A warning for my fellow pedants out there; I’m going to be using “Large Language Models” (LLMs) and “AI” how they’re being used colloquially, which is to say almost interchangeably. I know there are differences and that what is being referred to as “AI” in many of the cases I’m about to discuss are actually LLMs.

Also, if you are imperiously anti-AI, someone who would never ever EVER use it for anything at all, good. I get it. I’m mostly on your side, but please take your foot slightly off the gas for the sake of this conversation. And if you can tell what real-life incident I’m about to fictionalize—in the most charitable way I can—please put your favorite hot take about the author aside too.

Because what I want to do here is zoom out and look at a publishing situation we’re increasingly confronting, whether we want to or not.

We cool? Good.

Let’s start with a visualization.

Imagine that you are a writer and an outsider when it comes to the literary world. Not that hard to imagine probably, is it? You’ve got more ambition than you have money, but you’ve heard there’s money in self-publishing. And what writer hasn’t dreamed of blowing up, at least once?

Imagine you come up with an idea that you think is pretty frickin cool. You create a plot; you create a concept of your main character and what they’re going to go through. But like most people, you’re overworked and overtired, and let’s face it—writing is hard.

Imagine that you’re hearing from all sides that AI is inevitable, and if you don’t use it, you’re leaving money on the table. You’re gonna get left behind. That’s probably not that hard to imagine either, is it? Most people you know use ChatGPT; some constantly. You’ve heard that some indie authors are using LLM “assistance”, and some are even making big money generating entire books.

Imagine that at first you use an LLM to brainstorm. Even indie authors who say it’s wrong to use it to fully write your books say brainstorming with them is okay. Then you start using it to help you finish sentences when you’re stuck. And then it’s just kind of a natural progression to paragraphs, then pages. The technology makes it easy, the programs keep asking you if you want more help, and hell if you’re not going to take it. You justify it to yourself by saying that these are your original ideas, and coming up with prompts is a skill on its own? And it’s not like Amazon forbids you from putting books with AI content up there. They just ask you to check a little box and take your word for it.

I know I’m losing some of you by now, but please stick with me a little bit longer.

Imagine that you feel a twinge of discomfort when you see people get called out for using AI on Instagram or TikTok. But you’ve also gotten the message that lots of readers don’t really care. They’re just hungry for more content than normal writers can keep up with on their own. They bug authors about when they’re going to put out a new book. They get bored and forget about the ones who don’t produce at a pace that suits them.

Imagine you finish your book. You’re not made of money. And more and more indie authors say that, with stuff like ProWritingAid and Grammarly around, you don’t really have to pay for editing anymore. Why do editors charge so much anyway if the software can just fix all your spelling and grammar mistakes? Sounds like a scam.

Imagine you post the book, and it goes viral on TikTok. Now you’re making money, just like you were hoping you would. Sure, there are a few reviews that say your book seems like AI slop, some on Goodreads and across social media platforms. But you let it slide because overall things are going pretty well.

Now, imagine another one of your biggest dreams comes true—one of the big five publishers sees how well your book is selling and offers you a publishing deal. You’ve been chosen. You’re one of the special ones. You’ve got what every writer wants.

Imagine the company offers you a contract and tells you they’re going to give your book a new cover, a professional edit, and marketing and sales support. You are now a known author with a highly anticipated release, and you are surrounded by high profile gatekeepers and influencers singing your praises.

And imagine that, while you’re drowning in all those adulations, a reporter at one of the biggest publications in the world notices the AI allegations on Goodreads and starts digging. Then, they release an article naming you and claiming your book is written by AI.

Imagine that the internet runs with it. Some guy with an AI detection tool runs your book through it and the numbers are damning. Reviewers who suspected you are now getting thousands and thousands of hits on their accounts and channels.

What do you think your doting publisher is going to do next? Do you think they’re going to come out and defend you? Do you think they’re going to ask for proof, then send that proof to that huge publication that just outed you to clear your name?

Nope. You’re going right under that bus, kiddo, without even a chance to defend yourself. You’re just a number on a profit-and-loss statement to them, and guess what happens to that profit-and-loss statement if one of the world’s most-read publications pans your book? Nothing that benefits you.

Instead, congratulations. You effed around and unfortunately for you, you got to be the one who found out in the most high-profile way possible. You and your book are now a capsule in tech and media history, leading up to the place where the past and the uncertain future converge, where we’re on the verge of not being able to tell what’s human and what isn’t anymore.

A beacon of the book publishing singularity, maybe?

Nah. It’s much more boring than that.

So, What Are “The Rules” Exactly?

With self-publishing, particularly on Amazon KDP, it’s a stretch to even call AI policies “rules.” Some self-published authors are publicly flaunting their AI generated books, claiming they’re “winning the race” and making six figures by churning out more books than a human could ever write on their own. I’ll link a Reddit thread that challenges the claim that these authors make that much money, but regardless, people are free to post AI generated work on Amazon, and some readers don’t mind.

I haven’t personally talked to any fiction readers who don’t mind a fully AI-generated book, but there have to be a few. And the more the LLMs train on our work, it gets harder and harder to tell.

The actual Amazon guidelines were first posted in 2023, at the urging of the Authors Guild. In short, they make it mandatory for authors and publishers to disclose whether text or images in a book are AI-generated.

Here’s what the site says:
We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content. We distinguish between AI-generated and AI-assisted content as follows:

• AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered “AI-generated,” even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.
  
• AI-assisted: If you created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether text or images), then it is considered “AI-assisted” and not “AI-generated.” Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text or images yourself, this is also considered “AI-assisted” and not “AI-generated.” It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes.

How do they know? When the author is uploading a book to KDP, they check “yes” or “no.” That’s it.

Interesting to note: In the Bookbub AI author’s survey that came out last year, 74% of authors don’t disclose their AI usage to readers. Granted, that number includes people whose work is “AI-assisted”, but I thought it was worth mentioning because almost all of this is based on self disclosure. Almost all of this is based on the honor system.

We have AI checkers, but the consensus is they’re not super reliable, or they at least wildly vary in their reliability. There isn’t a lot of trust there yet, and where there is a lot of trust, there are also a lot of false positives and a lot of tears. As LLMs are trained on more and more of our human writing, it’s going to get harder and harder to “tell” and the standards for what those “tells” are will change.

(Side note: speaking of “you can always tell”, I’m making an effort to never link to the trans-panic stoking New York Times in my show notes. However, the sources I am linking will eventually take you to the site if you don’t feel like I didn’t already give you enough information.)

The Authors Guild is trying to put together a “Human Authored” Certification, but even they don’t trust AI detectors to give accurate results. And accusing people of AI use when it isn’t true isn’t a small thing. So at this point, they’re stuck using the honor system too.

And man, do we live in a world of dishonor right now.

Traditional Pub’s AI Stances (Or Lack Thereof)

So far, traditional publishing’s position on AI use is murky, but the big companies can’t really be said to be anti-AI wholesale. Many are using it for things like metadata and marketing copy generation, but not specifically book content. If it weren’t for the environmental concerns I have, and the way execs are overestimating how many staff they can cut based on these capabilities, I’d be a little more open-minded about it. In the way it’s currently deployed, I still raise an eyebrow (or two).

But there’s that common AI booster line that really sticks a CEO’s craw—especially one who is hired from a different industry. That is: without AI adoption, you will be left behind. Trad publishing already feels left behind, and in many ways, they are. They aren’t tastemakers anymore, and they haven’t been for years, some might argue decades. They wait for trends to surface and take off on their own before making moves. And those trends move so fast that the months-long publishing schedule makes them antsy.

Getting even further behind seems like a catastrophe.

In 2023, HarperCollins was the first company to make a licensing deal with an unnamed AI company to train large language models on their books. For a little more context: Newscorp owns HarperCollins. If you’re wondering why that rings a bell, they also own Fox News, which obviously hasn’t been doing all that they’ve been doing for the past quarter century for the money. Wink.

The unnamed AI company is offering a one time payment of $5,000 per book, which gets split in half between the author and HarperCollins. It’s supposed to be a compromise, because AI companies have already proven that they’re willing to train their models on books they haven’t paid for. Some might go as far as calling them “stolen”—see the Bartz vs. Anthropic settlement.

For now, fiction readers and authors are, on the whole, more likely to be extremely anti-AI. I’ve referred to the Bookbub and Gotham Ghostwriter reports on writer’s use of AI in past episodes, but the data supports the gulf between genres. For copywriters, ghostwriters, nonfiction authors, and the like, there’s a lot less hesitation to use AI tools although actually generating text still isn’t at the top of the list for most.

If you read through the comments from fiction writers, however, there is a much stronger stance being taken for all uses across the board. There’s more of an “I’d rather die” and “this is the death knell for art and humanity” trend in those comments. 

So while nonfiction books—more precisely, self-published nonfiction books—might have more wiggle room when it comes to LLM usage, fiction readers are less forgiving. And I think that’s reflected on social media, too, particularly Instagram Threads.

So when a massive company like, say, Hachette takes a stand against AI use in their books, it’s likely a marketing tactic based on which way the wind is blowing. It’s certainly not an objection to the technology itself, and not something I expect to stay rigid. Business decisions on the part of big publishers may morph over the years—and since traditional companies are increasingly late adopters—I’d say we can look to self-published work to see how things are trending.

But as of now, people who read traditionally published fiction seem solidly against their books being generated by AI, and that’s what publishing companies seem to be deferring to for now.

What Can Happen in the Handover

I used to tell authors it was very unlikely that their previously self-published book would be picked up by a traditional publisher. Their book was already out, and since the author is expected to do most of the marketing and publicity themselves, it would be a reasonable assumption that they would have already sold all they could.

But that standard is shifting. In 2024, 49 deals handed over the rights of previously self-published books to trad publishers. Last year, in 2025, that number jumped to 93. It’s still not a ton, but it’s not nothing either. 

(Also, nonfiction writers, please take note: the acquired self-pubbed books were predominantly romance and other genre fiction titles.)

My first impulse regarding AI generated fiction is to say…what’s the point? Can’t we enjoy creating something for the sake of creating something? But I’ve kind of answered my own question there. Because we use AI for things we don’t want to do ourselves, and when I see people letting generative AI write things for them, it tells me the person creating the prompts didn’t actually want to write it—or at least that they’d  rather be doing something else.

 And that only confirms my suspicion that nobody wants to be making LinkedIn posts because, oh my god, the trash. THE TRASH.

When art becomes a commodity, the joy of creation barely matters—but that’s been true since publishing began. But it’s also true that many people who get into publishing sincerely love literature and creativity and originality, and these people feel a level of responsibility for the culture into which these books enter and the effects these books have on said culture. But a lot of the people who care aren’t the ones making the highest-level calls. And they tend to be overworked, underpaid, and viewed as expendable.

The scale between these positions—and I’m talking about the commodification versus the purveyance of art—is increasingly out of balance, and when books become “content” and all content is in competition, profits win. A big part of the allure of picking up a self-published book is that it’s expected to be cheaper. It’s seen as a sure thing: there’s proof of sales and a pricey chunk of production has already been done.

In one of the articles I’ll link that directly addresses the event that inspired this episode, AI in publishing expert Thad McIlroy says, “The main reason a publisher acquires rights to a self-published book is all the online chatter (and the accompanying sales activity).”

Incidentally, Thad’s view on the recent statement from Hachette on AI-generated work is that it will only encourage authors to lie about their AI usage. While he leans a little more toward the “this is inevitable” view of LLMs than I’m comfortable with, I do think that’s a valid point—especially if past behavior is an indicator of how companies will behave in the future. If you prioritize easy-to-acquire content, and you want it fast, and you’re willing to gloss over quality control and due diligence, these things are going to fly under the radar more often, especially as the technology advances.

If the book is a product, and the prototype has been tested already, it’s easy to see as something that can be repackaged on autopilot. The precious time that editors are allowed to spend digging into a book is budgeted elsewhere. And the honor system is the only thing you can rely on to keep to your professed standard.

But as we’ve seen recently, being found out for breaking those standards, or even being suspected of breaking them, can cost you a lot.

Learning the Rules the Hard Way

When an author moves from one set of publishing conventions to a completely different one, things will get lost in translation. Typically, this is what agents are for. Self-published authors have leverage in a way they didn’t use to; whereas publishers once wanted all the rights—audio, print, ebooks, etc.,—they’re more content just to settle for print. But just because they’ve relaxed their grip doesn’t mean a self-published author isn’t at risk when they sign.

I don’t really know what the agent situation has been for these cross-over authors. But if you are a self-published author, and a major publishing company tells you that “You don’t need an agent”—proceed with caution. A small press might have the time to dedicate to educating you, checking your writing for red flags, and helping you understand what is and isn’t going to fly. But the bigger the company you’re working with, the less you can be confident that they’re looking out for you. Your editor might be an angel, but they’re not always the person making the business decisions. They might not even be the ones reviewing your book.

An agent is there to help you navigate the rules, and even if querying is hard, if you’ve already got a deal on the table, you have a better chance of getting the help you need. They might seem like an unnecessary middleman, but people who work at publishing companies are swamped. Again: self-published books are acquired with the assumption that production will save them money. You need to advocate for yourself, or have someone to advocate for you, even if people think you’re annoying.

But…if you have indeed used generative AI and are afraid to disclose that to a publisher, it sounds like your conscience is already telling you what you should do. If you know the risk you’re taking, you have to be ready for it to blow up in your face.

Normally, it irritates me to see people default to calling everything they don’t like AI. Like a lot. It’s tedious as hell, and can be incredibly damaging to authors, even if you can prove they’re false accusations. But there is a small but loud group of readers who have made it their personal mission to interrogate authors whose work they find suspicious; well, not so much interrogate as make the most sanctimonious callout posts you’ve ever seen in your life.

A lot of writers are hurt in the process, most of all people who aren’t doing it. And often, it just makes the accuser look like this is the first time they’ve ever read a book. Like, buddy, we’re the ones who taught the machines how to do that, and not everyone has a voice distinct enough to dazzle your free online AI-checker. If you’re accusing someone, you need stronger arguments than em-dashes and the rule of threes, or, worst of all, having a vocabulary greater than ten thousand words. 

But if you’re a writer concerned about these types of accusations, I’m not sure what else to recommend other than keeping a record of your draft history. Or, if you’re brave, you can just tell your accusers to fuck off and see what happens, I guess. Because chances are if someone is to the point of saying something publicly, you’re already getting, uuuuh…left behind.

By the way, that bit about telling them to fuck off isn’t a recommendation. If you decide to do it, I take no responsibility for the results.

If you want a comprehensive and thoughtful guide to AI and copyright protection, I’m linking to another one of Jane Friedman’s posts. She’s a lot more thorough and equanimous than I am.

Implications and Alternatives

To me, a lot of our conundrum about AI use comes down to a lack of imagination. This whole cultural shift to AI is making what we talk about and how we talk about it more homogenous. And I mean all of us—including people who have already completely sworn off LLMs. The parroting we see from LLMs is throwing the slop that humans have created back in our faces.

We were churning out rapid release books before this all started, with little concern for quality. We were all mimicking each other’s marketing speak and boss-babe hustle culture talking points and conspiratorial political rhetoric. I don’t want to be too judgmental of people (including myself) who are trying to survive the only way we can in the world as it is: by scrapping to make money.

Most of the glamor of being a starving artist is gone—if not all of it. All the same, when all our language and technology centers on short-term money makers, we’re surrendering to the idea that human creation is only worth what the highest number of people will pay for it.

The inevitable result of a focus on commodity over quality is this: that books are made by machines. That whatever costs less for the corporations  to produce will be lifted up over things made by human minds that aren’t the “sure thing.” And until the machines start unionizing, they’re going to seem like a much better deal than paying fallible human beings. 

Although, by the time the machines start unionizing, things are going to look a lot different than they do now—one way or another.

But many people who still love reading love it because of its power to connect us, to advance human thought and invention. In a way, that’s what futurists and tech optimists are hoping would come from AI as well. And in some cases it does (though not really any that have to do with generating words). But focusing on what maximizes profits in the short term restricts the use of both books and new technologies to something that keeps us stuck. It makes it easier for publishing companies to take safe bets on regurgitating words concocted by the internet’s various garbage patches.

When everyone is using generative AI to express themselves, the information available becomes recycled until it’s sucked dry as a ball of lint. When every learning source is lumped together into a single model, the answers you get to your questions are about as reliable as a source-free Facebook post. When everything is a copy of a copy of a copy, who are we supporting in the development and preservation of new knowledge? Who is doing the thinking and research to create more to feed the machine?

Now, I’ll say “fuck generative AI” and “fuck data centers” all day long in the spirit of what most people mean when they say it. In fact, I’ll wear a t-shirt that says it. But what I really mean is fuck AI in its current form. 

It does not have to be like this.

The more I look into AI technology as a whole, and even language models, the more I mourn what could be. We could have it so good. We could have data centers that integrate with our ecosystem instead of draining communities of their resources and pillaging the global south. We could have contained language models that help revive dying languages and preserve culture and history and work in tandem with researchers instead of gutting universities and sealing even more knowledge from people who could use it for good.

We could have so much more than a place to offload our thinking and substitute for actual human friends. More than something to write the LinkedIn posts we hate or give us bad advice repurposed from some doofus on a defunct forum post. More than “writing” mediocre books that give us a little bit of money and no emotional satisfaction.

But those opportunities don’t come when everything is mass-produced just for a consumer market and all the information is lumped into a single source that poops back and forth forever. It comes from smaller, more well-curated, cared for, and intentionally built systems. 

(Yes, this is me back on my decentralization bullshit.)

You can say “there’s nothing new under the sun”, but are you sure? Have you been looking? Have you tried? Have you wondered what could happen if we stop looking at everything as products and stopped looking at every new technology as just another way to sell products?

I don’t know how we can get to something better, but I do know we can’t get there without wondering or without seeking it out. And that’s less about bitching and moaning than it is about educating ourselves, challenging structures, and conceiving of new ones.

I’ve got a lot of links and sources in the essay version of this podcast on my website: hybridpubscout.com, and some of them are also in the show notes on your favorite podcast platform. Also, there are a couple of books I’ve added to the HPS Bookshop.org shop: Empire of AI by Karen Hao and The AI Con by Prof. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna. And yes, those are affiliate links. So far I’ve only read the first one, but I’ve ordered the second, and Professor Bender is one of the authors of the famous paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots that Google tried to suppress when it was first published.

If you have thoughts, you can email me at emily@hybridpubscout.com, find me on LinkedIn as Em Einolander, or follow me on Bluesky @emilyeino. 

The post Episode 88: What’s the Point? first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 88: What’s the Point? appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

I’m just going to be honest with y’all—I’m overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the world of publishing and providing a resource for authors, but everything is moving so quickly that it’s easy to feel left behind when my goal is to stay on top of things. So I feel that today, it’d be good to get back to basics. Let’s talk about a return to reading.

Yeah, remember reading? If I’m not mistaken, that’s what we’re all doing here, or at least why we started.

My suspicion is that even those of us who are reading aren’t reading the way we want to, with as much gusto and immersion as we know we’re capable of (or wonder whether we’re still capable of).

Recently, I celebrated my 39th birthday, and there’s something about facing down the final year of my 30s that’s making reflective about what I’m putting in my brain. When I turn forty, what will I have learned? Whose voices will I have listened to? How have I participated in the world in the context of my vocation and hobbies, most of which have books at their core?

And I’m not just talking about eating my psychological vegetables; I don’t regret the horror and romance that I’ve made part of my reading life in the slightest. But I want to incorporate more media—books and other written words in particular—that’s substantial, memorable, and enhance my life in a way that just accepting whatever the algorithm serves me can’t.

And sure, these reflections come from the fact that I’m aging, but also because of how underwhelmed I feel about my reading habits for the past few years. There are some real winners on my “read” list, but I’ve occasionally noticed myself shying away from things I know would be thought-provoking and maybe even life changing.

And I’ve been asking myself—why is that?

There’s a tendency to become protective of our minds in a way that’s fear-based rather than simply selective. Just look at the types of books that get banned: there’s a literal panic around subject matter that people find threatening. But as much as I try to be open-minded, something in my head is more resistant than ever to things that are too novel (if you’ll pardon the pun).

2020 set a precedent where we read so much less than usual—even though supposedly we had more time to. I mostly I just scrolled while waiting to see whatever the next disaster was. And even though I’ve picked up the pace since then, I think that year put me in a habit of resistance to reading more challenging subject matter.

It’s a little embarrassing, but I’ve uncovered a need for psychological safety in myself that I didn’t have before. It’s easy to watch low impact shows and movies and stick to predictable, tropetastic stories. Don’t get me wrong, I love romance, but it’s also a genre for people who want to know exactly what to expect, and I can admit to myself that’s a big part of why I read it.

Predictability, staying cocooned in my comfort zone takes a lot of magic out of literature and life.

Call it complacency or emotional overload, or even collective trauma, but I think things like last year’s drop in nonfiction sales shows that I’m in line with overall trends. The challenge of sitting down and learning something new is a lot for people to take. Educating ourselves with books is essential for people to seek justice and learn from history, and to sharpen critical thinking, but in moments like these, it can seem like either not enough or too much.

And for me, the last couple of years have been pretty cognitively challenging in another way.

Specifically, and I mentioned this in my first newsletter back a couple of months ago, I had a debilitating chronic migraine situation. And around the same time, I had to adjust to a few other health-related issues that took up a lot of my emotional and mental bandwidth. And yeah, I read, but the brain fog that comes with the type of issues I was having can make you feel like everything is just flowing through your brain and out again like water through gravel.

But now my health challenges seem to be in more of a maintenance mode, and I’m waking up on the edge of middle age with this urgency to make all the time I spend with a clear head count for something. It feels kind of like crawling out of a swamp, covered in mud and half-hyperventilating, and having someone walk up and say, “Oh good, you’re back. Here’s your to-do list.”

So between now and my 40th birthday next year, my goal is to take a more thoughtful, more carefully engaged approach to the books, stories, and articles I read. I want to read poetry and pick up classic novels I’ve been putting off.

And if you’ve stuck around to listen to me ramble this long, it might be because you’re interested in doing something similar.

If you’ve been a reader for a long time and have experienced the kind of fatigue I’ve been describing—and I know for a fact that there are a lot of people who either write books or interact with them in some way—you might relate to the idea of wanting to renew, refresh, and show courage in your relationship with reading.

I want to challenge myself again, and I’m hoping you’ll join me, both to keep our brains from melting and to hopefully uncover inspiration and knowledge we can use to make a positive impact on the world. Because even if it feels like it’s ending, we’re not dead yet.

Skimming Kills Your Soul

The volume of information we face daily is insurmountable. It’s like trying to squeeze thousands of people through a single doorway or trying to drink the ocean with a straw.

One study from UC San Diego determined that the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes of information across our various devices every day, the equivalent of about 100,000 or a solid, medium-large fiction book. And the wildest part is that study came out in the 2010s.

So we can’t give our full attention to every single thing that comes across our path—our tiny brains cannot process it. As an adaptation to most of our reading now being done online, we’ve all learned to skim. Our vision zigzags from the top of the page to the bottom (the headline, intro, and conclusion) then does a side-to-side sweep for points of context. Then we might go back through the text to search for details to the degree that we think we might need them.

It’s not the most effective way to take in a long form story or article, but definitely a more realistic way to approach a world with too many units of information constantly vying for our attention.

But sometimes it’s even less comprehensive than that. And this is where I’m going to get judgy.

I’ve seen trends where people skim-read books, in that they skip paragraphs or pages entirely if they’re deemed too long or text-heavy; they’ll look for lines of dialogue or keywords. Some people aren’t even bothering to read more than AI summaries (they really really want you to read their summaries by the way—I mean, that PDF looks long, do you want me to summarize it?) And no, this isn’t TikTok panic, I’ve heard it in person.

And I’m not on TikTok. Fuck TikTok.

Anyway, this haunts me. I lose sleep over it.

If that sounds mean, so be it. But I’ve encountered people both on and offline who identify as book lovers, but are almost solely skim readers. Most seem a little sheepish or frustrated about it, which is relatable. It’s hard to overhaul the way you read from one format to another, and our brains are now all accustomed to a world that is constantly spewing garbage at us.

But others proudly admit to it and get annoyed when books don’t accommodate their shallow reading style.

“There are too many words. Why do these authors expect me to read all that? I only read dialogue.”

And that’s when I turn into the joker. Rage bait taken. I’m flopping around on the bottom of the boat, waiting for the club to put me out of my misery. But who cares if I’m mad about it, right? Who am I to tell people how to spend their free time?

Here’s my appeal—for your own benefit as a reader.

If you’re a writer, hopefully you’re able to recognize what people are giving you when they read your book. You’re making a bid for them to spend hours of the only life they have on what you’ve created. It’s not a small thing for either of you: writer or reader. And when they make that choice, you want it to be worth it for them, right?

Now, I’ll turn that around and say that, as a reader, you probably want the books you pick up to matter, right? So why stay on the surface? Don’t you want more?

The Value of Deep Reading

Here’s what I’m not going to do today: I’m not going to define what a “good book” is. Everyone has a different concept of what is challenging and what is enjoyable, and whether a book is “good” or “bad” is immaterial to this conversation.

This is more about the way in which we read. It’s a case for reading deeply and with full concentration. It’s a plea for us to do our best to rebuild or strengthen our ability to concentrate on a book, even though the way most of us have been rewired can make it kind of a slog.

If we’re just talking about retraining that connection between your eyeballs and your comprehension, you can read any kind of book deeply. Hell, you can read fanfiction deeply. You can also read philosophy or the classics shallowly. And if you’re still at the beginning stages of getting your reading mojo back, maybe something snootier people might consider “lowbrow” is the on-ramp you need to get back into it. Only you can be the judge of whether that’s leading you in the direction you want to go.

Quality reading requires you to concentrate on something for more than a few seconds, or even minutes, at a time without getting distracted. It requires you to read a full page instead of skimming the first and last lines of each paragraph. It opens you up to new sentence structures and words and concepts you may never have heard before, and when you take note of these things, that’s when the enrichment begins.

(And don’t get me started on how fantastic that is for you if you’re a writer.)

That high-quality attention has been one of the major barriers holding us back from engaging with books in the way we used to. The way we still want to. What fun is a long fantasy novel if you have to remind yourself what’s happening every five minutes because you keep looking at your phone.

(And don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely preaching to myself here.)

There’s another complicating factor for people whose jobs are tied up in books. As publishing people—editors, writers, book reviewers, and even booksellers—we can get fatigued incredibly easy with the expectations placed on us. And we can find ourselves more focused on volume over weight. That’s not a moral failing; we’re responding to our environment and the pressures placed on us to stay in the loop.

And especially if we’re editing, we are doing something resembling a deep read. A different, harder, more draining version of it, in fact.

Maybe you’ve been asked to write blurbs. Or you have to beta an upcoming book for a friend. You just need enough information from that nonfiction book to write a press release or pitch letter, or you just have to get the gist of a huge stack of romance books so you can make an Instagram image carousel. And maybe you’re a writer who is just struggling so hard to get enough words on a page that putting more words into your brain seems insurmountable.

And maybe you’re just exhausted, fried by too much information.

But reading—deep, focused reading—contextualizes things that are happening to you and around you, so you can see patterns of history and social and environmental phenomena. It arms you with information that will help you move forward, even when that might seem impossible. It helps you empathize with others and understand points of view you haven’t considered before. And any genre, fiction or nonfiction, can help fill those gaps.

Reading can be more than just an escape hatch from a terrifying world or something you do to keep your place in a community. It’s not just lip service to say that it’s one of the most profound things you can do with your time.

Reading and Your Brain

Recently, I read a book called Reader Come Home by neuroscientist and literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf. She also wrote a book you may have heard of called Proust and the Squid. That’s the one that made her well known as a researcher of reading and the brain.

Wolf quotes neuroscientist David Eagleman, who said that “There are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are in the Milky Way galaxy.” And she goes on to describe how each of those constellations that form in our brains are different for every person on earth.

When you give all your focus to reading, you blast that old aphorism about only using ten percent of your brain to bits. Reading combines the parts of your brain that control language, vision, motor skills, cognition. It calls on us to access background knowledge we have about different subjects—knowing the definitions of words, geography, history, lore, or whatever.

And here’s what makes reading so important if you want to be a positive force in the world: you gain the type of understanding that makes what you find in books comprehensible…from other books. For every book you read, you increase your chances of getting even more out of the next one.

The less background knowledge you have, the harder it is to engage with a book. And unfortunately, the harder it is to engage with a book, the less you’ll feel like reading, and the less background knowledge you’ll accumulate.

Part of what made it hard to read as a kid, at least for me, was the fact that I had so little knowledge of the world. But it’s also one of the few ways to gain—and especially remember—that background knowledge.

And that so-called empathy we supposedly gain when we read fiction? That value comes from giving the characters our full attention and truly inhabiting their worlds. We don’t get it from just floating on the surface of a story.

This is part of why I’m saying start easy and with things you enjoy. But pay attention, because the more clues you gather, the better your experience gets.

The Pleasure of Reading Diversely

If you do want to read more books that challenge you, you need to be able to associate books with feeling good. That could mean hedonic pleasure, meaning it’s enjoyable while you’re doing it, or eudemonic, the pleasure you feel after having accomplished something. Pretending you can develop a reading habit without some type of emotional reward is self-deluding.

Remember that reading can be about what you want to learn, not just keeping up with everyone else is into. One estimate puts the number of books in the world at 158,464,880. You can find a book on basically anything you’re curious about.

To get super Reading Rainbow about it, there is an entire world of books out there. Even if you, like me, can’t get out and see the regular world as much as other people might be able to, whether that’s because of money or disability or whatever else—you have windows to the rest of existence. And reading diversely is what will help reading carry you to new places you might not visit otherwise.

When we talk about diverse books, your mind might go to movements like “Own Voices” or “We Need Diverse Books”—this ongoing effort to publish more books from people of all races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and sexualities. But I’ve noticed that if someone says I should read books featuring “Diversity of Thought”, I hear it as a euphemism for “read an inflammatory money-grab by a Fox News pundit.”

But honestly? Reading diversely is a win for everyone, and it’s easier than you think. Unless you’re reading only things in one genre, from one pool of authors who all follow each other on Instagram, your instincts are probably already leading you in that direction.

So just start reading about stuff that you’re curious about—any expert who writes a nonfiction book will have different thoughts than you have. Read something in translation from a different country. They will explore things that aren’t even on your radar. And yeah, definitely read books from people of different races, genders, and sexualities—even if you have similar values, your opinions are never going to perfectly align.

Fear of being challenged by something new keeps so many of us stuck in reading ruts. If you want to move forward, you’re going to have to rip that bandaid off.

And read books from twenty, thirty, fifty, one-hundred or more years ago! There is absolutely no way someone writing back then is going to use the same terminology or look at things from the same perspective as you do.

And if they do? I don’t know. I guess get back in that time machine before you kill us all.

Find an Approach that Works for You

As for format, different things do happen in your brain when you’re listening versus reading with your eyeballs. If you are on a mission to regrow your attention span and your ability to do close reading, research suggests you will have an easier time tracking and remembering what you read when it’s on paper books versus ebooks or audio.

But also…audiobooks are real books. Ebooks are real books. If you are most comfortable reading in those formats, embrace that! If that’s your on ramp, great. As long as you’re able to engage with a story, you’re going in the right direction. The fact that you don’t go for a walk three times a week shouldn’t stop you from going once. Just. Start.

And if you’re thinking, “Em, everyone is broke. Where are we getting the money for all these books?”, let me remind you that there are still libraries! And they need you to visit them and check out books to keep from dying out.

There’s also the Internet Archive, and if you’ve only got a little disposable income and are looking to buy, there’s your local used bookstore, or if you’re determined not to leave the house: Thriftbooks. Hell, if you use Amazon, there’s Kindle Unlimited. There’s lots on Kindle Unlimited, in fact. And if you can’t find one book, you really want to read at a reasonable price point (or for free), there is a long backlist of books. Again—spanning hundreds of years. You’re sure to find something.

The plan for how to keep yourself in the reading game is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself, but here’s what I’m currently trying out.

I’ve found that I’m the kind of person who will inevitably read more than one book at a time. Having a “books in waiting” pile in a range of different formats and genres keeps me from getting decision paralysis. On that list I keep: a collection of short stories or essays, a book of poetry, a horror or romance book, and then something a little more challenging, usually litfic or nonfiction. And yes, because otherwise I’ll get super sidetracked, I read those more challenging ones with a paper and pen and sticky notes (just for the books I own, of course—never put sticky notes in a library book!).

And here’s a really important one: I let myself DNF books if I don’t like them and I let myself switch to a different book if I want to read it more than what I’ve got going on currently, so I never stop reading altogether.

The post Episode 87: A Return to Reading first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 87: A Return to Reading appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

In this episode, I talked with Sarah Giffrow, an expert in helping small businesses with their online presences. If you weren’t aware, I worked for Sarah’s business, Upswept Creative, for a couple of years and witnessed the similar workflows and software used for publishing, website design, and digital marketing.

It’s not a galaxy-brained take to say that the tools that make up those workflows seem increasingly hostile to users—and I’d venture to say both the environment and the economy as well. Completely divesting from every problematic platform isn’t realistic for most people’s work, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s no reason to give up.

Both Sarah and I do our best in this conversation to find a balance between “you have no choice but to succumb to your billionaire overlords” or “smash your phone with a sledgehammer and run into the woods.”

Hopefully, it empowers you to try to nudge your ethics and your tech use into closer alignment.

Sarah Giffrow

Sarah’s path was set in the days of the Old Internet, after she built her very first webpage in the ’90s. She was raised in a tech-savvy household and went on to get a B.S. in Multimedia Design from the University of Oregon.

Sarah is the Creative Director + Benevolent Overlord of Upswept Creative, which was born out of her previous side-hustle as a photographer, where she often found herself seized by the irrepressible urge to help her photography clients improve their websites. These days, she calls herself “a website nerd and accidental marketer,” and learning about online marketing over the past decade has only made her better at websites and promoting small businesses in the big world of the internet.

In her newsletter, The Radical Marketer, Sarah writes about how to cope with online marketing when you’re trying to survive in a capitalist world. She digs into online marketing trends, and what small business owners do (or don’t) need to worry about. She guides readers towards building online marketing habits that feed their missions, without filling the pockets of tech billionaires, and helps business owners to bring more of the radical acts and ethical practices that matter to them into their online marketing.

Links of Note

• The Radical Marketer
• Article about getting the plastic out of the Pacific Garbage Patch  
• Bot Farms and the Troll Toll – American Hysteria episode
• Better Offline podcast
• Lex Roman

Tools:

• Ghost
• Calendly
• Affinity

Interview Transcript

Emily Einolander  00:00

Hi Sarah. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I used to work with Sarah back in Wow. 2019, 2020,

Sarah Giffrow  00:14

it doesn’t sound so long ago, and yet it feels so long ago.

Emily Einolander  00:17

I finally, like reached the point where it does sound long ago, which maybe is good, but maybe is really bad.

00:24

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s starting to but, but yeah, time is a weird social construct. Cool.

Emily Einolander  00:32

So Sarah, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your business? Yeah?

Sarah Giffrow  00:37

Um, so I Yeah. My name is Sarah giffrow, and I’m the creative director and benevolent overlord of upswept creative and we build WordPress websites and the online marketing for service based entrepreneurs and nonprofits. So So yeah, we’re basically thinking about your website, your social media and your email marketing, for folks who just need to spend less of their time on their marketing and have it actually do effective things for for what they’re trying to achieve.

Emily Einolander  01:11

Because marketing takes forever. I just, you know, I see all these people who are like, this is how you make 20 posts in an hour, like, you know, five minutes, which, I mean, come on, that’s nonsense. But, like, I spend so long writing a post that I’m just like, Who are these people and how do they do this? So, I mean, it’s good to have experts maybe, you know,

Sarah Giffrow  01:33

yeah, I mean, I mean, note that nobody, nobody who’s saying that, says that they’re necessarily good posts. Now this is, actually, this is something I thought about because, yeah, I’ve been because, yeah, I’ve also, a few months ago, started a newsletter called The radical marketer. And I have found that to be, I I found that to be, you know, decently easy, at least on the scale of things, to create content for. It’s it’s a it’s topics that I have lots of things to say about. But like, yeah, these past couple weeks, I’ve been like, oh, reflecting on the end of the year, and I’m writing about different things. And, yeah, there are just certain buckets of content that take me so much longer and are just like, it’s so much harder to just like, squeeze the lemon hard enough to get the little drop of wisdom that’s in there.

Emily Einolander  02:34

I’ve been loving the radical marketer that’s kind of one of the major basis for this entire interview is just some of the stuff you’ve been saying is, to me, a bit radical. You’re not just regurgitating the same well. I mean, you’re addressing the talking points that a lot of people are right now, but you’re not saying the same thing as what I’m mostly seeing, and it seems very realistic, but optimistic, which I’ve been enjoying about tech and about people’s use of social media and the way our brains work, which is really nice, especially for like, neurodivergent people. It’s, it’s like, Oh, I’m not, I’m not a weirdo by myself who can’t handle the world.

Sarah Giffrow  03:21

Yeah, yeah. And it’s, it really, I mean, I think, you know, at the core, I’m just, I’m always, I’m always going to have that little bit of optimism, like, even if it’s just completely blind optimism, it’s going to be in there, but, but, yeah, I think we’re just, we’re at a point where everything feels very like super intense extreme, like, you know, we’re like late stage capitalism. We’re seeing like, all of the, all of the best and worst things that could possibly happen. I mean, a lot of them on the worst ends, but, but, yeah, it’s, it’s sort of the internet is just sort of like that too, where, like, you’ll see, like, the most wonderful, heartwarming thing you’ve seen, like, in months, and then like, something that makes you want to, like, throw your computer out the window and run away to Alaska in the span of 10 minutes. Exactly.

Emily Einolander  04:15

I did see an article last night, and I don’t remember the date on it. Maybe this was a while ago, and I just missed it, but there was an entire thing about a guy who invented something that he’s been able to get, like, a million pounds of trash out of the Pacific Garbage Patch, right?

Sarah Giffrow  04:34

Yeah, yeah. And we would never just hear about that, unless maybe we happened to know the guy. But now we have the internet,

Emily Einolander  04:43

and it’s literally, literally a page where it’s like, here are some good things, like, I need to follow this.

Sarah Giffrow  04:50

Oh yeah, yeah. That is a response to a very, very needed thing. Yeah.

Emily Einolander  04:58

So I. So this is a publishing podcast. This is for authors. This is for publishers. And so one I find that a lot of things that you do overlap with things that I do, and one of those things is a lot of the tools and processes that we need to grapple with. You know, whether we’re using it, whether we’re not using it, which of them we are using? So what? What types of digital services do you need to do your work?

Sarah Giffrow  05:30

There’s definitely a lot of overlap in those tools. Like, a lot of a lot of what I do in a day centers around words like, I, I’m very much about, like, all right, please, let’s have your copy dialed in before we really start designing this thing. Because so much of design and marketing is, is, you know, it hangs on, you know, the quality of the words that are involved. So, so, yeah, there’s, there’s going to be, you know, word processing, collaborative document editing. And that’s, that’s probably the biggest thing. And then there are visual design tools, certainly, and, and, yeah, also, yeah, CRMs, oh, yeah, yeah,

Emily Einolander  06:19

yeah, that’s, that’s probably one that you do a lot more than I do at this point. But I, I guess a lot of publishing business owners probably have to deal with that.

Sarah Giffrow  06:28

Yeah, I feel like those are the big ones. And then, yeah, yeah, social media scheduling tools in particular, yeah, that’s probably Yeah, and, and email marketing tools. I mean, they’re just, there’s so many tools,

Emily Einolander  06:44

and more and more of them just seem to be minefields of ethical problems these days.

Sarah Giffrow  06:51

Yeah, that’s, that’s the, that’s the fun thing we get to navigate. So there’s

Emily Einolander  06:58

the AI encroachment on every single tech platform ever, and, and you’ve, you haven’t taken that lying down. I have noticed from what you’ve been writing about, so how’s that been? What’s been your response over time, and how’s that changed? And how do you keep your energy up?

Sarah Giffrow  07:16

Yeah, it feels like just a bit of vigilance. Because, I mean, it seems like you’re constantly having to say, like, no, please don’t write this email for me. No, please. I don’t want to try your new AI tool, but, but, yeah, I think, I think I may have been more open to it in the earlier stages, but I think my opinion has stayed pretty much the same over time in that it seems that the AI boosters are really well able. They’re really like trying to push hard into the creative spaces and and I have a, I mean, I have a huge problem with that, as you know someone who does design and marketing, because, because, yeah, I mean, what people ultimately want to achieve, particularly with marketing, is, you know, they want to stand out, and they want to be memorable. And so many of these llms are just, they’re pulling from things that already exist, and the result is predictably, just very samey, samey. And, and I really, and, yeah, it’s, it doesn’t have the capability of, like, you know, creating new ideas that that will stick in people’s minds. So, yeah, I’m very, I’ve been pretty vocally against that use of it, because, yeah, I think we need more humanity in the online spaces. You know, I saw some like, horrifying statistic about, like, some online platforms being, like, 50% bots.

Emily Einolander  08:54

Yeah, you were talking, you were talking in one of your newsletters about dead internet theory. And I was like, do you, do you, like, believe that’s true, or

Sarah Giffrow  09:05

I don’t think I’m there yet, but, like, yeah, it’s, but yeah, it’s sort of, it was just sort of an alarming, an alarming realization that, like, you know, yeah, there are people Like, using bots to achieve certain often nefarious ends, and, and, yeah, and we can’t, you know, it’s, it’s kind of messed up, that this, that this tool that was supposed to connect us all in this, in this beautiful manner, like, is now a space where we can’t even be certain that we’re dealing with an actual person there.

Emily Einolander  09:36

Yeah, and you have been on the internet back when it was fun. I mean, I was, I was for a while too, but I think you were, like, more participatory and, like, earlier stages of it. But, yeah, I just remember having a good time. It was dangerous. Sometimes like to to be online, you had to be a little bit more, like, keep a good eye out. But I think you should now too. And people have sort of lost i. Sight of protecting themselves online, but I don’t know, it almost feels like giving up to a certain extent, because there’s just so much push to be a certain way and be in certain places. And it gets exhausting after a while, because you’re just trying to do your work and you’re trying to see what’s going on with people, and, you know, trying to find a concert to go to or whatever, and it’s just this endless barrage of nonsense. Yeah, yeah. Now I’m ranting. I am gonna, I am going to link that American hysteria podcast that you put in one of your newsletters about, like, the the troll bots. Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. I think I’m gonna link it in the show notes. I think everyone should listen to it. But yeah, oh, I did want to ask you. Said, back when Gemini was really, like, getting involved and, like, was, ever was, you know, I, I don’t even know if it’s working or not on my computer anymore. I’m just like, I tell it No, but I still see it and you said that you were you said that you were on the phone with them trying to get it off of the upswept drive. Did that work?

Sarah Giffrow  11:20

Yeah, I think. So I, I went hunting for the proper toggles in the in the Google Admin to, like, turn it off. And so theoretically, it seems like that should have done it, but then it didn’t. And so I think, um, I think I came up just short of calling someone where, like, I had, they had this really circuitous like, you know, here’s how to contact support and and it just seemed like an endless loop. But I did actually, I ended up having to chat with an actual person who had to, yeah, toggle some mysterious things on their ends to, like, actually turn it off. So now it’s not there anymore. And I love that, but I the better part of an hour.

Emily Einolander  12:05

I’m very impressed I did not go to those lengths. But then there’s just one of me. So in your newsletter, the radical marketer, you’ve talked a lot of about divesting from different platforms, and I’d love to hear more about what that process has been like, how you made the decisions. I especially want to hear about how you, as a designer, ditched Adobe, and we have to talk about meta, obviously, because that’s that’s been a big one for getting rid of this year.

Sarah Giffrow  12:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As far as pulling pulling away from Adobe. That’s actually turned out to be similar or simpler than I expected. Yeah, I essentially, I had the entire Creative Suite. And I think that, you know, as, like, the focus of my business has narrowed, like, the activities that I’ve been doing also, you know, narrowed down a little bit, I essentially had to do some research as to, like, what else is even out there in terms of design tools. I I had some experience with Canva, which has had its uses. I use it with my team, sometimes just for, like, collaborative editing, so that I can design most of a thing, and then my social media manager can just plug in the necessary words. But it’s definitely, it’s definitely not as robust of a tool. But I ran across a an alternative called the affinity so they have a publisher photo, and and designer apps, and it’s, it was kind of a throwback, because it was, it was back. It was like, buying, you know, the Adobe Suite back in the day, or just like, Oh yeah, you pay a few $100 once, and it’s yours forever. Incredible. I missed that.

Emily Einolander  14:01

I was looking at them yesterday, and it did look like it was a affiliated with Canva. That is that correct?

14:09

That sure about

Emily Einolander  14:11

could be. But, I mean, yeah, the issue with Canva for me was just I was using Adobe for so long, and I’m used to like Photoshop and and in design that I was just like, where, how do I make a rectangle? Oh, regular ass rectangle, please.

Sarah Giffrow  14:32

That was, yeah, that was definitely, like the that was definitely the most challenging part of the transition. I definitely took advantage of the free trials so that I could, like, get my bearings and, like, actually make sure that I could actually perform the tasks that I wanted to perform in affinity. And, yeah, a lot of it was just this being like, Oh, they use a different word for this function than what I’m used to in Adobe. Are like, Oh, it’s open this menu instead of this menu. So just figuring out where things live, like and, and honestly, you can, you can Google it, find the answer pretty quickly. Yeah, the the first, the first design piece that I did in Affinity Designer, I, like, I was very diligent about setting my timer and like this took about the same amount of time, and I had not really had a ton of experience with this app, so I felt like that was encouraging. And at that point I was like, Well, I think, I think it’s, I think I feel safe clicking the Cancel button on my Adobe subscription.

Emily Einolander  15:39

I think I found the one. So, yeah, so you, I’m glad to hear that wasn’t too difficult. It does seem like such a monolith that, you know, it’s intimidating to try to get off some of these platforms, but you’ve talked a lot about leaving meta as well. What’s that? What’s that been like for you? But also, like, what’s that been like for some of your clients, if, if they’ve tried, or have they tried?

Sarah Giffrow  16:08

Yeah, I think that, yeah, that’s been kind of interesting and and definitely a more layered issue. We actually, we actually left our basically, have, like, abandoned our Facebook page. Like, you know, we’ve put up a bunch of notices saying, like, here you can find us on these other platforms, but we’re not maintaining an active presence there anymore. And, and for us, that seemed like the right call. It never really been one of our top performers. And, and, yeah, any anymore, as like more and more users are peeling off of the platform, it just seemed like our audience wasn’t there anyway. So it’s it felt like it was, it was time to to pull out of that. We’re still on Instagram and and that seems to be doing okay, but I talk a lot about, about disengaging from ads, as much as you can because, because, yeah, that’s that’s basically feeding the base

Emily Einolander  17:08

disengaging, like, as a user or as a poster, or, yes, yes,

Sarah Giffrow  17:16

yeah, definitely. I think it’s been a lot harder to like, unlearn the instinct to like, click on a thing if it shows me an ad. I like, yeah, yeah. So it’s been like, Okay, I’m gonna go over here and Google it instead of like, instead of clicking through on this and and putting, you know, 20 more cents in their pocket, which, you know, at scale, that ends up being a lot. But yeah, as far as client work goes, I think they’ve there. Haven’t, they haven’t made a lot of changes and and interestingly, one of, yeah, I’m thinking of a client in particular that we have, that that is a nonprofit, and there’s been a lot of like, there’s been a fair bit of, like, churn in terms of their following, yeah, where it’s like, oh, you gained like 221 followers this month, and you lost like 72 but, but, I mean, it’s still a net gain. So you know, in that, in that respect, they’re still performing really well and, and, you know, those 72 people were probably bots, or they were probably, or maybe they decided they didn’t want to be on Facebook anymore. Like, this is it just, there’s a lot of like, volatility in the numbers, and so you really kind of have to look at them and see, like, okay, but, but like, Yeah, where are the net gains? Like, where are we actually seeing results? And they are still seeing results. So, so, yeah, it’s, it’s felt like the right move for them to stay the course. But yeah, I, I also, yeah, I think that’s been the big thing about a lot of my discussion around meta is that, you know, I want people to be aware that there are, there are other options. There are other channels. I could yell about email marketing all day because they’re just not enough people doing it. But, yeah, but I also want to be sensitive to the fact that, you know, there are certain tactics that you know maybe have historically worked, and just pulling out of those completely is maybe not an option right now. So, so it’s really, I try to be case by case about it. And you know, we can always, you know, have that aspirational goal in our minds and and make those incremental changes over time. But yeah, it’s, it doesn’t have to be a cold jerky thing. And, yeah, I also encourage people to, you know, not just delete everything because they’re really mad one day, but to, you know, plan the departure.

Emily Einolander  19:51

Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely a risk, because just so many things happen to make you mad.

Sarah Giffrow  19:58

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’ve thought about it often, but I’m still out here. The cat videos are keeping me in

Emily Einolander  20:09

I did divest from meta in my personal life and in hybrid pub Scout, I did have to get back on Instagram with my like author pen name, because I didn’t really know what else to do, and that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about with authors. And because there is email marketing is really, really effective. But there’s also that chicken and the egg thing with your email list, because it’s like, how do you actually get people to join the email list? And there’s, you know, stuff at the back of your book where you can direct people there, but then it’s like, how do they find the book? And then it’s like, Amazon ads. And I’m like, is that really better than being on Facebook? So it’s just this really like net. It’s just a net. It’s a bunch of tangled things that go together and you it feels sometimes like you have to have the right combination, or you’re just kind of dead in the water.

Sarah Giffrow  20:59

Yeah, and, and that’s something I’ve been talking about too, is, is, you know, making use of the free capabilities that are available. So, yeah, if we’re not, yeah, if we’re not buying ads from metal all the time, like they’ve still made this tool freely available to us. People are using it for all kinds of things, promote their businesses, to do activism, like, if it’s out there, if we know we can reach people through it, then, then I there’s, there’s certainly an argument for taking advantage.

Emily Einolander  21:32

Yeah, that’s fair. So one thing I thought was really interesting, and that I feel like you’re one of the only people I’ve seen saying this, is, you know, authors, especially like I’ve been listening to podcasts where they’re being urged to optimize books and they’re publishing businesses, if it’s a business, rather than, like self publishing, to optimize for LLM search engines, especially chat, GPT. But you said that you’re not convinced that that’s going to be a long term thing, like you’re you seem skeptical that that’s going to be something that people are going to be locked into, unless you’ve changed your mind since the last time I saw you posting about it. But I love to hear more of your thoughts on that.

Sarah Giffrow  22:15

I my first thought was to go back to thinking about what search engines, how they used to work, and how they kind of do now, in that we’ve essentially, we’ve kind of broken organic search, because everyone is trying so hard to optimize for it. Because, you know, you think about like, you know, 10 years ago, if you would like Google something, you might actually get some relevant information. And if you Google the same thing, now, like so much of it is, is just like weird, click baity, hyper optimized articles from like directory sites or blogs that that you know don’t actually, that don’t actually answer the question you’re trying to answer, it’s just that they have all the right keywords in the right places, and so they’re showing up on page one and and, yeah, and that’s just that’s kind of where we’ve ended up, where we’re back to not being able to find what we need, because everyone is, like, working so hard to, like, get to page one of Google.

Emily Einolander  23:20

Yeah, no, I remember that was part of what I was part of my expertise. I put that in scare quotes, since this is an audio medium, yeah,

Sarah Giffrow  23:34

and so I do expect similar to happen with LLM search. Is that? Is that? Yeah, once we’re all trying to optimize for that as well, then we’re probably going to get to us another place where, like, the hyper optimized things that maybe don’t even have any value are going to float to the top. Yeah. But then I actually tested this out with a couple of different LLM searches and and did a and basically compared that with like what showed up in organic search. And so I was able to basically determine that you don’t really have to, you don’t really have to make a ton of drastic changes to optimize for LLM search, like the big finding that I came across, I just Googled things about website WordPress, website designers, something I knew about and but yeah, I think the main thing difference there was that it seemed like a lot of the llms were pulling From directory sites, and that’s and that sort of thing. So so I feel like outside of that, a lot of the same best practices that you are using to rank in organic search are also going to carry over to LLM search. So, so, yeah, it’s basically not worth paying. Panicking over, yeah.

Emily Einolander  25:01

I mean, I a lot of what I’m hearing is like, put alt text on your photos and images and write posts about each of your offerings. And I’m like, That’s why haven’t you done that yet?

Sarah Giffrow  25:17

Yeah, these are all the things that we should be doing anyway, to be optimized for organic search. So not, not really, very much has changed ultimately.

Emily Einolander  25:28

So it’s less that you don’t think it’s going to be a thing down the road, but you just don’t think it’s going to be that different.

Sarah Giffrow  25:34

Yeah. I mean, a little, a little of both, but yeah, definitely I don’t think it’s going to be that different, at least, at least from what I could see at this point in time.

Emily Einolander  25:42

Are you insinuating about the AI bubble right now?

Sarah Giffrow  25:45

I mean, I’m just just trying to be open to possibility.

Emily Einolander  25:52

I’m just one person floating in an online world. I’m like, All right, I’m doing my best.

26:03

We’re all just doing our best.

Emily Einolander  26:05

I was deals with EDS and trans podcast.

Sarah Giffrow  26:09

Oh yeah, in measured doses. I get really mad if I get a

Emily Einolander  26:14

little stressed out. Sometimes I feel very like in that bubble, all by myself, sometimes alone in my house, working from home, and I’m just like, ah, Sam Altman

26:29

can’t raise his child without chat. GPT, so Yeah,

Emily Einolander  26:33

can you speak to that? Oh,

Sarah Giffrow  26:35

man, that was maybe the most dystopian thing I’ve heard in a really long time.

Emily Einolander  26:41

I honestly though, to me, I was just like, that sounds like a you problem, but, yep, yep. What happens when you don’t have any friends?

Sarah Giffrow  26:50

Yeah, you know, I don’t, I don’t claim to be good at people, but, but yeah, I’ve been able to. I made it through four years of parenting, and I have a pretty happy child.

Emily Einolander  27:01

All right? So I was kind of talking earlier about the whole the way that we’re all trying to create a web that makes sense for ourselves with the services we use, and the attempting to create funnels or pathways for customers to find us, or readers to find us, if we’re authors. And you know some of that has to do with just what’s available for free, what we’re willing to pay for, what we are comfortable with using like. And I know that I’ve been trying to reevaluate a lot of that stuff for myself lately, and it’s so just intimidating, and it feels like such a big undertaking to try to, like, be an ethical business owner or, you know, publisher of one or whatever in the world right now and so, like, when, if someone were to take a first step into that world of untangling their own tech use, like, what would you suggest?

Sarah Giffrow  28:04

I mean, I think that there’s something to be said for just looking at things that you’re doing in a day, and how much they how much time they’re taking up. Because, because one, I’ve done that on multiple occasions over the course of my career, and I feel like I’ve been surprised every time. Yeah, yeah. Then you also, you also get a sense of, like, what, which of those things is actually, you know, getting you closer to your goals, and which of those things aren’t. So, yeah, so, yeah, looking at time and looking at data, if you’re on, like, social media at all, you you know there are, there are statistics available. You can tell how many people are clicking on things, and, like, you know how many inquiries are coming through your inbox. And you know you can, you can, at least, like, get a general sense of of what’s actually moving the needle.

Emily Einolander  29:01

So kind of making that, like, cost benefit for like, how long you’re spending somewhere, versus, like, how much of a return you’re getting, or even, you know, and not necessarily, like, there’s, you know, there’s the customer return, there’s the ROI, but then there’s also just, like, maybe how it makes you feel,

Sarah Giffrow  29:19

yeah, yeah, very much. So, yeah, I actually so one of the one of the offerings that I have is it’s more of a coaching package for your online marketing. Like, one of the first things that I that I ask in the discovery phase is just, like, what kinds of content do you like making? Because like it like, for example, you know, I I love writing. I love writing my newsletter. I love the written format for anything. I will take it over speaking any day. If you ask me to make, like, a 15 second video, I will just be like, I can’t do it. I need. Had like, three weeks to hype myself up before I do this, and then maybe I still won’t. Like, yeah,

Emily Einolander  30:07

oh god. I heard this woman who was like, oh yeah. I decided to use Tiktok because I make like, three videos a day. No problem. Like, what are you videoing? Like, what is this video you’re talking about?

Sarah Giffrow  30:19

I’m exhausted just thinking about, I know I had to sit down.

Emily Einolander  30:23

I had to take I had to take a breather.

Sarah Giffrow  30:28

Yeah, you know it’s, it’s good to plug into. You know those those places where you feel strong, and those places where it’s just, it’s just really difficult to even get started, because, because, yeah, it’s, you know, if you’re having to force it like, I mean, speaking as an AD, AD, ADHD, human, the executive dysfunction will rear its head at every opportunity,

Emily Einolander  30:55

and then at one point you just kind of run out of energy. Yeah. Where does that leave you? It leaves you shutting down your social media accounts impulsively. Hey, guys, I’m back. Just kidding. So you were talking about affinity for design earlier. Can you also share some of your favorite, lesser known alternatives for like, app, software, digital services, newsletters, maybe for everyone on substack, the Nazi website?

Sarah Giffrow  31:34

Yeah, I have to, I have to shout out Lex Roman, because I was, I was in a community of hers, and saw her talking a lot about outpost. So that is where I run my newsletter through has a lot of those sub stacky In capabilities, yeah. And I think, I think a lot of, I think a lot of people, more people have heard of beehive at this point, then, then have heard of I’ve heard of ghost, but I’ve heard of ghost. Ghost? Yeah, I said outpost. I meant ghost, okay, yeah. Outpost is a tool suite that’s that works with, that works in tandem with ghosts God, and it’s yeah and, and it’s super useful for, like, all of those, like, welcome flows and and re engagement campaigns and and little things that you that you like to have when you’re trying to maintain a paid subscriber ship.

Emily Einolander  32:40

Yes, that’s a good one. And then you’re still using Google Drive for most of your assets management and stuff like that. Or, yeah, yeah.

Sarah Giffrow  32:54

I mean, I think I am just because, yeah, a, it’s there, and B, I turned off Gemini, and C, I use Google for email accounts. Oh, yeah, it’s just sometimes simplicity is, is a valid motivator.

Emily Einolander  33:11

Yeah, no, that’s fair. I agree,

Sarah Giffrow  33:14

yeah, yeah. But I think, yeah, I think something that, something that I’m actually looking to do in upcoming installments of the newsletters, is looking at, is looking more deeply into, like, Who’s behind various pieces of software or various apps. Because I remember, like, I remember back in 2020 when we are like, in the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and, and, and I was thinking a lot about, like, okay, what can I do to really like, to really like, step into like, that, that, you know, diversity and equity and justice role as A business owner and like, actually, you know, take the anti racism a step further. And so I, like, started looking at, like, Oh, what are all these services that I’m using? Like, who’s actually running the show here? And like, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, for example, Calendly was a black owned tech company. I don’t know that cool, yeah. So, so that’s, that’s one to put in your back pocket.

Emily Einolander  34:23

I got it in my front pocket.

Sarah Giffrow  34:29

But, but yeah, I think, yeah. I think it’s worth educating yourself at least a little bit about, about, about the, like, the pieces of software that you’re using, and, India, and who and who’s behind the scenes, who’s behind the curtain, and what are they all up to? Because as ultimately, the most potent way we’re going to make our feelings known and make any changes is to control where our dollars go.

Emily Einolander  34:59

I’m looking for. Forward to that series that you’re going to do, because I would love to learn more about the people behind these apps, and it will help me a lot with decision making.

Sarah Giffrow  35:11

Yeah, that’s the goal. I think, yeah. It’ll probably lead me to make a few changes here and there, depending on what I learn.

Emily Einolander  35:20

Here’s a question. Is there anywhere on the internet where you’re still having a good time?

Sarah Giffrow  35:25

Whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to say when I think one of my biggest complaints since like, the mass exodus from Twitter rip Dad, is that I felt like I had so perfectly curated my my Twitter feeds, where it was like just this wonderful blend of like things you should know about, and also random things that are interesting and also really goofy internet jokes. And I haven’t really been able to recreate that since

Emily Einolander  36:10

there’s nothing like being on Twitter when something happened like that was, oh my God, it was the main character today, yeah. But, like, but the good ones, but like, the really fun ones that, you know, sometimes it’s just like a rage bait, but other times it’s just like, what is happening in this world right now. This is incredible, but i You can’t bottle that, and I think it’s a bygone era.

Sarah Giffrow  36:32

But, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I really, I really have to, you know, I really have to give it to, you know, anyone who is looking to engage online in a genuine way. I mean, I feel like, I feel like LinkedIn has been one of the more rewarding spaces for me over the past year, which, like, I would not have predicted myself saying that, but I’ve actually, you know, gotten, like, honest comments and feedback from people that I like to hear from. And it’s, you know, it feels, you know. I mean, it’s all very like, you know, within the bubble of like, you know, with under the umbrella of work stuff. But it is still like people are looking to have, like, genuine interactions there, which I appreciate, but, but, yeah, I just, I just have to say, you know, to all the people who, like, you know, want to ask you who you’re like, ask you to name your favorite Nicholas Cage movie, or who, like, can’t shut up about their dog. Like, just, just hold on to that, because I think the world needs it.

Emily Einolander  37:41

Like, oh, that’s a thing I like, I remember now. I think I need to do some more work curating my LinkedIn feed right now, because the stuff I get sometimes, like, basically, you’re one of the only people that I actually feel like interacting with right now. I saw a guy today literally say, Stop posting things that help people and giving away content for free. And I was like, he literally said, Stop posting things that help people. And I was like, what is happening? And I just was like, I am not engaging with this. That’s what he wants. That’s what he wants. He wants me to click on him, and I’m not gonna do it. But my goodness, that’s that attitude is kind of things in a nutshell right now?

Sarah Giffrow  38:29

People, yeah, oh, we have to, we have to fight that at every turn.

Emily Einolander  38:36

Yeah, it’s like, why should I put up everything I know behind a paywall? Like, that’s not how being a person works.

Sarah Giffrow  38:43

Yeah, yeah. Like, I love helping people. Why I do this job? Yeah.

Emily Einolander  38:49

For real, I was like, I don’t know if I’ll ever make money doing this podcast. Like, but that’s not why I’m doing Um, all right. Well, where can people find you? Online?

Sarah Giffrow  39:01

Yeah, so. So the newsletters at the radical marketer.com and and my services are at Upswing creative.com we are, we are on Instagram for the moment. We might be in jail because we like to talk shit about meta so much, but we’re on there, and we’re on LinkedIn, and we’re also on blue sky. So, oh yeah, those, those are the, those are the ponds we’re playing in right now.

Emily Einolander  39:32

Sounds good. Gotta play somewhere right now, or you don’t, but that gets lonely, I promise. Yeah.

Sarah Giffrow  39:38

I mean, you don’t have to. That’s, that’s always the thing I want to lead with. You don’t, technically, you don’t have to be in any

Emily Einolander  39:44

particular place, yeah, that is, that is true. You don’t have but there are consequences. All right. Sarah, thanks so much for talking to me today. This is really fun.

39:56

Thank you. I appreciate the invitation.

The post Episode 86: Creative Director and Radical Marketer Sarah Giffrow first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 86: Creative Director and Radical Marketer Sarah Giffrow appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

Writing is often a solitary activity. Writers spend their days living, and talking with imaginary people, inside our own heads. Existing in that wind tunnel and never coming out of it is not the healthiest way to move through the world (or around the outskirts of it). But, it can be difficult for a swath of people notorious for introversion to brave conferences, networking events, or new writers’ groups.

A lot of folks don’t even know where to meet other writers. But, like anyone else, writers need to connect with friends and colleagues. We need people who can relate to the experience of navigating complicated inner worlds and an even more complicated industry.

We need people to help us celebrate our writing successes and offer condolences for when we hit craters. We need networks that keep us grounded without pulling us down. Community, or as my guest Jessie Kwak puts it, constellations.

Jessie joins the podcast for a second time, this time to talk about her latest book, From Solo to Supported. 

In this episode, we discuss many of the subjects covered in From Solo to Supported; everything from how to meet other writers, conversation starters for conferences, and how to navigate giving and receiving feedback.

Guest Bio: Jessie Kwak

Jessie Kwak is an author, storyteller, and business book ghostwriter living in Portland, Oregon. When she’s not writing, she can be found sewing, mountain biking, and exploring the Pacific Northwest (and beyond). She is the author of thriller novels, two series of space scoundrel sci-fi crime novels, and a handful of productivity books. I first talked with Jessie in Episode 59 about her book From Chaos to Creativity, and also posted about her book from the same series, From Big Idea to Book.

Interview Transcript

The post Episode 85: Forming Strong Writing Support Networks with Jessie Kwak first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 85: Forming Strong Writing Support Networks with Jessie Kwak appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

This episode’s guest is David Morris of Lake Drive Books.

In today’s interview, David tells us more about Lake Drive’s mission, publishing practices, and unconventional financial model. David also offers his takes on how to determine what works for you when it comes to choosing a publishing path and gives some platform-building insights for authors.

Hybrid publishing has a bit of a nebulous definition at the moment, but as authors are becoming more disenchanted with traditional publishing and discovering how grueling self publishing can be, they’re becoming more relevant. 

Since it’s been the standard for such a long time, people are used to the traditional publishing model. They expect that:

1. Publishers pay for everything
2. Authors get advances and royalties
3. Publishers take care of book promotion and marketing

But here’s a few problems (among others):

1. The “everything” that publishers pay for has a big asterisk attached to it, even in trad
2. Advances and royalties are more underwhelming than ever (or maybe “less whelming”?)
3. Book promotion and marketing mostly falls on the author now (see point 1)

I’ve seen a lot of talk about hybrid publishing being predatory and no different from vanity presses, and in some cases…sure. But when you don’t have a major corporation paying all the up front costs, there are some practicalities to consider. Namely, who’s going to pay for all these professionals to do the work of making a book?

If you listened to the show before, hopefully you’ve gotten the message of how hard ghostwriters, editors, designers, marketers, and other publishing professionals work to create the best book possible. And that work needs to be compensated. But, authors, obviously, should get the best deal possible for their work, too.

So where does that leave us?

How do we bring books into the world while making sure it’s fair to everyone, especially when everyone who isn’t a CEO of a major corporation has such a tight budget? And how do you, as an author, know the money and effort you spend on the publishing side is going to get you to your goal?

The Independent Book Publisher’s Association (or IBPA) has tried to set up some standards for hybrid presses in the last several years. At last look, these are what the IBPA says a good hybrid publisher should do:

1. Define a mission and vision for its publishing program.
2. Vet submissions.
3. Commit to truth and transparency in business practices.
4. Provide a negotiable, easy-to-understand contract for each book published.
5. Publish under its own imprint(s) and ISBNs.
6. Publish to industry standards.
7. Ensure editorial, design, and production quality. 
8. Pursue and manage a range of publishing rights. 
9. Provide distribution services.
10. Demonstrate respectable sales.
11.  Pay authors a higher-than-standard royalty. 

As you may have noticed, there’s considerable wiggle room in there for these definitions (for example, you as the author are responsible for deciding how to define things like “respectable sales”). And the definitions are constantly evolving. So, that’s a big part of what we’ll be looking at in this and upcoming episodes.

Guest Bio: David Morris

David Morris is the founder and publisher of Lake Drive Books. David has thirty years of experience in editing, marketing, and corporate leadership with major publishing brands like HarperCollins/Zondervan, where he served as vice-president and publisher and worked on numerous bestsellers. His sole focus is working with spiritually progressive and personal growth authors, leveraging his experience to help them achieve publishing success. David is also a literary agent at Hyponymous Literary, co-host of the Publishing Disrupted podcast, an author, and holds a doctorate in psychology and religion.

Lake Drive Books

Lake Drive Books’s vision is to serve authors and readers who want to break the mold and ask honest questions about religion, spirituality, and personal growth. These books aim to help readers understand the past and move forward in a life where they can be real and feel seen.

Links of Note

• Affiliate link for a free Plottr 30-day trial
• HPS’s Bookshop.org shop
• IBPA’s Hybrid Publishing Criteria
• Lake Drive Books’ website
• Hyponymous Literary
• Publishing Disrupted Podcast

Transcript Below

The post Episode 84: Unconventional Publishing Models with David Morris first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 84: Unconventional Publishing Models with David Morris appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

Recent surveys (from Gotham Ghostwriters and BookBub) verify what you probably have already guessed, that there are profound divides between writers who use AI and writers who downright refuse. But interestingly, these surveys have also shown that around 60% of writers do use AI tools of some kind.

So, when you’re creating a software program for writers, you have some choices to make. Do you alienate your anti-AI users or your pro-AI users?

Or do you try to find a compromise that works for the greatest number of people?

One of my favorite tools that I use in my fiction writing is Plottr, which I introduced to y’all back in Episode 74. It’s a program that lets you visualize your story from beginning to end and keep your notes on characters, themes, settings, and other plot elements all in one central place.

When I interviewed Plottr’s education outreach lead back in 2023, I had bought the basic program for myself, which is a tool that you download and use offline. I’ve used it for at least three different writing projects, and it’s helped make my process much more streamlined.

So when the folks from Plottr reached out to me to chat about new developments, I was excited. However, when I looked into it and saw that they had a new tool that used AI, I got very uncomfortable. I’m way more on the skeptical side of this issue, and I was scared to see another program I use get gobbled up by AI features.

But then I got curious, because I noticed that it was being implemented in a different way that we see in products like Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot (or, if you listened to my last episode ProWritingAid). The difference is that instead of forcing AI features on Plottr users, they offered a choice where users could stick to the completely AI-free Plottr program, or buy the AI-powered Storysnap either on its own or as an add-on. 

Seriously, it’d be nice if more companies would do that instead of making you jump through hoops to opt out.

No matter my own feelings, I can understand how that statistic poses a dilemma for software companies that don’t want to go out of business. Plottr seems to be trying to create a solution that gives both groups what they want, and I wanted to know more about how that choice was made and where those lines were drawn. When I interviewed Plottr’s founder Cameron Sutter about the way they’re trying to employ ethical AI use, I learned that a lot of careful thought was put into how to deploy AI in a way that avoids using stolen works and doesn’t write users’ stories for them.

I’m not here to sell you Storysnap, but I did make space in this interview to talk about it (even though, as you’ll hear, I struggle to pronounce it correctly). To keep it simple: Storysnap helps series writers create a personal story bible, so they can easily maintain continuity throughout each book. Cameron does a good job explaining how they’ve attempted to address issues about privacy and what measures they’ve taken to keep the AI from training on users’ work.

Personally, I’m probably still going to stick to using Plottr on its own, happily and wholeheartedly. But take a listen and decide for yourself where you draw your line. 

(Who knows—you might not even make it past Cameron and my discussion about pizza toppings.) But I hope you do.

Links of Interest:

• Affiliate link for a free Plottr 30-day trial
• Learn more about Storysnap
• Plot For Good
• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
• AI Writers Surveys from Gotham Ghostwriters and BookBub
• Episode 83 Transcript

The post Episode 83: Plottr, Storysnap, and Letting Writers Choose first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 83: Plottr, Storysnap, and Letting Writers Choose appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

It’s that time of year again. You may love it, hate it, fear it, or be totally uninterested. I’m talking about…well, what you’re calling it now depends on your history with it and your feelings on the way things went down. It used to be National Novel Writing Month, aka., NaNoWriMo, and in some cases it still is. Some are calling it Novel November. Others seem to be not calling it anything and just *describing* what it is.

For the sake of ease, I’ll be calling it NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) during the full duration of its existence as a nonprofit. After that, I’ll see how I feel.

Please see my list of sources in the show notes, but it mostly consists of an interview with Chris Baty from the still extant NaNo YouTube channel, a big, dramatic deep dive created by Savy Writes Books (also on YouTube), a number of blogs and articles from around the web, and a couple Reddit threads and Google Docs.

This is a rabbit hole. I set out to write something about commodifying creativity and the problems of centralizing movements under capitalism. But it ended up being so much more than that, and though I have put in over twenty-hours of research, this still feels like a shallow reading. 

I’m going to do my best to sum everything up according to my understanding of what happened. This is all based on what I’ve been able to find, the main NaNo website and forums themselves are shut down. So, there are obviously going to be some missing pieces in my understanding.

But I believe survivors. And if you think that sounds a little dramatic for me to throw in, just wait.

I’ll warn you right now that unfortunately one part of this will include some pretty nasty predatory behavior toward kids. I’ll be sure to throw out another warning when we get there.

So, if you don’t already know, participating in National Novel Writing Month means you write a fifty-thousand word first draft of your novel all in the month of November, which breaks down to one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven words per day. To some it might sound ridiculous, or on the other hand, if you’re like some of the rapid release writers we’ve talked to on this show in the past, it may sound like a piece of Duncan Hines funfetti cake.

But this isn’t an episode about how to write your novel in November. It isn’t even an episode about AI—although some of you familiar with last year’s events have probably guessed it’s going to figure into it.

This is about what happens when what once was a scrappy project grows beyond your ability to control it. It’s also what happens when you try to put a decentralized movement into a box, or what happens when you turn creating something for the simple joy of it into something that emphasizes the “creator economy.”

It’s what happens when communities are held together by unsuccessful donation drives and shady sponsorships, and its leaders spend more time on begging for funds and shoving complaints under the rug than holding their own staff accountable.

To oversimplify, it’s a worst case scenario of monetizing your hobbies. It’s about how, the bigger you’ve built your big beautiful contraption, the more rocks in the gears make for a spectacular public breakdown.

The Movement

NaNoWriMo started in 1999 in the bay area, kicked off by a guy named Chris Baty, with this email:

“Hear ye hear ye, come one, come all, and dust off those word processing devices. Under the motto, ‘A Lousy Novel is better than no novel at all’ I have declared July National Novel Writing Month. To celebrate, I want to write a novel in a month, and I want you to write one too. Everybody’s got a ton of stories in them. Collectively we’ve lived over seven hundred years and in that time have accumulated enough characters, places, and plot twists to fill a dozen tomes. I am proposing that we seize art by the horns and spill some of those experiences onto the page.”

(By the way yes—you heard that right, it started out in July rather than November, which seems easier to pull off, if less alliterative.)

In his interview on the NaNoWriMo YouTube channel, Baty said he felt like this was going to be one of those things that he and his friends would try, fail at quickly and dramatically, and then never speak of again.

But things went better than expected. Out of the twenty-one friends who participated, six completed a first draft of a novel. So they decided to do it again the next year. This time, the participant count rose to one hundred forty, and twenty-nine people completed their first drafts—or, since NaNo was considered a challenge—they “won.”

When you hear the phrase “exponential growth”—think of NaNoWriMo in 2001. The event rose to five thousand participants. Baty and his friends hadn’t automated anything on their website, so participants had to be added manually to a Yahoo! group, and then to the website, in order to enter their word counts. 

That year, 700 people were validated—all by hand—to have finished their first drafts. The operation grew so much, that their web host said, “You’re taking up all the space we have. Ya gotta go.” Things were only going to get bigger, more time consuming, and more expensive from there.

But also much, much more exciting.

In 2002, the website for National Novel Writing Month moved to a new server and became nanowrimo.org. Someone stepped up to make an automated word counter, the only way they could manage the scale of the challenge. But scale was still a problem. They’d also started selling merch, and during a time where drop-shipping wasn’t a Bay Area buzzword yet, packing and shipping was all done by hand.

But now, what used to be a group of people converging on central website, became something decentralized, and therefore, it *was* much more scaleable. National Novel Writing Month technically wasn’t just a national thing anymore. They had participants living everywhere, with chapters on six continents and participants in seven. Yes, that includes Antarctica.

So what of these “chapters”? How were they all managed?

A core contingent of the NaNo nonprofit model included Municipal Liaisons, also known as “MLs”, because you can’t have an organization without acronyms.

All MLs were volunteers, and there were hundreds of them. They ran and moderated the writers’ forums in different geographical regions scattered around the world—never an easy thing, if you know, you know. They’d organize meetups and writers groups, and offer encouragement to remind writers that they weren’t in this alone. People from all all walks of life surrounded you. There could even be another person in your neighborhood right now, sitting up late tapping their words out, just like you.

In the beginning, NaNoWriMo was defined by these clusters of community all brought together by a shared love of writing and a desire to meet a lifelong goal. Many of the ideas that made NaNo so special came from these local and regional gatherings. Activities would expand over time, both locally and centrally—there was a podcast, features in major newspapers, celebrity pep-talk emails, and a growing number of of satellite events throughout the year. There was Script Frenzy for people who wanted to write screenplays, 30 Covers, 30 Days for people who wanted to work on their book design skills, and Camp NaNoWriMo, that took place in the spring and summer.

NaNo had tons of bells and whistles—different types of participation badges, staff-run sprints, and localized lock-ins where people would focus on churning out as many words as possible in a single night.

And according to Baty, it wasn’t about money.

NaNo wasn’t about capitalism or publishers gatekeeping. It wasn’t about writing a manuscript so you could start shopping it around ASAP. It was about getting together in cafés and online forums to commiserate with other people who had always wanted to write a book and were making it happen. It was about connecting with your local community and with writers all around the world at the same time.

In the words of one of Baty’s interviewers, “You don’t ask knitters when they’re opening up their knitting store.”

But hosting tens of thousands of people in multiple forums, providing them with automated word counters, and eventually paying a staff to manage it all (even though you have a slew of unpaid volunteers)—that costs money.

And as time passed, the money would change the tone and operations of this movement beyond recognition.

The Money

In the 00s (aughts), NaNoWriMo grew, and kept growing.

2005 saw the start of their Young Writer’s Program (referred to as YWP). One hundred schools and four thousand individual kids got in on the challenge that first year. It was a huge hit in English classrooms, where kids were encouraged to set their own writing goals that were more achievable than fifty-thousand words.

In 2006, the team finally turned NaNo into a nonprofit. That was also the year Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants came out, which was a book whose first draft was written during NaNoWriMo. Now someone had produced a New York Times bestseller during the challenge, someone who’d gotten a $5.2 million dollar two-book deal—a far different outcome than the haphazard writing-for-the-hell-of-it ways of “winning” NaNo in the past. 

Word was getting back to HQ that more and more professional authors were using the month of November to kick their novels into gear and knock over the barriers of their own perfectionism. People were starting to see NaNo as a potential selling point for their manuscripts.

Stakes were raised. So were aspirations. And so was pressure on basically everyone—participants, volunteers, and staff alike.

Because when trad publishing enters the picture, money starts mattering a lot more. And, to a growing nonprofit that needs tons of server space, it’s something that already matters a great deal.

(Incidentally, PSA—Americans who are listening, please donate money to your local food bank if you can. It’s a much more effective way to make sure people get fed than donating your old canned beans. It’s about to be a hungry holiday season for a lot of people. PSA over.)

I’m going to read a post from the old NaNoWriMo website that Chris wrote about the initial choice to become a nonprofit. Thanks, archive.org’s WayBack Machine.

“By the end of the third year, though, a new question had come up: money. I had paid for the first and second NaNoWriMos myself, but Year Three posed a dilemma. The web-hosting costs had doubled, and the work of running NaNoWriMo meant I hadn’t been able to take on any freelance writing assignments in October or November. Which left me in an awkward financial situation at the end of November.

“On the last day of the event, I sent out a PayPal request for participants to help pay for the event by chipping in whatever they felt was fair. The mood at the close of that NaNoWriMo was triumphant, and I figured that if everyone who had gotten something worthwhile out of the adventure were to send in $1, I’d have more than enough to build a new automated site, pay the hosting bills, pay my own bills, and take all the year’s volunteers out for a gigantic thank-you pizza.

“This was the start of my education in running an event without a mandatory entry fee. The biggest lesson of which is this: when you make contributions voluntary, very few people volunteer to contribute. No matter how great a time they had or how much they believe in your cause, 90% of participants just won’t find their way to clicking on the PayPal link or mailing in a couple dollars.

“The karmic repercussions of it all were mind-boggling to me. Who _were_ these monsters? I’d spent the last month staying up till 3:00 a.m. every night patiently answering emails, offering encouragement, and giving up every ounce of love and support that the Red Bull hadn’t leached from my body. And when I asked for one dollar in return, they turned a cold shoulder? Was this the definition of community?”

(Skipping ahead a little bit.)

“Either I was a monster, or none of us were monsters. I did some quick calculations and decided, for the sake of my self-image, that none of us were monsters. We were just busy. With our hearts in the right places and way too much going on in our lives for us to always remember to support the institutions that made us happy.”

That realization, Baty says, made him intent on doing more to communicate NaNo’s value to participants.

And it even seems to have worked for a while. But same as any company or nonprofit that needs funds to operate, staying in the good graces of participants is mandatory, and that’s especially true when you’re running an event that people can just as easily do without a central hub.

In 2013, Chris moved on from leading the nonprofit, but he’d been joined by lots of other people from the tech and nonprofit industries over the years. People have really nice things to say about him, and generally the bigger problems began after others took over ops from where he’d left off.

First, there was executive director Grant Faulkner. According to former employees, he was a lot more focused on the financial than the creative side of things. One of them recalled him standing behind her desk as she scrolled Etsy’s collection of fan-made NaNoWriMo merch.

“I always mean to send these people C&Ds for copyright infringement,” she reported him saying. And that was a tell–a sign that the spirit of the event had shifted from a collection of people pursuing their writing dreams to an organization that was just as dollar-driven as any other.

The more intense focus on finances led to greater pressure placed on the MLs (Municipal Liaisons, if you recall). I want to be clear: MLs are all volunteers, as opposed to Mods, who were paid honorariums or were full-on staff members.

I mentioned that celebrity writer s often wrote “pep talk” emails to raise writers’ spirits and solicit donations. But now, the MLs were expected to write daily donation emails too. They were also encouraged to visit schools and recruit teachers and teens into the Young Writer’s Program (YWP). 

When 2020 hit, with all events going online, things got even more intense. All the MLs were expected to create regional Discord servers and manage online events over Zoom. There were issues with a huge new website build that ended up having massive accessibility issues, especially for visually impaired users; and you can see more about how that led to ableism on that Savy Writes Books deep dive I’ve linked.

This increasingly rough treatment of MLs, combined with the controversies of 2022, 23, and finally, 24, the organization was well on its way to imploding. And now I’m going to get into those, to the best of my ability, but bear with me. There’s just not enough time for me to fit all of it in.

2022—Inkitt…or not

With the difficulty NaNoWriMo always seemed to have getting their robust community to donate, they started getting sponsorships to run the event each year. And, with sponsorships comes risks.

In this case, one of the sponsors was Inkitt. It’s a website kind of like Wattpad, where writers publish original serialized fiction. Also, notably, it doesn’t let you turn off tracking cookies when you’re visiting their website, and I think that really says something. So, I will not be linking you to it. 

What I will be linking you to is Victoria Strauss’s Writer Beware article that starts in 2016 and is updated through 2024. She points out initial and ongoing issues with Inkitt’s contracts, specifically the rights that they claim from enlisted authors. In a 2018 update, Strauss claimed they had, “an all-rights contract; Inkitt claims “the sole and exclusive” right to exploit or license just about every right and subsidiary right in existence.”

This seems like the sort of business that I need to do a deep-dive on down the road, especially since part of the aim of Hybrid Pub Scout is to make sure authors know how to avoid predatory presses. But for now, let’s just say that at the time, they had fishy contract language, claimed all (or almost all) rights, and didn’t have a track record of delivering on their promises.

So, in 2022, Inkitt became one of NaNoWriMo’s sponsors, and NaNo sponsors give a menu of “winner goodies” (yes, I’m cringing at that just as hard as you are) once people validated their finished novels.

Inkitt offered a “chance to win publishing contracts, social media spotlights, and more!” That “publishing contract” gave Inkitt first publishing rights, which prevents the author from selling the book anywhere else. It also dangled the hope that they’d shop the book to, as they called them “A-List” publishing houses. I can tell you, as can most people with some experience in publishing, that a book that’s already been serialized online rarely if ever is attractive to a publishing house. Sorry.

You know who might not realize that, though? A starry-eyed NaNoWriMo participant who just submitted their first “winning” 50k novel first draft.

So, knowing this, author and blogger Kestrel Casey took to the NaNo forums to express her concern. She describes the fallout as follows:

• “The mods panicked
• I was banned for disparaging a sponsor
• I wrote this post
• Other authors joined me in saying that Inkitt was not okay
• The mods presumably had a long and stressful meeting
• The mods un-banned me (and others) and sent both public and personal apologies
• I, for one, absolutely forgave them, because the core issue here is not their fault
• We all settled down for a long talk in the forums about sponsors, forum moderation policies, and how to make sure all this never happens again, which is ongoing at time of writing.”

(Well…less so now.)

There was a lesson here: NaNoWriMo prioritized their sponsors, and they seemed to be doing so at the expense of their users.

And post-November, the organization actually behaved pretty reasonably about it. They apologized, pledged not to let it happen again, and brought on Victoria Strauss herself as a consultant to help guide their sponsorship decisions.

But the fact that they took responsibility for this debacle would not be a preview of things to come. Because they were about to very-much-not-take responsibility for something much more important. And this is where we get into the darker stuff I referred to at the top of the podcast: NaNo’s inaction against child predators, and it’s coverup of said predatory behavior.

Consider this your trigger warning.

2023 Child Exploitation Coverup

You know that gif from Community? Where the guy cheerfully walks into a room holding pizza boxes, then looks around to see the room on fire and in total chaos? Well, that was me in 2023.

At least in my experience, NaNoWriMo was such a common concept among writers that many had no idea it was a nonprofit at all. They just wrote their novels in November either alone or with the support of their friends, without even going near the site. The first time I did NaNo in 2009, I’m not sure whether I used the site at all. 

(What I do know is I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and abandoned ship within a week.)

I did use it in 2010. That was the one and only time I “won”, resulting in a very weird manuscript I haven’t touched since, but think about often. It involved a Spirit Halloween, a small-town conspiracy, and serial killer tourism, and it makes about as much sense as…anything happening in the world right now.

Maybe I’ll dust it off again, but if I do, it’s more likely I’ll build it back up from scratch.

Anyway, when I rolled up to try NaNoWriMo again in 2023 with my pizza boxes, I had very little context for all the messy stuff that had been happening. All I saw was an email about halfway through the month that the forums were shutting down, saw someone else mention it was because of child grooming allegations, and backed the hell out like Homer Simpson disappearing into that hedge.

The point today is less about gory details and more about how the organization treated the kids who were reporting it, and what they did to all their teen-oriented programs in the aftermath. Now, nobody has gone to jail for anything, and I’m not a lawyer, so even though there’s evidence I’m going to throw a blanket “allegedly” up here just to be safe. Most of the following information is from interviews, saved excerpts from the forum threads, and messages from leadership.

You might remember that the Young Writer’s Program (YWP), had been a huge part of NaNoWriMo since 2005. It had its own community separate from the main NaNo site. And even before the grooming allegations came out, things weren’t going so well over there.

For YWP, the groups were run as “classrooms” by different “educators.” The only qualification to be an educator? Being over age eighteen. No background checks, no certification checks, no mandated reporter training, no nothing. So, it became a free-for-all where bullying could run rampant. And with bullying, comes bigotry—which wasn’t restricted to just the kids. Racist messages between staff members were also revealed during this time.

In addition to YWP communities, there were also forums for kids age 13–17 on the main site, one of which was called Christian Teens Together. And in that forum was someone with way too much power and free access to people they intended to abuse.

That forum moderator is called “Moderator X” on most of the reports about this event, but the primary sources (i.e., interviews with employees and volunteers) say their handle was CinnamonFridge. But apparently sharing their handle doesn’t really matter too much, because they’ve since died (or at least that’s the general consensus—they did have this weird habit of creating sock puppet accounts and killing the imaginary people attached to them off—but I’ll let you check out some of the linked material for more details because it’s super confusing). 

I’m just going to say “Mod X” because it’s easier to get out of my mouth.

Mod X, an adult, was a little too friendly with some of the teens on the site, particularly drawn toward ones who were complaining about having a hard time at home. But they also were one of the more tyrannical mods I’ve ever heard about. They implemented a “three-strikes” rule for the group, which numbered over a thousand kids. And I don’t mean three-strikes per person, I mean three strikes total—after which they threatened that they’d shut down the forums for six months.

When you’re a kid, especially a kid surviving an isolating pandemic, you form bonds with your internet friends. I mean, I’ve done the same over the past five years or so. If I lost access to a couple of my Discord servers, I’d be losing connections with people who have been there for me during some really rough times—but I’m an adult with a lot more agency over my social life than these members had.

But the real illegal thing Mod X did was link to their adult fetish site in the forums, where they basically sent the kids to interact with other predatory adults. They were also letting a lot of these predators into the actual forums to interact with the kids there too.

In May 2023, some of the kids complained to higher ups at NaNoWriMo staff about Mod X, including the acting Executive Director Kilby Blades, who had taken over a few months earlier.

The kids did not get help. After a month, nothing had been done. Except some hush-ups—at least one kid who spoke out on the forums got banned for it. Other posts and threads on the forums were hidden and frozen, and employees in the interviews I watched reported that Blades instructed them to, “Starve it of oxygen,” “it” being any conversation about abuse.

But, YWP forum members started complaining too, pointing to the culture of bullying, privacy breaches, bigotry, and some of the predatory, abusive behavior they were dealing with. The abuse was as serious as kids receiving death threats, and being exposed to different adult predators. When the kids complained about one in particular, all that happened was the threads created by that adult were taken down. There were no statements or announcements that the person had been banned, which didn’t do much to make the members feel safer.

So, In October, a month before the 2023 challenge, one of the members posted the following in what was supposed to be a Mods-only forum (which tells you something about site security):

“There is always an explosion of newbies in November, and you have children as young as 13 here. And your inaction is making the site dangerous. We are being forced to defend ourselves against something we should not be dealing with because you can’t be bothered. This is more than inaction. This is dangerous incompetence. And don’t respond to this with another ‘we’ll do better’ apology, because they never last. I’ve seen this cycle too many times. Tell us that he’s gone, that we don’t have to worry about him, and tell us what you’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And stop forcing children to be the adults in your place.”

The mods responded by giving the kids one day’s notice before closing the forum for a week.

Teens created a separate site to air their experiences where their posts couldn’t be erased, which I’ll link in the notes. These examples were far from the only ones of creepy, inappropriate, or downright illegal actions against kids. There were even allegations of sexual assaults taking place at local events. And since they were in public places like coffee shops, the volunteer MLs felt they had no power to kick anyone out, no matter what they’d done.

Now, regardless of whether I buy that excuse or not isn’t the point. The point is nobody was doing anything to help these kids or hold the adults in question accountable. So, they brought their complaints to the FBI, along with over a hundred pages of evidence. Then they brought it to the NaNoWriMo board—who was admittedly pretty removed from daily ops.

The staff and board ended up doing exactly what Mod X had threatened to do to the Christian Teens Together members. They shut the forums down, this time permanently.

The ML Exodus

A lot of MLs were quitting around that time. After all, they’d been urged to get as many local teachers and students into these forums as possible, and they understandably couldn’t stomach hanging out after what had happened.

But still others quit due to a contract NaNo HQ demanded they sign within two weeks of receipt—one that most lawyers would never let a client sign off on. The good thing about it is they stipulated background checks for all volunteers. Great. What wasn’t so great were some of the other rules.

One was that all NaNo-related communications could only take place through the site, which meant no more forums or Discords for local and regional meetups. Executive Director Kilby Blade was noted to have told employees that she didn’t understand the point of forums anyway—she believed writers’ retreats (famously an affordable option) were much more effective.

Even weirder is that the contract demanded that MLs never share information in any language but English, even though the organization spanned multiple countries. To illustrate the problem with that—in Canada, it’s the law that all official communications must be presented bilingually, in both English and French.

Last of all, the new contract placed full liability on MLs (which, for the billionth time, are volunteers) for anything that happened at their events or within their online communities. And with the way abuse had become so rampant and unpunished by actual staff or mods, that was not a risk people were willing to take.

And there’s so much, SO MUCH, more that I simply do not have the time to cover, and we’re not even to the part that people actually paid attention to!

2024 AI Statement

Good graces toward NaNoWriMo, which had already been tanking, were at their breaking point. And you’d think everything I’ve just described would do it, right? But what actually put the nail in the coffin was last year’s infamous statement on AI released on August 8, 2024. If you’ve seen any part of this already, it’s undoubtedly that statement, which I am now going to read.

“NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo’s mission is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. 

[They link here to an article that no longer exists…]

“We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

“Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.”

(ESPECIALLY WHEN FORUMS ARE SHUT DOWN)

“Ableism. Not all brains have the same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There are a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t “see” the issues in their writing without help.”

(ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY’RE WORKING ON AN INACCESSIBLE WEBSITE)

“General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.”

(WHAT ABOUT WHEN THEY’RE BULLIED OR HARASSED IN THEIR WRITING COMMUNITIES WITH NO CONSEQUENCES?)

“Beyond that, we see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole. It’s healthy for writers to be curious about what’s new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft. Our events with a connection to AI have been extremely well-attended, further-proof that this programming is serving Wrimos who want to know more.”

“For all of those reasons, we absolutely do not condemn AI, and we recognize and respect writers who believe that AI tools are right for them. We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that’s perfectly fine. As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.”

I mean, how do you feel about that? Particularly if you are from one of those underrepresented groups or have a “brain of different ability”?

People didn’t like that. And I’m going to be kind of charitable here to said “people”, and speculate that it drew more attention than the child exploitation issue because that was something that affected a group outsiders weren’t aware of. If you hadn’t been a dedicated NaNoWriMo person, you probably didn’t know about it. If I hadn’t been a participant for half of November 2023, I would have had no idea.

But the AI statement addressed a wider cultural phenomenon that has been the hottest conversation topic for anyone who creates art. 

Critics also speculated that this post may have had something to do with one of their sponsors, ProWritingAid, which had introduced a robust generative AI function called “Sparks.” For transparency—I did subscribe to ProWritingAid with the intent of using it as a grammar checker a while back and hadn’t really been paying attention to it until I started researc hing this. 

(To be completely honest, I’ve barely been using it. It has this weird alignment and formatting problem where, if you accept one of its edits, it inserts the change into a completely different line and sometimes into the middle of a word. And I guess I now understand why running the program uses so much RAM. I won’t be renewing my membership.) 

Regardless—that’s some egg on my face!

Pandemonium ensued after that statement. Authors Daniel José Older and Maureen Johnson stepped down from the board—Older doing it in a Tweet that added a “Never use my name in your promo again in fact never say my name at all and never email me again.” Writers who had previously written bestselling novels during NaNoWriMo, like Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, condemned the statement. Ellipsus dropped out as a sponsor, which is how I found out about them, so yay for that!

NaNo HQ issued a retraction, kinda, in September 2024 that read as follows:

“Taking a position of neutrality was not an abandonment of writers’ legitimate concerns about AI. It was an acknowledgment that NaNoWriMo can’t maintain a civil, inclusive community if we allow selective intolerance. We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve.

“We apologize that our original message was unclear and seemingly random. Our note on ableism and classism was rooted in the desire to point out that, for people in certain circumstances, some forms of AI can be life-changing. We certainly don’t believe those with concerns about AI to be classist or ableist. Not being more careful about our wording was a bad decision on our part.”

A little bit of a sorry-not-sorry there, but either way the damage was done. The good will that nonprofits rely upon to stay afloat was completely shattered.

On March 31, 2025, Kilby Blades posted a Powerpoint presentation on YouTube, discussing the organization’s dwindling finances, the results of so-called community vitriol, and letting everyone know that NaNoWriMo was no more.

So now what?

NaNoWriMo started out as an idea, and that idea was driven by a spirit of fun and community and creative expression. Some people are trying to keep the party going. 

Funny enough, ProWritingAid has created a clone of NaNo called “Novel November”, which definitely isn’t anti-AI. I did poke around in there, and it’s very similar to late-stage NaNo in that it offers rewards, badges, communities divided up by genres and interests, and a slew of sponsors and partners (former HPS guest Ellipsus is notably not on there).

Ellipsus did post some “preptober” templates that people can use to prepare to write a novel in November. There’s only one day left, sure, but that means you STILL HAVE TIME.

Some, “content creator” types are running challenges within their own communities, paid and unpaid, as are a few other writer-related businesses. I’ve noticed several have knocked about ten to twenty-thousand words off the 50k goal, and that’s probably more realistic for the way life is right now for most people.

But Chris Baty, who started the challenge in 1999, hasn’t lost love for it. He put up a site called “NaNo 2.0” for people who want to do the challenge on their own terms. Instead of accounts, wordcounters, groups and additional programs, there’s instructions, suggestions, and a link to a Bluesky account with about 400 members.

But you don’t really need any of this stuff to write a Novel in November. You can do it alone. You can do it with a couple of your friends, or you can make it last all year.

Content, Community, and Capitalism

So, what can we learn from this twenty-five year saga? How do we make sense of it?

First, it’s not enough to just throw out a “because capitalism”, because even though that’s a big part of it, it’s reductive. Individual egos, cynical leadership, and authoritarian mindsets are definitely ingredients. A general culture disrespect for and disbelief of children is as well. But it’s tough to argue that money wasn’t a driver for a lot of poor decisions that were made throughout this story.

So in a time where nonprofits are getting widely defunded, while the cost of living is rising faster than salaries can keep up, it’s a great time to see what we can do cooperatively. Especially when it comes to things that bring us joy.

Nonprofits aren’t corporations, but trying to manage a de-centralized movement like NaNoWriMo using one centralized organization is kind of indicative of how we approach creativity and community these days. Small communities get hurtful and messy, and terrible things can happen there—that’s also clear from this story. Mods in small groups, even ones who *aren’t* predators, can be power-hungry jerks or just make hurtful mistakes. But trying to engineer hundreds of small groups means these conflicts have the potential to hideously spiral into harmful patterns and then spur massive coverups.

And when corporations *do* come into play, we run the risk of dehumanizing writers in a way that we’re all too familiar with by now.

Your art becomes *content*. Your value comes from your ability to produce content. And that way of looking at it will suck the creativity out of you. And when everything is based on the anxiety of competition, it might even tempt some folks to turn to generative AI, even when the the goal of writing a novel in November is just to create a first draft, not complete and sell an entire book.

You’re not there to finish a book. You’re not there to source an entire project team for your self-publishing journey. You’re not there to make yourself into a product to be bought.

All you need to do is write. You can worry about the other stuff later.

Sound Credits

• Jester Dance by Conquest | https://freetouse.com/music/conquest  
• Meditation Music by Dana Music from Pixabay
• Typing Sound Effect by DRAGON-STUDIO from Pixabay

Sources

• History told from NaNo’s POV, on Archive.org
• Interview with Chris Baty
• Fall of the House of NaNoWriMo?
• The Fall Continues
• The Tragic Downfall of NaNoWriMo | Deep Dive – Savy Writes Books
• Reddit Thread: “Discords, forums and a decade’s worth of allegations: how Nanowrimo ignited a revolution against it – part one and part two
• Leaked Municipal Liaison Contract
• Victoria Strauss’s coverage of Inkitt from 2016
• NaNoWriMo Moderator accused of child exploitation
• NaNo Scandal Summary Doc
• Speak Out site for former YWP members
• AI Statement from NaNo HQ
• Inside the Heated Controversy That’s Tearing a Writing Community Apart
• Daniel José Older’s resignation post
• Ellipsus’s sponsorship retraction
• NaNo 2.0
• Ellipsus Preptober Templates
• Track Bear word tracking tool
• Thread for NaNo Alternatives, Writing Discords & Resources
• “State of NaNoWriMo” closing announcement

The post Episode 82: NaNoNowWhat? first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 82: NaNoNowWhat? appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

We’re building Ellipsus as a platform that prioritizes transparency, trust, independence, and creative freedom. Writers shouldn’t have to trade their privacy or their ownership for good tools. The rise of AI scraping and big tech overreach only made that more urgent for us. —Rex at Ellipsus

Whatever your attitude toward emerging technologies, we can probably agree it’s tough to be online these days. The tools available seem to be multiplying for some and dwindling for others—particularly for those who don’t want to use generative AI. A growing distrust of big tech is leading people to search for less exploitative options than Google or Microsoft. 

Fortunately for them (and also me), new developers are creating tools that don’t push AI without the opportunity to opt-in. One of those new tools is Ellipsus, a writing tool created by a small group of writers who wanted better collaborative document options, and who are solidly for transparency, privacy, and writers’ rights to their own work.

What Makes Ellipsus Different

As a text editor, Ellipsus is a lot like Google Docs, but more focused on better performance for large docs. It’s got a git-style feature for better version control, richer permissions, flexibility, and creative customizations. It’s got a unique knack for supporting real-time collaboration, and is simple enough to start using right away. 

How Ellipsus Addresses Concerns about AI, Privacy, and Access

Ellipsus has been very clear on their stance: no generative AI in the program, ever. They believe writers’ work shouldn’t be harvested to train models without consent. Generative AI, when built on creative labor, undermines originality, and they believe putting it inside a writing tool would be fundamentally counterproductive to fostering genuine voices. Ellipsus’s creators want it to be a safe space for writers, and are working on offering better encryption and privacy protections, too.

Things that Make Ellipsus Fun

Things that Make Ellipsus Fun

Ellipsus has a vibrant Discord community of writers providing mutual support, betas, collaborators, and the opportunity to commune. Collaboration options in the documents themselves are pretty fun too—I love being able to create different drafts for different beta readers so no one has to feel put on the spot.

And another small but mighty feature is the variety of different skins you can apply to your program (my current favorite is Red Velvet ).

Links of Interest

• Try it for yourself for free on Ellipsus’s website
• Ellipsus’s statement on generative AI
• NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose
• What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs
• Episode 81 transcript

The post Episode 81: Ellipsus—an AI-Free Tool for Collaborative Writing first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 81: Ellipsus—an AI-Free Tool for Collaborative Writing appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

I think books have a purpose for an author, and mine is about impacting change, helping people take what they want, and hopefully making their life or their team’s lives better.

I’ve been lucky to work with Karl Becker on his three books, Set Up to Win, Sales & Marketing Alignment, and Iceberg Selling. After the publication of his latest book, I realized it was way past time to invite Karl to chat! In this episode, we talk about his experiences as an author and how they have transformed his business and life. We also share what it’s been like to work on these projects together and how the writing process has taught us both that surprises, sometimes pretty big ones, are inevitable when you create a book.

In this episode, we cover…

• What Karl’s expectations were before writing a book and how his world has changed since becoming a published author.
• How the process of writing three books has helped him understand his own work better, form deeper connections with more people, and serve his customers better.
• The eye-opening possibilities that come from writing with a partner whose expertise differs from your own.
• A story about ditching your head trash and getting out of your own way from Karl’s latest book, Iceberg Selling.

Guest Bio

Karl Becker has founded and run numerous companies over the last thirty years and now runs Improving Sales Performance, a consultancy that supports sales organizations to build high-performing teams and achieve their revenue goals. He is the author of Set up to Win: Three Frameworks to a High-Performing Sales Organization and Sales & Marketing Alignment. He has a BA in economics from Colorado College and an MBA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. You can learn more about him and his work at improvingsalesperformance.com.

Featured above are Karl’s books, Set Up to Win, Sales & Marketing Alignment, and Iceberg Selling. You can get more info on their contents and my role in bringing them to life on my portfolio page. You can also learn more about Karl’s work at improvingsalesperformance.com.

Transcript — Episode 80: Karl Becker

Emily Einolander  00:21

Welcome to the Hybrid Pub Scout Podcast, with me, Emily Einolander, where we’re helping you navigate indie publishing. Today’s guest is Karl Becker. Karl Becker has founded and run numerous companies over the last 30 years, and now runs Improving Sales Performance, a consultancy that supports sales organizations to build high performing teams and achieve their revenue goals. He is the author of Set Up to Win: Three Frameworks to a High Performing Sales Organization, and Sales and Marketing Alignment. And now the new Iceberg Selling. He has a BA in economics from Colorado College and an MBA from the University of Colorado Boulder. You can learn more about him and his work at improvingsalesperformance.com or just ask me because we’ve been working together for three years, right?

Karl Becker  01:11

That’s right, at least three years. And it’s been amazing. It’s been a heck of a journey and a heck of a friendship. And I think we’ve done some really fun, great, hopefully inspirational and impactful work.

Emily Einolander  01:24

Yeah, and I’ve been wanting you to come on and talk for a long time. But I felt like after Iceberg Selling, Okay, well, we need to talk about this, because this is a really good book, and you’re going on other podcasts talking about it. So I can’t let you just do that without coming on mine too.

Karl Becker  01:41

Absolutely. You know, I love talking about all this stuff. I’m a huge fan of what we’ve done together, and I love talking about the books and the message. And you know, with Iceberg Selling, we have a business book, but we’ve got drawings, a walrus and polar bears, and that’s in it. So it doesn’t always have to be buttoned up. It’s super fun.

Emily Einolander  02:00

And the person who did the polar bears and walruses, the illustrations in your book, also did the branding for Hybrid Pub Scout. So that is that crossover Leigh Thomas, thank you for being awesome. So we have three books that we did together. Why did you want to do that?

Karl Becker  02:20

Well, it was like one of these life moment stories. And I think if you read Iceberg Selling, if you hear me in other podcasts, you know, I’m all about possibility. I don’t always know what’s going to happen. No surprise right there. My crystal ball isn’t perfect. But I’m always open to like, well, what is going to happen? I’m kind of open to the yeses in the world. And, so when we met, we were working together, doing kind of different things. And then we just started to get to know each other more. And I think that’s, there’s kind of a hint there, right? Like, I wouldn’t have known that you would have been such an exceptional writing partner. And I wouldn’t have you wouldn’t have known I had a book in me if we didn’t just become friends and start to talk. So I think that a big part of everything is just trying to get excited about the people you’re with and learning. 

But the story I want to tell about these books, and why I wrote them is, when we first started writing, I was convinced this book was going to be a workbook, I was convinced, oh, I’ve got all these kinds of exercises I use, and I’m going to put them all together, and it’s going to be a book. And it’s going to be very businesslike and very practical and pragmatic. And I think it was probably the first or second meeting was certainly early on as I started to share my vision. And you were like Karl, you’re all about change. This book isn’t about worksheets, this is about change, and how to help people change and navigate that. And that was such this pivotal moment of my life, because I knew I had books in me, I love to create, but you don’t always know what you don’t know. And sometimes having a guide that sees things differently is just an amazing thing. So I am so grateful that you are open to hearing what I thought I wanted to do, but also reflecting back the deeper the deeper thing that I was trying to communicate the deeper book that was in me. And I tell that to numerous people, because I’m so proud of the books we’ve created, and that first one Set Up to Win, wouldn’t have been what it was if you didn’t understand me and see deeper why I wanted to write this book and what it was really about because it wasn’t about what I thought it was gonna be about. It’s in there. But that wasn’t the main vibe, the main story.

Emily Einolander  04:39

Yeah. And I didn’t start out thinking that either. It wasn’t like I saw you and it was like, aha, he thinks all of these things about business and I’m gonna make him admit it. It was okay, we’re working on these worksheets here and that’s what I was planning for. And that’s what I was, you know, asking around about and as we were talking you were like, well Got to be able to make organizational change, you have to have this kind of person working. And this is the way you have to communicate with the leadership. And I’m like, This is not a worksheet that you’re talking about here. This is an approach. And you have all of these stories, you’re telling me because that’s how you talk. In general, like I, it’s, I try not to laugh when it happens. But I’ll be like, asking you maybe what I thought was a yes or no question. And you’ll be like, let me tell you a story.

Karl Becker  05:27

But it also be like, and the story needs to start with another story. You know, first the Earth cooled, and then the dinosaurs came? Far back. Karl, just tell me yes or no.

Emily Einolander  05:39

But also, that’s where the good stuff comes out. So you set the time aside, because it’s not going to be, go right through this form and answer every question uniformly. It’s, let’s see what happens. So that’s why it’s so hard to plan a book, exactly what it’s going to be like, from day one, unless you got this really kind of rote thing going on. It’s like, we got to leave room for the surprises, because I don’t think there’s been a time that you and I have worked on something where that hasn’t happened.

Karl Becker  06:12

You know, I would even say the most recent book, I think if we look at how it started, we were gonna write a book about sales stories. And this was our third book working together. And so you know, we play around with stories, you’re so good at pulling what you need out of my head and helping me see other things. And it’s just, it’s such a true partnership. But, you know, we had done that. And I think we were almost 50-60% through this vision of this book. And I read it one day, and I called you and I was like, “You know, I think this isn’t the book, I think we need to do a different book.” And so sometimes where you start, and where you end isn’t the same thing. But it’s the journey, and I think that’s been so good, it’s helping me truly go on a book writing journey to get, I’m gonna call it the gold. 

But for me, it’s really like getting the stories, the emotion, the message, the essence of what I’m really trying to communicate out. And I don’t know what that is, it’s like, if you just say, what’s the what’s the vibe you’re trying to get? What’s the main message? I might be like, I don’t know. But if we start to talk, it starts to kind of appear. And I think it’s so cool in that last example because of that kind of first draft of a different book, we became so incredibly efficient. With Iceberg Selling we cranked that out in a short period of time, and I think it’s the best work we’ve done yet. But I think it’s because part of writing that book was understanding what we were really doing and what I really wanted to bring forward. And I think that’s the beauty of a writing partnership. Like I knew I had books in me, I know I have stories and lessons I want to tell. But like so many things in life, just having a guide and a partner enables people to bring different strengths forward. And that one plus one equals three, when it happens.

Emily Einolander  08:07

Yeah, I find it extremely difficult to write by myself and I’m doing a blog series on that right now. Because people think that writing is this big solitary endeavor. And you know, you have those stretches of time where you’re all by yourself with your own brain. And that’s terrifying, and spelunking without a cave light. But the more that you interact with other people, especially ones who are passionate about writing or passionate about your subject, then you’re probably going to find things in there that you didn’t before. And we created an entire repository of your stories before we even started on this book, which was a lot of work. And I was like, oh, no, well, what if that was all for nothing? And then it was not for nothing, because, we just plucked those out of there when we were working on Iceberg Selling, and we made it teeny, tiny, but in a way that makes it easier and more accessible for people to read. Why don’t you tell us about that book a little bit. We’ve been referring to it this whole time. But if you want to give us kind of an overview.

Karl Becker  09:08

Karl, talk about what you love the most right now.

Emily Einolander  09:12

Yeah, talk about your favorite thing ever that you’re currently going around and talking about on other podcasts? Like maybe just tell me about it.

Karl Becker  09:18

This is not just in case you’re like, “What is an iceberg?” I am not in the business of selling icebergs. Icebergs sell themselves.

Emily Einolander  09:26

Thank you for saying that when I had coffee in my mouth.

Karl Becker  09:30

So, you know, I think this gets back to you know when we decided to write this book, I first said I want to see myself on stage. I want this book. I’m envisioning myself talking to a group of salespeople. Now, the book is also for anyone that’s not in sales. Like I’m going to tell you what it’s about. And you read it. I have been on numerous podcasts. I’ve done numerous workshops where somebody has stood up and they’ve said, these are life lessons. These are things that I can take as a parent. Whereas a leader or a manager, it’s awesome. That’s awesome. So when we talk about sales, just know if you do any communication at all, if you talk to other people at all, this actually might be fun for you to read. And so it was kind of this purpose driven book. I know, I haven’t told you what it is yet, right? Look at this guy. So it’s this purpose driven book. Like I envisioned myself talking to a bunch of salespeople. And I said to myself, what’s the one thing that if everyone left with would change their life, if it was just one thing? And the whole idea with Iceberg Selling is—I’m an iceberg. Emily, you’re an iceberg. Every problem out there is an iceberg, every client’s an iceberg. Your teenage boys are icebergs. Your older parents are icebergs. Everybody’s an iceberg. And what I mean by that is, most of the time, like an iceberg, you only see about 10% above the surface. Yet we act like we know everything about people. And, you know, if you want to get kind of funny, and it’s not that funny, but you know, the movie Titanic, right? That’s why that big boat hit that iceberg because they couldn’t see it.

Emily Einolander  11:13

Hilarious.

Karl Becker  11:15

I mean, of course, you’re king in the world? No, I’m the top of the world and then you’re not. But you know, I digress. But to get real, to get really real? Imagine that, right? People only see about 10% of who you are, and you only see about 10% of who they are, even your family members. And think about how different your life would be. If you could see the 90% underneath—what is their backstory? What’s really going on for them? In a term, I like to say, what is their world? How can I get their world? And if you’re in sales, I believe in sales, you’re a guide, I don’t believe all this stuff, Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room. That’s entertainment. People who are really great at sales, that is not who you’re going to deal with. You’re going to deal with someone that truly cares, listens, tries to understand you fully so that they can bring the solution that solves your problem. That’s why you’re in a conversation already anyway. So I just kind of put it out there in your imagination. You know, if you’re trying to solve somebody, or you’re trying to connect or trying to understand their world, meet them where they are, but you’re only seeing 10%, you’re at a great disadvantage of getting it wrong. And in the world of sales, that could mean a really good customer ends up not becoming a customer because you missed something, or you missed a lot of things. So I get back to, the whole idea with Iceberg Selling is if everyone and everything you’re only seeing 10%, how do you start to kind of give yourself the muscle memory or the skills to get better at showing up to be able to learn more about the iceberg? And then what are some best practices to actually uncover it as well. So that you can truly understand someone and meet them where they are and start to connect and bring solutions. And so that’s the high level. That’s the whole as I said the other day, that’s Iceberg Selling in a nutshell.

Emily Einolander  13:03

And that’s about as long as the book is actually. 

Karl Becker  13:07

Yeah, we wrote the book to be super fast. The Audible version of it’s about two and a half hours. So it was designed to be fun, fast, easy to either read all at once or in bite sized pieces. And I just commend you in helping me design it that way. Because I didn’t want it to mimic. If I were on stage, or I was working in a workshop and talking to people, could I take them through a very short, impactful “Aha” driven journey, where at the end, they feel equipped to do something and the book matches as if I was talking to you. And even the way it’s written is very, very conversational. It’s like I’m in your head talking to you.

Emily Einolander  13:47

I hope that’s what I mean for me. Yes. But that’s that’s because I have a very intense experience of actually writing the book. And I remember kind of using I’ve talked to Jesse Kwak before on this podcast, the book from Chaos to Creativity. So, you know, if any Microcosm Press people are listening right now, or just if you’re listening, I literally took your book out and was like, we should make it this size. And kind of like stagger the illustrations in this way. And Karl was like, that’s the one. So shout out to y’all, thank you for the influence. But also, I kind of wanted to touch on the fact that as a writer and as someone who collaborates in writing, how valuable the framework that you just gave us was, because if you’re interviewing someone, and it’s all just the top level stuff, who cares? Like that’s what everyone’s seeing all of the time. It’s not interesting, but when you’re really digging into something, that’s when all of the gold comes out, you know, otherwise, it might as well just be like a clickbait article. And I remember actually, when we first started working together on Set Up to Win, which is your first book, we were talking a lot about, you know, going through the sales process and the marketing process. And I sent you a meme. And I’m going to describe a meme like this is a Star Trek episode. It’s the one with the astronaut putting a gun to the back of the other astronaut’s head as he looks at the planet Earth. And I just put a diagram of the sales process and was like, it’s four act structure, always has been. So I found that my ability to think in terms of story, and that kind of trajectory really helps with me talking about the stuff that you like to teach. So that’s been a really eye opening experience for me, too. So if you like nerdy structural things like that, as I do. This has been great. I’ve learned a lot about writing copy and talking to people and growing my business. So it’s been a really valuable experience for me. 

Karl Becker  16:04

Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I think what we’re also bringing to the surface here, much like what we’re talking about an Iceberg Selling were a part of Iceberg Selling, when you when you get to – how do you do it? And I’ll get there, I think it’ll make sense when I get here. The first one is to do the research. What do you understand about the situation already? And then the second one is helping that other person you’re working with. Like, hey, where are we going to go today in this conversation? The third is starting to kind of get into rapport. How do I really learn about you? And one of the things around that, just as a quick pro tip is, the more you share about yourself, the more that other person’s going to share, and then from there, you can start to co-create. And I think those two pieces are actually why you and I’ve worked so well together and why I think the books we’ve created are so exceptional. Because what I envision in this rapport building is you learn some big things about me, you know, my family, my past, what I believe in, and likewise, we know very deeply about each other in our lives. Which to me, is we are as a writing team, learning more and more about each other’s iceberg so that we find these commonalities, and you’re teaching me things I don’t know. And I’m teaching you things you don’t know, which then for the reader, in this Iceberg Selling kind of concept, we begin to co create, I’m taking an inspiration from you, you’re taking inspiration from me. And then it’s kind of like, like morphing together into the content. Right. And even though this is my book, and I’m the domain expert, the way you interpret it and see it and share back to me enables me to build it, or us to build it together in a way that I think is more universal. Like I’m taking your skills, your experience, and mine and it creates a better product. And so I think that’s what’s so interesting about creation, right? Like, I could go and build this on my own and get an editor and clean it up. But it wouldn’t be half the book that it is because we’re co creating along the way. And like I said a second ago, like the pieces of your life that helped me see things differently, and vice versa. Just create a better product for the reader.

Emily Einolander  18:28

Yeah, because otherwise you’re kind of in your own head, and you have no idea whether what you’re saying makes sense to someone other than you.

Karl Becker  18:38

Right. And I think there’s an interesting lesson there. Like, I’m a business guy, I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve done it my entire life. And so to have a writing partner, your background isn’t the same as mine. Right? So for you to be able to understand what I’m communicating is a gift, because I think it enables the book to be written. Like if I wrote it just for business people, it wouldn’t be as universal, right? And I’m so close to being a business person, I’m so close to it, I may very well be suggesting or writing in a way that I think is super basic, and everyone understands, but it’s not. So I love the fact that you’re not a domain expert. You’re a domain expert in writing and understanding and interviewing and taking my thoughts and putting them together versus Oh, I know how to write a business book Karl, we’ll write it together. I think something would have been lost there because you’re learning and seeing it with fresh eyes and ears. And that’s enabling it to be really powerful and more accessible. And I think that’s one of the reasons team based writing works so well.

Emily Einolander  19:55

And I would also say that even if you are just writing a business book, most human beings enjoy the story aspect of it so much, because the first part of it was all that stuff you and I were talking about, where it’s about the people and it’s about, you know, your baseball story with your sons. But everybody talked about how much they loved the first five chapters or something like that before you got into the business part of it. And these were people who do the things that you were teaching them and they’re just like, I really liked this baseball story. 

Karl Becker  20:43

So I’ll tell the baseball story real quick. That your point is fascinating, right? Like it, I will tell a different story actually.

Emily Einolander  20:49

This is how our conversations go.

Karl Becker  20:52

Yes, welcome to my world, right? And your world. So I think a lot of times, Okay, I’m gonna put myself out there. So so my dad and I have the same birthday. He turned 80. And we had this birthday party, and you know, it kind of a nice restaurant. There was maybe 14 people there for my dad. And I don’t know if this is right, it’s not really fair. So if he’s listening, I kind of apologize. But that’s okay, hopefully you love me unconditionally. But I feel like, for him, that day was about the dinner, a nice dinner, literally the food. And yeah, he wanted to have his family around. But for me, it didn’t matter about the food. For me, it was the experience of being around family members that I don’t see that often and celebrating my dad’s 80th birthday. And the fact that we have the same birthday, same event, very different goals are very different outcomes that we’re playing for. Sure, my dad wanted to have a nice time, but I think for him, in his mind, it was like, Okay, we have a nice dinner, and everyone’s there, and we’re gonna have a dinner, and I’m gonna pay for it. And for me, it was like, we’re all gonna be there, and we’re gonna laugh and celebrate my dad. And we’re gonna open some fun presents. 

So I guess the reason I say that is, in this book, in all of the books we’ve written, but especially Set Up to Win, it’s not only about the content, but it’s about the journey the reader goes on. It’s about their personal experience with the stories and the lessons and seeing themselves in it, not just, Oh, these are the five things I’m supposed to do, or the meal that I just got. And so I do think even if you’re listening, and you have a book in you, and you have all this really great, pragmatic, smart thought leadership, I’d say yes, and awesome. But it’s also going to be about how it’s packaged and received. So that it’s more digestible, it’s more entertaining, and people want to be in it more. And that’s why instead of when, to tell the baseball story, we start with a story. 

We start with a story about a friend of mine giving me some baseball tickets. I live in Colorado, I’m a Colorado Rockies fan. And so at this point in time, my kids were pretty young. And my wife and I didn’t have a chance to go out that often. Because we had young kids, one of us always had to kind of watch them. And you know how hard it is to get a sitter, if you have children. Like it’s not, it’s not as easy as it looks on TV. So I was like, Oh, I’ll take these tickets. They’re great tickets. And there’s just two of them. And I’ll take my wife, and all week we tried to get a sitter, couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. So my oldest son, I think, was seven or eight at the time. And I said, Guess what, buddy? We’re going to a baseball game tonight. And it’s a night game. And I know you’re eight or nine or seven or eight, but we’re going to be out really late. And then he goes, Dad, are we going to catch a ball tonight? And for some crazy reason I go, yes. And if you’re a parent out there, if you promise anything to a kid, you know, I just made a big mistake. Yes, we are gonna catch a ball. So the rest of the day, I’m like, Oh my gosh, how are we gonna catch a ball? So we get in the car, we’re about to leave. And he’s like, stop. I slam on the brakes. He’s like, we forgot our mitts. And I’m like, Oh, he is like for real about this. He runs and gets this little eight year old kid mitt and my mitt, because we would play catch often, then we go to the game. And we’re there early. I’m trying to soak it all in as being a dad with a son at a baseball game. And he keeps pretending like he’s gonna catch it. And I start to believe this is really going to happen. I start to think, once the game starts, well, what if the ball does come to me, and I don’t want to be the dad that clocks, his kid and I drop the ball and someone else takes it. I’m on SportsCenter and I’m the blooper reel for the week, if not the year. So I’m like, I’m gonna stand up. I’m just gonna put my arm out. I’m gonna look up. I’m not going to take my eye off the ball. And I’m gonna catch it with my mitt and then I’m gonna make sure it’s there and it doesn’t bounce out, and I’m gonna grab it. Return to my son given this ball. Well, sure enough, it’s the third inning. He turns to me because we were going to catch up on it. Well, how about now? And Michael Dyer is at bat, and sure enough, this pop fly ball comes right to me exactly like I planned in my brain. I stand up, put my arm out, look at the ball, catch it, hold it there for a second look at my son and give it to him. And it was like this amazing moment. And of course, he asked me the question afterwards, Dad, when are we going to get the next one?

Emily Einolander  25:29

Because he’s got a brother.

Karl Becker  25:31

And so I start the book with that, because there’s a lot of intentionality to that story, right and faith in yourself and belief and possibility. But then fast forward. The second part of that story is, and Emily, you kind of told them, I have a second son. So I’m speaking at a conference in Dallas, and the Texas Rangers are out of Dallas. And we like to go to baseball stadiums when we travel. It’s kind of a way to kind of show my kids America and kind of what they’re like in that city. So I go, what if I wanted to catch another ball? What would I do? And I was like, Okay, I bet I could systematize this. I’m gonna sit off at third base. I’m going to dress my kids up in local team garments. So we look like Texas Ranger fans, all four of us. You’re gonna bring a kid because baseball players love kids. And if the ball you know, is a foul ball, and I don’t catch it, but it rolls on the field, I’ll probably throw it up to a kid. When I’m also just going to keep this positive. Nice, I’m gonna believe. And sure enough, it’s the ninth inning that it’s tied up. My family’s looking at me like we’re not getting the ball. I’m like, No, we are going to get one today. I believe that with all my heart. It goes into an extra inning and sure enough this pop fly from the Mariners comm hits, like the nearest pops into the field, this golden glove winner, last name, Beltray comes over, picks it up, looks up, sees me and my son, and throws it to me. And so we start the book with that story. Because one, it’s just a fun story. But the whole lesson is, Chance favors the prepared. There’s all these little steps you can take towards success and in sales. It’s not one thing, and in most of life, it’s not one thing. And so I could have told the story of like, hey, sales isn’t one thing, you got to really be clear on who you are and who you sell to and how you sell it. And what’s the process? And oh, my God, I already got bored. And this is my book. So we took the idea of, how do you catch a ball, knowing that there’s all these steps? Planning where you’re going to sit is a lot like, you know, what’s the strategy I’m going to do when I talk to a customer, right? So we tried to create these ways to bring the content into an accessible way of being received and stories are so good like that. And, Emily, I guess that’s kind of where we’re going with this right is, in these books, when you can find different ways, potentially through stories to connect with the reader, it does become a journey, and it becomes a great way to engage and get your message across.

Emily Einolander  28:10

So kind of like pivoting a little bit, but not really

Karl Becker  28:12

You want to go play. You want to go to a baseball game with me? You got it anytime.

Emily Einolander  28:16

Okay, thank you. I’ll take you up on that sometime. Um, so in the span of time that we’ve done these three books, there’s been a lot of evolving, and we’ve gotten better at working together. And we’ve gotten familiar with all of the stories that are in your arsenal. How has your experience of creating a book changed over time? And not just your experience of making the book, but of having the book as part of your professional portfolio?

Karl Becker  28:51

Well answer that one first. Because gosh, it’s like night and day, it is so different. And a friend of mine once told me that maybe three or four years ago, there’s a consultant, and then there’s a consultant with a book. And it’s totally different. As soon as you have a book, you are, you are seen so differently. And your credibility is so different. And I guess I would say it’s a yes and there too. Like, yes, it is, but one of the hidden jewels of having a book is my own personal clarity. Like when we wrote Set Up to Win. When we were done, I was so much more clear on how I wanted to be in the world, how I wanted to communicate what I do for a living, how I support people, how I build teams. And then I also had a framework that I could give people so that they could get a preview of it or digested in their own time to go. Yeah, I want to work with him. And so, having a book internally is one of the most amazing things is, at least for me, I got so much more clear, because you got to write like, you can’t just have a book that’s rambling. And no, it doesn’t work. And so being able to get clearer has been one of the biggest benefits because I’m just a more effective consultant and communicator or Keynote or running a workshop. I’m just clear. 

The second is amazing things happen, like, with Set Up to Win last February. In all my books, I have an invitation. Hey, if you want to talk, reach out, I love supporting people, I love talking about this stuff. So I always have an open invitation if and the same with the podcast, like if you want to reach out, reach out, I will gladly communicate with you. So I get this LinkedIn message from a guy named Jason at Semester at Sea. And he goes, I just read your book, and I’ve ordered it for my team. And I love it. And I’m wondering if you could speak at one of my events? Like, wow, okay, this is amazing. Like, wow, I don’t know who this person is, and they’ve reached out. So I got on a call with him shortly, took his LinkedIn invite, we became friends and spent the next couple months just kind of talking about how we could work together. And then I said, Hey, I’ve got this new book, would you be open to reading it? Because he’s like, I love your other two books. I was like, well, guess what, I’ve got one almost ready. And he read it, and he’s in the acknowledgments as a thank you because he gave me such great advice. And then he brought me in to do a workshop with his team for over around Iceberg Selling. And so how would that have happened if I didn’t have a book, right? And so now, not only do I have a friend, but I have a client. I’ve got a great story to tell. 

But I think having a book, I talk about possibilities, right? Like it just creates possibilities that I could never have imagined. Like, I’m going to run a workshop for a bunch of people at Semester at Sea, which is a college on a boat that travels all around the world, helping people become global citizens. How blanking cool is that? And so I think it’s a credibility thing. I think it’s a focus thing. I think it’s a possibility thing and it’s a legacy thing. I have two high schoolers now, two boys that are in high school, and they’ve heard the audio book, they’ve heard me talk, they’ve read it, they’ve seen it, they know they’re in it, there are stories about them. And that’s never gonna go away. And so as a father to know that I’ve got two boys that at any point in their life, they can open up this book and see themselves or see them their father and how I was showing up in the world, then. That’s, that’s worth the price of price of admission right there. That’s blanking cool, too.

Emily Einolander  33:05

Yeah, and then, have you had fun doing it?

Karl Becker  33:16

I did it three times, because I hate it each time.

Emily Einolander  33:22

Well, look, some people like to do CrossFit. Okay. We love doing things we hate to ourselves. 

Karl Becker  33:28

You know, it has been fun, because it’s my time. Like, it’s my time to get what’s out of my head when I’m passionate, when I might be processing through and share it with somebody, in this case you, that cares about me and cares about the product? And yeah, it’s work. It’d be like, Oh, wow, we’re gonna have an hour and a half to two hour session where we have a general idea. We’re going to talk, we’re going to record it, we’re going to transcribe, you’re going to ask me clarifying questions. And then you’re going to cycle on it. And go, Hey, does this generally capture this? That’s work, but it’s work that when you’re done, you can see it and feel it and touch it. And it’s real. And I like so much of what many of us probably do for a living, to quote to quote like an 80s commercial for all my 80s kids out there. Where’s the beef? Where is it? And once and once you kind of start to see another piece evolve and evolve and evolve and kind of come to life and read it. It’s it’s so fun. Oh, my God, I said that this is my book. This is really cool.

Emily Einolander  34:36

And it can be a little emotional sometimes too.

Karl Becker  34:42

Absolutely. Yeah.

Emily Einolander  34:43

When I was talking to this person named Amanda who does something similar to what I do, she was like, I try to prime people for the emotional experience of creating a book before we get started, because you always have these, even if it’s not actually exploring the story that does it to you. Like the waiting. And the revisions, where you go and look back over what you did and go, is this really what I want to say? Or like, Is this my life sitting here in front of me? 

Karl Becker  35:15

Well, the other part is, I would like to think this is about our relationship. You see, I can show up very raw. And I think it’s because you’ve built a really safe place for me to feel that I’m heard and understood. And I can explore something. And if I’m, if I’m tweaked, or I’m having a rough day, I’m sure there’s some recordings where I would probably be like, Oh, wow, I said that. But I think if you’re going to write a book, number one, and if you’re going to write a book with somebody else, as a teammate, as a writing partner, like you are to me, Emily, it’s not going to be right. Every time there’s going to be some, there’s going to be some times where you have to throw away all the work you did. Because, at least for me, I process out loud a lot. So part of the experience is being able to be vulnerable, and share and know that your writing partner, you, Emily, you have my back, you’re going to allow me to maybe unpack some things that I didn’t even know I was going to that’s really that. And I couldn’t do that by myself. Like if it was just me and a, I want to say typewriter.

Emily Einolander  36:28

I mean, people still use them. Sometimes. 

Karl Becker  36:32

But yeah, I mean, and so I think you’re right that in writing, there’s a lot of things that show up. It’s an emotional journey, because sometimes, I don’t want to do this today. But that’s where a writing partner helps, right? We’re gonna get on a call, and maybe the first 30 minutes, we’re talking and you’re a therapist for me. And then I process through whatever that was like, before we start, I want to tell you the story, you know, and, and then I’m at a place where I can get back on point and focus. And yeah, the waiting is kind of hard. And the reveals are cool, too. When the book cover comes out, when I see the illustrations, when I read a chapter that I forgot, I told a story and I’m like, Oh, my God, that was a great story. I remember that. The last part, I’ll tell you, just because I said that I was listening to the audiobook of Iceberg Selling on my way, on a trip recently. And I just turned to my family. I really liked this guy, he gets me, but that’s fun, right? Like, that’s fun to kind of see the thing you put into the world and it comes alive.

Emily Einolander  37:41

And the actual collaborative process is not a performance. So I think that there’s an expectation for some people that I’ve heard talking about collaboration, where it’s like, I show up to talk to this writer, and I have everything planned out in my head in advance, and they interview me and I answer the questions flawlessly with a totally clear mind. And I always look at people describing the process that way. And I’m like, is that really what happens? Is that how other people think, and I’m not sure. Maybe someone does, but you know, if they have an entire talk planned out in advance and it’s basically just transcribing it. But you know, for us, it’s just sort of been like, let’s wade through this, like unconscious mind stuff. That’s coming out.

Karl Becker  38:33

But I mean, I do think when I wrote the first book, and I had an outline, because people come in, and they’re like, oh, you know, you have this thing called the Revenue Equation. And, you know, there’s three stages, and each stage has five questions. There’s three chapters of your book, each one I’m like, Oh, yeah. first three chapters. Yeah, and then the fourth chapter will be the summary. Got it? Yeah. And then you and I start to talk and it’s like, wait a minute that’s dry. That’s like, we don’t need a book, we already have a worksheet. And so I think, even if you’re listening on Okay, yeah, I think I know that eight chapters or 10, or 12, and maybe you do and that’s great. I’m definitely not discounting that, but at least my experience has been those are starting points. Those are inspirations. Those are kind of directional landmarks, if you will, yeah, I think I want this in the story or, Yes, I think I want this in the book. This is the point I really need to get across. But for me, getting clear of the message was something that we worked on together and we process through. And for me and how my brain works, having a partner that helps me say it out loud and reframe it and keep asking for clarification. That’s how I was able to get clear.

Emily Einolander  39:44

Well, it’s been really fun. It has been emotional for me too. I will say to anyone who’s going to be doing this kind of work, you have to be emotionally open and prepared to hear sometimes stories that may remind you of something in your life that happened. It’s never not going to be an emotional experience. But if you are able to go through the entire process, then I think there are really big rewards to it. And I think that’s the entire metaphor for creating a book in the first place. Because there are so many steps to it. And it takes such a long time, even outside of the actual writing, that you kind of have to have a lot of emotional fortitude and determination to be able to finish it up. And we did it. Is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners?

Karl Becker  40:38

This story in Iceberg selling about Tim just keeps coming up again, and again, and again for me. And so if I’m going to really honor myself, today, I’m going to tell that story, do it. But in typical fashion, where I tell you that story. 

So I’m out to lunch with a Vistage chair, who’s a friend of mine. This is a peer group for business leaders where they have a coach and there’s usually 10 or 12 people and you’re talking through things. So I just wanted to give the readers that context. So I’m with my friend, Tanya, and she runs a group. And I said, Hey, I’d love to give you a book for all your members of Iceberg Selling, I just think it impacts things so powerfully. And I would love to give it to you. And I think it would be of service to your members. Yeah, if one of them wants to call me and maybe there’s an opportunity, that’s great, too. But ultimately, I played for change. And I am really proud of this book, and the more people I want to share it with, hopefully it affects people’s lives in a positive way. She said that would be great, but I need to ask you a favor. What’s that she was? What do you want me to say when I give this book to everyone? And I go, Oh, well tell him that Karl is your friend and he’s a sales consultant. This book is really great to help build salespeople and sales teams. Karl, that’s boring. And that’s going to fall flat. I need something that gets them to understand why they should read this book. And I said, Well, there’s a great story in there about a guy named Tim.  And Tim has a bunch of stuff in his head about selling and what does selling mean? And I said, you really should listen to the story. And I’ll tell it to you right now. But tell everybody in the group. Hey, there’s this great story in there. And this is what it’s about. And Karl and I were talking that many of you in the room might have a similar baggage and head trash around this where your sales team does. So if this story resonates, read the book, and if you like it, give it to your salesman, because that’s it. That’s what I want to tell him. I’m gonna listen to the audiobook. 

So that was the story before the story. Here’s a story about Tim. 

I’m speaking at a workshop of about 30 early stage CEOs and founders in Houston, an early stage doesn’t mean they’re all 20 years old. We had young folks in there all the way to people in their 50s, they had all gotten funding from different angels or venture groups to build a company. And this was a workshop to help them understand how to sell. So I’m running this workshop. And one of the things I like to do as an icebreaker is just going to say, what’s the, what I call the name game, people share how they got their name. So this one guy, Tim jumps up, and he kind of shares his name game. And in the name game story, he tells the background about his father being a fighter pilot, and a bunch of really great stories. And so he introduces his father and that’s how I get to know him in this name game story. Clearly, his father’s really important to him. 

So later on in the day, he tells another story about trying to close a deal. And then he has this great presentation at the end, when he goes to move to a next step. He doesn’t get the next step. And he’s never heard from the people who presented to before or again after it. And he’s really frustrated about it. So we all kind of talk about that as a group. He brings up another story before the session is over. Very similar theme, like he’s in front of people. He’s doing a presentation. They love this product, but then it never goes anywhere. This is this recurring theme. It never goes anywhere after he presents, obviously super frustrating to anyone, especially an early stage CEO who’s trying to get his company off the ground. So I wrap up and he comes up to me, he goes, Hey, do you do personal coaching? Like could you help me? I really like what you said today. Could you help me through some stuff? I said, Tim, I’ve got four hours before my flight. Let’s do it right now. He said okay. 

It was a nice day in Houston. It was spring. So we go outside and we’re just sitting. And he goes, I think I have a sales problem. I hate to sell. I said well, what is sales like for you? And he’s like, Well, you know, at the end of the end of the presentation, I ask for next steps. I move forward and I saw him, and I tried to close. And I’m like, that’s not sales. That’s the stuff in the movies. We don’t need to do that. He looks a little relieved. I said you really want to work through some stuff here. And he goes, Yeah, I really do. And I said, Tim, you mentioned your father numerous times in our session today, but whenever you tell stories, you have this grin like you really admire this guy, but you also talk like he’s probably not around anymore. Like you might have lost him recently. And he kind of gets a little choked up when he’s like yeah, Yeah, my dad passed away this summer. Okay, I’m really sorry to hear that. I want to ask you a couple more questions. But they’re gonna kind of go deep. Are you sure you’re still good with this? Because if you’re going to do some consulting, you got to get permission or it ends up kind of being abuse, right? 

So I said, Tim, you’ve told a couple stories about how your dad owned a mechanic shop, and he would tell stories about the sales guys who come in there to sell tires and stuff. I’m kind of picking up that your dad kind of messed with the salespeople and might not have liked him that much. He’s like, Oh, yeah, my dad, he would mess with those salespeople all the time. He really didn’t like salesmen. He doesn’t like anyone telling them what to do, which kind of tied back to this fighter pilot story where he ended up punching his superior officer to get out of the military. That’s a whole nother story. And that’s his story, not mine. I said, Tim, this is where it can get intense. I said, when you start to sell in your presentations, do you feel like you’re letting your dad down? That your dad sees you as the salesperson that he just doesn’t like? And Tim paused. And you could tell by his eyes that I was right. 

And I said, Well, here’s the good news. Tim, that’s not sales. Sales is being a guide. You’ve been really good about developing this, this tech product for people in the DevOps space, and you used to do their job. And your whole reason of doing this is to make their lives easier. Can you stay in that place? Can you keep telling your story about why you invented this, why you developed this product? And then instead of feeling like you need to convince somebody, just invite them to try it? Can you just say, Would you be willing to demo this? Would you be willing to take a trial, it can be 30 days, 60 days, early stage company, right, he’s still improving because he needs people to start to use it. I said, if you do that, they’re going to see your authenticity, they’re going to see how much you care about helping them in their solution with his product. And he kind of wells up a little bit. It was an emotional afternoon for me and Tim, he goes, that’s all I need to do. Yeah, that’s all you need to do. I said, and sure enough, that’s what he started to do. And he’s emailed me and messaged me, and it’s working. And it changed his life, because he changed his mindset about what it was. 

And I think, at least in my books, I’m hoping people find something that I’ve experienced in my life, whether it’s personally or as consulting, and they can apply it to theirs, and go on a journey of change or improvement, whatever it is that they want. So I appreciate you sharing, you know, asking if there’s anything else I want to share, because I think books have a purpose for an author. And for mine, it is about change and impacting change, and helping people you know, take what they want, and hopefully make their life or their team’s lives better. And in that story, when I tell that story about Tim, in a keynote, the whole audience gets quiet, they all see their dad, their mom, their whoever it is from their past that might be in their head when they do a certain job when they learn to do a certain thing. And I think that’s that shared human experience. It’s so powerful in books, when you can bring things like that forward, where my experience becomes universal or Tim’s becomes universal. And therefore the message really resonates and so I love the story about Tim, I love you let me share that. But I think that’s what good books do. You know, connect? 

Emily Einolander  48:32

Yeah, and that one’s been really powerful for people based on all the conversations we’ve had. And I mean, me too. As a business owner, it can be really scary to put yourself out there and there’s all the voices in your head telling you that you’re not good enough or that you’re a big phony. And everyone’s going to discover that you don’t know what you’re talking about, actually, and seeing that in other people and then going hey, they actually do know what they’re doing. Why am I thinking these terrible things about myself? It’s very helpful.

Karl Becker  49:04

There’s that clarifying piece, there’s that piece of self exploration in whatever story you bring, because it is a big part of you that is manifesting in words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs. But yeah, thank you for letting me share that. I really appreciate that. 

Emily Einolander  49:24

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I really believe in this book, and it’s been really fun to do and the illustrations are fantastic. And the cover is fantastic. And I’ve been enjoying promoting it with you as well. Where would you like people to find you?

Karl Becker  49:41

Yeah. Well, if you’re curious about me, there’s two places you can find me pretty easily. The first is we’ve talked about the book Iceberg Selling a bunch so if you just remember Iceberg Selling and you type in Icebergselling.com Or you Google Iceberg Selling and my name you’re gonna find a web page around that book. And there’s forms there and ways you can contact me on my LinkedIn profile, stuff like that. But from a kind of bigger brand, my company is called Improving Sales Performance. Same thing, you can find pictures of me there, I’m there, you can see the LinkedIn, you’re gonna be like, Oh, that’s this guy. And then reach out if you’d like Improving Sales Performances, the company side of things, and either of those avenues would be a good way to get in touch with me if you’re curious. 

Emily Einolander  50:30

And that leads you to the books as well. They will lead you to the books. Karl, thank you so much. I’m so glad we finally did this.

Karl Becker  50:37

Yeah, thank you. It’s always fun talking to you. And I appreciate the way we can just kind of keep exploring what we’ve done together and share it. So thank you too.

Emily Einolander  50:47

You can find Hybrid Pub Scout online at hybridpubscout.com, on LinkedIn, or on Instagram at Hybridpubscoutpod. Please leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. And thanks for listening.

The post Episode 80: Clarify Your Message through Storytelling with Karl Becker first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 80: Clarify Your Message through Storytelling with Karl Becker appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

A lot of the authors that we work with are really at a kind of precipice in their career. They’re about to level up….and that is a point at which you’re having to do so much with your mindset. At some point, not doing that self work is going to limit your growth.

Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar, founder of Page & Podium Press, joins Emily to talk about overcoming impostor syndrome and taking the courageous step to share your story.

In this episode we cover…

• Understanding the purpose of your book and what parts of your story should be in the spotlight
• How your personal story brings value to others and how more people may connect with it than you think
• The emotional experience of narrating your own experience, with all the baggage that might churn up (psst—getting a therapist during the book writing process is highly recommended)
• Why you owe it to yourself not to cut corners on your book production
• How collaboration with other authors and publishing professionals is the key to publishing a meaningful book

Guest Bio

Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar is an award-winning author, ghostwriter, and book coach and the founder of Page & Podium Press. Co-author of the forthcoming Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Amanda has authored two nationally award-winning books and ghostwritten many more.

After a fifteen-year stint in academia, Amanda left university life to found Page & Podium Press, a publishing company that helps leaders share their stories and ideas through world-changing books. The company has helped dozens of authors inspire their audiences with vulnerability, honesty, and the hard-won knowledge that comes from overcoming life’s most difficult challenges. 

Additionally, Amanda has been invited to speak at organizations ranging from FedEx to the National Communication Association to the US Department of State, sharing relatable examples and digestible philosophy on issues of identity, leadership, and socially conscious storytelling.

Find Amanda, Her Book, and Her Guidance

• The Page & Podium Press official website
• More information or to order Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement
• Free book strategy quiz
• Page & Podium YouTube channel

And in case you missed it—check out the first blog in Hybrid Pub Scout’s series, “Don’t Write in a Vacuum.” Part 1 is about testing your book topic and target audience, including using other people’s Amazon reviews to your advantage.

Transcript for Episode 79 Appears Below

Amanda Edgar  00:00

At some point though, you need someone else. You might just even need somebody that you know that’s published before to talk you through the process. You might want somebody just to read it that’s, you know, a really close, trusted friend that you know is going to encourage you. Or you might need something more robust like a book coach, or you might, you know, work with a publishing company. You will need somebody. No book has ever been published that was just one person and had it do really well.

Emily Einolander  00:51

Welcome to the Hybrid Pub Scout podcast with me, Emily Einolander, helping you navigate indie publishing. Today’s guest is Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar. Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar is an award winning author, ghostwriter and book coach and the founder of page and podium press, co author of the forthcoming summer of 2020, George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Amanda has authored two nationally award winning books and ghostwritten many more. After a 15 year stint in academia, Amanda left university life to found Paige and podium press, a publishing company that helps leaders share their stories and ideas through world changing books. The company has helped dozens of authors inspire their audiences with vulnerability, honesty, and the hard won knowledge that comes from overcoming life’s most difficult challenges. Additionally, Amanda has been invited to speak at organizations ranging from FedEx to the National Communication Association to the US Department of State sharing relatable examples and digestible philosophy on issues of identity leadership and socially conscious storytelling. Welcome, Amanda. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. It’s great to have you here. I just remember being on LinkedIn and seeing what you do. And being like, that reminds me a lot of what I like to do for people, and clearly lots and lots of experience doing it. Oh, yeah, well, it was truly the best of LinkedIn, because sometimes you connect with people and you don’t really connect. And when we connected, I felt like it was a really true connection. Well, and also, I mean, I feel like paying attention has a big part in that. Instead of just like carpet sending things to people. I’m very, like the automated connection messages that are so clearly just a bot. Yeah. And then they misgender me all the time. I’m just like, it’s such a quick heuristic of like, who I should be talking to or not as soon as I see Miss, I’m just like, alright, well, you didn’t look at my profile. Right? Right. Didn’t even do the bare minimum. You can set up a bot actually to reject those bots. Oh, my God, I could couldn’t I am just little Hold on. Let me go learn to code. Yes.

Amanda Edgar  03:20

We have a whole new career industry opportunity.

Emily Einolander  03:23

I mean, that’s what they tell writers to do. Right? Like we got aI Go code now. That’s right.

Amanda Edgar  03:32

All right. Well, tell me a little bit about the ways in which you help authors bring their books to life. Well, our main promise is that we always want to write the book, publish the book, design the book, in your voice with your vision. So we know that people are coming to us and they have a particular way that they speak to their clients or their speak to their constituents, or they speak to the people in their community. And it’s really important to us that as we’re writing books, or as we’re coaching people through writing books, that we are not putting any kind of a cookie cutter expectation or any kind of an expectation that’s going to limit their natural kind of pattern of their speech. We want people to read that book, and feel like they are sitting cross legged in front of that author, listening to all of these intimate personal stories, just like if you were you know, having coffee with a friend or one of my very favorite reviews that one of our authors got on Good Reads was I felt like a grandkid sitting cross legged in front of my grandpa. And that to me, that is the dream because we really want people’s books to help the reader feel like they know that author, they’re really connected with them. So on a more kind of logistical level, we do ghostwriting, we do publishing support, and we do book coaching. So we work with folks who want to write their own books. And then if you know people are just not a writer, they can also come to us and we’ll help write that book in their voice. Excellent.

Emily Einolander  05:02

I love that review of the idea of someone. The idea of someone picking up a book like that is also really comforting to me, because you hear so often, oh, nobody’s reading memoirs, and nobody wants to hear just like your life story. But it sounds like you have experience where that’s not true. And people do want to hear life stories of others, like, what kinds of stories do you find people are telling that you work with?

Amanda Edgar  05:32

Yeah, well, I mean, I’ll start, I’ll speak to kind of your larger point first, which is, I hear that too. And I talk a lot about, I think that business is very, very personal. So to me, when you are setting out to write a business, I think you have to share parts of your background. And it seems counterintuitive until you think about the major leaders who have done this and accelerated up through either their career through government, whatever their industry, because they told those stories. So I think we just had that movie that came out about Phil Knight, but that starts with that Shoe Dog, right? Everybody’s Red Shoe Dog was kind of in that entrepreneurial leadership world. If you haven’t, check it out. It’s fun read. But then there’s lots of others. I bet people know you know the story of Ray Kroc. The fact we even know who Ray Kroc is, right? So we go to McDonald’s. Great, but we also have kind of a connection to where did the store come from? And the same I went to I did my masters at University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas, everyone there knows the Waltons, you know everything about the Waltons. So I would really counter I think that problem is, the word memoir puts people off. And I think that’s kind of a vestige because I think that comes from the generation that kind of dreamt of retiring to write their memoirs, I feel like I heard that all the time when I was a kid. And it’s a very self indulgent activity, it is very, it’s not necessarily economically smart. Because you don’t really plan to sell it, it’s just for yourself. But memoir means so much more than that. And it’s not just celebrity memoirs, either we read people’s stories, and every single nonfiction book we read, it’s just whether you are framing it as a story that you’re telling to invite people into your world, or whether you’re framing it as something that you just want to do for yourself. I think those are both valid, actually. It’s just about understanding what your purpose is, and which of those you’re wanting to lean into. What do people what do people bring to us, and we do all kinds of stuff. So we have absolutely done, helped people with memoirs that really were just for themselves. I’m working with a woman right now she’s in her 80s. And she escaped a literal cult when she was in her 30s. And she does not have any, she’d like people to read it because she believes it could help people. But as far as is she wanting to be an international best seller and you know, go on a big speaker tour. Not really I don’t, she’s not interested in that. What she is interested in is going back through the stages of her life, making sense of what they meant to her then what they mean to her now. And really, most of the authors that we work with, she really wants to help people. So people who are in that situation now, often you don’t know, you don’t know what the roads gonna look like, you don’t know how to get out of a cold, who knows that. But if you can read about someone else’s story, someone else’s experiences and the strategies and tactics that can be so helpful. And sure she could do you know, a PDF download, or she could do a self help book. But I would rather read a story. So you know, if we can kind of read people’s stories and take away things that are going to help us that’s so valuable. So a lot of the others we work with, that’s an extreme example, of course, but they have done some amazing thing, right? They founded some organization, or they have, you know, lifted themselves up into a better position that they started. They’ve been through some mistakes that they found their way through, and they want to share those lessons. So the people that we are working with it’s stories, but the story has a purpose. It’s not it’s not just for them, the story is going to help people the story is going to help them see themselves more clearly than anything.

Emily Einolander  09:34

So when someone comes into a project like that, is that something that they know, they’re going to be guided through in that particular way? Or do they just come to you and say, I want to tell my story and full stop? Yeah,

Amanda Edgar  09:48

that’s a great question. Definitely. We are used to helping people find the fine point of their story is what I would say. So what happens a lot particularly with Stories that have a trauma component is that there are just a lot of things, right? Well, I’ve been through this, and then I’ve been through this, and I’ve been through this. So the instinct a lot of times is that people want to kind of wrap their brain and find all of the most intense things they’ve been through. The problem is, your reader doesn’t necessarily just want, you know, one intense thing after another, they want to see that you overcame a really big, single thing. So one of the things that we really try to help people with is understanding that the things that the things that seem really uninteresting to you, because you’ve lived them, are not necessarily uninteresting to other people. So sometimes we call this the curse of expertise, right is you know that thing, that thing is so close to who you are and how you live your life. So you forget that other people don’t spend their whole lives thinking about that thing. One of the things that this is something we do, but anybody can do this for you is just literally, let’s just talk through your ideas and see what’s going to resonate with the market that you want to reach. It’s based on just basic feedback. But I’ve been so surprised at an author a couple of weeks ago said something to me about the difference between happiness and fulfillment. And I don’t want to share what it is because I don’t want to spoil his

Emily Einolander  11:21

his launch by the book,

Amanda Edgar  11:24

by the book. But he had that just in the back of his mind. And it wasn’t even a central thing he wanted to talk about. But I will tell you, it’s stuck with me. And last week, we were talking kind of brainstorming strategizing, what’s he going to do on his he’s going to do a podcast tour, what’s he going to talk about on that tour? And I was like, Well, you have to have that has to be a topic because the way you were talking about it was so interesting. He had examples. And he was like really? Okay, if you think I should talk about that I will was so interesting. So sometimes you just need another person to hear your ideas and tell you if they’re interesting or not. So that yeah, that’s definitely a part of what we do with our authors.

Emily Einolander  12:04

Yeah, just coming in and letting people know that there are certain parts of their story that aren’t necessarily as clear to you as they are to them, and maybe a little bit more extraordinary than they think. Yeah, exactly. Valuable. Yeah, yeah. And the ways in which they can actually help people. I mean, how do you go about telling someone the opposite, though?

Amanda Edgar  12:32

Yeah, that’s a great question. So one thing that I believe really deeply is that everyone has something they can share. So sometimes it is, it’s never a matter of listening to what people are saying and being mean, or rude, or, you know, and I do know, some ghost writers and publishers who are like that. And I think there’s a big scary conversation about how Oh, agents just won’t even reply if they don’t like what you have to say, which is true. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have a book in you. And what I find is, if people are driven enough to get help writing a book, they do have an idea. We just have to finesse it and figure out what is the new piece. I will say one, one thing that I see a lot that I try to direct authors away from, particularly folks who are wanting to use their book, their story to elevate their industry stance, is a lot of times, those are folks that read a lot of books. And there’s a real impulse to spend your whole entire book citing other people. So you’re basically summarizing the Four Agreements, and then you’re going to talk about the four hour workweek. People can buy those books and read them, if they want to read those books. They’re buying your book because they want something that you have. And that’s where I find that personal stories come into play. Because we can take those personal stories, think of them as one axis on a chart, than the other axis is your topic. And at the intersection, no one else can write that book that is literally only you. So if we can kind of dig down and get specific enough, we can find something interesting. You’ve just got to get kind of let go of all the preconceived notions of what other people want to hear and what you’ve read, and what’s popular and what’s a best seller so that we can get to what you have to say,

Emily Einolander  14:29

Yeah, you’re kind of mining through other people’s material until you find those little personal gems.

Amanda Edgar  14:36

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And sometimes people will literally come in and say, Well, I know people always love this book. So I want something kind of like that. No, you don’t because you will always feel that you are secondary to that other book. Always, always. Let’s make your book and your voice because you have no competition. It’s just you.

Emily Einolander  14:56

Is there any value to people bringing in their favorite books and sort of the styles they like or the thing the audience they want to go to, in view of those books, that

Amanda Edgar  15:10

yeah, that is a great point. Yes. One of the really valuable ways to use those books is when we do our intake, we’ll ask authors, what are the books you like? Because I do think that can tell you a lot about the structure the you know, even just the do you want long flowing sentences? Or do you like very straight into the point? Do you want call out boxes with, you know, takeaways? Or do you want it to be a little more nebulous and philosophical. So I do think those can be great for inspiration. And I also think you can use if you’re writing your own book, you can use those books as templates, whoever wrote that book probably had templates to write. So pull the books you like, look through What’s everyone doing to start their introduction? That’s a great hence, you can use that, you know, as a tip, but we don’t obviously want to take their ideas, right? So it’s kind of just distinguishing between how can you find your own niche and present it in a way that’s appealing to that same audience versus just trying to replicate?

Emily Einolander  16:12

Well, you refer to that intake process that you do with people and the questions you ask them. So at the beginning of a project with someone, what do you want that would be authored to know about the process and just anyone who starts working on a book that they’re a nonfiction book that they’re going to Self Publish? What should they know, going into this very long and involved in? personal journey? Oh, no, I said journey again.

Amanda Edgar  16:45

It isn’t, it feels like the longest journey ever. Right in the middle of it. And especially if you traditionally publish it, because it takes so long. But yeah, I think the big there are two big things, I would say. One, if you’re going to share any kind of your background, be ready for intense self doubt, because it happens to everybody, you are going to have to be vulnerable. That’s part of the book writing process. And a big part of that is just coming to terms with how you feel about yourself. So a lot of times, we see this all the time you see this on Twitter, or LinkedIn or ex, LinkedIn. talk all the time about oh, you know, fail, big fail publicly, build in front of everyone. I think that’s great.

Emily Einolander  17:38

I think it’s horrifying.

Amanda Edgar  17:42

It is horrifying. And that’s the thing. You have to be such a strong, well adjusted person to just put all your failures out on display. Most of us can’t do it, myself included.

Emily Einolander  17:54

I can barely do it in therapy. I’m like, Ah, this is a really embarrassing story. I don’t know if I want to tell it. And it’s like, you’re literally paying me to help you with your problems. But okay.

Amanda Edgar  18:10

Yeah, my my precursor, it’s always you’re the only one I would ever tell this.

Emily Einolander  18:19

But now they’re saying fail publicly. Okay. Sure.

Amanda Edgar  18:23

Right, so that the catch 22, right, is that people will relate to you if you share your failures, because all of us, I think most of us are very sensitive about our own failures, they’re close to us, we feel like we’re the only ones that have ever messed up that way. So seeing that other people have those failures, and they came out and they rose to the top of their industry, or whatever the case may be, that’s great, that will connect you with your readers. But the other side is, it’s really scary to do that. And when you do it in a book, you’re doing it forever, in a way that even feels more forever than the internet. It’s not feels so intense. And what happens every single time without fail, is once we get about to the point where we’re at copy editing. So we’ve got a whole draft. Now we’ve got to polish it up, we got to kind of dig back in. That is the point at which authors always get at least a little bit scared. So they they wonder if did they share too much about themselves? Did they share too much about the people around them? Particularly if you had you know, difficult family stuff? Or you you know, you worked in a job where you were not treated very well or whatever the case may be? Am I gonna get sued? That’s a big question that comes up if I said too much. We protect people from that. We let people know if you know, oh, let’s maybe anonymize this or back off and make it a little bigger, but that doesn’t prevent that fear from coming up. So be ready for things to feel kind of uncomfortable, particularly At the point it becomes real. When you start that draft, it’s real in an exciting way. But at the end of the draft is starts to be real in kind of a scary way. So folks need to be prepared for that. A therapist is something I always suggest. Yes. Actually to everyone.

Emily Einolander  20:16

Yeah, everybody, everybody out there could could do with a little outsider. Perspective. Yes, that should not professional outsider perspective,

Amanda Edgar  20:28

that yes, therapy for all but maybe just every random friend. Um, yeah. And then. So I would say, the big thing is the emotional thing. The other thing is, realize that there are a lot of people, you’re going to have to get in your corner. And I heard someone say, recently, I love this, it takes a village to accomplish something big. And we really need to get used to paying that village. Because a lot of times you are going to need people who can who have skills and talents that you yourself don’t have, and that nobody in your friend group has, and or can give you for free. So especially if you’re self publishing, you have no parachute, you are going at it, right. So if you don’t hire a professional copy editor, that book is not copy edited, even if you went through yourself and tried to clean it up. That’s not the same as what a professional copy editor will do. You need a proofreader got to have a professional cover design. Oh my gosh, it makes such a huge difference in your sales, your marketing. So be ready to go all in and not try to cut corners here and there. Because in the end, what you’re going to do is you’re going to cut your possibility ROI so sharply, that you didn’t save any money, actually.

Emily Einolander  21:49

Right. You just kind of threw it into the wind. Yeah, yeah,

Amanda Edgar  21:53

you paid some people, but we would never do this at any other area of our life. Right? Like, oh, I need to have my my furnace unit checked up, right. But I’ll clean all the ducks myself, Oh, my gosh,

Emily Einolander  22:05

whatever. Oh, my God, you would be surprised?

Amanda Edgar  22:09

Well, that is no doubt true. But yeah, that my biggest piece of advice really is like, make sure that you have got the people you need in your corner, so that you’re not just kind of fumbling through on your first time for something that is forever.

Emily Einolander  22:24

I have noticed that people can be a little anxious about the design and cover process as well, because that’s the face that you’re putting forward to everyone. Does that take people by surprise? Like how much they care about it?

Amanda Edgar  22:41

Yeah, that’s, I love how you worded that? Because yes, it is the face in the marketplace. Yeah. I don’t think it takes people by surprise how much they care, I find that most people come in with all an already designed cover. And that is so me. And let me walk that back a little bit. Not that they’ve designed it, you know, in any kind of a program. But mind, you know exactly what that cover is supposed to look like. Okay, that can be fine. So I worked with a couple of designers who do career consulting, several years back, and they published traditionally, but they actually designed their own cover, because which is really uncommon. They pits their publisher, word designers were career consultants, they were writing for their audience. They said, We know what our audience is going to respond to. Can we just can we put your design if you don’t like it, you can do your own. The publisher, let them do that. I was very surprised.

Emily Einolander  23:41

Yeah, I’ve Well, I was kind of in an unconventional publishing house before. And I that probably happened once that that was allowed. But otherwise, it was like, no, let us gently guide you away from doing that. But in itself, publishing people have so much more control than traditional because they’ll just say no to you.

Amanda Edgar  24:08

Yes, yes, that is true. The thing that I think the thing that I think people need to keep in mind, though, is, if you do know your audience like that, you may be the best person design that book, if it is just that you’ve wanted to tell your story, or you’ve wanted to give this piece of advice, you may not have as clear a sense of who your audience is, as you think. Hmm. So it’s the audience that needs to like the book cover, not the author.

Emily Einolander  24:38

Interesting. Yeah. And how do you how do you determine who that audience is? If you think the author maybe doesn’t quite understand it as much, and then how do you test that?

Amanda Edgar  24:51

Yeah. So I mean, the biggest thing is we just have worked with enough people in this specific type of book that we have a pretty good sense of of what sells? I obviously, I mean, all the industry groups, I keep up with all the industry news. So I have a pretty good sense of what the trends are. I’ll be honest, we can’t always convince authors to do what what we know will work best for them. And you know that? I think that’s okay. In a way, right? No, yeah. As I said, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s always the author’s voice, it’s always the author’s vision, because we understand that what we’re doing is producing a book that’s for the audience, that’s to build ROI for our client. But it’s also a book that is often a lifelong dream of folks, right? That’s important to actually it is not all about money for us, we really want to make sure that folks feel really, really proud. But we do a lot of the same nudging that a traditional publisher would do. And in fact, our processes are really laid out locating traditional press, it’s just that then if we get pushback from the author, we listen a little bit more. But yeah, I’ll tell you a lot of times, a lot of times I find that, you know, an author will want to toss an idea out. And then when it comes back, a lot of times, they’ll realize, Oh, I see, I see why you were guiding me in this particular way. Yeah,

Emily Einolander  26:16

and you kind of don’t always know, especially if you’re not as much of a visual person, you don’t always know whether something is actually going to look good or not, or resonate with you, and you see it.

Amanda Edgar  26:27

Well, and I have an example that I think is kind of funny. So we worked with a guy who is a historian, and his book is about the Alamo. And when we were doing the, you know, the cover design, our cover designer did a beautiful job on it. I sent it to him. And he was like, Well, I’ve done a lot of reading and that part at the top of the Alamo, that curvy part that wasn’t there at the time that this book is set. So can we take that off? Because I’ve never seen another book that didn’t have that part. But it’s it’s anachronistic. And I was not sure, but I reached out to our designer who’s great. And he’s in house so we can have him do you know, try little things? So I said, What, no, what do you think? Here’s what he said. And our designer Austin? He was like, um, why not? Let’s do it. So he sent it back turns out to lop off the top of the Alamo. It just looks like a warehouse. Just it’s just a square building, then,

Emily Einolander  27:31

man. You know what? Yeah, you’re right.

Amanda Edgar  27:36

So we sent that I sent it to the author, and I knew that he was not going to like it. But you know, here it is. And he said, Oh, yeah, okay, you’re right.

Emily Einolander  27:45

It’s a fun, interesting thought. And I didn’t know that. But at the same time, you need people to recognize that it’s the Alamo. Right?

Amanda Edgar  27:52

Right. Right. And that was what the author originally or eventually came to, is, he had said, it’s really important to me that we have imagery of the Alamo on the cover of this book. So when he saw that, that’s not actually imagery of the Alamo. That he, you know, he said, Okay, let’s just go back to the original, and was very, very happy with that in the end, but sometimes you do kind of have to play around and see what’s going to make sense to you. It’s just part of the process.

Emily Einolander  28:22

So what do you see standing in the way I know, we talked about the that moment of fear when you start getting into copy editing, and especially at those revision periods of time. So what do you see standing in the way of these authors when they’re trying to start and complete a book?

Amanda Edgar  28:43

I think that the thing that they’re different things, certainly, the thing that is going to stop people from starting their book, in my experience, is this nagging self doubt that nobody cares what you have to say.

Emily Einolander  28:58

I get it. I’ve watched your imposter syndrome video. Was it helpful? I thought so. It was very empowering.

Amanda Edgar  29:06

Oh, good, good. Well, I think that imposter syndrome is a term. Everybody knows that term. Because everyone has that there. I don’t think there is anyone in this world who has not felt impostor syndrome at some point in their life. A lot of the authors that we work with are really at a kind of a precipice in their career. They’re about to level up. They’re about to start a speaking tour they want to join a speaker’s bureau are they’re really at the edge of becoming a real true thought leader. And that is a point at which you’re having to do so much with your mindset. Yeah, so. So it’s like you got to build all the self esteem that you have not really you’ve done, okay, without doing that self work. At some point, not doing that self work is going to limit your growth, right. It’s going to stop you from believing you have an I have to say, to write a book, you are trying to do all this work in your business and kind of grow, maybe your offers grow your team, that is a tremendous amount of stress. And oftentimes that takes the bandwidth that you need to think about what would a book project mean? This is why so many people hire us to just write it for them, by the way, right? Because if you’re out of bandwidth, we can help with that, actually. But you’ve still got to do that mindset work to feel like, okay, I’ve got enough under control, I have enough of a vision of where I’m going, that I do feel competent, that I can lead now, as opposed to that kind of lead follow lead follow that I think we all do at the beginning of

Emily Einolander  30:39

our careers. Yeah, when we’re trying to get good at what we’re doing. And when we’re trying to sort of build up that momentum and make money.

Amanda Edgar  30:48

Yes, well, and I think so. So often, for people that have been marginalized in some way by society, there also is such a draw of getting more credentials. And that makes it so hard to believe you’re an expert. If you’re still in a class, you’re still in school, you’re still in a certification program, you’re constantly hearing that you don’t know enough, you gotta get out of there, most of us actually need three fewer certifications than we think.

Emily Einolander  31:21

said to the doctor, right?

Amanda Edgar  31:23

Oh, my God, I still take classes all the time, I love learning. But you really have to do a lot of work in your mind to say, Okay, I want to learn more about this. But it’s because I’m an expert in this other tangential thing. And I’m building out, I see the world. But yeah, that that can be I think, it can be really, really difficult. If you’re still in that world of feeling like you don’t know enough to forward and get that book started. The unfortunate thing is that it lasts forever, you have to actively pull yourself out of that place. And really talk to yourself in that kind way that you would talk to your friends, you know, look at, look, make your evidence list, make your list of all the amazing things you’ve done in your life, and then put it on your bathroom mirror, you’ve got to lift yourself out of that world. Because it will always always hold back your growth. And it’s just a matter of when you can get up to some particular point. And you’re not ever going to get beyond that if you don’t work on your mindset. So that is a major, major thing that then is going to hold you back from your book. And the book would help you go further. So it’s, you know,

Emily Einolander  32:35

you gotta write that I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And everybody, everybody likes me. Write that on your mirror.

Amanda Edgar  32:44

That’s right, you are good enough, you are smart enough. Everyone loves you.

Emily Einolander  32:50

Yeah, I mean, I would say that writing a book is kind of like looking in a mirror and possibly for the first time in a while discovering that a few years have passed.

Amanda Edgar  33:03

And funny it is. And you know, one thing we hear over and over is that people, even though they feel their message is pretty clear, which that’s good, you should feel pretty clear about your message by the time you get to us. That the process of talking to another person in our larger package, you talk to us for eight to 10 hours before we ever get anything on paper. Right? That process is really going to show you what you need to think more about. And that happens a lot is what we’ll do a meeting, you know, I’m always asking questions and prompting people to think a little more deeply. There’s always a point where someone says, oh, I never thought about it that way, let me think on it more. And that is the way that you get so much deeper and so much more clear. And like we were talking earlier, more specific, so that you are making a real contribution in your book instead of just bringing all the stuff out that you’ve learned in your various certifications and from reading your various books. So yeah, the startup point is, I think, really mindset. As you’re moving through, I typically find that once people have made the commitment to writing the book, if they have support, they typically finish or for some very good reason they decide they don’t want to but it’s a conscious choice, not a fear choice. Right. I think the thing that holds people back from publishing most is not getting the support that they need

Emily Einolander  34:26

from the people who are helping them create the book or just in their general life.

Amanda Edgar  34:31

All of the above. So think about I you know, I talk to people a lot of times who have tried to write a book on their own, and they just couldn’t make progress. And so finally, okay, I do need help. A lot of times they’ll tell me they have not told anyone they’re working on book. Oh, and it almost is a point of shame sometimes. Because

Emily Einolander  34:54

it’s too like self focused or emotion

Amanda Edgar  34:59

is a lie. lot packed in there. I yeah, I think it’s the self focus. What I really think a lot of times is that we know if we tell people we’re going to do this big project, then they will know if we fail. If you never tell anyone, then you can just stop and start and stop and start and just be mad at yourself. But you never have to worry that other people are going to judge you. Right, right. That’s

Emily Einolander  35:27

yeah, working on any big goal is kind of like that. Yes, yeah. It’s interesting that we’re always afraid to show well, not always, I guess some people aren’t like this, but I certainly am. But we’re afraid to show people that we’re trying to sort of like reach a different level in our lives and careers. I don’t completely know what that is other than just like a fear of embarrassment if we fail. Yeah. Yeah.

Amanda Edgar  35:56

It depends so much to on how you generally talk to yourself and how you think about yourself and how you grew up thinking about things like money and expertise and authority. Shout out to all the Gen Xers are now authorities having to deal with that.

Emily Einolander  36:16

Yeah, that’s that’s the mirror thing. That’s when you’re right on the mirror. That Yeah,

Amanda Edgar  36:22

that’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s. But I do think embracing that side of yourself. It is a whole, it’s a whole thing. When you talk about the things that you want. First of all, we know your more science tells us you’re more likely to do the things that you talk about, right? Because we’re just constantly hearing ourselves talking about those things. You’re gonna get outside feedback. And I you know, I can’t speak for everybody’s friend group. I tried to build a pretty healthy group of people around me, I can tell you that if I share, I’m writing a book. Nobody says, Who do you think you are? No one says.

Emily Einolander  37:03

I can’t even imagine. Like, I mean, I’m sure there are people who, I think that’s a sign to reexamine your friend group, honestly.

Amanda Edgar  37:13

Oh, my gosh, exactly. Right. You might need a clean slate, I will be your friend.

Emily Einolander  37:16

I feel like all of my friends are interesting enough to write at least some kind of book.

Amanda Edgar  37:23

Exactly. Exactly. And you forget the things that are interesting about yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I will tell you from having written multiple books. The first one really, before I had any idea what I was doing, no one ever said to me, who do you think you are? I said that to myself. Right? So sharing, it actually is going to help you in so many ways to just feel a little bit more competent. But also to your point, you’ve got to have a support system. Nobody has ever written a book without a support system. Even if you succeed at getting the draft down, shut in your snow bound cabin.

Emily Einolander  38:02

I mean, I was about to say the Unabomber. Well, it wasn’t very good, though. I think it’s fair to say,

Amanda Edgar  38:12

sure. But how many self published books do we not know about?

Emily Einolander  38:19

was in The New York Times?

Amanda Edgar  38:23

Oh, my gosh, it’s a dream. Yikes.

Emily Einolander  38:27

He’s dead. It’s fine.

Amanda Edgar  38:31

That’s right. Yeah, even you know, if we think about people that you know, really talk a lot about writing in isolation. If that works for you, that’s fine. I have written things in isolation. I’ve written things in groups, I’ve written things with co authors, there’s all different ways. At some point, though, you need someone else. So you might need someone you might just even need somebody that you know, that’s published before to talk you through the process. You might want somebody just to read it that’s, you know, a really close, trusted friend that you know, is going to encourage you, or you might need something more robust, like a book coach, or you might, you know, work with a publishing company, you will need somebody no book has ever been published. That was just one person. And had it do really well.

Emily Einolander  39:20

Right? Yeah, I can’t even imagine how you would do that. Because everyone that you’re working with who is worth it is going to at least have an opinion or something to offer you in order to get that actually happening. And I can say personally, that it’s really hard to be a generalist in terms of book publishing. It’s a lot of work. It is it takes a long time to learn. So especially if you are an expert in something else, you might just not have the time to learn how to do all those things.

Amanda Edgar  39:52

Absolutely. And you’re gonna make mistakes the first time all of us make mistakes the first time. Absolutely. So if you hire someone When they’ve probably made their mistakes on other people or their own books

Emily Einolander  40:05

don’t like me like that. So if someone were trying to decide between self publishing, even self publishing with a team, like you know, your company offers, and I do, and traditional publishing, which you know, the little bit of that control it more control is out of your hands. What would you want people to consider when they’re making that decision?

Amanda Edgar  40:35

So the biggest thing for me is, this is kind of a whole theme of my life and this interview is you got to try to get fear out of the mix as much as you can. It is not about whether your book is good enough for traditional or you need to settle for self publishing. That is a false distinction. I hate when I hear people say that, yeah, excellent books have been self published, and really bad books have been traditionally published, you is not it is not black and white like that. What you have to think about is, if it’s going to serve your purpose, what do you want your book to do? Is that something traditionally published books do better? Or is that something that self published books do better. And I find that there are so many variables in here that it’s really difficult to give blanket advice. We put together a quiz for this for people that are interested in in our company. So your folks can take it, it is at page and podium.com/quiz. But it’s just going to ask you some questions about what’s your book about what’s your what do you want your book to do for you? What who are you as an author, and it gives, we put people into six different types. And we believe that those types have different recommendations. So sometimes, you know, for example, if you’re writing a book, where you are going to bring out a lot of dirt on other people, yeah, you’re not self published that book, because you need the legal team and the safeguards that a traditional publisher is going to be able to give you even if you hire one lawyer, that person is not necessarily going to be able to see all of the issues down the road. On the other hand, if you are, you know, you have a consulting business or a coaching business, and you’re really wanting to let people into your world, give some backstory, give some, you know, little wins that they can do in their life. Those books traditionally do really well with self publishing. If you’ve you know, if you really want that traditional contract for the status, go for it. But you also if you are building an audience already, you may be able to sell more books, and he will certainly get higher royalties, if he’s publish yourself. So it really comes down to what your goals are, where you are as a thought leader, what’s your books about? That kind of thing? Have you ever

Emily Einolander  42:53

had people who try to Self Publish and then traditionally published the same book afterward?

Amanda Edgar  43:02

I have not had anybody try that? Because I would tell them that that’s really, really unlikely. And I think that’s probably not your best route to whatever result you’re looking for. So I would be curious, you know, when you hear this, what people what are people looking for? Do you think usually,

Emily Einolander  43:19

I think that they’re looking for maybe the reach maybe a further reach than what they were able to get themselves? I think that’s the most practical reason to want to do that. But then there is also the some people want the clout.

Amanda Edgar  43:37

Yes, yes. I agree. I think I agree. So usually, I find that it is they they don’t know how to do the marketing, they don’t want to hire somebody to do the marketing. So they think I will, quote unquote, just traditionally publish. I think a lot of times, folks don’t realize, first of all, what I find when I talk to traditionally published authors, myself included is most of us did not get as much marketing support as we thought. It just is not, it is not the same as having a publicist, you know, somebody that is promoting you. And that’s their whole job. I mean, unless you are at the very, very top level, you’re probably not getting that from any traditional press. And a lot of the stuff that traditional presses will do, you’ll never see it. So it’s gonna be industry stuff behind the scenes. That can be helpful. But there’s a lot of companies that can do that stuff for you as well. So

Emily Einolander  44:34

in your traditionally publishing, in a lot of cases, they’ll tell you to get your own publicist or someone to do your social media marketing, even though you’re working with a publishing company, and supposedly they’re doing that for you.

Amanda Edgar  44:48

Yep, no, that’s right. Actually, I have a book coming out in March and we, this has now been months ago at this point. But we got an email saying please let us know who your publicist is. So that we can connect Do our marketing person with your publicist. Or if you’re not using one, that’s fine, too. But I mean, it was not like, if you’re not using one, we’ll provide one for you. Yeah,

Emily Einolander  45:08

it was like, well, wink, wink, wink. Good, good. Go quick.

Amanda Edgar  45:12

Yes, yeah. So and you know, the other thing is, really, you’re probably not going to be able to do that anyway. Right? I think we probably need to say most traditional presses are not going to want something that’s already been out there. When I work with academic authors, this comes up a lot, because if they wrote a dissertation, and then they’re revising their dissertation into a book, presses are going to want it dramatically revised, because it’s already out there. You affectively published it, when you defended it. If it’s, you know, you’ve got more than 15% or so of that book on the internet. A lot of presses do not want that, because that’s, that is something that they are buying the rights to your book, right. So if you’ve already distributed it everywhere, you’ve made it so so much less valuable to the point that they might not even want it. So I think your original question, would you what would you say to others that come to you and want to take their self published and make it into traditional, I would say, what is the thing you really want? Because I bet there’s an easier, better way we can get there?

Emily Einolander  46:15

Do you think having a self published book helps you sell another book, traditionally down the road?

Amanda Edgar  46:22

Oh, my gosh, you ask all the hard questions. That’s what this

Emily Einolander  46:26

is what the people want to know,

Amanda Edgar  46:27

younger people want they want. So a self published book can help you get a deal down the road, but only if it does really well. So it is a big gamble. Because you with that self published book, you are giving that agent and then later editor evidence of how well your books sell. So if the evidence is that your books don’t sell very well, then that is not going to serve you at all, and there’s no getting rid of that, that books out there. If your book sells really well, then that’s you know, that’s great, then they know your next book is going to sell really well it probably will. So be really careful. Be really careful with that. That is not to say, don’t self publish your book, it’s just you if you know you want a traditional book down the line, you better make sure that you do an excellent job with marketing and publicity on that first self published one.

Emily Einolander  47:19

Good to know. So what criteria do you think someone should use to decide whether they’re ready to go through with this?

Amanda Edgar  47:28

Yeah. So this is, again, this is going to kind of depend on what you’re wanting to say I did do a blog post a while back, that was five things you need to make sure you do before you write your memoir. I know your audience is not likely all interested in writing memoir. But really, I think the points stand for pretty much any book, you’re going to tell that’s going to have your personal story in it. But the main takeaways, I would say, you’ve got to make sure that you have enough distance from those events to know what they mean. A lot of times when we’re right in the middle of something really, really hard. We actually don’t have much to say about it yet. Because all we can think about is that moment. And I think about you know not to get kind of overly philosophical, but I think about that Brecht quote, will there be in the dark time will there be singing Yes, there will be singing about the dark time. And people take that, I think is a message of hope. It is a message of hope. But it’s also a message about when we are in those hard times, all we can talk about is the hard times. It’s a while after that you can start to see, oh, here’s what I learned from that. Here’s how maybe that could have been prevented. But you have to have the distance for that to be the case. Relatedly having a therapist during the process is so valuable, but also therapists help you come to that meeting a little bit faster than you probably could on your own. So that’s really important. I tell people to make sure they’re not coming into it to name names. So if you went through something and you felt like that, you know this one person was the villain of my life maybe they were probably a book is not the place to air all that out.

Emily Einolander  49:15

Unless you’re Britney Spears.

Amanda Edgar  49:17

Unless you’re ready you know and actually good for her because that’s what was happening we the way do

Emily Einolander  49:29

but she waited until she was free.

Amanda Edgar  49:32

She did and and I bet you know that telling has so much more meaning than if she had told those stories as as they were happening. No one would have even listened.

Emily Einolander  49:41

Well, she wouldn’t have been able to like legalese. But that’s not the point. The point is it was as meaningful because it was still going on.

Amanda Edgar  49:49

But the legal thing I think is important too, because obviously, a lot of us are in situations where our safety could be threatened. thinking, you know, lawsuits and that kind of thing, where, you know, if you have anything signed with your employer, you need to make sure that you’ve got, you know, look through that NDA and make sure everything you’re gonna share is gonna be okay. So the distance gives you so much more perspective on that. Whether you’re Britney Spears or not. I’m

Emily Einolander  50:18

also thinking, That’s interesting that you said it that way. Because I remember during like quarantines and that kind of COVID stuff, when it was especially intense, just like watching media and going, when are we going to be able to talk about this, like, when, when are we going to be able and I think like, the first thing I saw was like, inside, but the Bo Burnham. But that was a very specific moment that had passed, even though everything wasn’t done yet. Which I don’t think it ever will be. But like there’s a period of time that has passed during that entire process, but just starting to see people talking about it now, is you kind of get this jolt of like, Oh, yeah. Well, I was there for that, too.

Amanda Edgar  51:06

Yeah, yeah. So I it’s interesting. You bring that special up. I tried to watch that special recently. And it was like, it was like an anthropological. Yeah. Because I watched it. I watched it when it came out. Yeah, watching tons of standup at that time. Because what could you do? You need to laugh? You’re gonna laugh. But it was wild to watch that after the fact. But no, that’s exactly right. One of the books that we’re wrapping up right now, she campaigned for office during COVID. There’s no roadmap for how to do that. And then there were things I had forgotten that in working on that book with her, that, for example, there was a fairly long period where we didn’t know that you could talk to people at a distance outside without a mask,

Emily Einolander  51:56

right? I remember that. So

Amanda Edgar  51:58

if you’re going door to door, trying to get that Oh, for you, you have a mask on you keep the door between you. Maybe the person inside wants to go get a mask, two people yelled at her for wearing a mask. People yelled at her for being out at all. I mean, it just, it’s you forget about that, that stuff. Yeah. And when you kind of go back, it’s a really different way that you can talk about it that it was I’m excited for that book to come out for many, many reasons. It’s amazing. But I think the COVID piece, it’s just one chapter. And it was for me a very intense She also writes about the Trump election. Also, I big was writing it. Yeah, it was just you just don’t think it seems like it’s been a while ago. But

Emily Einolander  52:47

that was a tough year. That was a really tough year.

Amanda Edgar  52:51

We weren’t going through all the things in that one five year period.

Emily Einolander  52:55

Yeah. And just also what you said, you have to kind of go through it in order to be able to look back it in order to be able to look back and have it mean something to your life at the time. And I guess to all of our lives, in that particular example. Yeah, yeah. All right. So you were talking about the importance of being able to promote and market and sell your own book? Do you have any recommendations for people who are trying to do that? Especially if they don’t start out with a big audience?

Amanda Edgar  53:33

Oh, right. Yeah, um, this is a really hard question. The main thing I would say is, you don’t have to have a big launch. I do think that is a misconception that the number of books you sell on the day, it’s out, you know, pre sales and the day it launches. That’s, that’s your sales. That is not true. And particularly with nonfiction, nonfiction has a really long tail, you can keep from I mean, think of think of Profit First, that book Profit First, that book is old. He is still promoting it all the time. It’s a helpful book, it continues to be helpful. You can do updated editions. So I would not imagine that, you know, oh, I have to wait until I have 100,000 people on my email list before I write a book. No, you don’t. And in fact, a book can help you increase your email list. There’s a balance, you want to make sure that you are talking to people and particularly one thing that having an audience can help you do is dial in what they want to hear for your book, right. So I would be out there being visible, whatever that looks like for you. If that is posting on LinkedIn, if that is you know, starting on Instagram, if you want to do a YouTube channel or a podcast, I would start to just get comfortable just being out there so that the first time you share a story, it’s not your whole entire book. bits as you go and you’re getting kind of react Since that can be really helpful, but I would definitely I would I definitely want to change the way we think about book marketing, it does not all have to happen in the pre launch. And if you don’t have a big email list pre launches are can actually work against you in some ways. So.

Emily Einolander  55:17

Okay, yeah, this is actually really comforting to me, because I, I’ve heard that so much. And so it’s sort of like, well, if you’re using the book to sort of like build up your career, then that can seem like a bit of a catch 22.

Amanda Edgar  55:33

Yes, yeah, it can, you do want to make sure that you’ve got people invested. But I find that most people have enough personal contacts, go through, you know, go through your very first email, go through your address book, and make a list of the, you know, 50 or 100 people that have supported you at different times in your career, reach out to them, let them know you’re publishing a book and ask if they would be willing to be a hype person for you. Technically, I think we might call this a launch teams, people call it a street team, right? Essentially, just people that are going to be in your corner, going to help promote your book, give you reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

Emily Einolander  56:10

So hard to get people to do that. It’s

Amanda Edgar  56:14

really, really hard. And you have to follow up. And I think that’s what makes it really hard, right is I just was saying to somebody this morning, if you are kind of in the invitation in the inviting people to buy from you, whether that’s a book or a service, and you don’t feel like you’re being a little bit annoying, you are probably not doing enough, because people need reminders, and they need it in front of them multiple times a day, and most people want to support you, you just have to make it as easy as possible.

Emily Einolander  56:44

Yes. Oh, yeah. Easy as possible. And that requires reminding people. That’s right

Amanda Edgar  56:52

and sending them the link to the review page on Amazon, you can find that if you scroll down where the reviews are, there will be a link that’s like write a review, and you can send that link to people. That

Emily Einolander  57:06

is an excellent idea. Because that little button is kind of hard to find. Yep.

Amanda Edgar  57:10

Yeah. Then you click right you put it in the email, they click it, they can write their review. How long is it gonna take 45 seconds? Yeah,

Emily Einolander  57:18

yeah, we’re less or less?

Amanda Edgar  57:21

How much you have to say really what all of us want the stars. But you know, leave a few words, give some context, potential readers, take that extra 40 seconds.

Emily Einolander  57:32

Help your buddies. All right, do you have anything else that you would like to share before we close here?

Amanda Edgar  57:41

Well, I did just want to invite people, I was so excited to be on this podcast, because I think your people and my people are so similar. I really liked the idea of working with you. So I did want to offer a free one hour book strategy session to anybody that’s listening that wants to pick that up. So you can sign up for that at HTTPS page. And podium.com/hub H UB, That’s

Emily Einolander  58:07

so nice of you to extend to the listeners.

Amanda Edgar  58:12

If you’re working with Emily, I would love to help them support you. So if there’s anything that we can do to work together, make sure your book is as awesome as it can be. I hope you’ll reach out.

Emily Einolander  58:22

Yes, and I will say some of the questions I asked today we’re getting your wisdom on some things I actually had questions about too. So I really appreciate your insight. And I think that we’ll both be able to help each other serve our customers and authors and people who deserve to tell their stories, which is pretty much everybody.

Amanda Edgar  58:47

I think, everybody, I think it’s everybody, you just may need to wait for the right time when it feels good to you.

Emily Einolander  58:53

Excellent point. Is there anywhere else people can find you follow you on social media?

Amanda Edgar  58:59

Well, I will send you a link to my forthcoming book if people are interested in that it’s on the summer of 2020. Speaking of COVID we talked about protesting during COVID. About the George Floyd murder and all of the aftermath of that. I’ll I’ll share a link with you if you can put it in the show notes so people can find that book. But absolutely. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It was a delight as always to chat with you. Yeah.

Emily Einolander  59:24

Thank you so much. And hopefully we’ll chat again soon. Yes, excellent. Thanks. You can find hybrid pub Scout online at hybrid pubs scout.com, on LinkedIn, or on Instagram at hybrid pubs Scout pod. Please leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. And thanks for listening

The post Episode 79: Why Your Story Needs to Be Told with Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 79: Why Your Story Needs to Be Told with Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.