Interview with Dr. Debra Blaine – Part 2 – 373
In this podcast episode, John interviews Dr. Debra Blaine, a returning guest from 2022, for Part 2 of their discussion on how to publish a book and promote your business.
Dr. Blaine, a former physician turned full-time author, continues to share her insights on the writing and self-publishing process.
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Overcoming Writer's Block and Setting Realistic Goals
Dr. Blaine emphasizes the importance of manageable writing goals, suggesting that aspiring authors shouldn't feel pressured to write a 300-page book immediately. She recommends breaking the writing process into smaller, less overwhelming pieces.
Dr. Blaine also shares tips on crafting engaging openings and maintaining reader interest throughout a book, including using “hooks” at the beginning of chapters and “cliffhangers” at the end.
More on How to Publish
John and Debra discuss the financial aspects of self-publishing, discussing royalties, pricing strategies, and the importance of building a reader base. Dr. Blaine shares insights on Amazon's algorithm and how it affects book visibility and sales.
She also touches on the concept of “writing to market” and the benefits of creating a book series to increase readership and sales potential.
Practical Writing Tips from a Seasoned Author
Dr. Blaine offers practical advice for aspiring writers, including keeping detailed notes on characters and plot points. She discusses her current projects, including a guide on the elements of fiction writing and a new trilogy.
Debra emphasizes the value of consistent writing habits, suggesting that authors find a routine that works for them, whether it's writing every morning or setting aside specific times during the week.
Summary
To learn more or connect with Dr. Blaine, you can visit her website, allthingswriting.com, email her at db@allthingswriting.com, or find her on LinkedIn. Debra's books are available on her website and at Amazon, and she offers a free novella titled Deadly Algorithm through her website, providing an excellent introduction to her writing style and themes.
Links for today's episode:
- Dr. Debra Blaine's Website: All Things Writing
- Debra's latest book on self-publishing,
- For an example of Debra's writing download a free copy of Deadly Algorithm
- Vellum, the software Debra uses to write her books (this is an affiliate link)
- Debra's LinkedIn Page
- Part 1 on How to Publish a Book and Promote Your Business
- Purchase Your All Action Pass Videos and Bonuses from the 2024 Summit (Use Coupon Code 30-OFF)
- The Nonclinical Career Academy
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 373
Part 2 - More on How to Publish a Book
John: The question is when you're doing the coaching and people need help, you said it was the creative side.
Dr. Debra Blaine: It's the creative side, and feeling overwhelmed. A lot of them thinking I can't write a whole book. And so, the first thing is you don't need to write a whole book. Nobody eats a slice of pizza in one bite. You write a piece of the book and it doesn't have to be a 300 page book. It can be a 100 page book. It could be an 80 page book. You can sort of figure it out so that you don't overwhelm yourself. That and getting organized, helping them to organize.
John: Okay. I'm not going to jump into writing the memoir of my entire family, my nine siblings and all of their families and my parents and aunts and uncles and everything in over a span of 80 years or something. No, I'll remember not to do that for sure.
But I did notice recently, and I don't know if it was, I was reading a book or watching a movie or both was that I need something to get me interested in the first page. Like you said, if there's something happening right now, you just into it, you have no idea who you're reading about, what their motivation is, what's going on, except something is happening. That's a good way to get me at least interested in the book.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, and that's called the hook. And not only do you want your title to represent the book and be a little bit of a hook, your metadata, the book description, that first line that says what the book is about, that's got to be a hook. But then when you start your first paragraph should be a hook. One of the things that a lot of new authors do, in particular, is they start off the book with it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, which is great, because they had a longer attention span back then. But when I write a book, a lot of times when I consult with my author clients, I have them jump into a scene, it's already happening around you. It doesn't have to be the main character. But what is the emotional stress on this character? And why? And so, immediately, who is the person? What is the conflict? Why do we care?
And so, not everybody's going to love every book, right? But for those who are going to be your readers, they're going to eat that up. And then they're going to keep going. And at the end of every chapter, you don't want to leave the end of the chapter, "Okay, and she went to bed feeling much better." Chapter three. I can put that down and I forgot to pick that up. Oh, three months later. She went to bed, but the question was still in her mind of what happened to whatever, fill in the blank. You always want to end the chapter with a little bit of a hook that makes the reader want, I don't want to see what's happening and turn that page.
John: Isn't that how soap operas do it? There's a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. And so you'll come back next week.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, exactly. Right.
John: Something like that. Yeah. I don't know, when you get older, it seems like time is going faster. This is totally off the wall, but I just mentioned when I'm reading a book, each chapter towards the end seems to go faster than the ones that were the first half of the book. Is that just my imagination?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, it could be. In my books I tend to write short chapters, although this trilogy that I'm writing, I've noticed that the chapters are longer, but it depends. Some authors write shorter chapters. Take a look, look at the old books, the days of your, and if the chapter was 25 pages, and then this one is only five pages, well, then it's not you.
John: I see, they're manipulating me. Okay. I was going to ask you about some lessons you've learned that want to make sure prospective writers or current writers might learn from to make things a little easier for them if they decide to do this kind of thing.
Dr. Debra Blaine: I didn't know anything about really book writing when I started. I had this story to tell and I mixed it in. I had the story to tell about what's happening in healthcare, but I mixed it in with this medical thriller about people hacking into our EMRs and extorting money and killing the patients. I didn't have a sense of... I read a lot when I was a kid. I kind of understood instinctively the arc of a story and that I wanted my characters to be really interesting people and what makes somebody interesting. They learn things about themselves, but there were so many things I didn't understand. And even though I worked with a mentor for a year and he helped me tremendously. I used to say that I got my master's from Rich Cravolin because he used to be a professor at the University of Southern California, but he didn't send me a certificate. But there's so much more, I guess the PhD version. There's so much more.
I love that you're familiar with my books. I wrote Undo Influences and then I wrote Beyond The Pillars of Salt. And then I wrote the Meraki Effect and that was followed by the Meraki Nexus. In trying to put those together, what I didn't know then is that a series sells faster. Now, when I was writing my first book, don't talk to me about series. I got this one book and that's all I can handle, but series sell faster. And since in those three books or four books, I kind of used the same characters. I liked the characters. I had developed the characters. I liked what they stood for. There was one that I didn't like too much. So I knocked them off, which is something you can do when you're an author.
But the difference was, is that the first one, Undo Influences is a conspiracy thriller, a government conspiracy political thriller, takes place in 2020. Beyond the Pillars of Salt is sort of a natural progression of what happens to those people and to the world with climate change and dictatorship like government that we seem to be headed for, at least at the time. And so, then that became more of a dystopian. And then like a dystopian is almost by definition, science fiction. And then what did they do? They had to leave planet earth and figured out how to do that, try to make it as realistic as possible. And then they got to planet Meraki. And so, that was a pure science fiction colonization, space opera, whatever.
I tried to put them together. I completely confused the Amazon algorithm. Seriously, it's an algorithm. It learns some things, but it's also kind of stupid. But it's a political, contemporary political thriller, dystopian science fiction, and then pure science fiction. Dystopian fiction, mostly on earth and then science fiction on another planet. And my sales went like through the floor. The things that I didn't realize is, this time I'm writing this trilogy and I'm going to keep it all in one genre and I'm going to write it to market.
The interesting thing is, I know self-published authors. I personally know self-published authors who are five, six, and seven digit authors. And I know of traditionally published authors who are probably five, six, and seven digits or more like James Patterson or somebody who has other people write most of his books now, by the way. But I know these people, I've spoken to these people. They're my coaches. They've told me how to work things. I didn't know this stuff before. And so, it's really helpful.
I've also heard and seen that most writers don't make it big until they've published a number of books. One of our colleagues, Freda McFadden, I'll throw in a plug for her though, not that she needs it. She is a neurologist. She has written, she has completely dominated the top 20 Amazon thrillers for the last six, eight months. She earned so much money from that. I don't know how much exactly, but I can promise you, she's probably in seven digits at this point. But she told me it took her nine years to become an overnight sensation.
John: Right.
Dr. Debra Blaine: She's got like 20 books out. My friend Christina's got 20 books out. A lot of hers are novellas. People do it with novellas too. But the magic number they said is about five or six where you start to see that you really can, because there's so many books out there. And when people buy a book, they want to know if they like it, that the author's written other things because they want to stick with that author.
John: Let me ask you a quick question. In the online world, there's this thing, you've probably heard of it, a thousand true fans. If you have a thousand true fans, whether you're selling photos or you're selling books or whatever, or a podcast or whatever, if you have a thousand true fans, which means they'll buy anything you produce. Have you ever calculated whether that would be sufficient to meet a certain level of success?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, you need to sell more than a thousand books.
John: But if you have 10 books out.
Dr. Debra Blaine: If you have 10 books, now you've got 10,000. And if they're true fans and they tell other people. So if you figure the average royalty, if you do it yourself is between... Well, the little guy, it's less because it's a small book. I can charge less because the printing cost, the paper costs and the paper costs has gone up. With an eBook, most of the places, if you self-publish will give you 70% of the profits as opposed to Ingram says they give you 70%, but I never got more than a buck and a half. And whatever their processing fees are.
But let's say you're getting $4 a book and you sell a thousand in a month, then you got $4,000. Once you start selling, that's how my little guy got to be number one and stay there for so long. Because I sold 52 copies in the first week. And when that happens, once it starts selling, then Amazon, the algorithm again, starts saying, "Okay, this book, people like this book", and it starts showing it to random people. Even if they're not the people that heard about it from me from somewhere.
And so, the more popular your book is, this is the way all social media works. When you post something on Instagram, if somebody likes it, that's great. But if they comment on it, then the algorithm thinks, "Oh, people like this", the more people that have commented on it, the more people Instagram will show you or not hate Instagram, I can't really figure it out. But the algorithm part I understand. And it's the same for Facebook, for LinkedIn, for Amazon, for any of these places. The more people are interested, it thinks more people will be interested. And because Amazon wants to sell books, it wants to present the one that seems to be selling so we can make even more money.
John: Right. It behooves us to maybe if we're doing something like that, to get a big bump at the beginning somehow.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, that's what I did. Actually when I published this little puppy, I put it up for the first week for 99 cents. And a bunch of people bought it. Now, I don't think 52 people that I presented to bought it. But a lot of other people bought it when it was on sale for 99. So now it's $3.99. But other people bought it. And then it stayed up there for two weeks. It was in the top five.
John: When I want to learn something, it's been a while, but I would just go on to Amazon and look, they have free books and then they have 99 cent books. And so, if I say, well, I want to learn about this, I'm just going to buy the first five of those books for five bucks. And so, there is some motivation there. People are looking for that because they know there's a good chance it's going to have good information. It's not going to usually be garbage or the person wouldn't have taken the time to produce it and get it out.
Dr. Debra Blaine: You'd be surprised. Some things are.
John: But some things are.
Dr. Debra Blaine: The thing with that is Amazon doesn't really want you to put your book up for 99 cents because they don't make any money. What they do is if your eBook is between $2.99 and $9.99, they give you 70% in royalties. There's no printing costs or anything. If it's below $2.99 or if it's above $9.99, they give you 35%. 52 people bought this, but I didn't make any money on it. It was more to get it up there and get it to where it was going to be seen. They each have their and the printing price when you go to put something up when you self-publish it, it's going to tell you as you're in the different stages that you enter it, it's going to tell you, okay, this is your book. This is how many pages it is because it's going to have looked at it before you get to that stage and it'll say the print cost will be, and it can be $2 if it's a tiny book, or it could be $5 or $6, or if it's a hardcover, it's going to be maybe $12 or $14, which is why hardcover books cost more. When you calculate your royalties for a print book, you're going to take the cost of the book. Amazon gets 40% of anything in print. Take the 40% off, then take the cost of printing and subtract that from what's left from your 60% and the rest is yours.
And when you punch it in, you say, okay, I want to charge $8.99 for this book and it'll calculate and say, this is going to be your royalty. I want to charge $12.99. Okay, this is going to be your royalty. I want to charge $4.99 and say, nope, can't do that, it's costing us more to print that. Really, you're not blind to it. You know exactly what you're going to get.
John: All right. Well, I think we're about out of time here. We've covered a lot of things, answered a lot of my questions. All right. Did you already mention what you're working on now?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I'm working on the sister to this guy, which is going to be about how to organize your book. What is a story arc? What is a character arc? How do you develop characters? How do you write convincing dialogue? The basic elements of fiction and applying it. And then I even have one example of taking a story, "Sue found a cat under a bush and took it in." Well, that's a plot, but the whole story arc, I go into this whole thing and what she was feeling when she found it and what happened when she picked it up because it's a scared cat and the vet bill. I created a story arc, but I also use examples from real time, like movies that we know and books that we know. That's that book.
John: I have a question about that.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah.
John: That comes in my head also while you're talking. Do you have to keep a bio on your characters handy, or do you remember everything about how your characters think, what they would do in this situation, that situation, or you just wing it? How do you figure that out?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Great question. No, I can't keep all that on hand. Sometimes I can't even remember the name of what was her husband's name. But what I do is when I write, I have two documents going. I have the book and then I have the notes for the book, kind of like your show notes, maybe. And I list things. First of all, I'll write out the general arc of the story. I'll write out who are the characters and I'll put something about each character. And then when something significant happens, I'll add it. Okay, this woman was actually married to that guy and he did this. And I'll add those things and I save that.
And I do a lot of research when I write my books. Some of it's scientific, some of it medical, some of it physics, whatever. And I'll copy that and put it in too. I have it all so I can go back to it, not just in writing this book, but for the next book. Yeah, I can't remember all that.
John: I would think you'd need some kind of cheat sheet.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, how do you do that? I don't know anybody who can just sit down and... Maybe Frida can, I don't know.
John: I like to read series. As you mentioned, those are very popular. So I have this Michael Connolly has a series, he's like up to 30 books now. There's no way you could remember the characters, especially when he skips a book or two and then goes back to these old characters.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Right, right. Instead of reading the book again. But the other book I'm working on, which I'm really excited about, because this one it's more of a term paper kind of thing. I just started a trilogy. And did you read? Now I'm not intimidated by the idea of I'm going to write a trilogy because, well, yeah, I've written I've written seven books. Why can't I have a trilogy? So I can write three more. I don't know if you read. I put out a little freebie reader magnet Deadly Algorithm.
John: No, I have not read that. I saw it on your website.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, I can send you if you're interested. We can put the link in there because it's free if anybody wants it. It does put you on my newsletter, which is something I learned that authors need to have. But in that book, it's a medical thriller and it's got some EMR things and quirks. But what happens in the book is the mother. There's a child, a four year old child that has to be left behind with the dad.
And so, what I'm doing now is it's 12 years later and that child is looking for her mother. And so, this is going to be the quest and the bad guy, the antagonist in in the novella in Deadly Algorithm is basically corporate greed insurance companies, big pharma, they don't want to pay for health care anymore. So there they want people to die. And this particular character, who's the main character of that story, doesn't have any medical problems, but they give her one, a medical problem for which the cure will kill her. And so, why is that happening? And she has to run. Anyway, you can get that in just the blurb about it. So this is not 12 years later.
And now it's going to be where the real bad guy is way bigger than big pharma. And in the first part, the first book is going to be about Jenna searching for her family and what leads her to have to do that. And then ultimately, the population of the earth has been thinning due to climate change and people and too many resources depleted. And where is that going? I don't want to say the end of the book, but it's going to be that she said that that's a cat. She said, No, don't do it. But the bigger antagonist, the bigger evil is going to be way, way bigger. And it's going to have something to do with artificial intelligence. That's all I'm going to say, because that's the big thing these days.
And this time, I've got a lot of detail on that first book. I've got the second book, sort of roughly outlined, but I know where I'm going with it. And the same with the third. And I'm really excited about it, because this time, I'm writing it to market. I'm putting in the things that I didn't know to do before. So, how do you write to market? You find books that are like the book you want to write. And you look at them and compare them. How old is the protagonist? What's the setting? What's the year? Where are they? What are the common? What are the tropes that you find in there? What are the flaws of the characters? Now, that doesn't mean my book is going to be anything like them. But to just make sure that readers who expect those kinds of emotional bounces, we'll get them.
John: Nice, nice.
Dr. Debra Blaine: I'm excited about it.
John: Okay, that's going to be good. That'll be good for another podcast episode then. Okay, where should we find you? allthingswriting.com? Is that the best place to start?
Dr. Debra Blaine: That's my website, allthingswriting.com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. And you can email me at db@allthingswriting.com. I don't know if you want to put in, there's a Calendly link, which you can find on my website. It's hard to know if I was able to get it into LinkedIn, I don't think I was. I was trying to figure that out.
John: But I always ask authors this, writers this. Probably you've already answered it. But should they go to your website to buy the books? If you go to your website anyway, to check them out, but I do end up just pushing them off to some other site or do you sell from the website?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I haven't started selling from the website because it's complicated. But Amazon is a great place to go. You can just do just do a Google search Debra Blaine books. And you'll come up with my books. And the nice thing is that the more even though I would get more money if I sold them myself, the more people buy it from Amazon, that algorithm kicks up. So it helps.
John: Right, right. Okay, well, I'm going to let you go now here in a second. You have a minute or two, if you have any bit of last minute advice for the listeners, maybe try to convince them to become a writer or not become a writer or a novelist.
Dr. Debra Blaine: I had a note about that, but I can't find it. My advice is write. If you have a story in your head, we call it a word dump. Just start writing it. Don't edit it while you're writing it. It's a first draft. It's a rough draft. It's not even your first draft. Because you can get so bogged down. And you don't have to figure "I'm going to write 80,000 words." You don't even think in terms of words. Put the word ticker on later but if you don't start writing, nothing will get down there. I used to have a mantra when I was writing Code Blue. And it was, "It's not going to write itself." Because I was one of those people who wanted to have written as opposed to wanting to write. But it doesn't happen like that.
John: Are you disciplined now? Can you black out so many so much time where you're going to write? Or do you kind of wing it now when you feel real productive to do more and then other days...?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I try to write every morning. My brain is crisper in the morning. And that's still that whole COVID thing. And I schedule clients usually in the afternoons and evenings. And even if I feel like I'm waning, I don't want to say sundowning. But if I'm waning, once I'm talking to someone, that energy that we bounce off each other, that ignites me and that's really helpful. It's a different part of my brain, but to sit and to write and to do the research and go back and forth. I try to do that in the mornings. And I try to write every morning.
John: Nice. That's good. That's good. Sounds like something that we should emulate if we're going to try and do that.
Dr. Debra Blaine: You don't have to do it every morning. As long as you put aside whatever time it is for you. And let's say it's only three times a week. Three evenings a week I'm going to tell my family, please just give me an hour. And it's the inertia I think of, you need to get started. Sometimes I'll say I can only write for 20 minutes and it'll end up being an hour and a half because it's getting started.
John: Once you get going, it's like a lot of things. I might have to split this into two episodes, Debra, but it's okay. Because then I don't have to do another episode. I'll just spread this out. Nobody wants to listen for an hour and they can break it up themselves, but I tend to go. I'll think about that after we hang up here.
All right. But with that, I'm going to say goodbye officially from the podcast and thank you for spending all this time with us today.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Thank you. Thank you so much. I always love talking to you.
John: You should read the books guys, because they're entertaining. It's an escape. Reading, relaxing, walking.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And you write the best reviews for me too. Well, that's the other thing. Please write review. The reviews are the hardest thing to get. It's really hard.
John: I'm going to put that in the show notes too. I'm going to say, here's the link. If you want to look for the books or you can go to Amazon here and always write a review if you do that, because the author definitely needs that. All right, then, you take care.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay. Thank you so much, John.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 373
Part 2 - More on How to Publish a Book
John: The question is when you're doing the coaching and people need help, you said it was the creative side.
Dr. Debra Blaine: It's the creative side, and feeling overwhelmed. A lot of them thinking I can't write a whole book. And so, the first thing is you don't need to write a whole book. Nobody eats a slice of pizza in one bite. You write a piece of the book and it doesn't have to be a 300 page book. It can be a 100 page book. It could be an 80 page book. You can sort of figure it out so that you don't overwhelm yourself. That and getting organized, helping them to organize.
John: Okay. I'm not going to jump into writing the memoir of my entire family, my nine siblings and all of their families and my parents and aunts and uncles and everything in over a span of 80 years or something. No, I'll remember not to do that for sure.
But I did notice recently, and I don't know if it was, I was reading a book or watching a movie or both was that I need something to get me interested in the first page. Like you said, if there's something happening right now, you just into it, you have no idea who you're reading about, what their motivation is, what's going on, except something is happening. That's a good way to get me at least interested in the book.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, and that's called the hook. And not only do you want your title to represent the book and be a little bit of a hook, your metadata, the book description, that first line that says what the book is about, that's got to be a hook. But then when you start your first paragraph should be a hook. One of the things that a lot of new authors do, in particular, is they start off the book with it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, which is great, because they had a longer attention span back then. But when I write a book, a lot of times when I consult with my author clients, I have them jump into a scene, it's already happening around you. It doesn't have to be the main character. But what is the emotional stress on this character? And why? And so, immediately, who is the person? What is the conflict? Why do we care?
And so, not everybody's going to love every book, right? But for those who are going to be your readers, they're going to eat that up. And then they're going to keep going. And at the end of every chapter, you don't want to leave the end of the chapter, "Okay, and she went to bed feeling much better." Chapter three. I can put that down and I forgot to pick that up. Oh, three months later. She went to bed, but the question was still in her mind of what happened to whatever, fill in the blank. You always want to end the chapter with a little bit of a hook that makes the reader want, I don't want to see what's happening and turn that page.
John: Isn't that how soap operas do it? There's a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. And so you'll come back next week.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, exactly. Right.
John: Something like that. Yeah. I don't know, when you get older, it seems like time is going faster. This is totally off the wall, but I just mentioned when I'm reading a book, each chapter towards the end seems to go faster than the ones that were the first half of the book. Is that just my imagination?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, it could be. In my books I tend to write short chapters, although this trilogy that I'm writing, I've noticed that the chapters are longer, but it depends. Some authors write shorter chapters. Take a look, look at the old books, the days of your, and if the chapter was 25 pages, and then this one is only five pages, well, then it's not you.
John: I see, they're manipulating me. Okay. I was going to ask you about some lessons you've learned that want to make sure prospective writers or current writers might learn from to make things a little easier for them if they decide to do this kind of thing.
Dr. Debra Blaine: I didn't know anything about really book writing when I started. I had this story to tell and I mixed it in. I had the story to tell about what's happening in healthcare, but I mixed it in with this medical thriller about people hacking into our EMRs and extorting money and killing the patients. I didn't have a sense of... I read a lot when I was a kid. I kind of understood instinctively the arc of a story and that I wanted my characters to be really interesting people and what makes somebody interesting. They learn things about themselves, but there were so many things I didn't understand. And even though I worked with a mentor for a year and he helped me tremendously. I used to say that I got my master's from Rich Cravolin because he used to be a professor at the University of Southern California, but he didn't send me a certificate. But there's so much more, I guess the PhD version. There's so much more.
I love that you're familiar with my books. I wrote Undo Influences and then I wrote Beyond The Pillars of Salt. And then I wrote the Meraki Effect and that was followed by the Meraki Nexus. In trying to put those together, what I didn't know then is that a series sells faster. Now, when I was writing my first book, don't talk to me about series. I got this one book and that's all I can handle, but series sell faster. And since in those three books or four books, I kind of used the same characters. I liked the characters. I had developed the characters. I liked what they stood for. There was one that I didn't like too much. So I knocked them off, which is something you can do when you're an author.
But the difference was, is that the first one, Undo Influences is a conspiracy thriller, a government conspiracy political thriller, takes place in 2020. Beyond the Pillars of Salt is sort of a natural progression of what happens to those people and to the world with climate change and dictatorship like government that we seem to be headed for, at least at the time. And so, then that became more of a dystopian. And then like a dystopian is almost by definition, science fiction. And then what did they do? They had to leave planet earth and figured out how to do that, try to make it as realistic as possible. And then they got to planet Meraki. And so, that was a pure science fiction colonization, space opera, whatever.
I tried to put them together. I completely confused the Amazon algorithm. Seriously, it's an algorithm. It learns some things, but it's also kind of stupid. But it's a political, contemporary political thriller, dystopian science fiction, and then pure science fiction. Dystopian fiction, mostly on earth and then science fiction on another planet. And my sales went like through the floor. The things that I didn't realize is, this time I'm writing this trilogy and I'm going to keep it all in one genre and I'm going to write it to market.
The interesting thing is, I know self-published authors. I personally know self-published authors who are five, six, and seven digit authors. And I know of traditionally published authors who are probably five, six, and seven digits or more like James Patterson or somebody who has other people write most of his books now, by the way. But I know these people, I've spoken to these people. They're my coaches. They've told me how to work things. I didn't know this stuff before. And so, it's really helpful.
I've also heard and seen that most writers don't make it big until they've published a number of books. One of our colleagues, Freda McFadden, I'll throw in a plug for her though, not that she needs it. She is a neurologist. She has written, she has completely dominated the top 20 Amazon thrillers for the last six, eight months. She earned so much money from that. I don't know how much exactly, but I can promise you, she's probably in seven digits at this point. But she told me it took her nine years to become an overnight sensation.
John: Right.
Dr. Debra Blaine: She's got like 20 books out. My friend Christina's got 20 books out. A lot of hers are novellas. People do it with novellas too. But the magic number they said is about five or six where you start to see that you really can, because there's so many books out there. And when people buy a book, they want to know if they like it, that the author's written other things because they want to stick with that author.
John: Let me ask you a quick question. In the online world, there's this thing, you've probably heard of it, a thousand true fans. If you have a thousand true fans, whether you're selling photos or you're selling books or whatever, or a podcast or whatever, if you have a thousand true fans, which means they'll buy anything you produce. Have you ever calculated whether that would be sufficient to meet a certain level of success?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, you need to sell more than a thousand books.
John: But if you have 10 books out.
Dr. Debra Blaine: If you have 10 books, now you've got 10,000. And if they're true fans and they tell other people. So if you figure the average royalty, if you do it yourself is between... Well, the little guy, it's less because it's a small book. I can charge less because the printing cost, the paper costs and the paper costs has gone up. With an eBook, most of the places, if you self-publish will give you 70% of the profits as opposed to Ingram says they give you 70%, but I never got more than a buck and a half. And whatever their processing fees are.
But let's say you're getting $4 a book and you sell a thousand in a month, then you got $4,000. Once you start selling, that's how my little guy got to be number one and stay there for so long. Because I sold 52 copies in the first week. And when that happens, once it starts selling, then Amazon, the algorithm again, starts saying, "Okay, this book, people like this book", and it starts showing it to random people. Even if they're not the people that heard about it from me from somewhere.
And so, the more popular your book is, this is the way all social media works. When you post something on Instagram, if somebody likes it, that's great. But if they comment on it, then the algorithm thinks, "Oh, people like this", the more people that have commented on it, the more people Instagram will show you or not hate Instagram, I can't really figure it out. But the algorithm part I understand. And it's the same for Facebook, for LinkedIn, for Amazon, for any of these places. The more people are interested, it thinks more people will be interested. And because Amazon wants to sell books, it wants to present the one that seems to be selling so we can make even more money.
John: Right. It behooves us to maybe if we're doing something like that, to get a big bump at the beginning somehow.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, that's what I did. Actually when I published this little puppy, I put it up for the first week for 99 cents. And a bunch of people bought it. Now, I don't think 52 people that I presented to bought it. But a lot of other people bought it when it was on sale for 99. So now it's $3.99. But other people bought it. And then it stayed up there for two weeks. It was in the top five.
John: When I want to learn something, it's been a while, but I would just go on to Amazon and look, they have free books and then they have 99 cent books. And so, if I say, well, I want to learn about this, I'm just going to buy the first five of those books for five bucks. And so, there is some motivation there. People are looking for that because they know there's a good chance it's going to have good information. It's not going to usually be garbage or the person wouldn't have taken the time to produce it and get it out.
Dr. Debra Blaine: You'd be surprised. Some things are.
John: But some things are.
Dr. Debra Blaine: The thing with that is Amazon doesn't really want you to put your book up for 99 cents because they don't make any money. What they do is if your eBook is between $2.99 and $9.99, they give you 70% in royalties. There's no printing costs or anything. If it's below $2.99 or if it's above $9.99, they give you 35%. 52 people bought this, but I didn't make any money on it. It was more to get it up there and get it to where it was going to be seen. They each have their and the printing price when you go to put something up when you self-publish it, it's going to tell you as you're in the different stages that you enter it, it's going to tell you, okay, this is your book. This is how many pages it is because it's going to have looked at it before you get to that stage and it'll say the print cost will be, and it can be $2 if it's a tiny book, or it could be $5 or $6, or if it's a hardcover, it's going to be maybe $12 or $14, which is why hardcover books cost more. When you calculate your royalties for a print book, you're going to take the cost of the book. Amazon gets 40% of anything in print. Take the 40% off, then take the cost of printing and subtract that from what's left from your 60% and the rest is yours.
And when you punch it in, you say, okay, I want to charge $8.99 for this book and it'll calculate and say, this is going to be your royalty. I want to charge $12.99. Okay, this is going to be your royalty. I want to charge $4.99 and say, nope, can't do that, it's costing us more to print that. Really, you're not blind to it. You know exactly what you're going to get.
John: All right. Well, I think we're about out of time here. We've covered a lot of things, answered a lot of my questions. All right. Did you already mention what you're working on now?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I'm working on the sister to this guy, which is going to be about how to organize your book. What is a story arc? What is a character arc? How do you develop characters? How do you write convincing dialogue? The basic elements of fiction and applying it. And then I even have one example of taking a story, "Sue found a cat under a bush and took it in." Well, that's a plot, but the whole story arc, I go into this whole thing and what she was feeling when she found it and what happened when she picked it up because it's a scared cat and the vet bill. I created a story arc, but I also use examples from real time, like movies that we know and books that we know. That's that book.
John: I have a question about that.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah.
John: That comes in my head also while you're talking. Do you have to keep a bio on your characters handy, or do you remember everything about how your characters think, what they would do in this situation, that situation, or you just wing it? How do you figure that out?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Great question. No, I can't keep all that on hand. Sometimes I can't even remember the name of what was her husband's name. But what I do is when I write, I have two documents going. I have the book and then I have the notes for the book, kind of like your show notes, maybe. And I list things. First of all, I'll write out the general arc of the story. I'll write out who are the characters and I'll put something about each character. And then when something significant happens, I'll add it. Okay, this woman was actually married to that guy and he did this. And I'll add those things and I save that.
And I do a lot of research when I write my books. Some of it's scientific, some of it medical, some of it physics, whatever. And I'll copy that and put it in too. I have it all so I can go back to it, not just in writing this book, but for the next book. Yeah, I can't remember all that.
John: I would think you'd need some kind of cheat sheet.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, how do you do that? I don't know anybody who can just sit down and... Maybe Frida can, I don't know.
John: I like to read series. As you mentioned, those are very popular. So I have this Michael Connolly has a series, he's like up to 30 books now. There's no way you could remember the characters, especially when he skips a book or two and then goes back to these old characters.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Right, right. Instead of reading the book again. But the other book I'm working on, which I'm really excited about, because this one it's more of a term paper kind of thing. I just started a trilogy. And did you read? Now I'm not intimidated by the idea of I'm going to write a trilogy because, well, yeah, I've written I've written seven books. Why can't I have a trilogy? So I can write three more. I don't know if you read. I put out a little freebie reader magnet Deadly Algorithm.
John: No, I have not read that. I saw it on your website.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, I can send you if you're interested. We can put the link in there because it's free if anybody wants it. It does put you on my newsletter, which is something I learned that authors need to have. But in that book, it's a medical thriller and it's got some EMR things and quirks. But what happens in the book is the mother. There's a child, a four year old child that has to be left behind with the dad.
And so, what I'm doing now is it's 12 years later and that child is looking for her mother. And so, this is going to be the quest and the bad guy, the antagonist in in the novella in Deadly Algorithm is basically corporate greed insurance companies, big pharma, they don't want to pay for health care anymore. So there they want people to die. And this particular character, who's the main character of that story, doesn't have any medical problems, but they give her one, a medical problem for which the cure will kill her. And so, why is that happening? And she has to run. Anyway, you can get that in just the blurb about it. So this is not 12 years later.
And now it's going to be where the real bad guy is way bigger than big pharma. And in the first part, the first book is going to be about Jenna searching for her family and what leads her to have to do that. And then ultimately, the population of the earth has been thinning due to climate change and people and too many resources depleted. And where is that going? I don't want to say the end of the book, but it's going to be that she said that that's a cat. She said, No, don't do it. But the bigger antagonist, the bigger evil is going to be way, way bigger. And it's going to have something to do with artificial intelligence. That's all I'm going to say, because that's the big thing these days.
And this time, I've got a lot of detail on that first book. I've got the second book, sort of roughly outlined, but I know where I'm going with it. And the same with the third. And I'm really excited about it, because this time, I'm writing it to market. I'm putting in the things that I didn't know to do before. So, how do you write to market? You find books that are like the book you want to write. And you look at them and compare them. How old is the protagonist? What's the setting? What's the year? Where are they? What are the common? What are the tropes that you find in there? What are the flaws of the characters? Now, that doesn't mean my book is going to be anything like them. But to just make sure that readers who expect those kinds of emotional bounces, we'll get them.
John: Nice, nice.
Dr. Debra Blaine: I'm excited about it.
John: Okay, that's going to be good. That'll be good for another podcast episode then. Okay, where should we find you? allthingswriting.com? Is that the best place to start?
Dr. Debra Blaine: That's my website, allthingswriting.com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. And you can email me at db@allthingswriting.com. I don't know if you want to put in, there's a Calendly link, which you can find on my website. It's hard to know if I was able to get it into LinkedIn, I don't think I was. I was trying to figure that out.
John: But I always ask authors this, writers this. Probably you've already answered it. But should they go to your website to buy the books? If you go to your website anyway, to check them out, but I do end up just pushing them off to some other site or do you sell from the website?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I haven't started selling from the website because it's complicated. But Amazon is a great place to go. You can just do just do a Google search Debra Blaine books. And you'll come up with my books. And the nice thing is that the more even though I would get more money if I sold them myself, the more people buy it from Amazon, that algorithm kicks up. So it helps.
John: Right, right. Okay, well, I'm going to let you go now here in a second. You have a minute or two, if you have any bit of last minute advice for the listeners, maybe try to convince them to become a writer or not become a writer or a novelist.
Dr. Debra Blaine: I had a note about that, but I can't find it. My advice is write. If you have a story in your head, we call it a word dump. Just start writing it. Don't edit it while you're writing it. It's a first draft. It's a rough draft. It's not even your first draft. Because you can get so bogged down. And you don't have to figure "I'm going to write 80,000 words." You don't even think in terms of words. Put the word ticker on later but if you don't start writing, nothing will get down there. I used to have a mantra when I was writing Code Blue. And it was, "It's not going to write itself." Because I was one of those people who wanted to have written as opposed to wanting to write. But it doesn't happen like that.
John: Are you disciplined now? Can you black out so many so much time where you're going to write? Or do you kind of wing it now when you feel real productive to do more and then other days...?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I try to write every morning. My brain is crisper in the morning. And that's still that whole COVID thing. And I schedule clients usually in the afternoons and evenings. And even if I feel like I'm waning, I don't want to say sundowning. But if I'm waning, once I'm talking to someone, that energy that we bounce off each other, that ignites me and that's really helpful. It's a different part of my brain, but to sit and to write and to do the research and go back and forth. I try to do that in the mornings. And I try to write every morning.
John: Nice. That's good. That's good. Sounds like something that we should emulate if we're going to try and do that.
Dr. Debra Blaine: You don't have to do it every morning. As long as you put aside whatever time it is for you. And let's say it's only three times a week. Three evenings a week I'm going to tell my family, please just give me an hour. And it's the inertia I think of, you need to get started. Sometimes I'll say I can only write for 20 minutes and it'll end up being an hour and a half because it's getting started.
John: Once you get going, it's like a lot of things. I might have to split this into two episodes, Debra, but it's okay. Because then I don't have to do another episode. I'll just spread this out. Nobody wants to listen for an hour and they can break it up themselves, but I tend to go. I'll think about that after we hang up here.
All right. But with that, I'm going to say goodbye officially from the podcast and thank you for spending all this time with us today.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Thank you. Thank you so much. I always love talking to you.
John: You should read the books guys, because they're entertaining. It's an escape. Reading, relaxing, walking.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And you write the best reviews for me too. Well, that's the other thing. Please write review. The reviews are the hardest thing to get. It's really hard.
John: I'm going to put that in the show notes too. I'm going to say, here's the link. If you want to look for the books or you can go to Amazon here and always write a review if you do that, because the author definitely needs that. All right, then, you take care.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay. Thank you so much, John.
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