In this episode we take a deep dive into the business of being an author. Budgeting, business structures, what are the essential tools you can’t live without, balance between work and play, and plenty more juicy tidbits. Want to know what mistakes we’ve made so you don’t make them? Yeah, thought so 🙂

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 002: The Business of Being an Authorpreneur

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

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

Crystal: Welcome to episode number two of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to dive into the business side of being a writer and share some tips, answer some common questions about being a small business owner, which is what you are if you’re a writer who’s interested in making money from your writing. We want to help you set yourself up for success. But first, a little disclaimer, we are not accountants or lawyers, and while we can share our own experiences, however we cannot advise you what to do in a legal or tax context. So always consult the appropriate government agencies or legal and accounting professionals in the area, wherever you live and operate your business. So thinking about writing as a business is a little bit of a switch for a lot of people. I am always fascinated by how many writers I know in professional writers groups and who are even making money from their writing, but who aren’t saving expense receipts for their taxes, and they, you know, aren’t really sure about, do I have to register a business name or not? How do I do this? What should I be doing? So we wanted to start today, since we are the strategic authorpreneurs and the entrepreneur part is pretty key that we wanted to start off talking a little bit about how to get a solid business foundation for your writing self so that you start off on the right foot and you have a really great platform upon which you can grow your business. So Michele, I’m curious, what is your sort of approach to your writing as a business or what kind of business structures or systems or things do you have set up for yourself? Where are you at?

Our general approach to writing as a business

Michele: So there are a few things that I want to say about this subject. The first thing is that I consider myself to be unprepared on some sides. And the reason why I’m saying I’m unprepared is that I usually read a lot over a subject that I think might increase, or help me understand a subject. In this case it might be like, how do you treat your, for example, revenue coming from a books that you sell? So royalties in this case. Or for example, if you had the one on one conversation with the client and this client is paying you, how do you make sure, for example, if the person needs a receipt, but you have that, system set up to send it to NBC. So I actually started doing my first consideration over how to treat that side of the business a few months ago.

Actually, when I released my first English book, which was like five to six, seven months ago. So I basically discovered that there is a world. And the reason why I started doing that at that time was because I decided to get serious on that front.  When I released that, that first book, and so there was like a world that had opened up to me. The world of GST, the world of the tax and declarations and think that you can declare and subtract from the amount that you’re spending for things related to your business. It can be basically anything. Again, as Crystal said, we are not lawyers and accountants. But you can find out that, for example, there was a conference, I’ve read about conference that I attended a few months ago and there was a gentleman there called Jonas Saul and, he took a trip, for a few, I think it was like a couple of years; and he had to take an airplane to go Italy and Greece. And, he was actually able to use the flight tickets to subtract from the, from the business. There are things, that if you are good in learning, to keep track of your expenses in this, in the end. To declare it, so you have to pay less taxes.

From what concerns me, to think that I’m trying to use it a lot now, more with respect of the past is the Excel sheet. So that was a software that I wasn’t using using before. And quite actually, I know how to use it, but I don’t know all the potential that this thing has. And, I believe if you have to learn one software, probably Excel would be very good to input all the expenses that you have because it keeps you, and it gives you an idea of how much you are earning you per month or per year, and how much you are spending. And at the end of the, of the month, or, when you are in tax season, if you have to do that on a yearly basis, it’s going to be something that kills you or you want to kill somebody else.

So because it’s not something that you’ve done, it sounds like a whole lot of work that you need, then we see more months, then it’s going to feel like hell. So these are things that I’m using, in order to get better. Keeping count of how much I’m making. Keeping count of how much I’m spending and keeping count of the sources that the revenues are coming.

So it could be in consulting, it could be like a royalty from different books. It could be any of these kinds of things. But make sure, what I will say that you are keeping track of all the things using that instrument. It can be software it can be a notebook, that it’s the simplest for you, because when tax season comes, you will thank me.

Crystal: Yes. I just finished doing year end for our business and we are we did incorporate, so because we’ve had multiple publishing companies over the years, we started as a proprietorship or a sole proprietorship, which is a person can go into business basically by saying you’re in business. In BC, you don’t have to do anything formal to become a business. to get started with using, you are writing in business as such. You, you just need to start tracking receipts, for incoming and outgoing expenditures and revenues. And that’s really as far as you have to go for that really basic step. And so when we first started, that’s what we did. I think I registered my first company when I was 16 which is when you take the, the being a sole proprietor and you actually want a bank account with your business name on it.

Then for that, you do need to register your business name with the government. I think it cost $35 to go through the name registration process, and then once you’ve who have registered your business, you can qualify for a business tax number as well as get a bank account in the business name. So for me, our first publishing company was called Gumboot Books, and we did children’s books, and so we registered the name Gumboots Books because it is helpful as your business is growing to have a separate bank account for your business earnings and expenses.

It’s one way to keep it kind of clean if you ever are audited or anyone wants to see very clearly how your writing businesses doing or if you want to be able to see very clearly how your writing business is doing. Having a separate bank account that the royalties come into and that you pay your bills out of really makes that easy to see at a glance exactly how well you’re doing. So some people maybe at the beginning prefer not to know, but it is always better if you are in a position of wanting to be leveling up your writing career and actually making a living from it, you need to know where you stand, right? You, you can’t be making business decisions from a place of guessing of maybe something did pay off or didn’t pay off.

Maybe, uh, maybe your expenses are this much, but you don’t really know. You really do have to be able to make informed choices to grow your business. And so having that separate bank account can be very valuable and as I said in in BC anyway, it costs the $35 to register your business name for a sole proprietorship and that’s really it. The decision to make a leap to a corporation is, is quite a different one. And that is something that’s going to be very different for different people, but there are implications to incorporating, and it can be fairly expensive. I know in the States people say, Oh, you should definitely incorporate because it protects you from all of these things.

But the way that it works in Canada, there are minimal protections. But it’s not the complete separation than it is in some other places. And the rules around what you can do financially as a corporation or not are different. The types of things you can claim as your expenses are slightly different and they work in different ways if you are incorporated and you have to have audited books. So that means, you know, we have to use QuickBooks as our software. Well, we don’t have to, but that’s what our accountant uses and so by doing that, it saves him having to enter everything as well. So we use QuickBooks for our bookkeeping, and then we have to have audited financial statements at the end of each year prepared before we file our taxes.

And that, it can be a couple of thousand dollars a year extra just for filing your taxes because of the expenses associated with having an accountant who’s auditing that. So you don’t really want to rush right into that. You, you do want to be able to ease into that as your income demands that you make other arrangements and as your business arrangement requires it.

So it isn’t a starting place necessarily. It does have the benefit, but if the money is coming into the incorporated company that you can sort of stabilize your income of, you don’t have to pull it all out. So if you suddenly hit really big and your book takes off and you suddenly have all this money coming into your business that you need to be able to manage, then it can be helpful too be incorporated. But the good news is that’s because we have a delay between when those books sell and when we receive the money we usually have one to two months before that revenue is actually coming in. And so you can change your business arrangements at any point. And because you start an incorporated company, it doesn’t eliminate your old companies.

So you can actually shift those over time and relatively quickly. You don’t, you don’t need to take months and months and months in advance to set up an incorporated company. It can be done pretty darn quickly, actually. If you’re at the point of needing it to be done, then it can be arranged. So I would say just don’t feel locked in.

You are choosing what is best for you right now, and you’re choosing things in a way that will give you the potential to grow. But you’re not permanently committing to forever as whatever kind of business structure you’re setting up right at the beginning, you do have some flexibilities. So I think that’s important to remember.

Michele: Yeah, it’s a good point that you said. Like you have to consider the point you are at in your career. If you are like really starting out, then you have so much… you have a lot of expenses. Like it goes, like if you decide that you want to market your book, let’s say, professionally, you and you decide to buy software, like Vellum for example.

That’s more than 300 or 240, I think Canadian dollars, like just right up off the bat. The amount of time you’re gonna, um, you might need to like replenish and compensate on that expense, especially if you’re in the beginning, it might be like several months, if not a year or maybe two. It’s very important to consider the amount of time, that you’re saving.

That’s another thing that we didn’t discuss a lot, but money and time are both very important. So if you do that decision of buying that software, it saves you of the time. Remember that like in the long run, time will be more important than the money you’re spending in that regard. Basically for what I was saying is at the beginning, you will have a lot of expenses.

Setting up your own business requires time, money and energy. And you will not see, well, luckily you will, but you would not, most of the time see a result in term of money that comes in, which is immediate. So save for the rainy day. This is a suggestion that I don’t hear enough. But for me at least, they never ever go into debt to use those resources to finance your books. Save. That’s better. Maybe you have like you self publishing plan. I am, for example, never ever going to go into debt to pay for my books.

Crystal: Yeah, I think that’s a really good message. This current incarnation of my publishing career is not my first one.

So this is the first book I indie published was 2007, and in those days you were doing offset print runs this full color picture books. And each book was an investment of 5 to $10,000 just for printing. And that didn’t include, you know,  illustrators and all of those other things. And so it was very common in those days that if people were going to self-publish, they would literally mortgage their house to do it, or, you know, borrow money.

I was in a fortunate position. I was able to, go to the bank of the parents. And take out a loan, to fund a piece of that. So while I was borrowing money, I knew that they would be, I mean, we had a set payment schedule. Interest is charged. My parents are very, official about how that works. We have documentation, we have legal documents drawn up, and it’s great because it is just like borrowing from the bank.

But if some disaster occurred in our life, they would be in a position to pay a little bit more flexible than perhaps your average bank. Not to mention: it can be very hard to pitch a business idea. When you’re first starting out and maybe you’re young, maybe you’re not young, maybe you don’t have a day job that would let you get a loan for something.

But it really is a good way to approach it that you are basically putting on the roulette wheel every cent. It’s the same concept as, so if you’re going gambling right, that you need to be comfortable with walking away from whatever money you’re putting on the table. Personally, I like to think of it less as gambling and more as investing in your education because what you’re actually doing is learning.

And so my husband and I invested a ridiculous amount of money in our children’s book publishing company over a period of about seven years, and it costs the equivalent of two to three master’s degrees. In fact, that we never recouped that amount. I mean, it’s certainly did become a  source of some income generation, but we both worked full time to support that publishing company for, yeah, seven years.

And so, you know, you have to be really invested in something to want to invest in it in that way. And now, you know, as we, we ended up actually closing the doors on that publishing company, many, many years ago because it wasn’t making money. It was sort of paying for itself, but we were still working full time to support it, which is not what a business needs to do for you. Definitely not long term. It’s one thing if you’re in the startup phase and you’re pouring everything into it, but it should be in a position to give back to you at some point and you know, we just, that just wasn’t going to work with that incarnation of things. Now, the good news is the technologies have come a long way.

There is no need to spend $10,000 on a print run for books anymore because we have print on demand, which is amazing, and you don’t need to pay thousands of dollars for layouts or layout software for your book layouts because we have vellum and we have companies who make covers for people as one offs.

It used to be you had to go to a graphic designer and hire them completely separate from everything else. And that’s really expensive, right? There weren’t systems in place to support the indie publishing world, so no, the opportunities are fantastic. We have so many options and you really can, you know, slowly level up your business making use of all of these things without a major upfront investment, you need time. You need energy. You do need some money to do it professionally. I mean, technically you could do everything you needed to do for free, but quality wise, you’re going to have trouble competing in the marketplace if you do.

So there’s a certain amount of logic and payback for investing in the beginning and doing it right. But as you said, you know, I think a good policy is try to invest what you can from your income, from another source first to get going and then slowly be scaling up. You don’t want to quit your job to, you know, mortgage your house and, and use that for your first few books, that that’s not an ideal way to go.

If you have that amount of pressure on you and that amount of risk, and it’s a very, it’s a long timescale you’re looking at it to build an author career, nothing happens quickly. It does not happen overnight. Even the overnight success stories; I have one friend who was a great success story, but she was writing for 20 years before she published her first book, and then it was all in for the next few years before she really saw any returns.

And I have another friend who we joke that, you know, she’s a 13 book, 10 year overnight success story, because all people see is that point where you tip to the next level. They don’t see all of the crazy hard work and dedication and stuff that came before. So I think that’s something is to plan to play the long game.

If you are in this to build an author business and to build your writing career, you can’t expect to write one book and have that hit. How does that shape up to your, uh, experiences and expectations?

Experiences and expectations

Michele: Yeah. I think I like everything you said. Touches an important point. There is like the need of the savings, the need of having the long term plan because you are basically, think of it like this, like, if you implement too much resources at the beginning without seeing exactly or foreseeing what’s going to happen, again, going up in the business where nothing is certain. Zero things are certain. You’re going to be depleted. Everything like you are dying by bleeding. Fast. Yeah. So the body can sustain a very, fair amount of bleeding over time, but if you just no use your artery or your veins, it’s just be game over very fast.

But at the same time, to use this like a the metaphor of the body, like the body can and will sustain some, deplenish and things over time. And eventually it will adapt to that. So you can think of your business and your books and your stories exactly like the same way your body and you can sustain some loss and some losing.

In the long run, if you know that, maybe you have a $2,000 saving accounts, you know that for promoting that book or crafting that book, producing that book is not going to cost more than $1500, you know you’re going to survive. Even though you’re going to have a probe out there that you will have like $500 more for whatever. It can be advertisement that the next project. That’s why we stressed so much and that that’s why it was so important for us, for you to know exactly what kind of resources you have so that you can deploy them. Once you know how much you have of time, energy, and money, it’s easier for you to make decisions.

I’ll give you an example. Very, very practical. So, six months ago I produced and published my first book in English. For the English market. I knew from day one that my marketing budget was $20. So I could not spend more than that because that was exactly the amount of my debt I could implement for that first publication. That is a good thing though: because I had only that limited, very small amount. $200 is nothing. But because I had that small amount, I was forced to find the best solution. The best thing for your buck. Whatever it is called?

Crystal: Haha! The best bang for your buck!

Michele: Exactly. And it forced me to check which one are the best options? Which one are the things that with the amount of money I have, will give the most mean to this book launch? Now that research I did the first time was gold because I was able to understand which of the service that I, took time in researching were the best for that kind of book. Next time I will launch another book, I will already know seven or eight of those services worked, while some of them didn’t. And I would be able to use the resources that worked best. If I had used the $2,000 today, I would have spread myself in way too many directions.

I would not have been able to see the data. I wouldn’t have been able to understand what was working and what was not working.

Crystal: I think a lot of it does boil down to making decisions. you’re going to be faced with thousands of decisions as you are trying to decide, okay, well first, how much do I invest in this? Second, how do I choose where to spend it? And that analysis, the, the ability to decide what is going to have the biggest benefit, I think is really important. So, one of the examples I can give you is what I did was because I didn’t want to end up in a position like we’d been in before where we had spent so much money and didn’t really see a return on that, and it was pretty stressful financially and it’s hard on relationships. It’s hard on people, it’s hard on everything. And so I said, okay, I’m going back into this because I know this is what I want to do, but I’m not going to do it the same way as before. And so I was working a day job still and I was putting money into a bank account and I did a budget of, okay, if, if I was going to publish, you know, and I was doing novellas.

So if I was going to try and publish one novella a month for 12 months, which is a lot and crazy and don’t do that, but I wanted to have like a, what is the best case scenario? If I get into this and I just am on fire and I’m writing like crazy and I release something every month, how much money would I need to do that?

Because I knew that once I get into the momentum, I want to be able to sustain that. And so I did a budget. I figured out how much would it cost for covers and images and editing and all of that. And I put together that budget for myself, and then I put money in a bank account until I have that much, and then I started actually going through the publishing process with some of the novellas and that worked great.

I was able to apply that budget to the books and what I had to then decide was when new opportunities come to you. One was the opportunity to be involved in a beta testing a program with find a way, voices for audio books. They said, Oh, do you want to be part of this? We’re setting up some people with their own kind of stores on their website to sell their audio, and, and I had thought, yeah, okay, I’ll give that a shot.

But it meant I had to decide was I going to use the remaining money in my account currently for producing audio books, or was I going to use it to produce more of the manuscripts and covers and all the things for the future books? And so the equation that I had to look at was what is going to have the potential biggest long term benefit.

And at that point I had seen royalties coming in from the first few eBooks that I had put out, and I was interested to test the audio market a little bit. So I decided that I would actually spend some of the royalties that I had gotten from those first books, and I would reinvest in doing audio versions of those first few books as well.

And so I did that, and then I watched to see how much money was coming in from the audio, as well as how much was coming in from the digital sales of the eBooks and with each new release, more was added to the mix, which I could repurpose to the next one. But I know that you can’t make money without products.

And so what I was partly weighing was, which of these channels will get me more opportunities to actually generate revenue? And then I had to pause and wait for the market to catch up because I wasn’t sure if over time would they actually pay for themselves. Or would they not? And so there’s a lot of math, and you can see now why the tracking is so important.

Because if I didn’t know exactly what I had spent on producing each of those formats of each of those books, and if I couldn’t look at the income from each of those formats from each of those books, I can’t make a good decision about how to do it for the next one because I don’t have the right information to work with.

I don’t have accurate actual dollar figures. So. That was interesting and I’m very glad I did that. I won’t necessarily do all the versions of every book right away for all time, but experimenting with it allowed me to then know, just like you learned which of the promo things are working the best so that you can apply that to future products.

It did let me weigh, okay, for the next book, which versions do I want to do? Am I generating enough revenue from these projects to justify keeping doing them? And I did actually… I have a scale for myself that weighs how many hours I track all the time I put into a project and the scale weighs how many hours I put in versus how much I received in return.

And I track the same thing for my, my day job stuff. And it was only as that slider got to the point where I was starting to make close to what I was making at my day job at my writing, that I let myself dedicate a lot more time to the writing. So before then I was only letting myself do the writing kind of evenings, weekends, vacations.

I would take time off from work in this in the summer and the winter, and I would write during those breaks and I would write… yeah, evenings and weekends, basically. Anytime I wasn’t already working, I would dedicate to that so that I was sort of slowly sliding that scale over without the risk of giving up the day job and I was able to hold onto the day job for longer than I planned.

Because I adjusted my hours back, but I was putting the money into my publishing fund, and so I wanted to make sure that when I did decide to make that leap full time, I had enough money in there that I wasn’t risking the security of my family. I wasn’t risking my safety feeling like I for sure could make mortgage payments and all of those things.

I didn’t want to be forced to write stuff I didn’t I feel excited about or I didn’t want to be forced into making decisions from a place of fear or worry that I wasn’t going to be able to pay the bills. So for me, it really was you know, of delayed timeline because I wanted the security of the insecurity.

Like I wanted to know when I did decide to push that button and jump that there was in fact a safety net. I was not just flying off a cliff. Waiting to see what happened if I hit the bottom or flew. Yeah. So what do you think if we’re talking to folks out there who are maybe just getting started and they’re trying to decide, okay, well what do I need to have at the beginning to make this business run?

Like if you had to pick your top could not live without tools to get started as an authorpreneur, what do you think you would suggest for people?

Best tools to help you get started

Michele: Again, as we said, like the, the keeping of the records is very important. And, suggesting one single tool I think would be wrong in the sense that my brain works differently than yours.

So for you, a notebook works best, or better than Excel. You use that. But the core concept is like a keeping track of things. Crystal, you were mentioning like word count. You were mentioning the time spent on a project for mentioning the amount of money that you were putting into that. Those are all things that are significantly important in the long term. And, one thing that is important for you to understand, the first time you tried to do that, it will be very, very, very time consuming. And you will be kind of fooled into not doing it because it’s like a lot of work, especially at the beginning.

But what you’re doing here is like kicking in a habit. Like, nowadays when I have to input my hours and I put the hours in regarding the time that I’m using for writing, I do it like I’m brushing my teeth and this is like, because I’ve developed that, habit. So I don’t think about that anymore. Same thing when I have to put an expense so, or a royalty at the end of the month.

So I do that every single month. It’s something that I do at the end. It’s something that is established in my routine. It’s not something that is heavy on me. Because, I’ve been doing that for several, several, several times. So again, one of the most important things that I would recommend you having is cultivating this kind of habit of the record keeping.

And when I say record keeping, I am talking about a platter of different things: time, energy, also money you are using on a project. This I will say is the most important thing. Another thing I believe myself, to be very important is when you’re starting out, you don’t know everything.

Nobody knows everything, but there are people out there that knows way more than you. So if you ask me, what would you recommend? Books on the subject you are researching, for example. When I was researching about marketing, book marketing. I went over two or three of what I believed to be the best top self publishers that knew how to do that thing, and I studied their books.

Then I follow them like a stalker. I subscribed to their email list, which I receive every single day, and I got the value out of that. The other thing that I, searched for were coaches and mentors. So again, this is the shape of answering the question of “what you would recommend to a person that is starting out?”

People that know more than you do. Because like they’re going to like fast forward the process for you to get the point A to point B, because they already have the answer and you do not have to reinvent the wheel. So this might not immediately sound like something that financially or for the kind of subject we are discussing is meaningful.

But again, it’s an instrument that you can use. It’s books that answer your questions and you will not have to ask those questions anymore because you will know the answer now. And people. Self publisher, entrepreneur, writers. If you’re looking for answers on the craft of writing that knows more than me. So two things to sum it up: keep your numbers in every kind of format that you prefer and that it’s easier for you to keep long term, and seek the advice of people that are more advanced.

Because they are valuable for you as a writer and for you as a business owner. So for you as an entrepreneur, these are my top two. What are your top two, Crystal?

Crystal: My top two? Oh man. Okay. Well, I’m going to kind of cheat, so I’m going to say I want you to go to the show notes for this episode, or you can go straight to the strategicauthorpreneur.com site and we’ve collected up a bunch of the resources that we’re talking about for information.

So yes, information is definitely key. I think in terms of tools when you’re looking at growing your author career, you really want to know what you’re trying to accomplish and why. So knowing your why, why are you an author? What are you trying to do? Right? If your goal as an author is to you know, publish one or two books in your subject matter, maybe you’re a nonfiction author. So if you are looking to establish yourself as a subject matter expert, and that’s your goal, is to publish one or two books in your field and then promote the heck out of those by traveling and speaking and everything else, you don’t necessarily need the same business systems as someone who is going to set up a fiction writing career where they plan to write 20 books in the series over their lifetime. Right?

So for you, the choices you make about which tools you purchase or which people you hire to help you with services are going to be very different than the person who really does want long term to think about that. So for me, when I was trying to decide, okay, will I hire somebody to do the layouts for my book or will I purchase a tool that will help me do that and take the time to learn how to use it?

It absolutely made sense for me to buy vellum and put in the time to learn to use it because I knew that I was going to need to do layouts on hopefully over my career, hundreds of books. I’m at, I think the next one is 40, 41, something like that. And I, I know that I’m nowhere near done, right. I’m still young.

I’ve got lots of good writing years, so my intention is to publish tons of books. And so for me, if I can save myself the layout cost on every single book from now until the end of my career or until a new tool comes along that the 3 or $400 to pay for vellum in all of its formats is well worth it. So for me, I think, think about what do you absolutely have to do to get to that next step?

Well, you have to, write. Ideally you will edit and you definitely need to publish those books. And so the key pieces are going to be whatever allows you to do the layout piece or to get your book from written to published. So when you’re first starting, you focus based on your writing tools and then your publishing tools, and then you focus on where you’re going to connect that published book to the reader.

So your mailing list, which you can often start for free. So that’s fine. But just thinking about where are you going to grow to. Not just what’s going to work today, but what’s going to work today and for a little while? Because just like clothes, investing in a few classic pieces is better than a whole lot of the $20 kind that’ll sorta kind of work, but don’t make you feel like you’re rocking it.

So you want to have those key pieces, and we will put in the show notes, if we had to pick our, our perfect starter tool kits, then you can click there and find out what those tools are. But for me, it’s vellum for layouts. If you’re on a Mac. You can use Draft2Digital if you’re not, and there are some other tools out there as well, but something to do, your layouts and something to do your mailing list stuff, and I’m going to throw out their book brush is your rockstar non-techie solution to all of your imagery stuff.

So your promo images, they have a cover designer tool that they’ve just launched. Now there’s a whole bunch of things you can make with BookBrush to help promote your book. All you need is your book cover and a book brush account, and that will save you hundreds if not thousands over the course of your career in terms of getting your promotional images, your covers, promotional video clips, all kinds of things that you can make with that.

So be sure to check the show notes for a link to some tutorials and stuff we have of how to use that as well. What I’m curious about, what are you going to do this year to scale up your business?

What are we doing this year ti scale up our businesses

Michele: Okay, so we are in a business that is based on the thing that I’m doing: on writing more.

Now, writing more for me, it means writing more stories. Every story is, each story is a product. So what I need to do is allocate more time into that side of my business, which is producing stories. How can I do that? Now, I took the decision a few months ago to buy Vellum exactly for that reason, because I wanted to save up dozens, if not hundreds of hours in the formatting, which I’m rerouting completely 100% of my writing. And in fact; I checked, I read double the amount of time with respect to the few months, like that’s basically data.

Now this year what I want to do is writing faster. Faster stories. I set myself like the objective of write at least one story each month. So I’m going to need like other instruments for me, to help me share these stories. And one of the things I think we didn’t mention, or maybe we mentioned, but we didn’t say it too much, and that I want to drop here because I’m going to use it way more this year is book funnel. Which is basically a service that helps, I would say revolutionize and can potentially can scale up a lot, an author’s career. And BookFunnel, you can think of it like basically a hub. Where you can do several things. You can grow your newsletter following, which is huge.

And Crystal was mentioning that. You can give away a gift copy of your book. Or you can give a newsletters copy, so up to like 500 books in a chunk, for example, reviewers are previews. Now you think about that and, maybe you think like, it’s not that important.

Then then send it via email and that’s time spent. What I believe is that a resource like book funnel is huge. There are some bloggers that ask for my book to review. Before what I did was like just going on my Gmail, craft, really craft like a bunch of sentences, which made the message more personalized, and then send the book.

Now all of them are being taken care of by book funnel. Because once you upload the versions of your book on that website, any single person asks me for a book copy or an ARC copy review copy, I click a button. And that’s gold for me because my objective is writing more books. Gathering more time. And book funnel, it’s new and it’s just software that I would definitely use more in order to do that. And I suggest you, if you don’t know it, you don’t know the software. You don’t know the, sorry, the website. I suggest you to check that out because it’s really changing the way I write.

Crystal: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think the top three, we’ve identified a vellum, book funnel, and book brush plus a mailing list tool, whatever your mailing was tool is going to be, but you can, you can start for free with the mailing list tool and then you can scale up to paid options once your list grows a bit.

But definitely those are the pieces that you really need to have to be setting yourself up for success with your author career. So I’m going to throw in one more question here. There’s a whole bunch of questions that we’ve received that have to do with, things that are specific to the actual publishing process.

So we’re going to do a whole separate episode on things like ISBNs and, you know, how do you choose an imprint name and all that kind of stuff, because that’s all really part of the publishing process. It’s not just part of the overarching business stuff, but I am curious, how do you think you are maintaining the balance between your business and your private life? How are you balancing work and play?

Finding balance

Michele: That’s one of those questions that you don’t know how to answer. I don’t know how to answer, so I just try my best. Now balance wise for me, it changes on a day to week basis. Because life changes. And so I believe your balance should change with that. So what I do is I have a schedule and the way I see a day, for me, it’s structured.

I keep my sanity and my balance between my working life and my personal life. By the night before I go to sleep, I have a checklist. I make sure that I checked that. Then I know that there are two or three core objectives that are kept. Now, if I can do those two or three things, that’s all that I need to feel best.

And then I know that once I know I’ve done those two to three things, I can do whatever that needs to be doing in my personal life. Now, this can be like something that you see. Let’s just make a checklist then, but it might just work for me. Just me, Michele Amitrani. You have to understand, what is it that you can keep doing for long term.

And this balance…I talk about checklists. Then you can be really sure it’s going to be upset for some reason. You have to understand that it’s sometimes you just can’t keep that balance and it’s okay and you have to give yourself the permission and understand it’s fine. For example, today I couldn’t write for those two hours, and that was on the core objective, but I’m not going to die.

It’s okay not to do everything every single day. And and this is something that I speak from personal experience, if you ask me how I know it. I got really stressed out to a point that I was like, kind of a on depression side because I wanted to do everything that was on that core list. I don’t suggest you doing that.

What I suggest to you is keep yourself healthy by doing exercise, which is huge, and it’s not something that somebody necessarily associate with the life of a writer. I started doing yoga,  after I decided to be serious about the writing things because I know that those 15 to 20 minutes of yoga that I can do in my home helps me keep that balance.

So it can be anything you want. If I had to suggest you something, keep yourself accountable. When you can keep yourself accountable, it’s completely fine. You have permission to fail once or twice, then nothing is going to happen as long as one week after, two week after, you know, my longer term plan is this, and you are making steps toward that direction.

Don’t stress out because everything that happens in your writing life, it is going on influence your personal life. I guarantee you 100%.

Crystal: And vice versa. They definitely go both directions. I think we have, and my health psychologist’s background is going to come out here, but we had for so long this idea of balance as like somebody walking on a tight rope, you know, holding a stick with two equal buckets of water because it has to be the same to be balanced. Right? Like that’s, that’s sort of the vision I think that we have that work life balance implies you found this perfect spot in the middle where everything is smooth and nothing is spilling out of your buckets of water and there’s no wobbling and everything is great, but I don’t, I think that that is at all realistic.

I think that’s actually kind of doing a disservice to everything. I don’t know about all of you, but I find my balance comes from diving really deep into certain things in cycles. My seasonal balance, I’m going to spend away more time outside in the spring and fall. My little Irish soul withers in the heat and so I’m not good in summer, like I’m not good at outside when it’s super hot and we have a lot of forest fires and stuff here, so sometimes it’s really smoky.

But I love like being outdoors in spring and fall. The winter, all I want to do is be inside in my cozy little nest of a writing space and write like the wind. So things have a season, right? Everything in our life has a season. Some months it’s all about celebrating with family and friends. We have what we call birthday month because it seems like everybody that we’re close to has a birthday inside of a four week period, and so we just kind of give into that.

We don’t plan to do a lot of things during that time because that is balance. That is taking the time when it’s most beneficial for the family and friends that we have. It is prioritizing what needs to be prioritized in the moment. So I think when we look at balance, it’s easier to think about what are we removing from the buckets that we’re carrying along that tight rope, right?

So that it’s not so heavy and it’s easier to react quickly if we have that room to maneuver. So I think…there’s a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, which is really interesting. And another one called Essentialism by Greg McKeown I think is how you say that. And so those are two things I read together and it really did help me to start shaving away the unimportant things and deciding,

Okay, I will throw out another principle here, but it’s called the Pareto principle or the 80 20 principle, which is that we get 80% of the results from 20% of the things we are doing. And so in my writing business, every day, every week, every month, and every three months when we do our big planning retreats at the creative Academy, I sit down and think about what is going to get me the most bang for my buck during this next quarter of the year, these next 12 weeks. What am I going to get the most bang from if I dedicate my time to that? What is my most effective 20% and then I try to only concentrate on that so that I can lighten up those buckets and stand a chance at keeping some kind of balance. Right? So I think that’s a really valuable exercise to do for yourself.

So maybe we’ll give you a spot of homework for today, which is when you go away from this episode, sit down, grab a notebook, a journal. You’re a writer. We know you have one. Whatever format that takes and write down what are all of the things you’re doing in your writing life or your personal life that feel like they’re making the buckets full, and then look at which are the things that you could maybe lighten the load a bit. Maybe you don’t say, I quit social media forever, but maybe you say for the next three months, Twitter is not my focus. And you just give yourself permission to step back from it. See if anything changes. I quit social media a couple of years ago, mostly. I mean, I’m very rarely paying attention to things in most of the channels.

And, yeah. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared, and I didn’t really notice except that I was like, wow, I could get a lot done. So I think it’s, it’s just something to consider its like, where does, where does each thing fit in your business development plan? Where does each thing fit in terms of filling up the well, how, how excited does it make you?

How happy does it make you? What does it do to your soul and your body when you say yes or no to a thing? And then just look at scratching some of those things off of your list of what you’re going to worry about right now and then have permission to move on. So speaking of the things we’re going to worry about right now.

The time has come for the curious jar to make an appearance, and this is our jar full of random questions that were submitted by people we know, listeners, whatever. So I’m going to go around here.

How long from the time you wrote your first book until the time your first book was published and was it the same book?

Michele: Hopefully it’s not wet today.

Crystal: No, it’s not wet today! We learn from our previous errors and we evolve. So we have learned that, yes. Tell me when to stop.

Michele: Stop now!

Crystal: Okay. It’s sort of like sticking your hand in the Skittles bag. You wonder what color you’re going to come up with. Today, we’ve got a pink color one, and the question is “how long from the time you wrote your first book until the time your first book was published and was it the same book?”

Michele: Okay. Easy question because I have an answer, so it took me three years.

Three years. Three years to publish it. And yes. It was definitely the same book. I had no idea what I was doing, so it started as a, like an ontology. Then it became like a book that was like, well, everything about one character, but with separate stories. Yeah. And that’s pretty much it.

Oh, one interesting part. The idea: Poland from an historical event, a historical event that I was part of. And I lived in Florida for a year. And a year living in Florida. It happened that, uh, the very last space shuttle, which is called, Atlantis was the lifting up from earth. And I went to Cape Canaveral to see that.

And it was in 2011, summer of 2011. And that idea spun into a complete book. And that was the very first, and I think only time that a book of mine happened because of something that I saw. An event that was in the newspaper. Yeah. The last departure of state’s charter. I was there. That’s it.

Crystal: Nice. Excellent. Yeah…the first book I wrote, it depends how official we want to get. So, well, yeah, that’s what I mean. Like technically, so I wrote a story in grade 12 French class. It was an assignment. I was in AP French. We had to, we had to write some big long thing. And so I was like, Ooh, can I read a children’s book?

So I actually wrote my first children’s book in French class and my mom worked for a sign shop and we had all this vinyl at home, like the sticky stickers, like colored sheets of stuff and all the scraps she used to bring home for my brother and I to like make craft stuff with or whatever. So I got some cardboard and I made a cover for this book, and I illustrated it all myself.

It’s horrendous. I still have it. I promise if you come back to a future episode, I will reveal all and you can see my very first actual book. No, it wasn’t professionally published to say the least, but my French teacher kept it for almost 20 years. And when I went back to visit my high school one day, he was in the classroom and I was talking about how I was publishing, and he’s like, I have your first book.

So Mr J. Thank you for that. He gave it back to me so that I could have it for doing school visits with kids. So when I go into classrooms and I’m talking to the kids and they’re like, nothing we do at school is ever going to really matter. And I’m like, no. Oh no. You don’t understand. There could be things that come back later that did actually matter.

Michele: Well, your teacher is keeping your stuff for 20 years, that’s amazing.

Crystal: Well yeah, he said it was his favorite example, I guess, of that assignment or something. So he’d kept it for ages. Which turned out to be awesome because I did get it back and translated it back into English and it is in fact a book called Caleb and the Mess. So that was exciting. Okay. But my actual first published book was Then it Rained, which is a  children’s full-color picture book.

And I wrote it about two years before it was published. I think. Two years of revisions. There’s not a lot of words in that book cause it’s a kids’ picture book, so less than a thousand words and it got rewritten, I don’t know, hundreds of times, but it’s, yeah, it was about a two year process, I think, until I got to the point of actually publishing it, maybe three years from first draft to actually being available in the world.

Michele: How long do you take note or write and publish a book?

Crystal: Some books I’ve been working on for like 20 years and they’re still not done. But if I, if I am kind of ready and able to dedicate myself to it, I can write a novella. It takes about a month to go through the process of like developing the story and, and getting to know my characters. I mean, they’re all in the same story world, River’s End, for all of my fiction, so I don’t have to like, you, I’m not inventing new worlds each time I go to write a story, so I need to know the people really well and I need to get to know whatever locations are in there. So yeah, it takes about a month for a novella. If I’m not pulled in 57 other directions, doing things like Twitter, which is why goodbye social media

Michele: That’s interesting. From two years to a month.

Crystal: I’ve never written a full length novel. Well, I did when I was about 15. Finished it when I was like 18, and then the hard drive melted, erasing all of it. So that was the only full length book that I’ve ever written, actually in the fiction world, I’ve written plenty of nonfiction, but yeah.

So I dunno, ask me again in six months how long it took me to write my first full length fiction and maybe I can tell you.

Michele: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

Crystal: Yeah. I like the short stuff. I love like that length, it works for my brain and I can get in, but we are getting ahead of ourselves because we have a whole other episode coming up where we are going to talk all about our writing processes.

That was just a little teaser to real you in. But if you have a question you’d like to ask the curious jar, and by extension us, then you can email ideas at strategicauthorpreneur.com. And we’ll add it into the mix. We want to get to know you as well. So we’d love for you to leave a comment on the show notes for this episode and answer the curious jar a question for yourself.

What was your first book and how long was it between when you wrote it and when it’s published. We’d also love to hear about, what your plans are for scaling up your business this year. So if you’re, maybe your book isn’t published yet and you don’t have an answer to the previous question. Tell us what you’re looking to do to level up your writing and your  writing business this year.

For show notes, links to resources we mentioned, and coupons and discounts on tools we love, you can visit us@strategicauthorpreneur.com if you subscribe to the newsletter each week, we’ll email you just one thing that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey and a link to our latest episode.

And you’ll get a gold star in a million bonus points in the game of life if you leave us a review wherever you listen to this podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to get to know us and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode where we’ll be taking a deep dive into the actual writing process.

We’ll pull back the curtain and unveil all of the mysteries of our brains, which could get messy of what should also be interesting.

Michele: What are you still doing here? Go write!