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 as a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Marie Parks and Jessi Honard who are the authors of Unrelenting, which is a fantasy novel with the pacing of a thriller which also features LGBTQ+ characters. So we're gonna cover a bunch of different topics, but one of the things that I want to talk about first is the fact that the two of you brought 11 years worth of content marketing to your writing and publishing journey. And so you were kind of able to approach this with one foot, of course, in the creative world, but then also very firmly planted in the business world and knowing how important that is to success in publishing. So if you could talk about how you blended those two things, and especially how you brought over content marketing skills to your book launch for Unrelenting, that would be great.
Jessi: Yeah, absolutely, and thank you so much for having both of us here. It's such a great opportunity to chat with you. I'm Jessi. Absolutely, you're completely right. It is a blend of these two skill sets. Marie and I both were fiction writers for years, and also we run a content marketing business together. When we approached the launch for Unrelenting, one thing we had heard frequently from other authors was disappointment and feeling like the wind had kind of been taken out of their sails around their own launches. And often that, when we did a little digging, came down to not really having a solid grasp of the business side of it, and through no fault of their own, right? Most authors are creatives and they wanna really dive into that creative side of things, and so we went into it, well before the pre-launch period started, knowing that we really had to put that business hat on if we wanted to see the sort of traction that we were hoping for. And so I think a lot of it was just the mindset right from the get-go, we went into it saying, Okay, yes, this is a creative piece. Yes, this is something we've been working on for a long time with our author hat on, but now it's time to take that hat off for a little while. Put on the business hat and approach this just like we would one of our client projects. Marie, I'm not sure if you have more to add to that, but that's sort of the framework that I went into it with.
Marie: It may sound overwhelming for some folks who don't have over a decade of experience doing this day in and day out. But I think at the end of the day, this is something that any author can do so long as they are willing to remember that really at the end of the day, it's about relationships - leveraging the relationships you have. For instance, we were really fortunate that we were connected with you, Mindy, through our publisher, that we were able to have this opportunity to chat with you. But also those relationships with your readers. Doing what you can to make them feel special. So, putting out content that's fun for them. We did a lot of gamification. Chatted with our publisher about like, "Hey, what would be a good goal for us for pre-orders?" And then we shared that goal with our audience and said, "Hey, can you help us get there?" And then when we hit that goal, they were like, "Let's bump it up a little bit." And so it was kind of like a group team effort, and it was pretty fun.
Mindy: So when you're talking about using those elements and the things that you bring from content marketing, you're not just tweeting. A friend of mine that used to run Epic Reads, which is the YA marketing arm of Harper Teen - very good at what she does, she did that for a living for a long time - published her own book. Margo Wood is her name. And she was talking about how intensely difficult it is to stand out, and how you can really feel like on the social media side, that you're screaming into a void. And it's almost impossible to gauge what kind of effects anything is even having. I replied to her on Twitter and said, "Yes, I know. It's like, I've been doing this for 13 years, and I still don't know what works." And she replied, tongue in cheek, "Mindy, you just make a TikTok." And I'm like, "Oh, that's right. You just make a TikTok, and then you're a millionaire." Yes, there are some people that have done very well on TikTok, but the truth of that matter is that that's all fan-generated. The authors themselves are not actually creating that content. So when you talk about that high quality content, you're not just talking about, "I'm gonna send a tweet, and I'm gonna watch that go sell me some books this weekend."
Jessi: No, definitely not. Social media is a viable strategy, and it is one arm of what are many possible avenues that you can take. There are two important things that we kept in mind. One is, what Marie already mentioned around relationships first, and the second thing that was really important to us was making sure that we were keeping tabs on what we could control. If you send a tweet out into the void, you have no idea who's going to see it. You don't know if it's going to work or not, and so we set a goal for ourselves to keep track of what we could control because there's a lot that we can't. So the gamification is a really great example of that. We had a goal for our pre-orders, but we also knew that, as anyone who's published anything knows, reporting of those numbers is a little difficult to track sometimes. And so we issued a challenge to our audience of - tell us when you pre-order the book. So that we could just Excel document, put down they tally and say, "Hey, we're up to this amount of pre-orders." And we could deepen those relationships with them, and they could become a part of the community cheering us on. We also made sure that we weren't just relying on sending a tweet out. We had... Primarily email was the avenue that we relied on. We sent out a significant number of email marketing messages during the pre-launch and launch period that were focused on, yes, getting people to buy the book, but also providing value for them. Giving them sneak peaks behind the scenes looks at our writing process and our marketing process. How we had taken this journey to a published book. And I think that combining that with sending some tweets out, sending some Instagram posts out, and really, most importantly, having conversations with people, listening to what they had to say and adjusting as people gave us feedback and whatnot. I think all of that had a really big impact on our ability to reach people.
Marie: Yeah, and not just to purchase the books, but also in the back end to feel invested enough to go ahead and leave a review.
Mindy: Everything that you're saying is so true. We cannot do well if we are just sending out our tweet. And yes, of course, making a TikTok is great. I have actually been pulling back from social media pretty heavily as a consumer. I am still very present as an author. I went through a break up that was really difficult. I had to drop out of social media and all of that interaction, and I was gone for about three months. And I didn't make an announcement and say, "Hey, everyone. I'm going through a tough time. Not gonna be around." I just dropped out. And here's the thing. Number one, no one noticed. And number two, it didn't matter. It did not affect my sales. It did not affect the open rate of my newsletter. It did not affect anything. I'd been I think publishing for eight or nine years at that point, and I was like, "Why have I been setting aside like two hours a day every day to do this when it's actually not doing anything?" And I think that that tide has changed a lot. Now, you mentioned email marketing. So that is something that I will absolutely beat the bushes about for younger writers and people that are coming into this to understand. Like say for instance, TikTok. Everyone loves it. Everyone's using it. It is the go-to social media right now. If you write YA, that's where all the kids are. But there's a lot of talk about TikTok data mining and getting information from you, and TikTok has been on the verge of being shut out of the US once or twice. So if you are really relying on TikTok, and this can happen with anything - you don't know, and if you have heavily relied on 30,000 followers on Twitter... Elon Musk buys Twitter and says, "We're done with Twitter" and shuts it down, you've just lost all of that following. Your email list, the people that you have drawn to you, that want to hear from you - that belongs to you, and you have a direct access to their inbox.
Marie: Absolutely. Consistently email is the highest return on investment platform that you can leverage for your content marketing. Anyone who's trying to sell anything, including us authors. I think the stat heard most recently was like, for every dollar you spend, you get 38 back. Pretty fantastic. So it's definitely one of those things where we focused in on it, and like Jessi said, we tried to make it not just "buy the book, buy the book, buy the book," but you kinda have to. Don't be afraid to get out there and to say it again. And, as Jessi said, we added other fun stuff in there like a little character feature or let's talk about the setting or the magic or whatever. So that it also felt worth opening for somebody who had already done all the things, and they'd already purchased the book, already shared with their friends. It's about creating the invitation of the conversation.
Jessi: I would be remiss to ignore the impact that having a community as we were building our email list had for us. If you're an author who doesn't have an email list and is still building it up, one of the best things that Marie and I ever did for ourselves, well before we had our book with a publisher, was to start connecting with people who were similar writers to us and similar readers to our target audience and just building those relationships in those connections. Going to network events, whether they were in person or virtual. Joining discord communities where these people are having conversations every day about the craft of writing, about publishing, about reading, about the different types of books that people are enjoying, and just sort of being an active part of those communities to the point where you develop true friendships. And they can help uplift you when it comes to time to hit the pavement and start doing the marketing. And hopefully you can then return the favor for them.
Mindy: One of the things that I think a lot of authors struggle with when it comes to the marketing side of that, most of us are a little quieter. We're not that outgoing. I am fortunate enough to have both introvert and extrovert qualities so that I can apply both in my career and utilize both aspects of that personality. But not everybody is that way. Asking someone for their email, you're saying, "Hey, can I have some access to you?" It can be difficult, I think, to go that route and ask people to give you access to them and to say, "Hey, I would like to be more present in your life." I have a free short story, and so I'm giving you something. I'm like, "Hey, you sign up for my email newsletter, and you will get a free short story." And it's a little... I'm also giving you something. I am not just taking a thing from you.
Marie: Yes, 100%. That's such a good strategy. We even use that for our own business. You often, you get some kind of resource or tool for your content marketing.
Jessi: I completely agree. Having some sort of reason for them to join your list beyond, "Hey, just be on my newsletter," which let's face it, we all get so many emails in a given day that just being on another newsletter is not the most enticing ask in the world. Absolutely, having something that they can receive so that they can look forward to receiving those emails from you and get a sense of who you are, how you communicate via email, all of that.
Mindy: If anybody is interested on the best ways to begin and to cultivate and to proper care and feeding of your newsletter, I highly recommend the book Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque. I started using her step-by-step advice from this little book. It was a huge, huge impact for me. It has improved my email list and the open rate and the click rate. Everything went through the roof. So for those of you that are looking to do that, I recommend Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque.
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Mindy: So you guys are co-authors, and that's something that I think a lot of people are really curious about. So can you tell us a little bit about being a co-author and what your process is like?
Marie: Go ahead Jessi.
Jessi: I like to say that we cheated a little bit being business owners together. So we spent a number of years working together prior to sitting down and writing a novel together. That allowed us to just build those collaborative skills over the years. The other side of that is our process is really kind of chaotic. It works, but it's very different from many other co-authors that we've talked to. For us, it's immensely collaborative. We do everything in Google Docs. We tend to do it live together in Google docs. We'll set a day or a few hours aside to meet at the same time, and we will be quite literally writing the same scene together. One of us will be writing, and the other person will be a few sentences behind editing. And then the writer will eventually run out of steam or not know quite how to phrase something or reach something where they know the other person is slightly more adept at it, and so they'll stop and the editor will take the writer's position and the writer will loop back and become the editor. And we'll just keep trading places.
Mindy: Of all the co-authoring processes I've ever heard of, that one is original.
Marie: It's definitely not the most efficient thing in the world. The most efficient thing might be... Maybe each of us takes a POV character. We each write half a novel. We lace it together. I mean, I've heard of that before. That sounds actually really smart. Maybe we should try that sometime, Jessi, but instead we take twice as long, 'cause also on top of it, we're both discovery writers. What are we trying to accomplish in this chapter? At what point is this in the book? What kind of plot points are we hitting? And then from there, we start writing and sometimes all the plans go out the window. But I think the thing that's been most important about it, and I think this is true no matter what a co-author strategy looks like in the weeds, being able to take our ego out of it, so that it's not like, "Oh, my idea or your idea." It's more just like, "What's best for the story? What's aligned with the shared vision that we have for it?"
Mindy: Definitely. So I do write under a pen name and I co-author with two other friends. And our process is similar that we have a Google Docs and so we often won't know exactly what is going to happen. And so we will dive into what we are writing and we'll have a general idea of characters and the world or whatever, but we don't know what's gonna happen in a particular plot. And sometimes one of us will just be like, "Guys. Um, I'm sorry, I killed this character. If you don't like it, that's fine. Let me know." But generally what happens is that one of us will take a scene and then we write it, and then much like you guys, each of us then also passes over it, makes some adjustments, says, "Hey, I don't think this character would say this." The amazing thing about co-writing is that the manuscript gets longer when you're not working on it.
Marie: True. It's pretty magical.
Jessi: It's magic, yeah.
Mindy: That's my favorite part of it. So one thing that I find can come up often, for us anyway, because there are three of us with our fingers in it - is continuity issues. So for my listeners, continuity would be like if we say that this character has black hair and then suddenly she's running his fingers through his blond hair. At the beginning of us all working together, we attempted to keep what's called a Bible, a series Bible, and described our characters and locations and anything that is involved in the world building. But then the act of just keeping the Bible straight was so much work that it would have taken - that would have been just someone's job - so we, of course, hire a copy editor. And our copy editor goes through and tries to catch all of those things. How do you guys handle continuity?
Jessi: Sort of similar to you in our drive folder for the greater Unrelenting universe is a bit of a chaotic mess. We have landed on a sort of internal series Bible, we call them our global notes document. We have them for Unrelenting and now we're working on the sequel to it. And so we have this global notes document that as we're writing something and there's an event or there's a timeline or something like that, that just like we know, we'll probably forget it at some point, we throw it into that document. We also leave comments for each other within the document itself. Yes, we wanna make sure that there's continuity within revisions, but we don't have time for that yet because we just wanna keep moving with the plot, so we'll just leave a comment in the Google Doc.
Marie: And then sometimes too, it's just a matter of like, can we simplify it? We spent probably 15 minutes one day trying to figure out what side of a door the hinges were on. Couldn't we just say instead of she pushes or she pulls, she opens the door?
Mindy: I find that to be very important myself in my individual writing as well. Something I am bad at, and I mean bad at, is linear time. My copy editors and my proof readers really just kind of hate me a little bit. I don't care what day it happened on. It doesn't matter to me. That's not part of the plot. That does not matter to me. I do not use days of the week. I'll just say, "Hey, do you wanna go to a movie sometime?" I use very general time words because I will not get it right and it will be a mess, and I truly don't believe that readers care about this. But man, copy editors do.
Marie: That's a really great hack though.
Jessi: Yeah, we had a similar issue, and it still comes up. Like, with seasons. The entire premise of the first book is that the main character, Bridget's, sister has been missing for nine months. This whole book is taking place in a location that has four distinct seasons. We need to know at least what time of year each of these events happened because it just will dramatically impact what's happening outside.
Mindy: Yep, and if you have someone walking outside and it's cold and it is June, they will find you.
Marie: I only hope a reader would care enough, but I think you're right, I don't think they really care that much. But on the off chance that they do, it could totally throw someone out of the story and the immersion, so it is totally worth fixing.
Mindy: Now, I will say, readers don't care unless you are writing a real place and they live there. And then, boy, they will be on your ass. I also wanna talk about responsibly writing LGBTQ+ characters. 'Cause representation is of course very important. Unrelenting includes asexual, bisexual, and gay characters. And especially in fantasy, I feel like a lot of the time that it is changing. Luckily, it is changing across all genres, but a lot of fantasy, I would not see this representation apart from maybe the past 10 years. So if you could talk a little bit about representation and responsibly writing these characters, not just being like, I included this so that I can claim diversity and I get my stamp.
Marie: First of all, I would say we're not certainly the resource for that. Writing the Other has so many great resources and classes. There are several teachers who are just amazing. We've learned a lot from them around, just in general, writing characters who are believable and multi-faceted. How intersectionality plays a role in how they move around the world and how they experience the world. I think a lot of it was just learning and listening a lot. We also were able to pull from personal experience, lived experience of ourselves. We were also very fortunate that our editor is also an accomplished sensitivity reader, and so was able to provide additional support for us. I mean, I really do believe it's the author's responsibility to do their research and do as great of a job as they can on it. And then also, whenever possible, to lean into additional support and to make sure that that person is compensated for it. I don't know if you have more specifics around that, Jessi, you wanna dive into.
Jessi: You just said it's the writer's responsibility, and I agree with that as far as the research is concerned. I think it's also the writer's responsibility to create a world that is representative of reality, even when you're writing science fiction or fantasy. What you were saying, Mindy, about how 10 years ago or 15 years ago, you really didn't find these representations as frequently, especially within genre that is true, and also such a shortcoming of what actual world is like. If you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community and you are an avid fantasy reader, and you just gobble up fantasy book after fantasy book and you never see yourself in it, that takes its toll. We went into Unrelenting, not necessarily on a mission to wave the queer flag, but on a mission to make sure that the characters within Unrelenting represented the world and called upon some of our own lived experience, and that avid fantasy reader who picked up our book may see themselves represented in that.
Marie: Yeah, and I think it's also important for somebody who may be straight or cisgender and who may not identify as queer, for them also to see protagonists and characters who are queer. And it's not only encouraging and normalizing for people who do identify as queer, but for everybody, right? To say like, “Hey, everyone is capable of being the hero, being the sidekick, being the fill in, being the whoever, being the anything” right? For us, because Unrelenting is not a coming out story, we sort of laugh that it's like a book of casual queerness. People having adventures, and for some of them, this happens to be a part of who they are. It's not a story about struggling through life as a queer person or coming out as a queer person. It's just like people having adventures and some of them happen to have this identification. It doesn't always have to be about struggle. It doesn't always have to be about coming out. It can just be a story.
Mindy: I see writers who don't share that identity often hitting really hard on the struggle or the negative aspects. Being discriminated against. Being treated negatively because of this quality of yourself that just happens to be part of who you are. I do agree that it is so important just to show someone who is queer just having a regular day.
Jessi: And those coming out stories and those stories about struggles are absolutely valid as well. And I think we need those stories too, but we need more than just those stories.
Mindy: So the pacing for Unrelenting is very interesting because it is a fantasy novel; however, it has the pacing of a thriller. So how do you go about, combined with this co-authoring process, of managing your pacing when you are discovery writers and you're not necessarily plotting things.
Marie: I think we stumbled across it by accident. Is that fair to say, Jessi?
Jessi: This kind of maybe dives into a little bit of how Marie and I differ in our writing style. I tend to be very drawn to fast-paced plotting and cliff hanger chapter endings, which is part of what I lent to Unrelenting. A natural consequence of that as we were writing the story is that it sort of accidentally ended up taking on that thriller pace, and then we really realized it was working. People were really enjoying that fast-paced as opposed to the slightly more languid one you might find in some fantasy novels.
Marie: We were in a class that was being taught by Dan Wells, Let's Talk about Thrillers, and was defining thrillers. And I was like, this is our book. Our book, we accidentally wrote a thriller. So that was kind of fun, and at that point, I think the manuscript was already done enough that we weren't going to be making dramatic changes to hit every single beat. It's, I think, helped us in moving forward with the sequel more mindfully. We've actually learned a lot about plotting and telling compelling stories. We were told once that we kind of wrote this one by ear, just 'cause we're such readers. But now we're able to go forward more mindfully and it's yielding cleaner drafts and more purposeful writing. We're able to go forward more mindfully now.
Mindy: I also am a discovery writer. I just go. I feel like I write every single one of my books by ear, and so far it's worked out. Last thing, if each of you would like to share where you can be found on social media and where your book Unrelenting can be found as well.
Jessi: Yeah, absolutely. I am Jessi Honard, J-E-S-S-I H-O-N-A-R-D, on pretty much all of the platforms, and that's also my website address as well.
Marie: And you can find me at Marie Parks on Twitter. That's also my website, but then if you're also looking for the book, you can find it in all the places - a place where you can read a little blurb about it and then decide what seller you want to scope it out through or library. It's in a number of library systems also. Head to The Grigori, G-R-I-G-O-R-I, books... The Grigori Books dot com slash order hyphen Unrelenting.
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.