Managing a business is never easy. Savvy authorpreneurs know that their job is to produce great content, adapt quickly to the ever changing world of self-publishing and weather the occasional storms by keeping their eyes on the long term plan.

There are things authors can do to disaster proof their online business and ensure as much as possible that they remain in control of their writing career. In this episode we’ll dive deep into the strategies that can ensure you don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket, manage your royalties and keep track of expenses, own the digital land you’re building your platform on and keep up to date on new technologies and opportunities to repurpose content.

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• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 039: Disaster Proofing your Author Business

Crystal Hunt: Hey there Strategic Authorpreneur, 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 39 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. On today’s show we’re talking about how to disaster proof your business. How you can ride out the rough patches without losing hope and momentum completely. First though, a quick public service announcement: If you are finding these episodes helpful you can help us keep them ad free by going to our website, strategicauthorpreneur.com and clicking the buy us a coffee button, which will not actually pay for coffee, cause we don’t track that, but it will help us pay for things like website hosting, podcast distribution, and the transcriptions that are so helpful for those of you who are using those from the website.

And now, before we dive into our main topic of conversation for the day, let’s talk a little bit about what we’ve been up to this week, Michele, over to you.

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: There’s been a few weeks that I’ve been bothering you about the project that’s driving me crazy, and I’m happy to just say that this project is now on the web and it’s a Soul of Stone, and is a novella that I’ve been working on in the past few months.

And it has been an amazing experience to make it together but it took a long time and a lot of my energy. So I just want to say out there I’m happy that is out there. And I can’t wait to pass to the next project now. I don’t remember exactly who said that, but, it was something on the line of, ‘when you are on the project and you are finding that you can do anything anymore, that means that you’ve finished that project. You now can move on to the next one’.

I don’t feel quite like that. I’m proud of what I was able to achieve and I also do thank Crystal for a lot of suggestion and tips and tricks that she gave me, I feel a part of Soul of Stone, she’s also there. It’s just another way for me to say, thank you, on this podcast, and since I’ve also been working on the second mythological novella that’s going to be set in the same Greek world last week, if you remember, we talked about the Emotional Thesaurus guide and I didn’t recommend it, but just because I wanted to save it for this time. I mentioned this book already once, we actually mentioned it a lot of times, and if you can see it is the original Emotion Thesaurus. Why am I mentioning it now today? It’s because I’m really using it a lot now that I’m rewriting one of the novellas and, I’m just making sure that, my characters don’t frown too much and I’ve actually a variety of different things they can do, to make the readers feel a bit more.

And, I do believe every single time I’m reading this book and I’m using it as a reference that it enriches, the story. It makes it more three dimensional, it gives the characters a different way to interact with other characters, but also the world at large. I can’t recommend that book enough honestly, and this is just the second time. So bear with me please. I do find this to be a very good resource for a writers and I do encourage you to click the link if you want to really have a, what I would call a tool box that is going to level up your writing and make it more varies and make it more interesting for the readers.

Definitely the Emotion Thesaurus. So thank you Angela and Becca, for writing it. And, what have you been up to, Crystal in the past seven days?

Crystal Hunt: I’m still working on Elfed and because I am doing outlining and looking at romantic comedy beats, I dug out this book, which is called Writing the Romantic Comedy by Billy Mernit.

And there’s a section in here on the eight beats in a romantic comedy. And so I’ve been reviewing those and making a mashup in my template for the romancing the beat structure, and also this one and mashing them up together so that you get a dual POV character set of beats and also including the comedic aspect and the relationship elements from this template and putting all that into a plotter and making sure that it is all built into the template that I use for the story, so that when I have a romantic comedy story in my Rivers End series, I can just tap into that template and put it to work for me right away.

And I’m developing the same thing for the romantic suspense ones, where it’s a mashup of the suspense plot beats and the romance plot beats and seeing how that works out for the stories. So on the fiction side of things that’s where we’re at. Hopefully we’ll be done soon and out into the world. My goal is to have it out before Christmas day, but we’ll see how that goes depending on other things. One of the other things it depends on is that on the non-fiction side, we have been setting up our creative Academy guides for writers, all to go wide. So we’ve come out of KU with those now, and we’re able to put them out into the rest of the world. So we are setting up Publish Drive, which is a tool that lets you distribute to all of the other platforms, basically from one central place and really make the management of all of those platforms much easier because there are so many places to put your books in so many accounts to manage. And because it’s quite a big series of books we have, I guess the fifth one is coming out right now, that’s the Full-Time Author book and there’s a whole bunch more of those to come over the next couple of years.

So we were really looking at a way to streamline that process and draft a digital is great, but they take a percentage of your revenue and because those books are selling quite well when we did the math between paying a monthly fee, that’s a flat fee versus taking away 10% of all the revenue it made sense to go with the flat fee with Publish Drive.

So that’s what we’re experimenting with next on the non-fiction side and we’ll keep you updated about how all that works out over the next while as we see it in action. And now it’s time to dig into today’s episode, which is talking about disaster proofing our businesses. And I think the last few months, all of 2020 really, has been an interesting exercise in looking at what happens in our publishing worlds and in our personal and professional lives when everything in the world just gets a little bit messy. And so we have been doing a lot of talking at the end of 2020 year, about whatever the future might bring in a way that makes our businesses stronger and makes ourselves more emotionally prepared to weather whatever changes come up and financially, how do we make sure that we have plans in place that are going to make sure that we can ride that out until things recover when there is a dip or a distraction or an upset in the larger market or world, how can we make sure that we can keep ongoing through that and to cover and get back on track. So the first thing I would love to talk about, and this is right on track for us because we’ve been talking a lot about going wide and the pros and cons of that and I think both of us have come to some conclusions of how we’re going to tackle this next year, but let’s talk a little bit about diversifying income streams and Michele what are some of the reasons that you’re thinking going wide might be a good way to disaster proof your business?

Going wide

Michele Amitrani: There are some things that I was lucky enough to be exposed to. Several different authors that I respect and I follow started suggesting some strategies, and I was very interested in seeing what they were saying and what they were doing. So this happened a few months ago. And following to these suggestion, I made up my mind to go wide with my mythological series. Now, before I start describing exactly what I think is important for the diversification side, I just wanted to put out there that, proofing everything 100% it’s basically impossible. It’s not going to happen.

That’s why we’re going to talk about also way of dealing in this episode of way of dealing with, when something that happens that we didn’t predict, and that’s part of this disaster proofing, thing. There are some things that simply you will not see coming.

And if you have been doing these things for more than two months you will see that there is stuff that you just can’t see coming, and you can do anything about but react accordingly to your resources, to your time, to your knowledge. Put the pressure off your shoulders. You’re not a God that you can predict everything, but there are definitely things that you can do to better your chances of standings the currents.

And one of the things Crystal was saying was the famous word diversification, which is also used a great deal in investing. Why is so important? I think like there are different kinds of diversification when we talk and look about books, I will say you have to see a few different components in the picture.

When I say to you diversified by platform or diversified by genre or diversified by kind of products. So let me explain what I mean. If you only sell paperbacks and something happened to your POD. That’s a problem. If you sell paperback, ebook, audiobook, and different kinds of a products, if something happens to one side of your business, you still have some stream of revenue coming from other eBooks or the books courses that you’re selling.

This is what I mean by diversification, diversify your things, make sure and try to put as many different version of a similar product that you can, in order to avoid that kind of problem one of your income stream being shut down and you will know what to do. That’s and why do I think is this thing important to say right off the bat.

One thing to say, because of the wide choice that we both made. I’m seeing that a lot with my science fiction series in Italian, which is a Kindle Unlimited series and I’m seeing how much I’m making on the page reads, which is something only author exclusive on Kindle Unlimited can get. I’m happy that I’m making that income, but at the same time, I’m scared. Because if tomorrow Amazon decides that page reads, maybe it’s not a thing anymore and they want to change that suddenly 20% to 30% of my income on that side is gone in just one day. And this is that very thing that I was telling you at the beginning, a lot of authors started looking around and seeing when monopoly becomes too strong and it gets too much out of your products.

That’s one of the reasons why we’re talking about diversify your things. If you’re wide, and something weird happen on Amazon, you still have Kobo, B&N, you have the iTunes stores, you have dozens of other stores that you can rely on.

Of course we’re not discussing about volume of sales here. We’re just discussing about how can you make this viable in the long term. And since we spoke about wide Crystal as a long term game, it’s something that you have to be willing to invest energy and time. But why diversify is so important, not only because it gives you a bit more freedom in the way you’re gonna address the promotion side of things. If you are exclusive with Amazon KDP select, there are four or five strategies that you can use because of Kindle countdown deals and free books. There are page reads, but you are playing a completely different ball of games with respect of the wide. This is not a subject that we’re going to discuss in today’s episode, but it’s important for you to know if you are wide, so you decided to diversify, you also have more options on the table.

And you can do things that you can’t if you are exclusive and you have just that channel of royalty that is Amazon. So I think to answer your question, Crystal, this is why I think it’s important to diversify a product in different formats.

So I was mentioning audiobook, ebook and paperback. But also for platform. So when I say Amazon and I say Kobo and Google Play and Barnes & Nobles and all these other book stores, I’m mentioning different platforms, platforms that they are going to be used separately. And of course you can use an aggregator, like Draft to Digital, but in doing this, you ensure that you are a bit more stable in the long term, and really you put some of the pressure off your shoulders. One of the things that I think it’s important for us to discuss also once we said, basically, what are the options out there? Some of the options, because this is not all the options.

I mentioned before that you can use a different platforms, but with different platforms also comes different set of marketing tools that you can use. So marketing options that you have. If you’re exclusive on Amazon, you have those two and three options, but you can do way more things if you are wide and you’re willing to work and study in that.

So Crystal what do you think when it comes to try and marketing and keep the component of the diversification included into the picture what you will suggest to people to do?

Being flexible

Crystal Hunt: I think there’s a couple of really key things when we’re looking at diversification in marketing. It’s very tempting when you find a strategy that works to just go all in on that one strategy.

And whether it’s Facebook ads or Amazon ads or BookBub ads or a BookBub featured deal that you get on a semi-regular basis that keeps things rolling for you. If you only have that one strategy, then just as for format issues, what happens when something goes wrong with that? And a perfect example is, a couple of weeks ago there were some major issues with the Facebook ads platform where a whole lot of authors found their links suddenly didn’t work.

So their sales links, where they were running ads to get people to click and purchase through Amazon, Facebook just stopped them dead and there were no ads for those couple of weeks. So anybody who was in the middle of launching a book or who really had a system that depended on those ads to drive traffic was in a really sticky position where their income plummeted for that month because it, it took a while for that to get ironed out and to figure out what the problems were and get those fixed. And so if you are only depending on a single strategy, it’s quite risky because you don’t know when something like that is going to happen and things just glitch out.

And then sometimes you get shut down, completely nevermind a temporary thing. If somebody else steals your book and puts it up on a platform, both of your accounts can get frozen because of plagiarism issues. And you have to prove that it’s your book and sort things out and get your account reinstated.

So I think it’s really important to make sure that you really do have a bit of flexibility there and also that you own whatever platforms you’re promoting on. So if you’ve put getting energy into getting BookBub followers, then BookBub sends out an announcement every time you have a new release, that’s great.

You don’t own that, BookBub tomorrow could decide they’re not sending new releases anymore, or that they’re going to charge a hundred dollars for each notification out to your followers that there’s a new book or whatever, it’s their prerogative. They built it. You brought people and you got folks to sign up to follow you, but that is no guarantee that won’t change.

And I think same holds for Facebook or Twitter or any of the other platforms where you don’t own that space. You are running the risk of your account being closed down, or somebody hacking you and saying something awful and then your account gets compromised and shut down. There are so many ways that could go very wrong.

As long as you have an alternate option, so let’s say normally I’m launching a book and I would use a Facebook group and all of these other things, if something happened to those, I still have my email list, so I can email my key followers directly and nobody can stop me from doing that.

So I think that is really important to make sure that you’re aware who owns the digital land that you are building your marketing platform on, and that you understand you need a certain amount of control for yourself over that. And one of the things that’s very hot topic right now is folks selling their books directly from their own websites.

So block chain technology is a bit of a buzzword in the industry right now and they’re trying to just figure out how that works for books, but there are a lot more platforms, things like Gumroad and Patreon and the Buy Me a Coffee e site that let you as a creator, sell things directly to your audience in a different way.

And Shopify is another example, so there’s lots of options, but I think being earlier to the party and having those things set up in advance really does do a lot of favors for you in terms of knowing that there are other options and not waiting until things fall apart to put some of those alternative options in place for you, I think that’s really key and also keeping up to date on new technologies and opportunities to repurpose content.

So we definitely talked a little bit, Michele was mentioning earlier that you have a variety of different formats. Some of that, I think we just saw evidence of why that was really valuable.

We’ve got a paper shortage that’s been happening and so prices of printed books are going up. We had delays in printing when COVID happened, everything shut down, the physical bookstores stopped working, the supply chains that were in traditional publishing stalled out, and a ton of books got put into the print on demand system so that there was a distribution option for them.

And the orders could be filled without all the human steps in the middle. And so that’s really cool, but it put a tremendous demand on the system. And what that meant was bigger delays for books getting shipped out. And I think that’s a perfect example of where suddenly the demand for eBooks for kids was way higher than it’s ever been and the demand for audio books, so that parents could be listening to books while watching their kids and, keep eye on things and whatever else became extra important.

And so being able to get things that were not in a physical format became really key, quickly getting textbooks and books for school projects and things like that digitally was really necessary all of a sudden. And Folks who had those in place were able to take advantage of that, but if you waited and you didn’t have all of that stuff in place, and that makes it a little bit challenging to do that.

So I think just understanding what your options are as far as repurposing content, whether that’s through the AI voices that we’ve talked about before on the podcast or through audio books or repurposing some of your book content as blog content on paid platforms, like medium.com, whatever it is that you’re looking at, having those alternate options is really powerful for sure.

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I also think, one of the options on the table could be collaborating with other people. That’s an interesting thing. We just, spent a whole episode, the previous episode with, Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman talking about that. That’s definitely something important, that I came with in that episode, you can definitely use that as a leverage, as a diversified option to increase your income stream.

And I know Crystal she’s been doing that with, Eileen Cook, but also with Donna Barker. They have a whole series that is based on this collaboration kind of effort. And that’s an additional stream of revenue of course, for them. The thing is the sky is the limit when it comes to try and see left and right, what are the options? What are the opportunities? Sometimes it’s not that much difficult to find that the option, but just finding which one is the one that is good for you at that particular moment. And so we are in a day and age that there are so many options and there’s so much noise and we don’t know which one to use.

But collaborating with other authors for me is definitely one of the options. You will also look at writing a book with that person or creating a course with that person doing different kinds of things, masterclass, conferences. There are so many things that you can do that go outside the specific, source of writing a book.

So I think that’s, it’s an important thing to consider when you are thinking of collaborating with other authors, either one other author or a group of other authors. So that’s a way of diversifying, the things. And I don’t know, Crystal, if you want to add something on that regard, collaborating and using it as an additional option.

Collaborating with other authors

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think there’s a couple real advantages to those collaborations in that you have then multiple networks to help with marketing and promotion. And I think we’ve talked about, a little bit of what if world circumstances change or what if things change with the company or the distributors.

But I think it’s also important to look at what if something happens in your own life, maybe you get sick or you might have some mental health challenges or some physical challenges. You may have a caretaking scenario where you need to be looking after a family member or you might have your kids at home suddenly because the schools are closed down, whatever that looks like if you have extra support systems built into your publishing business, then that will allow you to bend a little bit more with those situations and it’s not all a hundred percent on you. So I think having that social support and having that practical support from the other people that you’re working with can really help you to survive those tough moments and also really making sure that you have a support system in place to help you make decisions as well.

When everything is changing all at once and something happens in the world that you have to react to. It’s really hard to guess at what’s going on and what’s actually impacting your book sales may or may not be the state of the world. It might be the trends have shifted, or that there’s a weird glitch in the reporting system in the backend that’s going to catch up in a couple of weeks. It’s really hard to know what those things are without getting information from other people. So I think having a community of authors that you can ask to find out what else is going on out there and is what you’re seeing typical of what other people are seeing helps you make a decision about how worried to be, or how upset to be, or how consistent this pattern is. If you are new to publishing, you may not know that in August and early September nothing happens in the publishing world. So you may be thinking, Oh no, I’ve done this all wrong, but really that’s just what happens at that time of year, that sales always dip and they always come back up again and there’s nothing to panic about. You just have to ride it out.

But without the information from your peers, you have no idea what to watch for, or be worried about or how long you should expect before those things change. So I think getting a community, Facebook groups online. You can always join the Creative Academy for Writers that’s our free community that Donna, Eileen and I created, and we have a, an abundance of really wonderful writers in there and everyone’s always happy to report back on what’s going on in their world and share information. Definitely there’s no need to go it alone. If you don’t have the people in your immediate network you can branch out and ask for help and information. We have those for you. So come on over and find us CreativeAcademyforWriters.com and we will help make sure you are hooked up.

So I know that this next topic is one that is very dear to my co-host. He is the master of lean mean sustainable business processes. So let’s talk a little bit about how the way you actually build your publishing business can support the ability to get through those tough times.

Creating a cushion for your business

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I like to refer at myself as the frugal squirrel sometimes.

And is just because I think, especially at my stage of my publishing and authorpreneur process is so important for me to understand this one element: the saving part. I’ve been following a lot of orders that are preaching this importance, and saving and building sustainable lean processes is definitely some of the most important thing that I’m learning as a relatively new author.

You can’t write if you can’t eat, it’s something that seems stupid and cheesy, but actually it’s important for you to understand. It’s correct. So as Crystal was mentioning I made it as one of my mission to understand that lesson very well. I am following, Nicholas Erik, who in his guide or for marketing, there’s a whole section of that book that is dedicated to savings. And you will say, this is not an investing book. Why are you putting a saving, on a book marketing guide? And I think that’s one of the most important parts of the book, if possible. This is something that cannot be stressed enough.

In his book Nicholas Erik says you should think of a income that you’re making as not entirely yours. And some of that is going to go to the tax person, some of that needs to go to retirement, some of that can be stuff that you are going to use for an emergency. And he actually uses some percentage. Depending on the country that you’re living in.

If you are in the US probably 30% of that income from books should be saved on the tax purposes. Again, I’m not a tax expert, but that’s the number he came up with. 10% of that income should be going down savings. And again, you might have to pay for your health insurance. The money that you’re getting in your Amazon account or whatever account you’re using is not actually 100% yours.

And that was one of the most important thing that I’ve learned early on in my process. That’s why we’re talking about saving now. So what do I do to basically put this diversification in use also on the savings side. Every single time I get royalties, this is usually done on a monthly basis, I will put all that in a Google spreadsheet and I will make sure that I know exactly how much I spent for advertisement, but also on production costs and promotion costs if I am like am now, in a releasing the face.

And also I will make our much, I am earning and then the net profit, this thing that I’ve been doing consistently for several months now, almost a year helped me gazing and understanding a couple of things. One of the most important thing that gave me a keen eye on is that, not all of that money is mine and most of that money that I see it’s used for production costs. You have to think of yourself like a startup. Most of the money that you’re spending, you’re spending it in cover design, in editing, in promotions and you’re not going to see that money back in month. If you’re lucky, maybe you’re going to see some in a few weeks.

But that’s why is so important the saving part and building a sustainable lean process, because you are going to have to do this several times in the future years, and you want to make sure you have a system, and system is one of those words that we repeated I think 1 billion times per episode Crystal. The system is important because it allows you to do something else that we warn you a lot, to not bleed out your resources, which is something you should definitely not do. You should not, pay for example a book cover design, and put it on your credit card. You should always use the money that you have upfront, and you can work a bit more, you can outsource a way to do that, but make smart, economical choices that are going to pay off a lot in the future.

Since we’re talking about the investing, I’m going to drop the word dividends. And I do think of books as buying a company and this company is paying a dividend and the royalty I’m getting is, I always, a part of me, at least the investor part of me think of a book as: okay. I have put my interests and resources on this company, read book, if it does well, and if I did my own work, that company’s going to pay dividends for me, read royalties in the book world. And that’s because I like investing in that kind of stuff and I tend to merge the two things. I think that’s why Crystal handed me the word on this side, because I really like that and I really think it’s useful for you to know when it comes to diversification, and also try to understand, you should make sure that you have some kind of buffer in, when it comes to financial stuff as well as creative and life stuff. Crystal was mentioning, stuff happens, and you can predict that, making sure that you have a person that you can rely on both psychologically, if you want also spiritually, that helps a lot, really and this is something that I experienced myself and, I went to a couple of moments that I really needed that kind of sustain and that also, I think is important when we’re talking about diversification.

It’s not only you, it’s you and a set of people that you’re choosing to be in the path with you in that publication process. So that diversification, it seems a cold word, but it’s actually something that can be used also for like family. if you want to integrate them as part of your authorpreneur journey.

And I was thinking, Crystal, exactly about that. We talked about saving, diversification, building a sustainable and a lean process that you’re going to use and perfect in the months and years to come. And I would like to know if you have a particular episode that maybe happened to you, regarding this subject of the making the process of publication as lean as possible so that you can use it in the future that you can relate to the listeners, and that you can just share with them.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, there’s definitely been a couple of times in my publishing history when this has been really important. And I think we talked about saving, but as much as saving is making sure that the process you put in place for your publication stuff can be maintained when there’s not a ton of income coming in from other sources or when you have to do for me, the example was that I published a whole bunch of things really close together because I really wanted to ramp up the momentum of my book sales. And so I did, every three weeks from September to Christmas in 2018, I released a story, and what that meant was I was covering cover production, I was covering editing, I was covering audio book production on, all of those things. I was also paying my mailing list costs and all of that stuff. But because there’s a two-month delay, roughly from when the book actually sells to when it’s recorded in the Amazon and eventually you get paid out, there’s roughly two months delay where you’re paying all those production expenses and everything else and you’re not getting any revenue from those projects yet. If you are going to scale up, if you’re going to make a run for the fences and you are … swinging for the fences, I guess would be the baseball analogy. If you’re going to really try to level up, you need a bunch of cash in hand to make that possible.

And you want to make sure that your outlay of cash is as minimal as possible. It can be very tempting as you see your revenue scaling up and you see the checks getting bigger to hire assistance or to decide you’re going to level up your cover design stuff, or that you’re going to commit to a bunch of expensive promos or put a ton of money into ads and that’s all well and good, but you really want to plan your systems around not the best month, right? If you were doing budgeting for the year and trying to do an income projection, you really want to pick what is the worst month of the year and times that by 12. Don’t focus on the best months of the year and times that by 12, because you are not building in any kind of buffer for yourself in terms of reliability. And the stuff that you commit to also creates a lot of pressure.

So I think that’s something that’s really important to acknowledge is that every sort of monthly commitment to spend money that you have, it puts pressure on you and your writing and your creative process and that can be really stressful and can completely change the way that you feel about your writing and the way that you are interacting with your stories and your readers.

And when that pressure gets really heavy, often I noticed a switch once people have made the leap into that full time thing, if you’re, depending on that as your source of income, then it really changes your relationship with your business processes and your newsletter readers and all of those things.

And so sometimes you notice that there’s a huge switch in the language people are using and the way they’re communicating with their audience, that doesn’t always have great consequences because that pressury sale tactic stuff, that’s not where you started. That’s not going to resonate with your readers and you really do risk alienating your audience when you really make that shift into sort of high pressure sales, because you really need those results quickly.

So I think, just thinking about maybe not quitting your day job too soon, if staying a little bit longer means you get to stockpile a little bit of money away for when you need that extra buffer or for when you have that opportunity to level up and we’ve had a couple examples where this did work out well in that we had been setting aside all of the royalties, actually from our Creative Academy books because we knew we were trying to get our Amazon ads to work for us. And we knew that once we did, we would have to float the bills for a couple of months as we scaled up. So that was one time where having that money set aside meant the adds did start to work we were able to take advantage of that and it really worked well for us to get some momentum going. But if we had not done that, we would have stalled out and when the opportunity presented itself to make that leap, we would’ve fallen down the hole and the cliff instead of actually making the jump successfully.

You’re welcome for the sound effects and the little graphics of the falling off the cliff if you’re watching on YouTube and get a little bonus hand gesture miming in there. But I think that really is key to make sure that you give yourself the freedom to still be your best creative self, and to still really focus on the quality of your storytelling.

Nothing burns your audience faster or decreases your royalties faster than a bad book. You know, making sure that you keep your eye on the part that matters, which is writing really high quality fiction and making sure that you have built enough buffer in your emotions, in your finances and also in your production schedule.

The same thing that we talked about, doing your budgeting with your worst month financially from the year, and using that figure to ripple out through the year. You also want to do that with your word count. So if you are planning your production schedule for the year, you probably want to do some of your word count projections and your, how many products can I write this year? How many books can I put out? Figuring you want to do that with your toughest possible month or the month where you can produce the least and make sure that you are doing your planning from that sort of minimalist place, because stuff is going to come up, that you were not expecting, things will happen in your life.

And if you have set your whole schedule based on your optimum performance, the psychology of feeling like you’ve failed before you even really got started is really high. So in order to protect that, to protect your happy place in your head, and to make sure that you are in a position to emotionally weather, whatever rocky stuff comes your way, just making sure that you build up those supplies and I think a happy file is a great way to do that.

So for anybody who has not heard this concept before, collecting up a whole bunch of your really positive reviews and happy experiences and great things that you have experienced in your life because of your author career, and just keep that on your computer so that you can review that anytime you hit a really low patch and you need a little inspiration to help jumpstart and get things back rolling again.

I think that’s a really great way to help keep yourself in the goods in terms of being a happy, balanced, functional, creative person, even when things are falling apart all around you. So on that note, let’s risk, stress, and disaster by opening up the curious jar and finding out what anonymous question we are going to tackle today.

So as usual, I will rifle my hand around in the jar until my cohost says, stop.

What is one story that made you want to write?

A blue one matches my shirt. Okay. So our question for today, what is one story that made you want to write?

Michele Amitrani: Okay, you go first this time. I was first the last time.

Crystal Hunt: This is interesting. So there’s actually a whole bunch for me and in really different kind of genres, actually. So one of my favourites was when I was young The Paperback Princess is by Robert Munch is one of my favorite stories. And that one and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, which I also love.

Those were two picture books that really just captured my imagination and made me love the idea of spinning stories in a non-traditional way or really getting that point of view shift and playing with that. So those are two picture books that definitely made me want to be a writer and make stories.

And I did, I started there, I started with kids books and then I also absolutely loved… there was a collection of two Nora Roberts romances that were Irish ones that were witchy as well and those are from way back. I don’t know, maybe late eighties, that I read off my mom’s bookshelf and I absolutely loved those.

And so the sort of Irish hometown romance stuff definitely appealed to part of me and I really wanted to do that as well. And they had a bit of intrigue and mystery in them and a little bit of psychological burst, a little bit of paranormal elements as well with the sort of empathy stuff and a little bit of wittiness anyway, all the best ingredients in my world.

So those were definitely quite inspiring. And then two classics that I just adored as well were, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin and The Princess Bride. So I think if you could just mash all of those up to get what I’ve been doing with my career, which is some combination of all of those things in various genres over time.

But those are some of my favourite elements. And I guess if you distilled out the biggest influences of what I do, you would find most of those reflected in some way in the sort of career choices I have made over time. Yeah. How about you?

Michele Amitrani: Interesting. So I remember, in my teenage years I was reading actually a series of stories.

And I actually, this is funny because I actually watched the masterclass by this author, the name is a R. L. Stine and he’s the author of Goosebumbs, and this might sound weird, but, when I lived in Italy, which are called, just to throw some Italian words at you, Piccoli Brividi, I loved those books and I probably read, dozens of them because, R. L. Stein wrote like a … I think like more than 50, for sure. Probably more than 100. He I think he had two major series Fear Street and then Goosebumps. But anyways, I was a teenager and I was devouring them. I was reading them. And actually the first story that I remember writing was after reading a bunch of these, I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was thinking, okay, I like reading this stuff. So I’m going to write a story. So I took, one, a notebook and my pen and I started writing a few pages and I think the story was about a mummy, in Egypt. And I’m going to spare you the particular, the story is not going to see the light of the day anytime soon but–

Crystal Hunt: Oh, dude. I’ve read that book. I know that one.

Michele Amitrani: I love those books, and really in some way they shaped the way sometimes I write horror stuff. That’s not horrible because although R.L. Stine has been defined like the Stephen King of kids, it’s not like a horror kind of stuff, but at that time and place, they were exciting for me.

They weren’t scary necessarily, but they were exciting. They were giving me adrenaline. So I was like, I want to write something about that. That’s probably the early memory that I possess that of a series of books that made me want to write something similar to that. And I can actually say Crystal, one of the, actually the latest release that I had for my 12X20 Challenge is a collection of very short, dark fantasy story, called Never Wish.

And I do believe some of that love of the horror, that I have and that I put in some of my stories does derive from, R.L. Stein, and from that bunch of books that there are, that I’ve read. So it’s definitely something that has shaped the way I see the world and I write the story and I populate lead them well with characters.

Definitely that would be my answer. Reading, Goosebumbs. I don’t even know if that’s the way you say it in English, because it’s a different word for me. Those series of scary books for teenagers and kids, I will say that’s definitely my answer. And I would like to read more o Stine’s stuff but I’m not sure if I’m this moment I’m going to like them because I grew up of course, and I read a bunch of other stuff, so I don’t want to spoil my memory of those books.

I don’t know if that makes any sense to you Crystal, but I guess that’s the answer to the question.

I also want to remind to all the lovely people that are listening to us, that if you’re looking for the show notes of this episode and links to all the resources that we mentioned, for the coupons also discounts on the tool that we use and we love please visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com and make sure you sign up for our newsletter: Just one thing, we release this on, every single week on Monday. Do make sure that you are a subscribed. We make sure to release at least one resource that you can use for your authorpreneur business.

Crystal Hunt: And be sure to hit the subscribe button wherever you are listening to this podcast or watching if you’re with us on YouTube, so you don’t miss out in our next episode where we’re going to talk to Eileen Cook about when and how to make the leap to being a full-time author and we’ll be celebrating the release of our new book.

So please do come by, listen to how, and maybe why and when you could make that full-time author dream of yours come true, but you won’t get there without writing. So until next week back to work for you guys, back to work for us and we will see you all soon.

Michele Amitrani: Bye.