Natasha Preston on The Island: Writing A Large Cast, and the Time Suck of Social Media

March 6, 2023 Mindy McGinnis

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 as a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Natasha Preston who has had a really interesting and amazing career. We're gonna be talking about The Island, which is her newest release coming on February 28th. But first, I wanna talk to you specifically about the beginning of your career because you have a very interesting career path in that you got started on Wattpad. And Wattpad was really something that launched you in a pretty big way. I think your name is probably the one that comes up the most whenever people talk about Wattpad and success in that arena. So, if you could talk a little bit about that and how that was so integral to your beginnings.

Natasha: Completely. I didn't even start writing before I found Wattpad. So I wouldn't be here at all today if it wasn't for that. It was about 2010, and I was just scrolling through the app store and I came across Wattpad. So I downloaded it and started just as a reader for quite some time before I decided that actually I have some ideas inside of me as well, and then I started to upload chapters.

Mindy: And Wattpad is one of those things where it really is driven by word of mouth. It's driven by readers really liking and engaging with that content and then telling other readers about it. For me, I really think it is just one of the best examples of true word-of mouth grassroots fan-based readership.

Natasha: Yeah, definitely, and I met a lot of people through Wattpad. Some of them I'm still in contact with now. So you build a lot of friendships as well, and these people recommend you and you recommend them.

Mindy: I know that you had such great success there on that platform. Did you then decide to move out of that realm and look more into the realm of traditional publishing? Or were you doing so well, the agents and editors approached you?

Natasha: My friend, who was also on Wattpad, Kirsty Moseley, she self-published her first book, and she encouraged me to do the same. So I actually self-published first, and then my publisher, Sourcebooks, in the US, they picked up The Cellar. So then they traditionally published that one.

Mindy: Yes, and The Cellar was your first book that came out in the US. Ridiculously popular. So, I was a YA librarian. I worked in a public high school for 14 years. So, The Cellar came out in 2014, and I just remember all of my students were so in love with it. I couldn't keep it on the shelves. Colleen Hoover before TikTok. That's kind of what The Cellar was like, and then your subsequent titles as well. Something else that I wanted to talk to you about was your cover art. In the US, they're very stark, and they're very striking. Very much look like thriller covers almost even for adults. Your covers are amazing, and I think that that has been part of the appeal. Of course, just getting the eye drawn to get people to pick it up. Are your covers the same in the UK?

Natasha: Yeah, they are the same. I love them.

Mindy: Yeah. They are really beautiful. Did that come about through your publishers? Or you had something in mind already? Did they just happen to strike gold the first time?

Natasha: Pretty much gold, yeah. So when it was on Wattpad, I had a flower image on the cover of that one. The characters are renamed after flowers, so it was kind of pretty organic to have a flower theme.

Mindy: It really is. It's perfect. And then your subsequent titles, they match. Your publishers do a great job of branding you. It's kind of like Stephen King or Jodi Picoult's... When you see the cover, I don't even have to see your name to know that it's your book because the covers are so distinctive.

Natasha: Yeah, yeah. They’ve done a phenomenal job of carrying that through.

Mindy: So your next release, your newest release, is The Island. It revolves around 6 teen influencers who have accepted invitations to an all expenses paid trip to a luxury resort and amusement park. And then of course, when they get there things suddenly go quite wrong. I would love to hear more about where you got the idea for this book. I love that you're operating with kind of that closed room mystery in the sense that the room is an entire island and there are rollercoasters on it.

Natasha: Yes, it's pretty much... I think I was flicking through Instagram, and I was seeing like all these influencers. And they are rich! The idea came from that. Putting them all together and seeing what would happen if they are in a place where they can't escape. And I feel like quite a lot of influencers would go to an island if they were invited.

Mindy: Yeah, definitely. It's kind of like the Fyre Festival. Do you remember that?

Natasha: I don't.

Mindy: Fyre Festival... It was a US thing, so it is possible it didn't hit the news so much there in the UK. But Fyre Festival was this really hyped, big party. They had these promo videos made and it was like, "you were going to be hanging out with very rich, very beautiful people. Buy your tickets now. It's gonna be amazing." And then people got there and it was like hot dogs on sticks. Drift wood for your pillow. There was nowhere to pee. It was really bad.

Natasha: Oh no.

Mindy: It was really, really bad. Tell us a little bit more about The Island. What are your characters like? Because influencers in particular... I go back and forth. I'm a difficult person. I'll just say that. I'm a difficult person. Traditional marketing just doesn't work on me. I'm always a little bit cynical, and I'm always suspicious. So whenever someone is trying to sell something to me, I immediately shut down, and I'm just like, "No. I don't like you, and I don't want what you're selling."

Natasha: I don't believe you.

Mindy: Exactly. It also makes it difficult for me whenever I'm trying to think about marketing my stuff, because the traditional stuff that does work, I never wanna do that because it doesn't feel genuine to me. So talk to me a little bit about your characters and where you got the ideas for each of them as individuals because you are writing 6 different characters.

Natasha: Yeah, so the gamer, two beauty bloggers, Paisley, who is like a main character, she reports crime - love her - and then we have Harper who is book reviewer. So they all have very different personalities. Some of them are pretty cocky entitled. And then some of them are a little bit more reserved, and they grow throughout the book. Obviously, when somebody is out there trying to kill you, you have to try and mesh all these personalities together so they can defeat the bad guy together and get through it. And also one of them could be the killer.

Mindy: I think that would be very challenging. I tend to keep my casts pretty small - two or three like maybe four, and then some peripherals. But I think writing six and trying to build them and, of course, give all of them their own layers as well, and still creating a little bit of suspicion so you're keeping that mystery going for each one of them... I'm sure that was challenging.

Natasha: I did kill one of them pretty early so... It took it down a little bit.

Mindy: Did you do much research into influencer culture and what it's like to be an influencer?

Natasha: I did a little bit. It is pretty hard because I think all of them have quite different experiences and how they're perceived and how people react to them. So I didn't want to do too much research. I wanted to be sort of quite organically just writing and then building how I see them. Do you do that? I should really research it, then I get stuck in this "I've researched too much" and it stops being my character. I try to make them something that they never were, if that makes any sense at all.

Mindy: Yes, it does. It makes perfect sense. Absolutely possible to over-research. You could almost get stuck in it, I think, cause you worry so much about getting it right. I write YA as well. But I have an adult book that I would love to get out one day, we'll see. I still have to work on it. But it is set in 1916 during the Spanish influenza. And I was writing a scene... It's set in the US, like in a rural area in a one-room school house. And I was writing a scene where the teacher... 'cause the Spanish flu could drop you very quickly. Your symptoms could just come on and you could become very violently sick and die within hours. The teacher very suddenly - she feels herself getting sick. She knows something's wrong, and so she doesn't want her students to get sick. She runs out of the building as fast as she can, and she's disoriented. She's ill. She also trips and falls, and she rolls down the steps and the kids come out and they're like, "Oh my gosh. What do we do? Should we even touch her?" And in my mind, her shoe had come off, and her shoe was sitting on one of the steps. But would her shoe have come off? What would her shoe have been in 1916.

So I go and I start researching women's footwear in 1916, but it couldn't be like high fashion. It had to be what a middle class rural woman would have been wearing in 1916. So I'm trying to figure all of that out. Eventually I decide no, her shoe probably would not have come off because it would have been a boot, And it would have been the kind that you literally use a crochet hook to finish tying, and it's like "no her boot is not coming off." I mean, I probably did two to three hours of research to figure out if her boot came off. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if her boot came off or not, number one. And number two, a reader probably isn't gonna notice or care, and I literally dropped everything and did not write for three hours 'cause I needed to know if her boot came off. And that is an example of caring a little too much.

Natasha: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's so easy to get pulled into that.

Mindy: It really is. Have you ever had that one thing that you just felt like you had to chase down and then you were like, "Okay. That was not worth it."

Natasha: Oh yeah. So, it was when I was writing The Cellar, and he weights bodies, chucks them in the river, and disposes of them. And I'm googling this for a very long time - getting a little worried that someone was gonna see what I'm doing, and I spent hours, "what weight do you need to make sure that they don't come back up?" And I think, "You know what. I could just write, 'He's weighted the body.' They don't need to know exactly."

Mindy: No, you don't. You're right. But that's exactly the kind of thing that will happen to you. That you just end up going down that rabbit hole of wanting to make sure that you're right, and essentially it doesn't actually matter. You're talking about the things that you Google, and then you have to worry a little bit. As a writer, we do end up looking at some things or wandering into parts of the internet or information that we might not necessarily want to be associated with. I can tell you that my ads that I get or on Amazon, when it's like "based on your recent search history you might be interested in... " and it's like, "No. I don't need that bondage material thing." Have you ever researched something like the weighting of the bodies and just been like, "Oh man. I am a little concerned now about my search history." Or also just... "Gosh, I wouldn't want anyone to stumble across this in my browser."

Natasha: Definitely. So when I was writing You Will Be Mine, the killer cuts out hearts. So, I'm googling "how you get to the heart." You ought to get through the rib cage and how you would cut it out. That was interesting.

Mindy: I have definitely searched some things that have skewed my ads. I actually have a friend who writes tech thrillers, and she needed to know how to get a bomb onto a plane. So she just Googled it and tried to figure out how to get a bomb onto a plane. She lived in California, and her husband was a TV producer. He also lived in California, but because of their work, they were at different parts of the state. One of them would fly to the other one every other week. She went to go see her husband, and she had been put on the no-fly list.

Natasha: No. Oh my gosh.

Mindy: Yeah, she couldn't get on the plane. She had a friend in Homeland Security, and she talked to them eventually. And they were like, "Yeah, dude. I can tell you exactly why you are not allowed to fly on planes anymore."

Natasha: Oh no! Did she get off the list though? Is she okay now?

Mindy: She did. She did, but without her friend inside the system to vouch for her who knows how that would have gone? But you gotta be a little bit careful.

Natasha: You do. Yeah, you have to be careful.

Mindy: So, tell me about what you are doing for The Island and press. Obviously, you're doing interviews and you're doing podcasts like this. Post covid... Are you doing much traveling?

Natasha: I haven't very much at all. I would like next year to come back to America. I've been a couple of times. Barnes & Noble events have been so much fun. So this time around, I'm doing an online with Barnes & Noble. Which will be really fun, but it's nice to go to in person, I think.

Mindy: Definitely. I miss being in-person a lot. I have a release in March, and this will be the first time since 2020 that I have done much in terms of actually doing a string of events or tour. I had a book come out in March of 2020, and we shut down over here... Third week of March in 2020 was when the lockdown started. I was touring with two other writers, and we had, I think, five cities right in the middle of March and at our first event, we had people. It was cool. At our second event, we had about half the crowd. At our third event, I think we had four people, and everyone was wearing masks. And at our last event that we showed up to... The book sellers, they were very kind, but they got a hold of us and they were like, "We're closing. There's not gonna be anybody here. Please come, and sign stock. Wear a mask, and go back home." We were like, "Okay." And then as soon as I got home from that tour was when we went on lock down.

Natasha: A similar thing over here. Everything just stopped didn't it? And it's still not picked back up, I don't think. There's still a lot more happening virtually.

Mindy: Yeah, there has been a lot more virtual events and trying to make things work online and doing zooms and Instagram Live. So, is that something that you have found success with? Do you enjoy doing the online stuff?

Natasha: Yeah, I do. It's still nice to connect with people and booksellers and readers. It's just not quite the same as being able to physically see them and you get to take pictures with people and sign a book for them in front of them.

Mindy: Yeah. I agree. I get energy from other people. That's where my energy comes from... Is from drawing off of others. And when I can get them excited, then they're feeding me back, and we just get a nice little feedback loop. And there is so much about that that is organic, but there's also... There's a real presence that is necessary in order to make that happen. I don't know. I feel like it's hard to get that same feeling and to build that same energy when you're doing it virtually.

Natasha: Yeah, when you're just on your own, it's not the same.

Mindy: Yeah. It's really hard to generate excitement for yourself. Well, and speaking of that, generating excitement for yourself... How was it for you writing over covid? I know a lot of writers struggled with being on shutdown, first of all just emotionally and mentally, but also just being creative and finding ways to write or things to write about. Suddenly we had all the time in the world, but we needed to have the drive.

Natasha: Yeah, no, actually, I was great during lock down. I mean, I had my children at home which I had to home school. So that was a little bit of a battle, but... No, it was great. I would get up at six. I would probably write a couple thousand words, and then the children would get up. I was on it. That hasn't happened since... It ended.

Mindy: So, is that your typical approach? Do you have a word count for the day that you like to hit?

Natasha: Yeah. Typically, I try to... 1500-2000 words, and I'm generally happy with that.

Mindy: I always say minimum 1000. If I can get two, that's amazing. 15 is a nice, nice little bonus. Do you write every day then?

Natasha: Every weekday usually. On the weekends I keep my children at home, so... Yeah, every weekday... Go drop them off and come home and just sit in front of the computer until I'm happy with my word count.

Mindy: Yeah, and that's something that a lot of newer writers or writers that are trying to finish their first book talk to me about. Tips and tricks. They're like, "How do you write a book?" And I'm like, "Well, unfortunately, the only answer is you have to sit down and do it."

Natasha: Yeah. You have to be quite disciplined 'cause when you are just at home, there's so many things you could do. You need to make yourself have that time.

Mindy: Yes. And writing is hard. I will do anything other than write.

Natasha: That's exactly what I do. I'll check social media, and I'll do some other things. And I tell myself I'm being productive by doing different posts here and there and answering emails, but it's really just putting off starting writing.

Mindy: That is exactly accurate. Yes. I have been working really hard for three hours, and it's like, No, you haven't... Actually you haven't done anything. So speaking of social media then... What has your experience been like with social media kind of changing? 'Cause you came out right around the same time that I did. The Cellar was published in 2014. My first book came out in 2013, and when we were first out in the world and publishing, social media was very text-based. It was tweets. It was Facebook posts. And then Instagram came along, and it was pictures. But now suddenly, it's videos, and it's music. And it's whatever the trends are. It's just more time consuming than I'm willing to put into now. It's like, I can have a thought, and I can have a one-off. And I could tweet that 10 years ago, and that was good. And people were like, Yes. And they would interact with that. And it's like, now I have to make a video, and I have to be using the right filter, and I have to have whatever song is popular right now. And for me, I've just kind of stepped back from that a little bit because like we were just saying, I can get too sucked into that and put a lot of time into it when I should be writing.

Natasha: I completely agree. My heart is still in 2014 where you could just pop a post up every couple of days, and that was great.

Mindy: Yep.

Natasha: It's a lot of work now. It's more interactive, I think, and I do like that. But you can spend hours where you used to just spend a few minutes, and it does take away from your actual writing time.

Mindy: I agree. I feel too that things are more crowded. I was on TikTok for about five minutes. I have an account there, but I very rarely post because I would put together something, and it took me so long to put it together, and then I would put it out there. And it's like if the algorithm doesn't basically choose you, you're not going to get a lot of reach with that. And it's like, man... And granted... Learning curve. I didn't really know what I was doing, and so it took longer. But I would just be like, "Oh my gosh. I just spent an hour making this 15-second video, and 40 people saw it." I say that as someone that definitely has not figured out how to use TikTok. I will say this though. The nice thing about TikTok and booktok... The readers are the ones that are generating the content. There's not so much responsibility on us to generate it. If they can do it, that's great.

Natasha: I mean, if someone out there just wants to do all that for my books, that would be fantastic.

Mindy: No, I agree. Whenever anybody is like, "Oh my gosh. I read your book, and I loved it." I'm like, "Cool. Are you on TikTok?" Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find The Island when it comes out on February 28th, and where they can find you online.

Natasha: The Island is to be in stores in America. So, it will be in Barnes & Noble for sure. Everywhere else, it's going to be online. So yeah, it's where you can get The Island. And you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. All of them. Just Author Natasha Preston.

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.

Melissa Landers on How Mental Health Impacts Your Writing & The Hit Or Miss of SciFi

February 20, 2023 Mindy McGinnis

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Mindy: We're here with Melissa Landers who is a fellow Ohioan and an author that has had a really interesting career path. One of the reasons why I wanted to have Melissa on the show is because she has not had the traditional path in a lot of ways. She has experimented, and she has done offshoots, and she has had lapses in her publishing career. And I think it's very important to talk about those careers as well. It's something that aspiring authors always wanna hear about - the overnight successes and people that hit the list and continue to hit the list and always do well. And the truth is that that is a very, very, very small percentage of people. Even continuing to publish is very, very difficult. For example, in my debut group of 2013, which was both YA and middle grade authors... Recently I was having a conversation with someone who was also a fellow lucky 13, and they said, "Hey, have you ever gone back and looked at our group and the people that we debuted with and done the math on how many are still traditionally publishing? Quite a few have found success in other arenas, but in the traditional publishing world have you ever gone back and looked?" And I was like, "No, I haven't." And just out of curiosity, I did, and I'm gonna take a stab at the numbers because I didn't write it down, and I'm not gonna take the time to go do that again. But I'm gonna say there were roughly 65 of us that were in this loosely knit group of debut YA and middle grade authors in 2013. And at the time that I looked, which might have been two or three years ago, I think maybe eight of us.

Melissa: Oh. Seriously?

Mindy: Yeah... Were still in the trad pub world. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on here because you have had hiccups, as you refer to them, in your career, but you keep coming back. So if you would just like to tell the audience just like a brief overview of your career and what it's been like.

Melissa: Well, when I first started writing, Alienated was the first book I ever wrote. And I was very, very lucky that it actually sold and it did super, super well. But I also was publishing adult contemporary romance under a pen name at that time, and I couldn't decide which I liked more. I didn't know which would take off better, and so for a long time I tried to do both. I do not recommend that unless you're just a naturally prolific author who spews awesome words without effort, because for me, it did burn me out. Looking back, if I could do it over again, I would have stuck to just YA sci-fi and spent all of my time and my resources simply on creating Melissa Landers as a brand. Because by trying to launch Melissa Landers and Macy Beckett, I was dividing and conquering myself, so there's lesson number one. I think I am up to 14 novels that are out or slated for publication through 2023, but I might be miscounting. I've been busy. You just may not have seen the fruits of my labor, because again - two different pen names. That's the first lesson that I would impart. Choose a name. Choose a genre. Choose a market. Invest in that brand.

Mindy: You and I met at different various writers conferences around Ohio. Ohio actually has quite a few writers, and it's got many book festivals and conferences that happen a lot. And so we do have a pretty tight-knit group of writers. And I remember when you were writing under Macy Beckett as well as your real name as a YA sci-fi author, because I believe we actually met at a conference that was partially romance-driven because if I remember correctly one of the big draws of that conference was that they had dudes that were cover models there.

Melissa: Was it Lori Foster's reader author get together?

Mindy: That's exactly what it was.

Melissa: That conference was the best. I miss it so much.

Mindy: Yes, that was fun. It is not my genre. It's not my niche. It was just a conference that was nearby, and any kinda writing conference is gonna have something for you if you're a writer. And I remember showing up and there were just like… ripped dudes just standing in the lobby just kind of flexing their pecks on and off, and I was just kind of like "maybe I should write romance." I remember you trying to take that, that two-pronged approach, and while, as you're saying, you wish that you had not necessarily been trying to do that at the same time, you learn from it. But also, man, all the skills that you picked up as an indie author before indie was huge, I'm sure that that's useful.

Melissa: Well, I actually wasn't indie. My first three romance novels were with Sourcebooks and my second two were with Penguin Random House. Now, I did get all of those rights reverted to me, and I put them up on... What is it? Kindle Unlimited. I haven't done a very good job really pushing those titles 'cause I'm not currently writing them. The only project that I did that was kind of not full indie more like a hybrid, was United, the third book in the Alienated series. Alienated did amazing. It earned out its advance like twice over. Invaded... The last time I looked I was like a whisper away from earning out on that. Because trilogies were not doing so well in the YA market at the time, Disney said if you do a third book we're only gonna put it out in ebook only. No print. Not even print on demand, and that was a deal breaker for me. So I partnered with a small publisher to get United out in hard cover. Did the cover design. I contracted out editorial. It was a lot of work, but I was really, really pleased with how it turned out.

Mindy: For listeners, just to clarify, when Melissa is saying that she earned out on Alienated what that means is that she earned her advance back, and it sounds like then again. That tells you how extraordinarily successful Alienated was. And if you're a whisper away from earning out on the sequel, that shows your read through and the success of Alienated being so great. So yeah, you had great success in the trad YA world right out of the gate with your first book with your name on it in that realm. And you were also writing in sci-fi, which had a moment, and as you're saying, trilogies were suddenly like a bad word. At first that was all you were ever supposed to do is write trilogies, and then, you weren't anymore. I have multiple friends that came out 2013, 2014 who were supposed to have trilogies and were asked, "Hey, do you think you could wrap it up in two? Because trilogies aren't hot anymore." So talk to me a little bit about how things changed career wise for you after you came out of the gate so hard with the first two books in this series. You improvised and did your third one on your own, and then what happened next for you?

Melissa: Alright, so we have Alienated, Invaded, United - that series nice, tied up in a little bow. My next series was Starflight, and that did extremely well too. Starfall, which is the sequel... Not as well. And so Disney said, "No more in this series. Give us something new." So I did. I decided to take a stab at writing high fantasy, and I came up with a proposal for a book called The Half King which is about a failed oracle who has to leave the temple where she's lived at since birth and travel to the palace to serve the Half King - a charming man who serves his kingdom by day and turns to shadow at sunset. Now, I sold this proposal to my former editor, not my current editor, my former editor, on... Let's see, three chapters and a synopsis. So about 50 pages. And she loved it. The whole team loved it. They sold in a two-book, six-figure deal. Currently, it is my only six-figure deal, and so this felt like a big career high for me. Now, I had a phone call with my editor after selling the proposal. I always like to do that, just to ask if there's any changes they wanna see as I complete the manuscript. "We love it. Just one thing. Do you think you can set it in space?"

Mindy: Oh my god.

Melissa: There was a disconnect when it came to expectations. What I did not expect to happen and what completely knocked me sideways was for my editor to completely reject the manuscript. I gave my publisher two different books. I did IPs. The first one, Blastaway, which was my only middle grade release, and it's super cute. I'm very proud of it. It's basically Home Alone in space. And then I gave them Lumara, which just released last month, which was pitched to me as Crazy Rich Asians but with witches. And again, so fun. So fun. My first experience with an unreliable narrator. And so I gave them those two books to replace the books in The Half King, and then my agent eventually sold The Half King elsewhere. I've since re-written it as new adult fantasy with lots of sexy sex.

Mindy: Nice.

Melissa: And it works so much better that way, but this stumble in The Half King completely interrupted my release schedule. The Half King was supposed to release in 2017, but it didn't. And then after Blastaway released, my editor left - went to a different publishing house. I had to wait for a new editor and then Covid happened, and my new editor had just said to my agent, "Hey, does Melissa like witches? I might have a great idea for her." But before we could get it approved, Covid happened and there were so many editors on furlough that they literally could not form an acquisitions committee.

Mindy: Oh.

Melissa: So for all of Covid, I was stuck. I had a contracted book, but I could not move forward on it. It was maddening, and that created an even bigger gap. And so Lumara just released last month and Blastaway released in 2018. A four-year gap in releases! And because publishing moves so slowly and because projects that are contracted now will not see the light of day for two years, just the slightest little stumble and bam, you have a many year gap in your release schedule.

Mindy: Absolutely, you do. That's something that almost happened to me with my third book, not necessarily that large of a gap, but I would have had a year without a release. With only two books out, that would not have been good. Long story short, there was a miscommunication. As you were saying, editors leave. They hop around, and my acquiring editor for my third book, which was A Madness So Discreet, had left Harper and had gone to a different publishing house. And there was a miscommunication to me about the due date for my first draft. I was given a date, and I was like, "Oh great. I have plenty of time." And the date that I was given was the date that it had to go to copy edits.

Melissa: Oof.

Mindy: Yeah, and I thought it was my first draft due date. And when they did hire my new editor, who's Ben Rosenthal, who is still my editor - we've done, I think, 10 books together now. Ben called me, and that was the very first conversation I had with my new editor... Was that he called me and was like, "Hey, I'm Ben, and I'm really excited to work with you and I loved Not A Drop to Drink. And I'm ready to read this manuscript. Whenever you can send it, please do." And I was like, "Oh, well, I mean I will, but I haven't written it yet, buddy. It's not due until this certain date." And he was like, "Oh, that's not... That's not accurate." I was just like, "Wait, what?" I had three weeks to write the book. They were like, look, you're not in breach of contract. There was a miscommunication on our end. We are sorry. You are not in breach, but we do need the book in three weeks. Or we'll take... You take a year off. And I was like, "Uhh. Well, this is how I make a living. So not taking your off. Gonna write a book in three weeks." And so that's what I did. I understand that it's pretty good. I can't tell you what happens in that book. I wrote it in a fugue state. You're right. Those lags. You can have that happen. You can have those gaps in your career, and because of the fact that there is such a long lead time in publishing, in traditional publishing, that gap, even if you have one stumble, it's gonna cost you two years maybe. How did you keep your readers aware of you as an individual? And if you do continue to use social media and a newsletter, how do you keep your readers at least aware that you exist for those four years?

Melissa: Honestly, I kind of didn't. I focused on if I posted anything to the Gram, it was personal. Like, here's a picture of me on vacation. I wasn't just spewing monotonous pictures of my books because, for me anyway, as a reader of myself, I don't like to see too much repetition from authors that I follow. I know what your cover looks like. I don't need to see it 20 times in my feed. Plus, there's the issue that my readership were originally teenagers - 2014 when Alienated came out. They are grown now. In fact... Oh my gosh, what a mind freak. So on Instagram, I follow the original cover model from Alienated. He is now married with a baby. They're adults now. They're grown. I don't know how many of them are still reading YA as adults, but I'm gonna take a stab and say not a ton. So, I didn't see the sense in spinning my wheels and trying to hold on to a readership that was aging out of the market. I just kind of let things be organic. I posted some things about my ordinary life, and I let the rest go. And then I kind of just got started again once Lumara was in production to promote that. I watch other authors spin their wheels on social media trying so so hard to clutch at readers, and it's almost like the harder you try, the more inorganic it feels, and the more you lose.

Mindy: Absolutely. I just had a conversation yesterday morning with Beth Revis, and Beth and I were talking about exactly this because I personally have lost any affection or pride or connection that I ever had with social media. And one of the main reasons is because I went through a break-up, right? Oh, about two months before the pandemic. I went through a break-up of a relationship that had lasted for 12 years. So, it was very upsetting. I was gonna make it and I was gonna be okay, but I was not interested in tweeting about my book or my life. I was like, "Dude, my life is really shitty right now." It's like I don't have a lot to say, and I'm not gonna post pictures of my cat. I'm just laying in bed crying pretty often. So it's like, this is not part of my life right now. I'm not doing social media. And I had been someone that was very active, and if there was a new platform, I was like, "alright what's this?" and getting involved. I really invested my time into that, and I had two hours every morning blocked off where I just used social media and interacted with other people and was involved in conversations and making my own content. And I totally dropped, shut down everything. Not even a, "Hey, going through a hard time. I'm not gonna be around for a little while” post. Nothing for three months, and literally no one noticed. It did not affect my sales in any way whatsoever. And I was like, "Alright, then what am I doing here? What is the point of this?"

And so I had that happen, which was just right before the pandemic, and then in the years that have followed, social media has changed very much from when you and I first started using it. It is now very picture and video-based, and it didn't used to be. Facebook and Twitter were the first platforms that I was active on, and it was, how clever are you with words? What can you do with words? I can utilize that. I am not dancing. I'm not lip syncing. I'm not pointing to words on a screen. I am 43. I don't give a shit. I don't know what's popular. I'm not gonna pick the right music. I'm not gonna... There's like none of it. None of it. I have continued now to just be like, You know what? I'm not interested. And I agree with you completely, that if I were to try any way, it would just be pathetic.

Melissa: Yeah, you can tell when it's inorganic and it's, as my teenager would say, cringey. I'm kind of like you not wanting to share hard times. There was no way five years ago that I was gonna be on social media and say, "Hey guys, you haven't heard from me because I wrote something so broken, my own editor doesn't wanna work with me." No, I was ashamed. I was very hurt. And that really taught me a lesson about how fragile my self-esteem is and how tightly bonded my self-esteem is to my creative process. I was unable to write for the longest time, and then when I finally could write, I was just a black hole of need for validation. My critique partner, Lorie Langdon, she's been on your podcast before.

Mindy: Yes.

Melissa: She can tell you every time I sent her a chapter, I would follow up, "is it okay? Does it suck? Does it suck?" And she would be like, "Oh my God, Mel. No. It doesn't suck. This is awesome. Stop." I like to think that I was this big tough badass. I am so not a big tough badass. I am like a little fragile flower made out of tissue paper.

Mindy: That was something I wanted to ask you about - was how did you recover? Not only talking about a career or maintaining your social media or the financial aspect. How do you recover emotionally?

Melissa: Time, honestly. Time was the only thing. Time and being able to get into a new project and watch that succeed. And by succeed, I don't mean in the market. Blastaway didn't sell super well, but I am so proud of it. It is freaking adorable, and I hate that it didn't do as well. But sci-fi, it is what it is. When you write sci-fi, you kind of have your hits and misses. For the longest time, I could not touch The Half King. The thing with The Half King is it's a beautiful book. It really is, and I'm not just saying that 'cause I wrote it. I think that when it releases in 2023 people who love high fantasy romance are gonna connect with it. But it has so much beauty in it, and I just knew that it deserved to be out in the world. But every time I would open the file, I would freak out and shut it down again. I could not work on the book. Last year when it sold again, and then I had a call with the editor and made a plan, and even kind of getting started on it, it felt... Oh, this is gonna sound so stupid, but it felt like revisiting trauma. And it took probably a month before I really got into the flow of things and began to truly enjoy the process and reconnect with those characters. It took a long time for me to get my mojo back for that project. Paper flower, fragile.

Mindy: No, of course it did. That makes perfect sense to me, and I don't think you're using the word trauma lightly. I will share what happened to me just this past summer. Starting last Christmas, I made the decision that I didn't think I needed to be on anti-depressants anymore. I had been on something for 15 years, and I was feeling good. And I'm in a great relationship, and my career is good. And you know, I've got a dog. I'm fine, right? So I slowly weaned, and the weaning process was great. I got myself completely off of the antidepressants that I had been on for a very long time. There was a window where I was okay, and then there was a much larger space of time when I just... What? It was bad. It was really bad. And I did not realize how quickly it was happening, and I did not realize how bad it was. And friends and family were like, "Mindy, you need to go back on a medication." And I was like, "No, I'm fine. Everything's fine. I'm fine. This is still just withdrawal." I was writing my 2024 release while I was basically having a nervous breakdown, and I didn't know it. I was aware that things were very wrong, but I just kept saying to myself that I am okay and this will pass. And it didn't. And I wrote my 2024 release, which is called Under This Red Rock, while I was going through the worst mental health period of my life. I wrote the book, and I turned it in, and I hit my deadline. And I emailed it to my editor, and I was like "Ben, here it is. This is not good. And I'm sorry, but I'm probably going crazy. And this is the best I can give you right now." And he was like, "Okay, alright." And he was like, "I'm sure that your version of horrible is probably a lot better than you think, and take care of yourself."

I did end up going back on medication right around Thanksgiving. Ben had gotten back to me, and he had sent me my edit letter. And he was very kind, but my level of what I aim to turn in to my editor - that was not there. And I did give him a first draft. And it was a nine-page edit letter, and there were some pretty big problems. And, like you're saying, I can't work with this right now. And at that point, I had gotten back on medication, and I was going through the acclimation phase, which I still am. I can't do this right now. I didn't wanna read it. I didn't wanna open it up. I didn't wanna have anything to do with that manuscript because I felt so shitty while I was writing it, and I got myself into a much better mental space. I got back on medication, and I was able to do the edit. Like you said, even then, just the experience of reading it, it is almost a physical place that you go to and I had to go back there. For one thing, the book itself is heavily involved with a mental illness plot line. I was dealing with writing the fiction of it while also reliving how I had felt while I was writing it, and you're absolutely right. It's difficult.

Melissa: From the beginning, ever since Not A Drop to Drink, your brand is kind of dark and gritty, right? My brand is light, funny, and when you're in a bad mental place, guess how easy it is to write light and funny.

Mindy: Oh, I can't even imagine.

Melissa: My previous editor at Disney... One of the projects that I had pitched to her when I was trying to fulfill this last book on my contract was one of my 2023 releases. She rejected it because she felt like it was a better fit for the adult market, but my new editor at Hyperion absolutely loved it as much as I do. And it is very funny. It's basically like a Jessica Jones meets Veronica Mars. It's a murder mystery, and it is humor and sarcasm from start to finish. And I wrote it over the summer when the sun was out, and I didn't have seasonal depression. And I felt good, and life was good. And I was happy, and I was in a good place. And when I tell you that book just bloomed out of me effortlessly, it was the most fun I've ever had writing in my life. It's kind of miraculous what you can do when your mental health is in a good place.

Mindy: It is. It is. You're absolutely right about my brand and what I write. Obviously, I have no problem talking about mental illness, so I will just keep going. I've been thinking a lot about how I'm gonna talk about this book because it does have a major mental illness aspect for my main character, and I was not in a great place when I was writing it. And people have been asking me, "What do you have coming out next? What's going on next?" And I'm like, "Guys... " So I have a release in March of this year, of 2023, and it is my lightest, happiest - I mean, it's a murder mystery, don't get me wrong, and there's some dark things - but it is my lightest, happiest, and probably most hopeful book that I've ever written. And I wrote it, of course, while I was on medication. Just in a really good place. Things were... Everything was really good when I was writing it, and I actually remember working on that book, which is called A Long Stretch of Bad Days, when I was writing a darker scene or a more upsetting scene or something where my main character was not in a great place, I had to kind of work at it. You know sadness. You know how it feels, and I had to kind of dig for it. And writing my 2024 release, which is called Under This Red Rock, there might be three lines in it that are funny, because I do try to have a little bit of lightness somewhere in all of my books. My 2023 is actually funny. I just got my Kirkus review, and they made a comment about how funny it is. Yes, thank you. Because it's like I always try to have some funny in there, and that's not what I'm known for. My 2024 release I was in the total opposite place, mentally, where I was like, "Okay, you know what funny is, and you know what funny means, and you're able to make jokes, and you've made jokes before. So write something funny because you just wrote 30 pages of just deep dark black shit."

Melissa: The old advice - “butt in chair, hands on keys” - it's great if the rest of your life is also great. But if your life is falling apart around you, your emotions are in shambles, “butt in chair, hands on keys” doesn't yield the same output, and then that comes across on the page and all has to be re-written anyway.

Mindy: Let's talk about Lumara, which is your book that just came out last month. And that one is something, from my understanding, it has helped you get right back on to your trajectory and put you back on your path.

Melissa: Yes, yes, and Lumara is an IP. It was actually my editor's idea when she reached out right at the beginning of the pandemic and said, "Hey, does Melissa like witches?" I had just enough time to say Melissa loves witches and then the pandemic and everything went sideways.

Mindy: Yeah.

Melissa: But yeah, she said, I have this idea. It's an unreliable narrator. Magic. This island with living properties, and I was sold immediately. And so it was so much fun to plot the book with her assistance and to explore magic in a modern day setting. So Lumara is set in a world where magic is real, and everybody knows it's real. It's not hidden. Like in Harry Potter. Magic is real. We all know it. And people who can do magic are called mystics, and they are treated like modern day celebrities. There's Mystegram. There's mystecon - you know, kinda like comicon only just for magic - where you can go and you can buy spells and you can get healed. And so this is the world you live in, but the main character, Talia, hates mystics. Hates them because she had a really bad experience and was basically ripped off of her whole life savings from one. Everybody knows she hates mystics. She won't shut up about it, and then one day she learns that her boyfriend, who she loves very, very much, is not only a mystic, but the son and heir to the most wealthy, powerful, mysterious mystic family in the world. And his cousin is getting married, and he can bring a date. And he wants Talia to come home to his private island with him and meet the family. But once she gets there, all hell breaks loose. It's an unreliable narrator. So if I say too much, I spoil it. But it's a mystery. Murder, generational curses, magic, love, betrayal - all my favorite things.

Mindy: Would you like to mention your 2024 release?

Melissa: Oh, yeah. I would love to. My 2023 releases... The Half King should be coming along fall/winter - I'm not really sure - from Red Tower Books. Again, this will be my first new adult release. Sex on the page - explicit. So not for my younger teen readers.

Mindy: I'm ready.

Melissa: And then my Hyperion release will be December 5th of 2023, and that's called Make Me A Liar. And that's the one that I said was the most fun book I've ever written. Basically a teenage girl with the power of transferable consciousness hires herself out for side hustles, but while she's in the body of a client someone uses her body to commit murder in public. She has to prove that even though her body committed the crime, her mind was not in it at the time.

Mindy: Wow, that's fascinating. I love that.

Melissa: Well, you know, I can't just write a normal murder mystery. It has to have some kind of weirdness in it.

Mindy: So last thing. Why don't you let readers know where they can find you online, and then also where they can get Lumara.

Melissa: Perfect, yes. You can find me online at Melissa dash Landers dot com, and you can sign up for my email newsletter there. And I promise it's not spammy. I only send out a newsletter when I have a new release launching. You can find me on all the usual social media sites: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. As far as Lumara, you can order that from your retailer of choice. And right now, Make Me A Liar and The Half King should also be available for pre-order. So, if either of those titles sounded interesting to you, I hope you'll preorder them.

Many Little Irons In The Fire - Diversifying Your Writing Income With Beth Revis

February 6, 2023 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We are here with Beth Revis who has a rather long and really interesting career in the writing world, and I love talking to Beth. Number one, she's interesting and she's funny. But number two, she has moved across all these different arenas in publishing. And I think she just has a really interesting story and has a lot of different things that she can talk about in terms of diversifying and writing outside of that traditional publishing box. So, if you could actually just start talking a little bit about your career because your career started with this huge bang. I remember I was not published yet, I was a YA librarian, and your first book Across The Universe came out and basically everyone was losing their minds. And that was even before it was released. I remember the publishing world being like, "everyone has to read this book." And even among educators and librarians, there was this humongous buzz for your first traditionally published series. So, if you could talk a little bit about what that is like - about coming out of the gate so hard right at the beginning.

Beth: It is freaking weird, man. I very distinctly remember that my publisher, before the book came out actually - this was before the book was out. One of the members of the team in the publishing department was speaking at the SCBWI. I think it was a national conference. It was something like that. And he kept talking about how much of an overnight success this book was going to be. He talked about it as if he had plucked me from obscurity, and there was this overnight success happening. I wasn't even at the conference. My friend texted to tell me about it, and I just couldn't stop laughing because I had been writing books for 10 years. I wrote 10 books over the course of 10 years. None of them were published. It wasn't an overnight success to me. It was a decade-long success before I saw anything at all in any return on it, and actually Across The Universe was the book that I was going to give up on. It was my hail Mary, last ditch effort. I just threw everything at the wall to see what would stick, and I didn't limit myself. I didn't try to think about markets or tropes. I was just like, "I just gotta do something," and it really was my last shot. And if that one hadn't sold, I do think that I would have quit writing. But fortunately, it did and everything changed. And it really was a perspective turn around to discover that sometimes dreams actually do come true.

Mindy: Yeah, they do. But one of the things that I think is so cool... Yes, it seemed like an overnight success to everyone else. You'd been working for a decade. I remember reading, I think, the first chapter of Across The Universe. Arcs weren't really that big of a deal yet. Somehow it was out digitally, maybe through a librarian outreach thing because I was at work and my boss was like, "Have you heard of this book? Have you heard of this person? That's all anyone is talking about." And at that point in my life, I had also been doing this for a decade, and I did not have an agent. And I did not have any success in any venue whatsoever. Didn't have short stories published. Had no agent. Had just been doing this for a decade and hurting. My boss knew this and she was like, "Oh my gosh, have you heard of this person and this book. Everyone is talking about it," and I was basically like, "No. I haven't. I don't wanna hear about someone else being so freaking successful." And then she was like, "No. Mindy, I think you need to read this." And I sat down bitter and angry, and I was just like, "Oh shit, this is really good." And it was really cool because all of my bitter grapes just got over-written entirely by my enthusiasm as a reader. This person deserves all of this. This person deserves all of the laurels and all of the credit. I think that that 10 years that you put in before you got any recognition is so clear and so obvious. It wasn't a trend. It wasn't a black swan. It wasn't something that just blew up and burned for 15 minutes and died. Your actual core talent was so obvious to me as someone that was also operating in those same worlds as both a writer and a reader.

Beth: I like to think that. But, I mean, there's a lot of talent in the world, and the more I'm in this industry, the more I'm realizing how much of this is also luck. And one of the reasons why the book reached the large audience that it did was 'cause I got really lucky in terms of opening at the start of the Sci-Fi trend and being there at the right time and having the right people support me. And there was just such a huge amount of luck involved in making that book work that I don't think I fully appreciated it until I got a little older and look around at the industry. 'Cause there's a lot of talent in this world, and it doesn't always get recognized, and that's the soul-crushing part of publishing. The writing is the art, but the publishing is the business. And sometimes in the business side of it, you just gotta end up lucky.

Mindy: I agree with that completely. And when I tell other people that, people that are outside of the industry, I think it comes off as false modesty and it's like... No. I know I'm a good writer. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, I'm aware that I'm good at what I do, but I also am very highly conscious of the fact that luck is such a huge player. I think it helps keep you humble, but also you have to recognize that you're absolutely right. I, and of course you as well, have been moving through the publishing industry for a long time now, and I encounter so many people that I will read their stuff, and no one has ever heard of them. And no one is aware of them. And I'm like, "This person is amazing. This person is a better writer than I am. This person should be hitting NYT." I think of it as both, again, as a reader and a writer, where I'm like, I want everyone to read about this book. I want everyone to know this book as a reader. I'm gonna share it with everyone I can think of. And there's that joy in that but then there's also, as a writer, that little, like for me, it's kind of like a fish hook buried inside of your donut - where it's like, I'm really enjoying this donut, but this is also reminding me that it doesn't matter how good you are. That's a horrible thing to realize.

Beth: It's the kind of thing that if somebody had told me that before I was published, I would have just brushed it off and completely ignored it. And honestly, if somebody had told me that when I was in the high of my debut year, which I debuted very well in terms of publishing as a business - that was a fantastic debut - and if somebody was like, "Oh yeah, but don't forget that there's a huge amount of luck involved," I would have just been like, "Oh, ha, ha ha. I get to be here." Since then, and having experienced a lot more and seeing the way things are... Yeah, there is a huge amount of luck. I absolutely thought that, especially after having written for a decade, that once I made it, that I would never have to worry about that again. But I have had books rejected by my agent. I have had books rejected by publishers. I've had books go on submission and not sell. Whole books that didn't sell all over again, and that just threw me back to those days before I was published. And I've had books that got published that were much quieter and they didn't make a stir. And there's a lot of people who don't even know they exist. And I've had some that just came out of left field that hit the right audience at the right time.

Mindy: Absolutely. That is the experience in a nutshell. I have, I believe, 13 books out at this point. Typically, when people talk to me, there's two titles that they talk to me about. They talk to me about The Female of the Species or they talk to me about A Madness So Discreet, and that's pretty much it. And I don't mind that. I absolutely love that people, number one, are reading my books and wanna come to my signings and show up and talk to me. But the two books that people talk to me about the most came out in 2014 and 2015. You worry. You're like, "Oh man, did I peak?"

Beth: Or did book marketing peak and no book marketer knows what to do anymore?

Mindy: That's true. Everything changed, didn't it?

Beth: I think it's not that much of a coincidence that YA hit like a hey day at a certain time period, in part, because of the books that came before. We had the blockbuster hits of Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter that boosted YA in a very significant way. But book publishing never knew what to do with social media, and when they started making marketing plans based on author social media presences, that was not a wise move on book marketing. And we've never really been able to recover from that, because book marketing continuously wants to have these free spaces where they can make a book become a hit. And what we're seeing now, especially with TikTok, is that what makes a book a hit is the readers. And if we can get the books to the readers as opposed to getting the books on social media, that's the key.

Mindy: You and I have talked off mic a lot about social media - and particularly TikTok. One of the things I think is so interesting about TikTok - and I'm giving you tons of compliments, and I know you may not necessarily want them - but you do a great job of making content, of putting things out there, and being active, especially in the TikTok space. I have talked to you plenty about the fact that I have just kind of fallen off of social media. There's multiple reasons for that. Right before the pandemic, I went through a break up that was really, really bad. And I was just kind of non-functional for about three months. I wasn't interested in anything. I was having a hard time with mental health and everything. And social media was very much like "talk about how great you are, and how great your books are, and how happy you are, and how successful everything is." I can't do that. So I just stopped posting.

Beth: But there's a point where that's what has to happen, and you should never, ever, ever, ever feel guilty about that. And anyone listening, also, don't feel guilty if you're not doing social media. Starting in 2018, my husband went into heart failure and he actually ended up needing a transplant. And I remember being in the hospital and having these conversations with hospice workers, and when you get to that level that's when they don't say, "Oh yeah. We'll do the surgery, and there's risks." They're like, "Well, what about the quality of life after surgery? Maybe you don't want it." I mean, that's the kind of conversations we were having with doctors. I remember getting a text from a friend who was like, "I know you're going through a lot. Do you want me to just take over your social media for you so it doesn't die?" And I was like, I could not give less of a care about social media at that point. I just completely didn't care about it. And my friend, who was coming from a really good place, and she knew that I like social media. I enjoy playing with the algorithms. I enjoy trying to make it work, but that was a point in my life where it did not matter. It absolutely did not matter to me, and I think that the key take away from that experience and from that memory is that social media actually doesn't matter. And you can always pick it up back later, if you want to. Like, your job is a writer. Your job is not a social media influencer.

Mindy: I had the exact same experience. I walked away for about three months. I just dropped and no one noticed. Nobody noticed. My sales were not affected in any way, and I did not lose followers. People were not like, "Oh, she hasn't posted in three days. Boring. Unfollow." No. None of those things happened, and so, like you, it made me really rethink, why am I spending two hours... And I would. I would spend about two hours every morning on social media interacting and reacting to other people's posts and making my own and doing all the things you're supposed to do. And I was like, Man, I'm spending two hours a day doing this. And when I stopped cold turkey, there was no effect.

Beth: None. Yeah. Doesn't really matter. It does matter that you can reach readers in some way when you are capable of doing so. Just because you write a book doesn't mean you have to open your life to anybody. But if you wanna reach readers, like social media is a good tool for that. I look at it as a good tool for this network where you might not subscribe to my newsletter but maybe you'll see this tweet or something like that. And I do kinda look at social media as this fun little gamble game where I try to outwit the algorithm. I absolutely am not going to invest my life behind the mask of social media. That's not where my art is. My art is in my book.

Mindy: I agree. I agree completely, and my art is not in front of a camera - in front of my laptop without the camera on. See, it's funny because I said that and then I realized just at that moment that I have one knuckle halfway up my nose as I scratch my own. And I was just like, "Man, it's a damn good thing the camera isn't on." Following back up real quick on TikTok, 'cause that is the social media that everyone's talking about right now, especially in the book world. I mean, you know, I've told you multiple times. I just hate it. And I have a hard time finding any success, but also just like everything about it makes me feel slightly woozy. One of the things that I do appreciate and like about it, as you said, it really is driven by the readers more than anything. The readers are the ones that are creating the content that tends to go viral or really break somebody out. I think writers can move that needle if they're doing the work and putting themselves out there like you do. Colleen Hoover, for example.

Beth: Oh yeah.

Mindy: You know, that's all driven by readers. Those are other people using that platform to talk about what books that they love, and for me, that's organic. And if for some reason BookTok were to take off for me, there's a feeling inside of me that it's like... Maybe I'm not necessarily missing out on this because for me what seems to actually work is the readers creating the content.

Beth: Oh, absolutely. To me, social media is where I build a community, because that's where I can talk to readers. That's where I can tell them things. It's not about selling books. It's about building the community, and if some people who like being in my little circle of community, also wanna support you with books, that's awesome. Any major book sales are not going to come from me getting on Twitter and doing a little song and dance. What I do on social media is much more about just reaching out and talking and being a part of a community than like "buy my book! Buy my book!"

Mindy: Going back to the trajectory of your career. You had your Across The Universe trilogy come out to, as we were saying, just amazing acclaim. It did so well. And then I wanna talk about The Body Electric. It came out in 2014. At that point in the realm of publishing, the self-publishing and indie publishing world was still very much at that point, I think, considered a second rate shot. Considered something that you do if you can't get something into trad. This is where lesser than books land. So I remember when The Body Electric came out, and it was self-published. And I was just like, "Wait a minute." As someone that moves in the industry, I was like, "Beth Revis is incredibly talented and really smart and knows what she's doing, and she's a great writer. And she self-published a book." And it really was a book that made me go, "Oh, wait a minute." This is a legitimate option, number one. And number two, the quality of that book, and I don't just mean the writing - the cover, the design... I remember seeing it on the shelves at SE-YA, which is the Southeastern Young Adult Book Festival, and no part of me looked at that and thought that is a self-published book. Everything about it looked like a trad book, and I was just like, "I thought that was self-published. It can't be. It looks too professional." So if you could talk a little bit about The Body Electric, which was, I believe, your first foray outside of the trad world, and why The Body Electric and why the route you took and how you managed to make it look so professional.

Beth: Talking about timing from before... When Across The Universe came out, it was a good timing in that the market really wanted sci-fi and it really had a lot of publisher support for it, and there was a mini trend of sci-fi. This was also close to the same time. Amie Kaufman and Megan Spooner's book came out very soon after that. There was a grounding for sci-fi, but, just to tell you how quickly trends change... Three years later, by the time Shades of Earth, the last book in the trilogy, came out, my publisher was like, "Oh, by the way. Now, sci-fi is dead." Had to be news to me because I still like it. I still wanted to write it. And I actually had already written The Body Electric and I was working with my publisher. They started off as a three-book deal. There were going to be three books following The Body Electric, and it was what was happening on Earth while Amy and Elder were in space in Across The Universe. I thought it was a good pitch. It was linked to the series. I thought it was good. My publisher thought it was good when they bought it, and by the time I sold it as a pitch to here's the complete book - and by which I mean we went through line edits, developmental edits. We were at the copy editing stage when my publisher was like, "Oh, we just don't think sci-fi's gonna sell anymore." So they were still gonna honor my book deal. They wanted three books from me still. They just didn't want that book or that series.

I remember very distinctly when I got the call from my agent about it because this was also the time period where I was trying to get pregnant. And I was in the parking lot after having an acupuncture session to prep me for IVF after having realized that I was still not pregnant which, anyone who's been through that, is not a happy time period. And then my agent cause and they're like, "they want any book from you but that one." But it's done. It was done forever. I was expecting copy edits, and instead I got the book basically being canceled. The book deal wasn't canceled, which was good for my finances, but the book itself was not gonna go anywhere. And so I had here this complete book that had been professionally edited and no where to go with it. I was locked into a contract, so I couldn't sell it to another publisher until the other three books of the contract were fulfilled, but I could self-publish it. And I had already self-published the Paper Hearts books, which were writing advice. That one started off as blog posts that I turned into a book because readers kept asking me for a format that they can highlight and take notes in. And so I kind of knew the system, and I was like, "Well, I might as well try it." And you're right. There was a lot of stigma. I remember I had people flat out ask me, they're like, "You're failing now. So now you're self-publishing. Oh, so you're just washed up and you failed." Regardless, I just wanted to take a shot. I wanted to see if I could do it. And I had this book done and I loved the book. And I just wanted to see if it was possible. So I invested a lot of time and money to learn the system. I hired professionals to finish the editing process - the graphic design, the cover, everything. And I love that little book, and it did pretty well for a self-published title. And looking back now, I wish I had kept that momentum going. I wish I had continued to always self-publish on the side.

Mindy: I've talked before on the blog about the fact that I also write underneath a pen name and have self-published underneath that pen name. You mentioned the Paper Hearts series, and I said earlier I wanted to talk about how you have diversified in so many ways. And I realize that your Paper Hearts series and your writing advice books likely aren't pulling in a ton of money for you, but it is still something that you have out there that is a venue for you that you can promote to people, if you need to. You have all kinds of workbooks as well as just publishing advice there. And so just for listeners as well, the Paper Hearts books are just fantastic. And they're very, very helpful. You had said that that was something that came out of re-purposing blog posts and putting some writing advice out there. This might sound a little bit heartless, but when I'm at a conference or a signing and there's someone that's like, "Hey, can you give me some writing advice?"

Beth: Yeah.

Mindy: That's like, "Hey, can you explain the cosmos?" Just real quick here. 12 minutes while I'm in line. Whenever this happens, I just like, "Hey, I've got a blog and I got a podcast, and just go hit those up. And this is the website." When you decided to do the Paper Hearts, was it kindness of your heart? Was it now I have somewhere to direct people that want that advice? Or were you thinking, maybe I can make some money too?

Beth: Everything really. I originally started on my blog because I had the long publishing career. I was doing blogs for years before I got my book deal. I was on submission for things, but I hadn't gotten the book deal yet. As my first book came out, as I went through edits, I recorded everything on the blog, and I really wasn't going to publish it until I had people asking me for it. And then I realized, "Oh, people do want it, and that would be the kind of thing I would want." It's like a super chatty, but very realistic, factual, not holding things back and sugar coating things, way of explaining the industry and the process and the craft of writing and the process of publishing, and even marketing a little bit. The blogs are all still up there. So you're more than welcome to go through it, anybody who wants to search through the Internet. I just compiled them into one format, and what I was really focusing on at the time, as I was developing them, was this idea that was forming of how I still really wanted to teach.

I started my career as a teacher. I worked for six years as a high school English teacher. I loved the teaching process. I hated the education system, but I loved the teaching process and being in the classroom with students. We had a creative writing club. We had a literary journal. It was a wonderful time. I truly enjoy teaching, and I feel like I learn something better when I teach it. And so fortunately, at the same time that people were asking for the print book of Paper Hearts, a friend of mine, Cristin Terrill, said that she had done some workshop retreats when she lived in England, and she was in America now. And she wanted to sort of re-create that atmosphere here. And I was like, "Oh. Well, I've been sort of thinking about teaching and writing this non-fiction book and making workshops." And those two ideas all melded together. It was Paper Hearts and the Wordsmith Workshop Retreats. So we started doing the retreats. The very first retreat, we kinda did it in my backyard. We did it in Asheville, and I brought the first printed copies of Paper Hearts and gave them out to everybody who attended. That's how closely tied those two ventures were, and we just started teaching workshops. We expanded to do online things, especially during the pandemic. Giving back to the community, but also integrating everything into a workshop, educational symposium-style type thing.

Mindy: Those... Having that hook as well that you're able to teach and that writers can come to you as well as readers, it opens up venues for you in terms of teaching gigs, but also just appearances and writing workshops where you can get paid. It's another feather in your cap.

Beth: Yeah. I also I think it's kind of nice when I'm teaching a workshop to be like, "Oh, and here's this workbook and you get to write in it and keep it and everything's organized."

Mindy: So I wanna talk more about just your career in general. I wanna mention all your books because they're all so great. You went on... You wrote the Give the Dark My Love series. You wrote A World Without You. You've written many, many short stories that are in anthologies - different anthologies. You were able to do some IP work with Star Wars, which is just so awesome. But what I wanna talk about next is the Museum of Magic, which is a book that is available now, and this started as a Kindle Vella. You were an early adopter of Vella. Talk a little bit about Vella and what it is and how you utilized it as a writer.

Beth: Vella came about at the perfect time for me, because I was sort of in-between books. I was questioning what genre I wanted to focus in on. I had done the IP work. I didn't quite know where I wanted to go. And when Vella was announced, I had actually been looking at an old book of mine I had written called Blood and Feathers. It was a fantasy novel that I adored and I spent years working on and building the world and building the magic system. And it never found a publishing home. And I was thinking of self-publishing it, but really doubting whether I had the chops to dive back into self-publishing. And then Kindle Vella was announced and I thought, well, that might be a good place for this book that I already have written. But I knew I wanted to rewrite it because I'd originally intended it to be like a series. I was like, I just wanna make it a stand alone. And so as I was re-writing it chapter by chapter, I was uploading it on Kindle Vella and giving readers a chance to vote... Very much inspired by Susan Dennard and the Twitter voting poll she did for Luminaries. Which character the main character should trust and things like that. That one did okay, and I really liked that interaction. And I wanted to find a way to take that interaction to the next level. And I've still really enjoyed doing Vella, and I decided I was going to write something specifically for Vella where every single chapter would be determined by reader votes. And to kinda take it even to a more chaotic level, I was going to write every chapter as if I were in a D&D session, and I would roll dice and flip coins and do other chance-like things to determine what would happen in the chapter. And I filmed that and put it on my Patreon for my patreon readers to see how the chaos happens. Then I let them all vote on like a major decision. It's not just like, what color t-shirt should she wear? It's, should she fight this guy or hide? Should she go down this path or that path? And the story evolved so much as I was writing it. My original plan for this was just like a girl kind of questing for these items so that she could fix a broken spell, and it became like this deep dive into history and feminism and politics and fairy lore and so much more. It is just sort of spun out of control in the best possible way.

Mindy: That's wonderful. And I know that you have had continued success with Vella. We talked quite a bit about Vella, and the serial world can be very hit or miss. I think that discoverability is a problem everywhere. It's getting your book visible - your Vella visible. It's more integral to your success. When we're talking about serials, it is marketing to a different audience, because my readers that wanna read my books, my physical books and hold them, I have not had much luck getting them to jump over to serial. So what's your experience been like with that?

Beth: Yeah, it's a totally different platform. It's something, especially in Kindle Vella, it kind of requires you to read either on your computer or your laptop or your Kindle device, if you have one of those. A lot of young adult readers right now tend to really value print books. I actually don't know how well the serials would have done, if it was just one. I think that's one reason why Blood and Feathers kind of struggled to find a home because I intended it to be a stand-alone. But as I was writing Museum of Magic, the fact that I could draw it out longer, but I split it up into books. So now I have a print book version of it, which I'm hoping my print readers will enjoy, but they could dive straight into the sequel and see the sequel happening as it comes, as opposed to waiting a year for it to happen. You can see the process, and I kinda hope that this is showing some of my readers that I'm working all the time. You only get a book from me once or twice a year, but I'm working all the time. And maybe now people can see that the fruits of my labor, as opposed to intermittently through the years, is happening literally every day.

Mindy: Absolutely, and that's something that people don't necessarily realize how much of a hustle - which is really one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you, is that hustle. You are constantly doing something. And I used to be that driven. I'm hoping to get back to it. You mentioned your Patreon, and you obviously do a lot of stuff with that and you're finding new and different ways to reach readers. The whole idea of absolute chance and flipping a coin and rolling the dice and videoing that and putting that material up for your Patreon. That is all so outside of the box of anything that I learned coming up 15 years ago, and I think it's just really wonderful that you have diversified yourself to the point where you've got a presence in all these different little avenues.

Beth: I mean, to be clear, if I were independently wealthy, you guys would never heard from me again. I mean, I love you guys, and I love writing. And writing is my art, but the hustle is really exhausting, and I am tired all the time. I'm currently chugging a green tea as I talk to you. I mean, part of this diversification absolutely comes from desperation. And I do wanna reiterate that it's not like I'm some super woman who has all the time in the world, and I'm just playing and flipping coins for fun. Part of this is from desperation. I had to find ways where I could write more books and reach more readers.

I mentioned my husband had a heart transplant, and I am still literally paying for a human heart. And they are expensive, especially when you don't get them off the black market, and it's just ridiculous. And I'm also the soul bread winner, and taking care of my son and my husband, and I did have several hard moments. I'm even gonna say it's one, it was many times, when I'm like, "Okay, can I even make this career continue to work for my family, or do I need to just literally do anything else with a salary?" And the freelance world is hard, and it is about diversification. And it's one reason why I wish I had continued self-publishing after The Body Electric. It's one reason why I'm doing all these different revenue streams. I describe it as having lots of little irons in the fire. With Across The Universe, despite the fact that I wrote it while I was teaching, I only really had two irons in that fire. I was teaching and getting my day job money. And then I was working on this one novel, and that was the only creative pursuit I had going. I cannot afford to just have one or two irons in the fire. I have to have a dozen irons in the fire and constantly be stoking the flames and trying to beat them into a livable income for my family. That also forced me to be creative in ways that I actually really have grown to love and like. With writing a serial novel, one reason why I do the coin flips and the dice rolls and things like that is because it keeps it interesting for me. I hope it's fun for the reader, but it's also very fun for me. And I don't have to carry the whole book in my head. I just have to carry some dice in my pocket and then see where the story will take me and kind of explore that. So it keeps it fresh and entertaining and something that I can do, because if I was writing just straight up three and five novels all at one time, I would get burnt out. I can think just a dice roll ahead for Museum of Magic, and that enables me to keep writing it.

Mindy: I agree so much about the hustle and how exhausting it is. People ask me all the time, "How do you do everything that you do?" And the answer is, "I don't have a choice."

Beth: Yeah, right.

Mindy: I make a living off of speaking appearances and signings and library visits, school visits. Obviously book sales come into that, but I can't control book sales. So much of what I do is me just trying to figure out something else, something else, something else. What else can I do? What is different? What is new? And you do get tired of chasing that. What is new? Because what is new may not always be successful or work. You hear so many things blossom and then die on the vine. I have been involved in projects that were the hot thing going and then six months later, by the time we had something available, it was no longer something people were interested in, and things would release and it just didn't really matter. But you never know what is gonna actually stick around for the long term or where you should invest your time, and you're literally rolling the dice and that's what we do. You were talking about... You remember when you were working and writing. I remember that as well. I was a librarian. I didn't make a lot of money because I was an aid, but I was working in a school full-time. So I had retirement. I had health insurance. Yes, it was weirdly a more restful time when I was working full-time and writing. And now I am scattered, but not in a bad way. Like you're saying, I'm diversified is the better word.

Beth: I think it's interesting that you brought up control though. Because with traditional book deals, we have control over our art, but we don't have control over whether or not it sells.

Mindy: Absolutely.

Beth: And that's the thing that can kill a freelance career. It only takes one or two books not selling for you to not have income for years. That lack of control is really the reason why I have leaned so heavily into this determined idea of always having something self-published as well as traditional published. 'Cause I make a lot more money with a traditional published book, and I know this is not true for everyone, but it's true for me - is that I make my money with traditional publishing. But if I can self-publish and get a set amount of money per month that is somewhat reliable, that is the bridge between those, and that is something that I control. I took November off for the first time in two years. I took some time off from writing all the time constantly, and I did not get any income. And I had to factor in my budget to realize that for the month of November and most of December, I was not gonna have any income. But outside of those times when I choose to take off, having some element of control of how much I'll get paid, or at least knowing something's coming, is actually a big help that traditional publishing can't give me.

Mindy: I explain to people very often that I get paid from that traditional gig, which is the main bread and butter, when you're on a book a year contract - once a year. And if you are working towards the future, if you're turning in a book on that year or if you have a contract come in, you might get paid twice a year. Then you're just... Well, gee. I hope I have enough money to make it until I get paid again. Anything that has to do with traditional life, like you were saying... You very suddenly had a health emergency. And that's something that just, quite frankly, we're fucked when something like that happens.

Beth: Oh yeah. The GoFundMe that somebody made, a friend of mine made it for me, but that's the only reason why I could continue to be a writer. It wasn't even that much comparatively, but quite frankly, the GoFundMe saved my career.

Mindy: Yeah. Yeah, and those are the kinds of things that we do have to rely on sometimes in order to keep us going. Thank God for readers and fans and supporters. Lord knows, I have been fortunate enough to not have any health emergencies in my life. But like you, I am self-employed, and I think about that all the time because I travel so much. Last fall, I was driving for three weeks. I was across the entire West doing school visits, and the whole time I was like, "Don't get in a goddamn car crash." It's like, do not crash your car because every cent that you made on this trip will go towards fixing you and more than likely, way more than that. So yeah, it's scary. You really are counting on the universe to look out for you when you choose this path.

Beth: Especially after the emergency of the health crisis, it made it fundamentally apparent that we only have an illusion of a safety net underneath us. Just like when Across The Universe came out and I thought, "Oh, I've made it. I'll never have to worry about this again. Surely, I will always be able to sell a book." Actually, that's just false, and our safety nets are made out of spider silk. And they're not gonna hold us up under necessarily big emergencies. And really the only thing we have left is our community and our art and hoping that can be enough.

Mindy: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Last thing, why don't you let readers know where they can find you online. I know that as we said, you've got so many different irons in the fire. So go ahead and talk about those and where people can find them and support you.

Beth: Yeah, I'm kind of everywhere. On most social media, you can easily find me by just searching my name - Beth Revis. I'm on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. I have a newsletter at Substack - Beth Revis dot Substack dot com, and I send that out monthly, and that is the most reliable place to always keep up with everything I do. You can find me at Beth Revis dot com, and my Patreon is patreon dot-com slash Beth Revis. I'm obsessed with making sure that the Patreon is worthwhile. So every Sunday, I upload a new chapter of the novel. Every Tuesday, I show you how I outlined the next chapter of the novel. Every Thursday, there is a writing post which can include a 30-minute video writing or Round Table critiques or just general writing advice and... Oh, I think that might be it.

Mindy: That's incredible.

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