Ep. 191: How Do You Keep From Getting Distracted While Writing?

Miniepisode with Rachael! How do you keep writing when your brain won’t sit still? Also, would you recommend Scribe? What about those sites that promise to promote your book for you? 

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. 

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Transcript

Rachael Herron: 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.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #191 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. This is technically a mini episode, but it may be more like a maxi episode cause I have three questions to answer and I want to do them justice. But there’s no interviewee this week, just these questions. So a little catch up while we are at it. I do not have COVID. That is the best thing ever. I got sick and from the point of which I got sick and got a test, two days later, it took them 12 days to get me the test results, which were negative, and for those 12 days I was stressed out and really, really watching my wife Lala, to see if she was going to get sick. And then she seemed to, because of course she would, I’m staring at her 24/7 waiting for her to get sick. And it was just allergies or whatever. And my thing that I had was just a bad cold, which is what I’ve been hoping for but that was stressful. So if you’re going through that or dealing with anybody, God forbid, who is sick from COVID, God bless. We are thinking about you and it sucks to have this kind of worry. So if you do have this kind of worry, take care of yourself, maybe write a little bit about it. Maybe journal a little bit about it. You know that as a writer, you process things through writing. So consider doing that. 

[00:01:39] In business news, I’m just finishing up this last revision, after which I think the book will go to copy edits unless my editor has some more little changes for me, but those will be pretty minor. Everything is in place. And now I’m in the beautiful, sweet spot of fixing the tiny things. Oh, you know what? And I shared something with my 90-day class earlier and I kind of want to share it with you now that I am thinking about it. I really love when I am doing these micro edits, because this, I call it my lyrical pass as my last pass. It’s when I get to make all the words, saying all the sentences as tight as they can be, but let’s face it. I am a workday writer. I write good solid pros. I don’t write lyrically, beautiful phrases that sing off the page. I write stories and I write them well. But this is the point at which when I’m doing these micro edits, the macro edit, the micro edits, I will sometimes come across sentences – okay, like a lot of times I’ll come across sentences that can be better in terms of mood and tone. And I’m just going to read a couple of sentences here that I wrote. So this is a scene that occurs in my book when my main character is having, she has just had a big phone fight with her ex-wife and it’s really tense, she thinks her ex-wife is out to get her and her ex-wife might be, we don’t know. So the paragraph that was in my book, as soon as her wife, her ex-wife hangs up on her. This, this the, the here’s the three sentences: I listened to a plane, drone overhead, and watched three bees poke at the flowers in lemon tree. Our- my backyard was in oasis. Too bad I felt like tugging out the delphiniums Rochelle had put in before she left. So that’s my normal writing voice. It tends to be kind of warm and fuzzy. It tends to be rainbows and puppies and this was a thriller and my big thing that I’ve been doing is upping the tension on every page to pull a reader through feeling the tension grow and grow and grow.

[00:03:58] So just today I was like, Oh, I can show people the difference here. So I went back to that paragraph, and just have to go, just going through the book in order and I got to it and I changed the paragraph just a little bit. And now it echoes the tension that I want to have in the book. So the revised sentences read like this: A helicopter roared angrily overhead as I watched three bees stabbing at the lemon trees and flowers. Our- my backyard had been in oasis. Now I felt like taking a blow torch to the delphiniums Rochelle had put in un-abandoned before they even bloomed. So that’s the tone that I was looking for. Harsh, stubby, uncomfortable. Yes. I used an adverb angrily because I wanted to. I use adverbs sparingly, but their words and I use all the words, you know, I do. So, thought I would just show you that right there. So that’s kind of the level of revision that I’m doing right now. And it is just a joy. It’s a joy, it’s so much fun. So I’m in heaven. And this book is due on Monday. I am talking to you from a Thursday and I think it’ll be done. I’m really, really close and I’m not stressed out. I’m just having fun. 

[00:05:14] So that is awesome. Well, let’s jump in to some of these questions. So I think I will have a normal opening and closing segment on this podcast. So I will just remind you that if you support me at the Patreon level at $5 a month or more, I am your mini coach. And you can ask me any question that you want about anything probably about writing. That probably would be the best idea since writers listen to this show. But how about it? And I really, really, really appreciate your support. This allows me to do this show to write the essays that you will get, that I love to write. They’re my favorite thing that I write and I’m going to be writing in one next week. As soon as my book has turned in and I already know what it’s about. For once. So you can always check that out at patreon.com/rachael R A C H A E L.  And now let’s get into these questions. 

[00:06:06] So this one is from Evan Oliver. Hello, Evan. Evan says, Rachael, first, let me say thank you for all the encouragement and inspiration that comes from your podcast each week. Your welcome. You do an amazing job. You do an amazing job and it’s so encouraging and helpful to hear you talk about everything that goes along with the writing life, especially self-care. I’ve only been a fan for about a month now. So I’m still going through the old podcast and hope to be able to read your essays this weekend. I have written three short stories on KDP, which is Kindle Direct Publishing. And I’m working on a fourth, but the marketing is currently kicking my butt and I have a couple of questions. Number one, do you know anything about services like whizbuzzbooks.com that claim to promote your book for you? And number two, what are good resources for self-publishing authors who are trying to figure out marketing in KDP? It feels like a lot of the stuff I come across as full of spelling errors and typos, or has little useful info. Okay. Good, big questions. 

[00:07:04] So I had never heard of Whiz Buzz Books. So that kind of tells you something there, but I went and looked at it, it looks like what I do for these kinds of things. So Whiz Buzz Books is one of those places where they will push you out, this one it looks like it’s on social media, I can’t remember if this one said it would also go to their newsletter list. But what I do in these a lot of times, even when I get offers like this, because they will end up cold emailing you, you’ll go to their Facebook page and they have 200 followers, or they say that they’ll tweet you to 2 million people and the only Twitter you can find for them has 7 followers. So whiz buzz does look like it’s been around in a while and for $49, they will, they say that they will push you out to over 600,000 real followers. Used to notify users of new books. They actually give their social media platforms a spot on their website, which makes me trust them a little bit more. They have 164,000 followers on Whiz Buzz Twitter, on Facebook they have 3000, although that is going to be a professional page. So it’s actual outreach will be a lot smaller. So, I mean, you could try this one. I wanted to right now, though, share with you the ones that I use. So I have Ed, I have an Ed. You know, everyone should have an Ed. So Ed Giordano is the one who does everything for me. And he’s a BookBob master. So BookBob, you may have heard of it’s the holy grail of this kind of marketing. When we’re talking about sending q book’s picture and its info out to a whack of people. BookBob does it, using their newsletter. BookBob used to be extremely effective. It is now effective. It’s- it’s now quite effective. 

[00:09:05] We have not done a BookBob yet that has not returned our money and made us but I’m talking about, you know, back in the gold- golden age in 2000, I don’t know, 12 or 13. If you got a BookBob, you’d make 10 grand that month and that doesn’t happen anymore. But you can make up the amount and then I do see a long tail of people who download all these free books from the BookBob and then they do read them. And then they do go on to read the rest of your books. So BookBob, I think is worth it. However, in your case, BookBob will not work because your book has to be, I think, 150 pages for BookBob to consider you for a BookBob. I think it’s called a featured deal. The one that you, the, the, the big one. However, you can buy BookBob ads we have not played around very much with that, but I’m not sure if there’s a length restriction on that, but you can look into that. The other blasters that I am, I am- Ed has tested this to make sure that they work and are working right now at the time of this recording, which is July 23rd, 2020.

[00:10:11] We are still liking e-reader news today. That’s a $50 blast. And let’s see, I’ll just give you numbers. Okay. So that was $50 and we got 673 downloads for that. We use e-book Betty, which is only $12.50 cents and we got 155 downloads from that. So that was about 8 cents a download, e-reader news today, we just spoke about with 7 cents a download, FreeBooksy, still does well. And that your book, your book that you’re advertising does have to be free on Freebooksy. That was $110. We got 2,700 downloads. So that’s 4 cents a download. Fussy Librarian that was $41, and that was 453 downloads for a cost of 9 cents a download and Robin Reads is the most expensive at 10 cents a download and it’s a $75 ad with 777 downloads in terms of my last book. But I think this was a just standard romance. So with the cost of BookBob being $657, I know ouch. That was a total outlay of money of almost a thousand dollars and we made it up and then some. The reason that we do this is to get eyeballs on our work, hopefully that reader for our mailing list and in what we really, really want is for them to go on and read the other books in our series. 

[00:11:46] So what Whiz Buzz looks like, they’re doing something similar to the ones I was just talking about. But I kind of want to say one thing and then it is hard. It is hard. If you are struggling to figure out your marketing, it is hard and it is hard with short stories. So I don’t know if you’re writing something long, if you want to, or if you want to write a series or if these, I’m assuming that you have a first in series free and you’re pushing a free first short story and it’s going to a series, if not, you may want to consider that first in series free, still does work. I believe all of my series that are self-published have a first book in the series as free. So that is still, it’s not a big organic marketing thing, but people do find the free book. So you may want to try that and give Whiz Buzz Books a try if you feel like it. It looks like their site looks legit. It’s just arguable, but about like how much effect anything has really. So keep an eye on the numbers. Write down what the, what, how your book sales changed, how many downloads you got that day, as opposed to other days, all of those things are really, really worthwhile tracking, which is why Ed is so amazing. Cause I’m so terrible at tracking that. And he sends me these incredible spreadsheets and all the information is on there. And right before I got on to this podcast, I sent him an email that said help send me what we do. And he sent it to me. 

[00:13:14] So, that is what I recommend, is just trying some things when I am experimenting with ads, I like to do them by themselves without trying anything else. So I won’t try an ad or, you know, a social media push by a company, if there’s anything else going around, going on around it. So we can test it cleanly that first time. So I hope that helps a little bit, but yes, please just know it is hard. So good resources for self-publishing authors who are trying to figure out marketing and KDP, I really have to say it is. M-effin expensive, but Mark Dawson’s course ads for authors is probably still the gold standard. I have taken it. I recommend him. I have also heard great things about Nick Erik, Nicholaserik.com  E R I K, I guess he does a great ad’s course too. I was just actually went in looked to see if I could take it and it is closed right now, but I put myself on the mailing list because, I do believe that nowadays selling books is many times pay to play and I’m saying many times, but really in my heart, I’m saying all the time, because there’s so much competition out there.

[00:14:32] And so we do have to spend money on ads in order to make money by selling books. And you can start out at a very low, very cheap rate. But yeah, it used to be, you could be found for free. And now that opportunity is a little bit less, but it’s out there and it’s doable and God knows, I have done it without Ed and have made money so I can do it. Anybody can, it just takes some thought and there are some books out there. Let’s see. I think Nick Erik has a book. I know he does because I bought it. I just haven’t read it yet on ads, and I would go to, you know, Amazon and look to see what the most popular best reviewed book on Amazon ads is. And then the best reviewed book on Facebook ads, if you don’t want to shell out for Mark Dawson’s course, which I think is more than $700. So there’s that. Okay. Yeah. So those are the resources I would use, also make sure that you’re listening to shows that talk about this a lot. Joanna Penn of course, I think is the gold standard for that. She’s always bringing on guests who are talking about this kind of thing. Six-figure author, that’s a podcast that talks a lot about this stuff too. So those are some good free resources that you should be listening to the career author podcast. If I think of others, I will pop them out to you. 

[00:15:55] Okay. So speaking of things, whether I recommend them or not, Tom Langer is a new patron. Hi Tom. Thanks so much for joining. And Tom says, have you ever discussed, Scribe on a podcast or do you have thoughts on it? A friend is recommending their services. Oh my gosh, Tom. Do I have thoughts on Scribe? Yes, I do. Yes. Yes, I do. It is a, it’s not a vanity publishing service. It is what I would consider to be a hybrid service in that you pay them a lot of money and they do all the steps for you that you would need to do if you’re self-publishing. There is some merit to those kinds of businesses.

[00:16:43] Most of them are teetering on the edge of vanity publishing, which just means that they take your money and you get nothing from them except you have to buy some copies of your own books, and that’s it to you, see you later. Goodbye. There is one called She Writes Press that I’ve heard very good things about, and that’s honestly, the only one that I’ve heard, very good things about. So people, when I hear these kinds of questions and I get them a lot, what I always do is go to Google and I put in like in quotes, “Scribe Publishing” close quote, predatory. Used the word predatory and just everything will pop up on these kinds of presses. I do believe that Scribe is predatory. It is owned by Tucker Max, who is just not somebody that I admire, he began his career, his illustrious career by publishing the definitive book of pickup lines. He kind of started, the literary genre frat tire. It’s, it’s, you know, that’s kind of fun. You can sell a lot of books. But he’s also just kind of a big jerk. Let’s see, I’m trying to scroll through his Wiki, even as Wiki doesn’t look at it, and it’s his own Wiki he is kind of the charmer that I don’t love. He offered to give planned Parenthood $500,000 if they named an abortion clinic after him. So of course they declined. He is kind of the, the guy who started the whole, how to pick up women book thing. And he has had multiple New York Times Bestsellers. 

[00:18:37] Anyway, don’t love the guy, don’t know him, perhaps he’s wonderful and decent and kind and gentle. I doubt it, but he started Scribes. So what he gets from running Scribes is a hell of a lot of money, let me click over to their costs. So, in order to publish with them, it starts at 10 grand and that is them doing the bare minimum of stuff. So, let’s just break it down. I went the most expensive way that I could do this self-publishing and I wrote down the cost. So a cover generally I’ll pay a hundred, $150 for cover, but even if you budgeted $500 for an awesome cover, okay, that’s $500. The edit that you will have to pay for, as a self-published author- I usually splash out about 2 grand for that, but say you did 3 grand, you get an excellent developmental edits, fantastic. You do your revisions. Then you hire a copy editor for 800 bucks say, and then you hire a formatter, to do all your formatting for you. Let’s say $150, even with these big numbers, bigger than I usually pay. We’re looking at $4,450. And so they’re making that other, by- can’t do the math, $5,550. I think that that is an egregious amount to charge somebody. And not only that, but they are obviously in the market of pushing you into higher ad spend. They do a really good job on their site about trying to talk you into the 16,000 guided author thing, which, you know, people pay for. The guided author gets you an audience with Tucker Max along with a bunch of other people, he’ll tell you how to write a book. And then there’s a Facebook group that supports you and they help you write your book in six months and then they help you put it up and get the book. And they, they don’t do the editing in that case. If you want the editing, oh no, maybe they do, do editing on that one. I take it back. But if you don’t want to write it for $36,000, that would, that’s the Scribe professional package. You just tell them what you want the book to be about, and then they’ll write it. They say we handle all the typing and the writing for you, but the words and ideas and voice are still entirely yours and you can have that for about an hour and a half on the phone per week. 

[00:21:05] Oh my gosh. There’s a hundred k option. Wow. There’s a – there’s one you can get for a hundred thousand there. I do not recommend Scribe. That’s, what I’m going to say about this. So let me tell you a few other things when you are looking at pack- kind of this, kind of like a packaging company. They’re going to take your book and do things to it and put it up online which you could do for free after paying for those services that I’ve already quoted to you, you could just upload it for free. You don’t need to pay $5,000 for somebody to do this for you. But if you do, there are people who do really like to keep their hands off, and don’t want to do this and they have the money to spend, in which case absolutely use a good service of one of these. I know that She Writes is good. I don’t know about anybody else. And I know you’re not a she, so I don’t know if that would stop it, but this is what I do. I put the publisher name into the Amazon advanced search and look at their books. I look at their covers and I look at how many reviews they have and how good those reviews are. I also look at the frequency with which they are publishing.

[00:22:15] So for a Scribe, their imprint is called Hounds Tooth Press. And if you do this with Hounds Tooth Press on the advanced search they’ve only been doing this since February, apparently of 2020. I will say their covers look great and they do have good reviews. So they may have some method of distribution of pushing out the word to people that these books exist, but they are brand new at doing this. So I would just encourage you to do the same thing with whatever company you are thinking about using, put in their press name and go look at it over on Amazon. The best thing to do, and you can’t do it in this case, cause they’ve only been doing this since February, as far as I could tell. The best case to do this, if you are looking at a different packaging company, go to an author, who’s about a year out. Who’s had their book for out for about a year, and email them through their website and say, would you recommend the company that you used? Do you feel like you got your money’s worth? Did they do distribution? Did they do promotion? What would you have changed about that experience? That’s the best way to find out, but I’ll tell you what, Scribewriting.com, it was just a joy to look at because it’s just so awful and is trying to hurt some people and that makes me angry. Don’t want these kinds of predatory people to hurt you.

[00:23:39] So, Tom, I love that you asked this question, and there are such better options out there. There are so many, including just hiring people and doing it yourself, which is what I do. I hire the people I need, and then it takes me, oh an hour to upload at all the different platforms, or I have my assistant Ed do it and that’s all it takes. It’s fantastic. And then you were in charge of everything and you are making every decision rather than letting some company who does not care very much about you make those decisions. That’s my advice. Okay. Thank you Tom, for the question. 

[00:24:15] And we are at the last question. Okay, this is from May, and May, she already knows this, but somehow I lost this question for a long time and just found it in Patreon unread. So I apologize to you May. Let’s see, she says I’m having problem focusing. I will start writing and go for maybe 10 to 15 minutes if I’m lucky and then I get distracted. Not always by outside things like my phone, sometimes my mind just wanders. Lately it’s been getting worse since I’ve been stuck inside since February. She’s in Korea and the viruses hit there hard. How do you develop the discipline to stay focused on what you are writing and not suffer from ADOS? Which is attention deficit oh, shiny! I love that. I’ve never heard that. Are there any mental exercises I can do to help? I already use freedom on my phone and computer, but I can’t block daydreams.

[00:25:03] Yes. May, I love this question. This is me, this is my problem. And the truth is, is that environment dictates what we do so much. Which is why so many authors, environment will always win against willpower. It’s just fact environment wins. You can only use your willpower so long and then your willpower goes, but I want to daydream, but I want to sit here and you know, this is where I’m comfortable and I can think about other things. So that is why writers for years, hundreds of years have gone outside their house to write. Once you go to the cafe, if you don’t have the password to the wifi, you’re going to write cause you get bored. That experience, that ability has been taken away from us during COVID-19. We can’t leave the house. We have to stay in the house. So all of us are really struggling with this, May. And I love that you asked it. For me, the biggest difference that has ever occurred in my writing is when I started a regular meditation practice because on a really secular level, meditation is just your brain doing pushups in order to stay focused. Meditation is not clearing your mind.

[00:26:18] It has nothing to do with clearing your mind. Meditation is just about focusing your mind. And that is what we do when we write, when you meditate, you focus on something, you could focus on a candle’s glow. You can focus on your breath is a really common one to do. And then you get distracted because that’s part of meditation. Sometimes it only takes a third of a second to get distracted from thinking about your breath. And when you eventually realize that you’re thinking about something else, you gently bring yourself back to the focus back to your breath. If that’s what you’re using, I use my breath cause it’s always there. And that right there is one rep, it’s one pushup for your brain. When I started doing this for my writing specifically for my writing, I felt the difference in a week, but I was able to stay on the page for longer, without getting distracted. And the benefit just goes up. And I know I’m proselytizing. I know I am preaching to the choir. I know a lot of you already do this. Writers just meditate because so many of us have discovered that it is the secret weapon, when it comes to staying at the desk, but girl, I also got to tell you, I have ADHD. You will not be surprised to know this from just knowing me and hearing me on a podcast. You will know that I am definitely shiny squirrel everywhere. I have been since I was little diagnosed when I was like six re-diagnosed as an adult and I have Adderall, I do not take it often. In fact, I usually don’t take it unless I’m on deadline. And you know, this is the way I always talk. I did take Adderall this morning, but it’s been like eight hours and that does honestly, helped me, slow down and focus. Apparently, people who don’t have ADHD when they take Adderall speed up. But those of us, I’m the age of ADHD. I am the hyper age. I don’t have the attendant- the attention deficit part. I have a hyper, so taking it slows me down and stops my brain from frizzing out and seeing all the shiny things around me and being distracted by the hair that’s on my arm that fell out of my head that is itchy. And oh my gosh, pull my hair back. I’m a little bit hot, normal, little bit cold. Put on my slippers. Take off my socks. 

[00:28:33] That is really what happens to me when I’m writing at home and when I’m actively meditating. And when I take Adderall, when I really, really need it, I try not to use it very much. It is prescribed by my doctor and my sponsor knows about it. But the fact remains that I am an addict, so I am very careful about it, which is why I don’t use it very much, but it can be very, very helpful. So if you do actually have ADD also, then maybe think about that May, as you think about treatment as an option. But far better than any drug I ever tried is meditation for keeping my brain on the page and in the place I want it to be, of course we will get distracted, but the distractions get fewer and you get to stay on the page longer.

[00:29:20] So this was a fun episode. Thank you very much for listening to me. I have been revising for like, 7 hours already today. So I know that are a little bit jumbled and that’s what happens. But so glad to talk to you all, and I wish you very, very happy writing. Please come over to HowDoYouWrite.net and leave me a comment or reach out to me anywhere where I am on the internet. And if you’d like your questions answered, you can go to patreon.com/rachael and just join it at the $5 level. Plus, you’ll get all of the back essays. There’s like 40 of them. Okay. That’s enough shelling. I hope you’re having a great week. I hope you do not have COVID and I hope you’re healthy and happy and be gentle with yourself. Give yourself permission to have what you need right now. And hopefully some of what you need is some writing. Bye now. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.