In this episode we are digging into the experience of switching writing genres with special guest bestselling author Elizabeth Boyle. We talk about what prompts authors to make a shift to a new genre, how to navigate that as a traditionally published authors, and how to approach finding a new community of writers to go along with your new genre, who are a good fit for you. Building a good team for yourself is key, and there are lots of things to be learned from writers in different genres than what you are focused on.
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This site contains affiliate links to products that we have used and love, and that we think may be of help to you on your authorpreneur journey. We may receive a commission on sales of these products, which is how this podcast stays independent and free of advertising. Thanks for your support! Click here for a full list of recommended tools and resources.
Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 014: Switching Genres with Elizabeth Boyle
Elizabeth Boyle: Hi, this is Elizabeth Boyle and you are listening to the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast
Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs, I’m Crystal Hunt
Michele: And I’m Michele Amitrani we’re to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
Crystal: Welcome to episode 14 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re speaking with special guests Elizabeth Boyle about genre hopping. But before we dive into that, let’s talk a little bit about what we have been up to this past week.
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele: There is a book that I’m really, really into. The name is Scrappy Rough Draft from Donna Barker, a friend of mine. Um, this book, it’s, it’s something special. I would say it’s very much, uh, a book that people who are starting out might need a lot, and the subtitle is very explicatory. It says: ‘Use science to strategically motivate yourself and finish writing your book’.
And basically, Crystal, that says everything about the content of this book. You don’t necessarily have to be like just a new writer to benefit from all the suggestions that Donna gives. What I found very useful it’s the science and all the examples that she used and I can clearly see that she spent a long time in research all that stuff.
It’s really like a way for writers to think of their work as a work in progress and not beat themselves too much if they don’t achieve exactly what they want to achieve. How their mind works when you’re talking about writing. Because when you’re talking about writing, it’s a completely different kind of endeavor from anything else.
And she tells us to treat the writing as a very distinct kind of crafting, which is completely different from anything else and our mind react to it in a different way. So basically the book gives you the tools to recognize when there is something that is blocking you. What are the things that blocks you the most?
It gives also the tools and exercise to do, practical exercise, to helping finishing your first draft, the second draft of whatever is that you are working on. So I found it particularly, helpful for that reason.
Crystal: Absolutely. I love that book. It is a great one to jumpstart. If you are feeling stuck or you’re not sure how and what to get to the next stage.
Are you trying to get some story idea out of your head and onto the page then that is an excellent book to get you jump started. I have not been reading this week. Actually, what I have been doing this week is looking at what I need to adjust in my setup. So the dual that I’m featuring this week. I have two things actually that I’ve been working on.
I’ve been just using my notebook and my whiteboard wall in combination to actually, make a list of any open circles. So, you know, when you sit down to work on a project and, you have these things kind of niggling at the back of your mind that want attention from you. So I have been just looking at what are all those little open circles where fiddly things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
Oh, I have to do that. In order to sort of, I make myself feel ready to dive back into the writing. So for me I’ve been having issues with the internet like most of the world at the moment, I think. And so I ordered an ethernet cable and just got plugged in, figured out how to move the furniture around, how to get everything ready so that I could be plugged in, hardwired into the system so that for recording podcasts, we wouldn’t be glitchy.
And so that if my husband and I both happen to be on a zoom call at the same time, it still works for both of us and that I can still do research for my books while he is gaming with his friends in the evenings or whatever. So it works out well just to have that one additional piece of equipment and actually two additional pieces of equipment. Because if you’re on a Mac and all the ports have been eliminated on the newer Macs, then you do need the adapter as well as the cord, which we have discovered in a two step process in our house. And I’m sure we are not alone in that. So, that’s been one thing, just working on getting the infrastructure to all work.
And the other thing was setting up an external hard drive for storing all my video assets because I’m about to work on some promotional videos and things like that for my books and also in podcast recording and developing tutorials for people to help with some of the content in my nonfiction books.
What I discovered is that my hard drive, the way that iMovie, which is what I use often to edit video stores, everything locally on my computer. And that just bogs everything down and makes it really hard for it to run. So, I’ve been just working on getting my iMovie library moved to an external drive and making sure that anything I want backed up is backed up and that my system works with all of those pieces.
And because we have all this equipment plugged in right now, it’s very, there’s like a big load on the system. So I’ve just been trying to figure out which things can I have plugged in at the same time and really tweaking my working process to be more efficient so that I’m not having to move things around, switch things, change things.
And so that has been this week’s project in my world is getting my digital self together. But we are going to talk about, in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about genre hopping, which is switching from one genre to another and various ways to handle that and some challenges that come out of that.
About Elizabeth Boyle
And we have special guests. Elizabete Boyle, who is a many times bestselling author, who’s been in the romance industry for a very long time and did a genre hop, or is in the process of doing a genre hop into, into a new genre, which is apparently harder to say than it should be today. So let’s have a chat with Elizabeth and then we will be back to talk a bit more about that.
I am very excited to welcome Elizabeth Boyle to today’s podcast episode, and our conversation today is going to be about genre hopping, but first, I would love it, Elizabeth, if you could tell those folks listening and watching out there a little bit more about you because not all of them know you quite as well as
Elizabeth Boyle: So who am I and what do I do? I have been writing romance since the mid nineties one book after another, and next thing you know, 20 years has passed and you look back and you have all these books behind you and you’re just like, wow, how’d that happen? And you have a career. It just kind of happens. You sit down, you put your butt in the chair, and you write words. And you make that career continue by writing more and more words.
Crystal: And how many books do you have now?
Elizabeth Boyle: 27, I think. Full length novels. And then, a couple of novellas and a couple of short stories.
Crystal: What’s the average word-count on a novel that you have?
Elizabeth Boyle: A novel is a, probably about a hundred thousand words at least. The earlier books were bigger because they gave us a little more room to write, but as over the years, they’ve kind of like, first it was like you could go up to 125,000 and then it was like, no, no more than a hundred and then they got real picky and started making us. Go to 90,000 and I tend to write long, so I always felt like 90,000 was more like a short story. To me, are you kidding? I just got going at about 70, What are you doing to me? You’re killing me. So, so the fun
Crystal: So the fun stat on that is that is roughly 3 million words. 3 million published words. So let’s just take a moment and be excited about that, because I think that that’s something that, right? Like so many people are struggling to think of how they could get to, you know, a hundred thousand words.But 3 million words, that is a pretty, epic amount of accomplishment. And you’ve been writing primarily enrollments, right? Correct?
Elizabeth Boyle: Yeah, historical romance and just that and very focused on that, you know, in research and in terms of the genre and readers and everything. And so for so many years I was so focused, I really kind of lost sight that there’s a whole world out there, writers and other stories and other ways, you know, to tell your truth.
And finally I got invited up to the conference in Surrey and hadn’t been to like a non-genre specific conference, probably in 15,16 years, and it was like the first reaction was coming from romance of course, I walk in and there’s men in the room and it’s like, and, right? Wow. Who knows what happened? When did men start writing?
Yeah. And then you find out that there’s poetry and song writers and people writing fiction and nonfiction and memoir and science fiction and speculative fiction and fan fic, and you’re like, really? You become, when you write in genre fiction and you’re writing one genre and one very narrow genre, you lose sight of the larger world of words, and that’s not always good.
It’s good that you are focused, and it’s good know your genre, and that you know your craft and that you really study it, but at the same time, you’re not broadening your craft and you’re not challenging yourself in those ways that can make you a better writer.
Crystal: Yeah. So, so is that what prompted your genre switch or your sort of broadening your writing horizons or what was behind that decision to make a bit of a leap?
What made you switch genres?
Elizabeth Boyle: Well, it was like the paths intersected. I had picked up the idea for this book in about 2010 and we were on a very long family camping trip. Driving across Wyoming, and I had written a book that never had been published, and I don’t know why that book came back to me while I was staring out the window at the gorgeous landscape of Wyoming.
But all of a sudden, some of the characters from that book started shifting, and I could see it and it gave me, there was like this moment of just all these ideas coming together and all these threads that had been nagging at me for years, all of a sudden it all came together and I went, that’s how I tell that story.
That is how I tell that story. And it was about the same time when I started going to the Surrey Writers Conference. And so it was just eye opening cross of seen other paths and having an idea that it was outside of my genre. And it really was an idea for a book that wasn’t really being written at the time.
And so it was like, you know, this is a grand idea But I don’t know if it has a market, but it turned out to be an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone. So I started just as I usually do when I have a story idea. I started collecting on it, research, story bits, dialogue I picked up, I started putting it into a notebook, which is generally what I do when I have a story idea.
Once it advanced to a point where I have more ideas and it’s really starting to reach out to me. I give it its own notebook and then when I have ideas or thoughts about it, I just write those notes and thoughts down in the notebook. So the notebook becomes the collection point. I’ll slide pictures in there.
I’ll slide research bits, notes, write things. Sometimes I’ll hear it … I mean, even to the point where I’ll hear something it, a mass or something, in the homily, or a conversation overheard over dinner. And those all notes go into the notebook. So that when I do sit down to write a story, then I have this kind of beginning point of ideas, and I’m not going to use most of them, but they’re just kind of those little sparks that say, this could be a piece, this could be a piece.
it’s like having somebody take like, four jigsaw puzzles, and dump them all into one box, shake it up, and then you have to figure out which is which. Which of the pieces you can use for this one particular jigsaw and which are the pieces you can’t use.
Crystal: Yeah. And so how does that work? Like when did you know that this story was not going to be a romance?
Elizabeth Boyle: I knew right away. Right away, it was not going to be a romance. And that was kind of frightening in itself because here I am, I’ve got, okay. A kid that’s potentially, you know, a couple of years away from college and a very steady income stream. And you can go, well, this would not be a good idea to take, you know, a year or two or maybe three as it is the case. Now off. To write this book. So you kind of like, you’ll step back and tell yourself, I really can’t do this. And I shouldn’t have, I should have been a little more willing to take that leap. But again, it was kind of the family life and the personal life and the writing life, all needed to coalesce at this one certain point where it was possible.
And, and then it finally did in, 2017 I got to the end of a contract. Just realized that I had to tell the story. If I didn’t write the story now, I never would. And that seemed a greater crime than, going without an income for three years you know it’s not. But I don’t have an income because I have royalties from old books.
But in the same sense, it’s not, you know, you just, you make adjustments for what you want in life and. You can just say, well, I’m not going to do this, or I’m not going to do that, and we’re going to, you know, it’s choices. My husband and I were both like, well, these are choices we can make, and it’s not the end of the world for us, so why not?
Crystal: I mean, that’s a point. Everybody’s going to be out on a pretty regular basis as they’re analyzing their author career is, okay, these are the options I have for the next step. What does that mean? So thinking about and talking about with, you know, your family, your spouse, your partner, whoever, what is this going to cost us.
Do this opportunity. And if you’ve got something creatively that’s really sticking with you and you know you have to trust a certain amount, your instincts, that’s a story that needs to be told. So I’m curious, cause you are traditionally published in your background, like that is your sort of your business has been a collaborative one in that you work with an agent, you have traditional publishers and that has been sort of how you grew your career.
How does that work when one says: Oh, I think I’m going to write a book in a different genre. How does that happen?
Elizabeth Boyle: Break the news to everybody that’s relying you? Just tell them. Because essentially they work. Your agent works for you. And I’m the publisher wants you writing books that you’re enthusiastic about and that you’re going to put your best work into and it’s your creative life.
If the publisher, you know, the publisher is going to either be there for that book when it’s finished and say, Oh my gosh, this is fabulous I want to buy it. Or you’re going to just have to find a new publisher, and that’s … Could be either the case. I still don’t know that yet because I’m not finished with this book.
My agent, on the other hand, was like: go for it. There’s all kinds of opportunities here. New opportunities are different. It’ll be fun to try. And she’s kind of, she’s a little more adventurous, so. You just sort of take that deep dive? I think it’s more having the support behind me at home, which luckily in our marriage, through the course of both of our careers, we have both at times had to ask the extra from our spouse.
You know, like my husband right now is going through an MBA program and it’s been a huge ask from him for me time-wise, because I’ve had to take on a lot of stuff over here because he’s studying and working full time. And so, like I said, it was like kind of the perfect time for me not to be under deadline for books because then we weren’t having this conflicting sort of thing.
And there have been times in my career where I have just been … had to be slammed and he’s had to, like either take time from work or allow me to travel. And when I was traditionally published, if I went on book tour he’d be on the hook for being at home for the kids. So we’ve always had that kind of cooperative relationship.
And that’s been always been a positive thing in my writing career is having this family support.
Crystal:. Yeah, that makes a huge difference for sure. And I think having, having the support of your agent as well as also. Really good, in that, you know, it’s not one, it’s not another source of conflict. Cause I think we get enough of the conflict in our own minds.
We are experts at creating that as storytellers. It’s all about wrapping up the conflict. So it’s, it’s pretty easy to see every way something might not work, but I’m curious. So the new genre is what? Cause I don’t think we’ve actually spoke about that.
Elizabeth Boyle: No, we haven’t. It’s sort of historical fiction, women’s fiction, with a touch of magical realism.
So it’s, it’s a reach. It’s gonna find its audience or it won’t. And that’s about what I want to say about it. I’m kind of keeping it close to the vest and … cause I really am excited about this idea and it, it just isn’t being written.
Crystal: Nice. So I’m curious, as you’re preparing for this, you’ve got an audience and you’ve got a newsletter list you’ve built up over the years of readers who follow you. How do you, or will you, or how are you preparing for that switch or preparing readers for that switch? Or are you at all.
How do you prepare your readers for the switch?
Elizabeth Boyle: I really haven’t been. A lot of my readers, you know, a lot of them just love rereading the books. So happily they still have, you know, they can sit and read 27 books over and over again.
But, also, you know, just kinda, I’ve been hinting at it, there where it’s not a romance, but they trust me enough that they’ll be the things that they like about what I write. Those things stay the same, you know. Humor, characters who they can really relate to, the familiar characters that we all have in our lives that kind of make us laugh or, you know, make us tear our hair out.
You know, when you populate a town with people, you tend to kind of have these characters that are universal so that they know what they’ll get. But I know there will be some that’ll just be like, no. I did that once when I was writing historical romance, step outside the box and wrote two books that were historical romance but paranormal. And there were a lot of readers who absolutely loved those books, and there were, there was a contingency that was like, don’t do this to my historical romance. So yeah, there’s, there’s a real divide in that audience in historical romance. And I’ve always been very aware of that.
And you just … I can’t … I have to write what I have. I want to write, and I have to tell the stories that are singing in my heart, and I just kind of gotten to the end of the road on romance, historical romance. I felt like I had written everything that I wanted to say. That’s not to say that I’m still not getting ideas for books that, you know, could be kind of fun to write, but this one, I have to get this one out. And then, you know, see where the road takes me.
Crystal: And so in terms of that shift in your mind of no longer being constrained by the rules of the romance writing, because there are very strict rules, is there anything that’s kind of surprised you about how you’re telling the story or like that has become to your awareness that you maybe haven’t explicitly thought about it?
I mean, after 27 books a lot of things become sort of internalized part of your process. And when you shake all that up and you don’t have all those exact same rules, what happens? What is that like?
Elizabeth Boyle: Well, it’s scary. First of all, you know, it is kind of like jumping off a cliff. And the comforts of a genre are gone. You know, when you write historical, when you write romance specifically, there’s a framework there that you hang the story on yet story is story, and I think people read what they read. Because they want to connect with people and people don’t change across genres.
The characters in a mystery novel, or you’re going to find them in, you know, the nosy neighbour who wants to, you know, tell all or no all is going to be, it can be in a science fiction novel, can be in a fantasy novel, can be in a mystery. It can be in suspense. They all have the nosy neighbor. I think those things kind of cross everything.
But, I think one of the things was this glorious feeling of being freed from those constructions. And then that terrifying moment of that you’re, you know, you just jumped off the airplane without a parachute. A Holy folks, what did I just do? It’s kind of like the trip to someplace exotic and new that you may be, you know, some Island country that no one’s ever been to or something in your, you know, the first person to go there or something.
And then you’re driving along and you’re looking around and everything is bright and beautiful and colourful and glorious, and you come around here corner and there’s a subway and you know you can go get your Turkey sandwich or golden arches and you’re like, wait a minute. And that in a sense, that moment is realizing that you still have to sit down and do the nuts and bolts of storytelling.
And you still have to do the writing. It’s not going to just be like magic. It’s not like I’m going to lay on the beach and the book is just going to come to me and I’m going to just type it out in these beautiful moments of inspiration. No, you really just do have to do the nuts and bolts of writing and that’s the same no matter what you’re writing. That answered the question?
Crystal: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s just interesting. Personally, I find limitations very freeing in a, in a weird way, like if I can do anything I find I often do nothing because there’s just too much choice and then there’s too many ways you could do it. So I liked the restrictions of genre in knowing what that is, but I like to hop between them. So that is, you know, sometimes it’s a mystery and sometimes it’s a thriller and sometimes it’s paranormal and they’re like, if I feel trapped in a thing, then II don’t, I feel like I can be my full creative self and I find that really stifling.
So, it is nice to feel like you’re choosing the thing you’re working on is very motivating and it makes it exciting to get up and work on things and sort of follow that passion is so important,
Elizabeth Boyle: I think that for years one thing I always did with every book I wrote was trying to find some element in it that was going to be a challenge. Something that would either make me a better writer or … like in one book I told the story (and then romance is often very difficult) I told the story three quarters of it just in the heroine’s point of view. Now that you know, that’s not done in romance. It’s kind of a back and forth hero, heroine point of views and I, but it was the only way the story could be told couldn’t.
You needed to stay out of his head. Her perspective was the only one that was going to work for three quarters of the book. And that was a challenge, but it was joyful because it wasn’t being done, and it was tricky and it made me really think about my writing and my word choices and how I was showing scenes and how I was telling.
And that was always something that I tried to do with each book was just find that element in it where I really needed to push myself and grow as a writer and this is just like a great big grow as a writer. There is a lot more to it.
Crystal: And I know you’ve, like over the years you’ve built up a lot of really strong communities through those genre connections as well.
So on the sort of writer community side of things, how are you finding shifting is influencing some of that stuff, or vice versa.
Elizabeth Boyle: It’s kind of interesting because in some ways, you know, I still keep my ties in the romance community because they’re my friends. I mean, they’ve been my friends for 20 some years, but some of the problems that they’ve been facing in like the last two years within the romance community I feel very removed from it, and I don’t feel like I have a voice in that anymore because I’m not writing there. And what I’ve written is there and I can’t change it. And so, but we still have the same connections as writers, you know, working writers, these are my problems are I’m doing research and this is what I need, kind of things.
But over the past, like 10 years, like I said, I’ve been expanding, deliberately expanding my writer connections in my writer community to include more people that have different experiences, are writing different things and that has allowed me to see a broader world. And I think that’s really important and that’s one thing I would say about the romance community is that it is so insular. They don’t, they don’t do a good job of seeing what’s outside and how it’s done. And if they did it would be better for the romance community. So what I kind of learn by stepping outside the community was, you know, that there was a big fence around it.
And I really got tired of that fence and I like my friends out in the other writer world. So they just have amazing experiences and are interesting people. But no, I have a couple of romance writer friends and we still chat back and forth on plodding and, we call each other for help and keep those ties, those ties are just not ever going to go away.
Crystal: Which is okay. I think an important thing to remember, both from the story point of view, it’s a theme that’s come up a couple of times in this, that the characters are people at their core, and the stories are about people at their core regardless of the type of person or, or who they are or what genre they’re in or whatever. Like those characters are ultimately just folks. Oh, and that’s true across the board. And the writers are the same thing. We’re all just people. We just happen to be telling a certain type of story in a, in a certain timeframe. And so that’s, I think a freeing way to think about it as well, is just you know, being people and writers together is a nice way to look at it and then we can help each other in whatever way we can.
Elizabeth Boyle: And just like anytime you step out as a writer, you have to be very discerning about where you put your emotional or put yourself in because it was like took the step out.
I was like, okay, I’m writing more of a kind of a Western sort of idea because the book is set in Wyoming. And so clearly I need to join Western writers of America. And I went to their conference and I have never felt more out of place and more out of step with an organization in my life. I mean, I thought, you know, oh, I’m just going to go in and we’re all going to be friends.
And I was like, oh my gosh, I left that like: what have I done? I, and so, but instead of just kind of closing the door on that and saying, okay, I’m going to go without a writer’s organization, I’m not going to have that I kept looking and I found a small organization called women writing the West.
It was actually an offshoot formed out of the Western writers association because it was a group of women in the, I think about the early nineties that just said, you know what? We don’t have a place here. We don’t have a voice here. We’re going to form our own organization. And yeah, women don’t have a voice.
I’ll be really honest, and women don’t have a voice in the Western writers association. They don’t, they get treated like second-class citizens there. And I know this is going to probably hacks some people off, but it’s the truth. I mean, to the point where you’re sitting at a workshop and a guy will Pat your knee, I mean, it’s just like insane. Yeah. I know.
Crystal: I’m making a cringy face for the people who can’t see me. I’m like, I’m feeling, I’m feeling that hand on my knee and I’m backing away.
Elizabeth Boyle: You know, the man still does have his hand. I will say that, but he probably will not ever do that to a woman again. And. Oh Lord. Like I said, I kept looking for the right organization and I found … even online I was like, uh, this may be not my organization. It really because it was formed so many years ago by a mature group of women, as you can imagine now, most of them are in their seventies and eighties but there’s a small group of women who are younger and that’s a real relative term, and they’re trying to build it as well. And when I got to the conference that night, I thought, oh no, this is just old ladies and what am I doing here?
But I actually met some of the most interesting writers I have ever met. And again, it’s that stepping out of your comfort zone, trying something new, giving it a chance.
Clearly you’re going to find out whether you like it or not, but you got to give it a try. And I wasn’t going to go to the conference and even when I, but it was close to my house, so I thought, okay, I’ll go. And after it, I got there and again, I went to my hotel room and thought, Oh, I should just take a flight home tomorrow.
I don’t want to do this. By the end of the conference, I had found some wonderful women and you know, and I love 80 year old women. They just, they knock men’s words. I love them. And they were so much fun. And I went back last fall and went to the conference again. And I’ve continued to be part of the group.
And as long as you don’t mind having to at least twice a month, explain to somebody what Facebook is, they’re kind of sweet, wonderful group. But they have poets again, poets. People writing nonfiction, people monetizing their writing in ways I never even imagined. I met a writer who has written some Western novels and everything, and then turned around and took a lot of her research and turned it into a Chuckwagon cookbook, and then took something else and turned it into a children’s series.
And it was this idea as a writer of taking everything you use in writing and allowing it to monetize, which is something I had never thought of as a romance writer. Here’s all this research I’ve done. Why wasn’t I monetizing it the way these people are. All along the way, and that’s, that was kind of one of the eye-opening light bulb moments of all this is that there are ways beyond telling a story in a novel to monetize all this work that you do.
Crystal: Yeah, I think that is a, that’s a great reminder for people who are sort of looking at their author business and trying to figure out, you know, times change, technology changes, everything is shifting so quickly. It can be a little disorienting. And in our mind, if the only version of having a publishing career is: get an agent, sell the books to publishers, and then write the next book there’s a lot of missed opportunity there. And so there’s definitely the, I think the opportunities are greater than ever before in terms of the things we can do and how accessible it is to actually do those. And to repackage. We are knowledge workers as writers, is really what it is.
Elizabeth Boyle: We’re content provider. Well, there’s constantly content that can come out of a project that can be add to the bottom line in a sense. I, as I’ve been putting this book together, I’m also thinking of what would be a companion to this and what would be some of the marketing opportunities to this. And there’s, it’s a whole different mindset.
It’s one that I think, publishers have been able to, take advantage of. Now it’s time for authors to do that as well.
Crystal: And so I’m curious, sort of as you’ve seen the shifting from really publisher focused publishing to more opportunities for authors to kind of pursue some of these pieces independently. What are, well, is there anything you’ve learned that has really surprised you or that you’ve kind of completely outside your comfort zone, you’ve pushed yourself to do.
Some challenges and lessons learned
Elizabeth Boyle: Um, I, well, I think one of the ones, again, light bulb moments was,, I had agreed to do two novellas for my publisher and, I had kind of discussed one with my editor and she said, Oh, that sounds like a great idea. To me, that was like, okay, so write the book. And I was at a dinner with the, you know, the main, all the editors, and there were a bunch of authors there and everything, and I said, somebody said something about, are you working on that novella? And I said, it’s almost done.
And the head editor, it was like, what do you mean it’s almost done? We haven’t approved that. I was like. Approval? What do you mean? We just, the editor and I discussed it. She goes, well, I didn’t approve it. And it was that moment of power where all of a sudden I realized, yeah, but that doesn’t matter.
And I looked at her and I said, well, if you don’t like it I’ll self-publish it. It was that shift in power and there was kind of that from the publishing side of the table. Collective ‘Ohw’ all looked around and said ‘Yeah’. It was a revolution.
So you realize that you see that shift in power and you’re like, I do have power. Yay. That’s been empowering because yeah, a lot of things you can say, you know, you don’t like it? Awesome, I’ll self-publish it.
Crystal: Yeah. You said earlier like it’s important to remember that your agent works for you. It is your business, right?
Like you are the author and there are a lot of circumstances where I think we feel like we don’t have the power, and as creatives we aren’t running a business in the same way that do you think of when you think, corporation or whatever, but. That’s not in fact true. It is just as much a business as anyone else’s business, regardless of what type of thing the product you’re delivering.
And that’s an interesting thing to mentally shift and change the way you think about your writing and your stories and your content to that business mindset.
Elizabeth Boyle: Going in that vein, I think that’s one of the things that I have learned over the years. The one mistake I think I made once I didn’t fire my first agent sooner.
And it was, I let the relationship continue for about four years longer than I should have. I should have fired her much sooner and I didn’t out of, you know, some misplaced loyalty or whatever. When they stop working for you, that is the time to say goodbye. And as a working author and you have, you have a track record or a publishing record, there’s going to be another agent out there.
I took a year to find a new agent. I talked to everybody I knew. I came up with a list of agents I would never hire an a thousand years and a list of agents that absolutely. I would hire any, please don’t ask me for the list. I don’t have it anymore. This was years ago, but. Do your due diligence.
And it was all the lessons that I had learned by not taking those steps earlier. I put those to work. These are the things I want in an agent. These are the things I, I don’t want in an agent. And here’s my list. And I at that point, sent out dealers to that list, the shortlist I’d finally come up too and I had offers for all of them within 24 hours.
So. You know, never doubt yourself. Yeah. Believe in yourself. Don’t think you can’t replace an agent or an editor or a publishing house. You absolutely can. Your writing and your work is the best that you’re provided for. And the talent and the writing is there, and you understand your genre and you’re telling the best story they’ll want you.
I think there, if they think they’re gonna make money off of you. Yeah. They want you.
Crystal: Yeah. And I think, you know, if you happen to be on the indie side of things, that’s even more true in that often it is a service based business and you are literally hiring them. It’s not that they are getting a percentage of your revenue as you go.
It’s most often an actual service-based contract. And so there is that, that other mindset shift and knowing that you are the one with the power in that, that you are auditioning companies or service providers to help you with the pieces the publisher would have handled traditionally or the agent.
You are negotiating the contracts for things yourself. I mean, ideally you’re going to have a lawyer helping you out, or at the very least, be using templates and advice from professionals. But you know, I think that there is a lot of value in recognizing yourself as the CEO of your writing business and, and steering your ship.
Elizabeth Boyle: I have a friend that is a very serious indeed published author, and she was like, I got approached by this foreign, you know, a foreign language press and I don’t know what to do. And I don’t have the expertise in this. And I was like, well, you could probably hire an agent just to handle your foreign sales or to go out there with it.
She was like, I never even thought of that because she had been indie, and indie don’t need an agent. Well, actually. She had an opportunity for more monetary gain by hiring this agent to handle just this segment, which is a very specific segment in publishing. I mean, not all agents will sell foreign rights, but some specialize in it and then you find that an agent and hand them over your indie and they’ll go out and sell it all around the world. Croatian rights this week.
Crystal: Nice. That’s going to be exciting.
Elizabeth Boyle: Croatia. It’s added to the language list.
Crystal: That’s awesome. So do you, so do you have your back catalog rights back for some of your stories and is that, or did you just retain certain rights when you did your …
Elizabeth Boyle: I have my first three books back. And the rest, I doubt I will ever get them back. You know, the contracts really locked me in. And, again, probably not the smartest thing, that was why I should have fired my agent earlier. She was like, well, this is, you know how it is and there’s no other way it’s ever going to be.
I shouldn’t have listened to her. You know, again.
Crystal: But the lessons we learn.
Elizabeth Boyle: Yeah, the lessons we learn again, making sure there’s a way to get your rights back. I was looking at, I have some audio rights that should come back to me. But then they turned around and the publisher said, we have offers for those.
And I was like, well, these offers are probably better than what I could get. Go out and pay for so many and make money, you know, this is cash up front, so why not? And let them sell them.
Crystal: Yeah.
Elizabeth Boyle: And you have to weigh those things. And if they do well, then out grab the rights from the other books and do it myself.
Haven’t done myself. Right. You just have to weigh those things as they come along.
Crystal: I think learning from each thing that you see happening is, is really important. And that’s why the writers communities are so valuable. And I think it’s so important to surround yourself with people. They don’t have to be doing the same type of book as you are. In fact, there’s value in having a couple of diverse writers’ groups because, you know, the things that the mystery writers are currently focused on might be different from what the romance writers or the science fiction writers are learning. And so it exposes you to more ways of doing things because the standards are very different in the different genres.
Elizabeth Boyle: Yeah. And meeting with people who are writing nonfiction, and again, poetry songwriters, all these people have different perspectives or ways of doing things that, of course, different. You can so learn from them. So learn so much. Always be open to learning new things and trying new things, especially with your writing and with your methods.
When I started writing, how I write when I started writing 20 years ago is not how I write now, or organized or anything. It’s evolved and changed and shifted over the years. And. You just, you learn to try new things and what works you keep and what doesn’t, you just. Okay. Kick it to the curb. Just don’t even, don’t even look back.
Sometimes you’ll look back and go: Oh, maybe that will work now. So.
Crystal: so I have an unrelated, well, it’s not really unrelated to storytelling, so I think it does tie in, but I happen to know that you have a passion for creating yarn based things as well. And I’m curious to know how that has intersected with your writing stuff.
Elizabeth Boyle: I am an avid knitter. I’ve been knitting since I was seven years old, and so I’ve always been a knitter. Just off and on, all through the years. And to me, I think, with knitting. It’s, it’s such a meditative process. it just kind of empties you just empty out and you knit and I think that clears your head and clears your thoughts.
And then when you come back, you can really focuse, you kind of remove the clutter and then you can focus on what you need to do and it’s a stress reliever. It also teaches you like when you make a mistake in knitting, you have to pull it back. You rip it all out, rep, rep, rep, and, you rip it back to the point where you made the mistake and you, and that’s part of writing is being willing, to, rip back the pages or rip out what doesn’t work and go back to where you made the mistake, being able to see that mistake, being able to read your writing as much, like reading your knitting, you read, you look back, you see where you’ve made that error in your knitting and you just ruthlessly rip it out and then you fix it and then you redo it, start over and keep going and being willing to do that will make you a better writer. People that leave mistakes in their writing are not going to have a career.
You need to be able to go back, fix those mistakes, clean it up. You know, make sure that it, when it’s done, it’s smooth all the way.
And this the same with knitting.
Crystal: Yeah. I think it’s also the same in business really. Like we can get paralyzed by being afraid to take a step in case we make a mistake or make the wrong choice. But when you can sort of look at your choices as, okay, I’m learning to do this, and if I make a choice that results in an error or mistake or something that’s visibly not how I want it to be in the thing that I’m making, I can dial back and undo because there are some things, it’s very hard to completely undo, but for the most part, you know, if you miss a step or you forget to do something, or your launch wasn’t right quite as organized as you hoped, like there are ways to make adjustments to those things and course correct after you’ve, after you’ve done them.
So I think just not being paralyzed by the fear, you can unravel things and re-knit them together if you need to along the way,
Elizabeth Boyle: if the book doesn’t launch the way you wanted you can relaunch it or you can try some other way. I mean, I, I keep looking at my books right now and I’m like, you know what, I’m just gonna like, there’s a whole audience that has come up that has not read my books, so to me, the goal now is how do I reach the readers that are 18 to 35 and share those stories with them?
How do I get them in line. I mean, you know, after they’re done watching them, come and read my romances. Absolutely. But you have… So it’s an opportunity to relaunch a book, new covers or, you know, trying to find a different way to sell that story. You know, this, blurb or this hook or this way of pitching this book didn’t hit people, but you know, the story is something that they’ll enjoy if you just find the real hook. Oftentimes when people say, well, which of your books should I read? The first question I always ask them is, well, what do you like to read?
And then I ask myself well, what book do I have that kind of dovetails into that. Oh, I like reading something with a mystery to it. Oh, well then you should probably read, This Rake of Mine. I like something with a little paranormal to it. Oh, read His Mistress by Morning. Oh. I like, you know, Oh, I really liked, something where you know, I like a lot of banter or mistaken identity.
Oh, well then you should read Love Letters From a Duke. So I have enough books that I tried to first of all, find out what people like, what are you looking for? And then again, duck tail, what I have in the back list that’s tailored, and once they put their foot in, then they’re willing to probably take a leap and try something that’s maybe a little outside of their initial comfort zone.
And so I think this is the same with relaunching, is just finding that right way to introduce it. I mean, it’s a basic marketing principle, right? Introduce it. You know, it’s not new tide. It’s the same tide that it always was, but we’re just going to put flowers on it and call it fabulous.
And people will go, Oh, look, flowers. Oh, that’s the way I like my tie.
Crystal: I love that analogy. Okay. So if people are interested in reading books with paranormal or historical or some romance or some mystery, and they want to come find you, where’s the best place to connect with you and your books?
Elizabeth Boyle: Probably my website, ElizabethBoyle.com
Crystal: Perfect. And we will put that in the show notes for a quick and easy click through to help you find some of those things. I just want to say thank you so much, Elizabeth, for taking the time out of your writing time to come and talk to all of us and help those of us who are maybe thinking about a little genre hopping and or looking at building a nice sustainable career that, it does help to see how people have rock to that process.
Elizabeth Boyle: What How time is up? How did that happen?
Crystal: I know it just flies by.
Elizabeth Boyle: This is fabulous fun. Thank you for inviting me on. This was great fun. And I mean, really, I’m shocked. I’m looking at my clock going. Really?
Crystal: That was an hour. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. And I have a shelf with some of your books on it, so I will be in the rereading category until that new one hits the stands and then I will check that out.
Post interview discussion
Michele: So it goes without saying. Elizabeth was amazing. Providing and giving us so much great content. She’s a writer who has been writing for like a quarter of a century, I would say.
So everything she said was gold. I’ll just focus on a couple of things she said, which I believe needs to be stressed out. Uh, needs not to be stressed out. It needs to be underlined. You can get that for the very last parts of the podcast when we make fun of ourselves. But, you know, a couple of things that really need to be, underlined for me.
Very meaningful, which I can use that to explain a bit better why I think they’re useful. The whole episode was about genre hopping. So it’s basically another way to say going outside of your comfort zone, which is something difficult in any kind of endeavor, not only writing. Why is that?If we are comfortable writing a genre, we will tend to keep writing that genre.
Which is not necessarily bad. What Elizabeth was hinting on was that at a certain point there are things that you lose if you keep doing that for years and years and years. And in her case it was more of a question of decades. So it was interesting when she said that: outside of the community I was the romance community, I started seeing a tendency behavior, stuff like that. I don’t necessarily like that any more or I didn’t feel there were 100% okay with me. So that’s when she started discovering other community. The Western community was one of them. And although there were some things she didn’t like of these other community and things eventually researching or their communities in that genre, she found something that was useful to her and to her book.
The book she’s working on now. This is important. When you are a writer and you’re willing to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, good things start happening. The way she was explaining a writing process, for example, how seeing things from a different genre perspective and these different writers helped her seeing their book in a different light.
So I would say the gold nugget that she was hinting at was: don’t be afraid of trying different things. Even if you’re writing in a genre completely different from yours, and you’re not going to publish anything in that genre, you will re-emerge from that experience enriched, you will know more stuff, and for sure you’re going to be using the new things that you learned in the genre you’re writing. So it’s painful in the beginning , but once you to have those other assets and that other knowledge, that is going to be helpful to you as a writer in your career years from now. So I really believe that’s something that needs to be repeated. Because what many writers that I know and then I’m following and there are successful, what they do is that now and then, they will try and change the things that they are writing. I always mentioned Masterclass. You’re probably going to be sick of hearing me telling you that. But there is like one author that I really like and follow. Neil Gaiman: he does change and shifts very often, and I do believe his writing style the is shifted because of that. Doing during fantasy, science fiction, dark fantasy children’s book. He wrote a very different array of things. Stephen King also, if you think about that, he didn’t always an only write horror. If I say for example, the Dark Tower that’s dark fantasy, it’s another genre.
They tend to do different things. Of course, mainly they stay in the same genre, so Gaiman will be fantasy. And, Stephen King would be horror. What she mentioned, Elizabeth, really made me think about the, about that. This was my first, okay. Pause,
Crystal: Pause for a second there. So, so let’s talk about, working in, it’s sort of experimenting a little bit.
So when we talk about experimenting with your writing. I mean, it takes a long time to build up a career in a certain genre. So what are some of the reasons you think people might want to switch, or have you ever thought about switching?
Michele: I did, and I am basically switching because every month I’m publishing a story that is different in genre
And I am noticing in the first end what Elizabeth was mentioning. And forgive me, the word, ‘a pain the ass’ set to change every single time the very foundation of the writing that you are using. So from science fiction to fantasy, there are some things that you have to learn.
And there are some, tropes that the readers expect you to follow. So it is and can be very tricky because you have to be able to learn very fast. But what I’m saying is experiencing and experimenting. Bear with me. Experimenting doesn’t mean necessarily to write the novel in that genre.
It could be a short story. I would urge you and encourage you to write a short story or a novella instead of a full length Epic novel, if you will. I am finding on my own experience that by changing and shifting, genre, point of view on things. I do get to use different kinds of tools and most of the times, because I’m writing in so many different genres nowadays, I’m on an exploring kind of path. I’m still learning trying to learn what I do like to write. I am finding this exercise of genre hopping to be helpful for my storytelling abilities. I find that if I write in one genre hopping and doing something, that is not drastically different, for example from science fiction to fantasy, in a more easily, uh, and trust worthy way. So when I approached the other genre, I’m more comfortable. I don’t panic that much.
But again, Crystal that comes with a lot of self-doubt at the beginning because what I would like to do is especially at the beginning, I wanted to sit down an write science fiction. I didn’t write a lot of fantasy before. Now I’m basically just writing in different styles of fantasy, dark fantasy, fairy tales, this kind of thing. That’s why I think it’s useful.
That’s why I believe that what Elizabeth said might be useful to the people that are listening.
Crystal: Yeah, and I think one of the ways that we define what we are by defining what we aren’t. And so it’s much easier to look at a thing and say, Oh, well that doesn’t fit with fantasy, or that doesn’t fit with sci-fi when you’re practicing deciding what genres things go into, you have to get really clear on what exactly does go in them and what doesn’t. And I think that’s a really valuable exercise for any other is if you practice writing outside your genre, you cement writing within your genre. It doesn’t mean you have to release all those stories to the world, or that you have to completely change your branding and go off in another direction.
But I do think there’s a lot of value in even just reading stuff that isn’t yours genre and saying, okay, it’s these four elements, like these are the four things that make it a cozy mystery instead of a romance or that make it a fantasy instead of a sci-fi. And having that discussion and defining that and talking to other people about what they think fits into that genre is also a useful exercise for you because it isn’t, as we’ve talked about before, it isn’t just about what you want to write. It’s also about what your readers want to read and what is the expectation of your genre market and are you meeting those expectations.
It’s fine to be innovative. It is not fine to break the promises your readers are expecting because something is in a certain category. So I think from a strategic business point of view, you have to deliver on the promise of your genre with your stories. And in order to know which rules you can break, you have to first know the rules, and you have to break those rules very, very intentionally for a purpose, at an inappropriate time and in an inappropriate way.
So I think that is a really useful exercise and something to keep in mind that, you know, if you’re feeling a little bit trapped in your genre and you’ve been writing in it for a long time, also just experimenting outside of it may remind you of what you loved about it in the first place, or it may be an indicator that if you’re really loving the other things and not so much what you were working on, then maybe it’s time for a little bit of a shift.
Even for a while, if not permanently, but just to give yourself freedom to flex a different set of creative muscles
Michele: There’s another thing actually I listened to a lot of authors who’d say: I’m scared of reading other books in my genre because I’m concerned I’m going to be influenced by that. I’m not necessarily agreeing with that statement.
I do think the more you read of that genre that you’re writing the more you learn what has been done, so you can do different things. That’s at least my view on that. I do believe what, these are other authors are saying they want to keep themselves ‘pure’ they don’t want to be influenced, but guess what? It’s almost impossible not being influenced. You are being funded by it Everything that is happening to you that you like it or not you are a sponge. So you might as well suck as much things that you can so that your writing is going to be influenced and be bettered by it.
Crystal: And I think that’s a really interesting point, but I think there’s a couple of ways you can use that to your advantage as well. If you know that there are, you know, three authors in your genre that you like then read a whole bunch of their books in a row before you get into the writing thing, if that’s a voice that you want to try to emulate or a feeling or whatever, then it can kind of train your brain into the length of the sentences and the length of the paragraphs and how the chapters flow from it, one to the next, and how the story arcs flow. But I think volume is the key. It’s the, if you read one or two books, it’s going to be too easily to just kind of subconsciously copy what’s going on in those books that you read. If you read 20 or 30, then anything you produce after that is going to be a mash up of all of those things. So that’s the difference between plagiarism and research, right? We joke that if you take something from one source plagiarism, and if you take it from a dozen sources, then it’s research.
I think that applies in your reading as well. And I definitely will go in and read a whole bunch of things, but I will be careful that before I’m about to do a deep writing phase, I will read only the really good examples and if I’m going to read stuff that didn’t really work or read authors I’m not sure about, I will read them earlier in my research cycles so that I am not unconsciously emulating something that I didn’t think worked. You can read those, evaluate them, decide what not to do, and then read some good stuff. That’s really prime examples of people excelling in your genre and then shift into your own writing after that, or even read your own writing if you’re in a series.
I always reread the books in the series leading up to that one before I start writing in that series again because it just, it gets my brain into the right mode.
Michele: Yeah, I think it’s very meaningful. There is another thing that actually Elizabeth said, it’s different from genre hopping and it’s still more different than like going outside your comfort zone. It’s a bit more extreme, and that’s why I liked it. She, at some point in the interview, she basically create a good example with one of her hobbies. I believe it was one of her hobbies, which is knitting, which is basically, she does that on a regular basis, is she really loves doing it.
And there is something she said that I want to, just say back to you and, and, I want to say why it’s meaningful to me and why I think it might be useful to you writers. So she said that knitting has taught her that when you make a mistake, you have to rip the fabric apart. And then you have to start over. You have to repeat back to the point when you made the mistake. And that’d be back to this point because it’s very interesting. And that is part of writing too. Be willing to read back the pages that don’t work and be able to see the mistake by rereading your writing.
So there is this beautiful parallel between writing and knitting. If you leave mistakes in your writing, she says, you’re not going to have a career. So that’s why I was saying it’s very powerful. If read in a particular way, might almost sounds like negative, but it’s actually not.
It’s very constructive. And I’ll tell you why. At least, this is my taking. When she compares and meeting her hobby to our work, because writing is their job. she made the us aware, or very important, powerful things that she does in both activities. When you make a mistake in knitting and I’ve never done that before, but she was so good in describing that I can understand what she was talking about. When you make a mistake, you have to go back. So this is the fabric, you have to go back to the point in which it wasn’t a mistake anymore. And she said the same: if you’ll make a mistake in the writing you’re not, doomed.
You just have to figure out what is the point where things went one wrong, very wrong. I do believe hat you can apply this suggestion to your everyday writing. So if you are stuck, and this is interesting because if you can stand another story from Masterclass, there is Neil Gaiman that says similar thing.
When you are stuck in a point of your novel, 90% of the time is because something went wrong a few pages before. So you went to, the right instead of the left. So what you have to do, you have to go back a few pages and when there was this intersection you have to understand there was a center, right, and left.
I went to the left and what’s happening if I’m just going back and go to the center? So exactly. The same thing Elizabeth said, but so with the example of anything. The reason why I also believe is so powerful is because it gives you the liberty to think of your manuscript as something that is very fluid, you absolutely can go back.
It’s going to hurt. Especially if he wrote three or four chapters in. But then you got stuck. You have to go back and probably erase those chapter, but it’s for a higher purpose. It’s for a higher goal, which is still finished that damn, novel, and she did that more than once. She relates that she has his notebook with, which she starts filling with the information and stuff when an idea pops up and becomes bigger, there are so many times that she had to use her own suggestion.
She was knitting the wrong way and she had to go back. So rip apart the fabric of your tale in this case, if I can put it a bit more poetically, and realize what was the mistake when you reread what you wrote, and try to come up with different scenarios and with different points.
If at this point you think the story is stronger and it’s what’s working and maybe you are too third of the novel and then you go forward and there is something wrong go back and try to go in a different direction, try to knit, rip it apart, and then start over creating a new design in this case, I really thought that was a meaningful Crystal. I really thought that was a big personal though, but at the same time a very useful way of giving us permission to fail. Go back, then starts anew.
Crystal: Yeah. And I think as somebody who has knitted uh, and I’m not good, I am very good at making mistakes in all of the ways in the knitting.
And it’s really about, instead of rip apart, you can use unravel. Right? Because you, the way that it works is you, if you pull, if you take the needles out and you pull on one thread, it’ll just come undone the whole way down the piece. I have unraveled entire scarves before and it makes a crinkly, crinkly yarn all the way down.
After all the, the, uh, winding beds, we were basically tying knots with sticks is what you’re doing when you’re knitting something. And so, you know, if your story, If you’re thinking about weaving together threads of a story that is effectively what you’re doing when you’re knitting, you’re just arranging them in different ways to get the look that you want on the front, right?
The type of stitch you use, it gives a very different effect to the person who’s looking at the finished product. So I think there’s also an interesting correlation is that often, if you are having trouble with a storyline in your mind and you can’t figure out how things work, actually physically knitting can help you sort of calm your brain and actually help you knit those pieces together in the story world as well.
So it’s a little bit of an aside, but I do love the knitting metaphor as what you’re doing, you’re choosing the colours of your yarn, you’re choosing textures, you’re deciding what kind of a finished product you want to have, and then you’re weaving those pieces together in a way that is going to make the wearer or receiver of that knitted thing happy and excited and fall in love with the thing that you made.
So it really is very, very similar.
And I know, oh, many writers who are also knitters. So I think that’s an interesting parallel to dive into. So yes, thank you for calling out those things for us. And now your favourite time of the episode, we have our curious jar, more excited about these rather than upset these days.
Would you write different stories or write your stories differently if you knew that nobody would ever know it was you who wrote it?
Michele: You know Scrappy Rough Draft, the potentiality. Yes, this is challenging, this is no good, but I am going to rock this. I’m thinking that way now.
Crystal: Yes and. This is challenging for me and I’m going to rock this. I’m going to shuffle my hand around in here. You tell me when to stop.
Michele: Keep going. Keep going. Stop.
Crystal: Would you write different stories or write your stories differently if you knew that nobody would ever know it was you who wrote it
Michele: That’s super easy. This is super easy. I’m the first one.
Crystal: Okay.
Michele: Completely and utterly the same. Same things. 100% that if I knew that they were reading or not reading.
And it’s just also like when I write stories, and if I didn’t do it this way, I would probably choose a, how’d you call it in English? Like a pen name, not the pen name. Now when you are using that, but another name, how you call it?
Crystal: That’s a pen name.
Michele: So I’ll use it. But no, the reason why I didn’t use it, I probably wouldn’t use it when writing English instead of, Michele Amitrani, which is almost impossible it seems, to pronounce. I’d use something a bit more Anglo-Saxon, but no, no, no, no, no, no. The answer to that question is no, because. No, because, there’s always a because. Because even though like I know my writing style is not at the point I wanted to be.
I want people to know that that’s basically me. And, if I, if there was another one way for me to write without people, people not doing that, it was me, I’d be sad. I want them to know, when I screw up something and when I do something. I’m curious to know, what about you?
Crystal: I think there’s definitely some stuff that I would experiment with differently if I was writing under a pen name like when I say a real pen name, I mean a pen name that isn’t my real name because I have pen names, but they’re all three names that are all mine, so people still know it’s me. I think because, because I do have an interest in so many different genres and I have gone through phases of being fascinated by crime stuff and criminology and also like serial killers and you know, crazy dark like medical stuff and whatever, I think I have a lot of really varied interests and I would be interested to experiment writing with some of those, but they would definitely have to be under pen names that are not connected anything else. And it’s not because I wouldn’t want people to know it was me. It’s more just, I think from a branding confusion perspective, although definitely when you’re writing romance and you’re having to decide like how steamy or the sex scenes going to be, I think there is always a certain element of knowing, like your family members and people you work with then, you know, my grandma, my, my daughter, my, my mom, like, you know, and then just random friends are gonna read it.
You have to be… You do have to be aware of that, that you are putting out in the world, and I think there is a certain amount of limitation, will say, if you are using your real name on what you want to put out there, not necessarily because you’re ashamed of it or not comfortable with it, but because other people react oddly sometimes to things that get put out and you get either judged or people just sometimes take any writing of sexual content as an invitation, which is creepy and horrible, but it does sometimes happen.
So I think there’s also that ingrained safety mechanism that just says, don’t invite this, which is a whole another slippery slope of a conversation. But I think there is always that filter in the background of, do I want to put this out in the world as me? Is that risky for any number of reasons? Or, you know, will this compromise a future opportunity if I’m connecting what I’m writing to my professional identity?
You know, how does that work? Because we’re making decisions about ourselves in the moment but yeah, you know, I’m only 41 so I think, potentially could have, you know, 40 more years of being active in the writing world plus, right? Like who knows how many but, but still working also in a professional capacity.
And so there is always that war of, okay, what is appropriate and okay now and what will be okay later and who will be looking at this body of work and making decisions about me, down the road. And so I think as much as we would love to say, oh, well that’s their problem, if they don’t like it, we also do have to be aware as professionals in whatever industry we’re working in, that there will be consequences to some of those choices.
And we may not know what those are going to be right now as the political landscape changes. And as you know, society changes around us at an epic pace, it’s hard to guess at what that will mean down the road. I think, yeah, for me, there’s always that little voice in the back of my mind saying, okay, does this work for who you might want to be one day and that that does influence for sure what I write.
All right, well, there’s a big one, so we would love to know, what would, what would you change if you were writing stories that no one would ever know are tied to you? And you can tell us as strategicentrepreneur.com on the comments for episode 14. So go ahead and visit us there. We would also love to add your questions to the mix in our curious jar so you can email those two ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will put them on a rainbow paper and put them in that jar to be shuffled up with the rest.
Michele: And as always, for show notes, links to resources we mentioned and for coupons and discounts on tools we love, you can visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com. You can also subscribe to the newsletter and each week we will send you just one thing that we think will help you on your own authorpreneur journey and also a link to our latest episode.
Crystal: You’ll get a gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life if you leave us a review or give us a star rating on whatever platform you are listening or watching this podcast on, it will help people find us and it will make us shiny, but less new and that is exactly what we’re looking for is to have those ratings and make sure other people can find us and listen to the episodes.
Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy life to get to know us and be sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss at our next episode where we are going to be okay talking about how to do a book sales make-over so for those of you who were listening to our episode on transformation versus generation, we’re going to go all in on the transformation part and look at how we spruce up some existing products that we might have and make sure we are. Maximizing every opportunity to turn that into product sales and dollar bills.
Michele: Thank you and see you next week.
Crystal: Bye.
Crystal: I figured out what the second thing is, it’s when I start recording.
Michele: Okay. The problem was that my,
Crystal: Not like random people joining us. Welcome to … It just bounced me to episode one. Where the heck did my talk go? Okay, we’ll try that again. Uh, there we go. Okay.
Michele: Start it over
Crystal: Okay
Michele: Is that knitting?
Crystal: It’s the K is silent, so yeah. I N G just pretend it’s knitting.
Michele: But I’m not. No, no. I meant like when you, you’re on top of something else.
Crystal: Piggyback. Piggyback. Yeah. So piggyback.When you piggyback somebody, you put them on your back end carry them. Or you’re piggybacking one idea on top of another.
Michele: Yes.
Crystal: Okay.
Elizabeth Boyle: So who am I? What do I do?
Crystal: These are questions that some days are more difficult to answer than other.
Elizabeth Boyle: Strategic Authorpreneur.
Crystal: Yeah. Author and entrepreneur. It makes for good outtakes. That’s really, you know?
Elizabeth Boyle: Authorpreneur. Is that right? Authorpreneur
Crystal: Yes. Like author and entrepreneur mashed up.
Elizabeth Boyle: Are you ready? What am I supposed to say?
Elizabeth Boyle: Seriously? What are you still doing here? There’s notebooks on your shelf. I know you have an empty notebook. You’re a writer. We buy them like nobody’s business. You see them on the shelves, they’re on clearance. You’re like, Oh, I need another notebook. It’s empty now. It’s time to go fill it. Pick up a pencil, go write the words.