S01E04: When money means mayhem

In this week’s episode, Samantha and Matilda talk about their money mindset!

By next week, Sam and Matilda will have collected information on the platforms they use to self publish, and discuss business plans. 

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with: The Deathless - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deathless-Frances-June/dp/B0915V5L6F

Most recent book: Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/fVXwW3j

MATILDA IG: @matildaswiftauthor

Website: MatildaSwift.com

Book to start with: https://books2read.com/TheSlayoftheLand (book #1 of The Heathervale Mysteries)

Most recent book: https://books2read.com/ButterLatethanNever (book #3 of The Slippery Spoon Mysteries)

Mentioned on the show:

Write to Riches by Renee Rose (also check out her Author Abundance Central group on Facebook): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RW43WWS/

Your Journey Into Abundance by H L Savino:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087D4CXT2/

We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers (she also has a podcast called Hello Seven): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BYYMZG3/

Become a Fearless Writer by Nina Harrington: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071R9X1JG/

5 Steps to Author Success by Rachel McLean (turns out it doesn’t have ‘Bestseller’ in the title, but Matilda was close): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MG97Q15/

Six Figure Authors Podcast (worth listening to the backlist and also keeping on your feed as they sometimes add new episodes): https://6figureauthors.com/

Transcript:

Welcome to your next step of the self-publishing mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of young adult books about magic, myths, and monsters.

I've written the books, changed their covers, tweaked their blurbs, tried tools from a dozen ad courses, and I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Matilda Swift here with my co-host, Sam Cummings, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us, and still a long way to go towards the quit the day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our mastery through missteps journey.

Each week, we cover a topic to help along the way, and this week's topic is going to be money.

But before that, let's do our wins and whinges of the week.

Sam, what are yours?

I will start with my whinge because why not?

Just throw it out there.

I really wanted to do loads of editing this week, but I really overestimated how much time slash energy I'd have, so that's something that I need to really remember.

I'm not a superwoman, I can't just do things for hours on end and not get tired.

And my win of the week is that I posted on socials this week, and I mean, effectively begged, but just said to people, I'd love to stay home in January, so I'll buy my book and I got some sales through.

So it just goes to show, if you don't ask, you don't get.

So that's my win of the week.

Yes, very exciting.

How about you?

Yeah.

What are your wins?

Yeah, I feel like my whinge I'm going to really gloss over, because my whinge is I'm trying to be really gentle on myself right now.

They mentioned last week that a friend of mine has recently passed away.

Also, I'm really deep, deep into the self-discovery mindset things.

So I feel like I am doing so much that is making me full of emotions and making me question things that I had assumed about myself, that I am just trying to be really gentle with myself.

So I'm going to say, whinge ies this week are that I didn't get any writing done, but also I wasn't necessarily pushing to do any writing either, so that's fine.

And then my whinge, I have got two whinge ies this week, and one is related to last week's, that I posted on Facebook, put it on my page, put a nice post on.

Yeah, and it felt super easy, very positive, both for engagement, and really felt like, and I have been re-listening to our podcast to remind myself what we talked about.

It really feels like I now have a strategy for Facebook, which feels, just makes me feel like a real weight has been lifted off rather than just the enormity of, I can't figure out where the right page is, I can't figure out what to do.

I've now got ideas of what to do, so that feels really good.

And then my other win is that I did, so you and I both doing the Orna Ross Creative Planning, or Go Creative planning process, there was a meeting on Thursday for everyone in the program, that was kind of the first month of the year review.

And I spent some time looking through the planning notes.

And I also, after the session, there was kind of a thing to do, we had to really think about how to change, like lean into a change in your attitude to money.

And we'll talk a bit more about that later.

But one thing that really surprised me that came out of it was that I have a part of my house that I just use as a dumping ground every day.

And I pass it all the time.

It's halfway up the stairs.

And it's just like a place where, you know, it's very dusty.

I have a lot of work done around the area, so it often gets covered in plaster dust.

And I always think, I went by the tidying up because it's going to get dusty again.

And I don't do anything with it.

And I don't need an extra tiny fraction of space when I have a large house for one person.

So I just kept ignoring it.

And then as part of this planning workshop, I was thinking, I was supposed to be thinking about a way to change your mindset around money.

And mine was that I wanted to live more abundantly.

So like use the nice things that I have, wear the nice clothes, eat the nice food.

And in my head, that transferred to have a nice house.

So that evening, I pulled everything out, cleaned it, painted it.

I have put out some nice fairy lights.

I've put down a little fur rug that I've got from another part of my house.

It is pink.

It's got a little bag hung up in there labeled snacks.

It's got lots of music.

I'm putting up a new bookshelf in there.

I've ordered a like LED fake neon sign to go behind my head.

To light it up.

So it is the coziest, loveliest little nook ever that feels, it's like the smallest part of my house, but it is my new favorite part of my house, just to cull up and read in.

It is slightly hard to get into.

You have to like jump up from the stairs.

It only fits people of like my height and smaller.

So like every five foot four under to get in there is yeah.

And it just feels like I'm really tucked away and it's a little bit inconvenient to get out of.

So it feels like you just want to stay there and snuggle up all day.

So it is fantastic.

It is exactly what I need right now.

And I'm so glad that I did it.

And it does tie into what we're gonna talk about in a little bit.

So I'm gonna say extra wins this week.

I feel like a real winner.

Amazing.

And if we don't hear from you for like several days, it's probably good.

Like we'll go and find you in the nook.

You've not been able to get out.

So if anybody says like, has anyone heard from Matilda?

I'm sorry, she's now living in the nook.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

And unfortunately for people listening and watching this video, Matilda actually sent me a text with the picture of the nook, and it is as cute as it sounds.

I'm very jealous.

I will be putting it on Facebook.

So if anybody would like to join my Facebook page, you can go and be a little Swift.

That is another way of me building my Facebook page.

It will be on my Instagram as well, because it is so beautiful.

I love it.

Mm-hmm, yeah, that's very cute.

So as you talk about money, how did you get on with this week's topic to get honest about your money and your mindset?

So I feel like I haven't got as far as I wanted to, but I sort of, and I could have, it would have felt artificial to get, I think, get further than I really am.

So I feel like I'm at the right space where I am right now.

And where I am at the moment is part of the Go Creative program is very much about treat your money professionally and make different accounts for different things and make an account for a salary, make an account for a profit, make an account for a tax, and then have a separate account for in-going and outgoing expenses.

So I've done that, and I felt that felt really good and very easy and something that I've been putting off for ages because it felt like it was gonna be an absolute pain.

So I've done that.

I haven't decided on the percentages for each pot.

And one of the things that we were talking about on Thursday in this Orna Rosco Creative workshop that we did was about having twice monthly check-ins and movements of the money pots.

And the first one of those should be on the fifth of the month, so the fifth of February.

So I am planning to get things ready.

That is a deadline I'm gonna meet.

I'm trying to get things ready for the fifth, but I will have my kind of spreadsheets ready.

I will have my percentages ready to move things in.

So whatever comes in at the end of January, I will apportion into those pots.

So that feels really good to kind of have that in place.

And I could have decided this week, like what I'm gonna do, how I'm gonna divide things up.

But I think I want to have a real sit down and think about money, and I'm gonna do that tomorrow evening a little bit, and then some over the weekend.

Because one thing I really want to do is, we talked a little bit about this a few weeks ago, is give myself a business loan, rather than just treat my savings as like resources I can use as and when I decide based on my mood at the time.

So, yes, I might decide at the moment about whether I want to make it a specific loan for the amount of money that I think I'm gonna spend this year.

And the reason why I'm not quite decided is because actually this year, mostly I'm gonna spend writing rather than releasing.

So I actually won't have very many expenses.

I will have advertising expenses because I'm gonna try and advertise my previous series.

So I don't know.

And I think I need to do a lot of thinking in a realistic sense about how much I'm actually gonna get written and published this year, which because I'm still in this sort of mindset and thinking stage, and there's really like broad view strategy, which encompasses absolutely everything, including like going to therapy and looking at, you know, my childhood.

That's where we're at now.

It's just like every week is a little bit deeper, a little bit further away from writing, but hopefully it's all relevant.

So because of that, I think I've not yet got to this age where I'm really being realistic about my writing this year, which is really unusual for me.

Like in the past few years, I have worked very hard post the kind of peak of the pandemic to get back into a very regular writing rhythm.

And, but that's all I've done, is like get back into that and get back into the stage where I felt like I could do three to four books a year confidently.

And now it's sort of as like I've thrown that up in the air, but I think with intention, but it does mean that I don't know how many books I'm getting out this year realistically.

I like, I might in my head say, yeah, three to four.

It's not true.

I think it'll be one, maybe two, which is concerning or I don't know.

It's just different.

I don't think it's, yeah, exactly.

I think last year you didn't know that you'll be taking this journey.

And so now it's just, it's difficult to reframe and reassess when you've always had like, if you have one of those mindsets where you're like, I've made a decision, I'm gonna do it.

That's definitely the sort of person I am.

And then to be like, actually, maybe I'm not.

I know that's like one of the most difficult things.

I'm so flexible with other things in my life apart from once I've made a decision.

Yeah.

I think also because it's the common path in self-publishing is like just write more books.

So it feels like to kind of, it feels like, you know, that metaphor of like turning around an oil tanker.

That's how it feels to like stop the writing hamster wheel.

Because to an extent, I have a slight concern that like I'll never be able to get back on it.

And like, what if I forgot and have to write?

What if I can't write quickly?

Said every writer ever.

I know, I think that was every book anyway, so it's absolutely fine.

But yeah, so that's kind of where I'm at with my money.

I've got more I'll talk about kind of, we want to talk as well about our mindset to do with money.

So we'll talk about that separately.

But yeah, in terms of my actual physical, like money things, that's kind of where I'm at right now.

We could maybe also do a talking about how we feel about money in the past, but we might come to that after we've had your initial thoughts on where you're at the moment with money.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so I have finally set up a business account.

I'm just waiting for it to be approved.

Because I've never set up a business account.

All of my banking that I've ever done, like you say, is just pulling from my savings on a whim.

I've never just been like, I've never sat down and thought, okay, I'm gonna allot this money to publishing.

It's always been like, oh, this is how much my format is gonna cost.

Just take that out of my normal current account.

This is how much a cover artist is gonna cost.

And it's never been a structured thing.

It's always just been, I can afford that, no problem.

Unfortunately, I can no longer afford to think like that because cost of living has really cut me off from, I haven't got any savings really because, well, I did go to Australia and it cost me a lot of money.

And that took all of my savings, but I'm just not getting money into my savings pot because all of my bills have basically doubled.

So that's something that I think, I haven't thought about money properly until like, on a, to start the course.

And then it was like, oh yeah, I really need to, because I was just burying my head in the sand because all the savings that I used to have are now gone.

And all of my money is going towards paying the bills.

So that's like a huge thing that I've got to try and figure out.

And I have been thinking about money and setting up this business account and trying to figure out how much my in comings are, how much my out goings are, and where I can redirect some funds.

Because obviously everyone's got spends that, I think I said this last week, buying a cup of coffee.

I could put the five pounds I spend a week on getting a coffee somewhere into a publishing pot.

So it's just all these, I've had all these big thoughts and I've done these small actions, but I know that it's gonna be a continuous thing.

So I've started the race, but I know it's gonna take a long time to actually feel like I've streamlined a process and I feel happy with it.

I mean, this all kind of links into the mindset part of things and what my relationship with money is like in general, because I think it's really interesting.

I've never sat down and thought about why I think about money the way that I do and doing the course with Orna and sitting down and writing down, she really is really into free writing.

So doing free writing around money and feelings around money has kind of opened my eyes and been like, oh, did not think about any of this.

This makes sense.

And also like, why would you?

Because I think it's such a foundational thing that you form a relationship with money before you even have enough of a sense of self.

Like your parents around you making choices about, do we buy branded products?

Or do we buy supermarket owned brand food?

That's what you expect to see in the house.

How comfortable do you feel asking for things?

Versus, is it very clear in your house that you should not ask?

Even just what's the moral judgment around money?

That sort of stuff you receive before you're even really old enough to think, you know, in a logical sense.

The weird thing is I've always been weird about money, even though when I was a kid, my dad would always say we'd go to a toy shop and he'd say, we weren't particularly rich growing up or anything, we were just very middle class, but my dad would say, go and pick something in the toy shop, anything you want.

And I would say, I would not be able to do that.

I don't need anything.

That's been my, as, and like it's been a thing as I've grown up, no one knows where I got this from.

I don't need anything.

That's always been my, and so I really don't know where I get that from.

I think it's like a past life thing, honestly.

So weird.

All of my siblings are just like, what?

Sometimes they go to, this is like of the time of like, Sylvania families and stuff.

So like my sister was like arms full.

I was full of Sylvania families.

Like you're missing out.

It's like, I've got one Sylvania family, I don't need it anymore.

So I don't know where mine came from at all.

I really do think it's a past life thing.

That's even harder to figure out, is like if it's from before you were born, how are we going to affect that?

Yeah, I really need to do some past life regressions to see what was going on there.

Yeah.

Yeah, so next then, do we want to go into kind of mindset things, or do we want to look at where we're at so far with our journey with money, in terms of self-publishing?

I think let's talk about where we are in terms of self-publishing right now.

So, like how much we are comfortable spending, like in what terms, like how do you want to broach it?

Yeah, so I think that's a good way to think about it, is like how do we think about spending money and self-publishing?

So I first started self-publishing when I was living in Hong Kong, in fact, and the taxes are very low there.

I felt like I had a good amount of disposable income, but not infinite amounts of money and kind of connected to the mindset stuff we'll talk about.

Obviously, I never felt like I could spend money that felt wasted.

So I spent money, you know, I had an editor, I had a cover designer from the beginning, but I would definitely choose those based on what I felt like a comfortable amount of money for me to spend without getting it back.

And I think for, I think my current level of spending for my books is I have a cover designer, I have an editor, you know, I pay for all sorts of other bits and pieces that I kind of don't factor in, but I would say the profits that I make for my books have covered the editing and design, but they don't cover the other things like, you know, website hosting, the newsletter service, the book delivery for book funnels.

I think there's so many ancillary costs that, and I think having to do taxes sort of makes you confront that where you haven't really made business choices.

You have just thought, yeah, I need that, so I will have that.

And I think that's very, very common in self-publishing.

There are so many products and things that you could have, you know, things like Scrivener, that everyone says, oh, it makes it so much easier to organize people.

And there's also Atticus.

People use other things for formatting their books, or they pay a formatter.

And without, you know, that becomes like common usage, so you can't really question it.

You know, I use Draft2Digital, like free formatting.

I think it works well.

It does a good job.

And I was like, oh, I'm not gonna spend money on that.

But there's other places where, you know, I think there's not maybe enough conversation about how much to spend on certain things.

Like how much should an editor cost?

How much should a designer cost?

It seems to vary very, like incredibly wildly.

So I've just spent what feels comfortable for me and for the quality that I think is good, which I think is not really, it's not based on ational decision.

It's not based on what I think my books are worth.

It's based on a comfort around money.

Yes, I think that's a crazy thing to think really is, I guess it's all to do with like self-publishing never, well, personally coming from me, never felt like I was starting a business, even though like now I'm seeing that that's completely how I should have approached this.

And we've both, like this is the whole point of these podcasts and like the whole point of our Mastermind meetings that we do is like finally getting to this point so far into our careers that we realized actually we should have been doing this as a business the whole time.

So if you are running a business, you would put some money into an account or you'd have a business plan and you'd say, hey, I'm going to publish this book.

I'm going to write down every single cost I think I'm going to need for this book.

I'm going to save my money for it.

And then I'm going to, you know, like it would have made so much more sense to do that.

But obviously, that's what you should do, right?

I mean, just the idea of like, why don't I have a business plan?

Yeah, I run a business for my day job.

And I put together like business plans, expenses, budgets.

That's my job.

I'm a director of operations for my day job.

That's my whole job.

And I have never even considered having a business plan for my books.

Isn't it like the most ridiculous thing?

So like, I think that what I love really at the moment is like, obviously on social media, I get a lot of, I follow a lot of indie authors.

I get a lot of content for indie authors.

And I love seeing people coming into it now, having such a better understanding of the business and like talking about how much money they're saving up in order to publish.

And like a few months ago, I remember seeing somebody say, oh, I've got like a pot of, I want to say five grand, which I'm going to use to publish my book.

And from savings, and I thought you can publish a book for basically for free.

But that was just me being my like glib self of being like, you don't need to spend money to publish a book, but you do need to spend money to publish a book.

But then there was a big issue of like bootstrapping, right?

That's like sort of a badge of honour that you bootstrapped your way, which I feel like really comes out of, you know, the 2016 model of like you're trying to race to to get the gold rush money.

And that isn't where we're at now.

No, that's like, that's when I started.

So that was when self-publishing wasn't, wasn't a viable way to make money.

It was for some people, but it was still very much a kind of like a vanity project.

Like that's how it seemed for a lot of people.

And that's kind of how I looked at it for a long time, is that I was, I looked at it as though it wasn't a legitimate business.

It was just me because I was sick of waiting for agents to reply to my emails.

And now the conversation around self-publishing has completely changed.

So like, I'm glad that it has, but I really wish that I'd like not started self-publishing back then.

I've done it now with like this mindset of, I just feel like I'm, I just feel like I wish I'd had like a fresh start, which is what I'm trying to do now.

Yeah, I was going to say you were kind of a fresh start.

So I went to the SPS live conference last year, around the year before, but the one from the year before, so from 2022, Rachel McClain was talking there, and she had just won the Kindle Storyteller Award.

I can't remember what it was the year before that year, but she had just won that.

And she had really only been publishing crime for a very short period of time, but she had started publishing, she'd been doing it for five years, and she had published all sorts of absolutely weird books.

I think she would have agreed to that.

She showed us her sales graph.

She has written a book, which I absolutely can't remember the title of now, which is something like How to Write a Best Seller, where she wrote what she wanted for several years and was like, why isn't this working?

And then she was very, very business minded about it and wrote a crime series that was to market that she loved writing, that was set in an area that she knew really well and loved.

And she knew enough about digital, lots of different aspects of digital, not quite marketing, but different digital products to be able to market it well.

And she used Facebook ads before she even released her first book.

She really had a plan and stuck to it and invested in herself, unbelievably, and has succeeded astronomically.

So, yeah, definitely if you can go to a talk, anything by Richa McLean, watch anything by her, read her books.

And, yeah, she's got a business book, which I will finally be able to put in the show notes, but it is something like How to Write a Best Seller.

Yeah, I think that starting to think of it as an actual business and trying to think to myself, how much money do I need to put in a pot that will cover, like, just cover expenses for publishing, not even thinking about all the extra stuff, just as like a launching pad, because it's all an experiment at this point.

Like, how much money am I willing to experiment with is probably the thing that I need to think about is how much am I willing to...

I don't even think it's how much money am I willing to lose.

It's, how much money am I willing to gamble with?

I mean, let's play the outro for now and again.

Yeah.

Because I think with Facebook ads, I don't want to feel like I'm losing money.

But I'm happy if I don't make money as long as I'm learning something from it.

Yes.

Well, that's it.

This is the thing about spending and getting something of a value in return, not necessarily monetary, that's the word, monetary value, but just a value of some kind.

Like what are you valuing?

If you're valuing the experience, amazing.

There's just probably so many ways to frame success when it comes to spending money.

But obviously we want more money in the account than we're spending.

Thinking about how we're going to frame money and our interactions with it, if we have a look at mindset things, which is how I started my never-ending, it seems, spiral deeper and deeper into my psyche and attitude to everything and self-worth.

That started with money and the idea of abundance.

And I think I will be interested to hear different cultural perspectives, because I think we're both bringing a very English perspective on this, on money and not wanting to stand proud and say, I worked hard for this and I deserved it.

Like we should be saying when we're receiving success, but yes, I think it feels uncomfortable, the idea of saying I have written something that I think will make money, that doesn't feel natural.

So yeah, that's how I started on my kind of mindset work.

I wanted to get a better attitude towards money, and I found some great resources, so I can chat about those and kind of go through what was helpful.

I just wondered if first you had any thoughts if you really want to share about money mindset?

No, not really.

I mean, I think that when I was delving into some money mindset stuff yesterday, I really feel, and this is probably, some people will roll their eyes at this, I really feel like money mindset and being proud of the money that you earn and feeling like you deserve the money reward is very much based in a patriarchal society where men are open to talk about how much money they make and be proud of it, but women have never been allowed to talk about how much money they're making, how much things cost.

I think for women, spending money has a frivolous thing, a bubble around it.

And women have always been made to feel guilty about how much money they spend and how much money they make.

And I didn't know that that's how I viewed money in society.

But it is.

Some people might be like, everything's about that.

I mean, it sort of feels like a lot of things.

I think it's interesting when you have a new outfit and someone compliments you, and you're like, oh, it was in sale.

70 bajillion cents off.

It was like, it cost me nothing.

The achievement is not having spent money.

I get most of my clothes secondhand, so it's always like, it was just in a charity shop.

Yeah, but it's an achievement.

But then I think it would feel unusual to have a woman be like, yeah, I bought this last week.

It cost a thousand pounds.

Oh, gosh.

Whereas I wouldn't find it as odd if a man was talking about his watch that way.

I would not consider it to have the same sort of self-indulgence.

I mean, it is self-indulgent, but nothing wrong with that.

You can indulge yourself.

Great.

So I was just making a list of books that I kind of read when I was starting out thinking about this money mindset.

Some I'm looking back through my phone, I think, because I ended up coming around to other issues.

I've got a couple of books that I haven't read, but I have read the sample and then bought them.

So I clearly like them enough to want to read them.

And then some of them that I have read, a lot of these books, they have a lot of exercises in them.

So I have read them and kind of done a couple of exercises, but I really want to go back all the way through them, which just takes a lot of time.

And now I'm like a million miles down this self-discovery journey.

I feel like I'm leaving the money stuff behind in a way that I don't want to.

So it's very useful to have this today to come back to.

And I am going to go back to these books.

So I think the most relevant book for authors is called Right to Riches.

And if you see the cover, it has the word right with a W crossed out and then written with an R at the beginning as well.

Like you have a right to these riches and you can write your way to being rich.

It's by Renee Rose, who also has an author Abundance Central Facebook group, which as soon as you look at it, I'm sure you will find many of your self-publishing friends are members already.

That is what I experience.

I think I checked today and there are maybe 10 people that I'm already Facebook friends with who are in the group.

So it is very publishing focused.

The book is very general in terms of mindset on money, but all the examples are very book related, so it is a great read.

Yeah, and a nice read.

My actual favourite book about money, because I like a bit of attitude, my favourite book that I read was We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers, which just made me feel really good about wanting to have money.

She has a really great perspective on it, and she's very much like, there's no wrong reason to want money, but a great reason to want money is so that you can help your community.

And you get to have the money to decide what you do with it.

It's not shameful to want to have enough money to pay for your family, pay for the kids to go to university, to make everyone feel financially comfortable, but also to buy yourself that nice coat you want.

She's really got a great attitude and a way of expressing it that makes it feel very achievable.

So I want to go back and reread that one.

She also has a podcast called Hello Seven.

Because she's not from a self-publishing focused background, the Hello Seven podcast is quite broad and it's very much general business, and she is a general business person.

So I would say I found the podcast less relatable.

The topics are often not close enough to what I'm interested in, but the book I absolutely loved.

Then two other books that I have downloaded and I read the samples and bought the book, so I must have liked them and must go back and read them, was HL.

Savino, who I think is also connected to Renee Rose in some way.

So HL.

Savino, Your Journey to Abundance.

Maybe it was mentioned in Right to Riches, but again, I've bought the book, but need to read it.

And then Nina Harrington, who I think is a cozy author, or definitely an author that I know of, Become a Fearless Writer, which is also about Attitude to Money.

And then just a general recommendation for a podcast that I'm sure most people have listened to, Six Figure Authors, which is a great podcast, relatively upfront about money and where people are going and how they're being impacted by money and changes in income.

So yeah, all those are ones that I...

They just take time.

They take time to go through, but they have all had a positive impact on my attitude to money and my mindset around money.

But it's still not where I want it to be.

I still want to feel like my books are a business asset, and I want to make a business plan now.

I have realized that.

I should make a business plan.

I will make a business plan and figure out how to make money from my books.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful to share those books, because I am somebody who's never really read mindset books ever.

I just plough through fiction books, like there's no tomorrow.

But after reading the book, which name is now escaping me, Big Magic.

Big Magic?

Oh, yeah, the Elizabeth Gilbert book.

Yeah, thank you.

The words are just like, gone.

I completely see the relevance for those books, because it really evokes such emotion when you're reading them.

And I think that that's something that I've never experienced because I've only read fiction books.

Obviously fiction books, like, make you feel a particular way.

But it's all false.

You know, it's just all like imaginings and stuff and like pretending that you did this character.

But when you're reading those books, you're not pretending you're a character.

You're thinking about yourself and the way that you could live your life.

And these other people have been where you've been and have made these changes.

And I just think it's like, I just can't wait to get some of those books that you mentioned.

I've had them on my list for a while.

And probably over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to grab some of them and start reading them because I just really need...

I would just say as well, I think the benefit of being a fiction reader, like being a good fiction reader, you can lose yourself in a story, means that these nonfiction books that are tapping into topics you are wanting to make changes in, means that those books are more effective for you.

I think a lot of people don't find books an effective way to learn, and they change their mindset, and I really do, because I think I'm very good at getting my mind connected to what I'm reading.

Even if I read these books and don't do the exercises, I feel my thoughts changing.

I love talking about this with my boyfriend, about how what you read really shapes your world, your inner world and your outer world, which is why as much as some people might not like this, I don't read the news.

Yeah, not a huge fan.

Because I have this thing where we've grown up, this is like going to go off a tangent, so I'll try not to go too far off.

We've grown up, we grow up in a world where you're supposed to believe the things that you read.

And when you're at school, you learn from books.

So your brain knows what you read is true.

It creates the world and everything around you.

And as soon as you start reading bad news, you start reading all these things, and you believe that everything is true that you're reading, and I think it can be really detrimental.

So I just want to read nice things and convince myself that everything's fine.

So I really do.

I think there's a big merit to that, I think, to limiting your news intakes.

Like I, during the pandemic, and I lived in Hong Kong during the protests, you read news constantly, and it's tiny, tiny incremental updates that just fill your mind up.

And I think it is such a hard balance between like, I want to be globally aware, I want to be a good global citizen and be knowledgeable and have changes where needed.

But also, it doesn't mean no benefit to know about an earthquake in a country that I have never been to, will never go to, cannot have any impact on.

And now I just feel bad.

Yes, I want to be a good person in my community, which means being a positive person who doesn't hate the world.

So I love, like, I just want to be like a nice person who is happy and can recommend books to people.

And that's my entire life.

I think that's a big part of We Shall Be Millionaires.

So I would say read the Rachel Rogers book first.

She's very focused on, yeah, on like make money to change the world around you, the world you can impact.

Yes, which is me sitting down to a tea.

Like that's my biggest dream is to be able to make money and feel like I'm impacting everyone around me in a good way, which is, yeah, like I can't wait to read that book.

Yeah, we should all be millionaires and we will get there.

Agreed.

You know, soon and together.

Yeah.

That will be fantastic.

So that sort of takes on to next week's topic.

So we've decided to have a sort of mini series on the topic that we are calling Branding and Being, which is about really focusing on...

So we started this by thought of niching down, and they call it niching down, depending on how you pronounce it.

That's how we very first started Mastermind Meetings, but it turned into a much broader kind of interconnected web of everything in our business.

So we're going to just have a few weeks looking at branding and being, which we're kind of categorizing as, let's look at the place that we are in our business and where we belong in our genre and subgenre and how we're putting ourselves there.

So starting with quite a broad topic next week that will impact our discussions for weeks to come.

So the one we talk about next week is resources and platforms, which is a really kind of broad topic that doesn't seem related to the idea of branding, but it will come in a lot when we talk about things in future.

So Sam, just to start with, do you have any thoughts already on platforms and resources?

Yes, well, I think that, like you say, depending on your genre and your niche, however you want to say it, there are definitely different platforms that benefit you more.

And just like in general talking about, if we're going to talk about platforms like social media, me being a young adult fantasy writer may have completely different experiences and outcomes on particular social media platforms than you writing Cozy Mysteries.

And so just in terms of that, I'm really excited to think about where the best places that I should be, who are the people that I should be trying to find there, and what resources will help me make those places lucrative.

That's how my brain is thinking about it.

That might change.

How about you?

I think we've got such a good combination of genres that are right at the opposite end of the age spectrum traditionally, but both audiences meet in the middle.

I think I'm really looking forward to this, because when I started stuff up, I came from a different perspective from you.

I had a very close friend who was a full-time author who shared with me all her ideas and knowledge on resources, and she was able to say, get on BookFunnel, here's the new set ous of Prider, you want to get started on, here's how to get your website set up.

So I had a real leg up in that and didn't have to make as many decisions or at least a couple of things to decide between.

And as I said, in the last few years, I've been focusing on getting back into a regular publishing rhythm post-pandemic crisis.

So I really want to maybe take a bit of time to re-evaluate things and to look at things that I never tried.

So I have had a friend recently who's used NetGalley to get some pre-publication reviews.

And I have never done anything like that.

And there are various other sites that do it.

And I've, you know, you hear, I think part of the problem is people who are loud about these things online often have had a horror story.

So then you think, I won't even think about that because that sounds awful.

I don't want to get terrible reviews on my book that's not even published.

But that's, you know, that's often just like the squeaky wheel, right?

And I kind of want to take a bit of time to review some platforms that I'm not using and think about why and maybe consider changing some things and just make sure I'm making more conscious choices.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's, yeah, I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be making big lists next week and trying to figure out are the lists useful or not.

Yeah, and I think it will help me look at like some new things.

So I have done part of a Kickstarter.

And it's about, you know, do I want to, that's definitely becoming bigger and bigger.

Do I want to do anything with that?

I've been ignoring TikTok for the most part.

Do I want to look at that?

Yeah, I think I have had a lot of things where I'm just pushing it to the, like kicking the can down the road.

So this will be a good chance for me to stop doing that and make some choices.

And we'll tie in nicely if you're going to be looking at a business plan, I think.

As I am, because I am a professional business lady.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

I will be looking forward to having a chatty next week about this and feeling incredibly professional.

Well, thank you very much for this chat and thank you to everybody who has been listening and we will see you next week.

You have been listening to Pen to Paycheck Authors.

Stay tuned for our next episode.