Category: Creative Differences podcast

Time-Saving Tip for Naming your Characters

This month’s special guest Nicola May reveals a tip for naming your characters that will save you time in the long run…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: So, let’s start with what small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?

NICOLA: I mean, again, I found this quite hard, but what I do do is… all my heroines have very short names; four letters or three letters. Ruby, Avy, Rosa. Victoria’s Vic. Because if you think how many times you type that in a manuscript, it saves you so much time. I mean, if you have something like Everard or, I don’t know, Christopher, you don’t want to be writing that… all those times. Although it’s good for word count.

MARK: I’m writing something at moment that has a character called Michael, and I’m four chapters in and already I’m thinking, I just want to call him Mike.

NICOLA: Yeah. You know, and I bet you you’ll have to go back because you will have so many wrong spellings of that as well.

MARK: Exactly. Yeah.

NICOLA: But it’s a little point, but it’s a good point. And also don’t choose a name that people can’t understand like Niamh, or things like that because there is nothing worse… As a reader, I hate it when I don’t know how to say the name. 

MARK: You have to go to one of those those YouTube channels where they tell you how to pronounce it. Yeah, yeah,

NICOLA: Because I’ve got I’ve got a Joti in my book, would you say Joti or Jotti? And my audiobook narrator… I didn’t think actually to brief her on that.

MARK: I was going to mention this later. I went to the audiobook recording for The Corn Bride yesterday. And once I was in the room with them, they had a list. You know, it’s how you pronounce that? How are you pronouncing that? I. And I was like… (makes a non-commital noise). I don’t have strong opinions either way.

NICOLA: I never want to meet my narrator, because I’ve got one character who has an accent of someone who’s traveled many places abroad. So you don’t know where she’s from. And I put that on the brief. I’m like, oh my God, the poor woman.

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Nicola May’s Biggest Mistake: “Don’t Snap at the First Thing…”

This month’s special guest Nicola May reveals the biggest mistakes (sorry… “learnings”!) of her writing career…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your writing career?

NICOLA: Now I like to call them learnings, Mark Stay, not mistakes.

MARK: Okay. Very good, very good. Yes, I like that. Yes. Good.

NICOLA: I’ve made many learnings. One of them, actually I went with W.H. Howes for the Corner Shop in Cockleberry Bay for my audiobook. There’s nothing wrong with W.H. Howes. I was jobbing at the time. I’d given up a big corporate job. I got offered 500 pounds advance. I was like, wow, I’ll take that. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah, a big mistake because I now know how to create my own audiobooks. The other three, I’m making a very nice living, thank you very much. Because audiobooks really heightened in the last year. So again, I think the moral of this tale is if you’re just starting out and somebody does offer you something, don’t snap at the first thing because you know you’re good enough. But if somebody big like… or anyone offers you something, so take a step back and think, okay, maybe I should go and look at other avenues rather than jump at the first opportunity with anything, with an agent, with a publisher, because we all get so excited. But I think if someone thinks you’re good enough a lot of other people will. So that’s my little bit of advice on that one. My other mistake, and I shouldn’t really call it a learning, is not to go with one of the top five publishers and be traditionally published. It was something I always dreamt of. I thought, this will make me… I will be a world wide international superstar. I signed a three book deal for the Ferry books. Don’t get me wrong, I was… The advance was incredible, but the marketing wasn’t after, and I felt that I had… I was a million miles away from the people who I was dealing with at the publisher. And I think because I’m such a control freak, being an indie publisher, I didn’t like that lack of control. So it’s almost… I don’t think I actually marketed those books as well as I did in my other books, because I kind of lost a bit of heart, to be honest. So again… but it’s not for me… for somebody it would be the most amazing thing in the world to be with a trad pub, but it didn’t work for me.

Tips for Marketing Romcoms: Nicola May on the Creative Differences Podcast

This month’s special guest Nicola May reveals her tips for marketing romcom fiction…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: (Reading a question from GB Ralph) “How do you reach your rom com readers and market to them? Romcoms can cross so many other genres: romance, comedy, women’s fiction, but don’t really fit into any one of them, which can make it tricky.” So yeah, the marketing of them. Have you identified who your readers are? Do you find that with your different series you’re marketing to slightly different people? Is there any kind of knack to this?

NICOLA: You know what, I’ve had the most scattergun approach to marketing my whole writing career. Sometimes I don’t actually know how I’ve been so successful (laughs), but I think is I just I talk a lot and I share a lot, and I think I’ve had such ground work from when I started out way back in like 2011, when the first one came out, that I’ve just created an audience by being repetitive, because I haven’t even got that many followers on any of my things. And but you know what I will say as well, Amazon is King. Once the algorithm hits, you get you over your 50 reviews once. And I think with KDP, they obviously want you to do well because they do well out of you as well. They will then give you the deals and throw you out there. I have got a mailing list and if I tell you how many are on my mailing list, people won’t believe it. They will gasp… 258!

MARK: (gasps!)

NICOLA: Because when I started out, when I started out with Cockleberry Bay, obviously Amazon just alert people when a new book comes out. So I’ve got a lot of followers on Amazon, but post and I didn’t think that. Now again, one of my mistakes… I should set up a mailing list. I never bothered. I don’t pay now for any Amazon advertising because I don’t know how to do it. I do think… now I don’t know if other authors find it more difficult now, but I could spend £100 and it’s gone within seconds.

MARK: I mean, it’s the thing we’ve shown the Cockleberry Bay, the Ferry Lane, How Do I Tell You? But how many books have you written in all? Was it 18?

NICOLA: I’ve written 18 now. Yeah, so I was writing two a year. Yeah, I’m lazy now. I’m writing one a year now.

MARK: I don’t think anyone’s going accuse you of being lazy. I’ve said this again and again. Resilience counts for a lot in this game. It really does. You’re going to have the ups and downs, the lows and highs. And it’s… you just got to hang in there haven’t you?

NICOLA: Well my motto is persistence over resistance. I’ve had so many no’s, I’ve made so many mistakes, but I think it is… just keep doing little things and keep… just every day and you will get results.

MARK: Right.

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Writers need to take chances… Nicola May on the Creative Differences podcast

This month’s special guest Nicola May reveals how she got her books into a major book chain…

Listen to Mark Stay’s Creative Differences on your favourite podcast provider:

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TRANSCRIPT

NICOLA: Don’t let anything or anyone stop you
because at the London Book Fair I once and chased after the book buyer of WH Smiths with Love Me Tinder and I said, “Go on, you know, you want to put this in your shop, but it ended up in WH Smiths Travel. Do you know what I mean? It’s like you’ve got to take chances.

MARK: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love that. Absolutely love it

What’s the best social media platform for marketing books?

This month’s special guest GB Ralph reveals his preferred social media platforms for marketing his books…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: Marketing wise, which platform do you find the most successful for your books?

GB RALPH: I presume you mean, like, social media platform? All sort of have different purposes.
My Instagram is sort of… I’ve inherited friends and family who are very lovely. There’s only so many times you can sell the same book to your friends and family. Then Facebook. I’ve picked up a lot of readers who I wouldn’t have expected. TikTok was really fun. It comes in waves where I get enthusiasm to do some videos and then it drops off again. But that is… because TikTok shows your stuff to a lot of people who don’t follow you. So I think that has been really interesting to pick up people who’ve never heard of me because my videos have been shown to them or whereas on the other platforms a lot of it is your stuff getting shown to a subset of your own followers who already know you. I don’t know. Probably the most engagement is through my mailing list actually, because that’s the most reliable. It gets sent out and I can see roughly how many people open it. That’s where it starts. And then it’s sort of like, okay, I have the content now, I need to now I can recycle that to the social medias.

GB Ralph on Starting a First Draft

This month’s special guest GB Ralph reveals when he’s ready to start writing a draft…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What’s the thing that makes you think you’re ready to start writing on a project?

GB RALPH: When I back-calculate from my deadline and find that I’m already behind schedule. (laughs) I don’t know, where is even the start line? Is it jotting down ideas, sketching them out? Plotting? Is it start writing, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’? I’m ready to start drafting my next book now. Like, as in, chapter one, scene one as of this week. I have a victim. I have a handful of suspects, each with their potential motives, and that’s about it. But I have I have about two novels’ worth of content and that I want to fit into one novel. So we’re bursting at the seams, and I need to start writing to see what ideas are actually smaller than I thought they were. Ones that don’t fit in at all. Ones that are maybe bigger than I had originally thought and will spark more ideas.

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What’s Bringing us Joy now…?

My special guest GB Ralph and I reveal the things that are bringing us joy this month, including books, TV and games. See below for a full list of links…

LINKS

GB Ralph’s website
Everyone this Christmas has a Secret
The Holly King by Mark Stay
Only Murders in the Building
Arcane
Mini Metro game
Allie X Last Christmas
Altego Music’s Wham/Chappel Roan mash-up
The Penguin
Beyond the Throne by Kristian Nairn
Rosalie Cunningham, To Shoot Another Day
December will be Magic Again by Kate Bush
Christmas at the Airport by Nick Lowe

Edit by Kai Newton
Production assistance by Emily Stay
Jingle by Dom Currie

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GB Ralph on Deadlines and Pre-Orders

This month’s special guest GB Ralph reveals the importance of deadlines, and why he sets up a book for pre-order before it’s even written…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your writing process?

GB RALPH: A small thing that has made a big difference in my creative process is having a deadline. No deadline, nothing happens. Deadline: Let’s go. I work well to a deadline, which is something I learned back in school. But as an indie author, there’s not really such a thing as a deadline, so I had to create one myself, which is… the main one is setting up a preorder for the next book, which forces me to get going through that, don’t you?

MARK: Because if you get that wrong, certain online retailers get very upset with the authors.

GB RALPH: Oh yeah. I know, I know which is is motivating. It can be stressful, but I think it’s a good kind of stress, the motivating kind, not the debilitating kind. It’s still deadline. It can be a year away, which is forever. And I need to constantly remind myself that I need to make little deadlines along the way. Ones that have consequences. Otherwise, I’ll pull a Douglas Adams and enjoy the wooshing sound as deadlines go by.

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GB Ralph: Share the excitement!

In this special festive edition of the podcast I welcome GB Ralph, author of the cozy Milverton Mysteries series!

We discuss:
Slow burn romance
Writing in scenes and converting them to chapters
Chapter word count analysis (it gets nerdy!)
Tips for book launches
Tips for writing on your commute and how Gavin wrote his debut novel on his phone
What he learned from switching from romcoms to cozy mysteries
How he uses deadlines to motivate his writing
And the importance of narrators for audiobooks

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LINKS

GB Ralph’s website
Everyone this Christmas has a Secret
The Holly King by Mark Stay
Only Murders in the Building
Arcane
Mini Metro game
Allie X Last Christmas
Altego Music’s Wham/Chappel Roan mash-up
The Penguin
Beyond the Throne by Kristian Nairn
Rosalie Cunningham, To Shoot Another Day
December will be Magic Again by Kate Bush
Christmas at the Airport by Nick Lowe

Edit by Kai Newton
Production assistance by Emily Stay
Jingle by Dom Currie

Mike Shackle on Deadlines

This month’s special guest Mike Shackle reveals the importance of deadlines, why releasing each book is like a pay rise, and whether he’ll ever retire…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: How do you know when you’re done?

MIKE: Deadlines, deadlines. Basically, every time I release a book, I. It’s like giving myself a pay rise each month of $1,500. So, yeah, it starts a big pay rise each each time over a year
and things like that. So if I was being really cynical about my career, I would just be writing
the next detective book and putting out… I had a discussion with this Sebastien de Castell, because he was talking about, you know, when do we know we’re going to retire? I mean, but, I need I know the, the money I like and I need to live on, but I have to make this stuff. I have to tell these stories. Even if it was just me doing it. And that desire to do that is only got greater as the years have gone
on, I probably end up in a loony bin, dribbling in a corner, talking about Simon Wise and, you know, everything else…


MARK: Reserve a space for me…

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