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How Are Books Published?
Jennie Nash • 2024-06-04
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan, speaking. The question for this episode is, how are books published? You will learn in this episode the role of a publisher, what self-publishing is, and how authors should approach releasing their work. Our guest is the author of nine books across three genres, including Blueprint for a Book, Build Your Novel from the Inside Out. The founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, which has trained over 75 book coaches to assist writers throughout their creative process. A successful book coach whose clients have secured six-figure deals with successes like The Chicken Sisters, a New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club's pick of 2020. I introduce to you Jennie Nash.
Jennie Nash:Shhh.
Dylan Carnahan:I'm in elementary school, feverishly writing to complete a paper within the allotted time. I finish, several weeks pass. It's after hours, I show up at the school with my parents, and we speak to my teacher. Suddenly during the conversation, she pulls out that exact paper I had written and places it in front of us. And there's a whole lot of red marks on it. And she begins to point out how I keep referencing Bob. I keep saying, what do you think Bob? Isn't that cool Bob? And quickly, I understand that the prompt was to write in the second person. However, I took that as writing to a second person. So that is my earliest memory about writing outside of like penmanship.
Jennie Nash:Makes excellent sense.
Dylan Carnahan:I guess it was a creative writing paper for me. But Jennie, can you talk about how you became interested in writing and eventually became an author?
Jennie Nash:Well, it's interesting that you mentioned elementary school because I think that's where it starts for a lot of people, either for better or for worse. A lot of people have had this experience that you describe and it's necessary in many ways. We have to learn the mechanics of this language that we all speak and read and write. But for me, it was around fourth grade when I realized that books were written by people. I loved books and I loved going to the library and I would immerse myself in them. It's where I felt calm and peaceful and most myself. And it dawned on me that there were authors, there were people that did this thing. And from that moment on, that's what I wanted to be.
Dylan Carnahan:It's interesting. So there's this realization like, oh, this is an occupation. Like someone has authored this work, right? And this is something that's possible for me to do.
Jennie Nash:Yeah, I think most kids around that time are, they wanna be an astronaut or a firefighter, these very tangible things that we can see people doing in the world, work we can see them doing in the world. I had the advantage, my dad was a writer, and he, around that time, he was working on a book. And I would go and I would sit outside to study and listen. It was typewriter days. And I would listen to the typewriter. And I just was, it was like music to me, I loved it. And when I realized he's making something that's going to be a book that people are going to read, like these books that I read, that was it. It was, I was, that was it.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that's very influential. And I think there's a degree there of like standing too close to the elephant, right? Like you bring up astronauts and like say a fireman and all that stuff. Those are, those are prevalent, but your textbook was written by an author, right? And it's almost like it's so in front of you that it's hard to pick up on.
Jennie Nash:Yes, yes. I think I was also good at reading. A lot of writers had that experience as well. There were, we had these color coded reading guides and you moved through the colors. There were quite a lot of them, like 25 of these color coded sort of workbooks that were in the classroom and I sped through them and I realized I was good at this thing too. There was that, the reading, the writing, the understanding of story. There's that sense that I had that this was the thing I didn't have to work hard at. You talked about working hard at your paper. A lot of other things were work in elementary school and this was total joy.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, and that obviously makes it a little easier to pursue, right? You kind of light up and have a passion for something. What do you do with that passion? So dad's typing away, you're eavesdropping, you're going through the whole volume of colored books. Where do you go from there?
Jennie Nash:Well, I started writing a journal and started writing little stories and started writing plays and just started doing it my own self and that practice really never stopped that creation practice. And I see in a lot of writers that I coach that that creative spark gets squeezed out of us by the world and the idea of sitting around and making something up or putting words down for other people to read begins to feel kind of preposterous. That the reason we were told to do it as we get older is for business and for work and to get things done and because we have to and people lose that confidence. I mean, every kid has total confidence that the story they've written is great. You know, I mean, that it's, I actually recently went through some old papers, some archival family papers and found some of my early stories and work and it was very cringy. You know, they're so, I don't know, they were whatever they were back then. But at the time, there was no sense of self doubt or is anybody gonna like this or what will people say or am I putting something down here on the page that's weird or unusual or different or all that self consciousness didn't exist and the trick for so many writers is to get back to that.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, it definitely is. There's kind of two things there. I think as you mature, you become more conscious of what other people think. And I think there's also, as you've kind of pointed out, when you do something, often you kind of, it's easy to lose that passion. I think for me, I can relate with baseball, having played baseball in college. Baseball is super fun until you have a 20 ending scrimmage. Well, baseball game, usually seven to nine innings. That'll take your passion a little bit away. You may be a little low at the end of the day, right? So there's kind of, that's where kind of the professionalism, I feel like comes in a little bit, right? Like the duty aspect. But I think those are two levers that you're kind of hitting upon.
Jennie Nash:Exactly, and they're levers writers always have to think about. That if you just write whatever you want as a grown up writer who wants to be published, that's not always the best strategy. On the other hand, if you write what you think the market wants, that's not usually gonna go well. So you have to find somewhere in the middle between, well, what am I called to write? What do I wanna write? What do I think? What do I wanna share? And what will sell? What will people consume? And what will allow me to continue to do this?
Dylan Carnahan:So Jennie, there's been something embedded within your last couple of statements here, which is coaching authors or being a book coach. How do you get into that? It's one thing to go, hey, I enjoy reading, I enjoy writing myself, but coaching, that's a whole other dimension. How did you get introduced to that and what made you want to pursue that?
Jennie Nash:Well, book coaching is a very new thing. It's emerged with the changes in the publishing industry in the last 10 years, but really more like five years. The work that book coach does is, think of it as nurturing a writer and nurturing a project over time. So an editor, we all know what an editor does, they go in when something is finished to bring that red pen like your teacher did and make it as good as it can be, which is brilliant, we all need that. Good editors are amazing. And it used to be that when a writer was connected to a publishing house, they would be matched with an editor and that editor would nurture their work and bring it forward and help them get it ready for publication. And with the changes we've seen in the publishing industry, that no longer happens most of the time. It rarely does still. And authors are responsible for getting their own work ready. I was just speaking the other day to a multiple New York Times bestselling novelist who told me she hired three different types of outside help for her book, in addition to having an agent and an editor at a publishing house. She just knows that she needs that kind of help. And she, as good as her editor is, they just don't have time anymore. It's not that they can't do it or aren't good at it. It's that they're so squeezed now. They have so many books on their plate. So book coaching is a new thing. And I happened to get into it at its infancy. And I came to it through teaching. I was working in a teaching program at UCLA writers program. And in the classroom, those 10 week adult ed writers classes, they're amazing. I loved it, but I also felt great limitations in it. You can't teach somebody to write a book in 10 weeks. What tends to happen is that you teach what you can teach. So that means maybe you teach scene writing or how to develop a character or some sort of craft based thing that's easy to contain within a short semester. And that's not coaching someone to write a whole book. That's not talking to them about why do you wanna do this? What is your goal? What's your vision? What's the shape of this book gonna be? What's the structure gonna be? How is it gonna live in the world? How are you gonna use it in the world? How are you gonna be connected to that book in the world? All of those big questions just were never answered. So I began to help people with that sort of work, which is the work of coaching. It's working with the writer and the project and the writing all at the same time and over time. And that's how I got into it.
Dylan Carnahan:That's really interesting. I think one of the things that you said a couple of times in there, and this is a little vulnerable to admit this, but when you use the word project, that resonates very well with me because as a consultant, that all of a sudden, that kind of reframes the way you think about a book. Oh, okay, I'm an assistant to the author. Well, this is a project. And when you say that, it has certain connotations that really help with my understanding. Now, you mentioned just kind of a shift within publishing. You alluded to volume being a potential thing. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what that shift was?
Jennie Nash:Sure, so publishing is a business that needs to make money. It's a big business that makes a lot of money, and the way that it makes money is, you don't know what book is going to do well. Every book is different, and that's a very different business model from, I always use Toyota as an example because my husband worked there for many years. So Toyota needs to bring out a new Corolla. It's their best-selling small car, and they're gonna have a team do research and development. They're gonna talk to consumers to know what's working and what they like and what doesn't, and they're gonna put all this time, effort, energy, and money into making that Corolla a car that people are going to buy, and that they're gonna buy a lot. And they bring out how many cars a year. I don't know the actual number now, but let's just say five, eight new models of car. There's a lot of products being brought out. And if you think of it as it's a business, there's products, these are different SKUs, like what business has that many different unique products? It's wild, really. And what the R&D at a publishing house is, let's take all these books and throw them out there and see what sticks. That's what R&D is. And so they're taking bets on different writers. And what began to happen is the bets that they began to take were more, you know, now we're talking about a giant cultural shift where the internet is making different people, global celebrities, influencers, that sort of thing. So a publisher could get books from those folks and be guaranteed, you know, if somebody has a million followers or 50 million followers, that's a better book guarantee for, it's a better risk for the publisher to take than, oh, Jennie Nash is a debut novelist and wrote a sweet little book about whatever. Let's take a chance on her. Like it doesn't make sense when you think about it from that point of view. And so part of it was a shift toward what is going to mitigate their risk and make money? What's going to be the big, what's going to hit? People in book publishing also, we must say, love books and love writers and love stories and love, if we're on the nonfiction side, nonfiction books. They get into it because they love it. So it's not like they're only there for the money. There are other ways to make money. There's probably easier ways to make money as a business than being a publisher. So it's not like there's just horrible people out there, you know, doing nothing but trying to make money. But that shift did happen. And if we think of back in the day, whatever that is, you know, in that Fitzgerald-Hemingway era, when writers were really nurtured and they were, it was assumed that if we help you out, we're gonna help you out over your career, you're gonna have years to be able to develop your ideas. I actually just watched a documentary that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the world of publishing. It's called, I think it's called Turn the Page, but it was a documentary about the great editor at Knopf, which is a literary publishing house. His name's Robert Gottlieb and his writer, Robert Caro, who wrote a five volume, I think he's still alive, a five volume series on Lyndon B. Johnson. This was his life's work. And Gottlieb was the editor of Caro and it was about their relationship over time and how they work together and how these projects were nurtured. And that it's just an extraordinary thing that they used to do that they just don't anymore. They just don't, they can't. They can't take a bet on someone and say, in 25 years, we think you're gonna write some great books, right? It's gotta be, is this book gonna happen for us and make money for us now? So those are some of the changes. The world sped up, the internet happened. The publishers began to figure out that if they picked a certain kind of writer, those books were going to sell better. All of these things are what changes. And at the same time, in terms of economics, the means of production became available to everybody. So that meant you could publish a book. We could take the transcript of this talk, put it up on Amazon as a book, and have it for sale in a couple days. So the means of production became available to everyone. You didn't have to have a publisher to get your book into the hands of readers. So now that's a whole other change that we're layering on top of those publishing-centered changes. There's now writer-centered changes. And the number of books that are being published has just vastly increased in all realms. And so all of those changes have just made things extremely different than they used to be.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that's, I appreciate your insight on that. There's a lot to digest there. I think, you know, you said it right off the bat. What a unique business model, right? So if you look at it through the lens of business, I mean, that, yeah, that you basically got a lot of, like you said, products out here and you're releasing them and volumes your friend, right? And some hit, some don't. And so you got to hedge your bets. And so, yeah, I think as you're saying, that's not an indication of character. That's an indication of the way business is and the way business is in this domain, right? And then again, just to hear the juxtapose that with how things were in the past, right? I think that you've done a good job kind of contextualizing where things are now.
Jennie Nash:Well, there's one other thing I want to mention, which is that it takes a writer years of their life to write a book. And the consumer, the reader, consumes that product in a few hours, depending on the book. So maybe three hours, five hours, 10 hours, you know, they're consuming that product so quickly. And in certain, I have a very good friend who is a very successful romance writer. She writes four books a year. She cranks them out because her readers demand them. They want the next book. They're ready for the next book in the series. Give it to me, I want it, now, now, now. And most writers cannot produce at the speed that she does. And so, we're also talking about the price of a book doesn't equal the effort that the writer puts in. You know, the way you put $12 price on a book that someone spent 10 years of their life writing or five years of their life writing, and readers complain about the price of that book, but how are authors going to make money? And the only way is volume. So, you mentioned that scale and that volume. So, it's not just that the publisher wants scale, it's that the writer needs scale as well.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that's a great, that's an excellent point. And it brings up kind of a larger thing. How do you quantify something that took years to produce, right? And I know that I've kind of heard that, you know, about Netflix, right? About like kind of how binge watching, right? Okay, so we produced a season, it's out. Well, you guys watched it in three days or something, you know, we're season two. It's like, we just released it, you know? And so, there's a, I draw that parallel to kind of writing books. And so, yeah, volume is the friend of the author as well. And, as you're saying, the consumer's demanding it.
Jennie Nash:Right, in some cases.
Dylan Carnahan:Well, you know, we brought up self-publishing. That was brought up at a point. So, what's the reason that some authors would decide to self-publish? What's the allure of that?
Jennie Nash:Well, writers can reach their readers directly. They don't have to go through a middle man. And readers more and more are demanding that kind of access to the writer. So from the writer's standpoint, if they have to be out there doing that work of connecting with the reader, doing that work of marketing their book, of getting it out there, of figuring out how to interact with their reader, why do they need a publisher? So it comes down to what a publisher... What does being published mean? So it used to mean... This is another change. It used to mean the actual production. They're going to make the book, they're going to print it, they're going to do all that, and it's going to show up by a truck in a bookstore or a library, and that was distribution. And a writer had no way to get into that game of printing and distributing a book to a bookstore. An individual could not play that game. And so publishing in that respect was a huge gatekeeper to writers' ability to get their book out. If they weren't chosen, they were out of luck. It was either you get chosen or you're out of luck. And unfortunately, the tradition in history was that it was largely white people and it was largely men who were chosen. So the changes that came to publishing were the means of distribution are now in the hands of all writers has shown the publishing industry, the limits of the gatekeeping that were traditionally there. And some folks have said, I don't need them. I don't need to give them my money because publishers take a cut of the money, obviously. I can go to my audience directly. I don't have to be picked. That's the big thing. I don't have to be picked. So it's a question of who is deciding what is worthy. And so self-publishing allows the writer to decide for their own selves that they believe what they've written has an audience. And people have proven time and again that sometimes the publishers don't know and the writer knows and they find their way and they create a large and thriving audience for their own work. So those are some of the reasons which would be, I don't want to wait to be picked. I don't want to go through the time. Publishing is extremely slow. Traditional publishing is extremely slow. So if somebody has something extremely timely that they want to bring out right away, self-publishing makes a lot of sense. If they have a captive audience already, it makes no sense to go out to widespread distribution. If you know how to reach your audience already. I'm a perfect example of this. I am a book coach. I run a book coach training and certification company. I've written books for book coaches. I don't think there's anyone truly in the world who knows how to reach book coaches better than I do. So why would I? It's a tiny market. It's a little tiny niche market that a publisher is not going to be interested in. So I self-publish my books for book coaches. That's a perfect example of why somebody would do that. The thing that keeps most people from it or a lot of people from it is this idea of being picked. Publishers are curating books. They used to be the arbiter of what we thought of as a good taste or a good work. And in many cases, they were offering us excellent work and we trusted them to do that. And we still trust them to do that. There's a sense of respect that we have for the publishers. And so when you are picked by one of the publishers there, it feels good. It feels, oh, somebody else thinks this book is worthy. It's not just me and my mom.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, those are all fascinating reasons. I think this kind of makes me think, and you bring up picking in a way, this kind of makes me think back to another, just media in general, right? You talked about influencers, right? That's a new thing as well, right? Where it used to be there was a curator of what got displayed on the television, what got displayed in the paper, and now that's kind of been fragmented, so to speak, and now individuals have that ability, and that sounds very similar to what you're staying with, self-publishing.
Jennie Nash:That's exactly right. I get a newsletter from Dan Rather, who was the anchor of NBC News. I think it was NBC, CBS, one of the big three, ABC, one of those big three, back in the day when I was a kid. And everyone, literally everyone, watched the evening news. Everyone watched, Dan Rather, that what he said was the news. It wasn't, you couldn't get it anywhere else. There was no other channel. And there was something, that fracturing you talked about, there was something comforting about that. If you put your trust in this institution, which for better or for worse, we all did. And we can see in media, you're absolutely right. There is no trusted source anymore. And in a way, there's no collective truth anymore. And the same is really true in book publishing as well. There are mega bestselling authors who you have never heard of. And that did not used to be the case. If there was a mega bestselling author, everybody would know. It would be this one monolithic thing that we all knew. When my kids were the original Harry Potter readers, when those books came out, and we'd go and stand in line on the release day to get the book that everybody was reading, everybody was reading, those days are gone. And my kids are just barely over 30. So those days are gone. And like I said, there are some people that say you just need a thousand true fans to run a good business as a writer. And if those thousand true fans buy your book, every book you write, you and I sitting here might never know that somebody's got a really thriving audience and a really thriving writing life and practice, and we might never hear of them. So that's what self-publishing has allowed. And it's powerful, it's beautiful, it's cracked open a lot in making the publishing industry look at ourselves and what we were and what we did and all of those very good learnings. At the same time, it's flooded the market with a lot of really bad books, so the reader doesn't have that curation anymore. They have to decide for themselves what they like or what they don't like.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, I think there are kind of two things there. I want to call back to something you said previously, which you mentioned is powerful, the power of self-publishing. I think, like you said, you're a good example. You're an expert in this field. You have asymmetry that you don't have to wait for someone to go, oh, hey, Jennie, I see that this is a great opportunity. You can capitalize that by yourself. Exactly. And so that's very powerful. Yes, I wanted to call that out. And then you bring up, too, there's a whole other aspect that I'm kind of seeing here, which is it's one thing to write something, but there's a lot that goes into it, as our discussion has shown. But the actual release of a work is another skill set, it sounds like.
Jennie Nash:Yes, and a lot of writers are resentful of that. They want to go back to the days when it seemed like all a writer had to do was write a book and the publisher took care of everything else. From some of my readings, I don't think that was actually true, but it was more true than it is now. The truth is now a writer has to market their book. They absolutely do. And if they don't want to do that, it's going to be hard for them to have anybody that wants to be a partner in that project. But the way I always talk to my coaches and writers about it is you have to think of the book as a product and yourself as an entrepreneur because that is exactly what it is. And if people are too precious about it, you know, well, this is the work of my heart. Well, this is the thing that I have spent 10 years on and it's so precious. And I mean, yes, have those feelings about your book and think of it as how am I going to get people to buy this? What is that going to take? And the only way that we know that works is word of mouth. It's the only way we know that works. If somebody loves a book, if you think of your own reading habits, I get into these reading, I don't know what you would call it. I fall in love with books. And then everybody that I know is going to hear about that book and it's going to be pressed into their hands. And I'm going to say, you have to read this book, and I'm going to talk about it, and I'm going to tell everyone about it. That's the way books typically are sold. So from the writer's standpoint, how do you get people to do that? Well, you write a book for a particular audience. You define who they are, you think of that ideal reader, you know what else they're reading, you think about how they're going to interact with your book. Readers come to books for so many different reasons. We come to be educated, we come to be entertained, we come to escape, we come to walk in somebody else's shoes and learn about the world that's different from the way we see the world. We come to master skills in some cases. There's so many reasons people come to books. And as a writer, I think the marketing starts before you even write. Who am I writing this for? What is the experience I want them to have? That's what I do in my coaching at the very start. So that somebody is writing a book, the worst possible thing in the world is to write a book just because you want to and not to have thought about who is going to read this book. What are they going to do with it when it's done? And that's the work. And so marketing a book, launching a book, bringing it out in the world starts at the very beginning. And then as you get closer to the launch, it's like, okay, who are these people? And how can I connect with them in an authentic way? Where are they? We just talked about the splintering of the media. Are they reading sub-stack newsletters? Are they listening to podcasts? Are they still going to in-person meetups? Where are they and how can I connect with them in the world? And these questions are as true, I want to add, for somebody writing a young adult love story as they are for somebody writing a hard-hitting business leadership book. But the questions are exactly the same and the answer about how you want to be in the world with that book is going to be different. That young adult author is probably going to want to be in schools and get in front of kids and have some sort of curriculum attached to their work so that they can teach and inspire. And that business leadership writer is going to want to be doing workshops in corporations for whoever their reader is. Is it middle managers? Is it senior VPs? Is it brand new hires? So that's why I think the work of marketing starts with the conception of the book. And so then as you get closer to the launch, it's about executing the plan that you made for how the book is going to be in the world. I happen to think that this way of thinking is, the strategic way of thinking has creative beauty in it. Some people think that it ruins the spirit of writing, that you should just sort of write what you want to write, and we shouldn't have to think about the marketplace, and the world will somehow rise up and embrace your book. Sometimes that happens, but I don't think it's a very good bet.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that is an interesting paradigm, right? Even you see the difference in how the question was asked, right? It's not the launch, and we go, okay, well, we're done. Let's go figure out who's going to read this, and where they're at, right? Like you're saying, at the inception, that's kind of you have more or less a vision as to, and I know in business, you'll hear the phrase a lot, product market fit or something, some variant of that. That's what's going on at the beginning. And then, as you said, it's the execution of that that's required at launch, rather than the sudden thinking of that.
Jennie Nash:That's correct. And I was a... I experienced this my own self as a writer, where I did not do this work. And I wrote... I said before, oh, Jennie, sweet little novel debut. I wrote that book. And I was lucky enough to get a big five book deal, a multiple book deal. And I got stuck in what's called a mid-list writer. So top of the list writer is going to be a big seller like Stephen King or Michelle Obama. Some debut authors are sort of tagged as, you know, the next big thing, and they get a lot of attention and money. And a mid-list writer is just kind of in the middle, and they're sort of neither here nor there. And that was what I was. And it was a terrible place to be. I couldn't stay there. They were not paying me enough to have it be sustainable. And the reason that my books were not doing well was that you couldn't really say what they were. They were good. They're good books. I'm a good writer. They were sweet. But it's like, what are they? Who are they for? And we sort of don't know. And so part of the reason I'm so adamant about this is I lived what it looks like to not do that work.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, well, I appreciate you sharing that and sharing kind of your struggles. And I hope that someone that's listening can kind of take that lens, if you will, that you've looked through. And I think that's changed automatically within our conversation, how I've thought about it. One of the things that we've spoken quite a bit about change, right? About how things have changed. One of the things that I'm curious of, because I think you're hearing it, one, talked about a lot. And I think, two, some people are maybe afraid of this. What are your thoughts on AI in writing?
Jennie Nash:Oh, gosh, it's such a big deal right now in our industry. And it is, some of what I'm seeing is absolutely frightening. By that, I mean, I have had friends whose books have been scraped by AI, turned into something else, slapped up there as somebody else's work. I've had my own book. Somebody made an audio book, used AI to make an audio book, and they're selling it. And fighting those things is like, you know, it's just a black hole. So, you know, huge damage being done to actual individual writers by people abusing this technology. I also, just yesterday, I was served up an ad on Facebook, I think. It stopped me in my tracks. It was somebody saying, you can make $20,000 a month by using AI to write a bunch of crappy books and slap them together and sell them. People will buy them. You just keep cranking them out. And it doesn't matter what the topic is. This is literally what they were saying. It doesn't matter. Just pick anything, slap it together, put it up there, and I'm making this much money and you can too. Let me show you how. It literally took my breath away. I thought, oh my gosh. Now our market is going to be flooded with that? What is that going to do to readers? I mean, something's going to have to change. I don't know what it's going to be. Will the market flush those products out? Will consumers buy them? It's just horrifying. On the one hand, I find it dangerous, frightening, sad, all those things. On the other hand, there are applications for it. Some of my coaches are using it. Can you take your own work, for example, and make a slide deck from it if you've written a nonfiction book that teaches something? Could you use AI to help you write a speech you have to give? Sure, those are great uses. Can you use AI to help you take your own work and put it into some other form? I guess, sure. So there's great uses. Plus, we're all using it every day. I use a grammar checker that's AI. That's amazing. I just the other day manipulated a photo in Canva, took out a background in order to use it in a social media post. We're using it every day. So it's here. It's not going away. But I don't know enough to know what's going to happen to writers. But I worry.
Dylan Carnahan:There is, unfortunately, as you mentioned with kind of the fear about it, it's in a way exploiting some of the things we've talked about, right? The volume. Exploit the volume. We'll put out more, right? And as you said, another thing it inherently exploits with that is that the consumer has to decide, right? And we've talked about it. It's not that hard or not easy to decide, right? And now there's even more available, right? And so it kind of exploits two of those things. And then, you know, I think definitely the most nefarious usage is taking over the people's work. That's certainly alarming. But you have the other end where you can integrate that within your own processes in a non nefarious way. And it can be helpful, right? Whether it's like you mentioned, as simple as a spell check or something like that. It's yeah, there's just a lot to unpack there. And the future is even more uncertain because it's moving.
Jennie Nash:Yeah. And I think it's we always have to remember the technology is not bad. It's what people do with it. It's people. So there's always going to be people exploiting other people. And writers frequently are targets of exploitation because they have such passion and sometimes kind of desperation for their work to be read and for their work to have an impact. It's not something that a bird watcher needs to care about or a gardener or a bike rider. But in terms of human endeavor, there are going to be people that will exploit writers. So education is important in this whole conversation about AI. Media literacy, how do you know what your sources are? Do we have to tag when something has been written with AI? What does that mean? Do we have to tag when the grammar checker has been used? There's a lot of education to be done. And then just straight up education in terms of how do you discern what is good thought, what is good writing, what you believe, who you want to trust, those just basic tenets of thinking and of individual thought. You know, my daughter is a high school English teacher, so I see what she's doing in the classroom and what she's up against in the classroom, and I really feel like a lot of it is going to start there. How are we educating people to think about what they consume? And, you know, for writers, one thing computers will never take away is the satisfaction, the really deep level satisfaction that comes from writing something that other people love. And if you, as a creator, there is true power and beauty in the creative act, and a computer doesn't feel that, a human feels that, and people will always want to feel that. And I think they will always want to do what is the hard work. You can only do that through hard work. If you press a button and scrape somebody else's words and slap a book together, you're not going to feel that. You might make money, that might make you feel good for a hot second, but the deep soul level satisfaction of creating a story or putting a nonfiction argument together that impacts other people, that's why we're drawn to write. That's the heart of it, and nothing will take that away.
Dylan Carnahan:Well said. Yeah, the human experience, right? It's kind of hard to get that when you replace the human part. And yeah, there's definitely something said for, there's a level of gratification that you can't achieve through ease.
Jennie Nash:Yes.
Dylan Carnahan:You mentioned about education and how that's an important right to cultivate the perspectives of people that are younger, so they enter this environment. I'm curious, what advice would you give to a perspective or new writer?
Jennie Nash:To prepare for it to be long and hard. It's really setting expectations. To prepare that you might not make money fast. To prepare that it's going to be painful, long and hard. To know that there's no guarantees. And to decide that that's an endeavor you wish to commit to. That's what it is. The clients that I love working with the best are those that embrace that reality. It's like, okay, this is going to be long, hard. There's no guarantee at the end, but I want to put my best effort to it. And that includes, okay, I don't understand this whole marketing thing. Maybe I don't like social media. Maybe I think there's evil out there in some of the things that I might have to interact with, but I'm going to learn it. I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to master it. I'm going to put myself to this work. Either that or just write for your own self. So it's making the decision. There is nothing wrong. There's quite a lot right with just writing for your own self because you like it, because it's therapeutic, because you're good at it, because you want to. Whatever reason, those are really good reasons. We've been talking this whole conversation about being read, being published, making a product that is bought and sold. But it's making the decision to go one way or the other and not to take one path and then suddenly think, well, why isn't this other path available to me? Because there are different paths. And so it's really the simple answer, what I would tell a new writer is be intentional. Be intentional about why you're doing this, what you're doing, how to do it, what you want out of it.
Dylan Carnahan:That's excellent advice. And I think embedded within that is, you know, and I think this is something that several guests have alluded to, and it goes the same for either path that you mentioned, which is to choose and enjoy that journey.
Jennie Nash:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Dylan Carnahan:Jennie, what's the best way for people to learn more about you and the work you do?
Jennie Nash:Folks can go to my website, which is jennienash.com. That's jennienash.com backslash blueprint. And on that page are the three books that I've written to walk writers through this method of inquiry that I've talked about. They're each blueprint book for fiction, nonfiction and memoir has 14 step framework to be intentional about what you're writing. It's ideally done before you start to write. There's some free resources on those pages and information about those books. So that's the primary place that I would go. And if anybody's curious about book coaching, they can visit my company website, which is authoraccelerator.com and learn about our training and certification programs. We've certified over 220 coaches in fiction, nonfiction and memoir, and trying to set the gold standard in this new industry.
Dylan Carnahan:That's exciting. That is exciting. We'll make sure that all of that is appropriately tagged in the show notes for our listeners to go and look at. Jennie, thank you for sharing your knowledge and time today.
Jennie Nash:Thanks for having me.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Jennie. We talked about how AI is impacting writers, reasons to self-publish, and finding an audience versus serving an audience. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources Jennie mentioned during our episode. And lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.