How to Write Serials: Finding Your Voice and Building Steady Income with KimBoo York

308 / Serial fiction expert, Kimboo York, joins us to discuss building long-term reader relationships, letting go of perfectionism and fan fiction, including insights on transitioning fan fiction to original works. We also talk about balancing productivity with kindness and allowing room for mistakes to set yourself up to have a resilient author career. 

✨ This week’s sponsor is: Reedsy https://reedsy.com/studio and https://reedsy.com/studio/templates

• Serial fiction business models
• Transitioning from fanfiction to original fiction
• Productivity and project management advice
• Community and discoverability on Substack
• Monetization methods for serials
• Legal concerns with fanfiction writing

🚨 Win a paperback copy of Trope Thesaurus: Mystery and Thriller by yours truly (Sara) and Jennifer Hilt. Comment on this episode on Substack with your favorite trope to write to be entered in the random drawing. Open until March 17, 2026.

💙 Become a supporter of the podcast https://wishidknownforwriters.com/support or https://wishidknownthenpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

• Access to backlist of exclusive supporter episodes
• Shoutout on a future episode 

⚡Links:

• houseofyork.info
• serial-nation.com
• scriptorium.kimbooyork.ne
• houseofyork.info
• scriptorium.kimbooyork.net
• https://newsletterninja.net/solutions/email-storytelling-pantry/
• Ingram Launches New Digital Catalog, DRC, and Ordering Platform: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99760-ingram-targets-edelweiss-with-new-catalog-drc-and-ordering-platform.html
• Thanks to long-time supporter Christa Bakker https://christabakker.com/
• Archive of Our Own https://archiveofourown.org
• FOOTLOOSE! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Footloose%20(1984)/works

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

I've been in fanfiction for most of my life, and there are some great writers there, and I'd love to see more of their original work out on the world.

Jami 0:08

That's great. I've never done fanfiction, like formally. I don't think there's a formal way to do that. I've continued in the story in my head, but I've never written anything down. Yeah. A lot of times I rewrite endings. Uh-huh.

Sara 0:22

Don't we all. Welcome to the Wish I Know Then podcast.

Jami 0:32

I'm Sarah Rosette. And I'm Jamie Albright. And this week on the show we have Kim Boo York. Yeah, she's back.

Sara 0:41

We had a really good chat with Kim Boo. She's been on several times, and each time we seem to hit a different thing. I think we talked about discovery writing last time. And this time we talked about serial storytelling. And it was really interesting because neither you or I do that.

Jami 0:56

No, it was very interesting. And it was a fun discussion about serials. And yeah.

Sara 1:02

We talked to her about serial fiction business models and ways you can transition. We talked a lot about fanfiction too, and how you can transition from fan fiction into other things, even legal concerns with fan fiction. And that was my favorite part.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

Yeah.

Sara 1:19

And some stuff about discoverability and community on Substacks. Yeah. So it's not just about serial storytelling if you're not interested in that. But she had some good ideas. She did. Don't forget our sponsor this week is Readsy. We will talk about them more in a minute. Got anything going on this week?

Jami 1:34

I'm just working. I have to. If I do three chapters a day, I can finish by next Friday. Or finish. Like I'm just you're just going back through making sure it all looks right and there's I haven't missed anything. And so because we're going to be away. That's coming up soon. We're doing a little writing retreat type thing. The last week in March, and then I'll have a week and then it goes to the editor. So I can't believe it. It's a little overwhelming, but very exciting. You really did not know if you would get here, right? I did not. I just didn't. I didn't know if I'd be able to do it, if I would ever write again. And then even when I started, I didn't know if it was going to be a real thing or if I could really make if I could make it a real thing. So it's yeah. Yeah. I have a I'm gonna be interviewed by Joanna Penn in Mar in April, the early April, about it. And I wanted I specifically wanted to do it before the book came out because the victory is in the finishing and writing the book. It's not in whether it's successful or not. I want it to be, but that's not where the victory is for me. So I wanted to make sure that I had done that interview in particular before because I don't want it to get clouded. I don't want anyone to misunderstand what I'm saying and and it to be clouded by commercial success or not. Even if it doesn't do well, I don't want that, I don't want the goodness of this to be impacted by that. Thank you. I'm a writer, I can't think of words.

Sara 3:27

It's later after five o'clock. I have no it'll be amazing if we're both halfway coherent right now.

Jami 3:34

So that's it.

Sara 3:34

That's all I'm doing. How about you? I have been working on my book and it's going so slow. And it's just one of those things. I am also slightly in mourning because it's getting really hot here already. And so I think I've talked about this before. How people who live in cold climates they don't like the winter and it affects them. I feel like this is my time when I go, it's getting hot. It's about time to go indoors, crank up the AC and eat ice cream, I guess. I don't know, because it's gonna be so hot for like the next six months. Yeah, I did go for a walk today and it was really warm. It was nice, but it was warm, and I thought, oh, this is just the beginning.

Jami 4:18

The beginning is not even that warm, yeah.

Sara 4:20

Yeah, but I was really involved in what I was doing, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna take a break because I need to take a break. Just go for the walk. Even if you don't want to, just go for the walk because it is good to get out and do that. Yeah, but I do have a couple of pieces of information that I thought would be helpful. One is I have print copies of the trope book. So this is a book that I co-authored with Jennifer Hilt. It's called the trope thesaurus mystery and thriller. And I have some of these to give away. So if you'll go over to Substack, I'll put a link in the show notes and leave a comment. And I think maybe tell us your favorite trope to write. Would that be a good question? Okay. So just you don't have to go into great detail. Just do that and then put well, we'll have a way to contact you if you're on Substack. That's one right reason we're doing this. I have a couple copies of those to give away, and I'll we'll give it what, maybe two weeks, maybe a week. Let's give it a week.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Yeah.

Sara 5:17

And then I'll randomly pick winners and mail them to you. And this is how we do a lot of things on the fly as we're deciding out that we're gonna run a giveaway. And then the other thing was I just thought this was interesting. I saw a news story or link to this article. Publishers Weekly has published this PR announcement basically that Ingram has announced they're going to launch Covered. And it's a new digital catalog and galley service designed to help publishers share titles with booksellers, librarians, and media, and also facilitate ordering. Basically, they want to be like a one-stop shop. NetGalay, you can go there and you can get a copy, you can share copies with readers. This will allow librarians to also get review copies, I believe. And then they, if they like it, then they can order it right there. So it says booksellers and librarians will have access to title information, including marketing plans, comp titles, sales, and inventory data alongside a Galley program available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats. So I was like, that sounds very comprehensive. And it will be open to Indies. Oh, that's good too.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

Yeah.

Sara 6:27

I don't think it's open right now. It's in beta right now. So I don't, I'm sure that we probably couldn't get in right now. But anyway, I thought that was interesting, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

Yeah.

Sara 6:38

Very good. Very good. Let's talk about Read Z. Okay. So ReadZ is our sponsor for this week, and they have this cool thing called Read Z Studio, and it's a free online app for authors to plan, draft, edit, and format their book. And it creates professional EPUBs and print ready files, and it's super easy to use. It's really nice.

Jami 7:02

Yeah, that's so good.

Sara 7:03

That's so good. And they have a lot of different templates, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, they have 40 plus templates that you can use for your story, like story structure, creating characters, world building, narrative devices, setting, and it walks you through what you might want to note down about these different things. And it works together with Reads Z Studio. I don't think there's anything quite like this that does all of this. Right. Yeah, it's really cool.

Jami 7:32

It is very cool.

Sara 7:33

Yeah.

Jami 7:34

You just know they're gonna do good stuff. They're just yeah, yeah.

Sara 7:37

It's quality. They do quality stuff. Quality stuff. They just do. Yeah. So that's Read Z. Encourage you guys to go check it out. And if you're interested in that, we'll have a link in the show notes. You go to read C.com slash studio, or if you just want to and you don't have to use the templates with the studio, you can just go use their templates, and that's at readz.com slash studio slash templates.

Jami 7:59

One more thing I wanted to tell everybody about is have you you sat down to write your email and you're like, what do I say to my email people? And y'all know I've let my email kind of go a little dormant, but I recently found Tammy LeBrec's email storytelling pantry. And it is so cool, y'all. I mean, it is just simple. Like she breaks it down. Uh she says a great use newsletter usually has three simple ingredients a story, a connection, and an invitation. And that's it. And so you it's it's kind of a little bit about your life or your writing process or something behind the scenes. You connect that to your books or your characters or writing life, and then you engage the readers with a question or something like that. And so it takes the selling out, but it increases engagement. Y'all, it's only $27.

Sara 8:56

I mean, that's very cool.

Jami 8:57

Super cool. I've really enjoyed digging into it. So if you're interested, the link is in the show notes. And you know, Tammy, she's she's been on the podcast, she she's wrote newsletter ninja. She knows what she's talking about when it comes to newsletters. So I just share that with everybody.

Sara 9:17

Well, that is great. Yeah, because it's almost like it's a little recipe. I can see why she called it a pantry.

Jami 9:22

It is, it's a little recipe, and it's really great. My friend Deanna Roy, she rides this JJ Knight, she's been using it, and she's the one actually, that's how I first heard about it. She's like, my newsletter engagement has just gone up like crazy. So yeah, so I'm putting some things into practice with it. So yeah, cool.

Sara 9:46

Yeah, so that would be a good way to because my newsletters can tend to get too long, and I have too many things. And I wish to break them up and send more frequently with smaller lists. Smaller chart, yes, instead of like the the what would it be, like a thesis.

SPEAKER_02 10:04

I said, Yeah, exactly.

Sara 10:07

Yeah. So well, that's cool. That link will be in the show notes, and also we need to thank our supporters for this week. We just really appreciate you guys.

Jami 10:15

Yes, thank you all so, so much.

Sara 10:17

Yes, and I thought it would be cool to go back and look at some of our longtime supporters. And I went back and looked, and Krista Baker is one of our supporters who's been supporting us for three years. So we really appreciate it. And we're gonna probably start doing a couple more shout-outs like this just to say thank you. And if you're interested in her books, I'll put a link in the show notes for that as well.

Jami 10:40

Yeah, that'll be great. It'll be great. Thank you so much, Krista, and everyone else who supports us. You know, I mean, we do this because we love it, but also, you know, the support really helps. It really helps. I mean, like the supporter, it's it's one coffee. I heard Joanna say it's a black coffee uh uh a month, but it's really just a coffee we can split. So, you know, yes, that's true. We share.

Sara 11:10

So thank y'all so much. All right, well, should we get on the interview?

Jami 11:15

Do it all right.

Sara 11:16

Here is Kim Boo. Today we're really excited to have Kim Boo York back. Hi, Kim Boo.

Jami 11:21

How are you? Hi, y'all. Good to be back. Good to see you both. We are glad you're here. We saw you in Vegas, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_04 11:30

November. So much.

Jami 11:31

Not to mention the other times you've been on the podcast. Oh, that too. We saw you in person, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:36

Yeah, but it all already seems like a whole year has gone by since November. I don't know.

Sara 11:42

It really does, yeah. In case people don't know you, let me read your bio real quick and catch everybody up, and then we'll just get into our discussion. Kimbu York is a Gen X fangirl who is also a librarian, former IT project manager, and a professional author who wears too many hats and crosses too many genres, including romance, fantasy, and nonfiction. She lives on coffee and hope. I think there are a lot of us on that diet.

Jami 12:04

Huh? Tell give us a quick update on what's been going on since you were here on the podcast last in May of 2024.

SPEAKER_04 12:12

Oh my gosh, that long ago.

Jami 12:14

Yeah, we were talking about discovery writing.

SPEAKER_04 12:16

Oh, yeah, discovery riding. Woo man. So there's been a lot of staying the same and a lot of things going forward. I've still got my serials running on my Substack fiction blog. So those are progressing really nicely and getting some getting some traction. I'm in the process of of reformatting and recovering a lot of my backlist. Man, that's not fun. Like, it's not writing, it's fun. Yeah. Until you have a 12-year-old book that needs to be updated. And so I did go to Author Nation in 2025. It was a highlight for me. It'd been a bucket list of mine to present there. So I did present on serials and serialization there, and that got very well received. And that's heavily influenced my plans going into 2026, which I can talk about later. I have a lot of irons in the fire. And since then, I did release another nonfiction book called Out from Fan Fiction, Transforming Creative Freedom. I understand it's a niche interest. It's pitched to fan fiction writers who want to expand and move into original fiction. So there that is definitely a difficult transition to make. And so I wanted to give people a step-by-step guide on how to do that if that's what they want to do. Because I've been in fan fiction for most of my life, and there are some great writers there, and I'd love to see more of their original work out on the world.

Jami 13:40

That's great. Yeah, what a that's a really cool subject. I've never done fan fiction like formally. I don't think there's a formal way to do it. I've continued in the story in my head, but I've never written anything down. Yeah. A lot of times I rewrite endings. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 13:57

Don't we all? And some of us just actually rewrite endings and then share it. So, yeah, same difference.

Jami 14:03

We'll talk about that in a little bit, but Sarah, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

Sara 14:07

What's the most important lesson you've learned recently?

SPEAKER_04 14:10

So this is a lesson that I have to keep relearning, and it's very general, but it's also very true, which is be kind to myself. I got back from uh auththanation in the what was it, the seventh and eighth, so mid-November. I came down with a serious respiratory illness. Oh no. And my lungs aren't great. I got whooping cough when I was in grad school in 2012, and that knocked me out for almost half a year. My lungs have never really been as drunk since then. So don't get whooping cough, kids. Get your vaccines. That's it's nasty stuff. And so I came down with this respiratory illness. I just had so much I wanted to do. And I kept pushing myself and then relapsing and then kept pushing myself. I did avoid pneumonia, but just barely. The doctor was like, okay, you either take this medicine and report back to me, or I am putting you in the hospital. And I was like, Well, I'll take the medicine. I'm good. But once again, it was another lesson on being kind to myself and being patient with myself. Because it's just, I sometimes your body or your brain or whatever, your circumstances just aren't up to your big plans. And you just have to say, okay, the important thing is for me to get well. So having patience and being kind to myself, man. Why do I have to keep learning that lesson?

Jami 15:26

I know. We all do. We all do it. Yeah, really crazy.

SPEAKER_04 15:29

My mama isn't here to put me in bed and make me drink my chicken soup. So I guess I have to do it myself.

Jami 15:35

We are not good patients.

SPEAKER_04 15:37

Oh, terrible.

Jami 15:38

Yeah, exactly. What's the biggest change you've had to make in your thinking or mindset over the last little while?

SPEAKER_04 15:47

This is gonna, this is a funny one. Because one of the projects I'm starting is Serial Nation. And it's it's a coaching and cohort and Patreon for people who are writing serials. And let me tell you, I did not want to do this. I resisted it every step of the way. And because I was like, I'm not a teacher. I'm not, I don't teach. That's not my thing. And then my friend Gina, who's author, who's also an author, she writes historical fiction. She was like, well, if you're not a teacher, why do you keep writing books that teach people things?

Jami 16:17

I was gonna say, you wrote a bunch of nonfiction books. So thanks. Thanks for pointing out the author. My finger crossed.

SPEAKER_04 16:25

My fingers crossed to point out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when she said that, yeah, sometimes a friend will say something to you and it just shifts your entire worldview. That was me sitting in a chair at the library where we were co-working. And I was just like, oh, yeah, okay, I can do this. I don't know. Maybe it's the I guess the takeaway there is being open to seeing yourself in new ways. That that was really the big challenge for me.

Sara 16:51

Yeah. Well, it sounds like that may lead into our next clip about how has your business model changed recently? So it sounds like you're branching out into more, you've always done podcasts, you've always written books, but what else are you doing?

SPEAKER_04 17:04

Yes, I'm gonna be picking up my own podcast, the Author Alchemist here, hopefully by next month. I've got some plans on that one. My fiction hasn't really changed too much. I am moving into direct sales, which I've dabbled with a little bit, but never seriously with print books. So I I bit the bullet and got a Mac mini so that I could use Vellum. That's like I've been suffering without it for so long. So I did that. And so that's one of the that's part of the reformatting project that I mentioned earlier, is that I want to actually make print versions that I can sell on my direct sales shop. Now I already have that shop. I've been selling ebooks and digital downloads on it, but never print books. So getting that, working with Book Vault, who's the one I'm gonna use for print editions and tying that all together. So that's gonna be a little bit of change to my business models, focusing more on print editions. And then, yes, the Serial Nation project, which is both a Patreon, I've got a Patreon already set up, and I'm gonna be running cohorts on that. Four week long intensives for people who want to start a serial fiction story, but just don't really know how to do it. So that's gonna be taking up a lot of time setting that up to get that rolling. So those are the big changes for 2026, honestly. Yeah, that's crazy.

Sara 18:21

That's a lot going on.

SPEAKER_04 18:24

You have your good those good ideas and it sounds like it's gonna be fun, and then you do it, you're like, wow, this is taking up 60 hours a week. I have no idea. This is turned this isn't as much fun as I thought.

Jami 18:35

I'm not having fun. Yeah. I need more sleep. What?

Sara 18:38

I wanted to ask about your reformatting and your you're going to focus on the print books.

SPEAKER_04 18:43

Yeah.

Sara 18:44

But your serials are really long. So how are you doing that?

SPEAKER_04 18:47

How are you breaking those up or putting them on the Well, it's so one of the things about a serial structure is that a serial structure, which is as I've explained in my book, Become an Instoppable Storyteller, and in my presentations, is that serials have a different structure from novels. And one thing about serials is that they have overlapping long arcs, and they also have what I call seasons. And so, what a lot of serial authors do, and which I plan on doing, is they take a season and make it into a volume. So it's not quite a standalone, it actually functions more like a series when it's printed. So a lot of authors who've done serials, you'll go and you'll see volume one, volume two, like volume three. My Dragon's Grail serial, ARC 4, is currently posting right now. So I'm getting ready to make arcs one, two, and three available as print versions and as ebooks if people want to do that. But the print versions are going to be a little bit more fancied up a bit. That's the plan with those. So it is a function of the structure of what a cereal is to be able to break it up like that.

Jami 19:50

Yeah, it is. But I'm I'm wondering, so like you sell your cereals on Patreon, or you don't sell them. You have a Patreon, they pay, they get the cereal, correct?

SPEAKER_04 20:01

No, actually, I'm not. My my cereals right now are on Substack. I eventually, yeah, Substack. Not Patreon, Substack. Patreon. Patreon's for Serial Nation, which is the coaching cohort thing. My serials are on Substack right now. They were on Ream for a while. I wasn't happy with that platform, but just because it wasn't working the way I wanted it to, Substack doesn't work the way I want it to. It's like where is my perfect platform? So I will probably end up transform transferring them onto my own, because I am a website developer. I'm good, I can build my own sites when I take the time to do it. So I'll probably end up putting them on my own websites and my own web pages. The model I have right now is that they post the chapters post for free, and they stay free for an extended period of time, and then they go behind a paywall. And then I eventually I post the older arcs as books. The first arc in Dragon Scrail, which is called Escape from Ice Mountain, that is perma-free essentially. You can go read the first arc on my Substack at any point in time. And that's the lead, the lead magnet that I have for those. And a lot of people, there's a lot of different ways to structure a serial when you have it online, what platform you choose and how you do it. So there's some who do, you know, they early access, they lock it down behind a paywall first. Yeah. Then they make it free. Whatever they want. So there's just a lot of different ways to do it. But that's how I have it set up right now. Okay.

Jami 21:26

Okay. That was my question. Like, how are you making money with them?

unknown 21:29

Basically.

SPEAKER_04 21:32

The money does come in with the subscriptions. It is hard. I will say this. A lot of people think that they're going to get into serials and just start making money right away. And some people do. I don't want to say that's not true. But serializing is more about building a long term relationship with your audience. Yeah. That's something I did learn. I did learn from fandom all about that. So for me, it's less that they're making me a lot of money right now than they are going to be making me a lot of money in the long term over the long haul.

Sara 21:58

So I feel like most Authors think of Substack as for nonfiction, but you're using it for fiction. So have you found that? Have you been able to find a fiction community there? Or did you mostly bring your readers to the platform?

SPEAKER_04 22:11

I found my community there. And let me tell you, yeah, the fiction community on Substack, you haven't heard of it, and it is huge. It is huge. Simon K. Jones, he's one of the leading, he started his series, The Triverse Universe, and he started that back in 2021. It just wrapped up. It's 400,000 words long. Oh my gosh. And has been running weekly for all these years. He's got an amazing audience on there. One of the things that I think that's a little different about Substack, and I know there's some opinions about Substack out there in the world, but it does have a great discoverability function between sharing your Substack, recommending Substacks, and also the notes feature, which is more of a social media Facebook feed style type of thing. There are a lot of writers out there, like horror is a really big genre on Substack. I would imagine, yeah. Yeah, horror is really big. Thrillers, some mysteries, some romance, not as strong. I think a lot of romance authors tend to go with ream over Substack. Totally understandable. But let me tell you, yeah, the readership is there. And one of the things I want to point out, and this uh, this is something I have to point out all the time. Just because people aren't commenting doesn't mean they aren't reading. Oh, okay, because even like we all know this when it comes to reviews, like how many people actually review the books that they read, right? It's just a teeny tiny little small amount. I've done the research and I found that like 1% of readers will leave a comment, if that. So if you've got two comments, that's just a fraction of the 200 people who've read it. So you really can't look at the numbers of how many people left a comment. A lot of writers get wrapped up in that the engagement, the value. You have to look at how many people are reading it, how many people are subscribed. Because with serials, it's a very different world. But yeah, readership is really strong on Substack. We're just not hearing about it.

Sara 24:09

Yeah. I didn't know that. We've just moved over there. We've made the podcast over there. Oh, I didn't, I somehow I missed that. Okay. Brand new just in the last couple of weeks. And I was looking around and I found another mystery author that I know. And she's doing tons of stuff over there. So we're gonna have her on the podcast to talk about that. It's not buzzy in the author community, the fiction world. So this is interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:30

No, it's not, but man, it's vibrant. And I will say this as well before we move on, is it's a really good place for authors themselves because the author community is pretty strong on there. We talk a lot amongst ourselves. We talk a lot about stories that we've shared and a lot of encouragement. It's very much a community vibe, and that's one of the reasons why I like it. And other newsletter services like Kit and Beehive and Button Down, they just don't have that. And that's what makes Substack special.

Jami 24:59

I do have a question about the serials, though, because like for that guy that you were talking about that has this 400,000-word serial, is there just a certain type of writer that can write serials? Because if you're a pantser, that seems or not a but like mostly a pantser. That seems like trouble waiting to happen. Exactly. And I know this because I did a very like during COVID, I did a 20,000-word novella that I released my newsletter once a week. And I had one continuity issue because basically something happened before it should like something happened, and then the thing that should have happened before it happened. And my editor was like, This technically should happen afterwards, but you've already put it out, and yeah, I wasn't gonna change it. And but I could see that happening a lot with me.

SPEAKER_04 25:53

I is that a danger of happening? Yes. Is that as more of a danger of happening than when you're writing a novel? Not really.

Jami 26:00

You can fix it in a novel. If you can't put it out, you can't really go back and fix it.

SPEAKER_04 26:05

Yes, so there are ways to do that. First off, a lot of authors who are writing serials, they're not writing a serial on the weekend and then posting it on Monday. What they're doing is they, and this is certainly something I do, I always have at least 30,000 words in the bank. Oh, okay. So I have 30,000 words ahead of what I'm posting so that I can have a pretty good continuation. Now, does that mean that 100,000 words ago I screwed something up? Yeah, that does happen. I think with if you're going to be doing a story that long, and this is leans into the productivity part that we were talking about, Sarah, is you've got to have the tools that help you keep track of those things. And that can be a spreadsheet, that can be something, an online database like Notion, it can be something built for it, like Campfire and World Anvil have wiki style features. I tend to roll my own. I use Legend Keeper, which is a wiki app that was designed actually for Dungeons and Dragons, but I use it for tracking my story data because then I could keep characters lumped together and geography lumped together. So there's a lot of ways of doing that, just depending on how your brain works. But it is something to be aware of when you're writing a serial.

Jami 27:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:24

But then you get to publish it as a book, and guess what? You do go get back and go fix it.

Jami 27:28

Yeah, that's true too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:30

A big difference with us, especially in the serialization community, is that there's an understanding that's the case. Okay. That an author going back and fixing something or changing something, either when the book gets published or later on down the line, they're like, Oh, by the way, I changed her dress to red because she's actually wearing blue, but that didn't work with the Star Force alignment. Yes. So she had the wrong game color. Right, exactly. Serial readers tend to be very forgiving about that. Now, you're always going to have the nitpicky people, but as a whole, I find that serial readers tend to understand that there's a little bit of flexibility and things might change eventually. Okay. But yeah, that's how you manage it.

Jami 28:12

Yeah, that's good to know. How do you view mistakes and how do you recover when things go wrong?

SPEAKER_04 28:18

Oh man, if you had asked me like 20 years ago, I'd say mistakes are not allowed and you know they're devastating and terrible. The hindsight of age. I'm a lot more sanguine about mistakes at this age. To me, failure, I think the problem comes in when people equate mistakes with failure. A mistake is not a failure. All right. A failure is where you fail to do something that you should have done. Right. A mistake is something where you tried something and it didn't work, or it tried something and you didn't have all the variables at hand, you weren't aware a mistake is, you forgot something. And I think going back to the being kind to myself model of things, I've really had to learn to let go of the hyperfixation on perfectionism and all those sorts of things to just realize that as long as I put one step in front of the other, there's no failure. There's no failure. So that's been a big change for me is just realizing mistakes happen. Failure is on me, but mistakes can happen for any reason. And so it's just a matter of keeping going.

Jami 29:24

I feel like it's a sign of immaturity and a little bit of naivety when we when we are hyper perfectionist and we cannot, and we can't view mistakes as just mistakes. We view them as failure because I think as you get older you do see, hey, you know what? There are things bigger than this in the world. And that this was just I must say it was not a failure. And yeah, I do think that with age comes that.

SPEAKER_04 29:57

I think that's trite, but therapy helped. Oh yes. In fact, I have it this afternoon. Yeah, yeah. I think for me because I did have a mother with mental health issues. So I grew up in a kind of a traumatic environment from the start. So for me, perfectionism and be having OCD, which is something I dealt with very heavily in my younger years, were trauma responses. Yeah. So age with therapy experience, you come in there and you're like, okay, yeah, no, the world isn't ending. This is gonna be okay. I just have to fold that project up or move on to a different thing or apologize. Sometimes you gotta apologize and just move on.

Sara 30:36

Yeah, it's a good reframe when you get it that way. It's fine. Yeah. Let's get back to productivity and talk about that with sustainability. What are like you're talking earlier about taking care of yourself and slowing down? And we want to be productive. And if you're writing a serial, you want you have a schedule you're trying to meet. So how do you balance that out with being productive but still taking care of yourself?

SPEAKER_04 30:59

So a couple of things that I think come to mind. One of the things that I really with my productivity clients, I used to do productivity coaching a long time ago. One of the things that I really tried to reinforce with them was that there's no such thing as a work-life balance. And I think it's trying to ever be like, I knew that already. But what I mean is work is part of life. Trying to have this life here on one side and then work on the other, you're already out of balance. So you have work and you're trying to get things done, and your kid gets sick and you need to go pick them up at school. Suddenly, your work life balance is out of whack because you've had to leave your work to go pick up your kid. But your kid is a big project, like your kid's an important part of your life. So it's not about balancing these things that are in opposition, it's about making your priorities and being flexible with what you need to accomplish. It's one of the reasons I'm a very big proponent of project management, which people get really scared when I say that. They're like, oh, I don't want to have to do Gantt charts and spread sheets. And I'm like, that's not what I'm talking about. So project management is really four stages. It's the ideation stage, it's the planning stage, it's the implementation stage, and it's the review process. So if you think of things in those four stages, if you look at something you need to do and how you're gonna go about it, it calms the whole system down because you can say, oh, where am I in this project? I'm in the ideation stage, a very exciting stage, but a very, you know, fle stage. There's nothing really determined yet. Oh, I'm in the implementation stage. This project's gonna go on for six months. If it's a book, it might go on for six weeks or a year, depending on are you a historical fiction writer? Are you writing contemporary romance? Right. And or it's a serial, it's gonna go on for five years, but every arc is only gonna take six months. So how do I get through the next six months? And you can start breaking these things down, and it's not about doing the charts, it's about having an understanding of how this is gonna affect your daily schedule, along with getting the kids to school, having time to take care of yourself, having time to exercise, meditate, and have a relationship with either your spouse, your partner, your family, being able to go on vacations instead of this kind of willy-nilly finding balance thing. It's about making your priorities and understanding how they all fit together more like a puzzle than a balance.

Sara 33:27

Oh, good. I think that's really true because like you're saying, being kind to yourself is the key in saying, okay, I obviously have to go get my kid at school today. I'm not gonna be able to write, and that's okay. And you have to be okay with it and just reassess later.

SPEAKER_04 33:44

And reassess later, and that's the secret. Like I think a lot of people think, okay, oh, my schedule was blown up because I had so this emergency came up or something happened, the toilet overflowed, whatever. And but it's not because the project itself is ongoing. Project itself didn't get derailed because you didn't write 1,000 words today. It's reassessing how that might impact the deadline and say, okay, if I write an extra 250 words for the next three days, I'll make up that thing, or just push the deadline out. I didn't do a pre-order, so I can just push the deadline out a week. My readers will be fine with that. I'll just send them a newsletter with a photo of the overflowing toilet. It'll be fine. Right. Yeah, reassessing, I think, is where a lot of people fall down on that because they don't have in mind of it as a project that's ongoing. They're just looking at their immediate deadlines and what's on their calendar. And I always tell people your calendar is a tool, it is not your master. All right. I think it's supposed to help you. And if you become completely obsessed with missing a date on the calendar, then that's not a tool anymore. That's something that is controlling you in the worst way.

Jami 34:47

Correct. Yeah, yeah. I think that's true. I was I have I had a lot to do Monday. A lot. Yeah. I mean, I just had a lot to do. I got up, I was about to leave the house, and my my we're looking for a car, and my husband said, Can you go look at this car? And I was like, sure. So I went and looked the car. My intent was to go ride afterwards. And because I leave the house to ride, I can't ride at home very well. And once I got to the dealership and I drove the car, my I like I started feeling really bad. My head started hurting. I started feeling like I had chills. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm getting sick. So I tried to push through, but then I was like, I was driving to Starbucks, and when I got to the exit from my house, I just turned the wheel and came home. And I just laid down for three hours until my head started stopped hurting. And I was like, at first I was gonna beat myself up, but then I was like, I don't have to. When it when my head starts feeling better, I can get up. And I got probably a thousand words done. It was a thousand words I needed to revise. I got that done later. I was gonna do a lot more than that, but I I got that done. And even if I hadn't got that done, I was sick, I was not feeling well. So what was I gonna do? You just have to let that go and know that okay, I can make that up tomorrow, or not, or just push it out if I need to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:10

If you have the project management mindset, like I said, it's not about the charts and the graphs, but if you have the mindset of this is just an ongoing project, I just need to reassess and figure out how to make up the time or change the deadline or just let it go. It doesn't matter, and figure out from there, it lowers the whole temperature of things, like you were saying, you can just lay down, yeah, feel better, and then come back and do what you needed to do.

Jami 36:33

Well, let's talk about your fan fiction thing. So your fan fiction thing, your fan fiction book, and just give us an overview about it. What do we need to know about writing fan fiction? Oh, about writing fan fiction.

SPEAKER_04 36:47

Wow, that it's so much fun. It's so much fun. Yeah. What's fun about it? What's fun about it? What's fun about it? What's fun about it is also what makes it a bit of a challenge. There's always the accusation that fan fiction is easier, and that's there's that's yes and no. I've read some amazing literature that was fan fiction. But when you write fan fiction, you're taking characters you already love in a world that's already been established, and you're just making them kiss or you're putting them on a jet plane and sending them up to the stars. You're just having fun with them. It's like playing with your toys. It's just that's why it's fun. You're playing with your toys. Absolutely. It's like when I was a kid, so I'm old, and when I was a kid, Star Wars came out, the original one, 1977. I was a huge fangirl, made my parents go watch that movie way more times than they wanted to watch it. And I got the action figures. And man, I had played with those action figures for hours and hours. Luke and Han and Fly on the Millennium Falcon and fighting Darth Veteran and it was oh, I was having so much fun. That's the feeling I get when I write fanfiction.

Jami 37:52

Really? Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. How can a how can an author find their voice, their voice through writing fanfiction?

SPEAKER_04 38:01

That is a great question. I think one of the things that's the best thing about fanfiction, especially for newer authors, I don't want to say younger because anybody can be a new author at any age, but less experienced writers, is that it's a playground, right? You're not trying to please a market, you're not writing to market, you're not trying to get an agent or a publishing contract. You can do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. And that freedom, if you follow it and you write consistently, just that's true in all situations. But if you are using fan fiction and you are writing it anyway, start exploring with it and challenging yourself. If you always write in first person, try writing in third person. Your audience isn't going to care because they're not fans on your newsletter, they're going to be upset that you've suddenly changed your style, right? That has no bearing on it. You can just go in there, you can change the tense. You always write it in present tense. What's it like to write in past tense? Oh, you always write science fiction. What's it like to write a rom-com? You can make all these adventurous choices with characters who are already established, you know their parameters, you know what they like and they don't like, you know how they act in situations, and you have an environment for them to live in. And you can just play with your own voice in a way that I honestly think is very difficult to do outside of fanfiction. And that's what whole master MFAs are all about is trying to get people to make these explorations in writing rather than holding themselves tight to expectations. So that I think is a really valuable aspect of fanfiction. It's not for everybody, but if you really want to make those characters go on adventures that never made it to the screen, then why not use it? I wrote a million words of fanfiction before I ever published my first original fiction book. Oh, really? And I think there's a direct correlation there.

Sara 39:52

Well, what about using it to test ideas? How would you do that? And how does it transfer to your maybe if you're writing in somebody else's world, how do you test an idea and then move it to your own world?

SPEAKER_04 40:05

So I do talk about that in the book actually, because one of the things that I think is the real problem with people making that transition is what is decision fatigue. That's really like the heart of it, is that when you write go to write your own fan fiction, you have so many choices, you have so many options running your own fiction that a lot of people get caught with do I go left or right with this storyline? And especially true for us panthers more than plotters, but it happens to plotters as well. Like you get in there and you're like, Oh, I've done this all this world building for this, I'm not sure where it's supposed to go. So when you're exploring ideas in fan fiction, just go ham, just do whatever you want, and then step back and look at the story and look at what the parameters are. Look at is this a black cat Labrador Retriever romance? Is this a there was only one bed trope? Is this an enemies to lovers trope? Is this a coffee house story, which you know in the fan fiction world, a coffee house alternative universe is where you take like the characters from Game of Thrones and you make them all baristas at a coffee house, right? Very different. Yes. See, one of my theories is that things like cozy fantasy actually got their start in fan fiction because people started writing something like Game of Thrones Coffee AU. There's tons of coffee AUs in every yeah, I don't care how tragic. There's probably a Romeo and Juliet Coffee House AU somewhere in the world. I'm sure there is. But I think that translated directly into cozy fantasy when that started getting big. The Omega Verse. That was fanfiction. That was supernatural fanfiction. We can point to the day that that Omega Verse was born as a concept because it was launched in a very specific supernatural fan fiction. And it took another five to six years before it reached containment and started showing up in romance novels. But yeah, you take a lot of those ideas, you can explore them in fan fiction. Is the readership gonna transfer over? A lot of people think that it does, but it really doesn't. People who like reading fan fiction, they do read other stuff. I don't want to say they only do. People who like reading rom-coms about their favorite Star Wars characters generally aren't gonna read a lot of rom-coms of original fiction. They might like science fiction, but the audience doesn't transfer. But the writing skills do, and I think that's what's important.

Jami 42:34

Yeah, if I was gonna do that, it would have been footloose, the movie Footloose. I saw that. I'm not I'm embarrassed. It was at a bit, it was at a kind of a bad time in my life, but in the little town that I grew up in, I was I had gotten out of college and I was waiting tables. That's that's illogical. And but I so I was living at home, but in this little town, you could go to the movie for literally two dollars a night. I saw I went to see footloose every night for a week, seven nights. I went $14. I went to see it because I was like, I it just did that thing for me, and I yeah, I mean, I could have probably written some footloose fan fiction for that. Yeah, you probably still could right now.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

Uh-huh.

Jami 43:25

I was immersed, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:26

Immersed in the world. I think that's the most important thing. Yeah, there are actually 42 footloose fanfic on archive of our own.

Jami 43:34

Oh my gosh. So that is amazing. Okay, so tell us where people can find fanfiction. See, I would I don't even know where to go to find fanfiction.

SPEAKER_04 43:44

So archiveofarown.org is run by the organization of trans transformative works. It's a long sentence, which means it's a fan fiction archive that's free. It's paid for by fans. For instance, I'm a member of the OTW, so my $20 a year goes to keep. Servers. It was launched back in I think 2008 by a bunch of fanfiction authors who got tired of our sites getting shut down. So they started this independently. There's millions of fan fiction there, there's all sorts of fanfic from every single property you can possibly think of. It's free to read, it's free to post. Now, is that the only place to find fanfiction? It is not. But if you are curious about other places that might be specific to a fandom, Tumblr is your go-to. Tumblr, go to Tumblr. A lot of fanfiction authors are on Tumblr, including myself. And we talk about our fanfic. Like I still write fanfic. I just finished up a gift fic for a friend who had been waiting for it for two years. But I did finish that was about it was only about 30,000 words. It was a novella. And I just posted it there right on AO3. Anyone can read it, but it was specifically for her. So yeah, it's easy to do. That's cool. Yeah.

Jami 44:58

That's cool. Well, now, how do you keep from getting in trouble with the author, with the original author?

SPEAKER_04 45:05

You don't. Okay, there you go. Yeah, there you go. The organization of transformative works has a sharp legal team, the money goes. And technically, fanfiction falls under fair use. I think, for instance, Anne Rice had a long and contentious fight with her fans over fan fiction. She hated fanfiction. She did eventually come around towards the end of her life, but for many years. There was no interview with the vampire fanfiction, which just blows my mind. But there was none because she would do takedown notices. And it was very aggressive and very antagonistic. But here's the key, and this is what a lot of other authors have learned pissing off your fans is not the best move. No, no, no, not a good idea.

Sara 45:54

To me, it's comparative to if you watch a show, a movie, a drama, and you take scenes from that and you create some cute, fun, interesting little TikTok or video, and somebody sees that and goes, Oh, I want to go watch that. But if you cut that off, you're cutting off free publicity in a way. And so I feel like if you have people who are taking your characters and writing a story about it, and it's transformative, right? That's part of the deal. That's part of the reason it's not caught up in the copyright issue as much, is because you're changing it into something a little bit newer, different.

SPEAKER_04 46:29

It's free advertising. And a lot of more modern authors have figured that out. Naomi Novic wrote, she does uh Tremer's series, Tremer Dragon series, or His Majesty's Dragon series. And she started out in fanfiction. That's not a secret. I'm not telling any tales out of school, but and she was one of the driving forces for people to realize that fanfiction is that it can serve exactly as advertising. I know for a fact that like the I got into Chinese drama fandom right before the pandemic. Perfect timing to sit around and watch a lot of videos in a language I don't understand. I'm right there with you. Hello, because of the fanfiction, because I didn't know these stories. And my favorite fanfiction, and this is something else I learned. My favorite fanfiction authors, I will follow them into new fandoms, things I've never heard of before, like obscure Chinese fandoms. I follow like one of my favorite authors was started writing writing Guardian fandom, a Guardian being a Chinese drama. And I was like, what is going on? What is this story about? And then slowly I just discovered all these new properties because I was reading the fan fiction because the author I loved read it. It is really free advertising for your story. Now, that said, if anybody has written fan fiction of my work, I make it a point not to read it because we don't want to cross those streams. That's a very important part. I don't want people a fan to come back and say you stole my idea from this fan. You don't want to mess with that. But having people do that on their own, man, I'd love it. I'd I that would to me, that's when I know I've arrived. That's gonna be fantastic.

Sara 48:06

Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like when you have people doing character art in the world and you want to continue to explore the world, whether through art or writing or yeah, I have a transformative work statement.

SPEAKER_04 48:19

That's not something that a lot of authors have these days, but I do have a transformative work statement on my website because I want to be clear that I do allow and support people doing fan fiction while also setting the boundaries of don't send it to me, I can't read it. But if you want to create fan works, whether they're fan videos, art, stories, you have my blessing. And I put that out there specifically because I don't want fans to feel bad. I don't want them to think, is she gonna approve of this or not? I approve of it, can't read it, but I do approve of it.

Jami 48:51

Great, that's that is awesome.

Sara 48:53

Yeah, so good, so good. If you had to start over today, what would you do differently?

SPEAKER_04 48:59

And I don't even remember what I said last time because it always changes, doesn't it? The more the more you exactly, yeah, yeah. And I'm saying this particularly because I think the industry has changed as well. I were starting over today, I would just I would say to myself, go with what your heart wants to do. And in my case, that was writing serials, writing very long stories with very intense world building that don't neatly fit into a standard niche according to the BISAC code, and uh and just to get out there and do it because the readers are out there. I think that was what I was always scared of. I had a real scarcity mindset. Yeah, I have to find those readers somewhere out there, they're out there, and they will find you if you keep putting your stuff out there. Now, is that always gonna translate into you making enough money to live on? No, that's a different skill set. But if I were starting over, I would start there. I would say, do what you love, do it in the format that you'd love, do it in the way that you love to share it, which for me is serials and serialization, and build on that because this is a long game. And I think a lot of people think they're gonna run, write one or two books and then make money hand over foot. And that's they might, but if you really love storytelling the way I love storytelling and the way I think you guys like storytelling, it's something you're gonna be doing for the rest of your life. So I guess in short, I would say start as you mean to go on.

Jami 50:25

Yeah, that's good, that's great. Thank you so much. Tell everybody where they can find out more about you, the books, all of that.

SPEAKER_04 50:32

All of that. My my main hub, because I do have so many projects and so many hats, is houseofork.info, and that's house of york one word.info. From there, you can get links to Author Alchemist site, which is where I have my craft books, kimbuyork.net, which is where my fiction hub is with links to my the biblioteca, which is my online fiction blog at Substack. So you go there, houseofyork.info, you'll find everything you need.

Jami 51:01

What about the serial nation? Where can they find out more about that?

SPEAKER_04 51:04

I have a link on that, serial-nation.com. That is has links to my Patreon, to the Substack I've started for it, and also information about the cohort that's starting in March. Perfect.

unknown 51:16

Perfect.

Sara 51:17

All right, we will have all those links in the show notes, and they will be at wish I'd known for writers.com. So thanks for being here. It's been great to catch up with you.

SPEAKER_04 51:26

Oh, it's always a wonderful talking with you guys. I was so excited. I was like, yay, to talk to my people. I'm sorry. Thank you so much for having me.

Sara 51:34

You're welcome. You're welcome. And also don't forget our sponsor for this week is Ritzi. And that link will be in the show notes as well. We'll see everybody next week. Bye.