The post Story Editing with Fictionary // EP166 appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>We welcome Kristina Stanley, founder and CEO of Fictionary, back to the show to discuss their new innovative tool designed to help authors hone their craft and self-edit more effectively.
Bestselling books have well-structured plots, compelling characters, and engaging settings that tell a great story. The other element bestselling books have in common is masterful editing. Today we welcome Kristina Stanley back to the show. An award-winning author and fiction editor, Kristina is also the founder and CEO of Fictionary, an innovative tool that’s designed to help authors hone their craft and self-edit more effectively.
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Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:01]:
You just tuned into the hippest way to start and grow your indie author career. Learn the ins, the outs, and all the all arounds of self publishing with the team from d two d and their industry influencing guests. You’re listening to Self Publishing Insiders with Draft2Digital.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:00:25]:
Hello, and welcome to Self Publishing Insiders. My name is Mark Leslie Lefebvre, and I am the director of business development with Draft2Digital. And I am honored to have in the virtual studios with me Christina Stanley, who is the founder and CEO of Fictionary. Christina, welcome.
Kristina Stanley [00:00:44]:
Hi, Mark. You know, thanks for hosting today. I’m really excited to be here and talk about story editing and gen AI and lots of other good stuff.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:00:52]:
Yeah. Well, let’s first talk I want I wanna talk about your background as a writer and and then and how that led into the the foundation and the creation of fictionary because you were solving a a problem that you recognized as a writer. Correct?
Kristina Stanley [00:01:05]:
Sure. Yeah. So I read a Mary Higgins Clark book, and it kept me up all night. And I was late for meeting, and I thought, I wanna write a book that does that to somebody. That’s just awesome. So that was my, like, first, I gotta write. Then I wrote some books, and I did well with, I I with the Canadian with crime writers of Canada and crime writers association on their debut dagger and, best unpublished crime novel in Canada and that kind of thing. And so I thought, okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:01:35]:
So I’ve got something here. And then I got a publisher and an agent. And, then my my my publisher said, you know, you’ve written these 3 books, but book 3 is really book 1. Okay. So I gotta rewrite. So I started this massive spreadsheet, and then I started collecting every piece of writing advice I read, knew, anything, and put it all together. Who’s the point of view, and what’s their goal, and what’s at stake if they don’t get it? You know, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. So I did all that, and I had this.
Kristina Stanley [00:02:07]:
I have a math degree, so I’m kinda, you know, little I like things like that. I did all that. And then, my books did my books did well, and I ended up getting a a publisher in in, Germany. And, so I thought, you know, I can’t be the only person who finds this story editing really, really hard. And then one day, literally, my husband walked by and went, what are you doing? I’m like, oh, I’m writing. He’s like, you know, Excel? Like, yeah. That’s what I do. I gotta do all this.
Kristina Stanley [00:02:34]:
And he’s like, there’s an app for that. I’ll find it. He comes back. There’s no app. We should do this. And so that was sort of the trigger into it that it’s still very, very difficult to write a novel and, you know, and and a novel that people love. And so it kinda came from that, and then it just started rolling along.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:02:56]:
That is that is fantastic. And and and it looks like the when you think about the evolution of of fictionary, you think about there’s been various phases of providing tools, creating community. I know we’re gonna be talking about something you’re really excited about as well, one of the later phases. But before we get into that, I I I rarely get the opportunity when I’m chatting with someone to say, congratulations, Christina. One of your one of your books that you’ve co authored, a non fiction book for writers, and I’m gonna pop that up on the screen, is currently, in the top 25 nonfiction bestsellers as reported through DraftDigital, a Smashwords, on the Smashwords store from sales across, numerous platforms. So let me let me just find that. And this is the so secrets to outlining a novel. Yes.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:03:46]:
And and so it’s by Kay Stanley and Al Cook. And so this is part of a series that that the 2 of you have worked on together?
Kristina Stanley [00:03:52]:
That’s correct. And so we our our first one is secrets to editing a novel. This is secrets to outlining a novel. And April 12th, we’re releasing secrets to writing a series. And how we do these books, they’re they are very actionable books. It’s all about, here’s a piece of theory. Here’s what you do. Do this before you go to the next chapter.
Kristina Stanley [00:04:13]:
And by the end of secrets to outlining, you’ve outlined a that you can use as you’re writing. And so, you know, my goal there is I know when I first started and I read all these BooksRead you think, make your protagonist likable. I’m like, oh, I like her. I don’t know what that means. You know? Or or when you switch point of view or what start a new scene, you’re like, okay. What’s that mean? You know, all these things, and it took me so long to figure it out, and I thought, it can be way more practical. All it is is if you do this, then you can see this, then you can see this. And if you do it in this order, off you go.
Kristina Stanley [00:05:04]:
And so we’re trying to help as many writers as possible really understand the structure of a story and then use that structure to be fully creative in it. And so it’s still your story. It’s still totally unique, but you have some boundaries. And then if you want to go outside those boundaries, at least you know you’re making a decision to do it and why you’re doing it. And then great. Go for it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:05:27]:
Oh, that is that is fantastic. How did how did the 2 of you come to wanting to to work together as writers and and formatting the idea for the series?
Kristina Stanley [00:05:37]:
Yeah. So, I met Lucy. Lucy, came into our community, and she took our, dictionary certified story coach program. And it’s where we train editors to be professional editors using our story coach tool.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:05:51]:
Okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:05:52]:
And the reason I we we started this program was that I was doing a lot of editing at the time, and we had a lot of writers say, you know, I I’ve had an edit, but I still think my story needs work. And I go, well, can I see it? Sure. And then it turns out it was a copy edit, not a story edit. So I thought, oh. And then I started looking around, well, where do story editors really get trained if you don’t already work for a publisher? There’s lots of nonfiction structural editing.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:06:16]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:06:17]:
It’s hard to find a place and so we thought we’ll create it. So anyway, Lucy was in that in that course. And she was so keen. It was midnight her time. She got up every night and came to course every week.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:06:28]:
Wow.
Kristina Stanley [00:06:28]:
Yeah. So very dedicated. And then she just kept connected with me. She was she was super excited about it. And then I had partially written the first book, and I was stuck. And running, I just thought, I can’t finish this, but I really want to. And so I reached out to Lucy and said, are you interested in coauthoring? I’m like, 3 quarters written, but I can’t finish. And so she said, yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:06:55]:
Of course, I am. So then we started coauthoring together. And then, she just started getting more and more involved in in fictionary, and so I hired her. Oh, wow. She is now head of community and training at Fictionary. So sort of evolved into this long term relationship that you you know, through co authoring, we already knew we worked so well together and her knowledge of story is so strong that, you know, the 2 of us are really challenge each other. And and particularly in our research of, well, I found this. Do you think it’s this? I don’t know.
Kristina Stanley [00:07:33]:
Because in this series, it does this and that works. So what’s the common pattern? And then you kinda go back and forth back and forth until you go, I see it. It’s this. And so I just really liked working with her, and so I hired her.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:49]:
That reminds me of something that I’ve long, known about the publishing industry. And you do have experience on as an indie author, also working with publishers the across the gamut. And that’s the value and the importance of relationships. Right? Relationships with your editor, with your coauthor, with, colleagues, etcetera. I mean, it seems weird in this digital world of of gaming algorithms and stuff like that, but isn’t it? That real that human relationship is still very vital, isn’t it?
Kristina Stanley [00:08:15]:
See now there, this is why we started the Fictionary community. So what it is, it’s unique in the sense that we have, both professional editors and writers. Okay. And so writers and editors can connect. The community is free. It’s, we’ve got just over 2500 members now, and we do a lot of free events. We do we have a section called ask an editor anything. So people can actually ask about
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:08:43]:
Oh, really?
Kristina Stanley [00:08:44]:
Something in their book. And a professional one of our editors, our editors are all tagged, so you know the answer’s coming from a trained editor
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:08:50]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:08:51]:
Of whatever your question is or whatever you’re struggling with your book is. And then we have live sessions where we actually will work on somebody’s blurb or their synopsis, our people will post it in the community and get all kinds of feedback. Our my most important value in the community, and I see there are some people from our community on the side here and they know what I’m gonna say, and it’s kindness. And, you know, I want it to be a place where we genuinely help and support each other. And that doesn’t mean you always say, Hey, it’s a great book. But it does mean when you give critiques and things, it’s in a positive and helpful way so the person can actually do something with it. So the community has really grown into a people like it because they are actually meeting people online. And so there’s lots of live events.
Kristina Stanley [00:09:39]:
Like, once a month, all of the mystery writers go on Zoom together and and talk in-depth about mystery or the fantasy writers or whatever. So people are finding their own their own genres. And then we created Fictionary Live, which is, anyone with our storyteller premium software, they can come in, and take endless courses. And they just run, and we do, 6 weeks to editing, 6 weeks to revision, 6 weeks to outline. People come on on a live, and it’s with a live instructor. And so again, you can interact, you can ask questions, you can show your work, all kinds of kinds of fun stuff with the goal. The the end goal of the whole thing is to help as as many writers as possible in an affordable way.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:10:23]:
I love that. And and also in their own way because you have this community, which is fantastic. 25 100 writers and editors interacting together, and and it’s great because you you’re looking for an answer to a question. You can go and ask an editor, which is fantastic. But but on top of that, you also have the more DIY. So as an author, I can use fictionary to go in and and and work to to make my my novel better or my story better. But also editors can leverage fictionary as well, right, to to to hone their craft.
Kristina Stanley [00:10:55]:
Yeah. And so I did a lot of studying on the latest wave peep like, the latest studies on learning and how people learn, and everybody learns in a different way. And if you even you may favor something visual, but if if you’re taught with here’s the theory that you read and here’s the action that you do and here’s the visuals that you see, all of that comes together and helps you learn better. And that’s the theory behind it all so that in the software, we have people who are not in the community at all at all, of course, and they just use the software. And they’re that truly, I just wanna work on my manuscript. I’m happy. I don’t I don’t need to interact. And so within the software, we got we have 38 story elements that you evaluate per scene, and there’s there’s editing tips right there.
Kristina Stanley [00:11:41]:
And so if you don’t know what point of view is, then you can look it up right there. You don’t have to go anywhere. It’s just there. You can look at it. And then, of course, we draw the story arc. So you can see where’s your inciting incident, plot part 1. Are they in the right place or not? We Smashwords count per scene, scenes per chapter. How many characters are in a scene? What’s the point of view? What order? What’s the percent? All these things that you can then evaluate.
Kristina Stanley [00:12:04]:
And so you have objective tools as a writer to go, look. My middle plot point is at 75% into the novel. That might not work. You know? I might I might wanna work on that. Right? So Right. Right. You can or you can look at it and say, wow. My protagonist hasn’t had the point of view for 8 scenes.
Kristina Stanley [00:12:24]:
That’s a long time. Wow. Is that really what I wanna do? Maybe. Quite possibly because it’s a time jump or a something. Right? But maybe not. And so it lets you see it and make a decision based on objective feedback. It’s not a person saying, hey, you know, it’s dragging a little here.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:42]:
Right. Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:12:43]:
It’s dragging because you’re saying incident doesn’t happen until 30% of the novel and what should be really 10% or before or even before the novel opens even.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:51]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:12:52]:
So you can see it. Like, And then decide as the artist, do you do you wanna change it or not? Because everybody has their own personal reasons for doing things in a certain way.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:13:01]:
Well, because this is this is obviously far more than just this this passive voice. This this is explicit passive voice and and and there’s a grammar issue here or it may be unclear. This digs into the way very much the way that a developmental editor would would or or or a story a story editor who who looks at all these elements and and talks about the inciting incident and and point of view and stuff like that. So it it almost is like, is this magic? How do like, is it Magic?
Kristina Stanley [00:13:34]:
Or do you have
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:13:35]:
a whole bunch of editorial, panel that quickly reads the story and
Kristina Stanley [00:13:39]:
Yeah. I have thousands and thousands of people. They’re just out there. My dogs help out. They’re really good at it. You know, all that good stuff. So I just wanna clear. So we don’t do any copy at any we don’t touch the pros.
Kristina Stanley [00:13:51]:
So so our our theory is that until you have a solid story
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:13:55]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:13:56]:
Why are you spending a lot? And then we all cheat and copy it a little bit because you wanna be productive. You’re like, oh, I could just do this better or that better. But it there’s times when you when you do a story and you think that scene doesn’t even belong.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:14:07]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:14:07]:
Right? It’s just it just has to come out. I wrote it because I loved it, but it has nothing to do with my story, so it has to go. Right. And so why spend a whole bunch of time? And it’s also different parts of your brain. It’s a very different skill set to story edit and to copy edit.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:14:22]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:14:22]:
And so if you’re trying to story edit, but you’re looking at, okay, this really oh, look. I’ve got the wrong introductory clause or the your brain is now focused on that that minutiae and not this is my story. Get the story straight. Right. Then you have to go away and work on the pros. Of course, you do.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:14:39]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:14:39]:
And and some people have very high pros proficiency
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:14:43]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:14:44]:
Where they write it the first time, it’s beautiful. Other people have to have to write it and then go back and rewrite it so it reads well. Yeah. You know, everybody has a little bit of a different, a a different way they do it. So, and as for the magic, I spent, oh, I don’t know, Couple of years working on a mathematical formula to draw the story arc.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:15:06]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:15:08]:
So and again, that comes from my math degree. Yes. And and, you know, it took me a long time in study and trying to really figure out, like, how can how can we draw this as gonna be helpful to a writer? And how it works. If it gets if it chooses the inside of the incident but it’s not the right scene, typically, there’s a structural issue with the manuscript, and there’s a word count misbalance in there.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:15:32]:
And
Kristina Stanley [00:15:32]:
so then the writing go, well, how come did it why did it pick this and not this? And they can see, wow, I spent all this time in this scene that is really somebody walking in her room versus it’s actually the inciting incident of the story. Right. So there’s an imbalance, and and it shows that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:15:48]:
I love that. And it’s it’s one of the many layers or one of the many stages that you do. So so just, you know, if you have a a novel that’s published and maybe, you know, it’s not doing so well or whatever, and you’re not sure why. You have a beautiful cover. Your blurb is fantastic. You’re running ads to it, whatever. It’s just not selling, or it’s part of a series. Maybe it’s people don’t seem to be getting through it to get to book 2.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:13]:
Is that something where you can take that story and then load it in to fictionary and say, well, maybe my insane incident takes 50 pages as my throat cleared or whatever that was. Right?
Kristina Stanley [00:16:24]:
Yeah. And, you know, I’d love the authors who reach out and tell me that they they had published their book. They pull it down because it was either not selling or it was getting bad reviews. And then they ran it through Fictionary, and they edited it. They revised it. Got it all ready to go republished it. And then they end up winning awards or hitting bestseller lists. And so, you know, that’s a very exciting story to me because I believe that writers and and and particularly indie authors do have the opportunity that if you publish your book too soon and you think, maybe I shouldn’t have, you can take it down.
Kristina Stanley [00:16:59]:
It’s absolutely fine. You just take it down, edit it, put it back up. You may wanna recover it, maybe not. But if you’re, you know, if you’re a famous person, that’s very hard to do. But most of us, nobody’s really gonna notice that, oh, you had a book up. You took it down? No? Yeah. Okay. So I think I don’t like it when writers decide, well, I’m no good at this.
Kristina Stanley [00:17:25]:
Writing a good novel is really, really hard. And so if you just publish a little too early, keep going. Just find a way to do it. And that’s what we wanna do with fictionaries that so come in and rewrite it, and then off you go again.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:17:42]:
Oh, I love that. I love that. So I just wanna, remind our live viewers, you can ask questions, and I’m gonna pop up a question now from SA Sul. I hope I pronounced that properly. Is there a cutoff word count on a manuscript for, you know, dictionary?
Kristina Stanley [00:17:57]:
No. There’s not. And here’s a little discovery. That is a very interesting question because sometimes what we find, and particularly people come to us and say they they’d like to hire one of our story coach editors to perform an edit.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:18:10]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:18:11]:
You know, they’ve done as much as they can by themselves. They they want a person. What we see sometimes is someone will have a manuscript that’s 300,000 words, 350,000 words, and we’ll go, hey. You have a series. Put it in 3 books. There’s gotta be 3 books in there. Right? It doesn’t have to go now maybe you wanna publish this one, but series are very commercially successful. Right? And so it’s an opportunity to, look at what you have and say, well, do I have 2 books? Do I have 3 books? Maybe I do wanna write a long term series because I already have 3 BooksRead.
Kristina Stanley [00:18:48]:
That’s kind of an exciting moment. The the word count limit is more on the bottom end in the sense that the story arc needs about 5 to 7000 words to draw.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:00]:
Okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:19:01]:
And it needs the 5 scenes plus a bunch of scenes in the middle and around it. So if there’s, like, too short a short story, everything else works, but the story arc itself, it can’t it can’t pull it out because there’s not enough there to figure out Right. What should be there.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:16]:
And and so this is just a reminder because some people I imagine may be listening to this and saying, oh, great. I can save the money on on a human editor, but it sounds like this is a tool that you use in addition to an editor because you talked about somebody who’s, okay, I’ve done enough DIY. Now I I I want, you called it a a story coach editor. Right?
Kristina Stanley [00:19:37]:
Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:38]:
And and that’s a, like, a a fictionary story coach editor specifically in that case. But it could be, okay. Now now it’s because I look at it as a possibility of, oh my god. My editor would be so happy with me because there’s so much less work for them to do.
Kristina Stanley [00:19:52]:
Yeah. Well, here’s what it is. What is really interesting is so a couple of things on that one. There’s different, ranges of authors and some are absolutely brilliant at just here’s the story structure. I have it nailed. They’ve done enough books. They put it through. They make sure.
Kristina Stanley [00:20:09]:
And they go straight to a copy editor.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:20:11]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:20:12]:
Off they go. Others, really strong at copywriting, great prose, but not so strong in the story, and they need more help. And so if you decide to go to an editor, you don’t have to. Some people are just talented. They don’t need they can do it themselves. Great. If you decide to go to an editor, you want an editor who will look at your work and go, alright. You’re not actually ready for, a story edit yet.
Kristina Stanley [00:20:37]:
You gotta go away and do these things. Right? So one an example of that would be if someone comes in and their manuscript in a romance genre is 300,000 Smashwords. You wanna tell that person, you should really look at that as 3 books. You know, a 100,000 is even getting long for romance, but, you know, you’ve got all this written. See if you can split it up before you get it story edited. Because the person who fights back is gonna be, here’s the breaks. Now go do that. Right? Or if, you know, you go to a copy editor, a good copy editor should be able to say, you really should have a story edit.
Kristina Stanley [00:21:11]:
The story is not there yet. And there’s no point in me copy editing because I’m not
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:21:15]:
ready. Or Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:21:16]:
Right? So it’s very important to establish a relationship with a, with your editor that’s that’s open, transparent, there’s trust, and and you’re on and also you the same type of feedback. And one of the things about the community that we like is that the editors answer questions, they talk to people, and then people often just pick their editor from that. Like, oh, I like Mark. I want him as my editor. Right? You can see how they answer, how they give feedback. I can understand it. It gives them a chance to see who’s there and and actually get to know the editor a little bit before investing in an editor.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:21:54]:
I love that. I I really I love that because it’s again, you’re you’re adding to you’re providing options. You’re providing opportunity and choices that authors can engage with depending on where they are. Because like you said, they may be great at copy and polished prose, but the story needs some help. And that’s where the that’s where the majority of the work needs to happen. Wow. Okay. So, and then this is sort of sort of related to the other question, but Adam asked this question.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:22:21]:
But just to just to clarify, so can fictionary work with episodes of of 5,000 words, for example, for serial fiction?
Kristina Stanley [00:22:29]:
Yeah. So let me make sure because serial fiction is a wide term. So by serial fiction is the question, like, the type that goes out on Amazon, Bella. I think it’s Vellum Vellum.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:22:46]:
Vellum. Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:22:46]:
Yeah. Amazon Vellum or Barnes and Noble, where they’re publishing and they have tokens and then.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:22:53]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:22:53]:
Is is that the question?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:22:55]:
And and, Adam, feel free to, confirm that that’s what you’re talking about. And then Adam says yes. Okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:23:00]:
Okay. So that. Okay. Yes. Because here’s what you can do. And I actually, have spoken to a few people there about about that that, the thing with serial fiction in that context, you really need to have a great exit hook on every scene. Like, because the the the when you’re just reading a book, you pick up your book and you’re reading it, you’re like, it’s okay, but I’ll keep reading. It’s good enough.
Kristina Stanley [00:23:24]:
Right? But when you’re actually putting out your tokens for it, then the reader is making a very conscious decision. I gotta have that next scene. And so fictionary is designed to edit on a scene by scene basis. So if I were putting up a novel on serial fiction, I would edit it the whole way through first and make sure I’ve got an entry hook, exit hook, entry hook, exit hook the entire way through. I would make sure that the purpose of every scene is really strong because serial fiction is a little bit more challenging in the sense because the reader has to put up money every time. And so they’re a little less tolerant on whether they’re gonna turn that page or not.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:12]:
Right. Okay.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:24:13]:
Alright. Cool.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:14]:
Awesome. Thank you for that, and thanks for the question, Adam. And so and I know this is something that we were gonna be talking about, or or this is a great segue, I think, is a question from Ace Adams. Says, good morning. What is the difference between fictionary and using some of the tools in chat GPT?
Kristina Stanley [00:24:31]:
Oh, I love that question. Thank you so much. So that was like it’s like I paid paid you to be in the audience and ask that question. So I have very strong views about this. We wanna use and we call it GenAI because we don’t use Chat gbt. We use Vertex with, Google.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:49]:
Okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:24:50]:
And mostly because that’s where we’re hosting. We have a good relationship with them. Anyway but what we’re looking at is with chat gpt, chat gpt will write a scene for you. You can prompt it. I wanna write a whatever, a dog’s dog walking down the street scene. And these are my things, and I’ll write it for you. Fictionary, we’re taking different takes. So our our goal is never to touch the manuscript that that belongs to the artist.
Kristina Stanley [00:25:16]:
You can you could write it using chat gpt, but when you’re editing, we are helping you analyze it. And so our first Gen AI feature that we introduced in December, is scene naming. And we introduced that because it seems like an odd thing. Right? But it’s part of performing a story edit. When you’ve written a draft, if you go through it and you name every scene in 3 to 5 words, you have an outline, you can see your story clearly, you can see where your key plot points are. Like, it’s a thing of beauty. Right? But it’s very time consuming. Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:25:52]:
So we did our prompt engineering to figure out, okay, how do we pull a a scene name out? And then you see things like, wow. AI named this I’ve had 5 scenes going to the grocery store. That just might be a lot of going to the grocery store. Right? And you can you start to see, like, no. Or it comes back with a name that doesn’t make any sense. And you think, well, why not? That means the scene’s not focused enough. It can’t figure it out.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:26:19]:
Oh, good idea.
Kristina Stanley [00:26:20]:
Problem. So if you can’t name it, there’s something in that scene that’s probably that is not focused. And so we chose that as our first AI to do. And then the writer goes and looks at that scene and they make the changes so so we don’t ever ever touch it. And that way also they know they fully own the copyright because that’s often a concern with with having chat gbt write a novel. The other thing I’ll say about Chat GPT so we edited some Chat GPT written novels, and they have the exact same problems as a human written novel. So they you know? And and sometimes a little bit more that when we edited, you think, okay. So that character is actually dead, and this is not a ghost story.
Kristina Stanley [00:27:06]:
So how can they be in this scene?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:08]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:27:09]:
Just nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. We can’t have we got it. There’s a little plot hole there. Or, you know, too much the neon lights on the ceiling were flickering in too many scenes. That that sort of stuff.
Kristina Stanley [00:27:21]:
So even if you write your novel using chat gpt, I recommend you still have to edit it like you wrote it. You need to know the story, and you still have to go through the hard work of editing it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:33]:
Wow. That that is amazing. So I’m just gonna pop up this comment from Lisa Taylor who says, I love scene naming. It is so cool to see what is generated versus what I thought it was. And and that reminds me of something. So I was thinking of I I recently with a coauthor, thanks to my coauthor who’s a project manager, very organized, etcetera. I’m a normally a panther, but my coauthor got me in the plotter. And and I and I found that a really fantastic tool even when I’m not coauthoring, but I have to go back and add the stuff to plotter for my previous books.
Kristina Stanley [00:28:06]:
Yep.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:28:07]:
It sounds like I could use the scene naming tool and just see I mean, I love what Lisa says. The idea of saying, okay. I’m gonna go on a plotter and then run the scene naming tool and see how different the names I gave it or we gave the scenes to what to what fictionary thought. That could help with maybe identify some issues. Yeah. But then also maybe that could help me with constructing my universe and and and all the scenes in the previous level. Like, it seems like a a great time saving tool as well as well as identifying issues potentially with the story.
Kristina Stanley [00:28:38]:
Well, it helps a a writer look at their own story, which is very difficult. I know when I first started writing, you’ve you’ve written your draft, like, oh, I got my draft. And you start reading, and you think, I don’t know what to change. There it is. Yay. I gotta hear a thousand words. Thanks. I don’t know what to do with it.
Kristina Stanley [00:28:52]:
So it’s it’s a difficult task. And the thing so when we when we name the scenes, we also draw it in the context of the story arc. And so you can see every scene name, and then here’s your inciting incident, and then these scenes. And so let’s say there’s too much time between the inciting incident plot point 1. You can look at the scene names in that context and go, these scenes could actually go later. That could be cut. Right. Right? And so you can see how to fix your story without actually reading it yet.
Kristina Stanley [00:29:22]:
You’re not anything bad. Oh, look all the scenes underneath. I gotta start so let me fix the structural thing first of what I need to think about before I get down into the details and start. You know the thing that we all do when you start editing is you redo your first scene a 1000000 times. But then you find out later after you’ve done a full edit that, hey. I’m gonna cut that scene. So we’re trying to go the other way and go, well, cut that seam. You don’t need it.
Kristina Stanley [00:29:48]:
Polish the other ones that you’re actually gonna keep.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:29:50]:
Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that. And and Bob says, totally agree with Lisa, of course, on on the the joy of the scene naming. And and in response to to the conversation, Ace says, right. I wouldn’t use it to write use chat tp to write a book. Yes. It has editing limitations.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:06]:
If you log out, it doesn’t remember the questions you asked to write a book as well.
Kristina Stanley [00:30:10]:
Or You know, I also think too with with chat gpt, some people can use it very well because they know how to prompt engineer. And then they know how to I gotta take this out, and I gotta store it here, and I’m gonna put it here. And then I can do my next thing, and my next question is gonna be this. And so some people are really proficient at it. And it’s a skill like any other computer skill of how to prompt
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:33]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:30:33]:
To to get the right and I’ll tell you, we’re our next, Gen AI feature coming out is is to answer, is there tension in the scene?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:40]:
Oh. Oh, that’s great.
Kristina Stanley [00:30:43]:
If you just ask, is there tension in this scene? 99% of the time, the answer is yes. Like, but there’s not. So we spent a lot of time figuring out, well, how do we prompt it
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:56]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:30:58]:
To to look at, alright. When do you know if there’s tension in the scene? How do you know? Right? Right. And so you figure that out, and then you gotta prompt around that and prompt
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. Wow. Alright. So, the questions keep rolling in, and thank you guys for these great questions. So Alyssa asks, are the manuscripts that users are uploading, do they get used as training data to to further hone fictionaries skills and abilities?
Kristina Stanley [00:31:31]:
Nope. And we’ve made that commitment, and it’s in our privacy or our terms and conditions policy.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:36]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:31:37]:
We don’t do that. And it’s in our written business agreement with Google that they don’t do that. So our manuscripts are are private. We don’t train with them. Having said that, we have a fabulous community. And when we were, naming scenes, we asked people, does anyone wanna send us their manuscript so so we can test out scene naming? And so we had a group of people just email me their manuscript so I could put it in and and our developers could test it. And then we had people in the community do beta testing for us on their manuscript, so we got feedback that way. So the the only time we ever see a manuscript is if someone actually physically sends it to me.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:17]:
Oh, wow. That is, amazing. And and I I love that I love that privacy. And, again, nobody reads the terms and conditions, so thanks for reiterating that.
Kristina Stanley [00:32:26]:
Look. They are important because Yeah. It’s your work. Right? And I think the most important thing you wanna know is do you own the copyright? And the answer is yes. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:33]:
Of course. Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:32:34]:
It’s got nothing to do with fictionary. Right? And do we use it for training? No. We wanna use, Gen AI in an ethical way, And I’m a writer too. I get it. I know how much time you just spent writing that book.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:48]:
Yeah. Of course. Of course.
Kristina Stanley [00:32:49]:
A very personal Yeah. Hard thing to do. And so I I think of it in terms of what would I want as a writer.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:57]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:32:58]:
And then, you know, it’s in our privacy and and terms and condition policy.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:01]:
Yeah. It looks like Bob’s, yeah, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t find any satisfaction in using that to write a book
Kristina Stanley [00:33:07]:
and And and, well, that’s that’s also a a oh, and thank you, Lynette. A very, insightful comment in that I people have been telling stories since the beginning of time. We have a basic human need to tell a story, and it’s not telling someone else’s story. People who are writing novels have a story they wanna tell. And there’s there’s pride associated with it. And there’s, like, everything that goes with it. It’s such a personal activity that I don’t know. I think it’s you know, and and Lucy and I have made a commitment to each other that we will never use Jenny and I for our our nonfiction books.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:43]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:33:43]:
We don’t we just don’t. It’s all our it’s ours. And part of it is the joy of researching and figuring out what it is on our own.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:51]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:33:52]:
That’s very satisfying.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:54]:
Well, I I I’m I’m gonna take a divergent, here because I am curious about some of the logistics of how you write. So when I’ve coauthored nonfiction books, I’ve used Google Spreadsheets Mhmm. So we can outline who’s gonna write what chapter, what what what do we think this chapter is gonna be about, and then we kinda go from there. Use, obviously, plotter for fiction. What What are some of the tools you and Lisa have used when you’ve when you’ve written together?
Kristina Stanley [00:34:18]:
Yeah. So we’ve we’ve used plotter. We’ve used notion. We’ve used Google Docs. We’ve used fictionary. And I’ll tell you okay. So we stick our nonfiction and fictionaries so we can see the balance of the chapters in there. It’s not to analyze the story because
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:31]:
The exciting incident is I I need to know how to write a series.
Kristina Stanley [00:34:34]:
But yeah. That’s my exciting incident. But you can see the structure, the word count we’re seeing, all of that. You can also look like how we look for entry and exit BooksRead, like, how are we leading from this chapter to the next chapter. And so Lucy and I have an evolving process that we’re we try different things, and usually we start out in fictionaries so we can we can see the outline and what we’re doing and then we decide what it’s gonna be, which is never anywhere close to what it ends up being. Right. Then once we start, in particularly for how to write a series, I had I did a lot of drawings on what different series look like and what a story arc is across a series versus one book and where do the scenes fit. And and so at one point, I said, so we say we have to go somewhere where we can do visuals.
Kristina Stanley [00:35:22]:
So then we just went into Google Docs so that we could see it there. We do a lot of work where we’re both online, writing and talking at the same time to chat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We do lots of discussions on on Zoom with you know, when we’re stuck, what do we think? Who’s gonna do what research? Both of us love to write. So sometimes one of us just takes a chapter and writes it because we want to. So we do. So it’s very fluid, I’m gonna say. It’s not as Okay. We don’t we don’t have a strict process.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:52]:
I love that. Well, thank thank you. I I was very curious. So thank you for that.
Kristina Stanley [00:35:56]:
You’re welcome.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:57]:
Gonna gonna gonna steer back to, Fictionary with a comment from Linda O’Donnell who says, fictionary is great because it’s objective. And this I think this is really important, the thing that Linda brings up. So as a writer with a sensitive psyche, the tool of fictionary gives you a way to evaluate your story structure without having to berate yourself because that can that can be very intimidating for a writer. Right?
Kristina Stanley [00:36:20]:
Yeah. And so I I think sometimes what Fictionary, the software, and our community helps with is getting a person from that point where they feel ready to share at least a piece of their story with somebody else for feedback. And when you can see it objectively and fix those things, then you’re much more confident when you put it out there. And if you put your your a piece of your story or you blurb, whatever it is you want feedback on, and you get really helpful advice back, it’s motivating. As opposed to hear all the things that’s wrong with it, it’s
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:54]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:36:55]:
You know, it’s totally working here. Maybe this little piece, that little piece. And so by going through the software, you’ve gotten you’ve gotten the story to a point where you feel much better about sharing it. Because really, everybody who’s written a book knows that first time you have someone else read it, you feel sick to your stomach. Woah. What if they don’t like it? And then you’re like, what if they’re only saying they like it because they love me? Right? It’s my mother. Oh, it’s a little weird. Right? Like, then you then you there all that self self doubt is there.
Kristina Stanley [00:37:26]:
You just don’t know.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:28]:
Yeah. But I that that is, so true. It it is a really hard step for writers today, but this this can also be a bridge, which is which is amazing. Go, oh, okay. And it’s and it’s it’s objective for Pusheen. It’s not, well, they don’t like me. Therefore, they don’t like my story.
Kristina Stanley [00:37:43]:
Right. So so they have something or they’re a competitive author or whatever. Even the other thing I’ll say about the community is is community members, some of them are so generous. Like, they’ll come on to our live events and they ask questions about their specific work and where they’re struggling. And what that does for other authors is they see there’s ton of people out there who don’t know how to do this and are are pretty good but still have problems or are well published authors and are still getting stuck with some piece of their story. And people really learn when it’s real examples.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:15]:
Yeah.
Kristina Stanley [00:38:16]:
And when someone says, this is my scene, this is what I’m doing, and I can’t get past it. And then editors have a discussion about it, and then out comes an answer. And then the person goes away and rewrites the scene, and they’re so happy. And that helps the other people who aren’t ready yet to ask questions.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:30]:
Yeah. Oh, that is fantastic. Well, thank you. Alright. So another another, question specifically about how the how how fictionary works is, essay asks, how does it analyze characters? Does it offer suggestions on enhancing characterization?
Kristina Stanley [00:38:46]:
Yeah. So fictionaries split into 3. We’ll call them super groups. So we’ve got story outs for character, for plot, for setting. So what we’re focused on is what’s the character doing? What’s the goal? What are the consequences if they fail? What’s the impact on them? What’s the impact on the protagonist if it’s not that character? What’s their, story goal tracking? So does every scene bring that character to closer to their story goal or farther away from story goal? And anybody from fiction who’s on this call knows that I don’t know how anybody can write without a skeleton blurb. And a skeleton blurb is who’s your protagonist, what are the what’s their story goal, and what’s at stake. Right? So Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen must win the Hunger Games or she dies and her family starves. That’s pretty clear.
Kristina Stanley [00:39:44]:
That’s book 1. That’s just book 1. That’s not the series, Skeleton Bird, but that’s book 1. Yeah. And when you know that, then everything you do is in the context of that character or characters if there’s more. And so we’re looking at the character in the context of the story and the action plot and not in the context of, you know, their appearance, their eyes are blue, their all of that stuff. That’s that’s coming next in the copy editing phase. Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:40:18]:
So we’re at kind of that level. I hope that answered that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:40:21]:
Cool. Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m gonna ask another question. This one from Ace is, does does fictionary work well with literary fiction?
Kristina Stanley [00:40:32]:
Well, that depends. Ah. So here’s so this is my view on literary fiction.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:40:37]:
Okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:40:38]:
I think literary fiction comes about when someone, takes the current popular way of writing and adds something new. So, like, when thought first came in, there used to be but you never got to hear what they thought. When dialogue first came in, when, specific points of view come in, right now, the point of view is is in. So my take is that people who are writing literary fiction need to know the basics and then they add on whatever they want. Right? They they’re changing something that’s different. It’s a different way of writing. That’s just my take. I mean, literary fiction is such a wide open question because everybody has a different view.
Kristina Stanley [00:41:26]:
So when I look at it from that context, my hope is someone writing literary fiction. They get their solid story. They know what they’re doing, and then they take it and turn it into whatever it is they wanna turn it into because it’s literary fiction.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:40]:
Right. Thank you. I I I love that explanation of literary fiction. That is that’s eye opening to me. Wow. I never thought of it that way. That’s so cool.
Kristina Stanley [00:41:49]:
It’s hard it’s a hard thing to define because it’s always been known of outside the boundaries. Right? But why is it outside boundaries? It’s because
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:58]:
It’s true.
Kristina Stanley [00:41:59]:
Writing is Yeah. Right? You’re not writing romance. These are my 5 beats. This is where they meet. Yeah. You know, all of that. Right? So it’s it’s just a diff it’s a different it’s a different outside genre of storytelling.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:42:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Wow. This comment comes in from Pamela Hines who says, as an editor, I use story fiction, a fictionary story coach. It’s a great tool to help me focus my approach to developmental edits to make sure that I’m not leaning too heavy on my strengths.
Kristina Stanley [00:42:31]:
See, that, it’s very easy. This is a fantastic comment from Pamela, who also is a fantastic editor and a fantastic copy editor. She she has many skills. So what fiction does so, like, anybody doing anything, if you’re you have things that you’re sensitive to, and so that’s what that’s your go to. And as an editor, it’s very easy to do that and say, you know, you never use NGINX. You never use that blah blah blah. Right? Focus, focus, focus because that’s what I see. Where fictionary doesn’t let you get away with that because what happens in a story coach edit, the editor does it in our story coach software.
Kristina Stanley [00:43:08]:
And when it’s complete, it goes to a storyteller account of the writers. And so the edit the writer sees not only all of the comments on a per se basis, they see all of the story elements filled out. So they see the editor thought the point of view character was Mark. The editor thought the point of view goal was this. And and you you can’t be, I always favor plot as I’m editing, or I always favor character because there’s character plot and setting, and the writer will see that you didn’t do any of those. And so it really forces an editor to be comprehensive across the board, and and you can’t because it’s human nature.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:47]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:43:47]:
It’s not that they’re not trying to be a great editor. It’s just you see what you see unless it’s right in front of you. Like, hey. I I didn’t look at setting at all. I’d never looked at the location of each of these scenes or Right. What are the objects in the scenes or any of those things. Oh, wow.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:08]:
Do I need to have a lot of technical skill as a writer to use this? And in addition to that, just to add on to that question is so, somebody’s listening to this. They’re interested. How much does it cost to get started using Fictionary?
Kristina Stanley [00:44:21]:
Yeah. Okay. So, again, depends on computer skills. We have people I know they’re 80 because they tell me. We’re like, oh, I’m using this. It’s great. So as long as you’re comfortable using a computer, it’s like any of the other software.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:34]:
Okay.
Kristina Stanley [00:44:36]:
There’s nothing super tricky about it. It’s pretty straightforward, but you have to be comfortable using a computer.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:42]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:44:44]:
So Fictionary is we’ve got Fictionary Storyteller, which is our basic product, and it’s $19 a month. We and with the all of them have a 2 free week free 2 week trial, no credit card required. So you can come in and spry it out your heart’s content. And then we have storyteller premium, and it’s $39 a month, and it includes Fictionary Live. And Fictionary Live is our ongoing training where we have our story coach instructors teaching all of our different courses.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:19]:
Right.
Kristina Stanley [00:45:20]:
And then we have, story coach software for professional editors, which is $49 a month. There’s also an annual price. We do have I think we’ve got a coupon at d2d25. Hang on. Is that what we called it? For 25% off for the first wait a minute. I’m gonna look it up.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:41]:
Alright.
Kristina Stanley [00:45:41]:
I should have written this down. That’s so funny. I’m pretty sure it’s d2d25, but let me test.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:47]:
25, just like that. D2D25. And people can find fictionary@fictionary.co. Correct?
Kristina Stanley [00:45:54]:
Fictionary.co. That’s correct. Awesome.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:58]:
Hang on.
Kristina Stanley [00:45:58]:
Let me just see. Yes. It’s d2d 25 is 25% off, for the 1st 6 months. And that’s for for all products, for all, monthly or annual.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:46:12]:
Awesome. That is fantastic. Christina, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I wanna thank everyone for the great comments, the great conversation, the great the praise. We didn’t even pop up some of the people who just loved fictionary so much, but thank you guys for being here and cheering us on. Just wanna remind people that you can watch. You can you can get tips every every Thursday at 1 PM EST. We’re we’re here in the virtual studios, ddd.tips/insight.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:46:40]:
You can get insider insights from great folks like Christina. You can also, if you have not self published a book, you can get started at, where is it? Start your self publishing career at Draft2Digital.com. Be sure to like. Make friends with the life like button. Share, comment, subscribe, and be sure to bookmark d2dlive.com. And, Christina, thanks again so much for hanging out with me today.
Kristina Stanley [00:47:09]:
Thank you, Mark. It was an absolute pleasure.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:47:12]:
Of course. And goodbye, everyone. We’re just gonna leave you with a word about draft2digital print.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:47:18]:
Ebooks are great, but there’s just something about having your words in print, Something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf, sign for a reader. That’s why we created Dedede Print, a print on demand service that was built for you. We have free beautiful templates to give your book a pro look, and we can even convert your ebook cover into a full wraparound cover for print. So many options for you and your books. And you can get started right now at DraftDigital. That’s it for this week’s self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital. Be sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with your will be author friends, and start, build, and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.
The post Story Editing with Fictionary // EP166 appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>The post Grow Your Story From Scratch at the Storygarden Summit appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>But we recognize that you might also need help getting that story written.
That’s why we’re proud to have partnered with the good folks at Plottr, Fictionary, and ProWritingAid in hosting a virtual conference that can help you at any stage of the process.
Learn and share ideas with Draft2Digital, Fictionary, Plottr, ProWritingAid and their guests as you’re taken through four days of workshops designed to help you with:
Here is the breakdown of the four day event (all times shown are in Eastern)
The post Grow Your Story From Scratch at the Storygarden Summit appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>The post Smashwords Bestselling Indie Authors of the Week – March 9, 2024 appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>Congratulations to our top-selling authors of the week!
The post Smashwords Bestselling Indie Authors of the Week – March 9, 2024 appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>The post From Traditional to Indie Publishing with Jeaniene Frost // EP165 appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>We talk to Bestselling Fantasy Romance Author Jeaniene Frost about her latest work and her decision to self-publish after over a dozen years as a traditionally published author.
Jeaniene Frost is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fantasy romance. She’s known for the Night Huntress series, the Night Prince series, the Night Rebel series, and the Broken Destiny series. Today we’ll talk about Jeaniene’s latest work, Both Feet in the Grave, and her decision to self-publish after over a dozen years as a traditionally published author.
//Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career//
Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor worldwide. We’ll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way—and we won’t charge you a dime.
We take a small percentage of the royalties for each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money. That’s the best kind of business plan.
• Get started now: https://draft2digital.com/
• Learn the ins, the outs, and the all-arounds of indie publishing from the industry experts on the D2D Blog: https://Draft2Digital.com/blog
• Promote your books with our Universal Book Links from Books2Read: https://books2read.com
Make sure you bookmark https://D2DLive.com for links to live events, and to catch back episodes of the Self Publishing Insiders Podcast.
TBA.
The post From Traditional to Indie Publishing with Jeaniene Frost // EP165 appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>The post Crafting an Irresistible Inciting Incident appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>At its most basic, an inciting incident is the event that incites your story.
It’s what triggers all the action, and subsequent reaction, comprising the body of your novel.
At Fictionary, we give the following definition: The inciting incident is the moment your protagonist’s world changes in a dramatic way, giving them a goal or motive they simply can’t ignore.
The inciting incident introduces your protagonist’s story goal – the thing they will work towards as the story develops, and which they’ll either succeed or fail in obtaining at the story’s climax.
It’s this interlacing of story goal, inciting incident and climax which gives overall cohesion and structure to your narrative. Without this, you may find that you don’t have a story, but rather a chain of events – which aren’t linking together quite as they should.
It’s hard to understand what an inciting incident is, and how it should function within story structure, without a basic knowledge of the Story Arc.
Let’s examine this first, before taking a deep dive into how we craft irresistible inciting incidents.
The Story Arc is a way of visualizing story structure, using concepts that have been in play since ancient times. Stories are divided into three acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution.
The Story Arc looks at where key plot points happen along the narrative, and how your story’s narrative compares to the ‘ideal’ story development.
Here’s a picture of how we show the Story Arc using Fictionary StoryTeller software, showing the ideal story arc against that of an example manuscript:
In order to understand the role of the inciting incident, you need to first visualize it in relation to all the other key plot points on the Story Arc.
Here’s the Story Arc for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight:
As the image above shows, the Story Arc maps the following key plot points on the narrative progression:
Inciting Incident:
This needs to come before the 15 percent mark, and it’s when our protagonist’s world changes in a dramatic way, giving them a goal or a motive they simply can’t ignore.
In this case, at the 10 percent mark of Twilight, Edward saves Bella’s life, and she can no longer ignore her fascination with him.
Plot Point 1:
Plot Point One should be between the 20 and 30 percent mark in the story, with 25 percent being the ideal. Plot Point One is the point of no return. The protagonist can’t back out of the central conflict; their desire to engage with it overrules all else. This marks the end of Act One.
In Twilight, Bella discovers Edward is a vampire, and there’s no turning back to her past ignorance now.
Story Middle:
In the middle of your story, the protagonist moves from reactionary to proactive in terms of how they approach their overall story goal. The Middle of your novel occurs between 45-55 percent of the story, ideally at 50 percent.
In Twilight, Bella sees the full extent of Edward’s power as a vampire, yet commits to him anyway.
It’s the end of Act II and the outlook should be grim. Plot Point Two comes at the 70-80 percent mark—ideally at 75 percent—and should be a low point for the protagonist.
In Twilight, an evil vampire sets his sights on Bella, putting her life at risk.
The climax comes at the 85-95 percent mark of the story, ideally at 90 percent. The story should build up to the climax with rising action, and now the climactic scene (or scenes) should have the highest level of conflict, the greatest tension, or the most devastating emotional upheaval. At this point in the story, the protagonist should fail or succeed in their overall story goal.
In Twilight, Bella faces down the evil vampire herself, refusing to call Edward to her aid, thus doing everything in her power to protect Edward. It’s a reversal of what happened in the inciting incident.
As the above example shows, often the strongest, most successful stories feature a satisfying ‘mirror image’ between the climax and the inciting incident.
In Twilight, the inciting incident and the climax work as a perfect reflection of each other, with the former coming at 10 percent into the story, and the latter beginning at the narrative’s last 10 percent. In the inciting incident, Edwards rescues Bella; in the climax, Bella does everything she can do to protect Edward by refusing to call on him to rescue her. He arrives anyway, and thus we see the inciting incident play out in a similar, but different, way at the climax.
It’s this difference between the two moments that illustrates the story’s central theme. Bella is no longer willing to be the damsel in distress calling on her boyfriend to save her; Edward must realize the only way he can ensure her safety in the future is to give her equal strength to his own. Thus, we see Bella’s learning journey from the entire story encapsulated within this difference between these two scenes. She’s learned she can’t protect those she loves without strength – both physical and psychological – and this learning plays out in the trilogy’s next two novels.
As a storyteller, it’s important to remember the power this ‘mirroring’ can carry within story structure.
The story goal is introduced at the inciting incident and answered at the climax: the difference between the initial question and the final answer is how the reader subliminally imbibes the story’s key messages.
This mirroring is one way that you, as a writer, can show rather than tell the reader about your protagonist’s learning journey over the course of the narrative.
Warning: Spoiler alerts!
Let’s examine how Austen’s inciting incident is irresistible to readers.
We’ll analyze this by looking at how the inciting incident works within the context of the story’s set-up at the first 10-15 percent, and how it interacts with the story’s climax at the 90 percent mark.
Firstly, Pride and Prejudice is a romance, so the inciting incident should target the genre’s ideal readers. These readers want to see two deserving characters overcome the odds to find happiness together.
At the novel’s 6 percent mark, Elizabeth and Darcy meet; Elizabeth overhears Darcy describing her in disparaging terms as he rejects the suggestion of dancing with her. This is arguably the novel’s inciting incident, since all of the story’s following action evolves from this one moment.
This scene is mirrored exactly at the 94 percent mark, when Darcy and Elizabeth meet and reveal to each other their true feelings of love.
Prior to Darcy and Elizabeth’s first meeting, Elizabeth’s mother has made the family’s story goal clear: the girls need to get married. Ideally, their mother thinks, to a rich man. Therefore, at Darcy and Elizabeth’s first meeting, we can see how Darcy’s rejection of Elizabeth makes her story goal seem that much harder to obtain.
When an inciting incident occurs prior to the 10-15 percent mark, it can still be helpful to examine what scene does take place at this mark, for greater insight into how the narrative structure functions.
At the 10 percent mark of Pride and Prejudice, Darcy grows aware of his attraction to Elizabeth, commenting on her ‘fine eyes’ to his friends. This means by the 10 percent mark, the reader knows, either on a conscious or unconscious level, that the story arc is likely to answer the question of will Elizabeth and Darcy marry? And how will it happen?
This scene is mirrored in the climax at the 90 percent mark, when Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine, visits Elizabeth to warn her to stay away from Darcy, reminding us of the external obstacles in the way of the couple’s potential happy ending.
In between the 6 and 10 percent marks, Austen gives the reader the extra information they’ll need to be fully hooked by the time they’ve reached the 10 percent mark.
For example, in this part of the narrative, Elizabeth clarifies her own version of her story goal, taking it a step beyond that which her mother has for her: she wants to marry for love, not financial convenience.
Elizabeth also tells us laughingly of her own inner failing—pride—which she uses to protect herself against Darcy’s rejection of her.
This means that by the time Darcy admits to his friends that he’s attracted to Elizabeth at the 10 percent mark, Austen has fully developed the story’s potential for external conflict and internal character growth—and it’s these two areas that really hook the reader in.
We’ve enough information to comprehend that Darcy and Elizabeth will never marry unless a) she learns to overcome her hurt pride, and b) she believes they are a true love match, and c) he learns to overcome his prejudice against her.
These are a lot of strong questions, asked by the story’s 10 percent mark, which hook romance readers into turning the pages, all the way until the climax provides us with answers.
This novel’s a thriller: the inciting incident should entice readers through high, life-and-death stakes and promises of nail-biting action.
Here, the inciting incident happens on the first page: Jack Reacher, an ex-military cop, is falsely arrested for murder.
This event sets him off on his story goal of catching the real killer.
The high stakes alone make this inciting incident irresistible to readers. We know Reacher’s innocent; we know Georgia has the death penalty. There isn’t much more information Child needs to get across to us so that we’ll care about the story’s outcome.
But once again, to understand how brilliantly crafted this story actually is, it helps to examine the inciting incident in conjunction with the scenes placed at the novel’s 10 and 90 percent marks.
At 10 percent, the police contact the man who, according to the evidence, really should be their prime suspect: a Mr. Hubble. But Hubble’s a settled, respectable guy; the police doubt he committed the crime. Reacher, the drifter, seems to them a far likelier suspect.
At the narrative’s 90 percent mark – the story’s climax and mirror image of the 10 percent mark – Reacher himself finally succeeds in tracking down the missing Hubble. This time, Hubble’s fled for his life from the real killer, but he’s the man with the key to unlock the murder mystery. Hubble’s involvement in the crime came, we learn, from his desperate desire to retain the façade of his settled, respectable life after losing his job.
As in Twilight, this mirror imaging of the first and final 10 percent illuminates the inner growth arc of the character. The key difference is that in Twilight, the mirroring shows us Bella’s growth. Whereas, in Reacher: The Killing Floor, the mirroring shows us the justification for Reacher’s lack of growth.
Reacher’s introduced to us as a loner: a man with nowhere to go, who jumped off the bus at a stop in Georgia because it reminded him of a story about a guitarist whose music he liked. By jumping off at this exact moment, he got unlucky, placing himself right at the scene of a crime he didn’t see happen.
As the inciting incident unfolds in the first chapter, we can’t miss one of the key questions about Reacher: will this man ever choose to settle down? Will he be able to, if he wants to? Right from the get-go, we see an urgent external need—to prove himself innocent—alongside the potential for internal growth—can he find a home? The combination of external and internal goals works as another strong hook.
As the narrative plays out, we see our protagonist Reacher crave connection and stability, yet he still rejects them in the end. And through the author’s careful use of story structure, we can’t help but understand why. After all, it was Hubble’s need for external respectability, his desperation to keep his stable home and marriage, that became his downfall.
Reacher, on the other hand, we understand, is above all that. He’s someone who’ll drift from story to story, taking his keen sense of independence and justice wherever he goes.
And his potential for future stories seems endless.
Child’s inciting incident, along with the narrative’s first 10 percent, and the use of ‘mirroring’ within his story’s structure, doesn’t just introduce readers to one story. It introduces them to an entire series of stories.
As a speculative historical action/ romance crossover, to be irresistible to her target readers, Gabaldon’s inciting incident must include both high stakes of life-and-death action, and the will they/ won’t they get together question of romance.
This inciting incident seems to occur at the 7 percent mark, when protagonist Claire, on a trip to a standing stone circle in the Scottish Highlands, accidentally falls through time and ends up in the 18th Century. This sets her off on her perceived story goal of getting back to her life and her husband in the 20th Century.
At the story’s 10 percent mark, however, Claire becomes acquainted with the Highland rebel Jamie, the man with whom she will end up falling in love. Her true story goal, that of finding and keeping real love, is introduced here, at the 10-12 percent mark.
These two scenes, at the 7 and 10 percent marks, work together beautifully to craft an utterly irresistible inciting incident for Gabaldon’s target readers.
By the time that Claire falls into the past at 7 percent, we’ve seen that she barely knows her 20th-century husband Frank, since the two have been separated by the Second World War. There’s a hint Frank may have been unfaithful to her over that time. Claire and Frank are desperately trying to get to reconnect as the story opens.
But their attempts are strained. They’re struggling to conceive, and Frank isn’t happy with the prospect of adopting—he doesn’t want to share Claire with anyone, unless it’s their own biological child, which gives us a hint that this relationship isn’t as healthy and strong as Claire wishes it were.
So, when Claire falls through time and meets Jamie, we understand why she’s the right protagonist for this story. By leaving her own world, she’s given the chance to learn to exist as an independent woman, and then to form a love that’s strong enough to survive battles and wars without fraying. And to have the choice to decide whether Frank is her Mr. Right, or whether it’s only a reluctance to break social expectations, which has kept her in her 20th Century marriage.
By the time Claire gets to know Jamie at the story’s 10 percent, we want to see both whether she can survive living in the past (high action stakes) and whether Jamie will turn out to be the man for her (the romance question).
The 10 percent mark and the 90 percent mark of Outlander also mirror each other beautifully.
At 10 percent, Claire has a frightening encounter with Captain Randall and is rescued by Jamie and his gang (who were Randall’s original targets.) Claire leaves with Jamie’s group, and her wartime nursing skills are put to the test as she patches up a physically wounded Jamie.
At the story’s 90 percent, Claire rescues Jamie from imprisonment by Captain Randall—Jamie having sacrificed himself to protect Claire. Claire spends the final 10 percent of the narrative helping Jamie recover psychologically from his trauma. She succeeds, and is thus able to help her 18th Century husband Jamie recover from trauma and reconnect with her—in the way that she wasn’t able to help her 20th Century husband, Frank. This shows us that Jamie truly is the man for her.
These examples show that irresistible inciting incidents generally display certain features:
If this all sounds rather overwhelming, you might find it helpful to check out Fictionary StoryTeller’s free two-week trial. With StoryTeller, you can visualize your own manuscript’s Story Arc, examining how your inciting incident and climax work to mirror each other, and you can explore ways of moving scenes around to ensure they’re in the best possible place. Or, come along to our free community, where writers and editors discuss story structure in depth.
As a Fictionary Certified StoryCoach Editor, Polly Watt will carry out a detailed developmental edit of your manuscript, providing objective, actionable feedback. She seeks to inspire you with fresh perspective and ideas, so that you can make your story shine to its fullest potential. You can learn more about Polly and other StoryCoach Certified Editors at Fictionary at https://fictionary.co/editors/
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]]>Congratulations to our top-selling authors of the week!
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]]>If you haven’t yet created a physical version of your book, a proof copy is meant as a preliminary version of your print book so you can give it a good, close look before you publish it. An author copy, on the other hand, is your finished book that you can order for promotional purposes. When you order a proof copy or an author copy from D2D Print, the process works in much the same way. You only pay for the manufacturing (at cost) plus the price of the shipping option you choose. You can only order one proof copy at a time, but the number of author copies you can order is unlimited. And in case you’re wondering, there are no annoying watermarks on D2D Print proofs.
The short answer is that a majority of readers still prefer physical books over digital ones. Don’t take our word for it. As you may have read from a previous D2D communication, according to a 2022 Pew Research report that examined the reading habits of Americans:
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Drop them a line at support@draft2digital.com.
Happy Publishing,
The Draft2Digital Team
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]]>Let’s talk about the revamped USA Today Best-Selling Booklist, from why the list went on hiatus to the renewed focus on indie bookstores!
If you’re curious about how the revamped USA Today Best-Seller Booklist works, or why it went on hiatus, or why the renewed focus on indie bookstores, this is the episode for you. Erik Bursch, the SVP of Consumer Product and Engineering at Gannett/USA Today, joins us live to give the inside scoop and answer your questions.
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Make sure you bookmark https://D2DLive.com for links to live events, and to catch back episodes of the Self Publishing Insiders Podcast.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:01]:
You just tuned into the hippest way to start and grow your indie author career. Learn the ins, the outs, and all the all arounds of self publishing with the team from d two d and their industry influencing guests. You’re listening to self publishing Insiders with Draft2Digital.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:27]:
Alright. We’re live. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to another edition of Self Publishing Insiders. I’m Jim Azovito, corporate communications for Draft2Digital. And today, it is my distinct pleasure, privilege, and honor to welcome Eric Bursch. Eric is the senior vice president of consumer products and engineering at Gannett USA Today.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:50]:
Welcome, Eric.
Erik Bursch [00:00:52]:
Jim, thanks for having me.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:53]:
Oh, so glad you can make it. I know you’re a busy guy. It’s a lot happening over there. So, of course, today, we’re here to talk about the return of USA’s USA Today’s bestseller book list best selling book list. It’s, yeah, I was reading through some of the history of the book list, and what’s really caught my attention, Eric, was that the book list is the longest journalistic project at USA Today. It’s been running since 1993. So, clearly, it’s it’s had some success. It’s it’s served the readers.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:31]:
Can you talk a little bit about, why the decision was made to to put the list on the hiatus and, you know, give it give it a refresh? We don’t it went on hiatus back in December of 2022. Can you give us an indication of what led to that decision?
Erik Bursch [00:01:48]:
Yeah. Sure. Happy to. And and let me just spend maybe a a minute or so talking about Gannett, as a whole. So Gannett Absolutely. Is we own, are responsible for over 200, properties inside the United States. USA Today being our national brand, and we have a lot of big big sort of, you know, regional brands, Detroit Free Press, Arizona Republic, IndyStar, etcetera. Also a lot of smaller papers.
Erik Bursch [00:02:14]:
So, you know, we are in, you know, a massive amount of communities across the US. And, you know, USA Today has had a lot of history in doing you know, we hear about data projects all the time now. Right? And it’s sort of the you know, obviously, with all the AI boom, you need data be to drive AI products. But data products and it has really exploded in the last couple years. This was is our longest running data product. Right? If you think about it, we were collecting data, you know, BooksRead data and and bringing that together and presenting that for several years now. And, you know, the way it was was, sort of brought together in the past before the hiatus was, you know, we received all the data points and, there was a lot of manual actions in that sort of process of collecting and, and and organizing, ranking, etcetera, to be able to to present that out every week. And there was a pullback in some of the resources that our, our content and editorial teams, had at their disposal, you know, during during that time frame right before we went on hiatus.
Erik Bursch [00:03:22]:
And, you know, really with with the reduced capacity of, you know, of some resources from the editorial side and that it was driven from a manual a lot of manual touch points. We had to make the decision at that point to to put it on hiatus. You know, I’m a I’m a passionate, you know, book reader. I’ve loved books my whole life, and and a lot of us in the product organization at at, Gannett and USA Today, we work closely with our content organization. We wanted to find a way to to bring this forward. And when you’re talking about data, you know, there’s there’s ways to automate as you know, automate data, you know, coming forward. All of our sources at that time were sort of giving us different, different types of formats, you know, that we were receiving from a data file. So we really had to normalize that and bring that together and create an engine that could create that could bring in our current set of sources at the time.
Erik Bursch [00:04:17]:
But also, we we wanted to expand out our number of sources and be, you know, adding every week if we needed to. We really wanna take in as many sources as possible. And and our engine that we built, it did take us obviously a couple months to get there, but the engine that we built is really a system that is fully automated and is an ability to to take in as many sources as as we can, get our hands on.
Jim Azevedo [00:04:42]:
Yeah. It was not a small endeavor. And your background is on the technology side. Am I right? And and you’ve been with Gannett since 2010. You’ve been there you’ve been there longer than I’ve been at Smashwords. I think you started in 2010, if I read that correctly.
Erik Bursch [00:04:58]:
As I like to say as I like to say, I’ve been there for a couple years, you know, from that side of things and and seen a lot of change. But, you know, even though, you know, I’m on the engineering side and and not to go too deep on on engineering, but, you know, myself and and, you know, a lot of my my my leads and and key resources inside of my department, we wear a product hat even though we’re engineers. And there’s a lot of things that I think that, you know, that we’ve been that have come up out of the engineering resources about products that have been massive wins for us, you know, going forward. So I I challenge my folks to think like, product folks every day. And, you know, and and a lot of the passion projects that we have come forward, BooksRead one of them. We’ve done a lot of things around sports and sports data, which is Mhmm. Sports has always been in USA Today. Sort of staple.
Erik Bursch [00:05:50]:
You know, we have a lot of sports fans in our engineering department and and it really, you know, leading some product efforts from that side has been some wins. So, yeah. I I’ve been there for a couple years, seen a lot of change, but this is this has been this was a very fun effort for for us to do and, and certainly, a lot of people thought when it went on hiatus that it was not coming back.
Jim Azevedo [00:06:10]:
Oh, yeah. We we heard a lot of that.
Erik Bursch [00:06:12]:
We heard a lot of that and, we knew it was coming. We couldn’t talk about it too much, but, but it was a great relaunch. You know, we had, a lot of visibility from a press standpoint on on relaunch, and that was good to see the that excitement.
Jim Azevedo [00:06:11]:
Yeah, the indie community, we were all about it. But there are a lot of authors out there who are thinking, hiatus. That equals it’s going away. It’s gone. And so when the announcement was made that, hey. We’re back. There was, like, a collective cheer that went out. Did you have a sense that it was gonna take a a few months? Did you think it was gonna take longer? Because to me, it seemed like it came back quicker than I than I thought it was going to come back.
Erik Bursch [00:06:56]:
Well, we had started working on it just before the hiatus, and, you know, you know, we felt we we wanted you know, I sort of set the goal of of trying to deliver it before the the heavy summer reading, season. You know, we we really wanted to get this out there, and we sort of set that late June goal internally. That was a a pretty big stretch goal for us. You know, and and, you know, even though it launched in late June, we were still, you know, you know, getting some of the pieces of the automation, to, you know, together the the coming weeks after that. But I think it was I think it launched at the right time. I think it’s import was important to get out there ahead of the summer reading schedule. Yeah. You know, obviously, we’d love to have it out sooner than that, but, you know, it was not a small lift, for us to deliver.
Erik Bursch [00:07:41]:
But I’m glad it’s out there and and glad we’re expanding all of our data points every week that we, that we have it out there.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:48]:
Well, we’re glad you’re back. You know, when when a reader’s out there, when they go out and they check out the book list and they check out the methodology of the book list right there on the headline of that page at USA Today’s, on with USA Today’s website. The headline says it’s the people’s book list, which I think is fantastic. But can you give us, a sense of what that means to USA Today, the staff, the journalists, and yourself?
Erik Bursch [00:08:17]:
Yeah. You know, really not to get it not to talk about other book lists that are not that are not USA Today, but, you know, I think with ours, we we do not add any bias to it at all. This is the list is driven completely from data. And we believe that, you know, I mean we are adding, as I mentioned, we’re adding sources every week, to to our, to to bring in that data point and and run our algorithms against it. You know, I think when you talk about people’s list, you know, I think we we feel that, without any sort of editorial oversight or and the fact that it’s driven by data, it’s the people that is buying the books in in any format that they’re buying and then and we’re just reporting on what people are buying, without that without that oversight. Because, like, there’s literally I mean, where we have it now, the sources come in. We do some validation checks from an automatic stand automated standpoint, and then it’s published out in an automated format. There’s not a there’s not a manual action.
Erik Bursch [00:09:15]:
There’s not somebody that says this BooksRead hey. I think this book is great. It should be higher than it is. Right? Or or why is this book on there? We gotta we have to you know, this this shouldn’t be on there. And ,
Jim Azevedo [00:09:25]:
Like my cousin
Erik Bursch [00:09:27]:
Go ahead.
Jim Azevedo [00:09:28]:
No. I was gonna say that.
Erik Bursch [00:09:29]:
No. That’s gonna be the end. Yeah. So so I think it’s I think, you know, you know, no algorithm is perfect. Right? And I think if if any of us if any of you have ever dealt in sort of machine learning or otherwise, it’s it’s always, you know, an ever changing, training side of things from an algorithm. And, you know, we’re continuing to to do small tweaks here and there as we see, you know, things pop up from a data perspective. But I I think that, you know, I love the fact that we’re adding sources all the time to make this an even more complete list, you know, than we had previously.
Jim Azevedo [00:10:05]:
Yeah. And it sounds like it would it would be frankly, it would be impossible to do this manually. Before we went live, you were talking about just how much larger the the source the source pool is for gathering this data. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Erik Bursch [00:10:22]:
Yeah. So, you know, there was a there was a limit of resource time and otherwise that went in and and, you know, we had, you know, when we call out by name some of the some of the sort of long term data sources that we’ve had, a lot of sort of big box, you know, partners of ours that provide data to us. And there wasn’t really an ability to take on a ton of more, sources, because of the manual nature. We we have we’re just over 7 x the amount of sources that we’re including now than than where we, you know, than where we, we were, from Okay. From before hiatus. So I think that that just speaks to the volume of us when we say people. We’re really trying to, you know, gather in all these different sources and making sure that we have the widest spectrum, you know, of of gathering the different types of data from books sold, etcetera, across, you you know, across the, you know, our data sources. I I you know, this is I don’t think a week’s gone by where we haven’t got a request or somebody asking us, you know, for, you know, to be added to to be included inside the data sources list.
Erik Bursch [00:11:28]:
I think there is an ability for us to to, to expand out. You know, we have the best selling lists. I think there’s also aspects for us to look at, you know, maybe an ebook list, you know, maybe an indie authors list, etcetera, to to be able to expand out the different types of list to surface up more of that the different types of data that we’re getting that might not make the top 150 per se, but are really starting to, you know, to to grow in certain areas of our, of the spectrum of data.
Jim Azevedo [00:12:01]:
I’m smiling because I I can imagine by saying that you’re considering breaking out an indie author bestseller list or an indie BooksRead bestseller list, I can imagine a lot of eyebrows went up and the excitement level just raised about 10 x on our side. So that’s a a ton of data. Yeah. The Smashwords store. So the Smashwords store is a contributor, and our store alone has a list of I think we give you just, you know, tens of thousands of book sales every week, and that’s just one store. Okay.
Erik Bursch [00:12:42]:
And I think it’s, you know, I think it’s, you know, one thing I do wanna call out with the sources. Right? And
Jim Azevedo [00:12:46]:
Sure.
Erik Bursch [00:12:47]:
And some of your audience, you know, might have seen this during when we relaunched. Right? So we had a a really I talked about earlier Gannett being in in, you know, over 200 communities across the US, and we really I personally believe that that bookstores, especially independent bookstores, are, you know, really the heartbeat of a lot of communities in a way. They bring people together in in ways that that other things in the community don’t bring people together. Right? And and we made a very conservative effort about bringing forward our connection to the independent bookstores. Every week, we’re publishing an, you know, an article about an independent bookstore across the US. We have led with, the the first sort of option for folks to, to purchase a book is is led with bookshop.org.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:43]:
Yeah. I would love that.
Erik Bursch [00:13:44]:
They they’re able to buy they’re able to buy through other sources. Right? And, you know, they’re there, but we’re leading with that connection, and we felt that that was an important mission for us as we talk about one of our mission statements as a company is to continue to be there for our communities. And, we felt that that was such an important connective tissue, during this relaunch. That’s something so the list didn’t just come back as is. The list came back with a much higher, you know, sort of integration there with with independent bookstores.
Jim Azevedo [00:14:16]:
Yeah. That was really exciting when I read about the new partnership with bookshop.org. We’re big fans. We’re big fans of, Andy Hunter and his team and, you know, what they’re trying to do out there with indie bookstores and to keep the eye on the community and give back to communities out there, across the nation and and beyond. How can you talk about how that partnership I don’t know how deep into the weeds you can go with that, but how that partnership came together? It’s it’s super interesting how there’s just so much thought behind the revamping of the list. It’s not just about data. It’s about this whole new forward looking indie community movement in a way.
Erik Bursch [00:14:58]:
Yeah. I mean, we so, a couple things started to happen, you know, in sort of, you know, sort of together. Right? I was certainly aware of BooksRead, and, you know, I I, I had a connection into a, into a bookstore in, just outside of Saint Louis called Novel Neighbor, and was a follower of them, you know, on in social channels just because I thought their content was amazing and how they presented it. And I also, at the same time, established a connection with with ABA and and their leadership there. And so a couple things sort of came together at the same time. We we, wanted to we really wanted to partner with BooksRead. You know, they that’s a that’s been a fabulous partnership with what they’re able to provide to us from a, you know, sort of metadata of BooksRead, and otherwise, and then us providing back to them the the channel for our users to to to go and purchase. And and really making a a national audience aware, they might not have been aware before what what Bookshop or who Bookshop is, and and why are they different than, you know, other places that you can that you can go buy books from.
Erik Bursch [00:16:14]:
Right? So I think that was 1. You know, ABA has been, been a really good partner and and we’ve tried to to really prop them up. We are talking about, you know, giving them some, you know, essentially a a mouthpiece to be able to to shout forward about their indie next list, and and what the you know, what we can do to help out there to amplify that that message. Right? US Senderday’s reach is is, is a little bit wider than than AVAs, and and we wanna be there and help them. That’s been a good partnership for us, and we will be at their, their Winter Institute conference, next month in February. If anybody is coming, we’re we’re hosting a happy hour there and would love to see you. And we also have, our our book editor is gonna be on one of the panels, for Warner Institute, so that should be fun. And then Novel Neighbor, your Novel Neighbor, I as I mentioned, I’d I’d been following them for for a little bit and, you know, they they had a very unique, layer of of doing these mystery boxes.
Erik Bursch [00:17:15]:
And it’s not saying that they were unique and that other stores aren’t doing this, but I was really impressed with some of, what they were doing. And it’s sort of like I call the stitch fix for books. Right? So, really taken in, like, what you know, this is what people have read, and and I would love to find them some new things. Can you can you put together a box for them? And I felt that, you know, with, again, with continuing down the the road of, of of being there for independent bookstores and otherwise, we formed a partnership with Novel Neighbor to, to highlight the work that they’re doing, around mystery book boxes and, and book subscriptions. We actually had a, we we wrote an article about, it was the first, the first the first mystery BooksRead. It was it was, like, ordered, I wanna say, 2 hours after we relaunched our our, our book list and we relaunched the the novel neighbor relationship at the same time. So 2 hours after we launched, I think the first order came in and it was it was for a mom that that had, had a had a had a daughter that that was a passionate reader. And she ordered up the mystery box and, we actually did an article on it because it was the first one and everything like that.
Erik Bursch [00:18:27]:
And just such a really cool thing to see of, you know, they they were based, this the person in the bottle was based in Virginia, Novel Neighbors in St. Louis. You know, really would never had a connection to Novel Neighbors before, but, you know, just the creativity they wouldn’t thought was it was put into this box of of of delivering books that that her daughter had not read and and just a passionate reader. It was just rave reviews back. So, and I I think that we we’ve had a couple other conversations with other bookstores about, hey. Could we help partner with you, and and amplify a a unique thing that you’re doing to the for the community that could be done at a at a national scale, that we could help, go forward.
Jim Azevedo [00:19:09]:
That’s huge.
Erik Bursch [00:19:10]:
You’ll I think it just again, I I can’t continue to to speak to the volumes of what the mission was here for us, you know, going forward.
Jim Azevedo [00:19:20]:
Okay. I wanna talk to you a little bit more about, how the book list intertwines with the book section. But before we get to that, I wanna take a step back because we’ve talked a little bit about this, but we’re still getting questions in the comment section, about the different formats that are reporting into into the sales. I’ll bring up this question here from Beth first. Beth Irwin asked, am I hearing this is a print centric only data collection? No. No. It’s not print centric.
Erik Bursch [00:19:51]:
It’s not, and and Smashwords is certainly an example of that. Right? You know, I think we we, we we are not limiting it to a a particular format. I do think that, I mean, with the data that we see, speaking at a very high level here, you know, we we do see a lot of volume with print sales, still. And and as a best as a best selling book list, you know, it’s our responsibility to adhere to the data that we’re receiving. You know, and so my comment earlier about us having a focus on sort of ebook specifically, a list that is that is trending there and and, and otherwise, I think that’s just to call out the fact of, there are there are, I think, a really strong and interesting ebook, ebooks out there that might not crack that 150, but are certainly do you know, having a strong following and strong sales that we wanna be able to showcase in some manner. So, no, we are not PrintCentric.
Jim Azevedo [00:20:55]:
Okay. And along those same lines, I’m just gonna bring up Steven. Steven says, hey. Why do ebook sales no longer count toward a best seller run? And from what everything that we’re hearing here from Eric, they do count toward the best seller run because you’re collecting not just print book sales, you’re collecting hardcover sales, ebooks, audiobooks too, Eric?
Erik Bursch [00:21:18]:
We are. Yep.
Jim Azevedo [00:21:19]:
Audiobook. Yeah. So all formats.
Erik Bursch [00:21:22]:
Yeah. And we do. And we and so if if there is a book that is, you know, is carried throughout all those different formats, we, you know, we bring them together in our algorithm and and count those count those as one.
Jim Azevedo [00:21:35]:
Okay. So I wanted to ask you too, can you talk a little bit about how intertwined the the, the BooksRead section content is with the bestseller list? You mentioned that you’re that you that you’re doing some coverage of indie bookstores out there, and you’re trying to get did you say one feature a week? That’s that’s amazing. How do you how do you manage that? How many people are on are on the BooksRead team?
Erik Bursch [00:22:05]:
Well, so that that comes with our partnership with ABA. Right? So ABA has has really helped us in highlighting a lot of unique bookstores, independent bookstores. So, you know, they put together that content. We review it from an editorial standpoint, but they’re the ones really pulling some of that content together. We have a we put together sort of a joint form that that, their independent bookstores can fill out, and submit, and then they’ve been helping to to package that together. You know, I think everybody has you know, everybody reads the news. They know that, you know, we have to be more and more, sort of we have to be very productive with each resource we have inside of the editorial division. I have to be an engineer, and I have to be even more productive with every resource that I still have on engineering side of things.
Erik Bursch [00:22:54]:
So, you know, I I think there there wouldn’t be the time to do that if it was if we DD not have that partnership to help us, you know, sort of pull together that that content. Again, I I think that’s that we we felt that that was an important spider web of type of content, on relaunch that was important to us, to be able to have all of those. And, you know, we will be releasing, it’s probably gonna go live, today or tomorrow. We’re gonna be releasing a, you know, a page that that pulls together as a basically a map of the US and every state that we’ve done an article on is highlighted and you can drill down into that state and see what articles are about independent bookstores were written about that article, about that, in that given state. And I think it rather than just to publish a week and then it sort of disappears a little bit, we’re bringing everybody back into the realm of, you know, of all the different articles we’ve written so far, and and that will continue to build as the as the weeks go by with that. And you asked about sort of our our entertainment BooksRead, sort of traditional editorial side of things. And, you know, certainly, they were, you know, the resources that are the editor and and the the other resources that are inside of that department, they were they were side by side with us as we sort we’re building the engine for for relaunch, you know, making sure that we were accounting certain things as we were setting up our algorithm and otherwise. But they don’t they as I mentioned, they don’t do anything with the list itself.
Erik Bursch [00:24:25]:
I’ve none of my team does anything with the list. That’s it’s coming through data, automated, published out. You know, they’re focused on stories that they feel have a, have a national presence to them.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:36]:
Yep.
Erik Bursch [00:24:36]:
From a US Today standpoint. You know, our over our 200 plus local markets, they do do they do do local stories, about books that might pop out. Whether it’s an author that, you know, let’s say we we have, the Austin Statesman. Let’s say if there was an author down in Austin, that had a, you know, you know, was getting a lot of press around a book, the local property might, highlight that and and write an article about that. That might then be promoted at the USA Today level, you know, that that being shared out to our USA Today property from there. So, yeah, that sort of gives you the you know, where where that editorial team sits and otherwise.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:15]:
Yeah. Thanks for that. And it makes me just get this huge sigh of relief to hear that the editor or the managing editor were so closely aligned with the tech with the tech team as you were refreshing this list because I think we’ve all seen, you know, BooksRead teams sort of dwindle and sometimes go away out there.
Erik Bursch [00:25:34]:
Yeah. And and, you know, certainly, there was a couple, you know, very, very passionate book folks, you know, inside of our product and engineering team to help push that along. But but we could have done that without them. They have a they were able to answer some crucial questions for us to to automate. And, you know, I mentioned that that we have a that our that our books editor will be speaking at the at the Winter Institute for, ABA’s Winter Institute in February. So, again, I I I love that she is spending the time and making herself available to, to that community.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:05]:
Fantastic. Yeah. Me too. As a matter of fact, I wanna bring up this comment from our own Mark Leslie Lafay, who says, I love the accounting book sales on all formats.
Erik Bursch [00:26:16]:
Well, happy that happy that we can see get some excitement there.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:20]:
Yeah. Omar and I are gonna try to make it out to, to Winter Institute if we can if we can if we can make it out there. Something that we’re looking forward to. And here’s a question I wanna bring up from Beth Cox. Beth, you may have missed it. Beth asks, and appreciate the question, Beth, are the sales broken out by format, unless if BooksRead bestsellers and print bestsellers? So we talked about this a little bit before, but do you wanna clarify again, Eric, how that’s like kind of a forward looking possibility?
Erik Bursch [00:26:51]:
Yeah. So right right now, we don’t we don’t break out. Right? We have some some filters in place that where you can select, by fiction, nonfiction as a filter and and some different genres, as a filter. But, you know, we we do our our display and, you know, the combined formats in a 1 50 a top 150, a list from a best selling perspective. I hope to and I hope to do this at some point in 24. I hope to be able to bring other lists to the table to complement our sort of flagship bestsellers, 150 list, to highlight, you know, formats or or genres or otherwise that might not have been able to to get to the top 150 overall, but are certainly, you know, worthy of of, you know, of a call out and and, you know, a position on a list and and otherwise. So, expect more from that in 24.
Jim Azevedo [00:27:46]:
Right. Alright. I love that. Before I forget to ask you hope I hope I didn’t ask you this question already. But with, with Gannett and the list and all the different properties out there, is the is USA Today’s best selling book list? Is it syndicated to other papers around the country?
Erik Bursch [00:28:07]:
So we don’t we don’t. I mean, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of, local papers that will call attention to it. And we don’t syndicate it for a couple different reasons. We don’t syndicate it digitally because, for most of our products, we from an SEO standpoint, right, we don’t wanna duplicate, your sort of data content that lives on one property, you know, and and then duplicate that data content on another property. What we will do is call attention to it and give that funnel of traffic into our, you know, into our sort of the core place where that data element lives. And in this in this case, on USA Today.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:49]:
Okay. Thank you for that. I’m gonna bring up another question from one of our viewers here. Oh, Stefan asks, if you’re able to answer this. Stefan asks, what are the numbers for each avenue to make the list? That is Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobal, Barnes and Noble, print. I gather that
Erik Bursch [00:29:12]:
Is is somebody is that question based on, like, well, what how many sales do I have to have to make the list? Is that is that I don’t That’s how
Jim Azevedo [00:29:22]:
I was that’s how I’m that’s how I’m reading it. Like, I guess, how many how many sales I have to have at Amazon, Apple, Google. But it sounds like you’re combining the numbers from all the different from all the different stores.
Erik Bursch [00:29:32]:
Yeah. That’s correct. And and, obviously, every week’s different. Right? You know, so where Yeah. You know, where 150 is, 1 week is is different on another week. Certainly, there’s ebbs and flows, you know, during the year of when when book sales might be higher. Obviously, even in the end of the holiday season, we saw an uptick, with folks buying any number of formats of books, buying those and and as gifts. Right? So there was a little uplift there.
Erik Bursch [00:30:00]:
The summer season, I think we saw, you know, at least certain genres really really spike high during the summer season, with what we saw there. But really, any any weeks, you know, different of, you know, of what would what it would take, unquote, to to make the the top 150.
Jim Azevedo [00:30:18]:
Yeah. Even on our journalists here at at Smashwords and some of the lists that we gathered from the DraftDigital sales, they can fluctuate wildly from 1 week to the next. It’s based on all the promotions and what else is hitting the market at a particular time. How do so if a bookstore if any bookstore wants to contribute sales data, how do you what makes them eligible to contribute sales data? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Erik Bursch [00:30:44]:
Yeah. Certainly, we’re we’re doing, you know, there there’s a level of check that goes in to make sure they’re, you know, sort of a valid bookstore. Right? And we wanna make sure that we’re taking in data, from that side of things. And then we have a process that we go through for, for setting them up. We call attention to it in in some of the verbiage, you know, on the book list itself. So if if you email BooksRead dot book list at usatoday.com, you know, that’s the the email thread to get into our queue and, let us start that discovery process. Once that discovery process is finished, you know, just as we DD with smash Smashwords, we’re we will provide a, a method for for that BooksRead to to follow a certain format that we need, a certain type of, you know, contribution contribution layers. So email has to be structured for a certain way for that to come into the system, and be processed automatically.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:37]:
Yeah. I haven’t imagined when you announced the the list was was coming out again, were you just completely slammed with requests from booksellers?
Erik Bursch [00:31:45]:
We were. We were, in a positive way. In a in a I would have been I would have been disappointed if we weren’t.
Erik Bursch [00:31:52]:
So as I mentioned, the at launch, you know, there was a couple other things we had to get in place to fully automate everything. So I had to I had to ask everybody for some patience, for submitting. To add those in, but, but we did. We we you know, it took us a a little bit, but, you know, for you know, we got out there. You were you were one of them on the Smashwords side of things, and you, we we got we sent out all the the updates to everybody with how to how to start submitting and and now those we’re still getting requests every week for additions, which is great.
Jim Azevedo [00:32:26]:
Well, kudos to you guys because it’s a pretty straightforward process. And originally, when you first came back to me and you’re like, hey. Thank you for your interest. It’ll be a couple weeks. We’ll get back to you. I thought a couple weeks? There’s no way they’re gonna be able to get back to us in a couple weeks because I could just feel the the tsunami that is probably crushing and about to hit you and your team.
Erik Bursch [00:32:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to be a little bit faster than it was, but, you know, we we I I should be open that the books is not something we solely work on. Right? We we my teams are responsible for all that we do digitally from USA Today’s perspective in our local property. So, there’s a lot of different priorities across the board, but, we wanted to get that one across the finish line, right, to a place where it can really run itself, and that was, that was a crucial piece. So we finally finally got there. We’re in a good shape right now.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:18]:
Okay. I wanna bring up this question here from, Guillaume, who asks, what is the secret ingredient for any book or ebook to make a bestseller list? And I write only fiction. That’s the that’s the $64,000 question there, Guillaume. We all wanna know. Do you have a sense based on what you’ve seen, Eric?
Erik Bursch [00:33:41]:
I I mean, you know what? I I’ve seen books make the list that I was really surprised had the numbers and and the following that they DD, and, you know, I you know, I’ve had others that I fully expected to to be
Jim Azevedo [00:33:54]:
Yeah.
Erik Bursch [00:33:54]:
You know, near the top. And, you know, obviously, the ones that are that are sitting near the top are a lot of very well known, your authors and books that are out there, but we’ve had some really unique books that have have have have populated fairly high on our list, which I’ve been excited to see because I think that that just you break sort of the mainstream, the books that everybody hears about. Right? You sort of break out of that and you get some really, really unique books that get out there. I don’t I I I don’t think that there’s I don’t I don’t have a secret ingredient to pass along. I think, you you know, for any book, you have to capture a sliver of of fandom and and, you know, a unique layer that that grips readers. And, you know, I a lot of the books that I get are from word-of-mouth. Right? I said, hey. You know, I’ll talk to friends of mine and they’re like, hey.
Erik Bursch [00:34:46]:
I just I found this book or somebody passes the book. It was great. You should check it out. And I think that just comes to authors, you know, not trying to sort of recreate the, you know, the the stories that have been out there and and done several times over, but creating a unique, you know, unique type of, a book, unique type of audience that you’re looking for, and and then build it upon that.
Jim Azevedo [00:35:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. Good good answer. The list this is kind of a follow-up to Guillaume’s question from my from me. But the list runs, Monday through Sunday. Or you collect data for sales that occur Monday through Sunday. Correct?
Erik Bursch [00:35:24]:
Correct.
Jim Azevedo [00:35:26]:
Do you have a sense of what’s what the what the best day for someone who wants to hit the list? What what the the best day is for them to release a new book?
Erik Bursch [00:35:41]:
So I think I don’t really have that. I don’t we don’t get data broken out by day of week.
Jim Azevedo [00:35:47]:
Okay.
Erik Bursch [00:35:48]:
You know, we ours are when we receive the the the numbers, we ask for those numbers to be rolled up for that that whole time frame. Yeah. You know, I think, historically, I think as a lot of us know, you know, we see, you know, Tuesdays being a heavy day for book releases, you know, or or at least, you know, touting of of book releases and otherwise with Tuesday, Wednesday time frame. So yeah. But I don’t I don’t have data on saying, hey. You know, this if a book is released this day, the sales really pop this day, etcetera.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:20]:
Yeah. And I’ve heard different things. I’ve heard, you know, some folks say, well, don’t release on Tuesdays because that’s when all the traditional publishers are releasing their big books. You have to compete with them. And, I think there are probably myriad different formulas out there. I wanna bring up this question. I don’t know if you can answer it, Eric, because I feel like it’s kind of encapsulates, the thoughts of a lot of authors out there. But Bianca De Ark asks and thanks for the question, Bianca.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:48]:
When comparing the current list to the prior incarnation, it seems like indie authors are not really able to hit the list as easy as easily. Do you have any idea, why that is?
Erik Bursch [00:37:00]:
Well, I mean, I can speak to what we’re doing now and the fact that we’re we’re we’ve we’ve 7 x ed, our number of sources that we’re receiving, and there’s no editorial oversight on on on BooksRead making the list. And we we are not there’s nothing in our algorithm that would, say that we have to we have to lean towards traditional publishers or anything like that. We are we’re using data to drive our list. You know, our prior our prior, incarnation, you know, the there there was there were some manual actions that had to occur there, and, you know, we tried to follow their their methodology as close as we could. We took in a lot of feedback from our our books editorial team on, some considerations that we should have an automated format. But I’m not in a position to say, you know, well, indie authors appeared more previously than they do now. You know, I could just say that we are continuously open to, to sources to receive so that we’re making sure we’re getting a wider spectrum of data in there and and really presenting out, you know, what we believe, you know, what what our algorithm says is is the best selling BooksRead know, for that given week. And, so, yeah, I don’t I don’t have any details or or explanation why there there was a perceived situation previously.
Jim Azevedo [00:38:26]:
Yeah. No. I appreciate that answer. And I think that’s a fair answer. And I’ve heard that from other authors as well, but it sounds like, well, the list is completely new. You’re taking on, is it the same amount of formats? It it sounds like like the new list has is ingesting more data from more formats than the previous list, but maybe I’m wrong about that. And and I know that the list is 7 x larger right now, and you’re constantly adding more stores to it. Are all the same stores that had reported before, some of the bigger stores, are they are they all reporting to the new list?
Erik Bursch [00:39:03]:
There is one, there’s one, partner of ours that, we’re just working through some details from, from a agreement standpoint, in that. Okay. So they are they are not included as of right now, but they should be included very, very shortly. And that’s just that’s just some language that we have inside of our agreement with them to Yeah. To to bring that data. Other than that, all the all the sources are there. You know, they were there previously.
Jim Azevedo [00:39:34]:
Okay. And we touched upon some things earlier, Eric, about, you know, what you see going forward with the new list. Was there anything else that you had or that you wanted to add about some ideas or what’s coming down the pipe that people can look forward to?
Erik Bursch [00:39:48]:
Well, I think the biggest thing is is is calling attention to the different types of, you of other lists that we could that we could call out to give attention to. You know, I mean, sometimes I mean, as I’m sure a lot of the the the folks in the community here are seeing it, it might be tough to to crack that 150. And, you know, and but but it doesn’t mean that there’s books at 175 to 200 that aren’t really, really, good BooksRead are really starting to to really skyrocket up the charts. You know, in a different type of format or in the indie world or otherwise. And we wanna make sure we’re we’re capturing that. To make sure that we’re we I mean, I I wanna bring our audience to a wider spectrum of of, you know, of of books and and listen otherwise. And some of that we can’t do, in the in the 150 list because it is strictly best selling, and it could it could be tough for some of those types of, you know, of parts of our data’s data sphere to to make it into the full 150 list.
Jim Azevedo [00:41:01]:
Okay. Okay. I appreciate that. Oh, I wanna bring up another comment here from Mark that says this is incredibly insightful out there and help clear up a lot of misunderstandings. Thank you, Eric. And another comment here from Lexi, who says, if I’m hearing y’all, there needs to be a bestsellers after dark list. Bet you thought I wouldn’t show that one. Alright, Lexi.
Erik Bursch [00:41:28]:
I’ll put I’ll put that one in the list the the the list top of it. We’ll we’ll think about doing.
Jim Azevedo [00:41:34]:
Well, okay. I mean, we’re gonna hold you to that, Eric. Well, I I would just I would
Erik Bursch [00:41:40]:
I I would just say, you know, I I love, I love hearing feedback. I try to get back to everybody that that writes in, to to our book list at usatoday.com email address. Yeah. So if there are ideas that anybody has or or otherwise, happy to listen to them. You know, we we doesn’t mean, you know, I’m not gonna be able to jump on a a great idea right away, but, because of all the all of our other priorities. But I do expect to have, have some advancement throughout 24. As I mentioned, we’re having that, you know, that the the independent bookstore US map list, that should go live, you know, in in the in the coming days. And, Jim, I’ll I’ll shoot you a link when that does go live.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:24]:
Oh, please do. Yep. That’s that’s a that’s a really cool project. Did you say the, the email to shoot any ideas is booklist@usatoday.com?
Erik Bursch [00:42:35]:
Yep. Book list. Yep. Without the s.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:37]:
Yes. Okay. Are we okay to share that here on in the comment section? I don’t want you to get in the inundated in your
Erik Bursch [00:42:44]:
No. It’s not a problem. Not a problem.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:47]:
Alright. Well, hey. I would I’d love to talk with you off the record about some ideas, and we we can brainstorm for different things in 2024.
Erik Bursch [00:42:54]:
I hope to see I hope to see you in Cincinnati.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:57]:
Man, we’re we’re we’re trying to yeah. Mark Lefebvre and I are trying to pull out all the stops to get one of us there, and we’re both, you know, trying to get there. So we would love to be there, and I think we need to be there.
Erik Bursch [00:43:10]:
Keep me up to date on that, and if anybody else is coming, you know, our our happy hour we’re sponsoring are, is, Tuesday evening 13th. It’s right one block from the convention center where Winter Institute’s at. So, happy to to to buy anybody a beverage of their choice and and some food and, talk to you about some ideas. So so, Jim, hopefully you and Mark could you and Mark can make it. I would love to connect.
Jim Azevedo [00:43:36]:
Appreciate that, Eric. As we wrap up today, I just wanted to remind our viewers to if you could please like, share, comment, and subscribe to Self Publishing Insider, we’d greatly appreciate it because we get to go out there and invite awesome guests like Eric here to come in and tell us about what they’re doing out there. Also, be sure to bookmark dddlive.com so you could see the topics and the guests that are coming, for the next week, because each week will we do it again. And finally, if you are an aspiring author, why not sign up for your free Draft2Digital account at draft, the number 2, digital.com? For all of you watching out there, thank you again for joining us. We really, really appreciate your viewership. And, Eric, if you don’t mind, if you could hang out in the green room for a second, I’m just going to place, I’m going to play a quick 32nd promo spot here, and I’ll meet you over in the green room. Everybody else, thanks so much for joining us. We’ll see you here again, same time, next week.
Jim Azevedo [00:44:42]:
Take care, everybody. Too. Thank you.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:42:54]:
Ebooks are great, but there’s just something about having your words in print, something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf, sign for a reader. That’s why we created D2D Print, a print on demand service that was built for you. We have free beautiful templates to give your book a pro look, and we can even convert your ebook cover into a full wraparound cover for print. So many options for you and your books. And you can get started right now at draft2digital.com.That’s it for this week’s self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital. Be sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with your will be author friends, and start, build, and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.
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]]>Congratulations to our top-selling authors of the week!
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]]>The post Everything to know before you migrate your account from Smashwords to Draft2Digital appeared first on Draft2Digital | Blog.
]]>At this time we’re enabling authors to migrate their own accounts when its most convenient for them. We prefer to let you have all the power and control over your work and schedule whenever possible.
As of February 16, 2024, we’ve extended an invitation to over 70,000 accounts. Each of those account holders is invited to fill out some quick questions to be sure that we didn’t miss any complicating factors.
If you have an invitation to migrate, you’ll receive an email from Smashwords (at the email address you use to log in) and you’ll see a banner at the top of your Smashwords Account page or Dashboard. Both communications have a green “Let’s do this!” button that takes the account holder to a migration survey.
This survey is helping us sort accounts from least complicated to most complicated as we continue to develop tools behind the scenes. If your survey answers indicate you’re still eligible, your account will be added to a queue and will be migrated during business hours while a developer monitors for errors.
If you answer the questions and your answers render your account temporarily ineligible to migrate, hang tight! You haven’t done anything wrong, rather, it’s that we need to develop some code to take care of some facet of your account. You can continue to use your Smashwords account as normal until you receive notification that your account is eligible again.
We are starting with very narrow criteria and expanding as we develop our transfer process. Users who have not yet been invited have known complications with their account that we cannot yet support. Over the course of 2024, we plan to handle all these complications so everyone can migrate.
If you would like to migrate ASAP, you can contact Smashwords support to request a manual review of your account to see if you can jump the queue. In some cases, we may want to communicate with you about changes that will occur during the migration.
Once the migration process has started, the author portions of your account will be locked and any information related to your books will be transferred to the Draft2Digital website interface. The process for an account transfer takes a few hours to a few days, and we will be shepherding accounts through at a pace where we can monitor things closely. You do not need to stay at your computer during this time.
Once the account transfer is initiated, your Smashwords publishing account will transition to a Smashwords reader account. If you’ve purchased books at Smashwords you can continue to access them through your Smashwords Library.
When the migration process is complete, a notification will show on your Smashwords account and we’ll also email you to confirm. That email is very important as it has the keys to your new Draft2Digital account: a link to set a password for your new D2D account.
We will be creating your account on your behalf when you migrate. If you have an account at Draft2Digital, we consider that one of the current “complicating factors” that make a Smashwords account ineligible for transfer.
If you have a Draft2Digital account that has no books in it and you would like to request a migration ASAP, contact Draft2Digital Support to temporarily disable your unused account. Once your unused D2D account is disabled, our team will be able to start your migration.
Ask! We are always willing to check your account manually. A lot of times, we’re able to say yes and get you in the queue.
As a part of the transfer process, we will be creating a new Draft2Digital account for you using your current Smashwords email address. When the migration process for your account is finished, we will email a link to your current Smashwords email address. Clicking the link in this email will allow you to set a password and activate your new Draft2Digital account.
If you have an existing account with Books2Read (owned and operated by Draft2Digital) that uses the same email you use to log in to Smashwords, you will be able to log in with your existing Books2Read password once your account migration is complete.
At the Smashwords store, your book links, series links, contributor links, and publisher links will remain the same after your account transfer.
At all your current sales channels, your current book listing links should continue to work as expected. Going forward, Draft2Digital will manage and transmit future updates of your books.
RSS, Twitter (X), Facebook, Wattpad, and Author Interview links will not be shown on the new author profile owned by Draft2Digital. Author interviews will be retired from the Smashwords website.
The biggest change is that you will manage all your books through the Draft2Digital. Once the migration process is complete, any changes to images (book cover, author photo) or metadata (book title, author, series, etc.) will need to be made through your new account at Draft2Digital. You will no longer be able to make changes to your books from the publishing dashboard at Smashwords.com.
Book categorizations. Draft2Digital saves your book categorizations as BISAC codes instead of using the proprietary Smashwords categorization system. This may mean that your book categorizations could change slightly when your books are processed through the Draft2Digital system. The good news is that you are in control of the BISAC classifications and can change or update them at any time on the Draft2Digital website after migration.
Draft2Digital will pay you. When you have royalties due (or an account balance transferred from Smashwords), you will need to set your preferred method of payment at Draft2Digital after the migration is complete. You can find your payment method under ACCOUNT > Payment Options – How D2D Pays You. We recommend you choose direct deposit, if possible, for the swiftest payment.
Historical sales data will be migrated into Draft2Digital’s daily reporting interface. Though your information won’t be shown immediately in chart form as it takes some time to process, your historical finalized sales reporting will be available as downloads on Draft2Digital’s site. Please allow at least a week for your sales data, including daily reporting, to be transferred and made available to you through Draft2Digtial’s chart system. (You can learn more about how to control the chart parameters on D2D’s blog or here in a YouTube video.)
Global pricing. Draft2Digital offers a feature similar to Smashwords’ Global Pricing Manager, known as “Territorial Prices”. The feature works differently than the Smashwords Global Pricing as Draft2Digital allows you to set an ebook price per currency, not a price per currency and country. We will set your territorial pricing to the highest price that you specified for each currency. You can change this setting at any time after migration by visiting each book on Draft2Digital and going to “Step 4: Publishing” of the Ebook Publishing Process and clicking the “Manage Territorial Prices” button.
You’ll have access to… all of Draft2Digital’s sales partners, payment splitting for your books with multiple authors, more ways to get paid, automated end-matter, and Books2Read Universal Book Links, Draft2Digital’s Print on Demand program D2D Print.
You will still be able to make Smashwords Coupons and, if you set up a preorder you’ll have access to Smashwords Presales.
As of February 23rd:
We hope this makes the migration process a bit more transparent and understandable for our Smashwords authors who will soon be our Draft2Digital authors! Thank you for bearing with us as we ensure a smooth transition for everybody.
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