The Creative Penn Blog: Helping you write, publish and market your book

Why You Need To Treat Your Writing Like A Business

May 24, 2019 by Creative Guest 1 Comment

Independent authors wear many hats, not just the one emblazoned ‘writer'. Bethany Cadman explores the idea that every author needs to treat writing like a business in order to thrive.

When we think of writers, we imagine arty, creative types. We visualize daydreamers who have chosen the less trodden path, who go with the flow, are arty, scatty, and loveably disorganized.

We conjure images of people, casually dressed, with mile-high piles of paper on their desks, and Post-It notes stuck to their hair, those who are caffeine-addicted, emotional, brilliant beasts who adore adventures and riveting conversation and love, more than anything, telling stories to everyone and anyone who will listen.

When we think of business people, we imagine those who are more stoic and sensible. We envisage smart, punctual people, those who are suited and booted with sleek hair and polished shoes.

We picture highly organized, strategic, spreadsheet-loving souls who stop at nothing to get what they want.

These two types of people are so at odds with one another, yet most writers could do with taking a leaf or two out of a businesspersons book. This doesn’t mean they have to compromise their ideals or make their life any less enjoyable.

However, by applying some typical business strategies to their writing, writers will see their productivity increase, their progression accelerate and become ever closer to reaching their writing goals.

So what are the things writers should do to achieve this? In this article, we explore some of the accessible and actionable ways a writer can start to treat their writing like a business.

Meticulous Organization

Any business owner knows that organization is key to the smooth and successful running of day to day operations. Writers too need to get organized if they want to be at the top of their game.

To become more organized you need to have a plan. Start with your end goal and then work out the steps that you need to get you there.

These steps should make up your action plan, and from there you need to figure out how much time it will take you to complete each step, as well as the resources you need. Then you can create a realistic schedule and will know what you need to do and when from the very beginning.

Progress Monitoring

Businesses don’t stay stagnant, they all aspire to improve and expand over time, and writers should feel the same about their work.

Not only do you want to develop as a writer, but also to build a bigger fanbase and reach a wider audience. Put tools in place to monitor your progress and challenge yourself to ‘grow’ each month by setting yourself achievable, clear targets whether they relate to your work, i.e., ‘finish ten chapters' or marketing your work, i.e., ‘getting 100 new followers on social media' or ‘increasing book sales by 25%'.

Even if you are experiencing success with your novel, it is essential to continue to progress and improve, and never, ever get too comfortable.

Customer Retention

A good business is nothing without its customers, and writers are nothing without their readers. It is crucial, therefore, to pay attention to your readers and listen to their needs.

Just as a business would reach out to customers to find out what they want and whether they are satisfied with the services they provide, a good writer will spend time nurturing their fanbase by communicating with them, responding to comments and listening to their feedback, and by giving them something valuable.

Just as loyal, returning customers are the foundation from which successful businesses are built, loyal, returning fans are what will help authors go from strength to strength.

Research & Education

A good business is always learning and trying to improve through the way they run their operations, how they treat their employees, the quality of their products and services and their customer satisfaction rates.

They do this by educating themselves, by discovering trends, by researching their competitors, by identifying what problems their customers have and providing solutions.

Writers should also dedicate themselves to learning about the craft of writing. They can do this through reading, through experimenting, through researching their genre and studying the delicate art of writing and storytelling and applying this to their work.

Marketing Strategies

Businesses need to market themselves to get attention, to build trust in their brand and to make people aware of the products and services they offer.

Writers, now more than ever, know that writing a book is only half the battle. Marketing plays an enormous part in determining the popularity of a book, and so the writer's who familiarize themselves with different marketing techniques and learn how to implement these will boost their books' chances of reaching interested readers.

Understanding how to use social media, promote offers, get in the press, and encourage readers to subscribe to your blog and newsletter will all strengthen your author platform and brand, and can be an invaluable way to ensure that as many people as possible discover your writing.

Hours, Holiday and Pay!

Last but not least, writers who treat their writing as a business should also remember to treat themselves as its employees. This means fair working hours, time off and making sure you are reasonably compensated for your efforts too.

Of course, we can’t predict how much money our books are going to make, but rewarding yourself for reaching goals and just being aware of the value of your time means you will appreciate yourself as an employee and be more motivated to keep up the good work!

We are no longer just writers. We are editors, marketers, HR consultants, Accountants, PR experts and so much more.

To do ourselves and our work justice we must recognize all the roles we must play, and start being more businesslike to give our writing the very best chance of success.

[Note from Joanna: For more on this subject, check out my book, Business for Authors: How to be an Author Entrepreneur.]

Do you treat your writing like a business or a hobby? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Bethany Cadman is the author of Doctor Vanilla’s Sunflowers and is a freelance writer and blogger. She has an MA in Creative Writing and has just finished her second novel, SWAP, which should be hitting the bookshelves soon! Learn more about her work at BethanyCadman.co.uk.

Writing Tips: 11 Tools To Capture Your Creative Ideas

May 22, 2019 by Creative Guest 5 Comments

Every writer has had more than one moment where a brilliant idea pops into our mind. Sadly, if we don't capture those ideas quickly they may be forgotten in the busy rush of life. Trevor Carss shares 11 free (or inexpensive) ways to make sure your genius story ideas never go astray again.

When crafting your next bestselling book, capturing creative ideas on the fly is often the greatest author challenge. The last thing you want is a missed opportunity at creating something special.

What if you are in the swimming pool and a thought floats by? Out for a run and forgot what you were thinking when you arrived home? For writing consistency, authors must remember and capture those fleeting moments.

When you have that next idea in mind, here are eleven ways to capture it quickly, before your thoughts move on to something else:

1. Google Keep

No matter what electronic device you have, Google Keep can capture anything for you. From text and drawings to audio and checklists, organizing your ideas is quite intuitive with this app. Google Keep is available for all major computing platforms.

2. Evernote

Evernote is a more robust note-keeping app in this list, with additional collaboration tools to make working in teams easier. For authors, this can be helpful when collaborating with editors, agents, and publishers.

There are free and paid options to choose from, depending on your needs. If you are not in the Google ecosystem, this is the best option available.

[Note from Joanna: I use Things app on Mac which syncs between my phone and laptop. It's my external brain!]

3. Google Docs

If you have several long-form ideas to write out, including full novels, Google Docs is the go-to cloud word-processor without a price tag attached to it. It used to be that Microsoft Word would be the platform of choice for aspiring authors. Not anymore. Every author should be considering this for their writing needs.

In terms of capturing ideas on the fly, this word processor is more sensible if you intend to type out several paragraphs of content. Autosave is an author’s best friend, and Google Docs does it brilliantly.

[Note from Joanna: I've co-written a number of books with Google Docs. It's great for collaboration as well as idea gathering.]

4. Google Sheets

If you like spreadsheets, having ideas organized in columns might be your preference. You can capture thousands of ideas into spreadsheets, and it’s great for developing a content calendar of your upcoming writing ideas for publication. Now Google Sheets has checkbox options to ensure you’re tackling tasks.

5. Google Slides

Storyboarding is an important way to map out every page. For this, Google Slides is an often overlooked but powerful way to plan out book ideas.

Crafting outlines, chapter-by-chapter, can be facilitated with this app. This program is like Microsoft PowerPoint and is typically used for presentation creation.

6. Apple Notes

For a simple option, Apple users go with the native Notes app on their iPhones, MacBooks or iPads. For ease of use, this is a great option to get started with. Especially when time is of the essence, you might want an app that just works. This is the one. The major downside to Apple Notes is it does not play nice with any other device but Apple’s.

7. Moleskine Notebook

The traditional notebook still has its place for those who prefer paper notes. With today’s smartphone technologies, Moleskine has smart notebooks that can be scanned digitally for searchable notes. Or, if you’re just looking for paper capture, any notebook will do. Go with unlined paper if you like to sketch out ideas as drawings.

[Note from Joanna: I used Moleskines for 15+ years but have switched to Leuchtturm1917 as the paper quality is great for fountain pen ink and the pages are slightly wider.]

8. Post-it Notes

For brainstorming sessions, Post-it Notes are a staple item. Having a stack of these by your bedside table doesn’t hurt either. Some of the best ideas jump out at you while you’re lying in bed.

9. Twitter

A unique idea capture method is Twitter. Known for its social media prowess, you can tweet an idea in 240 characters or less with Twitter. Keep in mind these ideas will be public, but that might work to your advantage if you are into social media for your marketing efforts. You can be the innovative author who tweets your ideas to the world. You are building a following while capturing your creativity!

10. Self-SMS

When you’re just looking to get the creative idea written down, sending a text message to yourself might be the best electronic option.

11. Browser Bookmarks

While reading informative blogs, some of the articles you come across might spark an idea or two for you. In case you would like to refer back to the article in future, your Internet browser can bookmark the page for later.

Final tips

To avoid app overload in your creative process, the suggestion is to use a maximum of 2-3 note-taking apps. My personal process involves a combination of Google Keep for notes on the fly, Google Sheets for content calendars, Google Slides for outlines and Google Docs for long-form content writing. Google Keep is the first place where my ideas go to grow.

By capturing your ideas in one main area, you will be better equipped to organize them for later. Avoid the dusty digital folder. This is the proverbial unused filing cabinet where ideas go to die.

Capture your ideas where you will see and act on them, rather than burying them away.

What are your favorite tools for capturing your creative ideas? Do you use any of the ones mentioned here? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Trevor Carss is the author and illustrator of more than 50 children’s books and adult short stories.

Follow his latest thoughts at TrevorCarss.com.

Self-Publishing And Marketing Literary Fiction With Jane Davis

May 20, 2019 by Joanna Penn 5 Comments

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03:21 — 51.5MB)

Subscribe: Android | RSS

Can self-publishing be a viable route for literary authors? If you write cross-genre, can you be successful with your writing? I talk about these topics and more with award-winning author, Jane Davis, in today's interview.

In the intro, I mention the AI text generator that has now been released in a modified version [TalkToTransformer.com] after being considered too dangerous to release in Feb [Techcrunch]; Google's new AI that can help you speak in another language in your own voice [The Next Web]; and how to turn your book into a podcast with text-to-speech AI, Amazon Polly [The Creative Penn blog]; and how moving house is like learning to write and publish.

Plus, my interview on how I run my author business plus my thoughts on a voice-first future [Unemployable Podcast]; my Mum, Jacqui Penn, on writing as Penny Appleton and a behind the scenes look at our creative relationship [Kick in the Creatives Podcast]; and how travel and writing can help you deal with death and grief [Books and Travel Podcast].

Do you need a professional editor or book cover designer? Do you need help with marketing, publicity or advertising? Find a curated list of vetted professionals at the Reedsy marketplace, along with free training on writing, self-publishing and book marketing. Check it out at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/reedsy

Jane Davis is an award-winning writer of literary fiction. Her first novel, Half-Truths & White Lies, won the Daily Mail first novel award. And she recently won the Selfies Award at London Book Fair 2019, for best self-publish work of fiction for her book Smash All the Windows.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

Making the decision to move to indie publishing

On the many factors and issues around book pricing

Why you need to try different marketing strategies until you find what works for your books

Finding your target audience

Looking at what a book has earned as a whole, rather than how it’s priced at any one time

You can find Jane Davis at Jane-Davis.co.uk and on Twitter @janedavisauthor

Book Marketing: How To Turn Your Book Into A Podcast

May 17, 2019 by Creative Guest 8 Comments

We are on the cusp of an explosion in audio content — but human narration takes investment and AI voices are improving all the time. If having your book narrated and turned into an audiobook is not within your current budget, why not try turning it into a podcast using speech to text technology? Makoto Tokudome walks us through how to do this using free and inexpensive tools.

Are you a self-published author? Are you looking to get your book into other mediums such as audio?

Do you wish someone would narrate your book? Wouldn't it be great to be able to turn your book chapters into podcast episodes?

Well, by using some free online tools, now you can!

I've put together this comprehensive tutorial to walk you through the process I used to turn the chapters of my book into a podcast. You can check out my example here.

In a nutshell, I used Amazon's Polly text-to-speech (TTS) service to create MP3's of my book chapters. And then used Anchor FM to create and publish the audio as podcast episodes.

The idea of creating podcast episodes out of a book was inspired by Mark Coker and his podcast episodes of his Book Marketing Guide book.

*Caveat – Although text-to-speech (TTS) technology is quite impressive, my understanding is that Audible/ACX and other vendors still require audiobooks to be narrated by a human.

So What Can We Do With Our Text-to-Speech Audio Files?

1. You can create a podcast

2. You can use the audio files of your book to be a lead magnet. Give your audio files as a free audiobook download in exchange for email signups.

What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that can convert text into audio speech. Text-to-speech technology has been around for some time. You may have even used it on your Mac or Apple device.

But up until recently the technology has usually produced halted, robotic voices. But Amazon Polly is able to create more lifelike speech that is quite impressive.

Amazon Polly currently offers this service in 26 different languages (e.g., English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc.).

I chose the male voice “Brian” with British English to narrate my book chapters. (Listen to a sample.) You can sign up for an account here.

Take a look at the pricing. My understanding is that you can request up to 5 million characters (i.e. not words) a month for free, and then $4.00 for each additional million characters:

Using Amazon Polly

After you sign up for an Amazon Polly account (i.e. Amazon AWS), you will first need to create a S3 bucket. (Out of this entire tutorial, this is probably the most difficult/technical part.)

This S3 bucket is basically an online drive or cloud storage in which Amazon Polly will save your MP3 files that you converted into speech.

Follow this guide to create an S3 bucket.

Select a unique name for your bucket (e.g. mtokudome)

Make sure you make a note of the region in which you create your bucket (e.g. US West Oregon).

Amazon Polly lets you convert up to 3,000 characters to speech on-the-fly. You can play around with the different languages and voices.

Anything beyond 3,000 characters needs to be a task request that gets processed by Amazon servers. This is why you first needed to create an S3 bucket.

At the very top of the page, make sure you select the same region in which you created your S3 bucket.

You also need to specify your S3 bucket name. Click on “Change S3 task settings” and input your S3 bucket you just created.

Now you should be all set up to start turning your book chapters into MP3s.

(If you have problems, email me or leave me a comment below and I'll try to help.)

The first step you need to do is prep your book chapters. Open up your book document (i.e. Word document). You need to remove any page numbers, footnotes/endnotes, hyperlinks, etc. Otherwise, all of these will be read out loud.

In my own book, I had a few foreign words and some acronyms that needed to be tweaked. In theory, you could copy and paste your entire manuscript, but I found it better to work in batches, chapter by chapter. I also did this because I use these separate MP3 files as different podcast episodes.

Once you have cleaned up the text, copy and paste it into the Amazon Polly window. Then select the language and voice you want to use. Double-check your S3 task settings to make sure that your S3 bucket is set correctly.

Once you're ready, click on “Synthesize to S3”. The task will be processed and completed in a few minutes.

Now go over to your S3 bucket where you will find your newly created MP3 file. Click on the MP3 file to download.

After you have created the audio file, you will most likely want to listen to the file. You may still end up finding words or pronunciation issues that need to be fixed in your chapter text.

If you're happy with the results, you can continue to convert the rest of the chapters of your book into audio.

What is Anchor FM?

Anchor FM is a free podcasting tool / platform that allows virtually anyone with a smartphone or computer to start creating their very own podcast. And it's 100% free.

Anchor FM removes the complexities of things like podcast hosting and distribution. Your episodes are hosted for free and distributed to all the major podcast networks (e.g. iTunes, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.)

You can sign up for an account here.

Using Anchor FM

There are plenty of ways to get fancy with podcasting, but the goal of this tutorial is to keep it as simple as possible. The goal here is to add cover art, some basic description, and create a basic intro and outro for each podcast episode. I include some basic audio editing suggestions below, but they are not necessary.

Editing Your Podcast Details and Episode Details
At the top of the page, click on “Settings” This is the settings page of your podcast. Give your podcast a name and description. Fill out the other details.

You can also upload cover art for your podcast. If you have the graphics for your book cover design, you may simply choose to upload this file. If you have some photo editing abilities, you may want to modify your cover design to fit more of a square aspect ratio.

If you don't have editing abilities, you may choose to use a free tool like Canva to create a simply design. Check out their templates for album covers.

Adding Your Audio File

At the top of the page, click on the “New Episode” link. At this page, you can drag-and-drop the audio file of the chapters you just created. For example, drag-and-drop chapter 1 of your book to create your first podcast episode.

Creating an Intro and Outro

The next step is to create an intro and outro. The simplest way is to click on the “Record” button and record yourself. If you have a microphone or headset, it can improve the quality of the audio. Once you create the intro and outro, you can drag them around in the correct sequence.

What to say in the Intro and Outro?

You may be wondering what to actually say in your intro and outro. You can google for some tips and ideas. But at the minimum, you probably want to introduce yourself and give an overview of who this podcast might be for. Here's my intro as an example:

Hello and welcome to The Thoughtful Language Learner Podcast. My name is Makoto and I’m also the author of the book The Thoughtful Language Learner.

Are you a struggling language learner? Do you feel like you lack the confidence and skills to learn a foreign language?

I believe that cultivating self-awareness and understanding who you are as a learner is the key to success.

Through this podcast, I’m bringing you the contents of my book. Each episode will cover a new chapter. Sort of a like an audiobook. And what’s cool is that I’m bringing you each chapter through some text-to-speech technology. I hope you like it.

Since the goal of your podcast is to get people to know about your book, you probably want to mention that somewhere in your intro or outro. The outro might also be a good place to have a call-to-action or a lead magnet for people to sign up for your email list. Here is my outro example:

I hope you enjoyed this chapter of my book. If you found it helpful, send me a message and let me know.

Also I have a free PDF that introduces some of the assessment tools mentioned in my book. If you are interested, just go to rebrand.ly/freepdf

Thanks for listening.

Editing Your Episode Details

You're almost ready to publish! After you click “Save episode”, you will want to fill out details about the episode. Give it an episode name and description. Again, use the episode description to be a place where listeners can learn more about you or about your book.

Once everything looks good, click “Publish this episode”.

Congratulations! You've just created a new podcast and put out your first episode.

The episode will be immediately available to listen to (and over the next day or two will become available on the other networks such as iTunes, Google, etc.).

Improving the Audio

Although this is not a necessary step, there are a few simple things that you can do to improve the quality and production value of your podcast.

You can use any audio editing software you like, but I'm using a free software called Audacity.

If you listen to podcasts, you probably notice that many intros include some sort of background music. There are some places such as Youtube's Audio Library that provide royalty free music that you can use for projects. (Note that some of them are free to use but require attribution.)

Find some music you like and download it.

Using Anchor to record your intro and outro is okay, but you can use Audacity to also improve the audio quality.

Finally, I noticed that the audio file created by Amazon Polly was a little too quiet. I used the “Amplify” effect in Audacity and increased the amplification by 3 dB.

Conclusion

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. I know that utilizing text-to-speech may not be for everyone. I personally find Amazon Polly's speech quality acceptable, but some may disagree.

As a self-published author, this was something new I wanted to experiment with. I'll honestly be happy if the podcast leads to a few more people finding out about my book.

Have you thought of turning your book into a podcast? What do you think about using speech-to-text? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Makoto Tokudome is a husband and father of two. He is a language teacher and language coach who loves to help learners get motivated and gain confidence. With an engineering background, he is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve learning.