Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.
In episode #117 of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with author Michelle Cornish.
Michelle is a recovering CPA with a passion for stories. Writing mostly women’s fiction with strong female heroines, her books often include nods to her former life as a CPA. When Michelle’s not writing, she’s hanging out with her two boys and husband in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, BC, Canada.
During our discussion, Michelle describes:
- How she uses preorders to stimulate productivity and accountability
- Why she has decided to try genre-hopping
- How she went about turning all of her novels into audiobooks
- Why an experimental mindset is the best way to approach book marketing
- And much more!
Listen to the full podcast episode:
Watch the video of the interview:
The Writing Coach Episode #117 Show Notes
Episode Transcript
Michelle, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Kevin.
Welcome back. I looked it up the last time you were on the show, it was October, 2018. So like years ago, it’s crazy. Well, the pandemic has created this feeling of like two last years, right? Like it feels like it’s 2019. It feels like you were on the show a year ago.
At that time we talked about your first book about murder audit and, you know, writing it, getting it out into the world. But since that time you’ve published several more books. So bring the listeners up to speed here on everything you’ve been writing and publishing over the last couple of years.
Yeah. Well, I continued on with the books in the murder audit series. So with the Cynthia, wherever books, so more in the thriller genre. And then I was also just feeling like I really wanted to write something light to find. So I attempted to write some chiclet that hopefully has a romcom feel to it as well. And a lot of that actually happened about a year ago. So independently during the pandemic I was teaching face-to-face at college and that wasn’t possible of course, with the pandemic happening. So I just decided to take the opportunity and write as much as I could. And I challenged myself. I signed up a bunch of pre-orders on Amazon. I think I had six of them, which I have to say I would do differently going forward now that I, I just finished the last one a couple of weeks ago. So now no more pre-orders without having the files can speak, is that is my advice to everyone, but I, it was a lot of pressure for me, but it also really challenged me to get a lot of writing done. So that was really great.
Oh, okay. Let’s see. Let’s explain this to people, this technique. So basically what happened was you posted on Amazon that you were going to publish six books and started reordering them before they were written?
Exactly. So I had coverage for all these butts and I knew what they were going to be about so that I could do, I could write book descriptions for them. And so I just decided, well, why don’t I just put them up there? I see if I get any pre-orders on them. And it also will force me to actually write the books. So that’s what I did. So one of them was one of the same thing, rubber that’s and then all four in the wrong pond series that I was doing. And yeah, I just thought, okay, let’s do this and see what happens.
Amazing. That is so ambitious. It sounds maybe though, too ambitious? There were lessons learned here?
Absolutely. So that, that is what I learned from the process is so all I will say, all of the boats are more like novella as the novels. So they’re on the shorter side, like 35,000 to 40,000 words. And I think if I was going for a longer boats, there’s no way I would’ve been able to complete them all. And of course so Amazon punishes you, if you miss your fee order that line. Right. And with the first book, I didn’t realize that they go by I can’t remember the exact term for the time, but in essentially England time. And I was thinking it was local time. So I actually did miss my deadline for the first one. And it got canceled. Yeah, that was awful. Thankfully though, there was only a few people that have the order of it. I still felt horrible about it, but so big lesson learned there to be careful of my time zones and watch the ticking clock on Amazon.
So Michelle, did you literally leave it to like the minute to hit publish?
Yes. So I was just wanting everything to be perfect as like checking for last minute type thing. And I thought, oh, I have lots of time. I thought I had until midnight Pacific time, but actually only had until five o’clock Pacific time, Actually I was ready to upload it at 10 after five. And I was like, oh, I don’t really know. And I could have done it before the,
Well, even if with the rest of this conversation is totally bland. We’ve already shared a helpful tip, more authors out there. It’s England time people.
Yes. Be very careful about the pre-order deadline. So thankfully Amazon didn’t revoke all my pre-order privileges because I guess they can’t actually do that when you have a pre-order that’s canceled and you don’t provide a filing time, they can actually just remove future pre-order privileges for, I believe it’s a year. So thankfully they allowed me to continue with the existing pre-orders that I had already set up. But yeah, I think my overall lesson for me anyways, is it will work better if I don’t set up the pre-order until I have the final file ready to go. Because I actually did that. Earlier this earlier this year, I had a file ready to go and I thought, well, I’ll just set up a free order in, and it actually helped me to promote it. I felt a little more relaxed for promoting the book, having it on pre-order rather than saying, oh, it’s really stay in promoting that way. I did the promotion from the PR and it felt a little more comfortable for me. Of course everyone has their own thing. Okay.
It’s funny. I work with so many authors and I would say like maybe 75% of the time they come to me wanting to write a series. Everyone wants to write a series, no one wants to work on a standalone book or, you know, it’s limited to the number of people. And what I found was like, everyone else, I started out with a trilogy saying I was going to write this trilogy. And after two books and the page Turners trilogy, I was like, oh, I’ll write something else. And that’s how M school came about. Like the page Turners is third person. School is first person page servers. It’s about boys. M school is about girls page Turners has magic M school has, I was just like, I want to do something completely different. So it doesn’t really surprise me that you said you wanted to branch out and try some chicklet. So was it the same thing for you after a couple of Cynthia Weber books will be ready just to try something else artistically.
Yes, definitely. I am still actually struggling with that right now because had always from the beginning, I don’t know why that, for some reason it was always going to be six Cynthia Weber boats. And so I’ve done four and now I’m, I started drafting the fifth one, but I’m just not sure that’s the book we should be working right now. Like, I don’t know. Something just feels off and yeah, it’s been really fun to try different things. I know there’s lots of advice out there about, you know, sticking to your genre and not genre hopping because I didn’t create a pen name for that. I just decided, anyway, I’m just going to try it and see what happens. It’s really publishing and writing. This is a big experiment and me anyways, I thought, you know what? I just going to see what happens. And it’s funny that you mentioned magic because that is actually something want you to write in others as well. And so I have like a chiclet series with magic that I want to write. There’s you know, coming of age story with magic that I want to write. And so, yeah, it’s sort of acquired to pick what’s the best book that I should be writing right now because I want to try to make us use the Docker backwards.
Yeah. So, absolutely. It’s hard to, it’s hard to know where to go and funny. I just want to try different and things. And actually, I can’t remember who it was. It might’ve been John Murphy,
Well maybe while you’re muted, something else say is, you know, the advice is to really pick a genre and stick with it, but I’ve ignored that as well. I mean, I’ve published M school, which has like blood all over the cover. And then I also publish rocket princess, which is a children’s picture book. I just want to create a variety of art and keep myself interested. And yeah, I mean, if readers follow me from one John or do another grade, but if not, that’s all right too, you know, I’m more interested in telling stories that interest me as opposed. I mean, I guess it’s different if you have a giant ravenous fan base, like if you’re George R R Martin and people are like gonna say your house on fire, if you don’t write the next game of Thrones book, but like we’re not George RR Martin, why not, you know, spread your wings a bit.
Yeah. And that’s actually part of it too. So I find with the Cynthia, whatever books they they’re just not popular. And that’s part of it too, is I don’t have fans. They’re like, when’s the next physio, whatever book coming. So then I’m like, well, maybe people don’t want to read the next thing. So that’s part of it as well as just trying to figure out, well, you know, what do I want to write? And, and that’s still keep meters happy. Of course I still want to sell books. But so yeah, I was going to say, I think it was done as if I said that writing in different genres actually helps to improve your writing overall. And I actually found that, like I just, and I find that I’m more excited. Like when I switched to, you know, the romcom for a little while, I’m more excited to go back to this ruler because it’s just a change. And then a person that gets bored really easily. So it’s fine for me to jump around and try different things.
For sure. And I mean, you said the simple Cynthia Weber series, isn’t huge. And yet when I looked it up, you’ve got a ton of reviews, very positive reviews on that first book. Was that something you were focused on and making sure you got a lot of reviews,
Not so much focused on the reviews, but I did do some promotion, so it was free for a while. So I was trying the strategy of having the first book in the series free, hoping to get read through which I find I did have a few people. Like, I feel like listen to your webinar series is maybe just a little too niche being about, you know, an accounted as the propane, as you don’t see that very often. So it was just a specific group of readers that maybe want to continue on to the next books in the series. And also, so with murder on it, there’s quite a good hook there into book two. So at the end you know, it’s, it’s not really a cliffhanger, but it gives a good intro into the next book that people might want to see, oh, what’s going to happen.
And auditing Jane DOE, which is a book too. But then from book two to three, there’s not so much, there is a bit of a, like a hint of what’s coming in book three, but not such a huge book as in the quantitative team. So I do find that the review is kind of, you know, it’s not a lot of people don’t want to read the next one, but I think I have so many reviews on murder audit just because it was free for awhile. And I got thousands of downloads when I was promoting it on. I think it was free book. See that I had some that time. So I actually did two different promotions on it through Freebooksy and the first one was the most successful I had, I think it was about 3,500 downloads. So, but when you think of that and then compare the number of reviews, if the reviews don’t seem as high compared to the number of people that downloaded the book. But yeah, I think having the free, the free book helps to promote that book for sure. But it just didn’t have the read-through results. I was hoping for
We’ll get in those reviews. I mean, those numbers seem fine to me. I, from my experience, it’s like maybe five to 10% people who buy and read a book or even free downloaded leave a review. I mean, it’s, if that, you know, it’s, it’s shockingly hard sometimes to get those reviews, you can see people buying, see people downloading, see people enjoying it, you’re getting feedback, but just taking the time to go on Amazon and leave a review. Not everyone does that. And some of the people who do do it, they’re like professional, Amazon reviewers. You’re like, oh, this guy really enjoyed my book. I wonder what else you click on it. And he’s like reviewing soap in like razors. And like these people like live the review things that Amazon.
Yeah. And actually, so I think last time I checked, I had 60 something reviews, but they’re actually, when you click on it, those are ratings. So I don’t have as many written reviews. I think that maybe like 10 or less written reviews, but a lot like lots of people will just give a star after they read it. And actually another thing that happened is when I made that one into an audio book, some of the audio listeners actually went and reviewed the audio book. I think there’s two IO listeners that have interviewed the audio, which was really nice and unexpected. But the, the site where I was promoting the audio book, they actually they suggest that people who do review when they grabbed the book, because again, it’s a free download for them. So they say it would be nice if you could leave a review, which that takes the onus off of me asking for reviews, because I just don’t like doing that.
Okay. Well you have set up the perfect segue into our audio book discussion. I don’t know. Were you planning? That was that we really like kind of throwing me the ball, taking care of it and run with it.
Oh no. That just popped into my head. That was just that’s exactly what happened with that book. So,
Well, this is one of the reasons I wanted to get you back on the show. Obviously, I always love talking to you, but I saw on YouTube, you were posting some little clips from your audio books and I’m a huge fan of audio books. I used to have a long commute to my government job. I’d be in the car 20 hours a week. And I’m like, how do I turn 20 hours of driving time into productive time? And one of the ways was audio books and, and I got so deep into them. So I’m a huge fan of them, really loved them. But I’ve never actually gone down that path with my own books. I don’t know why, I guess I’m just so focused on my coaching businesses and whatnot. I suspect if I was really focused on my author business, I would’ve jumped on to that, that boat sooner. But anyway, I was like, okay, I gotta get more shell out. I got to hear what this process is like. So tell me first off, have you always been a fan of audio books? Have you listened to them yourself before starting to turn your own books into them?
I, yeah, so I, I was never really an audio book listener until similar to you. I had a commute name as I was wanting to read for, but you know, obviously the drive, you can’t read a book on the drive when you’re the person driving. So that’s why I started listening to audio books is just to listen in the car after I drop my kids off and they were going to school in a different city or live. So I have the commute in the morning and then in the afternoon, and I was finding, I was getting a lot of listening in and then I would start listening while doing the dishes as well. And, and I just thought, so I was listening to mostly self-help help books to start with and I thought, oh, maybe I should turn and keep more money into an audio book because it’s sort of a business you know, self-help book as well. And so that was the book that I started with thinking that, you know, I enjoy listening to these self-help books. Maybe people will enjoy listening to keep more money in audio. So that’s
For listeners keep more money is your first book. And it was a non-fiction book about how to find a accountant if you’re a small business.
So yeah, so I started with that one and the process was really easy. I went through ACX so they do have options on ACX that you can do like royalty share or you can pay your narrator outright if you want to be able to publish the book on other platforms. So, because I had a limited budget for me, that was not even a decision to make. I knew I was just going to do a royalty share upfront because I didn’t have the budget to pay the narrator. So in end they have helpful things on the ACX site as well. So they, they give you like a ballpark of the range of if you work at Hey, that married or outright when it would be. And I think at the time that I checked into when I was, you know, roughly two to $300 per finished hour of the book. And so for me that I knew that was out of my budget. So I just decided to go with a royalty share. And so once you start the process by claiming your book, so ACX is linked to Amazon, so you can search for your book in there in the ACX database.
CX is like acx.com or something it’s its own website, but it’s a subsidiary of Amazon.
Yes, exactly. So you actually, when you log in to ACX as an author, you actually use your Amazon password to log in. Yeah. And then everything is linked up to Amazon. And so once you claim your book, then you can start the process of searching for a narrator and yeah. It walks you through and gives you tips along the way. So it even tells you like, okay, for example, if you’re wanting a fiction book, narrated the best passage to pick, like if you have multiple characters in the passage and you want to see the narrator’s range, and if it’s going to suit your book, then they recommend that you choose a passage that you want to, you know, sort of test the narrator out. So for keyboard money, because it was non-fiction, it didn’t, for me, it didn’t really matter. So I just use the first part of the book as the script that I wanted them to read.
I think they recommend roughly five pages to, just to upload for the narrator to test out. And you have the option, like if you know, a narrator ahead of time and you know, they’re on ACX, you can actually just search for them and request that they narrate your book and issue an offer, offer through the platform to them. But I didn’t, at that time, I knew nothing about audio books at all. So I just asked for auditions. And then you essentially wait. So once you have your script uploaded and you put in details like how long your book is, if you want the reader to be Canadian, British American, like you can put in all these best specifications, male, female, et cetera. And then you just wait to get auditions and you get a message sent to your email when you have somebody that has done an audition on ACX and you can go and listen to it. And yeah, it’s a, it’s a really, I had a lot of fun during it and all I’ve worked with five different narrators now and all of them have been really great to work with and had a great experience with them. So it’s always fun asking for auditions because you never know what you’re going to get. And then just listening to everybody, it’s this really fun.
I just had that exact thought, because I know for me, one of the funniest parts of writing and publishing a book is when you’re waiting for your cover designer to send you a couple ideas, you know, and it’s like, there’s nothing cooler than just like, oh my God, is this what my book’s going to look like? And so I imagined waiting to hear the auditions. It’s probably a really similar experience.
Yeah. Cause you, it says the person’s name. Like when you get the email, it says so-and-so left on audition for your book and then you can click on it, click through. And so you see the name, it’s like, Ooh, I wonder what this person sounds like. And it’s just so funny, you know, having a list of, and I mean, you do get all kinds of quality, I guess. So sometimes you click on someone and it’s really hard to hear them. So you know that, well that person, maybe they don’t have the right production equipment or whatever it is, but obviously you don’t want somebody that’s so quiet reading your audio, but because you want the best quality out there. And there is also actually quality reviews. So once your book is completed and you approve it, then ACX does their own quality review before they will publish it through to whatever platforms you have chosen.
So in terms of platforms, obviously there’s audible. Is there other platforms?
Yeah. So if you go with the exclusive distribution, it’s audible ACX and iTunes. So I’m the exclusive distribution. You split your 40% royalty so that the author gets 20% and the narrator gets 20%. And then there’s also, you can choose to do Y distribution where you can then take your files and put them on any site you want. And if you’re doing royalty Schaeffer, that then you split 20%. So you essentially get half of the royalties. If you do the non-exclusive route. And then you can also do the pay. Like I was mentioning earlier, the pay per finished hour rate, which would allow you to take the book and upload it wherever you want it to after.
Okay. So in terms of say, you go with the exclusive one, like the iTunes audible, what was the other one?
ACX so the actual platform where you do the recording, you can buy books on there as well.
Okay. So say I choose that option. Do I then like manually upload the audio book to each platform? Or does ACX candidate?
No, that’s all done through ACX so you, you actually choose it upfront. So after you decide on the narrator that you want to work with, you do, what’s called making an offer. So that’s when you choose, if you’re going to do the royalty split, if you’re going to do it exclusive non-exclusive or if you’re going to pay per finished hour. And so once, once you choose those options, then ACX has it in their system. So for example, I’ve always done the exclusive route. And so then they just automatically upload the book. Once they’ve approved it through their quality review process. I think if you were to choose non-exclusive, then you would have to then take the book and upload it to different platforms. So for example, if you wanted to have it on chirp, you’d have to take your files yourself and then upload them and put it on that website yourself. But I haven’t tried that. I do hope to do that route. Eventually. I’m hoping that I’ll have some budget that I can try that out. But yeah, I’m not too sure how that works.
So when you’re looking for narrators to audition, is it like your posting, the project and then they’re finding it, or are you sorting through narrators? They kind of choosing who you want to addition.
You can actually do it both ways. So for the books that I’m working on right now the romcom ones, there’s just four books in the series. And so far I’ve had the same narrator for the first two. And I’m hoping that she’ll be willing to do the next two as well. So in that case, because I knew that I wanted to work with her for the second book, all I did was just search for her and actually ACX makes it really easy. If you’ve worked with a narrator previously, it kind of includes it in a dropdown list. So you can just choose their name and make an offer right away. So you don’t, even though I still have to upload the sample narration that I wanted her to do, she didn’t actually have to go through an audition because I was just making her the offer right away a friend, but you can also have it. So if you don’t know who you want to work with, then you request auditions and that’s when they will send you messages. When you have people audition. I have to say there was one book where it seemed to take forever to get auditions. And I was like, oh no, nobody wants to read this book for me when I get it. But I did finally get some.
So when you’re listening to auditions, what type of things are you looking for? I mean, you’ve already said, you know, quality is obviously useful professional sounding quality, but if you have a bunch of people who all are voice people and have good equipment sound good. How do you choose one over the other? Are you going with gut instinct or what are you going for?
Yeah, I think it is a lot of gut instinct, but it’s I also listened to how they differentiate characters. So with the novels, I make sure that I have passages where it has more than one character talking and I try to also include male and female voices. So for example, for the Cynthia Weber books, because Cynthia Weber is female. I decided I want to have a female narrator, but I also want to see how the narrators do with male voices. So I made sure that my passage included both male and female characters in there. So that was part of what I was listening to. Sometimes I have like you know, like bang or, you know, things like that. And then I want to see how they narrate those kinds of words as well.
I know, especially as an independent author, I mean, it’s in the title independent or self publishing. It’s like, it can be a lonely process. And I always look forward to that point where I’m like dealing with editors and dealing with designers. It’s like, Hey, I’ve got a team finally. After however much time working on this book, this must be just like one more collaborator to have as part of your book project. That must be nice to just have one more person on the team, helping get your art out into the world. Yeah.
Yeah. It’s searching because they’re also, you know, getting a portion as a royalty. So it’s to their benefit to also help you promote the book. Right. yeah. So, and it is nice to be able to communicate back and forth. One of the narrators that I have, so you can actually send messages to your native narrator directly in the ACX platform. But it can be a little bit clunky sometimes. So one of the narrators that I was working with, she had given me her direct email, which was really nice because then we could just message back and forth through email and sort of avoid the whole ACX going back and forth in their system because they give you what happens is when you get a message in ACX, it of course goes through to your email anyways. So then you’re almost getting like double messages cause they’re in ACX and they’re also in your email. And so it was really nice that she offered to do that. And then when I worked with future narrators, I was sort of doing the same thing with them because it just felt easier. And then if I had corrections, it was easier to just email them instead of asking for the corrections through ACX
When the books were completed, I assume you went back and listened to the whole books. What’s it feel like hearing your own writing, read back to you by someone else? Does it provide some distance kind of lets you hear it as its own thing God, so close to you.
Yeah. So at the, for the first one for murder on it, there was lots of stuff that I was cringing because of course I had written more books and learned more things since then. So I was like, oh, I could’ve said that much better. And I actually did ask her to change a few things that were no fault of her narration. Of course it was just that I wanted it worded a little bit differently because I didn’t like originally written it. So that was a little bit humbling hearing the first one. And so then after that I made sure to go through and almost re edit the books before I would request the narrator to do it because of course I wanted to have them as best as possible. But I think that I find now that I’m writing other books, especially if they’re in the same series, so for Cynthia Weber, for exact example, I actually start to hear the narrator’s voice in my head as I’m writing the new book, which is weird, but it, it almost helps me to feel like, okay, how would this be sat out loud?
Like as I’m writing it, it almost just helps me to get a better feeling like, okay, how would this narrator say, oh, I need to write it like this instead. So yeah, I it’s been really fun and it was weird at first, but now I really like hearing the books read in it, it doesn’t, it almost doesn’t feel like my work, like once they put the character into it, cause they have their own interpretation. Of course. I mean, I can always say, oh, I don’t like the voice of this character. Could you please change it? But I kind of liked to see how they interpret it. So it does feel like it’s a little bit removed from being my book. Like it’s also now their project and their creative ideas have gone into it as well. So yeah, that’s really, it’s a really fun thing to hear the finished book for sure.
Well, for any authors out there hearing this and they’ve maybe been a little intimidated about producing an audio book, any, any lessons learned or any final tips you’d want to share with them?
I would say if you’re thinking about it, just go for it, especially if you’re open to experimenting with the royalty share, because all it costs you is your time and you, you know, you don’t have to put out any money up front and it’s a good little test to see if you like doing audio books and how they sell for you. And the process is really easy. I know I said earlier that with the messaging system in ACX, it’s a bit clunky, but it’s, it’s not a big deal. The system is really friendly. It really walks you through everything. So even the first one, I did keep more money. The very first audio book, I had no idea what I was doing and the system made it really easy to figure out it’s really user friendly. And of course the narrators too, like they’ve been helpful.
I think they’ve been narrating books longer than I’ve been creating audio books. So that was kind of nice to have a little bit of help from them as well. And they are essentially the producers of your audio book as well. So they’re, they’re the ones that are responsible for passing the quality control that ACX has. And so they’re a really good resource to ask too. So yeah, I would say just go for it if, if you’re, you’re not sure. And actually that’s how I ended up doing an I novels. I did the non-fiction because I had been listening to non-fishing books, but I hadn’t really listened to a lot of novels in audio books before I do now. I listened to way more novels than I used to do through audio. But I had asked a friend of mine who just, she was just automatically putting all for books into audio and she was mostly writing fiction. So I just asked her what she thought of it. And she said, well, I think the more options you have for people the better and the more chances to get your book seen by people. And that just really hit home for me, I guess I thought, wow, why not? I’m just, I’m doing royalty share anyway. So I don’t have anything to lose.
Well, Michelle, you know, I was there at the beginning of your fiction career and it’s just been such a pleasure to watch you continue to blossom and publish and experiment and be so ambitious. And now here you are teaching me all about audio books. I just wanted to congratulate you on, on watching your, your career continue in such a fantastic way over these several years that we’ve known each other.
Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, it’s, it’s been a lot of fun and I think you nailed it when you said experiment. Cause that’s, that’s really how I look at it as just a big experiment and try and giving things and seeing what works. I almost like, you know, they say throwing spaghetti at the wall and they, they say not to do that, but I think sometimes it’s just fun to do that. Why not?
Well, and I think in today’s world, I mean even if spaghetti stuck to the wall a year ago, well maybe the technology has changed now. I mean, our world is changing so quickly. You have to have an experimental mind stag. Cause if you did find something that worked two years ago, it’s probably not working now.
Exactly. And I find for me, so I’ve been following, you know, the successful self publishing authors and doing what they recommend and following the advice. And honestly, for me, it just hasn’t really worked. So the best thing for me was to just change my mindset and you know what, I’m just going to experiment and see what
I love it. I love it. Well, Michelle keep on experimenting and we’ll get you back on the show. He, he can continue to teach me and the listeners have had these different avenues for getting their stories into the world.
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