S01E47: When We Read Our Reviews

In this week’s episode, Samantha and Matilda get honest about reading reviews! 

Next week, Sam and Matilda are getting social as they talk about other authors and making those important connections. 

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with: Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/3QHym3m

Most recent book: Heart of the Wolf (Moons & Magic Book 2) https://amzn.eu/d/4HecH3a

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:

NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/

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 Samantha Cummings, here with my co-host Matilda Swift, 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 reviews and believing them.

But before we get into that, what are your friends and twinges of the week?

Never gets old.

I just had, I've just had like a week full of things.

So I feel like I say this every week, but it has really felt like I've had 10 weeks since I last spoke to you, and I can't wait to film one week.

My first win, in fact, I'm gonna say my main win is, I currently have Christmassy nail art that I have not revealed to you until now.

Christmas nail art, which is so beautiful.

I'm just holding it really close to the screen for anyone watching this video.

Because I made myself several months ago, I made myself a raw chart.

It's got a unicorn on there.

It's like when you'd give for a small child.

It's got five little steps along the way to each goal, and there are four goals, and I've hit mark one.

And the last one is the one day income.

That would mean that if I hit that every day, I'd be a six for a go author.

So I'm on the first tier of four tiers, and the way to get there.

So that felt phenomenal.

I got my nail art this weekend.

It's Christmassy because I'm just so excited.

I've got my Christmas party coming up.

I'm about to go to visit my uncle for Christmas.

I am feeling very festive.

So all those things together is for like a big win, but a good self-publishing win.

Winge is just a real life winge in that I live somewhere where we have a lot of floods and there is a very old fashioned sort of air raid siren that is one of the last few ones in the UK that marks when a flood is coming.

And it sounded this weekend when a friend came to visit, we were just doing some Christmas shopping.

And then suddenly it sounded like we were in the Blitz and we should be going into an air raid shelter.

But really we had to go home and be very wet and figure out a way to get her back to London when there's no trains or buses and the roads were all flooding by the minute.

So very dramatic, though, I felt like very, I have to wipe my lips.

But that was like about a thousand things in this week.

So feeling fantastic feeling like I am living my best life.

How about you?

I am full of whims.

I've had such a good week.

It's kind of been like a bit hectic and crazy because my sister is back from Australia visiting.

So we've been doing loads of family stuff and we went on a winter walk through, we went through Dun & Massey, which is a national trust place in the UK.

It's just outside of Manchester.

And it was, I mean, it was freezing cold.

It was one of the nights that it was like it dropped down to minus four or something.

So very chilly for a girl who does not like being cold.

And I made sure everybody knew I did not enjoy being cold.

But it was beautiful.

It was so nice.

The trees all get lit up.

Different kind of light engineers and artists and things come up with these designs for the trees.

And it was just, it was amazing.

It was so much fun.

There was like toasted marshmallows and mulled wine, of course.

It was so good.

And then I also took like, carry on celebrating with the week we went to the cinema to see Wicked, which was amazing.

I'm such a huge fan of Wicked.

So that was so nice to see it on the screen.

And the small cinema in my town is just like, it's so cozy and so personable.

And it was like they'd put on a premiere and there was food, there was cocktails.

So there was like wicked themed cocktails.

So we had some wicked themed margaritas.

Yeah, it was so much fun.

Everyone had their picture taken.

And there was like free, like as a free food and they gave out free snacks and popcorn.

And I instigated the clap at the end of the film.

Fantastic.

I mean, I live in my best life.

I think when it's a musical, I think you should.

So I instigated the clap.

I was very happy with myself.

So that's just like fun on a personal level.

My kind of like writing world.

Can I just interrupt here before we get into writing?

Yes.

It's known wicked because I saw a really good post on threads the other day.

So I am someone who I've never seen wicked in musical.

It's on my list of ones I want to go and see, but it's not top of my list because I read the book ages ago and was not impressed.

And I'm aware that the musical is very different to the book.

But in my head, I've just thought of that kind of tin.

It's like, oh, I thought the book sounded like it'd be really exciting.

And it was like, oh, this is not really what I wanted to read.

I love the book.

But yeah, I understand.

It's just not what I went in for.

And I was like, oh, OK.

And anyway, so I haven't seen the musical and I guess for one of those anyway, and so I haven't seen the film either because I live in an even smaller village where we're not getting the film until next week, because it's cheaper if you wait a while to get the film to a cinema.

So it's a little community run kind of historical building.

So I will be watching when it comes.

I'm excited.

But this post on thread said, if you ever think you're promoting your book too much, like remember how like, blah, you felt about the idea about being wicked.

And then you've seen 10,000 social media posts about it.

And now you're really excited to go.

And I was like, 100%, I feel that way.

Like, I probably would not have gone to see Wicked in the Musical, the movie, because I've never gone to the musical, except the fact I've now seen so many social media posts.

And none of them were about the movie, right?

I don't know anything more about the movie than I knew before.

I need the social media posts, but I have strong emotions about it now.

I feel like, oh my goodness, I would die for the co-stars.

They seem so authentic and emotional.

They are selling it.

They have cried.

I've seen them cry more times than I have cried my entire life.

It's so fun.

But I do like, you're right.

I think they've done such a good job of making sure that you can't escape it.

And I don't feel bad.

Like I'm not annoyed that they're doing it.

Like that they are plastered on everything, because it's fun and the film is so much fun and they love it.

And you can tell that they love it.

Like I did watch the interview.

I'm very aware.

Yeah.

I was going to say, I'm very aware that like, I am controlling my algorithm.

So if I stopped engaging with those posts, they would stop appearing to me.

So I don't feel like they are forcing themselves on me.

I feel like they have benignly tricked me into engaging with this film that I had no interest in.

And I'm on for the ride now.

I'm in.

And I think I want to feel the same way about my own social media posts.

Like that was such a refreshing thing to see.

I've got no hatred towards it.

I just wasn't interested.

And now I'm all in.

And I want to have the same attitude in my social media.

Anyway, carry on.

Yeah.

Wicked run over.

I've had such a good writing weekend.

I was really, really dropping behind on my word count goals.

Because I'm still trying to hit 50,000 words this month, even though I'm not doing nano officially, I still did want to do it.

And as of yesterday, I was like 10,000 words behind, really like not doing well.

And looking at myself, like at my writing and thinking like, oh God, how will I ever catch up?

That's a lot of extra words to be writing every day.

But this weekend, I've blasted it.

And I had such a good day writing today, like 6,000 words a day.

And I was like, and it was so much fun and so, so easy, because I've got to the part of the story that I've, like I've got very strong visuals for, like I definitely know this next part of the story.

And yeah, and now I'm like only 5,000 words behind and it feels great.

And the end of the month is like coming up very quickly.

And I think I will, yeah, I think I'll hit my target and the book won't be finished, but most of the book will be finished.

And that is going to be so much fun.

I will say a quick whinge is that, this is just a personal whinge, is that my sister is leaving tomorrow and I'm very sad.

She's, because she lives so far away.

Australia is just so, it's just too far.

And I don't get to see her enough.

So I'm just a bit bummed out that she's, I know it's like, and she keeps saying like, when are you coming to see me?

And I'm like, when I win the lottery.

But really, like when I make money from books, so I just need my books to stop bringing in some cash and I can go and visit my sister.

Yeah, so I'm a bit like bummed out about that.

But other than that, no, I'm not going to do any whinges.

I'm feeling good about everything else.

Very positive.

I'm feeling good.

Yeah, I think we talked about this beforehand.

It would feel like, I don't know we say this every few weeks, but I think it's true every few weeks, it would feel like a real like next level leveling up in our mindset.

I and I think today's topic is a really interesting one, because I feel very differently about it than I might have predicted I would feel about it.

And I think I've done different things with it than I would have expected.

And then I might have even done a few weeks ago.

So today's topic is reviews.

So do you want to just start by telling us what does that mean in a series about believing in yourself?

How do reviews help with this?

So the reason we chose this topic is because at the time when we were coming up with topics for the podcast, you were in such a downward spiral about your writing.

And you even though like, and you were just like, you were just saying like, I don't think, you know, am I any good?

As the people that have liked and reviewed my books, are they telling the truth?

And, and I think that it's that's such a universal feeling.

And like, obviously, my first response to you is like, of course, your writing is good.

Like, your writing is so good.

And you need to start believing that your writing is good.

And, but, but it does like have this whole thing about how easy it is to believe, like, the not so good reviews you get, and how much you don't want to believe the good reviews, which is, as usual, complete mindset stuff.

And that's been just the topic on this podcast since day one has just been like revelation after revelation.

It's like, oh, it's my mindset.

That's the problem.

So that's where I'm coming at it.

You read this book, but not everyone else knows this and we'll reveal it soon.

But I guessed it on a podcast that we will reveal soon that you were also going to guess on.

In it, I genuinely had to stop myself to say, I'm aware I've said mindset 7000 times, I apologize, but it is the big thing that we've been thinking on this year.

Mindset is everything.

And I think it's interesting that really the idea around what we use is often just like, don't look, you can't look, you'll feel bad.

But I really feel like positively that I part of for me, kind of being a professional author and feeling confident about my writing, is being able to believe, believe and not believe my reviews, right?

So like, take them in a professional sense, not use them as a way to say like, Oh, but like, Pug779 thinks I'm good.

So today I believe that person and I'm good.

But then it's like, Oh, but DampFlaw43 just thought my character is not believable, maybe I'm a bad person.

I want to look at things in a better, in a different view from that.

So I want to, I want to use my reviews as a way to affect my mindset, but not maybe in the terms of just believing or not believing them.

Does that ring true for you?

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, like, I know what you mean.

You can't say you 100% believe the good ones and then not believe the bad ones in that.

You can't say that in the same breath because, like, that's just, yeah, it's like saying you believe these people, but you don't believe these, but they're all the same.

We just all the same.

They all just want to be entertained and some of them are and some of them aren't.

And that's okay.

One of my favorite things to do is, I don't really, I don't so much do this with books.

I do sometimes, but it's more with movies because I'm more into kind of looking at movie reviews is once I've watched a film, I will go on to the Letterboxd app and I will leave my own rating because I just like to track what films I've watched and I'll leave my own rating.

And I never look at reviews before I watch things.

And I only ever look at the reviews afterwards.

And I love reading both the one star reviews and the five star reviews because I am a very positive reviewer.

And I generally like, even if I didn't like something, I can usually see like what I did like in it.

And I like feel like my reviews are more on the comical side.

If something's bad, it's like, it's funny.

And I think that's really helped me like over the past few months, is looking at other people's bad reviews and good reviews of something that's nothing to do with me and learn that like, it's okay.

Like, it's funny.

And you can, I've seen quite a few people recently with like book reviews, using their bad reviews as a way to advertise their books.

I don't know if you've seen people do that.

And I think that that is the level that I want to get to.

I think for me, they're interesting in the aggregate.

And I'll talk a bit about what I did with them kind of in a minute, but because I think you don't want to believe, like, I can't remember what's the names I came up with before, like Puglove779, like their review on that one day is relatively meaningless.

But if you have 20 reviews say similar things, then you're like, okay, this is a broader thing I want to make sure I know my readers love it, and I want to emphasize more of my next series, or I know my readers were not that engaged, maybe I'm not finding the right sorts of readers, or maybe it's a thing I need to work on.

And I think the tricky thing when you're starting out is you don't have enough reviews, so you don't know who to listen to, and whether one person's like, someone saying the mystery is too slow, and then the next person saying the mystery is quite fast paced, like, well, they can't both be true.

What am I doing?

And not having enough reviews really means that I've been over-affected by reviews in the past by trying to figure out, like, what do these five mean?

And now I've got enough reviews, I can kind of look at things in aggregate.

It feels very different, and I feel like I can approach them, you know, when you're sort of leveling out for people who are having a bad day, or people who didn't remember the book well, or people who are terrible at writing reviews, because that is a big thing.

Most people are not good at writing reviews.

They will just like, copy the blurb.

They will get the character's names wrong, or talk about things that are like incredibly minute, that happened in the first page of the second half of the book.

You're like, how is it something you focused on?

And no one else ever mentioned this.

Anyway, most people are not good at writing reviews.

That's fine.

That's just a skill.

But it just means that having only a few reviews makes it incredibly unhelpful.

Ways in which I've tried to make reviews helpful to me in the past that I think have not worked, that I think is maybe how we got on to this topic in the first place, was I have gone through my reviews and pulled out positive ones and put them on my wall, I will my book covers so I could look at them regularly and see them.

But really, looking at individual people who on a bad day, I can think maybe they're just being nice, maybe they're drunk, maybe they've got bad taste in books.

Those individual people, I can't find them persuasive because if you have to believe each individual good thing, you have to believe each individual bad thing, and I don't find that helpful.

So for me, I've been trying to take them in a career, and that's what I've done this week.

I am aware that I have got a big thing to talk about like it this week, so I don't want to get into it before we go to talk about anything else.

So how did you start approaching reviews to think about them this week?

I strangely like, I don't have, well, it's not strange.

I don't have a lot of reviews, so I definitely am in the ballpark of not having enough reviews to really gain anything from them.

The one thing that I have that has really helped me this year, in less like getting important stuff from reviews, but more like feeling more comfortable in trying to get reviews, is when I sent out Books to Book Reviewers earlier this year, and purposefully went out fishing for reviews that I knew that I was going to be copied into.

And that felt really scary.

I can't even tell you how much I was so excited to do the thing.

But then I was so scared for people to be like, I didn't like this.

It's like two and a half, two stars, like trash characters, awful story, not good.

And I was so sure, I'm not even joking, I was so sure.

And I thought like even bad reviews at this point, I'll take them.

I was so sure that I was going to get bad reviews.

And when I got a few really good reviews, like the people who actually did review it were so generous with their praise.

I, it made me less scared because I was prepared to accept bad reviews.

And somebody did message me and say like, it's just not for me, I'm not going to leave a review.

And I think last year, if somebody had messaged me to say that, it would have really hit very hard.

And I would have, like, I would have really taken it personally.

Like, oh, like they hated the book that much.

They're not even going to leave a review.

Like, like, should I continue writing?

But, yeah, exactly.

Like, she didn't say it at all.

She just, she just wasn't into Teenage Werewolves, which is perfectly fine.

But because I had already had, like, I'd already sent the books out and already got some reviews back from other people.

It did really level the playing field because I just thought, well, that is such a good showcase of just, like, real life when it comes to books.

And you don't have to take it personally.

You've created something that is so subjective.

And as long as I love it, and I really do love my books, like, when I reread them for various purposes, some stuff I hate, but I generally think they're entertaining books and I'm very proud of them.

So, yeah, I threw myself into the fire and I didn't get burnt too badly this year.

So I am feeling good about it.

Now you can tell us all about what you've done this week.

Yeah, I definitely, so just, yeah, I'm definitely going to continue that and send books out to people every now and again because it was a very fun experience.

It was just really nice to actually have a personal connection with readers and be messaging back and forth about stuff.

And I just really like sending people presents.

Yeah, I feel like I might do that as well at some point.

It looked very like a fun way to do something different and to get reviews in a really authentic manner.

So yeah, I think that is something I hadn't even really thought about when we were talking about reviews.

So I thought about like the really straightforward, straight to the line like your Amazon reviews.

And I was going back and forwards on what to do with mine because I thought, again, like looking at each individual one, you can end up with too much of a feeling of like, if I believe it when someone says the character is fun, I have to also believe when someone says the character annoying and it's like, well, they can't both be true.

So how do I take something from that?

And also, what do I want to take from that?

And I was like, what I really want to do in terms of looking at reviews is not the topic of this week's episode, right?

So we're in a theme, we're in a series now about believing in yourself.

But I want to embody believing myself by doing my reviews that takes me to a next level professionally.

And so what I wanted to do was look at my reviews in comparison with my two main comps.

And I would say I've got three main people I consider to be really close comp authors.

And two of them have released a series that is set in a book town or set in a bookshop, which is exactly what I'm doing for my next series.

So I thought, okay, perfect.

I'm going to drill down to those people because they are clearly, clearly laser focused on the same readers that I'm trying to focus on as well.

They've got the same culinary cozy background.

They've got the same types of characters.

They've got the same types of village that they approach and the same sort of level of humor and style of writing.

So if those two people have got enough similarities and they have both got a new series coming up that is exactly like the series I'm about to start, I want to figure out how I can make use of their views alongside mine.

So to take a slight step back as well, at, I don't know, a few weeks ago, Krista, who we've had in the podcast before, was talking about Notebook LM.

I think it was Krista.

And I tried it out and I've tried out with a few different things and kind of with that it's retrieval augmented generation, which is like a kind of the next phase of AI where you're not asking a general engine that's been trained on all knowledge ever.

You're using that engine, you're layering on top of it as specific documents that you're saying primarily get information from this document or this set of documents.

But you can also use all knowledge ever to back up.

But it reduces hallucination, it gets you much more specific answers.

So I've been playing around with that as well.

And then at work, I've just started doing a project in my day job that is kind of related to kind of rag as well.

And so we've been talking about different ways to use that.

So I've been trialing that.

So I thought, could I make use of that in terms of looking at reviews?

So I've gone through a few different steps of mine.

And I created a notebook in Notebook LM and in that you put in documents.

So I put in three documents to start with.

And one was all of my reviews for book one of my main mystery series.

And I got the ones just from the US.

And I took them and it includes, I literally copied and pasted.

So it includes like all the star ratings, it includes all the quotes and like their names, so it's very clear they're different people.

And then I did the same for a vaguely comparable number of the top in terms of most helpful, it's how Amazon ranks them, reviews from these two new Bookshop series, book ones and put those in as my Notebook 3 documents.

So I had a group of my reviews and a group of reviews of my two comp authors and they were both about Bookshop books, mine was about a non-Bookshop book.

But I know that I was going to add something else related to that in a minute.

So I asked all sorts of questions, I asked things like, can you summarize each of our review groups?

And then can you do things like, tell me what these two authors are doing that I'm not doing just according to the reviewers?

So what do I need to either do more of my new series or what do I need to bring out more of my marketing material that their readers clearly love, but I'm not maybe making enough of that my readers are thinking about at the top of my mind when they're reviewing.

And then I gave it my entire PDF of my next book and I said, look at this whole book, look at the reviews of these two authors.

And then can you tell me what I might have missed from this book that they, that those readers would like and what I need to kind of play up that those readers will love.

And then also, can you give me some likely reviews that I would get for this, for this audience?

And just to give me a sense of like, what sorts of, and I always said, given this audience and their reviews, what they find interesting, can you give me some quotes that I can use for ad copy from the book?

So I had to do loads and loads of things, all those things I had, I've got absolutely fantastic answers, and it was unbelievably useful, and also allowed me to see things in the aggregate without adding my own bias.

Because when you read your own reviews, you know that you tried to put in something like, I really tried to work on like the the setting.

So when you see reviews mentioning setting, you think, well done me, pat on the back.

AI doesn't do that.

It's just looking at things from the data you give it.

So from the information, what I've got out of it is great quotes from my existing reviews from my original series, quotes from my newest book that will directly appeal to people that I really, really want to appeal to, and a list of things that are of a shared interest between me and my comp authors' newest series, or between my readers and my comp authors' readers for the newest series.

All of those will be used for ad copy in future.

Also, all of them, all the information it brought out was just incredibly affirming, and made me feel like I'm on the right track.

The last question I asked it, or the second question was like, can you give me some likely reviews that these readers would give for my new series?

And this is the only not affirming part where it gave me like, positive mixed and critical examples.

And I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want to see the critical reviews.

So I just skimmed over it because I instantly felt like, Oh, I didn't want to see that my settings maybe not developed enough.

And it was like, this is just possible, like negative reviews, and one might say, yeah, it's like, No, I don't want to see that.

So then I, I just scrolled down and didn't look at it.

And then I just wrote, give me some possible positive reviews you would write about this series, just so I get a sense of what what I want to be pulling out and highlighting and like foregrounding to my readers, so that they're more likely to put those sort of things in their reviews, realistically.

So if I say, this great new series, fantastic characters in an unbelievably good setting, that's terrible, I'd copy, but you know what I mean?

Then when they come to the reviews, I think, Oh, what's good about it?

Yeah, quirky characters, great setting, let me write about that.

So helpful, felt absolutely, I felt like a mastermind.

I think I just wrote that song about me.

I felt like a genius, I'm so proud of myself.

Yeah, I'm great.

And it's, I think it sounds really much like it's, what you did is also tied into what we have spent a lot of time doing this year, which is looking at like butter and trying to do like pull quotes before we even get to the writing.

So it's like a lot of the hard work, but at the get go.

Because rather than like trying to think of like, what you're going to sell it on after you've already written it and it's out in the world, then you have to start thinking about all of that.

Coming up with all of that stuff beforehand is, I'm like, I just wish that I had done that.

But it's fun to think that that's something that I can do for my next big launch, for my next big book.

That's like, it sounds so good.

Well done.

It felt really useful.

I think it also felt very, not impersonal, it felt professional.

As in, I was able to utilize just the source I have without taking it personally.

Because when I asked it things like what might reviews of these books, these two other authors books, not like about this book, I fed it the whole book.

I was like, what might they not like about this book?

And they were like, oh, they might not like that, because there's not a lot of romance in it.

Their reviews often talk about how much they like the romance in each other's series.

So you should play down that or make mention that it's not romantic.

And that is, my series are not romantic.

Even I've tried to include romance.

In this series, in fact, I tried to include romance in book two, and instantly he turned out to be a bad guy.

I was like, you know what, it's just not for me.

I don't like romance in my books, either reading or writing.

So anyway, so it's like just either make that really clear or make sure you're not mentioning it so people aren't getting a false sense of what they're going to get.

And it was also talking about some readers, they're often really highlighting the very, very like lots of red herrings and lots of like deeply layered mysteries in this other specific authors books, which you don't have.

And I was like, yeah, I personally don't have it because I really want to have like a short and very pacy mystery.

So I'm going to emphasize that part of it that is like it's short and pasty.

It's very twisty.

But it's not like there's not dozens of like red herrings and false reveals and things.

The book isn't drawn out that way.

So I want to make sure I'm pulling out the things that people will love and not kind of trying to hide away from things people don't like will feel like, oh, that's missing.

That's fine.

I can't do everything at once.

You know, the book can only be one book.

It can't be, yeah.

It's not missing because you didn't intend to put it in.

That's quite an important thing to think when people leave reviews.

And they say, oh, you know, this was, like I've had reviews that said like, oh, this had too much romance in for me.

And when I read that about one of my books, I thought, I took it really personally, but then I just realized they didn't know it was a romance book.

And I had never marketed it as that.

So when they read it, obviously, they were like, oh, this has got a lot of romance in it.

So as long as you know that you didn't do it, you know, like you've not tried to missell someone, as long as you know that you're telling your readers exactly what they're gonna get, then you can't like, any misconstruction on their part, it's like, that's their own fault.

Like, sorry about that.

It's a bit like people using their negative reviews in their advertising of saying like, oh, so spicy, I had to hide it away.

And you'd be like, oh, like so spicy, I couldn't even read it without blushing so much, I had to stop reading.

I was like, that is perfect ad copy.

That book isn't for everybody.

Just like mine isn't for everybody.

So I wanna make sure I'm foregrounding things that are positive, that people aren't gonna think, oh, you kind of hid away the fact that there's no missing, there's no ranting.

Because quite often Cozies have got a romance kind of be blocked.

You know, people are often in love with the police detective.

And it's like, oh, well, they won't.

They have a few episodes or a few series.

No, a few books.

And then you have a love triangle.

And that's just never gonna happen in my books.

Like not ever, because I can't even bring one love interest in let alone two.

In my in my original series, I have got a very, very minor like slight love triangle, but it's like somebody being possibly ready to date again.

One guy looks kind of maybe possibly okay today.

And the other guy's like, he's also maybe interesting.

That's as far as I've got.

And that's like six percent of the series.

I was like, I don't think I was going to go anywhere.

They might do, but there's not going to be a, there's never going to be a like torturous love affair in either, in either of those situations.

So I just want to make sure I'm definitely a not promoting as a romance story and kind of be making people aware in a in a positive way.

Like if you also don't love romance and they're very friend focused, all my books have got like a very strong pairing of female friends who are kind of like a found family sort of friendship.

And I want to make sure I'm playing that up as much as possible.

So you're aware it's not a romance.

It's like a romance between friends.

That is the romance of, of my life.

Yeah, I think that's a very interesting way to go about it.

And like you say, you are, you're, you're pre championing your own work because you are, you're treating it like a job.

Like you're treating it like a very professional thing that you're doing.

And by doing that, you have like, you've decided that it's like worth your time and your energy to, to make sure that you get it right, like from the get go.

And that's like the most belief that you can have in yourself is to do it that way, rather than just like flinging something out and then hoping for the best, like...

Mm-hmm, yes, I think that is true.

That is a big thing.

And it also felt like when I was putting out the reviews of these two comps, I didn't do it with any sense of feeling of, I'm going to be worse or I feel embarrassed to even put myself against them, even on a computer program, nothing.

I felt like these are two people that I want to appeal to their readers.

How do I do that?

How do I make sure that their reads will come over to me because they will love my theories?

It felt very positive and constructive and professional, and that was a big change for me.

And that felt great.

And I think because we've said before, one thing that I really have found frustrating in the past is not having any levers to pull.

Being able to use Notebook LM to analyze reviews felt like a lever to pull.

It didn't feel like I was just sat there scrolling through reviews thinking, what do I do with this?

I felt like, okay, I have a thing to do with it.

I'm going to use my personal AI assistant to ask a different question.

It will outline for me incredibly meaningful, usable information that I can do something with and make ads with, and also guide my general marketing strategy.

I feel now much more empowered.

And that felt like a lever I pulled well and knowledgeably.

So that's what really good this week.

Yeah.

I think that's you've done way more than I have done.

I was just like, oh yeah, I'm just going to kind of talk about how I feel about things.

But you've been actually tinkering around with stuff.

Well done.

Yeah.

Do you have anything?

I feel like a short episode because I don't really have much more to say on this topic personally, because I feel like my stuff is just really coming from feeling and just feeling like I've leveled up in some way.

I really feel like over the last few months, I feel like my skin has gotten a lot thicker.

And I really feel way more focused about where I'm going.

And I'm kind of excited to go fishing for more reviews, whereas before I was kind of fingers crossing that I was going to get reviews, and then being scared to read them if I got them.

Now I really, since doing that whole thing of sending my books out to people, I really feel like fishing for reviews, as bad as it seems to say that, is going to be a major part of my career moves, like going forward, because I really liked the excitement of it.

And it made me feel so, it made me feel a part of something.

I think that's the thing that I struggle with the most, because I, you like your Cozy Mysteries and stuff seems to be a very close-knit group.

You can always find people to comp.

And you kind of know everybody that's in that big, in that group.

With young adults, it's so much harder to find a group of people.

And it's, yeah, I just, it's difficult to get to that stage of feeling like I know, like, that I'm doing the right thing.

But I'm at the point now where I feel like I've, I've found something that worked really well, is what I'm trying to say, for me personally.

Um, I think I've got one other thing to talk about, and that is sort of tangentially related, but I've thought about it a lot recently.

And I maybe just want to drop it here because it's the most relevant place to drop it, but I think it will come up a few times in future, is that I am really struggling to figure out sort of whether or not, but also how much and how I improve this, whether or not I have like a growth mindset.

I think I have always assumed yes, because I'm someone who works really hard at things.

But at the same time, I only work hard on things that I am good at already.

So sort of no, like I will just ditch things that I am and like drop them and never look at them again, that I don't consider myself to be good at.

And I think there are some things that I'm innately bad at.

And I just happen to be good at things that are your social order of being good at.

So it's easing me not to have noticed the fact that I am easily dropping things that I don't do well.

So I think I have really been trying to focus on areas in which I have a growth mindset and which I can push myself to expand it more.

And this is going to sound like it's completely off topic.

But I was thinking about this week in roller skating, because in roller skating, I go to a roller skating group and it is one of the few physical activities where you're not, it's not really a sport for young people.

It's an activity where you're more likely to be like an old overweight woman.

That's probably the, I'm probably the exact target of roller skating.

And when it goes to a big group as well, it's the same as my school group.

So there, there isn't a lot of push to always be striving to do the next amazing trick and do something dangerous and scary.

There's very much like, do what you need to do for this time, like enjoy it as you wish to enjoy it.

So some people in my roller skating group, we meet in big sports hall, and some people just do circles around the outside.

And the people who do that, some of them are trying to learn things like there's ways in which you can do slightly different steps, and you can do small like, you know, stylish things.

And then some people go into the center of the room, and they do like dance skating, so they're learning really complicated steps, and turning and twisting, and, you know, doing all sorts of things that are scary for me.

And I have, I just like going in a circle, like realistically, I just like doing a thing where I'm not trying to do anything complicated, I'm just going fast, and there's good music on, and it's like dancing, but you're like off in your own world.

So I enjoy that.

But there's been a couple of times where I've tried to learn something specific that I wanted to do, and I've given up.

And currently, I'm trying to turn around.

And I wanted to learn it's like for a reason, there was a time when I wanted to turn around, I couldn't do it, and turning around skating, I can turn around, obviously, I can very slowly turn in a circle and go the other way.

But there's a way in which you can like spin to turn around.

And I don't really like any sort of like spinning or dangerous things, because I don't want to land on my face and be injured.

And I don't want to break my teeth or like I don't want to do anything that would harm myself.

I'm a scaredy cat like I'm skating.

Yeah.

So I've been trying to learn to turn around.

But I've hit a wall where I I just have to be brave.

Like there's a part where it's got a bit scary and I try to be brave.

And the thing is, I don't need to be able to turn around, right?

I could just stop here.

And I feel so tempted to stop and just be like, oh, nevermind.

I'll just turn slowly.

It's never gonna be an escape emergency.

I don't need to turn.

But I've really been forcing myself to push through that and be like, because I think I'm bad at it, right?

And it's not that I think that it will be hard to keep learning.

I think I will not be able to do it.

So I want to quit.

So I'm really trying to force myself to keep going to do it.

And I think a lot of things in self-publishing, I have sort of been trying to figure out, am I not doing it because I'm believing I'm innately bad at it and I don't have a growth mindset and I'm not pushing myself to do that.

So for example, ads like I have found myself doing that thing that I have done in the past, where I was like, I tried it, I'm not good at it straight away, never mind it's dead to me.

And I'm really trying to push through.

And I think looking at reviews, it's helpful to see that like I have in the past felt like that.

I felt like I've looked at my reviews, I found some good and bad things, and then I've been like, well, there's nothing I can do in this, and then throw it away, but I'm not looking at it anymore.

And I feel differently now.

I feel like I can look at my reviews.

And if I saw something bad, I would know what to do with it.

Either I would know what to do with that ad, like that review, and I could do something with it, such as ignore it or look at it in the aggregate or whatever.

But also if it were a legitimate thing, I feel confident I could improve my writing to improve past that thing.

And I think there's definitely a thing to be said for, if you don't like looking at reviews, it might just be that it's not for you right now, but it could be for you in the future when you feel more capable of making changes in your writing in future.

And I've had a couple of people in my friends and family recently who have, for one reason or another, decided to read a bunch of my books at once and read them in sequence.

And more than one person said to me recently, oh, you can really see how you've improved over the years with the book to book.

And I was like, that's not the compliment you think it is, right?

Like, people read these books every day that you're saying are not great.

But fine.

And I was like, I can really see myself a couple years ago having been bothered by that.

And it doesn't bother me at all now.

And I can I can see what they intended to mean, as in you are growing as a writer.

And I think in the past, I would have taken that comment with like a non growth mindset view of just like, I did some things bad and maybe I'm still bad.

But it's like, no, I can see and appreciate how I'm growing.

And you should be getting better with every book.

And that is great.

If you're not, then what are you doing?

So yeah, sort of tangential, but I think I can, I think it's going to come up several times.

And it's really something I'm trying to work on in the background of the whole believing yourself thing.

It's like believing in yourself, a big part of me is trying to develop a better growth mindset.

So yeah, I also just to veer off, and this will probably in some way connect, I don't know, we'll see how, we'll see where this conversation goes.

Your inability or your dislike of turning because you're scared of the fallout, like literally the fallout, you will fall on it yourself, and you don't want to do that.

Yeah.

I used to have that same problem.

And I think we've probably talked about this in the past because you took up roller skating because you wanted to do something that you weren't good at and you had to learn, like force yourself into a situation that was difficult.

And when I was going to say, when I was younger, I don't know how time works, but a few years ago, which is probably like 10 years ago now, but I'm going to say a few years ago, I went to a Samurai class, which I then carried on going to for many years.

And I am purple belt in Samurai, you know, why not?

And I, but I used to really struggle with a lot of the physical stuff.

And it was always mindset.

It was always being scared of getting hurt.

It was being scared of fighting people, which was the whole point, was that we were going to fight people.

We used to do loads of self-defense stuff.

And every lesson, I would go, and I would be so scared.

And then I would learn something.

Also, my teacher, who is now one of my very good friends, and she still shouts at me for things.

If she thinks that I'm not doing something because I'm scared, she'll give me a stern talking to.

But she was like, well, tough, just do it.

Like, there's no room here to be scared.

You came here to do a thing.

You have to learn how to do it.

Who cares if you get hurt?

Like, I'm here, we're doing this as safely as possible.

And if you get hurt, I'll drive you to the hospital.

You know, it was just like, you couldn't escape it.

And we used to do a lot of things like break falls, where we'd learn how to fall.

And we would do rolling, where we'd have to roll across the floor, like from standing to throwing ourselves to the ground and rolling and standing up and running off.

And to me, that was the scariest thing.

I was so scared to do it.

And we used to practice by jumping on to like crash mats, which is so much fun.

Recommend to anyone.

If you have a crash mat, flip on to it.

Great, great time.

But then obviously at some point, you have to take the crash mat away and just learn what it feels like to hit the floor.

After throwing yourself from standing to the ground.

And so this is like coming back round to like to you learning.

Sometimes you just have to make it as safe as possible, whether that means putting on extra padding on your butt and your elbows and your knees and the helmet.

And you have to do the hard thing once.

And once you do it, it won't be as hard the next time.

And you will like, and you'll toughen up, like you will start not feeling it so badly.

And that is probably a great analogy for this whole thing.

It's like someday you're going to have to look at your reviews.

You can do it when you're in a good mood, do it when you're feeling good about yourself.

And that's the best time to do it until you've built up enough resilience within yourself to be able to look at them whenever and just take it on the chin.

And that's kind of where I feel like I'm at.

Like I've thrown myself on the ground so many times over the last few years, that now I'm just like, I can't even feel it.

I mean, I'm sure at some point I'll get a terrible review and I will take it personally.

But right now I'm in a good space where I feel like, yeah, sure.

Like, on to the next review.

See if you like this next book.

And that is an excellent, like you wrote the tangent right back around.

That is fantastic.

This is one of the two of us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We got there at the end.

I was trying so hard.

Epiphany, but also just really obvious.

Okay.

So I think that we've probably said all we can on reviews and believing in ourselves when it comes to them.

So we are coming back next week with the series on.

So I'm just like trying to get my computer to come back on with it.

How to Believe in Yourself, which is this series.

The next episode is all about other authors.

Do you have any initial thoughts on this?

Yeah, I think it's interesting.

I think we'll have quite a different takes on it as well.

Because like we said, cozy authors, there's a lot of cozy authors because it's a big genre.

And cozy authors are the sorts of people who like writing cozy books, therefore are relatively cozy people.

And they're quite, you know, grandmas in spirit, I would say.

I'm quite a grandma in spirit.

People like helping each other and being friendly and sharing things.

So yeah, I think I can, I've definitely in the last couple of years become much more in a space where I can give and receive help and feel more connected to other authors.

And I really want to think about how I can deliberately do more of that.

So I've got quite a lot I can talk about in relation to that.

And then I also started it this week, really, when I was thinking about that as a DiMera Views is part of what we want to talk about was kind of using other authors as models.

And it's definitely been helpful to come to it with the mindset of like other authors are equals and I can view them as like, they're doing this this way, I can do this this this way too.

So yeah, I think I will continue with some of the things I've been doing this week and then also looking at how I can make more use of my connections with other authors.

So yeah, plenty of things to go on that.

How about you?

Yeah, I think for me, other authors has always been the most difficult part of all this.

When we started doing this podcast at the start of the year, and we were doing all of our work on like brand and comp authors and all of that like fun research that we were really digging into.

I really struggled with comp authors and still to this day, do not really know like many comp authors and I don't have any connection or like I don't have, I don't feel like I have anybody in a group, like I don't have anybody to look on turn to, to kind of look to for help or anything really, because a lot of young adult books, it's mostly just like trad people that I see.

I follow a lot of trad authors, which is my own fault.

I should really try and follow more indie authors.

I do follow loads of indie authors.

That's to say, I'm just following trads, but yeah, I just feel like I don't have a very good grasp on the group of people that I'm working with, because we are, like you say, like we're on the same level.

I don't see any writer as competition, really.

It's like, we're just like colleagues, and I don't have a relationship with any of my colleagues, I feel, and that is something that I want to work on.

Because I think that this whole thing of us doing this podcast and our relationship has brought me on leaps and bounds in my belief in my writing abilities and believing that I could do this as a career.

I want to find more people that I feel like I can turn to and have good conversations with about, not just writing, but what's going on in the genre.

I don't think I'll do it by next week.

I think that I will have a better selection of people that I kind of want to befriend over the next few months.

I need to work on being more out there and find the people that I want to work with and talk to.

That's where I'm going to start next week.

I'm going to have some sort of list of people.

I mean, Cozy Mysteries Authors is such a good group that we're in fact having our works due this December.

I'm going to work that, and we're going away for the night together.

I'm going out for dinner, like a proper office job.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.

Hopefully, there's photocopier.

That's what I want.

And some mistletoe.

Yeah, but that's definitely something that I've worked a lot on in the past year or so.

I will definitely find, not just me working on alone, but I have been able to be getting closer and closer to people.

And that's felt great.

So yeah, it'll be good to see if we can figure out ways in which it can be applied to other genres as well.

Yeah, that's definitely my goal for next year, is to really try and find a good group of people that...

Yeah, like a little office gang.

Well, and that brings us to the end of this episode.

Thank you very much to everyone who has tuned in.

Hopefully, you have gained something from listening to us just babble about stuff, and falling over, and roller skating, and samurai fighting.

Don't forget to like us, subscribe to us, follow us on Instagram, leave a review, just anything that you want to do.

If you want to leave a bad review, go for it.

We don't care.

Yeah, we don't care.

But please do a good one.

Fine.

Yeah, I mean, ideally.

Yeah.

We shall see you all next week.

Goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to Pen to Paycheck Authors.

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