Sean Platt's Blog, page 14

8 Questions with Performance Coach Victoria Labalme

Sean:  Hi there everyone and welcome to Eight Questions. Today I’m talking to Victoria Labalme. She is a performing artist and a performance coach, and I’ve never talked to a performance coach before.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

This is kind of a big deal, and in the realm of performance coaches, I think she’s the biggest.

She’s talked to big, big corporate clients like Microsoft, IBM, Starbucks, Paypal, but she also hosts events where she can talk to a lot more people in one space.

We met because my friend, J.B., he introduced us and he said Victoria’s thinking about writing a book and she has questions about indie versus self-publishing and can you please talk to her.

And I think both of us were a little nervous because it’s one of those intros where you don’t know who you’re being introduced to, but you really like the person introducing you so let’s see where this goes. And so that was about a month ago and we had just a fantastic phone call and I just like Victoria so much and I thought you would really appreciate her view of the world.

So welcome, Victoria!

Victoria:  I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me, and hello everyone.

Sean:  My absolute pleasure, and I just know that there were about ten or fifteen things that were said during that call where I just thought oh, wow, you would be a great interview.

And just your whole premise that communication is art I think is wonderful.

That’s what we all do. I think it’s easy for those of us who write or paint or make music or film or whatever it is that we do, but really just living if you do it the right way is art. And the way we communicate with people, whether through the things that we craft, through our work and our intentions, but just our language.

The language that we use or the body language that we use to kind of orchestrate our life, that’s what you do professionally and I find that fascinating.

Victoria:  Excellent.

Sean:  So I guess we’ll get started with question number one. What is the number one mistake people make in day-to-day communication?

 Victoria:  Well, the number one mistake I see made, and this goes for communication in a phone, it could be even in a podcast interview, it could be on a keynote stage, sales meeting.

Any time you present is that people tend to focus too much on the information they want to convey and not enough on the experience the other person or people are having.

Because what we do is we say okay, I’ve got to get all these points across and then we have like what I call is a tennis ball machine of information just coming at us tennis ball after tennis ball.

Sean:  Or a fire hose, right?

Victoria:  Or a fire hose.

Sean:  You just can’t turn it off.

Victoria:  You can’t just turn it off. Exactly. So you really want to take the audience on a journey and turn it into an experience.

Sean:  Right. So we just recently had The Smarter Artist Summit, which was our first event that we ever held for more than a couple of dozen people and it was kind of big. We had seven speakers and it so wasn’t about the information.

Because of course you want to go to a conference like that and you want to learn something, but really we knew we were inviting a lot of introverts. So we had an introvert space upstairs where if it got too much for you downstairs you could just go up there. The rule was no talking upstairs. No talking. No conversation.

And we did other things that I think did a lot to silently communicate the vibe that we wanted.

So we didn’t have a stage. The presenters were on ground floor with the rest of us and we just had four stools so at any time the three of us would sit there, me, Johnny and Dave and then we would have our speaker there and it was kind of a discussion the whole time instead of a talking at the audience.

Victoria:  Love it.

Sean:  And that was something that constantly people kept saying that this isn’t what I expected. This isn’t the feeling that I thought. Because we are communicating to you that look, there is no hierarchy here, we’re all in this together.

And I didn’t even think about that at the time, but that’s what a lot of attendees said.

And it is that we don’t want to give them the fire hose. We don’t want to give them the endless tennis balls. We wanted them to be invited into a conversation, I guess.

Victoria:  That’s right. It’s exactly right. Part of what happens with any situations, even the set-up like you were talking about that you were all on the same level, but it wasn’t a hierarchy, is profound.

I mean you go into someone’s office and they’re communicating their authority by the fact that they’re in a high-back leather chair and you’re sitting like a little minion on a chair in front of their desk.

So we’re always kind of communicating our intention.

Sean:  Right. If you look at like a Cohen brothers movies, right, half of them have the scene with the big boss man behind the big giant desk.

Victoria:  Right.

Sean:  Right. Somebody has to come in and they’re just immediately subservient, and that’s not – I don’t know, there’s just such a barrier that you immediately place and we wanted to strip that.

So I know you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs too, right.

Victoria:  Yes.

Sean:  You kind of coach them before they get on stage and a lot of people listening to this podcast are creative entrepreneurs, right. They’re people who are going out to make their living with their art.

So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making on camera when they’re having difficult kind of broadcasting their message?

 Victoria:  Well, it’s a few different elements that will come up. One of them has to do with what I call the through-line, and that is your intention behind any communication.

As you know from theater, it’s a theater term that Stanislavsky coined, the through-line is the driving force behind a character’s behavior in a play.

So I like to think of that through-line in any scene. So let’s say your scene right now is to get on camera and communicate to your audience. When you get nervous on camera it’s because your through-lines is poked and forwarded to yourself.

So it’s oh, I’m nervous, am I confident enough, am I looking good, am I covering all my key points, do I think I’m smart?

And because you’re thinking about yourself you’re going to be nervous.

So if your through-line is directed towards your audience, to help, to share, to serve, to inspire, to encourage, if it’s there in that point of service, you will not be nervous.

The first mistake people make is they focus on themselves.

Sean:  Okay. So that’s really interesting, because again a lot of people who are listening to this write. And really a lot of entrepreneurs these days are writing anyway, right, because they’re connecting with their audience, they’re writing blogs or whatever they’re doing to broadcast their message.

So if you think about being interviewed, whether it’s on stage or on a podcast or wherever it is, and you don’t want to be nervous, you should just kind of write the scene for yourself ahead of time, right.

Treat yourself as a character in a scene, and if you think about it that way then you can remove yourself enough to give yourself the distance to not overthink it.

Victoria:  Yes, I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s interesting. I hadn’t considered that.

Mostly what I think about is the audience. So whoever it is that you as your entrepreneur, think of yourself as the entrepreneur. You’re out there, you’re trying to share a message and help other people ultimately, and get your word out.

So yes, if you focus on them it’s very different.

Sean:  So we do want to think about what would I want if I were in the audience, what would I want to get from this conversation the most?

Victoria:  Well, yes. I mean let’s talk about this podcast that we’re on right now. So you and I had a mutual intention here is to give as much value to the listeners as we can in the time that we have.

And so I’m listening as carefully as I can to your questions and thinking what do I have in my basket of material and value that will really give the listener something they can take away with and learn from? So that’s where my focus is.

Sean: Excellent. So what’s the best creative advice you’ve ever been given?

Victoria:  Do what stops time for you.

Sean:  Oh, I like that. Say more things like that.

Victoria. No one gave me that advice. There’s a great line that I share a lot from Bob Dylan. He said the purpose of art is to stop time.

Sean:  Wow, that’s really great.

Victoria:  I think great art does stop time. You know when you see your favorite TV show, your off of what I call your conveyor belt of life, which is everything’s crazy busy. And then all of a sudden you’re in this TV show and you’re out of time. Or you go to a movie and you’re out of time.

And I think for each of us there’s an activity or a series of activities which when we do them, time stops.

So whatever that is for you, if you can get into that space where you’re out of your conveyor belt and stress and say this is what I love.

And I always say you know what razzes your berry? What lights you up? What stops time for you, and if you can go to that place you’ll create beautiful material that is probably pretty unique.

Sean:  So basically find your flow. Like only work on those things that are easy to find your flow.

Because you know sometimes writing can be such a struggle, right, just facing the blank page and it can feel really defeating. But then you can write for an hour or two and it’s almost like getting runner’s high.

You can run and run really, really hard, but then if you run just long enough you break through some point and it just becomes time stops, right.

Victoria:  Yes.

Sean:  And writing’s the same. You can get into that fugue where you don’t even remember writing but there’s this beautiful thing that came out.

Is that an example of time just stopping?

Victoria:  I think so. I think so. And there’s a great performing artist named Michael Motion who gave me great advice on this flow piece as well.

He said to me years ago “Under what conditions do you do your best work?”

And I think you have in one of your podcasts, Sean I was listening to you talk about that, do what’s right for you. Some people get up at 5:30 and they write then, but that’s not necessarily the way for everyone.

So you think what are the conditions under which I do my best work, whether that’s alone, with people around, in a library, early in the morning, when I’m working on this, when I dance before, whatever that is.

So you want to set yourself up for success.

Sean:  So you should never try and follow what other people are doing just because – okay, there’s this artist that I really like and he reads every day between 7:00 and 8:00 while drinking his coffee. So if I read between 7:00 and 8:00 every day while drinking my coffee, my art is going to be amazing.

Because you don’t do that because that’s what stops time for him not for you, and you really have to listen to yourself.

Victoria:  Yes, completely. I think we can certainly take lessons from how other people have achieved success. We can say oh, that’s an interesting technique. But we have to put together our own concoction of that.

Sean:  Do you think that there’s an amount of trust with – I mean self-trust where you have to believe that well, I will find my way of doing things and it will be right for me, and I should stop looking for answers and start listening to my internal?

Because I think some of us, especially now, the world moves fast, we’re always checking out phones. We don’t really slow down, and if we’re not slowing down enough how do we know when time stops?

Victoria:  Yes. That’s definitely true. I mean I think we can be sort of in a busy day and still feel like we’re connected and time has stopped.

I can go through eighteen different activities in a day but I’m so present because I’m loving those activities as the day is going through. So you’re sort of like on a train and the train is moving fast, but for you you’re stopped because you’re in your world of activity.

The day goes by and you just wake up and go I cannot believe it’s 10:00 at night, that was a good day.

Sean:  Yes, I love those feelings, yes.

Victoria:  Right?

Sean:  Right, because you do have the days that are the opposite. So I guess looking at the converse is true too. When there are those days that just drag by and you’re thinking okay, well, clearly something was wrong with this day. Time did not stop for me. I need less of those activities.

Victoria:  Absolutely. And if you can batch those into one icky day when you do your taxes and your finances and you deal with your lawyer and all those things that we all dislike so much, it’s almost like get that shit done.

Sean:  Yes. The barf day.

Victoria:  The barf day, yes. And I want to touch on another creative element because you’d asked about what helps us creatively, and I think part of it is what I call trust the idea that will lead to the idea.

So when I work with speakers or people presenting, or even putting together a book or some creative project, I say you know I work with index cards. We call them V-cards. And I just say write down the idea, even if you don’t know why you’re writing it down.

I don’t think Shakespeare planned everything out in advance. I think these ideas come creatively and that ingenuity and genius comes for reasons we don’t always understand.

So rather than like shut it down right away, just write it on an index card, a V-card, and see where it leads.

Part of that is getting out all of those unexpected, uncertain – I always say curiosity, interest and whimsy are enough to go on.

Sean:  Yes. I couldn’t agree more. I also think it’s okay sometimes to have faith that the really good ideas circle back, right.

Victoria:  Yes.

Sean:  So when I was first starting out writing or just kind of building anything online, I was so afraid of losing every little idea.

Like okay that idea is great, I can’t lose it and I’d scribble just everywhere. Not on index cards, because I was never that organized, it was just in notebooks. I would write everything down.

But after eight years I have a lot of faith in my brain and I know that I don’t have to worry about every single idea because the good ones do come back around.

They may be a different form, but they do circle and you just have to have faith in your own brain’s patterns to know that okay, it may not repeat but it will at least echo. So you have to have faith in that.

So I know you work on a lot of different stuff. You work with a lot of different people, a lot of different kinds of people. I think you’re kind of always moving.

What’s your process for deciding what project you want to work on and how has that process evolved over time?

 Victoria:  Wow, that’s a really good question. I love that question.

Well, decision making is not the easiest thing for me. I actually have a new phrase which is I think decisiveness is overrated.

Sean:  I agree with that.

Victoria:  I think part of our indecision can come when we’re trying to figure out what to do, what to take on. We’re in a process and sometimes we don’t have enough information.

I think as our career develops we make decisions based differently.

So in the early phases of my career I was just trying to build credibility and develop skills and do projects that were fun and interesting and make a living.

And now I’m at a place where I have different criteria by which I judge things. It’s got to be fun. It’s got to light me up. The thought of it has to be like this is fun.

Sean:  It has to stop time for you.

Victoria:  Yes. I mean I just have to go like yes, this lights me up. So it’s got to have that feeling to it.

Depending on where you are in your career for each person listening, some of it has to do with finances, is this going to bring in the income. But it could also be is this going to build my skill set? Is this going to stretch me, grow me? Is it going to challenge me in new ways?

If you’re in a place in your career where you need positioning, it could be is this going to build credibility? Is this the name I want to be associated with?

Sean:  So a lot of legacy decisions too. Not just what lights me up right now, but what’s going to make a difference later and long-term?

Victoria:  Yes, and again, that later and long-term legacy has to do with where you are in your career because if you’ve achieved a lot of fame and success there may be other types of things you want to leave behind.

Whereas if you’re still trying to get on top of that mountain for you, whatever that is, you may need to put some bricks in place.

So for me, right now I really love working with influencers. I said this to you before, I have a client on Oprah tomorrow and that’s been really fun because the work that we’re doing is going to affect literally millions of people's lives, or when I’m working with an executive at Starbucks, I can see the message going out to thousands of people.

When I speak in front of a big audience, I mean that’s a real thrill and at the same time I’m always happy to help anyone I can. If it’s just someone who needs a piece of guidance on communication skills, if I can get material to them and help them in any way, I’m in.

Because I feel like we all have this art within ourselves and my goal, my through-line is to help people express themselves.

Sean:  Very well said.

If you could have one do-over what would it be?

 Victoria:  Oh, gosh, these are such good questions!

Sean:  You’re smiling so big.

Victoria:  I am because I love the question and I want to give it a really good answer. So let me just take a moment to think.

What is a do-over I would – I think probably for me I was the youngest of four. I was an artist and I felt coming into the career like I had to kind of prove myself in the corporate market.

So I spent a lot of energy early on, like building these corporate names into my list. And I have them but I think part of me shut down some of the art inside of me, the silliness and the whimsy and I regret not expressing some of that sooner in everything that I was doing.

So I think it would have slightly taken me down a different path.

And I’m thrilled with the path I have and now I’m going to add to it, but I think I was afraid – and I think we all have this. I think at some level we’re still trying to prove ourselves.

And I think I was the youngest of four, a little girl still trying to prove that I can work with the big boys, like Starbucks and Microsoft you know. And it’s like okay, I did that. I’ve proven myself.

My friend said to me how much more proving do you have to do? And I was like okay, okay.

So I think had I come from a different place earlier on, that would have been fun, just more fun.

Sean:  Okay. That’s actually a good segue, how much proving do I have to do. I read that you’re in Speaker Hall of Fame, which is just kind of fantastic.

Victoria:  Thank you.

Sean:  And as awesome as that is, do you still feel nervous when you take the stage?

Victoria:  I do, and it’s funny, I was just talking to somebody about this. I wouldn’t say I feel nervous. I feel pressure and a little bit of like anxiety, and I think a little worried always because I want to do a great job.

And there’s a wonderful quote from the great French mime, Marcel Marceau – and the mime jokes, oh, mime talks, all of that.  Anyway, Marcel Marceau was a mentor of mine. I spent a lot of time studying with him and he said once this great line.

He said the amateur is always pleased with themselves but the professional is too toujours inquiet, is always worried because they know their life depends on what they do.

And I always say to my clients, the fact that you’re pressured and feeling a little anxious before you go on stage is a good sign because it shows that you care.

Sean:  Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly where I was going to take it. If you ever get really so comfortable that you don’t have butterflies then are you taking your audience for granted? Are you taking your message for granted? Have you stopped being human?

Victoria:  Yes.

Sean:  Because I am very, very married to my wife. Like we are absolute best friends and you know still, I want her to think the best of me. I still take her hand and get a little chill when it’s date day on Wednesday and we leave the house together.

You know because I don’t want to ever take her for granted. I don’t ever want to lose that little flutter.

And so I think it’s the same thing but on a macro level. If you’re stepping on stage and you’re just looking out like yes, when’s this going to be over, there’s something, I don’t know, just really wrong with that.

Victoria:  Yes.

Sean:  It’s wonderful to hear that even people who are so comfortable with it, that clearly they’re awarded a place in the Hall of Fame, are still nervous because they care about the message. I think that’s fantastic.

Victoria:  Right, right. And there’s a line from Marceau which is part of this book that I’m working on that you and I talked about. He used to say risque avant, which is like risk forward. And the position of risque avant was a physical position is your heart is forward, like you’re a little forward with your heart open.

And a lot of performers, a lot of people in life, and this is true for a lot of authors, we kind of shrink back, we physically like concave our chest.

And I always say, you know, you want to put your heart forward. And so I think when you’re risking forward, in your life and on stage and in your book or your writing or your art, it’s going to feel a little scary.

It’s vulnerable to put your heart out there.

Sean:  It should. If something doesn’t challenge you, it’s not changing you and you have to kind of, I don’t know, not that everything needs to be suffering. I don’t really believe in the tortured artist.

I don’t think you have to suffer to create great art, but it should be pulling something from inside you and that shouldn’t be comfortable always.

Victoria:  That’s exactly it. That’s exactly right.

Sean: So we talked a little bit about always being on and communication is a very different thing now than it was certainly a century ago, but even five years ago, right. Things are moving so fast.

What do you see as the future of communication?

 Victoria:  Well, I think as things get faster the imperative upon you when you’re with someone live, and I mean live like online or in an email or in front of a camera, as I call it through the lens or live, it’s really important to stop time for them because everyone is so freaked out and busy and trying to keep up in this sort of hypnosis of hyperactivity, looking left and looking right.

So if you can come from a place of honesty and authenticity, and if you can really connect with them and craft and experience going back to this opening question of yours, that takes care of them, it’s going to really put you in a different position in their mind.

It helps you stand out.

Because everyone is so keen to prove themselves, as I said earlier. There’s so much neurosis out there.

And I think you have a beautiful podcast and it’s kind of like coming from an authentic place, and I think that authenticity is going to get more and more rare.

Sean:  Okay, I love that because distilled what you just said is if we take the whole Eight Questions and compact them is to be really happy you need to do the things that stop time for you. And to really make an impact, you need to do things to stop time for others.

Victoria: That’s right.

Sean:  That’s so beautiful and cyclical and what an elegant formula to live life.

Victoria:  Yes.

Sean:  Do you things that stop time for you and stop time for others and you will be happy and make other people happy.

Victoria: Exactly. So this is to pull through on that. Everyone’s on their own conveyor belt. So I always say to my clients when they’re putting together a video, a webinar, when you’re thinking of your book, like people are coming into it in that mindset so how can you take care of them and take them on this journey, whether that’s a novel or any type of non-fiction or a poem that really brings them out of time?

Sean:  That’s wonderful. Okay. Well, this will probably be a relatively easy question for you then. It’s the final one and it’s my favorite one.

What would you like your legacy to be?

Victoria:  Well, let me ask you a question back.

Sean:  Sure.

Victoria:  What do you define as legacy, because everyone interprets that word differently. So it could be how do people think of you. It could be what physical products you leave behind.

Sean:  I think how will people remember you. How do you most want to be remembered? So however you want to interpret that.

For me my legacy is most important I guess, right now at this time, if I were to die tomorrow what would my wife and children think of me? How would they – what would be said at my funeral?

We just our Smarter Artist event and I really felt legacy in probably a deeper way than I ever had before because so many people came up to me and said if you had not written Write, Publish, Repeat I would not have quit my job, I would not be writing full-time now.

The three of us really felt the lives that we had changed, so that was very deep and very meaningful in a way that I hadn’t – I mean we get those emails rather regularly, but looking in someone’s eye and hearing that is just – or eyes, we didn’t have any pirates there.

It was just a very different thing, and so I always end with this question but I think I’m, I don’t know, considering it at a deeper level now.

I think my wife and children are very, very proud of me at this moment because of this thing that we just did.

But what would – however people remember you, what is it that you would want to remember most?

Victoria:  Well, it’s what I do in my personal and professional life, and strive to do every day really, it’s to help people express themselves, to find their own path in life.

And I think that is an unexpected path.

So whether you’re on stage, or you’re putting together your speech, or you’re putting together your book, or trying to figure out the next decision in your life, what I do again and again is I help people find their own voice and express that in a way that only they can with the unexpected twist that makes it their own.

And that’s when people feel free. Everyone comes out of the work I do and they say I feel so much more myself. I feel so much more free and this is so much more fun.

Sean:  So you’re helping them to find their voice.

Victoria:  That’s right.

Sean:  And that is a beautiful way to spend your life. I mean what an amazing career really, that you’re helping people find their voice and find their direction.

I think as a culture we don’t tend to give communication the importance that it deserve in just the way that we exchange with each other.

Victoria:  Right.

Sean:  And the fact that you’ve kind of devoted your life to improving that, on a very wide spectrum, and again you’re talking about trickle down influence. You’re working at the very, very top to make sure that that message goes wide. It’s just a wonderful thing.

Victoria:  Well, thank you. And I think what hurts my heart is that I see so many people, we cover ourselves up with some kind of fear. We think we’re not enough and so my intention is really to remove those blocks.

I always say you’re more than you’re allowing yourself to be.

Find more about Victoria at her website.

The post 8 Questions with Performance Coach Victoria Labalme appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Christian Brown

Kevin:  Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to Eight Questions. I’m one of your rotating guest hosts, Kevin Tumlinson. I’m glad you could be here. And today I’m chatting with Christian Brown. He’s a best selling author of the critically acclaimed Feast of Fates, which I’ve read and enjoyed, Christian.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Christian:  Thanks. That’s the highlight of my bed ridden sickness.

Kevin:  Yes, Christian and I are both suffering from lingering illnesses so we’re going to hack and cough our way through this interview. Christian, so you’re a fantasy author. I have eight questions for you. You have not heard these questions. You have no idea what I’m going to ask you.

Christian: That’s plenty fine, yes.

Kevin:  And that’s half the fun. So we’re going to just get started. First of all, you’ve got some new work out right now, besides Feat of Fates. What’s on your plate right now?

Christian:  Feast of Dreams came out, Feast of Chaos comes out in a month and a half.

Kevin:  And that’s a continuation, right?

Christian:  Yes.

Kevin:  So I have to read it.

Christian:  It’s Four Feasts Till Darkness.

Kevin:  I’ve been told by some reviewers that my books that lead to other books are cheating so I feel like I have to read your book now. You’ve cheated me and forced me to read your next book.

Christian:  It was as advertised on the ten. There are Four Feasts Till Darkness so if I had only the three then I would be misleading the public.

Kevin:  Well, you know how it is. Okay. So let’s hop right in.

The first question is since your work has been described as genre changing, how has your work changed the fantasy genre?

Christian: Well I think it’s more speculative fiction. There’s a lot of people that like to apply this [indistinguishable, over-talking].

Kevin:  Yes, it’s hard to nail it down. I’m sorry.

Christian:  It is. Well, no but it’s really just writing a good story, you should be able to incorporate all of the aspects of current social social trends and social questions, and I think it does a lot of that.

In the first book you see acts of terrorism, horribly racism and sexism. These are problems that we face, obviously, well we’re talking about this at a very sensitive time.

Kevin:  Yes, it’s apropos.

Christian:  So much is going on lately. So these are problems that we’re still dealing with in the real world. And I know that some people have retreated into this safe fantasy that they’re starting to write. That’s not what I write, so your listeners just need to know that.

I mean my stuff is not as dark as George R.R. Martin or Abercrombie. Like there’s always this sort of thread of hope, but I’m not afraid to go to those dark places. And I think we kind of have to.

I think it’s sometimes easier through fiction to process these things than it is to necessarily see them on a daily basis or confront them. So yes, you’ll see a lot of that, a lot of things that are happening in our current social climate happen on the world of the day.

So I would say that’s why it’s been classified as genre changing.

Kevin:  Yes, you address – there’s another author associated with this podcast, Garrett Robinson, who writes. Do you know him?

Christian:  Yes.

Kevin:  Yes, so you guys are very similar in your approach to bringing social issues into your fiction and dealing with those. It’s very cool.

Christian: Yes, well I’m a product of diversity and I’m bi-racial and I’m gay and I’m married to a VT amputee.

Kevin:  Wow.

Christian:  Yes. Not intentional, it wasn’t like you know seeking out differences, but that’s just sort of how it turned out.

So we’ve dealt with a lot of hatred towards our family and towards ourselves. And so I try in the book when you examine that, it’s to show scenarios in which these people that are facing these issues can realistically succeed against them, though there is conflict. So that’s sort of the method to my writing I guess.

Kevin:  Yes, and you’re doing it well. You didn’t do yourself any favors, you just kind of stacked the entire deck of stereotypes and other things against yourself, but I think you’re doing okay.

Christian:  Basically I’d have to be – well, my partner’s one-legged but yes, I guess if I am a person of minority. So if I was a woman I’d have it all rounded out.

Kevin:  If you were three feet tall.

Christian:  Three feet tall, Lilipution also being in a wheelchair, I’d have it all covered.

Kevin:  So question number two. What got you into writing speculative fiction in the first place? I originally had fantasy written here but I’m going to change it to speculative fiction.

Christian:  I still like to be lumped in the fantasy genre because I think that genre needs more voices sort of like mine and Garrett’s. Everything’s been sort of the same for a while, where everyone’s sort of been trying to copy just this epic fantasy mold.

Kevin:  Yes. Everyone wants to be Tolkien.

Christian:  Everyone wants to have a pig farmer or someone like the Hobbit living in the middle of nowhere, hero rises from the ashes of nothing and saves the world. It’s been done so many times that it’s a little bit tiresome. Well to me at least.

I’d always read these stories, and some of which were relatively good. I mean if you’re going to do pig farmer stuff, I think Chronicles of  Prydain does it very well.  That’s a really great series and I’ve actually come back and read it a few times as an adult. Lloyd Alexander I think wrote that.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  So anyways I really loved his stuff and obviously growing up with my own differences, you know as you start to get older you start to deal with what the world throws at you, the hatreds and the differences and how we cope with all of that.

But then things started to resonate less and less with me, even though I’m still just intrinsically drawn to stories of magic and mysticism and different worlds, science fiction too. I mean I just like these concepts of other worlds and other people that have problems similar to ours.

But these books didn’t have problems similar to mine or similar to the people that I knew and so we sort of drifted apart for a while. And I stopped reading, I would say when I was about – I was heavily into physical fitness and I was a personal trainer for a while and so I just completely gave up on my cerebral side, became a meat-head.

For that I didn’t read for like about five or six years, just because the material didn’t grab me. And then my mother got sick with lymphoblasted leukemia and I was designated as her primary care giver and during that time – we had a wonderful time, her and I, but there would be silences and so I picked up books again and I started to see what was out there and there was some new voices.

I always get her name wrong, M.K. Jemisin?

Kevin: Yes, I think so. I know in general who you mean but I’m like you, I’m not always getting that right.

Christian:  I picked up her book, I think it was in The Princess Margaret Cancer Hospital here in Toronto. I picked up her book at the gift shop and I was like this is interesting. So yes, there were these new kind of voices, Gemma Files is another take. She writes interesting edgy fiction.

And I picked up these two completely random books in like some nowhere gift shop bookstore and they were fantastic. It was the kind of material that actually resonated with me as an adult.

So that sort of drove me back into writing and I started to explore some of my other favorite authors like Clive Barker and Dan Simmons who does some really great sci-fi.

So I started to fall back into it that way and eventually I picked up my own dead and buried manuscript, resurrected that and got to work on that.

Kevin:  Was that Feast of Fates or was it something else?

Christian:  Yes, I had the title – the first story that I’d written was actually the fifth story in this sequence that I’ve done. And it was completely different, completely different characters. And I think it was called – it has some weird kind of pseudo vampire name, it was called like Threads of Blood or something.

There is a book called Threads of Blood now, which I’m sure is great, but it was just not fitting for what I had written. So it was a very, very different story than what it is now.

Kevin: Yes, sounds like it. All right. So you brought up your career in health and fitness. How do you think that experience has helped your writing career?

Christian:  Discipline definitely.  Just gives you that discipline to do things even if you don’t want to do them and even if they’re uncomfortable.

No one – I mean yes, we like the endorphins from exercise, people who exercise and people who are into fitness, but you don’t – no one really likes to do it. If they do, they’re kind of lying because there’s nothing fun about exerting yourself.

There’s a little bit of that rush when it starts and it’s like oh, this is nice. We have a terrace garden in our – I make it sound really fancy but it’s not.

Kevin:  Our terrace garden.

Christian:  Our terrace garden. There’s this chin up bar so it’s really nice to just go out there and do chin ups in the morning before I start my work or whatever. But it’s still exhausting. It’s nice for about the first 30 seconds and then it’s like ugh, I want a coffee, I want to go back to bed.

But it teaches you that discipline of just forcing your way through uncomfortable situations, which is a good skill and you can learn it. Not through exercise, you can learn it in any number of vocations or hobbies, but that’s the way I happened to learn it.

You can learn it in the military. You can learn it in a lot of ways, right.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian: But yes, that’s definitely been a very valuable skill and yes, just not quitting, even when you feel you want to, also another good skill.

Kevin:  On that note, that’s actually the next question. On the days when you don’t feel like doing the work, what actually motivates you to get going?

Christian: Well I have a picture of my Mom in front of me so I always turn to her face and when I’m feeling lazy it seems to be glowering at me, “Get to work”.

  And just again, you just have to put in the time.

There are periods though, I mean I’ve never personally experienced – I know it exists for people, I’m not going to be like it doesn’t exist, but writer’s block. I’ve never personally experienced that.

I’ve experienced like exhaustion where I’ve just put so much of myself into something, or into a book launch, or into a series of things that my body and my mind was just like no, I’m not going to do this right now.

But yes, unless you reach those moments there’s always ways to just push yourself forward.

Kevin:  Yes, I’ve had plenty of those moments where I had lots of ideas and lots of momentum, but had just used up the last of my ability to actually write.

Christian:  Yes, well we’ll go for a walk, go do something creative, go see an art show. But again, do something that just shuts off your brain so it can recharge.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  So I think that’s actually very important is knowing the value of stepping away, which for obsessive people, I don’t know if you’re obsessive but I’m quite obsessive when it comes to doing things.

Kevin:   Are you kidding me? Do you remember having to go to a scheduler to get on this interview?

Christian:  Oh, yes. You’re multiple state, he’s got a whole questionnaire you had to fill out.

 Kevin:  Exactly man. We do it right around here.

Christian:  What’s your star sign.

Kevin:  By the way, that’s me. Like I created that for my – the people I interview for this show and no, I don’t think they have anything like that for everyone else. So it was just like well, if I’m going to do, I’m going to do it.

Christian:  Yes, that’s what I’m talking about, knowing when to step away. Yes, I think that’s one of the most important things too.

Kevin:  All right. So what’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? And this doesn’t have to be just writing or anything. This could be anything in your life.

Christian:  The best advice I’ve ever been given. Well, this is actually current topical with what’s going on right now, but I think my mother had told me once – she told me two things.

First she’s like, you know, always take the high road, which we’ve all heard that from our parents before. This was in particular due to a certain volatile family situation which I won’t go into. No one needs to hear my family drama.

There’s some stuff going on between her and her brother and whatever, and she had told me, like I had stepped in being like I said being mother bear in this situation, but baby bear, protecting momma bear. And she’s like you know, Christian, you just need to take the high road.

And it was against all of my instincts to do that because I like to – I don’t shy from conflict naturally. Like sometimes conflict’s necessary. I don’t seek it out, but I’m not afraid of having the tough discussion or make the tough decision.

But anyways she told me to step back, and in this instance she was completely correct. I stepped back and the situation defused itself, and everything turned out in a really beautiful way, which it probably wouldn’t if I had thrown myself in there like my instincts told me to.

And that’s also like in terms of writing too, that’s helped as well too because you’re going to get that negative review. It’s going to come. Usually if it’s a negative review, it’s not just going to be bad. Like if someone hates your book, they hate it with their entire soul.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  You moved them profoundly to hate it. So you’re going to get their review and you’re going to get the urge to respond to it or do something. You just do nothing, because that’s that person’s opinion and that’s their experience so you have to let that go.

So yes, I found that lesson has actually served me very well through my adult life.

 Kevin:  Yes. I mean I recently got a pretty bad review and same person, by the way, that accused me of trying to scam him by having a book that didn’t tell the entire story or whatever. And my very first instinct was I wanted to respond to that guy.

And I will admit I maybe took the middle road because I went on Facebook and asked everybody I knew to go down vote him and comment to him. So maybe I could have been a bigger man, but whatever.

Christian:  But you didn’t directly engage.

Kevin:  I did not directly engage, so I think you’re absolutely right on that. I think that when it comes to it, I point it out and I let people defend me. We’ll just say that.

Christian:  Yes. I enjoyed your book actually. I don’t read a lot of science fiction except Ben Simmons and some of the obvious ones, but I like that it’s just technical enough.

Like whether you do or do not know what you’re talking about, it seems like you do and that’s perfect, so it’s just technical enough and it’s character driven, which I quite enjoy. I don’t like science fiction when it’s too abstract and remote and the whole process is not about people, because I like the people personally.

Kevin:  I don’t want to go off on a tangent about my work, but I mean that’s one of my things, is that I’m a character writer. I think you are too.

Christian:  Thank you, yes.

Kevin:  I think that absolutely makes the difference in a good story. And that’s one of the things I enjoyed about your book, because I’m not really a fantasy reader either. Like I’ve enjoyed a few fantasy stories that were compelling to me but for the most part, that’s not the genre I go looking for so I appreciated your characters as well.

All right, moving on before I start promoting myself here.

So when you think of someone who is truly successful, who comes to mind and why?

Christian:  This is a bit of a weird one but I would say Timothy Findley. We’re talking about like in the literary field.

Kevin:  Any field really, but yes.

Christian:  We’re in the literary because it’s about books, it’s an author podcast. I pick Timothy Findley. I read him since I was young. I don’t know how many people know about him. He’s kind of forgotten these days, but he was very prolific and successful playwright and Canadian author.

Also openly gay man, married his partner and they live just this idyllic kind of nice life and he just passed away very gently at his home, surrounded by people he loved. And he had this amazing body of work that in some ways rivalled Atwood’s.

He was of the same calibre as her. He was still cranking out amazing work. But at the time they were two of our pillars of just great Canadian literature.

I say Canadian literature because I’m proud that they were of my nation, but at the same time read worldwide and he was an amazing, amazing character and dialogue writer.

Kevin:  Yes, this is the guy that wrote The Wars?

Christian:  Yes. Yes he just wrote some really – and Pilgrim, which was one of my favorite books.

Kevin:  Pilgrim, yes, that’s another one I was thinking about.

Christian:  He was clever, a smart man.

Kevin: So why him?  Why does he come up when you think about success?

Christian:  Hard work. Successful but not so successful that it changed him. I mean the man lived his life – he had enough money that he could have lived in Ottawa, the capital city, in a mansion, and he lived in a farmhouse surrounded by the comforts he needed and wanted.

So that to me it’s really – I just look at his life and I’m like that’s a really respectable pleasant life. And you know we’re all going to die sometime. That’s something that I would aspire to have as my – what I’m looking back on when that time comes. Very far from now, hopefully.

Kevin: I hope that after I die there’s somebody on a podcast saying you know who I think of, Kevin Tumlinson. That body of work. I’m hoping for that.

Christian:  And just a really nice guy. Like there’s nothing that I can really think that was particularly slanderous or scandalous about his career.

Kevin:  Yes, which is almost uncommon now, right. Because if you’ve heard of anybody…

Christian:  Who knows.

Kevin:  Right, yes. It’s like gone are the days when if you’re talked about on a news cast it’s like you know the author of The Wars and The Pilgrim. No, now it’s like TMZ and they caught him sneaking out of some sort of porn house or something.

Christian:  Yes.

 Kevin:  Which is a shame, that’s a shame. All right.

Christian:  Innocence is lost.

Kevin:  This is a connected question and it’s not one of the official questions. I just thought of it just now, but what does success actually mean to you then? I mean beyond this medium.

Christian:  For me? So I would say sustainability. I mean success is always going to be a bit of a moving target because you know you’re going to have to adjust your metrics and elements as you ideally become more successful.

But my first goal was just to be sustainable and to just make money off my books, which I accomplished over the past two years. I worked really, really hard and spending a lot of my own money.

Unfortunately that old adage, it takes money to make money, well it does. I spent a lot of my life savings just to get somewhere sustainable, and to make a quality product. You cannot make something that rivals, I’m sure you can it’s very difficult.

I was even pinching pennies and trying to be really conservative with my funds, but it still costs a lot of money to hire professional editors and to get web designers. It just takes money.

And cutting corners, if you want to stand toe to toe with some of these books that the publishers are putting out, some of which are crap, yes, but that describes books anywhere. It’s quality and it costs money unfortunately.

Kevin:  Yes, I try to point out to people because there is that statement as if it’s a justification. People will say, well, you know, sure my book is crap but there’s crap coming out of Random House too.

Christian:  So much crap out there.

Kevin:  Yes, like what do you want to compete with? Are you really saying you want to be competitive with the crappiest book that comes out of traditional publishing, or do you want to be at a much higher level?

Okay. So, next official question. So who do you think of actually as your biggest and best mentor and/or inspiration?

This is kind of loaded because I kind of figured you might mention your Mom, but you already mentioned her.

Christian:  I did.

Kevin:  So, we’re just going to assume your Mom is your biggest inspiration, I’m sure.

Christian:  Well, she kind of is, actually. Not to be a Momma’s boy, but she was the woman – my father as well, too, deserves mention because they both struggled with a bi-racial family in a time when it was not very acceptable.

Obviously people are still having serious issues with race worldwide, but this was like 37 years ago. We had a burning cross on our lawn. We went through some really dark stuff together.

So I’d say my parents, not just my Mom but my parents. Because even though my father and I had our issues as I was getting older, or actually when I was younger, the teenage years are never good for fathers and sons usually.

We found a happy medium but they taught me a lot of lessons about acceptance. They could have gone the other way and become very close minded and said no, you must fear all these people that are attacking us and you must hate them.

Even the words, the things that people say through their actions, my parents always seemed to do the right thing. So they were really amazing.

We weren’t a rich family. We were actually very poor and they worked their way up to middle class. So that was also a very good lesson for me in terms of how to improve your station in life and how to continuously work even though the world seems like it’s pushing you down.

And eventually something good will happen. You don’t see it at the time, but eventually you know that seed is planted and that seed grows. It just takes a long time sometimes, right?

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  They were great role models for determination, perseverance and all that.

Kevin:  All that stuff. I love that idea that one of the lessons was that you can improve your place in life, your station in life.

Christian:  Yes, like we’re a bi-racial piss-poor family. My only entertainment for the first seven to ten years of my life was the public library because it was basically free. Well, it wasn’t free but it was pretty cheap, and that’s where my love affair with language started.

To me it was like here’s this entire world and you pay nothing for it. And I’m already sort of a very internal creature, so if you fall into a book and envision everything in there.

You’ve read my writing too, it’s very sensory. That’s what happens to me when I read, is that I go into a book.

So it was wonderful entertainment for me. It was probably the best. I don’t think that I would have had that if we didn’t have to struggle, strange as that is. I think that that was actually a good thing for us, it brought us closer as a family.

Kevin:  So did you have that feeling when you were a kid going to the library that there were certain parts of the library that you weren’t supposed to be in, or certain books maybe that you weren’t supposed to?

Christian:  I just took off. I think I read like Poppy Z. Brite, remember her?

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  She went totally like off the grid though and she’s started like a cat rescue or something. It’s really like the early 90s. I read her when I was like maybe, oh God, twelve, which you can imagine I’m just like what is this. Like half my mind is like I don’t know what I’m reading or whether I should be reading this, but I read it anyways.

Kevin:  I’ve had this whole thing, I don’t know, I’ve always been a little timid in situations where I don’t know the rules, so for the longest time I didn’t really know the rules of the library.

Because we grew up out in the country, I mean going to the library was an ordeal. You had to go there. It wasn’t like I was going to walk by it on my way home from school or something.

We’d go in and I’m like there’s the kid’s section and then there’s this greater section, right. My whole thing was well, I’m a kid so they probably expected I need to stay here. But I’ve already read all of this crap, you know, this is all boring to me. I want to read that stuff.

So I thought I was going to get in trouble the first time I snuck out. Like I didn’t check out “grown up books” for years because I read them all sitting in the library, because I thought I’d get in trouble for trying to check them out.

Christian: I think once my Mom started letting me go to the library or wander the library unattended and get stuff and come back on my own, then that I was like I was going to do whatever I want.

That’s a child’s nature though is to sort of push the boundaries as far as they can. I read Peter Straub when I was very young too. Didn’t quite understand it. Lord of the Rings I read when I was very young too. I had to read it again when I was much older just to understand the language and get the flow of everything.

But yes, I still read that when I was very, very young. It was the enormity of it was kind of what captivated me. Because I’m like this is huge, this thing is the size of like the Old Testament. So books have always had a real magic to me I guess.

Kevin:  All right, so earlier you mentioned the fact that we all are eventually going to die, some of us, some of us. And I know what I want my epitaph to be, but what epitaph would you want most to be written about you when it’s all said and done? What epitaph would you like at the end of your life? I just stumbled right through that but we’re going to assume it went well.

Christian:  I would like to say…

Kevin:  It’s so morbid. I should have just stated it…

Christian:  We’ll talk about that after but we have a morbid viewpoint on it but it’s a necessary part of life. I think the sooner we sort of accept that and deal with it the less afraid we are of living.

But I would say oh, probably something about this world that I have in my head that I’ve written is so clear to me, especially when I’m writing and you’re really in those moments. Like I feel like I’m there. I feel like I can see these people living and breathing. That’s how real it is to me.

So maybe something poetic like wandering the sea of stars forever. Something like that, like a quote from the book, I don’t know.

Kevin: A quote from the book, yes. That would be appropriate. Now I change my answer. Actually, I want your quote now. And that’s cool. I could see that. That is poetic to have your work. I think Tolkein actually has something like that.

Christian:  Yes, I don’t quite remember what it is, but it’s something like – I can’t remember it, I’ll have to look it up.

Kevin:  I can’t either. I know there were two characters in his books, mentioned in the Appendices, that he actually has carved on his tombstone and his wife’s tombstone I think. Something like that.

There’s going to be like 8,000 emails now to correct me on that and tell me what an idiot I am. You would think I’d remember that. It’s like I’ve experienced that a thousand times. I should know that by now.

So in connection to that, you clearly want to be most remembered for the work you’re producing at the moment. You don’t think you’ll produce something else later?

Christian:  Oh, I totally will. Like I mean after – well, I’m working on the…

Kevin:  That’s kind of a loaded question I guess.

Christian:  After that I’ve got – so I already started the framework for the prologue. For some reason there’s this whole generation of people that have decided that prologues are evil, but that’s another topic for another day.

I wrote the prologue for my next project, which I’m going to start on after, and it’s an urban fantasy kind of. So, yes, I’m going to work on that and then I have a children’s book I’m going to do.

But the greater work that I will always go back to will be Geadhain and its world and its stories. So that’ll be the foundation I guess of my career ideally. But I can’t stay fixed on one thing for too long because you’ll burn yourself out and you need time to grow and to settle.

So yes, I’ve got part of two projects planned in each major arc.

Kevin:  That’s a good plan. That’s the way I’m doing it now too, especially since flipping to thrillers. I’m writing a Dan Kotler book and then I write another book something completely unrelated, and then I write another Dan Kotler book.

Christian:  Yes.

Kevin:  I just kind of stagger them.

Christian:  Just to mix it up a little bit. But you don’t get sick of your own work either, right?

Kevin:  Right, yes, which is a definite real danger when you’re like 30 books in. So where can people find you online or anywhere? What’s your physical home address and how can people get there?

Christian:  Where can we send that creepy package to. So that’s www.christianadrianbrown.com. That’s the landing page. It’s nice. I think you’ve been there before.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  You’ve probably seen trailers and it’s got a sort of Pinterest or Instagram like look.

Kevin:  Yes, it’s got a cool design I’ll say.

Christian:  I have a web designer and she’s fabulous. Her link is actually on the site too if you ever need a web designer, she’s fantastic. Yup, and she’s Canadian too so if you’re a US listener, you’re in for a bargain.

Kevin:  Canadian.

Christian:  www.christianadrianbrown.com. I have a Facebook page which is super active, a lot of people stop by there and shoot the poop. And Twitter, and that’s really about it. I’m probably going to do an Instagram this year but I think we had this conversation last time in our last podcast together, but I try and keep social media very curated because I don’t want like most people that it’s just like constantly Tweeting “I’m having lunch”.

I don’t want people to get sick of hearing my voice I guess. I’m not a very extroverted person necessarily. I don’t feel like talking all the time.

Kevin:  That’s where you and I are different.

Christian:  Yes. Honestly if you have that need to connect, then yes, you need to feed that need, but I don’t have that. Which is something obviously that I work on, because you can’t just be alone and never speak to anyone.

Kevin:  Okay. There’ll be links to your web page and probably some other stuff in the show notes for everybody listening. And Christian, I appreciate you being on the show with me.

Christian:  Yes, thank you for having me, it was great.

Kevin:  Yes, so that’s Eight Questions everybody, we’re going to wrap it up. Definitely check out Christian’s work at christianadrianbrown.com.

If you want to find out more about my work, I would be happy to show you if you’ll just show up at kevintumlinson.com you can find out about my books, podcasts and more. Pretty much anything Wordslinger, you can find it there.

Thanks again, Christian, and for everyone have a great week ahead.

The post 8 Questions with Christian Brown appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Fantasy Author Christian Brown

Kevin:  Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to Eight Questions. I’m one of your rotating guest hosts, Kevin Tumlinson. I’m glad you could be here. And today I’m chatting with Christian Brown. He’s a best selling author of the critically acclaimed Feast of Fates, which I’ve read and enjoyed, Christian.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Christian:  Thanks. That’s the highlight of my bed ridden sickness.

Kevin:  Yes, Christian and I are both suffering from lingering illnesses so we’re going to hack and cough our way through this interview. Christian, so you’re a fantasy author. I have eight questions for you. You have not heard these questions. You have no idea what I’m going to ask you.

Christian: That’s plenty fine, yes.

Kevin:  And that’s half the fun. So we’re going to just get started. First of all, you’ve got some new work out right now, besides Feat of Fates. What’s on your plate right now?

Christian:  Feast of Dreams came out, Feast of Chaos comes out in a month and a half.

Kevin:  And that’s a continuation, right?

Christian:  Yes.

Kevin:  So I have to read it.

Christian:  It’s Four Feasts Till Darkness.

Kevin:  I’ve been told by some reviewers that my books that lead to other books are cheating so I feel like I have to read your book now. You’ve cheated me and forced me to read your next book.

Christian:  It was as advertised on the ten. There are Four Feasts Till Darkness so if I had only the three then I would be misleading the public.

Kevin:  Well, you know how it is. Okay. So let’s hop right in.

The first question is since your work has been described as genre changing, how has your work changed the fantasy genre?

Christian: Well I think it’s more speculative fiction. There’s a lot of people that like to apply this [indistinguishable, over-talking].

Kevin:  Yes, it’s hard to nail it down. I’m sorry.

Christian:  It is. Well, no but it’s really just writing a good story, you should be able to incorporate all of the aspects of current social social trends and social questions, and I think it does a lot of that.

In the first book you see acts of terrorism, horribly racism and sexism. These are problems that we face, obviously, well we’re talking about this at a very sensitive time.

Kevin:  Yes, it’s apropos.

Christian:  So much is going on lately. So these are problems that we’re still dealing with in the real world. And I know that some people have retreated into this safe fantasy that they’re starting to write. That’s not what I write, so your listeners just need to know that.

I mean my stuff is not as dark as George R.R. Martin or Abercrombie. Like there’s always this sort of thread of hope, but I’m not afraid to go to those dark places. And I think we kind of have to.

I think it’s sometimes easier through fiction to process these things than it is to necessarily see them on a daily basis or confront them. So yes, you’ll see a lot of that, a lot of things that are happening in our current social climate happen on the world of the day.

So I would say that’s why it’s been classified as genre changing.

Kevin:  Yes, you address – there’s another author associated with this podcast, Garrett Robinson, who writes. Do you know him?

Christian:  Yes.

Kevin:  Yes, so you guys are very similar in your approach to bringing social issues into your fiction and dealing with those. It’s very cool.

Christian: Yes, well I’m a product of diversity and I’m bi-racial and I’m gay and I’m married to a VT amputee.

Kevin:  Wow.

Christian:  Yes. Not intentional, it wasn’t like you know seeking out differences, but that’s just sort of how it turned out.

So we’ve dealt with a lot of hatred towards our family and towards ourselves. And so I try in the book when you examine that, it’s to show scenarios in which these people that are facing these issues can realistically succeed against them, though there is conflict. So that’s sort of the method to my writing I guess.

Kevin:  Yes, and you’re doing it well. You didn’t do yourself any favors, you just kind of stacked the entire deck of stereotypes and other things against yourself, but I think you’re doing okay.

Christian:  Basically I’d have to be – well, my partner’s one-legged but yes, I guess if I am a person of minority. So if I was a woman I’d have it all rounded out.

Kevin:  If you were three feet tall.

Christian:  Three feet tall, Lilipution also being in a wheelchair, I’d have it all covered.

Kevin:  So question number two. What got you into writing speculative fiction in the first place? I originally had fantasy written here but I’m going to change it to speculative fiction.

Christian:  I still like to be lumped in the fantasy genre because I think that genre needs more voices sort of like mine and Garrett’s. Everything’s been sort of the same for a while, where everyone’s sort of been trying to copy just this epic fantasy mold.

Kevin:  Yes. Everyone wants to be Tolkien.

Christian:  Everyone wants to have a pig farmer or someone like the Hobbit living in the middle of nowhere, hero rises from the ashes of nothing and saves the world. It’s been done so many times that it’s a little bit tiresome. Well to me at least.

I’d always read these stories, and some of which were relatively good. I mean if you’re going to do pig farmer stuff, I think Chronicles of  Prydain does it very well.  That’s a really great series and I’ve actually come back and read it a few times as an adult. Lloyd Alexander I think wrote that.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  So anyways I really loved his stuff and obviously growing up with my own differences, you know as you start to get older you start to deal with what the world throws at you, the hatreds and the differences and how we cope with all of that.

But then things started to resonate less and less with me, even though I’m still just intrinsically drawn to stories of magic and mysticism and different worlds, science fiction too. I mean I just like these concepts of other worlds and other people that have problems similar to ours.

But these books didn’t have problems similar to mine or similar to the people that I knew and so we sort of drifted apart for a while. And I stopped reading, I would say when I was about – I was heavily into physical fitness and I was a personal trainer for a while and so I just completely gave up on my cerebral side, became a meat-head.

For that I didn’t read for like about five or six years, just because the material didn’t grab me. And then my mother got sick with lymphoblasted leukemia and I was designated as her primary care giver and during that time – we had a wonderful time, her and I, but there would be silences and so I picked up books again and I started to see what was out there and there was some new voices.

I always get her name wrong, M.K. Jemisin?

Kevin: Yes, I think so. I know in general who you mean but I’m like you, I’m not always getting that right.

Christian:  I picked up her book, I think it was in The Princess Margaret Cancer Hospital here in Toronto. I picked up her book at the gift shop and I was like this is interesting. So yes, there were these new kind of voices, Gemma Files is another take. She writes interesting edgy fiction.

And I picked up these two completely random books in like some nowhere gift shop bookstore and they were fantastic. It was the kind of material that actually resonated with me as an adult.

So that sort of drove me back into writing and I started to explore some of my other favorite authors like Clive Barker and Dan Simmons who does some really great sci-fi.

So I started to fall back into it that way and eventually I picked up my own dead and buried manuscript, resurrected that and got to work on that.

Kevin:  Was that Feast of Fates or was it something else?

Christian:  Yes, I had the title – the first story that I’d written was actually the fifth story in this sequence that I’ve done. And it was completely different, completely different characters. And I think it was called – it has some weird kind of pseudo vampire name, it was called like Threads of Blood or something.

There is a book called Threads of Blood now, which I’m sure is great, but it was just not fitting for what I had written. So it was a very, very different story than what it is now.

Kevin: Yes, sounds like it. All right. So you brought up your career in health and fitness. How do you think that experience has helped your writing career?

Christian:  Discipline definitely.  Just gives you that discipline to do things even if you don’t want to do them and even if they’re uncomfortable.

No one – I mean yes, we like the endorphins from exercise, people who exercise and people who are into fitness, but you don’t – no one really likes to do it. If they do, they’re kind of lying because there’s nothing fun about exerting yourself.

There’s a little bit of that rush when it starts and it’s like oh, this is nice. We have a terrace garden in our – I make it sound really fancy but it’s not.

Kevin:  Our terrace garden.

Christian:  Our terrace garden. There’s this chin up bar so it’s really nice to just go out there and do chin ups in the morning before I start my work or whatever. But it’s still exhausting. It’s nice for about the first 30 seconds and then it’s like ugh, I want a coffee, I want to go back to bed.

But it teaches you that discipline of just forcing your way through uncomfortable situations, which is a good skill and you can learn it. Not through exercise, you can learn it in any number of vocations or hobbies, but that’s the way I happened to learn it.

You can learn it in the military. You can learn it in a lot of ways, right.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian: But yes, that’s definitely been a very valuable skill and yes, just not quitting, even when you feel you want to, also another good skill.

Kevin:  On that note, that’s actually the next question. On the days when you don’t feel like doing the work, what actually motivates you to get going?

Christian: Well I have a picture of my Mom in front of me so I always turn to her face and when I’m feeling lazy it seems to be glowering at me, “Get to work”.

  And just again, you just have to put in the time.

There are periods though, I mean I’ve never personally experienced – I know it exists for people, I’m not going to be like it doesn’t exist, but writer’s block. I’ve never personally experienced that.

I’ve experienced like exhaustion where I’ve just put so much of myself into something, or into a book launch, or into a series of things that my body and my mind was just like no, I’m not going to do this right now.

But yes, unless you reach those moments there’s always ways to just push yourself forward.

Kevin:  Yes, I’ve had plenty of those moments where I had lots of ideas and lots of momentum, but had just used up the last of my ability to actually write.

Christian:  Yes, well we’ll go for a walk, go do something creative, go see an art show. But again, do something that just shuts off your brain so it can recharge.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  So I think that’s actually very important is knowing the value of stepping away, which for obsessive people, I don’t know if you’re obsessive but I’m quite obsessive when it comes to doing things.

Kevin:   Are you kidding me? Do you remember having to go to a scheduler to get on this interview?

Christian:  Oh, yes. You’re multiple state, he’s got a whole questionnaire you had to fill out.

 Kevin:  Exactly man. We do it right around here.

Christian:  What’s your star sign.

Kevin:  By the way, that’s me. Like I created that for my – the people I interview for this show and no, I don’t think they have anything like that for everyone else. So it was just like well, if I’m going to do, I’m going to do it.

Christian:  Yes, that’s what I’m talking about, knowing when to step away. Yes, I think that’s one of the most important things too.

Kevin:  All right. So what’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? And this doesn’t have to be just writing or anything. This could be anything in your life.

Christian:  The best advice I’ve ever been given. Well, this is actually current topical with what’s going on right now, but I think my mother had told me once – she told me two things.

First she’s like, you know, always take the high road, which we’ve all heard that from our parents before. This was in particular due to a certain volatile family situation which I won’t go into. No one needs to hear my family drama.

There’s some stuff going on between her and her brother and whatever, and she had told me, like I had stepped in being like I said being mother bear in this situation, but baby bear, protecting momma bear. And she’s like you know, Christian, you just need to take the high road.

And it was against all of my instincts to do that because I like to – I don’t shy from conflict naturally. Like sometimes conflict’s necessary. I don’t seek it out, but I’m not afraid of having the tough discussion or make the tough decision.

But anyways she told me to step back, and in this instance she was completely correct. I stepped back and the situation defused itself, and everything turned out in a really beautiful way, which it probably wouldn’t if I had thrown myself in there like my instincts told me to.

And that’s also like in terms of writing too, that’s helped as well too because you’re going to get that negative review. It’s going to come. Usually if it’s a negative review, it’s not just going to be bad. Like if someone hates your book, they hate it with their entire soul.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  You moved them profoundly to hate it. So you’re going to get their review and you’re going to get the urge to respond to it or do something. You just do nothing, because that’s that person’s opinion and that’s their experience so you have to let that go.

So yes, I found that lesson has actually served me very well through my adult life.

 Kevin:  Yes. I mean I recently got a pretty bad review and same person, by the way, that accused me of trying to scam him by having a book that didn’t tell the entire story or whatever. And my very first instinct was I wanted to respond to that guy.

And I will admit I maybe took the middle road because I went on Facebook and asked everybody I knew to go down vote him and comment to him. So maybe I could have been a bigger man, but whatever.

Christian:  But you didn’t directly engage.

Kevin:  I did not directly engage, so I think you’re absolutely right on that. I think that when it comes to it, I point it out and I let people defend me. We’ll just say that.

Christian:  Yes. I enjoyed your book actually. I don’t read a lot of science fiction except Ben Simmons and some of the obvious ones, but I like that it’s just technical enough.

Like whether you do or do not know what you’re talking about, it seems like you do and that’s perfect, so it’s just technical enough and it’s character driven, which I quite enjoy. I don’t like science fiction when it’s too abstract and remote and the whole process is not about people, because I like the people personally.

Kevin:  I don’t want to go off on a tangent about my work, but I mean that’s one of my things, is that I’m a character writer. I think you are too.

Christian:  Thank you, yes.

Kevin:  I think that absolutely makes the difference in a good story. And that’s one of the things I enjoyed about your book, because I’m not really a fantasy reader either. Like I’ve enjoyed a few fantasy stories that were compelling to me but for the most part, that’s not the genre I go looking for so I appreciated your characters as well.

All right, moving on before I start promoting myself here.

So when you think of someone who is truly successful, who comes to mind and why?

Christian:  This is a bit of a weird one but I would say Timothy Findley. We’re talking about like in the literary field.

Kevin:  Any field really, but yes.

Christian:  We’re in the literary because it’s about books, it’s an author podcast. I pick Timothy Findley. I read him since I was young. I don’t know how many people know about him. He’s kind of forgotten these days, but he was very prolific and successful playwright and Canadian author.

Also openly gay man, married his partner and they live just this idyllic kind of nice life and he just passed away very gently at his home, surrounded by people he loved. And he had this amazing body of work that in some ways rivalled Atwood’s.

He was of the same calibre as her. He was still cranking out amazing work. But at the time they were two of our pillars of just great Canadian literature.

I say Canadian literature because I’m proud that they were of my nation, but at the same time read worldwide and he was an amazing, amazing character and dialogue writer.

Kevin:  Yes, this is the guy that wrote The Wars?

Christian:  Yes. Yes he just wrote some really – and Pilgrim, which was one of my favorite books.

Kevin:  Pilgrim, yes, that’s another one I was thinking about.

Christian:  He was clever, a smart man.

Kevin: So why him?  Why does he come up when you think about success?

Christian:  Hard work. Successful but not so successful that it changed him. I mean the man lived his life – he had enough money that he could have lived in Ottawa, the capital city, in a mansion, and he lived in a farmhouse surrounded by the comforts he needed and wanted.

So that to me it’s really – I just look at his life and I’m like that’s a really respectable pleasant life. And you know we’re all going to die sometime. That’s something that I would aspire to have as my – what I’m looking back on when that time comes. Very far from now, hopefully.

Kevin: I hope that after I die there’s somebody on a podcast saying you know who I think of, Kevin Tumlinson. That body of work. I’m hoping for that.

Christian:  And just a really nice guy. Like there’s nothing that I can really think that was particularly slanderous or scandalous about his career.

Kevin:  Yes, which is almost uncommon now, right. Because if you’ve heard of anybody…

Christian:  Who knows.

Kevin:  Right, yes. It’s like gone are the days when if you’re talked about on a news cast it’s like you know the author of The Wars and The Pilgrim. No, now it’s like TMZ and they caught him sneaking out of some sort of porn house or something.

Christian:  Yes.

 Kevin:  Which is a shame, that’s a shame. All right.

Christian:  Innocence is lost.

Kevin:  This is a connected question and it’s not one of the official questions. I just thought of it just now, but what does success actually mean to you then? I mean beyond this medium.

Christian:  For me? So I would say sustainability. I mean success is always going to be a bit of a moving target because you know you’re going to have to adjust your metrics and elements as you ideally become more successful.

But my first goal was just to be sustainable and to just make money off my books, which I accomplished over the past two years. I worked really, really hard and spending a lot of my own money.

Unfortunately that old adage, it takes money to make money, well it does. I spent a lot of my life savings just to get somewhere sustainable, and to make a quality product. You cannot make something that rivals, I’m sure you can it’s very difficult.

I was even pinching pennies and trying to be really conservative with my funds, but it still costs a lot of money to hire professional editors and to get web designers. It just takes money.

And cutting corners, if you want to stand toe to toe with some of these books that the publishers are putting out, some of which are crap, yes, but that describes books anywhere. It’s quality and it costs money unfortunately.

Kevin:  Yes, I try to point out to people because there is that statement as if it’s a justification. People will say, well, you know, sure my book is crap but there’s crap coming out of Random House too.

Christian:  So much crap out there.

Kevin:  Yes, like what do you want to compete with? Are you really saying you want to be competitive with the crappiest book that comes out of traditional publishing, or do you want to be at a much higher level?

Okay. So, next official question. So who do you think of actually as your biggest and best mentor and/or inspiration?

This is kind of loaded because I kind of figured you might mention your Mom, but you already mentioned her.

Christian:  I did.

Kevin:  So, we’re just going to assume your Mom is your biggest inspiration, I’m sure.

Christian:  Well, she kind of is, actually. Not to be a Momma’s boy, but she was the woman – my father as well, too, deserves mention because they both struggled with a bi-racial family in a time when it was not very acceptable.

Obviously people are still having serious issues with race worldwide, but this was like 37 years ago. We had a burning cross on our lawn. We went through some really dark stuff together.

So I’d say my parents, not just my Mom but my parents. Because even though my father and I had our issues as I was getting older, or actually when I was younger, the teenage years are never good for fathers and sons usually.

We found a happy medium but they taught me a lot of lessons about acceptance. They could have gone the other way and become very close minded and said no, you must fear all these people that are attacking us and you must hate them.

Even the words, the things that people say through their actions, my parents always seemed to do the right thing. So they were really amazing.

We weren’t a rich family. We were actually very poor and they worked their way up to middle class. So that was also a very good lesson for me in terms of how to improve your station in life and how to continuously work even though the world seems like it’s pushing you down.

And eventually something good will happen. You don’t see it at the time, but eventually you know that seed is planted and that seed grows. It just takes a long time sometimes, right?

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  They were great role models for determination, perseverance and all that.

Kevin:  All that stuff. I love that idea that one of the lessons was that you can improve your place in life, your station in life.

Christian:  Yes, like we’re a bi-racial piss-poor family. My only entertainment for the first seven to ten years of my life was the public library because it was basically free. Well, it wasn’t free but it was pretty cheap, and that’s where my love affair with language started.

To me it was like here’s this entire world and you pay nothing for it. And I’m already sort of a very internal creature, so if you fall into a book and envision everything in there.

You’ve read my writing too, it’s very sensory. That’s what happens to me when I read, is that I go into a book.

So it was wonderful entertainment for me. It was probably the best. I don’t think that I would have had that if we didn’t have to struggle, strange as that is. I think that that was actually a good thing for us, it brought us closer as a family.

Kevin:  So did you have that feeling when you were a kid going to the library that there were certain parts of the library that you weren’t supposed to be in, or certain books maybe that you weren’t supposed to?

Christian:  I just took off. I think I read like Poppy Z. Brite, remember her?

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  She went totally like off the grid though and she’s started like a cat rescue or something. It’s really like the early 90s. I read her when I was like maybe, oh God, twelve, which you can imagine I’m just like what is this. Like half my mind is like I don’t know what I’m reading or whether I should be reading this, but I read it anyways.

Kevin:  I’ve had this whole thing, I don’t know, I’ve always been a little timid in situations where I don’t know the rules, so for the longest time I didn’t really know the rules of the library.

Because we grew up out in the country, I mean going to the library was an ordeal. You had to go there. It wasn’t like I was going to walk by it on my way home from school or something.

We’d go in and I’m like there’s the kid’s section and then there’s this greater section, right. My whole thing was well, I’m a kid so they probably expected I need to stay here. But I’ve already read all of this crap, you know, this is all boring to me. I want to read that stuff.

So I thought I was going to get in trouble the first time I snuck out. Like I didn’t check out “grown up books” for years because I read them all sitting in the library, because I thought I’d get in trouble for trying to check them out.

Christian: I think once my Mom started letting me go to the library or wander the library unattended and get stuff and come back on my own, then that I was like I was going to do whatever I want.

That’s a child’s nature though is to sort of push the boundaries as far as they can. I read Peter Straub when I was very young too. Didn’t quite understand it. Lord of the Rings I read when I was very young too. I had to read it again when I was much older just to understand the language and get the flow of everything.

But yes, I still read that when I was very, very young. It was the enormity of it was kind of what captivated me. Because I’m like this is huge, this thing is the size of like the Old Testament. So books have always had a real magic to me I guess.

Kevin:  All right, so earlier you mentioned the fact that we all are eventually going to die, some of us, some of us. And I know what I want my epitaph to be, but what epitaph would you want most to be written about you when it’s all said and done? What epitaph would you like at the end of your life? I just stumbled right through that but we’re going to assume it went well.

Christian:  I would like to say…

Kevin:  It’s so morbid. I should have just stated it…

Christian:  We’ll talk about that after but we have a morbid viewpoint on it but it’s a necessary part of life. I think the sooner we sort of accept that and deal with it the less afraid we are of living.

But I would say oh, probably something about this world that I have in my head that I’ve written is so clear to me, especially when I’m writing and you’re really in those moments. Like I feel like I’m there. I feel like I can see these people living and breathing. That’s how real it is to me.

So maybe something poetic like wandering the sea of stars forever. Something like that, like a quote from the book, I don’t know.

Kevin: A quote from the book, yes. That would be appropriate. Now I change my answer. Actually, I want your quote now. And that’s cool. I could see that. That is poetic to have your work. I think Tolkein actually has something like that.

Christian:  Yes, I don’t quite remember what it is, but it’s something like – I can’t remember it, I’ll have to look it up.

Kevin:  I can’t either. I know there were two characters in his books, mentioned in the Appendices, that he actually has carved on his tombstone and his wife’s tombstone I think. Something like that.

There’s going to be like 8,000 emails now to correct me on that and tell me what an idiot I am. You would think I’d remember that. It’s like I’ve experienced that a thousand times. I should know that by now.

So in connection to that, you clearly want to be most remembered for the work you’re producing at the moment. You don’t think you’ll produce something else later?

Christian:  Oh, I totally will. Like I mean after – well, I’m working on the…

Kevin:  That’s kind of a loaded question I guess.

Christian:  After that I’ve got – so I already started the framework for the prologue. For some reason there’s this whole generation of people that have decided that prologues are evil, but that’s another topic for another day.

I wrote the prologue for my next project, which I’m going to start on after, and it’s an urban fantasy kind of. So, yes, I’m going to work on that and then I have a children’s book I’m going to do.

But the greater work that I will always go back to will be Geadhain and its world and its stories. So that’ll be the foundation I guess of my career ideally. But I can’t stay fixed on one thing for too long because you’ll burn yourself out and you need time to grow and to settle.

So yes, I’ve got part of two projects planned in each major arc.

Kevin:  That’s a good plan. That’s the way I’m doing it now too, especially since flipping to thrillers. I’m writing a Dan Kotler book and then I write another book something completely unrelated, and then I write another Dan Kotler book.

Christian:  Yes.

Kevin:  I just kind of stagger them.

Christian:  Just to mix it up a little bit. But you don’t get sick of your own work either, right?

Kevin:  Right, yes, which is a definite real danger when you’re like 30 books in. So where can people find you online or anywhere? What’s your physical home address and how can people get there?

Christian:  Where can we send that creepy package to. So that’s www.christianadrianbrown.com. That’s the landing page. It’s nice. I think you’ve been there before.

Kevin:  Yes.

Christian:  You’ve probably seen trailers and it’s got a sort of Pinterest or Instagram like look.

Kevin:  Yes, it’s got a cool design I’ll say.

Christian:  I have a web designer and she’s fabulous. Her link is actually on the site too if you ever need a web designer, she’s fantastic. Yup, and she’s Canadian too so if you’re a US listener, you’re in for a bargain.

Kevin:  Canadian.

Christian:  www.christianadrianbrown.com. I have a Facebook page which is super active, a lot of people stop by there and shoot the poop. And Twitter, and that’s really about it. I’m probably going to do an Instagram this year but I think we had this conversation last time in our last podcast together, but I try and keep social media very curated because I don’t want like most people that it’s just like constantly Tweeting “I’m having lunch”.

I don’t want people to get sick of hearing my voice I guess. I’m not a very extroverted person necessarily. I don’t feel like talking all the time.

Kevin:  That’s where you and I are different.

Christian:  Yes. Honestly if you have that need to connect, then yes, you need to feed that need, but I don’t have that. Which is something obviously that I work on, because you can’t just be alone and never speak to anyone.

Kevin:  Okay. There’ll be links to your web page and probably some other stuff in the show notes for everybody listening. And Christian, I appreciate you being on the show with me.

Christian:  Yes, thank you for having me, it was great.

Kevin:  Yes, so that’s Eight Questions everybody, we’re going to wrap it up. Definitely check out Christian’s work at christianadrianbrown.com.

If you want to find out more about my work, I would be happy to show you if you’ll just show up at kevintumlinson.com you can find out about my books, podcasts and more. Pretty much anything Wordslinger, you can find it there.

Thanks again, Christian, and for everyone have a great week ahead.

The post 8 Questions with Fantasy Author Christian Brown appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Nick Thacker

Kevin:  Hey everybody. Thanks for tuning into Eight Questions and I am Kevin Tumlinson. I’m happy to be here and I’m actually really thrilled to be talking to my good friend, Nick Thacker. He’s a thriller author in the vein of James Rollins and Dan Brown. And he’s been invited to write books in shared universes for authors like A.G. Riddle, who wrote The Atlantis Gene. And in addition to his books, Nick is the co-host of a very popular Self Publishing Answers podcast with yours truly and Justin Sloan.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Nick, man, how you doing?

Nick:  Doing well. That was a good intro. I liked that intro.

Kevin:  Thanks man. I’m a writer and I do this sort of thing. So you and I know each other really well. I’m not going to try and fool anybody about that.

Nick:  We’ve met twice and we know each other really well.

Kevin:  We literally have met twice in person, that’s sad. We’ve known each other for about two years now I think?

Nick:  Yes, it’s got to be closer to three I think.

 Kevin:  Closer to three.

Nick:  Yes.

Kevin:  Yes, and we’ve done a lot of work together, including some co-authoring. We’ve written at least two books together.

Nick:  At least two.

Kevin:  A third will be on the way, I promise. But Nick, so you write primarily thrillers, right?

Nick:  Primarily.

Kevin:  That’s not one of the Eight Questions. I’m just clarifying.

Nick:  Oh, man, it’s going to be a lot easier than I thought.

Kevin:  This is going to be easy, yes. Your primarily a thriller writer so that’s probably what you’re best known for, right?

 Nick:  Those are the ones that are doing the wellest.

Kevin:  The wellest. You’re an author so that means that’s a real word.

Nick:  It’s real now. There’s definitely a sci-fi slant to it. Like you said Dan Brown and James Rollins, where the emphasis is on the thriller part, but there’s some science fiction. It’s like oh, what it in there.

Love that. That’s the whole conspiracy part of it that I like to write.

But I also have some straight-up science fiction. Not hard science fiction, but definitely in that genre, in the vein of science fiction stuff.

Kevin:  And he’s good at it. But enough ego stroking. Let’s get to the questions because I’m actually kind of excited to hear your answers to some of these. So let’s see how this goes.

Nick:  I’m excited to hear what I say.

Kevin:  Yes, me too. We’ll surprise ourselves. All right.

So first question, so what does your writing routine look like?

 Nick:  Oh, good one to start with. This is funny because I know what your writing routine is and I always feel try to live up to your standards.

Kevin:  No, no, there’s none of that, there’s none of that.

Nick:  It’s really interesting. I try to write and that’s basically where I am right now in my life. I mentioned this last week at the conference we were at and I think it’s definitely going to be true for me for this season.

My writing routine is weekly, not daily right now.

I’m trying to hit a word count where I’m hitting about 5,000 – 7,000 words a week, which is admittedly pretty low for what I’ve done in the past.

But when I’m actually going to write, my routine is pretty straight forward. I am a physical location type writer, meaning I have to be kind of in a physical space that works.

There are numerous spaces that could work but I have to be separated. I can’t have a TV on in the background, none of the background noise kind of stuff other than Starbucks and people milling about.

Kevin:  Yes, I find it a little ironic that you can’t work with TV and that sort of thing on, but you’ll work at Starbucks.

 Nick:  Right, well, because it’s different. If there’s a TV on, I’m watching it with something that can engage me in. There’s people in the background, they’re not talking to me or trying to get my attention is the big difference.

But I don’t write in silence. Typically I’ll have music on or something in the background. So the Starbucks thing is basically the same concept. That gets me in the headspace as well.

And once I’m in there it usually takes me about ten minutes or so to get in the zone of really working.

And I use the Pomodoro technique. I actually have a little timer on my phone and my computer which is just a set amount of time. For me it’s twenty-five minutes of writing, five minute break. You do that three or four times and then take a longer fifteen minute break.

Kevin:  So that’s kind of your writing spring.

Nick:  Exactly.

Kevin:  Yes, okay. You and I, we both like to work at Starbucks and that sort of thing. I probably have gotten a lot more used to working at home than I ever thought I would. I don’t range out as much as I used to but I do kind of miss Starbucks.

Nick:  Yes, and people have their moral feelings about Starbucks.

Kevin:  Yes. Some people do apparently, as emails will attest.

Nick:  Yes.

Kevin:  And then you and I worked together at a really cool coffee shop in Mount Pleasant, Joe’s.

Nick:  Yes, and I say Starbucks to mean places like that.

Kevin:  Yes, that’s right.

Nick:  It’s the vibe that’s really important. I don’t care about the brand of coffee that it is. I prefer the local type stuff anyway. So we lucked out with Joe’s. But if you’re ever in Mount Pleasant, Texas listeners, hit up Joe’s Coffee Shop.

Kevin:  I think it’s Joe’s Café. It’s pretty awesome place.

Nick:  You don’t have a choice. That’s probably the only place that’ll be open.

Kevin:  Yes, I’m going to try and get that guy to transplant that into my area. So let’s go to the next question.

So what’s the most effective marketing tool you’ve found?

Nick:  Build a mailing list and keep interacting people who like what you have to offer.

 Kevin:  Really? I expected something different.

Nick:  Did you really?

Kevin:  Yes. I kind of pre-wrote in my head the answer you were going to give, and that was not it. I mean yes, I agree with you the mailing list is very important. But I really thought you’d say something else.

Nick:  What did you think I was going to say, BookBub?

Kevin:  No. I actually thought you were going to go with Facebook ads.

 Nick:  Oh, see I consider that advertising and I think that’s all part of marketing, but if you don’t have access to funds for Facebook ads, and you don’t have access to funds for a BookBub ad or you don’t get selected, there’s not much you can do other than build a mailing list.

So that’s kind of the default go-to for me. It’s not new and it’s certainly not a novelty to anyone listening or reading the transcript of this. It’s just something that works and I think always will.

And it’s really not specific to – I don’t care if it’s an email address or a mailing address or whatever.

You have to have some way to interact with people that have already expressed interest in what you have as well as having given you permission to interact with them. And that’s how a mailing list is so powerful.

For what it’s worth, I build a mailing list through things like Facebook ads and BookBub ads anyway, so it’s all sort of related in that whole world.

Kevin:  Yes, and like you said it’s not new. Everyone tells you that. I struggled for a long time on building my mailing list. Do you have tips for people who are just starting?

Nick:  Oh, yes, I did too. I struggled with it as well. It’s one of the things that you – it’s sort of the spaghetti approach. It just has to be. You try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks.

And if you’re like me, and probably like you, you try the spaghetti method over and over again because nothing sticks.

The first thing that really worked for me was in the non-fiction realm was guest posting and just writing on other people’s blogs and asking people to head over my way and then enticing them with some kind of freebie offer.

What works really well now, 2016, is Facebook ads, getting people to sign up for your mailing list by giving away a book or three for free. They’ll sign up for that.

And then there’s little tips here and there. You can do things like ad links to your Amazon book description page. This may be against their terms of service but I do it all the time and they haven’t nixed me yet.

So I basically just say hey, if you want some free books, head over, type this in your browser and you’ll get the free books. And it seems to work pretty well.

Kevin:  I haven’t been brave enough to try that yet. I’m going to but I have this fear like I’ll do it and I’ll be the one user who gets busted.

Nick:  You’ll be the first one, exactly. I’m still kind of afraid of that so I don’t do it all the time. But if I have a big BookBub advertisement or something going out, a big promotion, I’ll usually try to add that in there and get however many people I can.

Kevin:  So you don’t permanently leave that. You put it in there while it’s on like a free promotion or something like that?

Nick:  It’s never permanent on purpose. I always put it up there and forget to take it down.

Kevin:  Which most of our marketing efforts, it’s just an accidental – it just stayed that way until it worked.

Nick:  Yes. This morning I think I had just removed it from one of my book description pages, but it’ll go back up whenever I do another promotion hopefully soon and stay until I remove it, hopefully soon after that.

Kevin:  So do you see a lot of traction from that?

Nick:  I do, I do. I’m not tracking it.

Kevin:  How do you know then?

Nick:  That’s what I was just going to say. I’m not tracking it directly so it’s impossible to know how much exactly. But the example that I use is BookBub where I purchase a BookBub advertisement, my book is sent out to their list and the only way they get on my mailing list from that BookBub ad is by going to Amazon, seeing my little note that they can get free books by signing up, and then seeing the bump in sign-ups after that.

So for example, the way to test it is to stop your Facebook ads, if you had them running, stop every other incentive you have on your web site and just keep the one on Amazon that leaks back to your personal page. And then you write your BookBub ad and you can tell how many people sign up from it directly.

Kevin:  I guess you can also create like a unique URL on your web site.

Nick:  Yes. The only reason I didn’t do that is I wanted – it’s not an actual clickable link on Amazon. That’s worth noting.

Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  Maybe if you were to try it, maybe how they would find out I guess, I don’t know if it would signal or put up a red flag in their system.

But it’s just text. It just says literally www.nickthacker.com/free-books and that’s what they have to copy and paste into their browser and then press enter to get there.

So the longer that is, the easier it is to lose people.

I don’t want to type in ?= or whatever.

Kevin:  But if you had a page like that, free-books, and that was the only thing leading to it then you would know.

Nick:  Yes, and I’m lazy so all my stuff goes.

Kevin:  Everything goes to the same page.

Nick:  But again, at the end of the day it’s not really as important to know where they’re coming from as much as that they’re getting on the list and engaging with my stuff.

I know that other authors may disagree with that statement, that’s fine, but for me building a list is far more important than knowing how to build a list, if that makes sense.

Kevin:  No, that works for you and you’re doing well at this so it’s not like anyone can fault you for what you’re doing. You’re doing it right, for you.

Nick:  There’s always a better way to track stuff is what I’ve learned.

Kevin:  Yes, that’s true, but there always will be. This is not the next question but it’s related to the current question. So do you track anything? What do you do to kind of monitor and adjust your marketing?

Nick:  I am a firm believer that the Amazon affiliate system is broken and flawed. So my brief stint in tracking exactly where my sales came from, one of the only ways to do that – first of all I’m exclusive to Amazon so when I say selling books, it’s literally just Amazon.

Because I’m exclusive I can’t even sell those books on my own web site. So the only sales I get are on Amazon’s platform. Whether that’s paperback, hard cover, they own Audible anyway, so everything is Amazon.

So to track Amazon stuff you need a tracking link and a tracking code, and the best way to do that is through affiliate links because Amazon’s associate program, that’s their affiliate program, allows you to put tags and links out in the world and they tell you how many sales were generated from that link.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  Ostensibly.

Kevin:  Theoretically.

Nick:  Yes. That is usually 50% accurate most of the time. So it’s really hard to tell. I’ve tried tracking that way and I’ve gone to the extent of setting up in my WordPress web site I use a plugin called Pretty Links, and it does exactly what it sounds like it would, it makes your links pretty.

And I’ve set up these Pretty Links to be kind of masked URL links to specific Amazon tracking codes and all that, and it’s again only as accurate as Amazon associates program allows it to be, which I don’t think is very accurate.

So I’ve kind of given in, thrown in the towel on specifically trying to track how many sales are generated.

What has worked for me is looking at ROI month over month, or X time over X time. I know that I did really well in audio books the last three months progressively, and I’m trying to figure out how to make that continue, that trend.

Kevin:  Yes.

Nick:  And I have my ideas on it. I think I had two BookBubs at the beginning of the year for two different books that really generated and jump-started a lot of audio book sales. So there’s not a whole lot, again, that I can control because it’s up to BookBub whether they accept it or not.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  But that’s the kind of stuff that I think tracking is really important. If we start getting really analytical and data-centric and granular about the focus, we kind of lose as authors because we’re not writing.

But we have to do something. And I think that something is just taking a birds eye view, even if it’s month over month, what did I do last month that worked, what did I do last month that didn’t work. And here’s the numbers that show I made this many sales.

We have that information. We just don’t always know exactly where those sales came from.

Kevin:  Right. Which is kind of sad.

Nick:  It is sad.

Kevin:  It is sad, yes. We should know that.

Nick:  Exactly. I think Amazon will improve as we go forward. They know a ton about us already.

Kevin:  Yes, that’s true.

Nick:  As buyers and authors.

Kevin:  They just don’t know how much they should share with anybody.

Nick:  They don’t want to go the Facebook route and run into privacy issues. But that’s where I think their platform is headed. Being able to tell us generally what the demographics are of our buyers.

Kevin:  So where does podcasting fit in with your whole business plan?

Nick:  That’s a hard question because most of the time it doesn’t. Most of the time it’s not the number one thing that’s going to help me as an author.

But it’s still a good thing. So I’m really challenged by where that fits in and what priority to give that. But the part that’s not challenging is deciding that it’s not the number one most important thing that I do.

I love doing podcasts and I do think that they’re beneficial to my career and anyone who does a podcast. It can be very beneficial but I still don’t think it’s ever going to be as beneficial as writing the next book.

And Kevin, you know this story better than anyone, but I’ve tried to downsize a lot of my professional life. In the past year we had a kid, and we’re about to have another one. There’s just all kinds of reasons for that. And of course the one thing I wasn’t going to give up was writing books.

So my world shrank and I think it helped me really clarify hey, I’m going to do this writing thing no matter what. And then as we kind of go forward, season by season, we’ll see how this other stuff fits in, like keeping up a blog and then that all kind of fits into that category.

Kevin:  Yes, you and I, we had lots of big plans to the end of about 2015 and we both sort of – I don’t know, at around the same time we kind of both hit that wall and decided it was time to downsize a little. Which I think benefited us more in the end.

Nick:  I know that it did. I feel very satisfied at the end of every day, end of every week that I’ve gotten a lot more done than I did before when I was trying to do all this other stuff.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  It’s kind of ironic too because I typically would do more stuff than I’m doing now, but hey, if I get that 5,000 or 7,000 words at the end of the week, I’m like yes, that book’s on the way. That book’s coming. That’s something else I can add to my portfolio.

And I think I’m pretty sure I can speak for you when I say that we are really excited about all the stuff we could be doing.

Kevin:  Oh yes.

Nick:  And so we get caught up in that and we chose those rabbit holes. And sometimes they’re even potentially profitable rabbit holes that are just not going to help us get closer to the mountain as you and Neil Gaiman like to say.

Kevin:  I think it’s like a cosmic rule now that that quote ends up in every single broadcast I do.

Nick:  It has to be.

Kevin:  It has to be. It’s in my contract.

Nick:  Nobody dies by getting shot or stabbed in the neck at the end.

Kevin:  At the end of every Nick Thacker book.

Nick:  Spoiler.

Kevin:  Spoiler alert. That’s the title of Nick’s next book by the way, Spoiler Alert. It starts with the antagonist being stabbed in the neck. Just to get it out of the way.

So what is your most important daily habit?

Nick:  Wow, my most important daily habit.

Kevin:  It doesn’t have to be writing by the way. You can talk about anything.

Nick:  It’s definitely not because again I’m not doing that daily. I wish I was. I wish I was at the point where I could make that commitment.

My most important daily habit has got to be stopping and reflecting on my day.

I’m trying to do this in the morning, I’m trying to set up the morning ritual and do all that stuff, but a one year old that doesn’t sleep at night typically changes that everyday, so. I know I use her as an excuse all the time but if she would just be better at life then I wouldn’t have to make that excuse.

But to stop and reflect that I have a one year old, that I have a family and that I’m able to write. That we have jobs and our life is good.

That right there is enough ammunition to get you through just the hardest day, or should be.

And so that’s one of the things that I’ve really been proud of myself for over the last six months or so, since I’ve started trying to keep a daily journal and just write down my thoughts and kind of process some of the things that are happening.

Because inevitably I’ll go into this thoughts and musings mode where I’m reflecting on the good that’s happening in my life every single day, and that’s a really good habit to be in.

Kevin:  I agree, man. What do you see coming out of that as you do that more often?

Nick:  My mind set has shifted in a really good way. My mind set is now man, I can do anything I want because life is good. Rather than: life is good, I don’t have to do anything. The mind set shift of well, no, life is good right now. I don’t need to make any changes because I don’t want to mess this up. And there’s value to that and being man of the house and wanting to security and all that.

But again there’s a lot more value in jumping into some of that risk of I could write this book, or I could work with that person, or I could do this. Wow, imagine what could happen. Imagine what could come out of that.

So you start to dream, you start to think and you get really motivated and then I start writing so. People get shot in the neck and all that, at least I’m writing.

Kevin:  But at least it’s a thriller.

Nick:  At least it’s a thriller.

Kevin:  Okay.  Side question, what defines a thriller for Nick Thacker?

Nick:  We kind of touched on this a little bit. For me, again, thriller is a huge genre. It’s like trying to define romance. But if you’re asking what a thriller – what mine are, or what I want mine to be?

Kevin:  Sure, yes.

Nick:  It’s this hint of conspiracy theory or like the science fiction what-if kind of question. What if we could live under the ocean and be fully sustainable, fully functional society? That’s The Depths. That’s the premise behind that book.

Or what if there was this ancient code that is kind of wrapped up in all these different monuments and things around the world? And a lot of authors have done that type of thing, but the thing that I really like about the difference between that and science fiction, which is just taking that to its logical conclusion and everything is futuristic in some ways or not quite the world that we live in now, is that I have to take that thread and put it in the world that we live in now.

What if the bad guy had access to a rocket that could travel ten times the speed of light? I don’t know, I’m making stuff up now. But that’s one thing and that’s a science fiction premise, but then how do you make that accurate in today’s world and maybe DARPA is working on something that does just that.

Kevin:  Yes.

Nick:  And I like that. I like to have that all kind of in there. I’m not answering the question very well so I’ll say it this way. Your thread that is pretty out there, science fiction wise that well, yes we’re years away from that. And then trying to craft a story that is non-stop action, that ends with the realization that oh, wow, this is happening and this is what it looks like, and this is the potential fall out from that or outcome from that.

Kevin:  Yes. Okay. I can live with that as a general definition of thriller.

Nick:  Good.

Kevin:  All right. As we asked the important daily habit question. Now I want to know what is your worst daily habit?

  Nick:  My worst daily habit is pretty simple. I go to bed too early.

 Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  I think I need way too much sleep.

Kevin:  I don’t think that that’s a bad daily habit, but go ahead.

Nick:  No, I’m talking like 7:00 yes, it’s about time to go to bed now. But then I’m not really getting up super early either. If my daughter gets up at 5:00, I’m up and I’m with her so it doesn’t really count as hours I get to work.

So I’m not really getting that chunk of dedicated time that I want. That’s killing me.

Kevin:  But you have like a toddler and a pregnant wife. I think this could be a temporary situation for you.

Nick:  That’s right. I’m really hoping so, absolutely. Once we kind of get back into the regular world of stuff. But everybody I’ve talked to that’s got kids is telling me that it never ends. You’ll be 50 years old and your kids are going to move out before you have time to yourself again.

Other authors have done this before, so I think I can make it happen.

Kevin:  So who are your biggest influences and why?

  Nick:  I’m going to have to say Kevin Tumlinson.

 Kevin:  No, come on.

Nick:  I knew you were going to say that.

Kevin:  No, no.

Nick:  It serves you right. You’re writing every day in your blog. You’re publishing them, you’re getting traction. You’re doing what I want to be doing, right.

Kevin:  This is not promote Kevin time though.

Nick:  Just shut up and deal with it, because it’s true. And when you think about it, you’re inspiring me to write better and more because you write like freakishly good stuff and you’re doing it way more often than I ever thought was humanly possible.

That’s inspirational, right?

Kevin:  All right, I appreciate that. But who are your real influences?

Nick:  You’re putting it out there and it’s published and there’s that. But it happens to also be amazing so anyway, yes, it’s just inspirational for anyone.

Kevin:  Thank you, I appreciate that. So who’s another influence then?

Nick:  Influences are easy. I’ve got a lot of guys that I’m essentially trying to copy. James Rollins and Dan Brown are the two that you mentioned that come to mind for me. I started writing because of Dan Brown. I read The Da Vinici Code in high school. I kind of rediscovered my love of reading.

I was like wow, I didn’t know there were books that were actually engaging and fun to read and so I fell down the rabbit hole of his books and then branched out to other people.

Found James Rollins. He’s my favorite author right now of all time. I mean he’s just – everything he writes I consume. And in person he’s a good guy. So it’s just, yes, he’s definitely a major influence in my life.

And then there’s a lot of authors that are similar to that, kind of all in that same thriller type action adventure genre that I could go on naming forever. But those are the two big guys.

Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  And there are a lot of guys that are influential for me just from the whole self publishing and indie author perspective. The big names that come to mind at the Hugh Howeys, the Mark Dawsons, the Joanna Penns.

They’re the ones that are really making waves in indie publishing and it doesn’t matter that they’re in a slightly different genre or completely different genre than me that I’m able to follow and kind of copy what they’re doing and achieve my own little kind of success because of the groundwork that they’ve layed or the things they’ve figure out.

Kevin:  Yes. Okay. I’m on board with everyone you mentioned except me. So all right.

Nick:  You should be your own inspiration.

Kevin:  I should be my own inspiration.

So if you could have one do-over, what would it be?

Nick:  What are we talking about, books?

Kevin:  Life, lifetime here, anything, man. What’s the biggest thing you’d go back and do better?

Nick:  God, there’s everything.  There’s always…

Kevin:  If you want to narrow it down to career, that’s fine, but it’s wide open.

Nick:  Yes, please.

Kevin:  You narrow it down on your own.

Nick:  One thing that I could do over. Yes, I have a hard time with that question too because I try not to regret stuff. I think you can learn from everything you do, even if you fail miserably.

And that’s the point of failure, for one, but even situations that aren’t your fault or you don’t make a mistake but just happen to you, I think you can learn from those, and of course we want to erase those.

Yes, my Granddad died and I never really got to hang out enough with him. I’d love a second shot at that as an adult. Like hanging out like adult to adult, you know.

Kevin:  Yes, man.

Nick:  He was a huge inspiration for becoming a reader at a young age, as was his son, my Dad, and so just to be able to show him where I am as an author. I don’t want to get super heavy but that would be a big thing, that would be really important, or that is really important. If I could go back and do it over again.

Kevin: Yes, man, I’m right there with you. Like my Grandmother put me through – she actually paid for me to go to the Writer’s Digest School. I think she was the first person to believe in me as a writer. So I would totally take that as a do-over.

Nick:  Yes, and the hard part about saying all that though as a do-over is I wrote my first book, The Golden Crystal, because he passed away and I felt compelled to give that to my Dad for Christmas. So I don’t want to really do it over, otherwise The Golden Crystal may not have ever come to fruition.

I think there’s a lot. Every book I want to redo. Every book I want to do over. Everything that I publish.

But I mentioned this before, the iterative publishing route that I’m trying to push out in to the world and what I’m trying to follow is exactly that.

Like hey, there will be time, when I make time for it, to re-release The Golden Crystal. Edit it better, laid out better, better cover design. All that stuff can happen.

Kevin:  Yes.

Nick:  Currently I need to get my name out there more and that means writing more books and better books. But we can iterate as we do it and we can get better and we can learn from those past mistakes so we don’t have to go back and do a full redo.

Kevin:  Yes, I agree with that. That’s cool. So the last question, not technically, but this is the last question on the list.

What do you want your legacy to be?

  Nick:  I want to entertain people.

 Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  With my books. I mean in life I hope that my legacy’s better than that, but if a reader comes and finds my book, I just want them to have a good time with it.

I don’t strive for really deep complex thoughts in tackling the universe questions, yet. I’m not a good enough writer for that. I don’t know that I ever will be.

I started writing and I started reading because I wanted to be entertained. It’s not different than going to a movie for me. I don’t want to go to a film festival movie that makes me thing too much, because I’m not there for that. I’m there to be entertained.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  And I think there’s people out there that are like that. And so I want to write those types of books. If there’s more to it than that, great, that’s awesome.

But my legacy people pick up my book and they’re going to have a good time.

They know they pick up a Nick Thacker novel and they’re going to be in for an adventure. That’s what I hope they end up being.

Kevin:  And I think you’re living up to that, man.

Nick:  Thanks, man.

Kevin:  So where can people find out more about your work?

Nick:  I’d love for them to check out the web site, just my name, nickthacker.com. And I’m on Twitter, I don’t typically do a whole lot of tweeting but I’m definitely there. I’m definitely around. And that’s @nickthacker as well. And then find me on Facebook. I shouldn’t have to explain where that is.

Kevin:  The Facebook.

Nick:  The Facebook. Just do a search. There’s not a whole lot of Nick Thackers out there, they’re not all authors either so it should be pretty easy to figure out which one’s me.

Go find me on those and hit me up and say hi and go over to my web site and grab some free books if you want.

Kevin:  Perfect. That was Eight Questions with Nick Thacker and if you want to find out more about me, and this is just my little plug at the end, but you can go to kevintumlinson.com.

But definitely be sure to check out Nick Thacker’s website, nickthacker.com. Find him on Twitter, find him on Facebook.

Nick, thanks so much for being on, man. I really appreciate it.

Nick:  Always a pleasure man, good talking to you.

The post 8 Questions with Nick Thacker appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Author Nick Thacker

Kevin:  Hey everybody. Thanks for tuning into Eight Questions and I am Kevin Tumlinson. I’m happy to be here and I’m actually really thrilled to be talking to my good friend, Nick Thacker. He’s a thriller author in the vein of James Rollins and Dan Brown. And he’s been invited to write books in shared universes for authors like A.G. Riddle, who wrote The Atlantis Gene. And in addition to his books, Nick is the co-host of a very popular Self Publishing Answers podcast with yours truly and Justin Sloan.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Nick, man, how you doing?

Nick:  Doing well. That was a good intro. I liked that intro.

Kevin:  Thanks man. I’m a writer and I do this sort of thing. So you and I know each other really well. I’m not going to try and fool anybody about that.

Nick:  We’ve met twice and we know each other really well.

Kevin:  We literally have met twice in person, that’s sad. We’ve known each other for about two years now I think?

Nick:  Yes, it’s got to be closer to three I think.

 Kevin:  Closer to three.

Nick:  Yes.

Kevin:  Yes, and we’ve done a lot of work together, including some co-authoring. We’ve written at least two books together.

Nick:  At least two.

Kevin:  A third will be on the way, I promise. But Nick, so you write primarily thrillers, right?

Nick:  Primarily.

Kevin:  That’s not one of the Eight Questions. I’m just clarifying.

Nick:  Oh, man, it’s going to be a lot easier than I thought.

Kevin:  This is going to be easy, yes. Your primarily a thriller writer so that’s probably what you’re best known for, right?

 Nick:  Those are the ones that are doing the wellest.

Kevin:  The wellest. You’re an author so that means that’s a real word.

Nick:  It’s real now. There’s definitely a sci-fi slant to it. Like you said Dan Brown and James Rollins, where the emphasis is on the thriller part, but there’s some science fiction. It’s like oh, what it in there.

Love that. That’s the whole conspiracy part of it that I like to write.

But I also have some straight-up science fiction. Not hard science fiction, but definitely in that genre, in the vein of science fiction stuff.

Kevin:  And he’s good at it. But enough ego stroking. Let’s get to the questions because I’m actually kind of excited to hear your answers to some of these. So let’s see how this goes.

Nick:  I’m excited to hear what I say.

Kevin:  Yes, me too. We’ll surprise ourselves. All right.

So first question, so what does your writing routine look like?

 Nick:  Oh, good one to start with. This is funny because I know what your writing routine is and I always feel try to live up to your standards.

Kevin:  No, no, there’s none of that, there’s none of that.

Nick:  It’s really interesting. I try to write and that’s basically where I am right now in my life. I mentioned this last week at the conference we were at and I think it’s definitely going to be true for me for this season.

My writing routine is weekly, not daily right now.

I’m trying to hit a word count where I’m hitting about 5,000 – 7,000 words a week, which is admittedly pretty low for what I’ve done in the past.

But when I’m actually going to write, my routine is pretty straight forward. I am a physical location type writer, meaning I have to be kind of in a physical space that works.

There are numerous spaces that could work but I have to be separated. I can’t have a TV on in the background, none of the background noise kind of stuff other than Starbucks and people milling about.

Kevin:  Yes, I find it a little ironic that you can’t work with TV and that sort of thing on, but you’ll work at Starbucks.

 Nick:  Right, well, because it’s different. If there’s a TV on, I’m watching it with something that can engage me in. There’s people in the background, they’re not talking to me or trying to get my attention is the big difference.

But I don’t write in silence. Typically I’ll have music on or something in the background. So the Starbucks thing is basically the same concept. That gets me in the headspace as well.

And once I’m in there it usually takes me about ten minutes or so to get in the zone of really working.

And I use the Pomodoro technique. I actually have a little timer on my phone and my computer which is just a set amount of time. For me it’s twenty-five minutes of writing, five minute break. You do that three or four times and then take a longer fifteen minute break.

Kevin:  So that’s kind of your writing spring.

Nick:  Exactly.

Kevin:  Yes, okay. You and I, we both like to work at Starbucks and that sort of thing. I probably have gotten a lot more used to working at home than I ever thought I would. I don’t range out as much as I used to but I do kind of miss Starbucks.

Nick:  Yes, and people have their moral feelings about Starbucks.

Kevin:  Yes. Some people do apparently, as emails will attest.

Nick:  Yes.

Kevin:  And then you and I worked together at a really cool coffee shop in Mount Pleasant, Joe’s.

Nick:  Yes, and I say Starbucks to mean places like that.

Kevin:  Yes, that’s right.

Nick:  It’s the vibe that’s really important. I don’t care about the brand of coffee that it is. I prefer the local type stuff anyway. So we lucked out with Joe’s. But if you’re ever in Mount Pleasant, Texas listeners, hit up Joe’s Coffee Shop.

Kevin:  I think it’s Joe’s Café. It’s pretty awesome place.

Nick:  You don’t have a choice. That’s probably the only place that’ll be open.

Kevin:  Yes, I’m going to try and get that guy to transplant that into my area. So let’s go to the next question.

So what’s the most effective marketing tool you’ve found?

Nick:  Build a mailing list and keep interacting people who like what you have to offer.

 Kevin:  Really? I expected something different.

Nick:  Did you really?

Kevin:  Yes. I kind of pre-wrote in my head the answer you were going to give, and that was not it. I mean yes, I agree with you the mailing list is very important. But I really thought you’d say something else.

Nick:  What did you think I was going to say, BookBub?

Kevin:  No. I actually thought you were going to go with Facebook ads.

 Nick:  Oh, see I consider that advertising and I think that’s all part of marketing, but if you don’t have access to funds for Facebook ads, and you don’t have access to funds for a BookBub ad or you don’t get selected, there’s not much you can do other than build a mailing list.

So that’s kind of the default go-to for me. It’s not new and it’s certainly not a novelty to anyone listening or reading the transcript of this. It’s just something that works and I think always will.

And it’s really not specific to – I don’t care if it’s an email address or a mailing address or whatever.

You have to have some way to interact with people that have already expressed interest in what you have as well as having given you permission to interact with them. And that’s how a mailing list is so powerful.

For what it’s worth, I build a mailing list through things like Facebook ads and BookBub ads anyway, so it’s all sort of related in that whole world.

Kevin:  Yes, and like you said it’s not new. Everyone tells you that. I struggled for a long time on building my mailing list. Do you have tips for people who are just starting?

Nick:  Oh, yes, I did too. I struggled with it as well. It’s one of the things that you – it’s sort of the spaghetti approach. It just has to be. You try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks.

And if you’re like me, and probably like you, you try the spaghetti method over and over again because nothing sticks.

The first thing that really worked for me was in the non-fiction realm was guest posting and just writing on other people’s blogs and asking people to head over my way and then enticing them with some kind of freebie offer.

What works really well now, 2016, is Facebook ads, getting people to sign up for your mailing list by giving away a book or three for free. They’ll sign up for that.

And then there’s little tips here and there. You can do things like ad links to your Amazon book description page. This may be against their terms of service but I do it all the time and they haven’t nixed me yet.

So I basically just say hey, if you want some free books, head over, type this in your browser and you’ll get the free books. And it seems to work pretty well.

Kevin:  I haven’t been brave enough to try that yet. I’m going to but I have this fear like I’ll do it and I’ll be the one user who gets busted.

Nick:  You’ll be the first one, exactly. I’m still kind of afraid of that so I don’t do it all the time. But if I have a big BookBub advertisement or something going out, a big promotion, I’ll usually try to add that in there and get however many people I can.

Kevin:  So you don’t permanently leave that. You put it in there while it’s on like a free promotion or something like that?

Nick:  It’s never permanent on purpose. I always put it up there and forget to take it down.

Kevin:  Which most of our marketing efforts, it’s just an accidental – it just stayed that way until it worked.

Nick:  Yes. This morning I think I had just removed it from one of my book description pages, but it’ll go back up whenever I do another promotion hopefully soon and stay until I remove it, hopefully soon after that.

Kevin:  So do you see a lot of traction from that?

Nick:  I do, I do. I’m not tracking it.

Kevin:  How do you know then?

Nick:  That’s what I was just going to say. I’m not tracking it directly so it’s impossible to know how much exactly. But the example that I use is BookBub where I purchase a BookBub advertisement, my book is sent out to their list and the only way they get on my mailing list from that BookBub ad is by going to Amazon, seeing my little note that they can get free books by signing up, and then seeing the bump in sign-ups after that.

So for example, the way to test it is to stop your Facebook ads, if you had them running, stop every other incentive you have on your web site and just keep the one on Amazon that leaks back to your personal page. And then you write your BookBub ad and you can tell how many people sign up from it directly.

Kevin:  I guess you can also create like a unique URL on your web site.

Nick:  Yes. The only reason I didn’t do that is I wanted – it’s not an actual clickable link on Amazon. That’s worth noting.

Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  Maybe if you were to try it, maybe how they would find out I guess, I don’t know if it would signal or put up a red flag in their system.

But it’s just text. It just says literally www.nickthacker.com/free-books and that’s what they have to copy and paste into their browser and then press enter to get there.

So the longer that is, the easier it is to lose people.

I don’t want to type in ?= or whatever.

Kevin:  But if you had a page like that, free-books, and that was the only thing leading to it then you would know.

Nick:  Yes, and I’m lazy so all my stuff goes.

Kevin:  Everything goes to the same page.

Nick:  But again, at the end of the day it’s not really as important to know where they’re coming from as much as that they’re getting on the list and engaging with my stuff.

I know that other authors may disagree with that statement, that’s fine, but for me building a list is far more important than knowing how to build a list, if that makes sense.

Kevin:  No, that works for you and you’re doing well at this so it’s not like anyone can fault you for what you’re doing. You’re doing it right, for you.

Nick:  There’s always a better way to track stuff is what I’ve learned.

Kevin:  Yes, that’s true, but there always will be. This is not the next question but it’s related to the current question. So do you track anything? What do you do to kind of monitor and adjust your marketing?

Nick:  I am a firm believer that the Amazon affiliate system is broken and flawed. So my brief stint in tracking exactly where my sales came from, one of the only ways to do that – first of all I’m exclusive to Amazon so when I say selling books, it’s literally just Amazon.

Because I’m exclusive I can’t even sell those books on my own web site. So the only sales I get are on Amazon’s platform. Whether that’s paperback, hard cover, they own Audible anyway, so everything is Amazon.

So to track Amazon stuff you need a tracking link and a tracking code, and the best way to do that is through affiliate links because Amazon’s associate program, that’s their affiliate program, allows you to put tags and links out in the world and they tell you how many sales were generated from that link.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  Ostensibly.

Kevin:  Theoretically.

Nick:  Yes. That is usually 50% accurate most of the time. So it’s really hard to tell. I’ve tried tracking that way and I’ve gone to the extent of setting up in my WordPress web site I use a plugin called Pretty Links, and it does exactly what it sounds like it would, it makes your links pretty.

And I’ve set up these Pretty Links to be kind of masked URL links to specific Amazon tracking codes and all that, and it’s again only as accurate as Amazon associates program allows it to be, which I don’t think is very accurate.

So I’ve kind of given in, thrown in the towel on specifically trying to track how many sales are generated.

What has worked for me is looking at ROI month over month, or X time over X time. I know that I did really well in audio books the last three months progressively, and I’m trying to figure out how to make that continue, that trend.

Kevin:  Yes.

Nick:  And I have my ideas on it. I think I had two BookBubs at the beginning of the year for two different books that really generated and jump-started a lot of audio book sales. So there’s not a whole lot, again, that I can control because it’s up to BookBub whether they accept it or not.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  But that’s the kind of stuff that I think tracking is really important. If we start getting really analytical and data-centric and granular about the focus, we kind of lose as authors because we’re not writing.

But we have to do something. And I think that something is just taking a birds eye view, even if it’s month over month, what did I do last month that worked, what did I do last month that didn’t work. And here’s the numbers that show I made this many sales.

We have that information. We just don’t always know exactly where those sales came from.

Kevin:  Right. Which is kind of sad.

Nick:  It is sad.

Kevin:  It is sad, yes. We should know that.

Nick:  Exactly. I think Amazon will improve as we go forward. They know a ton about us already.

Kevin:  Yes, that’s true.

Nick:  As buyers and authors.

Kevin:  They just don’t know how much they should share with anybody.

Nick:  They don’t want to go the Facebook route and run into privacy issues. But that’s where I think their platform is headed. Being able to tell us generally what the demographics are of our buyers.

Kevin:  So where does podcasting fit in with your whole business plan?

Nick:  That’s a hard question because most of the time it doesn’t. Most of the time it’s not the number one thing that’s going to help me as an author.

But it’s still a good thing. So I’m really challenged by where that fits in and what priority to give that. But the part that’s not challenging is deciding that it’s not the number one most important thing that I do.

I love doing podcasts and I do think that they’re beneficial to my career and anyone who does a podcast. It can be very beneficial but I still don’t think it’s ever going to be as beneficial as writing the next book.

And Kevin, you know this story better than anyone, but I’ve tried to downsize a lot of my professional life. In the past year we had a kid, and we’re about to have another one. There’s just all kinds of reasons for that. And of course the one thing I wasn’t going to give up was writing books.

So my world shrank and I think it helped me really clarify hey, I’m going to do this writing thing no matter what. And then as we kind of go forward, season by season, we’ll see how this other stuff fits in, like keeping up a blog and then that all kind of fits into that category.

Kevin:  Yes, you and I, we had lots of big plans to the end of about 2015 and we both sort of – I don’t know, at around the same time we kind of both hit that wall and decided it was time to downsize a little. Which I think benefited us more in the end.

Nick:  I know that it did. I feel very satisfied at the end of every day, end of every week that I’ve gotten a lot more done than I did before when I was trying to do all this other stuff.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  It’s kind of ironic too because I typically would do more stuff than I’m doing now, but hey, if I get that 5,000 or 7,000 words at the end of the week, I’m like yes, that book’s on the way. That book’s coming. That’s something else I can add to my portfolio.

And I think I’m pretty sure I can speak for you when I say that we are really excited about all the stuff we could be doing.

Kevin:  Oh yes.

Nick:  And so we get caught up in that and we chose those rabbit holes. And sometimes they’re even potentially profitable rabbit holes that are just not going to help us get closer to the mountain as you and Neil Gaiman like to say.

Kevin:  I think it’s like a cosmic rule now that that quote ends up in every single broadcast I do.

Nick:  It has to be.

Kevin:  It has to be. It’s in my contract.

Nick:  Nobody dies by getting shot or stabbed in the neck at the end.

Kevin:  At the end of every Nick Thacker book.

Nick:  Spoiler.

Kevin:  Spoiler alert. That’s the title of Nick’s next book by the way, Spoiler Alert. It starts with the antagonist being stabbed in the neck. Just to get it out of the way.

So what is your most important daily habit?

Nick:  Wow, my most important daily habit.

Kevin:  It doesn’t have to be writing by the way. You can talk about anything.

Nick:  It’s definitely not because again I’m not doing that daily. I wish I was. I wish I was at the point where I could make that commitment.

My most important daily habit has got to be stopping and reflecting on my day.

I’m trying to do this in the morning, I’m trying to set up the morning ritual and do all that stuff, but a one year old that doesn’t sleep at night typically changes that everyday, so. I know I use her as an excuse all the time but if she would just be better at life then I wouldn’t have to make that excuse.

But to stop and reflect that I have a one year old, that I have a family and that I’m able to write. That we have jobs and our life is good.

That right there is enough ammunition to get you through just the hardest day, or should be.

And so that’s one of the things that I’ve really been proud of myself for over the last six months or so, since I’ve started trying to keep a daily journal and just write down my thoughts and kind of process some of the things that are happening.

Because inevitably I’ll go into this thoughts and musings mode where I’m reflecting on the good that’s happening in my life every single day, and that’s a really good habit to be in.

Kevin:  I agree, man. What do you see coming out of that as you do that more often?

Nick:  My mind set has shifted in a really good way. My mind set is now man, I can do anything I want because life is good. Rather than: life is good, I don't have to do anything. The mind set shift of well, no, life is good right now. I don’t need to make any changes because I don’t want to mess this up. And there’s value to that and being man of the house and wanting to security and all that.

But again there’s a lot more value in jumping into some of that risk of I could write this book, or I could work with that person, or I could do this. Wow, imagine what could happen. Imagine what could come out of that.

So you start to dream, you start to think and you get really motivated and then I start writing so. People get shot in the neck and all that, at least I’m writing.

Kevin:  But at least it’s a thriller.

Nick:  At least it’s a thriller.

Kevin:  Okay.  Side question, what defines a thriller for Nick Thacker?

Nick:  We kind of touched on this a little bit. For me, again, thriller is a huge genre. It’s like trying to define romance. But if you’re asking what a thriller – what mine are, or what I want mine to be?

Kevin:  Sure, yes.

Nick:  It’s this hint of conspiracy theory or like the science fiction what-if kind of question. What if we could live under the ocean and be fully sustainable, fully functional society? That’s The Depths. That’s the premise behind that book.

Or what if there was this ancient code that is kind of wrapped up in all these different monuments and things around the world? And a lot of authors have done that type of thing, but the thing that I really like about the difference between that and science fiction, which is just taking that to its logical conclusion and everything is futuristic in some ways or not quite the world that we live in now, is that I have to take that thread and put it in the world that we live in now.

What if the bad guy had access to a rocket that could travel ten times the speed of light? I don’t know, I’m making stuff up now. But that’s one thing and that’s a science fiction premise, but then how do you make that accurate in today’s world and maybe DARPA is working on something that does just that.

Kevin:  Yes.

Nick:  And I like that. I like to have that all kind of in there. I’m not answering the question very well so I’ll say it this way. Your thread that is pretty out there, science fiction wise that well, yes we’re years away from that. And then trying to craft a story that is non-stop action, that ends with the realization that oh, wow, this is happening and this is what it looks like, and this is the potential fall out from that or outcome from that.

Kevin:  Yes. Okay. I can live with that as a general definition of thriller.

Nick:  Good.

Kevin:  All right. As we asked the important daily habit question. Now I want to know what is your worst daily habit?

  Nick:  My worst daily habit is pretty simple. I go to bed too early.

 Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  I think I need way too much sleep.

Kevin:  I don’t think that that’s a bad daily habit, but go ahead.

Nick:  No, I’m talking like 7:00 yes, it’s about time to go to bed now. But then I’m not really getting up super early either. If my daughter gets up at 5:00, I’m up and I’m with her so it doesn’t really count as hours I get to work.

So I’m not really getting that chunk of dedicated time that I want. That’s killing me.

Kevin:  But you have like a toddler and a pregnant wife. I think this could be a temporary situation for you.

Nick:  That’s right. I’m really hoping so, absolutely. Once we kind of get back into the regular world of stuff. But everybody I’ve talked to that’s got kids is telling me that it never ends. You’ll be 50 years old and your kids are going to move out before you have time to yourself again.

Other authors have done this before, so I think I can make it happen.

Kevin:  So who are your biggest influences and why?

  Nick:  I’m going to have to say Kevin Tumlinson.

 Kevin:  No, come on.

Nick:  I knew you were going to say that.

Kevin:  No, no.

Nick:  It serves you right. You're writing every day in your blog. You’re publishing them, you’re getting traction. You’re doing what I want to be doing, right.

Kevin:  This is not promote Kevin time though.

Nick:  Just shut up and deal with it, because it’s true. And when you think about it, you’re inspiring me to write better and more because you write like freakishly good stuff and you’re doing it way more often than I ever thought was humanly possible.

That’s inspirational, right?

Kevin:  All right, I appreciate that. But who are your real influences?

Nick:  You’re putting it out there and it’s published and there’s that. But it happens to also be amazing so anyway, yes, it’s just inspirational for anyone.

Kevin:  Thank you, I appreciate that. So who’s another influence then?

Nick:  Influences are easy. I’ve got a lot of guys that I’m essentially trying to copy. James Rollins and Dan Brown are the two that you mentioned that come to mind for me. I started writing because of Dan Brown. I read The Da Vinici Code in high school. I kind of rediscovered my love of reading.

I was like wow, I didn’t know there were books that were actually engaging and fun to read and so I fell down the rabbit hole of his books and then branched out to other people.

Found James Rollins. He’s my favorite author right now of all time. I mean he’s just – everything he writes I consume. And in person he’s a good guy. So it’s just, yes, he’s definitely a major influence in my life.

And then there’s a lot of authors that are similar to that, kind of all in that same thriller type action adventure genre that I could go on naming forever. But those are the two big guys.

Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  And there are a lot of guys that are influential for me just from the whole self publishing and indie author perspective. The big names that come to mind at the Hugh Howeys, the Mark Dawsons, the Joanna Penns.

They’re the ones that are really making waves in indie publishing and it doesn’t matter that they’re in a slightly different genre or completely different genre than me that I’m able to follow and kind of copy what they’re doing and achieve my own little kind of success because of the groundwork that they’ve layed or the things they’ve figure out.

Kevin:  Yes. Okay. I’m on board with everyone you mentioned except me. So all right.

Nick:  You should be your own inspiration.

Kevin:  I should be my own inspiration.

So if you could have one do-over, what would it be?

Nick:  What are we talking about, books?

Kevin:  Life, lifetime here, anything, man. What’s the biggest thing you’d go back and do better?

Nick:  God, there’s everything.  There’s always…

Kevin:  If you want to narrow it down to career, that’s fine, but it’s wide open.

Nick:  Yes, please.

Kevin:  You narrow it down on your own.

Nick:  One thing that I could do over. Yes, I have a hard time with that question too because I try not to regret stuff. I think you can learn from everything you do, even if you fail miserably.

And that’s the point of failure, for one, but even situations that aren’t your fault or you don’t make a mistake but just happen to you, I think you can learn from those, and of course we want to erase those.

Yes, my Granddad died and I never really got to hang out enough with him. I’d love a second shot at that as an adult. Like hanging out like adult to adult, you know.

Kevin:  Yes, man.

Nick:  He was a huge inspiration for becoming a reader at a young age, as was his son, my Dad, and so just to be able to show him where I am as an author. I don’t want to get super heavy but that would be a big thing, that would be really important, or that is really important. If I could go back and do it over again.

Kevin: Yes, man, I’m right there with you. Like my Grandmother put me through – she actually paid for me to go to the Writer’s Digest School. I think she was the first person to believe in me as a writer. So I would totally take that as a do-over.

Nick:  Yes, and the hard part about saying all that though as a do-over is I wrote my first book, The Golden Crystal, because he passed away and I felt compelled to give that to my Dad for Christmas. So I don’t want to really do it over, otherwise The Golden Crystal may not have ever come to fruition.

I think there’s a lot. Every book I want to redo. Every book I want to do over. Everything that I publish.

But I mentioned this before, the iterative publishing route that I’m trying to push out in to the world and what I’m trying to follow is exactly that.

Like hey, there will be time, when I make time for it, to re-release The Golden Crystal. Edit it better, laid out better, better cover design. All that stuff can happen.

Kevin:  Yes.

Nick:  Currently I need to get my name out there more and that means writing more books and better books. But we can iterate as we do it and we can get better and we can learn from those past mistakes so we don’t have to go back and do a full redo.

Kevin:  Yes, I agree with that. That’s cool. So the last question, not technically, but this is the last question on the list.

What do you want your legacy to be?

  Nick:  I want to entertain people.

 Kevin:  Okay.

Nick:  With my books. I mean in life I hope that my legacy’s better than that, but if a reader comes and finds my book, I just want them to have a good time with it.

I don’t strive for really deep complex thoughts in tackling the universe questions, yet. I’m not a good enough writer for that. I don’t know that I ever will be.

I started writing and I started reading because I wanted to be entertained. It’s not different than going to a movie for me. I don’t want to go to a film festival movie that makes me thing too much, because I’m not there for that. I’m there to be entertained.

Kevin:  Right.

Nick:  And I think there’s people out there that are like that. And so I want to write those types of books. If there’s more to it than that, great, that’s awesome.

But my legacy people pick up my book and they’re going to have a good time.

They know they pick up a Nick Thacker novel and they’re going to be in for an adventure. That’s what I hope they end up being.

Kevin:  And I think you’re living up to that, man.

Nick:  Thanks, man.

Kevin:  So where can people find out more about your work?

Nick:  I’d love for them to check out the web site, just my name, nickthacker.com. And I’m on Twitter, I don’t typically do a whole lot of tweeting but I’m definitely there. I’m definitely around. And that’s @nickthacker as well. And then find me on Facebook. I shouldn’t have to explain where that is.

Kevin:  The Facebook.

Nick:  The Facebook. Just do a search. There’s not a whole lot of Nick Thackers out there, they’re not all authors either so it should be pretty easy to figure out which one’s me.

Go find me on those and hit me up and say hi and go over to my web site and grab some free books if you want.

Kevin:  Perfect. That was Eight Questions with Nick Thacker and if you want to find out more about me, and this is just my little plug at the end, but you can go to kevintumlinson.com.

But definitely be sure to check out Nick Thacker’s website, nickthacker.com. Find him on Twitter, find him on Facebook.

Nick, thanks so much for being on, man. I really appreciate it.

Nick:  Always a pleasure man, good talking to you.

The post 8 Questions with Author Nick Thacker appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Arianna Golden

Sean:  Hey everyone and welcome to Eight Questions. So today I have Arianna Golden, and I’m going to leave my first question as her intro because I don’t even know where to begin.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Arianna is one of those people, and apparently we draw you like a magnet, I’ve asked Eight Questions once with Laurie Starkey which same thing. Like she started 93 businesses last year and then had to trim down to just seven or something.

I think that Sterling & Stone attracts the crazy, the ambitious, and the driven, and Arianna is a little of all of those things.

So we’re going to start right in with the first question because you are clearly crazy.

Arianna:  Okay. Yes. That’s never been in question.

Sean:  So much going on, right. Like there’s a lot.

Arianna:  Yes, there is a lot.

Sean:  The first time we met, I guess it was in an email and I just saw a big list of not only all the stuff you were doing, but all the stuff you wanted to do like in the next year.

And I thought oh, my God, I love people like this because just so much ambition and that definitely ticks my boxes. But there’s no way she can do all of this. There’s no way she is doing all of this. This is crazy.

And then a year later she was plowing through her list and making new lists and I love that. It drives me, that kind of thing.

And we were just talking before I hit record and I said okay, I feel like good stuff’s coming so I’m going to start. But we were talking about my daughter and she’s got a crazy brain like us but she doesn’t seem to have that like “I’m going to do it all!”.

So when you have this particular alchemy where you’re like I have all these ideas and I’m going to do every single one of them. Because Johnny always tells me I don’t know the word “or”, it’s “and”.  It’s always and.

Arianna:  Yes, it’s always and. Or is boring.

Sean.  You’re right, put the or in boring.

So how do you define yourself? What does your business card say? I know you don’t have a business card.

Arianna:  I do have a business card and it’s like the worst business card ever because I’m like I need to list everything out so I don’t have to write it down every time. So my business card is the worst, most boring business card ever.

Sean:  It’s just a list. It’s a card with a list.

Arianna:  It’s a list of websites. How do I define myself. That’s a really difficult question. I could say a lot of different things. I could say I’m a writer. I could say I’m a businesswoman. I could say I’m an entrepreneur.

But really the thing that drives me and that ties it all together is translating ideas from imagination to reality.

Sean:  Okay. I like that.

Arianna:  So like everything fits into that category.

Sean:  So transferring ideas to reality.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  So is that what your new and improved business card is going to say?

Arianna:  Well, I guess it sort of does say that, yes. I think it might say that. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at my business card in a while.

Sean:  Yes, we had this whole thing where we were making our business cards about a year and a half ago and it was me, Johnny and Dave and we were, you know, trying to figure out what they should say, because we do too much stuff, right?

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  And now it’s a little more unified than it was. At least we have a web site now that works, where people can go and figure it out.

But I think this was we were doing our very first speaking event and we wanted to have cards just because.

But how do we define ourselves?

We’ve got the whole podcast thing and non-fiction and fiction. And now it’s even crazier because we have a podcast network and we have the Story Shop and all of this.

But essentially we boiled it down to storyteller. My business card just says storyteller and I’m so pleased with that.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  Because ultimately it’s similar. I would define my business model as I make stuff and talk about it. And even in shorter hand it’s I’m a storyteller. So even Story Shop, that’s software. Like it’s not telling a story.

Arianna:  Yes, but it fits with it.

Sean:  It fits with it, yes. And so it was actually at another speaking even, maybe four years ago, I was talking to Tucker Max and he was talking to someone in the audience who asked about his Twitter handle, I think was the question. And he had one of those Twitters that says I’m this, this, this, this, it’s basically ninety words separated by commas, right.

And Tucker’s like don’t do that, that’s bullshit. Just pick one thing and own it. Be who you are with that thing and let everything else settle under that because then you at least own it and you at least know who you are, and it makes you a stronger person.

And I think thought of that when I was – okay, well, storyteller, that makes sense.

Arianna:  Yes, I’ve kind of done that within each of the different sort of silos that I have. So there’s the writing, which all happens under a pen name, but it’s one pen name for all of the fiction. And that’s it.

Sean:  But you’re writing in a lot of different genres too, right?

Arianna:  Yes, so I have email automation and tagging, and I’m in the implement ask method to take incoming people and match them with the stories that they’re going to like first.

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot since you guys took me through Bootcamp where there are a lot of genre requirements, if you’re going to write to market, but there are also what Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls reader cookies.

And so I’ve been thinking about reader cookies and what they are because I think there are a lot of story elements that people will follow through cross-genre if they know that the genre might not be the right fit, but they know they’re going to get their reader cookie.

Sean:  Right, right.

Arianna:  But you have to pitch the book to them in a completely different way.

Sean:  So they’ll eat their vegetables if you put it in a dish they like.

Arianna:  Right.  I don’t know, if you make mac and cheese with a little bit of broccoli mixed in, they probably will eat the broccoli without even realizing anything.

Sean:  Yes, so you have to treat your readers like children. I totally absolutely get that.

Arianna:  So anyways, that’s going to be an experiment. I don’t know how it’ll work yet. But it’s all set up to work that way.

Because I want to draw people in from a particular series and walk them through that series and find out by the actions they’re taking through that series based automation email sequence what are their reader cookies.

Sean:  That’s actually brilliant. That makes perfect sense. So is a lot of your future anticipated success as a multi-genre author, which we know from personal experience that’s a lot harder to pull of.

Arianna:  But I want to so that the covers and the descriptions that go on all the retailers will be based on genre expectations for the primary genre.

So that when I do ads and like email automation and social media posts about that book, each post will be targeting a specific sub-group of people who might be interested in the book.

Sean:  But we’re all looking for that ideal reader, right? The golden reader, the true fan who will say I want everything you have.

Arianna:  Right, but you can have multiple ideal readers.

Sean:  But is a lot of what you’re trying to do, is it dependent on like smart autoresponders and automations so that if you get somebody in Book Series C and somebody in Book Series A, eventually you can C to read A and A to read C, so you have to kind of guide them down a very particular path, right?

Arianna:  Right.  But the way I pitch the different series to each other will be a lot – yes, there’s a lot of conditional elements in emails, like in the P.S. section. So they will probably be, I don’t know, five different P.S.s for one email, and depending on which tags you have, based on what links you clicked previously, you’ll see different ones.

Sean:  So is this something that’s just like on a big, giant, beautiful mind looking white board at this board or is this happening?

 Arianna:  No, well, I guess it is in my imaginary house that has all the space.

Sean:  All right. It isn’t just rattling around in your head right now, right?

Arianna:  Well, it really is. So I’m visual. I think in pictures, and so if I can see it in my head, then I don’t need to write it down.

Sean:  Oh, that’s cool.

Arianna:  Which is actually it’s like really great when it comes to solving problems and building stuff, but it’s frustrating sometimes when it comes to actually writing down stories because I’ll get – I have the story in my head and then I lose the motivation to do the writing part.

But I’m too much of a perfectionist and a control freak to let anybody do the writing for me.

Sean:  Does that make it difficult when you want to work with other people, because if you see it in your head but they need it actually articulated?

Arianna:  It does sometimes. I’m very good at drawing like sketches on paper and writing checklists. I think it’s faster for me to write a checklist because I know all the steps in my head so I can just write it down. I don’t have to like plan what it is first.

Sean:  Right.

Arianna:  But yes, it does cause issues sometimes. Especially with people who need to think in a very linear way. I tend to spiral.

So one of the reasons why I can do all these different things, the writing, and the publishing, and the entrepreneurial like business stuff, and the fashion design stuff and it all works is because I have one idea.

So I’ll have one idea of a particular marketing strategy I want to implement, and I’ll take that big idea and put it into practice in each thing.

Sean:  So basically you’re always breaking things down into smaller pieces, because even if you can see the whole thing, there’s no way that you or anybody else can get that done unless it’s a bite of elephant at a time.

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  Okay, so I have two questions and they are different but they’re related. So I’m going to ask them back to back.

So you know the 80/20 thing, right, so how do you decide whether something is an 80% thing versus a 20% thing?

Because when you’re like us and you do and instead of or, that’s the problem. Everything becomes 80%, right, and you rationalize. Well, that’s 80% be because.

But how do you truly make that determination?

And then very related, how do you decide what to take on and what to say no to?

So there are things I know for me personally that are very 20% but I still do them anyway because it’s important to me for whatever reason that I do them.

So how do you determine what is 80% versus 20% and how do you determine what you actually take on?

Arianna:  I think mostly it’s just instinct. I know how I work.

Sean:  Instinct for both, for what’s 80/20 and also instinct for what you take on?

Arianna:  Well, a lot of it is okay, this needs to happen but I don’t want to do it. And if it’s like a really, really important thing that has to get done and I’m never going to do it because it’s not one of the things I enjoy doing but I’ll find somebody else who can do it for me.

Or I’ll find an automated system that does it for me so that I don’t have to.

Sean:  Or create an automated system, right?

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  And I know you work with a lot of people because that’s part of automating, and we’ll talk about automating in just a minute. But because you want to control stuff too, right, so how easy is it to find people that you trust and say okay, I trust you to go do that thing, or do you find yourself really articulating step by step by step? How relaxed is that process?

Arianna:   Well I think if you have the right people then you don’t have to worry about it. And I just did this a couple of months ago actually when I was hiring my first people for Abyssinian Books.

I went through and I gave them a description of what I was looking for and I was like if you read this description and you still think this is a good fit for you, here is the first set of application sheets. It’s a bunch of questions where you just write your answer in.

And a lot of those questions gave me an idea of where they were coming for and what they were looking for, and whether or not they were really passionate about the stories and reading them and talking bout them.

And if they filled out the form then there was an automation. They got an email with a list of instructions.

Like I had them video tape their screen, like do a screen capture of themselves taking a bunch of personality tests. Because the personality tests tell me okay, how do I need to explain myself so that you know what I’m talking about?

So I have intelligence types, there’s value languages, there’s love languages and then there’s your level big five or Myers Briggs personality type. And all of those things work together to influence how you motivate yourself and what types of feedback you need.

So if they were capable, like I didn’t give them any instructions of what software to use to do this. I gave them the links to the quizzes and the instructions and that was it.

And it was very clear between the answers to the questions in the first part and the speed and accuracy with which they completed the second part, I went from about 40 potential candidates to 4 people that I could interview.

Sean:  Oh, wow, that’s great.

Arianna:  Yes, and I had a spreadsheet okay. 1 was a no, 2 was a maybe and 3 was a yes for each of these different things. And I measured okay, what was their speed responding to part 2? What was their accuracy? What was my gut feeling about them before I entered the numbers? What was their score on the different company values? Like story and curiosity and connection and things like that?

And then I multiplied all of those numbers together, because when you multiply you get a bigger difference at the end. And so it was immediately clear, and my gut instinct was that these two people that I hired were the right people.

But the numbers of that scoring system, it emphasized that and made it clear in a visual way and a measured way.

Sean:  So that answers the question, and you rely on your instinct almost always and then when you need to back it up with data you can.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  But when you go as fast as you do with the number of things that you’re trying to do, you have to rely on your instinct a lot, right?

Arianna:  Yes. Well it gets really frustrating sometimes because sometimes I’ll need to do something and like I’m working really hard to do it and I have this image in my head of what I’m trying to do and like it’s not working.

And then I get frustrated.

Sean:  And then you build an automation.

Arianna:  I need this to be better but it’s not good enough, and I can’t get it good enough. Argh! I’m kind of a perfectionist too.

Sean:  You have to be to build those automations, right? So let’s actually talk about automations. Your new thing is automation for authors.

Arianna:  That’s the old news.

Sean:  Of course it is, because I haven’t talked to you in weeks. This ages faster than old fruit.

Okay, so talk a little bit about what automation is and why most authors – it’s something most authors need, and kind of what most authors get wrong in this area?

 Arianna:  Okay. So there are sort of two ways in which people tend to approach automation. Either it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and people jump in without really knowing what they’re doing.

And they go oh, I could use it to connect my lights to my phone so that when I come home the light turns on. Which you know it could be useful, maybe.

Sean:  But you could also just go like this.

Arianna:  So it’s a cool thing, but it’s not necessarily something that’s going to leverage your ability to be more places better, or to accomplish your goals faster, right.

So my big issue, because I spiral around topic to topic, I tend to not appear to be consistent about anything to other people unless I have automated scheduled things dripping out.

Sean:  Right.

Arianna:  So I’ll like have a burst of writing emails and three months later I’ll have another burst of writing emails, but I need those emails to send out over three or four months so that I have time to get back around to where I’m in a place where that’s a fun thing to do again.

So for me automation is a way to use your strengths to compensate for your weaknesses. That’s one half of it.

And the other half is if you’re strategic about it, you can create brand consistency and you can reach farther than you can on your own, but effectively you’re using the time you’ve set aside for marketing more effectively.

Because you’ve decided okay, I’m going to post to Facebook and I’m going to post to YouTube and then the automation is going to share those posts everywhere else.

Sean:  So is that where you need like a tool like – do you use Meet Edgar?

Arianna:  Yes, so I use Meet Edgar for my blog posts and my podcast episodes and then Meet Edgar will like reshare those every however long it takes to get back around to it. So Edgar goes through a list of like content in our library and I use RSS feeds to fill that content, and then it just posts whenever.

And then for the fiction I have quotes by my favorite authors that get Tweeted out through Edgar, as a way of sort of engaging the right people. I end up having different content in different places.

But I made that list once, a year and a half ago and I haven’t changed it, because you know you spend like two days making 200 quote cards and then you stick it in Meet Edgar. By the time the same quote comes around again, everybody’s forgotten what it was.

Sean:  Either forgot it or they didn’t see it the first time, right?

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  So what’s something that keeps authors from wanting to automate? Is it fear of not being original or just the technology part of it? What is it that keeps that barrier?

Arianna:  I think a large part of it is the technology part. I think it’s scary. If you think of yourself as being someone who’s not good at numbers, like maybe you had a bad experience in a math class, you might associate automation with like engineering, and engineering with math. And then so you don’t do it.

But all you have to know is what you want to be the trigger and what you want to be the action. Because things like IFT and Meet Edgar, they use different sort of ways of doing things to automate things, which is why you need to know what you’re trying to do.

But you don’t need to know any of the code.

Sean:  No, you just need to know your why and you need to know your basic strategy and then you need the right tools for the job, right?

Arianna:  Right. And then you need to be able to write messages that are actually going to resonate with your audience. You don’t want your messages to sound robotic because that’s where you don’t want to start using robots, right.

Sean:  So that’s my next question. How do you kind of tweak that then? You have to measure. You can’t improve if you’re not measuring. So how do you know this particular automation is working? Because part of the joy and benefit of automation is that it’s kind of on autopilot.

So how often do you check in? Are you looking at data to see okay, well, this got this many clicks and this many likes. How often are you taking inventory of your automation?

Arianna:  Not as often as I should because it’s not something I want. My next person that I’m going to get for Abyssinian Books is a data person so they can make the numbers make sense to me.

I need the visuals. The number itself doesn’t tell me anything. You’ve got 400 clicks. Okay. So what?

So I get weekly stats from Hootsuite and from Buffer and from Edgar. They tell me I guess very high level stuff. And I get weekly stats from Synomee about how many like pop ups have shown, how many welcome mats and how many subscribers I’ve got.

And it’s really the number of subscribers that I’m using as is this working or not.

Sean:  That makes sense. That’s a very healthy metric.

Arianna:  Yes, because you know the more subscribers you’re getting, the more people you’re going to get to buy things later on.

But I should go through and take out some of the old blog posts that maybe were time specific in Edgar, and I haven’t done that yet because to me that’s a 20% task.

Sean:  Well you can do that too, right, when you’re actually automating it for the first time. So if you write something that you kind of know ahead of time this isn’t going to be relevant three months from now. You can say can you set it within Meet Edgar to only run for three months and then it just expires?

Arianna:  I don’t think so. I haven’t really looked into it though. You can go into your library and remove things, and you can go in and like randomize the order.

Sean:  But once something’s in your library, it pulls it. That’s a manual task.

Arianna:  Yes, you have to go through and like weed things out every now and then. And that’s something that I’m going to have a minion do for me.

Sean: So the big takeaway here is that even automation isn’t totally automated.

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  Like you have to – everything requires maintenance, even automation.

Arianna:  Right. The things like Zapier and IFT where it’s just if something happens on one channel, it goes to another, that doesn’t really require as much maintenance as something like Meet Edgar where essentially you’re building a bucket full of like things.

Sean:  Well, that’s inventory management, yes.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  So what is your worst habit?

  Arianna:  My worst habit. Starting to read books when I should be doing something else.

 Sean:  Are you just a total infovore? Like do you read fiction and non-fiction equally, or do you read more?

Arianna:  No, again I go in cycles. There will be times when I spend a week doing nothing but reading fiction. And I will get no sleep and I will go through probably 100 books.

Sean:  Is that research for you? Does it affect the way you write?

Arianna:  Effectively it is research but like in the moment it’s not, this is what I want to do.

 Sean:  But that’s not why you’re doing it.

 Arianna:  Yes, yes. And then there are other times when I do read a lot of non-fiction. Actually I started my book club because I was reading only non-fiction.

The first year I started trying to learn how to do publishing, I found myself reading only fiction and it was like nine months that I hadn’t read any new fiction.

I had reread a couple of old things and that was totally weird to me, totally weird. And so I was like, okay, this needs to change. How do I build a structure into my life so that I at least read one new piece of fiction a month.

And then that fell apart because my system worked at the beginning, but then it stopped working. So my love languages are acts of service and words of affirmation. Which means that in order for me to be motivated, I have to be doing something that’s going to help somebody.

But in order to really feel like whoever I’m helping feel like I’m helping them, I need like people to tell me.

Sean:  I get that, I totally get that.

Arianna:  Right. So the way my book club was is I would interview the author at the beginning of the month, before reading the book. And then I’d read the book and I’d have a discussion. And I think I need to do those interviews like all at once when I decide what books I’m going to read for the year, and then the discussion needs to be something that happens on the same day of the month every month.

And that’s not what was happening.

I was having to schedule each thing individually every month, and it was the scheduling part.

Sean:  Yes. And it’s hard too when you have so many moving pieces to your business.

Arianna:  Well, my schedule changed. I’m terrible at routine, terrible at it. Because every time I set a routine, something happens and my schedule has to change completely, for some reason.

Sean:  So it’s one little piece is moved here but it changes the entire equation.

Arianna:  Exactly. And it’s really frustrating and if I could – I don’t know, I’m working on it.

Sean:  That doesn’t sound like a habit. I would say well maybe that’s your worst habit, but that’s not a habit, that’s just a reality. So the habit is reading when you should be not reading, or is it to put a final point on just kind of following your muse and doing what you want to do instead of what you maybe should be doing at any given time.

Arianna:  Yes. I guess it is following my muse, because the reason I read is because I get this gut feeling that there’s something I’m going to get out of this book. So everything I know about real live I learned from reading fiction.

This is why my fiction author personae is a Batman/Fairy Godmother, because you get super powers from reading. And it’s not all in my head. They’ve done research. Like when you read stories, your brain pattern mirrors the brain pattern of the person who explains the story.

Sean:  Oh, yes, for sure. That’s why it’s so good for fostering empathy.

Arianna:  Yes, and you’re literally gaining experience by reading stories about like elves fighting dragons, right.

Sean: That’s how you get experience points, right. Okay. So we get your worst habit.

What is one thing that you do that helps you be successful on a daily basis and do so many ands instead of ors?

Arianna:  So I don’t know if this counts as a habit, but this is what I do, and it took me till the middle of college to realize that I was doing this because I was working with someone who was the opposite.

So I think there are sort of two ways of dealing with a problem.

When you come across a problem that stops you in your tracks, either you’re the type of person who needs to dive really deep into everything related to the problem in order to find a solution and you’re like the rest of the world except that problem goes away forever until it’s fixed.

Or you’re like me and if I get that road block, I have to go do something completely different.

Sean:  It’s closing one door to open another right?

Arianna: Right. But it’s faster for me to come to a solution to that problem if I go do something completely different for a few hours. Because if I sit and I try and solve that problem right then, it’ll take me a week and I won’t get anywhere.

Sean: Yes, I get that when I’m outlining, when I’m story shopping something a lot. Like I don’t know what’s going to happen to the characters. But if I just sit there and try to beat out the problem, like literally, right, it doesn’t go anywhere. So I’ll put that aside and when I come back to it I’m like, oh, of course that’s what needs to happen!

Arianna:  Right. Or you’ll be doing something completely – I have so many ah, ha moments when I just watching my brother and like he was reading in the car, he was reading one of those big puzzle books with crosswords and word searches and stuff. It was like oh, that’s how I make the writings free fun. I’ll make them be some crosswords.

Sean:  It’s life, right. Life is about seeing the intersections.

Arianna:  Yes. So I don’t know that it’s a habit but like my thing that lets me do what I do is the fact that I know when to switch and I know when to come back.

 Sean:  Yes, that’s excellent. Okay. So here’s another two-part. I know you probably listen to these and you know the legacy question is coming. But I’m going to get specific with you because first of all, your schedule is going to change and your whole legacy is going to change.

So let’s just dial it in. I do know you’re a big thinker so I do want to cover ten years, but also like one year.

What do you want to see happen for yourself a year from today, and then what would you like to see ten years from today?

If there’s one big thing you’ve accomplished, and not everything because I know there’s so much there, but what’s the biggest thing you want to see a year from now and what’s the biggest thing you want to see ten years from now?

Arianna:  So the biggest thing I want to see a year from now is really Abyssinian Books being what I imagined it to be maybe two years ago I guess. And it’s on the way right now, but it’s still sort of like fledgling stage.

Sean:  And what is the Holy Grail for what you see? What would that be?

Arianna:  Okay, so this goes back to automation, a little bit. A lot of authors are great at okay, this is what I want, this is my goal. But they either don’t have the time or they don’t really know how to take that goal and put it into action.

So a lot of what I want to do with Abyssinian Books is provide the resources that authors need to get everything done that they need to get done. Which is why there’s a minion multitude, which is exactly what it sounds like. They’re like trained people who know indie best practices and can just implement stuff for you.

Sean:  There is a huge need for that.

Arianna:  Yes, like actually it wasn’t on the list of things to do this month until I had five authors be like you have minions? I’m so jealous. I’m like oh, I guess, you know, I want to do this so we may as well do it now.

So the one year plan is to really have the authors and the readers and a good repository of indie bookstores, and have those lists being built up to a point where they’re helping each other, and where the connection is helping to grow each of those lists.

Sean:  And then ten years, which is most people underestimate what they can do in ten years, but overestimate what they can do in a year.

Arianna:  Right. In ten years I want Abyssinian Books to be like dominating all of the trade pub companies.

Sean:  All right. All of the trade pubs, dominating, does seem lofty, ten years.

Arianna:  Yes. So like a lot of the reason that traditionally published authors stick with the traditional publishing houses is that they don’t want to do all the marketing. They don’t want to do all the businessy stuff.

And I think that’s a dumb reason to stick with a company that’s basically ripping you off. So I’m solving that problem and I want to steal all their authors and make their author be indie authors without needing to go through all that education in terms of being business minded and entrepreneurial.

Sean:  So you’re talking basically about a done for you. And there are a lot of companies out there but they don’t do it well, right, and they’re not really in the indie space.

Arianna:  They’re pretending to be.

Sean:  Yes, they’re pretending to be. So you’re saying you want to build the actual little teams that can take care of all of the stuff from list building to running Facebook ads to automating social media, all the stuff that an indie author needs that they don’t by and large – I mean it’s taken us five years now and we’re barely getting started with our team.

So if we’d had you five years ago, that would have been great. We would have just given you the keys to the kingdom and said run with it, right.

Arianna:  Right. Yes. So it’s the whole minion multitude is like probably one of the core divisions. I actually went and made a whole org chart this last week because the one I made two months ago is obsolete, which isn’t lying to me because I’m like I want to do it once and never do it again.

Sean:  All of your stuff is like Mission Impossible, like mission self destructing. The message is always self-destruct.

So where can authors get ahold of you? Where’s the best place?

Arianna: The best place for authors to go is abyssinianbooks.com and the way to remember how to spell Abyssinian is to remember that there is an abyss in Ian Somerholder from the Vampire Diaries or Lost.

Sean:  Okay, there you go. There’s an abyss in Ian Somerholder from the Vampire Diaries Lost, got it. Dot com.

Arianna:  Yes. Exactly.

Sean:  Okay. Well that is awesome. Where would readers find you? Do you want to talk about your pen name at all?

Arianna:  Actually the best place to go for readers is also Abyssinianbooks.com because you’ll get to find out about my writing, and you’ll get to find out about all the books that I love to read, and you’ll get to find out about all of the books that other people who work for the company like to read.

And there’s a couple of podcasts through Abyssinian Books that are also reader targeted.

Sean:  Okay. Well, that makes sense. As most people listening to this are either authors or creatively minded anyway. So that would make sense. They probably need multitudes of minions.

Thank you very much for joining us and I’ll talk to everybody next time.

The post 8 Questions with Arianna Golden appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Automation Author Arianna Golden

Sean:  Hey everyone and welcome to Eight Questions. So today I have Arianna Golden, and I’m going to leave my first question as her intro because I don’t even know where to begin.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Arianna is one of those people, and apparently we draw you like a magnet, I’ve asked Eight Questions once with Laurie Starkey which same thing. Like she started 93 businesses last year and then had to trim down to just seven or something.

I think that Sterling & Stone attracts the crazy, the ambitious, and the driven, and Arianna is a little of all of those things.

So we’re going to start right in with the first question because you are clearly crazy.

Arianna:  Okay. Yes. That’s never been in question.

Sean:  So much going on, right. Like there’s a lot.

Arianna:  Yes, there is a lot.

Sean:  The first time we met, I guess it was in an email and I just saw a big list of not only all the stuff you were doing, but all the stuff you wanted to do like in the next year.

And I thought oh, my God, I love people like this because just so much ambition and that definitely ticks my boxes. But there’s no way she can do all of this. There’s no way she is doing all of this. This is crazy.

And then a year later she was plowing through her list and making new lists and I love that. It drives me, that kind of thing.

And we were just talking before I hit record and I said okay, I feel like good stuff’s coming so I’m going to start. But we were talking about my daughter and she’s got a crazy brain like us but she doesn’t seem to have that like “I’m going to do it all!”.

So when you have this particular alchemy where you’re like I have all these ideas and I’m going to do every single one of them. Because Johnny always tells me I don’t know the word “or”, it’s “and”.  It’s always and.

Arianna:  Yes, it’s always and. Or is boring.

Sean.  You’re right, put the or in boring.

So how do you define yourself? What does your business card say? I know you don’t have a business card.

Arianna:  I do have a business card and it’s like the worst business card ever because I’m like I need to list everything out so I don’t have to write it down every time. So my business card is the worst, most boring business card ever.

Sean:  It’s just a list. It’s a card with a list.

Arianna:  It’s a list of websites. How do I define myself. That’s a really difficult question. I could say a lot of different things. I could say I’m a writer. I could say I’m a businesswoman. I could say I’m an entrepreneur.

But really the thing that drives me and that ties it all together is translating ideas from imagination to reality.

Sean:  Okay. I like that.

Arianna:  So like everything fits into that category.

Sean:  So transferring ideas to reality.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  So is that what your new and improved business card is going to say?

Arianna:  Well, I guess it sort of does say that, yes. I think it might say that. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at my business card in a while.

Sean:  Yes, we had this whole thing where we were making our business cards about a year and a half ago and it was me, Johnny and Dave and we were, you know, trying to figure out what they should say, because we do too much stuff, right?

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  And now it’s a little more unified than it was. At least we have a web site now that works, where people can go and figure it out.

But I think this was we were doing our very first speaking event and we wanted to have cards just because.

But how do we define ourselves?

We’ve got the whole podcast thing and non-fiction and fiction. And now it’s even crazier because we have a podcast network and we have the Story Shop and all of this.

But essentially we boiled it down to storyteller. My business card just says storyteller and I’m so pleased with that.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  Because ultimately it’s similar. I would define my business model as I make stuff and talk about it. And even in shorter hand it’s I’m a storyteller. So even Story Shop, that’s software. Like it’s not telling a story.

Arianna:  Yes, but it fits with it.

Sean:  It fits with it, yes. And so it was actually at another speaking even, maybe four years ago, I was talking to Tucker Max and he was talking to someone in the audience who asked about his Twitter handle, I think was the question. And he had one of those Twitters that says I’m this, this, this, this, it’s basically ninety words separated by commas, right.

And Tucker’s like don’t do that, that’s bullshit. Just pick one thing and own it. Be who you are with that thing and let everything else settle under that because then you at least own it and you at least know who you are, and it makes you a stronger person.

And I think thought of that when I was – okay, well, storyteller, that makes sense.

Arianna:  Yes, I’ve kind of done that within each of the different sort of silos that I have. So there’s the writing, which all happens under a pen name, but it’s one pen name for all of the fiction. And that’s it.

Sean:  But you’re writing in a lot of different genres too, right?

Arianna:  Yes, so I have email automation and tagging, and I’m in the implement ask method to take incoming people and match them with the stories that they’re going to like first.

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot since you guys took me through Bootcamp where there are a lot of genre requirements, if you’re going to write to market, but there are also what Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls reader cookies.

And so I’ve been thinking about reader cookies and what they are because I think there are a lot of story elements that people will follow through cross-genre if they know that the genre might not be the right fit, but they know they’re going to get their reader cookie.

Sean:  Right, right.

Arianna:  But you have to pitch the book to them in a completely different way.

Sean:  So they’ll eat their vegetables if you put it in a dish they like.

Arianna:  Right.  I don’t know, if you make mac and cheese with a little bit of broccoli mixed in, they probably will eat the broccoli without even realizing anything.

Sean:  Yes, so you have to treat your readers like children. I totally absolutely get that.

Arianna:  So anyways, that’s going to be an experiment. I don’t know how it’ll work yet. But it’s all set up to work that way.

Because I want to draw people in from a particular series and walk them through that series and find out by the actions they’re taking through that series based automation email sequence what are their reader cookies.

Sean:  That’s actually brilliant. That makes perfect sense. So is a lot of your future anticipated success as a multi-genre author, which we know from personal experience that’s a lot harder to pull of.

Arianna:  But I want to so that the covers and the descriptions that go on all the retailers will be based on genre expectations for the primary genre.

So that when I do ads and like email automation and social media posts about that book, each post will be targeting a specific sub-group of people who might be interested in the book.

Sean:  But we’re all looking for that ideal reader, right? The golden reader, the true fan who will say I want everything you have.

Arianna:  Right, but you can have multiple ideal readers.

Sean:  But is a lot of what you’re trying to do, is it dependent on like smart autoresponders and automations so that if you get somebody in Book Series C and somebody in Book Series A, eventually you can C to read A and A to read C, so you have to kind of guide them down a very particular path, right?

Arianna:  Right.  But the way I pitch the different series to each other will be a lot – yes, there’s a lot of conditional elements in emails, like in the P.S. section. So they will probably be, I don’t know, five different P.S.s for one email, and depending on which tags you have, based on what links you clicked previously, you’ll see different ones.

Sean:  So is this something that’s just like on a big, giant, beautiful mind looking white board at this board or is this happening?

 Arianna:  No, well, I guess it is in my imaginary house that has all the space.

Sean:  All right. It isn’t just rattling around in your head right now, right?

Arianna:  Well, it really is. So I’m visual. I think in pictures, and so if I can see it in my head, then I don’t need to write it down.

Sean:  Oh, that’s cool.

Arianna:  Which is actually it’s like really great when it comes to solving problems and building stuff, but it’s frustrating sometimes when it comes to actually writing down stories because I’ll get – I have the story in my head and then I lose the motivation to do the writing part.

But I’m too much of a perfectionist and a control freak to let anybody do the writing for me.

Sean:  Does that make it difficult when you want to work with other people, because if you see it in your head but they need it actually articulated?

Arianna:  It does sometimes. I’m very good at drawing like sketches on paper and writing checklists. I think it’s faster for me to write a checklist because I know all the steps in my head so I can just write it down. I don’t have to like plan what it is first.

Sean:  Right.

Arianna:  But yes, it does cause issues sometimes. Especially with people who need to think in a very linear way. I tend to spiral.

So one of the reasons why I can do all these different things, the writing, and the publishing, and the entrepreneurial like business stuff, and the fashion design stuff and it all works is because I have one idea.

So I’ll have one idea of a particular marketing strategy I want to implement, and I’ll take that big idea and put it into practice in each thing.

Sean:  So basically you’re always breaking things down into smaller pieces, because even if you can see the whole thing, there’s no way that you or anybody else can get that done unless it’s a bite of elephant at a time.

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  Okay, so I have two questions and they are different but they’re related. So I’m going to ask them back to back.

So you know the 80/20 thing, right, so how do you decide whether something is an 80% thing versus a 20% thing?

Because when you’re like us and you do and instead of or, that’s the problem. Everything becomes 80%, right, and you rationalize. Well, that’s 80% be because.

But how do you truly make that determination?

And then very related, how do you decide what to take on and what to say no to?

So there are things I know for me personally that are very 20% but I still do them anyway because it’s important to me for whatever reason that I do them.

So how do you determine what is 80% versus 20% and how do you determine what you actually take on?

Arianna:  I think mostly it’s just instinct. I know how I work.

Sean:  Instinct for both, for what’s 80/20 and also instinct for what you take on?

Arianna:  Well, a lot of it is okay, this needs to happen but I don’t want to do it. And if it’s like a really, really important thing that has to get done and I’m never going to do it because it’s not one of the things I enjoy doing but I’ll find somebody else who can do it for me.

Or I’ll find an automated system that does it for me so that I don’t have to.

Sean:  Or create an automated system, right?

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  And I know you work with a lot of people because that’s part of automating, and we’ll talk about automating in just a minute. But because you want to control stuff too, right, so how easy is it to find people that you trust and say okay, I trust you to go do that thing, or do you find yourself really articulating step by step by step? How relaxed is that process?

Arianna:   Well I think if you have the right people then you don’t have to worry about it. And I just did this a couple of months ago actually when I was hiring my first people for Abyssinian Books.

I went through and I gave them a description of what I was looking for and I was like if you read this description and you still think this is a good fit for you, here is the first set of application sheets. It’s a bunch of questions where you just write your answer in.

And a lot of those questions gave me an idea of where they were coming for and what they were looking for, and whether or not they were really passionate about the stories and reading them and talking bout them.

And if they filled out the form then there was an automation. They got an email with a list of instructions.

Like I had them video tape their screen, like do a screen capture of themselves taking a bunch of personality tests. Because the personality tests tell me okay, how do I need to explain myself so that you know what I’m talking about?

So I have intelligence types, there’s value languages, there’s love languages and then there’s your level big five or Myers Briggs personality type. And all of those things work together to influence how you motivate yourself and what types of feedback you need.

So if they were capable, like I didn’t give them any instructions of what software to use to do this. I gave them the links to the quizzes and the instructions and that was it.

And it was very clear between the answers to the questions in the first part and the speed and accuracy with which they completed the second part, I went from about 40 potential candidates to 4 people that I could interview.

Sean:  Oh, wow, that’s great.

Arianna:  Yes, and I had a spreadsheet okay. 1 was a no, 2 was a maybe and 3 was a yes for each of these different things. And I measured okay, what was their speed responding to part 2? What was their accuracy? What was my gut feeling about them before I entered the numbers? What was their score on the different company values? Like story and curiosity and connection and things like that?

And then I multiplied all of those numbers together, because when you multiply you get a bigger difference at the end. And so it was immediately clear, and my gut instinct was that these two people that I hired were the right people.

But the numbers of that scoring system, it emphasized that and made it clear in a visual way and a measured way.

Sean:  So that answers the question, and you rely on your instinct almost always and then when you need to back it up with data you can.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  But when you go as fast as you do with the number of things that you’re trying to do, you have to rely on your instinct a lot, right?

Arianna:  Yes. Well it gets really frustrating sometimes because sometimes I’ll need to do something and like I’m working really hard to do it and I have this image in my head of what I’m trying to do and like it’s not working.

And then I get frustrated.

Sean:  And then you build an automation.

Arianna:  I need this to be better but it’s not good enough, and I can’t get it good enough. Argh! I’m kind of a perfectionist too.

Sean:  You have to be to build those automations, right? So let’s actually talk about automations. Your new thing is automation for authors.

Arianna:  That’s the old news.

Sean:  Of course it is, because I haven’t talked to you in weeks. This ages faster than old fruit.

Okay, so talk a little bit about what automation is and why most authors – it’s something most authors need, and kind of what most authors get wrong in this area?

 Arianna:  Okay. So there are sort of two ways in which people tend to approach automation. Either it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and people jump in without really knowing what they’re doing.

And they go oh, I could use it to connect my lights to my phone so that when I come home the light turns on. Which you know it could be useful, maybe.

Sean:  But you could also just go like this.

Arianna:  So it’s a cool thing, but it’s not necessarily something that’s going to leverage your ability to be more places better, or to accomplish your goals faster, right.

So my big issue, because I spiral around topic to topic, I tend to not appear to be consistent about anything to other people unless I have automated scheduled things dripping out.

Sean:  Right.

Arianna:  So I’ll like have a burst of writing emails and three months later I’ll have another burst of writing emails, but I need those emails to send out over three or four months so that I have time to get back around to where I’m in a place where that’s a fun thing to do again.

So for me automation is a way to use your strengths to compensate for your weaknesses. That’s one half of it.

And the other half is if you’re strategic about it, you can create brand consistency and you can reach farther than you can on your own, but effectively you’re using the time you’ve set aside for marketing more effectively.

Because you’ve decided okay, I’m going to post to Facebook and I’m going to post to YouTube and then the automation is going to share those posts everywhere else.

Sean:  So is that where you need like a tool like – do you use Meet Edgar?

Arianna:  Yes, so I use Meet Edgar for my blog posts and my podcast episodes and then Meet Edgar will like reshare those every however long it takes to get back around to it. So Edgar goes through a list of like content in our library and I use RSS feeds to fill that content, and then it just posts whenever.

And then for the fiction I have quotes by my favorite authors that get Tweeted out through Edgar, as a way of sort of engaging the right people. I end up having different content in different places.

But I made that list once, a year and a half ago and I haven’t changed it, because you know you spend like two days making 200 quote cards and then you stick it in Meet Edgar. By the time the same quote comes around again, everybody’s forgotten what it was.

Sean:  Either forgot it or they didn’t see it the first time, right?

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  So what’s something that keeps authors from wanting to automate? Is it fear of not being original or just the technology part of it? What is it that keeps that barrier?

Arianna:  I think a large part of it is the technology part. I think it’s scary. If you think of yourself as being someone who’s not good at numbers, like maybe you had a bad experience in a math class, you might associate automation with like engineering, and engineering with math. And then so you don’t do it.

But all you have to know is what you want to be the trigger and what you want to be the action. Because things like IFT and Meet Edgar, they use different sort of ways of doing things to automate things, which is why you need to know what you’re trying to do.

But you don’t need to know any of the code.

Sean:  No, you just need to know your why and you need to know your basic strategy and then you need the right tools for the job, right?

Arianna:  Right. And then you need to be able to write messages that are actually going to resonate with your audience. You don’t want your messages to sound robotic because that’s where you don’t want to start using robots, right.

Sean:  So that’s my next question. How do you kind of tweak that then? You have to measure. You can’t improve if you’re not measuring. So how do you know this particular automation is working? Because part of the joy and benefit of automation is that it’s kind of on autopilot.

So how often do you check in? Are you looking at data to see okay, well, this got this many clicks and this many likes. How often are you taking inventory of your automation?

Arianna:  Not as often as I should because it’s not something I want. My next person that I’m going to get for Abyssinian Books is a data person so they can make the numbers make sense to me.

I need the visuals. The number itself doesn’t tell me anything. You’ve got 400 clicks. Okay. So what?

So I get weekly stats from Hootsuite and from Buffer and from Edgar. They tell me I guess very high level stuff. And I get weekly stats from Synomee about how many like pop ups have shown, how many welcome mats and how many subscribers I’ve got.

And it’s really the number of subscribers that I’m using as is this working or not.

Sean:  That makes sense. That’s a very healthy metric.

Arianna:  Yes, because you know the more subscribers you’re getting, the more people you’re going to get to buy things later on.

But I should go through and take out some of the old blog posts that maybe were time specific in Edgar, and I haven’t done that yet because to me that’s a 20% task.

Sean:  Well you can do that too, right, when you’re actually automating it for the first time. So if you write something that you kind of know ahead of time this isn’t going to be relevant three months from now. You can say can you set it within Meet Edgar to only run for three months and then it just expires?

Arianna:  I don’t think so. I haven’t really looked into it though. You can go into your library and remove things, and you can go in and like randomize the order.

Sean:  But once something’s in your library, it pulls it. That’s a manual task.

Arianna:  Yes, you have to go through and like weed things out every now and then. And that’s something that I’m going to have a minion do for me.

Sean: So the big takeaway here is that even automation isn’t totally automated.

Arianna:  Right.

Sean:  Like you have to – everything requires maintenance, even automation.

Arianna:  Right. The things like Zapier and IFT where it’s just if something happens on one channel, it goes to another, that doesn’t really require as much maintenance as something like Meet Edgar where essentially you’re building a bucket full of like things.

Sean:  Well, that’s inventory management, yes.

Arianna:  Yes.

Sean:  So what is your worst habit?

  Arianna:  My worst habit. Starting to read books when I should be doing something else.

 Sean:  Are you just a total infovore? Like do you read fiction and non-fiction equally, or do you read more?

Arianna:  No, again I go in cycles. There will be times when I spend a week doing nothing but reading fiction. And I will get no sleep and I will go through probably 100 books.

Sean:  Is that research for you? Does it affect the way you write?

Arianna:  Effectively it is research but like in the moment it’s not, this is what I want to do.

 Sean:  But that’s not why you’re doing it.

 Arianna:  Yes, yes. And then there are other times when I do read a lot of non-fiction. Actually I started my book club because I was reading only non-fiction.

The first year I started trying to learn how to do publishing, I found myself reading only fiction and it was like nine months that I hadn’t read any new fiction.

I had reread a couple of old things and that was totally weird to me, totally weird. And so I was like, okay, this needs to change. How do I build a structure into my life so that I at least read one new piece of fiction a month.

And then that fell apart because my system worked at the beginning, but then it stopped working. So my love languages are acts of service and words of affirmation. Which means that in order for me to be motivated, I have to be doing something that’s going to help somebody.

But in order to really feel like whoever I’m helping feel like I’m helping them, I need like people to tell me.

Sean:  I get that, I totally get that.

Arianna:  Right. So the way my book club was is I would interview the author at the beginning of the month, before reading the book. And then I’d read the book and I’d have a discussion. And I think I need to do those interviews like all at once when I decide what books I’m going to read for the year, and then the discussion needs to be something that happens on the same day of the month every month.

And that’s not what was happening.

I was having to schedule each thing individually every month, and it was the scheduling part.

Sean:  Yes. And it’s hard too when you have so many moving pieces to your business.

Arianna:  Well, my schedule changed. I’m terrible at routine, terrible at it. Because every time I set a routine, something happens and my schedule has to change completely, for some reason.

Sean:  So it’s one little piece is moved here but it changes the entire equation.

Arianna:  Exactly. And it’s really frustrating and if I could – I don’t know, I’m working on it.

Sean:  That doesn’t sound like a habit. I would say well maybe that’s your worst habit, but that’s not a habit, that’s just a reality. So the habit is reading when you should be not reading, or is it to put a final point on just kind of following your muse and doing what you want to do instead of what you maybe should be doing at any given time.

Arianna:  Yes. I guess it is following my muse, because the reason I read is because I get this gut feeling that there’s something I’m going to get out of this book. So everything I know about real live I learned from reading fiction.

This is why my fiction author personae is a Batman/Fairy Godmother, because you get super powers from reading. And it’s not all in my head. They’ve done research. Like when you read stories, your brain pattern mirrors the brain pattern of the person who explains the story.

Sean:  Oh, yes, for sure. That’s why it’s so good for fostering empathy.

Arianna:  Yes, and you’re literally gaining experience by reading stories about like elves fighting dragons, right.

Sean: That’s how you get experience points, right. Okay. So we get your worst habit.

What is one thing that you do that helps you be successful on a daily basis and do so many ands instead of ors?

Arianna:  So I don’t know if this counts as a habit, but this is what I do, and it took me till the middle of college to realize that I was doing this because I was working with someone who was the opposite.

So I think there are sort of two ways of dealing with a problem.

When you come across a problem that stops you in your tracks, either you’re the type of person who needs to dive really deep into everything related to the problem in order to find a solution and you’re like the rest of the world except that problem goes away forever until it’s fixed.

Or you’re like me and if I get that road block, I have to go do something completely different.

Sean:  It’s closing one door to open another right?

Arianna: Right. But it’s faster for me to come to a solution to that problem if I go do something completely different for a few hours. Because if I sit and I try and solve that problem right then, it’ll take me a week and I won’t get anywhere.

Sean: Yes, I get that when I’m outlining, when I’m story shopping something a lot. Like I don’t know what’s going to happen to the characters. But if I just sit there and try to beat out the problem, like literally, right, it doesn’t go anywhere. So I’ll put that aside and when I come back to it I’m like, oh, of course that’s what needs to happen!

Arianna:  Right. Or you’ll be doing something completely – I have so many ah, ha moments when I just watching my brother and like he was reading in the car, he was reading one of those big puzzle books with crosswords and word searches and stuff. It was like oh, that’s how I make the writings free fun. I’ll make them be some crosswords.

Sean:  It’s life, right. Life is about seeing the intersections.

Arianna:  Yes. So I don’t know that it’s a habit but like my thing that lets me do what I do is the fact that I know when to switch and I know when to come back.

 Sean:  Yes, that’s excellent. Okay. So here’s another two-part. I know you probably listen to these and you know the legacy question is coming. But I’m going to get specific with you because first of all, your schedule is going to change and your whole legacy is going to change.

So let’s just dial it in. I do know you’re a big thinker so I do want to cover ten years, but also like one year.

What do you want to see happen for yourself a year from today, and then what would you like to see ten years from today?

If there’s one big thing you’ve accomplished, and not everything because I know there’s so much there, but what’s the biggest thing you want to see a year from now and what’s the biggest thing you want to see ten years from now?

Arianna:  So the biggest thing I want to see a year from now is really Abyssinian Books being what I imagined it to be maybe two years ago I guess. And it’s on the way right now, but it’s still sort of like fledgling stage.

Sean:  And what is the Holy Grail for what you see? What would that be?

Arianna:  Okay, so this goes back to automation, a little bit. A lot of authors are great at okay, this is what I want, this is my goal. But they either don’t have the time or they don’t really know how to take that goal and put it into action.

So a lot of what I want to do with Abyssinian Books is provide the resources that authors need to get everything done that they need to get done. Which is why there’s a minion multitude, which is exactly what it sounds like. They’re like trained people who know indie best practices and can just implement stuff for you.

Sean:  There is a huge need for that.

Arianna:  Yes, like actually it wasn’t on the list of things to do this month until I had five authors be like you have minions? I’m so jealous. I’m like oh, I guess, you know, I want to do this so we may as well do it now.

So the one year plan is to really have the authors and the readers and a good repository of indie bookstores, and have those lists being built up to a point where they’re helping each other, and where the connection is helping to grow each of those lists.

Sean:  And then ten years, which is most people underestimate what they can do in ten years, but overestimate what they can do in a year.

Arianna:  Right. In ten years I want Abyssinian Books to be like dominating all of the trade pub companies.

Sean:  All right. All of the trade pubs, dominating, does seem lofty, ten years.

Arianna:  Yes. So like a lot of the reason that traditionally published authors stick with the traditional publishing houses is that they don’t want to do all the marketing. They don’t want to do all the businessy stuff.

And I think that’s a dumb reason to stick with a company that’s basically ripping you off. So I’m solving that problem and I want to steal all their authors and make their author be indie authors without needing to go through all that education in terms of being business minded and entrepreneurial.

Sean:  So you’re talking basically about a done for you. And there are a lot of companies out there but they don’t do it well, right, and they’re not really in the indie space.

Arianna:  They’re pretending to be.

Sean:  Yes, they’re pretending to be. So you’re saying you want to build the actual little teams that can take care of all of the stuff from list building to running Facebook ads to automating social media, all the stuff that an indie author needs that they don’t by and large – I mean it’s taken us five years now and we’re barely getting started with our team.

So if we’d had you five years ago, that would have been great. We would have just given you the keys to the kingdom and said run with it, right.

Arianna:  Right. Yes. So it’s the whole minion multitude is like probably one of the core divisions. I actually went and made a whole org chart this last week because the one I made two months ago is obsolete, which isn’t lying to me because I’m like I want to do it once and never do it again.

Sean:  All of your stuff is like Mission Impossible, like mission self destructing. The message is always self-destruct.

So where can authors get ahold of you? Where’s the best place?

Arianna: The best place for authors to go is abyssinianbooks.com and the way to remember how to spell Abyssinian is to remember that there is an abyss in Ian Somerholder from the Vampire Diaries or Lost.

Sean:  Okay, there you go. There’s an abyss in Ian Somerholder from the Vampire Diaries Lost, got it. Dot com.

Arianna:  Yes. Exactly.

Sean:  Okay. Well that is awesome. Where would readers find you? Do you want to talk about your pen name at all?

Arianna:  Actually the best place to go for readers is also Abyssinianbooks.com because you’ll get to find out about my writing, and you’ll get to find out about all the books that I love to read, and you’ll get to find out about all of the books that other people who work for the company like to read.

And there’s a couple of podcasts through Abyssinian Books that are also reader targeted.

Sean:  Okay. Well, that makes sense. As most people listening to this are either authors or creatively minded anyway. So that would make sense. They probably need multitudes of minions.

Thank you very much for joining us and I’ll talk to everybody next time.

The post 8 Questions with Automation Author Arianna Golden appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Austin Kleon

Welcome to Eight Questions. Today we’re talking with Austin Kleon, the New York Times Bestselling Author of Newspaper Blackout, Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work and most recently Steal Like an Artist Journal.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Dave:  Welcome to Eight Questions, Austin.

Austin:  Thanks for having me.

Dave:  Thank you. Question number one, what is your daily creative routine like and how structured is it?

Austin:  I try to adhere to John Waters’ routine. He says he makes stuff up in the morning and he sells it in the afternoon. So, I try to do all my real creative work in the morning, like making poems, writing freehand or coming up with ideas for new pieces.

Then I let lunch split the difference and then in the afternoon I’ll do stuff like answer email or do more what I call admin stuff, like doing interviews. Then if I’ve got stuff to finish up, I’ll do more writing, or Photoshopping, or coming up with slides.

Then sometimes if I’m having a slow day, at the end of the day I’ll read.

 I tried really hard in the past year or so to actually integrate reading into my routine because I feel like reading is something that if you’re really busy can kind of fall by the wayside. I really feel like if nothing good is going in, nothing good will come out.

I try to keep up my reading habit.

Dave:  And do you ever work late into the night or is that strictly family time?

Austin:  Never. I keep pretty lax hours. I work 10:00-5:00. Because I have small kids, and my wife and I go for about a three mile walk every morning and then we get showered up and really by the time I’m ready to go I’m only there at 10:00.

It’s almost like agency hours.

I always quit at 5:00 because I want to be in and I want to hang out with the kids.

Every once in a while, if I’m really crunched, I’ll work after dinner, but I didn’t get into this so I could work 100 hours a week.

The thing about writing is it’s a full-time job anyway. It’s something my wife says, yes, people see you and they think oh, that must be nice, but the part of being a writer and an artist is that you just never shut off. You’re always thinking of stuff and you always have your notebook open and it’s very hard to actually wind down.

I would say the one time I actually have down time is at night when we have a glass of whisky and watch TV.

People poo-poo TV, oh, I don’t own a TV. Well, I do and I use it like you should, to turn my brain off.

Dave:  I have a young son and I know during the summer when he’s home all day it’s very difficult to get work done because he sees me in the house and it’s hard to explain, okay, Daddy’s going in the office now and I can’t hang out with you. Is that a difficulty for you yet?

Austin:  Yes, it’s getting worse too because my oldest son is coming up on three and he really knows oh, Dad’s going away now.

The other hard thing for me is I work in my garage behind my house and there’s fun stuff out here too. I have a train table out here for him and the drum set’s out here, so he would love to come in here more often.

I use it as a real treat when you get to go into Dad’s office.

Sometimes when I have to fill in for some child care stuff, I’ll let him in here and he’ll play with the trains and stuff and the drums.

But it’s tough. There’s a lot of times I wish I had an office in town and I actually got in the car and drove in.

Working from home is wonderful, and I love being close to the kids. I love to come in and help my wife on a rough day. But there are benefits to working away from the home.

I’m a big believer in having spaces delineated for different tasks.

When you work in the house in particular, that’s one reason I like the garage. There’s something about what I call the “eight foot commute” between my back door and the door to my garage.

There’s something about just going through those thresholds that puts me back in the zone.

It’s funny, we just bought a new house in Austin and so we’re going to be moving soon. One of the things I was thrilled about is they have a detached garage in the new house, so I’m going to get to replicate what I have here.

Dave:  I want one of those giant shipping containers turned into an office.

Austin:  Yes!

Dave:  That would be so nice.

Austin:  I have this great picture of Stuart Brand working on How Buildings Learn, his book, and he actually had an office in a shipping container. This was back in the early 90s, before it was remotely cool. I looked at it and I said that’s what I want to do.

That’s exactly what I want because the new garage has two garage doors and then there’s an entry door. So, I’m going to put a wall down the middle of the garage so I have this narrow cozy space with a counter top on each side and then bookshelves all up the back.

I realized sometimes a space can be too big actually, particularly if you’re a writer.

Sometimes I don’t like having a really big space. The garage is 350 square feet. I think it’s too big sometimes. I think it needs to be cozier because it’s too distracting.

Dave:  Crawl into your closet and write.

Austin:  Yes. I love that. I love the idea of kind of being in this little space surrounded by books. That’s my favorite thing.

Dave: I have my desk facing a door, so I’m backed into a corner and I like that feeling of stuff around me. I definitely agree with you. Next question, what are some of the most important tools for your art, and how often do you experiment with new ones?

Austin:  It’s funny because my favorite tools are really just a pen and a paper. I’m a really big believer in analog tools.

I have two desks in my office, and one of them is the digital desk, which everybody has. It’s got your computer on it, your scanner, your phone and all that good stuff.

Then I have what I call an analog desk, which is just a desk that has nothing electronic is allowed on there. It’s just pencils, paper, scissors, tape, index cards, sticky notes.

When I do that morning work that I talked about before, most of that is done on the analog desk.

That’s when I free write and make one of my Newspaper Blackout poems, which if your listeners aren’t familiar with them, what I do is I take a marker and an article from the paper and I turn newspaper articles into poetry.

It kind of looks as if the CIA did haiku.

Dave: CIA is well known for their art.

Austin:  Right. Then sometimes when I’m really trying to come up with ideas, I’ll just read the paper with scissors or a scalpel and cut pictures out and make collages.

So, all the actual idea generation happens at the analog desk.

Then I’ll jump over to the digital desk and that’s when I actually type out my writing, and edit it and get it in shape. Or I’ll scan drawings in and get them arranged and ready for publication and stuff like that.

My routine is kind of a dance between those desks.

Whenever I get stuck at the digital desk, I know it’s time to walk away and go analog. Whenever I feel that things are happening at the analog desk, then I jump over to digital and finish it up.

I’m actually giving a talk right now where I talk about it and how people can start their own analog desks. I think it’s one of those stupid ideas that has actually stuck with people and surprised me so I’m happy to share it.

Dave:  I do cartooning and I do writing and I do the same thing. I don’t separate it like analog, but I do have one desk just for room sake, I have my digital stuff and then I have my physical stuff. I agree with you completely.

Austin:  Yes, and people who haven’t followed me for a long time, I was really cartooning-influenced in a lot of what I do, and kind of getting to know cartoonists and watching cartoonists work, and finding out about them.

I actually got that idea from Art Speigelman, because Art Speigelman has twelve different desks in his studio. Each one is for a different activity.

I was reading a profile of him and they were talking about how he danced between his desks. He’d start with a sketch, and then he’d scan it into the computer and draw all over it, and then he’d print it out, and then he’d paint on top of it, and then scan that back in and move it around.

It was this dizzying dance between these desks. I don’t have that much space but I liked that idea of having spaces dedicated to certain kinds of work.

Cartooning has influenced me in a bunch of different ways, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a cartoonist.

Dave:  In addition to cartooning, what are some of the other things that make up your creative diet? Like books, TV, other media, movies, music?

Austin:  Absolutely books. I try to read as much as I can. One of the things I do is I keep a reading log on my Tumblr. Every book I read I do some sort of summary.

If I’ve responded to the book more than others, I’ll do a roll on post about it and post some of my favorite parts.

If I read a book and I’m kind of eh, whatever, about it, I’ll just post the cover and make a brief note of it.

I love music, just like everyone else. I feel like every writer really wishes they were a musician.

I love going to the movies. The one thing I really miss about being a parent is being able to just up and go to the movies whenever you want to.

We have a great theatre in Austin called the Alamo Drafthouse. They actually do baby days, which is really cool. You can go Tuesday morning and see movies. I love watching movies.

I love TV actually. I think there’s so much good TV out there. I’m rewatching Deadwood right now.

Dave:  Loved that.

Austin.  Yes, it’s so good and I really hope they make this movie that they’re talking about. I guess HBO is in talks right now to do a Deadwood movie.

I love stupid stuff too. Broad City is one of my favorite shows. I think that’s so brilliant and so funny. I love dumb comedy stuff.

I loved in its earlier seasons, like Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. I loved that series. I love Louis C.K.’s show.

I feel that my attitude about consumption is that good consumption leads to good creation.

My Mom used to say garbage in and garbage out, and I really feel that way. What you feed on, that’s what you’re going to spit back out.

Dave:  Louis C.K. has an excellent mailing list, if you’re not on it. I love the way he does his newsletters.

Austin:  Yes, I love his newsletter. It’s like oh, God, here I am, I’m writing to you again. I’m sorry. Which I think in email it’s like apologizing for sending someone email is a great way to start an email.

Dave:  It’s awesome, and it fits with his personality perfectly.

Austin:  Yes. I think email is the great underrated medium right now.

I have a weekly newsletter that I kind of love doing. It’s as simple as can be. It’s a list of ten things I thought we were worth sharing that week.

It can be like if I have a new book, that’s at the top of the list.

If nothing’s really going on, it’s like well, here’s the music I’m listening to.

I feel like that list, I think we have 25,000 people on it now, and it’s just grown into this thing that I not only think is a great marketing device, because it’s a really easy way for me to reach people, but it’s also become this way for me to keep time and see what I’ve been doing.

On a good week, it’s like wow, I have too much to share. And then on a week that I’ve squandered, it’s like well, geeze, I’m stretching and I have to rely on my Twitter feed.

It’s an interesting way to mark time and to reach people.

People ask me all the time about to use social media. It’s just like anything else in life. You have to find a Venn diagram between what you want to spend time on and what people would actually want from you.

I think that I’ve struck a nice balance for that with the newsletter.

Dave:  How does being a father shape your art?

Austin:  Well, I don’t know yet. I’m still pretty new. I’ve only been a Dad for three years.

But I will say that everything people told me about having kids has become true in that it does light a fire under your ass.

Chris Ware – I’m not advocating this but every mental problem you have becomes clear to you the minute you have children.

I think he said it was cleared up. I don’t know that it’s cleared up. I think it becomes very clear to you what your issues are.

On the one hand, children dredge up things in you that you’re not ready for, but I think children also have a way of showing you what’s truly important to you. Because you just are so strapped for time that it’s a necessity to focus and prioritize what you really need to get done.

I think they just light a fire.

Kids have taught me a couple of things. I don’t want to go too long into this but one is the passing of time, being okay with just living day to day. Because I’ve found with kids that if you worry too much about the future it will end you and crush you.

If you are up with a kid at night and you think about doing that for a month, or even a year, it’s soul crushing. But if you can think to yourself I’m in this moment right now, all I have to do it get this kid back down and get to tomorrow, then life becomes a lot easier to live.

I think that’s true with the art too. It’s like okay, I’m not going to worry about what’s going to happen down the road. I’m going to focus on what’s in front of me and just take this, as Anne Lamont said, Bird by Bird.

The other thing is I’ve learned so much about just play and raw creativity from hanging out with my kid.

If I could write with the intensity that my son lines up cars or smashes trains together, I really feel like being around that kind of play energy does something to you. It gives you a model.

The third thing I would say is that being around kids stresses the importance of having to focus on one thing at a time. 

You have to be 100% present with your work.

The thing that makes me the worst parent is also the thing that makes me the worst artist, and that is the phone. When the phone is on and I’m looking at the phone, I’m not doing my work.

It’s the same thing with kids. If I turn my phone off and throw it under the couch, suddenly I’m a better father, magically, because there’s nothing else to distract me.

It’s true with art too. You have to just be present and be there and be into what you’re doing.

Dave:  Well put.  What is your biggest obstacle to actually getting the work done and how do you overcome it?

Austin:  I think my obstacle is the same as a lot of other people’s. It’s just laziness.

I’m just a lazy person.

I would rather sit around and read a book than do anything. For me, it’s my own laziness.  And fear. You have to be bad for so long in order to get good.

The other thing is I have a tendency to think about work when I’m not working. That’s always a bad idea. I think you should try as hard as you can not to think about the work when you’re not in front of it. Because then you allow your subconscious to work on it.

That’s much more powerful than actually trying to wrestle thing out in your mind.

Like we said before, compartmentalizing. Keeping things in the right place at the right time. That’s the biggest obstacle to me.

That gets increasingly messy when you’re working from home is that work and family get meshed and it’s real easy to run back out to the studio or run up to the office. I just decided it’s best to be schizo about it, just play those dual roles as much as you can and keep them separate.

But it’s hard.

Dave:  You have a lot of artistic interests. How do you decide for yourself which ones to push forward, what to put aside and what role does commerce play into it? Like the publisher might be interested in one thing you’re doing but not another. So, how do you decide how much time to invest into anything?

Austin:  That’s a wonderful question. I’m constantly worried about being that Jack-of-all-Trades. I have so many things I’m interested in.

This answer will probably disappoint people who are listening, but I really at this point in my life, I let commerce lead because I’m at a point in my life where a lot of the meaning in the work – the meaningful work that I do is hanging out with my kids. That’s the number one meaningful work.

My art, honestly, is a little bit secondary.

But what I think is interesting about letting commerce lead is it doesn’t necessarily mean you do worse work. I think we have this idea well, if you’re not following your heart and doing things from your soul, you’re compromising.

Dave:  You’re a sell out, man.

Austin:  You’re a sell out, yes. I’ll take my latest project, Steal Like an Artist Journal. When we started that project it was like I kind of hate these things. I kind of hate that genre of like prompted journal. I’m not a huge fan of it honestly.

But what I was trying to do is look past me and to think about what people like about the form, and what’s helpful to them, and then put my own stink on it so to speak. To put my own spin on the format.

As I like taking these formats that I’m not necessarily sold on and then think like how could I do this well, and how could I do this in a way that I’d be proud to put my name on it, and proud to work on it.

That’s what happened with the Journal.

It turned out to be one of my favorite things I’ve done. And if I was only following my heart and only following my dream, I’d say I’m not going to waste my time doing a journal.

That’s not new material. That’s not the next book.

I’m open to invitation. On the other hand, people have been hounding me for years about doing an online course, and that’s a very commerce driven decision. Oh, you could make so much money with an online course.

And I’m just not interested right now. I don’t want to do it, and so I leave that money on the table.

We haven’t merched out the way we could.

I just try to find that Venn diagram between what people want from me and what I want to give them. Because frankly I’m not rich enough to do whatever I want, whenever. Maybe one day.

Dave:  Your worry about the schizophrenia and liking all these different things and being a Jack-of-all-Trades, I think personally as a fellow writer and artist, that’s one of the things that makes you most interesting.

Especially to people that aren’t even in the writing field. I think they can connect. I think a lot of people are very unfocused. They want to do a lot of different things but they just don’t know where to start.

I think your journal that you’re doing is really good for that. It helps get people going that aren’t sure where to start. It inspires them. I saw the description of what the journal is and to me that’s the sort of thing that I probably would never have bought one before, but I think it definitely serves a place. It helps people create their own things and that’s a good thing.

Austin:  Yes, I appreciate that. When I was growing up, I was always – people call them polymath now and I think that’s a pretentious, awful word.

Dave:  I saw somebody refer to themselves as that the other day, and I had to look it up. I felt stupid. It was like oh, that’s nothing.

Austin:  I cannot use the word polymath. On the other hand, Renaissance Man is kind of sexist but when I was growing up, I looked up to Renaissance men. To me that was the kind of person I wanted to be.

I remember distinctly reading Shel Silverstein’s bio and it said like Shel Silverstein writes poems, makes books and sings songs and has a good time. And I thought that is who I want to be.

I want that multi-layered bio.

Someone like David Burn or anyone who does a lot of different stuff, those are the people I always looked up to when I was growing up.

One of the things I think is fun for me is that the digital age really lets you do that in a way that you couldn’t before. Any kind of media is really at your fingertips.

So, if you’re interested in film and cartooning and music, you could do all that stuff on your web site and your online presence is the thing that holds it together.

For me, what’s been really cool about growing up in this particular time and place, because I think every artist has to look around at their context, and they have to understand that they’re alive at this certain time and place, and the work that they’re going to do is influenced by their context.

What’s been fun for me, living in this particular age, is that it’s allowed me to follow all of my interests and to actually have an audience that’s okay for me, okay with me following my interests.

I’m always amazed at how people will follow me. I can put almost anything in the newsletter and people are okay with it, because they’re like oh, it’s interesting, I might have never looked at that before.

Dave:  Curation, it’s awesome. You touch on this briefly, about not being rich, loaded, whatever, to do whatever you want. That leads to my next question. If you had all the money you needed, what would you do artistically? Would you do it differently?

Austin:  I don’t know. That’s such a good question. I don’t know what I would do. I mean I would do nothing until I had to do something.

Dave:  Cultivate your couch cushion.

Austin:  Yes, I mean my friends are always telling me like you say hand me ten million and I’ll walk away for ever. I’ll read books in the Bahamas. They’re always like that would work for you for a couple of months, and you’d get real itchy.

That is true. I took an actual two week vacation this year, with the kids and the wife, and I was chomping at the bit to do something.

Dave:  Probably filled out four journals.

Austin:  Yes. I was dying. It’s funny because the minute I came back, I’d been doing those Blackout poems for like ten years now, the minute I came back I started doing an adaptation of that where I’d use a scalpel instead of a marker and I’ve been doing these pop out poems where I’ll cut little parts of the paper out and fold them up, and then I’ll use lighting to make them look interesting.

It’s been this whole – and people have responded to it in this really positive way.

Dave:  Yes, it looks cool.

Austin:  It was totally from me taking a break for two weeks and coming back and just doing something different.

People ask me a lot about creative block, and a lot of times my advice is don’t push through. Just walk away for a minute. But make sure you come back. Have a daily routine, but if it’s not working, walk away and do something else and come back, because it’s amazing when you’re away from the desk how you can see with fresh eyes.

Dave:  Yes, deadlines and the pressure to produce can definitely kill the creativity. I totally agree with you.

Austin:  I think deadlines are great. I think the problem is you have to make sure you have enough time before the deadline.

I have this talk this weekend, I’m giving two different talks this weekend and they’re both talks I’ve never given before, and I did not leave myself enough time and so I’m crunched and it’s not fun.

But I know enough now that I started early enough that I’m okay, I can get a night’s sleep and when I wake up in the morning, I know what I’m going to do with it.

That’s just a product of doing it for a while. You realize how much time you really need for a project.

Dave: Now we’re up to our final question. If you could go back in time to when you first started your creative career and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Austin:  Oh, my God! That was the premise of Steal Like an Artist. It was a letter to myself.

Honestly, I think I would say be kinder to people. Send a lot of thank you notes.

George Saunders gave a beautiful speech that he turned into a book on kindness, and I really think if I had any advice to my former self I’d say be kind, because the world is a small town and you will always, always be better off by being kind and patient and making connections instead of severing them.

Dave:  Good advice.

Austin:  I don’t know. Sometimes I think that be nice, the world is a small town.

Dave:  I appreciate you being on Eight Questions, Austin. Thank you very much for your time.

Austin:  Thank you for having me.

Dave:  Where should people go to find you? What’s the place place?

Austin:  The portal is austinkleon.com, and from there you can find my Twitter and my Instragram and my newsletter. My newsletter is my favorite thing I do. If people are new to my stuff, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. You can always unsubscribe if you get sick of me.

Dave:  All right. Thank you very much and take care.

Austin:  Thank you.

The post 8 Questions with Austin Kleon appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Best Selling Author Austin Kleon

Welcome to Eight Questions. Today we’re talking with Austin Kleon, the New York Times Bestselling Author of Newspaper Blackout, Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work and most recently Steal Like an Artist Journal.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

Dave:  Welcome to Eight Questions, Austin.

Austin:  Thanks for having me.

Dave:  Thank you. Question number one, what is your daily creative routine like and how structured is it?

Austin:  I try to adhere to John Waters’ routine. He says he makes stuff up in the morning and he sells it in the afternoon. So, I try to do all my real creative work in the morning, like making poems, writing freehand or coming up with ideas for new pieces.

Then I let lunch split the difference and then in the afternoon I’ll do stuff like answer email or do more what I call admin stuff, like doing interviews. Then if I’ve got stuff to finish up, I’ll do more writing, or Photoshopping, or coming up with slides.

Then sometimes if I’m having a slow day, at the end of the day I’ll read.

 I tried really hard in the past year or so to actually integrate reading into my routine because I feel like reading is something that if you’re really busy can kind of fall by the wayside. I really feel like if nothing good is going in, nothing good will come out.

I try to keep up my reading habit.

Dave:  And do you ever work late into the night or is that strictly family time?

Austin:  Never. I keep pretty lax hours. I work 10:00-5:00. Because I have small kids, and my wife and I go for about a three mile walk every morning and then we get showered up and really by the time I’m ready to go I’m only there at 10:00.

It’s almost like agency hours.

I always quit at 5:00 because I want to be in and I want to hang out with the kids.

Every once in a while, if I’m really crunched, I’ll work after dinner, but I didn’t get into this so I could work 100 hours a week.

The thing about writing is it’s a full-time job anyway. It’s something my wife says, yes, people see you and they think oh, that must be nice, but the part of being a writer and an artist is that you just never shut off. You’re always thinking of stuff and you always have your notebook open and it’s very hard to actually wind down.

I would say the one time I actually have down time is at night when we have a glass of whisky and watch TV.

People poo-poo TV, oh, I don’t own a TV. Well, I do and I use it like you should, to turn my brain off.

Dave:  I have a young son and I know during the summer when he’s home all day it’s very difficult to get work done because he sees me in the house and it’s hard to explain, okay, Daddy’s going in the office now and I can’t hang out with you. Is that a difficulty for you yet?

Austin:  Yes, it’s getting worse too because my oldest son is coming up on three and he really knows oh, Dad’s going away now.

The other hard thing for me is I work in my garage behind my house and there’s fun stuff out here too. I have a train table out here for him and the drum set’s out here, so he would love to come in here more often.

I use it as a real treat when you get to go into Dad’s office.

Sometimes when I have to fill in for some child care stuff, I’ll let him in here and he’ll play with the trains and stuff and the drums.

But it’s tough. There’s a lot of times I wish I had an office in town and I actually got in the car and drove in.

Working from home is wonderful, and I love being close to the kids. I love to come in and help my wife on a rough day. But there are benefits to working away from the home.

I'm a big believer in having spaces delineated for different tasks.

When you work in the house in particular, that’s one reason I like the garage. There’s something about what I call the “eight foot commute” between my back door and the door to my garage.

There’s something about just going through those thresholds that puts me back in the zone.

It’s funny, we just bought a new house in Austin and so we’re going to be moving soon. One of the things I was thrilled about is they have a detached garage in the new house, so I’m going to get to replicate what I have here.

Dave:  I want one of those giant shipping containers turned into an office.

Austin:  Yes!

Dave:  That would be so nice.

Austin:  I have this great picture of Stuart Brand working on How Buildings Learn, his book, and he actually had an office in a shipping container. This was back in the early 90s, before it was remotely cool. I looked at it and I said that’s what I want to do.

That’s exactly what I want because the new garage has two garage doors and then there’s an entry door. So, I’m going to put a wall down the middle of the garage so I have this narrow cozy space with a counter top on each side and then bookshelves all up the back.

I realized sometimes a space can be too big actually, particularly if you’re a writer.

Sometimes I don’t like having a really big space. The garage is 350 square feet. I think it’s too big sometimes. I think it needs to be cozier because it’s too distracting.

Dave:  Crawl into your closet and write.

Austin:  Yes. I love that. I love the idea of kind of being in this little space surrounded by books. That’s my favorite thing.

Dave: I have my desk facing a door, so I’m backed into a corner and I like that feeling of stuff around me. I definitely agree with you. Next question, what are some of the most important tools for your art, and how often do you experiment with new ones?

Austin:  It’s funny because my favorite tools are really just a pen and a paper. I’m a really big believer in analog tools.

I have two desks in my office, and one of them is the digital desk, which everybody has. It’s got your computer on it, your scanner, your phone and all that good stuff.

Then I have what I call an analog desk, which is just a desk that has nothing electronic is allowed on there. It’s just pencils, paper, scissors, tape, index cards, sticky notes.

When I do that morning work that I talked about before, most of that is done on the analog desk.

That’s when I free write and make one of my Newspaper Blackout poems, which if your listeners aren’t familiar with them, what I do is I take a marker and an article from the paper and I turn newspaper articles into poetry.

It kind of looks as if the CIA did haiku.

Dave: CIA is well known for their art.

Austin:  Right. Then sometimes when I’m really trying to come up with ideas, I’ll just read the paper with scissors or a scalpel and cut pictures out and make collages.

So, all the actual idea generation happens at the analog desk.

Then I’ll jump over to the digital desk and that’s when I actually type out my writing, and edit it and get it in shape. Or I’ll scan drawings in and get them arranged and ready for publication and stuff like that.

My routine is kind of a dance between those desks.

Whenever I get stuck at the digital desk, I know it’s time to walk away and go analog. Whenever I feel that things are happening at the analog desk, then I jump over to digital and finish it up.

I’m actually giving a talk right now where I talk about it and how people can start their own analog desks. I think it’s one of those stupid ideas that has actually stuck with people and surprised me so I’m happy to share it.

Dave:  I do cartooning and I do writing and I do the same thing. I don’t separate it like analog, but I do have one desk just for room sake, I have my digital stuff and then I have my physical stuff. I agree with you completely.

Austin:  Yes, and people who haven’t followed me for a long time, I was really cartooning-influenced in a lot of what I do, and kind of getting to know cartoonists and watching cartoonists work, and finding out about them.

I actually got that idea from Art Speigelman, because Art Speigelman has twelve different desks in his studio. Each one is for a different activity.

I was reading a profile of him and they were talking about how he danced between his desks. He’d start with a sketch, and then he’d scan it into the computer and draw all over it, and then he’d print it out, and then he’d paint on top of it, and then scan that back in and move it around.

It was this dizzying dance between these desks. I don’t have that much space but I liked that idea of having spaces dedicated to certain kinds of work.

Cartooning has influenced me in a bunch of different ways, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a cartoonist.

Dave:  In addition to cartooning, what are some of the other things that make up your creative diet? Like books, TV, other media, movies, music?

Austin:  Absolutely books. I try to read as much as I can. One of the things I do is I keep a reading log on my Tumblr. Every book I read I do some sort of summary.

If I’ve responded to the book more than others, I’ll do a roll on post about it and post some of my favorite parts.

If I read a book and I’m kind of eh, whatever, about it, I’ll just post the cover and make a brief note of it.

I love music, just like everyone else. I feel like every writer really wishes they were a musician.

I love going to the movies. The one thing I really miss about being a parent is being able to just up and go to the movies whenever you want to.

We have a great theatre in Austin called the Alamo Drafthouse. They actually do baby days, which is really cool. You can go Tuesday morning and see movies. I love watching movies.

I love TV actually. I think there’s so much good TV out there. I’m rewatching Deadwood right now.

Dave:  Loved that.

Austin.  Yes, it’s so good and I really hope they make this movie that they’re talking about. I guess HBO is in talks right now to do a Deadwood movie.

I love stupid stuff too. Broad City is one of my favorite shows. I think that’s so brilliant and so funny. I love dumb comedy stuff.

I loved in its earlier seasons, like Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. I loved that series. I love Louis C.K.’s show.

I feel that my attitude about consumption is that good consumption leads to good creation.

My Mom used to say garbage in and garbage out, and I really feel that way. What you feed on, that’s what you’re going to spit back out.

Dave:  Louis C.K. has an excellent mailing list, if you’re not on it. I love the way he does his newsletters.

Austin:  Yes, I love his newsletter. It’s like oh, God, here I am, I’m writing to you again. I’m sorry. Which I think in email it’s like apologizing for sending someone email is a great way to start an email.

Dave:  It’s awesome, and it fits with his personality perfectly.

Austin:  Yes. I think email is the great underrated medium right now.

I have a weekly newsletter that I kind of love doing. It’s as simple as can be. It’s a list of ten things I thought we were worth sharing that week.

It can be like if I have a new book, that’s at the top of the list.

If nothing’s really going on, it’s like well, here’s the music I’m listening to.

I feel like that list, I think we have 25,000 people on it now, and it’s just grown into this thing that I not only think is a great marketing device, because it’s a really easy way for me to reach people, but it’s also become this way for me to keep time and see what I’ve been doing.

On a good week, it’s like wow, I have too much to share. And then on a week that I’ve squandered, it’s like well, geeze, I’m stretching and I have to rely on my Twitter feed.

It’s an interesting way to mark time and to reach people.

People ask me all the time about to use social media. It’s just like anything else in life. You have to find a Venn diagram between what you want to spend time on and what people would actually want from you.

I think that I’ve struck a nice balance for that with the newsletter.

Dave:  How does being a father shape your art?

Austin:  Well, I don’t know yet. I’m still pretty new. I’ve only been a Dad for three years.

But I will say that everything people told me about having kids has become true in that it does light a fire under your ass.

Chris Ware – I’m not advocating this but every mental problem you have becomes clear to you the minute you have children.

I think he said it was cleared up. I don’t know that it’s cleared up. I think it becomes very clear to you what your issues are.

On the one hand, children dredge up things in you that you’re not ready for, but I think children also have a way of showing you what’s truly important to you. Because you just are so strapped for time that it’s a necessity to focus and prioritize what you really need to get done.

I think they just light a fire.

Kids have taught me a couple of things. I don’t want to go too long into this but one is the passing of time, being okay with just living day to day. Because I’ve found with kids that if you worry too much about the future it will end you and crush you.

If you are up with a kid at night and you think about doing that for a month, or even a year, it’s soul crushing. But if you can think to yourself I’m in this moment right now, all I have to do it get this kid back down and get to tomorrow, then life becomes a lot easier to live.

I think that’s true with the art too. It’s like okay, I’m not going to worry about what’s going to happen down the road. I’m going to focus on what’s in front of me and just take this, as Anne Lamont said, Bird by Bird.

The other thing is I’ve learned so much about just play and raw creativity from hanging out with my kid.

If I could write with the intensity that my son lines up cars or smashes trains together, I really feel like being around that kind of play energy does something to you. It gives you a model.

The third thing I would say is that being around kids stresses the importance of having to focus on one thing at a time. 

You have to be 100% present with your work.

The thing that makes me the worst parent is also the thing that makes me the worst artist, and that is the phone. When the phone is on and I’m looking at the phone, I’m not doing my work.

It’s the same thing with kids. If I turn my phone off and throw it under the couch, suddenly I’m a better father, magically, because there’s nothing else to distract me.

It’s true with art too. You have to just be present and be there and be into what you’re doing.

Dave:  Well put.  What is your biggest obstacle to actually getting the work done and how do you overcome it?

Austin:  I think my obstacle is the same as a lot of other people’s. It’s just laziness.

I’m just a lazy person.

I would rather sit around and read a book than do anything. For me, it’s my own laziness.  And fear. You have to be bad for so long in order to get good.

The other thing is I have a tendency to think about work when I’m not working. That’s always a bad idea. I think you should try as hard as you can not to think about the work when you’re not in front of it. Because then you allow your subconscious to work on it.

That’s much more powerful than actually trying to wrestle thing out in your mind.

Like we said before, compartmentalizing. Keeping things in the right place at the right time. That’s the biggest obstacle to me.

That gets increasingly messy when you’re working from home is that work and family get meshed and it’s real easy to run back out to the studio or run up to the office. I just decided it’s best to be schizo about it, just play those dual roles as much as you can and keep them separate.

But it’s hard.

Dave:  You have a lot of artistic interests. How do you decide for yourself which ones to push forward, what to put aside and what role does commerce play into it? Like the publisher might be interested in one thing you’re doing but not another. So, how do you decide how much time to invest into anything?

Austin:  That’s a wonderful question. I’m constantly worried about being that Jack-of-all-Trades. I have so many things I’m interested in.

This answer will probably disappoint people who are listening, but I really at this point in my life, I let commerce lead because I’m at a point in my life where a lot of the meaning in the work – the meaningful work that I do is hanging out with my kids. That’s the number one meaningful work.

My art, honestly, is a little bit secondary.

But what I think is interesting about letting commerce lead is it doesn’t necessarily mean you do worse work. I think we have this idea well, if you’re not following your heart and doing things from your soul, you’re compromising.

Dave:  You’re a sell out, man.

Austin:  You’re a sell out, yes. I’ll take my latest project, Steal Like an Artist Journal. When we started that project it was like I kind of hate these things. I kind of hate that genre of like prompted journal. I’m not a huge fan of it honestly.

But what I was trying to do is look past me and to think about what people like about the form, and what’s helpful to them, and then put my own stink on it so to speak. To put my own spin on the format.

As I like taking these formats that I’m not necessarily sold on and then think like how could I do this well, and how could I do this in a way that I’d be proud to put my name on it, and proud to work on it.

That’s what happened with the Journal.

It turned out to be one of my favorite things I’ve done. And if I was only following my heart and only following my dream, I’d say I’m not going to waste my time doing a journal.

That’s not new material. That’s not the next book.

I’m open to invitation. On the other hand, people have been hounding me for years about doing an online course, and that’s a very commerce driven decision. Oh, you could make so much money with an online course.

And I’m just not interested right now. I don’t want to do it, and so I leave that money on the table.

We haven’t merched out the way we could.

I just try to find that Venn diagram between what people want from me and what I want to give them. Because frankly I’m not rich enough to do whatever I want, whenever. Maybe one day.

Dave:  Your worry about the schizophrenia and liking all these different things and being a Jack-of-all-Trades, I think personally as a fellow writer and artist, that’s one of the things that makes you most interesting.

Especially to people that aren’t even in the writing field. I think they can connect. I think a lot of people are very unfocused. They want to do a lot of different things but they just don’t know where to start.

I think your journal that you’re doing is really good for that. It helps get people going that aren’t sure where to start. It inspires them. I saw the description of what the journal is and to me that’s the sort of thing that I probably would never have bought one before, but I think it definitely serves a place. It helps people create their own things and that’s a good thing.

Austin:  Yes, I appreciate that. When I was growing up, I was always – people call them polymath now and I think that’s a pretentious, awful word.

Dave:  I saw somebody refer to themselves as that the other day, and I had to look it up. I felt stupid. It was like oh, that’s nothing.

Austin:  I cannot use the word polymath. On the other hand, Renaissance Man is kind of sexist but when I was growing up, I looked up to Renaissance men. To me that was the kind of person I wanted to be.

I remember distinctly reading Shel Silverstein’s bio and it said like Shel Silverstein writes poems, makes books and sings songs and has a good time. And I thought that is who I want to be.

I want that multi-layered bio.

Someone like David Burn or anyone who does a lot of different stuff, those are the people I always looked up to when I was growing up.

One of the things I think is fun for me is that the digital age really lets you do that in a way that you couldn’t before. Any kind of media is really at your fingertips.

So, if you’re interested in film and cartooning and music, you could do all that stuff on your web site and your online presence is the thing that holds it together.

For me, what’s been really cool about growing up in this particular time and place, because I think every artist has to look around at their context, and they have to understand that they’re alive at this certain time and place, and the work that they’re going to do is influenced by their context.

What’s been fun for me, living in this particular age, is that it’s allowed me to follow all of my interests and to actually have an audience that’s okay for me, okay with me following my interests.

I’m always amazed at how people will follow me. I can put almost anything in the newsletter and people are okay with it, because they’re like oh, it’s interesting, I might have never looked at that before.

Dave:  Curation, it’s awesome. You touch on this briefly, about not being rich, loaded, whatever, to do whatever you want. That leads to my next question. If you had all the money you needed, what would you do artistically? Would you do it differently?

Austin:  I don’t know. That’s such a good question. I don’t know what I would do. I mean I would do nothing until I had to do something.

Dave:  Cultivate your couch cushion.

Austin:  Yes, I mean my friends are always telling me like you say hand me ten million and I’ll walk away for ever. I’ll read books in the Bahamas. They’re always like that would work for you for a couple of months, and you’d get real itchy.

That is true. I took an actual two week vacation this year, with the kids and the wife, and I was chomping at the bit to do something.

Dave:  Probably filled out four journals.

Austin:  Yes. I was dying. It’s funny because the minute I came back, I’d been doing those Blackout poems for like ten years now, the minute I came back I started doing an adaptation of that where I’d use a scalpel instead of a marker and I’ve been doing these pop out poems where I’ll cut little parts of the paper out and fold them up, and then I’ll use lighting to make them look interesting.

It’s been this whole – and people have responded to it in this really positive way.

Dave:  Yes, it looks cool.

Austin:  It was totally from me taking a break for two weeks and coming back and just doing something different.

People ask me a lot about creative block, and a lot of times my advice is don’t push through. Just walk away for a minute. But make sure you come back. Have a daily routine, but if it’s not working, walk away and do something else and come back, because it’s amazing when you’re away from the desk how you can see with fresh eyes.

Dave:  Yes, deadlines and the pressure to produce can definitely kill the creativity. I totally agree with you.

Austin:  I think deadlines are great. I think the problem is you have to make sure you have enough time before the deadline.

I have this talk this weekend, I’m giving two different talks this weekend and they’re both talks I’ve never given before, and I did not leave myself enough time and so I’m crunched and it’s not fun.

But I know enough now that I started early enough that I’m okay, I can get a night’s sleep and when I wake up in the morning, I know what I’m going to do with it.

That’s just a product of doing it for a while. You realize how much time you really need for a project.

Dave: Now we’re up to our final question. If you could go back in time to when you first started your creative career and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Austin:  Oh, my God! That was the premise of Steal Like an Artist. It was a letter to myself.

Honestly, I think I would say be kinder to people. Send a lot of thank you notes.

George Saunders gave a beautiful speech that he turned into a book on kindness, and I really think if I had any advice to my former self I’d say be kind, because the world is a small town and you will always, always be better off by being kind and patient and making connections instead of severing them.

Dave:  Good advice.

Austin:  I don’t know. Sometimes I think that be nice, the world is a small town.

Dave:  I appreciate you being on Eight Questions, Austin. Thank you very much for your time.

Austin:  Thank you for having me.

Dave:  Where should people go to find you? What’s the place place?

Austin:  The portal is austinkleon.com, and from there you can find my Twitter and my Instragram and my newsletter. My newsletter is my favorite thing I do. If people are new to my stuff, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. You can always unsubscribe if you get sick of me.

Dave:  All right. Thank you very much and take care.

Austin:  Thank you.

The post 8 Questions with Best Selling Author Austin Kleon appeared first on Sterling & Stone.

8 Questions with Serial Superconnector David Gonzalez

Johnny:  Dave’s art is connecting people and we were connected by a mutual friend, Danny Iny, who brings somebody to dinner and it’s kind of like a potluck. You don’t know what you’re going to get. Sean, Dave Wright and I spent several hours with Dave Gonzalez and then Danny was done. Danny, who had connected us, said I’m going to bed, and we were like let’s go get cupcakes and we went and did that.

To say Dave is a natural connector really understates it, and that’s part of what we were discussing. We could say he runs a digital marketing agency, he runs an affiliate management company, he’s a serial superconnector and he’s behind Internet Marketing Party.

(If you prefer audio, you can listen to this episode on the 8 Questions Podcast)

David:  What it comes down it, all told my businesses generate just shy of half a million dollars a year. I’ve got a team of eight people whose families I help support. I feel self-conscious about people calling me a connector or networker. It kind of makes me gag.

I know some connectors and people who use that term and after you hang out with them, you feel like taking a bath. Reminiscent of used car salespeople.

For me, I genuinely love talented, influential, quality people, in the same way that I think some people really like going into a boutique type of store, a craft, curio high quality craftsmanship type of place.

When I see a really well made tool, of any sort, whether it’s for a shoe maker or an architect or a transmission repair shop, I’m just in awe of it. Especially if it’s well made, like if it’s German or Swiss, there’s just some quality of it that makes me go, oh, this is so great!

I just got back from London and going to their open air markets and seeing the quality of craftsmanship that goes into their artisan cheeses and their flatbreads and their milk.

It’s amazing, and that’s the same way that I love people. Not just everybody. I like people who are really talented, really smart, influencial, and I like finding out what drives them and what they’re really interested in doing to make the world a better place.

Then my brain automatically starts to sort and filter for all the people that I know that they’re like at an ethos level, at a character level. I know that they’ll resonate first as people, whether it be at the level of intellect, of how they just are, their constitution.

Then if there’s business to be done, that just makes me ecstatic, even just putting people together.

I kind of feel that that’s my gift, that’s my art, that’s what I was given. So I feel blessed that I’ve learned over the years, and it took me a while, how to turn that into something that I can do as a career that I’m proud of.

Johnny:  It is an art. So, question number one would be what do you think of that art if you’re going to connect people? Because you do do it in a very non-douchey way. You haven’t actually hooked us up directly, you did with Sean, but you haven’t connected me to anybody but we’re connected and it was fast.

It was like you meet somebody and you’re like oh, I’m like this person. What is the skill there – I don’t want to say skill because it implies that it’s manipulative, but where are you finding these gems?

David:  I mean that’s how I do it. The only way that I can connect people well, is by connecting with the person first. Does that make sense?

Johnny:  Yes, it does because then you know it’s a known quantity, right. You know them.

David:  Yes, just the fact that your name is Johnny B. Truant, and how I’ve learned your sense of humor, and that you’re a writer, and that your partners with Sean and Dave, and the dynamic that you have.

I know that if I were to set up a Founder’s Dinner or even just a dinner with some cool people, because I like doing that sometimes, I’m going to invite this person and this person and this person, I know at the end of it we’re all going to be like that was fun!

Johnny:  This is where I mention I’m in town now.

David:  Yes, yes, exactly. I have invited you to a couple of things but you’ve been busy.

Johnny:  Yes, I haven’t been able to pull it off.

David:  I guess that’s one of the things, I really like people, but not just everybody. The very interesting story you told me about one of your past clients, that was so fascinating and how Danny just shared with me the different things that you guys have done in the field of fiction. That was fascinating.

It’s kind of lame when you look at it one way. I’m easily impressed or amused, or there are some people who are really cynical and they’re like oh, yes, been there, done that.

I’m like wow!

I guess I tend to look at people similar to – can you relate to what I’m talking about like finding a really high quality piece of equipment or machinery?

Johnny:  Yes. Everyone’s got a special talent and you’re like wow, I see your special talent and it’s beautiful in its own way. You’re uniquely you.

David:  One of my favorite movies, I just got goose bumps, I tend to like really good documentaries, but one of my favorite documentaries is Gino Loves Sushi. Have you seen that?

Johnny:  I have not.

David:  It’s about an 85-year old master sushi chef that has this little sushi restaurant in the bottom of a subway and it seats 18 people max and it’s got a six month waiting period. This guy is like the king of kings, lord of lords, master of sushi chefs of the period. He’s all about making the best sushi in the world.

He’s a one or two star Michelin chef. When you watch this – I’m sure some of your listeners and viewers will have watched it and will know what I’m talking about.

Anytime that someone is into mastery, I’m intrigued and interested, and I realize that there’s something there. They’ve learned rigor, they’re learned discipline.

Sometimes some people are lucky, they just know what they’re supposed to be doing but most people struggle and they go through a lot of dark night of the soul to finally emerge and go that’s it, that’s what I’m here for, that’s my mission, that’s my vision.

Did you ever watch the documentary called Born Rich?

Johnny:  No.

David:  By Jamie Johnson. He was heir to the Johnson and Johnson dynasty. He interviewed a bunch of people who were, from the moment of their conception, billionaires. One of them was a Vanderbilt. One of them was one of the Trumps. Just a bunch of super rich, wealth, off the charts billionaire kids that he was interviewing and asking what’s it like.

A lot of them were struggling with crisis of meaning. People just assume that oh, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. You’ve got it easy. But a lot of them were struggling, like what’s my purpose, why am I here, what am I supposed to do with my time?

How do I leave a mark beyond just being cool and getting into any club I want, and having whatever luxury car and mansion that I want and going to Ibiza?  Living the jet setter lifestyle doesn’t have any meaning.

I think everyone has to find their thing, and when people find their thing I’m fascinated and I want to put more people who have found their thing together.

I think the world is really fucked up and there’s way too much stupidity on the planet. If I could accomplish one thing it would be to put a sizable dent in the amount of stupidity on the planet.

That to me translates to organized religion, and politics as we know it, the current way that the financial structures and systems are set up. There’s just too much win-lose and the world’s kind of fucked up.

There’s a lot of suffering and lot of crap that is absolutely unnecessary.

What drives me is to connect with people that have found their magic, their gift, their talent, their inner tool, that Swiss piece made of Swiss or German fine crafted piece of equipment that they do their craft with and put them together with more people.

Let’s say you have $800,000,000 in your bank tax-free. You’ve already got all the mansions, the fast cars, all the travelling, everything out of the way. What would you do?

Sean’s one of the people I asked this of not too long ago and I asked what would you do, and he’s like what I’m doing now. I’m doing it.

When I find people that are doing what they’d be doing if they had all the money in the world, they’re still doing whatever they’re doing, I want to put them in touch with more people that would be doing that.

I never thought of this before, but when you see those ants that all quickly come together to form a bridge so the ants can crawl across them over water, I think that’s how I’m thinking of collecting and connecting amazing people.

Putting them all together so they can form a bridge so that stupidity can get less.

Johnny:  What I like here is that you’ve actually pre-guessed my final question, which is what would you like your legacy to be?  And it sounds like put a dent in the stupidity of the world is your legacy.

David:  It’s funny because that’s something that’s still a nascent idea for me. It’s crystallizing for me and I haven’t quantified how much stupidity there is on the planet. I just know there’s a lot of it.

Johnny:  Ask Dave Wright about that. He’ll tell you.

David:  Look at the candidates who are running for President.

Johnny:  Yes.

David:  Look at the waste, the way that we use subsidies. There are people who are starving. There are people with no water. There are people with – you get kind of emotional about it. I know this is the kind Yaro would always play forward.

We hang out, I loved that about our conversation. We were irreverent and laughing and acting like junior high kids, and then at one point we did get serious and talked about assholes in the marketplace.

We talked about what really matters. I like that. Being able to go really deep and really irreverent and silly and funny and whimsical, and dive in and out.

That’s the richness of being human.

Johnny:  I was going to ask you about one point and it’s funny because we were being irreverent and everything. Then you were like, I’m kind of a heart-centered person and I do things. And Sean and I were kind of like we just told a bunch of dick jokes, right. Tell me about that, that being your center.

David:  Dick jokes?

Johnny:  Dick jokes. No, the heart.  The heart.

David:  I was just playing with you the way you guys do. I don’t know how to answer. I don’t know that I have a clear question.

Johnny:  Let’s explore this together. It sounds to me that everything you’re doing with the connecting and all that stuff is coming from a place of heart rather than say you want to make a bunch of money.

David:  Yes, yes, yes. And I do want to make a bunch of money, but I want to make a bunch of money so that I feel more at home with some of the influencers that I know that have made a bunch of money.

Sometimes it matters. People can tell. I’ve also seen examples like a friend of mine that’s Muslim that was in Dubai and hanging around with a bunch of billionaires and they were all dressed to the nines and there was this one guy that looked like a slob. They asked who’s that guy, and they were like he’s worth more than all of us combined.

Once you’re at fuck you money, then it doesn’t matter what you dress like. Or if you’re really that talented and you have that much awesome going for you, that’s your way.

I don’t feel that I’m there yet or I don’t know that I ever will be.

I like being able to dress in a way that I feel good. I live driving a car that I’m like yes, this is a nice comfortable automobile that if I picked somebody up at the airport they’re going to be like oh, nice car.

I want to make enough money so all of that stuff is just handled so I can have a nice enough place downtown Austin, or near downtown that I can host really nice dinners and stuff. Right now I still live in a relatively humble home in a suburb in North Austin. It’s a 1,600 square foot place with a pretty small backyard.

It’s not the place I want to bring some of the influencers that I’m doing more and more, and spending more and more time with.

A lot of times I’ll find myself leveraging my friends that have big beautiful homes and penthouses and like hey, we’re having a dinner at so-and-so’s place. I’m still kind of second rate and so I do want to make enough money so that I can do that shit at my place instead of someone else’s.

I just wanted to speak to that because I don’t want to make it sound like I’m some sort of…

Johnny:  No.  High five on that because I agree with you. I want money for those same reasons. But that’s not why I think either of us do what I do as a primary, right?

David:  Right, right. I would probably be worth at least four or five million dollars, based on my network and my resources, if I was just in it for the money and I was more just a hustler and just a typical hardcore entrepreneur.

Johnny:  Networker with a capital N, the thing you didn’t want to be seen as.

David:  Strategy kind of thing. I think networkers with a capital N don’t make several million dollars, they make $200,000 or $300,000 a year and then they just kind of stay there and they’re just dirty. I don’t know.

I think all edges of the bulk are like your Sean partners and people that are really good at biz, they have the whole package, they look like models. I feel like I’m scrappy.

I’m a little short Hispanic guy who knows a lot of cool people. A lot of them are in the direct response and the marketing space and they’re scrappy entrepreneur hustlers and stuff.

I don’t know how well I would fare if I went to Wall Street or straight into the heart of Silicon Valley.

Johnny:  I think that’s the heart-centeredness. Because you’re not looking for what is the dollar to dollar conversion between two people. I’ve said a few times that one of my goals is I want to do cool shit with cool people. That’s my mission. You’ll notice there’s no high dollar value in that. I feel that that will follow, but it’s let’s do cool stuff first. I think what you’re describing is more like let’s attach a dollar sign to everything.

David: Oh, yes, yes, yes. It’s kind of frustrating though because I do want to make more money than I’m making. I’ve talked with Sean and it’s kind of like that struggle with the artist. You want to do your art and you don’t want to sell out. You don’t want to be that guy.

If you make enough money so you don’t have to give a fuck, and just do cool shit with cool people, then it’s like always inching forward to just do maybe a little bit of uncool shit with uncool people so that I can make this much money so then I can do more cool shit with more cool people.

Johnny:  Sell out just a little bit so that you can do more of the cool stuff.

David:  I hate to say it, I really do, but I do sometimes. It makes me dirty.

Johnny: So, let’s shift then towards the artist because you mention the artist struggle. Do you have other creative disciplines that you do, write or paint or anything that is an artist thing?

David:  I don’t really. I’ve always had a penchant for drawing and doodling. There have been times when I’ve felt like man, if I just sat down and consistently drew. Sometimes I see art in a place and not like oh, I could do that, because I get the rigor and the structure of when people do art over time and there’s visual style and there’s a feel and you can tell it’s been practiced.

But I feel like I have that naturally in me but I don’t practice it. On the writing, there’s been more coming to the surface. I’m an extrovert so I much prefer to get my thoughts out by speaking, if you can’t tell.

It’s painful for me to write, because I always feel like I’m editing as I’m creating and it’s very painful. But when I do just push through it, I usually feel pretty good about what I write. But I almost always keep that private.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that I’m friends with a lot of really good copy writers, like world class copy writers that are just exquisite with words. I know a few writers and it’s so difficult for me to not compare what I do, that Ira Glass thing.

Johnny:  Yes, I know that Ira Glass thing very well. You tend to undersell, you sell not to you personally but globally. One thing really stands out. Dave is very self-depricating anyway, but Sean and I love ourselves and love to hear ourselves talk.

You seemed anyway, genuinely fascinated with everything that we were saying to the point where it’s like he’s not humoring us, he’s really fascinated by us and that’s cool.

That’s one of the things you seem to have that is one of your talents, is the ability to be fascinated, and that is a connection thing. Do you feel that is a learnable skill, the ability to be fascinated?

David:  I think so and I think some of that is nature, but some of it has to do with the fact that I don’t often talk about it a whole lot. I did a lot of NLP studying. I studied with Richard Bandler, the guy who co-founded Neuro Llinguistic Programming 

I was going to get my Ph.D. in Psychology and I said fuck it, I’m going to go study a real functional thing instead of just a degree that doesn’t have terms in anything.

I went in and interviewed a bunch of psychologist and psychiatrists and they were like yes, I wasn’t impressed. Everybody I knew that was good at NLP was doing cool stuff, so I went and studied that for a long time.

I learned a lot about how to engage with people, have sensory acuity to pay attention to positioning, postures. I think I got so good at it that I just do it naturally. Then when I find somebody who’s really fascinating then I just turn all that stuff on, but it’s not like a ploy. It’s not a technique, it’s just ingrained.

At one point I was with one of my younger brother’s girlfriends. He was kind of on the outs with her and she was starting to get annoying and I just demolished her linguistically. She was like don’t use all those NLP tools on me. Why would I learn things, to not use them? It just doesn’t make any sense. Sorry.

At some point you learn certain skills in your behavior that you can’t not use them, because then you’re like I know how to walk, but I’m going to crawl. Because then I’m going to feel like I’m being advantageous? No. It’s just ingrained.

I think it’s an overlap.

If it was a Boolean diagram it would be my heart centered thing about really wanting to have an impact on the planet, and so I realized the best way for me to do that is to build meaningful, trusting relationships with influencers. They’ve already put in all the work of mastery of their thing. And I haven’t.

I just like people and I don’t feel like I’m mastering my thing. I feel like I just do it.

To me there’s a difference between rigor and interest, and I have an interest. I don’t spend a lot of time reading books on networking and connecting. I don’t go to a lot of classes on how to connect better.

Sometimes I think I should, because that’s what I like about other people that are masters of their craft, so I think there’s some of that self-discovery in that piece there.

Then the second piece has to do with the fact that I did study and train and learn about social dynamics and communication so much that that’s just ingrained into who I am.

And then the third piece is that nature part, that I do naturally like people. I’ve always been fascinated with cool shit or cool things or cool people. That’s not something that’s every changed.

I used to be a huge KISS fan. In second grade I took my KISS albums to school at Show and Tell. I used to love bb guns, and I’ve always been into things.

At some point I got really into cool people.

Another thing is because I’m short. There was one year in sixth grade there was another guy who was shorter than me. Other than that I was often the smallest boy in school and I was often smaller than many of the females.

Once I hit puberty I noticed things started to shift and change. I started liking the pretty girls but the bigger, stronger athletes were getting all the pretty girls.

I wanted to somehow stand out so I started being a class clown and funny.

I realized I was starting to get enough attention that when I was vying for the attention from the prettier girls or from the cooler people, it was like aggression started happening. So, I learned early on to saddle up with the bigger, stronger, cooler kids.

That’s where I learned to connect. It was a self-protection mechanism and I was always like the side kick. You know what I mean?

Johnny:  Yes, I have this perfect mental image.

David: I just did a therapeutic brain dump.

Johnny:  You just did a cleanse there. Last question, let’s talk about being a generalist versus being a specialist. Here’s specifically what I mean. I think that you and I are similar in this way that we both seem a little ADD about things. I have a ton of interests, I can’t succinctly describe what it is I do, and I have to list this, this, this and this.

It seems that you’re a lot the same way, that you have a lot of irons in the fire. I just wanted to get your thoughts on doing a lot of things versus saying you know what, this is what I do, I’m a painter or something, and that’s what I do. Rather than I do so many things I can’t describe what it is that I do.

David:  So, what do you want to know about my thoughts on which is better or my thoughts on where I fall in that? I missed the question.

Johnny:  I don’t actually ask questions.

David:  The ADD brains.

Johnny:  Right.  My MO is just I say things and then I see if somebody picks up on it.

David:  So, I guess I’ll touch on both.

Johnny:  Riff on it.

David:  I think which is better is not valid. I think that for each individual, you’ve got to find your way. There are times and places and context where it’s better for someone to really buckle down and become a specialist even if they are a generalist. But that may not be the way they should be forever.

Some people should be generalists. I’m a big Buckminster Fuller fan and that was his thing. I mean the polymath. Back in the day we were all generalists. You couldn’t survive if you weren’t back in pre-industrial revolution. You had to know a lot of stuff or you would die.

But now we are post-industrialism, information age, and I think we’re moving back to generalists but there’s value in being for money, for sure.

I’ve heard a bunch of my wealthy friends say the trick to getting wealthy is just really focus and double, triple, quadruple down on a skill that has a lot of financial value in the marketplace. Typically there’s not that many people who have doubled or tripled down on it, so it’s really not that hard if you have more than half a brain and some discipline.

I think there’s a lot of value in specialization and being a specialist. So that’s my riff on that.

For me, that’s a perpetual struggle for me and one that I do similar to the selling out versus heart, selling out versus heart. I specialize just enough so that I can be known, or have credibility, or have expertise so that I can get to the next level.

If I hadn’t specialized, for the longest time I didn’t, as creating an affiliate management agency, because I’ve been running Internet Marketing Party for almost eight years, and I only started my affiliate management agency three years ago.

So for the prior five years people were saying what does Dave do? I had sold a million dollar a year hypnotherapy center and I had a staff of twelve. I had money and I didn’t pay enough attention and I burned through that money over the course of those following five, six, seven years.

Then I had to specialize and that’s how I ended up meeting Danny. If I hadn’t specialized I’d just have been that guy that’s like I don’t know what he does but he’s always networking at events.

That’s what I mean by most networkers, part of their problem is they’re ADD and they love people and they loving connecting, but they never…

Johnny:  They never do anything with it.

David:  They always stay at comfort level of never like bam, feet to the fire, shit hits the fans, fuck I’ve got to make something happen.

I have some good mentors and great friends that help me be like dude, I see the pain and the struggle and the angst that you have and it’s always going to be there because all your friends are multi-millionaires and you’re driving a beat up car and live in an out-of-date house.

It was really weighing on me. I was starting to get really depressed to the point of it being really bad. A couple of my friends pulled me aside and they were like dude, you’ve got to start focusing on base heads, get your ego out of the way. Pick one thing, do it, do it, do it again, keep doing it until you build something that you can build, go from there.

And that’s how my agency started and now I wouldn’t say it runs without me, but if I went away for a month, it wouldn’t go away. I feel blessed and lucky to say that’s the case.

So, that’s my riff on specialization versus generalization.

Johnny:  Good riff. I could ask you eighty more questions but I won’t because your assistant’s going to kill you and then it would be the eighty questions podcast and that doesn’t make any sense. So, we’ll close this up but thanks so much for joining us on Eight Questions, Dave.

David:  Thank you so much. Johnny, I really appreciate it. It’s been fun. My hope is that at the very least you and ideally your listeners have enjoyed it as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing, because I enjoy the fuck out of this. I like talking. So, I really hope at least one person got value from it because then it won’t feel that I was just a selfish bastard.

Johnny:  I’m sure that they did

The post 8 Questions with Serial Superconnector David Gonzalez appeared first on Sterling & Stone.