Archives for March 2021

Ep. 218: Ricardo Fayet on Finding the Perfect Editor

March 17, 2021

Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world’s top publishing talent—from editors to cover designers, book marketers, author website designers, and literary translators. He’s the author of several Reedsy Learning courses on book marketing and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers’ conferences: NINC, RWA Australia, and The Self Publishing Show Live, among others. He’s also currently finishing his very first book on marketing. In his spare time, he enjoys watching football, and carrying tactical analyses to explain why his favorite team won—as well as referee mistake analyses to explain why it lost.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #218 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron, and I’m so thrilled that you’re here today. Today, we are talking to Ricardo Fayet of Reedsy. And if you haven’t heard me wax rhapsodic about Reedsy.com, (R E E D S Y.com) you will love this interview and if you’ve heard me wax rhapsodic, you will still love it. What it is really quickly, and then we’ll go into it. It is a place to find editors for your work. If you are going to self-publish or if you want an editor to help you, before you go out to find an agent, it’s a place to find them. And I need to apologize right upfront right now that I am so enthusiastic about the service it sounds like a commercial for him. He did not for him and the company, he did not come on asking me to do this. I reached out to him and asked him to come on my show. I believe in Reedsy. And before we get into my update, I just want to tell you, I want to read from an email that I got and here it is. Okay. This is from a reader. I get another reader, this from a writer, I get a lot of queries and I’m very flattered by them from people who want me to read and edit their books, especially their memoirs.

[00:01:37] And I just don’t have time to do that. I did that for a while, probably about a year, I did that and it took so much away from my writing. I’m a writer, not an editor. I’m good at editing, not my own work, of course, but other people’s work, students work. I’m good at that. But, I just can’t do that. I don’t have the time. So what I do is for years, I’ve been sending them to Reedsy. And I just got this email, a couple of weeks ago. I want to thank you for recommending that. I use reading to Reedsy, to find an editor to read my first draft of my book. I found the most wonderful person. She wrote a long editorial letter, gave an overview of each chapter and on many pages posed questions that when answered will add emotional depth to the story I’m writing. She is extremely encouraging and thinks the format is very good. The first writer who critiqued my work thought I should structure it differently chronologically, but this editor noted anecdotes. She loved and liked the chapter. The first critiquer told me to definitely drop. So although I asked you, if you would be able to do a critique and you weren’t able to, I really appreciate you recommending Reedsy. Thank you so much based on her guidance, I have my work cut out for me. So real letter that I got, I redacted the names. About Reedsy, you can go to RachaelHerron.com/Reedsy to find out more about it, or just listen to me, do this commercial for Ricardo’s company, but it is so important to be able to find an editor that you can trust that you know is good because that’s the hard part. How do we just go out and find an editor if we don’t know they’re any good, or if our friend says are good, how do, how does our friend know that they’re good editors.

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Ep: 217: Show Me the Money, 2020 Edition

March 17, 2021

Every year, Rachael Herron talks you through what she made over the previous year and how she made it because she firmly believes there’s not enough transparency in publishing. In 2020, she made $186,000, and here’s how she did it.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 217 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. Could not be more thrilled you are here today for our annual money, honey roundup. We’re going to be talking about how much I made in 2020, and I will spoil it a little bit right here and tell you that I made more than I made in 2019. So hazah! that’s the whole goal. Well, it’s not the whole goal. It’s actually not even a big part of the goal. So let me backtrack that a little bit, but it is a nice goal to have and I hit it. So I’m really pleased about that. First of all, though, a little bit of an update around here. Thank you all for your concern that you sent after the last podcast. I am still sick. I’m still battling some tough organs in my body that want to, like I said, leap out of them, leave out, leap out of it. So I have a CT scan scheduled for tomorrow. I did end up pushing my 90 day classes for two weeks which I just want to say was really huge for me. And I talk about it a little bit over at my Youre-Already-Ready podcast, which is not about writing. It’s more about life and I’m really loving that podcast.

[00:01:31] I’m so glad that I started it. Would I have started a brand new project? Had I known I would get sick a week later? Absolutely not. My goal for You’re Already Ready was to post to it a couple times a week, two to three times a week. And I can’t do that right now. Maybe once a week is my max for that. So that’s kind of rough, but the fact that I am listening to my body and like I talked about last week, I have one job right now and my one job is to get and stay healthy. And I’m working on that. I have other little jobs and one of those little jobs I have decided today is being able to do this podcast for you to update you. I was not sure. I was going to be able to get this out this early in the year. Usually I try to make it my first episode of the year. I couldn’t do that this year, but it’s the second. That’s not too bad. And I don’t feel like I’m pushing myself too hard after this. I will go lie down for another great long while during my lying down, I am reading a ton and treating it like my job because my writing friends, reading is your job. You should be reading. I really recommend the Good Reads Reading Challenge. I hate Good Reads as a platform. I hate that Amazon owns it. I don’t use it for book recommendations. Although a lot of people do get a lot out of that. I do that. However, a couple of years ago, I discovered that they have that reading challenge per year. And when you finish a book, you just zap over to Good Reads. Put in that you finished it. You can give it a star rating if you want. You can do a long review if you want. I don’t. I only do star ratings and I put red because I wanted on my list. Sometimes I don’t even do the star rating if I don’t care that much. If I love a book, I give it five stars. If I don’t love a book as much, normally I don’t finish it. But if I do, I just leave those stars blank because as writers, we are polite to each other. If you give a writer a two or a three-star review, absolutely, you will hang out with them at a party, at a conference someday. And you will wonder if they remember that and they might, so I leave five stars or nothing, but I always mark them as read in Good Reads.

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Ep. 216: Heid E. Erdrich on Writing Poetry in the Dark

March 17, 2021

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Loft Literary Center, and First People’s Fund, and she has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. She was also the editor of the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations, which was the recipient of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and a Midwest Booksellers Choice Award. Erdrich works as a visual arts curator and collaborator, and as an educator. She teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program of Augsburg University and is the 2019 distinguished visiting professor in the liberal arts at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She lives in Minneapolis. Her latest book is Little Big Bully.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #216 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron and I am so pleased that you’re here with me today. Today we’re going to be talking to Heid E. Erdrich on writing poetry in the dark. I have been getting so much more into poetry this year. I have mentioned it. I took a class. It has really unlocked and un-bottled some stuff inside me that is really important. And speaking of importance, Heid really talks about how writing can be transformative and we talk about how important to can be in terms of emotional health and strength and recovering from trauma. So I know you’re going to enjoy the interview. Very quickly, what’s going on around here? Well, what is going on? And I mean, very quickly, what is going on is I am very sick there’s something wrong inside me and doctors can’t figure out what it is and I’m in a great deal of pain. Right now, all the time. And I have been for the last 10 days and I need more tests and an MRI and all this other stuff. So, I have been feeling terrible. That is why there was no podcast last week. And I just need to say right now, that if there’s no podcast next week, that is why I’m going to try like hell to get this up. But I can only sit up for about 10 minutes at a time right now. So I’m kind of hearing my voice that I’m upset. I put on lipstick for you and I put on mascara but let me just talk for a minute about what we do when this kind of shit hits us. We do the freaking best that we can. That is all.

[00:02:09] I have my 90 day classes starting on the Tuesday after this goes out, I’m recording this on Wednesday. It’ll go up on Friday. Hopefully, if I get it done. And then I have 90 day classes starting on Tuesday. That is my focus right now, are these 90 day classes. They are so important to me. They are what I love to do. Number one in my life, you know is writing in terms of my work life. Number one in my life is my people, but number one of my work life, is writing in a very close number two, are helping other writers write their books and revise their books. You know that I love that so much and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I may have to push the class for a week or two, and I can’t even think farther than that, but I don’t think I will. Which is why, if you are taking one of these 90 day classes, I haven’t made that announcement because I think I’m going to be able to do it. Hoping, fingers crossed and that is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We don’t- in writing, we don’t need as much certainty as we think we do. There are plotters and there are pantsers. There are people who plot their books and there are people who fly by the seat of their pants. A real truth of life, I think for most people lies somewhere in the middle, we plan quite a bit and then things happen and we have to fly by the seat of our pants. And I am one of those people who prefers to plan things out. I prefer to have an outline. However, in reality, when I’m writing, I deviate from the outline almost a hundred percent, as soon as I start writing, Oh, one page later, I’m in a different land and that is just life. Remembering that is very important to me, remembering that everything is changing all the time and I don’t need to have the answer for what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day or next week, when the classes start understanding that we can make shifts. And most importantly, we have to take care of ourselves in whatever way that looks like.

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