Ep 207 Writing Goodies I'm Grateful For

Pencils&Lipstick podcast · Nov 20, 2023

Transcript

Hello everyone welcome back to pencils and lipstick this is episode 207 and it is November 20th and this week is the American Thanksgiving holiday so everyone in America will be running around like crazy people trying to get all the Black Friday deals basically what we do and in between there we eat Turkey and watch football and a parade in New York called the Macy's Parade. So we are going to have a quick show today because as Americans are busy cooking and inviting family over to their house and maybe anticipating a few discussions we'll say around the Thanksgiving table, I'm just not sure everyone's going to thinking about writing. I don't know. You guys let me know if you are planning to write this week. I am actually physically in Italy when you're listening to this. If you're watching on YouTube, no I'm not in Italy. I am recording this a few days early, the day that I leave actually. We have been saving and planning this trip for about a year now. So whenever one of our kids turns 13 they get to decide where we're gonna go and Thanksgiving just happens to be the only time that they have together because they don't

share a spring break together and this time that Christmas is for family so we are going we are gonna be spending our Thanksgiving in Italy it's gonna be so much fun. If you want to follow our adventures, I will be posting those at katcaldwell .author on Instagram. I know you're not supposed to do all those things, you know, all the personal stuff, but I don't post too much personal on my Instagram, but I do post my travels because I love traveling, especially food. You know, I'm gonna post my food. You guys can post your turkeys and I will post my pasta whatever I will be eating. We're also going to be learning to cook some pasta so that will be fun. So my middle daughter turned 13 this year and this is the trip that

she has planned. Anyway, can you tell I'm excited? I'm very excited. But it's Thanksgiving. It's what we are to gather together in America and give thanks for what we have. And so I love doing a podcast episode on thanks. If in gratitude basically finding all my words. If you don't know gratitude and the attitude of gratitude is actually a very helpful mindset for anybody but let's focus on creatives. When you have an attitude of gratitude it actually releases your stress. It can help you see things clearer. It can take away the blocks on our creative blocks, which are usually caused by stress, right? There's a lot of scientific data that giving thanks verbally or written in your journals, there's a lot of gratitude journals out there, right? It helps you not only with your mindset but with your mental health, which will also help you in your creativity. So let's take a moment to look at what we are grateful for and we are going to focus this episode on things pertaining to writing that I am grateful for. You know, writing can be a really frustrating career choice. You know, I always laugh that I make more money teaching people to write than I do on my writing, which my goal for 2024, 2025 is to flip those or at least equalize them. It just takes time. It takes a lot of effort.

It takes a couple books, unless you get a really great book, you know, and that gets picked up by somebody's book club, I don't know, or television or Netflix, right? So it can feel like kind of a job that no one cares about, that, you know, no one's gonna, the world won't end if they don't get your book right. And so I don't know, you can allow that stress to sort of get to you and make you just feel a little ungrateful, you know, like, why am I doing this and what am I doing this for? And I could go through all that. Like, you are doing it because you have a story that's unique to this world. And it's something I truly believe for both you and for me, but I have to admit that sometimes it's hard, right, to, like, trudge through the edits or trudge through the mediocre reviews or trudge through just trying to get the story that's in your head out. I don't know about you, but sometimes it's hard to finish the one story because I want to write the other one. You know, so it's a lot of battling by ourselves.

It's good to have friends who are writers. So my number, my first point of gratitude is I want to give thanks for my writer friends. I've made quite a few friends having put myself out there on the internet, especially with this podcast. In 2019, when I started it, it was on a whim and it was mostly to be able to talk to people who I thought knew so much more than me, which tons of people do, and I was curious about how they had gotten their book written, what they were doing to sell it, what they were doing to write the next one. I was just so curious and I really wanted to hear from writers, so I thought the only thing that I can give back to them is a spot on a podcast. And so, I have met so many wonderful people through this podcast, but especially Stacey Juba and Emma Desi and Louis Jordstad.

They have really become really good friends of mine. Like, I just love talking to them about the author business and writing, but I've talked to so many people that I'm just grateful for their time, for their willingness to talk to me, especially those who were willing to talk to me in the first few years, who, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. I was trying my best and sometimes I feel like I still don't know what I'm doing. But I've really created this group of people that I can reach out to now and talk about Just writing or business, being an author, the frustrations thereof. And I think that's really cool. Like I haven't even met Stacey or Louis in person yet, and I got to meet Emma in person this past summer.

I mean, let's go into like technology. I'm really grateful for Zoom, even before the pandemic, you know, I was able to meet people on Zoom and create these interviews and upload a podcast so that you guys can listen to them. I just think that's really incredible for all the bad things that the internet and technology does to us, you know, and might do to us in the coming future with AI. It has really broadened our world, hasn't it? And it's allowed us to sort of step into somebody else's office or home and listen to their podcast. Every week I invite you guys into my creative chaos here at the office and either talk to someone else or talk about what I'm looking at in writing. I mean as far as technology goes too I'm extremely grateful for pro writing aid or if you like grammarly. Even like the spell checks on word and google docs are great. Scrivener's got a finger there's out a little bit better. But if you followed me like six years ago when I was dashing off emails in between picking up, you know, a four -year -old from preschool and my other kids from elementary school, there were quite a few mistakes there because I just didn't have like the brain capacity or the time. And when I found ProWritingAid and Grammarly, I was just so grateful. Not that I always got them in, you know, the documents into the those guys before I sent out the email. A couple of you know what I'm talking about because a couple of you were kind enough to send me like little email texts saying, maybe you should check that sentence. It doesn't make any sense. But I'm really grateful for that. It's not that I can't spell. I was actually, Well, I never went to like a spelling bee, I was never good at that, but I can spell pretty well.

But, you know, your fingers are flying across the keyboard and you're thinking faster than you can type, at least I am. And half the time it's just like, you know, trying to get out and it sometimes doesn't come out correctly. So I am grateful for programs like that. I'm prorating able actually like check your echo words and to you know using like the past tense too much or the I think it just is an incredible product not that it is the only thing that you can use like it's not going to check your story and it does actually miss a lot when you're going through a book Like, I think it's actually best when you're using small chunks of text, not to put any downers on them, but like, it'll still miss some stuff, especially if you're doing a really long text. But it's better than I would be able to do all by myself. I'll say that.

Um, you know, I'm grateful for laptops no longer weighing 500 pounds. Remember the days when you were walking into class and your backpack was like weighing you down because you were literally carrying a full like 10 pound laptop and it took up all the room in the whole world. Oh my gosh. I mean, we have tablets now. we have mini laptops, those are a little, a little bad for your shoulders, right, when you're like trying to keyboard on that little tiny keyboard, but we have them like for in a pinch. I'm also grateful for these like crazy keyboards. I can't show you now because all my mic wires are over it, but you know, the ones that sort of split so that I can have

my shoulder in the right position. But yeah, laptops, the technology that's moving forward I'm really grateful for readers as well, people who have been willing to read my short stories and my novels and give me feedback, and I'm especially grateful to the readers who, even if they might not love my book, being kind enough to give constructive criticism back. For just willing to give my books a try or my stories a try, I'm always grateful to them. I'm grateful to the writers who are sticking with me as I coach them through their books, or the writers who have chosen me to give them editorial feedback on their manuscript. They're amazing. They don't have to trust me out of probably thousands of people out there who would give feedback for them. The Author Accelerator program has been amazing. I really do enjoy it. Every program has ups and downs, but I think Author Accelerated does a very good job about teaching story and story structure beyond just, you know, writing well. I think we can write well and still flop on the story, and I think they balance that a lot. The community there is really great. And being able to work with those writers as well, sometimes with my own writing, sometimes reading their writing. It's really, really wonderful. So just, you know, as we, as I branch out and do different things, you meet new people, right? And you're able to join different memberships and different groups and see how they're writing and see where you can challenge yourself to write in a different way or write something new.

There's some really good groups out there. If you guys, I know Black Friday's coming, and you're gonna get inundated with emails. So just keep an eye out for those if you are looking for a group. Next week, Gabriela Pereira is gonna talk about her DIY MFA membership program called The Hub. I know Lewis George has a membership program where they meet together and they talk about what they're writing. I know Carissa Andrews does as well.

Like these are really great groups that you can, of writers that you can come into and learn not only the craft, but you can meet other writers and and be around them and be challenged by them and be able to challenge them right so this being a little less alone and a little more reciprocal on that so be on the watch for those i know it's it's tempting to just delete everything all the time um i will also say you should be on the lookout for like i think yeah because it's NaNoWriMo as well. ProWritingEgg usually has a great discount so be on the lookout for those. You know there's a couple different people who have created amazing software for writers specifically. I'm going to tell you about a couple of them. One is Atticus. Before Atticus there was pretty much only Vellum or Adobe Publisher and how you could format your book perfectly. I have used Adobe publisher and infinity publisher and it was quite the learning curve I got things done I especially I what did I format on there I formatted my journals my writing prompt book and I think I might have formatted one of my my other books it's a lot it it can take a lot of time so Atticus and vellum pretty much upload your document and you put in a few tweaks and like it's done. It's pretty amazing. I don't want to say that it doesn't take any time because it definitely does take some time, but it's a lot

easier for most of us who are not, you know, trained in graphic design to use than Adobe. I know ReadSee also has a formatter online, readsee .com. I've never used it before, but I'm sure that for an e -book it's great. The great thing about Atticus, and I've only used Atticus, Vellum is for Mac and so I haven't used Vellum, but Atticus can also format it for print. So that is huge. We can make sure that our print books are exactly how we want them to look. We can be a little bit more in control about that.

And so I'm really grateful for just like the innovation on some people's part that if it was all up to me none of this would ever be invented ever so I'm just grateful for that and I haven't tried it yet but I've been told that Atticus has updated their software and you can now write inside Atticus and the way that Atticus is from the from the back end from what I've used it for is I think it would look a lot like working in Scrivener but on the cloud and so that's interesting. A couple writers have told me that that's what they're doing and that's pretty cool. So if you are looking for kind of an all -in -one there because I really like I really like Scrivener as well Scrivener is great it will back up to the cloud You can sort of move things around it. It exports chapter wise, which is really awesome But you know if you're looking for a one -stop shop most likely Atticus sounds like it's going to be one of those places and I'll put these links in the Show notes below some of them will have affiliate links that connected with them. Some of them won't Not everyone has affiliates but The other people who have made amazing products for us is BookFunnel and StoryOrigin. Some people say that they do the same thing, but they don't really do the same. I mean, they do, but they're a little bit different for everyone.

So you have BookFunnel, especially like sending your book out, your audiobook. I think Story Origin is starting to do this, but you have two different groups there. You can exchange books with other writers, where they'll put your book in their newsletter. It's called Swaps, and you'll put their book in your newsletter. And you can find different promotions going on. You can work with a lot of writers that way. You can meet a lot of writers that way. And depending kind of on your genre, um, you can find kind of more on one platform than the other, but other than that, they also help you host your book so that, like the other week, I gave away my Push a Pencil, my writing, um, prompt book, and I made it into an e -book, even though I think it's a really great paperback because there's room to write in it, but I made it into an e -book to sort of push it out to people, and it's hosted there and so I can give the book, give everyone a link, and then they can download the book at their leisure and that way I don't have to buy coupons from Amazon, I don't have to worry about that, so it's really nice that way. I believe Story Origin is already doing that as well, so I'm not saying that you need both of them. I actually have both of them because I use for two different things and I've had BookFunnel for a really long time and I use StoryOrigin for different different things so anyway I'm a bit weird that way. But definitely check out both of those BookFunnel and StoryOrigin especially if you have not gotten into swaps yet or if you're trying to look for a place to send your ebooks to people for like beta readers anything like that They really make it a lot easier. You don't have to send people a PDF link or a file or anything like that. Don't make life harder than it has to be, really. I know everything kind of adds up and everything costs money. Again, check your email for these different emails, Black Friday emails that are going to come in. But it's worth, if you're having a book come out, it's probably worth the $100 to be able to have one place

where the e -book is where you can send it all out to your beta readers. You can give e -books, like when I do my Kickstarter, they will get a book funnel link. And when I do my beta readers, they get a story origin link. And then I don't really have to worry about it. I don't get inundated with emails. I don't, nobody gets lost you know, I don't forget an email going down the list or anything like that. Everyone gets the same link and they just download it as they need it.

But then speaking of Black Friday, I know one of the biggest Black Friday deals ever is the same guy that created Atticus, Dave Cheston does his publisher Rocket Black Friday. So Publisher Rocket is a software that I use to check like keywords for Amazon and honestly I use the same keywords for Kobo. It can help you find like where you are in the Amazon lineup where you know your genre is how many times it's getting downloaded especially if you niche down in a genre like is anyone even looking for that. it's incredibly useful. If you think, I don't know about you, but I always think like, oh, that's a great keyword. And then I'll put it in to publish a rocket. It's like been searched for twice in 30 days. It's like it's a terrible keyword. Nobody uses that keyword. I don't know what's wrong with my brain. I always try to come up with like the most creative keywords and nobody's ever doing that. When you're googling stuff, you just put in, you know, billionaire,

there, South, small town, I don't know, that's the book that you want to read, right? So it helps you to find those keywords and, you know, where certain books rank up and down on Amazon. If you're looking for a new genre to write, you might want to check that out where it's ranking and how many people are downloading things. And he always runs this promotion in which he gives away his class on keywords for free if you buy Publisher Rockets. So the keywords and categories course, our class is like how to use it, like finding the right keywords and finding like the low competition niche genre, you know, that you can put into Amazon so that's how you can sort of shoot up the best, you know, to number one of that category, right? And sort of get that badge of honor. Um, you can, it'll help you like avoid the ghost categories where like Amazon just never pushes them. In fact, sometimes they don't even like let anyone see them because there are some categories, I think, especially with like the erotica genres where you will not be seen, right? So I think that's the that's the course that like really helps you get the full use out of the publisher rocket software. So he always gives that away for free on Black Friday. That one is an affiliate link down below if you want that. If you're on my newsletter, you'll also get it in my newsletter. But it's it's great. And it's if you're thinking about getting it anyway, you might as well get the course in order to use the software properly. right? Because what's the point of buying these things if we don't know how to use them? Um, so I would also say I'm grateful for Scrivener. I know we talked about that a little bit. Google Docs. Oh my gosh, where would I be without Google Docs? I have no idea. Um, and this year I want to add Mibble Art to it. They have created my book covers for my duology, um, Bended Loyalty and love and I'm looking at one now and it's so pretty and I'm very excited about it. They've done a really great job with it and they are working on a new logo for me so I'm excited about them doing that and seeing that. They're, I think they're a small company. A couple weeks back I interviewed somebody from Mibble Art, Katya, if you want to listen to that episode. It was really interesting on

like how to get the right book cover, what they're looking for, how they're working with authors to get better book covers out there. If you check them out in the link below, Miblart .com, they have like pre -done book covers and you can buy those. They've never been used before sort of things that they've designed and they haven't sold and you can find one cheaper or you can get one for a really fair price done especially for you.

So I just I'm grateful for them as well and all the other artists out there doing their best to give us great book cover art. Book covers are one of those things like we've been told since we were kids not to judge a book by a cover by its cover but obviously we do we all like it gets suckered in by beautiful covers. And I have to say I picked up Anxious People the other day by Fred Frederick Backman. I really hate his covers. I'm sorry, Frederick. I don't like his covers. I don't think he does the writing in the book justice. He must really like them. So it's funny how you'll like not pick up a book because you don't like the cover. Or sometimes you pick it up because you like the cover and maybe sometimes the story doesn't pan out like you wanted it to but anyway so I'm grateful for Mibble Art and anyone else out there who is who is creating those covers for us because I wouldn't be able to do my covers that's for sure so what are you grateful for let me know I will be on Twitter at Pencils Lipstick I'm on Instagram for the podcast at Pencils and Lipstick all spelled out If you want to follow me, I'm really grateful to be in Italy right now as you're listening to me with my family and enjoying my kids as in these moments that I have before they grow up and they leave me.

So if you want to follow that journey, it will be posted at katcaldwell .author on Instagram. Yeah, maybe you're grateful for TikTok if it's selling you books, maybe you're grateful for a author friendship or finding a new author to read, let me know what you're grateful for this season. And next week, as I said, we are going to be back with Gabriela Pereira. I'm so grateful for all of the people still willing to come onto this podcast and talk to me. I think you're really going to enjoy it, that episode where she talks about her program called DIY MFA. So I will see you then. Eat lots of turkey, be safe and be well. and we will be back to your podcast, what's it called? Inbox, downloaded, I don't know, next week. Be sure if you are enjoying the podcast to share it with all your writer friends. I am grateful for all of you guys who have shared it and who have reviewed it.

You guys are awesome. All you podcast listeners are the best as well. This would be nothing without you, quite honestly. I see the numbers you guys are constantly coming back our new ones new people are coming to listen and I am very grateful for that as well as we Keep trucking through the fifth year of pencils and lipstick. You guys can also let me know who you want to Hear from who do you want on the show that I can interview? If you're on YouTube, you can put it in the comments below and I will see that Otherwise you can hit me on X, it's not Twitter, sorry, put X at Pencils Lipstick or on Instagram as well. I'd be happy to reach out to whoever you'd like to hear from and see if they will come on the show. So happy Thanksgiving, everyone, whether you're in America or outside. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.