← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Writing Fan Fiction, And Multi-Passionate Creativity With KimBoo York
01:08:47
What if the key to finding your authentic voice as a writer lies in exploring someone else's fictional world first? How can multi-passionate creators manage multiple brands without losing their sanity? KimBoo York reveals how fanfiction can be a powerf...
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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 827 of the podcast and it is Saturday 6th September 2025. As I record this in today's show, I'm talking to the lovely Kim Boo York about writing fan fiction and multi passionate creativity. And even if you don't have any interest in writing fan fiction and to be honest, I don't, this is a fascinating chat about fandom and community as well as writing multi genre and multiple brands. I really enjoyed it, so I hope you do too. So that's coming up in the interview section in Writing and Publishing Things, Kevin Kelly has an article on everything I know about self publishing on his blog kk.org and Kevin has been at the forefront of tech and media for many years. He founded Wired magazine and he's written many books. He's famous in the creator community for his article A Thousand Truths fans published in 2008 and which still underpins how many of us make a living as independent authors and creators. He was on this show in May 2023 talking about excellent advice for living and I was thrilled to have him on the show. So his article is interesting as Kevin has published in many different ways which he lists out at the beginning and it's pretty much everything from traditional publishing to Kickstarter to self publishing on Amazon to coffee table photo books, a podcast, substack and many other examples. It is a long article and worth reading, especially as at his age and stage Kevin has nothing to prove. He's in his 70s and no one to impress anymore and so he doesn't pull any punches. I think it's it's a great article. So of traditional publishing, he says. For the most part the peak of this traditional system is gone, finished, over. Reading habits have altered, buying habits are new and attention has shifted to new media. It's an entirely new publishing world. Established mass market publishers are failing and they are merging to keep going. Traditional book publishers have lost their audience, which was bookstores, not readers. It's very strange, but New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of people who buy their books. Instead they sell to bookstores which are disappearing. They have no direct contact with their readers. They don't own their customers.
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They.
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Many of the key decisions in publishing today come down to whether you own your audience or not. So he goes into agents advances and says, one of the advantages of this traditional system going with a publisher, is that they bankroll your project. They reduce a bit of risk. Likewise, that is the genius of Kickstarter and other crowdfunders for self publishing. Pre sales bankroll your project, reducing risk. Crowdfunding becomes the bank. And he goes into a lot of the pros and cons of crowdfunding, which is great because he's certainly not a cheerleader all the way as I am not. It definitely only suits some people and it didn't suit me for like a decade. He reiterates, you are responsible for making sure your fans actually get what they were promised. This fulfilment aspect of crowdfunding is often overlooked until the end, when it turns out to be the most difficult part of the process for many creators. I agree with this, and this is why I personally reduce my risk for my Kickstarters by finishing everything before I even kick off the campaign. So right now for the Buried and the Drowned, the book is finished in every single format. I know the shipping costs which are included in the Kickstarter itself. I don't charge shipping later. I don't like doing that. I want people to know what they're paying at the time of finishing their pledge. I like basically knowing everything. And then as soon as Kickstarter washes up all the payments, I can deliver all the digital stuff, which I deliver, like literally on the day I can, and then I can deliver. I've already booked in the signing for my books for the Buried in the Drowned with Book Vault. I don't know the exact number I'm ordering yet, but I know an approximate number. So I've essentially arranged that already. So my fulfillment is it's not already done, but I know exactly how it's going to work. And I do feel that many crowdfunding campaigns fail because people just don't identify all the difficulties in fulfilment. So Kevin goes into different means of production and even his printing for Coffee Table photo books. He uses blurb for photo books, which I think is really interesting, as obviously that's something I'm interested in doing. He also mentions Lulu, KDP Print and IngramSpark and selling direct as well as ebook and audiobook stores. He says it is not hard to produce a book. It is much harder to find the audience for it and deliver the book to them. At least 50% of your energy will be devoted to selling the book. This is true whether you publish or self publish. Even with a commercial publisher releasing your work, you will end up doing the majority of whatever promotion gets done, as in planning, coordinating, executing and even paying for book tours and the like. You will be the publicity department no matter what. I think we all know that that's true these days. He then goes into subscriptions, blogging, social media, which he calls unmonetised publishing, which I think is quite a good phrase because we are publishing our words all the time. It's just whether you've monetized it, he says. We used to be people of the book, but now we are people of the screen. Our culture used to be grounded on scriptures, constitutions, laws and canon, all written texts. These were fixed in immutable black and white marks on enduring paper written by authors from whom we got authorities. Now our culture pivots on screens which are fluid, mutable, flowing, liquid and fleeting. There are no authorities. You have to assemble the truth yourself. As I said, Kevin doesn't pull any punches in this and this is hard reading for those of us who remain people of the book like you and I. Now, books are not going away for sure, but it is interesting. Interesting to consider the shift in culture, especially as I was thinking about yesterday, I was reading the latest Robert Galbraith book, which is a series I really like, and I I was aware that actually yesterday I started reading on my phone when I was having a coffee in a cafe and then I carried on on my Kindle before bed. And so that is two screens that I was reading on. And I also watched a bit of Netflix, a show on Netflix. Again, another screen. So when we consider that even if we are reading text that often it's on a screen, I think that's really interesting. Oh, Kevin says in his conclusion, the way I approach publishing today is with as much self publishing as I can handle. So yes, I certainly agree with that. It is well worth a read. Link in the show notes or just go to kk.org and in other self publishing news, a few people have emailed me about this that KU authors can now distribute ebooks to libraries and I'll link to Dale Roberts has a subset stack where he covers this. Several people said that they wanted me to comment on it. Now I couldn't find actual KDP help text about this and personally I feel that you really do need the company themselves to say whether or not this is allowed. But Dale has a screenshot of something that says it's possible and you can use Drafted Digital or Publish drive and select Library Distribution only. I really think KDP help should add something on this if it's allowed. So make sure if you want to get your ebooks into Library Breeze and you are using a system like Drafted Digital or Publish Drive that you don't check all the other boxes because that will put your ebook elsewhere and then you'll be in breach of your KU contract. So yes, be careful with that. So in AI news this week, the As I record this on Saturday, the details of the Anthropic case have just come through, so the settlement so as a reminder, the original case ruled that training on copyright works legally acquired is fair use. Anthropic have been buying physical books and scanning them as if reading books, which is fine as they paid for the copies. And there have also been, as we know, lots of licensing deals between AI companies and publishers, with no doubt more to come. But training on pirated works in copyright required a settlement. So the Verge and others report that there is a $1.5 billion fund set aside which might be around $3,000 per book pirated. This is still to be set in, but this is what's being discussed. However, this is the important part. There are some rules around what will get paid out. The book has to have been registered with the U.S. copyright Office within five years of the work's publication and registered before Anthropic downloaded it. So that's June 2021 for one of the databases and July 2022 for the other one. So if you have not registered your copyright with the U.S. copyright Office, as indeed I haven't because I register here in the UK and many authors don't register anyway, because this is the crazy thing with copyright, you don't need to register in order to have copyright on your work. But if you want to get a settlement in any court case, then registering is the way to do that. So it's a sort of hedge against court cases. I suspect many indie authors did not register and in fact Victoria Strauss Writer Beware reports that some publishers have not registered author works even if it was contractually obligated to do so, saying for larger houses it's standard for the publisher to register on author's behalf at the publisher's expense. So even if you think your book was included, and you can obviously check the databases, you then also need to check that the copyright was registered and that it's within these dates. All the links you need are at Writer beware links in the show notes or the Authors Guild also has a thing. But yeah, make sure you check this. I was then wondering if we would now see a whole load of lawsuits where authors join together to sue publishers who didn't register their works. Although of course the settlement amount, if it's say $3,000 per book, legal fees would be much bigger than that anyway. So really interesting that this is going ahead. I see lots of people going, oh, this is a real win for authors. But I think people are forgetting that this essentially solidifies training on copyright data as fair use. And if you think that even if it's billion dollars, Anthropic is worth a heck of a lot more than that. And these AI companies are worth a ton of money. So it makes me think that other AI companies will just go, oh yeah, yeah, we need to pay that too, get it over and done with and then get on with ingesting all the copyright data they can now legally do. So for those people who are like, oh, well, I don't want my books used in AI training, I can't see how you can stop that. An AI company can buy a physical copy of your book and then scan it legally. So I'm fine with this and upload my books to these systems anyway. Certainly up to Claude, which is Anthropics and ChatGPT and Gemini. But I hope authors who are anti AI realise the implications of these rulings as opposed to getting carried away with this one settlement. But I fully expect more licensing deals to come, more settlements, and hopefully this will settle down and we can move into the more practical reality of working with these tools. And Again, in my 2020 book on this, I had a whole chapter on copyright and licensing works in copyright. So this is something I wrote about years ago, so you could imagine I'm like, yeah, can we move on now? Anyway, please do check if you. You might get some money. You never know. If you did Register on useful AI tools, 11 reader this week has opened up to selling direct, so authors can earn 60% royalty on sales of AI narrated audiobooks. Our goal is to create a product that enables anyone, whether you're an indie author or a publisher, to create an audiobook in minutes and be able to monetize it. Madeline Shu, who leads growth and strategy at ElevenLabs, told Publishers Weekly, who have an article about this. Authors can use the free 11 reader platform by uploading manuscripts with limited customization options or access fuller features through paid ElevenLabs subscriptions that allow multicast narration, music integration and MP3 downloads. Okay, so just to be clear, if you use 11 reader, you can upload your epub and then anyone can buy the audio version of that through 11 reader, but you don't have control over which voice they use and all of that kind of thing. If you use ElevenLabs Studio, which is what I do, you fully control the audiobook experience and then also people can buy them on 11 reader.
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So if you get Death Valley on.
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11 reader, it it is in my voice clone. So there are two choices there, but people can buy it whichever way I use both. So again, Death Valley is made with ElevenLabs Studio, but many of my other books are Also just on 11 reader and you can choose the voice that they get read in. So links in the show notes for that also at 11 reader IO on their blog. A whole load of information about that. Then a couple more AI things I am on the Brave New Bookshelf podcast episode 47 with Steph Pajonas and Danica Favourite talking about how I use AI. We also talk about why, in an age of increasing technology I am starting a Master's in Death, Religion and culture, which is about as far from AI as you can get. Although there is one paper on Death in a digital age, which I'm fascinated by. My classes start in a few weeks and I'm increasingly excited about it. So yes, that's Brave New Bookshelf Podcast and Very different show the Novel Marketing Podcast with Thomas Umstadt Jr. Thomas and I geek out about AI together and we talk about different use cases and it's interesting because Stef and Danica are both technical people but our conversation is not very technical. Whereas with Thomas we do get into lots of different use cases. So yeah, two very different interviews with different hosts, different vibes, both of them lots of fun for me and hopefully you will also find them useful. That's Brave New Bookshelf and Novel Marketing Podcast. Now of course, I am an AI assisted artisan author and I love sharing how I use AI. So I am.
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And in fact as I record this.
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This afternoon, I'm doing my next webinar on the AI assisted artisan author stuff and it will have happened by the time this goes out. I've certainly had fun this week. I've spent probably almost 40 hours this week going through every use case, updating everything I have to cull slides because there's so much that I want to cover. I last ran these in June and it's amazing how much things have already changed. So if you'd like to join me? I do have one more webinar left this year, Sunday 21st of September. If you register you can attend live or get the replay in video audio with the slides and my prompt library. I will not be doing any more until early 2026, although if my course is going super super well and I may not do any more, I don't know. I'm not promising anything yet, but given how much is changing and I do really enjoy doing these webinars. If you've done one with me and it's really quite fun and fast paced tickets at TheCreativePenn.com live TheCreativePenn.com live in personal news, it has been the launch of my short story collection the Buried and the Drowned in the last week, currently live on Kickstarter as this goes out. The campaign finishes 15th of September so you might still have a chance and depending on when you're listening to this, it will be out everywhere before Christmas. The campaign funded and is ticking along nicely. Even if you're not interested in the short stories themselves, you might like to join me for a webinar on writing short stories. So it'll be my only other craft webinar this year and I have a few consulting sessions available. If you need one on one help or if you just want ideas for your own Kickstarter campaign or book marketing, check it out for some ideas@jfpen.com buried and you can see the gorgeous hardback with my first patterned sprayed edge and the design also mirrored in the custom end papers which I used Midjourney to make and also the book trailer which I made with Midjourney and Canva. So I just love all these creative things we can do now. And as I said, I've spent most of the week preparing my AI webinar. I do love to stay up to date. Like this morning the first thing I'm I'm pretty addicted to the AI news, so as soon as the anthropic settlement stuff came through I was like looking at all of that and updated that this morning and just fascinating. And as just a reminder, 99.9% of what we can use AI tools for is not writing publishable words. It's all the other stuff life as well, right? So thanks for all your emails and comments and photos this week, Matthew said In response to me talking about why we don't have physical copies of audiobooks anymore, Matthew says I love the idea of creating audiobooks on vinyl. Here are some photos of an audiobook I found in A secondhand shop a few years ago, an abridged version of Jay Tolkien's the Silmarillion read by his son Christopher. I was very excited to find this and add it to my vinyl collection, but in actuality it makes for quite a boring listen. I think that's great because what's so interesting there Elo Matthew, I presume you are a real fan of Tolkien, as is my husband and we have quite a few editions of Lord of the Rings and that's because he's a fan. So similar to you, this is real fandom stuff. Is collecting a vinyl collection of a favourite author even if you're never going to listen to it again. But Stephen also emailed and was not so keen on the idea. He said, I'm just curious to know if you have a record deck or a tape player or amplifier and speakers at home. I do, but they've been in the loft for over 25 years. Most people I know dumped their hi Fi's years ago. Me too for sure. I doubt many would purchase a system because their favorite author has put out a 40 minute disc. Now again, I think this is more about the souvenir of vinyl. And Stephen said, I take your point. However, I played my vinyl and while it was playing I would read the sleeve notes. In fact, I'm thinking of setting up the old system and listening to my old music again. Because we don't own the music we listen to on Spotify and others. That's true. And we don't own the audiobooks and you don't own ebooks. Remember, all you do with an ebook is you have a license to read the digital product. You can't resell it like you can resell a print book and you can't give away an ebook that you bought on a device. Jennifer sent photos of old gravestones. I've just returned from a genealogy related visit to Scotland. These are from the Kilfenan Church near the village of Tignabruach in the Kowal region. And Saskia sent a lovely picture of Wells Cathedral, which is my nearest Gothic cathedral. In fact, the Bishop of Bath and Wells is our bishop here and a trul. Beautiful place. And Sasaskia said, I grew up around Wells and in later life my mum was Keeper of the Fabric and a historian of the cathedral. I love this idea of Keeper of the Fabric. I actually think that is a book title, Keeper of the Fabric and it really brings up lots of things in my mind. And the last time I was at Wells, obviously I took lots of photos from my Gothic Cathedral book. And I know they have this ancient cope chest, a huge wooden chest built in 1120 from local oak where they keep the vestments and it is still in use today, which is I guess, yeah, just under a thousand years ago. Just under a thousand years ago. Amazing. Okay, please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepenn.com or on the YouTube channel 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 this episode is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's free, fast and easy self publishing platform favoured by independent authors all over the world. KWL was built by Authors for authors and their mission is to help you reach digital readers wherever they are, however they want to read. Audiobooks are one of the fastest growing segments in publishing and Kobo makes it easy for indie authors to get in on the action with their user friendly platform. You can upload your audiobook files, set your price and reach listeners around the world. Plus you keep control of your rights and royalties. And I wanted to bring this ad up today because you can use audiobooks created through Elevenlabs studio on Kobo. So yes, you can listen to Death Valley on Kobo as an audiobook because they accept all kinds of AI narration. And as ever I do label my books. They have a sticker on that says digitally narrated so don't miss out on the audiobook revolution. Join Kobo Writing Life and start sharing your stories in a whole new way. Thecreativepen.com KWL 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 TheCreativePen thanks to the 15 new patrons who've joined in the last week and I was thinking why is there a bumper crop? And I think it's because if you're part of the Patreon you get a reduced rate on the AI webinars and you can still get that. There is still a discount on the second webinar for 21st September. You can join the Patreon to get the discount. So thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering, writing, craft, author business, AI tutorials and last week I shared how to use ChatGPT agent to create spreadsheets for social media batch scheduling a very specific use case that people think is very useful. So 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. 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 TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview.
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Kim Boo York is the author of romance, Fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and a podcaster at the Author Alchemist. Her latest book is out from fanfic, Transforming Creative Freedom. So welcome back to the show. Kimbo.
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Hi Jo, it's great to be back. Love talking with you.
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Oh, yes, and we had a good chat last July 2024 when we talked about intuitive discovery writing. So we don't need to go further back than that. But just give us an update. What does your WR life and your business look like at the moment?
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Well, I mean, I think I speak for everybody when I say that 2025 has been a challenging year. So I've had to take a little bit on a little bit more freelance work as I've restructured how I'm doing some of my business. You were an inspiration for that. I'm kind of separating out my different brands now instead of trying to be one thing to all people, and that's taking a little bit of work. I've launched a new pen name, which I'm not going to talk about here, but it seems to be doing well off the launch pad. And of course, I'm redoing some of my old works, doing the business end. We're doing new covers, doing some new links, doing some new giveaways. So it's been a busy year and I look forward to what's going to be happening in the future for me, especially as I go into 2026. But that's kind of where I'm at right now.
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Well, that's interesting. Just talk a bit about this, separating different brands. Just remind us what are the different, I guess, different Personas that you have and the different brands you split into? Because I feel like, yeah, a lot of people think about doing this, but I, I often, I do say, and I have done myself, I've got the my two author names and I felt that they were very different. So it was important to me. But I know how much work it is. So talk a bit about that process.
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Well, I, I flopped back and forth. So for a long time I tried to keep everything very separate. And that took so much work and energy, as you know. And then I tried to put everything under one banner and that just became cluttered. It became hard to identify my demographics. It became, you know, do not even advertising. You can always do targeting and advertising, but with the more organic stuff. How do I post on social media? How do I talk about my. All my work? So I am somebody who is a inviterate project starter. Like, I always have multiple things going on. So I have Kim Boo York, me, myself and I, who is the author and the writer, and I do fiction under that name. I have Cooper west, which is one of my older pen names. That's gay male romance, romantic thrillers, paranormal romance. I have the author Alchemist, which is kind of my podcast and my craft writing craft and writing coaching brand. I have. I'm going down the list. I have the Task Mistress, which is my productivity. Just published a new book on a collection of essays on holistic productivity. Under that brand, I have the Skeptics Inspirational, which is daily inspirational post blog, that's going to be a book here soon. I have Patience and Fortitude, which is my grief blog and mourning blog and Book, which is the house where I published my memoir Grieving Futures, Surviving the Death of my Parents. And I could go on, but you kind of see what I'm getting at there. It's just, it's. They're very different things. And I realized that what I needed was a studio type of branding. So houseofyork.info is my studio home. House of York is my studio. It's the thing that produces all of these different brands. And so I do still have that brand. Everything is a House of York production. It sounds a little ostentatious when you put it like that. But for me, mentally, it's a great way to keep things separate and yet connected. So they're all me. They're all connected. And I can talk about different ones in different places, but they're also very clearly defined for marketing purposes. And that's what I really wanted out of that whole thing.
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Yeah, it is really hard. You don't have different email lists for all of those things, though.
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No, I do not. Right now, I just have the House of York email list. I'm moving into segmenting them. So I will have some different email lists going down. And certainly my newest pin name, the secret one that is is going to have its own separate email list. So eventually, yes, there will be separate email lists, but I'm. I'm working on Developing a way where I'm not having to do any, you know, six email lists a week.
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Right, yeah.
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Cycling, Cycling is important. Right. Planning things out, scheduling. Who, who would have thought? So I will eventually. And that is the goal is to have these different segmented lists list. But again I would be also be able to do a full blast to everybody if I had something special coming out that I wanted all my list to know. And again that's one of the reasons why I went with this studio framework of doing all of my brands and putting everything under one umbrella while keeping them branded separately.
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No, I like that. And I mean I often I have thought about this like because I have the two main sites. Well actually now I have three. The Creative Pen, JF Pen and books and travel. Travel and that's right, yeah. And so they're my main websites and then I have my Shopify stores and then I, I have YouTube channels and. And I have often thought oh my goodness, I should have one like landing page where I can send people to. And then I thought well who do I send to? 1 language, 1 landing page. Because I, I actually. Different people do different things. But I guess this is great to start on actually because I feel like you're a multi passionate creator and so am I and, and we have long careers and it's like, well you, you can't just stay in your lane, you know, I feel like some people say oh no, you should just stay in your lane. And we're like, yeah, it's not actually possible.
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No, no, I'm, I'm, I'm a seven lane highway. I can't.
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Well it's interesting though because it's not a seven lane highway. It's actually like three A roads we call them here. Like three major roads and then there's some little back lanes and then you might have one that's a bit of a cul de sac.
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Sadly far more accurate.
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Yes, but I think that's important too. And I mean like I was actually looking at your grief one and the death of your parents and I mean that's like a whole completely different area that perhaps is almost standalone and different people may find that book than find your romance or your productivity or whatever and that's fine. They don't need to find anything else. And so I think that's really good too. It's having all these different things. But yeah, just to make people listening feel better. If you are a multi passionate creator, so are we. You just have to manage it right.
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Figure out what works for you. But you gotta just try different things until you land on the system that works. I think that's, that's the lesson takeaway here.
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Yeah, yeah. Or the, or the way it works right now. And then you change things and in fact. So let's get. Yeah, let's get into the book because this is another one of these kind of quite random books, to be fair, which is out from fanfic. And I, I'm fascinated by this because obviously I've heard of fan fiction, but I. It's not a sort of world I am at all. So just start by explaining what is fanfic and the main site and you.
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Know what it is.
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Sure. So I'm going to start actually with the Wikipedia definition, which is a fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans of a form, as a form of fan labor unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. And honestly, that is the basis for a thousand different arguments about what exactly fan fiction is. It became very trendy there for a little while to look back and say Dante's Inferno. That's fan fiction, Bible fan fiction. Right. What is fan fiction? And it's one of those, well, you kind of know it when you see it type of things. Right. But I consider it to be the interaction of a creative person, whether it's writing, drawing, painting, creating videos with a property or fiction story that they love. It's them engaging with it on a personal level. And so that's really what fan fiction is. It's a hobby. It's the same kind of hobby as building Lego houses or model trains. You're taking something that exists and creating your own. Own work, I guess is the word I would use. But creating your own world out of it. And so it's. It's fun. It's fun. That's the bottom line for me is fan fiction. Writing fan fiction and reading fan fiction is fun.
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C
Yeah, it's fun. And let's just be clear about. You mentioned the word property and that it is fan labor and it's unauthorized. And right up front, we have to say this is when it's not your character. So it might be if you take, oh, I don't know, you give me some examples of what people have done.
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B
Okay, so take any show, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Game of Thrones movies, the Avengers. That was one I was, I was in for a long time, currently in a lot of Chinese dramas like Nirvana and Fire and the Untamed. You take those characters and that setting and you write your own version of say, a cutscene or a post scene or you change some of the canon facts of the story and you say, well, what if this person hadn't died? Or what if this, what if these people had met earlier? Or what if this one character had, you know, left when they were young and then come back 20 years later and you just add in these elements and have fun with taking it in a new direction. But as you said, they aren't yours, they aren't your characters. It's not your setting, it's not your story. You don't own that. And in the sense you own your own writing, of course you always own your own writing as a, a, in a creative sense. But in a legal sense you do not own it. And so it's something people really need to be aware of if they're interested in fan fiction, if they're going to explore it, if they're going to use it as a, as a writing tool, which you can, but you can't publish officially publish. Like you can't publish and make money off of this. This is definitely hobby level stuff, which I don't say it to be denigrate. I've read some amazing fan fiction that's truly life transforming. How beautifully and amazingly well done it was. It was. But it's, it's hobby. You can't publish it, you can't do anything with it legally, I guess you.
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C
But you can publish on a website. So, so what, what are the places that people are publishing their fanfic on?
- [34:51]
B
So they are publishing it. The oldest site right now is fanfiction dot net. It's still around. It still looks like. Like it was did in like 1998. It's truly. I don't know how people use it. The one that most people are familiar with is called archiveofourown.org it is a project of the nonprofit organization Organization of Transformative Works that was started 2008, 2009, I think for the express purpose of having a place for fanfiction to exist. And they've done a lot of work on the legal end to protect people's rights to write and put post fanfiction online. I try to draw the line between saying that they publish fanfiction and they post it for that reason. That's just a me thing. I don't think that that's really widespread in fandom. But for me, mentally when I'm talking about it, you post your fanfiction to AO3 as it's known colloquially, and you share it and people can read it and comment on it. And like it and it's a great site. They're tagging. Tagging system is truly a thing of beauty. But it is, again, it's not publishing in the sense of you're publishing a book, you're publishing something. There is fan fiction on wattpad, but they fought against it. They've taken down fan fiction in the past. They do allow it. It's kind of under the table on wattpad, but there is a lot of fan fiction on wattpad. I think going back a ways, the one direction fandom really had its moment on wattpad, but that was a long time ago. But there's still people posting fan fiction on WAT. Sometimes people cross post. They post on Wattpad and they post on AO3. So just depends on where you want to put your work.
- [36:32]
A
Okay, a few things here.
- [36:33]
C
So it would be obvious to me, like if it's, I don't know, Captain Kirk from Star Trek, that is like.
- [36:40]
A
A classic, you know, and a very obvious modern character.
- [36:45]
C
But think about Thor, for example. So Thor obviously being Norse God, none of that is under copyright as it in anyone can write a Thor story. But then there's Thor, the movies and the things that are Thor like in.
- [37:04]
A
It that are movie based as opposed.
- [37:06]
C
To the original base. So. So how does that kind of work?
- [37:09]
A
Like, how do you know?
- [37:11]
C
Especially when in people's minds sometimes things might get mixed up. You know, you might mention Ragnarok. Now, Ragnarok is in all the ancient.
- [37:18]
A
Stories, but the way they did it.
- [37:20]
C
In what, whatever Avengers movie or whatever, it might be specific. So is there. Are there lines here that people need to watch out for?
- [37:28]
B
I would say these days, yes, there's a little bit of line you need to watch out for. I mean, if your story is about Thor being a member of the Avengers, then, well, obviously, like it's like, yeah, yeah. But if it's just an independent story about Thor and his brother Loki. Right. Or Loki himself, there are definitely tells to use to be able to differentiate. Now to be clear on sites like AO3 and Fan Fiction and Wattpad, people do identify, they say like Thor MCU, which is Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tips you off. Or Thor mythology. Right. So it's oh, this is based on the Thor lore, the old style myths rather than the new style myths, I guess you might say. So there are definitely ways to identify that. And I think a lot of people, fanfiction writers take care to make sure of that because you don't want somebody coming into old school Thor and Loki mythology thinking that they're getting the fun Avengers good time. Let's beat up the bad guy story. Because they'll just get mad like, hey, this wasn't what I wanted to read. So fanfiction authors are very careful about identifying exactly what they're writing for and how they're writing for it. And oftentimes, yes, you wrote a riff on Little Red Riding Hood, right? Well, you know, okay, that's, that's definitely in the public domain. And they can post that on AO3. They can also publish that as their own story, original story, because that is public domain. That is not owned by somebody. So fanfiction authors are usually generally pretty careful about that.
- [39:08]
C
Yeah. And I guess why I'm emphasizing all this is because I still feel like many authors don't really understand what is in the public domain, what is fair use under copyright. And also it differs. So there are some countries where copyright expires earlier, I think. Is Sherlock Holmes one of these? Where it's sort of, I don't quote me on this. People go check it in your country. But it's like some of the Sherlock Holmes stories might be out of copyright and others are still within. And I think the Tolkien's universe as well. There's like different ways that things have been extended when you know they haven't in other areas. So I think this is really interesting and definitely you have to check all this before you publish it. But I did have another question. I mean you mentioned the one direction thing. Is this just all about having sex with different characters? Is it all romance and erotica?
- [40:01]
B
It is not. And in fact, so what gen is G E N It is what general fiction is. One of the most popular tags on AO3. Romance is very popular. Romance. They want their fave characters to kiss. Right? Like that's, that is a very popular element of fan fiction. But it's absolutely not what it all is. And it's not all written by 14 year old girls. This is another stereotype that comes out. In fact, if you go back in history, I would say the modern fan fiction era and a lot of academics would agree with, agree with me, began with the Kirk Spock fandom right out of Star Trek. And that like those women were full women because this was the six late 60s and the 70s, there was no Internet. If you wanted to share your stories, you had to have access to a Xerox machine. Remember Xerox machines? Right. You had to have access to a Xerox machine or a mimeograph machine. And then you had to have access to the post postage that would be required to mail these magazines out. So like you couldn't be a 14 year old girl and write fan fiction in that era. So it's always been a very owned, I would say, by older writers and not teenagers as the stereotype goes. And yes, a lot of the fiction out there is romantic, some of it's erotic, but a lot of it is also just general. It's like, I don't know, I was just looking. What was I looking at the other day? Game of Thrones fan fiction. And you look at Game of Thrones fan fiction and there's lots of different pairings that are popular in that. But you know, the, the time travel fix it tag is very popular in that fandom.
- [41:49]
C
People trying to avoid the final series.
- [41:51]
B
Yeah, right, exactly. Like they either want to avoid season eight, six through eight completely or they just want to redo it or they want to have something different so they have one of the characters, time travel, you know, the gods step in, whatever, it go back and fix everything. It's really popular in the Untamed fandom as well, the time travel fix it tag. So it's not just about the romance. It's about. I want to see. I have a current untamed fanfiction in progress right now actually, and it's very alternative universe. But I wanted to see what would happen if one of the main characters was actually given some autonomy and power earlier in her life. I just wanted to see what would happen if that. That happened to her and what, how that would change all the threads of the story going forward. And is there some romance? Yeah, there's some romance. There's also war, there's also magic and, and, and killer slaughter turtles and it's just fun. It's just fun.
- [42:48]
C
Yeah. I think fun is the. Definitely the focus here. But coming back on the IP side, there are books like 50 Shades of Grey is apparently supposedly based on I. Twilight fanfiction.
- [43:03]
B
Not supposedly very much. Absolutely. Yes, yes.
- [43:07]
C
Based on Twilight fan. So how did that become a publishable original novel? That was basically huge.
- [43:14]
B
So what you're talking about is what we call in the scene filing off the serial numbers. And a lot of authors have done this. E.L. james is not the only one. Cassandra Clare's done it. Naomi Novik's done it. Plenty of authors who don't want to be named have done it and many I've known. You take a fan fiction of yours is very popular or that you just personally like and you go and you file off the serial numbers. You don't just change the names, you change the setting, you change some of the dynamics, you change some of the character traits of the main characters. You have to really file it down enough that if someone was coming after you to say you based this on our story versus you stole our story. And that's really where the line has to be drawn and we're, again, it's not a clear one, but if you do it enough, you can get away with it. And that's what E.L. james did. Like if you did not know that it was Twilight fan fiction, you would never realize it was Twilight tran fiction. Even if you've read Twilight, like most people, they might say gosh, these characters are kind of similar but oh, that's just tropes. Right, so. Right. So exactly. So that's what she did and that's what a lot of other authors do.
- [44:27]
C
Yeah. So the tropes, I mean tropes are kind of universal and as you said, I mean the time slip go back in time and fix things. I mean that, that could go in any world. It doesn't have to go in a.
- [44:41]
A
Game of Thrones world, you know.
- [44:42]
C
And I feel like, because I, I never read the Twilight books or watched the movies, but I have read 50 Shades of Gray and it's obviously, it's set in a modern world. There are no vampires, there's no werewolves, so a lot of it is different. So I feel like that's important as well. But let's come back to you because I was really interested in the book you in, in talking about your own experience in fanfiction. You say my sense of shame was very real and I was really interested in that because I don't know you very well. But having talked to you before, I just, I just can't associate that with you. Like you seem very confident and so explain about that like why are some people embarrassed or even ashamed of being involved in fan fiction?
- [45:26]
B
Well, you've kind of hit on some of the reasons earlier when you asked is it all romance and erotica? And, and I talked about also it's not all written by 14 year old girls. For a very long time these associations with fan fiction was that it was very similar to romance genre. Honestly not that different of oh, that's, that's something women enjoy. That's what those horny, lonely women enjoy in their basements are writing, you know, sexy fan fiction. And it's not real. And it's, it, it doesn't take any effort, it doesn't take any work. It's just fake people. They're riding on the coattails of other people's work. So there was a lot of shame. I mean, there were a couple of people even up into the 90s that, you know, I won't give out names or anything, but whose careers were, were almost derailed or completely derailed because it was revealed that they had written fantasy fiction in the past. Publishers wouldn't touch them. Yeah, it was, it was a bad scene all the way around. It's hilarious because one of the oldest forms of fan fiction that we have these days is what's called Sherlock Holmes pastiches. And Sherlock Holmes pastiches started appearing in the 1800s. Like they started appearing not long after Sherlock Holmes stories were printed by Arthur Conan Doyle. And they were very popular up through the 20s and the 30s. Right. They were all written by very educated men. And they weren't called fan fiction, they were called pastiches. Right. And so those were okay, those were fine. But then you get up into the 60s and the 70s and you have women writing Star Trek fan fiction. Yes, a lot of it was Kirk Spock and some of it was truly terrible. But again, I've read some truly terrible, terrible books published by traditional publishers. So I'm not really sure that's a fanfiction only problem. You get a lot of new writers coming into fan fiction. So there is a lot of bad writing out there. I'll just be upfront about it and you'll, you can see it right away. You're like, ooh, that's not good. But a lot of these people are writing for the first time. I can't tell you how many times I've read an author's note at the start of a fictitious. It's like, this is the first time I've tried to write anything. But I was just so inspired, I wanted to do it. And to me, that's beautiful. That's amazing.
- [47:50]
A
That is beautiful.
- [47:52]
B
That is wonderful. Even if the work itself is very clearly the first thing they've ever written. But you're like, hey, you've started on an amazing journey. And that's the beautiful part. But the shame, the shame that's been associated with it. Like when I was first thinking about getting published in the 90s, because I don't know if anybody's listening, but I am an old person. I realized that I would never be able to admit to having written fanfiction when I was younger because I was a Kirk Spock girl in the 80s. I totally wrote that.
- [48:19]
C
I gotta ask. On This.
- [48:20]
A
I know.
- [48:21]
C
Is this a mm, gay romance thing with Kirk and Spock?
- [48:25]
A
Okay.
- [48:26]
C
Right. Just checking.
- [48:28]
B
I assume everybody knows.
- [48:30]
C
No, no, I didn't. I was thinking. Okay, that's interesting.
- [48:33]
B
Yeah. No, Kirk Spock was one of the first. We call them ships. It's that slang for relationship that grew out of, I think, X Files fan fiction in the 90s. But the Kirk Spock ship is. Is. Is one of the big motherships of fandom. It's. If you go on AO3 and look up how many stories are tagged Kirk slash Spock? There's a lot. There's a lot.
- [48:58]
C
Wow, that's interesting. What about the mixed race? Because wasn't it the first kiss on screen with Uhuru and Kirk? Was it those two there and a white actor?
- [49:10]
B
The first interracial kiss?
- [49:11]
C
Interracial kiss, yeah. That's the right terminology. I was like, what is the terminology here? But that kind of thing. Often this kind of fun writing can also push more boundaries. I mean, we've seen so many things come out of indie that would never have started in traditional publishing. I mean, what you think? Romantasy. There's no way, like traditional publishing would have started this Romantasy trend, which is so big now. And they've sucked up all the big ones, haven't they? So, yeah, interesting.
- [49:41]
B
Reverse harem, or why choose I think is what they call it these days that pretty much came out of the One Direction fandom. Like.
- [49:49]
C
Oh, yes, of course. That makes sense.
- [49:51]
B
The Omega Verse. I don't know if you're familiar with Omegaverse. No, but some. Okay, you know what? We don't have two hours, so I won't explain it, but look it up. Omegaverse came out of the supernatural fandom. A lot of people don't know that. They read Omegaverse. Now. The gay male, the. The mm romance publishing industry, which really got started when indies came on the scene. Right. 2008, 2010. Almost all of those authors, you go Back to the 2010, the. The MM hig they were all came out of fandom. Like fandom. One of the brilliant things about writing fan fiction and being in fan fiction is that you can see some of these trends coming. Like, I knew reverse Harem was going to be big. I knew Omega Verse was going to be big. I knew Romantasy was going to be big long before anything hit. Because it was being so popular, polarized in fan fiction. Because in fan fiction, you don't have to worry about whether it's going to make you money. All you're doing is you're having fun. You're trying out new ideas, you're throwing things at the wall. You're seeing what's interesting. You're coming up with new ideas and new stuff and sometimes it clicks and takes off. And you have that freedom as a fan fiction writer because you're not worried about how much money is this going to be and is this on market and is this a niche. Is none of that. None of that concern is there. You're just writing because you want to write.
- [51:08]
C
Yeah. And it feels like you're part of a group. You know, if you love the same thing as other people love, then as you say, it's part of the fandom for whatever that property is. I mean, Internet, that's. I mean, your book is called out from fanfic. So it's kind of turning from writing fanfiction into more professional writing, I guess. I mean, one of the things I was thinking is of course there are a lot of writers who are commissioned to write with within these universes. So do those sort of companies recruit from fan fiction?
- [51:40]
B
They do now. It was less common, say in the 80s, like when you had the Star Trek Marvels really taking off. And in the 90s when you had the Star wars novels taking off, they still went with a lot of traditional publishers. Even in the workhorses of the pulp fiction genres. These days it is a lot more popular and it's a lot more. A lot of traditional publishers are looking to popular fan fiction authors to mine for the next big thing. There was a dust up recently. There were three Harry Potter fan fictions. Dramoni, are you. That's a ship. That's a portmanteau of Harmony and Draco. So Harmony and Draco as a couple is actually incredibly popular in fandom. And there were three, three very, very popular fan fictions that are Germany fanfic that have recently been taken and filed off this. Although they didn't do a good job filing off the serial numbers. Everybody knew it right away and then started being promoted. They actually used Harry Potter references in their marketing, which of course the Harry Potter people were just like, you got to stop that right now. Like you stop it. But the reason the publishers published this is because some of these stories had a million, two million hits readers online and they knew, oh, this is a popular story. We could file off the serial numbers and make some money off of it. So yes, nowadays it's a lot more common for trad publishers and agents to look at fan fiction authors who are very popular, who have A following who've done a of lot, lot of writing. So it is more common these days, for sure.
- [53:23]
C
And then I guess your other thoughts on out from fanfic, like, for your own journey. That sort of. It sounds like you're still doing a bit of both, as in you still write some fanfic. But yeah, how do people cross over if they're like, no, I want to write my own. Is it just mainly a case of your own characters because you would have been using and your own world? I guess.
- [53:44]
B
Absolutely. So it's easier for some people than for others. I actually wrote the book because I did know quite a few authors who tried to write their own fiction. And what I noticed in a lot of those cases is that they tried so hard that they went so far out of their lane that they weren't interested in their stories anymore. They're like, I just. I get bored by my own writing. I just want to go back and write fan fiction. And I think. And the whole reason that I wrote the book is to try to help people who are used to writing about characters that they love and writing about settings that they love learn what those things are. Like, dial it down, figure out. Well, I call them parameters. Like, figure out what the parameters are of those characters. Do you just like wacky, klutzy characters who are also geniuses? Well, that's more of a trope that you can put that in any story. Doesn't have be to be Style Stilinski from Teen Wolf. Right. So it can be a lot of different things that you love. You can pull into your own writing out of your fanfiction without repurposing your fanfiction, without using other people's characters, learning what you love of those things and using them. Because it is a transition. It is definitely not super easy to transition to writing original fan fiction if all you've ever done really is written fanfiction. I, of course, had a little bit of a lift up because I had been writing original fiction for most of my life, so I was already familiar with some elements of it. But I did learn a lot writing fanfiction. In fact, I think I wrote over 1 million words of fanfiction before I think I really found my voice as an author and realized what I really want to write. So it can be a learning ground if you look at it that way. And I don't want to take the fun out of it. I don't want to say, oh, you should use this as a training grounds. But you can if your goal is to write original fiction. And you find that challenging.
- [55:42]
C
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I was reflecting then. I mean, I have thought before I would love to write a Bond book, which I think they've all been men who've written the Bond books.
- [55:54]
B
Right.
- [55:55]
C
Obviously there's lots of them written in more modern times. But it's, it's really interesting because then I think, well, my thrillers, my arcane series, you could definitely trace a lot of Bond kind of tropes, a lot of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft tropes. And it's, as you say, it's taking the things that you love about the, the movies and the books and the TV shows and then picking them out and then creating your own stories where there is still elements like that. I mean, those are not the original, original things. It's how you turn that into your own work. But it's skating that line, isn't it, that remains difficult.
- [56:32]
B
Right. And as you, as we talked about a little bit earlier, tropes are more universal. So if you can kind of dial, like you said, the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, well, what, what is that true? Or the Mummy, like, oh, it's the archaeologist going on adventure and running into and finding curse things and finding curses first items. That's, that's a trope. Like. But if you're not looking for it, you could just say, well, I just like writing Indiana Jones. I don't know how I'm going to write my own original story. But if you sit back and look at it like, okay, what is it about Indiana Jones? Or what is it about Kirk? Or what is it about La Mangie from the Untamed that I love? What is that? Can I pull on that? Put it, introduce it into my own characters and my own stories?
- [57:17]
A
That's cool.
- [57:18]
C
And then in the book, you have a brief section about how things have changed for indies over the last few years. I, I wanted to take this. Obviously, I always have to talk about AI, and you said, quote from the book, what is the point of churning out repetitive stories written to market if more like when an AI program can do it faster, better, cheaper, what does it mean to be a human creator of anything?
- [57:42]
A
And I love that because then you give people hope and you talk about this is actually ideal terrain.
- [57:48]
C
That's your words for, for you. So talk about this. Talk about how this sort of, oh, my goodness. Because I get people emailing me all the time saying, what is the point? So, yeah, so respond to that.
- [58:00]
B
What is the point? What is the point of Anything? Okay, no, but I think so. There's so many moving parts and Trina, you talk so well about how AI is impacting our industry, but for me personally, it's opened the door to allowing me to write what I really want to write and allowing me to put my own humanity into the writing because, and this isn't true for everybody, but for me, trying to write to market, trying to write to narrow down and stay in your lane, as we talked about earlier, felt like trying to turn myself into a machine. I didn't want to do that. I didn't. I didn't want to. And I tried and I tried and I failed abysmally, over and over and over again. So the humanity is what we own as humans. Our experiences, our insights, AI and specifically LLMs, because I like to be specific when we're talking about that. Specifically LLMs. The training that they've done has been so broad in, across so many genres and across so many types of writing and so many eras of writing that it's very generic. Even at the point where you say you can push a button, have it write a book, which we're definitely not there yet. As anyone who's played around with LLMs knows for sure, it's going to be median, it's going to be the median level, it's going to be average. Right? Because that's what AI is really all about. And taking our own spark of creativity and ingenuity and entered and allowing ourselves to grow into that rather than being worried about churning out the next pulp fiction, I think is an opportunity. Now some people who've made a lot of money churning out a lot of these, these books see it as a threat and I understand that. But things change. Things change in our industry all the time now. Like we had 150, 200, 300 years of things not changing at all. Then we had self publishing and indies changed everything. Ebooks changed everything. AI is changing everything. And if we invest in ourselves as authors and writers, as creators, as people with creativity, I think it is an ideal terrain because then we can explore the things we love to write. It's one of the reasons why I think, think that cross genre books such as cozy fantasy or romantic contemporary romantasy, what is even in what, what is that? I don't know. But all these cross genre things are, are starting to burble up because people feel more confident that they can reach the readers that they want and that they don't have to try to fit them, fit their round peg into a square Hole type of situation. So that's my thoughts on it. I mean I, I know other people have different opinions, but that's where I'm at.
- [60:55]
C
Yeah. And I actually think this is a better time for coming back to where we started around the sort of multi passionate creator because we have for many years it's been, well, if you write cross genre, which I do, if you write all over the place, if you don't do series, if you write standalones, if you do this, that and the other, you're not going to make good money. And many of us have made good money like that. But it's, but we've certainly felt, oh well, I should do this, I should go into this one genre or I should try not to write like for example, I've got three books in my Brooke and Daniel series and I, when I wrote them, I was trying to write a standard British crime and ended up with a male psychic character. And I was like, why isn't this selling? And I figured out over time that these British crime niche is not supernatural and it certainly doesn't have a male psychic in. And so it's so funny because. And those books have never, you know. No, it's funny because I love those books and I've always been like, why? Why can't the people who love this type of thing find these books? And I actually think they have more chance in a world of generative search, for example.
- [62:08]
A
Yeah.
- [62:08]
C
Where people can get much more granular. They're like, well, I like this, I like this and this and this and this, this and this. Find me something that I might like. And I feel like that is much going to be much easier for our work to be surfaced than someone who just has one category on Amazon, for example, that they buy in.
- [62:25]
B
Absolutely. I think one of the more hilarious examples of that is the search I did recently for Supernatural Cozy Apocalypse.
- [62:36]
C
A cozy Apocalypse.
- [62:37]
B
That is a nice one. Right. And there are books that came up in that search and I was just like, oh, this is cool. Because I wanted something that was like the end of the world but also people coming together and found family and maybe a little supernatural. Like is there dragons are coming up out of the earth because of climate change. You know, people come. I found the book Apocalypse Cow.
- [62:59]
C
Which Apocalypse, That's a great name.
- [63:03]
B
It's about a cow at the end of. At the end of the world. And it's a, it's a, it's, it's.
- [63:07]
C
Okay, but sounds like fun.
- [63:10]
B
It is fun. But these are the. Like you exactly Us cross genre writers, which I'm leaning into more. I think my, my serial Dragon's Grail is in a lot of ways still very much the epic fantasy second world type of thing. But I'm looking at it and it doesn't really fit into epic fantasy. It doesn't really fit into Romantasy. It doesn't really fit in. So like I'm having to think of different ways, ways of building up that explanation of it because it is kind of intrinsically cross genre and it's going to be a challenge. But I think it's a great challenge to have in this day and age because as you said, generative search is really going to be a game changer. I don't think people are ready for how much that's going to change everything.
- [63:56]
C
Oh, I already like probably for the last year Now I use ChatGPT to find books. I just find it so much better. I'm like, like here's a list of things that I really like. Go find me some books. And I just think it's, it's so cool to find more, much more weird stuff that just would not have been surfaced otherwise. And I guess where I'm going with this too is, and what I say.
- [64:18]
A
To people is you need, you need to be your weird self.
- [64:21]
C
So you know, like, well said.
- [64:24]
B
All of what I just said, that was what I meant to say.
- [64:27]
C
So yeah, be your weird self. And I can, I mean I see that with your words across different things like and I bring up your parents grief book again. I mean a lot of people might not have expected a book like that alongside someone who also writes about productivity and this fanfic stuff. And so that breadth of humanity is I think what people who might come in one of your books and then they're like, oh, this person has a whole load of stuff that is, brings more depth is, is just a different side of them. And I think this being the full human that you are is so important coming into this sort of new world.
- [65:07]
B
I agree. Especially coming out of the world where you were supposed to be just one thing and do that one thing and be one thing. For me as a reader, I love seeing what other writers are working on. I love seeing a writer whose romance novels I really love and they're branching into, you know, space opera. I'm like, ah, I'm all about it. Like I'd love to read the that and because it's to me it's more about what I enjoy reading in the author's own take on those Stories less than, oh, this is space opera genre. And that's all I read. And I don't think readers are like that. Some are. You got your whale readers who never leave their niche. But. But I think a lot of us, we like a lot of different things and I think this is a great time for authors to be able to expand and take advantage of that.
- [65:52]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe realize that, yeah, sure, you might not hit it out the way park with every book, but then whoever.
- [65:59]
B
Did, I know there's readers out there who love your psychic British crime stories. Absolutely. I don't have a doubt.
- [66:07]
C
Well, what's so funny is they get the best reviews of all my books. They get the best reviews. It's just the number of people who actually like that kind of book are like, yeah, quite few and far between. But hey, I didn't know that when I started writing them. So it just shows you and I think what's good. And like, I'm writing this book about Gothic cathedrals at the moment. Nobody asked for that.
- [66:28]
B
They didn't. But I am certainly looking forward to it because I love Gothic architecture and so I'm excited about that.
- [66:34]
C
Oh, fantastic. Well, this is the thing and I think we need to keep that in mind. So I guess as we close. Write what you want to write and hopefully in this new world with AI search people, more people will find us.
- [66:45]
B
Right? The dream. The dream.
- [66:47]
C
Happy times. So where can people find you and your books on.
- [66:51]
B
Okay, well, I suggest that people go to my main hub studio website, which is HouseofYork.info and that's all one word. HouseofYork.info that has links to all my sub brands, including my kimbuyork and Cooper west and Patience and Fortitude, the one about grief and mourning where they can read my dog's obituary as I just lost my pet and I'd love people to love my dog as much as I do. So go check that out. And yeah, so HouseofYork.info you can find everything there. And if you want to reach out to me, I'd love to hear from people.
- [67:25]
C
Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Kimboo.
- [67:28]
B
Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure as always.
- [67:34]
A
So I hope you found the discussion with Kimboo interesting. Let me know if you're into fan fiction or if you're struggling with managing multiple brands under one multi passionate creative umbrella. I certainly know how that feels. So let me know what you think. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepen.com or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepenn.com send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday I'm talking about self publishing and Marketing Books for children with Darcy Patterson. 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 and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.