Every literary genre has something refreshing to bring to the table. Paranormal romance writer Tasha Black recalls how co-writing with other authors helped her keep bringing exciting stories to her avid readers. She believes that collaboration and passion can bring new ideas to life. In this episode, Tasha and Ella Barnard chat about all things writing, editing, and marketing. Listen in as they share how you can start writing from your heart and customizing your author process.
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Co-Writing And Customizing Your Author Process With Tasha Black
We are here with Tasha Black. She is a USA Today bestselling author of paranormal, sci-fi and fantasy romance. She lives in a big old Victorian in a tiny college town. She loves reading anything she could get her hands on, making up stories and sipping pumpkin spice lattes. Welcome to the show, Tasha.
Thank you so much for having me.
I met you at RAM. I was there and you were there. I went to Romance Author Mastermind, which is lovely. Everybody, check it out. Now we are here and I would love for me and our readers to know more about you and your author’s journey.
One thing to know about me is that I co-write with my husband. We have been together since we were 21 years old so it is very easy to co-write with him. Long before I met him when I was a little kid, I always wanted to be an author and he wanted to be one too. As time passed, my friends in high school were into theater so I got into theater too. I went to college for theater and I did theater professionally for years.
When I decided that it was time to come home, get married, have kids and not be living on a tour bus, I wanted to find something else to do. Meanwhile, my husband was teaching karate and waiting tables. He then became a teacher. At a certain point, he was like, “I would like to write.” He would write beautiful short stories. He is a craftsman and he is worried about detail and perfection.
Meanwhile, I am a just writer that loves to write and detest revising. It is the worst thing that I can imagine, to go backward. I always want to go forward. While he was sitting at the table one night packing our way one key at a time, I realized maybe we could work together. That was 2014. Amazon had just opened the floodgates and people were beginning to make lots of money in self-publishing. Among those first people to get a foothold as an author was Viola Rivard, who was incredibly generous.
I do not know if you or your readers are familiar with KBoards.com. They have a writer’s room and that is a place where all authors share all kinds of information. Sometimes there is a little trauma. It is nice to go there and read and not say much, but it is a wonderful resource. Viola went there and talked about how she was able to make money by self-publishing. She talked about it in nuts and bolts way exactly what she did and how she did it.
My husband read that and was fascinated by it. I read it and we sat down together at the Panera with a single half sheet of paper and mapped out what we would like to write if we were going to do something like that. That was our first paranormal romance. We plotted it together. I vomited out a first draft as fast as I could, enjoying myself telling the story.
He went back over it like the nitpicker that he is. After that, we had a proofreader and all of that. We published the first book. I will say that late 2014 was a much easier time to enter self-publishing than now. We had success with our first book enough that he was able to leave his teaching job. He could have left it right away but he taught through the whole school year because he would never abandon his students and his colleagues. He was able to leave his job.
I kept a day job for substantially longer. I have a belief in my heart that we should not quit our day jobs until we are very sure that we are going to be okay. I think so much of what makes these books special and fun to read is that the person writing them is having fun. If you were grinding and worried about your bill or something, you are not going to be able to do the job as a writer that you would want as a reader. That is our story. Everything went from there.
I have multiple questions. In 2022, how many books do you have?
Your voice and your energy are what people will connect with the most.
I would say in the 80s because there are two of us.
When you sat down at the Panera and you are like, “My husband, paranormal romance, I think.” I want to be in that conversation. Was he like, “Yeah, paranormal romance, werewolf shifter?” What was that conversation like?
Perhaps it was a mistake on our part, but we do love paranormal romance because that is what Viola Rivard wrote. We were like, “That sounds fun to write.” I read it and it was fun to read. He was like, “Absolutely.” We loved True Blood, Gary Oldman as Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are in it with all of these stories. It felt natural that if we were going to write romance, it would have some fantastical elements in it that both of us enjoy.
I have been reading romance since I was thirteen. I have been reading romance and paranormal romance for a very long time. I do not notice a lot of dudes in the paranormal romance section of these bookstores. I know it is mostly primarily women. Did you guys then both go read some?
He read them too. He is a romantic guy. Many times, I sent him the first draft and then after it has been through beta readers, proofreading and back through him again, I always do the final polish round before he uploads it. It always seems good because it is better than it was. Usually, if there is a moment where I’m like, “Ooh,” that is something that he has added.
I’m going to call you Tasha and him, Black, instead of being like, “That guy.” You have a creative writing process with your husband. You went into it that little bit. You said you plotted the first one.
What we will typically do is we publish frequently, as you can tell by how many books we have out, generally at least a book a month. While I’m finishing the first draft of one book, during those last couple of days, we usually know roughly what we want to write about because we order all of our covers in advance. To publish this frequently, you have to be organized.
We have covers waiting and know roughly what it is going to be about. A few days before I start the first draft, we will sit down together with a cup of coffee. We use a program called Scrivener, which allows you to lay out all of your scenes. We use another program called Scapple, which is a brainstorming app. It looks like a giant yellow sticky note and you can put little notes as if you are writing them down all over the sticky note.
I find that that brainstorming app makes it easy for me to say things like, “Will he turn out to be a vampire? Does she secretly want to open a Swedish fish candy shop?” All those kinds of things without feeling that we have married to it so we can get a little crazy. We will put all the information about the characters and different scenes that we think would be cool to write about all onto the Scapple, which is the brainstorming app.
As we go, we begin to move scenes into Scrivener and we always go from beginning to end. We are very much scene by scene because if you think about it, if you’re co-writing, you have to be organized because you have to create a single vision in two different people’s heads. We have been together for many years, but no one ever shares a brain so we stay very organized.
Each scene in Scrivener allows you to have a description of the inspector bar on the side or in the little note section. We will write a description of the scene in each of those. Sometimes that will be three sentences like, “They wander through the woods. The vines try to eat them. They get away and find a cave.” At other times, it will be whole snippets of dialogue. It’s almost the way that you might describe a scene in a TV show to a friend and we call those beats. I think that language was lifted from the guys at a self-publishing podcast. We write these beats together and we place them in the Scrivener.
In the beginning, we would have every single beat for the whole book. Our books are fairly short, usually between 35,000 and 50,000 words. It’s not super long. Usually, a scene for us is between 1,000 and 2,000 words so we might have 30 beats. Now that we have been at this longer and neither of us has a day job, we can play it a little bit more by ear. We might plan 5 to 10 scenes at a time.
That allows me on the first draft to have a little more freedom to be like, “I want to take it on this tangent. She would never do that. Let’s do this instead.” When the whole Scrivener has every single beat written and fleshed out, now the first draft is done. I hand that to him and I begin the first draft of the next book, which we had started plotting and putting beats into the Scrivener a few days earlier.
While you are working on the first draft, is he still adding to the beats in the Scapple in the next book while you are doing that?
Sometimes, yes. We will sit down, have lunch and look at it together a couple of times during the first draft. We spend an hour at a time just being like, “Let’s adjust. Let’s add.” That is a mid-day author task that happens at least once a week, sometimes more than two times a week throughout. While I’m writing the first draft and having these little lunch meetings to put more beats in, he is editing the previous first draft.
You are writing the first draft and he is editing. He is working on the previous one and maybe a little bit on the current one and the future one. In the future one, you might be talking about it at lunch casually and whatever ideas that you casually come up with, he will go input into the thing while you keep working on the current draft.
I handle all of the social media. I write all the newsletters. I handle the website. In the beginning, we did not do any advertising at all. We still do not do Amazon ads, but we do Facebook ads. What I learned about myself and Mr. Black is that neither of us enjoys that. Both of us would always rather be writing, and yet we were leaving money on the table. We began by paying another author who is skilled with Facebook ads to run some Facebook ads for us, and it went well. This was at the end of 2020. She then decided that she was going to do that professionally for a larger company so she bid us adieu. I go, “That was nice while it lasted.”
At RAM 2020, I talked to a PR person who is Skye Warren’s PR person. She was lovely to talk to, and she focused on contemporary romance. She said, “Based on your back catalog, how fast you are producing, good reviews and whatever it is, it seems like you could use Facebook ads publicity. I recommend that you find someone who can do that in your genre.” We found someone for that and she began running Facebook ads.
We have our own teeny art team who have been with us from the beginning. She also sends art copies out to other people. She does those things. She has her own newsletter that all of her client’s books go out in and that has been lovely. In the winter of 2021, we realized we would like to do more with Facebook ads. For the PR person, that is just one of the many facets of what she does. She puts about as much attention on it as you would imagine would be appropriate for that.
We are working with someone who does only Facebook ads. She will go into the ads every morning and adjust them. She will do all those things that Skye Warren would teach us how to do. We took her class and did not do it. I do have to give a lot of props to the team. I also have to say that I’m so happy that we pay other people to do those things.
Every time I hit go on that PayPal, I do it with a light heart because I know that the writing is well than what I’m supposed to be doing. I still do not want to share profit with a publisher. Being able to pay ala carte for these incredible women to do these services for us is the best feeling in the world and I highly recommend it.
It wrote down on my note, “Team.” A lot of us, when we are starting, we do a lot of it on our own. I have just finished taking Write Better-Faster. It’s focusing on your strengths and allowing other people to do the things that you are not excellent at so that you can become the best at what you are good at. For you, it is writing with your husband. I do have a question because I might know you but not everybody who is reading. How many books, what is your book release schedule-ish, and how often do you put books out?
The universe knows what your gift is and what makes you happy.
I try to never go more than four weeks without a new book out. The ideal schedule for us is every three weeks. We are going to have a little break coming up because, without even thinking about it, I capriciously agreed to be part of two anthologies. One is with some authors I love that is for charity and another one is with an author who I worship and I could not say no.
We are coming up on a time during the summer when we are going to go eight and a half weeks without a release. That will be the first time in years. We have plans to bundle some old books that we put out and never bundled and do some discounting. We have very been lucky that the Book Club has featured our book in the past. We are hoping perhaps they will give us another one at some point. That is the first time in a long time.
It’s more frequently, every three weeks. There was a period of time when we accumulated some manuscripts that were ready to go. This was in 2020 when we had never published fantasy before. We decided that we would like to have a bunch of them waiting in their wings because we thought people might get more engaged with it if the next one is always coming quickly. Every two weeks for me started to impact the writing time because it is more newsletters, more social media, more our team, and more things that are stopping you from putting the time in on the book. That is what you want to do.
I was writing a 10,000-word short story a week and that was a lot. I then went every two weeks because it is not just the writing. It is all the other things too. I found my best author friend and we gradually went to co-writing and releasing a book a week. Those are some of the best books I have ever written.
They are good because we have complementary strengths in terms of writing. Your system and our system are similar because I’m a plotter and reviser. She is the, “I want to sit down and write,” that draft person. I do not like writing descriptions and she loves writing descriptions. We were complementary. She and I together is the writer that I always wish. My ideal dream perfect writer is the two of us. I could never do it on my own.
That is how I feel about writing with my husband. Neither of us could pull this out. He could not get the words out and what I wrote would be irredeemable.
She is a good writer, but I know that it goes a lot smoother and a lot easier.
That last little detail is the flourish that people remember.
I wonder, if you did not have your team, how does the team support you in keeping up that schedule?
Let me level with you. We are a family with three children who are in school, and supporting the five of us with writing is no joke. Where we were before, we could certainly take care with a teacher’s salary and benefits. What they helped us do is get to where that is all that we do. With those two team members, PR and advertising, they are helping us accentuate the sales to the point that we are squeezing the drafts out of each book, as opposed to putting it out there and people finding it eventually.
With our other team members, we have two beta readers who do a wonderful job. Even with two people on a manuscript, there can be things that are not clarified enough, something that they wish for or something that they hate. To me, that is crucial. That feedback from real readers who came from within our reading fans, and being able to tell us, “That is not what we want. Yes, we want that.”
Generally, we are not rewriting a whole book or something. Usually, it is smaller things or maybe add a scene because they are like, “How could you tell us about that scene? We want to be there.” I feel like it makes the book so much better and proofreading as well because errors are wily creatures. They are going to slip through anyway, but we do not want very many of them. We had one in the Look Inside. I’m like, “How did we do that?”
I read those a ton of times. You are self-reading your own mistakes, which you are sometimes blinded to.
The other person who I did not give credit to now who deserves all the credit in the world is my cover designer. I work almost exclusively with Sylvia Frost of The Book Brander. She has this amazing Facebook group, The Book Brander Boutique. She is in there and talks about writing stuff and she has got pre-made. Her prices are certainly not cheap. This is not $1,000-plus a cover. She is a woman who is ready to work.
The cover is a life hack because that is an ad that keeps on going until you decide it is off-trend to buy another one. While I have to keep feeding money into ads every single day, you pay for the cover once and if it makes people click, you are going to make sales with it for as long as it is on the book. I give total credit to her and her crew.
That is nice when you know that you can find a book cover artist that you can trust consistently to give you an on-brand because not all of us are artists in that way. We are different kinds of artists, but not always visual artists. There are a lot of book cover artists out there that are making beautiful covers, but it does not have to just be beautiful. It has to market, especially if you are releasing a book a month. You are getting a lot of covers and making sure that they are right. If we could go back a little bit to your system, you have a lot going on. After you finish this draft, your husband edits it. Does it go to beta readers at that point?
He does the editing and rewriting. I am a lucky author who instead of booking time with an editor, sending my manuscript away, getting it back all marked up telling me what needs to be changed, he changes it. The trust that has to be there for me to allow that to happen is rather insane. On the other hand, it is not just my idea. The book is his idea too, all those wonderful ideas. He trusts me to go from a blank page to 250 pages of heaven knows what.
He does not have enough time in our schedule to write it completely from scratch all over again. He is going to have to use those building blocks that I created. He trusts me for that, and I trust him implicitly to only make the book better. I can do that because of the care that both of us put into plotting and envisioning what we want the story to be, who we want the characters to be, and what we want a theme or the lesson to be. I know that the only thing he will do is refine and amplify that. After that, it goes to beta readers.
Your beta readers have been with you for a while now. They know that every month, they are going to get the book that they need to read and get feedback. It’s part of their early access. What is the turnaround time for the beta readers?
We try to give them a week, which is ironic because I might take three weeks on a first draft. Steve will take two weeks to edit and the betas will get a whole week, but it is not their book. At times, we won’t have that much time. It might be five days or something. They will usually get back to us with the notes in the margins, but also a general sense of how they felt or what they felt was good, lacking, missing and so forth.
These beta readers, were they just active fans? How did that transition happen from a fan to a beta reader?
I adore them both, but the first one I will tell you about was a reader who loved our book and reviewed them right away. We invited her to be on our team and she was. I noticed that some of the feedback she gave us was insightful and far above and beyond. I was like, “Why am I letting her in at this point? She should be on this in time for me to implement some of these ideas because she is right. I should not just tell about that scene off-camera. We should go there and have that scene.”
It’s important to love what you’re doing because otherwise, why are you doing it?
I’m not indulging myself in having this other happy scene near the end. It should be there, but the reader missed it in the same way that I was like, “I want to write this but it’s just a bunch of triquel.” She was like, “No, I want that.” That was how she was invited. The other one was almost the same way. She is a wonderful fan and reader. She ended up as an ARC reader. She catches typos and things that a proofreader might not catch. She is also insightful and a huge romance fan. I looked at the feedback and I was like, “What am I doing? Here is somebody else who needs access to this manuscript.” It was very organic and lucky.
I like looking at people who love your story and looking at their reviews, feedback, things, and seeing the opportunity. The first story I ever wrote was part of an anthology. Another author on the anthology who ended up being my best author friend who I co-write with now, we both had ravens in our story. My raven was huge that you could write on the back. I had the main character right on the back of the raven. I skipped that scene and he did not skip the scene where the character got to fly. I was like, “If you are freaking watching Neverending Story, you do not skip the scene where he is on Falkor’s back, and then he was there.”
Maybe it’s this feeling that if you are writing some literary masterpiece, there must always be that tension in the scene and some resolution at the end of it. I’m like, “We are lucky. We write books that people read for fun.” I had one where it was busting her father out of jail. There is a beginning, middle and end. It is just a happy reunion. It’s like we should see the happy reunion. Why not? Do not shove him in the next scene. Own it and enjoy it. It does not have to have a bad guy in that scene. We don’t need that.
Let’s talk about having that fun as a writer where it is not quitting your job. It’s a jump but it is not really because having fun as a writer means that your audience is going to have fun as a reader. My friend burned out because she is working full-time now. She has a day job. She is a single mom with young kids and she was writing after. Understandably, it is a lot, plus it is COVID.
The more time I spend with writers, doing it myself and the more authors I interview, the more fun and the more authentic, whatever it is, that you are. Mr. Black is like, “I’m super romantic.” You put yourself into it, which sometimes makes it harder to sell, especially when you are starting out. The fun or the true self that you have is the process of what people call finding your voice. It is also what people will connect with the most because that energy transfers into what you are making and into what they get to receive.
I remember when I was doing theater, I had this day job writing a newsletter for a civilian branch of the Navy. It does not sound boring. It was fun. I was cast in a play and I was going to have to leave mid-day on two of the days each week that I was scheduled to be there. I remember that the guy who I talked to about it was like, “You are leaving early.” I was like, “Yes.” He was like, “I get you first.” I was like, “Yes.” He was like, “You are not going to be tired of me. You may go, be in this play and you can still write our newsletter in the morning.” It struck me as like, “Yes, perhaps it’s a little evil, but also brilliant.”
That is why during the many years that I had a day job, I got up at 5:00 AM every day. I wrote at my most awake when the house was blessedly quiet, the children were sleeping, the sun was coming up and the coffee was still hot. My joy and my heart were on that page before anything else could happen and before I could get tired or whatever else. I did burn out a little on the day job, but the writing always felt like that was my me time.
I want to put this up because my co-writing author was having her quarterly review. We both were taking a Write Better-Faster. We are both doing the StrengthFinders. We are learning about our processes and stuff. I do recommend that to people to take it. It’s interesting. We are doing all this and she is burned out. She has health insurance with her job and she has kids. She is a single mom. Even if she is making good money, it is still not easy.
She was like, “What if instead of working 9:00 to 5:00, getting the kids up, taking them to school, coming back and hopping into work, what if I went from 10:00 to 5:00?” It is only five hours less of her job a week. She had her review and I was like, “When are you going to ask?” She is super introverted. When we did the Myers Briggs, it was 100% introvert. They have the line like, “Are you midline?” She was all the way, 100%.
I was texting her in the morning. I’m like, “You deserve it. You can do it.” Fortunately, the person she had her talk with was like, “How are you doing?” She opened it up. She was like, “I used to see you every day from COVID. Because we are working from home, I do not see you. How are you doing? I know you have a lot going on.”
She is supposed to be a writer, not in the office job. The universe knows that this is her gift and it makes her happy. Doing what she is doing during her day job does not make her happy at all. It is the cause of burnout. It is not the writing that caused burnout. It is the job. He opened up the opportunity for her to say that.
He was like, “How are you?” She has been nervous about asking. I’m like, “You have to ask.” She opens it up. Now, she is going to be working from 10:00 to 5:00, which gives her the time to come back at 8:00 or 8:30 or whatever time she gets back and work on her writing for an hour and a half in the morning during her best time.
Get those readers the best of ourselves. That is perfect.
At 5:00, she can be done with all the work because before, she was doing her work up until 5:00 and had to do more work after dinner. After the kids are asleep, she is tired and she goes back to work, not anymore. I hope this energy is going out. This is why I do this. There are many women that have a gift. She is an excellent writer. She loves what she is doing. She has a gift that will bring joy to people. How can we make that happen?
Isn’t it incredible that for an hour a day and you also think about her employer and how they could have lost her? Because they are willing to be a little bit flexible, they have got a grateful employee and she’s able to fulfill her purpose.
I’m glad she won’t have to do that anymore. She does not have to quit her job to do it. She gets to keep her insurance. She made it work, which will allow her to keep the fun and pass it like what you were saying.
It is going to come through and it is hard. It can be hard to juggle it and take care of yourself. You are going to drop one ball. It is important to have the love there because otherwise, why are you doing it?
I also tell people, “It still works even if you love it. You might love it and you might not love all of it, but it still works.”
It is not just the creative part either. Even though I do my writing in the morning, there is all the work of being a publisher that has to happen. For me, that is normally in the mornings now, but it used to be whenever I could spare five minutes. All those things have to happen. On the other hand, I have friends who are traditionally published.
What would it be like to write a book and have someone else dictate how that book needed to turn out, to not be able to say, “We got your suggestion, beta reader. We like these eight suggestions. We are not doing those other three.” To have the book come out and have no power to change the price, to change the cover description and rewrite it if you suddenly realize, “This isn’t the best book I could write.”
The first book that we ever wrote was a six-part serial. That was the Curse of the Alpha. We put that out and we did well enough that he could quit his job. We still rewrote it when we got a little better. We went back into it and wrote it again because we knew that we could do better than that. We added some things, took some things away and made it flow better. At that point, it was when we got our first book better. It was on that improved version of our first book. It’s to have the freedom to give new life to something. Writers have never had before.
You certainly would not be releasing a book a month. Something I want to focus on a lot in this next part of my life is to create the life that works for you. You have your strength. You love the first draft and the plotting together. He does this other part. You get to emphasize your strengths and you are like, “Neither of us like the Facebook ads. We are going to find somebody to go help with that because that is not our strength.” You get to customize your life to work for you rather than having to adjust your life to somebody else’s preferences.
I’m not writing and releasing now because I’m focusing on the show. I love books, but writing itself is not my passion. Helping women writers reach their dreams is my passion. I was writing quite a bit and coming up with new ideas. You have 80 books, romance and new ideas. You’re coming up with ideas and keeping the passion because I do know how repetitive it can be. In two years, I have had 40 books. They are short story romances, but romance is romantic.
It’s fun to learn the processes that work for you as an individual.
There is so much to say about this. The first thing I would say is that the big picture is the ideas for us are still a dime a dozen. If I had time to write everything that I thought of, I would be happy and there are still things that are sitting in a folder that is burning me up inside. I’m writing something now for a charity anthology that I have been wanting to write for two years.
I had to patiently write my way through other books. I have made it there and I’m excited. The ideas are pretty easy for us. I would say this touches on something that I think is important. It was important for us and it is something that we have had to get better at slowly over time. There is the world of what you, I or we would like to write, and then there is the world of what someone might enjoy reading and pay for.
I cannot go fully into their world and certainly, I can’t ask them to spend money to go all the way into my world. It is a matter of finding that small place or for someone else, a bigger place where that overlaps. One of the biggest helps to me has been identifying tropes. Certainly, the readers and I enjoy a little bit of knowing what is coming and being able to predict what is going to happen or three different possible outcomes.
Mindy Klasky is a romance author. She has this epic list on her site. If you go to her website, she has a for-writer section and she has a list of tropes. Every once in a while, I go on there, read down the list and think, “Is there something here we have not done yet?” We had this idea for a wrecked space cruiser and we’re like, “Wouldn’t it be so cool if there was a guardian onboard situation going on and they get trapped or whatever.”
Making sure that we are aware of what trope we are using and leaning into it and able to identify at least 1 or 2 in anything that we are writing is helpful. We have a series now where book ten came out, and it is planned to be a twelve-book series. That is Alien Adoption Agency. It is a mix between old West and romance.
These women want to adopt babies and they have to do it through this agency. The reason that the agency exists is that these warrior men wiped out a planet by accident many generations ago. The soldier warriors now have gained permission to grow babies in pods using leftover DNA from the people whose planet they destroyed. A guard is assigned to each baby so when it comes out of the pod, he cares for it while they wait for the mother to come. He is its guard until it is twenty standard years old. All the women are going to fall for these guards. How could you not? He already loves your baby.
They take place on these frontier moons and the women are giving them land, a house, a store or a farm. They have to go there and make it work. You will think about how many times you could tell that story. I could probably tell that story until I kill all the guards. There are a million ways to tell that story and I’m sure that anytime a reader clicks on one of those, they know what is going to happen. Ultimately, she is going to fall in love with the guard.
It is romance. We do know what is going to happen.
We can put them in different situations and their personalities are also different. The babies are different. When you find that thing that makes your own heart sing, it is easier. I have another series which is called Alien Surrogate Agency, which is about women who have fertility struggles on their home planet. They have to have a child first using IVF before they are eligible to become married. These women who cannot conceive go to this agency. You can imagine what happens from there. They act as surrogates for these unbelievable men and it all ends happily.
That is doing well for us now but I think that for us, and this would be where it was a long journey to get to this takeaway. Mr. Black and I had trouble conceiving our children. It took us many years to have our family. These themes of fertility treatments, adoptions, longing for a child or a baby and longing for a family are something that will always tug my own heart and his too.
I and anybody who has been reading for a while do know that part of the reason why I took two years off was because we were doing IVF and it did not take. At this point, I’m 41, I don’t know. I do understand putting what is important to you like that passion into a story, people will relate to that. It was March 2020 and I got the call that it did not take. Later that day, my grandmother passed away. It was very hard.
March 2020 is when COVID was just starting. They were like, “You can’t try again now because you can’t go into hospitals now. We do not even know what is happening.” That is when I started writing, and the story that I wrote at that point has a funeral in it. It is a book story. The grand gesture happens at the funeral. It is one of my favorites that I have ever written. At the time, I was like, “I do not know if people are going to like this.” It is a short story with a funeral in it. People respond to truth.
I feel like it comes through and it does not matter how much editing, polishing, beta readers or whatever. My heart was in those pages. I do not know if I could have written those books after the first 100 million times we’ve tried, but it is a thread through my heart. I know and you as well and anyone who has been through that, it’s most crushing. It makes you angry. I’m still angry. Even though I have a family now and it is no longer a part of my day-to-day life, the fact that anyone would have to suffer to build a family. Don’t even get me started on whether insurance covers any of these things.
They did not. My husband’s dad passed away six months after that. We have not done our taxes. We postponed our taxes for a while, but the money that we took out of retirement to try and have a baby, we are taxed on. It’s not to be about me, but I do want to focus on people that are being authentic and allowing for vulnerability.
Your readers might not even know that you have struggled with fertility. They might not even know that whatever you are putting into the stories, they will sense or feel. That comes through and that is one of the things that makes some authors more successful because they are able to put that somehow into their stories.
All of us can do that. Whether you had a personal struggle or it was just your day job. You still have a sense of humor or you love old cars. People can make me interested in things I am not interested in a book that they are interested in. Did you read The Little House Books when you were a kid? I was reading the Little House in the Big Wood, the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, to my daughters.
I had never realized how much of that book is an instruction manual on how to do things like smoke a pig, start a fire, make bullets and many things that I never would like to do, but it was fascinating and you could tell it. That was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story. It was her childhood, her heart was on the page and it is riveting now. We all have things we are passionate about or things we know about because we wanted to or we didn’t. Being able to find that is important.
The first Alien Adoption Agency book came out in January of 2021. We had been publishing for several years. We had a series that was single daddy shifters. My husband is very hands-on with our children. He was the oldest and had lots of younger steps siblings. He took care of them. I can’t find anything sexier than him taking care of our kids.
That theme was something we noticed that we loved writing about and readers were into it too. Those would consistently sell more and get more emails coming in talking to us about them. It took us a long time to find and refine what it was that was different about the life experience that could help us make a bridge to our reader’s hearts. I’m sure that finding that was a key for us.
I do not think it has to be something heartbreaking. I like how excited you are talking about the enthusiasm that you have when you are talking about your newer series, the series that you are looking at now. You are like, “Can we do an adoption?” I noticed the enthusiasm while you were talking about that. I was writing contemporary shorts. My co-writer and I are venturing into more fantasy paranormal. We burned out on the shorts because it is very prescriptive as a writer. There is no room. Even if you add one character, that is another 2,000 words to have more than two characters.
It is hard to write a short like that. At the beginning of our career, we tried hard to write shorter and got to a point where we could get a whole story out in 25,000 words. We realized that is not what we want. We want these extra side characters. We want the thought of if we can have one. We were like, “Let’s go longer.”
To play with the ideas, take a little tangent and bring it back because it is fun. I appreciate you sharing about your process like what it was then and what it is now. That’s where I and my co-writer are going, which is more beats. I help come up with a beat. I’m like, “What kind of things do you like in these stories? I can incorporate them into the outline as we are doing it.”
Rather than following the trends, start doing what it is that you love to do and people around you will lean into that.
Rather than doing chapters because that limits her creativity to have it be a chapter, I say, “Here are some things that you can include for this beat. Which one sounds cool to you?” Go and give her that freedom to do what she is good at. It is fun to learn the processes that work for you as an individual or as a team. It is fun to do that and you can’t do it until you do it.
We have tried so many things. There was a point where he tried doing all the beats up by himself. They were lovely, but it was not as good. It is always better if we are both in the room. He is talking, I’m typing and we got it projected up on the TV screen and it’s flowing.
I do have another question for you that was from before. This is not anything we have talked about. It is me being curious about this particular thing. You said that you would recommend the newsletter as one of the best things for marketing. I noticed you have a newsletter, Starter Library. I’m looking at your Amazon page, looking at your covers, which are beautiful. They are so on-brand. What is that? Tell me more about the Starter Library. It looks so cool.
This is Mr. Black’s thinking, and I agree with it with all my heart. Any advertising that we do, we are paying at the moment to reach people right now. The newsletter is theoretically for free. In reality, we pay a monthly fee. It is our way to maintain contact with people without having to go through the filter of someone else who might choose to monetize it to a point where we do not want to pay or might lose track of it.
When we started and we had only one serial, we told people that if they signed up for the newsletter after reading the first part, they could get the second part for free. We got lots of people that way. If you are a serial writer and you are willing to forego a little bit of income in order to get newsletter signs, it works. It was six parts and we had it in three bundles of two.
Parts 1 and 2 were free. Parts 3 and 4, you could get for free if you signed up. You only need to spend $2.99 to read the whole six-part serial. You would have to buy episodes 5 and 6. We sold enough of 5 and 6 to be fine and we got lots of newsletter subscribers. That was a time when people were on fewer newsletter lists.
After a while, we had more books. What we decided is that we would like to offer people a couple of first in series books. We are writing paranormal, sci-fi and fantasy. We are mainly writing sci-fi, paranormal second, and fantasy third. We thought, “Let’s offer them three books.” We wanted the newsletter to be set and forget it when I had a day job, as far as the lead-in.
For many years we had the same roll-out of emails to our new subscribers. We offered them a link to where they could download a paranormal book and a sci-fi book. At that time, we did not have a fantasy. Maybe, it was another paranormal. We would change them because if something goes to them for free, it does not have a value anymore to a newsletter subscriber. We want to give them something special and a lot of them would then go on and read the rest of the series. If they did not, shame on me.
What we are doing now to encourage newsletter signups is that we write a bonus epilogue for each of our books. We invite readers to go to BookFunnel, sign up for the newsletter and download the bonus epilogue. After that, they get a welcome sequence, which is now six free books, two at a time, over the course of a couple of weeks, all of them first in a series.
After that, they are on the regular newsletter and they get our regular news. It is a nice way to introduce people. Often, we get thank you notes back when people get the free books after they sign up, which is such a good feeling that they are happy. With 80 books, we have more freedom to give away more. We do try to be generous and give books away all the time. In our newsletter mostly, we will put something for free on BookFunnel for them to go and download just to say thanks or enjoy.
Sometimes when we have a swap with another author, we will offer their readers a free book, not even to join our newsletter but just to enjoy it for free. If you like it, buy the next one, join the newsletter or whatever. I’m a true believer in giving things away. If you think about it, there was a time when authors had to go through so many layers of weeding out in order to get published.
Now, I could write the first draft and publish it if I were that writer or if that is what I wanted to do. For a reader showing out money, especially because we are wide, there is no “pay, you access” to our books. I think that it is reasonable for them to get a sizeable sample of that work before they start spending the money that they work so hard to earn.
Giving away your books for free to potential customers, you would not give your sci-fi romance necessarily to somebody who reads historical nonfiction. Giving it away to your customers is the cheapest marketing because it is not the money that you are spending. It is possibly the money that you’re not spending, except if they were not your customer before, they are not going to be your customer anyway. It is like you break even.
You spend a little time building up sequence, putting it online or fixing it in the BookFunnel, but it is goodwill too. Everybody likes to get something for free. I know I do. It is such a lovely little piece like, “Thank you.”
Thank you for going there because that was one of the things that I was looking through.
This is good actual information. If you do this, always be vague in the back of your books about what people are going to get. Sylvia designed that beautiful and vague Starter Library graphic for me. This is why. If you change what you are offering and somebody downloaded your book in 2015, you do not want them to be like, “They said I would get a free copy of X, Y, Z. Now, it’s a copy of something else.”
With our first book, we did not think to do that. We have a special page for people who click from there to be like, “Here is what we are offering now. If you signed up at X, Y, Z time, here is a link to go get this other thing that you were promised.” We would never want to not fulfill a promise that we made to readers.
If you happen to have 80 or dozens of books that you need to go into the back matter and update.
We never do that. We try to give people as few places to make a decision as possible. We invite them to get the bonus epilogue and by doing that, they are joining the newsletter. We invite them to buy the next book. We tell them about the newsletter because it seems weird not to. We do not put 80 books in the back. We assume if they make it to our link on our website to join or to buy something else, they are going to find it.
The only tough thing that we are coming up against with 80-plus books is the idea that you wonder when a reader finds a new author and they decided, “I love this. Let me read everything else that she has ever written.” How many are they really going to read? Finding a way to make sure we are sending them to the place to get more of what they liked as opposed to a giant list of things that might not be their genre.
I started at the end. As I had more books to use, instead of having a list of all the books, I would do a couple of two series that were most similar to the one that they were reading. I’m like, “If you like this, you will probably like this series.” I have a picture of the first book and the link. I have a little thing like, “If you like this motorcycle one, you might also like this possessive one series that I have.” That way, I give two options. It is like, “If you like that, you’ll like this or this.” I have twelve series to choose from. It’s like, “Let me give you the more specific that you might like so you do not have to read my whole catalog. You can read this next one next series.”
This has been lovely. I want to ask you one more question. What is your best advice? You have been doing this for a while. We never even touched on the thing that you talked about in RAM, which is book cover blurbs. You have a lot of expertise and knowledge. What would be the best advice from you for people who want to be authors?
The biggest thing for me and the thing that changed our career was finding your voice and finding that thing that touches your heart but also resonates with readers. Rather than following the trends or whatever, you can start painting in broad strokes, but as soon as you see what it is that you love to write that other people love to read, lean into that. That is the greatest way to be happy, earn more and make your readers happy too.
When I’m doing these, I make a little mini Venn diagram with my finger of what you love and what people want and you write in the middle of that. I have said that many times. I have a program and there are many different keys, but it’s one of the main things because it is not going to work if you have not found that sweet spot. You can write to market all you want, but if you do not have the passion, there is a ceiling.
Your heart has to be in it. People can feel it.
I know there are types of people who can write to market and make money, but for the type of people who are reading this who want to feel integrity, authentic and do what they love, you can’t do it just for the money. You have to have that love and passion. I love that advice. Where is the best place for people to find you and your story?
My website is TashaBlack.com. That is the place to find my books, sales and information about me while I do have a presence everywhere. Facebook is where I most frequently find my actual self. If anyone has a question or wants to say hi, you can always PM me there. It is just Tasha Black.
If you like alien adoption and alien romance with some sexy things, go check out TashaBlack.com. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
This has been so lovely. Thank you, everybody. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links
- Tasha Black
- Romance Author Mastermind
- Viola Rivard
- KBoards.com
- Scrivener
- Scapple
- Write Better-Faster
- The Book Brander
- The Book Brander Boutique – Facebook
- Curse of the Alpha
- Alien Adoption Agency
- Alien Surrogate Agency
- The Little House Books
- Little House in the Big Wood
- Starter Library
- BookFunnel
- Tasha Black – Facebook
About Tasha Black
Tasha Black is a USA Today bestselling author of Paranormal, SciFi & Fantasy romance. She lives in a big old Victorian in a tiny college town. She loves reading anything she can get her hands on, making up stories, and sipping pumpkin spice lattes.
