143: August Q & A

 

It's our monthly Q&A episode! Topics discussed this month include:

  • using scrivener 4:04

  • how to gain confidence in your writing 5:02

  • using publisher's marketplace when querying 12:27

  • editing as my full-time job 16:42

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August Q & A

Hi friends, welcome to your big creative life podcast. I'm adjusting my chair as I'm recording. You might notice the sound quality is a little bit different. I'm recording at my co working space that I go to sometimes, and I forgot my microphone. I have a Yeti microphone that I use for the podcast, but I forgot it. And I have to record the podcast today because it's going to be released next week, and it's a whole scheduling thing. So anyways, we're just recording on the computer this week. Hope it sounds okay.

 

So before we get into our questions for this month, which we have four questions to dive into, I want to give you a little bit of a heads up about something that is coming in October. So I created a new program called Novel Jumpstart that launched in May, and it was an eight week program for writers who want some help writing the first 50 pages of their novel. And it was like a hybrid of a coaching program, where we met every week for eight weeks, you get access to an online course, and then I gave everyone feedback on their 50 pages once the eight weeks were done and I decided to launch it again, and I want to do it so it kind of lines up with NaNoWriMo a bit.

 

If you're participating in NaNoWriMo, awesome. If not, it will not matter at all. It doesn't really tie into it. But I was just thinking about the timing, because I knew I wanted to run it again in the fall. So Novel Jumpstart is going to be starting on Monday, October 14, and it's going to launch like registration will open on October 7. So I just want to give you a heads up, if you didn't do the round in May and it's something you're interested in, then just stay tuned. I'll announce when it's open, but yeah, it's going to open October 7, and then we'll start October 14. So this is for novels fiction genre if you've started writing it, but you haven't gotten very far, or if you just have an idea and you haven't even started writing yet, either way, this will be helpful for you, and I wanted to do it starting in October because I want to wrap it up before the holidays. So it's going to go October 14 through  December 9.

 

We'll wrap up before the holidays start, and November, which is the month that NaNoWriMo is in, is right in the middle of that. So this kind of works out great if you do want to participate in NaNoWriMo, because you'll have the first few weeks of the program to just get clear on your story, get clear on your characters, start writing, and then do a lot of work in November, finish it up at the beginning of December, and then you can send me the 50 pages, and I'll give you feedback so that you have a really good foundation for your story. If you're not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it's a program. It happens every November, and the challenge is for you to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November.

 

Okay, so our first question for this month is, how do you Scrivener to write your novel? I'm overwhelmed. Lol, this is an easy one for me to answer and say that I don't know. I've never used Scrivener before. I imagine there are a ton of tutorials and resources online, though, like if you check YouTube, even just reels or tiktoks. I imagine there are people who create content specifically around Scrivener who could do that, or even just authors talking about their own experience using it. But yeah, I've, I've never used it, so I can't answer that question for you. Sorry, I've used Google Docs and Microsoft Word. I might explore Scrivener at some point, but right now, I'm just happy with Word. I'm writing the book that I'm working on right now I'm writing it in Word, and it works for me. It's easy and yeah, so I just, I haven't felt the need. Explorer Scrivener, maybe someday.

 

So a lot of people do that challenge and but again, you don't have to, it's just the timing works well if that's something that you're considering. So I want to throw, throw that out there now, just so you can think about it. Of course, let me know if you want more information on any of that. It was a really, really good cohort in May, so I'm excited to launch it again. So I'll share more about that as it's as it's approaching.

 

Okay, next question, how to use Publishers Marketplace when querying? Okay? This is a great question, because it can feel overwhelming. Publishers Marketplace is a essentially a database of deals that are happening in the traditional publishing world. It doesn't include every single deal that's made ever when a publisher buys a book, but it contains a good number of them. So it keeps track of what agent worked on the deal, the agent that represents the author, who the author was, what their book title is, who it sold to. Sometimes it will give an indication of how much it sold for, but not always. And so you can see deals that are being made. You can see agencies that are very active agents, that are very active editors, that publishers that are very active and it just gives you an idea of the kinds of things that are being acquired, which is really, really helpful for you if you are wanting to query.

 

So I can tell you first how I used Publishers Marketplace when I was gathering lists of agents, because I've gone through this experience twice. I've queried twice for my first agent and then the agent that I have now. And when I was the first time around, what I did is I looked at the top agents. So Publishers Marketplace lets you search by a number of different things. You can search by editors, you can search by agencies like the entire literary agency, or you can search by the deal maker, the agent. So I searched for the top agents for debut authors. I've talked about this before. I don't know why I did that. I I don't know. I guess in hindsight, maybe it was like I should have been looking at women's fiction, because that's what my first book was. But for some reason, it just felt important to me, as a debut author, to find agents who represented debut authors. But what I what I did is I just searched by debut author and then pulled up a list of the top agents. Now, why I did this is because I wanted to see what agents were active in that space.

 

I wanted to see who was making deals pretty frequently, pretty regularly, because that showed me that those agents were kind of on top of their game, right? If there's an agent who hasn't made a deal since 2018 and they've only, you know, represented a genre that I don't write in, then I know that they're not going to be a good fit for me to query. Also, if an agent has ever only placed books at Digital only imprints or small presses where you don't technically need an agent, then for me, that was a bit concerning, and I wanted to stay away from that because I wanted to try to get a big five book deal, like I wanted to try to sell my book to a big publisher.

 

So, yeah, I just, I just looked at agents who were very active in that space, and came up with a list of people who I felt like would be a good fit. Because what I did once I got that list is I then looked to see, okay, so here are the top 15 agents. Let's say then I clicked onto their profile to see what kinds of books they were representing, and if I felt like they were good fits in terms of genre for me, women's fiction at the time, then I would add them to my list to possibly query. And I just came up with a list at first. I didn't even check to see if they were open for queries. At first, I just came up with the list using Publishers Marketplace. The second time around, I did a similar thing, but I focused on thrillers. I think it's best in hindsight, again, I probably should have just looked at genre so you can search agents by genre I believe, and just see again, same thing, who's active in this space, who's making a lot of deals at big five publishers, and, yeah, again, just coming up with that initial list, I in terms of strategy, I didn't only look at agents who are extremely active. Like, there are some agents who make, like, 15 deals a year. They're extremely busy. They're extremely active. They work at big agencies. They've got Junior editors working or agents working under them, like in the apprenticeship kind of structure.

 

So I didn't only want to query big agents at big agencies, but that's that's where I started my search. Before I use Publishers Marketplace, I had also looked at books that were I thought were similar to mine, or similar in some way, to see if I could find any acknowledgements who that author. Agent was, and I added them to the list. So then once I had a few of those names that I cross referenced, I looked at Publishers Marketplace, and was like, okay, you know, are these agents active? What kinds of deals are they making? What kinds of clients do they represent? And then if they felt like good fits, then I would keep them on the list. So yeah, that's, that's what I would recommend doing, is looking by genre, looking at deals, looking at the kinds of deals that they're making, the kinds of clients they represent, the kinds of, yeah, just all of those things.

 

But why I don't want to rule out any authors who or any agents who may not have a ton of deals under their belt, is there are new agents who are hungry for writers to represent. They're looking for authors to add to their list, and they might just only have, you know, five deals that they've made because they've been apprentice. They've been working as an apprentice under a bigger agent, and now they're finally stepping out and gaining clients on their own. And so I didn't want to rule out those people. But I just, you know, I think it was a balance. For me. It was a balance of big agents who have been doing this for years, who have tons of deals with more junior, newer agents who are actively building up their list, who are at very reputable, very established, well known agencies, but don't yet have a huge client list. That's how I I looked at at the data from Publishers Marketplace.

 

Specifically, you do have to pay to get on Publishers Marketplace, but I think it's worth it just to get that list. Because you know, you could easily, like I could have easily just stopped at looking at books that were similar to mine and looking in the acknowledgments to find agents, but and then build my list from that, but like, what if those agents hadn't taken on any new clients in the last four years, then I would be kind of wasting my time getting ready to query them, because, you know, they're probably not looking for New authors right now. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's how I approach that. And I think it's, it's, you can also look at agencies, if you want, like, the other way you could do this as look at the agencies who represent a lot of authors in the genre that you write, and then go to their website and kind of peruse the agents and see okay, are any of these agents a good fit? You could do it that way as well.

 

Okay, next question. I have so many questions, but I'll pick the main one. What do you do when you start to get down on yourself about your writing? Some days, I feel great about it, and then others, I'm really hard on myself. How can I feel more confident with my writing. This is so common, and I think part of the answer for this is just acknowledging that this is part of something that this is just something that you're going to experience. There is no magic pill. There is no magical solution to build up your confidence so that you never feel hard on yourself again, and you never feel a lack of confidence about your writing. This is just something that's gonna it's gonna ebb and flow. Some days you will feel great, and some days you will feel like your writing is a pile of shit. So what part of part of my answer is just acknowledging and affirming that this is normal and that this is part of the process.

 

So accept how you're feeling like putting a name to it and accepting it and being like, this is just how it is for me when I acknowledge that and I recognize that, it's like it took some of the power out of out of it. And I was like, You know what my brain might be telling right me right now, that this page I just wrote is absolute trash, and it might be, but I don't care. I'm gonna keep going. I'm not gonna let it stop me. So that's why it's really important to acknowledge that one thing that I found that can really help with this feeling of, well, two things I'll say that can help with this feeling of developing confidence in your writing, number one is to come up with a list of things that you think you are doing well in your writing, in your manuscript, whatever you're working on.

 

Think of this as like a strengths list, or even like a form of a gratitude list, like, I'm so grateful that I can do this well. And these can be big things, like, if you say, I really write dialog well, like, that's one of my strengths. Okay, great. But then you also want to include really small things. Like, if you just finished up a really tense scene between two characters, and you're particularly proud of the way that the scene ends, because it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Put that on your list, like this particular scene, I really killed that ending of that scene like pat on the back. It's freaking great. So come up with a list, and you want to come up with at least 10 things, put this on a post it note. Put it on a sheet of paper somewhere close to your computer or wherever you write, so that you. And pull it out and read evidence.

 

When your brain tries to tell you that you don't know what you're doing and your writing is crap and whatever to recognize. Oh, wait, I yeah, I might not be the most perfect writer, or, like, the greatest writer on planet Earth, but, like, I'm doing these things really well, and that's going to start to retrain your brain to look at the evidence of actually, no I can do this, because I'm doing these things well. And then the other thing I was going to say with the confidence piece of it is just experience, just it's like gathering data, gathering experience to know that this is something that's going to ebb and flow.

 

But then also experience of writing, like the more that you write, the more that you develop this, you will just start to I don't know it's like, that feeling just sort of fades that, that inner voice that tries to tell you, Oh, you need to beat yourself up because this is terrible and this is wrong and this isn't working, whatever, that voice just kind of fades away because you have evidence that you've continued to write, you've continued to work through it, and that it's not, it doesn't have to stop you completely. One other thing that I think can help, I don't, I don't, it depends on your circumstance, but for me, this was huge, is taking writing classes and writing workshops and just gathering knowledge and information about the structure and the craft of writing, because that helped me feel more confident, like I was learning and I was improving as a writer. Yeah, I might not be where I want to be in terms of skill, but I'm learning and I'm getting better. I'm improving, and that helped up my confidence as well.

 

Last question that we have for this month is, editing your full time job. Can you talk about how you transitioned from day job, if so, like, how long it took, etc. So, editing, working as a book editor, a coach, this is my full time job. I quit my day job in, okay, I just had to pause the episode and go look, because I could not remember what year I quit my job in. So I started this, I started editing, started my business as a side hustle, and was able to quit my job in March of 2022 so it's been almost two and a half years since I quit. I was working at a law firm doing business intelligence, competitive intelligence, in the marketing department, and yeah, would just work on editing projects like on the side, I started out on Fiverr, and I did maybe, like, six projects before I left Fiverr to strike out on my own.

 

And part of that was building up confidence, part of that was gaining experience, etc. And then what really helped, what propelled me, I started Tiktok in, like, summer of 2021 I want to say, or was it 2020 I always get fuzzy when I talk about years. I'm pretty sure it was 2021 that I started. So started posting content because I was like, well, you know, I've got this editing business that's a side hustle right now. Like, let me see if I can build it up. And I started posting on Tiktok, and slowly started getting clients from that. And then it just got to a point where I felt safe enough, because I booked out a few months in advance. I was making not a ton of money, but enough where I felt like, okay, if I was doing this full time, I could devote more more attention and energy towards it and build it up. And then, you know, I was, I was making enough money where I felt safe taking the leap to quit my job.

 

So TikTok really helped. I think it was I got my first client from TikTok probably a few months after I started posting. Like it did, take a few months for it to kind of catch on. And I don't think I really promoted my services as an editor. When I started on Tiktok, I was just kind of, like more posting content and like getting my name out there. But then I got my first client, and then it that just Yeah, eventually. So probably, I think my first client was like August or September from Tiktok of 2021, not my first client ever, just from Tiktok. So once that happened, yeah, it was like seven months, I think, after so so basically, to answer your question about how long it took, I maybe a year and a half, two years.

 

I don't, I honestly can't remember, but yeah, it's, it's definitely scary to take that leap to transition, and what helped me feel comfortable doing it is that I had built up an. Email list, like I said, I had built up a client base, and I was booked out a few months in advance, so I at least knew I had a few months of wiggle room financially. Like, okay, at least I'm at least I'm secure for these few months. And I just felt like I was at capacity in terms of the projects that I could work on, the clients that I could work with, because I was trying to juggle it with my day job, and it just hit a point where I couldn't do both. So yeah, and I do have some episodes that talk about how I got started as a book editor, tips for new editors to get started. So you can check those out if you want, like more about how I got started. But yeah, this is my full time job. I'm grateful, and it's so nice to not work in corporate anymore.

 

There are some tough things that come from working for yourself, having your own business for sure, and it's not for everyone. The up and down part of it is not for everyone, but I'm so grateful to have this chance, and really, Tiktok changed it for me, like Tiktok changed my life, which is why, I mean, it's, it's end of August as I'm recording this, like I'm just, I have this pit in my stomach about Tiktok being banned, because it's made such a huge difference in my life. It's still where, like, 80% of my clients find me. And there is this big part of me that worries about my business and how it's going to impact it if Tiktok does end up getting banned, which I think is set to go into effect at the beginning of 2025.

 

I need to research that and see where that is in terms of legal challenges and everything. But anyways, I was a bit of a rant about Tiktok. But, yeah, check out those episodes if you want some more information about my path, how I got started, all that good stuff. All right. Well, thank you for listening to our August Q and A episode. If you have a question that you would like me to answer, you can submit it at the link in the description of this episode, and I will answer it for the September episode at the end of the month. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf