Don and Laila discuss what they learned attending the 20Books Vegas conference in November 2022, as well as some updates in setting up their business.
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Well, wowee! It’s been a month. Well, not completely. Today’s the 15th, last newsletter issue went out on the 16th, yeah. Anyway, it’s been a very busy month, but first I want to tell you about what we learned at a conference we attended in November.
In the middle of all the chaos we talked about last time, with moving and our AirBnB guests causing lots of damage, well… we had signed up for a conference in February. When we moved we decided not to change our plans to go ahead and we went to Las Vegas to attend the conference.
So there is there’s a Facebook group that I discovered a couple of years ago. It’s a pretty big group called 20booksto50K. The notion is from one of the founding members of the group. As an independent author one day he looked at his royalties and on this particular day he made about $7.00. He started doing some math and he’s like, okay, if I had twenty of these, twenty books producing $7/day, then I could make $50,000/year. Modest, but it’s livable in much of the country.
So this Facebook group is dedicated to making indie authoring livable. It’s all about how to how to do the craft of making your book, putting it all together and marketing it, and strategies to make it work. We would love to do that, so we went to their conference, 20Books Vegas. It was awesome. I came away fired up and feeling optimistic and full of even more ideas.
Laila said that one of the main things that she came away with was how you don’t have to polish the thing so much. Like, just make a thing. Don’t worry about the details at first. When you’re writing, you’re always trying to hone everything along the way you want it to be, beautiful and soulful, but you have to let that go and just create. Don’t think about it so much and just put it out and make something. Just crank it out; that’s the first step. Laila was really surprised that a lot of people at the conference seemed to think, “I don’t worry about it too much and I’ll just send it to the editor.” She said: “I was always worried before. I needed to have it more polished. I thought the editor was just a backup for things that I didn’t catch. But now I understand it’s more of kind of a partnership.”
I remember one guy in particular. I read his post a year or two ago, and he was talking about how he does his business. Now he makes a pretty good living as an independent author, and he cranks his books out. He’ll spend a week or two writing a book. Friday afternoon, writes “the end,” sends it to his editor. And the following week, he starts writing another book. Meanwhile, the first book gets edited. And so he has this rotation, where each book takes a few weeks to produce, but he only spends a week or two to create each one. I don’t remember exactly how long. He only spends one cycle per book writing it. He pays somebody to edit it, he pays somebody to do the cover. All that.
Obviously you want it to be cohesive and have a good storyline. It’s not like you want to just put out whatever unpolished product, but you can learn how to produce good content quickly.
I’m actually applying these principles to this very update right now, to the newsletter and podcasts. I’m just trying to get it out there and make sure it happens. I’m aware that the audio isn’t perfect, the video isn’t the most aesthetic, but if every podcast episode were perfectly polished, there would be no podcast episodes.
Also, as far as publishing – “self-published” might be outdated terminology. It used to be you could pay a vanity press a large chunk of your savings, then you’d have all these physical copies that you’d have to peddle everywhere.
Yeah, it’s not like that anymore. Instead, you can publish directly to Kindle or to Google Play Books. If you can’t afford a professional editor, now there’s spell-check and Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid. If you can afford it you should still use a professional editor, but these tools can certainly help as well.
So I feel like there is a way ahead and we can see the way and I want to make it happen. I have drawn up a phased timeline.
To apply the conference to us, for stories: if there’s a guy out there who can crank out a book in a week, I can probably do one in 12 weeks, so I’m going to try to write a book per quarter this year. And so with with the Grendhill Chronicles, I have written about 34,000 words of it so far. One of the things at the conference I learned about Kendall Vella, which is a platform for serialized content. I kind of look where I am with Grendhill, and I would like to take advantage of Kindle Vella. For Kindle Vella, it has to be new content, though never available somewhere for free prior to that. So I think I’m going to take what I have so far of the Grendhill Chronicles and call that a novella.
So there’s the introductory novella and I could go ahead and publish that now I suppose, and I mean begin the process. It definitely needs editing. But yeah, for the Grendhill Chronicles intro novella and then book 1, I want to have it hashed out by the end of March. Update: I care too much about Grendhill and getting it right in order to write it so fast. I’m pushing GOHOMUSP first instead.
But maybe we should calm down. We’ve had to move, including partial moves, some 8 times in the last 3 years. Our lives are still in upheaval. So please be forgiving if we miss a deadline!
Also, in a perfect world, we will create original music to accompany our writing.
You know what? I’m going to cut myself off here. It’s late and I really need to sleep.
Listen to the podcast format or watch it on YouTube!
Since publishing our last newsletter issue, we:
- Filed our business as Thorn Syndicate Publishing LLC – for Children’s books and Non-Fiction!
- Gave it a “doing business as” of Grendhill Media – for Fantasy and Sci-Fi!
- Wrote 12k words of GOHOMUSP – my current work-in-progress humorous novel about a hapless guild of people with pretty useless superpowers. You know, like the guy who can double how fast grass grows, or the girl who can make herself findable (to the entire human race at the same time, no exceptions), or the man who can teleport but reeeaaallly doesn’t want to.
- Came down with some cold/flu. It gripped me for a solid week and a half. Wasn’t fun. Couldn’t write much during that time.
- Tried to go live on YouTube from mobile, but couldn’t because we don’t have enough followers. Please, if you have a moment, jump over to https://www.youtube.com/@GrendhillChron and hit the “subscribe” button so we can provide quick updates more easily in the future!
- Announced my fiction pen name, T. Solmi Pedramon! A bit odd, yeah? Well, he’s actually going to be one of the characters in Grendhill.
Catch us next time, and please tell your friends where to find us.