The Publishing Performance Show

Jamie Davis - Building Author Communities and Fantasy Worlds

• Teddy Smith • Episode 5

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Jamie Davis is a nurse, retired paramedic, author, and nationally recognized medical educator. He has written over 55 fun fantasy reads, focusing on urban fantasy and incorporating his medical background. As the conference director of Author Nation, Jamie helps organize one of the premier events for indie authors. His expertise spans writing, marketing, and building author communities.

In this episode:

  • Jamie's journey from storyteller to published author, starting with NaNoWriMo
  • Understanding and writing in the urban fantasy genre
  • Jamie's writing process and approach to plotting
  • Effective marketing tactics for authors, focusing on email lists and BookBub
  • The importance of networking for authors
  • Overview of the Author Nation conference and tips for attendees
  • Balancing writing with conference organization duties


Resources mentioned:

  • NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)
  • BookBub, Written Word Media, Book Barbarian, Robin Reads, E-Reader News Today
  • Author Nation conference: https://www.authornation.live/
  • Amazon and Facebook ads for authors


Book recommendations:

  • "Successful Indie Author" series by Craig Martelle


Connect with Jamie Davis:


Connect with Teddy Smith:


Join our Facebook Community - https://www.facebook.com/groups/publishingperformance/

Teddy Smith  
Amy, hello everybody, and welcome to the publishing performance show today. I'm really excited to be chatting to Jamie Davis, who's the author of loads of different fantasy books, and he's also one of the leaders of the author nation trade show, which is coming up in a few weeks in Las Vegas. Now I'm really excited to go to this trade show this conference, because it's got some amazing speakers, and we're actually going there to go and speak and have a look at what's going on. And I can't wait to share with everyone what we learned there, and he's one of the organizers of it, so I'm really excited to be able to speak someone who's got that big name in the industry. Now, in this show today, we talk a lot about how networking can be really, really important for your author journey, and how by having the right people around you, you can really start to build your online brand. And you know, branding something we talk about a lot in these episodes, so it's been a great episode. We also talk about writing different types of fantasy books, and how you can flick between different types of genres when you're doing your writing and still keep your voice consistent throughout all your books. It's an absolutely fascinating episode. Jamie's someone who's had absolutely loads of success in the writing world, so it's really interesting to hear his insights. And I will let you get on and enjoy the show. Hi everyone, and welcome to the publishing informant show. I'm here with Jamie Davis, who's the author of over 55 fun, fancy reads, with the last one actually being finished this morning in the coffee shop. And he's also the conference director and one of the organizers of AutoNation, which is a conference in Las Vegas, which I'm actually going to for the first time this year. So I'm looking forward to chatting about that. Congratulations on finishing your book this morning. Jamie, oh yeah, it's

Jamie Davis  
great. It's always a great feeling to finish that draft and and get get the whole story down now I can give it, let it percolate for a couple of days, and I'll dig back in for another pass before I send it to the editor.

Teddy Smith  
Yep, for did so what was the book she finished this morning? It was called

Jamie Davis  
Summer break Faye, and it's the fourth book in my uncle Chip saves the Fae series. It's it's fun urban fantasy,

Teddy Smith  
basically Nice. Now you've written quite a wide range of fantasy books. I would say, How would you describe your style?

Jamie Davis  
Well, I mean, you introduced me as author of fun fantasy reads. I really try to keep my books light and fun. I also have written some some stuff in the Sci Fi genre, in Michael anderly's cartherian universe. But even that is fun in kind of you know, things that focus around family values. Found family, family themes. So it all of my books tend to generate and revolve around that. Yeah,

Teddy Smith  
and have you always wanted to write in those genres? Was that? What was it drew you to those genres visually? Well,

Jamie Davis  
I think I didn't really know that I wanted to write in those genres. But when I started writing, you know, a lot of my my themes were really about found family and, you know, the people that we find, that we locate and and kind of gravitate towards in our adult lives, that formulate the the core of our friend group, our our you know, our closest co workers, if we're in a job that that facilitates that kind of thing, and it just, I found myself continually writing in those kinds of of directions,

Teddy Smith  
right? Okay, did you? Did you always want to be a writer when you were growing up?

Jamie Davis  
No, but I've always been a storyteller, and I think that that's the key for me. I don't think, like I've talked to a lot of writers that have said, Oh my gosh, I wanted to write books since I was five. And you know, I don't think I ever had that kind of realization. But I always told stories. I always made up stories. Had imaginary friends, had imaginary games that I was playing at any given time. And so those, those imaginary stories that I had always come up with eventually became stories I told my kids and and as they were growing up, and then, when I started writing, someone actually dared me to write a novel with some of the stories I had accumulated. And that's where my first series sprung from. Was, was participating in NaNoWriMo back in 2014 and I wrote the the core of the first book in that month of November that year.

Teddy Smith  
So NaNoWriMo is, is kind of like a a challenge that you can do to get a, yeah, National

Jamie Davis  
Novel Writing Month. It's really international now, and there is an organization that you can so you can check out to to find tools to help you move along. But basically it's the core of the challenges that you challenge yourself to write 50,000 words in 30 days. And since November is one of those 30 day months, it kind of worked out that people can write and in the month of November, average about 1600 words a day. And if you do that, at the end of the month, you should have about 50,000 words of a story written down.

Teddy Smith  
Yep. Now I know a lot of people that have done that, that challenge, and a lot of people, in fact, have actually started their writing career just by having that first book then being like, well, actually this, you know, either it sold well or, you know, they got a lot of they just enjoyed it. So loads of people I know have done that NaNoWriMo challenge. Yeah,

Jamie Davis  
I was lucky enough that that first book that that came from that initial challenge was really kind of caught on in the in 2015 when I got it edited and then released, and people were like, when's book two coming out? Yeah, so something that had taken me almost a year to really put together and finalize and polish. I then turned around and wrote another book, and was surprised at how quickly the characters generated another story in my head. And so I was able to go forward and continue the series. That series is now 10 books long. I've got the next book planned to write, probably this winter. And so, yeah, that book kind of like, every year or so, another story pops into my head for those characters. So I'll keep writing it. It's about supernatural paramedics. So it's easy to to come up with ideas for what they encounter in their daily lives. Yeah,

Teddy Smith  
I was going to ask you about that. So do you have a background in medicine? Yes,

Jamie Davis  
I'm actually a retired paramedic. I'm also a registered nurse, and worked in the ER, for a short period of time. Eventually I became a full time author, and that allowed me to retire from being in the medical field. But my love for healthcare and taking care of folks has never gone away. So when I started writing fantasy, it was a no brainer for me to take the idea of fantasy storytelling and my love for medical care and put the two together. Do

Teddy Smith  
you think having that knowledge about medicine and your background in nursing and paramedics? Do you think that helps you with creating scenarios for your books?

Jamie Davis  
Oh, for sure. I mean, I, I don't like put real patients in the stories, but, but I do, I do have those, those core, regular kinds of patients we run into, you know, the patient with chest pain, the patient who has an asthma attack. It's kind of fun to think about mythical creatures. And what kind of creature would, you know, encounter this particular medical problem and and how would that figure into their magical nature? And then cut have it all come full circle when the paramedics show up and have to take care of them. So it's fun.

Teddy Smith  
Do you find that you ever get people who are like in the medical profession get in touch to be like, Oh, that's not quite right, or that's not how you do that sort of thing. Well, actually,

Jamie Davis  
one of the things, one of the reasons I like writing that series, is I try to very hard to get them to get the medicine right. So because that's something that irks me, in fact, it drives my family. I'll be watching a TV show or a movie, and I'll be like, well, that's not how that happens. You know. And so when, when I, when I do things in in the book, I try to make sure that the medicine is correct, whether you know the dosages and the procedures and things are all factually correct as to how they'd actually be in a medical setting. And so I get a lot of doctors and nurses and paramedics who read my books and enjoy them because it they don't get taken out of the story by something that's wrong, they are able to fully immerse themselves into into the story I'm telling.

Teddy Smith  
Yeah, I used to be an undertaker, and I have quite similar experiences when I see stuff to do funerals on TV, you know, where people just do that cliched thing, and people always ask me, like, is this true? Is that true? And I'm like, No, hard, any of it is true.

Jamie Davis  
Yeah, it's, it's and you know what I mean when I say, you know, it takes you out of the story for a moment when it's wrong. So it's important for me to try to get that right as much as possible. Yeah.

Teddy Smith  
Yeah, definitely. Now, at the beginning of the chat, just now, you said that one of the genres that you talk about, so you write about, is urban fantasy. What does a What do you mean by urban fantasy? Because that's a term that some people have said, but maybe it's not quite clear. Well,

Jamie Davis  
urban fantasy has a lot of you know, similar terms. I mean, it can also be contemporary fantasy. It's in my in my sense, it's fantasy taking place in a modern world. Doesn't have to necessarily be an urban setting, yeah, but it's taking place in the modern world so that people have cell phones and drive cars and have electricity and all these things. You know, really, I. I think in a lot of ways, Harry Potter could be considered urban fantasy. In a lot of ways, it's in the modern world. They have modern things around them, even though they tend to gravitate towards using the magical world mostly, Oh,

Teddy Smith  
I see like, compared to something like Lord of the Rings, where it's like all wizards and swords, right?

Jamie Davis  
That's more high fantasy. And that's, that's where, you know, the authors come up with and generated a world out of whole cloth. And that's why high fantasy books tend to be a lot longer, because a lot of time has to be spent building the world, explaining what the trees look like. Why are the trees orange, you know, and those kind of things, whereas in my world, I don't have to explain why the light comes on when they hit the switch, or how a cell phone works, or how to drive a car. They just know, people just understand. They got in the car and started driving. That's all I need to say. I don't need to describe how a car works. So that's, that's one of the advantages I think, of writing urban fantasy, and that gives you a little more freedom to then come up with how the magical world wraps around the modern world and exists in between the aspects of the modern world. That's the fun part for me. Yeah,

Teddy Smith  
no, no, I get exactly what you mean now. So with your Do you have a particular writing process that you try to follow to build these sort of urban fantasy worlds? Yeah, I,

Jamie Davis  
you know, on the Panther plotter scale, if you've heard that before, you know, I don't think it's one or the other thing. I think it's more of a continuum. I think I lean more towards the pantser side, where I'm really I don't plot a whole lot. What I do tend to do is write myself a sentence of or so per chapter of a story beat where I say, you know, this is the the opening scene at home with the main characters. And then chapter two is, you know, where they're going to go next. And it just a sentence about it. But I don't write the I don't really do a whole lot of detail. I let that detail flow out of what the characters do in the moment as I write that write the scene. So I'm very much a pantser in that regard. In fact, you know, today, I thought there was going to be another chapter that came after the one I was writing to this morning. But I ended the book just, it was the right it was the right thing to do. The book ended very well. In the end of that chapter, it didn't require me to do another let's return all the way home. It was okay to say they were they were heading home now. And that was kind of the difference between how I write, you know, my stories, and and it just, I don't need. I didn't. I found that the plot that I thought I might need, I didn't need.

Teddy Smith  
Do you do you generally, like, make an outline for yourself about where the plot's going to go and what beats you need to hit throughout?

Jamie Davis  
Yeah, I do. I so I'll write out the like, I'll have, you know, an average book of mine that's about 60,000 words or so urban fantasy would be about 30 chapters, about 2000 words per chapter, that's my average. And then I will write like a sentence per chapter, roughly plotting it out. And it gets vaguer and vaguer as the book goes on. You know, I know that, like the last three or four chapters are going to be action sequences. So sometimes even you know the last the last three chapters might be big fight scene one, big fight scene two, big fight scene three. And I just leave it at that, because I know there's going to be I kind of have an inkling in my mind of what the final conflict is going to be like, but I don't know how they're going to get there, or what exactly the moving pieces are going to be for that scene when they arrive. So yeah,

Teddy Smith  
yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. Let you write so many books. Do you? Do you are you only writing one book in one time? Or do you work on multiple books at the same time? And do you have a system to sort of track make sure you're being productive all the time with that writing?

Jamie Davis  
I have author friends that write multiple books at the same time, and I applaud them. I think, I think it's crazy, but you know what works for them? Works for them. I can't do it. I I really need to keep the story that I'm working on in my head. In fact, if I start getting ideas for another book or another story, I will awfully often quickly write them down so that I can kind of offload them from my memory, yeah, so that I know that they're okay and I don't have to keep ruminating about them, because I need to stay in the moment for the book I'm working on.

Teddy Smith  
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So would you so throughout the year? So at the moment you're you're on the you've just finished up writing that book, would you go straight on to writing the next book in the same series?

Jamie Davis  
So what I'll do is I'll, I'll split my day up, because I do work full time, and I try to treat it very much like a job. You know, I'll usually spend the morning going through and working on my next editing path, which will take me three or four days to get through. And do an editing pass on the book before I send it off to my editor. At the same time, I'll be plotting out book five in that series. So in the afternoons, I usually spend some time sitting down and thinking about, Okay, here's the general scenario that I'm putting my characters in for this book. What's going to happen, what are the what are the big conflict points that are going to be, and what's the big main conflict going to be at the end of the book? And I kind of put those pieces together in large in a large format, and then, like I said, I'll break, break out 30 chapters and kind of plan out where these things are going to fall in the book. Yeah, yeah,

Teddy Smith  
amazing. Thank you. Now with your you've written all these books, but you also have to make sure those books sell as well. So what marketing tactics have you used that have been a really effective for you? Well, I

Jamie Davis  
think you know, one of the most underrated marketing tactics is generating and maintaining your own email list. So I've been working hard at that for over 10 years now, and have, you know, a pretty decent email list of about 3000 dedicated, you know, 3000 people that that are pretty active on my list. I clean up my list constantly. So I've probably thrown out three or four times that amount over the years, of people that just never clicked on anything. And if they're not going to click I I don't need them on my email list, because I pay my email subscription service per email subscriber like everybody else does. Yeah. So keeping that number as low as possible, but as active as possible. Can can be very profitable over time, and it's about building the list slowly. I generally build new lists with each series so I can keep track of where people came from and and that's a slow process. You know, it's one reader at a time, and I try to engage with people and answer emails when they come in, and all those things. So I think that's that's a number one, the most important way I use to communicate with readers and then get information about new books to them so they can go out and buy them. Other than that, I do a lot of the things that many authors do. I have a social media presence. So I actively work there. I do engage in Facebook and Amazon ads to keep the first books in my series churning so that they're always getting new readers into the series and moving through. And then, you know, I just, I just last week, had a BookBub feature deal, which is the, you know, the granddaddy of all, you know, marketing email newsletters out there. And it's, you know, that's, that's always very profitable for me to pay for that service.

Teddy Smith  
What were the results of that BookBub? Um, at the

Jamie Davis  
end of the first week, it was a 200% ROI, and it's still churning because, of course, it's a series. It's the first in a series that I put on sale, and so they're continuing to read through and order the books. So I'm still seeing increased sales on subsequent books in the series. So I'll tally it by the end of the month, but it wouldn't surprise me, based on previous BookBub deals I've had, that it would be 300 or 400% ROI for the month

Teddy Smith  
for people that haven't used BookBub before. How does it differ to some of the other lists out there?

Jamie Davis  
Well, their list is large and very high quality, so they work hard to maintain and refresh their list over time. It's not it's not inexpensive. This particular BookBub feature deal was just under $500 for the emailing to their list of my book that was on sale for 99 cents. However, it earned out in the first day. So, well, okay, you know it that book, plus the the extra sales of the other books in the series earned by the end of the day had earned out that series that earned more than $500

Teddy Smith  
yep, that's amazing. Yeah, I've used book Bob a couple times, and it's, I've had really good success there. Expect there are other lists as well which are really good. And I think written word media have some really nice ones too. Yeah, well, and written word

Jamie Davis  
media is great. I was going to say they're bargain books. He's the free booksies, yeah, and their other services are great. I'm a big proponent of them. I think they're the next they're the the next tier, they're number two, but also very good. I wouldn't call them second best. I'd just call them another alternative, and usually easier to get the featured deals, like I usually get about two or three of those a year on one of my series, and it's always happy and happy accident when one of those. Hits. So yeah, they're very selective about who they pick. So yeah, you just have to keep trying, keep putting your books in, keep applying for new ones, and it's just a numbers game.

Teddy Smith  
Have you tried to use any specific like fantasy mailing lists,

Jamie Davis  
um, like book barbarian, um, or is one that I've used in the past that does well. Robin reads e reader news today. Are a few that I that I can rattle off the top of my head. You know, they're they're all not quite as good as written word media, and definitely not as good as BookBub, but they do have a positive ROI generally, based on the price that you pay. I mean, you know, the difference would be, you know, I paid almost $500 for a BookBub featured deal, but for, like, one of the other lesser ones, I might only pay $45 for a mailing to their list. Yeah, and so, yeah, I only, I only sell maybe 30 or 40 copies, but that's enough to earn back

Teddy Smith  
what I've paid for. Yeah, yeah, especially in the long run, because you've got a series and people can write by the following books, yeah, exactly with the sorry, I just lost where I was in the uh, oh, yes. So you mentioned just before that you did Amazon ads when you're how do you approach that with writing fancy books? Because Are there particular keywords? Do you try and target for your books, or do you find that people are searching for your name?

Jamie Davis  
So I'm very much I'm not as active in running my Amazon ads as I am on my Facebook ads. What I generally do with my Amazon ads is I run ads for the first book in a series

Jamie Davis  
in all its formats,

Jamie Davis  
as a sponsored deal, and I run it, I run the auto ad campaign, where it targets the genre, specific genres and specific similar books to mine. So I have a list of similar authors, similar books, and those are my keywords for that. And then I also do the auto ads, because Amazon generally has a pretty good idea of what my series are like and who would like them at this point. And so they're pretty successful. I'm much more successful with my Facebook ads, and so I pay more attention to them. The Amazon ads kind of run in the background and and just kind of generate a little pretty steady trickle of of sales. Yeah,

Teddy Smith  
I find with Amazon, sometimes you need to have those ads running just in order to keep your organic rank, like being maintained, because it's Yeah, Amazon that you're serious about your books being put forward. Yep, yeah. I'll have to get you set up with, uh, with um, publishing informants so you can check it out. Because we've got, I'd love to check it out. Yeah, yeah. We've got some great tools. I think they'll work really well for you when so go out to the conferences and talking about AutoNation. Now I'm really excited. I'm going to AutoNation in Las Vegas, going back a step. Author nation is a conference for authors in Las Vegas, and you're one of the organizers of it, and you're actually the conference director. I'm really excited about going, could you tell us a bit about author nation?

Jamie Davis  
Yeah, author nation is, I think, the premier conference for indie authors. It's it sprang from another conference that happened before it, the 20 books to 50k Vegas conference that conference kind of closed down because the organizer had some health issues and needed to just kind of step away. So author nation was the conference that took over the contracts that that conference had, that original conference had in Vegas for these events, and so we've kept a lot of the staff and volunteers on board to maintain that kind of sense of community that was, that was existing there. And so it really is, you know, you're going to have over 1000 indie authors from all over the world there. They're going to be gathering in one place to all learn the same things, how to write a better book, how to market a better book, and and how to be successful in whatever success, in whatever way success means for them. Because that's a that's a very much a moving target, depending on the individual you talk with. And so we were hoping to offer opportunities for authors at all levels. We're going to have six and seven figure authors there that are going to be talk having high level conversations in certain rooms that will be open just to them. And not that it's going to be exclusive, but there is kind of like a mastermind that's going to happen on the side. Um. With these six and seven figure authors, but the advantage is they're going to be six and seven figure authors there talking about what they've done, presenting, attending the conference, sitting next to you, standing next to you in line, so you can talk to them and have a conversation and network with them. One of the things that makes these types of conferences so important, and I tell people this all the time, is most of being an author is sitting alone writing, and so it can be really hard to find other people that are doing what you're doing and commiserate a little bit about it. But if you can go to one of the one of these conferences and meet somebody who's achieved something that you've wanted to achieve, and you can have the conversation, how did you get to where you are, and what is the number one thing I need to do to get me started in that direction, you can have that conversation. And the people we have at this conference, and the culture that is part of this conference is such that the people are happy to answer that question?

Teddy Smith  
Yeah, I've interviewed a number of people on this podcast already, such as Kevin Jansen and Mark Lindsay. Your favorite? Everyone talks so highly about the conference and how it's like such a great community. I've already been invited for beers. I work for one evening after the conference. But if you wanted to say you're a new author, maybe what you want to get the most out of the conference, because obviously you've got to, it costs an investment to get there and things like that. What's the what's some tips to get the most out of the conference?

Jamie Davis  
Well, I'll tell you. The number one tip is to follow the conference guideline that is going to be emailed to you when you sign up for the conference, so everybody in the conference gets gets access to a planner sheet that will help you plan out what your goals are for the conference. That's important, because everybody needs to kind of have a plan. There's no way you're going to be able to attend the 150 plus sessions that we're going to have going on there, even though we're recording them and making them available to the attendees after the fact, there's just no way to assimilate that kind of information. So you really need to have a plan. Is look at where you are in your author career and where you want to go next in your author career, and then build a plan to do that. And so there's a planning sheet that all our attendees get access to, to print out and fill out and do for themselves, to take to the conference with them. The next thing I would recommend people do is look at the conference sessions and figure out which sessions are best for you. And then at the end of every day of the conference, our Managing Director, Joel Solari, is going to have a session where he's going to get on stage and start talking you through how to review your day and how to look back at what you've learned that day and how it fits in with your conference plan. And so there, the tools are built into this conference to help every person at every level achieve some part of the success they're searching for.

Teddy Smith  
Yeah, that's amazing. I'm really, really excited about going. Are there any talks in particular you're looking forward to seeing, or any talk as speakers? Oh, wow.

Jamie Davis  
There's so many. Craig Martell is going to be talking about planning for your author estate. So, you know, something all of us need to think about is if we're generating intellectual content and intellectual material that will live on after we're gone. So what are we doing to protect that so that our families can use it effectively as a legacy to live on. So I'm looking forward to that particular conference topic. There is all. There are always several topics on leveraging assistance and people in your in an organization to kind of build out your author business a little bit, and so I'll be looking forward to a couple of sessions on that as well.

Teddy Smith  
How important has networking been for you in your author business,

Jamie Davis  
it's been huge, and I would say that it's one of the things that a lot of authors miss out on, if they don't attend a conference, even a local event in your community, for local authors, is so important to get to know other authors, especially in your genre, and the reason for that is that I can't possibly write enough books to keep my readers happy all year. I just can't do it. I've got readers that will read one of my books in a single day, and then they've got 300 more books they plan on reading this year. And what am I going to do to keep them interested in what my next book's going to be? One of the things I do is I share similar books with them that are from authors that I know and have networked with, and they do the same for me. And so by building out your network. And just talking to people and meeting other authors, you can start sharing each other's books. We're not really we're not really in competition with each other, because readers consume more than one book at a time, and so we can certainly provide them access to other great books by authors we know and have become friends with and those authors will share our books in turn when our book comes out. And by doing that, you can really build, continue to build your readership over time, through helping other authors build their readership over time. 

Teddy Smith
That's really good advice because I think a lot of people see networking as some kind of abstract concept. They don't see it as something that is practical that needs to be done because they think, I'm just writing books, I don't need to speak to other people. as you've mentioned, knowing people, especially in your genre, that can really help you out to grow your fan base because if they're interested in something similar to you, chances are they're going to buy your books later on down the line. You never know how that's going to grow your band.

Jamie Davis
Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've made a connection. mean, you mentioned Kevin J. Anderson. I've known Kevin probably for five or six years now. And he's just the greatest, most generous person I've ever met. And he's an author that has written in the Star Wars universe, has written in all of these different mega franchise universes because he's such a well -known author. Plus Dune and all the other things, right?

Teddy Smith
Yeah, he's a producer in June.

Jamie Davis
And Kevin's just an ordinary guy when you talk to him. He's just another author and is happy to talk author shop with you. I think it's, you know, sometimes it's easy to get starstruck when you talk to somebody you know is a super successful author, but you have to remember they started out just like you with one book and no readers.

Teddy Smith
Yeah.

Teddy Smith
Yeah, that's brilliant advice. So just, I think it's really, I'm really looking forward to conferences. I've done lots of conferences like in just generally, like especially around Amazon and selling on Amazon and advertising, but I'm really looking forward to really getting into the author conferences because it looks like a really great crowd. So I'm really excited about authorization. If people want to get tickets for authorization,

Jamie Davis
Yeah, and plus there's gonna be a lot of fun things going on. There are gonna be after hours genre meetups. Nope, that's okay, go ahead.

Teddy Smith
Sorry, let's, I spoke over you then. Let's do that one again.

Jamie Davis
OK, go ahead.

Teddy Smith
Sorry, I just chatted over what you were saying. What did say? yeah, so I'm really looking forward to going to Author Nation. I've been to lots of conferences and got lots out of them, like generally, but it's my first time going to just an author conference, especially, well, at least one in America anyway.

Jamie Davis
I'm sorry, Teddy, you dropped out there at the very end. I heard you say you were looking forward to going to an author conference and then I didn't hear what the question was.

Teddy Smith
that's okay. I'll do it So I'm really looking forward to going to Author Nation because I've been to lots of conferences in sort of the Amazon world and especially in the advertising world, but none specifically for authors, especially not ones in America. So I'm really excited about going. Are there any sort of meetups or any ways to meet those people that you think should be in your genre?

Jamie Davis
There are after -hours genre meetups that are going to be happening as part of the Author Nation conference every day There will also be some fun just generally fun activities. There's going to be a variety show that's being put on by Soundbooth Studio, which is one of the premier dramatization narration audiobook companies out there and they're doing a variety show that that authors have contributed work to. So that's gonna be a lot of fun one evening. We've got Story Wars National Competition Finals happening on Wednesday night at the conference. And on Thursday night, we have the brilliant indie creator, Kevin Smith, coming in to speak, which should be just an awesome final keynote for the event.

Teddy Smith
Amazing. I'm really looking forward to it. If people want to get tickets, where's the best place to find out about those?

Jamie Davis
There are still tickets available so jump out there and get yours. You can go to AuthorNation .live all the information about the conference is there.

Teddy Smith
Great, we'll put the links in the show notes as well. Now, are the, just as we come to the end, what are the projects you're working on at the moment and the ones that you're excited about?

Jamie Davis
Well, I just finished this book so I'll be moving into book five in the Uncle Chip Saves the Fae series. That's titled Sophomore Fae and I'm looking forward to that. And then I'll be really, I'm not gonna start writing too much on that because the next month and a half are really focused on bringing the conference together. I really have to kind of put my author brain on hold for a little bit because...

Teddy Smith
Okay.

Jamie Davis
I'm really going to be down in the nitty gritty of making sure the conference comes off 100%.

Teddy Smith
Yeah, what's going to be your day -to -day job when you're there?

Jamie Davis
I'm the guy that makes sure that you don't notice anything's wrong. So, you know, I'm the guy that basically is making sure, running behind the scenes, all the volunteers, with a great team of volunteers that we have there, and making sure that the speakers are all happy and that the rooms are set up properly every day for the different things that have to happen at the conference.

Teddy Smith 
You're the shield.

Jamie Davis
all the AVs working, all that stuff falls underneath the conference director hat. So I'll be scrambling around doing a lot of things. However, I will say this, if you see me jogging by, wave, say hi, I will stop and talk to you for a few seconds, at least to get your name and shake your hand. So I urge people to come over and say hello to me. Just understand I might have to skedaddle pretty quickly because I've got to get on to handle something that needs to be dealt with.

Teddy Smith
Yeah, no offense.

Jamie Davis 
Yeah, no offense. So, but that's all that's all part of it. And I'm really looking forward to a great successful conference this year.

Teddy Smith 
Great. So thank you so much for that. There's been loads of really great tips, especially around the newsletters and how you do that networking. think that's been a real help for those people. If people want to get in touch with you or to follow you around anywhere, where's the best place to do that?

Jamie Davis 
You can find my books at jamiedavisbooks .com and you can find me on Facebook under Jamie Davis author and Jamie Davis books, so that's pretty much the best way to find me online.

Teddy Smith 
Great. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for today. Just so just last time for the final question, what's the book you recommend that everyone should be reading?

Jamie Davis
the book that everyone should be reading. Let me see here. I pulled it up. I'm going to suggest a series of books for indie authors. It's the Successful Indie Author series by Craig Martel. It's a five book series that includes things like reliable strategies for marketing, become a successful indie author. There's release strategies, collaborations, writing compelling fiction, and pricing strategies. They're all great books. available. You can get all five of them, I think, for like $16. So that's a great series. Craig's a good friend of mine, and he's just all about giving back to the author community.

Teddy Smith
Yeah, I've interviewed Craig, he's amazing. Those books are really easy to digest and short, so really good place to start if you're wanting to get into self -obstructing. Yeah, thank you so much for today. That's been really helpful. Looking forward to meeting you face to face in Vegas and we'll speak again soon.

Jamie Davis 
Yeah, definitely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in November.

Teddy Smith
Thanks, see you later.