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 Kathryn Holmes who has a lot of experience across different areas of the publishing world including different genres, age groups, as well as co-authoring, and soloing. So Katherine is going to talk to us about all kinds of different stuff, but the first thing that I wanna jump into is talking about writing across age groups, because specifically with what you write in between - which is YA and middle grade - if you are a writer, you're aware that those differences are pretty vast, but at the same time, as a reader, it might feel more subtle. So if you could talk a little bit about the writing differences between YA, middle grade, and then, of course, chapter books.
Kathryn: I started out in YA and published two young adult novels in 2015 and 2016, and at that time, I thought I was a YA writer. And then unfortunately, I couldn't sell another YA novel - which happens to a lot of us for various reasons. And so I was kind of throwing some things at the wall trying different things. My agent encouraged me to try different things, and one of the things that she threw my way was an audition for a chapter book IP - a write for hire project. And I had never written for this age group. So chapter books are like six to nine-year-olds, first to third grade, maybe fourth grade, and I never tried it. But I didn't have anything else on my docket at the time, so I gave it a try, and I didn't get that job. But I really liked it. I really liked trying to get into the head of a first and second grade audience. So I started working on my own, and that's what eventually came out was my Class Critters series, and there's three books of those out. And they're about the second grade classroom where every kid turns into an animal for a day.
The thing that I found about writing for that age group is, obviously the language is a little less sophisticated than it is in YA, and for me, I often found that in my first drafts, I would use language that was too sophisticated. And then as I went through the editorial process, a lot of times, both myself and then my editor would be like, we can say this in a more simple, straightforward way. Let's just say it. But then also just thinking about the concerns of a second grade character, a seven-year-old, versus the concerns of a teenager. For some reason, I really didn't have a lot of trouble getting into the head of the second graders. Like, thinking about the things they are worried about... Their friend dynamics, pleasing the authority figures in their life - their teachers and their parents - wanting to succeed and wanting to fit in in their classroom, and wanting to have fun. I feel like there were two kind of changes I had to make. I had to really think about the language and the vocabulary that I was using, and then getting into their heads. Now, it helps that I have a five-year-old. So I spend a lot of time at the playground. I found myself really observing the young elementary schoolers as I was working on these and just watching them interact. What are the things that are causing conflict between them? Or what are the ways that they resolve those conflicts?
Mindy: I have never attempted to write for a younger age group. I have written YA, and that is what I am published under. I have certainly considered writing adult, and I have a few manuscripts that are just like under the bed for adult. But I have never considered going lower simply because, it's not that it doesn't interest me, but I do enjoy a little more complicated vocabulary. My humor is a little dark for one thing, but it's also very, very subtle. And I don't know if the things that I think are funny or the way that I present things would ever work in middle grade or in a chapter book. So I do know that the way to a child's heart is fart jokes. So it's like...
Kathryn: The thing about my series is that every book is told from the point of view of a different kid. It's two girls and one boy, so far, and the boy book is obviously kind of sillier and jokier. So he turns into a dog, and there is a moment where I had him figure out how he was going to pee because what would a seven-year-old boy want to do when he turns into a dog? Left his leg and pee on a bush. The two girl books are a little different. And one thing that I found though, talking about different age groups, is that the things that I'm interested in I think remain the same no matter what age I'm writing for. I'm interested in characters figuring out how they fit in - whether that's fitting into their friend group, or their family unit, or expectations that people have of them. The dynamics of feeling shy and wanting to put yourself out there versus the kids who are really obviously able to put themselves out there, and then what happens when they have a moment of crisis? I feel like I'm constantly coming back to the same emotional themes. It just is bringing them to different age groups.
Mindy: Feelings are universal, and that is something that we tend to forget. And we tend to believe that we're a little bit more sophisticated as we get older, and while some of the thought processes might be the core, the base, the emotions, and the experiences, do tend to be essentially the same. You're talking about fitting in. The worst thing that can happen to a human being is rejection or exile. Those feelings and those themes, they really do continue through onto adulthood. It's just that maybe in adulthood we're worried about divorce. Whereas in kindergarten, we're just like, I really hope they let me sit with them at lunch.
Kathryn: So my second YA novel, How It Feels to Fly, is about a girl who has anxiety and body image issues, and she has a negative voice in her head. And she kind of has to figure out as a teenager how to fight back against that voice that's cutting her down in her head. And I actually came back to that in the third Class Critters book but with a seven-year-old who gets a negative voice in her head telling her that she's not gonna be able to do this thing that she wants to do, and that she's not good enough. So like you said, it's a universal experience and maybe the sophistication of how you talk about it is different, but it's certainly not a problem that is specific to one age group or one demographic. So yeah, it was really fun to dive back into that same issue, but think about it from how would you counsel a second grader through this situation.
Mindy: So talk to me about the writing and production schedule when we're talking about chapter books, because in the YA world, generally, you want to be producing a book a year. And I believe the same is true of middle grade. So when you're producing chapter books, which are of course shorter and thinner, what is that like in terms of your production schedule?
Kathryn: All three of the chapter books in my series came out in a single calendar year. I was writing them with about six-month turnaround. You know, starting to draft it, to getting it to copy edit. Turn around is definitely a lot tighter, but it also helped me really stay in the world and stay in the voice, 'cause I wasn't working on a ton of things in between. I was really kind of committed to those three books for that year and a half of time. So it actually didn't feel that tight of a timeline because I could write a first draft of it in a couple of weeks easily, and then take the time to revise it and get it to my editor.
Mindy: And what's the typical word count length on those?
Kathryn: Mine are about 10 or 11,000 words. They can go as low as five or six, and those tend to be for maybe early readers, like first graders and second graders. And then up to 10 or 11,000, which is kind of the third or fourth grade. They're for newly independent readers. So they're not for really starting to read, because they do have a little bit more sophisticated language than that. But they're for the kids who are independently reading, and so now they're ready to kind of try a slightly longer book format for them.
Mindy: Same question, kind of in the different arena - talking about jumping between those age categories, and obviously, when you're writing a book a year for YA and they are longer, your advance is going to be a little larger. When you're talking about writing three books a year, when you're writing chapter books, what is your payment like?
Kathryn: I was offered $30,000 for the three books. So 10k a book. And it is my understanding that that is a pretty good pay rate for chapter books. I haven't spoken to a ton of other authors about what they have gotten, but it is my understanding that that is a good advance. Honestly, when you break that down, that is a better per word rate than I received for my YA novels.
Mindy: Yeah.
Kathryn: If you think about the amount of work that you're doing. So I was quite happy with that. Like other book deals, I got the 50% of the total upfront, and then the remaining 50% with each book when I turned that in, 15 up front, and then five and five and five with each book when I turned it in. It's not enough to live on, but comparatively for the amount of actual words that I'm producing, I've found that writing shorter books pays a little bit better.
Mindy: You just said... You're so right, you're writing income not necessarily being enough to live on. I think I said it before on this podcast, but I'll say it again, only about 1% of published writers actually live off of their writing income. Very, very many of us are either working part-time, full-time jobs, we have spouses that supports ways, whether it's insurance and retirement and all of those things, 'cause we don't have that, but also side gigs. So you also, much like myself, operate in the freelance world with writing-related gigs. You have experience with journalism, ghost writing, copy editing. So talk to me about how you get yourself established in those side gigs and also what that is like in terms of that freelance life.
Kathryn: My first job out of college was as a magazine editor at a group of dance magazines. I was and am a dancer as well as a writer, and I did that for a couple of years. And then decided I wanted to go to grad school for fiction and get back into fiction writing, which I had left behind. But basically, when I left that job, I kept accepting journalism freelance assignments from them, and I am still doing that 15 years later - kind of a piecemeal article by article, a couple hundred dollars here, a couple of hundred dollars there - but I enjoy doing it, and I have been doing it for long enough that I'm really immersed in that world. So that's one of my side gigs is writing magazine articles about dance.
I've done freelance copy editing. I've done ghostwriting. For that, I had created a Reedsy profile. I'm sure some of your other guests have talked about Reedsy, the online marketplace where you can advertise your writing and editing services. I have worked with self-published authors and helped them improve their drafts before publication, and got that through Reedsy. I've done marketing copywriting. I, basically a few years ago, decided if someone will pay me to do something related to words, I will probably do it as long as it does not keep me entirely from doing my own writing. You have to earn money, but you don't wanna take on too many extra gigs that you can't actually do the thing that you want to be doing, or the reason that you're doing it all. I should also state that I am very lucky to have a spouse in a full-time tech job, so I do not have to worry about insurance. I have a lean month or a lean year, let's say. Last year I had a lean year. Luckily, I have a spouse who has a full-time steady job, and so I am able to kinda cobble together the freelance lifestyle.
Mindy: It is rough. I also freelance. I do not have a spouse, so I don't have insurance or retirement or anything like that. I obviously release a YA novel once a year, and that is the majority of my income, but I also write underneath a pen name. I do offer editorial services, both under my own shingle, and then also I do operate under a different name in the non-fiction world for people with their book proposals. And of course, I also have this blog and podcast, and I do co-authoring with some friends. Right, you do have to say, "Yes, I need these side gigs in order to keep my head above water, but I also have to be careful that I am not interfering with my main bread and butter - which is my fiction."
Kathryn: Specifically when I was doing the marketing copywriting job, I had an hourly requirement per week. So at least I knew I had a baseline of money that was coming in, unlike articles, which are more kind of here and there. Money comes in as it comes in the same way as published books. All of my creative brain time was going toward this marketing job, and eventually I was like, "I'm not doing the writing that I need to be doing. I'm just writing marketing copy." I had to let go of that, and I need to find a way to bring in enough income to make that happen. But also I'm a parent and child care man costs... I have to say when my daughter was little, I was not earning enough really to justify additional child care. There's that balance also of like how many hours per week can I get someone to watch my kids so that I can write on the hope of one day earning money? Such a juggling act.
Mindy: Yeah. It is hard, and it's something that I struggle with as well. You only have a finite amount of brain power, energy, and time that can be directed towards things, and some of the work that I do is a slug. I would never claim that I absolutely enjoy every minute of everything that I do. I do have the different wheel houses where I find personally that drafting creatively and writing from scratch and creating my own stuff, that drains me pretty quickly. I can and I have spent hours in front of the laptop just grinding and getting a first draft out, but I don't prefer to work that way. I would rather write a thousand words a day, and I can do that fairly quickly. And then I've got the rest of the day to do the work that I might be a little less excited about. But it is nice to switch gears and jump into my editorial brain and just be looking at someone else's work, and I'm not producing content, I'm helping someone polish their own or improve their own. I switch those gears and I start using those different skills that I have, and it is actually a relief to change over.
Kathryn: One of the nice things about the freelance life, about fiction writing not being my only job in general, is it's nice to switch gears. I try to do my fiction first if I can, and it sounds like maybe you do too, to get that kind of on the page. Get that checked off the list. And some days I do not wanna stop, but I have to get to another deadline. But then I find that I'm usually grateful for that because the next morning when I open up my own document, I'm just ready. I've missed it. I've been thinking about it. I'm ready to dive in. If I didn't have other things to do, I don't know if I would always be quite as chomping at the bit to get to my own writing as well.
Mindy: I think that's very true. You get a little bit of fatigue, I believe, creative fatigue when you are pulling everything out of the ether and you're just creating a world on your own. It's a lot of work, and I find it to be mentally taxing. I can do it for hours, if I need to. I don't think it's the best way to operate, and I do find myself scraping the bottom of barrel when it comes to pacing and plot and what happens next, and even dialogue. When I'm first jumping in, I'm fresh, and for me, it's just like a workout. It's like when I first start, it seems hard. I'm fresh, but it's hard. And then once I get warmed up, I'm moving. And then at the end, I'm like, "Okay, I don't have anything else left." Like I have given it my all for this half an hour, an hour, and I can feel it almost physically taxing me when I'm writing. I know when it's time to quit because I am no longer producing my best stuff.
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Mindy: So talk to me about submission, the submission world, and submissions slumps, because so many of the listeners I know are still struggling. They're still in the query trenches or out on submission, and that is a long lonely journey. It is something that can take the heart out of you pretty quickly, and I know it's something that you have experience with.
Kathryn: I am one of those where my debut actually moved really quickly through the process. It wasn't the first book I ever wrote. It was the second, but I landed the first agent who read the manuscript and she had minimal critiques for it. It went out on submission. The first editor who read it really liked it and ended up offering on it. And so it felt very smooth and very straight forward, and I was like, "I have arrived." They bought my option book without too much fuss, and so I had one, two, here we go. And I think it's pretty easy to feel in that instance that, okay, the hardest part is done and, spoiler alert, the hardest part was not done. Unfortunately, my second book underperformed as many books do. 'Cause it's so hard to know what the expectations are and what kind of benchmark you're trying to meet, and trends come and go. And my books were contemporary, my young adult novels, and by the time my second one came out that tread was kind of on the ebb. So that book didn't do very well, and then I didn't have numbers. And so then my third book, that option book was passed on. And at the time I thought, "Okay, I just gotta work on something new." I went on submission five times over the course of about three and a half years between my second YA novel and selling my chapter books. I wrote three different books, could not break through, could not sell them. I wrote another young adult novel from scratch, and then I wrote a middle grade novel. Took it back to the drawing board again and re-wrote it from scratch, and it still didn't sell. By which point, I have put many years of my life into this book and I'm like, "Okay. Maybe I just need to take a step back and let this one go."
I like to talk to people about the submission slump because it feels really, really terrible when you're in it. When you're like, maybe the books I've already published are the last ones that I'm ever going to publish. And it's really hard some days to just keep working and to keep sitting down at your computer when you no longer believe that maybe anything is going to come of it. And what really saved me was this transition into chapter books because it was starting something entirely new. Exploring a new age group. It almost felt like play again, in a way that writing hadn't felt like play in a really long time, and it had felt so fraught. Like if I don't sell this, my career is over, and then I didn't sell it. And then I'm like, ugh, how do I write another thing? And if I don't sell that my career is over. And so going into the chapter book world, it felt like play. And I spent a while just playing with those ideas and kind of refining it, and it felt really exciting to be trying something new and getting feedback on it and making it better. And knowing also that my YA track record wouldn't matter as much when going out with a new age group. I like to talk to people about that because I've been there and I did get through to the other side, but also the importance of finding the joy in it again, in whatever route that takes for you. The importance of finding play and a sense where it's not... Where every word doesn't feel like you're dragging it out of yourself because it matters so very much. But maybe you can just play around with something. Maybe you can try something new. Maybe you can find a way to explore in a way you haven't explored before, and maybe that will be enough to kind of find you through the other side, the j.
Mindy: The joy can get zapped from you pretty quickly when you are now writing and being a creator for a living. That is something that I found pretty early on, because at this point, the only book that I ever had written before it sold, you have to have a book that's finished and when you're writing it, you really are doing it for yourself. You have goals. You have things that you want to accomplish with it, but you're just writing your book. That is very freeing.
So I've been publishing for 10 years now. I think I have 12 books out, and so 11 of those I sold on spec. I sold them by writing the synopsis and saying, "This is what the book will be." And the publishers were like, "Yes. We'll buy that." So then you're locked in and you're writing this book, and this is your bread and butter. This is how you make a living. And while I love having the security of knowing that the book is already sold, it does take away some of that just inherent joy of writing the book for yourself. Writing it for the just pleasure of discovering what happens. I am a pantser, so for me, I am just kind of making things up as I got most of the time. Even though I do present a synopsis, it is pretty loose, and I sell it that way purposely. So I'm not married to anything. That little bit of discovery kind of can get taken away from you when you are not writing outside of contract. I do think that when you're writing with the concern of my career, when you're writing with a concern of my finances, it can kind of rob you of some of that joy.
Kathryn: Then it feels like work. It always feels like work, 'cause it is work, but when it just feels like a slog, that's just such not a creative space.
Mindy: It's not. It's a pressurized space, and it's an economical space, and it's a worrying space. And none of those things are helpful to creativity, I don't think. It's definitely a first world problem to say that now I have to write to contract. It does take away some of that fun which is one of the reasons why I started writing under a pen name and co-authoring with friends and just writing some things that are just for fun. And that are vaguely silly, and I can crack out 2000 words in, an hour, hour and a half, and just have a good time with it. My name isn't attached to it. It's indie publishing. If we do well, that's great for us. If we don't do well, we don't have a P&L sheet. It is very freeing to not have to worry about this in terms of how does this novel affect my career?
Kathryn: So my book that's coming out in 2024, the co-authored book, actually began as that fun side project. I am writing this book with MarcyKate Connolly, who has published many middle grade novels. It will be my middle grade debut, officially. I approached her about co-writing this book in 2018. So this was before I had sold Class Critters. This is when I'm in the depths of my slump, but I had an idea to do a middle school X-Files with two girls researching crop circles for a science fair project.
Mindy: Nice.
Kathryn: And I wanted to co-write it 'cause I wanted to go back and forth between the Mulder kid and the Scully kid. So we have our true believer in paranormal phenomena and we have our science-minded skeptic who just wants to win the science fair. And I approached MarcyKate about joining me. We both were new moms at the time. She was juggling many other contracted projects. I was still trying desperately to get one of my other books that was on submission sold. So we started working on it very slowly and kind of in between other things and throwing ideas back and forth and chapters back and forth. And it was always that breath of fresh air. It was always that joy to come back to in between other things, and it always felt hopeful and exciting and fun. Obviously, I'm super, super excited that it is actually going to be published. But that book has brought me so much joy for so many years at this point that it just makes me smile that it exists and that I got to write with a friend and that in between other things, I always had that to come back to.
Mindy: Absolutely, and one of the beautiful things about co-writing is that you walk away from the book and then when you come back, it got longer and you didn't do anything.
Kathryn: Yes. You leave a chapter with a cliffhanger and then the next time you find out how it continues.
Mindy: Yeah, it's lovely. I love co-authoring. I get a lot of questions about co-authoring because some people are very curious about that process and how you give up some of the creative control. I had never done it before, and it was something that was new to me when my friends approached me and asked me if I wanted to be involved. And I was a little bit worried because I can have some control issues just like in life as a human. But when it's a shared concept, because what I do under my pen name with my friends is not... Someone comes forward with an idea and then we all work on it. It's all three of us working together to come up with an idea. I think if I had my own original idea and I needed support in some way... Let's say, I had an idea and it wasn't something that I could pull off alone because one of the POVs is so far outside of my experience, or because there would be so much research involved that it might not actually be possible for me to execute it well... In that case? Yes. I think it is a lot easier to share your creative space and to share your world and your ideas. I have not yet had an original idea that I invite someone else into.
I have had other people do that for me and ask me to come on and help them with certain projects, and I have really enjoyed it. I do love the collaborative aspect. The key for me, I have found, with my co-writing partners, there's multiple of them, is that you can't be precious about your words. You can't be convinced that the way that you did it is the right way, and there isn't another way. Most of my writing co-authoring happens with two other friends and we write over each other. We don't have POVs that we each take a POV and write that person. We each have our own strengths, but someone will write a chapter and then the next person goes over that, makes some changes, some fixes, and then writes further. And then the third person comes in, goes over what the other two of us have dabbled in. They make some changes. They go over what I wrote and we're always... All of our fingers are in everything. So I have friends in real life that have read some of the stuff that's written under my pen name, which I don't share it generally. There are some people that know and they'll read something and they'll think it's really funny, or they'll really like a certain scene, and they'll text me or email me. And they'll be like, "Oh my gosh. This scene where this happened, I know that you wrote that. There's no doubt in my mind that you wrote this piece of dialogue." I'll look at it, and I'll be like, "I don't know if I did or not." I can't even remember because all three of us are so involved in every aspect of the text. So how do you and MarcyKate approach it? Do you have split POVs where one of you writes each character or do you both have your fingers in each of them?
Kathryn: We each took one character. So MarcyKate writes the Mulder girl, the believer in paranormal phenomena, and I write the Scully girl. And at the beginning, we really were just going back and forth from chapter to chapter. We came up with a general outline - a beat sheet. We had some long brainstorming calls, and then we just kind of tossed it back and forth to one another. And we only really dipped into the other's chapters, either when she would write a line of dialogue for my character that I'd be like, "Eh, that doesn't sound like her," or vice versa. And then through the editorial process, it got more and more merged because we were really conscious of wanting the two girls to have distinct voices. Because if you're going to alternate chapters, they have to have distinct voices.
Through the editorial process and the longer we worked with each other, the more confident and comfortable we both got dipping in and out of each other's chapters and really making notes. We use Track Changes and comments a lot. What would you think about changing this to this? Or do we really need this paragraph? We just turned in the book to copy edits, and so we are just beginning to draft out our proposal in some early chapters for what we hope will be the second book in the series, 'cause we envision our two girls investigating a lot of paranormal phenomena. Now, I'm finding that even though we're still alternating, we're already a lot more comfortable going into each other's chapters then we were when we started book one. We're starting at a slightly ahead of the curve place as compared to when we were starting to draft the first book. Which is good because hopefully the second book won't take five years to draft.
Mindy: Yeah, you learn those skills. You learn how to work together, and it changes according to your writing partners as well. So I have another person that I write with that hopefully we'll be able to bring our stuff into the published world at some point, and we write adult stuff together. And he writes the male character, and I write female character. And we don't cross over, and we don't intercede with each other's chapters. So it can change according to who you're working with.
Kathryn: And you have to get to know the person. I knew MarcyKate socially because we debuted in the same year, and I knew we got along. And I knew I liked her writing, and she liked my writing. But working together is an experiment and you figure it out a little bit as you go.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find your books and where they can find you online.
Kathryn: So my website is Kathryn Holmes dot com. K-A-T-H-R-Y-N H-O-L-M-E-S dot com. And I'm most active on Instagram. It's Kathryn underscore Holmes. It's the same on Twitter and yeah, my next book will be The Thirteenth Circle with MarcyKate Connolly.
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.