Meet your hosts—indie authors Crystal Hunt and Michele Amitrani—as we talk about what you can expect from our weekly show, debate what our writing and publishing superpowers are, and get into the nitty gritty of what we have to offer you to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.

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• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
• The Creative Academy for Writers (Community/Resources)

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 001: Welcome to the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast!

Crystal: Hey, there strategic authorpreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt

Michele: and I’m Michele Amitrani. We are here to help you save time, energy and money while you level up your writing career.

Crystal: Welcome to episode number one of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to get to know each other a little better and try to give you a sense of who we are, what we’re all about, and why we think we can help you along your writing and publishing journey. So first, I was good enough to get married and change my very difficult to pronounce last name to something far more reasonable, like Hunt.

Now, my cohost here is going to give us all a little lesson on how to say his first name because it’s a nice name. We don’t want him to have to change it, so

Michele: I didn’t have that luck. So I will ask to use some times to explain exactly, how to pronounce my very difficult family name, which is from Italy, by the way, if you’re wondering where my accent is from and my name is Michele and that you spell it exactly as Michele, but it’s, let’s say, the Italian version of the French version. So Michele Amitrani.

Crystal: So what does being a strategic authorpreneur mean to you anyway?

What is a strategic authorpreneur?

Michele: I’ve been thinking about the answer to these questions for quite awhile, and I have to say I was lucky enough to meet a lot of authorpreneurs. I started the SEF publishing while I was in Italy and I started doing that because I wanted to have a bit more freedom. Authorpreneur means freedom, but at the same time means like a lot of responsibilities. So in order to get better, like you really have to be curious about what you’re doing and you really have to want to learn different things because as authorpreneur, as the word itself says, you’re not just the writer.

And you’re not just an entrepreneur, you are several different things at the same time. So it’s like you have to juggle a bit and you have to put the different kind of hat. The, uh, the accountant hat on comes tax time, a funny time. The writer hat the entrepreneur hat, but you also have to be, in a way for me, a people person.

Because connection off and online are the thing that really can make or break an authorpreneur. And I think like a bit of the things that we are doing here, me and Crystal is really trying to connect with you. Uh, really trying to understand what is that you want to learn and we are just trying as authorpreneurs to put something on the table that can be useful to you. Yeah.

Crystal: I think to add to that, for me, it really is that mashup piece of, you know, creative people are not necessarily entrepreneurs by nature, and so there’s a certain amount of learning we have to do if we want our writing to be successful, especially if we’re going to be indie publishing than we are literally handling the business side of everything.

As you said, so many hats. All of the hats. And so having, a few more skills and having some connections and some information to help us navigate through the business side, I think is really important. And for me, I know there’s lots of things I would like to learn more about. And so us being able to share with you those things is an excellent excuse to take a deep dive into those topics and to round up some really great guests to help us explain things and understand things as well. When did you know you wanted to be an author?

About your co-hosts

Michele: I’ve used this date to start my journey as a self published author and authorpreneur, which is the 1st of November, 2013 which was basically when I released as a self publisher in Italy. My first short story is science fiction short story, which I translated in English with the title when gold was black.

I knew I wanted to be an author before publishing that, these short stories, because I love to write. Yeah. And I love to convey like feelings and emotions in the written way. I consider myself to be very introverted. So what I’m doing now, it’s like kind of an exercise for me. Uh, but at the same time, I love to connect with people.

I love to get to know what makes them what they are. And I think like writing for me, it’s a way to explore different side of me. So when I write, I can be anything I want. I can be, um, I can be a knight. I can be a serial killer. I can be a psychologist. The only boundary that I have is really like research and my own imagination.

These are the things that I think define what I wanted to be as an author so this is the reason why I became an author, to be different things and to share my stories. But the reason why I became an entrepreneur, it’s because I wanted to be an author, so it doesn’t really make sense if you don’t explain this.

In self publishing, when you’re starting something, when you’re publishing the book, that’s just the very beginning. So you start from that, and then there is a word. Which for writers in general is completely unknown because as a writer, you can write and you can publish a book, but then if nobody knows about the book, the book dies.

At first, I thought – as many think – that my stories will be eventually discovered, but no one discovered them. And that was like that for years. So that was a moment when I decided to also become an entrepreneur. Because I wanted the resources.

I wanted to understand what is the way I can use to spread my message to spread my stories. So I started as an author by publishing the 1st of November, 2013 that short story, but then I became an entrepreneur because I wanted my stories to be seen by more people.

Crystal: I decided when I was in, uh, kindergarten, there is a recording, apparently somewhere, a tape recording that our teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. And I said I was going to be an author. And, you know, because I liked to tell stories and, you know, I’m sure she nodded and smiled and whatever, and that was fine.

But, and I don’t remember this, but years later, maybe about 10 years ago, I was at, uh. An event in my hometown and I was selling books from a table and she wandered by, she would, she was long retired, but she recognized me and she was so excited and she said, Oh my goodness, I have. She’s like, I knew this was going to be what you did.

She’s like, I have this recording of you telling me at that age this is what you were going to do. But I took the long way around about it. I might’ve known what I was going to do, but I didn’t exactly directly dive into that because. I mean, being an author isn’t necessarily a straight shot to a solid, stable income, or at least that’s what we’re told.

So there was a long meandering pathway from Kindergarten, me saying I was going to do it and grown up me actually living that. So I think the entrepreneur piece, I was much more comfortable with the entrepreneur piece than the author piece for most of my life. Parents bought their first business when they were 18 and 19 years old and I grew up in a self employed family and they were very good about educating us about the whole process, so I can remember helping write flyer copy and laying out brochures for various business things and learning about payroll. When I was eight or nine I would help my parents. We owned a hotel and camp ground on Qualicum Beach. So I would, you know, help with payroll. I would help Counting tills and floats at the end of the night and learn about facing money and giving change and how you take bookings for stuff and basically got to work in every aspect of the business.

And they had various businesses over the years. So I actually never really thought about working for anybody else because I had grown up with entrepreneurship as sort of something you just take for granted.

You know, my brother started his first business when he was 16. I was, I think 17. I was a little behind the curve for my family average. But, um. It just was something that I was always excited about and interested in the idea of like building your own future and making your own choices and creating opportunities where there weren’t many.

So when I actually got around to committing to this writing thing and really wanting to give it a shot as a way to make an income, not just as sort of a fun hobby, I. It was a natural fit to indie publish because I’m not very patient and waiting around for a traditional publisher to say yes was an extremely frustrating exercise, and so I just decided to go for it.

So my grandma was actually the first one in our family to publish a book, and I thought, well, if she can self publish a book and figure out all the technology and everything else, then surely I can also figure that out. So I got some information from her about how she did it, and I went off researching and then…It’s kind of all been a very interesting, windy, twisty road from there.

But I’m curious to hear what has your, or where are you at in your authorpreneur journey, do you feel?

Where are we at in our authorpreneur journey?

Michele: I would say like, uh, I am very behind compared to you. I’m actually, I would say I’m starting out because it is true that I started the self publishing in Italian, in the Italian market.

But I really started publishing, yeah. Stuff in English like five months and a half ago, maybe six, when I released my first, uh, um, dark fantasy book. So for me, that’s the beginning of my journey as a real entrepreneur. In order for me to understand how this different reality of the, um, U S market and Anglo Saxon market in general works.

I need to learn a lot of stuff fast because I do know that people, um, that uses resources and, write books— There are people that are writing books at this very moment in their own language, which is in their case, English. And I have so many things that I consider myself to be behind. The language is one of these things.

Okay. I’m very open when I say this because like I do consider the language to be one of the biggest barriers. Okay. Not being taught English in an English school. I try to improve my English, but by doing it by myself, this is, I think where the introverted bit came into it too because like I’m a person that usually studies a lot by himself.

Um, I wouldn’t go as, say that I’m self-taught though. Ask a lot of questions. So I’m super curious. I bother Crystal with questions every single day. So she knows that, and she’s helping me also fast forward some of the things that maybe other people might take months, if not years. So I will say like, the point I’m at as an entrepreneur in my English works is a beginning. I think this is super helpful because if I’m at the beginning and Crystal is in an advanced stage, you can compare the point we’re at now and you can say, okay, so I’m more on that side of the road, I am more on the other side of the road and both of us I think we’ve been able to give you suggestion that are useful for your authorpreneur path regardless of the point where you consider you to be in at this moment.

Crystal: And I would say I don’t consider myself advanced. I actually see myself as sort of upper middle in terms of, I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, but I have, I have genre hopped or hit the reset button, um, three distinct times.

So I started writing children’s books and publishing those. And I did that for about seven years and then I switched to romance, um, for another few more years. And then I switched to nonfiction and all of the others are still kind of running in the background, but there is a very real reset in each of those cools that we’re swimming in each of the areas that we’re publishing in.

So I think there’s also a lot of room still to go. In terms of my journey, I have list of milestones I want to hit, you know, this long. Can you see that many? And so I would really like to, yeah, put it out with a caveat that we’ll be able to bring on guests who are much further down the path than I am as well, and fill in some of those gaps and also give us something to look forward to and something to strive towards because there are people doing amazing and interesting things in this industry that we can learn so much from. So I’m really excited to be able to introduce some of the really cool people that I’ve met along the way to all of you, and share what they have learned and what they know so that we can all benefit from their experience.

And. That’s, I mean, that’s really why I’m excited to be doing the podcast is I’ve met so many cool people and built a really neat community full of really diverse backgrounds and entertaining stories and really good knowledge sharers as well. So I would like to be able to. Connect people and connect ideas and help you find the things you need to make your journey smoother and you can avoid a lot of the mistakes that we’ve made along the way as well.

And how about you, Michele? What is your most exciting thing you’re looking forward to with this podcast?

What to look forward to in this podcast

Michele: It is that as I share what I’ve learned in my path, the different markets I’ve been, uh, to publish. So the Italian and the English market at the same time are super excited because as you mentioned, like we are going to invite some very interesting people, uh, some of them may be big, and their feedback, their insight is going to make this podcast, so much richer, because it’s not going to be only me and you. It’s going to be like a different people at different stages in different markets, different things in order to uplift single of their products. So I’m a super big fan of listening and learning, um, as I’m a fan of doing things so, and trying things and keeping data.

So most of the people we will hear they did all of these things and they are, all of them are using a different process. And the difference between them, we will make sure that you can pick up something from the toolbox. Maybe you try one thing, see, it doesn’t work. There is another guest that is going to have completely different views on maybe both marketing or writing or the craft of storytelling.

I’m so excited and I don’t know if I can explain it though or express this this much, but really I’m, it’s just me going out of my own skin because there are, there’s so much value to be added by every single experience we’re going to get and bring to the table that I think, you are going to be very, very, very, very happy with the outcome.

But at the same time, I want to, and we want to hear from your experience.  And we can definitely learn from each other. So if you want to tell us anything that you, think might add value to our podcast. Yeah. There are so many ways that you can do that though, right Crystal? They can send an email, they can do in different ways.

Crystal: Yes, for sure. We’ve set up ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com so if you have a guest that you want on the podcast or you have a topic you’d really like us to dig into, then you can just send something to ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will do our best to work it into the show. This is a team sport, writing and publishing.

It can be very isolating and it can be something in theory you can do on your own, but I think. We’ve all learned, you will never get as far on your own as you can if you have a strong network behind you, and if you’ve got a team of people who are pulling for you as well. Um, so our format, we are going to have guests on.

We are going to do a little bit of sharing about exciting things that have happened in our world since the previous episode, and if we’ve learned something particularly mind blowing, or if we’ve discovered a new resource we think would really help you, we will share those.

But talking about the format of the podcast in a technical way like that is a little bit like saying, um, if somebody says, what’s your book about? And you say, Oh, well, it’s got a cover. And there are some pages in the middle and you know, a bunch of words are on those pages, but what are people actually going to get yet from us? So when we were talking about what we were going to call the podcast and we were doing all this brainstorming and figuring that out, and we came to strategic authorpreneur as those three pieces that we’re going to tie together, and Michele said Oh. SAP. That’s what it stands for, and I burst out laughing.

Michele: I can’t believe that you just said that.

Crystal: Hey, one of the things you’re going to get from us is authenticity. We are going to talk the truth over here and you will get the real us. You’ll get the unfiltered actual people and some fun learning moments because we are all about language. But the reason why I burst out laughing was because I was thinking sappy because we, we both are a little bit sappy in terms of being, I think emotionally real, and you know, there’ll be a little bit of getting teary if something particularly moving happens.

I can guarantee that I will make at least a couple of the guests cry by saying nice things to them and that will be fine. Mmm. But also when we got to breaking it down a little bit, SAP is also, it’s the lifeblood of trees. Right? And then we started joking about maple syrup and it’s liquid Canadian gold.

And I’m Canadian. We are on Canadian soil at the moment. And so we were joking that our podcast is going to be liquid Canadian gold with a dash of Italiano just for good measure. So, um, that is. That was just a fun, silly thing, but I think illustrates what you’re going to get from us, which is authenticity. We’re going to be real with you about what are sometimes some really difficult and frustrating topics.

We aren’t going to gloss it all over and make it very Hollywood. You’re gonna get mistakes. You’re gonna get true stories. You’re going to hear about the crashy low times. As much as the fun, exciting, everything is going wonderful times. We’re going to give you some actionable Intel.

We are both get it done individuals. I think that’s one of the things that. Makes us work together so well is when we talk about a thing, we go out and we do the thing and we will have learned everything we could about it and we will tackle it in the smartest way we can figure out between us and our community.

And we aren’t going to do 15 minute episodes because we really want to dive into things in a real way.

We want to give you some depth. We want you to get a really strong grounding in whatever it is we’re talking about so that you can then go off and apply that in a way that will make sense and you can figure out what’s gonna work best for you and it is going to be participatory and community based.

So. We are going to ask you to play with us. Basically, we want you to send us questions and we want you to send us ideas and we want to hear about your experiences along the way as well. So we know what’s working, what’s not, where people are having challenges. And one of the interesting things as we were getting ready to do the podcast was I was reading about this idea of trying to be the best in your field. Like how do you make yourself stand out? And this concept of being a polymath, which is somebody who’s good at multiple things and you kind of blend them together. And often the advice we hear is, Oh, you know, just be an expert at one thing. So maybe we’ve gone all in at being the best writer we can possibly be.

But the industry requires, that you also be an entrepreneur and that you also wear all these business hats and that you do that. So I think it’s interesting. If we talk just for a second, Michele, what do you think are your of three main, your triad of skills in your polymath triangle? What do you think those are that you bring to the table?

More about us

Michele: Basically describe me a person or what you can bring to the table in 3 different elements is difficult. Uh, so thank you for that, Crystal, for making my life easy as always.  But I thought about that, um, as a, I wanted to bring more value to the table as possible. And this is one of the deep thinking that you have to do when somebody asks you what I would say is a profound question.

Okay.  For a person like saying, she just asks you a question. It’s not really profound. It is for me because it describes who I am and what I really, really value a lot. So I consider myself to be one, a very curious person. So there would have been no way for me to learn English if I wasn’t interested in –  And it is something that I, I believe you don’t even know Crystal, in political science.

So I have a degree in political science and international relations. Um, there were book in English. They were not translated into Italian. So I was like, uh, I’m really interested in the brief and the summary of this book, but it doesn’t exist in my own language. So what I do, so I had an option either don’t read it and don’t socking suck up. I don’t even know how to say it. The knowledge . Or learn the language, learn how to understand vocabulary learn, how to understand, English. Because. Even though, like in Italy, they teach you English, they really don’t give you the instrument to read the political science book in that language. So I took that path out of curiosity.

So yeah, I wanted to know stuff about the subject, that was not possibly available in my own language, Sorry. I remember. Yeah. Probably one hour reading a page after that, uh, after  the chapter or two take maybe half of the time to read one page.

Okay. All of these things before me on them trivial RCT. Okay. What was the thing that I believe made me the person that I am and then now I’m definitely translating in my author journey. If I don’t know something and ability to be useful to me, I don’t care exactly how difficult it is. I just want to learn about it.

Curiosity stream from this need to know, uh, things that are not accessible in my own language. And I think it makes me. An interesting person for that, uh, of what matters, like the curiosity side. And another thing that, uh, in some way, it’s connected to this adaptability. And this is more something that translates in the fact that I’m an immigrant.

So I am an immigrant in, I mean, in our Canadian nation. Now I’m also Canadian. And an Italin in our Canadian nation. The effort that’s requires. As a person that comes from abroad to build a new life? Mmm. Knowing new people when you are in your late twenties because I started this journey in my life 20s it is very, very much, lot other things at the same time.

Adaptability. It’s something that I also translate in my books so. I am adaptable in the sense that I’m, I read the book from a fantasy author, let’s say, and I love the writing style. I tried to understand and analyze the book. I don’t want to just read it. I want to understand why is the book makes me interested in that story.

So I’m adaptable in the sense that I would probably try to write a story in that style. So I’ll try to replicate that and then to build upon my own style. And that’s the way I am basically craft my own stories by adapting my style to authors I respect and that I know. So curiosity yeah. Adaptability.

And then the third one, I would say are storytelling hacks. In order to be me, though,I have to learn from people that are better than me, in the storytelling. So that is the reason why, I do courses or read books on the craft of writings, I mean 99% of the things that I see or that I read are not going to do anything to my story telling capabilities.

But one of these things, one of these, will become one of my hacks and I will be able to use it and to implement it in one of my stories.  And my passion for storytelling I am sure 100% that will help me in the medium to longer term. It’s not like Amazon ads or Facebook ads. You see the result immediately.

It’s something you build in the long, long, very long period. But it’s something that basically develop your style and your voice, which are things that many writers [00:27:00] never get to know because never got to try. That’s basically what I think with this blathering I’m saying what describes me, what makes me me.

Crystal: I think that adaptability and the willingness to just go out and learn things is so important because everything is changing on an almost daily basis.

In the world of writing and publishing, there’s so much shifting. So often the tools change, the methods, the strategies change, everything does. The interfaces on the tools we use are different. You know, half the time you log in and everything has changed since you were last there. And. That is really important to kind of keep rolling with that.

I think for me, the entrepreneurship side is definitely something that sort of business management piece is something I’m always really interested in. I love the team building side of it as well. So. In that entrepreneurship, how do you build your team to support what you’re doing?

The writing and publishing stuff? I have been very actively publishing, ran a children’s book publishing company for, uh, most of most of a decade, and then did the romance writing stuff in a, in a pretty big way. And now I’m very into the Creative Academy and the nonfiction and that side of things. And so the writing and publishing knowledge that I’ve gained over the last however many years, 16 or so is, is quite a lot. And I’ve been there through a lot of the industry changes and seen what’s consistent and what isn’t and where the opportunities are and learned how to recognize some of some of the things that you only learn through trial and error.

I’ve made all the mistakes you could possibly make. So I am filled with information on how to not do those things. And we’ll definitely share as much as possible of the expensive and hard lessons that I have learned so that you never have to repeat those things. So I think the entrepreneurship, the writing and publishing, and then the third triangle comes from my background.

I am actually a health psychologist by training because I as supportive as my family always was, the system says, don’t bet on making a whole bunch of money from selling your writing. And so I had a backup plan and my backup plan was be a psychologist because if I’m going to write about fake people, they’re going to be way more convincing if I know more about real people.

And so it was kind of a double edge thing where I could have my backup career, which would lead to steady income and a job. If the whole writing thing didn’t work out, and I also was able to use what I learned for that to inform my writing and my ability to build characters and my ability to work with people.

So. I listed, I call it growth hacking, but basically being able to change your own behaviors and your habits and be able to learn tips and tricks and kind of self leadership skills is really important on, on any kind of endeavor when you’re going off to become a better version of yourself and a more knowledgeable version of yourself and you’re diving into a new industry, all of that stuff is really important.

So for me, I think. That’s the triad of things that I have to offer is really how to make incremental progress with the occasional big leap and also, entrepreneurship and writing and publishing. If you had to pick one superpower that you think you have, what would that be?

Michele: This is, I think, hands down the most difficult question and, uh, I don’t really have an answer, even though I thought about that.

As Crystal was talking and giving me time, so thank you for that Crystal. I thought like a, I don’t really have like a superpower, like, um, okay. Superman will have or wonder woman will have. Okay. I would say like in this day and age, yeah. Uh, there is some things that a bit is missing and maybe I like to think in my presumption that I have.

And that is like empathy. I call it like empathy. When there is a person, I really try to understand and this person is in front of me. Why is she or he doing something? And if I would have done the same being on that side of the table. Which another thing that I took from my political science background, which is like a, when you’re dealing with somebody, for example, as an ambassador, you have to try to put yourself in their shoes, hands down, same thing when you are a negotiator.

You have to understand and ask questions to the other person. And in this kind of relation, you create empathy. It’s not a super power, but I do think like in this day and age there are aybe fewer people that uses it. And again, I might be wrong, but this is. This might be something that, it’s also brought by my Italian background.

Italians in that sense would be maybe a bit more warm, uh, to try to Maybe to laugh, and eat good food. I consider ourself, to be like the hobbit of the European union. And this is something, when I say usually people laugh, but yeah. Hobbits are maybe not dangerous and they enjoy themselves too much.

But when there is to help each other, when there is to overcome something  we bound together. And, uh, I think empathy is a good way for me to describe my super power, if that makes any sense.

Crystal: Yeah, for sure. And it’s, I mean, it’s key. It’s one of the cornerstones of the curriculum of what we’re teaching our kids now like that, that is a very central piece. If you can’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you can never truly help them, or you can never truly understand them or where they’re coming from or what they’re trying to accomplish. So you’ll have plenty of opportunity to put that superpower to good use.

For me, I think it’s probably information, information consuming.

My superpower, I read fast. I read a lot. I have a life that allows me to spend a lot of time learning things on a daily basis. And so I ingest all of the information I can get my hands on about a topic and then I can distill it in a way that hopefully makes sense to other people. So for me, I think that is my super power that I’ve kind of been practicing my whole life.

And what I have to offer all of you is I know that not everyone has the freedom or the space or the time or the money or any of those things to be able to learn all the things we would want to learn. And we don’t have time necessarily or enough background knowledge to filter what we do take in. And so hopefully I can offer that up to all of you is that I have put in the time and the energy, to do that and that I can offer up. The, the best of what I find so that you get a curated experience of the self publishing world. So you don’t have to read all of the 600,000 articles that have been published in the last little while about it.

Michele: I didn’t say this to you before. But I will say it now. I always consider you the sponge. I never told you that. But this is basically every single time. Okay. I have to interact with the sponge now, so I’m going to feel like this. Yeah, because like that’s true. Like, um, whenever I need something, she sends me like, half a dozen links on article one more interesting than the other.

And I have to select which one is the most interesting but problem is all of them are very interesting. So. Before I know it, I use one or two hours on my time or resources and so my mind is it. That’s a sponge fault. It’s all right. Yeah. That’s fair.

Crystal: All right. I will be a time sponge. There you go.

Now, we do like to keep things interesting. So we have introduced a wild card element to each episode. I made some inquiries around my friends, family, creative networks. And I bought a jar and this is the curious jar and the jar is filled with questions. And so we are going to randomly, you can see I’ve got a few in here…I haven’t put all of them. I’ve got like 20 pages of questions people sent, so we started off with a handful and we’ll—we’ll keep filling it up as we go, but we’re going to draw a random question here. Tell me when to stop.

Michele: Stop

Crystal: Okay. It’s kind of soggy, I might have to dry it off better. Okay. First lesson learned.

What would your 30 year old self tell your 15 year old self?

Okay. Here we go. So our question for today from the curious jar is: What would your 30 year old self tell your 15 year old self?

Michele: Okay. Um…And I start of course, so that you have some time to think, okay. 15 years old what was I doing, I was probably playing video games. Yeah. Mmm. 17 hours per day. Well, my 30 years old self would say to my 15 years old self, it’s probably this.

You read that story? Because I remember that I was still reading a fairly amount of books. At least compare it with people to my age. You read that story. Why did it make you interested in that? Find a reason why  I would say for them, the way I was made and I’m made, cause I’m curious. Yeah.  I would have probably wrote something resembling very awkwardly and not very well written that story.

But I’m sure 100% that that exercise would have kept me writing like 10 years before and that’s 10 years more than I would have added to my writing career. At the same point that at the same time, if I had another option would be like, don’t say to him anything because the way he, you are now, and I’m quite happy with the way I am.

It was by doing all the things that brought you to this point. So there is a part of me that says, yeah, give him, that suggestion. So maybe Kindle a bit of storytelling self faster, but at the same time it’s like, well, they want to do that. Yeah. Maybe changes things. That is probably my answer.

Crystal: Okay. I, I am older. My 30 year old self is more than a decade in the rear view mirror and I have no idea what she would say to my 15 year old self.

I can do my 40 year old self. What would my 40 year old self say to my 15 year old self and that would be. Um, at 15, I actually had just started writing my first romance novel and the universe acknowledged it was terrible by melting the hard drive of the computer I typed it into at a later date. Um, I have somewhere in my stuff, I have a binder, like a floppy binder with some of the printed out pages. It has a Winnie the Pooh sticker on the front of it. Pretty Epic for a romance novel.

I had no idea about anything. I just read, read so many of them off of the bookshelves, and I just thought they were so fun. So I think my advice be, just go for it. Just, yeah, just keep writing. And. Also I think to follow the fun because it is really easy once our writing becomes a business and we start using all these metrics, like, you know, is it paying the bills?

What’s, what’s my ROI? Like return on investment. Am I making enough money to justify doing this as a career or spend my time at this? And I would just say: Follow the fun. All of the times in my career when I’ve had the biggest successes and made the most momentum, has all about how engaged was I? How?

How much passion was I experiencing for the projects I was working on? Was I lighting up when I was telling people about it? There’s a certain energy when you’re really excited about something and it, it lights people up from the inside. And if that goes away, then it becomes work. And work does not light the fire of the muse and make you, you know, thrilled to get out of bed in the morning and write stuff.

And so I think that would be my advice to my past self is get your act in gear because you, I don’t even know how many books I could have written at this point. Like if I hadn’t spent a lot of years not writing. I spent a lot of years developing worlds and things like that, and actively avoiding writing.

So get the words onto the page and get the stories out of your head and just follow the fun and get it done.

Now if you want to add questions to our jar, you can email ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com I have a stack of little rainbow papers and we will fill them with questions and fill up the jar. And we also want to get to know you a little bit.

So we are going to post with the show notes. At strategicauthorpreneur.com we’re going to post a reminder of what the curious jar wants to know for this episode, and we would like you to add your responses into the comments so that we can get to know you a bit better.

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Michele: and with us, and to basically starting this journey with us. This is the beginning of something that we believe to be really, really important and big values. So we are so excited to have you on board.

Crystal: Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to get to know us and for sharing a bit of your journey with us along the way.

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