As an aspiring author, you need to find your tribe, your community. If you are indie publishing, a group of people who are in the same boat as you is all you need. This is what SciFi romance writer, Maddie Syn did. She is an independent author who writes love stories in alien worlds. Some of her works include The Guardians of Re’Utu books and Big Feels. Learn her writing process and what methods work for her. Discover how she started blogging in the erotica genre. Find out what works for you and acknowledge what doesn’t work for you. Learn all about that today with your host Ella Barnard as she talks to Maddie about her journey into creative writing.
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Listen to the podcast here
Connecting With Your Tribe As An Indie Author With Maddie Syn
I am here with the lovely and beautiful Maddie Syn. She is an indie sci-fi romance author sharing stories at the intersection of love and adventure. I know her because she’s been writing and doing stuff for a while, so we already know each other a little bit. I’m super excited to have her on the show. Thank you so much for being here, Maddie.
Thanks for having me.
Let’s jump right in. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your author’s journey?
Once upon a time when I was six years old, I liked writing stories. I wrote a whole series of stories about a frog that traveled the world and I never stopped. I went to freelance writing, blogging, and that kind of thing. That became my main source of income. I was doing a lot of corporate stuff. It was easy money. It was easy to do because you can pump out blogs as many and as fast as you can go, but it’s not fun work. It’s soul-crushing.
My husband is an audio engineer and he had the opportunity to run sound for a writer’s conference locally here in Georgia. He was like, “You should come. You never know who you will meet.” I went with him and it reignited my passion for writing fiction. I was in a room full of people who were trying to connect with agents, talking about The Hero’s Journey, and all these things. I was like, “I have not thought about this stuff in years.” I’ve not done any creative writing in years. That night, I went home and I had Post-it Notes all over my wall. I had plot points. My husband was like, “What is happening here?”
From the time that I had been writing when I was younger, we were all writing in Microsoft Word because that’s all we had. At this writer’s conference, everybody is talking about Scrivener, Vellum, and all this stuff. I was like, “I don’t know what any of this is.” I have no impulse control. I needed one of everything.
I got into that and then I started doing a lot of digging and talking to other people. Somebody led me to the 20BooksTo50K group and all of their resources. It was like this whole world opened up. I was like, “This is a real thing that people do. Here I am.” I did that. I thought that I was going to take the easy route and start an erotica pen name and not take myself too seriously at first. That also turned out to be a lot harder than it looks.
As much as I enjoyed doing erotica, as the kids say these days, I was once an accountant. If you’re on TikTok, you know what I mean. I’ve done a lot of adult work in the past and that’s my background. Erotica was not a stretch for me but writing it was different. The speed at which you have to put books out was challenging. I love sci-fi. Sci-fi is my jam, poke sci-fi and classic sci-fi. I’m the biggest Robert Heinlein fan ever. I wanted to merge these two things. As I’m doing this, along comes Ruby Dixon and Ice Planet Barbarians takes off. I’m like, “I’m in the right place.” Here I am, months into this pen name.
You had an erotica pen name and now you have Maddie Syn pen name as a sci-fi romance author. I love that you jumped right in. You’re like, “Writers conference? I’m back. I’m doing it.” You went to the Facebook groups. You saw people were doing stuff and you were like, “I’m going to try this.”
I did a lot of reading because I have an ADHD brain. I read 20BooksTo50K posts for five hours straight.
Which is easy to do.
I consumed a lot of information rapidly. To be fair, I had been doing a lot of those same things for my nonfiction writing as far as blogs and stuff go. I was familiar with how to format and what tools were available for proofreading, pro-writing aids, and stuff like that. I had been using a lot of those tools in a different capacity. The biggest hurdle for me was understanding how publishing on Kindle works. It’s fairly intuitive once you’ve done it a couple of times, but trying to understand the scope of having cover art made, I don’t see that for blogs. I just go find a random stock image and drop it in.
The biggest hurdle for new authors is understanding how publishing on Kindle works. There’s a lot that goes into it like having cover art made and relearning how to have a creative voice.
That stuff was the bigger barrier for me and also relearning how to have a creative voice. In the blogging world, you’re trying to write at a 3rd to 5th-grade reading level and no paragraph can be more than three sentences long. It’s broken up and granular. Having a narrative voice was something that took a little bit of time to relearn and think through as far as the craft of writing goes.
I find going from present tense to past tense when I’m writing. I’m like, “This is hard.” I have to triple check.
I’ve never written in first-person before. Everything that’s trending right now or at least a lot of what was trending when I started on this pen name was first-person heavy. I was not prepared for that.
It’s different. It’s a mindset shift and it takes a while. You said when you started erotica, it was difficult. What was difficult?
Understanding expectations for erotica was hard for me.
What does that mean?
I’ve seen this a lot with people starting erotica pen names and I went through it too. It’s this idea that they’re there to knock it out. They want to get straight to the point of the spicy stuff. Everybody was talking about erotic shorts and you’re publishing them in 5,000 words and these 5,000 words pay off when you’re getting Kindle reads at $0.50 a page.
How many of those do you have to write to gain momentum? Are you doing covers for all of those? Are you writing a whole bunch of those and packaging them together in one big volume? Are you writing along a common theme? That was hard for me because I was writing at a pace that I was like, “You wake up and write whatever spicy thing you feel like writing that day.”
You have to find your niche and I was not good at that. I was writing like, “Here’s a vanilla scene. Here’s a not vanilla scene.” It took me a long time to understand that things like billionaires matter. In my mind, it was like, “Who cares? We’re just getting to the spicy stuff.” You had to give enough of those indicators to draw people in and I was not good at that in the beginning. It took a long time to find my way.
This is one of the topics that I love talking about, not the erotica part but the specific of what readers want topic. It’s different per genre. Readers are going to want and expect different things. I read erotica and I like it. What I find a lot is that people think that it’s a written version of porn, but porn is primarily made for men and erotica is primarily written for women. It’s a very different audience. It’s men versus women.
As somebody who worked in the adult industry, that was hard for me to understand because I was used to the performative aspect. This is what we do when the camera is rolling. We are trying to show this thing so this is what they want to see. It was different. I was like, “These are two different groups of people.”
What men are watching porn for and what women are reading erotica for are completely different.
There was a lot of unlearning and relearning. Even if the basic tropes, kinks or whatever your subject matter was, even if they were the same, you were looking at them from opposite sides of the lens. That took a lot of slowing down and thinking, “What do I get out of this as a woman?” It’s different and hard to put into words. It’s not something we talk about. Nobody has ever asked me that. That was a learning experience.
I fall in love with everybody because I’m a weird poly person. I was like, “I like writing spicy stuff but I also like all the fields. That was like, “Erotica is fun but I want to do something big.” It did not feel like there was enough runway from erotica. I’m sure there are successful authors out there who do that, but it would be weird to go from a smattering of random erotica shorts to go into a full-length sci-fi romance. Even if I didn’t set it on an alien planet or even if it was just a human romance of that scale, this is going to be so vastly different.
So then you paused?
I still have stuff going on but I have not published over there recently because I’ve been so overwhelmed with the alien plot as we say.
I felt like I was way in because I read Ruby Dixon a long time ago. You got in starting at a good time. You decided to transition from erotica to sci-fi romance because you love everything sci-fi. How has that been? What did you do differently? How has it been going?
You were there for most of this.
Not all of it. I was there at the beginning and nobody else reading this was there.
One of my favorite conversations ever with you was when I sent you my first outline for the first book in my sci-fi romance. It was all like Romancing the Beat. That’s how it was all formatted. You looked at it and you were like, “Where’s the romance?” That’s when I realized that I had a deep problem. I was using the right template in all the wrong ways. I may have cried for a second.
How are you saying this is your favorite when I made you cry?
Because it’s still funny to me now. It was so obvious after you said it.
I’m trying to be so gentle. People are creative and I don’t want to do anything to stifle somebody’s creativity but I’m also like, “You got to make money.” You didn’t come to me for me to just say yes.
You pointed out that I had the right tool, I was just not a square peg round hole kind of thing. I don’t know how many times we redid that outline.
It’s okay to admit that you can’t always do what somebody else does. You have to learn how to modify it to fit your ability.
It was only once or twice. It wasn’t that much. We went through it, and then we had other people come in with ideas and that helped.
That showed me for the first time that I’m not an outliner or I wasn’t an outliner. I’m working on that. I’m in recovery. It was the first time I had done an outline and problem-solve. Before, I was 40,000 words into solving. It was like, “I can fix these problems right now before I start?” That was different and challenging in its own way because in the back of my mind, the whole time, I was like, “That’s fine. I’ll just fix it as I go. I know what I mean.” You then get into the story and you have no clue what you thought you were doing or maybe that’s just me. That’s how I write. I have zero clue what I wrote down in my outline and it’s all out the window.
That was a challenge of understanding, even as someone who reads a lot of sci-fi and a lot of romance, I was still not centering the relationship correctly in the plot. I still struggle with that. I’m six books in now and I’m still like, “This is hard.” I don’t know if it’s hard because sci-fi makes me want to make things bigger and more universal than just a love story in a small town. Everybody struggles with centering the relationship the right way or some people are intuitive at that.
Maybe your inclination is to be outlander length where it’s like, “It’s a time travel romance.” No, it’s like, “Time travel romance.”
With the popularity of space opera and stuff, you’re thinking on such a grand scale. It’s hard in a single book to center that in the right place so that the reader is reading it and getting the love story they need, and the background that they want in the right dimensions that are relative to one another.
A sci-fi romance should be between 70% and 80% romance, 20% to 30% sci-fi.
That’s hard because there’s so much cool alien stuff going on out there. I want to tell you about all of it and you’re like, “What about that couple that we were talking about?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I forgot about them. They fall in love, I guess.”
Maybe you need to start another pen name just for sci-fi.
Just the thought of that stresses me out.
I mean not immediately.
I have trained myself to stick to a routine. That hasn’t happened yet but one of these days, it might.
I know about you though, once you decide to do something, you’re like, “Okay.” After I gave you that outline feedback, you were like, “I stayed up for eight hours and redid the whole outline tonight.” I was like, “Oh.”
I have to apologize to my editor because I do the same thing to her, unfortunately. She’ll have my book for a week or two weeks, and then she’ll send me feedback and I’m like, “I guess I’m not sleeping.” I will sit down and do all the things right then because if I wait or if I start to procrastinate, I will have a meltdown. I will do marathon editing sessions as soon as I get her feedback and I put it back in her inbox within 48 hours. She’s like, “I’m not ready yet.” I’m like, “Take your time. I need to do this for me.”
You went from pantsing to outlining, which you’re still working with. What’s the difference? What are some of the pros and cons that you found of each for you?
It gives me a much better sense of how to focus the story in the right place as I’m writing. It ensures that I reach a resolution. A lot of people struggle with being so excited about an idea. You start writing and you don’t have time to plot because this idea is so fresh and real. You’re going to do it and then nothing will stop you. You dive in, get to the middle and lost your way, so you slow down and then you stop.
By having a resolution written in the outline, whether that’s the resolution I ultimately end up at or not, I know approximately how many words I want in this book. I know that more or less, this is where these two characters end up. In this case, it’s a happily ever after because that’s what we’re doing here. That’s fine and easy but what does that look like for them? I try to set that at least in as much stone as I can so that whatever happens in between, I know that this is where I want them.
I usually write two sentences or something about what the next book will be. I have a reason for why I want them there. If I don’t have a reason for them to get to that point, who cares? I’ll throw it out. Now that I’m doing a series, which is a thing I never did before either, I’m trying to make sure that I set these characters up to lead into the next book. They have a reason and a purpose for the happily ever after that they have and I get there. I might move the pieces around in the middle.
Just to clarify, in your series, each book is a different couple. You want the couple that you’re writing about to get to a certain point or the happily ever after, and then you also want to introduce the next character to the series.
Somewhere in that ending, they’re going to meet somebody, introduce somebody or somebody is going to show up. I want it to be at least sensical how they ended up there and why the next book features the next person. I try to tie that together so that it’s concrete.
What are some of the cons? What are some of the things that you’ve struggled with because of this? Do the pros outweigh them? What’s going on there?
Part of the struggle is more of a mindset thing than an actual writing thing. When I start to notice that I’ve gotten off from my outline, my natural inclination is to panic. I’m like, “Oh no, I’ve done it again.” I have this moment of, “Do I trash my outline? Do I rewrite the second half of my outline? What do I do?” In the book I’m currently working on, I decided to stop what I was doing before I made it worse. I sat down and re-plotted the two scenes that I was working on. I then went back and blended them into my existing outline.
I made sure that within two chapters, I knew exactly where I was going to be. I wasn’t rewriting the whole ending. This wasn’t going to be like, “The next six chapters have to change.” I stopped exactly where I was and I got my pen and paper out. I always plot on pen and paper for some reason. That’s just the rule here.
I got out my notebook and I was like, “If I redo these two scenes with where I’m at now, how can I get back on track by chapter 20? That is the goal.” That did take some work and a little more work to think through that I still have to be in this place at this time. Ultimately, that saves me from the panic of like, “Now I have to rethink thirteen more chapters. I’m not doing that. I had a plan. I’m going to stick to it as best I can.”
I like how you’re learning as you’re writing. The first outline is, “Where’s the romance?” The next outline is, “More romance,” and then now you’re learning how to work with the way that your brain works.
Pay your developmental editors well because they’re there for you.
I can’t help myself so I buy every course, writing books, craft books and productivity books. I feel like I’ve read all the things about how it should work. It’s okay to admit to ourselves that we can’t always do what somebody else does. There’s a reason for that. We have to modify it to fit our abilities, thinking and systems. That has been a process.
I buy a lot of courses and books, but I try to think of them as tools. It’s like, “I can use this or not use this.” I get to learn it and then when it’s applicable, I can use it and pull it out. If it’s not, then I don’t have to. I can take a little bit from this book, a little bit from this course, and then make them my own. Everybody is different. You might like the Snowflake Method of outlining or you might like this or you might like some combo.
I have never plotted two books in a row using the same method. I bounce between the Snowflake Method and whatever chaos feels good that day. It has been a little frustrating for me because when I found Romancing the Beat, I was like, “This is the one.” I used it for a book and was like, “I will never have to search for this again.” The next month, it didn’t feel right so I was like, “Now what?”
I’ve gone through cycles where I’m like, “This book, I can see how it fits into this method easily without even trying. In this book, I need to sit down and do all the steps in the Snowflake Method to hammer it out.” I have discovered that even with myself, there’s not one single way that works every time. It’s frustrating.
You’re reading all these things and getting the tools, and then you can know which ones work for you sometimes and put them in your own personal writing toolbox. Sometimes Romancing the Beat will work. Sometimes a Snowflake Method will work. As you have more experience, you can be like, “Okay.” The other thing that factors into this is our own mental state and where we are. It’s not like the outlining is abstract. We have to bring ourselves to it and we’re not always the same mentally.
With my biggest issue being focusing the story in the right place, I have found that sometimes what works is writing the sci-fi stuff in the Snowflake Method, and getting all of those details into that spreadsheet that I have for the Snowflake Method. That’s every little detail that I want to tell everybody all the time, and then taking Romancing the Beat and putting my couple in that, and overlaying the two of them. Now I have both plots.
I understand that Romancing the Beat has to be in the top layer. It’s in the foreground. All this stuff I did for the Snowflake Method made me feel good because it got all of those things out of my head. I didn’t necessarily have to write them until I reached a spot where they were relevant in the foreground. That’s complicated.
The challenge for you is that there’s sci-fi romance and there’s sci-fi. Where you would ideally write would be somewhere in between and that’s not a genre that people read.
There’s sci-fi alien romance and then there’s sci-fi.
It oftentimes has almost zero romance.
It is hard. When you told me, “Where’s the romance? Go read ten more books in your genre. Make sure this is what you want to do.” That evening, I went and got one of my favorite Tana Stone books. I reverse-engineered it in a spreadsheet. I read it chapter by chapter, estimated the word counts for each chapter, and mapped it to Romancing the Beat where every beat happened in her book.
I added it all up to find out what her average word count was per book. I took granular notes about what the hero was doing and where the heroine was in every single chapter. I have this enormous spreadsheet that’s the Tana Stone books now. It’s silly but it was the most intensive detailed look I could get at how to properly pace all of those things because I had no clue. Romancing The Beat has twenty beats but these books have 40 chapters, so that’s not necessarily two chapters per beat, sometimes it got sixteen chapters.
Some of the beats are a paragraph.
For days, that’s all I did. Page by page, I was counting words and taking notes. It was a little crazy but it helped. I can do that for 100 more books in my genre and probably still learn as much each time, but I don’t have time. I’ve got to schedule down.
I would recommend that to anybody if you have an idea. I wanted to go and do a little bit longer darker romance. That’s the next project that I want to work on. I am reading longer darker romances. Once I find one that I like and this is representative of all these ones that I have read and closest to what I would want to create, I’m going to do that same thing. It might not be quite as detailed as your spreadsheet but I’m going to reverse outline and be like, “What are the chapters?”
It doesn’t mean that I’ll mimic it exactly but I’ll have that in my mind so that I know, “Here’s when something dark happens. Here’s when they have a moment.” I want to know what these successful authors are doing that people love and how they are doing it. I love the idea of reverse engineering or reverse outlining.
I struggled because coming from erotica, it was all spicy scene after spicy scene, back-to-back. When I was trying to figure out how to make two characters like each other enough, the spicy scene made sense. To this day, my editor is like, “They rushed into this, don’t you think?” I’m like, “Okay. Sorry.” I’m bad at that whole build-up thing. We have to go back and add it afterward in every single book.
I’ll be writing and I was like, “I’m this many chapters in and they have not done it yet.” I’ll drop brackets that are like, “They need to like each other before this.” I’ll send it to the editor that way and she’ll be like, “Yes, they do need to like each other before this happened.” Pay your developmental editors well and send them coffee because they’re there for you. That has become my process.
That’s not an unusual thing and it’s not just because you came from erotica. Especially in the short romances I write, you might have a sex scene in the last chapter. I like the build-up of tension. I don’t like to pop the sex scene in the middle or in the beginning. I like the build-up to it, but it’s still only a handful of chapters. You have to be like, “Who is this person?”
You then have a meet-cute. There are only six chapters to get to that sex scene because the seventh chapter is the sex scene. I have to get them to meet and like each other. It’s hard sometimes. There are times I’m outlining and it’s like, “What do they like about each other?” I’m like, “She’s curvy and hot, and he’s hot.”
In my last one, I was so frustrated. It was not going the way I wanted it to. At one point in my outline, it was like, “What does she like about him in this chapter?” I was like, “Nothing. He sucks. I hate him.” I completely trashed the character and started over because I was like, “I can’t stand this character and there’s no way that I can talk myself into making her like him.”
I never disliked them because I only have a couple of chapters. Mine is always like they’re hot, they’re a guy, and they know how to use their stuff. That’s it. How do you think outlining or whatever you’re doing now has helped in terms of reaching readers and having an audience of people who like your books?
At the outset, I try to be much more aware of the tropes I’m choosing. With the whole sci-fi thing and the scale of the world we’re trying to build in, the temptation is to add all kinds of cool things and go as crazy and hard as you can into alien worlds. I try to slow down in the beginning and be like, “I want to have that enemies-to-lovers thing happen.”
Alien abduction is easy to work in most of the time, even though I don’t usually do alien abduction. My last series did. When I’m outlining, especially if I’m using the Snowflake Method and it has you write your concept as a sentence and as a paragraph, I try to make sure that in that first or second step, I’ve already decided that these are the 2 or 3 big tropes that I’m going to make matter and count this time.
If you’re just social with people and ask them to put your book in their newsletter, they’ll do the same.
When I go through an outline of the themes, I try to look at them and think, “If enemies to lovers is my thing, what can I do in the scene to make sure that people see that dynamic?” That’s hard sometimes. You don’t have to plug it into every scene but as long as you’re aware of it, you can point it at where it matters.
Therefore, you’re fulfilling reader expectations as much as possible. What would be helpful or good for you on one of your series or in the future series is to outline the sci-fi aspect of the series. You get to have all your sci-fi series with explosions and aliens, and then each book gets its own romance. You have an action arc in your sci-fi through the series, and then each book has its own romance within the arc of the sci-fi action series.
I’m trying that for an upcoming series. It’s a little bit of a time travel, time portal romance. I do have seven books mapped loosely for what’s happening in the big picture. I have the first two written down a little closer and zoomed in on here are these two people and here’s why this story matters to them but they’re only going to carry the story this far. I’m trying that. I haven’t started writing yet. We’ll see how well I stick to that.
It’s finding how to match what you love to write and what’s enjoyable and fun for you to write, and overlap that with what people want and love to read and will buy over and over again. That’s probably one of the biggest challenges of being an author, especially if you’re somebody who doesn’t like something quite that’s right exactly in that genre.
It’s finding that sweet spot. I would expect it to take a couple of years to figure out where’s my spot where I get to do what I love and they get to read what they love.” You sound like you’re doing it. You’re on track and you’re figuring it out. What do you think has been the best and most useful marketing-wise?
I have tried a few different things. I spent a long time planning the first release of this pen name with you before it went live. You and I were working together in January. My first book did not go live until May 1st. I wrote it quickly. On average, I write about 5,000 words a day. The writing part did not take all that much time. The rest of it was trying to figure out how to do that pre-launch stuff. This was the first time that I mined the 20Books group for everything you could ever possibly want in a launch strategy.
I did go ahead and write a second reader magnet that ended up being full length, which was not my intention at first. There I was writing the story and I could not stop. I’m doing that and getting a mailing list going on BookFunnel. All of that was helpful in the beginning and has continued to grow steadily since then. I have around 1,500 subscribers now to my newsletter. I try to be diligent about calling the numbers whenever people are not responding because it’s expensive to keep people around who aren’t opening your emails.
I try to do 1 or 2 BookFunnel promos every month. Sometimes sales. Sometimes I go back to my original reader magnet and send it out in a new promo. I don’t do it every month because I felt like I was getting the same people over and over. I try to do it every 2 or 3 months and try to keep it cycling with my new releases. That has been good. I have done a little bit of ads on Amazon, but my conversion rate wasn’t too good and I got scared.
The conversion rates on Amazon and the numbers that they show you are useless.
It was making me nervous because I didn’t know what was going on. I can’t handle that because I was refreshing it. It was stressing me out. That’s a me-problem.
Amazon’s reporting isn’t a combo. The anxiety that you have around it, maybe, but the actual quality of the reporting is definitely Amazon. They’re reporting quality needs so much to be desired.
Even if they update it on the hour and they say it does whatever it was, that would be great, but it doesn’t. I’m seeing it just sticks and sticks, and then all of a sudden, you’ll see a charge for $70 and a bunch of random numbers. It’s a lot to make sense of and a lot to stress over. Honestly, my fifth book is going live.
Congratulations.
Thanks. I started dabbling in ads and then was like, “I don’t have enough of a backlist to be able to see how well this will work.” I didn’t spend much on that. I ended up stopping it and saying, “Once I have 2 or 3 complete series out, maybe I’ll revisit this and it will make more sense.” I ditched that but I have spent money on Ereader News Today and the big newsletters. I can’t remember all the names.
There are quite a few of them. You go to some other groups and you’re like, “What are some of the paid promo newsletters?” Just search for that term in the Facebook group for authors.
I’ve used those with good success. I’ve not had a runaway success or anything on any of my launches but I’ve remained steady. I make more on this pen name in a single month than I made before on my erotica pen name over several months. Overall, it’s a win. These books are longer and there’s more content so it’s hard to measure all of that comparatively. I have not done Facebook ads at all yet because I’m also scared. With all the changes happening with Apple right now, I want to see what happens before I throw even $1 that way.
I am here with you because I had so much resistance around ads. I interviewed somebody who was like, “I did some ads,” and she didn’t have any mindset issues around ads. They’ve been doing well for her. She’s doing these Facebook ads. She doesn’t even do Amazon ads. She does Facebook ads. I was like, “How much resistance around marketing ad ads, specifically, is affecting my success?”
For my nonfiction stuff, I was familiar with SEO and all that stuff. I do my husband’s AdWords through Google for his company and that’s successful. For me, what’s hard about it is that he sells engineered designs. The average ticket price of a sale for him is $15,000 or $30,000. His cost-per-click is $2. If that turns into a sale, that’s excellent. I have to spend $0.30 to maybe make $1.14 which is bonkers. I have a mindset resistance there like the payoff is not big enough. I know that’s insane. That’s the game I’m playing and I have to play by the rules.
It’s a challenge. If you were to think, “I’ll put in $30,000 and I’ll get out $100,000 two months later,” you would do that in a heartbeat. As you’re saying, $0.30 to $1 is exactly the amount that you were saying, just more. You do it and you’re like, “That’s a $70,000 profit.” Yes but it’s not $2,000 to $15,000. I can see why you’re like, “That’s a little bit crazy. That isn’t fair.”
We’re definitely in a different industry. It is what it is. When I’m sitting here doing the ads side by side, I’m like, “Why am I not an engineer?”
Because that’s not what you love. You love this. That’s why you’re doing this.
Aside from all the normal marketing stuff that we think of in terms of marketing, probably the biggest thing has been finding other offers in my circle. I was invited to a Discord group that is just sci-fi romance authors and I have made friends IRL. I know what you’re thinking. That sounds not real but it is real.
We met up at 20Books. We had drinks, hung out, and then talked about everything we had planned and then we planned meetups. Now we’re doing sprints and cross promos together. If you’re social with people and ask them to put your book in their newsletter, they’ll do the same and then you exchange readers and it blooms for everybody.
It’s one of the modules in my course.
Your launch day is not the only day that matters for your book. Think more long-game.
I have to have information beaten into me.
I’m sure I have a whole module that’s like, “Make friends with other authors.”
There’s that whole reading it in a textbook versus going out and doing it.
You did the course at the beginning of 2020 so it wasn’t the ideal time to go out and make friends with other authors.
I’ve been in Facebook groups with other authors and I didn’t engage with them that much and it didn’t hold my interest. Being in this Discord thing where we’re all chatting and on video chat is totally different. It was this intersection of like, “These are my people. This is a way that I can interact with them that I’m comfortable with, which I never had before.” That was new and it has made a big difference.
We’re releasing a monster anthology. At the last second, I got into this anthology and wrote a Yeti romance, which is not sci-fi. I was joking about it and they were like, “That would work.” Here we are, we’re submitting all of our stories and it’s going live. That’s a big thing that’s happening. Find your friends and your people. It is harder than it sounds but once you’re there, you’re there.
It’s especially hard when you have to do it all virtually. When I was living in a teeny-tiny town in Idaho, I’m like, “I have to meet everybody virtually because there’s nobody around me writing.” In COVID, that has been difficult.
I’ve been to critique groups. My local library has a writer’s critique group. They were writers but they were not my people. I live in the South and life is hard here. It was one of those things where I went into that group thinking, “These are going to be my people,” and they weren’t. Finally, finding my people was like, “This is what it’s supposed to be like. I’ve heard rumors of this.”
You’ve released a few books now and you’re in this pen name. You’re not in the I’m-not-there-yet phase.
A lot of people in the local group have been working on the same manuscript for their entire adult life and they’re getting down to every comment and period being exactly in the right place. I go in there and I’m like, “Sometimes I don’t finish my draft before I send it to my editor. Sometimes I need her to tell me what needs to happen, and then I go back and fix it but sometimes it’s not good.”
The quality of people that you can meet all wants to hang around with other people who are doing the same thing. Every author that I find wants to be hanging out with other self-published authors who are learning, growing, and trying to improve their writing careers. It’s leveling up. You leveled up but you have to have released a couple of books to be able to reach that level.
They’re open-minded to indie publishing. My local group are all trying to get trad published. There is a visceral disconnect in our mindset when I’m saying, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to send it to this editor, and then it’s going to go live in two months.” They’re like, “It’s your first draft,” and I’m like, “I only need to do one and a half drafts before it’s done.” There’s a misunderstanding of what the expectation is and what we’re aiming for. Of course, it has nothing at all to do with the quality of what you’re writing. It has to do the process. That’s hard to explain to people when you’re meeting them.
You know it when you find it. You’re like, “My people. My tribe.”
People don’t balk at the thought of like, “You send it off and then you do the edits and then you hit the button on Amazon and it’s done. It’s magic.”
You’re like, “I found my man chest. Look at my man chest cover. Look at my alien man chest.”
My core writing group. I have been trying to learn how to do my own cover and I have not done graphic arts in a long time. They have been bombarded with some poorly done man chest.
There’s a process. I’ve made a lot of man chest covers. Alien man chest is a different cover. It can’t just be a man chest. There has to be something alien–y.
That’s a learning curve.
Making a man chest blue is already taken. You can’t do that. Somebody has already done that. If you want purple or green, it would still be, “Uhm.”
For what it’s worth, I have paid for my covers.
The ones that you see online right now are paid for.
It was done by professionals. I’m not qualified. I am aware of my limitations.
On that note, what’s your best advice that you would give to people who are on their author journey right now?
This is something that I can credit to Elena Johnson. It’s something that I’ve been coping with big time. Your launch day is not the only day that matters for your book. I’m saying this as my book is going live in less than 24 hours and I’m already refreshing the page as if tomorrow is going to tell me anything of importance at all. I know how many pre-orders I have. I don’t have to keep refreshing that. Thinking of things in the long game is extraordinarily hard and understanding that if it doesn’t launch well on day one, it can still sell well. It’s going to be fine. It doesn’t feel fine right now because I’m panicking but it will be fine.
I saw your post in 20Books about, “What do I do for lunch?” I got on ADHD medication. I just discovered and got tested and I’m like, “Oh.”
Me too. I’ve been on it for over a year now. Wouldn’t you know? My brain functions.
It’s life-changing. When I saw your post, I wasn’t in a capacity to be like, “Oh.” People make a big deal about a book launch like, “What am I doing?”
What I should be doing for launch day is anything that does not involve my computer.
Working on your next book.
I should be cleaning my house or doing anything that is not staring at it. One of the things I’ve been talking about with my writing group is that I’m a little trigger-happy when it comes to releasing books. I write the book, and then it goes to the editor, and then I publish it as soon as it’s done or I upload it from the pre-order and it’s out of my hands. I have not successfully held back multiple books to do a proper rapid release. That’s a life goal of mine because it works and I believe in the strategy. I just have no self-control.
The problem with the way I’m doing it is that I’m writing along and then I release it in six weeks, and then I start on the next book after I’ve already released it. If that launch day goes poorly, I’m super demoralized going into the next one. What I had planned as a five-book series. Suddenly, I’m like, “I might only do three books because people aren’t reading them. The launch didn’t go the way I wanted it to. I’m not even sure I want to do this.”
In the next series that I have planned, I’ve promised myself that I am not going to do that. I have accountability partners now who are going to make sure that I don’t do that. I am going to hold books back until I have the series mostly complete, and then I’m going to do a proper rapid release. I am not going to let the launch date numbers ruin the momentum of the thing I’m doing.
That’s smart. The theme of this whole interview has been to learn what works for you, and then use that and acknowledge, “This doesn’t work for me. I’m not going to do that.” We could have 200 positive reviews and one negative review. You know the one that will stick in your mind over and over that comes back when you’re starting to write the next book or twenty books later is that one line.
When my first book for my second series went out to ARC, I immediately got a three-star review back on my first review on it. I was shattered. I was in the process of writing book 2 and stopped. I’m like, “I’ve done something terribly wrong.” It took a long time to be able to get back on track. I had to push the pre-order for the book back by a month because I could not find that again. I’m trying to not let that be a thing again and that’s hard.
I have lots of one-star reviews.
It’s hard because you send it out to ARCs and we’re conditioned to believe that ARC’s feedback is positive.
You don’t send that person an ARC again.
I removed that person from my ARC list. I’ve been down with my likes. It threw me for a long time.
You’re making it happen and doing it, but learning what you need to do like make friends and have accountability. What doesn’t work is looking at the reviews or whatever like, “This is the outlining that works.” You learn that as you’re doing it. You are and you’re doing a great job. I’m proud of you.
Thank you.
Where is the best place for people to find you and what book would you like to tell everybody about?
My website is MaddieSyn.com. It has links to my newsletter, my Amazon page, and all that fancy stuff. I should talk about Book 1 of Guardians of Re’Utu because Book 2 is going live. You got to read Book 1 if you want to get Book 2.
The name of the book is Consumed by the Stormbrought and it’s about a woman who gets abducted.
This is my alien abduction story, which I have not done in the past. I did not have abductions in my first series. I wanted to write alien paladins. They’re holy warriors fighting this angry alien god and they have to appease the gods by offering him tribute in the form of Wives. That’s their title. They abduct these women and put them through a series of trials to make them meet Re’Utu.
The important thing is that the guardians are there to take the tributes or the Wives through this process and trials, not to fall in love with them. It’s a little bit of forbidden love. They don’t get along because she was abducted and now he’s making her a trick pony and she’s like, “What the hell?” It’s a little bit like angsty enemies to lovers also but they work together. It all works out in the end, I promise.
That’s romance.
There’s a dark side plot that goes through the whole series.
That’s the one to check out.
Hopefully, Book 3 will be out soon.
Fingers crossed. We’ll see. Thank you so much for being here and chatting with me, Maddie.
Thanks for having me.
People will get a lot of value from this. Thank you. Thank you everybody for reading. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links
- Maddie Syn
- The Hero’s Journey
- 20BooksTo50K – Facebook group
- Ice Planet Barbarians
- Romancing the Beat
- Tana Stone
- BookFunnel
- Ereader News Today
- Elena Johnson
- Guardians of Re’Utu
- Consumed by the Stormbrought
About Maddie Syn
Once upon a time, there was a frog…
Seriously. I wrote my very first story at 6 years old. It was all about a frog that travelled the world. And I’ve been writing ever since.
These days, I do most of my writing about love stories out in space, but I like to play around in other genres too. I am an avid reader and lover of all things sci-fi and fantasy, but I will read just about anything I can get my hands on.
Outside of writing, I am usually carting around kids, cuddling my fluffy animals, and doting over my scaly ones.
