This month’s special guest Tracy Buchanan reveals how her dog inspires her creativity…
TRANSCRIPT:
MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?
TRACY: Oh, having a dog in my office. A small thing: it’s walks. I know that sounds really… Going out for walks when I get stuck on something or trying to come up with ideas. And that’s what my dog — my dog assistant is snoring at the moment — comes in. So that’s that is a small thing for me, because if I’m sat there and I cannot figure out this plot hole, if I go out into nature, walk around… It untangles. So I’d always recommend that to anyone: going out for walks.
Tonight is the first Green Room session for writers and it’s not too late to get involved.
I’ve already had great questions on editing a first draft, finding agents, writing for TV, collating research, writing series summaries and more! Even if you don’t have a question, do please come along as something might occur to you in the moment and those can be the best questions of all.
Twice a month, I’ll be running a 30-minute live session on Zoom where you can ask me questions about the craft of writing, your WIP, or the business of publishing. The sessions will be fun and informal and chatty. You can send me questions in advance. They’ll be recorded live and saved on Kofi for exclusive access to Green Room supporters.
There’s no long term commitment. With Kofi, you can support for just a month, or for as long as you like. Pop in, pop out: whatever works for you. My goal is to be able to give supporters advice that will make a real difference to their writing and career, because the way I see it: having worked in this industry as a salesperson, bookseller and author for over 30 years, I’ve made every mistake, so you don’t have to.
Here’s a clip from the first episode of the Creative Differences podcast where I explain what the Green Room is and how you can get involved…
Twice a month, I’ll be running a 30-minute live session on Zoom where you can ask me questions about the craft of writing, your WIP, or the business of publishing. The sessions will be fun and informal and chatty. You can send me questions in advance. They’ll be recorded live and saved on Kofi for exclusive access to Green Room supporters.
I’m running this via Kofi, where you can join by clicking on the Green Room membership tier for £20 a month…
There’s no long term commitment. With Kofi, you can support for just a month, or for as long as you like. Pop in, pop out: whatever works for you. My goal is to be able to give supporters advice that will make a real difference to their writing and career, because the way I see it: having worked in this industry as a salesperson, bookseller and author for over 30 years, I’ve made every mistake, so you don’t have to.
A simple proposition: write, edit, publish and market a self-published eBook and get it up the Kindle charts… in a year. Fifty-two weeks. Yeah, a doddle…
Oh, and while you’re trying to achieve this, and on top of all the other crap you have going on in your life, you’ll also be helping run a weekly podcast where you interview folk from the industry and maybe a few authors? Maybe even a few bestselling, mega-million-household-name-type authors?
And yet, here we are… Luckily, my cohort in this exercise in insanity is the super-driven entrepreneur and life coach Mark Desvaux who could convince the most devout nun to abandon her vows and take up pole dancing (don’t worry, he only uses his powers for good, not evil).
Mark is also that wannabe writer who’s started writing a novel a few times, but has never finished one. He still has that joyous naivety that all it takes is a bit of application and before you know it you’ve written Harry Potter And The Cash Cow Of Azkaban.
I, on the other hand, am a cynical sod who’s worked in bookselling and publishing for over twenty years and have seen more disasters than Donald Trump’s press office. There’s no way you can cynically take a dash of Dan Brown, add a smidgen of James Patterson, sprinkle it with EL James’s chutzpah and wait for the royalty cheques to come rolling in.
However, that’s not entirely our plan. While our book may end up the literary equivalent of the Hindenberg, we are totally convinced that there are writers out there who can beat us to it. Writers who might have a half-finished book in their bottom drawer, writers who just need a little guidance from the experts (that’s not us, let me make that absolutely clear!), and could get their work published and read by the masses.
We launch today with three episodes, so you can really get your teeth into it, and they’re all fab. You can find the podcast on iTunes: http://bestsellerexperiment.com/itunes
Please subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes, and, if you like us, please, please, please leave a review and a rating on iTunes. I had no idea how important this stuff is to keeping your podcast alive. Apple use these as their major metric when it comes to making the podcast visible and easy to find! Without them, we wither and die… and I want this to fail because I was right, not because of some sodding metric!
If you’re not on iTunes, you can listen and download from our website: http://bestsellerexperiment.com/podcasts/
This really is aces. Updated every week it’s the highlights of our interviews, and by the time we’re done there will be about 80,000 words of advice from some of the best authors on the planet… For free! You’d be crazy not to.
Still not convinced? Then check out our trailer for a quick peek…
Like I said, this is going to be fun.
Oh, and to the chap who left a comment on our Facebook page bemoaning the whole exercise and declaring that Graham Greene would never have stooped to this… it’s called the Bestseller Experiment, not the Timeless Literary Classic Experiment.
Mark Stay Writes 