wetranscripts | Entries tagged with newsletter

Writing Excuses 18.18: Launching an Author Newsletter

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-18-launching-an-author-newsletter/

Key Points: Two kinds of newsletters, content newsletters and marketing newsletters. Content or announcements? One newsletter or many? One channel is probably best. What are you passionate about? How often can you do it? Don't overcommit! Look at platforms, MailChimp and others. Consider an assistant! Collect addresses.

[Season 18, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Launching an Author Newsletter.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week we wanted to talk about creating your own newsletter. One thing that I wanted to distinguish up front is that, in my view, there are two distinct types of newsletters that exist in the world. I think a lot of the confusion that people have, and a lot of the trepidation people have, comes from confusing which one is which. So, the newsletter that I do, Publishing Is Hard, is what I would call a content newsletter. It is a thing that I create and send out on a regular basis that are essays, whatever missives, what we would have once called a blog. The other type of newsletter is a marketing newsletter. This is for announcements. It's not a place where you write an essay about what you think about craft, what you think about writing. It's a place where you tell people, "I have a book coming out. Preorder it. I have an event coming up. Buy tickets. Here's my new cover." Whatever it is. Right? So keeping those two things distinct in your brain, I think, is the first step to really understanding a strong newsletter strategy. So that's sort of like the overall framework I wanted to launch this conversation with. There are reasons to have both. The basic difference is, I think, every single person who is doing a thing on the Internet where they want people to buy stuff should have a marketing newsletter. Should just have one. If you have… Launching a content newsletter is a more deliberate thing and takes a lot of work and thought as to what it is you want to be doing with it. But if you want to be an author, if you want to have published books, please, please, please make a newsletter. We're going to talk a little bit more about why and how to do that.

[Mary Robinette] I was very resistant to doing a newsletter for a long time, because all of the newsletters that I heard people talk about were the content newsletters. I was like, "Oh, that's very exhausting." Even though I had blogged daily for years. It just… It felt different. Then I was also resistant to doing a marketing newsletter because I'm like, "Who's going to read that? It's just going to go in and say by my things. It's just going to be people putting me in spam folders." But I'm finding that actually having control of my audience is like really handy for not just the regular things, but also the surprise visits, the "Hey, I have a sudden giveaway I want to do." That it is a nice way to connect to people.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think one of the things we're finding as digital marketing develops over the last I don't know how many years since Al Gore invented the Internet is the only thing that we know works is email marketing. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think display ads, I think content marketing, all of those things can work in certain circumstances. They tend to be very, very expensive. Email, though, getting in people's inboxes, especially people that you know are interested in what you're providing because they signed up for your newsletter in the first place is just one of the most effective ways to activate people, to get them to go do the thing that you want them to do. So having a marketing newsletter, the reason I recommend it so highly, is it's direct access to your core audience, to your main supporters. It is… You can make an appeal to them that is like, "Hey, please do this thing." Now, the thing to remember with a marketing newsletter is that every time you send one, some percentage of the people are going to unsubscribe to that thing. Right? That's okay, that's part of the process. Right? You're going to lose people every time you send it. So, the thing about that, every time you pull the trigger on sending a marketing letter, is that I'm going to lose some people when I do this. Because it shows up in their inbox, they're like, "I don't remember signing up for this. I'm going to unsubscribe." It's fine. It's how people use the Internet. But you want to make sure when you are doing it as a result, you work doing it for a really intentional purpose.

[Erin] I have a question that is just for me. I am somebody who does a lot of things in different areas. I do some game writing, I do some short story writing, I do some teaching. If I'm creating, because I've yet to put together a newsletter, but I'm using this as the drive to do it, am I like… Should I be having three newsletters? Should I be having one that, like, has a lot of different types of content? Or will people get mad and unsubscribe more?

[DongWon] It's a tough balancing act, because you don't want to hit the marketing things too often. Right? If you're sending one every week when you have something dropping, people… You're going to lose a lot of your audience over time as people unsubscribe, because they're like, "These are too many emails." Right? So finding that balance is tricky. If you're a traditionally published author, it's not too bad, you're doing one or two or maybe three of these a year. Whatever. With the number of things you have coming out, I would advise, like, yeah, have one channel. I don't think segmenting your audience is going to be… I mean, it's just like way too much work for you and too much work for your audience, too, to figure out which newsletter they want to sign up for. I would just try instead and really think about how can I bundle these things together to make sure that I'm not touching them too often.

[Dan] Yeah. Which is kind of, sort of, what I do with mine. I call mine a water cooler newsletter. Based on something a friend of mine told me a while ago, which is, if you think of social media as a water cooler, that's a place where you go and you have interesting conversations with people. If someone shows up at the water cooler and all they ever talk about is how you can buy shirts in their store, you don't want to talk to that person or listen to what they say. So my newsletter is very much a marketing newsletter, and I send it out once a month, whether I've got a new launch or not. I need to tell people about my calendar, and what events I'm doing, and so on and so on. But I also make sure to include I'm going to recommend somebody else's book in every one. What is Dan reading right now? This. I am going to give you a quick update on what I am writing, in case you are interested. Like, I'm halfway through this book. So it is a tiny bit of content to help give you something interesting to read, and to recommend other people as well as just me. So that it's not purely, "Hey, go to my store and buy my merch."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's why, like, mine will often have pictures of my cats and I have an automation set up so that on your birthday, I send you a short story, and every year it's a different short story. That… Remembering to change them is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry for everyone who got the same short story twice this year.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I love that. I love having that little bit of a personal touch. Right? It can be automated, but still, it's like a thing that you receive. It's like, oh, here's a special thing from this creator I follow, who I'm a fan of. I think it's a great way to like get them more engaged with you in a more personal way.

[Howard] Coming back to answering Erin's question, what should you put in your newsletter. I would ask this first. What's a thing that you're interested in and would be willing to write about on a regular basis that might interest other people? That could be movies that you like to watch. That could be… It could be cooking. I mean, there… Any topic. Literally, any topic. Because when you're creating content, when you're creating a content newsletter, when you're creating something with hooks, something that grabs people and holds them, you have to be passionate about it first. If you're not passionate about it, it's going to be twice as hard to write about it. So that's the… For me, that would be the first question. The second question, then, is how often can I do it? How much… What else do I have to promote that I would roll into it? With DongWon's newsletter, it's about your passion for publishing. Which dovetails nicely with Writing Excuses, passion…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For talking about writing.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yup.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It's important when you're asking yourself these questions to remember that you're giving yourself an extra job. For the most part, you became an artist because you're excited about creating art, not excited about promoting art. So don't over commit to something you know you're going to resent. Make it something like DongWon's newsletter is something that they love to write, they're passionate about. If it felt onerous, you wouldn't do it.

[DongWon] That's also part of why it's so irregular in terms of the timing. I do it when I have bandwidth to do it. I am often insanely busy, and it's… I just don't have the bandwidth to come up with another well thought out, carefully worded newsletter. Right? So when it comes to the marketing newsletter, that's why my advice is to make it as light of a touch and like a lift as possible for you of keep it simple. Stick to really basic things. At a bare minimum, just announce when you have stuff. Include extra things if you can, in terms of recommending other people's books, little personal touches like your… Like the cat photos or the short story for… On people's birthdays. Those are lovely little things. Those aren't necessary. You can make it as late as possible for you to make it manageable. Then, when you're looking at the content style newsletter, really think about what your bandwidth is. How much can you take on? Can you do a thing once a month? Once every two months? Don't overpromise to your audience and leave them feeling disappointed. Give them more rather than give them less when you're making that sort of content approach. I want to switch to talking about the mechanics of it, how you do these things, what platforms you use, things like that, but let's first take a break for a moment. Then we will be right back.

[Dan] All right. So, I want to talk about the new book from our good friend of the podcast, Piper Drake. She has a book out called Wings Once Cursed and Bound. It actually comes out in two days from when this airs on May 2. This… Piper has a very successful career as a romance author. Wings Once Cursed and Bound is a step into a bit of a new genre. It is kind of modern fantasy. It is about a woman in Seattle who is secretly hiding the fact that she is actually a char… A kind of mythical creature from Thai folklore. She is a bird person. She encounters a guy who is a vampire who goes around in the world collecting mystical artifacts and locking them up so that they don't cause problems for people. He is currently looking for the infamous red shoes. Kind of the same idea as the Hans Christian Anderson story about the red shoes that make you dance forever. So, it's the two of them and those red shoes. They get embroiled in this big story. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. That is Wings Once Cursed and Bound by Piper J. Drake.

[DongWon] Okay. So, as we're thinking about how do I set up that newsletter platform for myself, Erin, you are currently thinking about doing this for yourself. Sounds like the rest of everyone else has your own marketing newsletter. What platforms are you all using? How did you go about setting that up? What do you feel like works for you? I mean, are there best practices that you're finding really helping you reach your audience in the way that you want to be?

[Mary Robinette] So, I work with a company called Northstar Messaging. Because I have a limited number of spoons. So I had started mine with MailChimp. That was working really well for me for a long time. But there were a number of automations that I wanted to do with onboarding, and it was hard. It just didn't do that well. So we've just switched over to Active Campaign which allows you to build sequences so that… This is called a nurture sequence. So someone comes in, and they get a welcome message. Then, a little bit later, they get a different thing that has some additional evergreen content, as they're being folded into the regular flow. So that's… That idea of a nurture sequence is something that I had heard about a lot, and hadn't known how to execute it. Which is why I was like, "Hello. You are professionals." It's something that I have experienced as a consumer, and I know that they're useful. But I just… I couldn't understand how to do that for myself as a writer.

[Erin] I think that's a great point, which is that it's nice to see what you like in a newsletter. Like, if you have… You see somebody's newsletter and you're like, "Oh, my gosh. This design, I'm loving it." Like, it's nice to see, like, how are they sending it to you. Usually you can find it somewhere. Scroll down to the very bottom newsletter, you might see like, sent to you by MailChimp, or Constant Contact, or one of the many other platforms that is used to send newsletters. Or, if it's the kind of content newsletter like you have, DongWon, you can sometimes tell in the URL. Like, what the service is behind the service.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I love doing that, just because, even though I don't actually have a newsletter, I love making up the idea that I'm creating a newsletter, doing lots of research, and then not sending it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, often I collect lists of places that would be good to use, just by looking at what other people do and saying I want to do that.

[Howard] You're LARPing as a newsletter sender.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I don't actually know what system I use to send out a newsletter. Because of a different tool that I use, which is an assistant. I understand that this is not immediately accessible to every aspiring author. I have an assistant whom I pay. She puts together a newsletter for me, among other tasks. I will sit down at the beginning of every month, and I will write three paragraphs. What is Dan working on, what is Dan reading, what does Dan recommend. Then send them off to her, and she turns it into a newsletter and sends it out into the world. That has been, for me, an incredibly valuable way of offloading the parts of this business that I know are important, but that I don't want to do, and still get some value out of them.

[Howard] I have the same model. My assistant's name is Sandra. Sandra has a full plate of a million other things. With the long Covid and chronic fatigue, it's not just that I don't really want to spend time crunching the text for a newsletter, it is that we have to prioritize my time now so that I am doing the things that only I can do. Anything that can be done by somebody else gets handed off. So the newsletter management has been handed off. Now, that said, Sandra will sometimes come to me and say, "Hey, do you have anything for the newsletter? I need a picture. Do you have… My bank of Howard pictures has run dry." So I will dig around and I will find something. This happens with newsletters. It also happens with a thing that is very much like a newsletter and is core to our business model, Kickstarter updates. When we're working on a project and we need to let people know, "Hey, here's what… Here's where we are in this. Here are some art drops. Here's what's new in the…" It reads exactly like a newsletter, and the audience is exactly like a newsletter audience in that it is a self-selecting group of people who have chosen to hear about this. That's one of the things that I like to remind people about newsletters is that they work better than banner ads or anything else because it is a self-selecting group of people. If someone unsubscribes, they have self-selected out of the group, and that's fine.

[DongWon] But at some point, somebody said, "Yes. I want to take this content."

[Howard] Exactly.

[DongWon] That is such a huge difference versus…

[Howard] Incredibly… Incredibly valuable.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

[Howard] Incredibly valuable. As a data point on that, when we did our last Kickstarter, we looked at… We had a marketing company help us find all of the self-selecting people that… Anybody who'd ever bought anything with us, subscribers to the newsletter, previous Kickstarters, whatever. It was over 15,000 email addresses. We sent out one mail blast saying, "We're launching a Kickstarter."

[DongWon] Great.

[Howard] And had more subscribers than we had ever had before. So, starting a newsletter and collecting these addresses is… It's going to help you in the future, one way or another.

[DongWon] That's the thing. You can start collecting them early. You don't have to send a newsletter. No one remembers signing up for newsletters. Once you do it, you're not like, "I can't believe that person hasn't emailed me yet." Right? So you can start collecting emails now. Then, when your first novel comes out, five years from now, then, maybe, you have a few thousand names on that list. Right? That can make a huge difference as you just grow that a little bit over time. Just make sure any time someone goes to your website, someone goes to your link tree, or Twitter profile, or whatever it is, "Hey. Sign up to get updates from me here." I think starting to grab those like little drips, it adds up over time. What I love hearing all of you talk about this is… It kind of… This is one of those things that plays into the category of what we call authoring. Right? Things that go into the job of being a professional author that aren't actually writing books. Right? Which is an enormous amount of time. It is always shocking to me how much time and effort goes into dealing with email, responding about events, answering interview questions, all these things that sound like nice problems to have until you're doing this so much you don't have time to write. So, newsletters is a great one, especially a marketing newsletter, to offload to a consulting firm, in Mary Robinette's case, assistants, whatever it happens to be. But when you're early-stage, sort of more Erin's position, you're doing that research and figuring out how to launch it and build that up. I love hearing that you've already done all that homework. We'll get you to pull that trigger soon.

[Erin] It's happening.

[Mary Robinette] I should say that the marketing firm is a very new thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Before that, it was assistants, and before that, it was me, and when it was me, it was wildly irregular.

[DongWon] Exactly. That's the process. Right? You learn by doing. I love hearing Erin talk about, like, figuring out what you wanted to do by seeing what other people were doing. I mean, that's so much how we learn how to do all these marketing techniques is what's working. What are authors I like? Who do I respect? What content am I getting in my inbox that I think is good? Just sign up for a bunch of people's newsletters. I know it's going to be annoying for a minute. But just see what they're doing. Right? Go to your favorite authors pages. See what their newsletters look like. Learn some techniques from them. Then start applying that little bit by bit for yourself.

[Howard] It is worth pointing out that your newsletter can be a business model unto itself.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] If you are passionate enough about what you are writing, if you touch a nerve, you may find, wow, Howard writes about lazy recipes for old people, suddenly has 50,000 people reading it. Well, maybe if I turn that into a book, I can make money out of it. That is a legit thing. Which is one of the reasons why I would encourage you, if you're going to do a newsletter, write about things you're passionate about. Because that passion, that's what connects people to your fiction, it's what connects them to your TikTok, it's what connects us with each other.

[DongWon] If you're doing a content newsletter, you can get people to subscribe and pay. It's shocking how few subscribers it takes for that to suddenly feel like, "Oh. This makes sense for me to be spending a couple hours a week on this."

[Erin] I think that's also good because it gives you an assignment. So, one of the reasons that I have not started a newsletter for myself, despite the fact that I once worked as somebody who sent out newsletters for other people as a job. So it's… I know what the thing is. Is because it's so easy to put yourself last and say, "Okay. I only have so much time. I'm going to do stuff for other people." Or to put your writing self first, which is a completely legitimate choice. But the authoring does sort of need to get done. So by being on this podcast, I'm forcing myself to do the authoring. We're going to be asking you to do some of the authoring, too. But I think even more than that, if you have subscribers, it's a way to sort of offload… You're not making yourself do it, you're doing it for somebody else. You're giving them a gift. So, as long as that doesn't become a huge like pressure on you, I think it can be a nice motivation to kind of kick yourself in the butt and sort of make yourself do the thing that you want to do. Because you want to reach other people and let them know about what you've been doing.

[Mary Robinette] It's as if… It's almost as if when you're saying you're using this as a way to get the… To make yourself do the newsletter. It's almost as if you are figuring out who you are, and then doing it on purpose.

[Laughter]

[garbled Exactly. Wow. Callbacks. As if we've planned these episodes. Exactly.]

[Mary Robinette] It would have sounded so much more clever if we hadn't all just giggled at that.

[Laughter]

[Dan] We're clever, we're just not very professional about it.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] On that note, I think I will take us to our homework for the week. I think our homework is probably pretty easy to guess what I'm about to tell you to do based on everything I've said on this podcast so far, which is… Go make your own newsletter. Make a marketing newsletter, figure out what service you want to use. MailChimp is probably the most popular, but do a little googling. There's a million guides out there. Make an account. Make a free account. Just sign it up. Figure out how to integrate it into your personal website, if you have one. If you don't, make a website. Highly encourage you to do that. Then, you don't have to do anything to it. Don't send a newsletter, don't do anything with it. Just make it, get the sign-up form on that site, and let it be.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we talk about why publishers make choices, how writers can use that, and why Howard's been using the Time Machine all wrong. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go start a newsletter. Or go subscribe to ours. Because we also needed to start one, and recording these episodes made us realize that we hadn't. So, use the Time Machine, find our newsletter subscription button, subscribe, and join us.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.16: Deep Dive: Publishing is Hard, by DongWon Song

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-16-deep-dive-publishing-is-hard-by-dongwon-song/

Key points: Where do you get your ideas? Whatever I'm dealing with in my day-to-day job. Issues in my inbox, what people are talking about in social media, huge kerfluffles in publishing. Who are you writing for? In theory, for other people in the industry. In practice, mostly writers. How do you decide how much of yourself to mix in? For me, making it personal is important. How do you decide what to write about? Not a schedule, not a plan. A burr under my saddle. Do you have a file of draft essays, a boneyard? About 2 months ago, I deleted all of them. What does running the newsletter do for you or your career? It's a brand building exercise. But when you change, how does that match the brand you established? The newsletter is a living document, and I am too. Having editors who are friends helps the agent and his clients.

[Season 18, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deep Dive: Publishing is Hard, by DongWon Song.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So this week, it's my turn for the deep dive. I'm not a writer, necessarily, like everyone else on this podcast. I'm on the industry side, as we talked about before. So there is a little bit of like a… What do we talk about in my case? How do we do this?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I realized that I thought it might be interesting to dig into a newsletter that I run. In 2019, I started a newsletter at that point on Substack that was about my experiences in publishing. It's in part instructive about how the business of publishing works, but really, it's through the lens of here's how I experience it, here's how I think about it, here's how I talk about it. So I've been doing that on and off for the past several years… Way longer than I realized. I thought I'd been doing it two years, but 2019 is not two years ago.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So I wanted to have it featured on the podcast for us to talk a little bit as a way to understand how I think about publishing, what perspective I'm bringing to the pod, and really kind of dig into some of the tricky issues that I like to tackle there.

[Howard] A couple of things. DongWon, when we do these deep dives, often we put your feet to the fire…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And ask you how you did things. Also, when you say I'm not a writer like these other people, after having read several installments of Publishing is Hard, you're a writer.

[Dan] Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.

[Howard] You're absolutely a writer.

[Dan] Maybe not an author, but a very good writer.

[Mary Robinette] Again, we're going to totally digress on this. The reason I'm digressing on this is because I know that we have listeners out there who are nonfiction writers, and I want to remind them that they are writers, just like DongWon is a writer. It doesn't have to be fiction to be writing. And your pub…

[DongWon] I will back up and say I'm not a novelist and I don't write books.

[Chuckles and laughter]

[Howard] Fair enough.

[DongWon] Because I completely agree with everything… What everybody's saying. I will say I am a writer in this regard, which was… Having to go back and read things I had published several years ago was truly agonizing and I do not understand how you all do this on a regular basis.

[Howard] See, that brings me to the third part of this tripartite thing of mine, which is, now that we've established that you are one of us as a writer, the first question I have to ask you is where do you get your ideas?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Suffering and trauma, Howard. Yeah, I mean, I get the con… The ideas for what I want to talk about basically by whatever it is I'm thinking about in what I'm dealing with in my day-to-day job. Right? So what issues are coming up in my inbox, what am I seeing people talk about in social media, what huge kerfuffles are happening in publishing that's… And Publishers Weekly this week. All those things are things that I start thinking about, and then… Often what happens is I'll see a bad take, I'll see somebody interpret something that somebody said as part of a testimony or as part of an article, and I'll be like, "Wait. People don't understand this the way that I understand it. Writers are seeing things happening in the industry and they don't have my 17, 18 years of experience of working inside the sausage factory. Are there things that I can explain about this? Are there ways I can illuminate some of what the logic behind what looks like an crazy decision is, and how people might approach it in a way that makes life a little bit more navigable for those of us in the industry, for those of us participating from the other side as writers and people looking to get published?" So…

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you just said is a question that I'm curious about. You talked about seeing a hot take, and going, "Well, that's hot…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When you're writing, who are you writing for? Are you writing for writers? For the young up and comers, or are you writing for fellow industry peers to be like, "Hey. Folks. Trying to get your…" Or does it depend?

[DongWon] The conceit of the newsletter is that I'm writing for other people in the industry. The conceit is this isn't a newsletter for writers, it is a newsletter for people in publishing, people who are looking to talk about publishing. In practice, I know most of who's reading it are writers. Even though, every time I poll, I get lots of emails from friends in the industry or colleagues or whatever. I think it really does resonate with people who work in publishing. But I also recognize that that's a very tiny population. Therefore, most of the people reading it are people who want to be published, who are either people who have books out or are aspiring published authors, whatever it happens to be. So there's a little bit of a trick that I have to pull that I'm writing for other peers when I think about it, but then I also need to adjust what I'm saying so that it lands for people who aren't in the industry in the same way, and therefore may not have all the same… I don't know, internal defenses and understandings of how the business works. Because one of the things I want to do is make publishing legible to people who aren't in it, and one of the ways it's illegible is that it's a tough business. We talk about things that are very important to people, about their art, about their craft, in ways that can be very blunt and are fundamentally about profit and money because publishing is a business. Right? So finding ways to talk about those things without unduly traumatizing my audience or discouraging people. The last thing I want people to do is read this and feel like, "Oh, I can't succeed then. I can't publish. I shouldn't be trying to do this." That's my worst-case scenario. So how do I talk about difficult experiences in a way that has enough accessibility and empathy for the audience that I can sort of navigate that balance? So it's an ongoing conversation in my head. It's a very very very good question.

[Mary Robinette] That seems like that's a very applicable thing, then, to write for one audience and then edit to broaden it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I think that's the thing that a lot of people can incorporate into their process. Right? So my first drafts often I have to be like, "Oh. I can't say that. That's too harsh. That's an inside thought." Right? How do I edit that to be for a broad audience?

[Howard] There's an entire group of writers, communicators, out there facing the same problem and that's the sci-comm community, where they are writing from the standpoint of scientists, but trying to write to everybody else.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] They need to make it understandable, but they need to not dumb it down. They need to deliver the bad climate news, but they need to not send us into a panic and make us not care anymore. It's a fine line to walk.

[DongWon] It is. It's like it's a very flattering comparison to make.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think on that note, let's pause for our thing of the week.

[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is actually another podcast. It's a podcast called Friends at the Table. It's an actual play role-playing podcast that is one of my very favorite things on the Internet. The previous season of this, I think, I broadly declared on Twitter that it was my favorite piece of media that year, and I still stand by that. They just launched a new season of the podcast called Palisades. That's a science fiction story about a planet under attack by sort of invading forces. It's a story that is about revolution, it's a story about resistance, and it's a story about giant robots. It is some of the most intricate fascinating world building I've ever seen with fantastic improvisational play. I cannot recommend Friends at the Table highly enough. Now is a great time to jump in as they just launched their new season.

[Erin] I have a question.

[DongWon] Great.

[Erin] About Publishing is Hard. Which is that one of the things that I love about it is how much personality and like personal story you weave in there. So you're doing the… Talking about the industry, but you're also talking about yourself. I'm wondering how you decide how much of yourself to kind of put in there. You know what I mean? What to share with us when you're sharing all this other information?

[DongWon] Yeah. It's a tricky question. I think, for me, making it personal is very important. We'll talk about this more in a future episode, but I don't want to be someone standing on a hill didacticly telling you, "This is how publishing should be. This is the only way to succeed. This is my 10 rules for success." That's not the kind of thing I'm trying to do. So, for me, rooting it in my own subjectivity, rooting it in my experience, feels really important to me. Right? So what I want to be doing is telling personal stories. I'm going to tell you about stuff I went through, but that's complicated because I can't talk about client stuff in a direct way. Right? I can't expose whatever's going on with the particular writers I work with, a lot of that is confidential. Also, my job as a literary agent is always to be hyping out my clients. Right? So you don't want to necessarily air people's dirty business. Right? So, it's a delicate balancing act. I am often talking about personal experiences, but I'll have to be a little vague or allude or blend a few things into one scenario. So I try to make sure that the emotional core of it is very personal and very honest, while having to elide some actual details and be a little slippery about what actually is what. Because I never want things to be mapped from one thing I write about to a situation that affected somebody else.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I find that a lot of times when talking about issues is that if you can depersonalize it or decouple it as you say from a specific incident that it becomes easier for people to apply it. At the same time, the more specific you are, the easier it is for people to internalize it because we learn from stories.

[Dan] So, this leads into another question I had, which is, take us behind the scenes a little bit. How do you decide what are the things that you want to write? Do you have a schedule? Do you just have some burr under your saddle that eventually turns into an essay? How do these topics get formed?

[DongWon] Anyone who has subscribed to my newsletter is very aware that it is a very irregular event. I'm not on a regular schedule. It's not monthly, it's not weekly. There are gaps between when I publish things. That is somewhat deliberate. But it's because I don't have a schedule, I don't have a plan. What I'm looking for is when do I get a burr under my saddle, I think that's it exactly. When does something gets stuck in my head in a way of like, "Oh, wait, I have something to say about this." Sometimes that's I watch a TV show, and they did a cool thing and I want to talk about that thing. Sometimes that's somebody's having a fight on Twitter and I'm like, "I have thoughts about that, but I'm going to let that cool off a bit before I share my thoughts because I don't want to contribute to the discourse, but I do have insights that I think might be helpful to people, hopefully." So, it's kind of all over the place. I'm not much of an advanced planner when it comes to the newsletter. I like to go a little bit more off-the-cuff than that. But… Yeah.

[Howard] Do you have a file of draft essays, a boneyard of things where like, "Oh. Now I'm ready to finish this essay, and I will release it to the world."

[DongWon] I did and then about two months ago, I went through and deleted all of them because I looked at all of them and I was like, "I don't want to talk about any of these anymore."

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] The moment had passed for me. Right?

[Howard] A piece of me just died inside. You deleted your boneyard. I think those are words.

[DongWon] They are words, but there's always more words, and there's always more ideas. Right? I think that's one thing that… I encourage people to save their stuff. Go back to what's in the chest. Go back and see what's in that desk drawer. But also, don't be afraid of throwing stuff out. You will have more ideas. More stuff will happen. Even as I was trying to pick out newsletters for us to talk about for the podcast, I was going through some of it… I don't necessarily agree with everything I said before. I was surprised, actually, by how much… I was like, "Oh, I still vibe with this." I still stand by what I said then, even if I would change a couple of things here and there. But an idea that I had for a newsletter eight months ago that I was like, "Oh, not interested enough to finish this." I'm happy to let that go by the wayside. Maybe something similar will occur to me again six months from now, and I'll do it then.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I find that that's true for me with a lot of things, that there's the… The person who started that, that original thing, is not the same person that is sitting down to write it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] It's… Unless I have a new spin on something… I used to blog every day and talk about stuff, and I would bank things. Where I'd like write several things in a day. I don't understand how I did that. A. But, also, frequently I would come back to something and be like, "I don't… I have no connection to this." That was a different person who wrote it.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, sometimes I think, Oh, maybe I'd have more subscribers, maybe I'd grow the audience more, those kinds of things, if I did have that bank of more regular content to tap into. But it's also just not the kind of project I'm doing. I'm doing this as much for my own interest in amusement as for anything else. There is a paid tier to the newsletter, but all the content is free. Anyone can read any of the issues. The paid thing is almost more of a tip jar. Like, do you like what I'm doing? Do you want to support it? I started doing twit streams and bringing guests on. Those guests are paid roles. That's kind of what the subscribers go to, is just making it so that it's worth it for me to spend time on this and to bring in some guests and things like that. But, for me, because it's free, I feel comfortable posting stuff when I want to post stuff. When it feels relevant to me.

[Dan] I want to dig into this a little bit. Let's talk about what you think the newsletter has done for you. Clearly, it's a thing that seems primarily designed to give back a little bit. You love the industry, you love working in it. You want to talk about it, you want to help people out. But at the same time, a really common piece of advice we hear is, "Authors, get a newsletter." You're not exactly in that position. But, what are the ways in which you think running this newsletter has benefited you or your career?

[DongWon] It's a brand building exercise for me. It… The revenue from it is nice, it's a little bonus. The educational component has a lot of emotional investment in it. The professional reasons for doing it are is it does build my brand. Writers get to see this is how I do business, this is how I think, this is how I think about the industry. Does that make sense to me? Does that seem like someone I want to work with? Right? It's a way for writers to sort of audition me a little bit before working with me. If they like my ethics, if they like my perspectives, if they like my view of how to be in the business. That's very important to me. It's also marketing for me towards publishers. Right? So a lot of editors read my newsletter. I hear from them, I get lovely messages from them, and those are people who want to work with me. Who… They think of me positively when one of my manuscripts lands in their inbox. So it sets me up in a number of ways, it lets me have a brand in a way that was more sustainable and clearer and more fun to do than Twitter was. I mean, Twitter is a mess in a lot of ways. So the newsletter let me talk about things at length in ways that let me be much more clear about who I am and what I stand for.

[Erin] This brings me back to something that both you and Mary Robinette said earlier, which is that you change as a person, and what you believe changes. So if part of it is branding yourself, how do you like square that with the fact that you may be a different person now than the brand that you established maybe a year ago or two or three years ago?

[DongWon] I mean, like, I literally have a different gender than when I started bus… The newsletter.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Like, somebody will be going, "I don't use that pronoun anymore. What's that doing there?" Like, yeah, I've changed a lot. I certainly… I don't have the perspective in this business that I did when I started, much less five years ago, much less probably last year. It's a business that evolves. Publishing is so slow in certain ways, but how we see content, how we see our roles in it, what are… I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about workers rights in the industry. HarperCollins had that massive strike last year, which concluded positively. They got a lot of what they wanted. Like, that has absolutely informed my thoughts about like how do we resolve a lot of the issues in publishing, in the industry. It's like, "Well, I was pro-union before, but, boy am I pro-union now in terms of publishing workers, in terms of young editors and assistance and people coming up." How much better with this industry be if we had stronger labor rights and relations? Right? I'm not sure all of my publisher friends would like to hear that from me…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Especially those in more senior positions. But our thoughts and things do evolve. It was interesting to go back into the archive and see what I still stand by and what I didn't. But I think it's a living… The thing about a newsletter is it's a living document. It's not I wrote this and this was my opinion and it's calcified in a certain way. I hope people can see that and understand that. I haven't really gone through and pruned old things I don't necessarily stand by anymore. But there's nothing in there where I was like, "Wow, I said… I was way out of pocket on that one." But it's subtler than that, I think.

[Dan] I would say in a lot of ways the brand you are building here is less about the specific insights and more about your style of thinking and analyzing things. The way in which you present things rather than the specifics that you present.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I also love them because the newsletter sounds like you. Like, the one we were reading specifically for this… I saw you give that keynote speech.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, "Oh, yeah. No, this is exactly your rhythm and inflections." Then, subsequent ones I'm like, "Oh. Yeah. No, this is like sitting down to have a conversation."

[DongWon] My newsletters are profoundly ungrammatical, which is funny. I use repetition a lot in them, stylistically. It's because that is how I talk, especially when I'm lecturing, especially when I'm like speaking in front of a crowd or even on the pod or whatever. So, yeah, it's nice to hear that it is reflective of how I think and talk so much.

[Howard] I want to circle back to something you said earlier which… At risk of unduly waiting this, this might be a good point on which to close. That is that when you said you have friends who are editors who read this and who like what you say. If you are a writer, you want an agent who is friends with a lot of editors. Because what you are paying the agent for is to put your work in front of as many editors as possible in as positive a light as possible. To put it in front of the right editors. That is… I mean, that's the bread-and-butter of the job that you really do. The fact that this newsletter is getting you more attention from editors is good for your clients, present and future.

[DongWon] Well, one thing is I used to be on that side of the table. I was an editor at a big five house. I have a lot of understanding and empathy of what they go through. So I think my newsletter's a little bit of framing that as well. I want to be clear, though, that there are other ways to be an agent. Right? There's a mode of agenting that is much more antagonistic and much more hostile to the publisher. Right? They get projects because they're big projects, because they're big agents. It's a different way of interacting. It's much more old-school, quite frankly. It can also be really effective. It's not how I do business. It's not just who I am as a person. So part of me doing the newsletter is making clear this is my approach. Not that I think other approaches are wrong. It's not how I want to do things. But, yeah, again, it's really a way for me to express to the world, whether that's writers, whether that's my peers, whether that's people I want to work with, who I am as a person and how I want to be doing business. So, thank you for taking the time with me to dive into talking about how publishing is hard.

[DongWon] Dan, I believe you have our homework?

[Dan] Yeah. We have, actually, a two-part homework for you today, dear listener. We want you to subscribe to a couple of newsletters. They're a very valuable thing, they're common in the industry. We want you to seek out to with the following criteria. Number one, find a creator that you really like who has a newsletter and subscribe to it. Number two, possibly and maybe ideally with that same creator, find a newsletter that person subscribes to, and subscribe to it as well. Because then you get a sense not only of what they are putting out into the world, but what they are absorbing. What the creators you love our reading and interacting with.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we'll talk about branding, personal identity, and why Dolly Parton can never have a bad day. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.50: Consistency, Inconsistency, and the Crushing Weight of Expectations

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/11/17-50-consistency-inconsistency-and-the-crushing-weight-of-expectations/

Key Points: What does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to provide new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to the audience? Seasons and breaks, or a never-ending juggernaut? Focus on regularity or focus on content? Under-promise and over-deliver.

[Season 17, Episode 50]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Consistency, Inconsistency, And the Crushing Weight of Expectations. 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Howard] This episode was my idea. Because today is December 3… Is it December third?

[Dan] It is.

[Dongwon] It is December third.

[Howard] It's December third. Wow, look at that. We're recording this on December 3 for December 11 because we realized we had a hole in our schedule of episodes. We could not let that stand. Then we took a step backward and had to ask, well, why not? What was our original commitment to publishing an episode every week without fail? I'm actually going to throw this question to Dan. Dan, do you remember 2008? Do you remember back then when we decided how often we were going to do this?

[Dan] I have [garbled] memories of 2008. I don't remember if there was a specific decision made other than if we're going to do it weekly, let's make sure we do it every single week.

[Howard] Yeah. See, that was my memory as well. That was a 2008… I guess it was the only 2008 any of us got. But back then, I was eight years in on what would become a 20 year run of Schlock Mercenary where the daily web comic updated every day without fail. That was a thing that, and I'm not mincing any words here, made me feel important and special. So I thought it was something that we should do with our podcast as well. So we have inherited that. Here it is 2022, very nearly 2023, and we are still insisting on putting this stuff out every week. Now, fair listener, we're not recording this episode in order to tell you that we're going to change that. We're going to explore how the crushing weight of your expectations drove this recording session and what the alternatives might be for those of you who publish newsletters or do other sorts of social media things, Patreons, whatever else. Let me throw it out to the august body of two…

[Dan] I just want to say really quick that us doing an episode about how we never miss an episode kind of feels like the radio station constantly interrupting songs to tell you how they never interrupt the songs…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. There's… For my pitch to this episode originally to Dongwon, I said, "Oo, oo, I have a silly meta-meta-idea."

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Dan, it's important to let them know what they're getting and so you need to remind them of what it is we're doing here.

[Howard] It is.

[Dongwon] Howard, question for you, actually. Is your streak completely unbroken? Are you at 20 years of not missing a single day?

[Howard] Yes. 20 years from June 12 of 2000 was the first strip through July 20 of 2020 was the final strip. Every day has a strip on it, and all of those strips aired on the day which they were scheduled. There was this one time where the strip aired about eight hours late because a universal… Err, uninterruptible power supply in the server farms was configured incorrectly and power cut out and the generator didn't come on and then the UPS exploded. We had to move to another host. I think that was in 06. That was the point at which everybody just insisted I was metal and I couldn't be stopped. When, in point of fact, that was I know people who can solve the technical problems and I have a buffer.

[Dongwon] How stressful has that been for you? Like, what does that feel like to know that every day I got to get this out? I mean, obviously, you're banking some, those are in the bank in advance, but what's that process felt like?

[Howard] It's like… I couldn't have accurately described it until I was out the other side of it. You ask a fish what water taste like, and they're like, "What? What does the world taste like?" No. I am now like the fish who has crawled out onto dry land. I'm like, "Hm. Water was nice. Air is different."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There was a constant pressure, but it was also a piece of what I used to motivate me, to get me moving. The idea that a strip, that a day could go by without a strip was just absolutely unthinkable to me. Because I knew that if I missed one day, then it would be okay, and I would just start missing days over and over and over again.

[Dongwon] Right.

[Howard] So… But that's me. That's… I don't want to project that mindset on to other people. That's where… With this whole discussion, we have to be careful.

[Dan] Well, that's what I want to bring up next, is… I honestly, despite doing two of them, I don't listen to a ton of podcasts. So is never missing a week, is that actually a rare thing? Or does everyone do that?

[Dongwon] I think, as one who listens to an insane amount of podcasts, it depends on the podcast. There are many that I follow that are religious about weekend, week out. Then there are some who are like, "Yeah, we missed four or five over the course of our several year run." Then there are some who update irregularly, and you just get new content when you get new content. I think one way that podcasters sort of get around the burnout component is by bundling them into seasons. Right? So we'll do 10 episodes weekly, and then take a break for two months while they prep the next season, and then come back for another 10 episodes. I think that's a way to sort of manage that schedule and manage expectations because really that's what it comes down to. So much of what this is what does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to be providing new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to that audience.

[Howard] Yeah. With some of the more produced… Produced is the wrong word, and I don't want to put a negative connotation on it. The more heavily produced… The higher production value podcasts run a lot like television seasons would run, which is, hey, we're going to do a run of a couple of dozen episodes, and then we take a break. During that break, what is happening is we are arranging for the sponsors and the ads and the content and whatever else for the next season. That's… When you've got five or 25 people working on a thing, that makes a lot more sense than insisting that this is a weekly juggernaut that just never stops rolling and outputting a thing.

[Dongwon] Well, so much of the advice for authors these days, is integrate multiple touch points for the audience. Right? So, you have your books, but then you're also maybe you have a podcast, maybe your Patreon, a substack, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. All these are ways in which you're interacting with your audience on a regular basis. So I think the reason I found this topic interesting was what's the logic behind how you structure that, how do you approach that, how do you manage your own burnout and audience expectations at the same time.

[Howard] Yeah. On the subject of authors, we should have a book of the week. Dan, did you bring us… Did you bring one?

[Dan] I did bring a book of the week. So, I am a big fan of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. She has a relatively new one, I think it's a month or so old, called The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. Which is a retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in the Yucatán Peninsula in the either early 1900s or late 1800s. I'm not deep enough into it to know exactly where. But Sylvia writes a very distinct subset subgenre that I adore. Which is historical Mexican feminist horror. If you're into that, she is so good. Her… Last year, she put out one called Mexican Gothic which was a haunted house story. This one is much more kind of that H. G. Wells Dr. Moreau thing, but all from the point of view of this daughter, transplanted from France, growing up in the Yucatán Peninsula, raised by a Mayan nanny. Then, at the center of this giant culture clash, written with this delightful core science-fiction element on top of it. It's really good stuff. I'm not done with it yet, like I said, but it's fantastic, and I recommend it. So that is The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia.

[Dongwon] That's tremendously exciting. Mexican Gothic was really one of my favorite reads last year.

[Dan] Oh, it was so good.

[Dongwon] Just terrific.

[Dan] This one, thus far, I'm liking even more.

[Howard] That's… It's cool, and I love the way you described… And I'm going to make a point out of this… When you said the genres. Name those off again.

[Dan] Historical Mexican horror.

[Howard] Okay. Historical Mexican horror. One of the things that's fun about following authors on social media is that discovery that if you like, for instance, horror, branching into a historical horror is not a big stretch. You start seeing some of these overlaps. If you like historical, branching into Mexican and horror at the same time, that is not a big stretch. So, yeah, when you say Mexican historical horror, if you are into that thing, no, if you are into any of those things, there's a really good chance that you're going to like this new thing. This is one of the reasons why having some sort of presence on social media or whatever is useful to us so that we can find those places where we overlap with people's existing interests and say, "Oh, well, you know, you liked The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you might actually like Schlock Mercenary. It's not a book, and it's not British, and it has pictures, and it's not as funny, but…"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are enough parallels.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think with the social media component, like having sort of these regular contact points like I was talking about earlier is… Can be really, really important. Right? I think having the daily updates, the regular updates, that you were talking about from Schlock Mercenary. I think the basic advice for Instagram is, like, post a reel a day. Right? For TikTok, it's like regular… Make sure you're regularly updating your content. That can be really important. But that can also create an enormous amount of pressure on creators. I think it holds a lot of people back from even trying to start to build their brand that way. I launched a newsletter a few years back, it's called Publishing Is Hard. I really love doing it. One thing that I decided before I launched it was I'm not going to commit to a regular schedule. Because I know me. I know what my life is like, I know how much work I have on my plate at any given time, and, as a literary agent, the amount of work that I do goes up and down wildly. One week will be completely insane, the next week will be quiet. Right? So it just wasn't realistic for me to make a commitment of I'm going to send a newsletter every week. Now, my colleague Kate McKean also has a brilliant newsletter called Agents And Books. She does two newsletters a week. Right? We both have different audiences, different strategies, different approaches, and it's really cool to see what she does and what I do slightly different because I, at the beginning said, "I'm going to send these irregularly." When I first created it, it was in sort of the copy that I made. Anybody who has followed it has known that there will be periods where you won't hear from me for a minute, but then I'll send a new one out. The balance is you can sort of focus on regularity of getting the piece of content out, and it's usually a little bit shorter, it's a little bit more pointed, or, what I do, is make sure that what I'm giving somebody… I'm trying to make sure every piece is pretty special to the audience. Right? I'm putting a lot of care and craft into what I'm writing. Not that you don't for a daily update, but I'm giving something a little bit more emotional, I think, then what my colleague Kate does. Right? So I think finding that balance point between okay, if I'm not doing a weekly update, what am I offering my audience that sort of makes up for the lack of regularity in a way that balances it out for them.

[Howard] Yeah. To be sure here, if we had decided that Writing Excuses was going to be a 30 minute episode instead of a 15 minute episode, the weekly schedule would have crushed us.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the recording sessions, we just wouldn't have had enough time to do the things that we wanted to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah. Those people who do like weekly three hour podcasts? Unimaginable, to me, how they do that. I mean, it's just a bigger part of their lives. I think we all have primary things that we're doing that are incredibly time-consuming. So we can fit in these 15 minute a week episodes. Which is, just, again, a really different balance point.

[Howard] Dongwon, you talked about how the crushing expectations can prevent people from even getting started. For a while, I had a twitch stream… I still have technically, a twitch stream, I just haven't streamed in forever. A twitch stream in which the art that I was doing for the X DM books was showing up as part of the stream. Then something happened, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I realized the effort of configuring things so that I can stream this is preventing me from getting the work done. The stress of having an audience in front of me is preventing me from doing the really hard work where I have to be unafraid of making mistakes. I'm just not comfortable doing that on stream. Which is weird to hear from the guy whose 20… Or whose year 2000 artwork is available for everybody to look at. But, long story short, I stopped streaming and started getting the work done. So, yeah, the decision to create regular content can be a decision that results in less productivity. That's not what any of us want.

[Yeah]

[Dan] Well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the points I want to make here is this is not an episode about how you should start a podcast.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Or about how you should have a TikTok. Right? We are not telling you that any of these outlets are necessary for an artist's career. What we're trying to get across is the idea that you need to look at your own output, at your own schedule, decide for yourself if one of these extra peripheral activities might be valuable to you, and then see what would be the best format to stick that into. If you want to do a podcast, you want to do a quick and dirty weekly one like we're doing, you want to do something longer and research that comes out in discrete chunks once a year, how do you want to structure that? Maybe the answer is nothing at all. All three of us used to be on Typecast which ran for about three years with different cast members here and there. We really worked hard to make that a weekly thing as consistent as possible. It wasn't always. Eventually, we had to let go of it because our schedules became such that it was not worth our time anymore. Sometimes that happens.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think an important point here…

[Howard] I still miss it.

[Dongwon] I do miss it too, actually. Yeah, it was fun. If I have any point here, it's… Yeah, don't feel like you have to do these things. If you do do it though, if you're thinking about it, don't be afraid to experiment. Right? Don't feel like just because most or some newsletters are weekly, that this is a thing that you're tying yourself to, but you're going to have to do every week. I think that expectation can actually limit you more than open things up. Right? So, don't be afraid to experiment, try new things, and don't feel like you have to do the one piece of advice that you've heard elsewhere. You can do in a regular schedule. My only advice is as you do that, to under-promise and over-deliver. If you're not sure you can do weekly, don't tell people upfront you're doing weekly. Right? Just say, "I'm trying this out, this is an experiment, let's see how it goes." Right? I'm currently launching a monthly twitch stream and I've said many times, this is experimental. We're trying this out. I'm trying to figure out how do I do scheduling, how do I coordinate this, how do I get guests on. All of this stuff. It's been super fun so far, pretty easy so far. But we'll see where I'm at in six months. So, just make sure that you're being realistic with yourself and realistic with your audience. Because where this goes wrong is when people feel really misled. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] There have been times where I've under-promised and under-delivered. Right? Like, that happens. But I think if you have that relation with the audience, you can work with them and sort of make it up to them and find a way to balance that out.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] If you take away anything from this episode, under-promise, over-deliver. That's your soundbite. Thank you, Dongwon.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's a very good one.

[Dongwon] You're welcome. Words to live by.

[Dan] Let me throw out one more thing that I've learned with my newsletter. Which I do try to send out regularly. But regularly for me use… It is not tied to a day of the week or a day of the month. I try to do a monthly newsletter, but it is more important for me to get it out on a Monday than it is to get it out on the first Monday of the month. Just because I know that that is the time when it is most likely to be seen and clicked on. So that's a different kind of consistency, and a different kind of schedule keeping to keep in mind.

[Howard] Yep. Hey, Dongwon, you want to send us home with some homework?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, here's what I'd like all of you to do. Make a list of all of your regular commitments, the stuff that you're obligated to do every week. Whether that's going to therapy, picking up your kids, whatever it is that you have that is a regular thing. Put that on the list somewhere. Then, once you have all of that together, consider your bandwidth for adding new items to that list. Is that a daily Instagram post? Is that a weekly TikTok? Is that a newsletter? Is that this, is that another thing? Really think about what do I actually have time for. Then make a rough schedule of what content updates you could do in a sample month. Right? What feels realistic, what feels manageable. Then reduce that by a little bit. Right, in that under-promise kind of component. Right? Think about what feels realistic now, and then realize that you're probably not going to hit that target. What's a little bit under that that you could shoot for. Yeah. I think that's a good place to get started in terms of putting together a content plan for yourself.

[Howard] Outstanding. That's… It almost sounds like a life hack. Hey, I think we did it. I think we filled our December 11 hole.

[Dan] Yay!

[Howard] So. Fair listeners, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/21/16-8-smart-promotion/

Key Points: Promotion has revolutions, so focus your effort on writing your next thing. Make sure you have a solid website with a newsletter that you control. Pay attention to the way readers are finding out about books, not just where writers congregate. Don't forget that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful promotional tools. Then, start looking at social media. Pick the places where people are talking about your books, and that you find easy to use. You want to be part of the discussion. Pick the areas where you can write good content.

[Season 16, Episode 8]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Smart Promotion.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are talking about smart promotion, how to promote yourself smartly.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, it's… This is something that I am terrible at, so I am genuinely excited to hear what Brandon has to say, because it's very easy to waste a lot of time and energy on promoting yourself in ways that have no return on your investment. So, what can you tell us, Brandon, about how to do this right?

[Brandon] Well, number one, write your next thing. This has been the only constant throughout my entire career, because promotion has had a huge, multiple huge revolutions during the time that I've been a writer. I started trying to break in in the late 90s and even mid-90s, when email was not a thing you could assume people had. Right? I ended up breaking in in 2005, before Audible and e-books on Amazon were a thing. I had broken… I broke in before Twitter existed. Right? I broke in when MySpace was a thing. I have watched social media revolutions happen over and over, but the only big constant is you should be focused mostly on writing your next thing. We're going to talk about promotion, we're going to talk about all the different ways you can promote. The thing about it is, these ways have consistently stopped working for… They'll work for some authors, and not for others. They will work for a time, and then stop working entirely. The entire game changes so frequently that if you're not consistently working on the next thing, you're going to be in trouble because that's the only standby thing you can know will be useful.

[Dan] I can give a great example of this. Back when I was doing Partials, so we're talking nine or 10 years ago, book blogs were all the rage. They were huge. I did a blog tour on a bunch of different book blogs, and it launched Partials through the stratosphere. It was fantastic. Three years later, when I launched my next YA science fiction series, book blogs were gone. They… I mean, they're still around, but they're not effective anymore. They're not a useful form of author promotion. So, we had to completely restructure all of our promotion for that series.

[Brandon] Yeah, when I broke in, I remember going to San Diego and driving to every bookstore and delivering… Hand delivering a copy of my paperback. I would walk into the store and say, "Who is your science fiction reader? Can I give them a free book?" I would say, "Hey, if you'll read this, I'll give you this free book. Here's a short pitch on it." I was able to go to 24 bookstores in San Diego. When I last was there, and look to see which bookstores I could go to, there were four that carried my books. So, things have changed dramatically. Now, that's partially because San Diego was saturated with Borders. Places where Barnes & Noble had a stronger foothold have still… More of those metropolitan areas didn't lose as many stores. But even still, the physical book market… My most recent book, Rhythm of War, which came out in November 2020, it was over 50% audiobook in its first week. The fact that… And even now, it's evened out at about 40% audio and around… The rest is split, hardcover and e-book. This is a really different world. If I'm going to say right now, the big revolution happening right now that's happened the last couple of years is book marketing has become pay to play. That's been the trend over the last few years. Unfortunately, all the major social media sites, now, if you want to get eyeballs on your posts, you need to pay for them. Indeed, the big, big change was Amazon deciding to charge authors a lot of money to promote books on different pages. If you are now… If you are an indie author, the biggest change that probably happened in the last few years is, once uupon a time, you could put books up on Amazon… There was a wild west period in 2010, even lasting into the mid-2000 teens, where if you were writing really fast and putting out good books and beating the traditional publishers to the market, you were able to sell huge numbers of books. To sell those books now on Amazon, you need to pay six figures income. I had two indie authors in my writing course at BYU last year, and both of them were spending 5 to 6 figures on marketing their indie books to make back about that much money. Which means that Amazon used to pay you a 70% royalty. They still do, but actually they're charging you half of that back in advertising money, and Amazon is no longer paying more money to indie authors than traditional publishing pays to traditional authors. That's gone now. That's a really big change in the way that marketing happens on the… In the modern era.

[Howard] One of the things that I… A soapbox I've been on for 15 years now, that I'm happy to still have as a functioning soapbox, is the idea that your brand, your identity online, needs to have a home that you own. Your domain name, your server, your blog posts or photos or comics or whatever, and you don't let go of that. Everything else you do, whether it's Twitter or Instagram or whatever else, all of those things are under someone else's control and they can cut you off in an instant just by going out of business, and a lot of them will. So this…

[Brandon] Now this is… This was point number two on my list, Howard. Of things to say.

[Howard] Oh, okay.

[Brandon] We didn't… I didn't even share this, but you nailed it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Number two. Once you're writing your new book, number two is to make sure to have a solid website with a newsletter sign-up that you are keeping up-to-date. People don't go to individual websites as much as they used to. Your individual website is not going to get the hits that your social media does, but it can't be taken away from you. It actually can't. Remember, when we talked about how publishers are not your friends. I've had multiple friends that when they launch a big new series, their publisher comes in and says, "We're going to build a really cool new website for this series." They said, "Great." They're like, "We're going to spend like money on this," and it's been great, except the publisher owns that website. That website is in all of the books. It is branding the series and not the author. My recommendation to you is to say to them, "No, thanks. My website should be the main Brandon website. You should not be building one on Scholastic.com for me that you are sending people to. We're not going to publish in the books that website that you want to put up." Put your foot down, because that's going to brand the series and not you, and it's going to take the power away from you in one of the few areas you can maintain it in your publicity career.

[Dan] Yeah. Once the publisher decides that it's no longer going to support that website, then all of those people who are being driven there from the books, they're finding nothing. You have no control over it, you can't use it for updates, you can't cross promote other books. It's… Now better than just saying don't do this is providing an alternative. Suggesting how about we take some of that same marketing money and we do this with it. But, Erin, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

[Erin] I was going to make a horrible analogy and say that it's sort of like when your work… Like, anybody worked and, like, they gave you a Blackberry, like, a work Blackberry, and they're like, "Just do everything on this. Cancel your personal cell phone plan." Fast forward like five years later, you're quitting that job, and you're like, "Oh, wait. My entire life is on something that I didn't actually have control of, even though it was in my house and I felt like I did. I didn't." One other thing though that Brandon said reminded me the idea of having not as many people going to your website and more people going to social media is that I think there's also a difference between what writers do and what readers do. It's always important to remember that you are both a writer and a reader. So, where are you, as a reader, finding out about the books, the stories, the things that you're consuming? A lot of times, I love Twitter, and, like, I love talking to people on Twitter about my work, but I find more writers congregate on Twitter and talk amongst each other about the field, whereas when people are looking for a book recommendation, they may be more likely to find that through some other source. So I think it's important to think about, like, what are you doing, and would you find out about your own book in the way that you're promoting it. If the answer is no, then you should probably change that up a little bit.

[Howard] A fun example from… And I have… We have three of the key participants here. Typecast RPG, which Dan launched, two years ago now? Two and a half years ago?

[Dan] Yeah. Something like that.

[Howard] It's a live streaming of role-playing games. Dan's the GM, I'm one of the players, Erin's one of the players. For a year and 1/2, we were trying to do Twitter marketing, Instagram marketing, whatever. We talked a little bit about setting up a Discord channel for us. The response was always, "Why would we do Discord?" Then, we're recording this in December of 2020, literally three weeks ago, I sat up and realized at the end of an episode, we end these episodes and our audiences having this fun interaction in the chat room in Twitch. Then we stop, and they all have to go home. They can't keep talking. If we set up a Discord channel and link them to it, suddenly our fans, our viewers can keep having their conversations, and by having those conversations, and I've said this explicitly to them so it's okay, by having these conversations, some of them may become evangelists for our show, talking about it in other places and doing our marketing for us. I feel like an idiot for not making this connection 18 months ago. I guess the lesson there is we all get to feel like an idiot for not having made the right decision sooner. But that decision is always going to be one that you have to look at. The landscape is going to be changing, and you're going to discover that something that you previously said, "Why would I even use that?" is actually the thing that you should absolutely be using right now.

[Dan] You can go right now and join our Discord if you want to be part of our Typecast community. I'm sure will put the notes in the liner notes.

[Dan] We need to do a book of the week and this week it is coming from Brandon.

[Brandon] So, one of the fun things about being a published novelist of some renown is that you get offered a lot of books before they come out. We looked at the schedule for this year and work sure that I was going to be on an episode, because were frontloading my episodes, when this book comes out, so I'm sorry, I'm promoting it to you several months early. But, the book of the week is Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. Andy Weir, you may know, is the author of The Martian which is a fantastic book and movie. Project Hail Mary is his new book coming out in May. I loved this book. Just absolutely. 100% loved it. I like it more than The Martian, which is a great book. This is more of a me book. It's got a little bit more of a far future feel to it, even though it's kind of happening now. The science and technology is more science fiction-y. It's… There's just something, just pleasantly fun about this book and the problem-solving, and I can't even tell you really what the book is about without giving you huge spoilers. But it is written… There is a non-linear fashion to it, where you're getting flashbacks to find out character… It's what we call a white room book. Character wakes up without any memories in a white room, and he has no idea how he got there, what's going on, and what his situation is. He slowly pieces together his past and his history as he is trying to keep himself from dying and to solve a big problem. It is delightful, and I recommend it to anyone. One of the things I love about Andy Weir is he is kind of bringing hard science fiction to the masses. I count myself in that. I bounce off a lot of hard science fiction and I force myself to read it because I know it's good for me, and there are some really interesting hard science fiction books. Andy Weir's, I never feel like I'm forcing myself to read. I'm having a wonderful pleasant time. So, Project Hail Mary.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Brandon] Also is a really good pun, because the character's name is Grace. Hail Mary and Grace play into what's going on in an interesting way that is never mentioned in the book, and is just a delightful pun.

[Erin] You know…

[Dan] Well, awesome. Sounds good.

[Erin] Listening to that, I have to say, reminds me that word-of-mouth and people telling you to read something is one of the, like, most powerful promotional tools out there.

[Brandon] It really is.

[Erin] It's so important and something that I think about in terms of marketing just generally, is, "Is your book, is your work, in… Like, on the lips of the people who are talking about the works you love and that you want to be in conversations with?" If you're like, "I am also writing hard science fiction for the masses,"… I'm not, but let's say I was. Like, I also want people to say, like, "Oh, if you like that Andy… If that's what you like about Andy Weir, you'll also love Erin's next novel." So, really figuring out what are those people doing who you want to be, like, your book and your work to be mentioned alongside. How are they promoting themselves? Who are they getting in front of? What can you do that similar? Is a good way to try to like get that word-of-mouth that is so powerful.

[Brandon] That's actually a brilliant thing to bring up that I didn't even have in my list of notes here, Erin, because I have several friends whose careers him were made by the fact that a series got really big, that they had a book similar to, at the same time. Kind of just been bought or just on submission. That they were able to then get on those bookstore talkers, where they're like, "If you like this, here are books like it," and get that halo effect, and it made their careers. You could say that I… My career was made kind of by that. By picking up the Wheel of Time in a similar way and things like that. But I do want to get to the third point on my list of things. Number one is write your next thing. Number two is make sure you have a solid website with a newsletter. We didn't talk enough about the newsletter, we've talked about them before. Newsletters are one of the most valuable resources you can have, because those are people who opt in and who want to get an email from you telling them when a new thing is out. You will have, generally, a smaller number of people on your newsletter then you will have following you in various social media settings. But the buy-in, you don't have to… Like, on Facebook, you make have 100,000 followers, but when you post on Facebook, you don't promote it, 15 of them will see it. I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your newsletter often will have a 30 to 40% response rate, is very common. They're annoying to set up, you have to get something like MailChimp, it takes a little bit of upfront set up an understanding, but it is absolutely worth your time to have a newsletter, and to be writing one at least every year, or I try to do them quarterly.

[Dan] Well, I wanted to just jump in quick and say, per our earlier discussion, newsletters have been one of the longest lasting promotional outlets. They have outlived five or six generations of other promotional systems, and they're still effective.

[Brandon] Yep. You can't… They can't be taken away from you. Again, you control that newsletter and you can send it to people. Now, there are ways to do this right so that you're not ending up in spam folders, and there is the fact that people generally get a lot of newsletters because unscrupulous sites sign you up for their newsletter knowing that it is one of the best marketing tools. I would recommend that you be upfront with your newsletter and not have one of those big pop-ups and not just automatically sign people up. Treat your fans with respect. These are the people who are going to be spreading the word-of-mouth. Give them a good return on their newsletter. Generally, a good tip is to put some exclusive stuff in the newsletter, like exclusive fiction, previews of things, or, oftentimes a newsletter promotion is very handy, and things like that. But point number three is, after you've done those things, then you can start to look at social media platforms. Understand that social media, we're still in the wild west in social media. It's less than 20 years that social media has been a force. Early in social media, new platforms would rise and fall every couple of years. That's stopped happening, and big platforms have started to get a foothold, but what we found is that people tend to calcify on their given platform, and, like, you'll find Facebook and Twitter having this problem, they don't pick up new people very often. The people who were active on them stay active, but they don't pick up the new people. The new people go to a new generation of platform and are there. So you can drive yourself mad trying to be on all the platforms and reach all the people. I would recommend doing what Erin has said. Find out where the discussions about your books are happening, or find out the social media platforms that are most easy for you to use, that you will be consistent on. Because being consistent is more important than being in the place that is the most popular. If you're in the place that's most popular, but you are bad on that platform, it's not going to do you as much good as having a nice Twitter timeline where you are consistently updating and are writing interesting things.

[Howard] One of the most powerful things about social media, and, again, Erin mentioned this with regard to word-of-mouth, is the idea that other people are talking about your work. I've had people say, "Howard Tayler is writing the finest hard science fiction in the market today." That is not something I would ever dream of saying about myself. People are not going to believe it if I said about myself. But if someone else says it, I can retweet it and say, "Thank you. You are very kind." Now I have accomplished some promotion and expressed an opinion or amplified an opinion about my work that I could not have done myself. The social aspect of it is key. I can't just shout my brand into a void, I have to participate in a discussion.

[Brandon] Yeah. Knowing what your social media is trying to do is another thing to think about. During the years when blogs were a big deal, becoming a platform writer was a thing you could do. John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow both kind of broke out as platform writers, where they were having a big platform where they were writing really interesting things and people work coming to them for the other things that they were writing. Also, they started writing books and selling to that audience. Harder to do now than it used to be. You can still do it. But that's very different from, for instance, my social media presence. Because I have the luxury of having a large audience already. My social media platform does not have to draw new readers. My social media platforms are there for existing readers to get information that they want. That's a very different type of social media platform. Like, my Twitter is very different from Howard's. If you want to read a Twitter that you're just going to have fun with, go to Howard's Twitter. Right? If you want to know specifically about what Brandon is doing, that's the reason to go to my Twitter. I'm not going to entertain you on my Twitter. I don't have to. But I will probably entertain you on Reddit, where I'm posting still mostly about my books, but in much more expensive ways and doing updates and things like that, because I'm on Reddit and I'm just there as part of that community. It was very easy for me to do updates on Reddit that are interesting and engaging for me to write an interesting to the people who are going there. So I have made a focus in the areas where I am most likely to write good content.

[Dan] Now, that kind of leads into… I know that we still wanted to talk about targeting your audience, but I'm afraid at this point we have to can-of-worms that for a future episode, because it sounds like effective promotion is something we could talk about forever. So we promise we will come back to this at some point in the future.

[Dan] But this episode is wildly over time, and we need to cut it off now, with a little bit of homework from Brandon.

[Brandon] So, this can actually tie into that targeting your audience thing. Which is, I would recommend you take the authors that you read and go see what their social media presences look like. Because you can learn a lot by looking at what different people are doing and seeing what you think is effective. Take that author and kind of… You're going to have to kind of lump them in groups based on their sales and their awareness of them in the market, and see what kind of responses they're getting on various social media platforms. Use this to kind of start building an idea for yourself how you would want to approach this. These are things you can start while you're not published yet. You can spend too much time on them, so don't do that. But be watching what people are doing and be thinking about this.

[Dan] Awesome. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.7: The Convention Survival Kit, with Gail Carriger

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/14/11-07-the-convention-survival-kit-with-gail-carriger/

Key Items: Wear gloves, use Purell, or Wet Ones. Signing pens -- a Sharpie, a highlighter. Post-it's. Notepad. Business cards. Name tent. Covers. Elevator pitch. Sign-up sheet for your newsletter. Exclusives (badge ribbons are good!).

( In my little kit, I have... )
[Brandon] I'm going to leave you with a writing prompt, as is customary. Your writing prompt is a character gets approached when they're drunk to pitch for something very, very, very important. That's your writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: fiddling

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.18: Launching an Author Newsletter
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.16: Deep Dive: Publishing is Hard, by DongWon Song
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.50: Consistency, Inconsistency, and the Crushing Weight of Expectations
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion
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Writing Excuses 18.18: Launching an Author Newsletter

Writing Excuses 18.16: Deep Dive: Publishing is Hard, by DongWon Song

Writing Excuses 17.50: Consistency, Inconsistency, and the Crushing Weight of Expectations

Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion

Writing Excuses 11.7: The Convention Survival Kit, with Gail Carriger

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