012 Pay it Forward Marketing, Business Planning and Crafting Emotions with Angela Ackerman

Hello and welcome to episode 12 of The Rebel Author Podcast. Today I am joined by Angela Ackerman and we’re talking pay it forward marketing, business planning and crafting emotions.

Episode Question: what business planning methods you find most useful?

The two articles I’ve written recently:

One on setting up money and finance basics for your writing business is over on writers helping writers:

https://writershelpingwriters.net/2020/01/six-steps-to-setting-yourself-up-financially-as-a-writer-in-2020/

The other on crafting villains appears on the Insecure Writer’s Support Group

https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/2020/01/4-tips-for-creating-villains.html

Don’t forget the Alliance of Independent Authors is running a sale on it’s twice yearly self-publishing conference which I happen to run. If you’d like to grab over 100 hours of content, you can use my affiliate link below:

https://selfpublishingadviceconference.com/?pa=0A19CBF504

Listener Rebel of the Week is Zack Geoffrey

If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can support the show by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

 

Book Recommendation

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Kobo https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-hazel-wood-1

Amazon UK https://amzn.to/2R8X9GI

Amazon USA https://amzn.to/2TQoFeb

Episode Transcript: Pay it Forward Marketing, Business Planning and Crafting Emotions

More About Angela:

Find her books here: https://writershelpingwriters.net/bookstore/

One Stop for Writers software here: https://onestopforwriters.com/

Read her article on Business Planning here: https://www.janefriedman.com/business-plans-for-writers/

Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Sacha Black
Hello and welcome back to the rebel author podcast. Today I am with the absolutely amazing Angela Ackerman. Angela is a writing coach and international speaker and co author of the best selling book, The Emotion Thesaurus, A Writers Guide to Character Expression, which is now an expanded second edition; which I own and if you don’t, you really ought to. And she also has many, many sequels, of which I also own all of them and I highly recommend them. I’m trying not to fangirl here clearly it’s not working. Okay. Um, her books are available in seven languages are sourced by US universities, recommended by agents and editors and are used by novelist screenwriters and psychologists around the world. Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site writers helping writers, as well as one stop shop for writers and innovative creative library built to help writers elevate their storytelling. Welcome, Angela. It is a huge honor to have you here today.

Angela Ackerman
I think I am the one who’s honored.

Sacha Black
What? Oh my goodness, I think my brain just melted.

And for those who don’t know, I have been a long term fan of Angela and Becca and all of their thesauri of which I’ve had the first one for an awfully long time. And it’s all tatty and covered in coffee and crumbled edges, which I now find horrifying, because I tried to keep my books very clean and smooth. But and yeah, I think the books that you guys create are just the number one writing tool and writing book that every single author should own. So yes, thank you so much for coming. Oh, and yeah, so sorry. I will stop. I will stop. I just thank you for being here.

Angela Ackerman
Oh my gosh, you’re so sweet. And thank you very much. You know it It never gets old during that our books are actually really helping people because it’s, I don’t know, description and show don’t tell specifically is is something that we all struggle with to some degree. It’s something that we all hear so don’t tell. But we don’t really understand the extent of how it infiltrates like every aspect of storytelling.

Sacha Black
Totally. Yeah, completely. Yeah. And it’s not just show don’t tell there you have your location, your rural, your urban your emotional wounds, and I have to say, I’m not sure if it’s the wounds or the original emotion thesaurus that I love best. But both of those, I think combined, really help a writer to dig down and create better characterization and deeper characters. So whenever you’re doing hit pause, go order the books, and okay, right, let’s get on with the episode. So tell listeners a little bit more about you and your journey and how you go into full-time writing?

Angela Ackerman
Well, I’m, I’m a Canadian, so I live in Canada. And like most writers out there, you feel a little bit isolated when you start. I wasn’t involved in any in-person groups. I didn’t know any other writers in my real world. So I went online to try to connect with other people because I knew that, I thought that I was a pretty good storyteller, but I needed help. And I needed to learn how to become a stronger writer. And I really needed the feedback from other people to kind of gauge where I was on the path and if I was headed in the right direction, if what I was writing was actually publishable all of that.

And so I ended up on a site called one stop for writers or sorry, critique circle. Oh, my God. And the critique circle is an online critique. site where people from all over the world in all different genres, they kind of get together and They put their work up for other people to critique. And I learned so much there. Just so much about good, strong storytelling. And I really, through the eyes of other people, I learned kind of where my weaknesses were.

And this happens to be where I met, backups, Becca Puglisi, who is my co-author, and she’s my partner in crime on my blog, and at one stop the writers and her and I, we just really enjoyed each other’s work. And we really forged a strong friendship. And both really were passionate about learning, writing, craft, and growing as writers and also helping other people. And I think that’s kind of where we sort of jog left a little bit because we started the critique circle, both of us with plans of, you know, becoming fiction authors. And that’s still a plan for both of us. But along the way, we realized that we really had a passion for learning, writing and sharing what we know. We started blogging together. And that blog led to this whole series of the source books that we write, which look at different aspects of description, that is just really hard for writers to master and to use fully. If you take setting for example, a lot of people think of setting as you know, while we want to make sure that we’re describing the setting vividly enough that people can see what’s going on. But really setting is responsible for so much more than that there’s so much more that you can do with it, including, you know, characterizing your stories cast. You can use it to foreshadow, you can evoke mood, you can steer your readers emotions steer the characters emotions. You know, there’s just so many different ways to use sensory description to really power up your novel.

And so we started exploring each topic and really digging deep into each one. You mentioned the emotional source and the emotional wound to source. A big piece that has resonated with writers is anything to do with characterization. Because, as you’ve noted, the deeper a character is, you know, the more compelling it is to follow in a story and you just you feel really pulled into the characters point of view and what they’re experiencing. And it’s just so much better of an experience for readers. Yeah. So yeah, so we started, we started writing these writing guides. And it turned into this whole huge, massive thing that that’s kind of been our main focuses is writing our writing guides and then bringing them to life as well through one stop for writers. Which is a site that we have that not only has all of our the sources that we’ve ever created, which are, like 16 of them. I know there’s only six books, but there’s actually we’ve written we’ve written many, many, many different sources on different topics, and then back and I also like building different types of creative tools that will really help writers demystify different aspects of storytelling, like building strong characters, like structuring stories. Just making it all easier so that writers focus on what they’re best at which is actually writing the story.

Sacha Black
So of those 16, obviously, I’m clearly asking her for entirely selfish reason reasons. But I’m all those other stuff. All of the 16 going to come out, please, please.

Angela Ackerman
As books?

Sacha Black
yeah.

Angela Ackerman
I’m going to break your heart a little. Oh, probably not. Or if… umm, well, I won’t say no, for sure. But some books are some topics are more suited to be books than others. Yeah, because some topics are bigger than others. For example, we have one that’s all about different types of weather. And it’s super awesome. I mean, it really shows writers how to use that element effectively in your storytelling to, you know, create that foreshadowing and to build that mood and things like that to stay away from the cliches that we all know about, and use that sensory description, but there’s really only so many different types of weather that you can describe. It wouldn’t be a book, in the sense that people are used to seeing or writing guides, that would be a smaller volume. Yeah, but others will definitely become books. The one we’re working on right now is all on occupations. And that’s the next one that will be out in 2020.

Sacha Black
I mean, even if you published a smaller version, I would buy it and I’m pretty sure everybody listening would buy it too. So whatever you publish, we’re gonna buy. I wanted to come back on one of the things that you were saying about emotion because it’s so I’m writing I’m working on something called The Anatomy of Prose at the moment so it’s kind of looking at the the nitty gritty detail of what what you do at the sentence level and how that can impact character creation. And you know, that aspect where writers learn how to find their voice, you know, it’s not prescriptive in the “this is right, and this is wrong” because I think that’s all bullshit. Anyway. You know, a writer’s voices is a writer’s voice but something you said about emotion and I think that is the universal thread that that pulls every reader through the journey but something I was thinking about today, I can’t remember exactly what you said that jogged me. But I think the more detailed you go, and this is the beauty of your books, because they have so much detail in there and so many little what’s the word you know, like rabbit warrens, you can go down with the level of detail. It’s the detail in what each character says, does, describes, feels that really makes emotion universal, which sounds bizarre, because when you write a character with a huge level of detail, that is based on the things and their perceptions of how they look at setting this is what you were saying, and how you know how they’re perceiving and feeling about the setting. Even though it’s personal to them. It’s that level of detail that makes it universal that we then reflect on. And so that is one of the reasons that I love The Emotion Thesaurus and in fact, all of them really because you do give us so much detail that we can… The number of possibilities for for creating characters is just infinite. So yeah, thanks, guys. And okay, so for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve used the pay it forward marketing method. So could you tell listeners what that means? First of all,

Angela Ackerman
okay, I don’t think of it that way. But I can see why other people would think of it that way. For me, I just, I do something that I really enjoy, which is to help people. So basically what I do with my marketing is I build goodwill with people by giving generously, and it’s, it’s not a gimmick or an angle. It’s not anything like that. It’s just that helping people is a really big part of my philosophy. It’s a big part of Becca’s philosophy. It’s one of the reasons that we, gel so well together. Like I said, we really are passionate about this. And so we basically feel that if you can help someone then do. And so we’ve incorporated that, into our marketing in the sense that it’s all about understanding who our audience really is, and what they need most. We’re very lucky in the sense that our audience are writers.

And so as writers ourselves, we’re really keyed into exactly what it is that we all need and where we struggle the most. And so it’s very easy for Becky and I, to sort of sit back, think about those struggles and go, Okay, well, how can we help? What can we do with our knowledge with the tools that we built with our connections to other people with the resources that we have with them, different kinds of links that we curate, whatever it is, the people that we know, how can we help other writers solve these problems? And and that’s essentially what we do is just really think about how we can deliver things that Our audience needs. And this builds trust because people know that we are there for them that that we are invested in their success that we believe that we’re all in this together and, that what we’re doing is very genuine. And because they they trust us and they trust our recommendations, and they know that we’re really invested in them. I think that it creates an environment where they feel really good about promoting our work, sharing our work with other people, because they find it valuable. They found it find the information that we share really valuable. So it’s a two fold thing where they want to reciprocate in a sense that we have helped them in some way and they want to help us in return, but they also are being genuine about it because they too, are getting value from the things that we do. And they care about other writers and they want those other writers to benefit in the same way that they have. So it’s kind of this, this beautiful engine, where we’re all just really helping each other in whatever way You know, we’re best suited to do.

Sacha Black
Absolutely. And I think you guys have really found that thing that you’re passionate about as well. And I think that obviously shows in, in all of all the things that you do and I think when you embody that fully you it is like your tribe kind of flocks to you as well as you kind of giving out and it’s like this beautiful reciprocal kind of, I don’t know, karma, I suppose. Yeah, ad I think, you know, it’s a real lesson to you know, as part of this indie self publishing kind of journey to work out who you are and what you want to say and then say it passionately, but yeah, I just, yeah, I totally agree. So for anybody who, who would like to give back I suppose, and feels like they would like to use a very similar ethos or mindset. Do you have any tips on how they should start and how they should build their own platform, I suppose?

Angela Ackerman
Well, I think that it definitely has to feel it has to be something that’s authentically them. Right? It has to be a part of who you are. You can’t think of it as like a tactic. Because it’s not, it’s not a marketing tactic. If you’re only doing it to get something, then it’s not going to feel genuine and other people are going to know that. So really, you want to be thinking about what you can give and not what you can get and just trust that everything will work out.

And it doesn’t really matter if like in in some sense as I get other people who will say, well, Angela, that works really great for you because you’re a nonfiction author, and you have writers as your audience, but what about me as a fiction author, like how do I, you know, how can I build this sort of relationship with my readers? And it really the same techniques can happen? I don’t like you’re saying techniques, but the same mechanism can happen for a fiction author to just as it can, for someone who’s a nonfiction author, the only difference is the subject matter expert area. So as a nonfiction author, I mean, I know that my audience specifically they’re going to struggle with a lot of things to do with writing craft, they’re going to struggle with a lot of things to do with imposter syndrome and, and all of these different things. So the information, the help that I am going to give them is going to meet those needs, but a fiction author, they are going to have a very specific audience based on the type of books that they write.

If they write something about, I don’t know if they write romance books that incorporate dogs in some way, like maybe every single romance that they write. It’s all about dog lovers. It’s always about a vet and somebody who trains dogs or rescues dogs, and there’s always that element of just people who really love dogs. And that’s part of the romance plot that they’re that they’re building in each book. If they’ve written something like that, clearly the common denominator with their reading the audience Is that they’re going to be people who love dogs. They’re going to be romance readers, but they’re also going to love dogs. So that is a subject matter, a subject that where they can be a subject matter expert in, and they can think about, okay, my audience that really loves, you know, they love dogs, they love hearing about dogs, what kind of content can I share? That’s going to entertain them that’s going to interest them, that maybe it’s going to help them out with little problems that they have with their own dogs if they have a dog. What kind of, you know, funny videos can I share? What kind of themes Can I share? What kind of sites are out there that are going to get people interested? What events are happening that have to do with dogs, you know, what great charities are there that are doing excellent works for people who who love dogs.

There’s, there’s a whole you know, there’s a whole world of information out there keyed towards this very specific group of people that are going to enjoy this book. And above and beyond all of that. There are also going to be other authors out there writing books that are about people who love dogs too. And the reality is, is that some writers, they feel really resistant in recommending other people’s books that are a lot like theirs. But I don’t understand this because the reality is, is we’re not competition. If I read a book that’s really good, like, when I read your books, for example, I know they’re really high quality, I know that these are going to help writers. I don’t see you as competition. I see you as someone that has an incredible amount of knowledge that’s really going to help writers. And I feel really good about sending people to your books and your site. And I don’t think of you as competition because the reality is, is that I mean, can we ever have enough craft books?

We cannot. And and our readers, they. One thing we know about them is that they love to read, and we will never ever, ever be able to write books fast enough to keep them satisfied. So why not pass them on to other people where we read their books. We love them. books were were happy to play matchmaker. And again, that continues to build that trust. readers understand, you know what? Okay, Angela, she’s busy. She hasn’t put out a book in, you know, six months, it’s okay, I’ve read a book, it’s all good. But she says, to read these three books, and I’m going to read them because I trust her judgment, I know these books are going to be great. And it’s the same thing. If you’re a fiction author, you know, it’s okay to promote other authors. because it keeps your readers engaged with you. They, they’re engaged, because they know that even though you’re working on your next book, and you don’t have anything to maybe offer them right now, as far as new reads, you’re still thinking about them, you still care about them, and you still want to make sure that they’re being taken care of while they’re waiting for your next book. So absolutely. This this method of building trust and being there for your audience and understanding what it is that they really need, what they really want, what they really enjoy. That’s all super important. And it doesn’t matter if you write fiction or nonfiction either way, you can do that.

Sacha Black
Yeah, there’s so much things that I love about everything that you’ve just said. There’s a phrase that I hear really often in the indie community I and I always get it slightly wrong, but I think it it, I think it’s the rising tide lifts all the boats or something. Yeah, and I just think that’s so true because indies are so willing to collaborate and work with each other. And it is so true. You know, I am not one of these people who reads as many books as some of the me I write young adult. For my fiction at the moment, I’m writing adult fantasy, but some of the girls I see on Instagram or just consuming books, there is no possible way and author in their entire lifetime could satisfy that kind of voracious reader. And, you know, I think I read between 60 and 75 books a year and even you know, even I that’s a lot of books for one author to be to be able to produce that many books a year, let alone… You know, that’s the beauty of being a leaders that we like to delve into all these different things. So, I love that. And also, a sort of, it’s quite goes back to what you were saying earlier about finding that, that thing that you love and that you’re passionate about, and then going deep, you know, creating as much content as you possibly can to share that with people who love the things that you love as well. I was thinking a bit about, like this explosion of micro, not micro expressionist poetry on Instagram, that’s how they’re finding their audience. And and also podcasting. I know quite a few fiction authors now who are finding vast amounts of readers because they’re publishing whether it be short fiction or horror fiction or whatever on podcast so yeah, I just love everything that you’re saying. Next question, so I there is no possible way I could have you on the show without asking about creating emotion and characters. What are the key elements to creating emotion?

Angela Ackerman
Um, I would say, first and foremost is building a bond between your reader and your character. Because readers are not going to care about what the characters going through and their emotions if they don’t, if they don’t care about that character, if it’s if they can’t really understand them and feel empathy for them. So you really want to build that bond, really know the character inside and out, understand, like, what’s motivating them, what they fear, all of those different things that you can build these really realistic compelling layers that make a character feel like a real person.

That’s real people are complex, and our characters should be complex as well. And I think that when we build characters that are really deep and you know, they have… they’re almost a mirror of the real world. They’re a mirror of the reader themselves, you know, they they have you know, they have content fears, they have common experiences that they’ve had. And they feel emotions, the drivers of what might be happening in the story to the character to cause an emotion that might be unique. It might be something that the reader has never experienced themselves. But they’ve all experienced that emotion at some point in time. You know, we all know what it’s like to feel betrayed or powerless. We all know what it’s like to fail or where to screw up. And so if you can kind of build the deep character, and really build in struggles and emotions that readers can relate to, that is really going to create that connection between the leader and the character. And then when they’re, when they’re in the moment and they’re experiencing this this situation that is causing them to feel these complex emotions, sometimes conflicting emotions. readers are really going to feel drawn in because they’ve been there. They’ve felt those things. They’ve been stuck with really terrible options and choices. They’ve been in situations where they made a big mistake. And now they have to figure out how are they going to undo this thing? Or how are they going to face up to it? How are they going to accept responsibility for it? All of these things, that common experiences that we can pull from the everyday world, put them into storytelling that are just going to make that character seems so much more real, and real relatable. So I would definitely say like, that’s, that’s a really big part of it. I think the other thing is to understand again, when you’re digging deep to understand who your character is, and really looking at their history, understanding, you know, where their personality came from, all of that kind of stuff. You want to be thinking about that internal landscape, especially the emotional landscape and their emotional range. So you want to know things like, is your character expressive, or are they reserved? Are they type of person who was going to share what they feel? Are they gonna, you know, want to sit down and talk to somebody talk it through, or they sort of the type of people that they just, they bottle it all up. They hold it And until like there’s this big explosion when they act on what they feel, you know, what’s that going to look like? Is it is it going to come through hurtful things that they say? Really definitive actions that maybe they regret afterwards? Or is it more subtle? And so understanding those things about your character it just did it adds these layers of realism and makes that person feel so much more unique. Like a real person.

The thing that we have to remember about our characters is that every action choice and decision and behavior should always line up with who they are. Right? That’s, that’s really important, because that’s how our readers actually, they pay attention to the characters behavior to navigate the story to understand what’s important to the character, what should I care about, what’s, what’s the goal here, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And so understanding who your character is deep down, and how emotion is going to come out through those actions and decisions and choices. It just, it makes the whole novel so much more compelling and the journey so much more compelling, because everything lines up beautifully with who that character is. So I can’t underscore enough to really understand who your character is deep down.

Sacha Black
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic advice, especially, you were saying earlier about what their reaction would be if they were say, for example, a sort of emotionally reserved person. I think that’s really key because it also creates consistency and I think that’s part of being human. We are very habitual creatures, and we react in very predictable ways. Until we suddenly don’t. And quite quite often, that’s when you know, your protagonist will face a obstacle or whatever. And then eventually they get over their flaw, which is whatever’s keeping them consistent and stopping them from fulfilling their. I can’t think of the word, you know what I’m talking about?

Yeah. Have you ever seen Game of Thrones out of interest?

Angela Ackerman
I haven’t. Oh,

Sacha Black
OH M GEE, okay. Wow. Well, I guess

Angela Ackerman
I totally want to Yeah, not on my channels.

Sacha Black
Oh, wow. Okay, well, I was going to say, George RR Martin does some of that really, really well, because he quite often will create characters with really strong inner values, and they’re very, they behave very consistently against those inner values and then suddenly he will pit a very difficult decision against those inner values and I think that always makes for a really interesting characterization and plot.

Angela Ackerman
Yeah, I love it. I love it when any characters morals, moral ground, the line in the sand is challenged. Yeah, I’m in a situation where, you know, they really do to decide like: am I gonna hold to this belief? Yeah. Yeah,

Sacha Black
Yeah, me too. All when they have two bad decisions which bad decision do they go with? I always think. Yeah. Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. Oh, anyway, sorry, right. Nitty gritty. Let’s Let’s go down to the sentence level. What kind of techniques could an author use to evoke emotion?

Angela Ackerman
I would say to really think carefully about each and every word. Often we can do a lot more with less if we power up our language. So you’re going to want to use very specific verbs, verbs that are they plant an image in the readers mind you want to describe actions and thoughts and visuals in a way that just conveys that immediate image that a reader can really picture it. So I wrote down an example here I’m going to read it off. I could say something like

Laura paced her mind stuff with the hate laced Barb’s that she would unleash on Desi when he got home. Or I could say something like, Laura stomp laps around the kitchen table hands flexing jaws tight. Desi was a dead man. Like which one can you actually see?

Sacha Black
Oh, yeah. 100%

Angela Ackerman
What we need to think about is how can I show it to the reader? Like how can I build something you know, you can imagine those hands flexing like in and out just the pacing the jaw tight, you know, teeth kind of greeting together. You can imagine all of those things, you can see it and then you know Desi was a dead man. like boom, you get the sense of what that character is feeling in that moment. So that’s kind of what we want to do is just make sure that everything is conveying that that image and that we’re trying to keep that word economy because especially if the pacing is really strong, you know, you’ve got a high action scene or something like that. You don’t want sentences and sentences of flowery description. That’s just not realistic for that type of scene, you know, your character isn’t going to stop and think about everything, right? They’re just going to act, they’re not going to notice everything. They’re just going to focus on the things that are critical to their mindset in that moment. So it’s really about putting ourselves in the character’s shoes, and thinking like they would in that moment and think about what are they perceiving from the room that they’re in and why. And, only painting a picture of the details that really matter. Not everything. Not that there’s a half there’s a there’s a cold cup of coffee on the table. You know, like details that don’t matter to the scene, you want to focus on the things that matter that reinforce that emotional state.

Sacha Black
Yeah, absolutely. And, and the beauty of this is, you can play with the technique and the pacing. So I was it’s funny, I was literally writing about this today in that 90% of your action scene should be, you know, the shorts to top the staccato sentences of fast paced actions, very little, you know, emotional sensory description, if it’s kind of a hardcore battle scene. But then you can play with that, and let’s say you, your protagonist, see somebody that they care deeply about die, you know, you can slow down one or two seconds of, of their realization of what’s happened and, you know, extend the metaphor or because that’s what matters to that character in that moment. So yeah, I love that.

Angela Ackerman
I think just playing on what you said. I think to Like that’s where symbolism can come in and be very powerful. If someone has, you know, that you love is just died, you know, what is the character going to notice about that person that has special meaning to them? You know, is it a? Is it a gift that they gave them? You know, are they wearing something? You know, did they just give them a flower like five minutes before and the person just stuck it in their lapel and now oh my gosh, they’re dead. And, you know, like, just slow things down and focus on that one detail that has a connection to that character that that symbolizes something greater than what it actually is. Yeah,yeah.

Sacha Black
Love it. I’m uh, I feel super geeking out right now on all of all things wordy. So let’s let’s flip this on its head and talk about mistakes that you see authors making with trying what we do when they’re trying to create a motion. What do you see most often?

Angela Ackerman
Um, a few things. I would say one would be not going deep enough. So not personalizing that emotion to that specific character. And not letting their characters show a vulnerable side. I think that’s a big one. A lot of writers don’t want to hurt their characters, they, especially if they’re writing characters that are tough, you know, they’re, they’ve been hurt. They’ve, you know, the world has hurt them. They’re they’re damaged, they’re damaged goods. And it’s hard sometimes, because legitimately, they have a very high shield around themselves, especially where their emotions are concerned, because life is, you know, serve them up a lot of lemons. And so they’re very used to getting hurt, and they don’t want to get hurt again. And so they do create the shield around themselves. But you do need to build in moments where that shield slips, where you do show that inner vulnerability where you do get real with how the character feels in the moment, in a specific circumstance where maybe they’ve failed or there’s a mistake that they’ve made or they feel something unexpected. Something that they bought, maybe they were dead too, because they’ve just been hurt so much in the past, and then unexpectedly, they’re affected in a way that they weren’t expecting. I think those kind of moments are super powerful. And, and by not allowing that vulnerability to show through because writers are afraid that maybe the reader is going to think that their characters weak. I think that that’s a mistake. I think Instead, it actually makes them seem more real, more like real people. Yeah, so I think that that’s a big one.

The other one that I see is, is naming emotions. And this is something that is so easily fixed with a search and replace, to look for places where you actually need the emotion. It’s very rare that you actually need to say what an emotion is, because that’s what show don’t tell is all about. If you’re showing an emotion through something that the characters doing, through the way that they’re perceiving their world through thoughts that they have, whatever that looks like through their actions. You won’t need to tell by telling and naming that emotion. And often writers use and they’ll name the emotion because they’re worried that maybe they didn’t do a strong enough job of showing it. And so they kind of just tag it on, you know, just in case you didn’t know that, you know, they, they shivered with fear, you know, like that sort of thing you don’t, you almost never need that you almost never need to say what it is you should be just describing it. And so I always encourage people to really challenge themselves to think about, you know, how can I render this emotion on the page in a way where it’s really 100% clear that this character is he’s shivering in fear. He’s not shivering because he’s cold or for some other reason, you know what I mean? It’s how can I build elements through my description that’s just going to reinforce this particular feeling?

Sacha Black
Yeah, absolutely. And I know I don’t think I have anything else to even comment. That was just such a good answer. And you’ve recently sold translation rights. Can you talk us through the process, how you went about selling them? And any lessons that you guys have learned from that experience?

Angela Ackerman
Yeah, so it was really interesting what happened in our case, because of course, we’re self-published. So we weren’t really thinking about translation rights from the get go or anything like that. It’s different now. But back when we first published the emotion thesaurus, it was like 2012. And so back then, I mean, self-publishing was still a really dirty word. And, you know, you just we weren’t really thinking along those lines that maybe there was potential for for our books in other languages. But what started happening is that we were being approached by some agents in other countries asking if the rights were available. And Becca and I were pretty busy already with all the other stuff that we were trying to manage. And we both felt like the last thing that we wanted to tack on to everything else is trying to work with publishers in another country, when there’s language barriers, when there’s a lot of things that you need to know as a publisher or as a, the owner of a property like that, like tax law and withholding tax and things like that. There’s lots of different things to know. So we thought we should find an agent to kind of work with these people and see if there’s a deal can be made. So we did. We did look around. We asked, we mentioned our situation to a few different agents. And we finally found a really great one, Marlene Segars at two C’s literary. And it’s been great.

I mean, if someone comes to us, and they asked if the rights are available, we just pass them on to Marlene, and then she and her her agents, and the sub agents in each country, they kind of work with that publisher to see if a deal can come about. And if she’s at different events, publishers approached her about it. Then she contacts us with potential deals. So it’s it’s been really really, really great. And I’m so glad we went this route because some of our books have done really well in, in some countries like for example, Japan, our books, the emotion thesaurus especially and the setting thesaurus source. Were super popular over there. The setting the source was the number one book out of all books sold on Amazon.

Sacha Black
Wow.

Angela Ackerman
It was on TV, it was on BuzzFeed, it was on all different kinds of stuff down there, which was just fantastic. And we would have never maybe thought on our own to, to explore foreign, rights? So I’m really glad that we did. I would say that you definitely can choose to go at yourself. You can choose to negotiate these rights on your own. I do know authors that do it. And I know that there’s support systems in place to find that kind of information. Joanna Penn, I know that she has had people on about foreign rights. I know that she has resources on her blog and stuff like that. ALLi is another one where you know, they they’re very, they can be very helpful with that kind of information. In our case, we decided to actually work with an agent. And like I said, it’s been really helpful to have a go between, especially to find out information about withholding tax and what that looks like and to have somebody, you know, give the publisher a nudge if you haven’t gotten your royalty statements yet, and all that kind of stuff. All of this was very new to Becca and I, because we, before we started self-publishing, we were not traditionally published. So we did not have any exposure to that sort of side of publishing. So we found having an agent has been really fantastic. So I would just make sure that you choose an agent that is, you know, their backlog there. They’re the clients or people that are in your space that are, you know, their books that are a lot like yours, so that you know that they have good contacts,

Sacha Black
And Is that how you sort of initiated your searches by looking at similar books and authors in who their agents and publishers might be or, I mean.

Angela Ackerman
Yeah, that’s exactly what we don’t we, I think we looked on Amazon to see who had foreign editions and for writing guides and then who were the publishers for those foreign additions.

Sacha Black
Yeah. As somebody who’s a fellow only ever indie I mean, this whole trad world, it’s just mind boggling to me I just I you know, I’ve never even queried so. I find it all very interesting. And you mentioned ALLi there and they’re doing a six month program at the moment called the ALLi foreign translation rights program. And they’ve got a few authors in different genres all trying to sell rights at the London Book Fair. And they’re recording the sessions every six weeks or four weeks that I think we’re doing them and it’s just fascinating seeing the process and and how indies because actually indie selling rights is still quite new. And obviously there are indies who’ve been selling rights for a while, but it’s not as mainstream as say, for example, that Kindle has now become, you know, from 10 years ago. So yeah, I find this whole arena really interesting. And, and, especially because I haven’t ever queried so I’m like, how do you do that? So I’m asking all the naive questions now. But thank you,

Angela Ackerman
Donna. No, it was really great. And I think too, the other thing to remember is that you don’t necessarily need an agent, you can decide to do it yourself. You can hire a translator and, work with a translator, one on one. That’s another like, the wonderful thing about being indie is that there’s so many options, you know, nothing is really off the table as far as processes to get your workout to your readers. I mean, that’s the great thing about being in this side of things.

Sacha Black
Yeah. And also you can try things and if it doesn’t work, well, you don’t like it. Well just suck it off and try something else. Yeah, because we were not contracted to to anyone. Okay, so I talk about multiple streams of income all of the time. I think it’s really important for a variety of reasons, not least of which to protect yourself and your sort of financial. Nope the words gone. Financial security, that’s the word I’m looking for. It must be late at night. And any tips for listeners who would like to have multiple streams of income? Because obviously, you guys have two businesses essentially, don’t you? Can you talk to us a little bit about your second business and how you manage the chaos of what must be running two separate businesses?

Angela Ackerman
Chaos is a very good word.

Well, definitely, you know, I think that if you are trying to financially support yourself through your writing, we do need to think wide we need to think about our intellectual property and all the different ways that it can be used. And for a lot of writers they become speakers They do speak to certain groups subject matter that is tied into their book, if you wrote a book about I don’t know, let’s take the dog lover example, if you did a bunch of research in that space, and there was some kind of event for dog lovers, maybe some kind of conference or some big thing with different booths and stuff like that, maybe there’s an opportunity to get involved with that organization. Maybe there’s an opportunity to run a workshop of some kind, to let people into the world of a writer and a dog lover or something along those lines. Another avenue that a lot of writers go for is they actually go to writing conferences, and they teach writing because of course, we all have to learn how to write well in order to, be an author to be a successful author. And so a lot of people they enjoy sharing what they know and they teach workshops, and that can be another stream of revenue for people. I would definitely recommend that if you’re a fiction author, Try to think of what ties to your book. Because you’re much more likely to find your readers within the audience of events that are, that are tied to that specific area, then you would potentially say teaching at a writers conference that could have, you know, many different writers that are in different genres that only a tiny subset may actually, you know, read the type of books that you write. It’s, it’s not that that’s not off the table. But try to think about opportunities where you could do speaking, where you’re more going to be directly aligned to people that are most likely to be connected to your book through whatever makes it special.

But yet for myself, I back and I, we love creating these writing guides, but a problem that we ran into is that our guides are very big as you know, and heavy and has we were, you know, each and every one as we were putting them out, we’re thinking oh my gosh, like these poor people that are carrying like these stack of books two books for their you know like they’re writing in a coffee shop and they’re hauling you know, these phone books around my goodness because a lot of writers do like our books in print because they’re very, very easy to navigate you can see everything all the information on a on a particular emotion on a two page spread and things like that. So, you know, we we realized that ebooks are not like they they work for many people do like ebooks, because they’re very portable, they’re not heavy. But they’re also not quite the best format for books because we really like giving people the option of being able to see everything on a single entry all at once. Because it really helps you brainstorm quickly, you’re not scrolling through six pages on a Kindle to see all the information that we have.

So we were thinking outside the box, how else can we kind of frame this information and make it helpful for people and so we got together with Lee Powell who’s the creator of Scrivener for Windows. And we built one stop for writers and One Stop for Writers allowed us to do two things. First of all put all of our source content in one place because some are books some were on our blog some were on our hard drives. And so we really needed it all to be in one place. Anyone who has used our books, they know how useful they can be for brainstorming. So when you have 16 of those type of resources, where you can look up talents and skills or symbolism or setting or weather or any of these different topics, character, motivation, emotion. When you can see it all in one place. It just makes everything so much easier. The second thing that One Stop for Writers allowed us to do was Becca and I are out of the box thinkers. And one reason why I think our guides have worked really well is because we challenged what the idea of a writing guide is. Our thesauruses are part educational, where we teach you how to use a better description, in a particular area, but then most of it is at the source where We break down all the micro topics within that topic of setting or emotion or wounds or whatever the topic is. And we go through it all and create this incredible list of ideas.

And so, thinking outside the box in that case really helped us think about how to help writers in a new way. That’s really big part of who we are. And we also like thinking about other ways we can help writers. So we built all different sorts of tools that don’t exist things that as writers ourselves, we really need. We know we’re going to make it so much easier for us to build strong characters and really powerful stories. And so at one stop for writers has kind of become this library where we’ve been able to build all these different types of tools that just make all those puzzle pieces of storytelling so much easier to manage. Now, it is a bit of a balancing act, because it essentially is this whole second business that we have to run Becca and I what makes us successful is that we have an excellent relationship with Lee at One Stop Writers, all three of us bring different skill sets to the table. We all are responsible for different things based on our strengths and weaknesses. And so together, we make a really powerful team. We really need to understand our time and the value of our time and make sure that we’re really well organized. As you know, from the conversation that we’ve had recently in your Facebook group. We’re big on making business plans. And so every year Becca and I will create a business plan for writers helping writers and our books. And then for One Stop for Writers. And so we have to figure out okay, how are we splitting our time this year? What are the big projects that we want to get done where our focuses and what are the action items that need to carry out by the end of the year and it really comes down to becoming very good at kind of getting a read on when am I overreaching and trying to do too much? Like, what can I reasonably get done?

This is such a struggle, right?

Sacha Black
Yes, struggle is real.

Angela Ackerman
Struggle is real, right? Because we always overreach. We’re like, we can write six books this year, you are always overreaching. And we have these grand plans in January of all the things we want to accomplish. But we need to remember that you need to build in time for things to go off the rails for new opportunities to come on board, which is fine, but it also means that we need to get very good at assessing those opportunities as they come along. And so Becca and I, we understand what our big goals are, for one stop for writers for writers helping writers every year. And when opportunities come along, to join, participate in different collaborative marketing events or to go if someone invites us to a conference to speak or something like that. We have to look at is their time in the business plan. And is it helping me With one of the goals that I have for this business, and if the answer is yes, then we definitely will take advantage of that opportunity. But if the answer is no then we have to we have to sit sometimes decide to step back from that opportunity and just say, you know, unfortunately the timing is not going to work. Keep me in mind for next year something along those lines

Sacha Black
Because you brought up business plans, I’m going to go totally off script here. Do you find that having Becca… because you are partners in crime that also means you are accountable to each other. So do you find that the creation of the business plan you become… Okay, so what am I trying to say? What I’m trying to say is, I quite often will write, whether it be a business plan or a list of goals or things that I want to achieve in a year. By about June, I’ve gone off and done several other things so, I don’t know if that’s because I want to rebel against the structure that I’ve put in or if it’s because I have, you know, I’m a shiny Matt, I like shiny magpie syndrome or what but do you find that having somebody there like helps you to be more accountable? Do you find that you then end up staying on plan? Because so that’s, I think the two things I struggle with most are one sticking to a plan and an a rough timeline. And the second one is just that, as you were saying, knowing what’s actually realistic and being able to be able to match that time because I’m like, I’m going to do all the things this year….Yeah, you know, I’m definitely not gonna do all of the things but I want to!

Angela Ackerman
Well, I think like for Becca and I, we didn’t start with business plans. But we, you know, we would just kind of go through the year and okay, have, you know, kind of loose timelines, okay. We’re going to publish this book in September. So it means that we have to be organized by blah. And the final revisions have to be in by here and all that kind of stuff. But the rest was just all kind of like, you know, Misty, for lack of a better word. Like, maybe something will happen in there. I don’t know. I’m sure we’ll fill our time because there’s always, always way too much work. And never enough time. That’s the thing that’s common with all of us because we all have families and other responsibilities. Some people have other jobs, that’s just life. But where we got stuck is that we were starting to get frustrated because we felt like we were always certain things were getting pushed to the next year to the next year. We get all we don’t have time to work on the website. You don’t have time to do this. And it starts to get to you because these things, these little things that you don’t address suddenly become big things and stumbling blocks where you want to do something really big and cool but because you’ve got these little things hampering you don’t have in place you don’t have a good kind of platform for for marketing. or whatever it is, or you haven’t really researched something, you know, you realize you can’t take advantage of that opportunity. So that’s kind of where you have to realize, Okay, time for the big girl panties to go on with the big boy panties to go on and get organized. And so that’s where Becca and I got to is it’s like we need to organize ourselves. And once we started following a business plan, everything changed for us.

We were so much more productive, because we follow this plan and the link you can share the link if you want with the with the show notes on this if you like. But Becca and I, my husband is a business management consultant and he helps people with business plans all the time. So I asked him to sit down with us and help us form one and we built one that has action items that are sorry focuses for us that are year after year after year. Like I don’t imagine the focuses for our business plan ever changing. It’s only the action items that will go under each category, that sort of thing. And so, year after year, we will build a business plan, we will decide what are the things that we need to get done this year, we always leave a little bit of room for magic, because of magic, magical things come along, right opportunities come along, and you want to be in a place, take advantage of the good opportunities, but you also need to become discerning about what’s going to what’s going to get you ahead as far as your goals and what is leading you on the path that goes astray into another direction that you have no plans on going down and it’s not going to further your goals.

So like I said, everything changed once we did this. So I don’t know that having Becca necessarily made it all easier. Because we were kind of struggling when it was just the two of us. We would always talk things out which was super helpful. We were always on the same page when we would move forward. We always talk things through in our strategy through before we made decisions, all of those things have always been in place with us. But once we started following the business plan, it made a big difference. Because the plan on a page that I use that I’ve recommended that you link to its puts everything, all your goals on a single page, you print it out, you put it on your wall right next to where you work. So every single time an action comes up some opportunity, and you’re like, Oh, I want to do that. You look at your business plan. And you see, you have to look at it and go, is there really room for this thing? Or is this pie in the sky? It’s just, it’s impossible. And then you have to decide, okay, well, I really want to do this thing. So what am I willing to sacrifice? Hmm. Sometimes when it comes down to sacrificing, you know, there’s things on that list that you’re like, Okay, you know what? This thing is more important than that. So I’m going to talk to Becca and we’re going to have a conversation about taking advantage of this and letting go this other thing. Sometimes that may be where you where you get. But other times, you realize it’s apples and oranges, and that you just need to stick to the plan.

Sacha Black
I’m giggling back here again, because the thing that I usually sacrifice is sleep or self care. That’s probably why I end up a mess!

Angela Ackerman
I mean, don’t get me wrong. Yeah. I mean, there’s I don’t think there’s a writer out there that doesn’t sacrifice those things we all do. But we also, we want to, we want to move forward without regret. Right? You don’t want to be at the end of the year looking at your business plan and going, man, like what happened? And I didn’t get this done, and I didn’t get that done. And now I feel like I’m more behind, you know what I mean? And that drag you down? Yeah. And let you feel like I’m, I can’t be successful because I just can’t get it together. And so, we really want to be, you know, deciding what’s important and following through, I thought makes us feel successful.

Sacha Black
I there’s so many things that you’re saying that resonate and that that’s the weird thing is, even though this has been the biggest year ever, because I left my job. That’s also where I’ve got to I’ve got to the point where I feel like I’m failing because I’ve left my job. And actually, I haven’t completed any of the things in the first six months that I wanted to complete. And it’s not because I haven’t been trying, it’s just because I’ve been doing the wrong things. And, you know, part of that is about managing the client work versus managing my work. But yeah, so many things that you’re saying are making me have like many epiphanies. So thank you.

Angela Ackerman
I think a thing to sort of think about is, a lot of us don’t have a business background. And yet being a writer, guess what, it’s a business, right? Our intellectual property is a business whether or not we want to think about it that way or not. And so, all of a sudden we’re forced to wear different head or different hat then we’re different head This is really bad. So we’re used to wearing a different hat all of a sudden, maybe something that we’re not comfortable with. It wasn’t associated with our, our day job if we had a day job, or we had a job before. And so it’s all new, and it’s all fresh. And I guess where I come down to is the question. You know, when you started, when you first took your pen to a piece of paper and started writing research, first started typing the very first sentence to your first story. Were you an expert? No, it takes time to learn these skills. So give yourself a break.

I mean, you just transitioned to full time writer. And it’s going to take a while to figure out what this looks like for you, and what you can accomplish and what you should focus on what you shouldn’t focus on. I mean, right now, it’s like Pandora’s box is open and all the goodies are on the table and you’re like a kid, you know, with candy everywhere and oh, my God would wait first. You know, because there’s all these possibilities for you and your business and where it can go. But you need to just slow down and figure out okay, let’s pace ourselves. Let’s figure out what are the most key elements to have in place. So that everything else that comes along it’s just going to be so much easier. And so definitely, you know, cut yourself a break, invest time into talking to people about, you know, what is it like to be in a business when you’re a writer, you know what, how did you make that shift from writing to marketing to running a business? Like how did you make that leap? Because it is not necessarily an easy shift for a lot of people. It wasn’t for me, it wasn’t natural, especially marketing because I’m not big on look at me promotion, oh my gosh, I don’t like that at all. So marketing was tough until I figured out a way to do it. That is me, which is helping other people. I like doing that it doesn’t feel like marketing at all. I perfect it. So there’s a lot of information out there now I think, as far as becoming, you know, turning yourself into a functional business as a writer, so yep, just search for

Sacha Black
Amazing. Thank you okay penultimate question, then this is The Rebel Author Podcast. So tell me about a time you unleash your inner rebel.

Angela Ackerman
I would have to say, it was probably in 2012 when Becca and I published self published The Emotion Thesaurus. And the reason why that was super rebellious was because, like I said, back then there was not see, it wasn’t like it is now. There was a lot of stigma around self publishing, there was a lot of traditional industry sort of looking down on people who self published. And so not only Rebecca and I self publishing a book at that time, but we were self publishing a writing guide, in the very industry that was very negative towards self publishing in general. And we were putting ourselves up there as an authority among people that were, you know, best selling authors and agents and editors, because I mean, back then all the books they were all like the writers digest books. You know, it was like Donald Maass and James Scott Bell and all these incredible, like super smart people that have so much knowledge in their heads about writing and publishing. And here we are, with our little, you know, emotional resource guide saying, hey, yeah, we knew a lot about this. And we’ll just put this on the shelf here. And I think that that really, it took a lot of guts for us to do that. And there was certainly a lot of imposter syndrome that we had to work through. Because Becca and I both came from the traditional industry route, where you know, it’s years and years of submitting work being told you’re not good enough, you know, getting an agent, the agent doesn’t work out, you let go of your agent, you get another agent, you get two acquisitions, it doesn’t work out. You query again, and then it goes to acquisitions again, and it you know, like that whole pattern of this isn’t right for us. You’re a square peg trying to be fit into a round hole. You know, it really does eat away at your self confidence. It makes you feel like you know, you’re a poser. You’re an imposter. So the fact that we came from that we were unpublished we didn’t have any traditionally published novels at that point in time. We were not editors. We were not bestselling authors. We were not agents in any way. We didn’t have any of that education or clout or authority. And yet we published that book anyway. That was definitely our rebel moment.

Sacha Black
I love it. And I love also you sort of alluded to this earlier, and that even the structure of your craft book is it’s kind of rebellious because it is not your standard, your flowing prose type and craft book. So yeah, I think you guys are both like secret rebels or maybe not so secret, maybe open rebels. And so where tell listeners where they can find out more about you and your books, and your website and everything?

Angela Ackerman
Well, I am I am. I like social media. So I am almost everywhere. So definitely look up my name Angela Ackerman, and you’ll find me on Twitter. Facebook, all those kind of good places definitely come to writers helping writers. That’s the blog that Becca and I run together. We’ve been doing it now for I think 13 years which makes you feel super old.

I know right?

There’s just so much incredible knowledge there. We have the resident ready coach program which Sahca is a part of the invite seriously, we invite incredible minds from all over to share their viewpoints on on writing craft and it’s fantastic because different voices you get different insight and everybody back that so definitely come. There’s so many great articles, especially on anything to do with writing craft, show, don’t tell description, emotion. These are all things that we’re really well known for. You can also find me at One Stop for Writers. It’s the site that back and I run with the power. Again, it’s my happy place. It’s where I get to create all these really great things. They’re going to help writers focus on their writing and get their books out fast. And make everything easier. There is a free trial if you want to check it out. So there’s you know, there’s there’s no barrier to do that if you would like that. Yeah, that’s basically where you can find me. That’s onestopforwriters.com and writershelpingwriters.net

Sacha Black
Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you very much to all of the patrons supporting the show. If you would like to get early access to all of the episodes you can do so by visiting www.patreon.com/Sachablack and that is Sacha with a C. Thank you to everybody listening. I’m Sacha Black, you’re listening to the amazing Angela Ackerman and this was The Rebel Author podcast.

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