In today’s episode we’re tackling what did NOT work for us when it comes to the process of actually publishing your books. We look at some of the most common things that go wrong, and how you can avoid them so your publishing process goes as smoothly as possible!

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Books we mentioned in this episode

• Akimbo (Seth Godin’s Podcast)
• H M Word (Podcast)

Visit our websites

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

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 031: What NOT to do—The Publishing Process

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

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

Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 31 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show we’re talking about things that can go wrong in the publishing process. So uploading of files, actually hitting ‘publish’, and then waiting for things to show up on the respective stores.

But first, what have we been working on this past week?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: So it’s been now nine months Crystal that I started my 12 by 20 challenge and I decided that it was important for me to just look back and see what I’ve learned from feedback from readers. And so basically I’m taking some time now to gather the data and I’m getting all the reviews and all the feedbacks that I’ve got from previous readers of my, now eight and half almost stories and I’m trying to decide what to do in the next three months, which is when my 12 by 20 challenge will finish, will end. I’m shaking as I’m telling you that, because it’s really, you can see it, you can see the horizon, you can see that it’s going to happen. You’re still standing. You have like almost nine stories on your back. So it’s time for consideration. And, so that is what I’ve been doing in this past few days, really to take a deep look at what worked and what didn’t work and I just want to take some times to also thank all the people that took the time to read my stories and point out what was working and not.

And I have to say, and this was a year in which I wasn’t expecting really anything. There’s a whiteboard there with, printed in gigantic letters ‘Have Zero Expectations’, and really it’s the year that I had more things happening. It seems like this is like the end of the year stage, but because I’m nearing that, I feel like it’s important for me to point that out.

So it’s basically being a moment of reflection and, resource wise, actually I have one book that I really enjoyed and I re-read the book is by a name that I’m sure most of you are familiar with Seth Godin and for the folks that are seeing us on YouTube, the name of the book that I recommend is the Linchpin.

This is really a generous booker. I followed Set for years and years, both on his blog and on his podcast, Akimbo and really this is a book that was published in 2010, but I feel it’s really, very, current, there are so many things that are still applicable nowadays, and it’s basically a lot about how us as society change, what are the people that make the most difference? And I think, the linchpin, the person that, make a difference, it’s still a concept that it’s important, even more important nowadays, there is a story that shares sat in the book, which is about, an artist, Picasso and, I think this story basically symbolizes the whole book and I’m just going to relate it because I think it’s, it’s meaningful. So it looks like, I’m just trying to relate the story as it was: A person, meets Picasso and he says: look your artwork, your art, your design is amazing, but just why do pick the reality and transform it, shape it in that particular way?

And, Picasso, he says: ‘Well, what’s reality for you? ‘And this guy would take a picture of the wife and show it to him. ‘This is reality’. And the artist would look at the picture and he will be like: “Really, that seems like pretty small and flat to be real.”

And so I think it’s an interesting point to see stories like this, that what makes Set’s work so special for me. And so I really recommend you this book because it’s really a perspective, a different perspective on our realities and our society and how to make the most out of all of our days as artists.

Now it’s your turn to give us, your reality checking for your week Crystal. What happened to you?

Crystal Hunt: I’m all about the stories at the moment. So I remember mentioning a few episodes ago that I had ordered The Occupation Thesaurus and I promised to check in after it had arrived and I had been using it for a little bit.

So is this, I’m holding it up on YouTube so if anybody is on video, you’ll be able to see the cover, but it’s basically a giant collection of different occupations that your characters can have. And it’s not just a book of lists though. I think this is like the psychology and the introduction is really interesting talking about how people’s jobs are a reflection often of what they believe about the world and what kind of hole they have in their soul or The Emotional Wounds Thesaurus, which is the other book I’m holding up. So I have these two guides by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are two of my favorite resources at the moment. And I’m using them together in combination because often our emotional wound or the hole in our soul is what kind of drives us to choose the careers that we choose and to try to fix that or plug the hole or solve things for ourselves. And so it’s really interesting too. So look at that from a positive way, in terms of, what career could you give your character to help them deal with that?

And also as the evil storyteller, how can you mess with what they’re doing? Maybe the career you give them as the exact opposite of what they really need to be doing, because you’re trying to ramp up the tension and stakes and the conflict in your book and create potential for growth and change.

So I think those two together are really fascinating combination and I’ve really just been fleshing out a set of characters that I knew existed in Rivers End, but I hadn’t really gotten to know very well yet. And they are part of a series of intertwined, like Christmas stories that have a bit of magic in them as well.

So Merry is the first one and it’s already out. So if you are curious what I’m talking about, you can see there’s a finishing carpenter is one of the characters in there. And, the other is a social worker think is what Mary is, she works with, kids who are struggling that is an interesting combination of jobs. And also I’m excited to see how the other characters all end up, being tortured by me based on their work. So there you go. But definitely both resources that are really helpful in that fleshing out and getting to know the people that you’re writing about. And that’s me. We are going to talk about things that have gone wrong.

Once you get those stories written and you get to the point of hitting the publish button, you would think that you’re home free at that point, but that’s actually not the case. So we are going to share a few of our experiences about things that have gone wrong at various points in the publishing process.

And talk about how did we change how we do things or what did we learn from those experiences in order to not have those go wrong again for us. So Michele.

Challenges during the publishing process

Michele Amitrani: I have a list of things that I’m going to just say one after the other, and then I’m going to also tell you the lesson that I’ve learned. Now keep in mind that, I try to be, I tried to be very careful when I update the file, so I am scared that something goes wrong. So I think that’s good in the sense that I’m going to check and double check, but still I made a lot of mistakes. One of this was, I completely forgot, after writing it, to put a front and back matter of a book, updating it, and then finding out that there was nothing once it was just out there and people were buying it and it’s not something you can stop immediately takes time. It takes some hours, sometimes a couple of days for your book to be, to be, uploaded and then, it’s time that you are losing. And so all those people that were having those books, downloaded, they couldn’t have the version that I wanted them to have.

Of course you can change it, then you can update it but it feels bad, very bad. The other thing that I did wrong, I didn’t ask people to review my book at the end of my story. Recently, kind of recently, Amazon, we stop showing, your book, especially if it’s in the Kindle, after some point.

So if you don’t believe the important message immediately after the story, some of these messages can go lost. I knew that, but still I made a mistake to put all the information after that critical point. So I had to go back and change, everything. And because I wasn’t only on Amazon, I was also wide, imagine having to do that several times time. So that’s an afternoon that I lost just because of that.

The other thing, because I’m talking I’m going wide, I also updated Kobo, or two of my Kobo lives, eBooks. And then I didn’t really read that a couple of requirements, at least a few years ago, they had slightly different requirements in cover sizes and I just updated the Kindle cover.

And then I found out on the store that the cover was stretched. And actually you could see the stretch of the cover and was like, why is that? And then I found out that the answer was it’s because at least at that point, the cover requirements were different from Amazon. So I had to go back and change everything.

I also updated an old version of my book instead of the new one. That’s why so important, and we repeat so many times why to sort things well. And that’s probably one of the most meaningful things. If you can learn something from my mistakes. It’s learn how to sort things out quickly, it saves times, but also mistake like this because you don’t want to upload the old version of the book when you are putting time, possibly money in the newest version.

And you want to make sure that you give the readers the best possible version. I also, this is weird, but I also added the link of Amazon on one of my books that was published on iTunes and iTunes doesn’t like when that happens, when a profit is directed on Amazon. So I had a message and I didn’t understand what the problem was, but then, Drafts to Digital was like, actually, iTunes say there is a competitors link so you have to, they’re not accepting your book. And I had to get some time to understand why what’s the problem. Then again, that’s where the research part comes into play, because you want to know these things before they happen. So I had to, go back into my Vellum file, change the content of the book and make two different versions that then I upgrade update one on Amazon and the other one on iTunes. These are just some, a few of the mistakes that I did, but there is something that you can take away from this is organization is King. You can screw things up, but just know that you can change things pretty easily and pretty quickly, thanks to the fact that we are self-publishers. So even though you do a mistake, you can go back and change that. So that’s important that it’s, life breeder that does put some of the pressure off your shoulder, but if you can get things right the first time it’s way better. And I assure you will have some times in which you see that there is a problem, and you stop breathing. Our heartbeat skips, that kind of stuff happens if you have published one book or more books, you know that feeling, it happened to you probably once, maybe twice, some of those things that even Crystal is gonna tell you probably also up to you, hopefully is not going to happen to you anymore after we shared the bad things that happen to us.

But yes those are the mistakes that I made in the publishing process. And those are the way that I’m now using organization and double-checking and doing my research before, that are keeping me from making these mistakes. Spoiler alert. I’m going to make way more mistakes in the future. I’m not going to lose sleep over it because I know those are things that you cannot avoid. It’s like typos: They are immortal. Everybody knows that there is no way you can kill them all. So just be kind with you when you find that mistake, knowing there are other authors that are battling with them every single day. And now I want my co-host to tell us everything about the nasty, angry, very bad mistakes that she made in her author career.

Crystal Hunt: Well, because I have been helping other people upload their books, as well as myself, I have seen almost every kind of error message you could ever see when publishing books. And I think that’s the biggest and most important thing to point out is that it doesn’t always work perfectly. It doesn’t matter how so many books you’ve done.

I think I’ve hit, publish on my own books more than 25, have my own books that were published directly, never mind all the client ones and everything else. And I don’t know of any one of them has ever just worked perfectly without me needing to follow up with something. You might have everything goes smoothly through the file upload process, and then for some reason your book description just doesn’t show up on the other end or it does show up, but it’s all scrambling, even though you totally use the tool. And I think I’ve got a whole list here, which I will give you a bit of a breakdown of some of the different types of things that can go wrong.

And I think that they may not be the exact thing that doesn’t work for you or gets you an error message or a glitch or a holdup, but at least they’ll be illustrative of the types of things and hopefully be helpful. So as Michele mentioned, uploading the wrong version of the files is definitely a common issue that people have.

And I think there’s a really funny cartoon that is illustrating a basically graphic designer is a graphic designer joke about file naming. And it says book final. Book final version two. Book actual maybe final version. And it’s just that we just keep adding to it. So when you’re thinking about file naming, it’s why I’m always going on about including dates in your file names, not just versions because, one instance I had been using versions and I used to use version one, version two, version three, version four, but I didn’t have dates on my file names.

And I thought that version five was the most recent one and so I did my edits on version five and I uploaded a new one, but it turned out there was actually a version six, but because I didn’t have dates and it wasn’t stored in the same folder, I couldn’t see that. And so you really need to include your dates because had I done that, I would’ve known that. Oh, I know this says it’s version five, but I definitely did an update a few months after that, especially when you’re talking about 10 or 15 years or even two years between when you’re updating stuff and when you made it in the first place, you think you’re going to remember, but it’s really hard to keep track of it all of that stuff after you start building up quite a number of books over and over years. So really check your file naming. And the other thing that happens sometimes is you upload the file and it’s the correct file, but the change doesn’t quite take in Amazon system for some reason. And so it uploads, but something glitches out in the processing and so you still don’t have the new file version on the other end. That’s what people are actually getting when they download the book. So it’s really important, even if it’s like the fifth time you’ve uploaded these files. And you’re pretty sure that everything is good. Use the online previewer, because if you check the online previewer and it’s not the right version of the file, then, that’s a clue that something has gone wrong in the mix.

And one of the pro tips that I have for you is it can be really hard to tell if it’s the right file version or not. So I always have two or three different mile-markers, basically. So if I know that on, chapter one, I changed this word, or I fixed an error in spacing on that this page or whatever, I will have a note beside me of usually three things, something from the beginning, something from the middle and something from the end that I can double check in that document to make sure that they are all changed. Because there’s always also the worry that the file as you were making your changes and saving them, maybe it saved two thirds of your changes, but your word document may have glitched out or Vellum may have glitched out.

Nothing ever goes perfectly. So having somewhere from beginning, middle, and end to check to confirm that you’re good all the way through is really smart. There’s often delays in publishing. We might make a whole schedule around when Amazon is going to approve our files and things will be available.

But it doesn’t always go exactly according to plan and everything is pretty much done by computer processing. And so it is machines checking your files. I have had files that were perfectly clean, but when they go through the checker, the checker said: Oh, your images aren’t high enough resolution or it’ll flag something, which isn’t actually a problem in those files, it might be like one pixel off, but it’s enough to trigger a rejection notice from the system. And even though it won’t make any difference to the quality of the finished product, the checker will not let those files through. And then you have to go through tech support and you have to argue your case with humans who can manually override it.

But it’s quite a process and it’s not always fast. And right now, especially things are not fast. So it’s really important to just make sure you have flexibility in your timing schedule. Another one where things often go wrong is with preorders. So in the olden days, which is prior to two months ago, I guess you had to upload your final files in order to set up a preorder.

And so what people would do is because you had to upload a file, people would upload a draft of the book or, a placeholder book that wasn’t the actual content and they would just upload a placeholder. And so I had one where I had the book, hadn’t been through the final polish yet, but I had uploaded, it was at least the finished product or the almost finished product of that title.

So I had uploaded that to save the space and let me set up the preorder. And then I was going to switch out the file to the final edited one in enough time before the preorder published that everything would be all good. It used to be, had to have your files seven days in advance of when your preorder was going to go live.

So I set all that up. I got to the point of, okay it’s seven days before uploading and I went to upload my file and my account said, no, this title is locked. It’s already, the time has already gone by your deadline has passed. And what happened is the servers for Amazon are not located in the same time zones as mine are.

And so seven days for them was midnight on whatever day, where they were not my time. And so that meant that I had missed the opportunity to actually get the correct file in there. And even though it was seven days till it was going live, they would not unlock it and they never have. So there’s all kinds of horror stories from authors out there, the author community talking about the wrong things being sent out from a preorder because, people did upload like placeholders that weren’t at all the book or that it was a partial or something.

And so pre-orders have always been a little risky that way. Now Amazon has got smart and there’s a countdown clock on your dashboard. When you get into the critical time before a preorder is going to go live, there’s actually a clock that says you have, 16 hours and 42 minutes and 36 seconds before your title will lock.

And I think it’s only 72 hours now in advance that you have to upload the files, it’s not as long as it used to be. So that is good as well. I think you can also upload without a file now you can set up a preorder up to a year in advance with no files uploaded. So for me, I definitely default to not putting a file in until I have the actual file that’s ready because then you’re not risking the wrong thing being sent out and now that you have that option, then it’s a really nice option to do. Let’s see another challenge that I’ve had and run into is that when I had a book that I published wide at first, and then I wanted to pull it out of why I didn’t go into KU, I had gotten notifications that, yep. It’s all good, it’s okay, it’s been unpublished, but not every store had actually pulled it down. So when I went and published on KDP, then I got this nasty notice a couple of days later that said, you’re in violation of your, KDP agreement and we’re going to shut down your account and yeah, it was not pleasant. So then you have to reach out and explain that yes, it has been, you have to contact those other vendors that they’ve founded on. And it was some obscure little site, which I didn’t even know that it had ever been published there because once you publish through something like Draft to Digital or Publish Drive, there are tons of little stores that can pick up the distribution for that, or if you go through IngramSpark, there are tons of stores that could list your book in their store. And some of them are very slow to respond to those take down notices. So just to be aware that is a thing, but you just have to reach out as quickly as possible and I think the good plan is to give yourself, even if your distributor says, Oh, if you cancel your book with us or take it down from the store you need to give us like two weeks before all the listings will be down. You might want to build in an extra week or so just to be on the safe side for your KDP books so that you’re not ending up in violation of your service contract.

On that note as well. If you are wanting to use KDP print and IngramSpark for your book, you have to do it in a certain order. So if you do it in the wrong order, you’ll just get error messages repeatedly, because Kindle will keep telling you that the book is already in the system and that they can’t actually list it. It already exists.

So you need to upload to KDP first, your print files and then just don’t activate the expanded distribution channel on KDP. Then you upload your book to IngramSpark and you hit the publish button there. You do it the other way around you’re going to spend a lot of time with tech support. I can tell you from experience, they will sort it out eventually, but you’re going to need a couple more weeks probably in your publishing plan.

So it’s much better just to do it in the correct order and start with KDP, don’t activate expanded distribution, then upload to Spark. That is the magic order of doing things and I think maybe one of the funniest and most challenging sets of error messages that I ever got was well, actually two, and they were both using IngramSpark, to do publication and distribution.

One was, I had a book that was, it was a black cover basically. It was like a dark kind of mystery. And it wasn’t one that I had written, but it was through our publishing company and the message. I got back said: The cover is too black. The black on the cover is too black. I was like, I’m sorry, what?

And there are different types of colour and when you’re looking at RGB versus CMYK are two different types of color. And within the CMYK world, which is one of the things that we use for offset printing and things like that, when you prep your files with that kind of color, there are different options for choosing the type of black you’re going to use.

And basically it was too much ink saturation is actually what they were trying to say, but it was like reading a letter from the lawyer where you can’t understand a word that’s in it and it’s all just technical gobbledygook. And there was like, eight pages of instructions on how to change it to the proper version of that colour.

So that was an interesting learning experience. So I would just say, read the guidelines really carefully on the publishing platform you’re using about how they want the files prepare for those platforms. Because especially if you’re dealing with books with illustrations or images in them, then there’s a few hundred ways that things can go wrong.

All kinds of things around, again, the type of colour that you’ve chosen, the type of format you export your PDF, it might be where your margins are. Sometimes there needs to be a blank space down the gutter, which is the middle of the book where they’re going to do the binding because the glue can’t stick to ink.

And so they want to make sure that there’s actually a space there. So that’s a whole another set of learning. And then the final really odd thing was, if your book has bleed, which means the pictures go off the end of the page, you need to make sure that they go a quarter of an inch usually all the way around, extra, or an eight, depending on your printer, but there’s a certain margin of stuff where your pictures and your ink have to go off the edges of the pages.

Now, if you have stuff that’s on a white background, maybe the colours parts all go off the edges but it turns out if you have a white background, you actually have to make a white box and put that as the background layer on all of the pictures with the bleed. Otherwise the computers think that you haven’t done the bleed correctly all the way around on all of them.

So that I think is a really common issue with children’s books if people are uploading children’s books or like photo books or things that are heavy on images, is that you’re like, yeah, but I did that on all the parts that were actually pictures, but if there’s any white background, you have to do the same thing for those as well and that has caught us a number of times over the years.

Okay. So that’s a lot of things that could hang you up. I think the key takeaways from this are always double check, triple check, quadruple check to make sure that everything is okay at every single step of the process. Don’t assume that just because at step one it was okay, It’s okay by the end. Always be the first person to download your book and always re download after each update that you do to make sure you’re getting the correct one or ask somebody who’s just downloaded to confirm for you that it is correct if you already have it and you can’t get it downloaded again.

And really just don’t panic. I think you should be the T-shirts that we wear that just, they don’t panic, very Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, but, it’s really important to just understand it’s not ever going to go perfectly. It doesn’t mean the universe is telling you, this is a terrible idea that you should turn around and run.

It is not a sign, it doesn’t mean you don’t know what you’re doing. And it really is just a matter of being patient and if you don’t get the answer you want from tech support, the first time you just call back, there’s people on the other end of it, just like we’re all people. And so they all know different things and they all have different sets of skills.

And so even if something is supposed to have worked. And it didn’t try again and just don’t give up, be the squeaky wheel, be stubborn, be polite, of course, these are people on the other end of the phone, but also stand up for yourself and make sure that you keep calling back until your problem is solved and eventually it will get solved.

What was the tipping point that made you go all in on your writing?

Alright, so now time for our favourite curious jar. You going to stick my hand in here and tell me when to stop.

Michele Amitrani: Now stop.

Crystal Hunt: Light blue. Man, everything’s going to seem easy after last week’s, which was like, improv a story!

Michele Amitrani: That was really difficult.

Crystal Hunt: Ooh. Okay. Here’s a good one. What was the tipping point that made you go all in on your writing? Interesting.

Michele Amitrani: Okay. This time you want to go first or do you want me to go first? I always give you the option

Crystal Hunt: Either way. I’m happy to go first, if you would like some time to ponder.

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. Do that, please.

Crystal Hunt: Okay. There’s a few different times in my life that I’ve gone all in on my writing in different ways.

So that’s an interesting question. The first time I went all in on my writing was just after I finished my master’s degree in health psychology, and I came home and I had a massive loans and no job because there was only like 30 health psychologists in the world at that point and nobody knew what the hell we did.

And so there were no jobs advertised for that. It wasn’t something that existed and I really had spent a bunch of time when I was doing my practicum coaching people and living their best lives and, pursuing their dreams, and I was feeling like a total hypocrite because I had always wanted to be a writer, and here I was a psychologist, which while an excellent career, was not what I had intended to really be doing. And my boyfriend now husband said: Well just we’re look for jobs and he found one right away and he was like, just try some writing for a little while then, and see, what will work.

And while I was handing out resumes and doing things like that, and so then I did some writing and started sending things out and, it really wasn’t working all that well and I think I talked before about my auntie who, had given me the advice of don’t wait to do anything you want.

And so we decided, okay, let’s not wait for this to workout. Let’s just go all in and we’ll start a publishing company of our own. We ended up doing that, which was quite the adventure and, that was in 2007 and so I learned a ton and it was really interesting, but it really was, I think, the tipping point really was, her last kind of words to me were really, you need to do this, if this is what you want to do, just make it happen. And so that was definitely a tipping point was, she passed away and it was a very distinct lesson for me that I just needed to get things going on and not wait around. So that was the first kind of real tipping point for my writing and that did lead to me, hustling and all kinds of ways. I was doing school visits. I had produced a bunch of my own books, we started publishing other people, I was writing on contract for an educational publisher in Korea. It just all spun up into a career of all of these different pieces that came together to be earning a living.

And so that was round one, and round two of going all in I think mentally I’ve been all in since 2017, when I decided to do my 40 by 40 challenge for the romance writing and just went for it. And then, this current batch of all in is really around doing it as a career with a real focus, not just on all the teaching stuff, but a focus on the revenue from the actual royalties, from the books as well.

And I’ve always had at least two other jobs in the background of, as I’ve been writing to pay the bills and make sure that there was never any pressure on the creativity to have to pay the bills, but this time around, I really want to just focus on that. I don’t want to do a ton of consulting stuff on the side and all of these other unrelated to writing projects that I’ve been working on.

So I really just want to see what I can do with one full year of focusing on building my writing career from the creative side, as opposed to the business side. I don’t know if that really answers the question or not, but that’s the impetus for going all in this time is just because I want to see if I can and I want to see what happens when I do. I’m excited to see how that all shakes out and you guys of course will be along for the ride.

Michele Amitrani: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you said that there were several different tipping points. I’ve never really liked the sentence: ‘going all in’ because it’s more like you’re getting all your resources in one basket, then everything, something happens then, and then you’re screwed.

So I understand the question, but I am going to just explain you what I think it’s the best answer for me, Michele Amitrani. I think there were three moments in my writing life that really could be the tipping points. And the first one was in 2014 when I published my first basically, self-published book. Self-published a fiction book, which is Omnilogos and that was important for me because it gave me the freedom to think, okay, if I can go do this and I can publish by myself without asking permission it means that I actually have the freedom to release a second book and then the third book, but I made a number of mistakes because I believe that by two, I will be making a living out of it, which has completely not happened. And we know that it takes way more than that. I think I was cute in the sense that I like to think that might have happened, but I was young and, I was very excited, which is, doesn’t mean that it’s bad, but it’s a lesson that I had to learn.

Tipping point, good point. I published my first fiction book but not so good the, having too much expectations out of that publication. The second tipping point the second important moment was, I would say in 2018 and 19, when I started actually to connect with community of writers here, I met a bunch of meetup groups of writers something that I’ve never did before, because I thought I have it in figure out, which is another super big mistake that I, that I made about the moment in which I was like, no, I’m wrong everything started spinning. So I went on meetup, found people that were connecting to groups and then believe it or not, one of the meetup group, which, was had the, by the Vancouver Genre Writers got me to know, the Creative Ink Festival. So it was a guy I’d mentioned, dropped the name and he was like, yeah, there is a festival, a writing festival. And I was like, really? Vancouver? There is like a festival? I didn’t even know about Surrey or stuff like that.

Surrey I had no idea that existed, but that was a connection for me to Creative Inc and guess what Creative Ink was the connection for me to the Creative Academy, because that was the venue actually that I spoke with Crystal the very first time. I listened to her talking in workshop. And so that was the very beginning.

After three to four months, I joined them and I became a member of their community and that really was the second tipping point when I really was part of something bigger than myself in that regard, I started being a, I want to use the word notice, but probably just a bit of a too much, but I started being invited me in, attending conferences.

I wanted to be in conferences. So I would give my availability as a volunteer. For example, at the Surrey International Festival, I was a volunteer in, October 2019. So I started connecting and connecting the dots. And I would say the last tipping point, at least for now was when I really started my 12 by 20 challenge because this is basically giving me, it’s giving me a window from which I can see. Okay so this means riding on a regular basis. That means that there are days in which you basically not going to sleep because you have to meet deadlines. You promise that you attached to this thing, consequences if you don’t do it, there are people that know that held you accountable. You are starting having an audience. So it, this is, that’s why my12 by 20 challenge is more of a tipping point because it’s really making aware, making me aware of what might look like an author life. Somebody that release releases content on a fairly regular basis.

I’m now just doing short stories, every month but even people that release three to four books per year it might be something that I can think about that I can see me doing in the future is basically allowing myself, to giving myself the freedom to think of Michele Amitrani as a potential author.

Like you can do that, it’s just going to take a lot of hours, a lot of hours of sleep and, lots of, me trying going around and just failing and failing. But as we said more than once, this is important is when is the point when you get desensibilize not to failure, but you start building a routine, a habit and a system, and a system is something that I’ve never had and these 12 by 20 challenges giving me a system to write consistently and then just keep going. So I would say this is the answer to my question.

Crystal Hunt: Okay. I think I need to go back and revisit. Cause when I’m thinking about it, What keeps coming to mind is that what I talked about was like the practical tipping points from like a business sense, but those aren’t the emotional tipping points.

Those are quite different.

Michele Amitrani: Give us your emotional tipping point.

Crystal Hunt: So I think there, one of them was, we were at a retreat for, my consulting company e had a team of six people that work with us full time, and we did these quarterly retreats every three months we’d get together and we would talk about how things were going and what was working, what wasn’t in our personal context, as well as our creative context, as well as in our business lives and then we would reshuffle everything for the coming months to make sure we can inch more towards our goals and make sure that everybody was happy and balanced and working a good schedule and all of those things.

And so I found myself writing on a piece of paper in a journal, which I have behind me on the shelf: 40 by 40 and I had been wanting to switch to being a romance writer and wanting to be a romance writer for most of my life and I’d done a couple of books, I did Silver Bells in 2014 and had been writing and developing the world that I write it now for almost 20 years, just quietly in my laptop, but I listened to a podcast It was H M Word and she was talking about how she, the thing that kickstarted her was that the doctors told her she was dying. She had a limited amount of time to live, was the main breadwinner in her family, and she needed to figure out a way to make a bunch of money that was still making money after she was gone to support her family.

And I remember listening to that podcast and thinking, surely it’s not going to take something like that to get me in gear. And so I was thinking about it, I was thinking about what’s really holding me back here and what was holding me back was that I had never made it the priority. I had always put my other kinds of work first and all these other things and so that moment I said, okay, it was 18 months before my 40th birthday. And I said, okay, I’ve got 18 months I want 40 stories in my story world by the time I hit my 40th birthday, which was a fairly ridiculous goal I intended to write a lot of short stories anyway. But going after that meant that I was writing and releasing like every three weeks or so, I was releasing a short story or an novella or something into the marketplace.

And I had promised myself, I would just write and release for those months and that once I hit 40, I would figure out I figured I would know better how the writing went and was I any good at this genre and were people liking the stories and then I would make some business decisions and see how it was going.

And I think the tipping point for going all in was after that first like holiday season, when I opened up my Amazon account and I saw that I had a quarter of a million downloads on the free books then that was leading to sales and I was, I had made more money in a month than I had made in most of the year from other things and so it was an interesting moment just seeing what was possible if you were willing to go all in. And so then it meant almost two years of shifting gears with the business and building a foundation for actually moving on from that and to be able to dedicate the more time to be writing and to make sure that my staff all got other jobs and were able to do other things and that we wrapped things up properly.

That was actually the tipping point was that one crazy holiday season where I realized what was actually possible if I was making it a priority. And that did emotionally unlock the feeling that I could want that, it was a legitimate thing to want and it was realistic. I’ve always been very responsible and realistic and goal focused and very practical about things.

And, it didn’t make sense to give up a company I had spent 20 years building for something that wasn’t going to be financially viable but still I gotta pay the bills if we still have a kid, groceries and all of those things. It needed to be something that made all the sense, but that really was the tipping point was seeing the numbers, the data actually supporting that this was possible if I was willing to put in the time and effort and make it an actual priority. I think that was the moment of deciding and then easing around to it.

Crystal Hunt We’d love to hear your answer to the curious question, which is what was the tipping point that made you go all in, on your writing? What are you still waiting? Have you gone all in? And that doesn’t mean quitting your day job to go all in. We mean like that feeling of commitment that you’re like, yeah, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. That’s an all in kind of a feeling. So share that with us in the comments below, we would love to hear what you have to say about that.

Michele Amitrani: And remember for show notes, links to resources that we mentioned, and for coupons and discounts on the tool, we really recommend and love visit us at strategicauthortrepreneur.com

Crystal Hunt: Until next time, happy writing!

Michele Amitrani: We’ll see you next week. Bye!