Nova McBee On Getting A Film Deal First & Having An Editorial Agent

February 21, 2022 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 a a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Nova McBee author of the YA trilogy that begins with Calculated, which is pitched as Count of Monte Cristo meets Mission Impossible. Calculated is available now, Simulated is the sequel, and then there is Activated, which is the third book, which will be upcoming. So Nova has a very, very interesting story in that her publishing journey is very much backwards. So if you would like to talk a little bit about what that means.

Nova: When I say that – my agent was like, who are you? This doesn't happen. And it's not normal. You're not normal. I mean, it's true. Everyone has a completely different path when it comes to anything really, but especially publishing. Some people can get deals within a week and others take seven years. The backwards journey is I got a film deal first, right after I got my agent. And then I got an audio book deal. And then lastly, I got a publishing deal. That is completely backwards.

We have to talk about our journey. And I remember when I first started writing books, how hesitant I was to say, I'm a writer or I'm an author. You feel like you have to get it somewhere for that to be spoken out. It was a challenge in me and I, I needed to start speaking it out to all my friends and family that didn't know I was doing it–and even strangers–before I had my agent before I had my publishing deal. And because of that, I ended up meeting a girl who was living in China at the same time as me. And she happened to be an up and coming producer. Her father was a producer. So we got to talking about my book that I was still pitching to agents at the time.

And she's like, wow, that sounds like right up my alley. She's like, I'm actually working with these producers right now that are looking for something almost exactly like that. I would like to read it, to see if it's worth passing on to them. You know, how do you say no to that? You're like, okay. And, you don't know where it's going. I was rejected for two and a half years at this point with agents. Let's just try at this point. I gave it to her. Didn't hear back for a while. And then I got an agent and we signed. Maybe three weeks after we signed – on a different book, by the way – and then I get this call from the other two male producers in California. And they're like, this book has gone through our entire team and we need to sign you before anyone else does.

We need the rights to this. And my agent was like, who are you? And what book are they talking about? So she's like, well, I better read this book, you know, which was Calculated. And so she read it in a day and that started this very unique journey of just negotiations and learning about the industry and what that means. And then she's like, well, then we have to put down the other book and we need to focus on Calculated, getting Calculated a publishing deal. She kind of threw it out to all of her contacts and it was taking again a long time, but she had put it out to some of her audio book contacts and the audio just responded first. And they're like, Hey, we're super interested. We really like it. We wanna sign you. That’s my backward publishing journey. I think it took almost a year.

This new imprint contacted us. They'd heard about the book and they contacted us and said, Hey, we're starting a brand new YA imprint. And we would like to have the chance to read Calculated to consider it as the lead title. And we were not sure because it was a brand new imprint, a very unique style of publisher. They're sort of a mix between independent and traditional. They do both. They're very fascinating and very innovative and very cool to work with because they are so flexible and willing to try everything. I've just had the best experience with how awesome they are, like truly team players. And so they read it, they loved it. We signed that deal. It went backwards very much.

Mindy: So I think it's really interesting that you had this relationship that got you a film deal. It can feel like it is almost a barrier in some ways, because people are like, I don't have connections. I don't have the things that I need in order to make that happen. I understand that feeling because I had heard for so long that networking is so important. Networking in this industry is a big deal. I am a farmer's daughter from Ohio. I was not going to have contacts in publishing. And I got into the industry by cold querying, my agent picking me up and that was in 2010. And so I've just been building since then. It's been real work, but, but because of the networking that I do, like I did have an in, in the sense that I was a librarian at a public school. So I had connections in the library world that could help me then promote the book, but all of that, networking with other authors and agents and editors, knowing who you are that does take time to build.

Nova: Exactly. And one thing that I didn't mention was while I was cold querying, which is how I got my agent, I actually was accepted into PitchWars. And before Calculated, actually. Pintip Dunn was my mentor and I didn't know anybody in publishing. I had nobody. I started out as like, you know, zero contacts, like you, in the industry. I was actually living in China at the time with zero contacts. Rachel Griffin, who's the author of The Nature of Witches, we had met on one of my visits back to Seattle. And she's a friend of mine. She was like, yeah, I'm gonna try, try this thing called Pitch Wars. And I'm like, oh, I am so not into contests. But, then I felt like I was supposed to do it. In the midst of that, there was an agent who was really interested in working with me, but I just felt like it was wrong.

And I was like, well, I'm gonna try to do Pitch Wars first. And then I got in and then the networking, like you're talking about it, sort of exploded because you meet everyone in Pitch Wars. My year was just incredible. Everybody was so encouraging. So supportive, all wanted to be friends, all wanted to boost, all wanted to read each other's work. I was like, what is this goodness? Because everyone was just pouring into each other and boosting each other. And it was like the most fruitful year ever, where I just got to meet all these people, it was just sort of placed upon me. And yet I didn't get my agent through that either. You know, my agent was cold querying. All the Pitch Wars agent requests didn't pan out. Nobody wanted Calculated,. And so I, in the midst of that, I wrote another book called The Never House. And I started querying that book and that's the book my agent read and signed me on. And she had no clue about Calculated.

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Mindy: I think it's really interesting too, that we talk about publishing and the different paths of publishing, but I also wanna point out, you did get your agent through cold querying. I know people hate it. I know people hate the process. I know that it is soul sucking. I know that it is hard, but I was querying for 10 years. You gotta get punched in the face, if you wanna be able to move forward in this business. I was rejected for 10 years.

Nova: That is intense. Mine was two and a half. I watched people give up after like 10 rejections and I'm like, yeah, what? But what? No. And, people do give up. And, but in the midst of that, I was actually growing stronger. It sucks, like rejection does not feel good, but in the midst of that, this article popped up and it was like this actress. I don't even remember who it was, but she was like, if you can't handle rejection, you will never be able to handle success. And I was just like, dang, that's so good. Because in the midst of that, like, if you're not really sure you're supposed to be somewhere, it's so easy to get bullied back out of it. You know, you learn to stand your ground and who you are and what you want and what you think you're supposed to be doing. You know? And it just, for me, it was a good season where I was like, no, it doesn't matter what they say. I'm supposed to do this. I'm gonna write books and I'm gonna get that publishing deal. And it's gonna happen. I don't know when, but it's gonna happen.

Mindy: You have to build that thick skin. There's no doubt about it. And one of the reasons why I was getting rejected, yes, for 10 years, I wrote four different novels. The fifth one was the one that finally got picked up. I deserved to be rejected for 10 years. I didn't want to process feedback. I didn't wanna share my work with anybody. I didn't wanna have critique partners. Like I didn't wanna do the actual work. I wanted to write a book and have everyone love it. And tell me it was a genius. That is not how this shit works. I had to basically grow the fuck up. So I deserved all the rejections I got and it did make me obviously a better writer. It pushed me out into sharing my work with other people, processing feedback, learning the industry, discovering trends, all of the different things. Yes, it did build that thick skin.

And you will be rejected. Once you get an agent, your rejection is not over. You're gonna be rejected by publishers. And then you will be rejected by your readers. Like that's just all there is to it. I used to read my reviews. I don't anymore. I simply don't see the point. Good reviews make you rest on your laurels. Bad reviews make you feel like shit. There's nothing you can do about them. You can't respond to bad reviews. That's poor author behavior. So there's literally nothing you can do. I didn't write this book for you.

Nova: Yeah, no, I think that's so good to talk about, actually. You had to step into like letting people see your work and getting feedback. That happened to me too. And the first time I shared my work with somebody outside of my family and they were like, yeah, I'm not really feeling it. I'm like, oh… But then, but then I'm like, well, why? And they were like, well, because of this and this, and I was like, oh yeah, I can see that. Once you receive feedback and have awesome critique partners, it's like gold. The minute I show them, they're gonna see something that I'm missing. And then I'll be able to go back and make it even better. It's such a powerful stage in the process. It is.

Mindy: And it preps you for that larger, it may not be a rejection, but it feels like we're when you get your letter from your editor. You get an edit letter. You open it up, you read it. And it's one of two things. You either cry or you get pissed. I get pissed. Like, that's just who I am. I'll read the edit letter. And it's like, you don't understand me. You don't get what I'm trying to do. I usually don't return to it for as long as a week, sometimes two. And then you open it up and you read it again. And you're like, yeah. Okay, fine.

Because the truth is every time I turn in a book, I know exactly what's wrong with it. When I get that feedback returned that says - Yeah, you were right. You didn't do this good. It's just like, oh yeah? You're just defensive. You know where your weaknesses are. And having them pointed out does not make you a kinder, gentler, more lovely person.

Nova: That rejection keeps coming. And, and then, you know, you'll get reviews on that same book, an author, Shannon Dittemore, we were talking right before Calculated came out. She told me the same thing. She's like, I don't read any reviews. And she's like, I just advise you not to do it. Well, that's really hard to do for the first time author. Right? I did. So of course I read my reviews. Thankfully, the ones that came in right away were good. Like really good. And I was encouraged.

I had a really cool experience with Pitch Wars when it comes to edit letters, because Pintip Dunn, she was incredible. She marked out all the places that she loved, which I think is the best kind of critique. Here's all the places that you are so strong. And this is why I love the book. This is why I chose you as a mentee. And here's where we can make it really stronger. Calculated, has a dual timeline. And it was already pretty tight, but she pressed me in that. She's like, you can make this better. She's like, you need to pull information that I need in the present from the past and vice versa. The more you pull these two together and you stretch that information. Just those nuggets of truth that she really passed on to me, just like really built me as an author as well.

And my agent, her name is Amy Jameson. She's absolutely incredible as well. She launched Shannon Hale's career, and Jessica Day George. And she's an editor too. So before my work goes to the publisher, she reads it for me. She doesn't give me a huge edit letter, but oh, I will have comments all the way down. She tells me, I'm your toughest critic, but I'm also your greatest supporter. She goes through the whole book with me. And I don't know if that's part of her job description, but she just believes in her clients.

Mindy: I have a very, very good relationship with my editor. For one thing we've been working together since 2015 at this point.

Nova: Is that at Harper Teen, are you with Harper?

Mindy: I’m at Katherine Tegen, which is a branch of Harper. So I'm with Ben Rosenthal and he's been with me since 2015. We've actually worked together a lot and that's kind of rare and we have a wonderful relationship. So my agent is pretty hands off in the editorial area because she knows that I have a great relationship with my editor and that he and I are gonna hash that out. And we work really well together now. I've also been with my agent for 12 years. So in the beginning she was a little more hands on, but now that I'm a little more established and I have my own relationships within the publishing industry, everyone knows that I am not going to turn in junk and that I am going to fix whatever you say needs to be fixed. Like I am going to work my ass off. People know that about me. So I already have that reputation, so she doesn't have to guide me editorially like she did in the beginning.

Nova: That's so true. And every publishing house will be different, you know? Are all of your books with Katherine Tegen?

Mindy: With the exception of my two fantasy novels that are with Putnam? Yes.

Nova: That's amazing. Wow. I'm impressed.

Mindy: I love, I love the imprint. Also of interest - I've had the same cover designer for all of my books.

Nova: Wow. Are you kidding me?

Mindy: No, I'm not. The ones that are with Putnam aren’t her, but yes.

Nova: You know, just having a team that you know, and that you trust. That's so powerful as well. It's just so cool. Cause then you guys know how to work together. You know, each other's systems and you can speak freely with each other. I'm assuming.

Mindy: Oh yeah. Very. I would like to talk about using the classics and in your particular case, the Count of Monte Cristo, as a launching point for your story. So is it a story that you've always loved? Like what led you there?

Nova: I didn't know anything about the industry when I started Calculated. So I was living in China and then also, I've lived abroad for a long time. I've also lived in Europe, in the MiddleEast. And I actually read the count of Monte Cristo when I was living in France. It's intense.

Mindy: I've read it.

Nova: But you're so steeped in the story that it stays with you for so long. It just like completely captivated my mind. And I went through a whole period of time when I knew I wanted to be a writer where I went through a classic period. I'm from Seattle. And there's quite a large community of people who are anti-trafficking, you know, Seattle's a hub for that. So I had come back to the states for a little trip and I had gone to this trafficking meeting and I was just sitting in my living room afterwards thinking like, what if this story happened today? Where would it be? It would have to be a super powerful country.

And at the time I was living in China, I was like, oh, what if it happened in China? Who would be taken? Would it be a guy or a girl? I was like, oh, it'd definitely be a girl. And like, the story just started evolving in my head. What if I could do a spinoff? How would she transform into all of these identities? Cause like in the count of Monte Cristo, he has more than one identity. He's not just the count of Monte Cristo, he has multiple identities. In one morning. I had the whole story in my head, but it took two and a half, three years to write that. And it was my first novel.

Mindy: It's pretty fascinating how you can take these disparate things in your life. Like you were saying, it was a book that you had read and then living abroad and then being involved in this, this trafficking concept and those things all coalesce. Last thing, why don't you let people know where, where they can find all of your books and where they can find you online.

Nova: Of course you can buy them on Amazon, but they're also through any bookstore. You can order them through any bookstore online. And my local bookstores, the Edmund's Bookshop and Third Place Books, you can order them there. There's signed copies in those bookstores. I'm on Instagram and, and Facebook. You can find me there and Twitter, I pop in on sometimes, but not, not usually. And yeah, my third book comes out in April and there's exciting film news about to come in the next few weeks. So I'm looking forward to announcing all of that and hope people like my books!

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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.

Tavi Taylor Black On Fame Culture & Writing At Any Age

February 7, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

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Mindy: We're here with Tavi Black, author of Where Are We Tomorrow, which is a novel about four women working backstage on a rock tour, each of them coming to terms with what it means to be a woman in a male dominated industry It was nominated for the Next generation Indie Awards and the American Fiction Awards. So that is super exciting. And when you reached out to me about being on the podcast, I was immediately interested. So why don't we just start with you telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to write Where Are We Tomorrow?

Tavi: I kind of think of myself more as an artist than a writer because I've done all kinds of different arts, but I came to write this particular book because my career has been in event production and I did tour with bands for many years. But my artist's life was always a little bit separate from that. This was a project that I was able to bring both my artist's life and my career into one project. I worked on this particular book for 12 years before I got a publishing contract. I got the idea for this book while I was on tour with four women and that's pretty unusual. It was on the Norah Jones Tour in 2003, I think. So, I was working with all of these women on tour.

And I started out in the lighting crew on the Phish tour back in, I think ‘95. I was the only woman. For many tours I went on other than caterers. I would often walk into a venue in the morning and the stagehands that were there - almost always all men - would point to the kitchen and say “kitchen’s over there.”

Mindy: So obviously you had the background to bring to writing a novel and you also had the experiences of someone who is kind of operating on the fringe as a woman, if you're the only woman for a long time backstage like that. I have no concept of what that is like. I know what it's like in a green room, you know, I’ve been in spaces with pretty famous people, but it's always been in a fairly diverse background, skin color, culture, but also gender. Can you talk a little bit about how that feels? Not necessarily externally, but internally, what was it like for you to be like, okay, I gotta walk in there and establish that I'm even allowed to do that?

Tavi: I like that you asked that externally versus internally because externally, of course I had to just be there, show up, do the job, do a good job, prove myself just like everybody else did. But internally I definitely felt so nervous. And my husband often asked me why did you do that? Why did you feel like you needed to be in that, really in some ways toxic environment, a place where men definitely let me know that they didn't necessarily want me there? Some did, obviously, the man who hired me wanted me there. He said, I think it's more civilized when there's a woman around. But internally there was something that I felt like I had to prove.

But the interesting thing about it for women, is that they were kind of two ways to go in this business and I'm not always proud of the way that I went. But there was the sort of go along with the jokes and laugh and everybody kind of gets along with you, which is sort of the way I went. I was like, I want to do well here, I want to have friends here. I'm going to just ignore their misogynistic rude comments. And then there's the other way you could go where you could call them out and say that's not acceptable. And those women were always known as the bitches. In some ways, I think, well why wasn't I a bitch? I should have been. But I didn't. That was the choice that I made.

And so in some ways this book is an exploration of the different ways to be female inside of that world. I think that the thing that makes this book different from other novels and memoirs about backstage is that you just don't hear about the lives of the people that are making the show happen, versus the people that are on stage very often.

Mindy: Yes, absolutely. My cousin is married to a cameraman and he is actually, in the world of cameramen, rather famous because he's very very good at what he does. Directors request him and asked for him to be there and have him on their films. But you know, if I said his name, like it doesn't matter, no one would know. And my nephew is in high school and he always knew that his cousin was a cameraman but it never really mattered. He ended up looking at his Instagram for some reason, there's all these pictures of him hanging out with Nicholas Cage and stuff like that and he was just like, oh my God, AuntMindy did you know? And I'm like yeah, I did. These people are - they're moving and they're making these things happen and they're there, you just don't know about them, you don't hear about them.

Tavi: One of the themes of the book is this idea of our addiction to fame. I was a painter for many years, sometimes I still paint, I feel like people would not be that interested in that. But the minute I said, oh I work for this famous person - that's so interesting, I'm like what about my art? What about the thing I'm doing? The writing I'm doing? Why isn't that interesting? It's only that I know this famous person 0 who is just a person by the way.

Mindy: Yeah, I have a friend that lives in Hawaii and she housesits for… I mean I won't say their names but extremely famous people. She's like, that's what people want to talk to me about. I have a whole life, I have all these things that I do. I just, this is like babysitting and that's what people want to talk to me about.

Tavi: These brushes with fame, we have a real addiction to it. There's this great book that I really love called Fame Junkies. It's written by Jake Halpern who actually does a podcast as well. It's one of my favorite books just talking about how addicted to fame we are and what we'll do to be around it. And as an artist, like I've always pursued an art, I was in a band when I was younger and it's a funny thing to have this feeling about fame, to actually now have to promote myself as a writer and like, what am I looking for - fame? Well, I want people to read my book. I want to talk about the book, but do I want to be famous? No, it looks awful.

Mindy: It is difficult. I agree. So the nice thing about being a writer is that being famous as a writer usually means you can still walk down the street and no one knows what you actually look like.

Tavi: I mean you have how many books out there? And I bet People don't know you when you are in public.

Mindy: I have like 12, 13 books out there and no, most of the time I can walk around completely anonymous and it doesn't matter. I have been recognized on the street. I mean it is cool and I actually like it. But generally people that are readers, I think that fan base is a little less toxic and a little more empathetic and understanding than like movie or music fans. I could be giving readers more credit than they deserve.

Tavi: But I think that it's true that often you don't know what an author looks like, anyway.

Mindy: You know, that's a really good point. And I personally I go back and forth because it's like I am very open and I talk about my life and I talk about all different kinds of elements of my life. I talk about mental health very openly because I write for teenagers and I think it's important for me to talk about these things. But there are things about my life that are really, really basic information that no one has. I don't talk about those things. There was an event where they were looking for information from every author and they just kind of had a grid where they were just filling in information about everyone. They were like, where are you from? And I'm like I'm from Ohio. And they're like, where in Ohio? And I'm like, it doesn't matter. Because if I say the name of the tiny tiny town where I'm from, you've got me within like a five mile radius.

My instagram is not me. It's books, it's cats, it's my dogs. It's not me. It's not my face. I don't put myself in front of the camera that often. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with it. I'm not comfortable selling my face.

Tavi: Yes, That's how I feel. My God, I'm just like, you don't want to look at me. That's not what this is about. I'll sell you my books and I'll talk to you about my books all day, but you're not buying me, so I struggle with that as well. And that's not the culture that we have right now. I have a young daughter and I don't let her on social media. She's 11. I've never put her face anywhere, but other people have. So how do I protect her from this? I'm not sure

Mindy: People are scary. That's how I feel about that.

Tavi: You know, with being scared, I just sometimes feel like maybe that's why I had to do this work that was so tough and I'm such a sensitive artistic soul. I think I needed to do some work that would really toughen me up, You wouldn't even get a nap on tour. You would get done at two am loading out, take a shower in the locker room, get on the bus, get up and load in at eight a.m.

Mindy: That's a crazy lifestyle even and I assume very little privacy.

Tavi: None. To roll out of a bunk and have, honestly, some guys that you just wouldn't ever want to see you in your pajamas like right there in your face in the hallway of the bus. It was not easy.

Mindy: No, I can't even imagine I need my privacy and I need my alone time. I imagine you do too.

Tavi: Yeah, I like it. Don't get it much though!

Mindy: You said before that you had toyed with and developed your craft in different areas of art, you were painting and you were also in a band yourself. So you took this route of being a roadie in doing this work. What made you say, I think I want to try writing?

Tavi: Well I always secretly wanted to be a writer. When I was probably in high school or even at seven, I was writing stories but I got discouraged really young by a couple of people. One was a friend who just said, oh you better stick to painting after I had written my first play. And and then another was a tutor in high school who just was like, you're awful, basically, you shouldn't even bother. I feel like, wow, if I could ever go back, I would just talk to myself and say, don't listen to those people, they're just haters.

So I secretly wrote. I wrote in journals. I wrote songs. Finally the other art forms just weren't very portable for touring. I was pretty old when I decided - I'm going to actually write. I must have been about 35. I got a cabin in the Keys by myself and I said, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna sit in there for five days and if I don't come out with 50 pages, I'm not a writer. So I went and I did that and I wrote the 1st 50 pages of a novel of course that I never finished. It got me started. And so I just started writing, I'm like, I'm going to write a novel. And then of course, I realized quickly that I didn't really know what I was doing. And so I took a class at the U. Dub here in Washington and then I decided, oh, I need to go back to school because I've always loved school.

And so I went back and got my M. F. A. I I felt like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be the oldest person. When I stepped onto the campus, one of the people in the registrar's office was somebody who had just gotten out of undergrad. And she looked at me, and she was going in the program, she said, are you one of the professors? But you can write at any age doesn't matter.

Mindy: Of course you can. I think it's interesting that you had those experiences of negativity early on. I mean, I can tell you, I finished my first novel when I was in college, so I was like 19 years old and it was really, really bad and I’ve talked about this before. It's not false modesty, it's not - no, tell me it was beautiful, you know. It was really bad and that's okay. No one is an amazing writer when they are 15, 16, 17 years old. You have to give yourself that grace and that space to grow and improve. And I think way too often there are those people in young writers' lives, whoever they are, and even if they think that they're positively motivated by saying - don't waste your time. You don't know what you could be discouraging there. Everyone has to have that space to bloom and grow.

Tavi: That's okay, I'm here and everything teaches us something. Obstacles are good. It really just shows that I did actually want to be a writer if I kept going after all that and finally did it. And of course as soon as I got into grad school, it was the first place in my life, honestly that I ever felt like, oh, I belong here. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. Just took a long time to sort that out. Some of us are late bloomers and I've come to terms with that.

Mindy: Obstacles are good. I like that statement and I think that that probably can be applied pretty easily to the publishing industry. So let's talk about how you moved from writing to that process of becoming published. What was your course? You had an MFA, you wrote your book? What was that path?

Tavi: It is so long and winding, like so many writers. And as I was coming along, I loved to hear these stories because like I said, I worked on that one novel for 12 years. But of course, there are other novels. The first story I got accepted into - a literary magazine - I was so excited about. I was just out of school, I got a call on my birthday that said, actually, we're not going to publish it. I was like, you're kidding. Like, the first one I got accepted and the woman was like, you know, the editor just cut yours and I'm so mad about it and I'm sorry. And so there's that.

And then, I got second place in a contest, I got the check and the check bounced. I was like, oh my God. So this is sort of the way that it's gone. And I've tried over the years to get agents and I've had a lot of agents interested who all at the last minute said, actually - I think maybe not. Okay, what's next? And sort of strategize and after chasing agents for a long time, I finally just said I'm going to go straight to a small press and see. I was fortunate that Touch Point Press has been really supportive of this book and they accepted it.

They wanted to see some changes. As a writer, you have to be willing to hear this isn't good enough yet. You have to be willing to dig in, tear it apart again. This book has gone from first person to third person. It was past tense, then present tense and past tense again. Now, Touch Point is going to publish my second book as well, which was actually what I started working on in my MFA program.

Mindy: That's wonderful. So, tell us a little bit about that second book.

Tavi: The second book is completely different. It's a historical novel that is set on the coast of Maine in 1913, with a woman who has a maid on the estate. She's 17 and the estate owners and the servants' lives get entangled and there's a jewel heist. This one's more plot driven. It's kind of fun.

Mindy: Going the route of having an independent publisher gives you that freedom. I mean, I'm lucky I get to hop around. I write across various genres. I don't know why my publisher allows me to do this but I think it might partially be because I've never really hit really big with any one genre, so they're never pigeon holing me, quite. But I love that you are just writing so widely and so diversely.

Tavi: I'm just interested in a lot of things and now I'm working on middle grade. My daughter and I started working on it when the pandemic hit, just as a school project sort of like let's do some writing! And we've just had so much fun and now we're writing a series.

Mindy: I love that, I think that that is beautiful. Middle grade is not something I would ever be able to write and I just say that as far as my voice. My voice is pretty, it's dark, my interests are pretty rough and - not that middle grade doesn't pack a punch. It certainly does. I don't have the wide eyed wonder, I'm more acerbic.

Tavi: Yeah, I don't think I would have done it without my daughter. But she is just so full of ideas, she's just an idea gal, and she just throws them at me and we work it out and it’s been fun in that way. I don't know that I would have done it by myself, but now that I'm into this world, I'm really into this world, so that's really cool.

Mindy: I like that a lot, I think too, speaking of going directly to the publisher, I'm a proponent of agents. Like I'll just say that up front, but I know a lot of authors, because I have one foot in both worlds, I self published under a pen name and I also write trad. My publisher in the trad Pub world is HarperCollins, I do both and I love both. Like, there are pros and cons to both and straddling them has been super fun and I really enjoy it. After having the experiences that I've had in the indie world, I’ve really come to understand the attraction of absolutely and totally being your own person, like all the time. Which my agent doesn't like, tell me what to write or anything like that. There are pros and cons to absolutely and completely being your own person and handling everything yourself - but you are literally doing everything yourself.

Tavi: It's true. I mean if I'm being honest, I would love to have an agent. I really could use a partner navigating all of this because. All day long now what I do is send out queries, try to do marketing, to have somebody to sort of grow with would be really excellent. I haven't given up on that idea, I have to move on. I have to be able to somehow publish my books. Touch Point has been amazing in that I can reach out to them and I can talk to them. That's a real advantage of working with them to sort of strategize and figure out the next steps in getting the book out there. It's a big wide world of publishing. I mean, I really feel like I've taken a crash course in the last couple of years or maybe the last 10 years. How does publishing work?

Mindy: Or does publishing work? Sometimes it feels like. So when I first started trying to get into the publishing world back in like 2005, self publishing was like a dirty word. It really was only for people that couldn't make it for the most part. Production was sloppy. There just simply weren't the resources there that there are now and now, like I said, I participate in it, I self publish under a pen name and I am proud of what I produce under that name. It's not my brand, like it goes against my brand as Mindy McGinnis, but it's stories that I have in me, it's fun, it's loopy, it's silly. It's stuff that I can get out and still be producing rather than just writing one book a year.

Tavi: Well, but the thing is you have the advantage of knowing what you know now, like, I think with self publishing, the danger is that you're going to put out something that's not ready. The good thing is that there are gatekeepers that I'm so glad I didn't publish the draft of the book that I had six years ago, it's a much better book now. And I think that if you're a first time author, maybe it's not a good idea to self publish, because you need those gatekeepers. It's better to keep going and get the book that you want and it should be out there. But you've got the advantage of like, you know, what's a good book at this point? You've done this, you've got a lot of books out there. You can self publish because you're not going to put out something that's not up to your quality, right?

Mindy: And that is a really, really good point. And I have thought about that myself many, many times because I was trying for 10 years to get an agent. It took me 10 years and five novels and I wanted to quit so many times and I wanted to self publish. And I am so glad I didn't because then there would be very, very subpar books out there with my name on them.

Tavi: Exactly. And you can't take them back now.

Mindy: No. Now there are people out there with them on their Kindles and I would be so embarrassed. I would be so embarrassed if that was the case because what I was producing early on, I wasn't doing a good job. You said earlier, you've got to be able to process the feedback and the criticism and improve and I wasn't doing that. Very much in the early stages, I was like, no, I'm a genius and you will respect my work. I was 19. Last thing, let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your book, Where Are We Tomorrow?

Tavi: So I have a website, it's just to TaviBlack.com or TaviTaylorBlack.com. My book is published under Tavi Taylor Black. And I also have a podcast myself. It's called The Personal Element that I co host with another writer. We take personal essays that we really like and we have the author read them and then we talk about what we like about the essay.

Mindy: That is super cool because essays are an art form that are underappreciated.

Tavi: They are and I honestly was not somebody who I've written some, but I've never published personal essays, mostly just short stories and things like that. But my friend Christine Young, who's a writer, does personal essays. We have seven episodes out there, but it turns out that I love it and I guess you know, you've been doing it for a long time, it's actually quite fun to do a podcast.

Mindy: I love doing it, I love meeting people and talking to them and like after my conversations, I'm always energized and interested in something new and like you never know what's going to open up for you.

Tavi: And so you can find that podcast, The Personal Element anywhere that you get your podcasts or Personal Element Podcast.com or there's a link from my website as well. And my book’s on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Amazon Bestselling Author JK Ellem On Knowing Your Strengths & Limitations

January 24, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We're here with Jack Ellem who writes under the name JK Ellem and has had tremendous success in the indie world with publishing and especially on Amazon. So Jack's here to talk to us about writing specifically thriller fiction, crime fiction and achieving self publishing success. So, I mean, first of all, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you write and why you decided to go with indie publishing over traditional?

Jack: Super happy for the invite to be here today. I came to this with no experience at all, nothing. The indie path gave me a way to learn the craft, to learn how to write and to how to put stories together. So I wasn't the type of person that was going to work on a manuscript for a year or two years and then submit it to 100 agents and then just get rejected. I thought two years of my time - that's quite a waste. So I thought, look, write a book, write the first book, test it. I'm always keen on testing the market. I've got a business background. What I've learned is that get your product out there, 80% done or 90% happy with and let the market decide and get some valuable feedback and then go on to book two and implement those improvements and get more feedback and go into book three.

And indie publishing allows you to do that. It allows you to find your way, to get experience. But more importantly allows you to test the market and get your stories into the hands of readers quickly and get feedback quickly. Traditional publishing doesn't allow that. By the time you finish a manuscript, it could be another 18 months until it hits the bookstores. Indie publishing appeals to me, Mindy, from the get go purely because it's almost like social media, it's instant response. You can put something up and you can get some feedback, good, bad or indifferent and that's what I wanted. I didn't want to spend two or three years of my life crafting a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which I wouldn't have done anyway, and realize after two or three years of blood, sweat and tears that hey, it was the wrong genre or I've picked the wrong audience or I've tried to follow the market and it hasn't worked. Indie publishing allows you to be extremely flexible, nimble, you can pivot, you can change direction and you can write across multiple genres from there. So it's purely the flexibility and the ability to interact directly with your readers on a shorter timescale was what made indie publishing so attractive.

Mindy: Very attractive. I agree. So I have one foot in each. I do write under my real name, in the traditional publishing world, but I also write under a pen name in the indie. And it has been so much fun. I was very grateful. Some friends of mine encouraged me to enter into that world and to write with them to co author some books, kind of experiment and see what we could do and accomplish. And I agree wholeheartedly about the turnaround because in the traditional publishing world, you know, my books are coming out about 18 months after I finish writing and editing. So when they hit the shelves, my attention has already turned elsewhere. I've written another book since then, I'm in the midst of editing something else. Also, just to watch your list of available titles grow so quickly. When you're in the trad world it's one a year and when you're in the indie world it's as many as you can produce.

Jack: That’s it. And that's one of the appeals. I've got a lot of friends in the traditional publishing sphere and I wonder what they do for the rest of the year. It would drive me crazy. You've got the lever on the production cycle. You can increase it, you can slow it down, you can go flat out and do four or five books a year. Or you can do just one. You don't have that control when it's trad publishing.

Mindy: I also of course love what you said about pivoting. So if you see a trend, if something is happening now, that's hot in trad publishing. If it's trending now, it's too late for you to get on that bandwagon by the time you have your book finished written, polished edited with a cover, the trend is going to be cooling if not already over. By the time your book hits the shop. Not so with indie pub, as fast as you can write it, you can get it out there and you can cash in on what's hot right now.

Jack: And the other thing I thought was odd. I've heard a lot of trad authors, their publisher or the agent will come to them and say, hey look, we want you to write this, want you to write the next Girl On the Train. I think for the bulk of traditionally published authors, they are led a lot by their agent and by the publisher because they're all thinking, well I need the next two book deal. I need the next two book deal. I don't want to be dropped by my publisher. So sometimes they get pigeonholed into having to write what their agent or what their publisher thinks is going to be the next trend. If I see another Girl On the Train or a Woman In the Window or A Man In the Door sort of book, I'm going to go insane.

Mindy: That was the thing for a while - a person in the house. It can happen, especially in the trial world, you can get pigeonholed. That has not been my experience, so I can't speak to it. But that's partially because I write across genres and my publisher is fairly open with me and lets me hop around and kind of do what I want, to be honest with you. But also I do write YA. I write for teens and that is a little more forgiving of an age category when it comes to changing genres. I don't know that the adult world is the same. I could be wrong about that.

Dystopian had a really, really long tail. And then vampires. The one thing that is true about traditional publishing is that if there's something that is hot, it does tend to last a little longer because it does take time for that book, whatever it is that hit - Twilight of course, sparking off vampires, Hunger Games, really ushering in dystopia. And then Girl On the Train bringing in the unreliable narrator, thriller - Gone Girl as well, I think we can attribute to that. But those lasted for years. Gosh, vampires for like 12, 15 years.

In those mega cases, yes, you can write to a trend and still expect some success. You have to decide whether it's not that that's what you actually want, which is I think something that you're pointing at. One of my only frustrations and it is a frustration, still trying to figure out many things in the indie world. The trends do tend to change much more quickly. You have to be nimble and you have to be ready to tap into what's hot and be prepared to write it, I think, but also be prepared to have it be over quickly as well. In some ways I feel a crunch with Indie, it's true of trad too, I wouldn't say that it's disparate, but if something's hot, you need to be writing it right now or you're going to miss that train.

I wanna hop onto something that you said initially as soon as you got here, you said you have a background in business. So obviously that would be a huge benefit to you going into the indie world because you have to be a business person to do this.

Jack: Well, It is an advantage, but it can also be a hindrance because if you've got to enter into this world with a bit of an open mind. There are some fundamentals you can still apply, like planning and having a strategic plan and mapping out your business plan for the next 12 months and books you're going to write and marketing you're going to do. But it's a different type of industry. With a normal business within the law, you're free to do what you want to. With the publishing industry, it's still, I find it's still a very closed shop. Even though you're publishing independently, there's still the effects of traditional publishers there, you know, the massive publishers and they do influence trends. So it's a case of trying to work out how as an indie author you can still grow a client base of readership and still influence that readership while all the time you've got some big players in the room. But there's enough of the pie for everyone. So having some business skills, having run a business and having to get your product or your book on the virtual bookshelf still applies.

Mindy: What industry were you in before you came into publishing?

Jack: I originally had an accounting firm and I was very much into the planning, the business planning. I did a course, I went to Harvard and Boston and did a course on launching new ventures and I felt that that really helped. Getting your book, getting your story into the market and testing, testing, testing was what they really pushed during that programs and it's like a startup. You are a startup of one when you're an indie publisher, whether you've written 10 books or you're bringing out your first book, you are a startup of one and you need to approach it like you don't have an infinite budget. You could easily spend, waste tens of thousands of dollars on marketing and your product could crash and burn. So you've got to have that approach of being a lean mean startup.

Mindy: What did you bring with you that translated and what did you have to learn from scratch to go from accounting into publishing?

Jack: I think what I had to learn from scratch was the entire industry. Was how to get your books out there from the production side. You know, should I go wide? Should I go with Kobo, Apple, everyone, Barnes and Noble? Or should I go narrow and just focus on Amazon? And you never stop learning from that side of it. So it was learning how the industry works and learning about paid ads and Facebook and Amazon ads and how to do a really good cover, how to do a really good tagline. And I guess elements of marketing.

I've always been a person that I go against the grain. I'm contrary and I look at what every other competitor or what every other book or author is doing out there and I try to do the exact opposite. I always had that mindset of - don't follow the herd. Whether you're writing a book or whether you are running a company with 100 staff, just don't follow what everyone else is doing because you'll never stand out from the crowd. Iff you can imagine 10 million books on Amazon all vying for your attention. If you throw yourself into that sea of sameness, and say I'm going to write a book, you'll drown in with everyone else. What I brought to the table from my business days was you've got to be brash and you've got to stand out from the crowd and that's what really changed some of the marketing that we did. And that's what sort of created some of these books that just took off into the stratosphere purely because of the marketing being different. Don't be the next Girl On the Train. And so basically learning everything I could about the industry and then bringing those elements of being different, standing out from the crowd. That's the fundamentals that I brought to the table.

Mindy: And everything you just mentioned is all aside from actually writing the book.

Jack: That’s it. That's probably one of the takeaways. I'd say to your listeners, if you're starting off and you think marketing looks like a daunting task, focus on writing the books. You’re spot on. Was it, Bella Andre, the romance author said - oh and this is a woman that's written nearly 50 books and she's hybrid too. She's done multi million dollar deals as well as independently published and you think, oh well she'll sit back on our laurels now and and push out one book a year. But no, she's still writing four or five books. Her number one marketing rule is - the best thing you can do for marketing is get your next book out, that's it.

Mindy: In the trad publishing industry, something that I learned there that definitely translated over to Indie and not all things do, but - front list sells backlist. If you put out a new book, it draws attention to your old, particularly with Amazon, which I want to focus on for a little bit here because I know that you had great success with Amazon. The Amazon algorithm is a magical formula that no one has really any access to because it is in fact the golden fleece of the publishing industry. But one of the things that we can say about Amazon is that it does tend to reward newness. It likes the shiny new thing and I think that the importance of putting out that next book, like you're saying, is very, very true. Like you got to stay relevant and you've got to be putting something out. With those things in mind, I want to go back to what you were saying about standing apart. That is the trick - making something that is similar yet distinct. That is the absolute challenge. Talk about how you developed something that wasn't the next Girl On the Train, but it's going to appeal to the same audience.

Jack: Great question. I did two things. I'm going to be very specific here because I think your listeners will benefit from this. I was running Facebook ads a couple of years back. I got to a point where I was spending 100,000 a year. What revenue it created, royalties it created went back into Facebook ads. It was just breaking even. I'm thinking, well I'm making Facebook rich, but I'm not really getting ahead. Everything I earned went back in to pay for more ads that went back into ads. I would do the typical thing of looking at my genre and looking at what everyone else was advertising. After 12 months I realized that hey, my ads looked like everyone else's ads. If I was looking at a thriller book, you'd see an ad pop up in your feed. It would be a picture of a thriller book. It would be, you know, Mindy hunts serial killers in Ohio. And I'm thinking, well there's already 10 books, you know of Mindy or a similar person hunting serial killers in Ohio. And I'm thinking they all look the same.

And this was going back, I think to 2018. I look like everyone else. It feels like everyone else. And I hit upon this idea, my wife was addicted to her cell phone. Just loves reading the news. She just loves reading the news on her cellphone. The key here is to design an ad for a book that doesn't look like an ad for a book. And that was the challenge I set myself. So what I did was that I came up with a breaking news ad. I didn't have a picture of the book. Nothing. I just had at the top of the ad, Breaking News. And I had it in red and automatically, I thought, well people's eyes go to that. They want to see what's breaking news. Let's have an ad that's not an ad, but it's a news story for a crime that's just happened.

Start off with one of my books, A Winter’s Kill, which is about a serial killer in the midwest. Breaking News: Ex special agent returns to her hometown not realizing that the number one serial killer in the country has moved there, too. As soon as I put that up, it just took off. It differentiated itself from all the other ads people were getting because it didn't look like an ad for a thriller novel. It looked like a piece of breaking news. A Winter’s Kill just took off.

I did that again with another book. You tested it, it worked. Do it again. So I had a book called All Other Sins. Breaking News: housewife from Nebraska finds $1 million dollars on the side of the road. And I did that ad and it just took off as well. That's where everything pivoted. I went from the normal, here's my cover. It's about a woman. It's about a serial killer, blah, blah, blah. Everyone goes, yes, we’ve seen that. If you talk about the Facebook algorithm when an ad does well, it's just self perpetuates and they keep pushing it in front of as many people as possible. That was the turning point where I said, I've got to do ads that don't look like ads for what I'm trying to sell. And we're all trying to sell something. It then moves on to the next trend. You tend to saturate what you're doing. So you've got to always come up with the next one.

Mindy: I have not found the best way to do an ad for my audiences. Now. Of course, I'm speaking about my pen name here. I agree completely that you have to be prepared to put money into it if you want to use ads. But I also like what you're saying, you have to find that sweet spot in between. Because if you're just making enough money selling books on your ads in order to run more ads, that's not a good business. You mentioned Facebook ads and you mentioned AMS, which is Amazon ads. I'm curious how you approached Amazon then, because I think those ads would be a little trickier in terms of not making it look like an ad for a book. So how did you find success there?

Jack: On the Amazon ads? We didn't. We tried to copy the same formula across and you’re correct. Spot on. It's a different type of platform that didn't allow that sort of flexibility. The bulk of the success came from running the actual Facebook ads. And like I said, it's one of these things - you don't want to be so distracted that your next book is pushed back in publication. Having to learn AMS. And then you're having to learn Tiktok ads or you're having to learn doing ads on Twitter and so on. That could suck up a lot of time. And I know authors that haven't put stuff out for months and months because eight hours a day, they're trying to work out how to crack an algorithm on an ad platform and you've lost direction. So you've got to be very quick, you put a small amount into this platform and then test it from then. My advice is is stick with one. Master one. And like we still haven't mastered Facebook ads. We stopped our Facebook ads at the moment. To tell you the truth, we're doing a refresh on that. Don't try and straddle across. While I'm doing Facebook ads today and then I've got to learn how to do AMS ads and maybe I can do Twitter ads - someone said they were great. You're only going to scratch the surface on a couple of them. Pick one that you like, that you can understand, that it's easier to do. Become a master of that particular ad platform.

Mindy: And those ads will suck money pretty quickly. You have to keep an eye on them. Don't just set it and forget it because they will spend.

Jack: Absolutely. They've got your credit card, they'll just take it out every month. It can be daunting at the end of the day.

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Mindy: Common mistakes. What are some really common mistakes - beyond letting yourself be sucked away from the actual job of writing the book - what are some common mistakes? Things that you see writers right out of the gate doing as not a good choice?

Jack: Writing a series and that's going to maybe sound contradictory to what some people think. But right from the get go out of the gate, I'm going to write three books. I'm going to write five books. This is going to be a 10 book series. I'm going to tell everyone on my Facebook page, hey, this is book one of 10 or book one of three, and then they lose interest after the first book. But I think if you're starting out, you're still finding your way. My advice would be to do a couple of stand alones, but do them quickly. Find out what you like. Find out what the readers like. It doesn't matter if they're different genres, test the market with a few stand alone. Every new book that I write is not part of a series. It's got the potential to be a series. Let the reader decide based on the uptake and the sales and the reviews.

And Mill Point Road, which was probably the most successful book I've had, I never intended it to be a series. It was a standalone. It was done and dusted, page 350, The end it was done. People started coming back - when are you going to write the next one? What happens to Becca? As an author, starting out, just write a couple of standalones, let your readers tell you what they enjoy and then follow that muse from there.

And I think the other one - write the books, don't be distracted. I've got to do a course on this. I've got to do AMS ads, no. Put your Facebook page up, put your business page up and post regularly into that. Don't worry about having to run ads at this stage. Your ads will happen once you've got enough contacts on your Facebook. Write the books, get two or three up and just focus on you, finding yourself what you like to write.

Mindy: And what the readers want to read. I agree with that entirely. My partners and I, when we did our first series, we initially said this was going to be a seven book series. And we finished out the seven book series, but the first one did well and then, you know, the readers fell off and by the time we cranked out the sixth or seventh one, we knew there wasn't gonna be a great read through. The trend itself had already passed. And we were feverishly working on the next thing because we wanted to get that out and get that out there because we were working on an old thing that was already halfway dead. So yeah, that's very true.

Jack: Yeah, don't commit.

Mindy: I agree too, on having a little bit more to sell than just one book before you really start investing money in ads and things like that. I think that's important. I know that it's really easy to lose your shirt when you first jump in. You get excited and you hear stories of people throwing up a book and waking up in the morning and they've made $100,000. That might happen once to one person, but it's probably not going to be you.

Jack: Now that you mentioned it, one of the mistakes that I did make is having to long of a stretch between books. I think now I make sure that once I've got a book ready to be published in the back of it there's a pre order for the next one, or for the next standalone or for the next in the series. Maybe write two or 3 books before you even publish the first one and then put them all up. If you don't have anything they'll go to someone else, they'll go to another author. So it's not unheard of to break down that 120,000 word book into three smaller books.

Mindy: Especially with the e book readers and the readers and the genre readers, mystery and romance in particular. They will binge a series and if you have it ready for them they will buy it. I want to talk about Mill Point Road. That is your book that really broke you through. I'm looking at its listing on Amazon, it has over 2000 ratings. That's wonderful.

Jack: I call it the wrong turn book. I find the marketing success and the writing success is never deliberate. It just happens, you stumbled across it. So, Mill Point Road, I call the wrong turn book. I was in Maryland, in 2019. And we're driving around, my wife and I, we got lost in the countryside and I took a wrong turn, crested this hill and on the top of the hill there was this ridge with all five of these mansions, really beautiful houses in this gated community and the road was called Mill Point Road. And I said to my wife, I turned to and said, I wonder what happens up there behind closed doors? And that's the genesis of the book. I spent the next couple of days in Hagerstown and outlined a book. If I hadn't taken that wrong turn Mill Point Road wouldn't have come into existence. So that's really the genesis of the book. The best ideas just tend to happen.

Mindy: They do and when that inspiration hits you must grab it.

Jack: That's it, literally. I was scouting for locations. People probably drove by me while I was walking down the side of the road trying to find a good place to put a body.

Mindy: Yeah, I’ve been there

Jack: I just had to stay there longer and outline this book. Came back and wrote it and it wasn’t an overnight success. But once again I did something different to the marketing with that book and it took off.

Mindy: Looking at your Amazon listing, you're doing all the things that you're supposed to do. You've got a great cover, you've got a great tagline - Five Women, Five Dark Secrets, One Killer Who Knows Them All. You've got your keywords that are worked into your subtitle - a serial killer, mystery and suspense crime thriller. Those little tiny things that you can do that are going to return for you on SEO returns on search returns.

Jack: And that's something that I never knew about, but I had to learn about. How to, you know, put your keywords in there, try and cover as many genres in that subtitle so the algorithm will throw it up to people that are interested in crime. They're interested in domestic thrillers, they're interested in mystery and suspense.

Mindy: Listeners may not know, but especially the platform Google Play, it's entirely run by an algorithm. It’s entirely run by bots. And so if someone searches on Google Play, they're looking for a serial killer thriller, mystery suspense. Because Jack has all of these keywords in there, it might pop up Mill Point Road. If people click on it and then they buy it, the algorithm has learned - serial killer, mystery, suspense thriller - give them Mill Point Road, they'll buy it and it'll keep doing it, it'll keep throwing you in front of them. I see you also have an audio book. Why don't you talk to me a little bit about audiobook production in the indie world?

Jack: It took a lot of time and a lot of learning. So we made the strategic decision that if we're going to do audio books, we were going to sell the rights to that. I just didn't have the time to look at production and how we produce an audiobook, selecting your narrators. And I was approached by a company out of the UK that said, we'd like to buy the rights to Mill Point Road and every other book in that series. So I said no problem. And away we go.

You cannot, as an indie author, you can't do everything. And you know that Mindy, you'll get burnout, you'll go insane. Be willing to break off parts of your product. If you can make a book and then there's a paperback and there's an e book and there's an audio book to it. You need to view them as individual products that you can easily snap off and sell to someone that's good at doing distribution on a paperback. Everything I've got is for sale. I've got a company out of the UK at the moment that is looking at the foreign rights translations. So just think about that. You've got one product. But within that one product of your book there are multiple products and you don't have to get them all to the market. What you need to get to the market is that initial book. I just want more readers or more listeners, whatever platforms, whatever countries. I just want more of those people. And if someone can come onboard and partner and I’m all about that then. Just because you're an indie author doesn't mean the door is closed on those options, you've got to approach it as I've got a product, I can break it off and I can sell that version of it to an expert.

Mindy: You own the rights and that's one of the key things is that, I know under my pen name we've sold rights to serial fiction apps that they buy the novel and they break it up into episodes. I'm not going to produce that, I don't have time, They do it and they pay me for the product. So yes, I agree. You let those professionals deal with their corner of the world and you provide the material.

Jack: I had a friend of mine, he's a thriller author and he spent literally 18 months and did nothing but translate one of his books into German. Everything else stopped. All his writing. The fact is halfway through it, he hated it, but he couldn't stop. He had started. The train had started rolling and he couldn't get off. I think you have to have therapy. Another thing, I guess the tip to your listeners is - know your limitations. At the time we may think we can conquer the world, but stick to what you're good at and if you're good at writing and getting the books out then stick to that. You're much better in the engine room rather than anywhere else on the ship.

Mindy: Completely agreed with that. Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your books?

Jack: Everyone can just go to my website, JK Ellem. J K double L E M dot com and you can find all my links to my books, the audiobooks and all other information about me.

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