← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Scaling An Author Business With Rachel McLean
01:03:18
How do you successfully scale an author business? How do you delegate to your team as well as continue to research and write the books you love? With award-winning crime author, Rachel McLean. In the intro,
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- [00:01]
Joanna Penn
Welcome to the Creative Penn Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double n. And here's the show hello creatives, I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 777 of the podcast and it is Friday the 18th of October 2024. As I record this in today's show, I'm talking about scaling your author business with Rachel maclean and we have a fascinating discussion. I really enjoyed this one about ambition growing from being an author with one series to an imprint with multiple series and a bigger team going wide from KU to direct into bookstores and more, as well as the mindset you need to take the next step as well as deciding whether you want to scale or not. So yes, this made me think about lots of things for my own business. So that's coming up in the interview.
- [01:12]
Rachel Maclean
Section.
- [01:17]
Joanna Penn
In Writing and Publishing Things. Amazon launched a suite of new Kindle devices this week, including a reimagined Kindle Scribe and the first ever color Kindle. Now I still use a Kindle Paperwhite I I have had a few over the years. I still love it, but it's good to see Amazon is still investing in ebook devices as of course Kobo does, so presumably that means they still care about ebook sales and borrows in ku. So I think it's always good to see investments in areas that we care about. Also, Spotify is expanding its audiobook offering to four additional markets. Your audiobooks are now reaching a new audience in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Eligible users have 12 hours of monthly audiobook listening included in premium and all other Spotify users can have access to your title through a la carte sales. You don't need to do anything. If you publish audio wide through findawayvoices.com your books will be on Spotify if you have chosen that. And as a user of Spotify Audio myself I love the premium and I love being able to listen to audiobooks on the app. And at the moment I have paused my Audible account because I do listen to so much on Spotify.
- [02:30]
Rachel Maclean
I haven't cancelled it yet.
- [02:32]
Joanna Penn
I just at the moment I'm like oh well which way am I going to go? I really love being able to listen with non fiction. I really enjoy listening to just chapters and rather than getting the whole book sometimes for example with health and wellness. I listen to quite a lot of fitness stuff and weightlifting and health stuff and being 50, which I am next year, and all this. But I like delving into different chapters and that's what I enjoy on Spotify and you can't do that on Audible in AI things. Lots of you have been trying Google's Notebook LM to generate audio from your notes or your books or whatever and having a chat with your own material. And they have just made that audio customizable. You can now add notes basically saying what the hosts should focus on, which I love. I haven't actually played with it yet because it just happened just before I was recording this and I'm looking forward to more developments there, like when they have different voices. At the moment it's an American man and an American woman. But it'll be very interesting once we can customize that even more. So I'm going to go back in. I mentioned a week or so ago I put all my random one liner notes that I've been keeping on my Things app for years and I just put all of that into a notebook. And at the moment the audio is kind of a generalized discussion of my thoughts. But what I want to do is say, okay, focus on archaeology in particular or focus on supernatural stuff and see what it comes out with. So yeah, fun, fun, fun. Also, there's a crossover with publishing and marketing and AI as Amazon Ads launches new AI tools for advertisers, the AI Creative Studio and Audio Generator. AI Creative Studio brings Amazon Ads AI powered creative generators in a single application. Brands can conceptualize, create and refresh content regardless of format. Turning whether it's turning a simple product shot into videos or in the near future converting a TV commercial into online sponsored ads, AI Creative Studio makes it easy to build and scale campaigns in innovative ways. So just to repeat that whether it's turning a simple product shot into videos. So of course that could be a photo of your book that could be turned into a video. This helps brands reach customers. Now this is not on the KDP Ads dashboard. If you log in through Amazon KDP and then click through into marketing thing. It's not accessible that way at the moment, but no doubt it's coming. That's for the Amazon ads, I guess people who go through the main website. But Meta is also doing generative multimedia. TikTok of course is doing that. So basically you can have AI generate marketing assets around your book. Right now this is not something I'm playing with mainly because I only use Amazon auto ads on a few of my books and I just set them up and then I review them monthly. It's a pretty low spend for the return. I think at the moment these are all experimental, but within the next, let's say six months, I think these will be much more useful. Coming in 2025, one of the biggest AI trends will be agents, essentially text to employee or image to employee or whatever. You can just say here's a photo of my book. Please create marketing assets and run ads for them. Here's a budget. And yeah, I think these will be rolled into all the normal tools that perhaps we use, certainly for Facebook ads or meta ads for Amazon ad. I'm talking about agents as part of my talk at Author Nation, and no doubt I will return to the topic here as well as we start to look forward into 2025. Also on AI the Alliance of Independent Authors has a new article on enhancing creativity with AI tools, and you won't be surprised to know I am quoted in it. But it also features other authors talking about how they use various things in an ethical way. Mattie Dalrymple finds AI helpful in overcoming the blank slate stage of character development. She uses prompts like give me a physical description of a man who owns a pawn shop in Western Maryland and the word porn There p a w n to be clear. So yes to kickstart ideas. Author Faye Klingler uses AI to break through creative blocks when she needs to move a story forward. When stuck on how a character might achieve a specific goal, she asks ChatGPT for a list possible actions. I don't necessarily use one of those ideas, she says, but it sparks my own creativity with ideas I hadn't thought of before. I absolutely use chat for lists of things all the time. I'll be like, okay, this is where we are in the story. What are 10 ways that are really unusual? And then I might make that more specific, like what are 10 ways the story could continue if the book is Horror, what are 10 ways the book could continue or this scene could continue? If it's a Thriller, what are 10 ways it could continue if this character is injured? So and just getting a list of ideas, it helps spark your own. And like she says, I mean often you don't necessarily use exactly what it's come up with, but it's just a way to prompt your own brain, which I think is cool. Klingler also uses AI for drafting book descriptions, which she then refines based on her understanding of her audience and marketing goals. Author Howard Lovie, currently working on a book about fighting anti Semitism, which I supported on Kickstarter. Thank you for doing that. Howard relies on AI to streamline his research process. Lovi uses OTTER AI to transcribe hours of interviews with experts, making conversations searchable and enabling him to extract relevant quotes efficiently. For his research on policy documents and lawsuits, Lovi uses NotebookLM to categorize information and analyze key themes. This is a great use case for NotebookLM. I've been doing this too. It's like, here's a load of stuff. What are 10 themes that come up in this material? And then explore exploring the themes I'm interested in more he says AI tools don't do the creative work for me. They help me access what's important or relevant and allow me to make connections between disparate sources. Ultimately, I'm the one shaping the story. So the article goes into the various ways that the alliance of Independent Authors encourages ethical use of AI tools. And it says by using AI as a supportive tool, these authors enhance their process without compromising their own voice and vision. Readers will gravitate towards voices that feel real, intentional and engaging, a demand that AI generated content alone can't fulfill. As AI becomes more sophisticated, writers can use it to deepen their engagement with readers, maintaining creativity and agency at the heart of their work. Embracing AI responsibly ensures that writers continue to stand out in a crowded marketplace offering stories and insights that are uniquely their own. The future of writing belongs to those who see AI as an assistant, not an author. And I would also say not as an enemy. So yes, AI as an assistant. And of course AI assisted creativity is what most of us do. That's certainly how I think of myself. The AI assisted artisan author. The A4 as I coined I guess a couple of years ago now or a year or so. I can't remember when I put that out. But if you go back to thecreativepenn.com A4 you will find that episode where I introduced that concept in Personal News. Hopefully you enjoyed the previous episode. The surprise in betweenisode for my lessons learned after more than 10 million downloads of the show. Thank you for listening. It was fun to reflect on the journey of this podcast. And as I said there, I'm still planning to keep it going into 2025. I'm taking bookings. I'm kind of up at March and April at the moment for interview book. So yes, we're still going into 2025. The Blood Vintage Kickstarter finished. Thank you for everyone who backed it. We had 204 backers, which is awesome. And a total of £12,192, which is around US$16,000. Now, of course, remember, any Kickstarter number is gross and you still have to pay for the printing and the shipping and all of that kind of thing. But it is a very nice start, especially because that Kickstarter was only for the limited edition hard. And of course I put in the webinar. There are some. There were consulting sessions, a few consulting sessions, but the only version of the book available in that is the hardback. Now, a few people have arrived saying, oh my goodness, I just missed it. So I have enabled late pledges on the unsigned hardback. Only now they only just started this with Kickstarter, so all the signed stuff, all the webinar, all that stuff is closed. But the unsigned hardback, you can still order for another few weeks for those people who have suddenly discovered it. So, yes, the of the book is still doing the rounds with us publishers, with my agent. They are probably all at Frankfurt Book Fair right now. Apparently everything is just not happening. But I do have a deadline of the winter solstice. So if there is no contract, at least under discussion by then, I will publish everything before 2025, or I guess in early 2025, because I would record the audiobook as well myself. I also finished my short story Seahenge this week. Yes, I'm just going to call it Seahenge, and the COVID looks awesome. It's around 8,000 words, so I guess it's a kind of longer short story. The main characters are a marine archaeologist. I've always loved marine archaeology. I think that's something I might have done in another life. And one of the researchers in the team who uses a custom AI model to decode Neolithic symbols on the henge timbers. And if you don't know, Seahenge is a real place. And my author's note is super fun. And yes, there are also some mysterious remains in my fictional Seahenge which were not there on the real one. But as I was writing it, I was like, oh, this could be a book. It might be something I might expand, but I'm happy with what it is. Now, what I love with short stories is this kind of moment when you finished it and you're like, oh, yes, that's perfect. And for me there is a sense of perfection with what you wanted to achieve with a short story. I think it's much easier to feel that with something short. Maybe poets get that feeling too. Like, yes, that that is the poem and this story the same. It's like this is the story. So it's with Kristen, my editor and then I will narrate it so I'll read it myself I guess. 8,000 words. It's going to be almost an hour audio and I will have it out in November on my store jfpenbooks.com and everywhere wide in December. My next job is to work on the second edition of how to Write Non Fiction. I'm going to incorporate memoir aspects. There's some things I want to update and I'm planning to have that out before the New Year self help boom. And if you're in the Patreon, I've put a long discussion on that there. Thanks for all your emails and comments and photos. This week Janet sent a picture working from inside her van in Sunny Warboys, which is near Ely where I was and got and thought about the story for Seahenge she said really enjoyed listening to Emily Murdoch. She resonated with me. Fantastic Ledger and lace that is from YouTube. I think Emily reminds me a bit of Georgette Heyer in that she geeks out as much over the history as she does in the romance fiction. This was a great conversation. I I think Emily will be thrilled with that comparison because of course Georgette Heyer is hugely successful. Presumably gone now I think Hamor sent an email I listen to you when doing house chores, so the picture of where I'm listening to isn't that exciting. Instead, here's a picture of one of my watercolor paintings. I appreciated that. Also, I love your attitude on AI and how it can simplify and improve not just life in general, but an author's life in particular. And talked about how once upon a time a teacher forbid the use of a ruler in art class, saying you should be good enough to draw a straight line yourself with no help. And then how years later Hamor used a ruler and it helped a lot and enabled him to focus on other aspects of his art which he he enjoyed far more. So this I thought this was a fascinating example and he says I've been more conscious about not letting judgy past pedagogy or just judgy attitude hinder my use of instruments that can help my art. I love that and I just find that crazy that somebody said that because of course some of the greatest artists use things to help draw lines. So yeah, interesting. And finally Elizabeth emailed. I listened to Emily E.K. murdoch. Such a wonderful, engaging conversation inspiring me on my author journey.
- [15:44]
Rachel Maclean
I would also be the first to.
- [15:45]
Joanna Penn
Subscribe to a Did you'd know podcast by you and Emily, sharing your passion for history, human stories and all things gothic. Emily and I did email about this and I basically said look, I got excited in the moment and I don't have the bandwidth for another show. And if I did have the bandwidth, I would want to go back to my books and travel podcast. So the moment that's not happening. But of course Emily might do it. Or maybe there's a gap in the market. Okay, please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel or message me on X at the Creative Pen or email me, send me pictures of where you're listening. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation so today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital Self Publishing with support and this is one of the great reasons you might choose to publish through Draft 2 Digital. They have a human customer service team.
- [16:39]
Rachel Maclean
Who can help and sometimes that's just what you need.
- [16:42]
Joanna Penn
Through Draft 2 Digital you can publish ebooks to all the big platforms as well as library systems. You can also publish print books and they can help you through that process too. They have formatting tools as well as an easy publishing system. I use Draft 2 Digital for my ebook distribution to Nook Library Systems and now even to Apple. I also use their excellent payment splitting for my co written book the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre. A great option if you're co writing a book or if you're doing an anthology or collaborating with other people. There are no charges for formatting or updating your book. They take a distributor, 10% of retail price on sale. No upsells, no service packages, no fees of any kind. Set your price to whatever you want want, even free. Make as many changes as you want to your book. Update the COVID distribute it to any and every sales channel you want. It's your book, your choice, your world. They also have marketing tools and promotion opportunities available. And yes, they send out emails every now and then which says we're doing this holiday promotion or in fact I think this last week it was a bundle promotion that I put a book into so that comes out up and Drafts 2 Digital says your book is your priority. Our priority is you. We build tools and services that let you focus on writing while we take care of layout, publishing, distribution, print on demand paperbacks and more. Check them out@draft2digital.com that's with a number two draft2digital.com so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing. But my time in creating the show is sponsored by my community@patreon.com thecreativepenny thanks to the 10 new patrons who've joined this week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to everything, covering topics on creativity and AI, mindset and business. My patron only Q and A solo episodes, which are basically another podcast. A month of just me answering questions and live office hours. This week I also put out an article about the pros and cons of doing a new edition of a new non fiction book. Sorry, of an old non fiction book. So I wrote it before I decided I was like, right, I need to decide whether or not I'm doing this new edition. Let's write a little thing for the patrons. So that came out this week and I essentially talked myself into it. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. Although to be honest, the price of a black coffee at Starbucks now it's like half a black coffee at Starbucks or a whole coffee if you're feeling generous and you get access to everything, all the backlist content and Q&As. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePenn Right, let's get into the interview.
- [19:48]
Rachel Maclean
Rachel Maclean is the award winning author of the Dorset crime series as well as other crime books and has now sold over 2 million copies. So welcome back to the show, Rachel.
- [19:58]
Rachel, thank you for having me.
- [20:00]
Oh, I'm excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in November 2022 and we talked about how you pivoted into crime fiction. So we're just going to jump straight into things today. So you started out with your Dorset crime series, but you now have five series in total and you work with multiple authors under your imprint, Ackroyd Publishing. So how has your business changed over the last last few years?
- [20:27]
In some ways it hasn't changed that much and in other ways it's changed massively. So the core of my business, which is about writing crime books that readers want to read, I write in a very similar style. Obviously my craft has developed over that time and being really like doubling down on engaging with readers, I see that as actually my, after the writing, my most important job, because that's the thing that I can do and my team can't do for me. So that hasn't really changed, apart from the fact that it is scaled because I've got so many more readers now. But in the sort of day to day management of my business, that has changed hugely. I've now got a team of seven people who work for me. They're all freelance, they each work a couple of days a week and they do various roles. I've got a publishing and production team and they project, manage all the books, do the COVID design, pull all the files together, manage the editorial and so forth. And then I've got a marketing team who help me run my shop and do advertising and data for me. I've got somebody who liaises with bookshops, I've got somebody who does AV work for me and I've also got a number of co authors who I work with now. So a lot of my books are co authored with people who I've known for years and who I've been working with as part of my writing group for years. And that enables me to sort of manage a bigger business which takes up more of my time, while still producing more books now than I was able to produce without them. And also it's really good fun because I get to work, particularly on the creative side. When you're generating ideas for a new book or a new series, I get to work with other people. So we'll go for a trip to the location that the book's going to be in and we'll walk around and we'll sit in cafes and things and we'll chat about what's going to be in the book and we'll come up with ideas and. And it's really enjoyable.
- [22:16]
Oh, so many follow up questions. But the first one I have is this is quite a personal thing for me and also people listening because I feel like what you have done is you have gone from being an author to essentially being the CEO of a much bigger business. Like you said, you have seven people, you're co writing. So at some point you made a decision. I am going to scale the size of my business and the income, obviously. But you decided that there was something you wanted to do around running a bigger publishing company. So what did that feel like, as in that and how did you make that decision? Because obviously it is a much bigger deal than like me. I have not made that choice and it's something I come up against over and over again and I always step back from. It's like I actually. You don't want a bigger business. So what was that moment? So other people listening might be able to figure that out for themselves?
- [23:12]
Yeah, I mean it's interesting because I always thought I didn't want a bigger business and I didn't want to manage people. And I think that's because my experience of managing people in the past had been in huge organizations I worked for like government agencies and all sorts where it was very. It was very process driven. You had to do performance management on a certain day and you had to manage people in a certain way and you. And they didn't really have all that much freedom over what you did. Whereas I'm finding that managing people within my own business is very different because A I get to recruit them and I get to find people who are a really good fit for my business and have got the skills that I need and skills often that I don't have and B, I get to. To work with them in a way that works for us and it's really flexible because we're such a small business. It's not like one person has a particular job title and they can only do that thing. People end up sort of dipping into other people's jobs and we all work really closely together. I get everybody together on a fairly regular basis. So we always have. We've got a Christmas lunch planned in December. We have an away event in the spring where we all go down to Dorset and have a couple of days together. We have a summer lunch where we get all our editors and narrators and all the rest, everybody that whole full team together. So I found that I enjoy that much more than I thought I might and I really do enjoy it. But the point at which I had that light bulb moment, I guess in a way. I went to the 20 Books mastermind in Majorca immediately after self publishing show last year. And I went to that specifically with the goal of talking to people who were very successful and had been very successful successful for a long time. And we're sustaining that and of learning from them because I was at a point where the Dorset crime series had taken off the Kindle Storyteller Award had mass. It had a massive impact on my sales and I didn't know how to sustain that and I knew that the workload involved in that was more than I could do on my own. And at that point I was thinking, well, I need to sort of clone myself. I need to Find somebody who do all the business side of things. And I actually offered that job to my wife and she turned it down.
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Joanna Penn
I'm glad.
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Rachel Maclean
I'm glad she did.
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I'm glad she did now as well, because.
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Joanna Penn
Saved your marriage.
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Rachel Maclean
We're much happier. We're much happier having different jobs. She has a job. She works for the University of Birmingham, and she's very happy doing that. It gives a whole different. It's a whole different type of environment from what I do. But I went to the Mastermind in Majorca and there was a talk on running your publishing business with a team. And the light bulb for me with that was the fact that you don't have to hire one person to do the business management. You can hire multiple people to each do a part of it and to each work a certain number of hours. So I started off by identifying what the. I already had a PA Jane. She's theoretically a va, but she lives quite close to me, so she. She's not all that virtual. We do see each other, and she was already doing some of the admin for me. But I needed somebody to manage the publishing process for each book. And that was the thing that I was finding, was a real sticking point for me because I have a terrible memory. I was forgetting what the deadlines were. I was uploading books to the KDP dashboard moments before I had to in order to fulfill a pre order. I was really disappointed, disorganized, and I was thinking, how do I find this person who can manage that process for me? And it just so happens that Rebecca Collins from Hobeck Books, she and I are friends, and she posted something on Facebook about some work that she was doing for another client that was exactly that work. And I thought, oh, hang on a minute. I didn't know Rebecca did that. So I gave her a call and we had a chat. And it turned out that she had availability and. And she had exactly the skills I need. So it started with Rebecca, and then it slowly grew. So I've sort of added one person at a time. And over time, people's roles have grown, so there's been more work for them to do. Rebecca's gone from doing one day a week to doing two days a week. I've got Catherine Matthews, who also works for spf. She's running my shop. And the great thing is she also runs Claire Lydon's shop, and she learns things when she's doing each of our shops that she then uses in the other one, which works for both me and Claire. Because it means that we're. And Claire and I are friends as well. She writes Lesvic. And I think I recommended Catherine to Claire. And so having people on my team who have got experience and skills in areas that I don't necessarily have or who can dedicate a bit more time to learning about something specific. So the Shopify store, Catherine and I were both quite new to that when we set it up. And I said to her, well, I will pay for your time learning how to use Shopify and how to get my store set up. And she went away and has been really good at just taking it on board and working things out for herself. And I could have done that, but it would have taken me a lot of time. That would have detracted from the writing. And the other real challenge I've got is in my personal life. I have an autistic son and he's not severely affected by his autism. But it does mean that I have to be available for him more than you might do for another teenager. And that can really throw things. And having people that I can delegate things to, it's incredibly helpful because I know that my business isn't going to just slide if my son needs me. And it means that I've been able to focus on him much and develop my author career at the same time. And I'm not sure I would have been able to do both at this level.
- [28:56]
Yeah, I love that. And it's so interesting because you must be ambitious because this is an ambitious move.
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Yeah.
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Do you identify with ambition? Is that a word you do identify with? Yeah, but you haven't mentioned, oh, I want to be a seven figure or a multi seven figure author. So is money a motivation?
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Money is a motivation that's less about the cash, it's more about a lifestyle. I have a lifestyle now that I really enjoy. So I spend a lot of time traveling, I write a lot of my books are based in Dorset and I have a flat in Dorset now because I spend so much time down there. It's right on the beach and it's an absolutely wonderful place to go and clear my head and get fresh air and go for walks and write and take the family down as well. We spent a lot of time down there in the summer and I'm working on a series which is a spin off series for one of my characters. And it will be set, each book will be set in a different European city and I'm doing, oh, I wonder why I want to travel to those European cities. I listen to you Talking about your research trips. And I think, yeah, I want a bit of that. I'm going to Dorset and I'm going to Scotland and I'm going to Cumbria for those series, which is great and they're wonderful places to visit, but why not go to Paris and then you're.
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Gonna have like, set in a Maldives scuba diving resort.
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Absolutely, yeah. I think I've got a series that I write with Millie Ravensworth, who's actually two authors, Heidi Goody and Ian Graham Grant, that is set in London on a vintage Routemaster London tour bus. So we've got two amateur sleuths who, because they're running these tours, they find themselves in the middle of mysteries in iconic London landmarks. And we were thinking, why don't we get one of them, go and work as a guide on a cruise ship or something so we can do that. So there's a bit of a debate going on over who gets to do that research trip if we do it.
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Yeah. And I think this is important too, because this is a lifestyle, you know, that we're doing for creative reasons, but also to have input into our ideas. Like, I never have any problem justifying this, but I do want to come back to you. I'm fascinated with the ambition to do this because you've already grown so much, you're working with these co writers, but essentially what you're building with ackroyd Publishing is it's a publishing imprint that does crime books. And it made me think, think of Bookature and if. If American authors don't know Bookature is an imprint. And it started in crime and it grew and it got bought for a ton of money. And I wondered, so are you looking forwards into the future and seeing that you might sell the business or that you want to grow much bigger, or do you have grand plans?
- [31:36]
I think I've. I have toyed with the idea of growing and publishing other authors. So I do have a couple of authors who are Ackroyd Publishing publishers who are not crime authors. One is my wife, Sally Brooks. So that's sort of kind of cheating. But she writes lesbian rom coms and Sapphic rom coms and she has a day job. She loves the writing, doesn't want to do the marketing and business side of it. So I said to her, well, how about if Acro Publishing published you? And to be honest, it doesn't mean we're working together because it's actually the team who are doing that. I'm not very heavily involved in the publication of her book. And I've also published Hazel Ward, who writes women's fiction. And she is somebody who I've known for years and I've been a beta reader for her books since she started. So it's very much been really, really slowly doing that and only working with people who I know are really good writers and really good to work with, because I talked to Cascini at hera, who published my paperbacks, about what it's like managing a lot of authors. And it's hard work and you've got to juggle a lot of different expectations and a lot of different styles of working in terms of what they expect from the publisher. And I'm quite wary of that. So I'm more interested in building a sort of group of cohorts who work with me so that I am still the brand because I'm building a really loyal readership. I've got thousands of people who will buy my books on the days of the day they come out. And what I do is. It's more like the James Patterson model in a way. So I'm working with a co author. They write the first draft and I write the second draft. We plan it together. So what I do in the second draft is I will add in character detail because I have characters who move cross series. And I will also add in location detail because we tend to write about locations that I know about, although the Cumbria crime one, Joel Haymes is getting to know Cumbria better than I do. And I will also add, I will tweak the style so that it's a style that my readers are familiar with, so that when a reader comes to a book that's co written by me and any one of my co writers, they will be slightly different. They won't just be exactly the same as a Rachel Maclean book that I write on my own, but they will feel familiar. They'll have a similar sort of structure in terms of the number of chapters, the length of chapters, the style of writing, what you can expect from that book, the level of gore that you get in a crime book, the level of humour, although that's different for the cosy mysteries, they're definitely funnier. And that's why I write with Heidi and Ian, because they are comedy writers and they're really good at that. So, yeah, it's about building up that brand and bringing other people into it and involving them to help create more ip. And also they're all people who I know and have worked with, have known. I mean, Heidi and Ian, they were the People who first got me into self publishing. So it's really nice to be able to involve them in it and work with them and they both live fairly close to me. So we'll go on, we'll do research. One of the series we're writing is in Birmingham, so we'll meet up and we'll go for a walk around the locations and find the place the body's going to be dumped and that sort of thing, and then go and have lunch and plan the book. So it's. It makes it really enjoyable working. I'm working with friends and the team in Ackroyd Publishing that I've built as well. We're developing friendships within the team and it was great when I got everybody together last March and we went down to Dorset to see everybody getting on so well and enjoying themselves, because obviously that's important if you've got a really small team. So, yeah, I think it, it just adds another dimension. It takes a little bit away from that loneliness of being a writer sitting in your room.
- [35:20]
Joanna Penn
It doesn't sound like that's your life at all.
- [35:22]
Rachel Maclean
But I love that you mentioned James Patterson because he gets a lot of flack because he is the most read author, the richest author, the guy who sells the most books and he co writes, as you say, he co writes with lots and lots of different people against in lots of different, lots of different series. He does still have his own. I think that Alex Cross series is just his. But what's. I think what's also interesting is you have Ackroyd or you mentioned before crime books that readers want to read. And I just want to remind listeners if they don't know when. And I'll link back to our first interview, but you. You were not successful with your first books, right?
- [36:01]
Joanna Penn
No, no.
- [36:02]
Rachel Maclean
And you pivoted to write crime books that readers want to read.
- [36:07]
Joanna Penn
So can you maybe just go into.
- [36:08]
Rachel Maclean
That a bit more now? As in how do you know what readers want to read and how do you add in this kind of Rachel Maclean secret sauce that makes your books sell so much after failing at the beginning?
- [36:22]
Yeah, well, I started out by writing books that crossed genres and found it really hard to market them in any of the genres that they were in. But what was useful was that I learned a lot about marketing during that time and so that when I did pivot to crime, I already had a head start there because I already had a mailing list that I'd started to grow. I already knew how to advertise and so forth. But what I did, it was. It was January 2020 and I was at a point in my day job. I was a technical writer. I wrote about WordPress and WordPress was in the throes of changing the programming language that it used. And I was either going to have to go back and learn just JavaScript or I was going to have to double down on the publishing and make a success of that. And I was definitely keener on making a success of my writing than I was on learning JavaScript. So I thought, right, what do I need to do in order to reach more readers? And I was inspired by people like J.D. kirk, Barry Hutchison and L.J. ross and looking at what they'd done and the kind of books that they'd written. And something that was becoming very prominent at the time was in crime, the idea of the location being a key element and almost being like another character. So my first series, which I wrote in 2020, was set in Birmingham. Those were the Zoe Finch books. I wrote those in Birmingham because I knew Birmingham like the back of my hand. And it actually turned out quite convenient because it was locked down and I couldn't have gone on research trips anywhere. I was using Google Maps the whole time. I was probably responsible for half the statistics on people using Google Maps that they did at the government briefings every evening. And what I did was I read authors of crime and thrillers who were very successful. So I read books by some of my comp authors who were published by the smaller digital first publishers and the big indies. I read books by people like James Patterson and Dan Brown and I pulled apart what it was about their books that worked and what readers liked. And I read their reviews and I was inspired to do that by. I can't remember the name of it, but I think it's Six Figure Author by Chris Fox. He said, don't read your reviews, read your competitors reviews and find out what it is that readers love or hate. And sometimes what readers hate will be exactly the same as what they love because you'll get some readers who are turned off by the very thing that attracts other readers to the book. And I did that and the thing that came out was the locations and the characters. So I, I spent quite a lot of time identifying what my locations were going to be and a lot of time working on my characters and my central team and I developed them. And then when the Zoe Finch series came to a close, I thought, right, where am I going to go next? And I'd been visiting Dorset since I was A child. I first went there as a baby and my parents had a caravan down there. So I know Dorset really, really well and I thought, I'll go down to Dorset. And it felt quite risky moving on to another series because Zoe Finch books had sold enough for me to be able to give up my day job, but they hadn't done been hugely successful. But I was a full time author, which was what I wanted to achieve. So I moved to Dorset and it turned out to be the best thing I ever did because a lot more people want to read about Dorset, them want to read about Birmingham and for.
- [39:44]
Americans who might not know, it's a lovely coastal area as opposed to a gritty, massive city.
- [39:51]
Yeah, exactly. Imagine reading about Maine as against reading about Boston, I suppose. And the other thing that worked really well was the character that I moved to Dorset, DCI Leslie Clark, she was Zoe's boss in the Zoe Finch book. So she, she was a dci. And I, I always enjoy writing sidekicks. I sometimes find sidekicks are. They're a bit more real in my mind because I can see them through the eyes of the protagonist. And I, I loved writing Lesley, so I thought, right, I'm going to move, I'm going to move this grumpy, middle aged Brummie down to Dorset and see how she copes and what they make of her. And people love Lesley, some people hate her. I've sat in author events where people have had arguments over whether they like Lesley or not, but as far as I'm concerned, that means she's real in their minds whether they like her or not, because she is quite grumpy and she doesn't suffer fools gladly. But yeah, it turned out to be the best decision I ever could have made writing a series in Dorset. And I thought I was bringing that series to a close nine books in, because there was a series arc. And that's another thing I always do in my books. There is always a series arc that might be police corruption or the death of a major character who, you know, who would have been a major character. So it's Leslie's predecessor. And that came to a close and I thought, right, that's it, I'm done with these books. And I constantly kept having people saying, is Leslie coming back? When are you going to write Lesley again? And I had about a year of that. So I'm now writing another nine books in that series and the paperbacks will be published by Hera. So Hera have republished, published the Dorset crime, existing books in print, but they'll be publishing them as new books in paperback. So that'll be really interesting because I'll be getting new books into bookshops and getting.
- [41:34]
So that's a traditional publisher.
- [41:36]
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:38]
Right.
- [41:38]
So here are. They're a small publisher, a bit like Bookature, that sort of. So Kashini Naidu, she used to work for Bookature. She was the woman who discovered Angela Marsons. And she. What I like about Hera is that they are all about mainstream fiction written by diverse authors. So they have. Their authors are not the normal run of the mill people you expect to be published by traditional publishers. And they were interested in my books because Lesley is gay and I always have gay characters in my books. And it's working really well working with here or there, the way they work and their ethos and their values fit really well with mine. They. Because they're small, I'm sure I get a lot more attention than I would if I was at a bigger publisher. And we work really well together.
- [42:30]
So I want to come on to something. So Amazon recently named you as one of the top 10 most read authors on Kindle Unlimited in the UK over.
- [42:40]
Joanna Penn
The last 10 years, which is astounding.
- [42:43]
Rachel Maclean
Like, how did that feel, by the way?
- [42:45]
Oh, it felt amazing. It was, it was really funny because the evening that it happened, J.M. dalgleish was number eight and I was number nine. And he posted a screenshot of it to Facebook where he cut it off under his name. And I thought, oh, I'm not on that list. And then Sally, my wife, she went and found the press release and she said, there you are on the list. You're just underneath him. So I joked about it with him afterwards. But yeah, I mean, that felt like a huge achievement because there are, there's some really big names there and also there are people who've been writing a lot longer than me. So for me it means that in the time that I've been, because it's only been, oh, three and a bit years that I've been publishing my crime books and to have sold enough to be one of the most read authors in KU in that time, it felt great. And my readers were lovely about it because obviously I put in my newsletter and my social media and readers were so pleased. Pleased. For me, one of the things I love about being an author is that your readers want you to succeed and they want to help you. So I refer to my readers as my reader army. And I do things like when I've got a paper, when I've got a new edition of a paperback coming out or a new book coming out and I want them to buy it in bookshops. I'll say to them, right, you're my reader army. I want you to go into bookshops and ask them to stock it and they'll do it. Yeah, they want to help me out. So, yeah, it was great. Great.
- [44:05]
Yeah. But I wondered because you're so big on ku, which is obviously ebook first, how you mentioned Shopify earlier and also now books in bookstores. So how are you getting your readers to move from reading just in KU into buying from your store, buying from bookshops, buying in other ways than they've been used to.
- [44:27]
Yeah, I mean that, that is a process that we're still working on and experimenting with. So Alex, who works on my advertising, he is experimenting with various ad campaigns that run to the store. And one of the main benefits of running ads to a store, as I know you've mentioned on your podcast, is the fact that you can use conversion ads instead of traffic ads in Facebook. So Facebook actually knows if they're converting and can therefore run better targeted ads. It also means that we have access to data. So I know who's buying books and I can retarget them and I can upsell and so forth. But where I've had the most success is in audiobooks. Because I found that people seem to be less wedded to listen to an audiobook on Audible than they are to getting their ebooks on Amazon. Because people find it difficult to understand that you can read a book on your Kindle that you haven't bought from Amazon, Amazon. So I pushed, I've been pushing quite hard on audiobooks. I've been pushing the fact that I have a release date for my audiobooks on my website, which is the same as the release date for the ebook and the paperback. It's a reliable release date. If somebody pre orders it from me, they will get their file on that date. Whereas Audible. I can't set a release date, I can't set a pre order. And I found that starting with audiobooks has been quite successful. And I've been doing it mainly through my mailing list, through my newsletter. And so it's slowly educating people and encouraging them. My next experiment I'm running right at the end of this month. It starts, I'm running a kind of Kickstarter, but I'm running it on my website instead of on Kickstarter. So it will be a two week period. So I've Already got a sign up page for people to be notified when it goes live and it'll be a two week period. And I've produced a coffee table book which is, it's Rachel Maclean's Dorset Crime Trail and it's the, the story of each of the locations from each of the books in the series, why I chose to write there. It gives you information about the location, but in a way that is, it's told through the lens of me doing research trips to those locations. It's very anecdotal and there are stories from my childhood in those locations. Locations and that kind of thing. Lots of photos, including stock imagery, but also my photos as well. So that's going to be exclusive to my website for two weeks and people, they get it and there's going to be bundles and so forth and add ons just like you would with Kickstarter. But I, I figured that it was probably easier because I'm already trying to educate my readers to use my website to continue doing that than to add another platform in right now. Now, because crime readers tend to be older and tend to be less likely to be on Kickstarter, I got the idea for doing this from Alana Johnson, who has done the same thing. She writes cosy, not cosy, sweet romance. And so the demographic of her readers is quite similar to mine and she has run Kickstarter in inverted commas on her website very successfully. So we'll see how it goes. I mean, obviously it's the first one and there'll be teething problems and so forth and it's turning out to be a lot more work than a normal launch. I was on a video call to Rebecca, my publishing manager, yesterday and we were trying to work out all the dates. So it's like, right, when does it go live? When do we have to place the orders? When do we send them out? When will they eventually be released? Because bookshops want them as well. But I don't want bookshops getting them until after the Kickstarter, which is not a Kickstarter, which is not a Kickstarter. Kickstarter, non Kickstarter. Yes.
- [48:04]
Yeah, I think, I think what you're talking about is essentially a, a bigger pre order than.
- [48:10]
Exactly.
- [48:11]
Yeah. And I think that's really important to note. I do think the word, you know, Kickstarter is a brand. It's a different website. It's, it's a very different model. What you're talking about and what I think I'm going to do for a book as well, next year is, is that sort of pre launch on your website for premium editions that you print after the pre orders happen, whereas indies are normally used to, you know, you can do a pre order with an ebook and it's done and it just goes out and not a big deal. But I think that's great. And I'm super jealous because I totally want to do a book like that around locations, but I have so many.
- [48:44]
Oh, and I know the problems that you've been having with your photographs of churches.
- [48:48]
Yeah. Photo permissions. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I might. But if someone's just said to me, look, you just hire someone and they do all the, all of that and it just takes a lot longer than I'm used to. But I think that's really interesting just on the audiobook. So you are selling the audio books obviously through Shopify, but you're directing everyone to Book Funnel.
- [49:09]
Well, as soon as somebody makes the purchase in Shopify, Book Funnel then sends them the email with the file.
- [49:15]
So just so people know, this is another app that people have to have. They have to have the Book Funnel app to listen to the audiobook. And it's fascinating to me that what you're saying is people are more, I guess, happy to download a new app for audio than they are to consider, you know, using Book Funnel to get an ebook onto their Kindle device. Which again is not difficult at all. And I think the more people like you and me and everyone, the more people who are actually educating people on buying direct, the easier it's going to be. And we have to remember this is only year one or two of the kind of move into selling direct. So fast forward 5 years, 10 years, where will we be then? I think that it be very interesting ecosystem of, of what we can do with these direct things. But I love that you're doing so much so on that. I do want to ask you as well. Authors love to use tools. Now you're working with a lot of freelancers, you're working with different publishers, you use different tools. One of the big discussions right now for authors is AI. So I wondered, what kind of AI are you using as part of your business?
- [50:20]
Yeah, I use chat GPT to help with when I'm coming up with ideas for books and when I'm brainstorming. So the first book in my Petra McBride series, the one that's set in Paris, I had an idea which was around artworks in the Louvre. And I needed to find artworks with particular themes and I needed to expand on those themes. And think about how those might relate to characters. So I spent a day just on my phone with Chat, just throwing ideas back and forth and getting it to identify artworks in the Louvre that might fit with this idea, and then getting it to tell me about areas of Paris that exemplified the kind of people who fit with the themes of these artworks. And then once I'd done that, I sort of shortlisted and came up with a final list of the artworks that I want to use in the book. So what I then got ChatGPT to do was give me a walking route around the Louvre, which will take me to all of those artworks in the most efficient way possible, so that when I go there on my research trip, I can. I don't have to wander around the Louvre hours trying to find all these places. And also I wanted it to find artworks that would be near. Like I wanted something near the Mona Lisa, for example, but that's not the Mona Lisa, so nobody's looking at this other artwork and that kind of thing. I got it to identify what they were near and what else would be going on in that part of the building. So it's really useful for that kind of thing. So I use it at that point when I'm also, when I'm trying to. When I've got a whole load of ideas for a book and I'm trying to pull them all together into a coherent structure, I'll put what I've got into Chat GPT and get it to help me shuffle all the parts together and put them into a coherent structure. I do a lot of the start of my location research is often on ChatGPT. So I'm currently writing a book set on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. And I did, before I went there, I spent a lot of time on ChatGPT. It's based around archaeology, this book, researching archaeological sites, the history of the island and so forth, and then getting it to give me sources, because sometimes it does make things up, you have to be aware of that. But getting it to give me links and sources and then delving into those and then finding places I could visit. I also use novelcrafter, so I use novelcrafter with Chat and with Claude to help me with editing. I will put a first draft through a pass of a fine tune that I've created in novelcrafter before I then do the second draft. So it cleans it up for me. I've developed a fine tune that is based on my own writing, where I've fed that into ChatGPT and I'll put my first draft in and get it to run that fine tune. So it just tidies up all the messy bits before I do the second draft. And I find also ChatGPT really helpful. I do a lot of dictation, so I'll often dictate a first draft or I dictate my newsletter quite a lot. So I'll do my newsletter when I'm sitting in my car waiting to pick my son up from college or something. And I dictate it and I use OTTER to dictate because I find that otter's really good for the accuracy of picking up the right words. But it doesn't add punctuation, it doesn't add speech or anything. It adds punctuation as if you're in a meeting and assumes that you're different speakers instead of adding dialogue. ChatGPT when you give it something in Otter, it's really good at working out what's actually going on in terms of what's dialogue and what's not and adding the paragraph breaks in the right place and punctuation. So I do that as well. And that speeds things up both with fiction and with the newsletter. So, yeah, I'm constantly looking for new ways to use it and for it to help me be more efficient and have access to more information.
- [54:08]
I love that. I do think those of us like you and I, we're pretty heavy on our research and we use places like you say, if you use places in art. I also have a lot of art history in my books and archaeology and all of that. And it does just really help to have a creative collaborator to help you. And I often will do exactly the same as as you. But I was thinking listening to you, and this is the point with AI to me as well, you are leveraging a tool to make more Rachel, like make Rachel more Rachel for you to put more stuff out into the world. And you're working with other humans who are helping you put more Rachel out into the world. And I've also been wondering about how. How many issues people have with AI And I wonder partly if it's to do with creative confidence. So you are a confident writer. You've written I know millions of words at this point. As have I. And your tone of voice. My tone of voice around AI is it has no emotion or the only emotion it has is happy and positive around.
- [55:12]
Joanna Penn
This is a great tool.
- [55:13]
Rachel Maclean
This is really helpful to me and I can do more with this. And I guess how I'm thinking about this is we're confident in what we produce is our work.
- [55:23]
Yeah.
- [55:23]
And also you came out of technical writing and I was an IT consultant. So do you think that those things play into your. Your confidence around AI?
- [55:32]
I think so. I think the fact that I worked in IT before means that I'm my. My default position with any new tech is to want to explore it and see what it can do for me rather than to be scared of it. I also believe very strongly that AI in itself is not good or bad. It is just a tool. And if good or bad things are done with it, that is because of the people who are doing those things. So if people use AI unethically, that's not the fault of the AI. That's the fault of the way that those people are either using or configuring the AI. And I think, I think you talk a lot about doubling down on being human. And obviously I'm using AI at a. It's not the full extent of my creative process by any means. I'm adding on, you know, nothing. I would never release something that had just been written by AI. I always work on it as well. And I also don't release books that have just been worked on by one of my co authors. That's. I work on them as well because I'm adding that, that Rachel. I mean, I actually call it Rachel Ifying. But and I also, I've been doing a lot more video. So it's that thing of being visibly human and being yourself. So I've been. Interestingly, I've been using TikTok, but I don't. I hardly ever put videos out on TikTok, but I use TikTok as a video editing because TikTok's editing tools are really good and you don't have to pay for them. And you, if you download the video that you've created before you publish it, you can download it without any TikTok watermarks on it and then I'll use it on Instagram or my newsletter or whatever. So I've been doing quite a lot of video, like little snippets of me. A thing that's becoming quite a part of my brand is me walking along a beach somewhere talking about what the weather's doing. And you know where I'm going today to research the next book and also where I'm going to dump a body. That is the thing that my read. If you ask my readers what does Rachel do? It would be she finds a beauty spot, she dumps a body in it. So I always do videos from my crime scenes and those go out on social media on publication day and it's me standing in the crime scene telling people, right, this is where this is going to happen and this is where the tents are going to go, forensics and all that sort of stuff. And it just brings it to life for readers and I think makes them more. Makes them feel part of that world that I'm creating as well.
- [57:58]
I love that. I keep thinking, yes, I must do more video. And then I just never do. And I. I was looking at some of yours because they're on your Shopify store as well, on your book pages. And I really think that is great. I mean, it's. It kept me on your Shopify store page page to watch a video which gives all the signals to the algorithms or whatever. So I think actually it's a really strong thing to do that. And so, yeah, I urge people to go and have a look at one of your videos because, you know, as much as I think you're amazing, I mean, it's not like they're amazing professional videos.
- [58:35]
Absolutely not. That part of the brand is, you know, if something goes wrong in the middle of my video. So, for example, I recently bought Gimbal, which is a stick thing that you put your phone on and video yourself and it supposedly self levels and follows you as you move around. But sometimes it goes wrong and sometimes I don't put my phone in it properly and the balance goes off and it just goes a bit weird. But instead of thinking, oh, I need to edit that out, I'll just laugh about it and say, oh, it's doing it again. I've got to work out this gimbal. And that just becomes part of what readers enjoy, that you're not trying to create this really polished thing. And often I'm. I do a lot of video where I'm somewhere where it's windy and I'm yelling to try and be heard. I have got little Laravel mics with the little fluffy thing on to stop the wind noise. I'm sure there's a technical term for it.
- [59:29]
Joanna Penn
It's called the dead cat.
- [59:30]
Rachel Maclean
The dead cat, that's it. Oh, goodness. I won't tell my cats. But even so, when you're standing on the top of a mountain in Scotland filming a video of a crime scene, there's going to be wind noise and I'm sort of yelling into the camera and sometimes I'll end up just doing a voiceover afterwards. But people quite enjoy that. They find it quite funny. That I'm about to get blown into the sea somewhere or something like that. So, yeah, I think that lack of professionalism, I would say to people, if you're planning on making video, don't worry at all about it being polished. Just record yourself in a natural way, as if you would if you were sending a video update to one of your friends or family or something like that, and just, just make it you.
- [60:17]
Oh, well, I'm excited to talk to you again in like two and a half years. So it's been two and a half years since we last spoke and in two and a half years it'll be very interesting to see where you are then because, you know, your trajectory is looking pretty good. So tell people where they can find you and your books and everything do online.
- [60:37]
Yeah, they can find everything@rachelmaclan.com which is where those videos are. And there's also all my books are available for sale there as well, and my newsletter.
- [60:47]
Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Rachel. That was great.
- [60:50]
Thank you.
- [60:54]
Joanna Penn
So I hope you found this episode useful. Wherever you are in your writing career, I love what Rachel is doing, even though it's not my choice in the way I run my business. And if you have ambition to grow, think about what that means in terms of your creativity and what you're writing and the people you will need in your business. And it sounds like Rachel's got the right balance at the moment. She's still loving the creative side and has people who take away the things that she doesn't necessarily want to do or that people can do better than her. So I've gone on her email list for the travel book, her travel book about the sights in her crime books. I absolutely want to do something like that sometime. And in fact, this is where I do need someone. If you are an expert in photo permissions or someone who does that for authors, please email me joannathecreativepenn.com as I think I really just have to hire someone to help me with that. And Rachel's discussion really just made me think, yes, I need to do that. I'm never going to do it myself, as ever. I love to hear your thoughts about the interview or about anything I talk about in the introduction. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepenn.com or on the YouTube channel. Message me on X at the Creative Pen or email me joannathecreativepen.com Send me pictures of where you're listening or of course, your favourites, graveyard, cemetery or ossuary. I always like those. Next week I'm talking to Serbian author Boris Bacic about writing horror. It is the Halloween episode, as well as how his success came about in Kindle Unlimited. So yes, talking about talking with a ku you author. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook, Facebook and X at the Creative Pen, or on Instagram and Facebook at Jfpen. Author Happy writing and I'll see you next time.