, it’s probably not going to cost you thousands of dollars.

It’s probably going to cost $20 of sales. So that’s not a big, huge deal. So accept that you’re going to fuck up. Experiment. I believe really strongly for myself to not price 99 cents, but I have friends who feel very differently and that is going to be a you question. There is no wrong answer.

JP: Cool. No, that’s really helpful.

Yeah I know that we are still on the fence as to what we want to price it, but it’s also because that’s not where we’re at yet. So it’s just pie in the sky dreams, but yeah, look at what else sells in the genre and basically aim for the average or lower.

Crys: Yeah. With you, particularly, you guys are planning on releasing three books fairly quickly?

JP: Yep.

Crys: And I would probably not lower your first book to any kind of sale price until book three is out. And then go at it. Lower to 99 cents. Throw sales at it. Try to get BookBubs. If you have it at $2.99 or higher to start with, then the sales email lists will be more likely to pick you up and share you because it’s on discount.

JP: Nice.

Crys: Cover designs. This one is probably the trickiest for a new author, because you do want something that fits in your genre and isn’t going to screw you over. You don’t want to just go with Canva necessarily. Some people do great things in Canva.

But you also don’t want to spend $600 because, especially on your first book, you don’t actually know what the market wants. You think you know, but 9 times out of 10, you’re going to be wrong. And you don’t want to waste $600 on something that earns you $50 over three years. Worst case scenario is your book never earns anything, but I’m going to assume that your family is going to at least buy your book and you’re going to earn $50.

JP: I think definitely if you don’t have advice as to like who to go with for cover design, then like 99 Designs is perfect for you or Reedsy or Fiverr. But I guess like the most important thing for me when I was, when we were looking at it, was back catalog of the designer.

Luckily we got a recommendation for someone and they fit. They hit every mark that we were looking for. But I think that the most important thing is to get a back catalog of someone, or use something like 99 Designs where you can get multiple people to throw out ideas at you.

Do your research in your genre, look at what the covers look like on Amazon, and see if the cover you’re being given looks the same.

Crys: Facebook groups for cover designers can be really helpful, especially in finding premades. The problem for most of us who are writing is we’re following the advice to write series, and it can be more difficult to find premades that are in series, but you can always contact the cover designer and say, “Hey, would you be willing to make this cover a series if I write more books in this series?” and a lot of times you can get a fairly decent cover between $50 and $100 that matches your genre.

I think we should talk about social media just a little bit, because one of the things that is thrown at us when we’re new authors is you need to build a platform. You need to build a platform. You need to build the platform. And this is really hard for a lot of us.

If you enjoy social media, and you know how to do it, and by do it, I mean engage with people, particularly people you don’t actually know, then by all means set yourself a time of day or week that you do your social media thing. You can start out just by being a fan in Facebook groups for your genre or on Instagram or on TikTok, whatever it is that’s your jam.

You can talk about your writing process. You can share like what your plans are. I know some people who have built up giant fandoms before they’ve released a word, just because they’re one of those people who just knows how to share their behind the scenes process, and not let that process of sharing fuck up the process of writing, and connect with people without feeling super awkward about it.

I am not one of those people. And that is okay. You don’t have to build a platform before you launch. Is it advantageous? Of course, but it’s not a necessity. The necessity is to write the books. Everything else comes after.

JP: When it comes to social media this is the one and only time that you’re okay to be a creeper; creep on the people that are doing well as authors on social media. Follow them, look at what they do. See what kind of voice they have on that social media and see if you can mimic it in your own voice.

Let’s say that we have one author that really likes to show off all the wineries she goes to or something along those lines. You don’t drink wine, that doesn’t make any sense to you, but you can see that what she does is she uses her hobby of drinking, this is probably going down a bad route, but you can see that’s what she’s using to bring people in, to see a facet of her life.

And you can do something else. Maybe you do woodworking, maybe you do painting, but you can put that stuff on your social media and that kind of lets people see you as for who you are. Not an alcoholic.

When would you use your personal network? So your friends and family that they may not be like followers of you as an author, but they’re just your friends and family. Do you bring them into your social media? Do you keep them away for a while?

Crys: Again, it’ll be unique to you as an author.

If you’re going into KU and the Amazon algorithm is going to be extremely important to your success, then I recommend trying to keep some distance between your author persona and your real life persona, even if you’re using your real name for writing, for a little bit so that the algorithm can pick up your actual readers and try and get some organic delivery of your book to readers who do want your book.

I am one of those people who, because I’ve been writing under a pen name for so long, my identities have been completely separate for years now. And now that I am starting to create stuff under my own name, I trained myself to stop using Facebook as myself. So I always forget to share anything that I do, even though my community would be really interested in following along. My friends and family would be really interested in following along and knowing what I’m up to.

I’ve just fallen out of practice. If they want to go follow me on TikTok, great. Because that’s about the only place that I’m active. But I don’t cross post to Facebook. I don’t share things on Facebook very often.

JP: I know what I did when I took Instagram and I wanted to create the author persona, I made a whole new Instagram account. It has my name on it, has my picture on it. I’m not hiding any of that information, but I just wanted to start fresh. Because my personal Instagram account is full of like pictures of my dog and food cause I can’t stop.

And while I don’t mind if I potentially incorporate that into my future author brand, while I was still figuring out what my author brand was I wanted it to just be completely new own entity.

I’ve seen some crossover from friends and family who’ve seen it and jumped on, but that’s probably the extent that I’m going to go is like I’ll promote on there.

And if friends and family are on there, then that’s life. But I think it helped make that dichotomy to say like, this is the author. If you want to follow this person, you are going to get the author news from this person.

Crys: Yeah, I do think that’s helpful. And some people really like their work slash creative life to be very separate from their in-person life. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people like to have them really blended, nothing wrong with that either. There’s a TikToker I follow, I actually started following her because she bought a giant rubber band ball from an antique store and was cutting through it.

And then I found out she was an author. She is just hilarious. She does these sleepwalking videos because she’s a crazy sleepwalker and she’s started this little story of running into a vampire who’s been asleep for 200 years in a park and then bringing her home. And all of this has made me really interested in her as a person and as a writer, because I think she’s hilarious.

And I’m like, “Oh, I would love to read your books because I found out about you in a really random way.” And so if you’re the kind of person who does all that kind of sharing already, just keep doing it. You don’t have to stop, but you also don’t have to go make yourself do it.

JP: Yeah. I think that that was my issue is I’m very sporadic when it comes to social media.

And I know that if I want it to be a venue for people I don’t know who may be fans of something I write and almost need some type of a schedule. So I’m slowly trying to figure out what that looks like for me. I obviously can’t post once every three or four or five months because that’s not going to gain any traction, but I know at least I need to post two things a week at minimum and then grow from there.

Crys: Yeah. I am only now, four years in, starting to build a real social media strategy. And I have lucked out in that my co-writer is amazing at social media and has handled that.

I think you can succeed without social media, but it’s going to be different, and it’s going to depend on your genre.

Social media is such a Catch-22, and it’s one of those things that I will always say, if you like it, do it. I love TikTok. TikTok makes me excited. I can see ways to tell stories on TikTok. I can see ways to teach on TikTok that I just never felt comfortable doing on Facebook on Instagram.

I feel like I’ve found my currently native spot. And if you have a native social media spot, live in it, do it, like just don’t force yourself to do something that’s going to drain your energy and take away from working on the actual parts of your business and your writing that you do have energy for it.

JP: Yeah.

And one author I can immediately think of off the top of my head is Zach Bohannon. And he doesn’t have a social media account because he just doesn’t want one. And he still is very successful. He just sends out emails whenever he’s ready with a book release or whenever he’s about to announce one, just so people can pre-order, and from talking to him that works for him.

By no means, do you have to have a social media account. It is one tool that you could use if you wanted one.

Crys: I think really what we’re talking about with both social media and advertising, and most of the steps here, is just in time learning. When you need it, then start learning it. Because of course, the best time to start is 20 years ago, but the next best time is now when you’re actually ready.

I’ll emphasize over and over: the writing comes first. Especially for your first books, because you won’t have a lot of people looking at you.

Readers will want to know that you can be trusted to put out books regularly or complete a series. They want to know that you can deliver that consistently, whether that’s consistently on time or just consistently in tone and style, they want to see that. So books first, over and over and over again. Can’t emphasize that enough.

JP: Yeah. Books first, but advertising, you brought it up. What kind of tools would you recommend to advertise or market a book? The, like top three.

Crys: When you first starting out, genre email newsletters. I don’t actually even know what a lot of them are because I haven’t, I don’t advertise right now. I am a zero advertising person. And, but the ones that I used the most are new release and deals email lists.

Some have better returns than others. A lot of them are really cheap. I think that’s one of the easiest ways to just test putting your book out there for a very cheap price. You will not get a lot of return on a lot of them, but that’s probably the best place to just start to be like, okay, I want to try putting a book out there.

Second advertising element would be social media posts. And this for me in the past has been joining genre Facebook groups, noting what their rules are about self promotion. A lot of them will have a weekly thread or they’ll say authors can post on Fridays with their new releases or whatever. You look, you read what the rules are, make a list.

When your book is out, hit those groups up, making sure you follow their rules. You don’t want to spam. Follow their rules. It’s very easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time. You can basically create a quick script that you can copy paste in all these groups, and it at least gets your name out there as a new author.

You’re probably not going to get a lot of sales of that, but what you’re doing right now is practicing. You’re practicing advertising.

Then actual advertising is when you’re going to get into paying money for views and creating ads. That’s on Facebook. AMS. BookBub. I have played around with AMS a tiny bit and that’s about it. So I have no advice on actually running ads.

JP: Wonderful. But I think that that’s a good case study, regardless because you are successful and you don’t run AMS ads.

Crys: When you are very niche, you are able to do that.

AMS actually doesn’t like accepting ads from my niche. It’s a sub-niche of romance and it’s really hard to actually get an ad accepted by AMS.

You can either put your self out through paid ads, or you can put yourself out through social media or, and this comes back to the community aspect, you can connect with other authors of your genre and say, “Hey, I’m a new author. I have a new book. Would you be willing to share it?”

Ideally you already have a relationship with these writers so you’re not just cold calling them out of the blue and being like, “Help me. I am a stranger.”

Because I have helped some people like that, some newer authors, but for the most part, I like to, like at least have had one conversation with the person before they start asking me for shit. That’s actually probably been the number one way that I’ve got sales that weren’t from my user base has been from connecting with other authors and them sharing that I had a new book out.

JP: Yeah. And I think what you had said hit something for me. I’m not necessarily published. I have some short stories published, but still in the author community I’m capable of contributing. Either from experience or from other facets of life and I don’t feel like I’m not allowed to have a voice in that community.

I’m already participating in a community. I’m already building those relationships with authors so that when the time comes, it’s not going to be a cold call to an author I barely know. It’s going to be my community. And I’m going to ask them a potential question.

I think it’s important for newer authors who may not be published or may have a couple of short stories published to know that you still have experience, you still have struggles that you go through. You still have questions that other people have that you can bring up to other communities and participate in. And that way you’re not just that silent voice waiting until you feel like you have permission.

Crys: Yeah. And there are some people who are going to listen to this episode and be like “I really just want a checklist of all the things I need to do before I publish.” We’re talking more about mindset than anything else and the approaches to the big elements of starting out.

But if you do need a checklist, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of checklists out there that you can find out when you book your cover artists, book your editor, book your formatter. Here are the order of how to do things and which things you need to do.

It’s okay to need that list. And it’s okay to not need that list and just be like, I’m just going to throw my first book out and not expect anything, but I’m going to have a mailing list sign up in the back. If you don’t do that, my goop spirit will come through the internet and smack you.

Because that’s just the biggest mistake you can make. Like, if there’s just one mistake that I never want anyone to make, it’s that one.

JP: Oh, here’s another creeper tip. Mailing list. Feel free to creep all you want on other authors, because that’s how you figure out what the hell they’re writing in the mailing newsletter, because I have no idea.

That’s why I creep on people.

Crys: Absolutely. A recommendation for learning how to build your newsletter after you start mailing people regularly is Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque. That seems like a pretty good point to wrap up and I would ask our listeners, if they have not yet published, what is their plan? What is the thing that they are most worried about? And if you have published, what’s one thing you fucked up?

JP: Yes. I would love to hear that.

Crys: Let JP learn from your mistakes.

JP: Yes, please.

Crys: All right, we’ll see you next week.

JP: See you later.