In this episode we talk about challenges and opportunities of writing of a series. What is a KAREful author and why should you be one? What to do when you just aren’t getting the results you hoped for when it comes to sales and reviews? What are the different kinds of series and what approach might suit your personality? What if you write standalones—can you as the author be the connecting thread in a series? We dive into some answers to those questions and even reveal what we wish we’d done differently if we could go back and do it all again.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 013: Strategies and Options for Series Authors

Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneur. 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: On today’s show, we’re going to talk about writing series and hopefully share some specific tips and things to think about, to help save you some frustration along the way as you are crafting and deciding on strategy for writing and releasing your own series.

Michele: And I don’t know about you, but I’m particularly excited because like, I don’t know exactly how you say it, but we play at home, meaning that there is something we can really add for value. Because like there is one resource that, Crystal here, wrote and that I’m going to use a lot, um, on the subject of series writing, and, she is showing it right now, but for people that can’t see her, the name of the book is strategic series author and is plan, write and publish a series to maximize readership and income which is like a mouthful. Lots of stuff. Lots of things that we can use to talk about, and it’s big but big in a good way. It’s not boring stuff. It’s filled with content, with juice, with tomato sauce as we Italians would say, filled with it, fill with life. So I would say like, stop me. So …

Crystal: No, I’m not going to stop you. It’s highly entertaining.

Michele: Go, go, go.

Crystal: Go. Just be all the Italian you can be.

The KAREFUL approach

Michele: But yeah, we’re going to talk about this. It is something that, especially in the last few years, lots of authors have been talking about writing the series, um, and how to plan for a series, before you even start writing it. There are so many things that we can discuss about this. But one of the things that I wanted to ask you Crystal, and this is a concept that touches … Which is actually very important in your book on series. You start off, uh, by seeing something that is very meaningful for me. Uh, and I really didn’t think about a lot. And you call it the KAREFUL approach.

And it is interesting that you apply this to series writing. But at the same time, you say, this is something you can actually use for everything. It’s basically a roadmap and something you can use in life to learn overall. And I’m just going out explain like briefly what we are talking about if I may. Well for the audience, so KAREFUL stands for, like, there is K, A, R, and E. K is for knowledge. And you’re going to explain exactly why then there is the action, there is reflection and then there is evolution. Why is this important for a person that is listening. That he, or she, is seeing us and that wants to write a series.

Crystal: So I think there are some really unique opportunities for testing and change and growth when you’re looking at a series, because you are releasing a number of products to effectively the same audience. I mean, that audience is going to grow, but ideally you’re going to have your core of readers and you’re just going to add new people on kind of as each release comes out or as you broaden your market, it’s on your marketing stuff.

So I think, when you’re planning to do something that’s similar but slightly different a bunch of times, that is the perfect opportunity for you as an author to really reflect on what’s working for you and really keep track of things as they change. So in a series, you can release book one, and you, you know where you’re at and you go through the experience and there’s probably a pretty high learning curve, especially if it’s your first book that you’re publishing.

So, you know, you’ll start off by learning everything, literally everything you do, you are learning it for the first time and you’re testing it out so you’re not really sure how that’s going to go. Or, you know, what’s going to happen as you release that, but then you have the opportunity to reflect back on how things went, and then actually change your process.

So as you said, when we talk about being a kareful indie author, uh, you’re gonna at each stage, you’re gonna gather knowledge about what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it before you get started. So that’s really what the K is for, is a. Yeah, the ring knowledge step. And then action is once you know what you need to do, you’re going to actually take actions towards accomplishing those things.

And then once you’ve done them, you’re going to reflect on what you did. You’re also going to record. So that’s another, ‘R’ word in there, you’re gonna reflect and record because when you come to your next book, unless you’re releasing them like four weeks apart, you’re probably not going to remember exactly what you did. And even if you are rapid releasing, you’re going to have a really hard time keeping track of all of those details. And in the moment, everything kind of just gets going and you think, Oh yeah, I know, I’ll remember because I did this and it was really exciting and interesting or challenging or whatever.

But you don’t remember when you come back. So much stuff happens in between. What’s a really good idea just to reflect on what you are experiencing as you’re doing it so that you can then make some changes. So if I am reflecting on the process of publishing my first book, and I think, you know, I run five promos to try and get the word out about that first book, and only two of them really got me any action. Then I would make a note that next time these two are for sures and maybe not so much with the other three that didn’t get me any results that I hoped, and then you can make really informed decisions and you can customize your process, whether it’s in the writing phase or in the publishing phase or in the marketing phase.

So I apply that careful philosophy Basically everything I do with, with writing and with publishing because I think it is a very flexible way of approaching things, and that incremental improvements or changes has led to some really great systems and had decreased the resistance for me with each subsequent book that I put out, I feel like I have a better and better base of checklists, and I don’t have to make every decision every time. If I know that these 15 steps out of the 30 I did for my last book publishing project worked really well for me and I just discard the ones that didn’t  I have a nice lean, effective process to follow and I can apply that then to all my future books.

Michele: So what you’re saying basically … because I’m interested in that because I think it’s very meaningful on the reflection stage is when you access the data that you gather and you make the decision based afterward in evolving.

So that’s, that’s a crucial part. Like it’s basically when you say, okay, no BS anymore, like this is what’s worked. Yeah. This is what didn’t and just for jumping on from this to another thing you have to be extremely critical of your own work. How basically do you do that? Like, because that’s your series, and I know this for a fact.

I spoke with a lot of the authors that launched the series and it didn’t work, but they didn’t want to believe it. So they kept putting money on Facebook ads and, and there was a problem, there was a structural problem. Like I understand what you’re saying and it’s super interesting. And on the reflection stage is of course.

It is the way it should be, but we are human, right? So when we see that series, that we spent months or years and it tanks, how do we find the way? How do we find the North? How do we understand that in the face of diversity that we have to move on and we have to change. We have to shift.

Adapting your series with the times

Crystal: Okay. That is a really good question. It is extremely hard to be self aware or comfortable enough with yourself to understand that you, you are separate from your work even though they are your books. You’ve created something that takes on a life of its own. And so being really clear about that boundary, I think is really important.

You are not your product. And for me, it also really helps to know that I created the thing. I have the power to change it. And so if I am always at every step of the stage applying that reflect and evolve mentality to everything I do it’s not that I did it wrong, it’s just what am I going to do next to make it better?

And so there’s never a sense that, well, this is the way you do it and then if you do it this way, it’s right because the industry changes so fast and the tools change so fast, and the world around us changes so fast that the only thing you can do is just examine each situation and then make a shift. So one of the things I tell myself is, okay, I’m looking at my report product and I’m looking at.

I’m not saying what did I do wrong? I’m saying if I was going to start over and do this again, what would I choose to do differently? And so I think focusing on the positive action, not, Oh, this failed, but how could I make it work better is a really important mental and emotional shift for you and it leaves you in control.

It’s not, I put a book out and people didn’t like it. I would ask myself the question. Okay. I put this book out, I didn’t get the results I was expecting. Now I’m going to look at each area and see what was it, and if I go to that book listing and I see, okay, you know, there are 40 reviews on it and only 15 of them are good, like what are the bad ones saying?

Right? If you’re not getting any reviews at all, you need to look at, okay, am I not connecting with the readers enough to ask them to leave a review or is it that they’re not loving it so they don’t want to say something. Right? And so, you know, for me in trying to diagnose at the beginning was, is it just that no one’s finding the book, or is it that they’re not reading it, or is it that they’re just not leaving reviews?

And so I did use a service called hidden gems to kind of test that philosophy at the beginning. It’s because they are set up to provide you with readers. And so I knew that if I. I put together my blurb and I put together my cover and I sent the package in. If no one volunteered to review it, then the problem was my cover and my blurb.

Right. Some combination of that, if people volunteered to review it but then didn’t leave the reviews, that was probably, they didn’t love that book and they didn’t want to post something negative because those are reviewers who are vetted and they leave reviews. Like there’s an 80% review rate on the people who choose to say yes.

They would review that book, which means if you get lower than that, there’s something about your book that didn’t connect, whether it was you connected with the wrong people or they just didn’t love the story, but are going on. Well, if don’t say anything. Yeah. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Right? And I think that’s often what happens, but we don’t want to admit that maybe that’s what’s going on. So I think you do have to, you do have to kind of, you know, a woman up man up, whatever person up and put on your big kid pants and look at those reviews and really look at what your readers are telling you.

And you do have to make some hard choices, but you can always change everything. I mean, I’ve made literally every mistake you could make in releasing the series that I’ve released. Yeah. With each book I learned from whatever I didn’t do in an ideal fashion, and then I could apply that in future books.

And so. I think it would be easy to get to discouraged if you’re thinking of it as. I only have three good ideas and these books are it for me. And you know, I failed at this. Well, yeah, okay. If that’s your attitude, you maybe did, but we are writers and we have an infinite capacity for storytelling and an infinite capacity for learning.

If you are going to be up potter, you do not expect to, you know, sit down in front of a wheel with a bunch of clay and make a perfect cup the first time you smash it all up back into a big lump of clay and you start over a lot of times. I don’t know if you’ve ever done any pottery, but it is disgustingly difficult to get things to match up. It’s much like building a story.

You have a vision in your mind of how it’s going to be and you try to make that and it’s like kind of wonky around the edges and things go flying and nothing works like you thought, or you try and put it in the kill and then it cracks, and is like that with storytelling. You have a vision and you try to pull it off with your words and, and your skills that you have in the moment. But sometimes you just have to squish it up and start over. Or do you need to get a coach or somebody to help you along the way. So I think, you know, when we take that feedback and we act on it, that’s when you have all the power and that’s when you unlock the possibilities of what you could actually do.

And with a series with each book that’s getting better, you are opening up the opportunity to sell your entire back list to all of those new readers. And so I think even more important than when you have standalone titles where each one is kind of its own thing and can be judged as its own thing with a series it’s all about read-through and buying in and getting those true fans who are going to jump on board and just devour every piece of content you create for your series.

So I think putting it in the work and being a little bit hard on yourself or being very just honest, it doesn’t even have to be hard on yourself. It just has to be analytical and being open to feedback and understanding people are giving that feedback in a positive way in that they, they thought your work was worth reading and commenting on. They thought it had the potential to be better than it is, which means they are investing their own time and energy to share their thoughts with you about how it would be better. And so it’s easy to take that just as criticism, but that’s a hugely lost opportunity if you can process that feedback as an opportunity to connect with your readers and to hear what they’re really thinking then you can make course corrections. You can adjust things for future so that you are not removing potential from your series and your stories down the line. So I think it is, a lot of it is our own heads and it’s our own self-confidence, especially when we’re starting out.

It is so hard. You get a review that somebody didn’t love your book, and it’s just crushing because this is, this is your baby, this is your guts on the page, right? You have put so much time and energy and in your head you can see the perfection that it is, but there’s a lot that gets lost in translation of pulling it from our brains and getting it onto the page in the way that someone else could pick it up and experience it the way we experience it in our minds.

And so that is a phenomenally complex process, and just accepting that it takes time to get it right and that it, you know, it’s ultimately, writing feels very solitary, but it’s actually a collaborative activity because it’s not about the story we wrote. It’s about the story our readers read and we are meeting them in the middle and we are compromising and what we’re sharing and what they’re choosing to share.

And so it is really a collaborative effort in a way that’s really hard to acknowledge when you feel like it’s your story.

Michele: I think there are a couple of things that you touched that might be very meaningful for the listeners and viewers of this episode. One of the things is, one of the things that we mentioned lots of time in the episodes of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast which is basically try not to bleed out your resources. And this is something we repeat so many times that I think, Crystal we’ll have to tattoo it. Make a tattoo or something like that or we’ll have to put something on one of our cups like: ‘Don’t bleed out’ because it’s really important. It’s something that we repeat so much and so often. And the reason is that. Again, self-publishing is not a sprint. It’s a marathon, is a long-term game. The first series is not, and it doesn’t have to be the last. You can write like 20,000 series. How many authors, Crystal, you know, successful authors who wrote only one series? Probably it’s not a lot of them like authors, write a lot of books. Some of these books might be a standalone, many are series. Yeah. The nuts and bolts here, the bedrock is that the more you write and the more you publish, the better you become at that kind of thing.

So I think distilled in a few words, that’s what Crystal is saying and it’s very powerful. And the other thing that I wanted to ask you that you touched, but we didn’t really delve into, and I think it’s very important, is the definition of a series. And this is something that you touch in your book again, and it’s very meaningful and it’s something that I’ve never before considered. I’m going to just touch briefly on the subject and then I want to leave you, uh, to explain more specifically what we mean by what is the series like a series generically speaking is like a series of books, so it can be two, three, four, 20,000. So, and if you can write 20,000 books and they’re successful, well, go, go please keep going.

But it doesn’t mean that when you think of a series, you think of a 200,000 words long book. It doesn’t have to be an Epic fantasy, but some of us have the idea of series like, okay, it needs to be like big. It needs to be like complicated or complex. It needs to make sense. Maybe it needs to be tied down. This is all stuff that we think, and that may maybe, stop us from adding a more interesting taking of that work. You explain Crystal in the work that there are very different definitions of the term series. It can be a serial, it can be like something that is spawned from only one location. From characters.

Can you elaborate a bit more about this concept? Why is very important and why are these important for authors that have different taking on the writing and the craft of writing and why it is also important that they know because they can use a, I don’t know, their particular craft on building a character and make a series out of that. It doesn’t have a plot-based kind of series. Right?

Different ways to do a series

Crystal: Yeah. So there are a lot of different ways to do a series. And so I think the most broad definition that we could go with is just several books or stories that are connected in some way. And so why a series is effective is because if you can bring a reader into a story world and then you can lead them from one story to another to another.

With some kind of familiar element. You’re not dealing with a cold audience each time, right? If we, if we were in marketing land, we would call that a warm lead. So selling the next story to somebody who is already enjoying either the characters or the world, or some sort of plot piece is much easier because they already know they like what you’re doing with the current one.

And so getting them to hop into another one, they’re just like, Ooh, give me more. It’s like pushing next episode on Netflix, right? That is very, very, very low resistance and you’re already intrigued. You’re already in the world, so it’s really easy to say, yes, please. I would like some more of that. So I think.

At the base, like a series is just some connected books or stories. And so I think there’s, that’s the first piece is not just picturing, you know, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, biblical of like 15 ridiculously long books, and it’s going to be 25 years of your life to write. You know, like, you certainly can do that if that’s your passion, but it’s not required.

I mean, I think my favorite, type, sort of series as I was getting into reading a lot was the trilogies, because you’ve got three linked stories, and it might be that it’s one big plot timeline that’s broken up into three pieces. It might be that you have three characters who are all friends, and each one gets their main story.

It could be family members, or it could just be three stories that take place in the same world. Right? And so I think, yeah. There are lots of different opportunities there to explore those in different ways, and I think length is also something to think about, you know? For me, when I started all of my story ideas, I had so many stories I wanted to write and I was thinking of, well, okay, if I’m going to do this as a series and I need full length novels for all of these things, it’s going to be like.

Like, 30, 50 years before I get all these books written. And that’s if I go like the wind. So I mean, that just wasn’t, it wasn’t very enticing for me to want to dive into it because I was like, well, I just committed to the rest of my life and I’ll probably not even finish. Like that doesn’t seem like fun.

So you know, you can scale your lenght to fit your series type as well, and you can use it to learn. So you can do a mini series of short stories that gets bundled into a larger project, which is kind of what you’re doing with your 12 by 2020 project. Right? So yeah, there’s, there’s that kind of option.

There’s what I did, which was releasing a novella each month in a different mini series, and then bundling them into a box set at the end of that. So I think. You know, just opening up …

Michele: Remember the name of series?

Crystal:  Oh, sorry, sorry. The Rivers End romances. Yes. Thank you. So yeah, the Rivers End romances are all intertwined.

They’re also flexible. So for me, when you’re looking at, well, I’m not the kind of writer who wants to be tied into a single main character for like 15 books, then you know, for me, I get that happens. So I like to have the maximum amount of flexibility in the structure of whatever I’m doing so that I can really play with the characters and play with the plot lines, and I can even hop genres because I can write contemporary romance or romantic suspense.

I can even do historical romance if I want to do a flashback of, you know, some of the older characters looking at their histories. Okay. Really, there’s no limitations in there other than it’s all happening in Rivers End, which is, you know my story world.

And so I think that’s really good if you’re the kind of person who needs the flexibility and maybe doesn’t quite where you want to go over the next few years with your writing, but you know, you want to make things connected, then that is an option to really focus on the world itself.

And then you have maximum flexibility in there. And I know some authors who really don’t want to track all the details, from book to book. So they don’t, you don’t want to have the same locations. They want to travel all over the world and they want to, yeah. Well, to go on record research trips and they want to be able to not have to remember who was, whose cousin, and they want different characters in each book. So, you know, if that’s the case, you can do a linear series with a single main character that develops over time. And so then all you need to know is like, do they have any injuries or scars from the previous book?

You need to remember for this one, but you can start fresh with your locations and all of your details and not have to have the spreadsheets that I have that tell you what kind of art is on the wall of the cafe on

Michele: Or the map. Just tell them about the map.

Crystal: Yeah. I do. I have a lot of maps. I have a lot of spreadsheets. I have a lot of databases to track.

All of the details, and I think that’s fun, but I’m a geek, so if that’s not something that lights you on fire, then when you’re thinking about your own series, you want to look at, okay, which pieces do I think are fun to play with this over time and where would I want the flexibility versus the consistency?

And you, you have room for both. You want some things that are consistent and some that are flexible to keep your storytelling options open.

Michele: That’s something interesting. Okay. Wait, let’s say. Let’s make this jump of faith. Let’s say that we convince some of our, a lovely person that are listening, that writing a series is an amazing idea.

How do they actually go about and write it? Like is there a way to structure it then that you will suggest to them to follow? Sometimes you can talk about the go-as-you-go kind of approach, right? How do you basically structure a series if there is even a way to structure a series, it’s already different, so, so difficult to structure a book. It can be a novel or novella. We know that well. How do you do that? Multiplied by a series of books?

Crystal: I think there’s a couple of ways to tackle that, I think. One thing that’s really important to know is, is whether you’re writing an open ended kind of a series, or if it’s got a finite number of stories in your story art.

So if you’re going to do something where you have that main character who goes on a series of adventures in each book is kind of just the next installment in their life. I think you need to know: do I have enough flaws in my character to maintain some kind of growth and arc over each book while still giving them some room to go over time?

Like you really want to see some kind of character change and you want that to be maintainable. So you got to start with somebody who is very layered, a little bit broken, maybe a lot of broken, and quite a complex character is often a better choice there. You know, if you’re, if you’re, if you don’t have enough room to work with that character and you don’t have enough fodder for the complications and those internal battles and that internal growth, it’s gonna feel a little bit blank.

Right? You’re not going to have quite the same level of engagement over times. So I think just making sure you have enough substance to work with is really important. If you’re going to do a three story arc or a five story arc, or you know there’s a set amount, or maybe it’s five main characters in a family who are siblings and they’re, each one is the center of their own book.

I think it’s really smart to do some high level plotting first, just so you know, okay, which sibling is going to be the center of each book? Are they linear or do they all take place in the same timeline? So for me, I have several stories that take place on the same timeline. So they share like a three-month period where all of the stories take place, which means I have to know what’s happening in some of those stories in order to write the other ones.

Because things that change in one will change in the other. If that does not lit your fire, then you’ll want to make sure that it’s a linear timeline so that you can just write that first one, knowing roughly what’s going to happen in the other ones are knowing at least whose story is going to be each of those books.

Because you want to write Easter eggs in order to help lead people into the next book. So if you know that book one is about, um, I’m gonna use a real example here, which is my O’Donnell family mini series from the Rivers End. So the first book is called The List, and it’s  about Connor. And, uh, we know that the second book is going to be introducing his brother, Patrick and Marcy, who’s his best friend, and so, you know, I know that I need to weave them into the first book so that by the time we get to the end of the story, the characters have come alive enough that the readers are invested in finding out what happens to them. But if I didn’t know the order of the books, I wouldn’t know which characters to weave in or how much screen time to give them or whatever.

So it’s important, I think, to have that idea of what is it that ties together those stories? And if you’re doing something where there are a plot thread that ties through the entire series, you need to make sure that pacing wise, you have the right sort of story arc and development on those pieces of your story.

So if, you know, I’ve got three books and my main story arc is up here on the top in a nice little, mountain shape, and then you know that you have individual book arcs underneath that, you have to have some idea of what’s going to happen and make sure that the pacing for your series story rolls out in a functional and effective way, in the same way that you would an arc for each of your books. So it’s not that you have to plan out every single scene or know every character. But you need to make sure that you have enough of an idea of where it’s going, that you can build each piece in a way that isn’t going to break your overall, um, plans.

Michele: We started this podcast by admitting and saying to the audience that we were going to say everything about the mistake we made, because we wanted to them to know those so that they could avoid them or at least learn from them. Because we are talking about series. And because we’re talking about mistakes, could you share with us some of the mistakes you made with your series?

And what do you think, like, what’s the thing that you made wrong, something that you did wrong and, stuff that you can help other people understand not to do.

Crystal: Yeah. So I wrote a book, basically all of the mistakes I’ve made, I’m sharing it how to not make those in the book.

So that’s the good starting place. Um, there’s a few that I can rattle off absolutely right away. Uh, and some of it is mistakes specifically from a series perspective, and some is just a learning in general, as I went. But I think in terms of the series stuff, I did not know how the stories were going to interlink in each of my mini series.

I actually have about five separate mini series in my Rivers End world that are active right now. I had to write my way into the story. As much as I’m a great brainstormer and plotter, I don’t really know what’s happening until I get in there and the character starts to take on a life of their own.

And so I wrote book one of five different mini series before I wrote any book two, just because I needed to get my head around the world and see how things connected, and that just worked for me. What I should not have done was released them all. I should have just held them until I had two or three, you know, miniseries and then released that.

That being said, I was using it as a learning tool, so I’m not sure that I would actually go back and change that. I’m, I’m conflicted on that. It’s not the smartest way to do it, but it was effective, so I could really learn what worked or didn’t work for readers. So I think, okay, in the The MacAllisters stories, there’s four that are currently out in that series, and what I did wrong there or would do differently now is that book one and book four finished one couples arc, and I would have done that differently.

I don’t have a clear trail in those four stories necessarily that leads you into what’s going to happen in the next book. So I would adjust how I handled that inside each story. But as I was writing them, I didn’t necessarily know exactly how they all fit together and I didn’t know how it was going to close out those story loops cause I hadn’t planned them ahead. So I think that is what I do differently now that I have shifted. For the O’Donnell family I sat down and I planned the overall story arc for all seven books and I figured out the main characters of all the books and I figured it out how they connect and then I decided on a timeline and I will not be releasing… cause I have a couple of those written, but I’m not releasing them until I have a couple more.

And then I’m closer to having a completed series. So I want at least three in the miniseries to be ready before I start releasing so that I can then dive in to each of them. Now, that being said, if those were my very first books I was releasing, I don’t think I would hold them all because I would want to see how people were reacting to the characters.

And I would want to see if a storytelling method, because we’re working for people and I would want to learn from the earlier books before I had finalized the later books. So, because they’re not my first books, and I did all that experimenting with the book, the good ones, I got a really good sense from my readers of what didn’t work for them, and I was able to then on this series, put all that into action. So I think it’s a good idea, not to say that you should write a starter series, but I think if you’re new to all of this and you’re just kind of getting your feet wet, it’s not a bad idea to just plan a trilogy to start with and then see how that goes and use it to gather information about yourself as a writer and about your readers and about the publishing process.

And see what worked and didn’t work for you. You can always do it, spin off series, right? You can do a linked trilogy to that first trilogy if you take a secondary character and turn them into something else. So I think there’s opportunities to give something, a contained space to be. So it’s these three books is asset, but then you have offshoot options and so that keeps the door open, but it doesn’t commit you to like 15 books in a series that maybe it doesn’t take off and, and then you don’t have to go back and start over and redo those same books.

You can hop over to another set of ideas or another set of stories and apply what you learned from the first ones to those.

Michele: One thing that I was wondering while you were talking. Let’s say that there are a number of the people listening to us, or watching us that they definitely see the value in releasing a series, but they don’t think they’re quite there.

Um, even if we’re talking about novellas novelettes, small things, they just think they can write short stories, let’s say, or a novelette or novellas. But they’re really interested in using the strategy that you’re talking about to promote these standalone things. I think this is valuable for me to ask you because I think there are things that we can translate and use that to even standalones.

So let’s say you have like 20 standalones, you don’t actually a series, but I do believe that you have some suggestion for these people to promote them, market them. I’m just thinking for example, or something you told me sometimes go, even only like making the cover or the font of your name in a particular way.

It doesn’t have to be the story necessarily, but even the packaging, the way you package it. Can you just elaborate a bit more about that? Because I think it’s very valuable.

Crystal: Yeah. I think you, you can be the connecting piece, like we talk about series that are connected by a main character or a location or a plot or whatever.

But you could be the connecting thread in your series. So if you are writing a series of short stories, even if they aren’t directly connected via any of the things we talked about. If you have a mailing list and you are able to communicate with your readers and you’ve got a clear path from one story to the next story to the next story, to the next story, you can write the connecting threads, right?

So let’s say. Let’s say for you, cause we’ll, we’ll talk about it in the context of your 12 by 20 projects. So that is 12, short stories. You’re experimenting with genre a bit, right? Cause you’re hopping around, but you are consistently releasing one story each month. For free through your website.

And so readers can sign up and then each month they get a story. That means you can also communicate with them through that. So you might be sharing a story as an introduction or sharing a personal story as an introduction to each of those. Maybe you’re talking about a different writing technique, or maybe you are experimenting with a different aspect of creative writing in each of those and then getting feedback on that. So you can create the experience of a series where you’re still pulling your readers along from story to story to story without starting over. And you can say, okay, well if you really liked this story.

Here are a couple others in my catalog that fit with that. And so you’re using the same principles and the same concepts to lead people from thing to thing. You’re just adding some bridging material in the middle to make that connection in a way that works with the structure that you have. And I do think Amazon’s algorithms really supporting frequent releases.

You know, seeing what happens to your sales stats when you don’t publish anything for two to three months on Amazon is stuff it starts to drop, right? If you don’t have any new content, then that really hurts your sales. So if you’re looking at this from a business perspective. Finding a way to have those connected more frequent releases is a really powerful promotional tool, and you really can make that work for you in terms of staying in the minds of your audience. Right. It’s hard break in and find the people, and then once you’ve found them, it’s hard to get them to remember you. If it’s a long time between releases, you know, you can kind of get lost out there in the big wide world of a million books in the Kindle store.

So I think it is important to really find a connection point and to work on your reader experience since. There’s a good book, Strangers to Super Fans by David Gaughran talks about sort of the failure cycle in your reader process, or where do you lose your readers, like their water going out through holes in the sieve along the way.

Right? And so I think there’s some real value in looking at that. Okay? You and your series are looking for read-through, and you as an author are looking for a read-through from story to story to story if it’s a standalone. So when you go back and examine the experience for those readers, the stories themselves, the covers, and you can create some consistent experience, then it helps people to kind of stay anchored.

So for you as an author, your branding, which is what we talked about with having your name in the same font on your covers or using a consistent color palette, right? If you go to someone’s website and every book looks completely different than any of the others, it’s really hard to know who are you?

What are you about? You’re not going to see a book in an online store and think, that’s a Michele Amitrani book for sure, because of how it looks, right? It doesn’t matter if they are the same series or the same story, but being able to recognize consistent elements, it means people are going to know something feels familiar and they’re going to know that they’ve liked all your stories and they see another thing and they think, Ooh, that’s another thing by this author that I really liked, and so I’m going to give that a shot, even if it’s a slightly different genre or whatever. And so yes, you do have to be specific to your genre markets for sure.

You want to be smart about matching up what you’re doing with what’s expected in your genre, but you also need some identity as an author yourself because you need people to be able to recognize you in a crowd and be, hey, I love those books that, that’s one of those ones I liked because even if they don’t remember your name, where they don’t remember exactly which of your books they’ve read, if they can remember some piece of your branding and that feels familiar when the next book comes out, you have a better shot of pulling them back into your story world.

Michele: That’s very meaningful. And because we are talking also about mistakes, I feel like I should share also my fair share of mistakes. We were previously talking about like, if you can’t do what other authors are doing, just try to do yourself.

So do you. There has been a time in which I did not follow that good suggestion. Which would … Me and other authors, we have a certain skillset right now. That skill set can be increased over time, but it is important to figure out, for example, for me, I can’t write an Epic fantasy right now.

There is number of skills that I asked to have and I didn’t master yet. I can’t write a 200,000 words book, I just can’t. I would love to, but I can’t. So what I did try to do a few months ago was, uh, for a book that I published, Lord of Time, I really liked the feedback that I got from that book, but I never thought about doing a second or a third.

But because of the good feedback I was thinking of, maybe I can write a series or a sequel. And so I spent like three to four months trying really write a sequel. But I did not succeed because I didn’t have the story, So everything I did on those three or four months, I just lost three or four months.

That is why the idea of the 12 by 20 project came along, because I assessed again, the careful assessment proposition or whatever you want to call it, the system. I did assess: okay, that didn’t work. Obviously I didn’t get any product finished product done in three to four months, which you say a long time.

Especially for me that I really wanted to publish at least a couple of works per year, two or three. And I reassess. I gathered the data. I understood that even by writing like five to six hours per day, I just couldn’t do that. I could have written, forcefully, another 60,000 word book over a series that I never planned.

So I just backtrack, I adjusted. I assessed my situation and I just tried to understand what I can, what can I do? And then I tried to write a short story, which it was Glass into Steel, which I finished writing in like a couple of weeks of afternoon. That was a rough draft, but it informed me on what I could do, which is writing short stories in a bearable amount of time, like two or three weeks. For sure. In one month I can publish a story. So that’s what I’m doing now. And I guess that’s basically what we have been said in this whole episode is just you have to understand what are your strengths. And, of course you do study the market, but don’t just try to take necessarily what other authors, at different moments in their career, are doing because they’re not you. You are yourself, so you have to assess with the Kareful approach what you can do and work on that. Right Crystal? Just enact whatever you can do with the time that you have allocated.

Maybe is two hours per week. Just use that. You don’t have to write the next Lord of the Rings necessarily, but you can write your next book or series or short story or novelette in the amount of time with the resources that you have. I think like that’s basically: don’t copy other people, just do you.

Crystal: Yeah, that’s definitely a recurring theme is it doesn’t matter what works for everybody else. If it doesn’t sit well with you, if it feels like work, I mean, yeah, you’re going to have to work hard. But I mean, if it, if it feels like the kind of work where you are cringing and actively avoiding it, then you need to shift something.

And, and I think it’s really important to recognize that not every story should be a series for sure. So, you know. That is important to recognize. I have a bunch of stories that are not going to fit inside my series. I have some YA stuff. I have some random things that do not fit in Rivers End at all and so I am okay with that.

I can build multiple things. Right? And remembering you have the freedom just because you know, a series might be what everyone’s saying is easier to make better sales on or that if you’re looking to build a business it’s a smart strategic decision to write a series. It is, but not at the expense of the story and not at the expense of your creative passion.

Michele: Or your health.

Crystal: Yeah. or your health. None of those things. We definitely get pulled in. So that idea of like, well, this is smart, this is how I have to do it. And I, so this is a mistake that I made was, you know, when I got started, I gave myself 12 months just to write as much as I could and not worry about the marketing.

I just wanted to write and write and write and write. And I did it with shorter projects so that I could finish them and reflect on them and then do the next one differently. And so I did that 12 times in a year. I did 12 novellas and at the end of that, I learned what worked for me and what didn’t work from a writing process and from a releasing process because in the end I did just put the stories out cause I wanted feedback and then I could change the way I was writing based on the reader feedback from those stories.

So that was a really good cycle for me in it. It did help me learn a lot of things. But then when I had the books, I got sucked into trying to market them in the same way that other people were marketing their books and, and you know, and doing the things you ‘should do’. And a lot of things didn’t work for me the way that it worked for other people.

And just isn’t going to, I mean, we, we learn about what worked for other people and we try to emulate that and we do what they said they did. But the time is different, the person is different, the story is different, everything is different. So you can’t repeat exactly what someone else did and expect their results because they found a way that works for them.

And you have to find them the way that works for you. And yes, that’s harder. And it would be much easier if someone could hand you a roadmap and you could follow it, but this is not that kind of journey. So, you need to build your own roadmap as you go, which is why we do that ‘Reflect’ stage, right? You take some actions, you reflect on: ‘did that work for you?’ and then you add it to your own roadmap or you don’t.

And then you know what to replicate next time. And with everything that you hear on a podcast or you read in an article or you read in a book, you should be evaluating each of the things you’re ingesting, right? The knowledge you’re gathering should be evaluated through the lens of: ‘Does this fit fits me? Does this feel like a good fit?’

And you can trust your instincts? If it’s just that you’re afraid to try a thing, you should try to push past the fear and learn a bit more about it, before you decide to cast the decide. But if you have gone through that gather knowledge stage and you know that this is an option, you could do this thing and it really doesn’t feel good in your gut, or it’s making you avoid your writing time, or it’s making you, panic and feel like your priorities are totally out of whack and that you’re, you’re, you’re just on overload. You need to kick that to the curb, or at the very least, lock it in a closet for awhile until you want to go back and let it out again.

Right? You need to, just, follow your instincts. Because I think when, when stuff doesn’t feel good to us, that there’s a reason for that, and so yes, we’re also often just scared of change and learning.

So don’t let that be the thing that drives you. But if something legitimately does not feel like it’s in alignment with who you are as an author or a person, feel free to say ‘no thank you’. Right? It doesn’t have to be part of your path.

Michele:  And I just want to remind to listeners that we did discussed all out about this stuff. In a book that is available and that Crystal wrote which is called Strategic Series Author: plan, write and publish a series to maximize readership and income. We just touch some stuff, but there is so much more there and it’s full of value. So if you’re interested, you can definitely check that out.

Yeah. And, um, if you don’t have anything else to add about that, maybe we can just open the box of, Hell, whatever it is.

Crystal: Yes, we will in a second. I do want to add one thing though, because I do have a Masterclass that is free for people that’s in the creative Academy for writers library. So there it’s called: Plotting and Planning your Series, and it does cover some sort of high level stuff that is in the book, but if you want a little bit more and you’re not quite ready to fully commit to a whole book You can start with that masterclass and it’ll just walk you through some of the different things we talked about, the different types of series.

And it’s got some great tips, different tools that you can use to help you track your characters and your settings and your databases and your timelines and all of those things, as well as some coupons for things like that.

So if you check the show notes, we have links to the creative Academy and the book and some other resources that will help you out. So be sure to check that and. This is your favorite part.

Michele: Friend, just make it fast.

What do you think is the best adaptation of a book to film or book to TV and why do you love it?

Crystal: So here is the curious jar, which is  for some reason highly torture us for my good friend here for, so we are going to open this up. You are going to tell me when to stop rifling through it and then we are going to pull out a question that we must answer.

Michele: Now, now, now, now.

Crystal: That was fast.

Michele:  Wow, red. Is that red?

Crystal: A red one today! Ooh, nice one. Okay, so today’s, the question is, what do you think is the best adaptation of a book to film or book to TV and why do you love it?

Michele: Yes. Okay. I have the answer to that. I do

Crystal: it. Dive in.

Michele: Can I read it again? Best adaptation. Okay. Okay. I got it.

Crystal: Okay.

Michele: So by Isaac Asimov, the Bicentennial Men. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the movie, is a science fiction movie and uh, no spoilers.

Basically the, the plot is like, it’s the story of an Android in a not so distant future, but it’s taken from a short story by the science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, I read the short story and it’s amazing. They made the movie out of it. I think it was released in the nineties. Uh, but it was, I remember watching it that, uh, a theater.

Oh my gosh. I think I, I’ve watched that movie like a thousand times and every single time, I mean, I did not cry. But, Oh, I went very, very close to a couple of times. And every single time I rewatch it because yes, I, we watched a movie. Uh, Robin Williams performance as, uh,  the Android is like, for me, it’s amazing.

And, uh, I really think it’s one, at least one of the best of the patient from like short story. Into a big release, like a Hollywood movie. Uh, good. A great plot. It’s actually kind of similar to the short story and, it’s like everything, the science fiction fans, I think, want to see in a book about Androids.

I think, I think, I know the Italian name, and I think the English version is called bicentennial men. Like a man that has 200 years.

Crystal: Okay.

Michele: So that was my answer. Good answer this time. I love d it.

Crystal: Okay. Well, I have two and for very different reasons. So I’m going to explain both. So my first one is Pride and Prejudice. It’s the BBC drama version that was a TV mini series, and I was in grade 12. Well, so in 1996 and my AP English teacher was white, phoned me at home on the weekend, and I was like … I mean, when he actually had like picked up your phone, you know, or anything. So she, she called her home phone and of course, have me panicking, cause I was like, why is my teacher phoning my house on the weekend? This cannot be good. But she was calling to say, you need to turn on the TV and you need to record this pride and prejudice version because she said it’s word for word from the book. It’s fabulous.

And that was, you had to have a book that you basically had memorized and could write any essay on. Um, for AP English, they would just give you a question and you would have to use specific quotes from the book that you had chosen and everything else to explain your answers.

And so I had chosen pride and prejudice, so she was calling to say, you’ve got to get this because you could just watch it. And it’s like reading the book, right? So.

Michele: She called you? So I why she called you?

Crystal: me, Yes. And so I, I, I watched it. I loved it. And I actually have like the anniversary edition of it now on DVD, the VHS tapes that I recorded off of.

I’ve gone a Von gone away, but I still absolutely love the casting. And the dialogue is just so spot on. It’s so accurate. I, so I love that. And the other one that I really enjoy as a much newer one, but it’s the Virgin River Netflix series. And the first season just came out a couple months ago, and it’s an adaptation of Robyn Carr’s series of books.

And what I love about it is. It’s filmed locally, which is also really fun. So recognizing some of the locations is cool, but what I really enjoy about the story is just the way that they’ve hold in the plot of a whole bunch of books, because she’s been writing for, and I think she wrote in Virgin river for 20 or 25 years.

And so there are a lot of fulllength romance stand-alones in there, but they’ve blended the plot lines in a way that really does a good job of kind of combining things, but maintaining the original essence of the books. And so I think that is, it’s recent, but it’s, uh, it’s a current favorite in terms of how they handle that adaptation of book to screen and books to screen and still maintaining the integrity of the characters. And they did a great job with the emotional depth of things and with the soundtracks and everything all feels really good.

And you know, I’ve been a longtime fan of those books and you know I want to be that when I grow up. So it’s definitely something that I was analyzing, not just from a, an audience perspective, but as an author looking at it, thinking if those were mine, I would, I would love that.

I would be well with that. And so I really, yeah, I really enjoyed that. I thought they did a really good

Crystal: My jar is getting a little bit empty. It’s kind of sad. Look, there’s only a handful of questions, so we need you to send us more questions. So if you could email ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com let us know what questions you would like to torture my cohost here with, because that is entertaining for me anyway, and hopefully all of you as well.

Then we will write it on a colored paper and add it to the mix. Also we would like to get to know you all a little better. So if you can answer that question, what is your favorite book, two film or TV adaptation and why do you love it in the comments on the show, we would love to hear some recommendations from you and, and just to get to know you all a little bit better.

Michele: For show notes, links to resources we mentioned and coupons or discounts on tools we love visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com. Subscribe to the newsletter and each week we email just one thing that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey and a link to our latest episode.

Crystal: And if you leave us a review anywhere that you listed and to this podcast, you will get a gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life.

We are a very new podcast and we need your help because nobody can find us if we don’t have reviews. So you have all the power. Please go and leave us a little rating and review and tell us it’s what you’re enjoying about the show. We would love to hear what you are loving. Thanks so much for taking the 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, we’re going to be talking with bestselling author, Elizabeth Boyle on genre hopping.

I know you’re now. Completely paranoid because I’ve made it wrong.

Michele: My heart is broken. Be quick about it.

Crystal: Oh, we froze. Wait, We’ll come back. We’ll come back

Michele: For a second. We froze.

Crystal: Yeah. Okay. We’re back now. Yes. It was the part of you saying you bought presents. The Universe is like no presents.

Michele: no presents. Okay. I’ll leave you with that. But you know, it froze at the very last stop for a week. You have to do the things about.

Crystal: I read

Michele: Oh, wait. Once you were at the Surrey conference and there was something happening, probably you were stressed or something you were read to here.

Crystal: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I’ve flushed like crazy. It’s been years since it was really bad, but like. I’m getting better. When I was a kid, it was horrendous. Like when I was in school, I would have to stand up. So I was on student council and part of what we had to do was go and stand in front of each of the classes and tell them like not to do drugs or drink before they came to the school dance.

So you can imagine like as like a 13 year old or whatever, that’s not cool.

Michele: Not cool

Crystal: being that person, and I would just go like this hideous. Shade of red from top to bottom, and like, it’s just, yeah, it’s not good. So yeah, that’s, that’s a thing. But I’ve mostly grown out of that. I used to be paralytic, really afraid of like public speaking as well And I was actually like …

Michele: You went a long way.

Crystal: Yeah. So that’s a thing. Um, and now I only turn hideously red sometimes instead of All times. So it’s way better.

Michele: It’s a win. You’re evolving. The beautiful torture is done, torture part. Yeah.