R.S. Mellette, Matt Sinclair & Elephant’s Bookshelf Press on Indie Authoring & Publishing

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: So we're here today with two guests, and if you recall from a former episode with MarcyKate Connolly, we talked about AgentQuery Connect, which was a forum that was very active 10, 15 years ago, where a group of us all met, came together, and all of us have achieved different forms of success in different arenas of publishing. Today I have Matt and Robert who have had success in the indie publishing arena. That is an arena that I dabble in as well, and I wanted to have them come on and talk because Robert is an author and then Matt runs his own publishing company. So if each of you would like to just begin by introducing yourself.

Matt: This is Matt Sinclair, I'm the president and Chief Elephant Officer of Elephant Bookshelf Press. The company I formed 10 years ago, last month, it was 2012, that was our first anthology and the first short story in that anthology was written by our wonderful host, Mindy.

Robert: And Robert Mellette. I write as R.S. Mellette. The books that I have published are through Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, so I'm very happy about independent publishing as none of my stuff tends to fit in the large commercial publishing world. I'm the author of Billy Bobble Makes a Magic Wand and Billy Bobble and the Witch Hunt, the newly out, Kiya and the Morian Treasure.

Mindy: I think you make a really good point about finding a place for books that aren't necessarily fitting inside those pre-approved niches that the traditional publishing industry likes to use to do their marketing. Robert, why don't you talk about that a little bit, like what you write and why you weren't necessarily finding any traction in the trad world?

Robert: It's really weird, the traditional publishing world because you really do have to thread a needle from miles away. It's so hard, but if you just look at Kiya and the Morian Treasure, it came about because I was working on Xena: Warrior Princess, and I was writing the Xena Scrolls for the website, which was basically a way of recapping the episodes, but with modern day characters arguing about the translations of these ancient scrolls So it was kind of fun and tried to get a publishing deal with Universal. Well, Universal Merchandising was fighting it out with Universal New Media about who would own this, and I lost the fight, no deal was made. So I moved the characters into outer space and that became Kiya and the Morian Treasure.

Now, as I was getting it published, I got an agent. I was going to the editors, this was a good book, but the editors would all come back saying – I love this, but it needs a boy character. What do they always say? The girls will read books about boys, but boys won't read books about girls.  That's the line and they will not change it. No, I think what you're saying is that girls will read action books, but boys won't read romances, 'cause that's kind of what I was getting out of it, and I wasn't sticking to my guns and being all - no, I will not change my work, it's my work! 

I tried, I tried to change it. It would fall apart, I'd put it back together. I tried so hard to meet their standards. It just wouldn't work. I kept getting back – I don't know what shelf it goes on. Middle grade or YA? Its science fiction- put it on the science fiction shelf. Where’s Hunger Games? It's a very frustrating battle, and I don't bequeath those editors. They all have to keep their jobs, they all have to put their kids through school, they've got their things to do, that's their job. But they very much need a Matt Sinclair and Elephant’s Bookshelf Press to relieve that pressure valve. Because I think the audience, they don't want another forced romance, they don't want another, Oh, what boy will she choose book? They want something fresh and something new, and you need Matt to do that.

Mindy: You're right, tat old school mentality that is really entrenched, that won't budge, and there is a feeling that boys don't read books either number one, written by a women or featuring girls as characters. I'm here to tell you that's simply not true. I think trade publishing still believes it, but a lot of my readership is male. My publisher does a very good job of number one, trusting me. Number two, putting gender-neutral covers on my books. Anyone can carry around my book and read it, a boy doesn't have to feel like he's carrying around a girl book. But you're right, there are those... I don't know what shelf it goes on, that's the primary consideration, you're right. They wanna sell books, they've gotta know where they're gonna put it in the bookstore, and if it doesn't fit nicely somewhere that is a roadblock for your book. It is unfair from the creative side, but from the business side of it, it is a consideration. Matt, do you wanna talk about how the indie world can help alleviate that?

Matt: I would also say that they're not wrong. It is hard to identify which shelves books should belong to. I wish Billy Bobble, which is a really great story, I wish I had a better place to put it in terms of shelf myself. The difference is, the vast majority of what we do with Elephant’s Bookshelf Press is sell books online. And so it's a different type of shelving situation, you had Dave Chesson from Kindleprenur on recently. Quite honestly, he saved Elephant’s Bookshelf Press without him knowing it. What was then called KDP Rocket came out, it helped me better identify categories for these books, and I'm still experimenting on every single book. Like I said, we've had 10 years of publishing now, and I recently changed categories on books that I published eight or nine years ago, because there's still ways of getting these books out in front of people. There are some wonderful short stories, and short stories are a hard sell to begin with, but there are wonderful short stories that have barely gotten any readership yet, because I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is the best way to get those books in front of the right readers. 

To Robert’s point and to your point, I publish what I love, and the advantage is I have a small little publishing company, and I can choose books that might be difficult to place on the shelf. It might be difficult to market, but I really enjoyed them. I'm literally reading Kiya to my kids at bedtime right now. It is a real issue. I'm glad that I'm fitting a niche, as Robert and Mindy are saying, but I would also like to sell more copies of these wonderful books. My chief objective right now is to find more ways of getting these wonderful books in front of the readers that want them and deserve them. 

Mindy: And that is the trick when you are an Indie, because I write underneath a pen name as you know, and I think that the pall that kind of hung over self-publishing and Indie publishing for a long time has gone away. There is a lot of really good stuff out there, equally as good and some of it, if not better, then trad stuff that I come across. But the problem becomes visibility and marketing. So Robert, if you wanna talk about how that comes into play for the author on the author’s side of marketing. When you're an Indie author, what are some of the things that you have found that will work on the Indie side, and what are some things that might work for trad and don't work for Indie?

Robert: It's all the stuff that everyone has said before, you know, if you're researching how to sell your book, you've heard everything I'm about to say. But I'm telling you it's true, you have to find your platform. I 'm lucky–lucky and I worked really hard. There’s still a huge Xena fan base out there. They're fantastic. So a while back, I started joining all their Facebook groups and just saying Hi. That's the other thing. You have to be honest, you're selling a book, you've gotta get in there and say, Hey, I'm selling my book. You can't get on there and go, Hey, I'm one of you guys! Unless you are. I'm actually a fan of the fans, so I get on and say things about that, and I've been posting on there for a while. In Hollywood, this isn't a big deal, I was a featured extra on Star Trek Enterprise, so I went on to the Star Trek Enterprise fan base on Facebook and said, Hey, I'm selling a book. And this was like a year ago, two years ago. I posted about being on Star Trek and people were like, Oh my God, you're a star! And it's like, no, I was just unemployed and I have a SAG card, so I signed up.So on Enterprise, I became a thing. 

Now, it was interesting, if I tried to post about my book on the Enterprise Facebook page, it would get rejected. So I would go to my initial posts that said, Hey, I'm here to sell my book, and I happen to have been on Enterprise, and I put notices in the comments, and that would push that up to the top and then people would be able to see what was going on in the comments. So there's little tricks like that. I did spend some money, I decided, you know, if I was a deep sea fisherman, that was my hobby, deep sea fishing, and I went out and bought a boat, everybody would be fine with that. That's your hobby. I went out and bought a boat, not expecting to make any money… maybe I could become a commercial deep sea fisherman, I don't know. I went out and spent quite a bit of money on a PR firm. That's actually going pretty good, but if you're hiring a PR firm - one, you are setting money on fire. You're just hoping somebody sees the freaking fire. Please see the smoke from the fire that I have set with his money.

Now, everybody complains, Well, I hired a PR firm, but I'm doing all the work. They're doing a lot of work too. Half of their job is to just get you to a place where you can do the work. I say it's like hiring a Sherpa, they're gonna carry a lot of stuff up the mountain with you, but you have to climb the mountain. That's helping a lot. And you just have to keep at it. It's a job. I get on Facebook, my wife's like, What are you doing? You're on Facebook. Well, I’m working.

Mindy: I'm working as a substitute, and I will be in the school and a kiddo can come to my desk, and they’ll be like uhhhh, you’re on Facebook. And it's like, I'm working. We're gonna do sustained silent reading for five hours, kids. I'm really curious about your experience with PR, because I think that you're right, people misunderstand what it is and what it's about and how it works. I think it's very similar to an agent because it's your agent's job to get you in front of the editors, but your work still has to sell itself. So I feel like with PR, it's their job to get you in front of people that can get you noticed, but then you have to produce the content or the video, or do the interview, or do whatever it is that's going to get attention.

Robert: That's exactly the case. You're also the one that's getting yourself in front of things, but you've got the PR back up. And that's the other nice thing about having the subtle difference between self-publishing and independent or small press publishing. Matt's a traditional publisher. He's a traditional publishing house, he's just a very, very small publishing house, he's not under one of the Big Five. So for me, it's kind of nice to be able to say, my publisher’s doing this, or my Publicist is doing that. Somebody just reached out, I think on Instagram, and was like, Hey, do you need to help promoting your book? I'm like, Sure, talk to my Publicist. I’m on Facebook working, and somebody said, Hey, I need a novelist to sit in on a panel at WonderCon. I message the guy and gave him my credentials, and he's like, Yeah, let's do that. He was another AgentQuery person. Two cool things happened. 

One is that I was at an artist booth, and I was telling them about the book and somebody standing next to me got this weird look on her face and said, I've heard of that. She had not been to the panel, we couldn't figure out how she heard of it, whether she heard of it because of me doing stuff, or whether she heard of it because of the PR doing stuff. I just love the fact that a complete stranger had heard about my book – so something's working. Also, I sat in on another panel and there was a guy from SciFi radio, and he said, if anybody's got an audio book, come up and talk to me. I just finished editing the audio book, which about killed me. And so I went up and I got myself a gig. A lot of writers would say, Well, my Publicist didn't get me that gig, I got that gig. Yeah, but when I emailed the guy, I’m gonna copy my publicist. And two, I had a killer press kit to send to him. I had back up. 

Matt: It gives you legitimacy. Someone else thinks that this is a quality book, this is a quality writer. So I think that has a lot to do with it as well. It's some of the legitimacy that you get when you have an agent. Yes, it's an extra level of security for anyone who books you. It's a good investment. 

Robert: That's the other thing too, is that just because you have the money to hire a publicist. I’m not rolling in it. No, I just had some money saved up. Just because you have the money doesn't mean a Publicist is gonna take you on. I got turned down by three or four different Publicists because they didn't do SciFi, they didn't have space. It's like getting an agent, they've gotta like your work.

Mindy: I have not taken that step of hiring an outside publicist yet, it's something that I considered multiple times for different books of mine. I've never been in a position where I've had the money that I could just be like, Yeah, I'm gonna spend it on this. And I've heard wonderful success stories from people that invested that money and did very, very well because of it, and then I've heard from people that really felt like they had just thrown their money down a black hole. So you've gotta do your research, you have to know that the people that you're giving your money to are going to be worth it, and that they've got those credentials themselves. But also like you're saying, you've got to be ready to do that work. It's them laying the groundwork for you to be able to prove yourself, you still have to show up, and prove yourself.

Robert: You work your behind off on PR, Mindy, so you're doing a lot of the work and you've done it for so long. You've got your own ground work. There really is a thing you have to figure out for each different platform.

Matt: And Mindy has established a brand as well. Whether she did that consciously,  I think her books are all consistent. They can be different genres, but they all sound like Mindy McGinnis. And that's very much to her credit. And that's how her publicity efforts appear to be too, and that's what we're trying to do with Robert's books. 

Robert: The other thing too, is you write so fast. Oh my God, you write faster than I can read. But also, I’m dyslexic. So, you know. 

Mindy: Yeah, I do write fast. What's interesting, 'cause you're just seeing the trad side. So it's like I write very fast, but then if you consider it- since 2018, under a pen name, I put out (with other writers... Let's be clear) With co-authors, I've put out about 20 books. I write very fast. It is a skill that I have built over time. It's partly because I was working full-time. I think I was probably five years into a trad career before I was able to say, I am gonna work from home. And it was still not an easy decision, it was a risky move, and I've been able to do it. For the longest time I was writing in stolen moments. I was writing in the doctor's office. I literally had my feet in the stirrups, getting my Pap last year with my laptop across my knees and they're like, Are you good? I'm like, I'm great. You do what you need to do. That's who I am and that's how I operate. So when I do have free time, I'm like, Well, I'm gonna write and I can write 3000-4000 words in about an hour and a half.

Robert: I hate you.  I hate you.  I hate you.

Matt: I'm basically the anti-Mindy. This is the first book we've published since the pandemic. A big part of that is because the majority of what I did for Elephant’s Bookshelf was at lunch time at my day job and on my commute to and from New York City. People ask, where is your office? I said, first car in New Jersey transit from the 609. That's where I did almost all my Elephant’s Bookshelf  work. And then on my 12-hour EMS shift, I would put in several hours twice a month, and that was how I'd get the advertising research done. Stolen moments is the right way to put it, you do what you can when you can, and to the best of your ability.

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Mindy: So tell me a little bit about getting started as an Indie, I know that you were just getting your feet underneath you, and that things were going pretty well, and then the pandemic hit.. So just tell us a little bit about EBP in general, how you built it and how it's going today.

Matt: Well, the two of you are part of the beginning of Elephant’s Bookshelf. It started with two other writers, Rob Grindstaff has been doing a good job of promoting his new books, also was part of my initial team looking at the short stories that became Spring Fevers. It started from AgentQuery Connect. We just shared some messages between myself and Rob and Cat Woods - ebook publishing is getting pretty hot, this is interesting, we should look into this, and let's all collect writers that we trust, basically have them write some short stories and let's see what we can do with it. And for years before that, I have been thinking about creating a magazine, like basically a literary journal, 'cause I work in the magazine world essentially. So the idea of just organizing it appealed to me and I said, Alright, I'll serve as the publisher, I know more about writing than I do about publishing. I don't think I actually said How hard could it be? 

Robert: Oh, the number of times I have said that about something.

Matt: From there to “how hard could it be” is something that emerged over time. I quickly realized that I had to spend a lot more time learning how to be a publisher, becoming a better editor and still trying to write as best I could. In terms of the fiction, personally, I don't wanna say I lost a decade, but I spent a lot less time writing than I would like, and I know that I'll get back to it, I have ideas that just don't leave my head. 5000 words here, 10000 words there. I know I will be able to complete them. The publishing journey is something that continually evolves, you're continually learning from every success and from every failure, and from every mistake. And I spent a lot of money just trying to get the right tools to get these books out in front of people. I think the best part is just learning, I enjoy learning.

Mindy: How did the pandemic affect the small publishing world? What has it been like? How did you have to shift?

Matt: When the pandemic struck, we had just had our first writer event, if you will. Basically, Valentine's week 2020. Four writers, myself included. promoting the last short story collection, Flight, which was science fiction. And Robert actually briefly contemplated flying in from California for it, which shocked the heck out of me, I'll tell you. I wasn't even asking him about it, as he lives in California, but we had a great time. We had a great response with the Q and A. I felt like we were really developing a readership, just right in front of my eyes there, and I could see where it was going, and one of the other writers, he and his wife and I went out after the event. Elephant’s Bookshelf is gonna really take off now, and then within a month, we had the pandemic taking away everything. As I said, it was difficult for me to find time to do things, to promote things, it made advertising more crucial. And we did okay, initially. You had more people with time to read, but reaching them was just as difficult, and then you couldn't go out and promote in the way that I was just starting to enjoy doing. It was hard, I suspect that's true for many other independent publishers, and probably some had greater success 'cause they had more time to concentrate differently.

Mindy: One of the things that you have to do to balance is of course, where you're putting your time. That's the biggest thing for me as a writer who also is self-published, the money that I'm putting into it is a question on the self-pub side, the time is a question on the trad pub side, but you kinda have to balance both of those things.

Matt: And you have to balance family. One of the things that I loved about the pandemic, and it sounds weird just to say that sentence, is I got a chance to coach my daughter Kathleen's soccer team. And that's the time I wouldn't have had if not for the global pandemic. That was valuable to me. You're absolutely right that it's a give and take in terms of time and where your priorities are at that point in time. I think that from a writer standpoint, there's probably stuff that will emerge from these two years that I can't even imagine right now. I've often wondered even before the pandemic, how is it that people forgot basically about the flu pandemic a little over a century ago? There's very little in writing in the novels of the time, I couldn't imagine that happening after this pandemic, we're seeing writing with The covid story as a key element already.

Robert: They did outlaw spittoons.

Matt: You can no longer spit on the sidewalk.

Mindy: You sure can where I live. And then I wanna say really quick, you talked a few times about your short story collections that EBP has, so I have a short story in each of the collections that is based on seasons. I always see The Fall, which is called The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse. I'm looking at my Amazon author page right now. Your author page is listing like what's selling the best, Right? So right now, there's $1.99 Kindle deal on Heroine, so it's in front, followed by my book that tends to always sell the best no matter what. Then my two newest. Two that I did not expect to see sitting here – my fantasies are here, which is surprising. I've been doing a lot of school visits, so that's probably why. Even before one, two, three… in front of three of my trad pub books is The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse, which is the short story collection from EBP. That one is always showing up for me, it seems to always be doing well, what do you credit that to?

Matt: Honestly, I think one of the big things that I would credit that to is, if you remember the final story in that collection was a short story written by a South African writer named Judy Krume. The story is very dark, it's basically about the South American shaman, the tribe is restless, if you will, and it's very graphic, and I remember I was thinking, Alright, don't put my story after that. I was like, You know what, no one will ever read my story, if I did that because people are not going to read past that story. So it became a quick decision as to where to put it. Judy sent a copy to one of the Good Reads groups and said, I think this would be an interesting book for you to review, somehow got them to make it their book of the month, and that was what got it, the initial bump. That's how I see it. That's 2012. We published that 10 years ago in the fall. I tried to publish it on the Mayan calendar end of the world, that was the pub date, and ironically enough, it was also when Hurricane Sandy wiped me out in New Jersey. We did a little bit of publicity right after that, calling attention to the fact that the publisher's home was knocked off the grid for two weeks, just as this book was going live. I had Jean Oram push this across, I went up to my first aid squad, which had a generator and sent her a quick email just saying, here's all the files. Can you finish this? It's already done, I just had to basically press Publish. And so she did that because she was the editor for that particular edition. Got a little bit of a bump from the Good Reads group. 

And then again, I mentioned KDP Rocket. I got good categories on that particular one, it's a post-apocalyptic story, as you alluded to earlier, Robert, it had a shelf, it was easy to publicize. Honestly, it was one of the reasons I chose to do science fiction for Flight. It's one of the reasons I chose to do urban fantasy, which actually the urban fantasy didn't really do well. The Horror collection has done okay at times, that is a cover issue, probably need to change that cover. The Fall has done very well, it's been very consistent, and I owe that basically to readers. that's what it comes down to, there's an audience for that type of story, that type of book.

Mindy: The last thing: where can listeners find you online? Where they can find Robert, your books online? And then Matt where people can find EBP and where they can find Kiya and the Morian Treasure, and if they're interested in submitting, where they can submit.

Robert: Best place to find me is on Facebook, RS Mellette. As far as where to get the book, you can get the book anywhere books are sold. So go down to your local independent book store and have a chat with them and have them order it. Bezos does not need to send another celebrity into space. He can, that's fine. I don't care, but I just assume that that local bookstore owner gets to feed their family.

Matt: And you can find Elephant’s Bookshelf Press at Elephant’s Bookshelf Press dot com. That's the primary place. You can also, if you're a writer and you're going to send something to be considered, you can send it to submissions@elephantsbookshelfpress.com. As Robert said, wherever fine books are sold. 

Robert: And even some so-so books. 

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.

Amazon Bestselling Author JK Ellem On Knowing Your Strengths & Limitations

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.

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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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.

Chelsea Bobulski on Implementing Indie Strategies in Traditional Publishing

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Chelsea Bobulski who is the author of the All I Want for Christmas series, which is upcoming for this holiday season. And one of the reasons I wanted to have Chelsea on is because Chelsea has moved from the very traditional mainline experience of publishing, where you have a book coming out every year and there's a lot of downtime, to a very new experience where she is writing and releasing this christmas holiday themed romance series for books every three weeks from the end of October leading up to the holiday. So that's a really interesting experience and very different from other guests that we've had on. So Chelsea is here to tell us a little bit about that experience. 

Chelsea: Yes, I'm very excited to talk about it because it has been a totally different experience from what I've done before, but it's been very exciting. 

Mindy: Absolutely. I can't even imagine. My episode that came out on October fourth was actually with my own editor, Ben Rosenthal. And one of the things I asked him to talk about is why does it take so long in traditional publishing for a book to go from a contract to a physical object that you can buy on the shelf? Because a lot of people ask me about that. You have had an experience where it doesn't necessarily have to, but you're taking all of that work and you're condensing it down into a very tight timeline. 

Chelsea: Yes. Absolutely, yeah, I was very blessed getting a book deal with Wise Wolf Books, they're a new imprint, but with an already established company, Wolfpack Publishing has been around for quite some time and has been very successful with this model. And basically what they do is they act like a traditional publishing company in terms of how they support the author. But they take a lot of the things that indie authors have been doing so successfully in order to push out books quickly, knowing that readers who fall in love with the series want to be able to binge the series. 

And so they've taken a lot of those tactics and implemented them into a more traditional publishing sphere and their whole goal is to be able to quickly publish these books in a series without sacrificing quality, just as indie authors have been doing for quite some time. So it's a little bit of an experiment in a way in the sense that at least for me, because I've never done it this way, as I said Wise Wolf books as part of a larger publishing umbrella that has been doing it for a while and doing it very successfully. 

But for me this is a whole new experience because as you said, I've done two books traditionally The Wood and Remember Me, we're both with Fiewel and Friends, Macmillan. And so this is a whole new experience to basically write three books in a year because the first book which is entitled All I Want for Christmas is The Girl Next Door, I had completed. And we were sending out two different editors and then we actually ended up getting two offers of publication for that book. And we went with Wise Wolf because I was just so excited by the prospect of being able to put out the books quickly. And so that was in August 2020 that we got the book deal and said that between August 2020 and now, basically I've written the other three books over the course of a year. And so it's been a very fast process. But it's also just been very exciting and I can't wait to get the books out into readers’ hands. 

Mindy: I can't imagine the writing pace. I can write a book very quickly. And if I were only relying on traditional publishing and one book a year as my income, probably wouldn't be survivable. As you know, I've got my fingers in all kinds of different things. I do co-authoring and I do a lot of editorial work on the side. I have a blog and the podcast. And all of these things bring in money so that I'm generally working all of the time. But people ask me often, you know, what do you do all day? And most of the time the answer is I answer emails. That's a lot of what I do all day. There's not a ton of actual writing time. Actually cranking out for books that quickly, I can't imagine how much your actual writing schedule changed. 

Chelsea: It actually changed quite a bit also because I am a parent of two young children. And so that also factors into how much writing time that I have. My mother in law was kind enough to be able to come and help. Typically she'd come for three days a week. And so for those three days I would just focus on writing and of course as we've gotten closer to the release dates, I've had to kind of balance the writing with some more marketing things and emails as you were saying. But for the most part I just wrote for as long as I could as much as I could each of those days. I just think it was by the grace of God that any of it got done though. 

Especially because there were six weeks total spread out throughout the year where she couldn't come at all due to Covid related issues. My husband had Covid in November. We all came through fine. There's another time where we had been exposed to it and didn't get it, but we didn't want her to come up, just in case. And then she got sick. And so that has definitely made it more difficult because that mixed in with maybe other life things going on where maybe she couldn't come visit for that week. So even though it was a year of writing, it was actually three days a week and it wasn't always consistently happening. And so, like I said, it was not by my power that these books got done, that's for sure. 

Mindy: I understand. People that are outside of the experience have a concept of a writer, really just like sitting down and grinding things out and taking huge chunks of time. And I know that my own experience is that if I've got 15 minutes here or I have to go to the doctor's office, I'm going to take my laptop with me and use it in the waiting room. The lady that cuts my hair, I had to go to a new place because my old one got shut down during Covid and just met this really nice older lady who was going to be cutting my hair from now on. And she has a very Old fashioned approach to what she does, she talks to her customers. And I would be sitting there with my laptop and she's like, Oh, I'm sorry, you actually need to work. And I'm like, yes, I have to work, and I'm sorry. It's not that I don't like you or anything like that. I have to work.I can't sit here for 40 minutes while this dye rests on my head. 

And it's so sweet though, because it's like, she's totally cool with me sitting there and working, while she cuts my hair, but also she clucks her tongue at me and she's like, you work too hard, you're working too hard and you do too much. And she always feeds me, it never fails that while I'm there, she's like, here's a piece of pizza. She wants to hen cluck over me. And so when I know that I'm going to get my haircut, I like have to factor that into my eating for the day because I know that she's gonna make me eat. 

Chelsea: That's amazing. Well, and I don't know about you, but for me drafting is when I really can't be interrupted like, I can do revisions and be interrupted because you can kind of come in and out a little bit more like solving a puzzle, you know, and obviously like the email stuff, I can do that and be interrupted. But when I'm drafting I know that I need a solid chunk of time to get into it and then to even to come out of it, especially writing this many books so close together, there were times where I felt like I was almost world hopping. Like this other world was a real place. All four books take place in the same small town, a fictional town that I named, Christmas, Virginia. I was living in this world and I would have to almost shake it off to get back into the real world. It was very disorienting sometimes. 

Mindy: I go pretty deep when I'm drafting mentally, but I've come to a point in my life and now with travel picking back up, I have to find those skills again. I have to be able to work at an airport, I have to be able to work on an airplane. I talked about this on the podcast before I think, but you know, people have certain triggers that they use to help them tell their brain it's time to write. Some people, you know, they have a space that they go to an office or a candle that they burn or a specific type of music. Something that's the trigger that tells their brain they have to work. 

I use a white noise app on my phone, it's perfect because it's portable, I can use it anywhere. I plug in my earphones and I can be on a plane, I can be in an airport and it's a constant noise that never breaks. So with music there will be a slower song or a moment or a rest or pauses in between the songs and that noise comes in from around you and it can penetrate this bubble that you've built inside of the snow globe. But with that white noise, it is a constant noise. There's no sensation and it drowns out everything.

I use it at home. Like even when I am alone at home in my room, I turn on the white noise when I'm writing and that's how my brain knows that it's time to work. And I got to the point where it's like even if I don't have my headphones in, I have my app out and I just have my phone making the noise in public and it also works to keep people away from you. I'll say that as well if you don't have your headphones, if you just turn that on, people don't want to hear it and they move away from you. 

Chelsea: I never even thought of that. That is a good idea. 

Mindy: Now you've got this push since these books are done and there are four of them - of promotion. And because most of the time as a traditionally published author, you're only hitting your audience once. So how are you going to approach promotion with your audience when you're saying, hey, I've got a new book out -- every three weeks? 

Chelsea: I'm trying to learn a bit from, as I said, like, indie authors have been doing this so well for so long. And I think part of the benefit to it is the fact that because you constantly have something new to talk about, right? It's a new book that I think helps promotion in and of itself, because I think that raises excitement a little bit. You enjoyed book one? Well, look, book two is already coming out! And so they don't have to wait, because I think a lot of times that will slow down the momentum of promotion is the fact that people say, oh, I loved this book. When is the second one coming out? And you have to say, oh, a year from now and between then and the next publication date, you hope that they don't forget you. You hope that they enjoyed the book enough that they'll remember. 

But people also get on with their lives and they might totally forget that, Oh yeah, that was supposed to come out a year ago now, I guess I should go pick that up. So, I think that helps a lot. But mostly I'm just trying to focus on what I can do because my time is limited for promotion. So I'm using Instagram a lot just because I'm most comfortable with Instagram, but I also have an amazing Facebook street team that I've been cultivating. They've been helping me get the word out as well. Today I actually posted about the preorder swag. I have a really awesome scene card that was done by an artist named Madison Brown. She does a really fantastic job. And so each book is going to have a little scene card that you'll get as part of your swag in the mail. If I run out of supplies, it'll be digital. Just looking for things like that that I can do to keep people interested and realize that these books are coming out so quickly and leading up to Christmas is very exciting because you know, it just helps people get in that holiday mood. 

Mindy: And we're really looking for that, especially right now.

Chelsea: I really, that was the thing I appreciated most about getting to work on these from through the end of 2020 and into 2021 is I just wanted to lose myself in a Christmas-y word. And I purposely did not include any Covid type things. Like I think it's great that some people are talking about masks and stuff in their books, but I was just like, I just want to live in a world for a bit where this was never a thing. And so that's what I really focused on and one of the things that I really love about the series is that each book is centered on a different couple, like all the couples are friends, so you'll see how the couple from book one is doing in books 2,3 and four, like as you go on. So if you really love certain characters, their story doesn't end with that book, like you'll get to see kind of what they're doing in the next book. So that was really fun to do as well.

Mindy: Something on your side too, and I actually had a conversation yesterday, I was talking with Mary Kole who runs the Good Story company, she also used to be an agent. She was talking with me about how a lot of people are looking for these lighter reads and they are looking for hope and people are kind of pulling away from darker material and they're looking for something to escape the actual world that feels pretty dark and hopeless sometimes lately. You think that that type of approach, having this content - because from what you used to write, your traditional release books were horror. 

Chelsea: Yes, I definitely feel like I have two different sides to me. I have the horror side and I like the christmas romance side and so I'm excited to get to show both now. I mean I think that hope is something that people are always looking for but obviously in the middle of pandemic, it's just even more so. And so each of the books definitely has a lighter feel, they do deal with some deeper themes, even though it's Christmas, there might be a slightly darker element. There may be a character is wrestling with that they have to figure out by the end of the book, but it is all very light and like cheery and Christmas cookies and snowflakes and I just wanted readers to feel like they want to just curl up with these books next to a roaring fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa or a hot cup of tea and just indulge and relax. 

Book one, All I Want for Christmas is The Girl Next Door, it definitely has all of those hope filled messages. Because it's about a boy, Graham Wallace, he has been in love with the girl next door for basically a decade now, ever since she moved in, but she's been dating his best friend, Jeremy for the past two years. And when they first started dating, you know, as is typical in high school, you're kind of like, it's fine, it's only going to last like two weeks and then I'll help her grieve that relationship and then I'll slide in and I'll be the boyfriend, you know. That's kind of how he was thinking about this relationship, but now they've been together for two years and he's just heartbroken and he's been trying his best to deal with it. And then in just a moment of heartbreak and weakness, he looks up in the sky and sees a shooting star and he thinks to himself, “all I want for Christmas is Sarah Clark.” 

And so he wakes up the next day and the whole world has changed that he's the one who's been dating her for two years and not his friend Jeremy. But he starts to realize he and Sarah are maybe not as great together as he thought that they would be as he had imagined in his mind. And not only that, but it's also affected more than just him, It's affected Sarah, it's affected Jeremy, they're living completely different lives now with different goals and it's not necessarily a good thing. And not only that, but Graham is starting to fall for the new girl in town and he's thinking to himself, why am I falling for this new girl? If this wish came true, like I must be destined to be with Sarah, why am I feeling this for the new girl if this wish came true? 

And so it really focuses on the idea of what we think we want isn't what's always right for us. And so it's really his journey into figuring out what that looks like. And so I loved it and I love setting it at Christmas time because I think that Christmas is just the perfect time for hope and renewal and learning really special lessons that you can carry on into the rest of your life, which I'm hoping Graham does.

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Mindy: Now it's interesting to me, like we were saying your first two books being the traditionally published ones that were more horror based. I hear you like so loud because obviously what I write under my real name is very dark, serious stuff and when people meet me in real life, they're like, you're funny. So, I also do write under a pen name and I write with friends of mine and we co author books and they're just ridiculously silly and funny, quite frivolous It’s wonderful for me because that's my outlet, but I do it under a pen name because the branding would be so screwed if I did them under my real name. So I write those under a pen name, so I have an outlet for both. Now there's pros and cons to that, I can't market the stuff under my pen name using my real name and the social media platforms and the mailing list and all the stuff that I've built over like 10 years. Also, I don't know if that audience crosses over. I don't know that my readers that love my books would want to read the things I write underneath my pen name because they are so wildly divergent. How are you approaching that in terms of marketing? Your audience and your readers, they know you as a horror writer and now you're writing like this really fun, really sweet romance series. 

Chelsea: I think that obviously there will be some readers who will not be interested in crossing over only because they are horror readers. They really have no interest in a light romance. And I totally get that, like we all have our books that we love and that we connect with and I don't really have time for another genre because it's just not where our heart is. But I do think that there are readers who will cross over. Even though they're different genres, a lot of the themes are similar, like my horror novels tend to be more atmospheric, creepy and chilling, not so much a jump out and scare you. Although I will say Remember Me, I've had several readers email me and say, you know, I can't take a shower anymore because of the shower thing that happens in there. You know, these are the creepy things that happen. The themes itself, um themes of redemption or themes of romance, things like that I think do cross over in that sense. I think people who enjoyed The Wood and Remember Me would really enjoy this Christmas series, so it's lighter, but it's very similar in different ways. 

Mindy: One of the things that you're talking about is probably your voice and your writing approach in terms of the whole spirit of the voice of the book is probably still similar even though you're changing genres, I obviously write across all different kinds of genres. I write historical, I've written fantasy. A lot of thriller, suspense, psychological dystopian, but that voice is still the same. It's still a Mindy McGinnis book. And while my readers don't always follow me, like my fantasy for example, like most of my readers could care less about it. Fantasy is a niche that you either read or you don't, but you can still read it and be like, oh I can tell that Mindy McGinnis wrote this, and I imagine it's similar with yours. 

Chelsea: Absolutely. And the second book which is entitled All I Want for Christmas is the Girl in Charge, one of the main characters in that one is a former child prodigy, a violinist and he's a current juvenile delinquent and he has this darker past that he's working through. And so that's an example of some of those darker elements coming in. And then also the book four All I Want for Christmas is the Girl Who Can't Love, my heroine, Savannah is dealing with a difficult relationship with her mother as well as this supposed family curse that makes it so that if they fall in love with anybody, like it's just not going to work out, it's doomed to fail. And so she's just decided that love as a concept isn't a real thing. Like she just focuses on the biology behind and the Chemistry behind it. This is what's happening in your brain when you fall in love and because I can name it, I can also choose not to partake in it. And so she has a little bit of a darker arc as well, even though it's a lighter Christmas read. 

Probably out of the four books, my third book, All I Want for Christmas is the Boy I Can't Have is probably the lightest because the hero and the heroine developed this connection over a shared love of romantic comedies. And so that one definitely is like the lightest one. But even there, the hero, August, is dealing with the fact that his father has these really crippling expectations on what he wants his son to do with his life and it doesn't line up with what August actually wants to do. And so they're lighter books, but they definitely have those darker themes of trying to fight for what you want, or fight through maybe some past traumas and things.

Mindy: Talking about writing and having to generate these books in general. You said, you have edits due for the very last one coming up here this weekend? Now you're edging really close into turning in book four and then promoting book one. So are you going to deal with A flurry of three months worth of promo? 

Chelsea: Like I said, I mean just knowing the season of life I'm in, I'm not in a time where I used to be like when I had no kids, I had all the time in the world really to devote to that sort of thing. Or if my kids were in full time school, which they're not, you know, they're not old enough for that yet, then maybe I'd have a little more time to focus on this thing. So right now I'm really trying to take an approach of - just do what you can, just getting the word out. And also these preorder swag campaigns, that's probably gonna be honestly the biggest undertaking, depending on how many preorders I get in. It’s having to do all the mailing and everything for that. And then just reaching out to people who have been such support systems for me from the beginning. Other authors who are so generous to promote the book as well on their platforms and things and just try not to freak out about what I can't control. 

Mindy: Well that's key to publishing in general because you can't control much. I actually just got all my royalty statements yesterday. For those of you that don't know, when you get your royalty statement, it's already six months behind in traditional publishing. It lets me know how many books have sold and how much I've earned and earned out. So the one I just got is through June of this year. So I ended up looking at my royalty statements last night, it is hard to have any idea what you have done that actually mattered or had any impact because this is just an amalgamation of numbers covering six months worth of sales. So as a traditional author you can't see - I paid for this ad in Facebook, I paid for this Book Bub. I did this or I did this author visit or I did a whole bunch of swag mailing. You're sending up little lanterns and hoping that they are shedding light somewhere and had some impact. But you really don't know.

I’m operating with a foot in both worlds. Under my indie name, there's so much more power because you know - this week I've got this promo running and you can follow your numbers by the hour and you can see the impact. I wouldn't give up either one of them. I love both of them for different reasons. I'm sure you remember I used to like really freaking try. When Not A Drop to Drink came out, one of my swag - which was clever - but one of my swag items was a bottle of water. I made stickers that wrapped around the label, the company label and it was the cover of my book and a tagline and a QR code that you could scan and it was clever. But at the same time water is freaking heavy. I would have to carry bottles of water around like I couldn't travel with, I couldn't fly with it that doesn't go through security. 

It was an event with ALA and I had bought bottles of water in Chicago and spent time putting stickers on 200 bottles of water and then setting them out on all the tables for when the librarians came in. They were like, oh cool. Yeah, this is clever. I like this And then you know, they drank the water and threw the bottles away. I will never forget walking through that room and seeing the trash cans that were full of my swag. I just kind of stopped doing all of that because I figured out how much effort and work I was putting into something that I couldn't actually track if it was effective. I do think preorder campaigns are worth it from everyone I've talked to that has done it. I don't want to do what you're doing. It's awesome that you do. And I know people that have amazing luck doing that. A lot of people will have those pre-order campaigns. I don't think I have the patience.

Chelsea: One of the things that I was really excited about number one, I'm definitely making sure that the actual physical mailing is like small paper things so that hopefully it doesn't take a whole lot of time to put together and doesn't cost a whole lot to ship. But the other thing I was excited about doing these scene cards and I can't remember if I mentioned this already or not. But the other thing is a digital coloring page of that scene card that you can get just through your email. I really love that we can do things digitally because that also helps. And I loved the idea of that, because I'm thinking about doing something that promotes readers to maybe color the coloring page and then share it online and do some kind of big thing with that. 

And so I think the idea behind preorder swag is if you can find something where it continues to give life to the book so that it gives people a reason to continue posting about the books. Such as I got this awesome coloring page from this book that I love and I'm going to show, you know, it kind of keeps the momentum going and you're not doing more than just emailing this coloring page. So I was kind of looking for things like that. Again, I don't know how successful it will be, but I also, I'm trying to approach it less from an idea of marketing and more of an idea of just wanting to say thank you because again, there's only so much I can control and so it's my way of saying thank you to those who did pre order and I'm trying to keep my focus on healthier things than freaking out about numbers and things like that.

Mindy: You can't get that feedback right away in the traditional world. So like for example, I do get confused about timelines because we operate on all these different timelines in the traditional publishing world. So I got my royalty statement last night about my release, The Initial Insult. So that came out in February of 2021. Right, is that right? I think that's right. So it's October and I'm just now getting some sort of idea of how that book performed. That type of feedback, especially in this world where we just don't know what's going on most of the time, having these numbers eight months after the fact - there's so much not knowing and you kind of have to be like, you were mentioning freaking out over the things you can't control. You can't control most things in publishing. 

And so I have really made a point of, I'm just going to write my book and I'm going to handle the things I can handle. I do bookmarks. I find them to be super easy. People use them, they're light, like you were saying you can mail them. But my biggest thing has always been I do events and I show up and I do school visits and I try to put my physical self in front of people as much as possible because I'm a good speaker. And of course during Covid that was taken away from me.  Go out there, little dark depressing book in the middle of Covid and let's see what you can do out there on your own, right? I can't go with you. There's no touring, I've been doing this a long time now and it's kind of nice to just really hit that plateau. This is what I can do, this is what I can't do. You're going to let go of some things. 

Chelsea: Absolutely. That's the healthy thing to do. We only have so much capacity for stress. Like you don't need to focus it on things that you have no control over anyway when there's plenty of things in your life that you can control and that need more of your attention. And the other thing that I learned from an author friend of mine early on, she got a book deal before I did. And so I was able to kind of learn from her experience. She focused very heavily on promotion and marketing. It was a two book series. So she was just really heavy into making sure that the series got out there as far as it could go and do as well as it could. 

It's not that that wasn't helpful or successful for that series, but once she got to the end of all of it, she realized - I've spent all my time and promotion and I haven't written another book in so long. And so I'm going to have such a huge gap between books coming out. The idea that nothing sells frontlist, like backlist. Like she, she was not building any more books in the front, you know, to continue to support those books that she had already written and so I kind of was able to learn from her experience that yes, promotion is good. But the best thing you can be doing is working on the next book as well. And so just trying to find that balance between the two as opposed to putting too much emphasis on one or the other. 

Mindy: Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book? Because the first one, All I Want for Christmas is The Girl Next Door, is coming out at the end of this month. So why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book and where they can find you online? 

Chelsea: So the book is available for pre order for both e-book and paperback on amazon. But then also if you would like a signed personalized copy, you can get it through Gathering Volumes Bookstore. You can go to their website and request it to be signed and or personalized. I'm happy to do both. And you can also find the links to both of those on my Instagram bio. The link in there and my Instagram is at Chelsea Bolboski C H E L S E A B O B U L S K I. And as I said, I'm mostly on Instagram but I have a website Chelsea Bobulski dot com That is being updated as we speak. I don't update it as much as I should. And then I also have a Facebook author page also under just at Chelsea Bobulski and those are all the places where you can find me. And if you have any questions, you can always message me on Instagram or also through the contact form on my website as well.

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.