The Publishing Performance Show

James Blatch - Decoding the Self-Publishing Formula for Author Success

• Teddy Smith • Episode 7

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James Blatch is a former BBC Defence Reporter, BBFC Film Examiner, and author of military aviation thrillers. His reporting career included coverage from HMS Invincible during the Operation Desert Fox build-up, Kuwait's Ali Al Salem allied air base, the Arctic Circle, and the UK air offensive during the Kosovo Conflict in 1999. James is also the co-founder of the Self Publishing Formula and organizer of the Self Publishing Show Live conference.

In this episode:

  • James' journey from BBC reporter to novelist
  • How his defense reporting experience influences his writing
  • The inspiration behind his first book "Final Flight"
  • Using NaNoWriMo to kickstart writing
  • The value of working with a book coach
  • Understanding the "why" behind your writing
  • Plotting techniques and book structure
  • Marketing strategies for self-published authors
  • Success with German translations
  • Organizing and running the Self Publishing Show Live conference
  • The importance of networking for authors
  • Thoughts on traditional vs self-publishing
  • Advice for new authors starting out


Resources mentioned:


Book recommendations:

  • "Save the Cat! Writes a Novel" by Jessica Brody
  • "On Writing" by Stephen King


Connect with James Blatch:


Connect with Teddy Smith:


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


[00:00:00] Teddy: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the publishing performance show. I'm really happy today to be interviewing the fabulous James Blatch, who is one of the big names in the self publishing world. He is the host of the self publishing show live. He works with Mark Dawson at the self publishing formula, and he's also the author of some unbelievably amazing Successful books in the self publishing world, all about the Cold War and the RAF and aeroplanes and [00:00:30] wars and things like that.

[00:00:31] Teddy: Basically books that are all sort of books I love to read. So I'm so happy to be able to interview him. And today we're talking all about networking as an author, how you can get your best sales up on Amazon. Using your newsletter and author websites to generate sales and much, much more. So I think you're going to really enjoy the show and I hope you have fun.

[00:00:51] Teddy: Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the publishing format show. I'm here with James Blatch, who's the author of three authors, all focused around the Air Force and Cold [00:01:00] War history. And he's a former BBC defense reporter and a film examiner of the British form of film classifications. Uh, thanks for joining us, James.

[00:01:09] James: Hey, Teddy. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:11] Teddy: Yeah. So it's been great to speak to you. I've wanted to have you on as one of my first guests because I was meant to go to the self publishing show, but my wife was giving birth at the same time. Um, but you prioritize that with the hospital, uh, came first, I'm afraid. Um, but I would love to hear a bit more about [00:01:30] that later in the show, but I'd like to talk to you more about your books at first.

[00:01:33] Teddy: So I know you've got final flights, which is one I've been reading recently, and I've really been really enjoying it. It's focused around sort of the Air Force and the RAF during the Cold War. Um, tell us a bit about that book and your inspirations with it. 

[00:01:47] James: Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, but everyone says they have a book in them, right?

[00:01:50] James: And now you meet people all the time. I've got a book of me and that, that was the book that was in me. And the, the books that followed it have been a little bit more like an author writing a book, whereas that book was the one that, [00:02:00] that fell out of me. A lot. I'd started and stopped a few novels over the years when I was younger.

[00:02:05] James: I used to like writing and thought I could write books, but it just wasn't accessible or a realistic career for most people. And so, like everyone else, they just got put in dusty drawers. And then it was in November 2010. I was working at the British Board of Film Classification. You mentioned there's a film examiner.

[00:02:23] James: And I logged into the early days of Twitter back then, and I saw that one of my friends was doing something called NaNoWriMo. [00:02:30] And I didn't know what NaNoWriMo was, never heard of it, but he posted in his tweet, said, I'm going to be doing this to stave off mental torpor. That's what he said in his tweet.

[00:02:39] James: And I clicked on the link and saw you write a novel in a month. You know, people wouldn't know what NaNoWriMo is. It's 50, 000 words in a month, so it's about 1600 words a day. Yeah, it's a program, 

[00:02:49] Teddy: isn't it? The nano course. 

[00:02:51] James: Yeah, well, it's, it's just something you do. You can sign up. I think it's there is a kind of website and you can join groups where you can just do it by yourself.

[00:02:58] James: You don't have to, it's just a thing to [00:03:00] do in November. And I thought, well, I will do that. And I guess I had been thinking about this for a while, because this story sort of fell out of me fully formed, which was weird. It's never happened since. But basically, and this is a little bit daddy issues type thing, my father was a RAF pilot.

[00:03:19] James: And I didn't really know what he did in the Air Force, he'd stopped flying fixed wing aircraft by the time I was, well, about around the time I was born. So I remember him flying hovercraft, which I became obsessed with as a little [00:03:30] boy, seeing him flying this massive hovercraft, really noisy things, military ones, down in the South Coast.

[00:03:35] James: But I, I think I just assumed he must have flown freighters or done something not particularly interesting because he never spoke about his RAF career. Then I got his log books as a teenager, started looking at them, and I couldn't believe the range of exciting aircraft that he flew. And it turned out he was a test pilot.

[00:03:52] James: So he was a decorated test pilot, and he worked for six and a half years at Boscombe Dam, a secret trial space, which is still there [00:04:00] in Wiltshire. And he flew virtually every aircraft the RAF had, and he put it through his paces. He had a new aircraft to introduce in the Argosy. And he flew the lightning when that came in.

[00:04:09] James: I mean, literally everything Vulcan bombers was, was one of his main things. And it was incredibly exciting and challenging work. And he still doesn't sort of talk about it. And I, and he's a very undemonstrative person, you know, he's not the, I love you type. He's not the huggy type. He is the kind of standoffish, the silent generation called him.

[00:04:28] James: And when I, when I say this, a [00:04:30] lot of people say to me, including a lot of Americans actually say, my father was exactly the same. So. Very generational. His father was in the First World War. So his father came back from the trenches, a difficult man, and, you know, who knows what he saw, and we can understand maybe that left him troubled and unable to connect emotionally.

[00:04:48] James: Sort of the way we analyze things today, but his generation didn't analyze it like that, and they just put their head down. And so this story was about a test pilot in his thirties who [00:05:00] in the 1960s, was there. And I, I knew that I would have this moment in the story where he would come to a choice where he either, he knew something was going wrong.

[00:05:11] James: He either put his head down, obeyed the rules and ended up basically as my dad, or he stood up and said, I'm not doing this anymore. This is wrong. And he went out of his way and risked everything to save some lives. And save, and saves himself and became somebody who could look other people in the eye and [00:05:30] emotionally connect.

[00:05:30] James: So kind of fantasy story about a service brat who was brought up one wondering who his father was and where he came from. So that, that story was built around that theme, which I think is really interesting because I've struggled a little bit with theme in my later books. They're more like, I don't know, James Patterson style novels that, that just where things happen rather than there's a, there's a kind of.

[00:05:51] James: Theme to it. A character arc journey is very strong. Those novels, those sort of thriller novels are a bit more plotty rather than character [00:06:00] y. Um, but that first book, that's what that was about. And it took me, it was a painful writing process. It took me 10 years to write it. Although six years in the middle, I did nothing on it.

[00:06:08] James: I just wrote it at the beginning. I did get it finished in NaNoWriMo. I got it finished by Christmas afterwards. Did my 50, 000 words successfully. Then wrote it up to about 90, 100, 000 words and then just knew it was a mess and left it. And then six years later, got it out. A few more tortured years later, got a book coach who helped me revise it properly.

[00:06:28] James: And that got it finally [00:06:30] out. And that was my, that was me learning how to write a book, that process. Um, learning how a novel works. 

[00:06:36] Teddy: Interesting news book coach did what did they do to help you? How did that process work? 

[00:06:41] James: So I I had my podcast back in the day and I interviewed Jenny Nash She was a big editor based in LA's edited lots of best selling books around the world's fantastic editor She was starting a book coaching service.

[00:06:52] James: I didn't know what book coaching was. I knew what editing was But the what the sort of theory behind book coaching is that [00:07:00] before book coaching you have editing and what you do with editing is you work in the dark by yourself and you write a hundred thousand word novel and when you finish doing this mammoth unbelievable task.

[00:07:10] James: You then hand it to someone and say, what do you think of this, which is ass around face, right? And it's, there's no, there's no other industry that works like that. You don't go off and design a car entirely by yourself after a year and then go to your boss and say, well, I've designed this car. Do you like it?

[00:07:25] James: Yeah. You know, it doesn't work like that. It starts on the drawing board saying, well, what do people want? What are we [00:07:30] doing here? And, and so with the novel, you can do it the other way around where you have an editor who will talk to you right at the beginning about what structure your book's going to be like, what themes it's going to have in it, how you're going to achieve that.

[00:07:42] James: And then every time you write a scene or a chapter, you send it to them, they mark it and they send it back and they say, look, this has worked really well in this or this hasn't worked. Rewrite this. And so you work with an editor as you're writing the book. And that two things happen. One is the book's more fully formed, fitting better to what you [00:08:00] set out for it to be.

[00:08:01] James: Secondly, you're learning on the job. how writing works and how character works. So I spoke to Jenny on this interview. She described all that and I thought this is for me. 

[00:08:11] Yeah. 

[00:08:12] James: I contacted her. I said to her immediately off air, I want to use the service. And she set me up with one of her, she helped me, she helped me sort out the theme of the book.

[00:08:20] James: I didn't really know why I was writing that book. We'll tell you this quickly as well that so I've told you why I wrote that book, but I didn't know [00:08:30] that at the time I just knew I had the story it was quite exciting But when when the book was a mess and I wanted to revise it and get it out Jenny said to me I want you to write down a paragraph and explain why you need to tell this story Why do you need to tell this story?

[00:08:45] James: Interesting question. So I wrote down this, this whole page of why I needed to tell it, and that's when all of that came, and it dawned on me why I was writing, why I was so obsessed with this and wanted to find answers in there. And she said, that's fantastic, because that's the strongest start you could possibly imagine for a [00:09:00] novel, is to have that motivation.

[00:09:02] James: And then the idea was to kind of weave that into the DNA of the script all the way through, beginning to end. And so that was a really important part of the process was Jenny asking me why I needed to write the book. And then the second part was working with a book coach to get it done. 

[00:09:15] Teddy: Right. Yeah.

[00:09:16] Teddy: Cause you often hear people say, Oh, you also hear people talk on these podcasts say, Oh, you've got to think about what is your, why, what is your why? And it's kind of like this big concepts that is quite difficult to understand, but the way you've just described it, you can see why it's so important, especially if you're writing [00:09:30] something so personal to yourself because you can get those themes you need into the story.

[00:09:34] Teddy: Right. 

[00:09:34] James: Yeah. Yeah, I think the difficulty is for people who write a lot of books and a lot of my friends writes, you know, Cara, who is my co host of a podcast now, she does like a book every three weeks or something ridiculous. I think for them it is quite, I wonder, do they, why do you need to write this book?

[00:09:48] James: It might be a very prosaic answer for them, which is because it's my job. 

[00:09:52] Yeah. 

[00:09:53] James: I write books all the time. Not every book has to have this life changing theme in it, but it really helps if you feel [00:10:00] that, you know, for instance, you feel that The man who doesn't speak loudest doesn't get what they want in life and you want to kind of prove that wrong That's a strong motivation to write a story about this classic superhero spider man type thing the quiet Slightly awkward one who proves everybody wrong So if you do if you can latch on to a theme it does help enormously in getting the book done 

[00:10:21] Teddy: Definitely I can I can totally see why you say that and do you think talking about those themes and things?

[00:10:26] Teddy: Do you think your experience with the being a BBC reporter [00:10:30] like? I guess you're in conflict zones and things like that. Did those, did that have any effect on, for example, the themes or even the characters? And did it help you to write particular types of people? And, you know, did it help basically write the book?

[00:10:43] James: It definitely helped write the book. I think the main help was being around in crew rooms in the air force or squadron rooms and in the army. And being a part of that atmosphere, that banter, the way they talk, the way they, the command structure works, the sarcasm, all the rest of it. I think that that's [00:11:00] something that first of all, I loved it, loved being in that environment.

[00:11:03] James: I know I was lucky enough to stay on aircraft carriers a few times and operate from there. And just being in that environment without having to get up early and polish my shoes like Uh, I wanted to make sure that got into the book, particularly the kind of black humor, the coping mechanisms that are very well developed in the military, particularly the Royal Air Force.

[00:11:23] James: A couple of things happened to me that, that left an indelible mark. I don't know where you are in the book, so I don't want any spoilers, um, [00:11:30] uh, for this, but I will tell you that I was, uh, I knew a station commander at RAF Wittering in Cambridge. I knew him very well, a guy called Chris Moran. High Flyer in the Air Force was, was on his way to being Chief of the Air Staff.

[00:11:42] James: Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack whilst running a triathlon years later. But anyway, at the time, this is back, back in the nineties. I've gotten very well with him and he always said to me, you know, the way it should be with the press between someone like me, a senior RF officer and you, the press, is that you should be able to come onto my [00:12:00] base at any time and ask questions.

[00:12:02] James: And if I don't like you being here and don't want to answer the questions, it's because I'm doing something wrong. So he wanted a transparent look. I'm obviously not operational security, it's a different thing, but a transparency to everything. So we had a really strong relationship and he sent me flying in Harrier.

[00:12:15] James: Which was fantastic. 

[00:12:17] Teddy: That's amazing. 

[00:12:17] James: But what happens in the Air Force and the military is every two or three years they move people on. So he did his couple of years at Wittering and then he said, here's the new guy coming in who you don't know from Adam. And suddenly, you know, [00:12:30] I hate to use the word cynical like contact, but he was a friend as I'm very useful because I could pick up the phone to him and say, we're doing a story about two F 15s in the Air Force.

[00:12:38] James: Can you just explain something to me? And he would, even though he's nothing to do with the United States Air Force, he would have the knowledge to give me background. 

[00:12:45] Yeah. 

[00:12:45] James: So it was very useful. Anyway, a new guy comes in, a guy called David, who was very nice, very lovely, just been equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh for a couple of years, so he was looking rather portly at that stage and had lots of wine and cheese for a couple of years, then coming back to Harrier flying, he was doing, [00:13:00] doing his refresher training on that, on the Harrier jet, which is a complex aircraft to fly.

[00:13:05] James: And I met him and Chris very kindly introduced us. It was a Friday and he said that he's taking over from Monday. So his first week's next week. And I remember him saying to me, what can I do for you? You know, basically, why are you here? And I wasn't sure how the relationship was going to be going. And I said, look, when there's good news stories, it's easy.

[00:13:24] James: So if you're doing a charity tractor pull down the runway or something we can do that fine, you know But [00:13:30] my editors every day they wake up. They don't worry about the good news story at the end of the show They worry about the headline, you know, what's the news story at the beginning? And unfortunately that sometimes when it's bad news That's when I'm here and that's kind of a test of the relationship of your transparency when things are going wrong How you deal with it?

[00:13:46] James: Are you up front? Do you front up to the press? He said this is what happened and I said usually those opportunities Those moments while they're not very pleasant at the time can be opportunities to show your professionalism. And so that, that's the [00:14:00] conversation we had a week later, Friday, I'm driving around in the County.

[00:14:06] James: It's two o'clock in the afternoon, get a phone call for my editor. And he said, a Harrier has crashed and there's no news of the pilot. And so we've got a bad feeling about this. And we think it's going to be our lead story. I need you to get to witchery. So I've got to witching. It was the middle of winter.

[00:14:23] James: It was dark. I got there about four o'clock already. It was a slowish news day. So this was going to be headlines on the [00:14:30] main news as well. So all the satellite trucks are in the car park. I got there and everyone knows. I know what I knew the station commander. I'm on and off base quite a lot. So I got a little bit jeering for my colleagues in the press.

[00:14:39] James: I know he was in the RF reporters here, but weirdly they hadn't said anything to anybody and nobody was let on and nobody come out to speak to anyone. So there was this vacuum of news. We knew nothing. They'd confirmed that the pilot had died. But we didn't know anything more than that. Was it a training mission?

[00:14:57] James: The Gulf War was building up at the time [00:15:00] and this was not the way to deal with stuff. Um, so I stood there not really sure what to do. And as I stood there, a officer came out and said, James, you've got some, there's a part that you left something, your ID, you left something in the guard room. And I was like, I don't know what he's talking about, but I followed him into the garden, more jeering from my press colleagues or 30 or so people standing around in the guard room.

[00:15:21] James: They took me through the guard room. Out the back of the building, put me in a car and drove me to the middle of the base. And I said, what's going on? And I said to them, look, [00:15:30] you've got to say something because people are going to go to press in a minute. They're going to go live on the news and they're going to make stuff up, you know, not make stuff up, but it's not a best way.

[00:15:38] James: They said, you'll find out in a moment, got in the middle. of the base. There's a guy called Les Garcide Beatty who was the second in command of the base and he said, uh, he said, David's dead. So that was the new station commander. Christ. So he'd been there one week and he'd been on a training mission and he'd done a, he'd A loop, a loft [00:16:00] attack where you pull the aircraft up, got confused in cloud, come down 70 degrees nose down, hit the ground at 500 miles an hour.

[00:16:08] James: And that happened in the blink of an eye at Barnard Castle. And so, you know, I suddenly sort of looked around, I saw everyone was in tears and there was this repressive, oppressive, it was shocking to see it that close. And Les said to me, What do you think we should do? And I said, wait, obviously they don't, they didn't really need my help at that stage.

[00:16:26] James: Les had worked things out. It had just taken them a little while to [00:16:30] gather their wits about them. They invited the press on. I said, put them in front of a Harrier, be in your flying suit, get out of your uniform, be in a flying suit, look operational. That's what he did. He did it all brilliantly and he answered all the questions.

[00:16:43] James: And, um, and that was done, but as we went out, we went past the officer's mess and let's said, do you want to come in for a drink? I was slightly odd as I got closer to the officer's mess. It was the noisiest place. It was like the aftermath [00:17:00] of a wedding. It was packed to the gunnels, everybody in the station, or officers, every officer in the station was in there and they were drunk.

[00:17:09] James: Um, and I actually said to Les, I don't think it's right for me to come in here, so he said, fair enough, and he took me back to my car. But that's how they dealt with that, and that was a little creak of the door open for a civilian to look into the military world of how they deal with stuff. And it might look incongruous to some people, and I [00:17:30] know the Americans do it differently.

[00:17:31] James: I found that out as well. getting drunk, back slapping, telling stories that evening. It's because half the blokes in that room have to get back into their jets the next day and do exactly what David was doing, knowing that they're a few seconds and one mistake away from the same fate. Um, and that's, that's the reality of the military life.

[00:17:51] James: And I became incredibly impressed with the individuals who did it and also struck by the drama of it all. [00:18:00] So I wanted to capture that in my books. That's kind of one of my motivations. 

[00:18:04] Teddy: So I guess it's important to capture, like, if you are going to write about a topic, maybe if you know about it, obviously it helps loads because you can get into those sort of nitty gritty details that you wouldn't have been able to get having not known about it.

[00:18:16] Teddy: But have you done something? Have you ever written a book, maybe about something you didn't know quite as much about? And have you had to face that sort of research? How have you done that research? 

[00:18:26] James: Yeah, definitely. So my second book was set, I want to set in America [00:18:30] for purely commercial reasons, but also I sort of interested in, in the test flying.

[00:18:34] James: When people think of test parts, they often think of the astronauts and Edwards Air Force Base in the States and Pax River top go well test flying. So you get very geeky now about the difference, and obviously America's a big writing market. So I wanted to set a book in America and I had an American exchange.

[00:18:52] James: test pilot in my first book called Red Brunson. And so the second book was his story like the year before he ended up in England. [00:19:00] So yeah, that was one where I, I wasn't as familiar with the culture of the environment then it's very different in the sixties as well. And also some of the mechanics of how people got through the test pilot school and stuff.

[00:19:12] James: So I had to do quite a lot of research like that. I read a couple of books. I read first man, which is a book about Neil Armstrong. He was there exactly that era. There was also, they made a film around that time, which was useful for me. And I read what I could online. A few people had written articles about their time at Edwards and test flying.

[00:19:29] James: [00:19:30] So yeah, I did, I did research, but you know, I'm very geekily interested in all this stuff. So it didn't really feel like a labor. It was a labor of love, 

[00:19:39] Teddy: I guess. Yeah, definitely. Um, the other day I was actually looking at this tweets someone did about the way that J. K. Rowling like plots her stories and they did this like biro drawn, um, like, uh, I guess it's kind of like a, uh, an Excel spreadsheet, but hand drawn.

[00:19:53] Teddy: Do you use any, when you're plotting, do you use anything similar to that or do you have a way of like making sure your story follows a particular structure or [00:20:00] anything like, any, any way of doing that? 

[00:20:02] James: I saw that as well. I mean, that was incredibly impressive. 

[00:20:06] Teddy: Yeah. It's amazing. 

[00:20:07] James: Handwritten as well.

[00:20:08] James: Yeah. Handwritten, very detailed plotted. That was just, it was the whole series, I believe. 

[00:20:12] Teddy: Yeah. 

[00:20:13] James: And the whole series art was in there. So not surprising. One of the best selling, probably the best selling series of all time had that amount of work going into it. Um, I do have a secret. Theory about plotting is that people say they're we used to say pantsers and plotters It's not a great expression [00:20:30] discovery writings probably a better way of saying it and some people say they're just discovery writers They they can't bear plotting, but I think everybody's a plotter I think either you just have a process where you don't have to write it down your brain can cope with that kind of Long form structure in it.

[00:20:44] James: I'm not like that. I do need to plot I don't do anything as clever or detailed as, uh, J. K. Rowling, but what I do do is I'll probably write out in three to four thousand words, I'll write out the story. [00:21:00] 

[00:21:00] So 

[00:21:00] James: I'll describe it, um, without actually writing the book, obviously. 

[00:21:04] Right. 

[00:21:05] James: And in most cases, I don't even need to refer back to that again, having gone through the process of writing it out, then allows me to write the book.

[00:21:12] James: And in terms of structure, I didn't know this at the first time. I don't think I've read many craft books when I was writing my first book, Final Flight. But for the second and third books, my fourth one now, there's two books I would recommend that I've read. But the main one is, is, uh, Save the cat writes a [00:21:30] novel.

[00:21:31] James: So save the cat is the was the kind of Bible of screenwriting I don't know how old it is probably 15 20 years old something like that But it basically is called save the cat because if you've got a hero a positive hero They need to do something like save a cat in the first scene So it tells you all the all these beats you've got to you've got to hit and the long night, dark night of the soul.

[00:21:53] James: And once you understand Save the Cat structure, you will see it in every film you watch. You will see, ah, here we are. Here's the long night, dark night [00:22:00] of the soul moment where everything's gloomy and nothing's, there's no way out apparently for your character. So I, I use Save the Cat. And, um, and have those beats written out and that helps inform the way that I plot my book.

[00:22:15] James: But I, I don't do anything too detailed in that. Like I said, I sort of just write out the structure knowing what beats are going to be hit. 

[00:22:21] Teddy: Yeah. So I'm, most of my books are, well, all my books are nonfiction. Uh, so I kind of do a similar thing where I'm like saying what points I need to [00:22:30] get across each part.

[00:22:31] Teddy: So I have like an outline, which is usually about 1000 words or so. And it kind of plots out each chapter and what points you need to. You need to be guessing on how they link back. I find it makes it much easier to get that editing done at the end as well. 

[00:22:44] James: Yes, yeah, definitely. And it's interesting that people writing non fiction plot in the same way, because you often think non fiction books are different, but it's all about telling a story.

[00:22:54] James: And you have the same beats with non fiction that you do with fiction. 

[00:22:58] In fact, the best, 

[00:22:58] James: the very best nonfiction books [00:23:00] read a bit like novels. I would, I would say Darva Sobel's Longitude is a fantastic nonfiction book about, it sounds really dry about the invention of, an accurate wristwatch which, but it's saved, it has saved millions of lives because they need to know where they are at sea and they can only do that with an accurate watch.

[00:23:16] James: So this guy called Harrison eventually made, but it is brilliant. And there's another book by Claire Tomlin, who's a brilliant autobiographist also a biographist who wrote a book on peaks and both of those books are compelling [00:23:30] reading books, a bit like reading a novel and they're both nonfiction books.

[00:23:33] James: I think it's the same thing. 

[00:23:34] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Especially if you want to get that, make it readable and make people actually want to, you know, buy your next book as well. Yeah. Um, before you talk about launching a book in America because of commercial reasons. 

[00:23:46] Yeah. 

[00:23:47] Teddy: Yeah. What about so that was obviously like a marketing decision you made with your books.

[00:23:53] Teddy: What marketing stuff have you done? Like, have you, especially, have you done any advertising or have you had a particular marketing plan which [00:24:00] you followed for your books? 

[00:24:02] James: Yeah. So I started by building up a mailing list. So I, I wrote my first book very publicly, you know, I talked about the, the tortured process and the agony on my podcast.

[00:24:12] James: So I ended up with a lot of authors on my mailing list, which actually turned out to be not particularly helpful. Because Amazon really cares about your also boughts, you know, who's buying your books. It helps inform Amazon's algorithms to who to send your book out to as a possible prospect. [00:24:30] And if you're getting people who read romance buying your book because they listen to the podcast, which is lovely of them 

[00:24:35] to 

[00:24:35] James: do that, but it was, so I actually found it quite difficult selling my book organically.

[00:24:41] James: So I used advertising, 

[00:24:42] Teddy: yeah, Facebook 

[00:24:44] James: ads, yeah, Facebook ads, advertising, actually Facebook ads. Facebook ads was my main advertising method. And the reason for that is that even with Amazon ads, it's still working off that algorithm. Which is a bit confused for me at the beginning. I didn't have, you [00:25:00] know, I need.

[00:25:01] James: men in their 50s onwards who are interested in aviation, military, air museums, and stuff like that, which I can do on Facebook. And despite a lot of interest disappearing on Facebook, some of those are still there for me. And when you're driving traffic, that traffic you're driving, it's really important to drive the right traffic to your book because driving the wrong traffic, your book is a shortcut to getting bad reviews, bad reviews.

[00:25:23] James: Books that get bad views don't normally get bad views because they're bad. Whatever that means they get bad views because they're in the hands of the [00:25:30] wrong reader. Somebody's confounded their expectations. So I use Facebook ads to relentlessly drive audience member to my books and that Gradually undid all those disparate buyers had at the beginning and fourth and helped Amazon understand who my readers are.

[00:25:47] James: So it took, that was a long haul couple of years running mainly Facebook ads. Then I started running Amazon ads. They started working, but I've got to say my biggest breakthrough in the last year and a half has been my German [00:26:00] translations. 

[00:26:00] Teddy: Okay. That's interesting because, um, yeah, I spoke to I spoke to Brownell Landrum last week and she said her, um, her translations have been like.

[00:26:08] Teddy: In Germany have also done exactly the same thing. They've been amazing. 

[00:26:10] James: Yeah, it's been my, it's put me, I mean, making a profit with two and a half books, two novels and a novella is difficult. You know, you need a series of three, four, five, six before you start really getting the read through giving you profit.

[00:26:24] James: Very profitable in Germany, which is fantastic. 

[00:26:26] Right. 

[00:26:26] James: And I think partly that's because my German also [00:26:30] bought hadn't been contaminated. 

[00:26:31] Teddy: Right. Okay. 

[00:26:32] James: Cause I didn't have German listeners buying the books. How do you, 

[00:26:35] Teddy: translate them? Do you get a, do you use AI or do you use a person to, to, so 

[00:26:39] James: far I have used people, humans.

[00:26:42] James: I've used fiverr. com and I found a really nice guy. Um, a top tip is if you get your books translated into German, you need to get somebody in Austria to do it. Because a German translator in Germany, if they've translated your book, owned copyright of that version.

[00:26:57] James: Oh, right. Which is absolutely nuts, [00:27:00] but it's German law. Yeah, completely crazy. Normally they don't do anything with it. It's just a kind of sits there, but they could screw you over. And it was an unscrupulous person. That's my business point of view. You don't really want it like that. So for a German translator, I think maybe you could have a pre contract that would work around that.

[00:27:18] James: But the easiest thing is to find one in Austria. 

[00:27:21] Teddy: Right. 

[00:27:21] James: So, uh, it's, you know, an extension of the same language. So that's what I have. I have an Austrian, uh, translator and because it was [00:27:30] five or not one of these kind of, you know, I wasn't paying 10, 000. I was paying 1, 000 to get my book translated. Yeah. It was ridiculously cheap compared to a lot of people paying.

[00:27:39] James: Because of that, I then got a second separate editor in Germany. This, the editing can be done in Germany. So we've got a German editor who went over that translation and made another pass at it, that which is another thousand. So it cost me two thousand dollars, probably pounds, two thousand pounds to get my books translated each.

[00:27:57] James: But, AI is moving [00:28:00] really quickly at the moment, uh, Anthropic's Claude is apparently stellar at at translation, so I've been using Anthropic for all my blurbs and ad copy in Germany. So, I'm absolutely not averse at all to using AI in the future, and I may try it out with my novella, which I haven't translated yet.

[00:28:19] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. That's really interesting. I didn't know that about the Austrian, but also the translations. Yeah. It's two people who said that now. So it must be a thing that I think the German market is actually quite under represented. People don't really, people concentrate on [00:28:30] translating Spanish because of America.

[00:28:31] Teddy: But I think Germany, Germany is actually the second biggest Amazon market. It's bigger than the UK, which it is. 

[00:28:37] James: And it's growing and it's where probably we were in terms of take up of Kindles and that's where we make most of our money selling e books and take up of Kindles is probably where we were five years ago.

[00:28:46] James: So I remember five years ago, it was a lot easier to sell books in the UK today. So, so I would say, uh, take advantage of that, but do it properly. Don't put out a half arse translation. Germany, quite tricky language to translate into because people there's [00:29:00] formal and informal in Germany, and you have to work that out in advance.

[00:29:03] James: What characters are going to be spoken described informally, informally. And stuff that you don't necessarily know about. And then yeah, so invest properly in the translations. Cause you'll get very bad reviews very quickly if they're not, it's not done well. 

[00:29:15] Teddy: Yeah, that makes sense. But go back to your main list that you're talking about before and using your main list and it wasn't right.

[00:29:20] Teddy: That is actually, I've never, basically I've got a couple of main lists and because I've got a couple of businesses and I've, I've never like wanted to put my books onto a main list that wasn't relevant [00:29:30] for exactly the same reasons. You have, have you ever used like one of the services, that, that have main lists or newsletters and they do the marketing for you, something like written word media or one of those sorts of.

[00:29:41] James: Yeah. So I do absolutely use them, but I use them for promotions for the books. So book bub is the big one. I'm getting a featured deal and I did get an early featured deal with my, with final flight, which got it, got it, take it onto the runway and taking off, which was great, but I use them for promotions.

[00:29:57] James: But your mailing list is going to always going to be the [00:30:00] strongest launch pad you have, uh, particularly for launches. Um, and so getting that listing and in my case, gradually whittling away the authors and just getting it full of the readers of my books has been, has been my target, but yeah, I written word media.

[00:30:16] James: I mean, I'm partly in business with them as well because we, we founded hello books, which is a similar service to free booksy. And that's we have a partnership with WWM, so, but I still use them as a customer. I use the free booksie and hello books [00:30:30] and apply for a book bub. So what I tend to do is apply for a book bub, get rejected and then use hello books and free booksie.

[00:30:39] Teddy: Do you, um, when in your books, do you have like a QR code or something for helping people to sign up? To your main list or how do you gather those? You know, 

[00:30:47] James: I have a link. I don't have a QR code. I don't sell a lot of print copies. So I'm not sure the QR code would do very much. But I have a link at the back of it.

[00:30:56] James: And yeah, so I have. So what you can do at the back of your book [00:31:00] is the ideal thing is to have some sort of lead magnet. To to give away in return for an email address. So ideally you'd have another novella, which I have written a novella. So I could put that in the back of the book and give that away for free.

[00:31:13] James: And then people join your mailing list. They get a free book and they're on your main list, which is worth a lot to you, as I say, marketing in the future. 

[00:31:19] Yeah. 

[00:31:20] James: For final flight, I actually came up with the device. And again, as you're reading the book, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but there's something that links to the story that you can get.

[00:31:29] James: In return for joining [00:31:30] my main list, once you get to the end of the book and it's worked, it's worked nicely for me. 

[00:31:34] Teddy: Exciting. You're going to get my email now just because of, uh, you've got to finish 

[00:31:39] James: the book first though, cause it does contain spoilers. 

[00:31:41] Teddy: Okay. We'll do. Um, so thanks. That was really interesting about your book.

[00:31:46] Teddy: Let's go. Should we go on to, I'd like to talk a bit more about the other side of your business. So the self pub, while your podcast and also the. The self publishing show. So tell us, so the self publishing show that was in London, that was a few months ago, a month and a half ago. [00:32:00] Um, how did it go? And you know, what was the highlights from this show?

[00:32:05] James: Yeah. So we, we had the idea of having a, an independent, an indie author conference in, in London. You'll, you'll know that there's a big one in Vegas every year. It used to be called 20 books. Author nation is taking over this year and There was nothing really on this side of the Atlantic. What you had was a couple of smaller versions of 20 books in Europe.

[00:32:26] James: So there's one in Madrid, uh, is it Madrid? Yeah, Madrid. [00:32:30] Um, and you had the London Book Fair. The London Book Fair was a pretty dismal experience for indie authors. You'd go to the London Book Fair, absolutely dominated by traditional publishing. So huge stands from Penguin, Random House, and Simon Schuster with queues of authors trying to get deals with them.

[00:32:47] James: And the independent authors. were shunted up to one end like the poop deck of a ship up at the top. So it was quite good in that little area when you got there because everyone you knew was there, but it did feel like [00:33:00] we were a slightly, uh, irritating side show for, for LBF, even though I suspect LBF is very keen on indie publishing, but when they sell a big stand for a hundred thousand pounds to Simon Schuster each year, obviously they're, they're going to be focused on that and we don't spend the money that they do.

[00:33:17] James: So I understand that. But we felt there should be a conference. It's just indie authors in the UK and Amazon KDP were very supportive of that because I think they were buying stands at London Book Fair and thinking this is [00:33:30] the best use of our money. So when we said we wanted to do a conference, it would just be indie authors and a thousand of them in a hall in London, they said, We'll sponsor it.

[00:33:38] James: You know, they were, they wanted to be a part of it. So we've got them on board and we did the first one in 2020, uh, March the 9th. So we were that close to having to cancel it. We're like four days away from lockdown, but we, we got it, we got it on and it was fabulous and great fun. We did the next one, obviously in 22, having skipped 21 and 20.

[00:33:59] James: So it's 24. [00:34:00] Is that our fourth one? Is that our fourth? I guess it is, yeah. Must be. Yeah. Oh yeah. which is amazing. Um, and yeah, so I think the cost, it's a, it's a very expensive show to put on. So this year I sort of came to a decision even before, sales were a bit slow, everything slowed down a bit this year.

[00:34:15] James: I don't know how you found it in your business, but it's definitely been a slowdown the last 12 months. I think book sales have followed that as well. And our ticket sales weren't as good as I wanted them to be. We can seat 900 there and we ended up, I think 770 something, but I wanted it to be sold out [00:34:30] and it was a struggle to get to 770.

[00:34:32] James: And I was thinking, well, we're charging 199 pounds plus VAT because we had to add VAT this year. So people are paying 225 pounds, whatever it is. Um for a ticket plus they've got a hotel because it's a two day conference in london hotels in london are expensive So it's you know, probably costing people the best part of a thousand pounds to come down and 

[00:34:49] yeah 

[00:34:49] James: do the conference So I actually made a decision even before we'd started that next year.

[00:34:54] James: We'll do the conference. The main conference will do on one day And we'll charge 99 and [00:35:00] we'll fill the hall and I want to fill the hall with Indie authors and I don't really care about making profit or not. I care about covering our costs. I don't necessarily want to lose money on it. But I want there to be a moment when the vast majority of active Indie authors in the UK are in one room at the same time talking about what they love and what they do.

[00:35:18] James: Yeah. So we'll do that, but we'll bolt on a more intense workshop day for those authors who are already making money from their books, have a business that can afford to spend. And that will be a couple of hundred pounds [00:35:30] to to take part in. Yeah. Um, so that's our plan. 

[00:35:33] Teddy: And so, because that sounds like a great plan because I've, for me in my business, I've always had thought networking is one of the biggest things you can do to try and to grow the business, to meet new people, get new opportunities.

[00:35:43] Teddy: Has that, has that something you've focused on? Has there any been any particular, not including your own show, but other than anything, networking opportunities you've done that have been like, this is amazing. We should be doing this. And have you had some good, met some good people? 

[00:35:57] James: Yeah, I think networking is is being very [00:36:00] important.

[00:36:01] James: It's been very important for the the nonfiction side of my business. So that's the online courses that we learn self publishing. So for that business, getting to know the other big industry players and finding areas where you can help each other. Like, for instance, they could come in and teach your audience something about their products, which is of useful.

[00:36:22] James: So organizations like Draft2Digital, which are aggregators of PublishDrive in Hungary, they'll come in, they'll do a webinar, they'll teach people how to use their products. [00:36:30] Their products are very well used and very important for indie authors. At the same time, they're getting shop front window to our built up main list, which has got a quarter of a million people on it.

[00:36:40] James: So that comes from networking, having those conversations, that's been very important. For book selling. I'm not sure if networking is very important, particularly, I think what's important for authors is finding other people who are similar to you, who you can be friends with, who can help you when you're struggling with plot and being in a little author WhatsApp group and stuff like that.

[00:36:59] James: That's, [00:37:00] that's important and you'll find that at conferences, you'll find those people. The other thing it's good for, I think, is, is finding things on the marketing side that you weren't aware of 

[00:37:09] tricks 

[00:37:10] James: of the trade services that you don't know about. I think all of that generally comes from conversations at conferences.

[00:37:16] James: It's quite hard to sit at home, even with the whole web in front of you and nowhere to start looking. You can take part in some, some Facebook groups. Trust as 

[00:37:24] Teddy: well, because if you're just at home, it's hard to know if the software is any good off. It's worth using. 

[00:37:28] James: Yeah. Who are these [00:37:30] people type thing? Um, but at a conference, if you're standing with a group of six people and some of them will have used that product before and know them and stuff.

[00:37:37] James: So yeah. So I, you know, I'm a big fan of networking. I'd like to say, I don't think it necessarily helps you sell books. I think it helps you create your marketing ecosystem. 

[00:37:45] Yes. 

[00:37:46] James: And perhaps more importantly, you meet for, I've got friends for life where I met at conferences. I just went to in the summer, you know, just stayed with some friends in Maryland in the States a romance author, a sort of science fiction y author, a lit fiction author, [00:38:00] or fiction author, and another historical romance author.

[00:38:03] James: And the four of us are tight. Group of authors who talk about everything and we now go on holiday with each other. We met at a conference in Florida five years ago. So that's the sort of thing that can happen to you. 

[00:38:14] Teddy: Yeah, that's really cool. Love that. Um, have your show, who've been your favorite speaker so far?

[00:38:20] Teddy: Cause I know last year you had, or this year, sorry. You had EL James speaking there, which is amazing. Um, yeah, you've had some great people speaking. 

[00:38:28] James: We have, we have lots of [00:38:30] good speakers. Um, who's been my favorite. There's a guy. So he'll James is really interesting. Obviously one of the global superstars of, of book writing.

[00:38:37] James: I think the biggest 

[00:38:38] Teddy: selling book of the last 10 years or something. 

[00:38:40] James: It's unbelievable how many books she's 170 million. I think she sold copies of that. And if you think she probably made a quid, at least a quid, a copy, that's successful. And I, what I found great about Erica is that she's, although she's traditionally published and she produces her films and stuff and moves in a slightly different sphere from everyone else, she has a very [00:39:00] indie writer mindset.

[00:39:01] James: She, she converses in the language that we understand, but not every traditionally published author does do that. She completely, uh, down with, with the sort of marketing effort we do and running traffic and all the rest of it. 

[00:39:12] Teddy: Yeah. 

[00:39:13] James: Um, I would say one of my favorite authors speakers we've had at the conference is a guy called Mark Racklow.

[00:39:19] James: And I, uh, you weren't there this year, so you wouldn't, um, would have, oh, did he speak this year? Maybe he didn't speak this year. We've had him speak for two years in a row. I think maybe we gave him a rest this year. Now Mark is a German. [00:39:30] He is a nonfiction writer. He writes self help books like 30 days to change your life.

[00:39:34] James: I think it's one of his books. So that sort of thing. When I got to know him, he was living in Barcelona. So when we had him on the podcast, I said to him, I'll tell you what, I'll come and visit you. So I went down to, he was living on a boat in Barcelona. Went down to his boat, interviewed him. He's an infectiously lovely and funny guy.

[00:39:51] James: He now lives in Hungary. 

[00:39:53] Yeah. 

[00:39:53] James: And I bumped into him, actually went over to visit Published Drive, who I just mentioned in Budapest, a few weeks ago, and he came along and we had a few [00:40:00] drinks together. But his speech is absolutely brilliant. And if you want, I'll give a link to to the digital version of our conference.

[00:40:08] James: If people want to watch it, because if you buy this year's conference, you get all the previous years thrown in four previous conferences. So three previous conferences. So he's included in both of those and it's an electrifying. motivational stuff doesn't happen by accident. What you do today decides what's going to happen to you tomorrow.

[00:40:28] James: And doing successful [00:40:30] things and not doing unsuccessful things just for, you know, it's, it's kind of basic stuff, but you need to be told it. And he tells it in a brilliant way. And it's very funny. So Mark Brecklauer is my favorite speaker we've had at the conference. 

[00:40:40] Teddy: Oh, brilliant. I'll definitely give us the link.

[00:40:42] Teddy: We'll put that in the show notes for this. So you can then click it and go to it. Yeah. I've only heard good things about the show. So definitely going to be going next year. Um, Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. 

[00:40:51] James: Good. We better do it then. Yeah. 

[00:40:55] Teddy: So thank you so much for saying there's been loads of great tips.

[00:40:58] Teddy: I think everyone's going to get [00:41:00] loads out of it and it's really interesting to hear what you've been up to. Just, um, have you just touch on one last point you mentioned before you're talking about self published versus published with like 50 shades of gray and things like that.

[00:41:11] Teddy: Have you ever considered trying to go published down the published route for your books or is there any reason why you haven't thought about that? 

[00:41:17] James: I was in self publishing before I started because. writing, you know, so I was already embedded in self publishing. I worked alongside authors.

[00:41:25] James: I learned aspects of the trade, particularly the advertising side without [00:41:30] being an author myself, 

[00:41:31] uh, 

[00:41:31] James: which led me to start a publishing company ironically which I sold this year. But for that reason, I'm a fan of the culture and the control. of self publishing and I'm not a fan of being on somebody else's timetable to write a book.

[00:41:47] James: I would hate that. I would hate to know I've got to hand in this manuscript in September and then I'm going to have the edits back to them in May whenever it is. I don't like, I don't like, conversely, I don't like the slow nature of it [00:42:00] and I don't like the quick deadline nature to the writer. So there's nothing about traditional publishing that attracts me.

[00:42:06] James: Um, I mean, I wouldn't say never forever. I suppose if I get to a point where I simply don't want to open up my Facebook ads accounts anymore, maybe I'd sell my backlist to somebody at some point. But for now, I love, I love being a self published author. I enjoy the marketing and I enjoy the freedom of writing.

[00:42:21] James: If I don't want to write a book, I won't. If I do, I do. Yeah. And that's worth more than Then seeing my book at the airport, which would be nice from a fantasy point of view, [00:42:30] but it doesn't equal the benefits of self publishing to me. 

[00:42:33] Teddy: No, definitely. And for people who are just starting out, have you got any sort of key tips?

[00:42:37] Teddy: Um, like most people listening to this might not even have written their first book yet, or they're in the process of doing it. So what, what's the main bit of advice you'd give them when they're first starting out? 

[00:42:46] James: I think it's never too early to think about marketing and self publishing. So building a mailing list, you can actually start building a mailing list before you even publish your book, ways of doing that.

[00:42:56] James: Um, so start doing that. It'll pay you. It's a bit like starting a pension as a [00:43:00] kid. You know, you could put a little bit a month in when there's a child and suddenly that's worth a lot later. As you start pension in your fifties, it's a bit late, isn't it? So I think started building a mailing list.

[00:43:10] James: earlier. So understanding how that works. It does sound complicated from the outside, but there are ways of breaking it down. so that would be my advice is think about marketing right from the beginning. Think about your book, who you're writing it for, and are they, is there a big enough audience for it?

[00:43:27] James: So a lot of times people come to me and [00:43:30] they say, I'm writing a book. A very, very common thing is that something had happened to them in their life. So probably some trauma. And they say, I've got to tell the story and so I'm going to write this help book about how to navigate this, this chapter. And I would think, I think you should absolutely write that book, but I don't think you should write it with a view to being commercially successful because you navigating that episode in your life is best will in the world.

[00:43:56] James: Not going to be, there's not a huge audience for that, but it might be something that you need [00:44:00] to do. On the other hand, they might say I've got this fantastic literary fiction book. I love Ian McEwan. Um, and so I think I can write one of those books. I think, well, very few people can write Ian McEwan books.

[00:44:10] James: Ian McEwan can, Ian Banks can, and, um, you know, Maggie O'Farrell and so on. But they are the rarefied atmosphere at the top of literary fiction. Most people sitting on the tube reading a book are reading James Patterson or Clive Cussler or E. L. James. And those are the books you should be looking at emulating.

[00:44:29] James: [00:44:30] Um, Genre fiction books with a series in mind and understand the structure of those books. So you get that bit, right? The sort of, again, it comes back to, I said earlier about building the car in the dark and then saying to our boss, I built this car. Do you like it? 

[00:44:44] Yeah. 

[00:44:44] James: The reason they, they start with market research is for a good reason.

[00:44:49] James: So if you work at Electrolux or something, some electrical company, they will start with a blank bit of paper in a boardroom and they'll tell people to go home that night, look around their kitchen and work out what [00:45:00] problems can be solved with an electrical device. So they'll start with the need. That's what we should be doing as authors.

[00:45:06] James: I mean, it's not the traditional way of doing it. The traditional way of doing it is, I've got this amazing book, and you go to your agents and, and, and query notes and stuff. But the best way of doing it is, what do people want? I'm going to write that. 

[00:45:16] Teddy: Yeah, loads of people forget about the keyword research at the beginning and what people are actually searching for.

[00:45:20] Teddy: And that's, especially with non fiction, it's particularly important. But I mean, obviously, with fiction, it's the same thing. People are looking for particular genres, types of books, particular keyword search terms, you know. [00:45:30] It's 

[00:45:30] James: I think it's easier with nonfiction, actually. I think it's easier to come up with that because in nonfiction, when you advertise nonfiction, you're basically solving a problem for somebody.

[00:45:38] James: You're answering 

[00:45:38] a 

[00:45:39] James: question, yeah. Yeah, you're answering a question. With fiction, you're hoping somebody, you need to get, you need to sell, the worst, the worst fiction books to market are the ones that don't clearly sit in the genre. If somebody says to you, well, it's a little bit sci fi, but it's a little bit romance as well, you think, well, I don't really know what that is.

[00:45:54] James: But if they say, I've written an epic sci fi, It's a bit like Star Wars. You know what that is and you can advertise [00:46:00] that. Yeah. I've written a contemporary romance. It's got a bit of spice in it. I know what it is. I can advertise that. So yeah. So being definite about it, that's the best thing you can do. Um, and then do a good job of writing the book.

[00:46:11] Teddy: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for all those tips. Um, what are your plans for your next books? What are you working on at the moment in your publishing world? 

[00:46:18] James: So my first three books, very much military aviation based. The first book, the test pilot book we talked about, second book test pilot in, in the States.

[00:46:25] James: Third book was the character from the first book, Rob May, his first [00:46:30] tour in Egypt in 1950s, when he met an eccentric flight commander. So again, very military aviation based. I've decided to go in a slightly different direction with book four, same characters, same universe. So it'll be Susie, who you probably have met already in book one, her in her MI5 job four years after those events.

[00:46:48] James: And it's going to be a bit more Jean le Carré espionage and a little bit less Royal Air Force military flying. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm about 30, 000 words into it at the moment, [00:47:00] writing it literally today. And um, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I'm enjoying that. So she's going to end up on the, in, in Berlin, of course, at some point.

[00:47:08] Teddy: It's amazing. Yeah, I've been reading Rory Clement's book, so it sounds quite similar to that. 

[00:47:13] James: Yeah, and I've been quite inspired by that, and also the Mark Heron's Slow Horses series recently, which is a modern day set, but I do love the whole intrigue of security services. 

[00:47:23] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. That's the book I'm reading at the moment, is the Slow Horses, because I watch the TV program.

[00:47:27] Teddy: Yes, yeah, it's excellent. Brilliant. [00:47:30] So thank you so much. So just the final question is, is there any book that you're reading a moment or one that you recommend that you think everyone should be reading, but maybe isn't? 

[00:47:37] James: Well, I mentioned, uh, Save the Cat earlier which I should, I always forget her name, but I'm going to tell you her name because I looked it up.

[00:47:45] James: Uh, Jessica Brody. So Jessica Brody writes Save the Cat, write a novel. Um, I mentioned that earlier and that's a very, that's probably, for me, that's the best craft. There are a lot of books on how to write a novel, but for me, that's the best one that lays out the key points. The other book I would [00:48:00] recommend people read is On Writing by Stephen King.

[00:48:03] James: So On Writing, it's quite a short book. It's quite autobiographical, but Stephen King has obviously a brilliant writer, but he has a way of putting into one sentence some real truth bombs about how fiction works and why you should be writing. And I think on writing is probably a good overview before you become a writer yourself to read.

[00:48:24] James: And Jessica Brody's Save the Cat is the next step, the more detailed one of how to do 

[00:48:28] Teddy: it. Brilliant. [00:48:30] Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you. It's been a really good conversation. Good luck with the next books and we'll speak again soon. 

[00:48:36] James: Great. Teddy, thanks for having me on.

[00:48:38] Teddy: Thank you.