Writing collaboratively can be a great opportunity for indie, hybrid and traditionally published authors. Whether you’re good at working with others or see the potential benefits that a collaboration could bring to your business, joining forces with another writer could help you level up many of your writing projects.

This is what happened to Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, the authors of the well-loved series of thesaurus guides that sit on many writers’ desks.

In this episode Angela and Becca tell us about the opportunities and the challenges of working collaboratively, how they compensate for each other’s weaknesses by dividing up the work based on their strengths, and why looking at readers’ needs is the best thing an author can do to level up their writing career.

(Bonus! In the past episode we officially reached our first big milestone for downloads of the podcast! If you want to see how we celebrated this event, don’t miss out the first ten minutes of the episode. Thanks to all the listeners and viewers out there that helped us achieve this. You’re awesome! :D)

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Complete Episode Transcripts

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 038: Coauthoring with Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

Angela Ackerman: Welcome to the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Angela Ackerman, and I’m here with …

Becca Puglisi: Becca Puglisi. And today we’re going to be talking about author collaboration.

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

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

Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 38 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. On today’s show we’re talking about writing collaboratively with Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman, who are the pair behind the series of Thesaurus guides for writers that we love so much and are always recommending to you. First, we just wanted to say, if you find these episodes helpful, you can assist us in keeping them ad free by going to our website at strategicauthorpreneur.com and clicking the Buy Us A Coffee button. While neither of us actually drink coffee we do use that money to help us pay for podcast distribution, the transcription costs and the website hosting to keep everything live and coming your way with zero obnoxious commercials.

So thank you so much to those who have supported us in the past. And, if you’re up for it, feel free to click that button and buy us a virtual coffee. And now what have we been hard at work on this week? What have you been up to?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: So Crystal, I’m so happy to give this announcement. I was, WhatsApping with you, yesterday actually and I was showing her a number: 999 which was, the number of download of our podcast. And I promise Crystal to be better at celebrating. So I just wanted to announce that we reached and surpassed a thousand downloads on our podcast platform. And, that is something that I’ve been keeping an eye, a keen eye on, because, it was important for me to share it. Not only with you, but also with the listeners that have been with us for now months, it’s not been a year yet, but, it is a way, that I see people are following us and are getting something out of all of this conversation that we’re having.

So when you ask me, what have you been up to in the last week? I was just waiting for that number to round and to get to 1000 or more. And now finally can brag about that. And I actually have something a bit different today. And, again, this is a bit different than usual, but, if there is something that resell Crystal told me, I have to get a bit better at celebrating.

And so I bought something for me actually and I’m going to show it to you. And I don’t know if this is gonna sound weird, but this is something that I wanted for some time. And it’s a kind of a deluxe chocolate spread hazelnut, think a Nutella, but according to this, it should be like way better than that.

I love Nutella and I wanted to prize myself with something. But it has always been a bit too expensive for my standards. But in this case I don’t drink that much alcohol, but I do love chocolate. So that’s the way I’m going to celebrate the over a thousand downloads (not continue YouTube, of course).

And, with you. I’m going to remember that when I spread that loveliness of my bread, put some nuts maybe on top and then, yeah, that’s something that I definitely wanted you to know. I’m very excited and I’m very thankful and I’m humbled and I’m also sure Crystal is happy that we reach that milestone, that results.

Also I have been working, hard, getting my, mythological fantasy novella out. Now if everything goes well, by the time you’re listening to this episode, it should be just a few days before the Soul of Stone is released. So I’m doing 1001 different things, to make sure that the release, the data, everything is going according to plan. Something is going to go awry probably, but we’re going to also talk afterwards in the next episode of disaster proof publications, but in this case I feel like I am in that kind of situation when I have to deal with different kinds of things. And so if you see me a bit crazy or stuff in the next episode that there is contest, you have my contest, then you know why that is going to happen.

I also been reading one book, a science fiction and it’s actually a, on the cyberpunkish side. And I wanted this book to be the recommendation of the day I actually had been re-reading this book. It’s called Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. And, it is really interesting, although I’m not writing science fiction this year. It’s easily for me one of the best, the genre that I enjoy the most. So I always find going back to that genre, somehow, reintegrate, replenish my strength, on the fantasy and science fiction side. So I like that book because although there are some concepts that are, how can I say, it’s not an easy book for some of the concepts that are used, it is very entertaining and it’s like a kind of a detective kind of book based in the 26 century. And Netflix actually released a series, I think one or two years ago. And I watched that and it was a good, not as good as the book, but it was entertaining.

That’s what I’ve been up to, Crystal, and that was a book of the week. Now it’s your turn to rock the viewers and listeners’ world.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, no pressure. I’ve been up to a couple of different things. And first I should say cheers to all of our podcast watchers out there and listeners. Thank you so much for helping us hit that first goal.

I am drinking my soda water out of a very fancy real crystal glass today for anybody who is not watching on YouTube and can’t see me actually toast to the camera. So that is my way of celebrating is very fancy glassware with some sort of bubbly liquid. We may upgrade that to one of the little mini bottles of champagne later tonight.

But for now, since we’re in the middle of a workday, we’re sticking with the soda water, and they’re really fancy glass, but it is black cherry vanilla soda water so that kind of levels it up. I feel. In terms of writing stuff I have been working this week a lot on my next fiction release. Actually, it’s been really fun to get back into the fiction and it is called Elfed it’s a romantic holiday comedy and it’s the next in the The MacAllisters of Rivers End.

So there’s Jenna and Isaac who are the main of Silver Bells and that sort of start of that franchise will say they, their niece doesn’t make it to their wedding in the last book and she gets snowed in on Christmas Eve at the airport in Vancouver, trying to make her way to the wedding. And so it is Lindsey’s story as she is navigating a very awkward situation, dressed as an elf because she came straight from her job. So it has been really fun to work on the comedy side of that and watching masterclasses from Surrey on comedy and timing and all of those things and really working on that. So there’s two resources that I’ve been revisiting as part of my outlining and character development process.

Because the cast of characters, this book is actually the start of another mini series. And so there is a cast of about eight characters that I’ve been flushing out. So I’ve been using my Emotional Wound Thesaurus with any number of sticky notes and it. And the Occupation Thesaurus as well in combination.

So these two are the core of my character development process, and that seemed extra fitting as our interview guests today are in fact the creators of those thesaurus guides. So without further ado, we are going to dive into the interview and then you can see what all the. This is about, we’re talking about writing collaboratively, and that was the focus of our conversation with Angela and Becca.

And they had a lot of really great stuff to offer. So it will go off to the interview and back here in a few minutes, and we will debrief all of what we heard.

About Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman

Welcome to the working with co-authors edition of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. And we have Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman here talking to us today as they are experts on the topic. And I would love, we can start to just do a little bit of an introduction and I’m going to say, I’ll start the introduction by holding up my giant collection. Ooh, it’s getting heavier by the edition. I have to say of your books. I have quite a number and I’m a fan of the one-stop writer’s site as well.

And so that is how I came to start talking to these ladies and appreciating their work, a great deal. As you can see by the 57 tabs, these are the characters who’ve all been wounded in various ways. And, we also frequently recommend their books on the podcast. So instead of talking about them, I thought maybe we could talk to them today and find out how it is they have had such a successful collaboration over a good number of years and get a little bit of insight into how these really helpful books and the website come to be. So ladies, if you would be willing to share a little bit about each of your backgrounds and also, your press kit very intriguingly said there was a number of fascinating coincidences that led to you working together.

So if you wanted to elaborate a bit on that would be also fantastic.

Becca Puglisi: Our backgrounds are super similar and this is the story of Becca and Angela. It’s like the Forrest Gump with the peas and carrots, I’ve always felt like that’s kind of the way that we are. We both started writing about the same time. Both started writing middle grade and young adults kids fiction. We both joined critique circle around the same time, looking for critique partners and of the thousands and thousands of people on that site, we connected and really fell in love with each other’s work. And just, that was the start of it in terms of our collaborations, it was very cool.

We started out as critique partners and then Angela, decided, what we really want, I want to do a blog, but, I think you want to do one too. And it would be so much easier to do it together. And so then we, we collaborated with our blog and then the books came along and it’s just been one just really great, opportunity after another, for us to work together.

Angela Ackerman: Yeah. And it’s great that the miles haven’t really been an issue because of course, Becca at the time that we met, she lived in Florida, I’m in Calgary, Canada. And, Becca has moved a few different places over the years, but, we do everything virtually, so it really doesn’t matter as far as some of the amazing coincidences, Becca and I have just gotten to the point where we’re just, it’s very clear to us that the universe wants us together because so many weird things have happened. We’ve only actually met in real life, I think four times now. And that’s amazing considering that we met, I think in 2005 is when we met at the critique circle and we started publishing books together in 2012.

So that’s a long relationship that we’ve had and we’ve only actually ever met four times. Now of the times that we met there was one time where, I was going to be coming down to Florida and, Becca was going to meet me in Disney World. We were going to spend the day together and Magic Kingdom because of what, a great way to meet each other for the first time.

And it was hilarious because I was there with my in-laws and my kids and Becca was driving up and I had realized that I had completely forgotten my cellphone one at home. So I didn’t have her contact information. And this is way back when Facebook was really new and I think Becca told me I’m going to be wearing a red shirt.

And I told her I was going to be wearing a green shirt and I’d seen a picture of her, like an avatar on the site, like a couple of times. And that was it. So here we are driving to Magic Kingdom. I realized I don’t have her contact information. We agreed to meet at the entrance of Cinderella’s castle and Cinderella’s castle has several different entrances and I’m envisioning Kirby at one entrance, me being at the other, both of us wondering where the other one is, I’ve never been there before. And so as we’re about to go over, you can take like the, you can take one of three fairies over, or you can take like a SkyTrain. And I load my family on one of the ferries and I grab a piece of paper and I’m writing Becca’s name on it.

Cause I figured I can hold it up because I’m so paranoid at this point in time, this is going to be huge travesty and as I’m like writing her name on a piece of paper, I look over. And I see this woman sitting there in a red shirt, she’s all by herself and I’m looking at her and I look at my husband, Scott. I said, Oh my God, I think that might be Becca. And she didn’t look up. So I said Becca, and then she says, Angela. And the reason why this is so amazing is at that time of year, there were approximately 35,000 people that go into Magic Kingdom every single day. And there’s three different fairies and one sky train that go over constantly, and the fact that Becca and I ended up on the same ferry, like 10 feet away from each other among all these strangers is just like mind blowing to me.

So that was the first fun coincidence we had another great woman that we had was a few years later. It was actually in 2012, when we published the Emotion Thesaurus and Becca, I reached out to her and I said, Hey I’m going on vacation from this date to this date, can you watch the blog and, pay attention to comments and stuff like that.

And she said, Oh, I’m actually going on vacation too. And I said, Oh, where are you going? And she said, I’m going to Grand Canyon. And she said, where are you going? I said, I’m going to the Grand Canyon. So we both ended up going to the Grand Canyon at the same time. How is that even possible?

So we, anyway, our trip slightly, overlapped a bit and so we met up for a little bit of time and it was always, it was really special to me because Becca, she’s the one that proved our Emotion Thesaurus, when we self-published it. And so she had the proof copy, it wasn’t available yet and she gave me the print, the proof copy so that I could actually see it and hold my book for the first time.

And so she gave it to me on that trip. And so I still have it on my bookshelf, very special moment our first book. And of course back then we had no idea like how crazy everything was going to get. So yeah. Some fun stuff.

Crystal Hunt: That’s very cool. I think it’s great. When you think there would be additional opportunities for the universe to have thrown you together, there’s that interesting moment of just knowing okay, we got this, we just would have been thrown together until it happened one way or another.

So that is excellent. I’m curious, what does your creative process look like? Being a couple a couple of countries away and doing everything virtually. How do you collaborate to make the books come to be like, do you each have specific jobs or is it different for different books? How do you manage that working relationship?

Managing a working co-author relationship virtually

Becca Puglisi: Angela, we joke cause Angela is the idea person. She’s just got like a million ideas in her head. It doesn’t matter what’s going on or how much else is happening they just keep coming. I have said that they’re like breeding rabbits, they just go and they go. And which is awesome because I am a little, more on the practical side. I don’t want to say that she’s not practical because that’s not the case, but she has these ideas and she’ll bring them and we’ll talk about them and decide, Oh, great idea. But totally, don’t have the time or, wow that’s amazing. Cuckoo, we can not do that. Or yeah, this is awesome. We totally should do that. And so from there we have to figure out, really what our audience needs. That’s always in the forefront of our process. What do authors need? And we very often look at our own needs as authors to figure out what we could produce that would help other people.

That was how the Emotion Thesaurus started is that both of us and our own writing we were both struggling separately with, my character is always doing this, and this they’re always shrugging or, clenching their fists or whatever. And I cannot think of another way to express that emotion.

And so she was having the same problem. So we started these lists of emotions and that was, how the Emotion Thesaurus started. And after that, we started thinking, what else do people need help with? What do we struggle with? We really struggle with characterization and figuring out my characters traits and where they come from and how they manifest what they look like? And so those were the next books that we did and that’s really how we come up with, with ideas, is that we try to see what it is that we struggle with because so much of author difficulties are very often universal.

We all kind of struggle with the same thing and that’s really how it gets started, and then as far as the process goes, we really just, we split it up. We come up with an outline for, if we’re doing a book, what the content is going to be and what the entries are going to be. And we split them in half and you do this and I’ll do this and we write everything up and then we swap.

And we edit and we swap again after that and we edited again. And by that point, the whole thing is such a mixture of both of our voices, that it doesn’t sound like, Oh, I can tell Angela wrote this section. Rebecca definitely wrote this section. It’s all very cohesive and, and just fitting the style that we have come to do. That’s how we handle our books. Angela May want to talk about, some of the other stuff.

Angela Ackerman: Yeah, it’s, I think what really makes us a strong partnership is that Becca and I compliment each other really well, where she’s strong in places that I’m not and vice versa. And so it’s really easy for us to feel the other person’s gaps.

One thing that Becca is amazing at that I’m terrible at is like the last 10% of any project. Like she’s very detail oriented. And so she’s excellent with grammar and editing and spotting little things that I’m done with a project at a certain point in time. And my brain is moving on to okay, now we got to figure out marketing and all this kind of stuff.

And so she always carries everything, that last little bit. And so it’s really, it’s so great how well we work together and we carry that also into the business side of our relationship, because that’s the other piece is that we write books together, but essentially we have businesses together as well, and those businesses may need to be managed.

We need to market and all that kind of stuff. And so again, we divide and conquer where Becca she’s super organized, she tracks everything. She’s the one that uploads all our books and she works with formatters and all that kind of stuff. And then I handle the marketing and the social media and that kind of stuff.

And so again, it’s just, it works really well because we’re both doing the things that we’re really good at. And, so there’s never really, I can’t think of anything maybe correct me if I’m wrong Becca, but I can’t really think of an area where both of us are… or there’s just an area where neither one of us are proficient at it.

So yeah, it works really well.

Crystal Hunt: And because you’re in different countries in businesses together is there anything, if people are contemplating a collaboration with, friends and other writers who are outside of their own country, are there any additional challenges that you’ve found by having a business that involves people from both sides of the borders?

Becca Puglisi: I’ll start. The one who handles the business part of it … that’s for me has been the most difficult part. Me and Angela, no problem. It’s having a business where one partner is in the United States and one is in Canada. It has created a lot of really challenging situations for us in terms of just business setup, taxes, things that just have to be filed and tracked, because the government requires it, a ton of research in the beginning for us to figure out, do we do the business here?

Do we do the business there? What kind of business do we need to do? Is it a partnership? Is it an S-corp? Is it, what are we gonna, how do we set it up? So that is, by far for me, the biggest. There’s always something where I have to deal with the government. It’s Oh, cause I know that they’re just completely confused by the Angela and Becca show.

Every time I have a problem or a question like I have to go through five different people. Cause they’re like, I don’t understand this. Like where is she? Where are you? And it’s okay, just send me on up the ladder. Cause I know that’s, what’s going to happen. I’m sure that Angela has other things that, probably having to do with them shipping and whatnot.

But there are some challenges, living across the border.

Angela Ackerman: I would say probably the other challenge, fun challenge for us is foreign rights because it adds this other layer to everything where, you’re dealing with again, tax information in other countries, and everybody has a different tax treaty with withholding taxes.

Some you can apply to get back, but you need forms from the government and you’ve got to file those every year and then others don’t. And, luckily for us, we have, a foreign rights agents who you know, navigates that for us and just says, okay, you need this form or you need to do this or whatever, but it just, there is a lot to it and this is where I just every day, I’m so grateful for Becca that she’s doing that because it would be a nightmare if I were the organizer, because that’s just not, my … I’m not organized the way Becca is and she’s so organized and I think the more complicated our business gets, the more we really need that.

And yeah, I’m super grateful to Becca.

Crystal Hunt: Now you guys have how many books now is that? 11? Is there, how many guides exist? I’m trying to remember. I just looked at a picture.

Becca Puglisi: It depends. There’s eight books, but the Emotion Thesaurus we did twice because we have a second.

I don’t know if you would say that was eight or nine, but I believe that’s right. One of them is a booklet. It’s the Emotion Amplifier is really, it’s only like 40 pages long. But I think eight is what we say.

Crystal Hunt: Okay. And so from a business perspective, people are always wondering, how many books in a series do you need before you start to really see some traction?

So I’m curious from a timelining perspective and from a number of books like you, the first one was 2012 and so there’s been one or two each year, very consistently since then. Do you have any thoughts of like, when did the tipping point come and what might’ve been some of the drivers of that?

What was the timeline like before you saw some traction in your careers?

Angela Ackerman: Actually, it’s funny because I’m just, I’m researching our roots of the Emotion Thesaurus right now for one of my newsletters. And, so I’m re-familiarizing myself with some of the early numbers for the Emotion Thesaurus. And I would actually say that in our case, the tipping point was the Emotion Thesaurus. It just, It fills such a need for people because there just really was no help in the area of show: Don’t tell emotions, right? People, their characters were always struggling, they were always, making fists when they were angry, they were frowning or their hearts were racing. And so their characters were always doing the same things and everybody struggled with there has to be something better.

And so when that guide came along and it shows, all the different ways to show through body language and dialogue cues and, visceral sensations and thoughts, how to communicate a specific emotion, it just, it really exploded. And, as Becca mentioned, we started the blog together and we actually started the Emotion Thesaurus on the blog. We blogged an entry each Saturday and, that’s been our thing sense since we, no matter what we’re running on the blog it’s every Saturday we’ll do a new entry. And so we had already built a pretty big interested readership on the blog when we decided to turn this into a book and it just, it really blew up quickly.

When I looked at our stats for how many books we had sold I think, by 2013, we published it in May, 2012 and by March, 2013 we’d probably sold about 25,000 copies of the Emotion Thesaurus and Becca and I had both agreed that if we sold 50,000 copies of that book over its lifetime, we would be ecstatic.

And I mean to date between the first edition and the second edition, we’re well over 250,000 books of just that one topic. So I definitely think that really, because it met such a huge need and because it was so different, it was one of the very first, books out there that just looked at what a reference book is a little bit different than your typical, how to guide.

This is part how to guide and then part tool. And there really wasn’t anything like that. And so it ushered in this whole idea of our resource book could look a little bit different and still be helpful because now of course you find many books that follow this sort of format.

So I would honestly say the Emotion Thesaurus was it’s been point. It seems like anything to do with characters is really, extra popular and I would say that characters are something that just universally writers are really paying attention to because of course the core of any story.

Your readers have to empathize they have to connect to that character, especially the main character. If your characters are weak, then the story will be weak. And so it’s a universal area I think where people, any book to do with characterization seems to be extra popular.

Crystal Hunt: And you both came together originally because you were writing your own fiction and focusing in similar areas.

And I know that focus is key to moving anything forward and so you have mentioned that you had to shift away from that you made a choice to really set those things consciously aside and to focus on the guides for a period of time. And I’m always curious how people juggle and how you decide, do you have a certain number of years or a certain number of books or you just meet every year and be like, is this year we switched back or no?

How do you manage that together with that balance of sort of your own creative ambitions and dreams and your helping all the other writers, ambitions and dreams?

Becca Puglisi: We don’t have a set end goal. We, honestly, when we wrote the Emotion Thesaurus, we didn’t expect any of this. We were hoping that it would cover our expenses basically, and now here we are, and your stack of books that you can barely hold up. It’s crazy.

We never envisioned One Stop for Writers. that was never really, we had talked a little bit about, Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we had an app or some kind of, something on the internet that people could use that had our tools in it.

And then once again, someone came to us a really talented developer associated with Scrivener who said, I love your books and I think it would be really cool if we had this online this website. And we were like, Oh my gosh. So that was another situation where it just fell into our laps and we just had to go with that cause it was perfect.

Becca Puglisi: So that’s the way that I think we’re, we’re just open. We’re, as we go along, we look for opportunities, we don’t really have an idea of, when we reach this point, we’re going to stop or we’re going to change directions or whatever. We’re just going to keep providing resources for as long as we realize that people need them and we’re able to help them with that.

Whether those are books or online resources, we’re constantly with One Stop for Writers we’ve got a list of my, along of things that we really would like to add that we feel are gaps that aren’t out there and that we would love to be able to add to that particular toolbox for people.

So really, Angela may have other things in mind but I don’t really have any kind of end game. It’s just as long as the opportunities were there and we can provide them then that’s what we’re going to do.

Angela Ackerman: I think that, one thing that Becca and I learned along the way, even though it’s interesting, cause this whole career was unintended, we were on the track of, we were going to be fiction authors, that was the goal. And then we just, we realized that this struggle that we had was also something that other people had and we realized that we had a way to help with that struggle. And, what we learned about ourselves was the, we both love to teach.

We love to help. And Becca already knew that because she was a teacher in her former, pre author life. But I wasn’t, and, it’s just been incredibly rewarding to help writers. It’s just something every day, Becca and I are excited to do, and we’re excited to do it in new ways. And like Becca mentioned with one-stop for writers.

People, they associate our books with us and so they know how many books we have, but Becca and I have actually written we’re on our 16th or 17th Thesaurus. So we’ve actually written a lot more than there are books. We just can’t, the books or they take a long time to really dig into a topic with such intensity and not every thesaurus that we write is a candidate for books.

And because we need clones, that’s why we created One Stop for Writers because it just, it’s just really nice for us to have a way to take these things, these projects and we don’t have time to turn it into a book, but we can put it on a website and it is all together. And the other great thing that we love about one-stop is one thing about Becca and I is that we’re creative thinkers.

That’s evident with the way that the books are set up. They’re very different. And we’re always trying to think, how can we help people in a way that they’re not being served now? And, there’s a lot of ways where we come up with ideas like, Oh, it would be really great if this tool existed, but it doesn’t exist. And so One Stop for Writers as an avenue for us to build different sort of tools even though we don’t have a developer bone in our body, we thankfully have paired up with people who are really talented in that area and they can take our ideas and help us turn them into something really amazing.

So it’s just very satisfying and I don’t know, like for me, I think that I really do want to get back to fiction. That’s not a door that’s close to me. I don’t know about Becca, but right now, it’s just very satisfying what we do. And, I know that, down the road, there will be a right time to turn back to that and make more room for it.

But right now, it’s just, it’s very satisfying to be able to go to work every day and really love it.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, there’s some really cool stuff in one stop for writers. It is like the ultimate dark playground. I don’t know if you’ve seen that wait, but why procrastination cartoon, where they explain why procrastinators procrastinate and there’s this place called the dark playground, except that it’s totally okay to go there because it’s all about developing your stories and making your characters and, it is a very cool thing to check out.

So there’s actually an entire well, there’s two different interviews that I’ve done in the past with Angela and one of them is specifically talking about one-stop and what it offers and all of the amazing things that are there.

So I’m going to link to that in the show notes for you, so that you can go over and check that out. And we’ll also link to One Stop for Writers so that you can go and poke around in there. I believe there’s even a little free trial period, so you can take it for a test drive, get hooked on all the calls stuff that’s in there.

I love the little drawer opening idea section that tickled my imagination to no end. And there’s lots of handy plotting and timelining tools and things like that as well. So there really is… It’s just a giant toolbox of goodies that you can use in your creative process, which is really cool.

One more thing I did want to talk about with you, ladies is that you have a focus on relationships as opposed to marketing. And so I think when looking at how do we get the word out about these things that we’ve created and how do we approach as strategic authorpreneurs we are, of course, hoping to make some actual money and support ourselves by doing the things that we love to do as a career, as a job. And so if there’s anything you can share around how you’ve approached that marketing plan, or what kinds of things you do that do focus on building relationships? I think that would really help, for folks to hear about those ideas.

Building relationships and a marketing plan

Angela Ackerman: I think that, what’s been really successful for us is that selling books or selling subscriptions or filling seats in a webinar or whatever it’s all secondary for us, it’s all about what does our audience need? How can we help and provide the things that they need? And so we always focus on that, an intense focus on understanding who our audience is and what those needs are, what they’re interested in, or what’s going to entertain them.

Knowing who your audience is, allows you to really figure out what the connection points are. So obviously for us we’re all writers and it makes it very easy for Becca and I to build relationships with people because we have this huge topic that we can all talk about that comes with a lot of struggle points and things that we’re all trying to figure out how we can support each other on.

And so it’s a natural platform for us all to have great conversations around. But even if you’re a fiction author, really understanding who your audience is and who the exact people are that are going to connect to the type of book you’ve written. This is a pathway to figure out how you can build, how you can reach out to those people online, find them in different social spaces or different websites, wherever they may be in different groups and just talk about the things that you really love, talk about the themes that are present in your story, or, the different types of topics or a time period or genre specific topics that tie into your particular story. Every single story is going to have a very specific group of people that are going to be attracted by it.

If you had a YA book that was about teenagers, that, I dunno when the storyline follows them, ghost hunting, amateur ghost hunting, where they go to different places that they think are haunted and they’re trying to find paranormal activity and then lo and behold they find it obviously a book like that is going to appeal to people who love the paranormal and they love ghost hunting shows and they love movies that are about spirits and poltergeist and stuff like that and this builds an entire topic that you can discuss online and share this thing that you both are obviously interested in, because if we’ve written a story like that, we’re obviously interested in that kind of paranormal aspect of ghost hunting too.

So we’ll have, something that we can talk about. And so that’s really, I think what is good for writers to think about is: don’t think about readers as dollar signs, that’s like the worst thing you can do. Instead, just think about how you can have conversations about things that you both are really going to enjoy and love.

There’s a article I wrote for someone else’s blog and I can give you the link to it if you want that kind of breaks down the relationship marketing a little bit more, and the different components that kind of go into it because it’s a larger conversation, but people might find that article helpful so I can make sure you have that if you like.

Crystal Hunt: That would be fantastic we will get that in the show notes for sure. And I have one very last wrap up question. If Becca, if you could get into a time machine, go back in time to 2012, is there anything you would do or say to your past self to prepare you for what was to come or to set the stage for you?

Angela. I’m going to ask you the same question. So ponder.

Becca Puglisi: I think I would tell myself that… It’s …this sounds very generic, but that it’s all gonna work out. In 2012 I had a two and a three-year-old when I was trying to, when we were trying to publish the Emotional Thesaurus. I remember very vividly trying to edit that book while one of my kids had a fake thermometer in my mouth and the other one was taking my blood pressure.

It was like, it was insanity. I wish I had a picture of it, but that was that whole time period. And I remember so many times thinking: I have made a huge mistake. This is impossible. This is crazy. I can’t do this, trying to balance family and, new opportunities come along that are so good and you just see, I, we have to do this, but how do we do this? It all just works out., we’re good. Angela and I are good. We’re my gosh, almost. How far are we almost 20 years into our collaboration together? If I’m doing my math correctly and she and I are great, we don’t have issues and we’re happy to be working together.

And we don’t always see everything eye to eye, but we have such a good collaboration and a good respect for each other, a strong respect that it, we just take the path together and we’d figure it out together. And if I could tell myself that back then, I think I would save myself a lot of worry and just, anxiety in the beginning about how it was all gonna, how it was all going to work.

Angela Ackerman: I think how I would probably answer that would be, I would tell myself to not question my skillset and to not let imposter syndrome get into my head. I think that is probably the biggest thing that I struggled with, especially in those early years, is imposter syndrome. Becca and I, you look back now and where you are now, but, when we started the Emotion Thesaurus, this was a time in 2012, where there was still quite a bit of animosity or friction with self-publishing.

It wasn’t popular. There was a, turn your nose down, it’s, people who self publish and you saw that in the traditional industry, a lot of the professionals were self-publishing, I don’t know. And here’s Becca and I, no, we’re we had published no fiction, so we were not authors, we were not editors, we were not best-selling agents or anything like that. We were just Angela and Becca with an idea. And … it’s took a lot of discussion and courage for Becca and I to publish that book because we were publishing it in an era where it was dominated by traditionally published books.

And we were publishing it as an authority saying, look we understand emotion really well. And we’re going to help you describe this better. And it was, it was hard for us to do that because I don’t think we really felt like an authority at that point in time and it was very intimidating because the bookshelf was, it was filled with writer’s digest books and, there was not really a lot of self-published books back then.

And I think I spent a, it got in my head a little bit, probably because I had spent so many years trying to get published in the traditional industry and so you get a little bit bashed around by that process and so it, I think imposter syndrome was something that really got to me and it took me quite a few years to actually start to just let that go and say, Angela, you’re being dumb.

Like seriously, you know what? You’re doing good work, you’re helping people like, you’re fine. And being able to let go of that was really powerful for me. So that’s probably what I would go back and tell myself to do is just to let go of that a little bit faster.

Crystal Hunt: That is super helpful. I think we could all use a trust ourselves just a little bit more and believe that everything is going to be okay messaging at the moment. So that is great. So we’re going to put it in the show notes because I know you’re going to want to follow up we are going to put links to the guides, we are going to put links to One Stop for Writers and hook you up with all of the great resources that these ladies have put together and your tagline, I think releases it all, which is writers, helping writers has always been your motto, right? Which is just get out there, offer up what you have, what you know, in a way that’s going to help the other people in your community doing the same thing.

Thank you as one who has benefited greatly from that generosity. Thank you for sharing that knowledge. It has been extremely helpful in developing my own stories and we’re always thrilled to recommend out the best of the resources that we find so thank you so much for spending some of your morning with us to make sure that everyone else gets a little peek behind the scenes as well.

Angela Ackerman: Thank you very much. It’s always, it’s super fun to talk about anything writing and, it’s always really special to actually be online with back at the same time in the same conversation. Cause that just doesn’t, like I said, we’ve only met four times in person and so anytime we get to spend together, it’s always awesome.

So thank you and thanks so much for just being interested in the process. It’s been really fantastic working with Becca.

Becca Puglisi: Thank you so much. This has been really good. Angela said, it’s always fun when we can get together and not be having a business meeting, just to chat about the things that, that we like to talk about. So thank you.

Post interview discussion

Michele Amitrani: That was great. What a lovely couple of writers. There are several things that, really made me think a lot more about collaborating writing and, Becca and Angela were very good in, focus and locate what are the most important parts that authors should keep in mind when working with each other.

And at one point, one of them came with the fact that we created this guide the very first time, the thesaurus, before the emotional it was because there was a need, of the public. And I think this audience need was one of the most important things that,made the interview interesting.

They focused on something that there wasn’t there in the market. I still remember when they said, this was a research his book meshed up with how to guide. There was nothing like that in 2012, not even close. Now there are more products that are similar to those, but the important part of all this is that they entered in a relatively Virgin market and it was amazing when, if I’m not mistaken, Angela said that they sold up to this moment a quarter of a million copies, not of all the series I’m talking about just the original Emotion Thesaurus book and that’s like mind blowing. It is something that really made me think, Crystal, that if you really help writers getting something, for example, they were trying to fix the problem of how do I describe my character without him or her frowning or, I don’t know, closing hands into fists.

They put together the efforts and tried to really deliver something that we writers needed an alternative way of describing the emotions and the feelings of our characters. And I just wanted to ask you, since you spoke with them directly, what was the feeling that you had when they told you collaborative is like trying to fill in the parts that the other person is not maybe very strong in doing, so like filling up works and filling up points.

How do you think people that are listening to us and then maybe they want to collaborate, can use that and integrate that to their process?

Crystal Hunt: I’ve been testing this in multiple formats. I’ve covert in a number of books actually and so some of the tools that have worked really well or what I’m keen to share with you guys, so that you can try out collaboration for yourselves and work that into your process.

I think one of the best way to do this is using something like Google docs where you can both edit live or all edit live, if you have multiple people who are contributing. And that’s what I Eileen Cook and I have been testing out for our full-time author book. We have been writing collaboratively in a Google doc, so we had a brainstorming session and we outlined together, which is similar to what Becca and Angela do and then we each kind of chose certain sections that we were going to be the first read on, and then we swapped and we went and viewed each other’s work and filled out the ideas or filled in the holes or gaps like they were talking about.

So I think it is a really neat way to do that, it’s a really interesting process especially if you are working with somebody who, you know, you are familiar with, and I think your voices are more similar in terms of the writing and that makes that editing process more smooth. Now that being said things still get handed over to an editor to go through from top to make sure that everything really has been smoothed out and that it is a consistent coherent work.

There are some really funny things that happen when you’re co-writing and one of the things we discovered was that the other books in the series that we’ve written have been from our own point of view and so we’ve told a lot of personal stories and you use I, and then when we went back in, we realized, Oh, we can’t both be, we have to actually reframe some of this stuff, so just that conversion to a collaborative mindset was really interesting. I think the actual tools you use are not critical in terms of what it is. Google docs is nice because you can both work it while it’s live and you have that version revision, which is really handy in case you have made a mistake or change something that shouldn’t have been changed, it’s easy to dial that back. So that’s important. There are some editing functions in there, which are also really helpful for gathering feedback from each other.

So just like you can track changes in Microsoft word, you can also track changes in a Google doc, but if you don’t want to use Google docs, you can actually, you can both work in the same Scrivener file, just not at the same time. You would have to take turns back and forth, or you can share a, just a word document actually and pass that back and forth between the collaborators. And so one person writes as much as they can and then turns it over to the other person. Or if you really divided up your sections cleanly, then you each can write your own sections and then you can mash them all up once everybody has got all of their contribution finished, you can braid them together into the book and then start doing the back and forth.

I think one of the most important things to remember is your version naming. And a lot of the strategies we’ve talked about before, making sure that it’s very clear which is your current version and having a really good system for leaving notes for each other inside the manuscript when you want someone else to weigh in on something, or when you want to flesh things out further, then that really helps to have figured out what your system is for that and then both people follow the same kind of guidelines. It makes the editing and polishing things much easier.

Michele Amitrani: Yeah, and I also think that it’s very good to recognize which are our strengths and which are our weaknesses. Becca and Angela spend some times in saying there is some part the legal, bureaucratic part that, Becca is doing, not looking very happy about it, but she specialized in that. And Angela is more focused on the marketing side when it comes to that part. So I think what Crystal said, it’s also important because it hints at the fact that you’re not going to be able to be good at everything.

And that’s why you also aave a deal opportunity to just ask the collaborators to help you in that regard. So you can balance out weaknesses and strength and I’m sure Crystal and Eileen are doing something on that side, something similar. There was another thing that came out from the interview.

And I think this is something that writers don’t talk a lot. That’s why I want to stress it and underlining it. On the … let’s say it was like the, at the very end of the interview, there was a moment in which Becca and Angela, where the relating what were the difficulties of the project, and I’m just not referring solely at working with another author, but in general, generally speaking as a writer. So Becca and Angela had a difficult, rough time, especially at the beginning and Angela said that she had to bottle with the imposter syndrome, for example, when she began, and Becca with anxiety and uncertainty.

And I think this is extremely powerful and freeing, for them to share this bit of the publishing process. And I think it’s something that, we spoke about many times, several times, we are seeing an author at a particular moment of, his or her career and we think some stuff happened at the beginning, but there’s actually work and there is grit and there is difficult stuff happening but the beautiful lesson of all of this is that they together were able to push through that moment. I think not all of us has the possibility to work collaboratively, but I think this might be an additional reason why we might seek out somebody to help us in process.

Writing is a lonely journey, in some regards and I think making it a bit less lonely, at least for some of our projects with the collaborator, with the co-author that’s an awesome experience and it’s a way that you can share your excitement and your frustration over projects. I’m sure Becca and Angela had this kind of conversation more than once, and I’m sure they have helped each other on the psychological side.

And I know Crystal you have a background in that regard scene for sure you can say way more, of me on that subject. You have been collaborating with other people. And I would just like to know what do you think of what Becca and Angela said about the difficult part of not only working collaboratively, but … so being able to, split up tasks and stuff, but also when you are in front of that screen or that keyboard or notebook, how do you ensure the other person if she or he can help you in your process so that you can help him or her in their process?

Crystal Hunt: I think that anytime you’re working with someone else it is helpful in that, at least for some personality types, I shouldn’t say for everyone, but for myself, I am far better when I’m accountable to somebody else. So in terms of hitting deadlines and not procrastinating and putting things off when there’s somebody else in the equation, I think it’s really helpful to know that you’re working together.

So that’s one piece is just that external accountability can be really helpful in terms of moving things along. Another one is when you are having those self doubt moments, and you’re not really sure about your own skills or whether or not you’re able to communicate something, it really helps to have another person there because they believe in you, even when you don’t and vice versa.

So you are able to really encourage each other and also help each other through the sticky bits. So when you get stuck on an idea or something you’re having trouble expressing or, you get partway there, but you can’t really make the thought clear, it’s a lot easier … we’ve talked about before generative work versus transformative work, there’s a whole episode on that in the archives if you haven’t heard that yet. When you should go back and listen to it, but we talk about generation versus transformation and transformation is a lot easier because you’re starting from something and you’re tweaking it. You’re not starting from nothing and creating it out of thin air.

And so when you’re working in a partnership, you get to take turns with that, and so you can take things the next level and always two minds on a topic is better because we’re coming from different perspectives, different backgrounds, different experiences. So I think that breadth of knowledge is also really helpful in terms of moving a project forward.

And I think one final sort of benefit in there is also the imposter syndrome thing, that’s a real thing, but it is much easier to chase away with company. So I don’t have to necessarily believe that I am a rockstar in that situation if I am working on a book with somebody else, I just have to believe that they’ve got this and then I will come along for the ride.

So I think as long as both partners believe that about each other, then you’re doing great. It’s just like a relationship. You want both sides to be bringing their own skills into the mix and like we talked about earlier, you will compliment the person you’re working with. One of my favourite things I think is that I’ve worked collaboratively with a number of different people and what’s really interesting. Is that your role? Isn’t always the same. When I work with my husband, his brain for story structure and the way ideas are organized and everything is very logical and he has a really good handle on the structure of things. And my focus is on character and the emotion of the story, and we bring those two pieces together, which means the end product is very strong, but if I’m in a different working relationship, like with Eileen, for example, then, I actually take that role.

And so that’s really interesting to see how your role changes as you work with different people in different types of creative process. So that is really interesting, you learn a lot about yourself as a writer, and I think you gain some flexibility of process as well, because both of us, all of us, whoever we’re working with have to step outside of our own comfort zone in terms of our own author processes, to figure out a solution that works for both sides.

So whether it’s a new kind of software or a new way of drafting a story or a book, if it’s nonfiction, then it’s just really interesting to push your boundaries and make you grow as a writer. So I think there’s so much to be learned from each other in this process. And you end up with something that is far greater than the sum of its parts when you get those extra collaborations, just like with the children’s books, when you have an illustrator who comes in and brings your story to life with imagination added into the mix, what you get is so much more than what you would get from just one person’s brain and interpretation of a story.

So that is a really wonderful experience from collaboration is that I do think you end up with something that is far greater than you could do on your own.

All right, so hopefully you will have some fun with collaboration on various things. Now, one of our collaborative projects is this jar and today it has a very fancy bow because we are celebrating. If you’re on YouTube, you get to see the fancy bow. Otherwise, our jar is filled with questions that come in from our audience.

Have you ever met an author who’s on your favourites shelf and what was it like?

If you have a question, you can send it to ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and I’m going to stick my hand in the jar and Michele is going to tell me when to stop. Oh, so fast. Okay. A green one. All right. What does our green papers say today? Ooh. Okay. Have you ever met an author who’s on your favourites shelf and what was it like?

Michele Amitrani: I have never met an author that wasn’t my favourite shelf. I would like to meet some of them. Well, I meat a couple of them online. I’m not sure if that counts, in a conference. But yeah, I’m just thinking of what would I do in that case? How would I behave? I believe if you are reserving a part of your bookshelf to a book in your keeping that book there, it means something for you. And so the person that wrote it must have mean something to you or maybe the words were able to move you in a particular way.

I’m just thinking if I met somebody like, I dunno, Neil Gaiman for example, what I would do? I would probably try to have a conversation with him. He’s one of my favorite authors, and I would probably try to ask him a couple of questions about… not that much like his writing style or … because those are things that are not necessarily transferrable to other authors.

But I would more like to know how is… what does he feel like when he writes something? So it’s not like that much on the process of writing, which is very specific for writers, but on the feeding side and, what motivate him, to write? So that’s would probably be my scenario in case, but the answer to the question is no, I’ve never met an author so far on my bookshelf, maybe in the future.

What do you think Crystal? I believe that you had some occasion in which you met somebody, so share those occasions with us.

Crystal Hunt: Yes, I’ve been lucky to meet several people off of my favourite shelf, over the last 15 years or so in the writing world, but a couple definitely stand out. So when I was in high school, I guess I got my first Outlander books and I got really into sort of the historical crossover stuff, and I also was reading Jack White had a fantastic Arthurian legend series like the singing sword and all of those ones. And so I think it’s called A Dream of Eagles cycle and I had the full collection of both of those authors wise, like an entire book, plus just the books of those two authors. And so the first year that I went to the Surrey International Writers Conference, I was fascinated to discover when I got there, because I ended up there as an accident, it was just a friend of mine said, Oh, I’m going to this thing tomorrow, you should come and there’ll be lots of interesting people there. And so I said, sure, and followed her to the conference, but I had no idea what I was getting into.

And it turned out that both Jack and Diana are two of the founding sort of sponsors of that conference and have been involved for over 20 years, almost 30 years now, actually. And as I was involved with the conference for a number of years, I got to actually meet both of them a bunch of times. And one of the times that really sticks out for me is that I met Jack Whyte and ended up just sitting together, chatting at one point. And he was asking me about what I was writing, which was a very surreal kind of conversation to have sitting there with somebody who you’ve been such a fan of for so long.

And I’d actually, it was in a really rough patch. So I hadn’t really been writing very much. And I said, Oh, I’ve been working on these things and, but I’ve been having a tough year and he said, that’s okay, next year I’m coming back and I’m going to ask you what you’ve done past year.

And so I said, Okay. Excellent. And I went away and here’s me thinking: Yeah, no, he’s not coming back next year. We’re not having this conversation again, but in fact, when I came back the next year, he did remember, and he did ask me what I’d been working on and it was, a really turning point moment, that I was able to say I had actually made some progress and that it was just in case he does remember, I feel like I need to have something that I can say besides, Oh, I …nothing. I haven’t been doing anything at all so that was really sort of a driver for me to take a lot of action and that was 2018 and I actually had done a ton of books at that point. So I just wanted to say thank you to Jack, if you’re out there listening, the remembering and the asking, the care in that made a huge difference to me as an author to think that somebody who I idolized in their writing world was paying attention.

That was really huge. And just to meet people though that are, the names on the front of your books and now I have an entire shelf behind me of things by my favorite authors, who I know in person. And so that is just a really fun shift in terms of career moments to get to meet so many really amazing people who really do this as a living and have this as their life.

For those of you out there who have not yet encountered your heroes from the page in real life, there are ways and means to do that. And it is really freaking cool when you get to. Hang on for those moments, they’re coming back, even if it’s all online right now, eventually we will once again, have writer’s conferences in person so until then, hang on, it’ll be well worth the wait, when it does come around.

Michele Amitrani: I’m looking forward to those moments. I also need such an episode. I think it would be interesting to relate as a story in the future, right? I just want to remember to you listeners and watchers or viewers that for show notes, links to resources that we mentioned and for coupons and discounts on the tools we’re using, and love, visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com and make sure you sign up for our, ‘just one thing’, a weekly email.

Crystal Hunt: Be sure to hit the subscribe button wherever you are listening to this podcast or watching on YouTube so that you don’t miss out on our next episode: we’re going to be talking about disaster proofing your business on how to make it through the tough patches. So that will be one to make sure you are. Until then happy writing and we’ll see you next week.

Michele Amitrani: Bye.