In this episode, we’re talking about indie publishing and tackling the following questions: How and why did we choose to go the indie route? What did we try that didn’t work? What software/tools do we use in the publishing process to give ourselves more time for writing? Should you go wide or Amazon exclusive? What would we change if we could go back in time?

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• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 005: Inside the Indie Publishing Process

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

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

Crystal: Welcome to episode number five of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to talk through the actual publishing process, so we’ll deep dive into how we publish our books, why we chose those methods, tools, and platforms, and share any tips or tricks we have to offer up that you can apply to your own publishing adventures.

So I want to know first, what made you decide to indie publish? What was it that brought you along that pathway?

What made you decide to self publish?

Michele:  I actually was lucky enough, like somebody asked me this question at a one reading that I did that the Vancouver Public Library a few days ago. And I was like, that’s an interesting question.

And I was like, but I also have an answer, which was like independence. And so when somebody asked me that question, I was like, I got the answer. I really, really like to be independent on most of the things that I do. So when I was faced with the choice of the finishing my first novel in Italian, what do I do?

Do I start like the process of trying to be picked. Or do I pick myself? This is not an easy choice. This is something that starts from the kind of personality you have. Publishing a book is daunting. Even if there is somebody else that is helping you in the process, publishing a book by yourself, it is crazy.

I think the first time you think about that because like when you do this, and what I was thinking was like, if you take this road, you’re going to be both the person that makes the decision of plugging and publishing. So you’re going to be both the judge and the jury at the same time. That’s super, super scary.

And that’s why we need buffers, which are, for example, in the previous episode we talked about the editor. It’s because there is no way you can do a professional product and deliberate and package it professionally by yourself. That had been said, independence was the thing that really, really, really drove me to learn all of the other things that are connected to self-publishing.

Because the moment you write the book and you publish it, that’s the beginning. That’s not absolutely no way, shape or form how the things end. There is a world to understand after that. There is the copy edit kind of thing. There is like the marketing kind of things. All the things that I’m still trying to figure out or all of these things that I’m still trying to understand. Even though after years of doing this.

But again, independence was the thing that really made the difference for me. I’m sure there is going to be something along the similar side though, on your life from what I learned and what I know about your family, but I want to know more specifics.

Crystal: Well, we have to go back in time a little bit. We have to get in a time machine and go on a little journey to know how this shook out. I didn’t intend to indie publish because back in the day that it wasn’t a thing, right? It, it was not what it is now, but there were so many options and all of these things you could do.

So the story is, I moved home from Ireland and I had just finished a master’s degree in health psychology, and nobody knew what the heck a health psychologist was. So there were no jobs that I could be qualified for because there was, I don’t know, maybe 40 of them in the world at that point.

And they were just like, yeah…no, we can hire a social worker or a counselor, like these are the options for this job. So I had a hard time explaining to people what I was doing and you know, I had always wanted to also be a writer. I had this dual thing going on my whole life where I wanted to do both, and my husband said, you know what?

And at the time it was my boyfriend. He was like, okay, I’m working right now. Just do the writer thing for a little while and see what happens. And so I started writing and I was doing kids’ books at the time, partly because our daughter was little. So that fit in really well, but also because they seemed shorter.

I thought that was an easier entry point, which it is not that. Stupid, stupid assumption. They’re fricking hard. But I managed to write a bunch and I started actually mailing them out. I wanted to get them published so I sent out one of the ones that I’d been polishing for like two years, and I sent it out.

I found this publisher online. Yes, there was the internet even then, but it was fairly new. So I sent this manuscript to this publisher I’d found in the intranet, and they sent me back a letter like six months later that said, Oh yeah, great story. We don’t publish this kind of book anymore, but we haven’t updated our website, sorry.

So I’d waited like six months to get this letter that was basically like, oops. And so I was like, okay, super frustrated. So I sent out another one, same story off to another publisher, and I waited for months and eventually I get back this lovely letter that said, this is great, but we don’t publish rhyming books.

And I was like, well. Okay. And I didn’t understand why at the time. We’ll do a whole other episode on children’s books and rhyming books at some future date. And I could explain that little story, but, you know, through all of this, we had had some family stuff going on and my aunt had actually been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And so I had gone to visit her in the hospital. And the last conversation we had, she was talking about how she had waited until she was an adult and her kids were mostly grown before she went back to school to be a teacher. And she said to me like, don’t wait. That was just what she was saying, you know what you want to do? Don’t wait. Find a way and make it happen.

So that obviously had a pretty big impact. She passed away not long after, and so our family was all obviously a little shaken by that and everybody was very much in the mode of, okay, we don’t know how much time we have. And so for me, I internalized that as this has been my dream to do this thing.

Like I’m not going to keep putting it off because I don’t want to be looking back later thinking, I wish I had had more time with this. So my grandmother in the meantime was a librarian. So she was well familiar with books and all of that stuff, and she had wanted to write it up, her memoir.

So kind of a family history, which she had done and had worked with one of those sort of one of those author services companies who helps you put your book together. I think it might’ve been Trafford do you use at that point they were a Canadian company and fairly well known. And so I asked her, well, how did all of that happen?

And she told me everything she knew about self-publishing. And so I dove into that. Children’s book market at that point, and this is 2007 like this is really before it was cool or even accessible or even smart to be doing it that way. It was so hard. But it, it taught me a lot of things that I was able to kind of apply.

And when I did eventually make a leap into romance, I was coming to that decision from a really different place, I think, than a lot of people were. And when I was starting to write romance, we were still at the point where a lot of people, we’re still traditionally publishing, even to the point of saying most people, we’re still traditionally publishing.

But that shift to indie publishing for romance authors was kind of just starting. And so I was looking around, I was part of the Romance Writers of America, Greater Vancouver Chapter, RWAGVC for short. And I was looking around at my fellow authors, many of whom had built up solid publishing careers and were writing for publishers on the regular.

And I was looking at their publishing calendars, which were like writing six books a year, and they were forever scrambling to hit these deadlines. And I had by this point spent a dozen to 15 years, whatever, building up a consulting business as well. And I didn’t want to have to walk away from that to hit writing deadlines or to have somebody else kind of determining what my schedule or my life was going to look like.

That was one of the big determining factors for me was I can’t let someone else set the publication schedule in my world because that could break our family. I could break our business, it could do a lot of not great things. And so I didn’t want that external pressure. And the flip side of that was some of those people were publishing series and the publishers wouldn’t always renew those series.

And for somebody who was looking at having all of the books in the same series, I didn’t want to have to reinvent a whole bunch of different towns and you know, start over from scratch. And at that point people were still signing away character rights and things like that.

And I didn’t want someone else to be able to tell me if I could write or not write. So ultimately it does boil down to the independence part. I just a bit of a control freak and I don’t want someone else being able to make decisions about how my publishing life is going to look. So for me it was, I’m more than happy to do the extra hard work involved to do it all myself, or to hire the right people to my team to help me do it, and then have the ability to make choices.

Michele: So you had that, I would say early start in the sense that you started doing that before self-publishing or publishing in general was cool. So like if you have to count them, how many books, like did you publish?

Crystal: In total?

Michele: Yeah.

Crystal: Well, we published a lot of other people’s books along the way as well, but of my own, I think the next one is maybe number 40, because I did some sort of traditionalish arrangements where I wrote for an educational publisher in Korea for a long time as well. So I did a ton of stuff under pen names and kind of like ghost writing for them, some of it under my own name.

And then romance books, and I wrote some nonfiction books along the way, as well as the kids’ books and a couple of journals and things like that.

Michele: So we’ll say 40 so that’s the indicator. Interesting, I think also for the audience, like I wrote seven so I’m like here, and you’re like…

Okay. I’ve got some things to do. Write faster!

Crystal: I think I have a decade on your age wise, though.

Michele: But if you think about that, it’s interesting like, because the amount of work you put there and the amount of time, some things that you saw didn’t actually work, but then you double down your efforts and you were able to pivot. Now you’re successful.

Exactly. Because you understood what was working for you and the thing that you said about the, “I was looking at other people” and I was looking at the way other people were publishing works. That’s one of the ways you made your informed decision. I don’t want to be that. I want to be me, which I think says an awful lot of things about who you are as a person and where you want to be and where you want to go. So that’s interesting. I did not know that

Crystal: I think mostly we learn from the things that don’t work. If you have a book or an experience and it’s super successful, you don’t always learn a lot from it. You just think, yay, that worked, but you don’t know why. But when something doesn’t go the way you thought it was going to go, or it really doesn’t work.

You- well, maybe not everybody, but I find that I examine why not and then I will alter things a bit and try again because I truly do believe that the only way to fail at something is to stop trying. Like as long as you are making changes and trying again, you’re still making forward progress. The only way you don’t succeed is if you quit.

If you take yourself out of the game, because then you never know what was going to be the thing that you hit. And I know there’s a super famous quote, which I will totally mangle by somebody smart, maybe Steve Jobs or something that’s talking about that success is really serial failure while avoiding disastrous consequences.

And that’s it. It is not succeeding enough times while not completely destroying your life. You can then kind of learn from each of those and just turn the dial a little bit each time and course correct a little bit each time. And so I think indie publishing is the perfect illustration of that philosophy, right?

It is making smart micro choices, each thing you’re doing, tracking your results, checking out what didn’t work, and then altering your plan a little bit to go from there. So yeah, I think that that is pretty valuable. And you know, each thing that you’ve learned kind of rippling that out into the other formats and the other experiments that you do in the publishing space.

And I like to think of them as experiments that helps me mentally. You know, just learn from every type of experience, whether it feels good in the moment or doesn’t. So let’s talk for a minute about what kinds of experiments you have done in your publishing career. So what kinds of formats have you tried out or what kinds of things have you tested in the last while?

Formats and tools for indie publishing

Michele: I am actually in the middle of an experiment as well. Speaking and talking, which is writing and publishing in my second language, English. And I have a lot to say about this. But first I want to say all the other things that I tried before. I did try several things that did not work.

One of the things was, I mentioned this in a previous episode about one of my previous works in Italian. It was a science fiction book and it was like a European science fiction. I will say as a genre. What I did was I just took this book and I translated it into English and it was just a translation of a book that I did because I wanted to try and see if I can keep writing in Italian while I’m translating books and maybe just publishing them in English.

That book tanked and it basically didn’t sell any copies. And the reason was because I didn’t do my research. I had no idea what I was doing. What I do know is that I lost the, well, I didn’t lose- I used nine months to translate this book by myself. And it was a 90,000 words book from Italian into English.

And of course I had to edit it professionally. So I had to ask the two or three different editors to see it and correct it, and then I just put it out there and did nothing completely and utterly. That was a big failure and a one I’m not necessarily proud of, but it was one of those stepping stones.

The tool that I used wasn’t a tool, it was more a belief. The English market is way bigger than Italian, so if you are publishing a book in English, you are going to sell 10 times as much, which it didn’t turn to be exactly the case. I sold maybe a tenth of what I was selling in Italy. And again, the reason was that I did not do my research.

Tool wise, there are some things and software and things that I use in order to give myself more time for writing. So usually the tools that I use are not necessarily because they are sparkling, it’s because they are strictly useful in the sense that they give you more time to write. One of the things that I use is Vellum, and I purchased this actually just a few months ago, completely different experience that is giving to my day to day activity.

I probably will say that I am writing one to two hours more per day just because I purchased this softer. It was a biggest expenditure for me. And it was something that actually you had recommended and I was like, no, no, no worries. So there is no way I can afford this kind of thing. But then I have to thank you because it’s really, really changing the way I write, and it’s a formatting thing.

So you would think it doesn’t have anything to do with writing. It gives me more freedom to write. So it was definitely worth the money.

Crystal: I have a quick question. So are you actually writing right in Vellum?

Michele: No, I’m not. I write in Scrivener, actually. But before Scrivener I wrote in a notebook.

So in longhand. You say it like that? Longhand writing. Very first draft. Because I am writing very short stories now. So no more than 15/20,000 words. It fits in maybe 35 to 40 pages, and my notebooks are kind of being maybe 300/400 pages. I think that stuff, I type it in Scrivener. Then I edit the second draft, I will say.

Vellum, I just use it to basically copy and paste from a software, like Word it can be, or Pages, or it can be Scrivener. And then it’s basically something that I use just to package the beautiful thing and then put it out there. I use that only for the formatting side, and it’s making my product so much more beautiful. The experience for the readers is so much better right.

So tool wise, this one changed the way I am writing, even though it’s a software that just formats your book.

Crystal: Okay, I’ve got a question there. So is it changing the way you’re writing because it’s freeing up more time for you to write because you don’t have to spend it on formatting?

Or is it just like, you know when you get to formatting, it’s not going to be a horrific chore, so that—

Michele: Both of those things. But the most important is that it’s giving me the time. Time is super important, so I don’t care how much it costs. And you find now find a software that seems to cost a lot, the question that I ask myself is, is this tool going to give me time? This is huge for me. Is it going to give me 30 more minutes per day? I’ll say, yes, I’ll buy it. Even if it cost a lot, because 30 minutes per day multiplied for 365 that’s a lot of hours. And lots of hours are books, we know this, Crystal.

Crystal: Time is words and then words are money

Michele: I will say without saying too many things, the mistake that I made was the Omnilogos kind of thing and try to just understand something without studying it, without doing any kind of research, without having any kind of data, which we already touched on that point, it’s super important. I mean, some data’s to base our decision on.

And I will say more on the ground to Vellum freeing up a lot of time, really saving me. A huge investment of time on the formatting side. So when I had to do the formatting with the Scrivener before, it was like a really a pain in the…beep. But now it’s a beautiful. You just copy and paste, make sure that everything is correct and fine.

Just export it and you have all the lovely formatting. I can’t stop recommending this software enough also to my Italian fellows

Crystal: Okay. So you’ve published eBooks, right, which you lay out in Vellum. Do you also use Vellum for print book layouts?

Michele: Yes. And I actually did it that for, the very last one, that I published, Lord of Time. And again, it was so easy to go to before I had to use Word to re shape, and then upload it on CreateSpace, which now no longer exists. And there was so many other hours because the formatting would be completely different than if it was done with word, at least for me, it takes a lot of time and you want to punch somebody in the face at the end.

But it’s like just a click. You just click that. Then you make sure that it’s, for example, six by nine or five by 8.5, whatever it is that is, you know, it’s going to be the paperback format and it’s good. It’s done. So I can’t stress enough how much it is important for me to use this tool.

Crystal: Yeah. And I think it’s important to point out too, like when we’re comparing layout tools and we’re talking about what you can use to format your book, it is possible to use Word to format your book. You know, that is something you can do. There’s a guide on KDP that you can download and follow all the instructions.

So if Word is what you have access to, you can do that. You can use Scrivener to directly export to your eBook formats for sure. That is also an option. Again, it’s a little fiddly, I’ve found since Scrivener three. The export function just breaks my head a little bit. So, personally I write in Scrivener and then I export to a Word document for my editing phase, and then I pull it into Vellum for layout.

And it’s important to point out too, how layout used to work, and there are a lot of book designers who are still using InDesign to layout books. If you have a really graphic heavy book or you want a lot of funky formatting and it’s a nonfiction like how to kind of thing. And you have lots of fancy sidebar call-outs and you want to get really complex with your design, you’re not doing that in Vellum. That’s not what it’s made for.

But if you are publishing a straight up book with like chapter headings, you can insert images, you can do all kinds of cool stuff. It’s just, you know, if this is our scale of possible design things you could do with your book, Vellum can do about this much, and then InDesign can do the rest of that scope.

So depending on what you’re creating, and it’s important to know if you go to someone who is saying, well, I’ll do a book layout for you, you can hire me for this service. You need to know which tool they’re using, and it’s going to drastically impact the cost of your book layout. And it’s also going to impact the export options because with Vellum, you set up the same file and you can export in a whole bunch of different ways, but InDesign doesn’t work quite the same way. The other thing to be aware of is the cost and the learning curve on InDesign because speaking as someone who actually, there was no vellum, there wasn’t anything else. We made our print books in InDesign and then we actually had to like HTML code, the eBooks. Which is not cool.

Michele: That doesn’t sound very fun.

Crystal: I have a fantastic screenshot of, it’s a file directory and the first one is like eBook for X book, version one, and then it’s version two and then it’s like please let this work version four and then it’s like, are you kidding me? This still doesn’t work version nine and there’s this list file, things that become mostly exclamation points and swear words by the last one. And now we click a button and it’s imported in like four seconds. And then we have a book 10 minutes later. So you know, when you’re looking at Vellum and you’re thinking, Oh, it’s like $300.

That’s pretty expensive. We used to pay like $1,200 to a designer to lay out a basic novel, and if you were looking at like a graphic heavy book, you’re looking at thousands of dollars in the design phase and then you can’t edit it later, right? But if you have Vellum, you can pull it in. It looks professional because it’s using templates that other people made and it really does simplify the actual publication process.

And so if you are looking at tools, that’s a really good option. If you want something that gets you close to that, but not quite as much freedom but is free, then Draft2Digital does have a layout tool that will do that for you for free. So regardless of where you’re at in the process, think about that.

And think about for yourself, like are you embarking on a career where you’re going to publish 20 books in the next 20 years or even five books in the next five years? Well, if you invest in the software that’s going to help you do that easily and pleasantly, then you’re not going to delay finishing that book because you really don’t want it to tackle the publishing part, which is something our subconscious does, right?

To protect us from the things we know are coming that we really don’t want. So let the procrastinator in you go to sleep. And when the layout phase is actually more a carrot, right? It’s more something that we want. Do you know that expression, the carrot and the stick? There are two different types of motivation.

If you’re a donkey, right? The carrot in front of you will lead you forward and the stick whacking you from behind is like a different kind of motivation. So we’re always looking for carrots. But in this case, I think it, it does make a huge difference to be able to just build that book file yourself and then you can make changes to your front matter, your back matter. When Kindle changes, which page is the first page people start on? You can just go in and adjust your book files yourself without having to pay somebody else to do it, and you can do it in a moment’s notice. You’re not having to wait for someone else to help you with that. So, yeah, I think as far as setting up a smart author business, that’s one of the things that you can do to give yourself a really big leap ahead.

I would also like to talk about KDP Select. So when we talk about are you wide or are you KDP? This is kind of what we’re talking about. So KDP select is when you give Amazon exclusivity to sell your book. And so there are some perks that come with that. And there are also some disadvantages. Going wide is when you publish in all of the places.

So, you might do that through Draft2Digital or through PublishDrive or Smashwords yeah, so those are all places that are like aggregators where you upload your file there and they blast it out to all different sales platforms. Kobo is another place you can upload directly to. So some folks will go wide and others will go KDP select. So my Italian friend, what did you choose and why?

Wide or KDP Select?

Michele: Again, as you were mentioning that I believe it’s something that you have to make a decision, whatever you want to go on a direction or the other. Now for myself, since I’m starting out, I’m publishing a book in English. I’m thinking two different strategies.

I want to keep it simple for me to have all my books and royalties and things that happens on one store, which is also the store where I got the most of my revenue, which is Amazon. So for example, I decided to give you a real example, to publish Lord of Time, which is my latest dark fantasy book just on KDP select, and that means that I’m giving this platform all the rights of publication of the eBook version. I think I took this choice because I didn’t want to spread out my resources, especially with my first book, on different venues. I just wanted to have everything at the glance on one store, which is Amazon in this case.

But I took a completely different kind of approach. So it’s a different kind of strategy with another, I will say a series of stories that I’m releasing now, which is basically my need is the most people possible have to have access to these stories, which by the way are free. And I’m releasing these stories on a monthly basis.

So what I decided was, I don’t need these stories to be exclusive. I don’t want to make money out of them because my goal is to understand from feedback what works and what doesn’t. So the choice to go wide, so to publish the books both on KDP, and wide with Draft2Digital made sense to me because I needed that to happen.

I didn’t want the revenues in this case. I just wanted that book to reach as much people as possible. For this reason, I transformed the stories that are wide and that are free. Also in kind of reader magnet if you will, in the sense that there is a message in the stories, which again, this in these stories which are wide, which ask for feedback of people that are reading these stories.

And also if they’re interested in getting the new short story each month to subscribe to my mailing list. And I’m seeing the results of this as we’re talking. And that’s because I took that decision to give access to my stories to the most high number of people, different kinds of choice. So it depends on you.

This is something that I did because I wanted to understand different things, and to touch, different elements him. But again, as Crystal was saying before, when you take a decision like going wide, there might be things before that you thought that are completely different with a person that may be thinking of publishing only on Amazon.

If you want to become a user today bestseller, author you can’t unnecessarily do that if you’re publishing on a Kindle select because you give exclusivity of your story to Kindle, you can definitely do that if you are wide. So if you’re Kobo, Google Play, Barnes and Noble.  there are strategic consideration that you do way before you publish about them. So that was my decision when I had to release that kind of book or those kinds of stories. I do know that you have some goals related to your stories, and I do know that you have strategies in place to ensure that your books have a the most success possible.

And I also know that you take that kind of approach thinking beforehand, before you’re publishing those books. So what kind of retailers you want to publish them. What do you do exactly when you have to make the decision, what goes on in here?

Crystal: Isn’t that the question? So I have made this decision multiple times over my romance writing career and I have adjusted at different times.

Morally and sort of gut feeling wise, I would love to be wide because I would really like to reach the most readers possible. I would love to support all the different companies who are providing readers with books. That would be my preference. However, for the moment for starting out, when you’re just at that ramping things up phase.

You have a few considerations. So one of them is where’s the money? The unfortunate reality is that building an audience wide takes a lot more time. I’m a statistic, I’ve heard from a few different people in a few different places that it takes about two years to really build a platform wide to get to the point where you’re actually seeing some, you know, real sales revenue. I left all my books wide for the first year and I think I had like $22 from everywhere that was not Amazon. So part of that is on me because publishing wide requires that you are very actively marketing on all of those different platforms.

And I wasn’t, I told myself. I didn’t have a responsibility to market for the first year. All I was focusing on was writing books and getting them released, and I just wanted to see what would happen organically with that. So I did do that. All of the books on all the platforms, just to see what would happen.

It turns out a whole lot of, not much for most of the places, but Amazon really did spike. And for me, I really noticed a shift in the revenue when I did go into the Kindle unlimited program. So part of that is because I write in romance. Romance readers are known for devouring books at an alarming rate.

They’re what we call whale readers for the most part. And you know, if you just picture a whale swimming around, like swallowing all the krill, that’s what they do. The books are krill, and they’re just like. Lots of romance readers read enough books that they actually can’t even post all their reviews in real time because Amazon only lets you do so many a day.

Which is a thing. So that is a really lucky problem to have. And that is partly why, you know, romance tends to be a nice genre to be publishing in, because readers love the content. They get super attached to your characters to get drawn right in. But the impact of that economically, as most readers can’t afford to purchase every book they’re going to read, right?

So historically, you know, my mom has a lot of sisters and I have a bazillion rough cousins, who all read stuff. And there’s a lot of the ladies that read romance novels and we swap them all around because you couldn’t afford to buy them all for yourself. Well, Kindle Unlimited is basically the equivalent of that, right?

These subscription reading services, they let you budget. So, okay, $10 a month, and I can read all the stuff I can read. That’s pretty irresistible. So for me, that’s where my readers are hanging out. A lot of my readers are in Kindle unlimited. So for me it made sense to offer that up as an option, especially with a series where they can burn through everything they want as fast as they want.

They get really into it, and then things just kind of take off. Now that’s not to say that all of my revenue, or even most of my revenue comes from page reads because it doesn’t, because my books are really short. I write novellas. And because you’re paid per page, they actually make way less when somebody reads it in Kindle unlimited than when they read it in KDP select.

But I find that people who are going to buy it are different people than the ones who will read it KU. So that’s two different pools of readers. And so overall it really did increase the revenue. And yeah, what I wanted in my strategic career building was to be able to get a whole bunch of products out there.

And I want it to be generating revenue, which I could then use to pay for the next book. Right? My goal was to see if this could be a self-sustaining kind of a business for me where, you know, did I make enough with each new release that I could pay for the editing on that book? And was I making enough off of eBook sales to then pay for making an audio book?

And so that’s always been my goal. You know, when you make products that will last your whole lifetime, you have a lifetime to earn off of them. So I wasn’t worried about making all of the money I ever needed to make off of that book right away because I know that I’m building long tail income over time, and the more products I can produce, the more of a

shot I have of those numbers getting big and impressive. And I’m sustaining me and my family as time goes on. And so that was the goal, was to be able to pull the money out of the existing books and put it back into reinvest in the business. So that’s always been kind of what drives me, but I do have a go wide plan.

It’s just like a three to five year plan. I think you need enough content that you can have stuff in KU and in KDP select that’s generating enough revenue to keep your business going, and then you can transition as you add more products that maybe not everything is in that same space, and you can add more things in the other platforms and then slowly build up your readership there.

But in a way that’s sustainable because it’s not taking all of your existing revenue. And shifting it out into the wide platforms. So I think just buying yourself the freedom to really both in time and energy and money to you buy yourself the freedom to really invest in going wide properly, which I did not do last time.

I just threw them up there and then was like, nothing happened. Okay. I guess that didn’t work. I know it will work, but it does need the same level of effort that everything else does in this publishing game.

Michele: So if there was something that you wouldn’t do necessarily in the past, would it be that? What you said, to go back and just releasing it wide as they were, or would it be something different that you change. And if there is something that you wanted to change of the process you were talking about.

Crystal: If it was the same me going back to the same, I definitely would choose to do the same thing again because the only way for me to know if that was going to be better for me or not was to try it.

And I think no author can tell any other author what will or will not work for them. I would just say, if you are going to go wide, you have to learn about it. You have to read about how it’s working. A lot of the really successful wide authors right now maybe started in like 2010 2011 2012 when things were very different. And so they already have an audience there. So if you’re looking at, you seem to jump into it, you need to understand how do you connect with those retailers? There’s a great book by Mark Lefebvre called Killing it on Kobo. So I think you know you have to do your research. If you’re going to go wide, you have to plan marketing campaigns.

In Amazon, he algorithms bring the people to you. That is not the case in the other bookstores, the Apple bookstore or the Kobo bookstore, you know, it’s people deciding which books get featured, still. It is not an algorithm, so you have to connect with those people, otherwise it doesn’t work.

And so it’s really important to understand the undercurrents and the patterns in the market you’re looking to sell into. Even the way that new releases are featured, you’ve got to notify them months ahead. If your book is coming out, if you want to be a featured new release, there’s the whole process that you go through to do that. And marketing campaigns that you plan are done months ahead.

So it’s very different than the way things work on Amazon, and so you can’t apply the same rules and the same behaviors to both of those different markets and expect it to work because it won’t. Right? You’ve got to specialize and you’ve got to learn the peculiarities of each of those markets and then make that work for you.

Michele: Makes sense. Totally, 100% interesting that you were saying I wouldn’t change necessarily anything because I have learned from what I did and now I know that I’m at the place I want to be.

Crystal: Yeah, and I mean, okay, I guess I would have changed one thing, I would’ve written more. I did a bunch of testing and things started to really ramp up and then life happened and I was on like a monthly publication schedule and I was just seeing this and then, life happened and then I didn’t write so much the following year, and I definitely saw that reflected in the royalties I was getting, which is an excellent experiment and an excellent data collection tool. I have a really nice graph to show you all. We’re just going to wait till it goes back up again. But I think that it’s interesting to have that data, not just from somebody else, but from yourself. So, yeah. I want to know what is something you have learned while going about your indie publishing journey that most surprised you?

Michele: Well, one of the things was what I mentioned before, that not necessarily the way I was writing in Italy was going to be effective in the American Canadian market. One of the other things I’ll say is relating to writing and to storytelling more than publishing though. But I would say like, it’s still relating because like when you write something, then you have to publish it and you have to really make sure you connect the dots in a meaningful way.

So one of the things that I would say are surprising, at least they are for me about the experience of my experience of publishing a book independently is the amount of information you can learn outside and the amount of mistakes that you can avoid making. You should just ask people that are already been there.

And this is something that I completely ignored for a long time because, okay I guess this is me being very personal and opening up, but for some time, especially when I was in my first small Italian pond, I thought I had everything figured out, which was not completely the case.

When I stepped into the bigger more complex, American Canadian market. I was like, I completely don’t know anything about how things work. I don’t understand what works and what doesn’t. So what are you going to do? Are you going to admit that you don’t know stuff? Or are you’re just going to be coasting and then fading away?

That was why in 2019 I can honestly say is the year I really started to connecting with people. The very beginning of my indie publishing process started from there because it was the moment I allowed myself to say, I don’t know this, but I know so many people around me that have the answer to my question.

Let’s ask them. Let’s see how this goes. Let’s not be that kind of person that has just closes in on themselves. Doesn’t look at things that are happening and that are bad on the writing or publishing side. This is exactly the reason why it might mean nothing. But it’s important for me that I, for example, purchase something like masterclass, which is giving me insight, and I said this before on how other writers, write.

Which is super, super huge because getting to sit with Neil Gaiman, Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood, and they’re sharing the way they go into this process. It’s helping me understanding, I don’t know anything at all. There was a very famous philosopher in Greece that said I know I don’t know anything.

And I think this is the state I’m in and I think that this is what made me realize that if there were one thing I will change or try to do better was do these kinds of consideration way before, open up and just ask for help and do not try to reinvent the wheel when it’s already been there all the time in front of your eyes.

Crystal: Yeah. I think for me, what I found most surprising was probably how quickly the practical side is getting easier. Because the developments in the technology and the tools available and everything else are just increasing at an exponential rate in terms of- I mean, how many hours? It used to be like an entire week, plus of laying out a book like the actual publishing part has compressed right down into a little bitty section.

Preparing to publish, writing the book, those are all giant categories. Promoting the book lasts forever and ever, but that actual publishing part where that used to be this huge thing with all of these barriers know we really can get, if you’ve got a finished book and you need like layouts and ISBNs) and publication like that can happen in a week. It’s crazy.

So I think that is really exciting because it frees us up our energy to work on the creative part and polishing our product so it’s perfect. And connecting with our readers on the other side of the finished book, cause I think for most of us, no matter how business minded you are or how fun you think learning new tech is, I know I’m among a small number of people that is super fun in my writing groups. I love it. Not everyone does it get that. But I think know not having that as a huge barrier in the same way anymore really does open things up. So I think that to me, I’m constantly surprised by the speed of change in the industry.

And so as long as you can look at it through the eyes of the opportunities it’s presenting you, then that’s a way to not hate the change because I think a lot of people get really upset that a button is not where it was when they last logged into their account and the name on something has changed, but I think we’re creative people.

We can imagine what else that published button would be called or what else that function could do if we just let ourselves get past the fear and do that. So I think that’s an interesting thing to look at is, is just, yeah. Our brave selves in the way that we navigate with technology.

Michele: I’ve heard the noise.

Crystal: You’ve heard the noise. Yeah, I know, right? It’s like when you’re a kid and the cookie jar lid is rattling. Yeah. You can totally busted by your mom. Okay, so it is time for the curious jar to make an appearance and clickety lid comes off. I’m going to rustle my hand around until you say, stop.

What is your secret writing dream?

Michele: Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Yes. Stop now.

Crystal: Whoa, orange one. All right. Oh, my word. Oh man. This is about to get real. Okay. What is your secret writing dream?

Michele: What is your secret to writing? You mean like a, like a secrets?

Crystal: I don’t even know who submitted the question. It’s just it’s here, so we just have to interpret. You can put punctuation wherever you need.

Michele: Writing dream. What is your secret writing? Maybe she or he meant something that you want to be able to achieve, like it’s your dream.

Crystal: That sounds reasonable.

Michele: I will say. I got this. I got the answer to this question. And I think this, will sound very bad though. I’m just going to say it.

Crystal: Just say it. Just spit it out and remember it’s okay to be big.

Michele: My goal-she, she or he called it dream, I’m going to call it call as a storyteller, as a writer is this. I want you to be thinking of my stories, the moment before you die.

And this is just something that came out. I’ve been thinking about that with my why, if you want to or why are stories and it’s just, I think because I believe like books and words have the power to change worlds and to change lives. And so I just came up probably with this sentence now. I want  my story is to be the last thing you think of before you die, because like they really made an impact on you.

I know of people that became astronauts because of Star Trek. Or the way Gene Roddenberry envisioned this world of the possibilities, for example. I’m a Trekkie, that’s why I’m using that example. But yeah, I want to do something similar. I really want to be able to inspire you to change your day to day lives.

To the moment to where like there might be a reader that read one of my books and at the last moment was like, Oh, it made sense, that story that Michele wrote. Finding it out now or it changed so much of what I am now. So I would say that’s my goal…dream. Whatever you want to call it. Change or shift in a good way, the life of somebody that much that they are thinking in the last moment of his life or her life.

Crystal:  I think that’s probably where that question was supposed to go. One of the things that came up at the, I was at a productivity kind of conference on the weekend, and one of the things that came up was not being afraid to be big, to put yourself out there.

You have to aim high, you have to live large. You have to be the biggest, brightest, shiniest version of yourself. In order to kind of reach people that way, and you have to be vulnerable, you have to like crack yourself open and say, yup, here’s what’s in my guts and my brain and this is what I would like to be and what I want. It is scary to say stuff like that.

For me, I think my secret writing dream. I want to have like a Netflix Virgin River version series for River’s End. I am all over that. I think they did a great job with Robin Car’s Virgin River series and I burned through that first season on Netflix in one night.

And I want that. I want that kind of production, or like Outlander, you know, Diana Gabaldon’s series that’s been turned into the TV show. So I have loved hearing her side of that process and, just, I can’t even imagine what that feels like to see your story world come alive. So yes, that is my secret writing dream is to have a TV series or some kind of cinematic type deal for my town.

Yes. All right. On that note, we want to know what your secret writing dream is, so drop that in the comments. We would love to hear about it, and if you have a curious jar question, you can email it to ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we’ll add it to our collection of little rainbow papers inside the curious jar.

So if you are looking for show notes, links to resources we mentioned and coupons or discounts on tools that 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.

Michele: And you’ll get the gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life if you leave a review for us, wherever you listen to this podcast, we are shiny new podcast and we do need your feedback. We do need your reviews.

Crystal: 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 take a deep dive into book launching strategy.