The key to being a successful self-published author isn’t just writing stories. You also need to have smart marketing that attracts a loyal audience. In this episode, Ella Barnard chats with romance author Ines Johnson on how she balanced inspiration with an effective advertising and marketing plan to achieve results while writing the stories she loves. Ines caters to two audiences, one as Ines and the other as her pen name, Shanae Johnson. Join in on their chat to learn more about Ines’ strategies for building a backlist, her writing process, and tips for using ads.
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When Inspiration Meets Smart Marketing With Ines Johnson
We are here with the lovely and amazing Ines Johnson. She’s been here on the show before and I am very excited to have her again. She is a lover of fairytales, folklore and mythology. She spends her day reimagining the stories of old in a modern world. She writes books where damsels cause the distress, princesses wield the swords, and moms save the world. When I read it before we met, I was like, “Yes.” Thank you so much for being here.
No problem at all, I’m happy to be here.
We appreciate it. Let’s jump in. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your author’s journey?
As I like to say, I like kissing books. I started reading romance at the tender age of twelve because my godmother, in her pantry shelves, instead of canned goods, spaghetti and stuff, she had Harlequin novels from top to bottom. She was my second library, and she lets me read them. That’s what we do. She was like, “Do you want to read?” “Yeah.” “Go read.”
At the same time, when my parents turned the TV set on, I was fascinated and enthralled. I grew up in the ‘80s on Saturday morning cartoons, afterschool specials and Sesame Street. When I went to school, I knew that I wanted to be on television and I loved stories. I loved how they organized a story and how you got a lesson at the end of a story. This was the ‘80s and ‘90s. It wasn’t pointless, violent or entertainment either. There was a reason, and I loved that reveal of the reason after I was entertained. That’s what I thought all stories were and I was wrong.
I went very purposefully into television. I worked for places that did documentaries like National Geographic and Discovery Channel. I did children’s television. While I was doing that, I was writing my books on the side. At one point, I decided that self-publishing was a thing. You know how people talk about when they get their rejection letters. I got no letters. I would send things out and got no response back. I published my first book and it took off from there.
There’s a lot in the ‘80s. I also grew up in the ‘80s and they had lessons like Care Bears, learning to love each other when I was little. It was lovely and a sweet time. I have a curiosity. When you were starting and writing books on the side, were those romance or kissing books?
I only speak romance. I don’t know how to speak another language.
Tell me a little bit about that. What romance are you writing initially? Are you still writing the same? How has the writing part of your career changed or evolved?
One of the biggest lessons for me was learning that not everybody reads every romance that was put in front of them. I didn’t distinguish a male romance, historical romance, Western romance or clean romance. I don’t care if they’re kissing. I was going to read it. I assumed everybody else was like that. My first book was an MMF romance where the swords crossed.
My second book was a contemporary romance with a little bit of magic with a mother as a heroine. My third book was a polyamorous romance. I was all over the place. They all had kissing. It didn’t make sense to me that some readers didn’t want to follow me with each book. It took me a long time to understand the categories and subcategories of romance because to me, it was just kissing.
Once I figured that out and how to better talk to readers about the tropes and the subgenres that they wanted was when I started to get successful at this author thing. I was writing up a storm and putting the books out but I wasn’t building a loyal audience for Ines. I was building an audience for that book and then a different audience for that book. I wasn’t building my author brand because my brand was just kissing. I had to realize, “If there are going to be more than two people in a relationship, it goes over here. If the doors are going to be closed in a relationship, it goes over here.” Once I figured out how to categorize, things got successful in my business.
Did you start putting them under different pen names? How did you categorize them?
Even though the plot has been nailed into my head, what still is the most important thing is the pacing of the story.
Here’s the thing. At first, they were all under Ines, and then I was like, “Some people don’t want to read this. Let me have a split personality.” I then split myself into 2 and 3. At some point in 2020, I realized that I don’t like being one person. Don’t do as I did. Do as I say. I became successful when I compartmentalized things. I don’t like being compartmentalized. I wanted to write when I wanted to write.
Because I had gained some success, I could get away with it and tell my readers, “In this book, the swords are going to cross but in this book, the bedroom doors are going to be closed.” I could get away with that because I have built trust and enough of a backlist where they knew that in the series, I could give them what they wanted so they would follow that series. I did away with the pen name. Now, I only have two pen names.
For anything, contemporary romance and steamy romance and paranormal romance with steam goes under Ines. Anything clean and wholesome with no bedroom mentioned goes under Shanae. Those are the only things that I divide. I’m very clear on my branding, the covers and blurb, exactly what subgenre is going to be happening between the covers.
I had somebody say to me, “I want to do multiple genres.” It was an email, so they weren’t going into the details. I was like, “Is it romance? If you’re doing contemporary versus paranormal, those can go under one pen name but with clear marketing.”
It’s hard if you do contemporary and paranormal. Some people won’t cross over. That will happen. I would hedge my bets. If I was just starting, I would have two pen names. I experienced that when I first started. I needed more than one pen name because nobody knew who I was. I had nothing. I had no following and backlist. You need to get people familiar.
What I would tell this person to do is to pick one. Start with contemporary and then build a backlist. When you’ve got yourself a nice backlist and you don’t want to do another pen name, then add on the paranormal and let your readers know. I wouldn’t go back and forth. I would start to build a backlist first so that I can build that consistency.
I emailed her back. I was like, “They could be under the same pen name but I would start with one. Build, get some success on it and then add in the others.” Most writers don’t want to write one. They have a ton of ideas. They’re like, “I want to do this and this. What about this?” You’re like, “Of course, you want to do that.” For financial reasons, if you want to do that, go do that but if you want to make the money, pick one, build some success on that and then venture out.
My Ines pen name does whatever she wants. I allow her to do whatever she wants. With my newer pen name, Shanae, who writes clean and wholesome romance, she writes clean and wholesome Western romance with military heroes on a rehabilitation ranch. If and when I try to write anything that is not what I specifically said, my readers will very politely pat on their pearls and will be like, “We’re not interested in this. Where are the wounded warriors on the horse ranch?” That’s difficult for me because I’m starting to run out of ideas. How many times can I flip this story? It gets hard.
I’ve been writing the last couple of years. I started a pen name and was writing a short romance. Talk about writing the same story, 10,000 words of contemporary short romance. You have to write them fast and read them. We’ve co-written over 40 stories but it’s two new people. Yours is very specific. How many books do you have? How old is that one?
Maybe 4 to 5.
Under the new one?
Yes.
You are banging them. No wonder you were so specific. Could it be a different horse ranch?
It is. I tried different horse ranches but still, the most successful is that very first one. They want what they want. I’ve started to take longer breaks in between to refill the creative well.
We talked about this in the other episode. It was a while ago and I didn’t refresh. I’m a bad person. I do know if people aren’t going to read or we have new readers. Working in TV, how has that affected writing your books?
That’s where I was trained. There’s a good amount of time where writers come and they were trained in something else like in art. There are a lot of lawyers and nurses in this field. They either have the feeling for it because they read so much or figure it out in the school of hard knocks. I was trained in screenwriting. There was pacing, which is the key thing with me. It has to feel right. When I came into this land of novel writing and people were like, “I’m a pantser,” I was like, “What’s a pantser?” because you can’t do that on TV. It’s because there’s so much structure that you have to follow for it to work.
Even though the plot has been nailed into my head, what still is the most important thing for me is the pacing of a story. That’s what my readers enjoy about what I do. My books are shorter. I’m sure people aren’t happy with shorter books, but I don’t hear a lot of complaints. I see a lot of people reading. With the pacing, I got the best compliment. It was a weird compliment. Someone was reading one of my Ines books and said that I write dirty Hallmark stories. I wish they had said it about Shanae, who writes Hallmark-y.
What it told me is that’s my television pacing. I’m not verbose. I’m very brief. I get to the point, into the scene, out of the scene, move on to the next and keep the pace moving. I’m used to having to butt up against commercials and deal with a shorter attention span because someone’s watching. I’m still used to having to show everything. It still boggles my mind that I’m allowed to have an inner monologue because that’s not a thing in television and film. You’re not getting a whole lot of the inner monologue. You’re getting the dialogue and action because that’s what I was trained to do. Move the scene and the story.
We have loglines and one word in TV and film, to stick to that, and it is constantly thriving. That’s what people like about my stories is that it’s fast-paced, but I’m hitting all the beats because that’s what we’re taught on television. You have to hit these signposts. It’s not so much about the plot. The beats are the most important thing. You can skip over a plot point but you have to hit that beat. Once you do, then that’s what satisfies the viewer or reader.
I liked that but I’ve also don’t quite understand it. What is the difference between the plot point and the beat?
In a regular plot point, if we’re using a hero’s journey, we’d have the ordinary world, a call to adventure, meet the mentor, and refuse the call and the adhesion point. In television, there might not be a mentor. You might not see so much of the ordinary world. You might start in media’s res with the person right there in it. The setting becomes more important than so much of, “Let’s establish them in the ordinary world and see where their day-to-day life is like.” You need to be hit with the mood and tone of the place.
For example, if you take Emma by Jane Austen, we’re spending time with Emma’s family, getting to know the lay of the land and this history, but if you take Clueless, the first thing that you see is you get hit over the head, and this is Northern California. We get hit with the visual, a friend, of here she is in high school and the beats of, “This is what high school feels like.” There isn’t the slower pace of, “Let’s understand this sub-character’s motivation and that character’s motivations, who’s only going to be here once or twice and add to the story.” It’s a faster pace. You still have the beats like the meet-cute. I only speak romance. You still have to establish the main character but it’s fast. You want to get to that meet-cute faster, understand why they can’t be together and get to that adhesion point. That happens fast. That might be all of act one in a book or the first ten minutes of a movie. That’s different pacing.
Your books feel pacing-wise, sometimes more like movies. I’m going with the metaphor we were using with Clueless. That makes more sense. When you say shorter for people, is that 50,000 words?
It’s 30,000.
How quickly are you able to get those out? I can go look on your Amazon or you could tell me how often you get a book out.
You have to remember that I come from a world where it was thirteen episodes a season, and there are 2 or sometimes 3 seasons a year. It was never in my head that I was supposed to only write 1 or maybe 2 books a year if I was fast. I had to turn out thirteen episodes a season and I was usually working on at least two seasons a year. It’s 26 episodes. I was trained. Just like I met some people who worked in the news, I’m getting to it.
When I permitted myself to do what I knew, that’s when things changed.
She’s setting us all up for you not to be comparing yourself against her and then feeling bad.
That is exactly what I’m doing. I know people who work in the news who write even “faster” than I do. I write by chapters. I can write by word count. It doesn’t work for my brain. My pace is four chapters a day. That’s the max that I can do because I’m telling complete stories. I’m telling a beat with each chapter. My books are anywhere from 20 to 24 chapters. You do the math.
My eyes are going to the side doing math and I’m like, “She’s writing a book in 8 to 10 days, the first draft.” After the messy writer part, then what happens?
I go back and clean it up. My real plotting is that I have an idea of what’s going to happen in the book. I know the beats because they’re so ingrained and I know how to hit the beats. I sit down, and it turns out to be a beat per chapter. I love alternating POV, so I’m usually going back and forth per beat. It’s messy writing. Some people like to take a break and let the manuscripts sit. I don’t feel the need to do that. I will even sometimes go on the next day.
I’m still at the same pace of writing but it feels more luxurious for when I go back to revise. It’s like there’s a security blanket. I’ve gotten to the end. I had an idea of what happened when I sat down to write because I knew the beats and where I was headed when I did that first draft. I heard this other podcast where the host talks about a skeleton draft and I love that idea. I write a skeleton draft, go back and put clothes on the characters. In my first draft, no one’s wearing any clothes. I do not describe the scenery because I write it like a script. All you get is action dialogue. I go back, describe the scene and the setting.
Now, I know what they did and understand why they did it. In the first draft, there are not a lot of inner monologues either because I’m still getting to know the characters. Now, I do once I get to the end. Especially once I get to that dark moment, that’s where everything clicks into place for me. I thought I knew why they did it but they were like, “You didn’t know at all. Let me tell you exactly why I left this joker, why I’m running away or for whatever reason.” When I’ve seen what they’ve gone through, then I can go back and weave all that in. It takes the same amount of time.
I love that you have the system that you found out that works with the experiences that you had, the education, what you know about yourself and how you write. When you were starting writing, was this a similar system or is this something that has also evolved?
It’s evolved because I was trying to learn how to write novels from other folks who were writing maybe one book a year or they were still working on the same book for five years. That’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I was slowing down and luxuriating over the words. I’m taking hours to write one sentence but it is not how I was taught.
When I permitted myself to do what I knew, that’s when things changed. My first book took me maybe five years to write. The second book maybe took a year. I would be turning out a script. It becomes addictive. Someone said this to me once, “When you hit that publish button and start to see those sales in your dashboards, it becomes addictive.” It was. I am a publishing addict.
A lot of people are like, “How do you keep the motivation?” I’m like, “Money is very motivating.” It’s not money in a dirty way that people might be thinking. You put your creative self into something and into the world. The way that people can respond positively is by buying your book. That’s the positive energy from people that like your stuff. I like money but I know that a lot of artists struggle with this. There’s a cultural thing around art, money and artists. What are your thoughts about making money as an author?
It’s not even so much money as an author. I’ve always known that I wanted to be the type of person who loved what she did for a living. I love television because of the story. I knew I always wanted to be involved in stories because that’s what I was going to do for a living. That was going to be my job. I take care of my stories and characters, but they had to take care of me in return. That’s the way I look at it.
I am not interested in starving and living a life of luck. That’s not interesting to me. I don’t believe that you have to suffer for art. Art is beautiful. I consume more beauty so I can produce more beauty. I feel that if I was suffering, that would come out in my work. I’m writing romance. Romance is this beautiful land where people, mostly women, go to escape.
With a lot of aggression in their lives, they come to this world where they know that they’re going to be safe, respected and get an emotional feeling that they created. Those endorphin drugs that they crave. I love being in that world. I love reading. I’m doing another turn for my sisters out there. You gave me all these wonderful books, Romancelandia, let me add to the pile. I will joyfully add to the pile and keep adding to the pile until my dying day. As much money as I make, I spend it on books.
I’ve got tingles when you were saying about taking care of beauty and story. I want to dive into that a little bit. After the Super Bowl, I have deep-dived into Dr. Dre. I watched that Super Bowl halftime show almost every day. You can see on him the culmination of years of work for his art that he gets to appreciate. He’s living in the moment and very present in that. It energizes and inspires me every time.
There’s a documentary about Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine called The Defiant Ones on Peacock. The thing that struck me when I was watching it is that they weren’t about the money. Both of them were about the art of music, finding artists and making sure that they were able to produce art. They’re so passionate about that. I know that it’s in the documentary and that money is also a thing that we are aware of but the passion that they had for the art overshadowed it.
I’ve been on my healing mental journey where I’d been looking for a motivation to get my energy up like, “Why am I reaching out doing these episodes?” I’ve had a lot of readers but I’ve also had a lot of challenging things in the last couple of years. My world is changing. It’s life-changing like, “How am I moving forward from this point?”
Seeing their passion for art, beauty and creativity, I was like, “It doesn’t have to be about me and my life. It doesn’t have to be me worrying about myself. I can focus on and get my motivation from the beauty of the art or the writing in this case.” How do you make sure to take care of the story and the beauty, and share it? Is that a conscious thing or just the way you are?
With every morning cartoons and afterschool specials, I look for the lesson, “What lesson do I want this couple to talk about? What lesson do they need to learn? What lesson did I learn that I want to put into a story?” That gets exciting to me because I loved the unfolding of the lesson. In all of my books, even the smuttiest smut that I write, there’s always going to be some lesson that is learned. I love metaphors and finding metaphors to work with those lessons.
There’s one book that I wrote that a very conservative friend of mine was like, “I can’t believe you wrote that.” There’s this one book called Test Drive that I wrote, which is a polyamorous romance book with a beautiful love story between two people who happened to be polyamorous. They had other partners in this book. The heroine studied insects and this was when the locusts were coming. Her first sexual experience is into the locus coming.
They have this one night of frenzy and then they fall apart on the floor. That was what the whole book was about. Her life was turning upside down. She was making all these choices amid this orgy. There was a whole lesson in that about who she wanted to do and how she needed to spread her wings, fly, be free of society’s restrictions and love more than one person. I loved it. I thought that book should have hit the New York Times, but it didn’t.
It resonates. It’s not just about the smut that’s in that book. There’s a point and a lesson. That’s what I like to do. I love being taught. If you tell me something new that I didn’t know before, that’s exciting to me. In my books, I try to give a little bit of a lesson of like, “Did you think about it this way? Here’s something that you may not have known. Here’s a connection that you may not have made before.”
Is that something that you do deliberately as you’re thinking about the book ahead of time or while you’re writing it? When does that happen?
I’m deliberate but sometimes it teaches me something. There are so many times where it gets to that dark moment, and I thought the book was about this but I’m completely wrong. I’ve seen the Cyrano de Bergerac film, which I thought was romance. I was mistaken. If you don’t know, it’s beautifully acted and shot. It is not a romance, so be forewarned.
I wanted to tell a story about watching my own Cyrano de Bergerac. Somewhere along the lines, it started to be about bullying and finding your voice. That’s not what I had planned for it to be at all. Things just came in. I remember my daughter and I went to see the Cyrano movie. My daughter was also watching a lot of YouTube videos about North Korea and learning all this tragic stuff about families being separated. If one person wants to defect, they will kill the whole family. All of it came into the book.
The book turned about a hero who was in love with a girl but the girl was in love with his brother. The hero told his brother to say all these poetic things to the girl and the brother did, but the brother wasn’t into it so he broke her heart, and the girl was going around singing these sad love songs. All of a sudden, it became about bullying. It turned out that the hero was from North Korea.
At the end of the book, the heroine had to find her voice but not only did she have to find her voice. She was very worried about falling in love and not having to struggle for her art anymore because that’s what the people wanted to hear. They wanted to hear the breakup songs and the Taylor Swift songs. You start to fall in love with the hero who wasn’t a fighter.
Even though we’re supposed to be using the same plot and tropes over and over again, the stories never come out the same. It’s pretty much impossible.
He was always like, “No. I’m a pacifist. My family is from North Korea. I was the only one that managed to escape. If you fight back, everyone gets hurt.” He had to learn to fight. It became about this. I was like, “That was not what I was planning. I wanted to tell a Cyrano de Bergerac story.” It became something different from me walking through my everyday life.
Do you think that these are lessons that you need to learn yourself or you’re trying to teach other people?
Sometimes, it’s something that I need to work through. Sometimes, it’s something that I thought I knew what I was talking about and I didn’t. Sometimes, it is what it is. It’s always different. That’s the beauty of coming to the page. Even though we’re supposed to be using the same plot and tropes over and over again, the stories never come out the same. It’s pretty much impossible.
As people and artists, we change every single day. Our perspective changes every day. If the world read more romance novels, the world would become so much more peaceful and better. Every book you get, you’re having a different experience and growing with every book. If we give 100 romance novelists the same trope and descriptions of characters, we go in 102 different directions.
I started reading romance at about the same age as you. It wasn’t my grandmother that had a pantry but it was the community with these moms. I moved around a lot, but they would go to the discount bookstore with a box of romances. Once a month, they would go turn in the old romances and get a new box of romances. Those romances would circle the whole table with all the daughters of those moms. I was about thirteen probably.
I agree with you about if the whole world read romance. That’s part of the reason why I do what I do. I’m not as much of a writer. I can write, and I’m good at it, but I don’t love it the way that I love helping writers. Writers of romance or writers in general, to be a writer, if you’re writing about people, you would have to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Women generally are awesome. If women writers had a lot more money and power, the world would be such a different place. I am with you on that. I’m going to shift to marketing. When you first started, when did you see your success and start seeing money that you could live off of? What do you think made that difference?
It’s when I started my Shanae pen name, I wrote specifically in one genre and stayed in my lane.
Do you keep your Ines name to play with?
It’s on its own. Ines could take care of me, but Shanae takes care of me, my daughter, sister, brother, mother and everybody. I’m thankful for that. The only way that Shanae was born was because of Ines and all the lessons I learned with my first pen name, not the mistakes I made. A lot of new authors are like, “What’s the secret?” There’s no secret. Everybody is putting their business out there. You can read all about it. What you’re going to find is for a lot of people, it takes time and a lot of books. Some fewer people are making it out of the gate with 1 or 2 books, but there are a lot more people who are making it with time and a backlist.
You’d been writing under Ines for a while. When did you decide to start Shanae? What was the inspiration there?
There was that movie in the theaters. It was poppy and based on a book. It was a girl walking and a guy holding a guitar. He was a rockstar and still in love with a girl that got away. It turns out there’s a secret baby. I can’t remember the name but the picture of it is in my head and someone’s probably screaming at us now. I watched that and was like, “I want to tell that story.” It looks so sweet.
I’m writing all this smut and having the time of my life. At the same time, Alex Newton and his K-lytics report came out saying that clean and wholesome romance was in its second year as a category on Amazon and was on the rise. I was like, “I know how to write like Hallmark. Let me do this.” It was a combination of those two things. I also read the K-lytics report for 2018. The very first clean wholesome romance was in its second year.
I remember reading that report, which I didn’t have an idea about. I just knew that I could do it. It said that Western romance was on the rise, the keyword is military romance, ranches and brides and marriage of convenience were the most popular. I put them all together. That’s how my bestselling series, The Brides of Purple Heart Ranch, was born. It was a mix of a bit of inspiration and a lot of marketing.
You had both, and that’s my favorite way when I talk to interested authors. The magic part right there is when you have something that you’re inspired by, and it matches.
Paranormal women’s romance is on the rise but I don’t feel the passion. I love writing multiples but that idea of writing more than two men wasn’t super interesting to me. The bully romance was on the rise as well. If you heard bully romance and you were like, “I love enemies to lovers. The meaner, the grumpier. The alpha, the better.” That didn’t set off alarms in my brain.
With paranormal women’s fiction with older heroines, I was like, “I’m getting old. I’m remembering my glory days. I want to relive my glory days.” That didn’t resonate. It’s the idea of a small town. I love marriage of convenience in any shape or form. I love a wounded hero. I love someone who’s broken and love will heal them. That’s what resonated with me, so that’s what I went with. If you’re looking around and seeing certain things on the rise, look at it, see if it sparks joy and follow where that joy takes you.
Would it be fair to say that Ines has been following the inspiration all along and Shanae was deliberate?
Ines was like, “I don’t want to write that. I want to write specifically this.” Shanae could be deliberate because there was joy sparked, and there was interest in wanting to do which was on the rise.
You had all the things that you’ve learned. What would you say are some of the things that you learned? Is there anything else that you could say, “I learned that doing Ines and utilized it with Shanae?”
I learned that newsletter was key for me. That was something that I own and speak directly with people. I’m good at writing and interacting with people. The idea of going to a reader event is not exciting to me. I don’t want to talk so much. I will write you letters until the cows come home. I knew I needed to build a newsletter and be visible in the charts.
I had figured out how to do that with ads. I learned ads during that time but I didn’t have a clear audience to deliver books to. With Shanae, I knew exactly the keywords that I needed to use because I was very clear. I looked for them first before I started writing the books. I used the knowledge that I had with newsletters, ads, promos, visibility, and I zero honed in on it with Shanae.
What ads do you find most effective?
It’s not even so much what do I find most effective because I strongly believe that you’re going to find effective what you want to do. Book cost per click ads are effective but I don’t want to babysit them and they need babysitting. It’s the same thing with MMF. MMF is very effective but they need to be babysat. I don’t want to babysit them. You shouldn’t do this but I will leave the Facebook ad running for months.
You’re supposed to go in and wean and prude. I love the fact that I could turn something on and if I make my audience big enough, they can get clicks for a long time and I don’t have to pay attention to it. That’s what I kept looking at. There was a success in MMF book cost per click ads, but I liked the fact that I didn’t have to babysit the Facebook ads.
Are you self-taught with the Facebook ads or do you have somebody you’d recommend?
Build your backlist. Write more books. Put more books up there. Find the audience and bring them to that first book.
Mark Dawson’s Facebook ads class taught me how to do them, and then I later took it, which taught me another process, but it also taught me a process that leaned towards romance and the romance audience. If I had to choose, with romance, I would do Skye Warren.
I’m happy to promote. If it works, I am not exclusive. I like to take a lot of courses so I’m like, “What’s that?” Different courses resonate at different times and voices. Find who works for you. What about the ads that will work?
They work when you’re paying attention to them. That’s not even the best way to say it. A lot of these systems can work, but that’s going to work more because you’re paying attention to it. I turned off my MMF because I didn’t want to go in there and look every couple of days.
It’s inspiration plus practical again. It’s not an only inspiration because it’s ads but the feeling of ease or, “This doesn’t bother me. I like this slightly better.” You match it to this practical like it could be Facebook, Amazon or BookBub, but the one that feels good to you is Facebook. My whole life is around this theme. What feels good but is also practical?
People are making a killing on TikTok. I went on TikTok for a month and said everything that I had to say. I didn’t have anything else to say or other video ideas. I was like, “That was fun. I’m tired.” I saw sales increase but I’m sure if I had kept going, talking and making cute videos, I would have had even more sales but I was like, “This was fun. I want a new toy to play with.”
When I first got on TikTok, I was obsessed. I’m late to some of these things. I have a ring light somewhere because during that first month, I was obsessed but it’s in the closet now. I would enjoy getting back into TikTok at some point but it has to be after other things are managed. What’s one challenge that can be a lesson?
Honestly, the challenge that I’m facing is that I have two author groups that I am constantly in touch with every day, people that I do sprints with every morning that we’ve been doing sprints for years and people with who I like to check in with as well. The challenge that I’m finding is that it’s the same way that I didn’t want to be very forthcoming with how much and how quickly I write.
I get pushback because of how I do my business and how I’m wired. Having that pushback does not spark joy. It gets frustrating for me to want to share because people will hear about my process and think that it should be their process when it’s not. It’s my process. You need to find your process. If there’s someone who does write one book a year or one book every two years and they hear that I’m doing a book a month, sometimes more, that’s going to make them uncomfortable and they’ll push back on me. This is me setting myself for years. This is how I work.
I keep getting that because not all people have my process. It makes me very reluctant to share. I like to bounce ideas off of people because I like to see where my weak spots are and where I am not looking. Even with my close inner circle, I’m becoming more reticent to share the full extent of my global plan, and I find that challenging.
I’m glad we’re talking about that. You’re not the first author that I’ve talked to. It comes up in different ways. One person had been in an author group and she had been the one learning. She started surpassing the people that she was learning from. There was some pushback for her. She struggled for a bit and took a break from writing. She went and pivoted with her friends to find the ones who could be encouraging.
I do think those people are out there for most people but it’s not always easy to find them. I’ve done this myself where I have friends that I was best friends with. I was at their wedding and then we aren’t anymore. As my vibration changes, I’m pretty woo-woo. We’re at a different pace but there’s a mourning process. It’s hard and sad. It’s not like you don’t care about people anymore just because you’re growing financially or you have your processes.
I do want to say here that everybody has their process and that whatever works for you is going to work. Along this line of inspiration and what feels good, what feels good is going to be individual to each of us. There’s not going to be something that feels good and matches that marketing that’s the same for me, you or any other person out there.
I tell people that I’ve made money with my short story romances and had a lot of people going like, “I could do that too.” I’m like, “You might be able to. That might be the thing but I don’t want you to think that just because I did it.” I had a spark of inspiration when I started and two years later, I was still trying to do it but I’m not growing anymore because the spark isn’t there anymore. I need to pivot to something that feels good and that’s going to be different per person. I want to emphasize that for everybody reading. You can be successful doing it your way with inspiration and smart marketing. What do you think?
The best thing that I did, and people can do, is to study themselves. I don’t know if that would equate to you journaling or keeping track of what you do. I’m a planner babe. I love stationery, pens and stickers. I like to keep track of what I do daily. I can go back, look, and see if there was a spike here. “What caused that spike? Were you in a different place? What was your mood?” I do self-care every day. I’m like, “What self-care were you doing that day? Did you miss your self-care that day?”
My number one topic every single day is studying myself because I am my business. I need to look for ways to be more efficient and make my processes better, including my processes of resting. I decided in 2022 that I’m going to take Fridays off and have three-day weekends of not writing. I still do my admin and I’m always allowed to plot. I don’t have to do four chapters on Fridays now because I would always get tired by Friday, but I only recognize that because I have a Capto record.
I would always see the word count or the chapters would go down come Friday. I’m looking and still getting the same amount of work done. I’m getting it done Monday through Thursday instead. On Friday, I do some admin and then I go play. I live near Washington, DC. I could go to the Smithsonian, walk around, sit out on the lawn and chill. That recess is another way to refill that creative well. The only way that I know that is because I was keeping track and studying myself.
Transitioning, if you had a piece of advice to give people who want to reach their author goals, what would your advice be?
Finish the book and start the next one. That’s what it was for me. I used to have a plaque on my wall that said, “Build your backlist.” There are people out there who have lightning strikes with one book. It happens. There are so many more countless people who had built their backlist and are making a full-time income because of the number of books that they have.
I like to hedge my bets. The more well-trodden path says, “Build your backlist. Write more books. Put more books up there. Find the audience and bring them to that first book.” I love the first book free, especially if I have a whole bunch of books behind it. Putting that first book free and making sure there’s a hook is another thing that television taught me.
You don’t have to contend with commercials and novelists. Stop watching streaming. Go back to network television where you have to contend with the commercial, and watch how they break right before the commercial. Watch the techniques they use and start putting those in between your chapters and at the end of your books. How they hook you from one commercial break to the next and from one week to the next. How many of you watched Bridgerton Season 2 and are dying for Season 3? It’s because they hooked you.
They didn’t tell you Anthony and Kate’s story. They start to tell you a little bit about Benedict. You wonder what’s going to happen with him. Everybody is all up in Pen and Eloise’s business because they give you that. That’s television for you. Shonda Rhimes, although she didn’t write that story, it’s in her company, and some people are trained television writers in that company who know how to hook you and keep you coming back for more. That brings you back to writing the next book, making sure you hook them, keep hooking them and never let the tension go.
Even with the streaming services, they’re only releasing one a week and it hooks. I am waiting for Friday when The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey come out so that I can see what’s going to happen with Samuel L. Jackson. I love that. If you watch The West Wing or Friends, you can see the breaks.
She is a master at the hook.
They’re beautiful. Her shows are everything that I want them to be and more. I’m like, “Thank you, Shonda Rhimes.” Grey’s Anatomy would probably be a good one to watch for the hooks. Where is the best place for people to find you? Let’s do both Ines and Shanae.
If you want to read steamy romance, go to InesWrites.com. If you want to read about wounded warriors who are healed by the power of love all while riding horses, you can go and visit ShanaeJohnson.com.
Thank you so much for chatting with me. I enjoyed it.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you everybody for being here. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links
- Ines Johnson
- From Screenwriter to Indie Author with Ines Johnson – Previous episode
- Emma
- Clueless
- Test Drive
- The Brides of Purple Heart Ranch
- Mark Dawson’s Courses
- Capto
- Skye Warren
- ShanaeJohnson.com
About Ines Johnson
Lover of fairytales, folklore, and mythology, Ines Johnson spends her days reimagining the stories of old in a modern world. She writes books where damsels cause the distress, princesses wield swords, and moms save the world.
Ines writes books for strong women who suck at love. If you rocked out to the twisted triangle of Jem, Jericha, and Rio as a girl; if you were slayed by vampires with souls alongside Buffy; if you need your scandalous fix from Olivia Pope each week, then you’ll love her books!
Aside from being a writer, professional reader, and teacher, Ines is a very bad Buddhist. She sits in sangha each week, and while others are meditating and getting their zen on, she’s contemplating how to use the teachings to strengthen her plots and character motivations.
Ines lives outside Washington, DC with her two little sidekicks who are growing up way too fast.
