The Story Studio Podcast - Writing, Storytelling, and Marketing Advice for Writers & Business

This week we focused on what a new author can do to build a booming indie publishing business. So many of our listeners are just starting out, and they’re either working on their first book now or have one or two books out already. So what can someone do in that situation? We went through a few key issues that might be on your mind right now like: Should I start a blog? And what should I blog about? Should I write a full novel or focus on shorter books? Should I break in with a series or release a standalone title first? What should I do if I’ve written a Bialy-Pimps-style book? (A massive standalone that leads to nothing else.) Should I go with KDP Select or Launch Wide? As always, it’s good to remember that we don’t really give advice on this show. But we did try to put ourselves in the shoes of a starting author and speculate on what we’d do. For sure, the most important thing we realized was the importance of thinking long term when making business decisions. If you do that, you’re future self will love you! Oh, and here’s the video of Garrett’s we mentioned. It’s HIL-AR-I-OUS. Watch the video version here:

  This week we talked to Ray Chase about audiobooks, officially welcoming him to the budding Sterling & Stone family as one of our top go-to audio guys. While we couldn’t help but dick around a little, there definitely was some advanced audiobook talk going on, too. The Newborn Empire that is Sterling & Stone First, we talked a little about our small team, with new support members like Archer Caldwell and Jacob Tullos, and how we’re all working to get more organized. We look forward to the episode in mid August when we’ll dig deep into Sterling and Stone, our upcoming umbrella platform for all our fiction, books, and podcasts. We’ll also be talking about direct selling. Today was mostly a cock-tease for that show. Well, we did talk about potato salad, too, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Interview with Ray Chase When Ray got on, after a million years of microphone and camera trouble, we were able to get down to the nitty and the gritty of audiobooks after ACX cut their royalty plan nearly in half. A key issue for new writers is trying to get respectable narrators to agree to a royalty split with such low profit rates. Ray gave some great advice on that. We also basically agreed that Ray should be the voice for most Collective Inkwell and Realm and Sands titles from now on, including Dave’s favorite books of all time, Johnny and Sean’s LOL series of sitcoms (especial Space Shuttle). If you’re interested in getting your books to audio, this episode is a must-listen! See the video version here:

We got together this Fourth of July to talk about the launch strategies we’re using for The Dream Engine [link], the book Sean and Johnny wrote in 30 days for Fiction Unboxed. Along the way, they talked about how to pre-sell a book without a presales page from Amazon, how to get into more than two categories, the importance of building a team around your publishing business, and why Sprite Zero has no idea how to make a publicity-friendly aluminum can. Why Ray Chase is Awesome Listeners get a real treat at the start of the show because Johnny plays a sample of the first chapter of The Dream Engine in audio, read by the ever-talented Ray Chase, who will be on next week’s show. We even get to hear part of it twice because we can’t help but screw stuff up on the show, like always. Ray will basically be one of our go-to guys for audio from now on, so if you love his reading, you’ll love the next year or so here at Sterling & Stone. We Answer Voicemails, Like the Pros We Are Victoria asked about pre-ordering on Amazon. Apparently, if you know the right people in Amazon, you can get pre-orders as an indie, which is what Jason Gurley did. But for the rest of us… well, see below for Johnny and Sean’s solution. Then Gayne from Texas asked about checking out reviewers that give you bad reviews. Sean admitted to doing that, because it helps you know how seriously you should take any negative reviews. Pre-Orders for Indies on Amazon (Sort Of) Finally, the guys talked about what Johnny calls the poor man’s pre-order. They’ve published The Dream Engine on the down low, not even telling their list, so they can collect reviews before the official launch date and promote on BookBub and elsewhere. By the way, if you want to help out, you can totally buy The Dream Engine on Amazon here [link] for only 99 cents, and then post a review for it here. That would totally help us out! Plus, you know, you’re getting a 4 or 5 dollar read for less than a buck, so there’s that. How to Get into Phantom Categories on Amazon That’s what David Gaughran called them in his epic guide, Let’s Get Visible. We talk about how Johnny, with Darren’s help, got The Dream Engine into more than two categories. Not only that, but he also got into categories that you simply can’t register for when you publish the book through the KDP dashboard. No matter what kind of book you’re writing/publishing, you totally want to know this stuff. By the way, the link that Johnny mentions in the show is here, all about how to use keywords to get into those phantom categories. Really awesome stuff. ACX—Your Best Audio Option to Date Finally, Johnny talks about how we tried to get The Dream Engine into ACX directly, after hiring Ray to do the audio, only to discover nothing is that easy. After doing research and asking around, we ended up putting it through ACX with the exclusivity option checked, meaning we can’t even sell the books on our new site, Sterling & Stone. It seems going through ACX is still the best deal in town for indie authors, even if the royalties recently dropped like a ton of bricks. Here’s the video version of the show: A Special Thanks to Our Sponsors Sprite Zero has a pretty awesome logo. They just apparently don’t know where to put it on their cans. Just ask Dave. But if you already know where you want to put your logo or book cover design, you should totally think about using 99 Designs for your designer needs. In fact, if you go to 99designs.com/spp, you can get a free Power Pack upgrade, valued at 99 bucks, allowing you to get even more designer time and attention. And of course, where would we be without our amazing Superfriends over at CaptionAccess, who provide all our transcription needs, while at the same time fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. If you ever need transcription work done, shine your bat signal over to captionaccess.com and tell them you heard about them on SPP and get 30% off.

In this week’s show we talked with Tom Corson-Knowles about “Frictionless Publishing.” We also ranted about how technology hates us and looks for opportunities to kick us in the balls. Scrivener, Dropbox, and Looking for a Needle in a Needle Stack First, we ranted about how technology gave us a hardy F**K YOU this week when Sean and Johnny had version issues on Scrivener. That meant hours of shifting through documents to piece together all the most recent chapters of The Dream Engine. Johnny likened it to dropping a string with a bunch of needles and having to sort through them and put them back in order. But tragedy was averted and Dream is still up and running. By the way, if you aren’t an Unboxer, don’t worry, you haven’t lost out. You can still join now here and see all the videos and read all the content. You can also see all the freely visible blog posts here. Now that the project is finally done, that will be a record of lessons learned that you can examine any time you want. We also had an interesting discussion about white noise. Johnny has started using white noise to help him focus on editing, as opposed to the music he listens to when writing. He calls it drowning out the sounds with controlled silence. Dave also sometimes uses white noise when writing, and his wife has started using it to fall asleep. This is the white noise site Johnny mentioned on the show. Tom Corson-Knowles Talks about Frictionless Publishing Tom Corson-Knowles is the nonfiction writer of several books about business and writing, including The Kindle Publishing Bible. We had him on to talk about his concept of “Frictionless Publishing.” He didn’t get far into his explanation when a lively debate erupted about publishing before you’re ready and presenting a good first impression to your readers. Both Johnny and Sean ended up seeing both sides to the argument. You’ll have to listen to see where you stand! View the video version here: Get a New Logo with 99 Designs As always, this podcast is proudly presented by 99 Designs, where you can find awesome designs for your book covers, websites, business logo, or even clothing for an affordable price. Go to 99designs.com/spp to get a free powerpack upgrade, valued at 99 bucks, and you’ll see why we’re looking to use 99 Designs for our new Sterling & Stone website logo. Click below for the full transcript of the show, or download the full PDF version here. A hardy thanks to CaptionAccess for providing awesome transcripts!

For our first show in a while without a guest, we wanted to talk about how to be more efficient. Dave pointed out halfway through that it's ironic to talk about efficiency on a podcast in which we never get to the fucking point. But whatever, Dave. Basically, we want to eliminate distraction behaviors and recoup that time. In my case, I've recently moved to a schedule that actually allows me to get some sleep… but to do it, and to wake up later without losing time, I've instituted an INCREDIBLY anal and strict set of behaviors for myself for the times when I DO work. The result? I actually seem to be getting more done and having more free time. All while sleeping more than an hour extra every night. This one is chock full of habits for making slow improvements and always getting better at what we do. (And I'm sure we'll do another of these… because our efficiency presentation was so inefficient, we could have gone on for another hour, easy.) Watch the Video Version Here:

We started the show by talking a bit about how surprising Fiction Unboxed is turning out for us, in terms of showing us how our own process works. If you still want to join Fiction Unboxed, you still can (it's not at all necessary to follow along live), but even if you don't, check out a few of the freely visible blog posts to see what we're doing and what we're learning. I almost want to recommend that writers teach what they know to someone else because the learning that comes from it is awesome. Seriously; check out those blog posts. (The Day 13-15 posts are especially illustrative.) After answering a few voicemails, we were joined by Chris Garrett, CDO at Copyblogger. Copyblogger is one of our favorite online authorities, friends, and partners, and we've been huge advocates and supporters from the beginning. (Chris is also one of the authors of the first book Sean ever read about online business. Oh, and he's also an ardent Fiction Unboxed participant, since he's learning to write fiction.) Chris talked to us a ton about the importance of having an online platform, what that platform should entail and what its main purposes should be, and how you can get one. We also hit a few key topics like: - Should you blog? What should you write about if so? - How can you maximize engagement with readers and conversion to what you want to buy?" - How should you build your email list? - Should you sell your products direct? This was an amazing show and we're so happy to have had Chris on. And we're also totally giddy that he likes Fiction Unboxed so much, but that's on us. :) View the video version here:

Before adding our guest today, we talked briefly about the very interesting things that we've discovered while writing our novel for Fiction Unboxed. Specifically, we began writing the rough draft yesterday (check out the writeup here) , and the whole experience has been downright exhilarating. We also talked about partnering, and what to keep in mind when working with anyone else. Sean and I share a story from our passionate affair while Dave added anecdotes about how things are in his and Sean's long-term marriage. Ahem. Moving on… Our guest today was Ashley Coombe, who has a whole bunch of stuff going on… but whose most relevant role to this episode is her position with Shareist, a cool social media scheduling tool. We're social media idiots, so Ashley (who we met in Denver) spent the show convincing us 1) that social media is very worth paying serious attention to and 2) that we can do it without pulling our hair out. Ashley also posted a Social Media Setup Checklist on the Shareist blog, which you can get here. View the video version here:

Today we had on someone for whom we all have a serious professional boner, Jason Gurley. These days, Jason is working hard on his writing (his new book Eleanor is available for pre-order now), but we've salivated over his book cover designs for a while now. Alas, he's stopped taking commissions just in time for us to miss out. Bummer! But we got the next best thing: we got Jason on the show to talk about what you can do yourself in terms of covers, what makes a good cover, and what you need to keep in mind when hiring a cover artist. This was a great show, and it gave Dave an inferiority complex. Learn something and give Dave a heart attack… what's not to love? View the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

If you were on YouTube this week for the live show, you might have seen a false start, which we cancelled halfway through because Sean's internet wasn't working. WTF. Saving us from ourselves, we were able to get a pair on that we'd been meaning to talk to: the second appearance of Darren Wearmouth with his co-author, Colin Barnes. We've been wanting to talk to these guys because not only can they give us a different-than-us perspective on working with other writers, but they're also business-minded. And British, which Dave likes. Colin and Darren talked all about how they worked together on Sequence (currently with Darren's literary agent and the upcoming Critical Dawn (independently published). We got the ins and outs on how they plan, how they write, and how they work in general. Colin and Darren also gave us a big scoop on research for targeting a book at its launch. They're better with data than us, trust us. View the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

Today we stepped mostly away from our recent preoccupation with Fiction Unboxed (it ends May 22nd at 9:30AM) to have a fun, informative, ball-busting session with our most regular guest, Ed Robertson. We also promised to give him his cat back if he agreed to do the show again. Of course, we later reneged. After a bit of wrap-up in which Sean and I talked about our trip to Copyblogger's Authority Intensive conference in Denver, we moved into talking to Ed and what he's up to. This was interrupted by the world's worst ad read for our favorite cover design marketplace, 99Designs. We figure that it was so bad it was good, though, and were able to keep 99Designs looking awesome while we looked like total incompetent assholes. Everyone wins! As always, Ed was a fountain of information. We learned about his upcoming projects, the future of the Breakers series, how pricing his 3-book Breakers box set at 99 cents in conjunction with select promotions earned him about 50 bazillion sales, and much more. View the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

As a quick note, this is the LAST EPISODE to hit the audio feed before Fiction Unboxed ends. So if you want to get in, do it now (and man, the rewards keep stacking!) We talked a bit about lessons learned from our Kickstarter experience before delving into the topic. For one, our Thunderclap experiment seems to have been a huge bust. We had almost 1.1 million in social reach and over 500 joiners, but all we seem to have done was to flood the Twitter and Facebook feeds of people who already knew about the project. More analysis next week. We also talked a bit about "Kickstarter stigma," which we hadn't anticipated. It has made getting publicity for the project much harder than anticipated and a general mixed bag. We love the response of the SPP audience, but the larger world in general has seen KICKSTARTER first and BIG IDEA second. We'd hoped it would be the other way around, and that people would think, "Look at this CRAZY COOL IDEA they had… and oh, by the way, they're funding it via Kickstarter." The entire experience is also exhausting. More to come on this stuff a month or two down the road, after we can catch our breath. For today's main topic, we talked about how to choose your next project… where to put your creative energy. This stemmed from a discussion recently wherein Sean and I had to bump two big projects. Most recently, our project with the codename "Axis" had to be moved until July, and this made us both really sad… but it was necessary. We talk out the thought process and juggling multiple priorities. But it all works out, because we'll now be beginning my (Johnny's) first Guy Incognito project, written specifically for kids. It's called Connor Kwik, and we'd like it to be our Harry Potter. It's sort of like The Beam for kids. Stay tuned! View the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

As we record and broadcast this, Fiction Unboxed continues to roll along. The rewards keep stacking up and we've set an AAAAAMAZING stretch goal involving opening up a shared story world for all of us to write in. Be sure to check it out and spread the world so that we can hit that goal! The more the project funds, the more EVERY BACKER WINS. After a bunch of odds and ends, we got into the meat of the show by adding in Darren Wearmouth to our blokish mix. It was odd, because Darren is a fan of the show… and we're simultaneously fans of the stupendous feat Darren managed with his first and (currently) only novel, First Activation. Darren had one book -- his first -- and hit Amazon's Top 100 with it at launch through a very cool strategy of pricing low, advertising heavily, and trying to hit critical mass. And it totally worked. This is a great strategic show and gave us things to think about for our own future launches. Darren also promises to touch base after his next indie launch and let us know if it works a second time. You can view the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

We spent a bit of time at the beginning of this show glorying in the stupendous rallying of the SPP community during the day's debut of Fiction Unboxed. We tried not to beat the whole thing to death, but suffice to say that the project funded fully after only about 11 hours. YOU made that happen! Thank you! As of the time I write this update, our current stretch goal is this: Thanks to the fantastic support of the folks at Literature & Latte, if Fiction Unboxed's funding reaches $35,000, every single backer at the $89 level or higher will receive a copy of Scrivener writing software for free! HOW AMAZING IS THAT? Remember, the more the project funds, the more EVERY BACKER WINS. We have some absolutely amazing further stretch goals planned, so please… go out and tell your friends! Tweeting and Facebook are great ways to spread the word, but personal recommendations -- via email, on your blog, etc. -- are even better. (Oh, and if you haven't done it yet, please head on over and sign up for our Thunderclap. That'll help spread the word… but if our "Thunderclap" goes off, we're eager to share the results with you for your own use.) We spent the rest of the show talking through what's changed for us since we started the podcast two full years ago. What have we done that works? What have we done that didn't work? We made some good moves and some bad ones, but we're always pushing and trying new things. And of course, we always report it all back to you! HAPPY 2-YEAR ANNIVERSARY, SELF PUBLISHING PODCAST!! View the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

Before we got started, we announced that our Kickstarter project Fiction Unboxed -- where we're writing a book live in 30 days and letting the world watch -- will be live by the time this post goes up! If you want to join us, be sure to do it now because the best spots are limited! Also, we're experimenting with Thunderclap -- a mass-broadcast social media blast. But for our Thunderclap to work, we need 500 people to be part of none of it will happen and we won't have anything to report to you. Joining it take only about 15 seconds, so please head on over and sign up. This was an intensely full episode, and I'm not even going to attempt to explain all of the little details. Suffice to say that it was all about a big addition to our sales strategy, based around changing our "join the mailing list offer," adding an autoresponder to bond with members and "tell our story," and adding a direct sales channel for some new bundles. One by one: 1. The Realm & Sands "offer" page. This is the page we'll use to build our list. While it's in progress, the offer page is here, but by the time you read this, it may have moved to its permanent home here. 2. An autoresponder series to come. Sean is writing this now, and we'll implement it as a series of emails people will get AFTER they join our list, to bond and lead people through our varied catalogue. 3. A new series of book bundles for sale. As of recording, this was still in progress, but it's pretty damn cool. We'll report on this as the experiment continues! There's a lot more to this, though, and a ton of detail within what's above, so be sure to listen to this one a few times! You can view the video version here: SHOW TRANSCRIPT Transcripts of The Self Publishing Podcast are provided by CaptionAccess. You can download the PDF version of this week's show here, or click the box below to read it in-line on this page.

Hey, before you watch this video or listen to the audio of this episode, could you do us a favor? If you haven't Thunderclapped yet, please do. It takes 15 seconds and will make our goals (and yours) happen faster. CLICK HERE TO THUNDERCLAP! And here's the video!