Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello authors.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: I'm Joanne Morrell, children's and young adult fiction writer and author of short nonfiction for Authors. Thanks for joining me for the Hybrid Author Podcast, sharing interviews from industry professionals.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: To help you forge a career as.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: A hybrid author both independently and traditionally publishing your books.
[00:00:18] Speaker C: You can get the show notes for.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Each episode and sign up for your.
[00:00:22] Speaker C: Free Author pass over at the Hybrid Author website to discover your writing process.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Get tips on how to publish productively, and get comfortable promoting your books at www.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Let's crack on with the episode.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Hello authors. I hope you're all keeping well in whatever part of the world you reside and listen to the podcast in Today's interview is with author Shane Simonson on self publishing books versus Blogging on Skills substack and we chat what the biggest contrasts Shane's found between self publishing and substack, particularly when it comes to building a readership and maintaining engagement, the differences between self publishing and substack and how they impact creative process and the way one might structure writing projects. Shane's advice to authors on what factors they should weigh in terms of long term financial sustainability and audience growth, how writers can strategically use both substack and self publishing to create a well rounded and sustainable hybrid author model, and much more so in my author adventure this week it has felt like the kids are taking over. I guess it always does usually when you're a parent. But you yeah, my kids seem to be accumulating lots more winter team sports and so a lot of my weeknights have now gone to their training and a couple of sections of my weekend are now going to their games and so I'm feeling a bit like a chauffeur driving them around to their various activities and things like that. As we do, as we do. But it got me thinking. Usually I utilize that time and to get some work done. So one of my daughters has basketball training on a weeknight and it's for an hour and sometimes she doesn't want me to even come and watch. So you know, I'll spend time working in the car and that's an extra hour's work that I can add to the pile. But it made me think about other conversations I've had with parents when the kids were younger. Being present for your children and watching them practice their activities. Generally it's difficult. Anybody out there is a parent jugg a day job with a creative life trying to do this as a career knows it's a balancing act. You have to grab snippets where you can and not feel guilty about it. So I'm past that point. I was thinking, if you hold guilt by doing some writing or getting some work done while your kids are doing an activity and you're not being present, how about be hybrid and do it one week and not the next One week you can use that hour to utilize and write or work or whatnot, and then the following week you don't and you be present to watch your. Your kid. I think that's a good compromise. I think it's not bad. But this has all come about because of timetable. So I had a business meeting last week with a professional mentorship. Now I've finished my business coaching, I'm now doing something else. But this was more of a touch base and he gave me some really good strategies and one that's just. I'm sure everybody has it. Well, maybe not. I mean, I use calendars and things to schedule my time, but it turns into more of a to do list. This timetable was color coded blocking out time in Excel and it was for being realistic about actually how much time I have to dedicate to this business in amongst everything else and blocking out the time in categories of the different elements that make up this hybrid author business. For me, it's book writing first and foremost, because the whole hybrid author thing came out because of my writing and books and really at the heart of everything. Writing is what I want to do. But the podcast is really taking over and pushing to the forefront because it's really taking off. Pay to play model is working out well. It's becoming a real growth business in terms of earning an income. My focus has been solely there, but I also have workshops and speaking gigs added in the mix. So there's three things on top of that though. There's also business admin promotion as well as social media campaigns and social media stuff. So I made a timetable all different color coding, which I've not really been that type of person, but I was actually really excited about these little different coloured blocks. It was simple, very to the point and it actually just made me feel a lot more better about being structured and just kind to myself. So you need to first know yourself. Like, I know that I get up early sometimes, but not every day and not all the time. And if I'm going to say to myself, jill, you're going to get up at 5:30 every morning and write for an hour before, you know, you start doing all the school run and then getting into other work during the day, I'm not going to do that. And I can tell you right now that's just not me. I'm also not going to probably write every single evening either. Again, not just not me. And that's to do with different levels of energy that needs to come from. Yeah, that needs to come from me. So I like how simplified this gentleman. Let me make this. It was just to carve out one evening and one early morning to do. I think book writing is what we're trying to get back in there because I've obviously fallen off track with my book writing, which to me is. Is the. It's. It's. It's my whole. This is my whole business. It's my whole point. So that really needs to come back in. And if you've been. If you've been listening to the last few episodes, you'll be able to here that I'm desperate to get back to my writing projects. So timetables in place. Kicking off tomorrow. It is an early start writing, and I will get up. I'm past that point where it's too hard to get up or whatever. I'm in a workflow process now where I just do in saying that though scheduling to be consistent and rigid is like every day at this time is not me either. And I know people preach consistency and they preach different things, but this whole business to me is what I love is the fact that it can be flexible to the individual. So I'm going to make it flexible to me. And that's why I'm going to love it so much. And it's definitely one massive part of it. So starting tomorrow, book two, I've fallen down on that project. It's the second book in the women's fiction series. I have been already been plotting it. I have actually started writing it. And I was weighing up whether to go back to that or to go to the young adult project, fiction project that was working on last year. Good feedback keeps coming in for the writer, the hairdresser and the nurse, Book one in the women's fiction series. I'm gonna go with book two, I think get it done. And I think the time in my life that a lot of stuff's happening, a lot of personal things is definitely time to pour my heart and soul out into that. So I'm really, really excited to be getting back into book writing as tomorrow. So I'm also reading a book I found in the library. It's called Now I'm Recording in the Car.
So I'm gonna be rustling because I'm picking up the book. I'm Actually holding it in my hand. It's called Being a Writer. Beautiful hardcover. If you can hear advice, musings, essays and experiences from the world's greatest authors, Travis L. Burrow and Helen Gordon. So they've compiled, they've compiled all this together in one book and it's really inspiring. I saw it just when I was working in the library and I thought, I'm gonna get that. It says, being a Writer is an inspiring assemblage of wisdom, wit and hard won practical advice from some world's greatest authors musing on the art of writing. It is an anthology for dipping into, but also for drawing genuine lessons about the whole messy business of writing literature and what it takes to be a writer. Its contributors range from Samuel Johnson in 18th century London to Laurie Moore in 21st century Wisconsin. And their experiences deftly illuminate the pleasures and pitfalls of a compulsion to write. And I love that last sentence. A compulsion to write. I have a compulsion to write. Who here has a compulsion to write? So, yeah, I thought there was a couple. I'm just going to read a couple snippets. You're going to hear a little more noise with the paper as I find my place. I just really wanted to share it because I'm finding it inspirational. And who doesn't want a bit of inspiration for their writing week? And if anything, I'm here to provide you with that. So I hope I don't get this person's name wrong. Hanif Qureshi says, I was afraid to write because I was ashamed of my feelings and beliefs. The practice of any art can be a good excuse for self loathing. You require a certain shamelessness to be any kind of artist. But to be shameless, you need to not mind who you are. Sometimes writers like to imagine that the difficulty of becoming a writer resides in convincing others that that is what you are. But really the problem is in convincing yourself. And I love that because it's true. It's taken many years for me to get to where I am today to, to accept the term writer. And even when I'm talking to people about it and, you know, my partner told someone I was an author and I'd written a book, and this shyness just still creeps up the cheeks and I still feel withdrawn into myself to be like, yeah, you know. So the next one is by Margaret Atwood, well known. No writer emerges from childhood into a pristine environment free from other people's biases. About writers, all of us bump against a number of preconceptions. About what we ought to be like, what constitutes good writing, and what social functions writing fulfils or ought to fulfil. All of us develop our own ideas about what we are writing in relation to these preconceptions. Whether we attempt to live up to them, rebel against them, or find others using them to judge us, they affect our lives as writers. Most people secretly believe themselves have a book in them which they would write if they could only find the time. And there's some truth to this notion. A lot of people do have a book in them. That is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same thing as being a writer. Or, to put it in the more sinister way, everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence. It also, because of the nature of activity, a deeply symbolic role. As a grave digger. You're not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people's projections, their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions. You represent mortality whether you like it or not. And so it is with any public role, including that of the writer, capital W. But also as with any public role, the significance of that role is emotional and symbolic. Content varies over time. I love that. And finally, we have R.L. stine, another one that you will know. People say, what advice do you have for people who want to be writers? I say, they don't really need advice. They know they want to be writers and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it. And I've always felt this is a calling for me as someone who has gone through school, gone through lots of different jobs, to discover that this is the career I want. And it's gonna take probably a lifetime to achieve the kind of success that I want. You have this feeling inside you're not gonna give up. Even if it doesn't equate to whatever. There's this compelling, like it said, compulsion to write in whatever capacity that means. So I hope you enjoyed that. I just wanted.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: Thorn Creative, where beautiful websites for authors are brought to life. No matter what stage you're at with your writing, your stories deserve a dedicated space to shine. Whether you're just starting out or have a bookshelf full of bestsellers, your website is the hub of your author business. Finding everything you and your books offer together. Thorne Creative can nurture all aspects of redesigning your old story site or start afresh from the initial design. They can provide ongoing hosting and maintenance to marketing your books online, saving you time, money and stress trying to wrangle your site yourself. An author website built by Thorne Creative can easily direct readers to your favorite retailers, your publisher, or simply set you up to sell to them direct. The options are endless. Thorn Creative have worked with many authors across all genres and know what goes into good, functional working author websites to sell books. Head on over to thorncreative.comau websitesforauthors to read author and publisher testimonials and to see what they offer and some of the sites they've created.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Shane is a biochemist turned teacher turned experimental farmer who decided to add author to the list. He writes weekly nonfiction essays about his passion for transformative agriculture on substack at Zero Input Agriculture and released a short non fiction book, Taming the Apocalypse on the enormous potential for novel domestications. Under the pen name Haldane B. Doyle, he has also released the world's first and only science fiction novel based purely on biological technology called Our called Our Vitreous Womb. He loved appearing on other people's podcasts so much that he started two of his very own the Zero Input Agriculture podcast launching Any Day now and Sci Fi High Five, analyzing and highlighting the best books in the fourth self published Science Fiction competition. Amazing. Shane, welcome to the Hybrid Author Podcast.
[00:15:01] Speaker D: Thank you very much for having me on.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: We're absolutely thrilled to have you. You can tell us, how did you come to be a writer?
[00:15:07] Speaker D: So there's two threads that came together. I had that idea of a science fiction story based purely on biological science. A hard Sci Fi. There's a lot of soft ones, but I wanted a hard one that's been bugging around in my head for over a decade. I then reached a burnout point doing my experimental farming where I just needed to not think about it for a while and I couldn't leave the farm because I had ongoing responsibilities. So I took a holiday into my imagination and sat down to write my first novel. Yeah, it took me three tries. I got well into it twice, realized it wasn't working, and started again. And I nearly gave up at that point. But A Covid Fever Dream gave me the idea to break the story into four long novellas that tell the story from different points of view but have the same thread character tying it all together.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Wow, that sounds really interesting. And from a Covid Fever, well, you.
[00:16:01] Speaker D: Got to make lemonade, right?
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Oh yeah, something Good came out of it then. Well now that sounds really interesting. And are you, are you an avid reader of this genre like the science fiction and stuff? Is this what you like?
[00:16:12] Speaker D: Let's just say I'm an avid DNFer.
I browse extensively.
My tastes, I really love when someone takes a risk and does something unusual. I really love self published science fiction because TRAD is becoming so cautious about taking risks. That's why I'm loving digging through the self published sci fi competition. There's all sorts of crazy things that you'd never expect to see.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, that would be really exciting. So obviously you have experience, you know, self publishing world and you are also blogging on Substack. Can you tell us the biggest contrast you found between the two? The audience listening probably familiar with self publishing, but not so much substack. So maybe define what that when it comes to building a readership and maintaining engagement for both, how do they differ?
[00:16:58] Speaker D: So it's interesting. I went into writing novels, you know, very. I think you have to go into it with grand, probably delusional plans to get you through the amount of work it takes to get a book finished. But I've found Substack much more rewarding. I was doing all this work on the farm anyway, so I started a WordPress blog, got some following and then Substack started to kind of rise in popularity. So I'm like, I'm just going to move it over to Substack for a whole bunch of potential advantages. And the growth in readership, the organic growth in readership without me having to lift a finger was just amazing. It was night and day, it was a free blog to begin and I had readers emailing me demand that I turn on paid subscriptions because I just wanted to support what I was doing. And contrast that to having to chase people around to read your novel, even if you give it away for free. It's night and day. It comes down to the time commitment more than the price you pay to read a novel. If you buy a novel, you're kind of putting that pressure on yourself as a reader to put 4 to 12 hours of your life aside in quiet to get through it. But with the substack post, a blog post, even the fairly long ones, it might take you the time it takes to eat lunch. You can sit there and read somebody's thoughts on a particular topic. So I think that makes it much easier for up and coming writers to let people give them a chance. Whereas yeah, if you put a novel in front of Them. A lot of people are reluctant to.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Even open the COVID Yeah, no, fair enough. So I take it Substack. So I've heard of it. I haven't gone over there and I haven't even actually looked at it. But in my mind, I guess it's like, like one of these. Is it like a subscription type model, like masterclass and things like that?
[00:18:40] Speaker D: You're paying like there's a wide variety of ways you can monetize or put your content behind paywalls. So for me, for example, my posts got free for a week and then they go behind a paywall. I really love that because anyone can keep up with what I'm doing and they have an incentive to read it quickly because if they wait too long, it's going to disappear. And the people who come to my work later and want to, you know, they want to read more, they've got an incentive to pay the subscription so they can read my back catalog. I think it's a really good balance.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: It's like blogging, blog posts and articles, short form content.
[00:19:12] Speaker D: So yeah, it started as a blogging platform. So short form posts, mostly nonfiction. But more people are trying to use it for fiction.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:19] Speaker D: More recently they've added audio and video hosting so you can make podcasts. It could be the new YouTube. YouTube has a lot of problems. Even very successful creators are abandoning YouTube because it's so unrewarding and unreliable, I think would be the way to put it. Even though you potentially can reach, you know, billions of people, you spend so much time turning your work inside out to make it fit the algorithm, which keeps changing. And then you're constantly worrying about being censored or demonetized. If you do, you know, the thing that's suddenly no longer allowed. Substack has a very low moderation policy. You really have to do something terrible to have your blogs taken down, which has pluses and minuses. Look at YouTube. A lot of its content is directed towards very young children, cartoons and silly things. Substack, I think, is more for an.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Adult reading audience, more intelligent.
[00:20:09] Speaker D: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what I love about Substack is that it's not algorithm driven, it's subscription driven. And your subscriber list, you have access to people's emails. If you want to leave Substack, you can take your audience with you. They don't keep them at ransom.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: That's really good. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. So how much time are you putting into blogging on Substack?
[00:20:30] Speaker D: Do so much on the farm that it's pretty easy to put out a weekly post. They're normally 1 to 3,000 words.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:20:36] Speaker D: I'll also read books on related topics and do reviews on them and like bounce my thoughts around. Occasionally I'll slip in some short fiction just to. That usually gets the lowest engagement. I don't push that too far. But it's an audience that I've cultivated around nonfiction. Yeah, you have to think about who you're talking to. But I'm very wary of audience capture. Like if I ever feel like I ever absolutely can't say something, I'm just not that kind of person. I don't care enough. But yeah, very low conscientiousness on that front.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Is it one of these platforms where you follow other bloggers on there and you're sort of seeing not what they do, but it's. It's kind of a community. Bloggers follow bloggers. Is it like that or not really?
[00:21:20] Speaker D: Yes. Yeah. Though I. I think I follow more people in genetics and history and economics and all those kind of fields because I'm. I'm interested in how they relate to experimental biology.
Most of the like permaculture, gardening content on there I'm not as interested in because I've kind of seen it all before.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: No, that's really interesting question that keeps coming up in my mind with this sort of type of style, I suppose is how do you end up getting people to pay for content like this when there's. I wonder if it's just learning from a specific person. I know quite a few WA authors that are on it and it's actually YA fiction people that are coming to mind. But they are the types of things that I see their headers being, which is stuff that I want to know. I suppose they're selling their knowledge. There's one lady who's been in the industry for ages and she's. I won't say names and stuff, but she's. It's kind of like the first time she's talking about stuff quite freely. Suppose people are wanting to pay for that. It's content. I guess my question is, is the content different on Substack than anywhere else and is that why people are paying for it? Is this what makes it successful? I suppose. Do you think?
[00:22:30] Speaker D: I think the trick with substack and fiction is it's probably going to be like a serialized long form fiction.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Oh, sorry. They are not actually sharing fiction, but nonfiction. Sorry, they are fiction writers, but they are sharing nonfiction stuff. So. But. And it does seem like Quite opinion based as well. Like their thoughts on stuff, their thoughts on the industry, why she's stepping away from certain things and how she's not made lots of money in a particular thing. Like, I guess, and I see these titles and I'm like, oh, I want to hear what she thinks about that.
She doesn't share that anywhere else. I suppose she's charging for that, which is fair enough. But I'm just thinking, what makes Substack special that people are paying for content? Is it because it's not found anywhere else?
[00:23:16] Speaker D: I think that it's probably where Substack can work for people. It's about finding a niche that nobody else has really fought to delve into. Because, like, if you try and do something really, really niche on YouTube, for example, the algorithm is going to do absolutely nothing for you. You'll never be seen organically. Even people searching for those topics might have a hard time finding you. Whereas Substack, I think, yeah, the growth model seems to be much more diverse.
I post my updates, my weekly posts on social media like Facebook, for example. I'm a member of a whole lot of different groups of relevant subtopics. If that week's topic is tomatoes, I'll go to the tomato breeders site and put my post up. And I find the way I jump around between those different intersecting niches on various social media groups means I don't oversaturate any one channel. Like, if you, if you're going into a Facebook group every week and posting, oh, here's my other blog post, people get sick of that really quickly. I think there's a. There's a rhythm to it. There's a pacing. Like once or twice a year for most of those very niche social media groups is ideal just to start gathering people interested in your other topics on Substack.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Don't annoy people.
[00:24:28] Speaker D: It's a fine balancing act.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Self publishing offers a lot of control, while Substack is, you know, you're obviously getting immediate feedback from readers and things. How do you feel these differences have impacted, like, your creative process and the way that you structure your writing.
[00:24:45] Speaker D: So I think Substack has really been useful for all of my writing, both the nonfiction and the fiction. Just getting me in that habit of every week sitting down for an hour or two and putting a topic together. Have you heard of Heinlein's Rules for Writing?
[00:25:00] Speaker A: No.
[00:25:01] Speaker D: There's some interesting YouTube videos and I'll have to send you a link, but basically Heinlein was completely against the modern obsession with editing and rewriting and just like chopping and changing and like agonizing over every word. His writing habit was to write a new short story every week and just keep churning out things and not going back over them too much.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: I like him.
[00:25:20] Speaker D: As you're developing your writing skills, you can train yourself to expect to have to do all huge amounts of like, painful editing. Or you can train yourself to get it mostly right on the first try. Remember the old days, people would write essays in class by hand. And there's a set of skills you need in planning and execution so you don't have to cross out whole paragraphs and waste time. The ease of editing on digital platforms like Word on a computer has drawn us towards doing more editing than we really need to do. So yeah, I'd encourage people to look up Heinlein's rules of writing.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: If you shoot me through the link, I'd love to see that.
[00:25:58] Speaker D: My way of putting it is that editing is like plastic surgery, where a few expertly applied small touches can be transformative. But if you keep chopping, eventually you end up with the Frankenstein's monster, where nothing's quite in the place that it feels right.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Michael Jackson.
[00:26:15] Speaker D: I love that.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: That's a good way to describe it.
[00:26:18] Speaker D: This is one reason I really love writing my novel as four novellas. Two of those and there are about 40,000 words each. I find that is the comfortable length I like for long form fiction. When I read a novel that's like 80,000 words, it often feels like they've forced themselves to pad it out to be a real book. I love putting a novel's worth of everything combacted down into 40,000 words. And it's in this weird no man's land. In terms of length, there's 30,000 words and under, definitely a novella and 50,000 words and above a novel. But there's this weird intermediate zone where almost nobody writes. I like being experimental and getting to the point, so. But the advantage of that with the writing is I would draft like one of those 40,000 word novellas. I did actually twice get to the end of it, put it away, put it aside, come back and do the editing. And I'm like, it just doesn't have the heart. It's really hard to inject spirit after the fact. So I threw that draft away and I rewrote it. Rather than spending three times as long moving one word here and there.
Very painful. But if you want to be a writer, you can't train yourself to resent writing. Like the idea that You've wasted time putting down 30,000 words and not published it. If you're going to be a writer, you have to accept that there's going to be a lot of writing. That doesn't make it the final chopping block totally.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: But then you've got to look at the lessons you learn from writing those manuscripts. So for me, starting out, I've probably got about, I don't even know, but I've got quite a lot of manuscripts that I've labored years, you know, slogged over and had rejected by traditional publishers. It's too painful to go back because I've spent so many time on these manuscripts. They deserve to be looked at again because now as I've advanced as a writer in my career and things like that, I could probably go back and look at the story and realize, oh, this is what's not working working or this is whatever. I think because I came, I did my uni degree and it kind of teaches you at uni like to be quite literary and focus on like language and conventions. And I, I'm a commercial fiction writer and I have an older voice and I've finally realized all these things. And I was lost in the children's fiction for a while. They are different age groups and stuff. And so these manuscripts reflect that. But I think because I was more focused on language than say story plot elements, that's where it falls short. But because I've spent so much time, each one even like self publishing in my first year of uni, to me that was like a self, I had crippling self doubt. That project was years in the making and actually put it out there. But because of the self doubt I had and I was telling people it was crap and all this stuff, that was a lesson. That was a lesson because I never had it professionally edited. That was my self doubt lesson. The next one, the first manuscript I wrote took years. A YA fiction was like apart from changing the names, it was just my story as from adolescence that taught me discipline, that I could actually sit down and finish your work. But I never. That that's not going to come out. Like I'm not going to go back. The title I love, but I'm not going to use that. So definitely these, even though there was, you know, there was not money earned or anything like that, there's no product out there trying to earn me money. Each project helped me grow as a writer. So I think there's lessons in those writings that you're talking about there. They're definitely not wasted.
[00:29:36] Speaker D: The lessons I learned from those novellas was that there's a window of opportunity when you're preparing to get into the drafting phase. And if you move too soon, you don't have a good grasp on the characters. You can have the plot and all the details laid out, but if you don't really feel the character, then it's very difficult to make those sentence by sentence decisions as you're drafting. And you, you tend to just be kind of going through the motions and ticking off boxes. The contrast is if you wait too long, then the excitement about the story can kind of stagnate.
And yeah, I definitely find I need to put about a month aside to write every morning and get 40,000 words drafted in that time. And I also one of the reasons I chose to do it that way was to make it easier as a starting writer. Running a half marathon is more than twice as easy as running a full marathon because it's that second half of when you're still running that you're likely to hit the wall.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: That makes sense. So how long have you been blogging on Substack and how long have you been self publishing books as well?
[00:30:42] Speaker D: So I released the first self published science fiction autumn last year. That's 18 months ago. Two years of getting into the writing leading up to that. The nonfiction book I self published earlier in the year was like six months ago. And it's amazing. Like it's what would it be like 20% as long as the fiction I put out and it's been out for a third as much time selling much more easily than the novel. I think it has a lot of advantages. But I should point out that I am allergic to marketing the way that you're supposed to market self published books of like Amazon ads and social media ads and all that kind of stuff. My position, my strategy that I'm taking is that I want to focus on writing now. When I've got a back catalog of four or five books I'm proud of, that's when I'll consider paid advertising. I think it's more likely to have a positive return on investment at that stage. There's also a chance I will blow up spontaneously just from being so weird before that comes along. I just need the right person to notice me and it might happen without being that's my fantasy. I should point out I'm enjoying anonymity because I like writing odd things just for me. I look at people like George Martin with his final book of A Song of Ice and Fire that everyone's breathing down his neck for. I can't imagine anything worse. What a nightmare. It's a living nightmare. I wouldn't want to do that.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Be careful what you wish for.
[00:32:07] Speaker D: With substack, that's been really good for continuous income. It's completely outearned anything I've done with self published books. Yeah, but the second I stop putting out the weekly posts, it's probably going to drop off pretty rapidly. It's like a shark. If it stops swimming, it'll die.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: How do you keep up momentum with posts and publishing your books and farming?
[00:32:27] Speaker D: Well, I'm lucky. There's always something happening on the farm that's interesting. I'm always doing new projects. I can pad that out by doing book reviews, theoretical analyses and essays. I'm not worried about running out of stuff. I'm about to launch the podcast talking to interesting people. I was doing that through another group and decided to do it solo and enhance the substack. With the novels, I see potential for long term passive income, particularly if they're like one of a kind and like, you know, might gather some kind of cult following over time. Maybe that's not as true for romance and mystery novels where they're more of a kind of impulse buy. They're like a snack they. And it's a much bigger audience, but more of a churn. Maybe I'm wrong with that. I don't know that end of the writing world as much, but I get the impression that sci fi is a very small readership and very fragmented. Like the people who love space operas love space operas. The people who love aliens with tentacles. Doing the United nations in space. It's very fragmented and I've picked a niche that didn't really exist before. I tried it. I haven't made things easy. It's another reason why I haven't done much in the way of conventional paid advertising. I've just let it sit there and see what it does.
[00:33:37] Speaker A: No, but it's quite smart as well. Like I was speaking to a lady and she said the same. If you're doing paid ads, you probably start to see a turnover if you've got three books rather than just one. Everybody's story's different and the way everybody's doing stuff's different. There's not one way of doing stuff which is pretty cool. You've got to find your way. It sounds like you definitely have found your way. Whether you think it's, you know, it sounds like you're.
[00:33:59] Speaker D: I'm definitely my way. I'm Starting. I'm starting. I should point out too that one. One thing. When I started writing fiction, there were two major goals. One was to finish it and actually get it out in the world and not like, spend two years and end up with nothing. But I also wanted to get to the end of that process and want to continue writing. I was very aware of protecting my own motivation and desire to enjoy the art. The more I started tinkering on the edges of, like, the whole world of marketing, of like, selling your own product, the more I realized with my psychology, if I do that, I'm never going to want to write a book ever again. It's just going to suck the fun out of it. Yeah, yeah, you have to. You have to, like, nourish your heart through a creative process because it's, it's.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: It's. Oh, gosh, it's hard to describe, isn't it? Like, with the process and stuff. And sometimes it can be, like, wonderful and other times it can be. It can feel quite hard. I think you have to love it and you have to enjoy it to do it. And I don't see. I wouldn't do it if I didn't feel those things because it's hard enough when you love it.
They hate, and it's still hard enough. Why would you do it? You know, there's probably easier things.
[00:35:10] Speaker D: Oh. I've got one little tip before we move on. Something that worked well for my creative process that I haven't seen other people talk about. So I would have an outline, you know, nicely polished up before drafting. When I was in the drafting phase, I got in the habit of reading the next day's chapter outline before I went to bed, turning it over in my subconscious all night. As soon as I get up in the morning, I would read the end of yesterday's drafting without editing anything and get straight into the flow with what I'd been like, ruminating on during the night. And I'm a big believer that a lot of that creative process comes from the subconscious. And you have to give it the right opportunity to do that work to its best potential.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that's absolutely gold. I think I've spent well used to in the past. I've realized that it's a bit of a procrastination now. If people sit and then they reread the stuff that they've wrote before, like, they're effectively losing the time that they've got that day. And it works for some people, I guess. But it sounds like you're ahead of the game, doing it the night before and then you can just get right into it the next day.
[00:36:09] Speaker D: And particularly for getting in the heads of the characters and giving them a chance to bounce ideas and the conflicts off each other. I found it made. I look at it this way, like I'm doing another eight hours of work every day on the novel while I'm asleep, assuming I get to sleep. You don't want to wake up at 2 in the morning, feel like you have to get out of bed and stare at the bright screen and type something out.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's it. Well, for authors who want to self publish their books versus building a consistent blog on presence on Substack, what factors should they weigh in terms of long term financial sustainability and audience growth?
[00:36:42] Speaker D: It's interesting, particularly if you're writing fiction. I'm not sure if substack has a naturally fiction oriented audience at this point in history. That could change in the future if more fiction authors start moving over there. I definitely see it as a viable alternative to building your own author website. It's very easy to set up. It sends emails straight to people's inboxes like there's no intermediation as long as you don't end up in the spam filter. You could potentially get some monetization mechanisms through substack. There's room for experimenting. I think it's got potential. It's working better for non fiction focused content than fiction. But there's gotta be a way to crack the code, I'm sure.
[00:37:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, how do you see like substack and self publishing complementary platforms for an author career? Do you think they're going hand in hand? Are you plugging your books as well?
[00:37:32] Speaker D: I don't know how many sales I'm getting of my fiction via substack readers. It's definitely not zero. Maybe my numbers are so low that it's hard to draw any broad conclusions at this stage in development. I would encourage people to give Substack a go. It isn't algorithm driven like TikTok and YouTube. That's like all that viral garbage that just clogs those social media sites. Because it's all about the algorithm and you winning that winner takes all kind of competition. And for the control that it gives you in keeping in touch with your followers, with the people who decide to subscribe to your particular substack channel and that it's constantly growing too, that audio and video and notes are being added too. That's kind of like Twitter. It's a really interesting Little like evolutionary experiment, seeing how you have to get those ingredients of an interface and a community working just right before it takes off. Remember when Twitter was relatively new and it was growing really rapidly, the authors who started promoting themselves on there early in that growth phase had a really easy time like building a big following and getting a payoff. Whereas if you go onto Twitter now it's a mature platform, the numbers are stable, and building a following is much harder. I see these platforms as having a life cycle, and if you can identify one that has potential relatively early in that growth phase and jump in and invest before it's obvious worth doing, then you've got a better chance of it actually paying off for you without having to like, you know, spend. And you're good friends with Jody. He spent so much time on Twitter to build a following. Does that actually translate into book sales? Same with the YouTube channels, the, the fiction channels that had like millions of subscribers and then they put a book out yet some sales, but the drop off rate from millions of subscribers to maybe thousands of readers. I don't know, it just seems like a really inefficient way to reach people who care about what you're doing.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: It comes back to, you can have all the numbers, but if they're not engaged, what's the point? You should have a handful of engaged people rather than thousands of followers. It sounds like Substack is kind of quality over quantity.
[00:39:42] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: If you're building people that are actually that care about what you're doing because they are paying and following you. So how can you, how with Substack do you. Because obviously I haven't been on there, which I'm definitely going to go and check it out. But how do you engage with your readers? Is there comments or are you in some sort of chat room? Like, how are you directing them?
[00:40:03] Speaker D: You can open for comments on any post. It can be only for paying subscribers. Some popular blogs do that so you don't end up with like a comment section with like hundreds of comments that nobody reads. And again, like, it gives you that tuning ability to have quality over quantity and give a payoff to people who are supporting you.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So have you ever heard of Patreon and these sites? How have you heard of them?
[00:40:24] Speaker D: I have. I considered them for my novels, but the advice I got was that they work much better for people who have an established name and readership. That if you, if you're just coming out and you don't have name recognition, it's difficult to get over the thresholds for the Kickstarter and Patreon system.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: And I was just going to say like whether again Patreon, I've heard about it, but it sounds similar to Substack. I suppose that you're on there as a creator, you building a community and a following that's kind of paying and you're able to put whatever content you want up in it. I suppose.
[00:40:58] Speaker D: I recall changes in the terms of service for Patreon or Kickstarter because Patreon intermediates between you and your followers. You can't just leave and take your followers somewhere else. Substack is unusual in that regard. It keeps the site accountable to the content creators. We're a well known platform. We're going to put the screws on our content creators because they have the potential to leave.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: What's daunting about these sites and building a following is that it's not yours and that it can just be zipped away by like. But you know, that's pretty cool if they allow you to keep your following. That's really interesting. What have you got going on in the future, Shane? You got your books coming out and more subs? Sorry.
[00:41:36] Speaker D: Yes, I have more fiction than I have more fiction lined up outlined than I have time to write. But I'm waiting until I sincerely want to write it. Probably when there's a drought and there's not much going on in the farm, I can take a month away and write the next installment. The first four books are a complete arc. The second, the book 5, 6 and 7 that I'm working on. They follow on from the story but they're kind of their own thing. The most interesting thing I'm doing at the moment is I'm analyzing all of the entries to the self published Science Fiction competition. So that's my Haldane B. Doyle substack. I'm calling it Sci Fi High Five. If people are interested in an analysis of 188 self published titles. I go through the titles, cover images, blurbs and do tournaments and tier lists, analyze the factors that were the most important for making particular books stand out. I hope to read five entries out of all of them that really stand out in full and then bring the authors on to talk about their books and also recommend an author that they've read that they liked in the self publishing world so that I can start a kind of chain of high fives. Hence the name.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: Oh that's cool. Yeah, I love that. That's really awesome. And how did you come up with.
[00:42:43] Speaker D: That idea probably through my frustration of other alternatives for marketing Self published Sci Fi I think it's very niche. I go on every podcast I can find but there's not many of them. The TV and movie side of things really dominates and all the really interesting stuff is happening in the self published corner of the genre and it needs more attention.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:43:05] Speaker D: So yeah, that's my little bit to help out. It's self interest too. Like I'm shining a light on my own work so maybe I'll get a few extra sales out of it. But I just like the spirit of freedom and creativity that the Internet originally promised and it's still there but you have to go looking for it.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I love that you're a farmer. I think all your interests and passions are merging into one which is really cool. Well thank you so much Shane. It's been incredible talking to you. Can you tell our listeners knows you know where can they find everything you're doing right now online offline?
[00:43:37] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. You can check out my Zero Input Agriculture blog at Substack, which will soon have a podcast added onto it for those in the know if you I'm name dropping. I recently interviewed David Holmgren about the potential of breeding crops in Permaculture. Co Founder of Permaculture there's your name recognition. I talk to people from mosquito crop breeders to visionaries. I'm really impressed, amazed at the range of people that I've managed to lure in to come and chat to me. So that's one thing. You can read my non fiction book about domestication reinventing like the whole of agricultural civilization Taming the Apocalypse. That's a short ebook and audiobook is available if you sign up to my Zero Input Agriculture substack as well and you can read my fiction. It's our Vitreous Womb and that's on Amazon and Kobo and I think that's it. I think that's everything.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: Oh that's amazing. What kind of crops do you have?
[00:44:32] Speaker D: I am particularly working on staple and tree crops. Probably the most exciting project I'm doing. There's a Jurassic era pine tree in my area that gets basketball sized cones covered in spines. It was a major crop for indigenous people. I'm gathering the genetic diversity of that crop and trying to hybridize it with a South American relative that drifted away on Gondwanaland like 60 million years ago.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:44:56] Speaker D: So most domestic crops have a hybrid origin. So this is my best chance of creating a new staple tree crop that can grow everywhere from the Tropics down to quite cold in environments with a bit of breeding work.
[00:45:09] Speaker A: That's exciting and sounds really cool. Yeah.
[00:45:11] Speaker D: I have to stay alive for the next 20, 30 years to finish that project. Well, to really start that project.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Take care of yourself then.
[00:45:19] Speaker D: I will, I will. I'm dodging venomous snakes all over the place.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: Oh, it's hilarious. Do you know anything about vineyards? I'm interested in that at the moment.
[00:45:26] Speaker D: A bit. A bit. I know that the grape genus, there's like this huge diversity of wild species and only a couple of them have been mixed together to make European grapes. And a little bit of work in America with muscadine grapes. Muscadine grapes that do much better in the subtropics here.
But yeah, the potential to breed all sorts of wild and crazy grapes that nobody's ever seen or tasted before and to make them productive, it's huge. It's huge. It's such simple work that anybody with a passion and a bit of a.
[00:45:57] Speaker A: Garden could start doing amazing. Yeah. Well, you'll be. I'm going to be touching base with you about that.
Sounds like you know all your stuff.
[00:46:05] Speaker D: Brilliant. I'll be happy to help.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much, Shane. It was wonderful talking to you.
[00:46:09] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: So there you have it, folks, the truly unique and inspiring Shane. I love how hybrid Shane is and how unique his voice is in the industry. We can all certainly learn so much from him and his experimental nature, which is what being hybrid is all about. Next time on the Hybrid Author podcast, we have a loner sold from me and I'll be chatting on hybrid social media strategies for authors. I wish you well in your author adventure this next week. That's it from me. Bye for now. That's the end for now.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: Authors. I hope you are further forward in.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Your author adventure after listening, and I.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Hope you'll listen next time.
[00:46:52] Speaker B: Remember to head on over to the.
[00:46:53] Speaker C: Hybrid Author website at www.hybridauthor.com to get your free author pass.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: It's bye for now.
