Who doesn’t want to get paid to spend their work days lost in magical worlds with a bunch of imaginary friends? Yes, you’ve guessed it, today we’re going to talk about making your full-time author dream come true by examining what it really takes to step up and become a business owner who day-dreams for a living.
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet. The road to authorly independence requires a lot of working hours, a system put in place to avoid things like writer’s burnout. Not to mention balancing finances and staying sane while figuring out how to slay dragons, give an emotional wound to a talking tree your readers can relate to, and craft the perfect happily ever after.
In this episode Eileen Cook—co-author of Full Time Author: provides tips and tricks to get you to the point you want to be by explaining why a body of work is so important for your writing career, highlighting the top skills you need to master if you want a shot as a full-time author, and sharing how you can create a system that keeps you accountable and lets you do the most important thing there is: write down words, sell your stories and start the next phase of your writing adventures.
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.
Resources we mentioned in this episode
- The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Soul of Stone by Michele Amitrani
- Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
- Elfed by Crystal Hunt (Upcoming)
- Full Time Author by Eileen Cook and Crystal Hunt (Upcoming)
- Red Sister by Mark Lawrance
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 040: Full Time Author with Eileen Cook
Eileen Cook: I am Eileen Cook and I’m excited to be here on the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. Today we’re talking about being a full-time author.
Crystal Hunt: Hey there strategic authorpreneurs, I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We’re here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.
Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 40 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. On today’s show we’re talking with special guests, Eileen Cook about her experience of transitioning to being a full-time author and the book that she and I have written on some strategies and exercises you can work through to help you tackle that, the going full-time as an author thing more successfully. First a note, 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 ‘by us a coffee button’. While neither of us drink coffee, we will use that money on extravagances, like website hosting, podcast distribution, and transcriptions of our episodes.
Crystal Hunt: First, let’s have a little bit of an update as to what we have been doing this past week. Michele, what have you been up to?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: Crystal, I’m all over the place! I am in the middle of publishing… actually one of the book is already published and now I’m about to publish another book, which is Soul of Stone.
I spoke about that in the past few weeks. Soul of Stone is out, my mythological fantasy in the English world. And now I’m gearing up for releasing on the Italian front. So there’s so many things to do that that I’m not going to bother by just mentioning all of them. But it’s a lot of stuff, It’s a lot to take in, I mentioned this a few weeks ago. Now the workload is getting bigger and bigger, which is exciting because you are seeing all the pieces you worked for in the past few months, actually coming together. But at the same time, you have to be very careful not to burn yourself out in many ways.
This is also something that we discussed before. It’s interesting and it’s lovely, and if you are interested in mythological fantasy, I definitely suggest you to give my book a try. I’m not very good at self-promoting, as you can see, but here you have it, Soul of Stone is out.
And I’m very proud to announce that, and really all the other things that I’ve been working on, especially in this past few weeks that I can see how it is difficult to fast release multiple titles. Now it’s going to be Soul of Stone and the Italian version. And then I’m going to release in two maximum, three weeks from now another book, which is the second one in the collection slash series of mythological fantasy.
It’s not easy and it’s taking a lot of hours away from my writing, which is good. It’s fine. In this process, in this moment, I’m learning. But I do understand when there are people talking about writing burnout so, that’s something that I want to definitely avoid. And it’s a subject of conversation that we discussed before, even in our leveling up sessions.
So I want to try to avoid that mistakes. But it’s good, again, that I’m trying and seeing how all the pieces fits together and what amount of time and resources involves. And so it’s super iper interesting to see, and super helpful for me. I’m going to survive this. You’re going to see me surviving on November and December and, at the same time in order to survive even better, I’m reading a book that I’m actually loving, and this is part dark fantasy part contemporary fantasy slash urban fantasy.
I wanted a book that was similar to my Lord of Time. I felt like I wanted something to be, let’s say magical and dark at the same time so I’m reading now a book by Bryan Camp, if you are on YouTube you can see, let’s see if I can show it to you a bit better: The City of Lost Fortunes which was a book that was suggested to me by an author friend.
And I’m really liking it I definitely suggest you do or read that if you like fantasy, contemporary fantasy, urban fantasy, and it’s really similar… It has its own personality, but it’s very similar to American Gods by Neil Gaiman. So definitely if you like that are suggested to give it a try.
Now I know also please have some things that she wants to say, something to catch up or something to make you aware of. Crystal, take it from here.
Crystal Hunt: All right. Well I’m still writing Elfed and I’m having lots of fun with various Christmas romance shenanigans. And, I have my author assistant working this week on entering all of the details from events, people, places into the plotter database that we’ve created.
I was getting, I was getting a little overwhelmed by managing my own side of the creator side of things, where I have all of these characters and all these books plotted out and all of this stuff, and then managing the part that’s already been published. When I would go and try to decide, Oh, can I change this characters role? Or can I adjust where this event fits in the timeline? I didn’t know if I had publicly committed to that in any of the other, like 10 stories that are out there. And so I was having trouble keeping track of what was public facing and what was just created in my head. So I’ve got my assistant entering all of the things into the database that are public.
So whatever she can see from the books, then she’s putting that into the plotter database. So I will have my templates and my spreadsheets to guide me, but also I will be able to double-check what has been locked down and can’t be changed anymore in that side. So I’m very excited to have that as I go into these next couple of books.
And I have also been working my way through what is an entire book of notes that I took from the SiWC, the Surrey international writers’ conference workshops this year, because we did everything at home. here was the recordings of all the sessions are available for 30 days after the conference.
And so I was trying to plow through all of those in the period that was available and then taking all my notes now that’s come to an end, I’m taking all of my notes and just going through them and deciding, okay, of all the plotting things I watched, which pieces am I going to integrate into my templates on my plotting process and really revising my systems in advance of the new year, just to be ready to tackle all of the things that we’ve decided would be fun.
And one of the books that came out of those sessions, multiple people recommended this same book and it’s called: Several Short Sentences About Writing and the person who wrote it is Verlyn Klinkenborg. And I had never heard of this book before and then three separate people this year at the conference recommended it.
So I ordered it and I’m going to read you just a tiny little snippet, because I think it really sums up, what this book does.:
‘This is a book of first steps. Their meaning will change as your experience changes. This book contains the bones of many arguments and observations; a vertebrae here, a mandible there, but the whole skeleton is what you make of it. You’ll find as much about thought and perception here as you will about language. There are no rules. Only experiments. The premise of this book is that most of the received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong, but harmful. This is not an assumption. It’s a conclusion.’
And his argument is that most people who write about writing, know what works for them, and they do it usually in a looking back analytical kind of way, but it can’t really explain the magic of things and it can’t really explain the small little details. And It’s the whole book is little chunks of wisdom that you can test and experiment with and see if they work for you and then apply or not apply as you may choose. And so it’s a really interesting way to look at the writing craft and also to look at a how to book where it is a jumping off point for a lot of thinking.
So it’s really interesting so far, I’m just digging into it and I thought you might all be interested in that as well. Okay, so now we are going to dive into the interview with Eileen and then we’ll be back at the end to chat about what we heard and see what you thought about it. We’ll see you soon.
Being a full time author
Hey, there everybody. We are here talking with Ms. Eileen Cook, who is a previous guest on the podcast and someone we are familiar with, but we have her back today talking about being a full-time author because there is a new release that you can get your hot little hands on called: Full-Time Author, which is all about making that switch to being a full timer and doing this as a career.
So I think if we could start off Eileen with a bit of a story about how you came to be a full-time author, and when you made that leap.
Eileen Cook: I think it all depends with so many things about, when do you want to start the clock ticking? In terms of being a full-time author has been my goal, my dream, since I was a little kid.
So I was that person going to the library at a very young age and already imagining my book on the shelves and all of those kinds of things. But for a long time, that’s what it was. It was just a dream or a daydream that I was having. And I think what I found, which is what I think a lot of people find is there is very rarely a step into being a full-time author.
It’s like a slow ambling shuffle in that direction. So a little of one step forward and one step back. I knew that I loved writing. So I was fortunate enough to get my first book out and published in 2008. And of course my dream was like, I’ll just quit my job, and I will now do this full time but it didn’t pay me that much, certainly not enough to walk away from my job at that point. So I started looking at how to move towards that and certainly when I tell a lot of people, when I’m asked, when they say, can you make a living as a writer? Is it takes a body of work. So of course, what you want to do is buy the book, have that book sell really well and then hopefully have people be like: My God, she’s brilliant, I have to go buy her other books and then they go back and buy your back list. And then you bring out a new book and they like that book, plus the last book you did plus your previous backlist. And so I started to build a certain amount of income that was coming in from both current books and past books.
But then it was also about spreading out. So I started doing a little bit more writing and coaching with other people. I started to get hired to do teaching, and I’ve continued to teach with the Creative Academy and with Simon Fraser University and so slowly, each of these things came into being each bringing a little portion of income. There was money coming from foreign sales and things like audio books, all of those things came together where it wasn’t a leap to becoming a full-time author. At that point it was, and here I am, a frequent flyer on your podcast. All I ever wanted!
Crystal Hunt: I think there is an interesting conversation to be had around why we called the book Full-Time Author and not Full-Time Writer. Oh, and you’re
Eileen Cook: Oh, and you’re going to have me make that conversation just because it’s her podcast now. She’s like: I just asked the question. I think that was, there was a bunch of different reasons for that.
And part of that was for people to understand that definition of author really encompasses a lot of those different things. So we wanted to make the distinction between just writing for full-time, which could be, for example, writing copy. It could be, writing technical guides and things like that.
We wanted to make the distinction that the focus was being on an author and then from that, there are obviously other things to expand that out, but those are all around, based around the idea of you as a creative person, whether in the fiction or non-fiction field, but building your life and your career about that concept.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah. I think that is really important. As people have this vision of just a writer, someone tucked away in their garret, plunking away on their computer, their typewriter, or their notepad, depending on the era. And that’s what you do, you just write books, but it’s not just that, because that is one part, hopefully a major part of what you’re doing, but even when you get a traditional publishing contract, there’s still an expectation that you will be a bit of a public figure at least that you will help with some promotion, maybe have some social media accounts, like all of these things have to fit into your day.
Eileen Cook: And the business. I have to say I was a full-time proponent of the Garrett idea.
Particularly if I could have that same French, that would have been the fact that I don’t speak French was not a limiting factor. In my fantasy I learned to speak French probably from a very cute French man. But it was this idea that yeah, I would be toiling away, I would, type, I would write the end, I would send it off and magic elves known as my agent and publisher would craft it into a book and put it out in bookstores.
And then the money would just show up and tidy little bricks on their front door. And that’s so far has not come to pass and I’ve realized that there is this whole business side of things, whether that’s, control of my assets, my working relationships with people within publishing, keeping track of funds, keeping track of what rights have been sold, what rights haven’t sold, promotion reader’s engagement.
The idea that, you know, Oh, if I’m writing full-time, I’m getting up not early, cause again, this is our fantasy, so I’m, lounging out of bed in my feather bathrooms at 8:00 AM with a cup of tea and I write for, six hours before I go off and practice my French, with my lover.
That really isn’t the case. There’s a lot of other things, on so many reasons that is not the case, but in particular is because it is a job. And I think that is one of the biggest shifts that I made in my mind. It’s a job that I love. It’s … there is no other job I would rather be doing, than this job.
But it is a job which means I write on days when I don’t necessarily feel creative. There are tasks of the job that I don’t particularly care for and like doing, and some of those I can sometimes farm out. I’m a big fan of bringing in help whenever possible, but there are some things at the end of the day you have to do, because it is your business at this point.
And I think particularly, I don’t know if you want to comment on the shift is I think people embrace that on the indie publishing side. That’s part of what attracts them is this idea of control of the process and I think traditional people were all like, Oh, I’m going to have people for that. So I think people on their traditional side, we sometimes are surprised and there’s sometimes this moment of discouragement of Oh, there’s all these other things and I am going to be expected to be a part of that.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think that is true that for a lot of people your personality and your sort of predisposition to enjoy certain things that are part of that business side or the publishing actual act of doing the things. It is very different. So knowing your own personality and what your skill sets are, is really important when you are deciding, what might be a better fit for you?
And what kind of budgets do you have available? And yes, there are spreadsheets involved in being a full-time author. You can resist all you want, but if you really want to do this, then that is something… the more you’re willing to embrace the parts you don’t love the better as a career overall you’re going to be able to develop things and be moving forward.
And I think you made an interesting point that going full-time as an author it’s not usually precipitated by a single choice or an action. You hear stories about people who are like, I lost my job and I couldn’t find another one and I was desperate and I’d always wanted to be an author so I just did. And Yeah, there’s probably a rough couple of years in there with the establishing things, but we don’t usually recommend if you want to be a full-time author, that you go out and quit everything to leap off the deep end blind. But that you do layer in these other pieces and you work your way towards that, but how do you know when it’s time to actually make that shift, whether it’s in your mind or the language you’re using or the way that you schedule your day, what do you think are some things people should watch for that might indicate they’re ready for that?
When are you ready to be a full time author?
Eileen Cook: Ooh, good question. I think there’s probably…she’s is like, I know that’s why I’m in charge of the podcast.
I think there are a lot of things that kind of help with that. I think part of it is thinking through, and first, just having a clear idea in your head that you have let go of the strictly romantic version of the idea and you’ve let go of the Garrett, you’ve let go of the Frenchman, you let go of all of that in favor of understanding what that would look like. And part of that means, again, depending on your personality type, but I’m going to lean on myself for a minute. All of a sudden the sun came out and I’m like, Oh, is fear around finances. When you have a day job every two weeks, assuming that you show up, they pay you. Writing doesn’t work that way it tends to be in clumps. There may be delays in traditional publishing. It’s not too bad, usually paid monthly, after a two month delay. In traditional publishing, it’s a much bigger delay. You’re typically only paid twice a year out for your royalties and then again, upon signing contracts.
So part of it is really understanding your finances and understanding what you feel comfortable with and whether or not you have a nest egg or a spouse or some other way that you have budgeted it out to feel comfortable with that leap, I think is a big part of what kind of gets you ready for that.
And that you have done the work. I always think of it in the same as just in the same way as if you were buying a franchise to open your own knitting store. My dream come true. My T J knitting star combo, you’d have to research where’s the space? Do I want to have that store? Do I have the funds to get that store up and running? Do I have the business documents I need? Do I have all these things organized? Do I know who I’m going to reach and how I’m going to reach them? And those are the same things that you’re doing as a writer. Have you researched the market? Do you know where your books are gonna land? Do you know how you’re going to build up your readership? How you’re going to reach out to all those people, because you are in essence opening a business. There may not be a new storefront, that’s just your website, but there is in fact, a business that’s being operated. So you want to do as much of that homework beforehand.
So what am I missing? Cause I know you’ll have thoughts on this.
Crystal Hunt: The side of preparation that’s not about the practical stuff, but that’s about the emotional stuff I think is really interesting because for a lot of people, you may not anticipate what it’s going to be like to work by yourself at home.
For the most part, how are you going to deal with building a community or making sure you don’t actually become a hermit in your Garrett, but still have some kind of contact with the outside world.
No disrespect to actual hermits intended, as long as that’s your intention but I think there’s a little bit of a risk to inadvertently become cut off when so much of our social systems and so much of our networks can be built around our occupation or our job setting and, I think the whole world is transitioning a bit on that front right now and everybody’s learning how to work from home and how all these things work. Now, writers have been working from home before it was cool.
Eileen Cook: Yeah, before it was cool,
Crystal Hunt: We have this down for sure, but I think that there are some risks in both the social isolation piece and also in the physical health side.
I know, when I was in hustle mode trying to build up enough of a catalog and other things and enough teaching gigs to make my writerly career pay all the bills it needed to, I was a server and I worked in like nightclubs and restaurants and I would get 20,000 steps a shift without even thinking about it. All you do is walk for eight to 10 hours a day. And then when I wasn’t doing that anymore, and my job was to sit and write things, that has consequences. So you need to start working into your schedule and working into your habits and completely change everything about how your day looks like.
Eileen Cook: Work provides structure, right? Like particularly, there’s a certain time you have to be at work and there’s certain people that you’re working with and relying on. And when you become, working at home by yourself, it’s really easy… Like I can remember for me early on in my kind of full-time career is I had this realization, I don’t think I’ve talked to anybody real in weeks.
And I, I’d had my head down, it was close to a deadline. I was, it’s assisting off take out and Diet Coke and that is not a good place to be. And so for me, part of what learning to be a successful full-time author has been about creating structure. So looking at things that I do on a regular weekly basis, whether that’s things to get me up and moving, but also lunches with friends.
And again, during pandemic times, even if those were online, but just making sure and nothing against my dogs, because they are fabulous conversationalists. But it’s good to have that check in, and also that support because, being a full-time author again, there is nothing else I would rather do, but there certainly is some significant up and down at times.
And so I think it is useful to make sure you have that support system, because I think unlike, maybe not many of my being judgy, but, and unlike at other careers I think writers, we tend to really blur that line between who I am and what I do even more than other people may do becomes, a statement.
If someone doesn’t like your book, it’s about feeling like you yourself have been rejected. And I didn’t have that when I was writing medical legal reports, I got, I didn’t like it if someone didn’t like my works it didn’t feel personal. Whereas writing is a very different sense.
Crystal Hunt: And I’m curious, so when writing does go from a hobby or a side hustle or something that we just love to do on the weekend and evenings and so we do it when it shifts into the day job and you literally need to create stuff or you don’t buy groceries. How did that feel or was that challenging? Did that change your relationship with stories and writing?
Going from hobby to having to pay your bills
Eileen Cook: I think it did. I think you do hear it from a lot of people and I’ve heard it from a lot of agents and editors, the second book struggle. And a lot of that has to do for a lot of people the first book, they may have written it over years. It was their baby. They wrote it on the evenings. They wrote it … they wrote it when the muse called to them and then the second book comes with this deadline, which is: nobody cares if your muse showed up or didn’t show up, you better show up and be in front of that typewriter and turning those pages out. So for me, that was the shift where I started to think of it as: Okay, this is my job and that means that I need to show up, even if I’m not feeling creative, even if the muse isn’t there, that I need to treat it that way.
And I think that is a shift and I think you have to work a little bit harder sometimes as a full-time author to remember the joy. That’s one of the reasons that I love teaching and mentorship and stuff at the Creative Academy, because you see people who are so excited about their story and they want so badly to get it out.
And it reminds me like, Oh yeah, that’s what this is. How fortunate am I, that I’ve had the chance to do that. So it reawakens that excitement for me. And I think it’s important to fill your brain so that new ideas are coming to you all the time. So that’s podcasts and classes and going to the art museum or watching a movie or, reading any of those things to just remember that strangely enough, filling the well is a part of your job. Creativity comes naturally. I do believe that I think every person can be creative, but I think when you have to expend creativity every day, you need to make sure that you are putting some ideas back in your idea box. I see you actually even have an idea box on your, shelf .
Crystal Hunt: Yes, literal idea box.
Eileen Cook: You need to put some ideas. Yeah. So you can lay them, pull them back out.
Crystal Hunt: And in fact, that idea box is full of toys. It is like these, this wooden toy that like you just, if you need something to clear your brain, you can turn it. And it clickety clack all the way down. And there’s one, that’s a kaleidoscope that’s made of wood and you can look at anything in your world with it and it turns that into a kaleidoscope image, which was a present from my mom and bought a million years ago, but I keep it there because I need to look at things in a different way and that’s part of being a writer. So there’s a handful of just fun things like that are actually just playful and silly and interesting and make you look at the world in a different way.
That is one of the benefits of being a full-time author. Is that being creative is an acceptable part of your job description. So I have dr. Zeus wisdom on my shelf and random, silly things in the background that you can see because it, it helps keep a bit of the joy and the fun in those things.
Eileen Cook: And if you’re a writer, people will buy you endless amounts of blank notebooks.
That is the other benefit of being a writer. She ever thought, I wonder if I’ll ever have a blank notebook, just become a writer.
Crystal Hunt: Not to mention said blank notebooks, that one purchases for themselves become business expenses. So there’s a whole side benefits to having this as a career, for sure. I think one of the other things that’s really interesting is, you said, as a self-employed person, as a full-time author, you are going to set your schedule, you are going to decide what your life looks like, you are going to be the only one managing you, you are your own boss. And so maybe it is sharing anything that you either have found challenging or that is challenging for people when they are making that switch from it like a day job scenario with lots of structure to, Oh, I don’t actually have to get out of bed or get out of my pajamas ever if I don’t want, how does that work?
Eileen Cook: The one thing that I have discovered is that because I do have the flexibility that I can change it up. And I do find I go through different modes. So for example, in the summer times, I tend to wake up really early, partly because I don’t have great, as you can tell, curtains to block the light. So my place tends to brighten up quite early in the morning, So I will get up early and get the day going. As winter comes, it tend to sleep a little bit later. And I tend to be a little more creative in the evening. I don’t know if it’s the fires on and the fireplace that suddenly I feel that, whereas again, in the summer, if by evening I want to be on a patio, like it’s a totally different experience.
So one part I think is respecting my own challenges. And one of the things that I really like is to sit down every so often and look at my schedule and figure out if it’s working. So what will help me? And I may end up changing it up but there are some things I’ve consistently found useful, which is I do best when I have a couple of days where I don’t have a bunch of things scheduled that are big, open blocks that can be used for writing can be used for something can get filled in if they need to.
So that means that I’m often trying to squish appointments and other things into a couple of days, maybe earlier in the week, so that I have those done. So other things that afford to turning off things like social media, my phone and various things, like if I need to have a concentrated block where I’m actually freeing my brain to do that. One thing I never thought would work, but I find hardly really does as those writing sprints that we do in the Creative Academy, I thought: Oh, I always get my words and I don’t need to sit down with a bunch of other people in a totally silent room and write. But that sort of accountability and that sort of specified time, it means that I often can sandwich some words in which always feels good.
I try and kind of respect my own body and those kinds of things. So making sure I’m putting in some times to move otherwise I can very get nappy in the afternoon. So I find if I block even just to take my dogs and I can’t use the ‘w’ word because they’re around, I take them for an ambulation say around lunchtime, it recharges me.
So that’s a benefit. So I think there are those things of knowing, is there a particular time that you feel more creative? And so for some people it’s mornings or afternoons, then making sure that time is sacred for your most important, most prioritized work. And then shifting around that.
And then at least for me, the biggest hurdle was understanding that changed because I had set up a schedule where I was like, Mondays, I do this ,Tuesdays. I do, I love nothing like lists Wednesdays. I do this, all these kinds of things and that worked great until it didn’t so understanding that shifts depending on what I’m working on, what’s happening in my personal life has made a huge amount of difference, but it needs checking it.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think that is the ability to shift seasonally or around, if you have a teaching gig that runs for three months and then you don’t, then you are constantly going to be shifting your schedule a little bit. So focusing more on the routines that lead into your writing time, as opposed to, I can only write between these hours or in this set of perfect circumstances, because that is, as we know, very difficult to achieve those perfect circumstances on any kind of regular basis.
So being able to shift and change a little bit, but having some things stay consistent is really important. Speaking of consistency and things shifting and changing, we had talked about income being something that is all over the map, a roller coaster a lot of times, and it is completely impossible to predict, even if you are indie published and you’re getting a consistent income every month from your royalties and you’ve built up a platform and you’ve nailed your ad systems, something changes on one of those ad platforms and suddenly you have 50% less income that month and you were expecting, or, something happens in the world and people just aren’t reading books as much for a few weeks or, whatever that is, maybe your publisher goes under you, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.
And so one of the things I think is a really good practice, if you think you’re ready to go full time as an author, you want to make sure you can make and stick to a budget. And that sounds very basic, but actually for a lot of people, if you’re used to there just always being more money every couple of weeks in that account, you might need to do a little bit of an audit of your finances and look at, okay is there a bunch of stuff I’m subscribed to that would be A distracting me from writing and B, adding to the money I need to make every month.
Like you can do a lot with subtracting from the things that you’re responsible for, in terms of not needing to make as much. And that might mean you could go full-time a little sooner, if that is your passion and you are not loving your day job, then, looking at ways you can reduce the expenditures on your day to day kind of stuff around your own life and what you can minimalize or subtract is a way to escalate the timeline a little bit sooner to be able to get into that kind of stuff.
Eileen Cook: Even speaking for myself, like I went from the traditional house in the burbs, the lawn and all of that to living in a condo and there was a host of reasons for that.
But one of the reasons that actually gave me some amount of real happy is it cut my expenses significantly. So I think if you’re going as a full-time author, knowing where you spend your money so tracking that for a period of time looking at where those things are looking at, what things you could cut if you wanted to, or where if you had to, there are several things I know, okay, if I needed to, I could jettison this expense.
So I choose to have it now because don’t get between me and my Netflix, but if something came up, I could live without Netflix. I could cancel that, I could move on. So knowing where there’s some give and whether or not you want to subtract certain things. So you have more freedom and flexibility.
Crystal Hunt: Excellent. I think one other interesting area as well is around negotiating with the other people in your world. If you are going to make that jump to full-time author and you’re coming from a situation where you were in a day job, for some people they’re like, Oh, you’re home all the time now. So that’s great so you can deal with the deliveries and you can handle the dishes and every kind of interruption suddenly becomes your job because, but you’re home. And so I think maybe any tips for setting some boundaries in both space and, scope creep of your jobs would be super helpful.
Eileen Cook: I think this is really important for people who have a spouse or kids at home where it becomes that idea of yeah, you’re the one who’s at home so you can do those things and I think as much as possible that you can be setting some timelines. if you can go to a separate place in your home, if you can have an office with the door, where you can shut the door and where it is clear that when the door is shut I am at work. I think a lot of people are probably getting some amount of this right now with the pandemic, because you’re finding that you are home. So it is that thing of, yeah, there is the glory of, I can throw a load of washing while I’m working on something and have clean laundry at the end of the day and my page is done. But if I’m also sticking in that I’m going to go to the grocery and I’m going to pick up the dry cleaning and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that.
Then those pages don’t get done. So I think you do have to block off, even if it is just an hour at a time, certain things where it’s like in these times, I cannot be bothered. And then other times maybe I can do some of those extra things and again, a lot of people may make a deal with a spouse where one spouse will become the quote unquote day job runner and in return, the writing spouse will take on more of the things at home, but then you just need to figure out how am I going to schedule these things so that they don’t lose out? Because sometimes you can feel very productive because it’s the kitchen is clean and it’s great. And you might get feedback for people where they’re like, wow, like kitchen looks amazing and you made, B Fergie on and all this other stuff, but was that what you needed to be doing with your day?
Was that your priority? Or could the kitchen be clean enough and something else had happened? So I think it’s about creep. I think when you use that word, that was a really good way of your role can shift without thinking about it. So regular check-ins, as we talked about with schedule with your health, with your job creep, checking in how your relationships are going with the people around you.
You need to do it maybe much more often then, at work we often had a yearly check-in where you meet with your supervisor we kind of advocate, 12 week years. And that for me has ended up being really useful because I usually know what’s coming up in 12 weeks, is just sitting down and being like, did I accomplish what I wanted to in the last 12 weeks? Are my priorities the same? Have they shifted? Are there going to be new demands? Are the kids home, not home? Is it spring? Is it winter? Are people coming to visit, all of those things that let me decide and be the master of my schedule instead of the other way around.
Crystal Hunt: Yes, absolutely. I think maybe one last topic that would be interesting to touch on is just around our approach to our creative projects we can get protective of them and a little precious sometimes. And it does boil down to it being a business and that can be a hard thing to reconcile, but I think if people know themselves, which things that really matter to them, whether it’s how you want your characters depicted on your cover, or, if you know what you’re comfortable with having things adjusted in your book or in your publishing process, makes sense from a marketing perspective and what are you not because you are going to find yourself in situations where you have to make a decision and you’re going to have the fact that you need to be your bills warring against this creative side of yourself.
So what advice, if any, would you have for people who are trying to find that middle ground or manage those pieces?
Eileen Cook: I think there are a few different things that you can do.
One exercise that I have done with clients when I used to be a counselor and, one of the things I do sometimes with my characters is that kind of a values card sort. And you can actually just download them from online and you sort, what values are the most important to very important, somewhat important and not important at all. And of course, then the trick is you have this nice big stack under very important and someone says, you can only pick three.
So that becomes a moment where you’re doing this thing Oh, and you have to really narrow it down. And I think it’s useful to know, what is it that is really important to me so that you can figure out where you want to make those stands, because it’s also sometimes a way of protecting yourself or this can’t go out until it’s perfect and that means it doesn’t have to go out and that means no one has to judge it and nothing’s going to happen with it. So knowing yourself, like, why am I making this fall in the sand? Is it about feeling in control? And I feel out of control if other people are helping, is it around wanting to procrastinate or is this something where it’s no, this is vitally important to me and I need to make a stand.
And if that means something gets delayed, then it’s important enough to do that.
Crystal Hunt: So writers: know thyself. Know where you stand, know what your things are important to you that will keep you being you. I think it’s very hard once money starts being exchanged for creativity, it can be an interesting negotiation process with yourself and will you want to work on that project? There’s contract work, there’s all kinds of different ways to make money from your writing. And so there’s lots of interesting choices to be made along the way that will make it be your journey instead of someone else’s.
Now, we picked this topic because there is a book that we wrote called Full-Time Author and I, where should people get their hands on this fine piece of work?
Eileen Cook: Oh, I’m so glad that you have asked. They certainly can go, to Amazon, they can go to their local book dealer, in terms of any online forum that will be made available to them. And they can always check us out on the Creative Academy website. So we have a nice kind of link of all of our books up on there.
And you can see a little bit more about what they are about, and see if this one or others might be useful to you.
Crystal Hunt: As always, we will put all the links in the show notes for you so that you can, easily find a copy. And, the book is … we are experimenting with wide folks, so the book is available in all of the places online that you could possibly want to buy books.
So we encourage you to support whoever you feel good about supporting. And, we look forward to hearing what you think.
Eileen Cook: I think we’d love to know if people are on their full-time journey, I hope they send us emails and let us know how it’s going and, we’re big believers, there’s always room on the shelf so we want more of you out there. More people to invite to the party!
Post interview discussion
Michele Amitrani: We are back and it’s always great to interview Eileen. She has several different ways to add value and today she did so by relating her experience as a full-time author, it’s been several years now that she has been in this smooth sail phase, even though there is nothing like smooth in the writing world, but there are definitely some things that she said that made me think a lot about this side of the business.
One of the very first thing actually she hinted at that Crystal when she said you have to have a body of work, a backlist, in order to make this really work long-term, and the reason that I’m mentioning this over everything else as the first point that I want to discuss with you is that you will have to realize that your career is made by a different set of steps and your books provide you with those steps.
If you have one or two, you’re not going to go necessarily very far. It can be a best seller. You’re going to be like seven books and you can be, J.K. Rowling, write seven of them and you’re good to go. But in all the other cases, you have to be a bit more authorpreneur as we like to know and think in the long term and realize that every single book brings you closer to your audience in the sense that, people that discover you today, let’s say you Crystal and let’s say they just downloaded Silver Bells okay? But let’s say that this was several years ago and you had just Silver Bells. That was it. You were done. Now, 2020 we’re almost finished this lovely years, if they purchase well, if they download Silver Bells what’s going to happen is that they see a plethora, a number of different works. And if you love that, if they love that they’re going really buy a lot of stuff because your backlist is big. It’s solid you have different works. And I think that’s what Eileen was hinting at, she doesn’t have one or two books. She has several books actually in different genres. More than that, she’s publishing traditionally and self-publishing some of the stuff like books, non-fiction books from the Creative Academy. What this tells me and I don’t know if it tells you something different, is that, first being in this game in the long run it’s not a guarantee to make you or break you, but it’s definitely better than try for one or two years and just releasing a couple of titles and then just abandon it. So thinking long term, diversify your stream of incomes. Again, she’s doing self-publishing and also she’s doing a traditional publishing, but she also loves teaching so that’s, that can be another stream of revenues.
And people that love your newest book have to check also your previous one. That’s why I was hinting at backlist and stuff. People might go through you with, for example, the old MacAlister’s serious, box, right? In that sense they might see, Oh, there’s another book, Oona. What’s this about? Maybe they love that.
And so that’s what I’m trying to hint that you don’t have a book or two, you have several. So I want to ask you, since you spoke with her directly, do you think that when she said backlist do you necessarily need to have a series of books or standalone books also are important for your writing career?
Crystal Hunt: I think it’s always easier to get readers to commit to multiple books in a series because they’re usually attached to the characters of the world or something else already. But Eileen doesn’t write in a series other than the nonfiction, the fiction books for the most part are not in a series.
And so I think you definitely can build a back list, but I know for me, when I find a new author that I really like, I want to go and read everything they’ve written and I’m not saying, Oh, I won’t read it because it’s not a series, but some people just really like those and so it can be a little easier to get that consistency if you do have folks reading the same thing.
So yeah, it’s not an either or I think you can absolutely be successful with either, but you just might find it a little bit easier to get some immediate traction. And you might have a little more read through in a series where people do get really attached, but there’s also the opposite problem, which is series fatigue. So people … often writers carry a series too far, and there’s not enough change where they start to get really repetitive or, everything’s a little bit too much the same, or they run out of ways for their character to change and grow because they’ve gotten so many books in the series, but they don’t really have anywhere else to go.
Then you can get readers opting out because it’s got old or stale or it doesn’t feel so exciting. And as a writer, if you’ve written 15 books in a series, are you still excited about those characters and that world? That’s a key question to ask. I think you can go all the way in either direction, but really somewhere in the middle is nice that you might do some stand-alones as those appeal to you and then you may have some kind of cornerstone series that, keep things going as well. It is, as you said, that’s another form of diversification of having multiple options. I think one of the biggest things is really looking at how well do all the pieces support each other. So it takes a lot of energy to switch gears, switch brains, and to alternate between the teaching and the writing and jumping between non-fiction writing in areas that you teach in, that’s a pretty easy pairing, right? That doesn’t require a shift in the type of thinking you’re doing whereas if you are going from fiction to nonfiction and bouncing around, that is a little bit harder. So I think just being aware that while diversification is good and interesting.
Whether it’s in genre or income stream or wherever with each shift you make, you are increasing the amount of energy and attention that has to be paid and you’re going to have to learn more things to do it well and put in more energy to keep things going and maintain your momentum in each of those areas.
So we’ve talked about before the kicking the soccer ball down the field metaphor, where if you have five balls that you’re trying to kick down the field and you only get five kicks in a day, each one can’t get all that far, but if you have just one ball or two balls, you can make a lot more progress down the field with those same number of kicks.
So keep that in mind, as you’re looking at diversification, there’s a point at which if you go past it, you get diminishing returns actually for having all of that. So a little bit of diversification and the dose of focus in combination is ideal.
Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I also think, the other thing that she mentioned when you’re talking and thinking of yourself as a full-time author and you deserve the title, it’s just not something that happens overnight. It’s just a buildup of things that brings you to that moment. And she relates when she had the first book published, but it was a number of steps it’s not, it wasn’t an overnight success. So I think it’s important for us to also consider full-time business thing. It requires time and we mentioned the word marathon instead of sprint several, times. What I also think it’s important that she mentioned what she was talking about the business side of things is that it’s actually a business. Gone are the days when she thought of this as a muse inspired process that youwrite whenever you want, or you have your glass of wine. I think she mentioned something about a French lover and stuff like that. Just to take the idealized version of it out of the picture. You are in business. And, we liked that concept because we’re talking about strategic authorpreneurs. So there’s the authorpreneur part of it with author.
And that’s because it’s not about full-time writer, it’s about full-time author, which requires a number of different hats that you have be able to wear. You can be a full time copywriter. You can be, and you can definitely do that but if you want to define yourself as an author, there are a number of things that you have to be proficient at.
So she definitely said one of the things she maybe didn’t enjoy the most was for example, learning Amazon ads of Facebook ads and stuff like that. She understand that it’s important. But for example, I’m sure you Crystal, you have more on that side, you know a lot of that stuff because where you come from it’s the indie publishing world. And she, as she mentioned, she comes from the traditional published work, but she sees how good things can be taken from one side and the other side and all to come back to the point that this is a business so you should be able to wear different kinds of hats.
When she talked about, you have to be good at budgeting, there was a lot on our conversation that you had because you don’t get paid the same way as a day job. She was like, you know, if you show up every couple of weeks, you get a paycheck and you can buy food with that, put clothes on your back, shelter, the kind of things we need to survive.
But in the publishing world royalties come in a very different ways and things can change and in a day schedule and a day, actually in a couple of days, even, Amazon ads, maybe the whole platform change and suddenly. 50 or 70% of Royal royalty goes down or maybe it’s different something goes well and for some reason the Amazon algorithm kisses you and your books and they skyrocket and you make thousands of dollars a month. What do you do with that money? You have to be good at budgeting them because they’re going to be rainy days. And so I was very happy that you guys talked about that.
On this same subject, since you are an expert on that Crystal, on the businessy side of things, what do you think would be interesting for our listeners and watchers and viewers, when you have to treat something like writing as a business, and let’s say they don’t see how this is possible, let’s say, they say: I didn’t start all of this because I wanted to being able to fill up an Excel spreadsheet and put numbers in it. That’s not why I started writing. What do you say to these people?
Crystal Hunt: I think there’s a few different ways you can come at that conversation. One is: if you want to make it a business and you want to make a living from it, you don’t really have a choice.
You do need to treat it as a business. The part you have a choice about is how you run that business. There are some business owners who just, they hire a bookkeeper, they hire an accountant and they hire people to do their marketing and promotion for them and that’s fine. If you have the funds for that, if you have the cash and you can say, I don’t want to do those parts, I’m going to pay other people then you can absolutely do that.
I did not come from a background where I had enough ready money just to hire people to do all the pieces from the beginning. I had to learn how to do everything myself or it wasn’t going to happen because there just wasn’t a budget for that kind of thing. And so I think it really is, it’s part of it’s a choice in terms of how you want to approach your business.
I find some of this stuff interesting. And so it is… I’d like to know enough about all the pieces that even if I do choose to hire it out, I know enough about it to hire the right person and to understand if they’re doing a good job and to make sure that I know what questions to ask them to know: are they doing it right? Or are they staying on track with things and do I need to worry about stuff? So I really do think that knowledge is power. You can deny it as much as you want, but it’s going to prevent you from being as successful as you could be if you understood how the business worked.
So we absolutely can choose how much of our time each day and week, and month and year we spend on the business things and that I think is where your power and your creative freedom comes into play is you can do a bit of analysis on your own personality and you can look at what are the parts of it that you really enjoy. What do you maybe not enjoy, but you’re willing to just learn enough about so that you can be effective in your management of those pieces. And so I think, yeah, if you’re in denial about it and you absolutely cannot accept the fact that your writing is a business that’s okay, but maybe it’s better for you to be coming at it as a hobby that you love, or just something that you do for fun and maybe you get the occasional royalty check and that’s okay. But if you are planning to be a full-time author and base your entire career off of it, you’re going to have a really hard time being successful and managing your career over time if you’re just being blind to all of the business aspects of things. I think if you choose not to see them, you’re definitely limiting your potential and how far you can go.
Okay. On that note, we are going to dive into the curious jar while you all think about how you want to approach the businessy stuff.
Are there words you like so much, you just want to jam them into your stories? Are there any words you try to avoid?
All right. The lid is off. I’m going to dig my hand around until Michele tells me to stop.
Michele Amitrani: Now you can stop.
Crystal Hunt: Okay. Orange one today. Our curious jar question this day: Are there words you like so much, you just want to jam them into your stories? Are there any words you try to avoid?
Michele Amitrani: You know, this makes me, I don’t know why the moment you started reading the question I was like, I know what this is about.
I don’t know why it just maybe a fifth sense. I was remembering like somebody asked exactly the same question in an interview with Neil Gaiman. And he came out with: yeah, I don’t like the word ‘moist’. And I was like: Why? I like every single word if they help me give a better, a better experience, to the reader and a better description of what’s happening.
But I get what he says with moist. Like for me, I have nothing against that word, but it’s an author base and word based. So I guess to answer that question, there probably are some… there is actually a couple of words that I’m, I’ve read recently, in a book, that I was like, I need to jam one of these in one of my story ASAP, because this word is great.
It was the word ‘suggestion’, but used in a very different way. The book was Red Sister by Mark Lawrence and he was using it as to describe a place. So he would say something like, and I really hope I’m not misunderstanding the thing, but he would say: There is an iron sky with a suggestion of blue, something like that. Then it was like, this is a really great way to use the word suggestion in a description. So I was like, I need to use suggestion in some way. But, I didn’t actually accomplish that yet. So definitely ‘suggestion’, used for describing something or someone will be nice.
That would be the word that I now have stuck in my mind. I can’t think of anything else. I can just think of Neil Gaiman interview, his answer ‘most’ and then ‘suggestion’ from Mark Lawrence and I pass the word to you Crystal Let’s see if you can come up with better stories than me.
Crystal Hunt: I really like interesting words. So on my computer, my screensaver is the one that comes up with strange and unusual words and their definitions. And so I have them running on my screen all the time and every now and then something will pop up and I’ll be like, Oh, that I totally need to figure out how to work that into either a class or conversation or a story. Zero examples of exactly what they are come to mind, but, But there’s lots of like words that feel like what they mean I really love like luminescence is, phosphorescence like they glow when they feel very bright and shiny and magical. And I like words like that. I also really made up words. Those make me happy, where an author has been able to be so convincing in their world building and they’ve made up a word and it becomes a real thing.
Dennis Fown, I believe made up a word that he wanted to replace the swear words in his books because he writes for teenagers and he didn’t want to get banned and so he made up this word and it was a stand in for swear words. And he did it so convincingly that there was a couple of school districts that actually banned his books because of the swearing, but he didn’t even use any swear words.
And so he said that was a major creative victory for him because he was able to be so convincing in his invented language that this fake word became enough of a convincing swear word to get him banned. So I thought that was very cool. I am with the no moist, moist is not a good word and I write romance so that’s just not a thing. There is a whole abundance of terms that I never want to see in books in a romance contexts.
I am not going to list them all here, but I’m sure that anyone who has ever read, especially older romance novels, you have all of these total euphemisms for sex and different things, and it’s just horrendous to read.
So I’m going to go ahead and spare you all the ear worms of those, and trust that you can make your own list of the words you do not want to hear in books. If you do have any particularly good words or horrible words that you feel you need to pass along for us for torture his purposes, then absolutely you can email us at ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com. Or if you’re watching on YouTube, you can drop in the comments or leave us a comment wherever you’re listening to this and let us know your favorite and least favorite words that you would like to work into things.
Michele Amitrani: Also if any of the things that we mentioned in this episode books, or any of the people that we actually mentioned interested you, for the show notes and the links to all the resources that we mentioned, and also for coupons and discount on the tools we use and love, you can visit us@strategicauthorpreneur.com as always and make sure you see now, for our just one thing weekly email, where we make sure to send you at least one thing that can be used for your authorpreneur journey.
Crystal Hunt: We are going to dive next week into talking about what you do with the manuscripts that you may have created during NaNoWriMo. So the end of November marks the end of national novel writing month, and that means millions more people will have a completed manuscript or completed in quotations because they’re usually not quite done by the time you blast out that first draft.
So we’re going to dig into what you do next and how you can tackle that. And we will look forward to seeing you then, so make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out on that next episode.
Michele Amitrani: Bye guys, we will see you next week.
Crystal Hunt: Bye.