Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Chelsea Bobulski who is the author of the All I Want for Christmas series, which is upcoming for this holiday season. And one of the reasons I wanted to have Chelsea on is because Chelsea has moved from the very traditional mainline experience of publishing, where you have a book coming out every year and there's a lot of downtime, to a very new experience where she is writing and releasing this christmas holiday themed romance series for books every three weeks from the end of October leading up to the holiday. So that's a really interesting experience and very different from other guests that we've had on. So Chelsea is here to tell us a little bit about that experience.
Chelsea: Yes, I'm very excited to talk about it because it has been a totally different experience from what I've done before, but it's been very exciting.
Mindy: Absolutely. I can't even imagine. My episode that came out on October fourth was actually with my own editor, Ben Rosenthal. And one of the things I asked him to talk about is why does it take so long in traditional publishing for a book to go from a contract to a physical object that you can buy on the shelf? Because a lot of people ask me about that. You have had an experience where it doesn't necessarily have to, but you're taking all of that work and you're condensing it down into a very tight timeline.
Chelsea: Yes. Absolutely, yeah, I was very blessed getting a book deal with Wise Wolf Books, they're a new imprint, but with an already established company, Wolfpack Publishing has been around for quite some time and has been very successful with this model. And basically what they do is they act like a traditional publishing company in terms of how they support the author. But they take a lot of the things that indie authors have been doing so successfully in order to push out books quickly, knowing that readers who fall in love with the series want to be able to binge the series.
And so they've taken a lot of those tactics and implemented them into a more traditional publishing sphere and their whole goal is to be able to quickly publish these books in a series without sacrificing quality, just as indie authors have been doing for quite some time. So it's a little bit of an experiment in a way in the sense that at least for me, because I've never done it this way, as I said Wise Wolf books as part of a larger publishing umbrella that has been doing it for a while and doing it very successfully.
But for me this is a whole new experience because as you said, I've done two books traditionally The Wood and Remember Me, we're both with Fiewel and Friends, Macmillan. And so this is a whole new experience to basically write three books in a year because the first book which is entitled All I Want for Christmas is The Girl Next Door, I had completed. And we were sending out two different editors and then we actually ended up getting two offers of publication for that book. And we went with Wise Wolf because I was just so excited by the prospect of being able to put out the books quickly. And so that was in August 2020 that we got the book deal and said that between August 2020 and now, basically I've written the other three books over the course of a year. And so it's been a very fast process. But it's also just been very exciting and I can't wait to get the books out into readers’ hands.
Mindy: I can't imagine the writing pace. I can write a book very quickly. And if I were only relying on traditional publishing and one book a year as my income, probably wouldn't be survivable. As you know, I've got my fingers in all kinds of different things. I do co-authoring and I do a lot of editorial work on the side. I have a blog and the podcast. And all of these things bring in money so that I'm generally working all of the time. But people ask me often, you know, what do you do all day? And most of the time the answer is I answer emails. That's a lot of what I do all day. There's not a ton of actual writing time. Actually cranking out for books that quickly, I can't imagine how much your actual writing schedule changed.
Chelsea: It actually changed quite a bit also because I am a parent of two young children. And so that also factors into how much writing time that I have. My mother in law was kind enough to be able to come and help. Typically she'd come for three days a week. And so for those three days I would just focus on writing and of course as we've gotten closer to the release dates, I've had to kind of balance the writing with some more marketing things and emails as you were saying. But for the most part I just wrote for as long as I could as much as I could each of those days. I just think it was by the grace of God that any of it got done though.
Especially because there were six weeks total spread out throughout the year where she couldn't come at all due to Covid related issues. My husband had Covid in November. We all came through fine. There's another time where we had been exposed to it and didn't get it, but we didn't want her to come up, just in case. And then she got sick. And so that has definitely made it more difficult because that mixed in with maybe other life things going on where maybe she couldn't come visit for that week. So even though it was a year of writing, it was actually three days a week and it wasn't always consistently happening. And so, like I said, it was not by my power that these books got done, that's for sure.
Mindy: I understand. People that are outside of the experience have a concept of a writer, really just like sitting down and grinding things out and taking huge chunks of time. And I know that my own experience is that if I've got 15 minutes here or I have to go to the doctor's office, I'm going to take my laptop with me and use it in the waiting room. The lady that cuts my hair, I had to go to a new place because my old one got shut down during Covid and just met this really nice older lady who was going to be cutting my hair from now on. And she has a very Old fashioned approach to what she does, she talks to her customers. And I would be sitting there with my laptop and she's like, Oh, I'm sorry, you actually need to work. And I'm like, yes, I have to work, and I'm sorry. It's not that I don't like you or anything like that. I have to work.I can't sit here for 40 minutes while this dye rests on my head.
And it's so sweet though, because it's like, she's totally cool with me sitting there and working, while she cuts my hair, but also she clucks her tongue at me and she's like, you work too hard, you're working too hard and you do too much. And she always feeds me, it never fails that while I'm there, she's like, here's a piece of pizza. She wants to hen cluck over me. And so when I know that I'm going to get my haircut, I like have to factor that into my eating for the day because I know that she's gonna make me eat.
Chelsea: That's amazing. Well, and I don't know about you, but for me drafting is when I really can't be interrupted like, I can do revisions and be interrupted because you can kind of come in and out a little bit more like solving a puzzle, you know, and obviously like the email stuff, I can do that and be interrupted. But when I'm drafting I know that I need a solid chunk of time to get into it and then to even to come out of it, especially writing this many books so close together, there were times where I felt like I was almost world hopping. Like this other world was a real place. All four books take place in the same small town, a fictional town that I named, Christmas, Virginia. I was living in this world and I would have to almost shake it off to get back into the real world. It was very disorienting sometimes.
Mindy: I go pretty deep when I'm drafting mentally, but I've come to a point in my life and now with travel picking back up, I have to find those skills again. I have to be able to work at an airport, I have to be able to work on an airplane. I talked about this on the podcast before I think, but you know, people have certain triggers that they use to help them tell their brain it's time to write. Some people, you know, they have a space that they go to an office or a candle that they burn or a specific type of music. Something that's the trigger that tells their brain they have to work.
I use a white noise app on my phone, it's perfect because it's portable, I can use it anywhere. I plug in my earphones and I can be on a plane, I can be in an airport and it's a constant noise that never breaks. So with music there will be a slower song or a moment or a rest or pauses in between the songs and that noise comes in from around you and it can penetrate this bubble that you've built inside of the snow globe. But with that white noise, it is a constant noise. There's no sensation and it drowns out everything.
I use it at home. Like even when I am alone at home in my room, I turn on the white noise when I'm writing and that's how my brain knows that it's time to work. And I got to the point where it's like even if I don't have my headphones in, I have my app out and I just have my phone making the noise in public and it also works to keep people away from you. I'll say that as well if you don't have your headphones, if you just turn that on, people don't want to hear it and they move away from you.
Chelsea: I never even thought of that. That is a good idea.
Mindy: Now you've got this push since these books are done and there are four of them - of promotion. And because most of the time as a traditionally published author, you're only hitting your audience once. So how are you going to approach promotion with your audience when you're saying, hey, I've got a new book out -- every three weeks?
Chelsea: I'm trying to learn a bit from, as I said, like, indie authors have been doing this so well for so long. And I think part of the benefit to it is the fact that because you constantly have something new to talk about, right? It's a new book that I think helps promotion in and of itself, because I think that raises excitement a little bit. You enjoyed book one? Well, look, book two is already coming out! And so they don't have to wait, because I think a lot of times that will slow down the momentum of promotion is the fact that people say, oh, I loved this book. When is the second one coming out? And you have to say, oh, a year from now and between then and the next publication date, you hope that they don't forget you. You hope that they enjoyed the book enough that they'll remember.
But people also get on with their lives and they might totally forget that, Oh yeah, that was supposed to come out a year ago now, I guess I should go pick that up. So, I think that helps a lot. But mostly I'm just trying to focus on what I can do because my time is limited for promotion. So I'm using Instagram a lot just because I'm most comfortable with Instagram, but I also have an amazing Facebook street team that I've been cultivating. They've been helping me get the word out as well. Today I actually posted about the preorder swag. I have a really awesome scene card that was done by an artist named Madison Brown. She does a really fantastic job. And so each book is going to have a little scene card that you'll get as part of your swag in the mail. If I run out of supplies, it'll be digital. Just looking for things like that that I can do to keep people interested and realize that these books are coming out so quickly and leading up to Christmas is very exciting because you know, it just helps people get in that holiday mood.
Mindy: And we're really looking for that, especially right now.
Chelsea: I really, that was the thing I appreciated most about getting to work on these from through the end of 2020 and into 2021 is I just wanted to lose myself in a Christmas-y word. And I purposely did not include any Covid type things. Like I think it's great that some people are talking about masks and stuff in their books, but I was just like, I just want to live in a world for a bit where this was never a thing. And so that's what I really focused on and one of the things that I really love about the series is that each book is centered on a different couple, like all the couples are friends, so you'll see how the couple from book one is doing in books 2,3 and four, like as you go on. So if you really love certain characters, their story doesn't end with that book, like you'll get to see kind of what they're doing in the next book. So that was really fun to do as well.
Mindy: Something on your side too, and I actually had a conversation yesterday, I was talking with Mary Kole who runs the Good Story company, she also used to be an agent. She was talking with me about how a lot of people are looking for these lighter reads and they are looking for hope and people are kind of pulling away from darker material and they're looking for something to escape the actual world that feels pretty dark and hopeless sometimes lately. You think that that type of approach, having this content - because from what you used to write, your traditional release books were horror.
Chelsea: Yes, I definitely feel like I have two different sides to me. I have the horror side and I like the christmas romance side and so I'm excited to get to show both now. I mean I think that hope is something that people are always looking for but obviously in the middle of pandemic, it's just even more so. And so each of the books definitely has a lighter feel, they do deal with some deeper themes, even though it's Christmas, there might be a slightly darker element. There may be a character is wrestling with that they have to figure out by the end of the book, but it is all very light and like cheery and Christmas cookies and snowflakes and I just wanted readers to feel like they want to just curl up with these books next to a roaring fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa or a hot cup of tea and just indulge and relax.
Book one, All I Want for Christmas is The Girl Next Door, it definitely has all of those hope filled messages. Because it's about a boy, Graham Wallace, he has been in love with the girl next door for basically a decade now, ever since she moved in, but she's been dating his best friend, Jeremy for the past two years. And when they first started dating, you know, as is typical in high school, you're kind of like, it's fine, it's only going to last like two weeks and then I'll help her grieve that relationship and then I'll slide in and I'll be the boyfriend, you know. That's kind of how he was thinking about this relationship, but now they've been together for two years and he's just heartbroken and he's been trying his best to deal with it. And then in just a moment of heartbreak and weakness, he looks up in the sky and sees a shooting star and he thinks to himself, “all I want for Christmas is Sarah Clark.”
And so he wakes up the next day and the whole world has changed that he's the one who's been dating her for two years and not his friend Jeremy. But he starts to realize he and Sarah are maybe not as great together as he thought that they would be as he had imagined in his mind. And not only that, but it's also affected more than just him, It's affected Sarah, it's affected Jeremy, they're living completely different lives now with different goals and it's not necessarily a good thing. And not only that, but Graham is starting to fall for the new girl in town and he's thinking to himself, why am I falling for this new girl? If this wish came true, like I must be destined to be with Sarah, why am I feeling this for the new girl if this wish came true?
And so it really focuses on the idea of what we think we want isn't what's always right for us. And so it's really his journey into figuring out what that looks like. And so I loved it and I love setting it at Christmas time because I think that Christmas is just the perfect time for hope and renewal and learning really special lessons that you can carry on into the rest of your life, which I'm hoping Graham does.
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Mindy: Now it's interesting to me, like we were saying your first two books being the traditionally published ones that were more horror based. I hear you like so loud because obviously what I write under my real name is very dark, serious stuff and when people meet me in real life, they're like, you're funny. So, I also do write under a pen name and I write with friends of mine and we co author books and they're just ridiculously silly and funny, quite frivolous It’s wonderful for me because that's my outlet, but I do it under a pen name because the branding would be so screwed if I did them under my real name. So I write those under a pen name, so I have an outlet for both. Now there's pros and cons to that, I can't market the stuff under my pen name using my real name and the social media platforms and the mailing list and all the stuff that I've built over like 10 years. Also, I don't know if that audience crosses over. I don't know that my readers that love my books would want to read the things I write underneath my pen name because they are so wildly divergent. How are you approaching that in terms of marketing? Your audience and your readers, they know you as a horror writer and now you're writing like this really fun, really sweet romance series.
Chelsea: I think that obviously there will be some readers who will not be interested in crossing over only because they are horror readers. They really have no interest in a light romance. And I totally get that, like we all have our books that we love and that we connect with and I don't really have time for another genre because it's just not where our heart is. But I do think that there are readers who will cross over. Even though they're different genres, a lot of the themes are similar, like my horror novels tend to be more atmospheric, creepy and chilling, not so much a jump out and scare you. Although I will say Remember Me, I've had several readers email me and say, you know, I can't take a shower anymore because of the shower thing that happens in there. You know, these are the creepy things that happen. The themes itself, um themes of redemption or themes of romance, things like that I think do cross over in that sense. I think people who enjoyed The Wood and Remember Me would really enjoy this Christmas series, so it's lighter, but it's very similar in different ways.
Mindy: One of the things that you're talking about is probably your voice and your writing approach in terms of the whole spirit of the voice of the book is probably still similar even though you're changing genres, I obviously write across all different kinds of genres. I write historical, I've written fantasy. A lot of thriller, suspense, psychological dystopian, but that voice is still the same. It's still a Mindy McGinnis book. And while my readers don't always follow me, like my fantasy for example, like most of my readers could care less about it. Fantasy is a niche that you either read or you don't, but you can still read it and be like, oh I can tell that Mindy McGinnis wrote this, and I imagine it's similar with yours.
Chelsea: Absolutely. And the second book which is entitled All I Want for Christmas is the Girl in Charge, one of the main characters in that one is a former child prodigy, a violinist and he's a current juvenile delinquent and he has this darker past that he's working through. And so that's an example of some of those darker elements coming in. And then also the book four All I Want for Christmas is the Girl Who Can't Love, my heroine, Savannah is dealing with a difficult relationship with her mother as well as this supposed family curse that makes it so that if they fall in love with anybody, like it's just not going to work out, it's doomed to fail. And so she's just decided that love as a concept isn't a real thing. Like she just focuses on the biology behind and the Chemistry behind it. This is what's happening in your brain when you fall in love and because I can name it, I can also choose not to partake in it. And so she has a little bit of a darker arc as well, even though it's a lighter Christmas read.
Probably out of the four books, my third book, All I Want for Christmas is the Boy I Can't Have is probably the lightest because the hero and the heroine developed this connection over a shared love of romantic comedies. And so that one definitely is like the lightest one. But even there, the hero, August, is dealing with the fact that his father has these really crippling expectations on what he wants his son to do with his life and it doesn't line up with what August actually wants to do. And so they're lighter books, but they definitely have those darker themes of trying to fight for what you want, or fight through maybe some past traumas and things.
Mindy: Talking about writing and having to generate these books in general. You said, you have edits due for the very last one coming up here this weekend? Now you're edging really close into turning in book four and then promoting book one. So are you going to deal with A flurry of three months worth of promo?
Chelsea: Like I said, I mean just knowing the season of life I'm in, I'm not in a time where I used to be like when I had no kids, I had all the time in the world really to devote to that sort of thing. Or if my kids were in full time school, which they're not, you know, they're not old enough for that yet, then maybe I'd have a little more time to focus on this thing. So right now I'm really trying to take an approach of - just do what you can, just getting the word out. And also these preorder swag campaigns, that's probably gonna be honestly the biggest undertaking, depending on how many preorders I get in. It’s having to do all the mailing and everything for that. And then just reaching out to people who have been such support systems for me from the beginning. Other authors who are so generous to promote the book as well on their platforms and things and just try not to freak out about what I can't control.
Mindy: Well that's key to publishing in general because you can't control much. I actually just got all my royalty statements yesterday. For those of you that don't know, when you get your royalty statement, it's already six months behind in traditional publishing. It lets me know how many books have sold and how much I've earned and earned out. So the one I just got is through June of this year. So I ended up looking at my royalty statements last night, it is hard to have any idea what you have done that actually mattered or had any impact because this is just an amalgamation of numbers covering six months worth of sales. So as a traditional author you can't see - I paid for this ad in Facebook, I paid for this Book Bub. I did this or I did this author visit or I did a whole bunch of swag mailing. You're sending up little lanterns and hoping that they are shedding light somewhere and had some impact. But you really don't know.
I’m operating with a foot in both worlds. Under my indie name, there's so much more power because you know - this week I've got this promo running and you can follow your numbers by the hour and you can see the impact. I wouldn't give up either one of them. I love both of them for different reasons. I'm sure you remember I used to like really freaking try. When Not A Drop to Drink came out, one of my swag - which was clever - but one of my swag items was a bottle of water. I made stickers that wrapped around the label, the company label and it was the cover of my book and a tagline and a QR code that you could scan and it was clever. But at the same time water is freaking heavy. I would have to carry bottles of water around like I couldn't travel with, I couldn't fly with it that doesn't go through security.
It was an event with ALA and I had bought bottles of water in Chicago and spent time putting stickers on 200 bottles of water and then setting them out on all the tables for when the librarians came in. They were like, oh cool. Yeah, this is clever. I like this And then you know, they drank the water and threw the bottles away. I will never forget walking through that room and seeing the trash cans that were full of my swag. I just kind of stopped doing all of that because I figured out how much effort and work I was putting into something that I couldn't actually track if it was effective. I do think preorder campaigns are worth it from everyone I've talked to that has done it. I don't want to do what you're doing. It's awesome that you do. And I know people that have amazing luck doing that. A lot of people will have those pre-order campaigns. I don't think I have the patience.
Chelsea: One of the things that I was really excited about number one, I'm definitely making sure that the actual physical mailing is like small paper things so that hopefully it doesn't take a whole lot of time to put together and doesn't cost a whole lot to ship. But the other thing I was excited about doing these scene cards and I can't remember if I mentioned this already or not. But the other thing is a digital coloring page of that scene card that you can get just through your email. I really love that we can do things digitally because that also helps. And I loved the idea of that, because I'm thinking about doing something that promotes readers to maybe color the coloring page and then share it online and do some kind of big thing with that.
And so I think the idea behind preorder swag is if you can find something where it continues to give life to the book so that it gives people a reason to continue posting about the books. Such as I got this awesome coloring page from this book that I love and I'm going to show, you know, it kind of keeps the momentum going and you're not doing more than just emailing this coloring page. So I was kind of looking for things like that. Again, I don't know how successful it will be, but I also, I'm trying to approach it less from an idea of marketing and more of an idea of just wanting to say thank you because again, there's only so much I can control and so it's my way of saying thank you to those who did pre order and I'm trying to keep my focus on healthier things than freaking out about numbers and things like that.
Mindy: You can't get that feedback right away in the traditional world. So like for example, I do get confused about timelines because we operate on all these different timelines in the traditional publishing world. So I got my royalty statement last night about my release, The Initial Insult. So that came out in February of 2021. Right, is that right? I think that's right. So it's October and I'm just now getting some sort of idea of how that book performed. That type of feedback, especially in this world where we just don't know what's going on most of the time, having these numbers eight months after the fact - there's so much not knowing and you kind of have to be like, you were mentioning freaking out over the things you can't control. You can't control most things in publishing.
And so I have really made a point of, I'm just going to write my book and I'm going to handle the things I can handle. I do bookmarks. I find them to be super easy. People use them, they're light, like you were saying you can mail them. But my biggest thing has always been I do events and I show up and I do school visits and I try to put my physical self in front of people as much as possible because I'm a good speaker. And of course during Covid that was taken away from me. Go out there, little dark depressing book in the middle of Covid and let's see what you can do out there on your own, right? I can't go with you. There's no touring, I've been doing this a long time now and it's kind of nice to just really hit that plateau. This is what I can do, this is what I can't do. You're going to let go of some things.
Chelsea: Absolutely. That's the healthy thing to do. We only have so much capacity for stress. Like you don't need to focus it on things that you have no control over anyway when there's plenty of things in your life that you can control and that need more of your attention. And the other thing that I learned from an author friend of mine early on, she got a book deal before I did. And so I was able to kind of learn from her experience. She focused very heavily on promotion and marketing. It was a two book series. So she was just really heavy into making sure that the series got out there as far as it could go and do as well as it could.
It's not that that wasn't helpful or successful for that series, but once she got to the end of all of it, she realized - I've spent all my time and promotion and I haven't written another book in so long. And so I'm going to have such a huge gap between books coming out. The idea that nothing sells frontlist, like backlist. Like she, she was not building any more books in the front, you know, to continue to support those books that she had already written and so I kind of was able to learn from her experience that yes, promotion is good. But the best thing you can be doing is working on the next book as well. And so just trying to find that balance between the two as opposed to putting too much emphasis on one or the other.
Mindy: Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book? Because the first one, All I Want for Christmas is The Girl Next Door, is coming out at the end of this month. So why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book and where they can find you online?
Chelsea: So the book is available for pre order for both e-book and paperback on amazon. But then also if you would like a signed personalized copy, you can get it through Gathering Volumes Bookstore. You can go to their website and request it to be signed and or personalized. I'm happy to do both. And you can also find the links to both of those on my Instagram bio. The link in there and my Instagram is at Chelsea Bolboski C H E L S E A B O B U L S K I. And as I said, I'm mostly on Instagram but I have a website Chelsea Bobulski dot com That is being updated as we speak. I don't update it as much as I should. And then I also have a Facebook author page also under just at Chelsea Bobulski and those are all the places where you can find me. And if you have any questions, you can always message me on Instagram or also through the contact form on my website as well.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.