SPEAKER_02 0:00

So, my goal in writing this next book was to help you make better decisions in your author career. But rather than just translating what I wrote the first time, I decided to say, here is a whole new book with the same mindset of how do we be better decision makers in our author career, but taking into account now the fact that we're in a different world than we were in 2017, 2018. And how do I give you the benefit of my experience given what we are facing now and what we're likely to face in the next eight years to 10 years.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, a formerly repressed creative soul, turned fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories: the one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me each week for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job that we do not do alone. Welcome to Red It Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hey writer, welcome back to the Ride It Scared Podcast. I'm your host, Stacy, and today I'm joined by our returning guest, Becca Sine. My love Becca, I'm a huge fan. She is the host of the QuickCast for Writers, and she is the author of the Quick Book series for writers. If you haven't heard of them, I highly recommend. They are great mindset books. And our conversation today is one I think that any writer who is considering a writing career needs to hear right now. We're talking about what's changed in the publishing landscape over the last 10 to 15 years, why so many writers feel stuck or discouraged in today's saturated market, and how that market has changed over the last decade. And we talk about how to start making better decisions about your writing and your business. Becca also shares insights from her upcoming book, Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit, which digs into how writers can navigate this new era of publishing with more intention and less burnout. So if you've ever released a book and wondered why it didn't sell, felt like you're doing all the right things, but nothing worked, or wondered if this is the best time to invest in audio or advertising, or you're struggling to figure out if you should be focusing on your craft or on marketing or on platform building, or you just feel overwhelmed by all the conflicting advice about what you should be doing next, then this episode is for you. I'll give you Becca's full bio in a moment, but before we jump in, I wanted to give you a quick reminder. If listening to this podcast has helped you keep going in your writing, I would love to hear your moments of courage, whether they're big or small. The courage files are open for submission. And starting in September of 2026, I'll be sharing listener stories right here on the show to help encourage others and help those writers who submitted celebrate their gains. Each quarter, I'll randomly select one submission to receive a free editorial assessment and coaching session with me. So you can submit your courage moment through the link in the show notes. Okay, here's Becca's bio. Becca Syme holds a master's degree in transformational leadership and has been a success coach, primarily using the Gallup Strengths Finder, for over 15 years. She's coached over 5,000 individual authors and creatives through her Write Better Faster and Strengths for Writers classes and coaching cohort. Six and seven figure authors, major award winners, mid-listers, and new authors alike. Becca is the host of QuickCast for Writers, author of the Quick Book Series for Writers, and a USA Today best-selling author of Cozy Mysteries under the pin name RL Sime. Hi, Becca. Thank you so much for coming back on the Write It Scared podcast. I am so happy to have you as a returning guest. How's it going?

SPEAKER_02 4:34

It's so great. And thank you so much for having me. My Kickstarter is officially done. So I feel like a big check mark off of the list for that. And so I'm really excited to be here to talk about that book.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yeah, me too. I'm excited to help you share it with the world. So for anybody who doesn't know, Becca was on a podcast in season one, episode 34. And that is where we mostly talked about how to use a tool called the Clifton Strengths to find a writing process that works for you versus subscribing to all the general advice out there and thinking that that is the way it's supposed to be. It's more about figuring out what works for your brain and you as an individual. So if you're interested, I will pop a link in the show notes so you can go back and look at that. So, Becca, you are the author of a series of amazing books called The Quit Books for Writers. And that's how I originally found you was through, yeah, through where is it? I have it right here. This beautiful baby right here.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Oh, yeah. I love that cover.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

The very first dear writer, you need to quit. And now you have a new one coming out. For anybody who doesn't know you, you just want to share briefly what it is that you do. And then let's talk about your new book.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

Yeah, I do success alignment for writers. Primarily, we utilize personality metrics as a complicated because we only start with the personality stuff, right? It's not definitive. And we're trying to help people find their best alignment for what will work the best for them in all realms of their writing career and life. And I've coached more than 6,000 individual authors at this point in my career. I have a master's degree in transformational leadership, and I'm also a writer myself. So I got into this because I was a novelist, and my writing friends needed help with some of the things that they were going through and their businesses. And I had this background that I could be helpful. And so I started jumping in and helping answer some questions about like why are these things happening to me? Turns out there's some really quick and easy reasons why you might be doing things the way you're doing, and maybe you shouldn't change them just because other people don't do it the same way. And that's how I got into my business now, which is again like success alignment for authors, trying to help authors get the most success that they can out of their writing career.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

I love it. And I've worked with you and taken some of your classes and have had a phenomenal experience that's not only changed the way that I approach my writing, but just the way I approach business like a little bit. So I definitely understand more about myself. So the original book in the quit series, Dear Writer, You Need to Quit, came out what, seven years ago? I think now. Seven years. Okay. And the next book that is coming out is called Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

So tell me about this book. What it who's it for? What kind of writer is it for? What do you want them to know about it?

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Yeah, I think people who haven't even read the other book can read this book and still be located enough in it.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

So it's not a refresh.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

It's not a refresh. And weirdly, I thought when I started writing it that I was gonna take this framework of the old book and like just rewrite the parts that really needed to be rewritten, but this is actually a completely different book. It's like the way I approached the book in 2017 when I was writing it was I had all these clients that I've been working with, and they were like, I can't explain to people exactly what you do, other than you have to just do this thing with Becca. And can I can you write a book that I can give to my friends that would explain what it is that you do and give your methodology? And I was like, sure, it's the middle of the gold rush. I'm coaching a very kind of like broad base of people. I had a lot of information at that point. I'm like, I can give some guidance to an awful lot of writers based on my experience. So let me do that. But I was speaking to the middle of the gold rush era kind of author who had a very different set of problems than post-gold rush era authors have.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

And especially Do you want to tell people what the gold rush was for anybody who doesn't know?

SPEAKER_02 9:06

In case you didn't live through it, the gold rush was 2010-ish, maybe 2009, depending on who you ask, to about 18, 19, 20, somewhere around there. And essentially it was when publishing was New York rules published. There were gatekeepers. It was very difficult to be seen unless you got through one of the gates. And you definitely didn't have access to readers en masse. And Amazon and other platforms really changed that for us and allowed us to have access to readers more directly, allowed us to publish ourselves directly. And that led to an opening of the market to a lot of people who would not have previously had access because there were only so many gates that were open, right? And so when the gold rush happened, it was like now there are no gates, everyone has access. And so we all rushed in and started publishing. And because there was more scarcity in the market at the time, that created a big bubble that made there be a lot more money on the table in terms of there were fewer people trying to get at the money, and so there was more access at that time. And now the the unlike the gold rush of your where there's no more gold in the mountain, that's not the case. The resource of reader attention is a renewable resource, but it is also cumulatively taken by other people who now have the reader's attention, right? And so when we hit the end of the gold rush, it was the market is now saturated enough that the problems have changed for the readers. Like previously, there was a big problem with there were a lot of good storytellers and people who just didn't have consistent enough access to readers. Readers wanted more than they were being given because the market was kept at a modest level of scarcity on purpose. Now the readers have a completely different problem, which is there's way too much content for them. And they now need curation of that content. And so the saturation point of the market has hit us in a place where we're in this really weird space. On one hand, it is for sure not closed. So it's not like the 1849 US gold rush, right? Where all the gold's gone and now we all just got to go home. That's not really what's happening in the publishing market. So it makes it hard to have conversations with people about it. But there are very clear patterns of saturation and the bubble being gone and that type of thing. Pay-to-play is now more the buzzword. It's very hard to get seen, it's hard to get discovered. And so the rules have changed, the problems the readers are having have changed. And that means the problems writers are having have changed. And so my goal in writing this next book was to take the mindset of like, how does my coaching at volume help you to make better decisions in your author career? But rather than just translating what I wrote the first time, I decided to say, here is a whole new book with the same mindset of how do we be better decision makers in our author career, but taking into account now the fact that we're in a different world than we were in 2017, 2018. And how do I give you the benefit of my experience given what we are facing now and what we're likely to face in the next eight years to 10 years?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

That was a great tee up to talk about what is coming in this book. So the book is aimed to help writers throughout their publishing era make better decisions so that readers can find them, right? So that they continue an author career that is sustainable. So why don't we kick off by just talking about some of the major struggles that you do see authors facing? You touched on a few of them that the market is more saturated and it's more about curation. So can you break that down a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Yeah, what happens when there is too much choice? If you've ever heard there's this really famous discussion around this that has to do with types of peanut butter in a market, like a consumer scientist talking about how they decide to make decisions around what types of peanut butter to put on a shelf in a grocery store, right? If there are 400 types of peanut butter in the world, I don't put 400 types of peanut butter on my grocery store shelf. I make an educated guess about what the people in my town are likely to want to purchase and what I can reasonably sell. And I'm probably gonna sell maybe four, five, or six brands of peanut butter because what they found in consumer science is that when consumers are faced with too much choice, it makes them freeze. And then what they do is they leave the peanut butter aisle. They don't get excited about more options, they get overwhelmed with decision fatigue. And what we don't realize about the market is that when readers have to decide yes or no about each individual choice, it's too many choices for them. They're getting overwhelmed with all of the things. And so what ends up happening is we have stuff like book talk or the algorithm on Instagram or the algorithm on threads, which has been designed to try to curate the quote unquote best of the best, but it doesn't always work that way. And oftentimes what ends up happening is it drives so much attention towards very specific books that we end up back in the gatekeeping scenario again, where it feels like there's something that I'm being kept out of. But the reality is just that consumers are it's in the consumer's best interest to not have too many choices that they have to pick from when they go looking for a particular thing. So if I go to Amazon looking for a book on, because I just did this, I was looking for a specific book on habits that somebody had recommended to me, and I only had the title of the book and it had the word habit in it. And when I put that in, the amount of book results that I got back was so significant. And the book that I was actually looking for was nowhere to be found. And I finally just stopped looking because I kept getting sponsored product ads and I was getting the wrong books with the wrong titles, and then I was getting atomic habits, which I didn't want to read. And it's like the choice was just too overwhelming. So the easiest thing to happen is I go to a curated place, somebody gives me a link, and then I click on that link, or I go to TikTok and somebody says, You're gonna love this book, and then you go read that book. And unfortunately, what that creates for writers, where we have now come into an industry that feels like it is so open, right? Like we've now thrown the gates wide, and we all feel like we should have equal access to every reader, but we can't because consumers will get overwhelmed with too many choices. So when there are too many of us to choose from, it turns out it is actually just going to happen that the choices have to be curated somehow. And then it's very difficult for me to figure out as a author business person, as a business owner, how do I make decisions about my books not getting seen when I am in the early phases of my author business and I haven't found a pocket of demand that's renewable for me yet. So a lot of authors are making decisions about nobody wants my book, my book isn't selling and therefore I suck, or they're throwing thousands and thousands of dollars at things like direct sales and Kickstarter trying to figure out how to be discovered when they're they don't have a demand for their books enough yet that they're consistently being pushed, right, by curation engines or curation machines in readers' directions. And then it's becoming frustrating for them. It's hard for them to continue, or they're believing that their books are bad or that readers don't want them or the market has shifted when the reality is just there's so much saturation, you have to know how to read the data in the right way. So, just as a for instance, there's a service called Kindle Trends, which is a data analytics service, and you can get a newsletter sent to your inbox every week that tells you in your genre how many books were published every week and how many books were published every month. And when there's 213 books being published every week in your genre, it is going to be very difficult to read the data for when you release something and it doesn't sell. The likelihood of me being at the top of searches when I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising, I don't have a known quantity name, I may or may not have a great hook to my book, right? All of those things can determine the way that my book is shown to readers. But what I receive is it didn't sell, it didn't get picked up, it didn't get noticed, people aren't reading it. And we don't think about it from the consumer's point of view, which is can you imagine if you go looking for mysteries and 213 brand new books on top of the 1.2 million books that already exist in that large category subgenre? 1.2 million is a guess, it's not that many, but but can you imagine the overwhelm? If we're overwhelmed by 26 flavors of peanut butter, that we wouldn't then also be overwhelmed by 213 new mystery books every week. Like it is it is so much for consumers to have to deal with. Part of our experience as writers needs to also be having a little compassion for the consumers and having a little compassion for the system that's trying to serve both of us, and then figuring out creative ways to find pockets and segment people off and be very targeted in who it is that you're trying to reach, instead of saying, I'm for all contemporary romance readers. That's too broad of a target unless you're willing to spend a lot of money, right? Or take your chances with luck and timing, where Loki's in charge, right? So it's almost like the problems that we were having when I released my first book in 2012 as an indie, I did no marketing, no advertising. I didn't tell anybody about the book, and I made four figures of income very quickly, and then five figures of income very quickly, right? Like it was so different in those years, and even in 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, I was still not advertising. And then all of a sudden, it's like the rules start to change, and the rules start to change on a broader scale, and it takes us so long to catch up, and we don't realize we're still interpreting things based on old data. And I'm still trying to run my business as though I'm running a business from a system that's really designed to serve people who are in a market that's really wide open instead of being in a saturated market.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

You also talk about the different phases of author businesses. So why don't we talk about the five phases of an author's business and when they might be starting to see some of these struggles and how that sets up maybe the decisions that they have to make.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Yeah, the five phases is based on a model that's common in business realms and organizational and organizational and industrial psychology realms that is about the organizational growth curve, right? So the model is if you are looking for demand, which anyone that wants to grow a business or wants to grow a nonprofit or some kind of organization is looking for demand for whatever you produce. So when I'm looking for demand, that means that the demand that I can find is what's going to govern the growth of the business. So is there demand for what I'm producing? And can my supply fill the demand for the growth for what I'm producing? So I think a lot of us look outward and we see, oh, there's still a lot of demand for romanticy, or there's a lot of demand for rom com or mystery or whatever, right? So in theory, there is a lot of demand, but there's also an incredibly high amount of supply. And so a lot of what I'm doing. Doing in the early phases of my business is trying to figure out if I have found a demand pocket or not. And then trying to find more places where demand might exist so that I can try and capture some of those available pockets. Because in order for my business to grow and for the trajectory to continue in an upward direction, supply and demand have got to meet each other on some level. So just because I have a romantic book doesn't mean that there's demand for my romantic book in the market. I may be releasing on a day when there's 25 romancy books releasing, and then I may just not get seen by the right people because I'm not in a narrow enough audience, or there isn't a narrow enough audience accessible, or the market is overserved, or whatever, right? There are all kinds of reasons. But if I'm making decisions about my author business based on being in somewhere other than research and development, which is phase one RD, is can I find the demand that exists? And is there a demand for what I'm producing? So if the answer is no, not yet, then I have to continue to labor inside of research and development phase, which means I'm not going to make my money back for a while. I may make back just barely the expenses that I'm, and sometimes I'm not even making that back, right? Once I start making back significantly more than my expenses, then the demand I've found is growing. And now I can start serving that demand and capturing more of those people so that I can continue serving that demand and then growing my ability to continue producing what it is that readers want. But then that pushes me into these different phases. And then each phase, again, based on how organizations grow and how demand and supply function, then it pushes me into needing to make different decisions. And so many authors are making these decisions about creating infrastructure around their business or like putting their product into multiple different streams of income, like creating all these different versions of the product, translations, audio, subscription services, et cetera, without thinking like, but do I even know if there's demand out there for this that I'm going to get my time paid for or that I'm going to make my money back? And we're not thinking about a lot of those things because everybody's telling us, like, do audio, do translations, et cetera. But the caveat that they're not saying is either be willing to lose the money and then it's speculation and not investment, which is a whole segment in the book. Is it investment or is it speculation?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

And then if it is speculation, I have to be willing to not get the money back. But if it's investment, then I have to know that there's an actual demand there that I'm meeting, that I have a reasonable enough expectation of making that money back that's based in something other than other people have found demand in that market. I haven't found it yet. Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Then I have a question.

SPEAKER_02 25:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

When a lot of us come into writing, right? We have an idea we have that has a soul and a heart behind it, right? This is the creator's side of things. And uh for those of us who are planning to to pursue more of an independent publishing to route, how does it line up for us? Like we let's say you're a writer who's got an entire world built in your brain, and you've drafted, I don't know, three or four of your books and you're revising them, and you're thinking about self-publishing in the next year, and you're setting up a plan for this, and you're you become aware that okay, so I need to look at the market for this in a different way than perhaps that I have been. And you realize that maybe there isn't the demand here that you were hoping for. What the hell do you do then?

SPEAKER_02 26:14

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked it in that way in particular, because before you release, I don't know that I would look at the market at all. Like the way you prove demand is by looking backwards, not forwards. You don't know for sure that you found demand. That's why the research and development phase is so experimental, right? So here's just one example. Talking about author success archetypes, right? There are four different ways that people can potentially interact with the market as they're writing. So there are the trailblazers who want to change things and do new things. There are the drafters who want to come behind people who are already doing good things and do great things. Like they want to multiply on trends that they see or waves that they see, and then they want to take it and just own the whole market. Those are the drafters. Evergreens are the people who struggle with not quite being draftery enough because they don't always have all the skills to be able to read the market and change themselves to write to the market, but they have a desire to watch the market. So there's a tendency to want to kind of shift in that direction. And my encouragement with the evergreen name is you've got to grow where you're planted. Like you've got to write the thing that's in you to write. And then you either look at the market afterward, like you can't, you cannot become a drafter if you're an evergreen, because you don't have the skills to force yourself to change what you're writing. You can maybe shape it after it's finished, or you can have a weather eye on the market every once in a while, but you can't act like a drafter where you're just believing that you can change everything about what you write because you don't have all those skills. And then there's the islands, which is like DGAF, leave them alone, let them write their thing. They're gonna do they function the best when they don't pay attention to anything. And evergreens can trend more in that direction if they want to, but they tend not to because everyone tells them to trend towards the drafters. So again, the evergreen name is grow where you are planned, don't try to change what you're doing. And that is a significant portion of writers, by the way, more than 50% of writers. But what ends up happening is people hear all of this right-to-market talk. They hear about tropes and trends, and but if they are not the kind of person who can watch a whole bunch of books and look at what they all have in common and what they're meeting in the in readers' needs and what the readers want, what's going to make readers happy, and then morph themselves into that thing, change themselves more into being able to write directly for the market and also enjoy that and do it effectively and tell a great story doing it, then they would be better off writing what they love and writing what is good for them and what lights them up, and then changing the elements if they don't work correctly. So it's almost better for people who are earlier in their career to not think as much about the market as they may want to or as they may be told to, because you want to see what your natural storytelling mechanism produces. Because otherwise, we're gonna end up with a whole bunch of people who are trying to write something that's trendy, and then they're not meeting that need effectively for the readers because they don't have all the skills that it takes to shape shift themselves essentially into what the readers want, right? Like they really have to be more organic to either what's the type of story I really want to tell, and maybe I change the trope a little bit because there's a trope that's really popular right now. But I would encourage people who are early in the process, the best time that you have to write something that is not exactly what's trendy and not exactly what's on point, and do well at it and see if you can create your own kind of segment of the market is when you're earlier in your publishing journey. So you don't have this publishing history behind you. You can still reinvent yourself after if you want to, but the best time for you to do whatever is in you to do is the when you're earlier in your career. And I would always want to encourage people, especially the people who just love writing, please don't look at the market because it's unless you are wired to look at the market, it's not gonna help you. You're probably in that evergreen segment where it would help you to grow where you're planted more and then just grow towards the sun if you need to, as opposed to drafters really are shape shifters on some level, and they can really almost make themselves into whatever the market requires of them and enjoy it and be good at it. But that is not the case for an awful lot of us, and we really need to remind ourselves of what was happening before the market was the way it is now, which is that when we didn't know all of these things about what happens later in the process, we were just letting ourselves write and submit, and we were letting ourselves enjoy and experience and be a little more organic with our process, and we really need to let that happen more than we do.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Yeah, I think that it's quite stifling. You can look at the trying to figure out the end-all outcome of everything, and then that puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on the early phases of career, and especially this kind of career, because there's no stepladder.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

It's this, I don't know, whitewater rafting, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 32:20

Yep, a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Yeah, it's a completely different experience. So for someone a little bit beyond where we've just been speaking about, how does the next phase of the author business model work? You know, they get beyond research and development. What happens next?

SPEAKER_02 32:38

Yeah, once you know where the demand is, now the main question is if I continue to produce this thing that I have discovered demand for, will I continue to yield more money? That's the question of phase two. And so when we get into the phase two space and we know that we can do something that works, we know we could. I guess I would say we know for sure we can produce something that has sold, then there's a pretty decent chance, especially if we let ourselves continue to write, if we're able to continue to write what had sold in the research and development takeoff. Oh, now we're into phase two place. Then we want to answer that question. Can I produce more money if I produce more product? Because that is still a question for an awful lot of people. Sometimes they are not able to quickly produce the thing that they were writing. And so now we almost have to say, is there going to be demand for something that I write with the same people if it's not exactly what I gave them before? That's a different question. It's still a phase two question, but it's a slightly different question because the easiest thing to do with demand pockets is to keep giving them the thing that you know they want. And so then there's just all of these different questions that you have to answer around initial demand, and that takes time. So, also a portion of this, especially the navigation of these business phases, is that for some of us, this was gonna be years of time getting through like just one big question of the business phase. So, can I not give in to the temptation of doing all of these crazy different things? Again, unless I can afford to. If you can just afford to spend money and not get it back, totally different place that you're in. If you are not intentionally needing to make money out of this, totally different place to be in. If you're experimenting, totally different place, your business is still going to function that way, but you don't need to worry about. But those of us who have limited resources and we need to be wise about how we spend them, we do actually need to uh acknowledge that the these decisions can take sometimes months and years to know the answers to. And so there is this almost, especially in the earlier parts of the phase when you're seeing some growth, but you're not seeing huge amounts. And then the answer is, okay, now let's publish another book. That's gonna take me eight months. Okay, great. Then come back in a year and we can have this conversation again, right? That's a hard place to be as a quote unquote business owner. So I get why people start to make these kind of frantic decisions. I've got to make all the money I can right now. And it's no, that's not the rule. Like the gold doesn't go away, right? Like it's a renewable resource. You can take many different swings at the pitches. There isn't only one pitch. This isn't Hamilton, right? You're in the room one time and you get your shot one time. That's not this, right? And but sometimes we need the reminders, which is again why I write books like this. We need the reminders, that's how we function.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

So if there's three other phases, could you briefly touch on what those are? And then I can you direct us to where we can learn more?

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Yes. So the third phase is infrastructure building. So once you know that there's a good amount of demand there, then you want to make sure that you can continue to produce whatever product it is. Right. And then that's the place where we start to ask do I need to put this product into different, almost like income streams, right? Do I need to start doing translations or audio, et cetera? And then each time I do that, phase three and four, you go back and forth between them. Like you do a little more infrastructure, and then you see, does it produce growth? Okay, great. If it produces more growth, then we can do more things. So we can either now add more layers of HR, which is what a lot of people need to do. They need to hire somebody to run ads for them. They need to hire someone to be their assistant, they need to hire a house cleaner, they need to like all these kinds of things. So we've got to test is this the right decision to make? Some of the answers are no, and some of the answers are yes. And so you end up with this phase three, which is infrastructure. And then does the infrastructure yield money? That's phase four, which is the growth from infrastructure. And then phase five, once you eventually get there, because you go back and forth from three to four, just going up and up until you hit a mature phase where okay, now I have exhausted all of the places where I could make more infrastructure that will actually make me money. I probably made a couple of choices that have dipped me a little bit. So now I have to pull back on some of that infrastructure. Maybe I can't put every single book into translations because they're not yielding me as much money anymore, things like that. And so now I have to get to a mature place where I'm not one Xing or two Xing my previous year's profit anymore. Now I'm growing by 2%, 5%, 10%, maybe as much as 15 or 20%. And then I'm also going down some years where I'm maybe didn't have as great of a year. Maybe I could only release two books instead of four. Although, again, like in a mature phase, even two books instead of four, you should still not see a huge amount of shift.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Because you've gotten so you have so much, you have created by this point.

SPEAKER_02 38:25

Yeah, a renewable demand. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Yeah. And you're also pulling in new people.

SPEAKER_02 38:31

Yes. Yep. Because you are providing a very specific thing experience for people, even if it's not something you intend to be specific, it is a specific experience that people are getting from you. And so the more you continue to provide that for people, the more renewable the demand will be. And then you get some attrition of old people who are now not interested anymore, but you're always continuing to collect new because the demand exists in the market. And now you are cumulatively meeting that demand. So now there is this. Yep. Now there's this idea in business management of the cumulative advantage that you have when you have a larger business, right? You have a natural kind of brand, you have a position in the market. So phase five is mature business, and those are the people who have that advantage of having. And then the goal is actually a mature business where you're seeing very little change from one to one year to the next year, and you're able to just continue to produce a pretty consistent amount of money with the energy input that you've described. With the energy inputs, yep. Because if you try to grow again, so much of growth from phase five is about luck and timing. So, did I happen to get the Netflix deal that got done well that made me a lot of money, as opposed to the Netflix deal that didn't get done well, that did not make me money, right? Or didn't get made, even though they optioned me or whatever, right? So there's some luck and timing up there. But then also, if I do something like start a new pen name or start a new genre or something, then I'm risking this mature business to do something brand new that may or may not please the current readers that I have. And then I'm essentially taking at least part of myself back to research and development again. So it's a very complicated application, but essentially the model itself holds because the model is governed by the principles that govern demand, basically supply and demand.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

What I extrapolate from this is by understanding where you are in the phases, will it take away the decision fatigue that comes from listening to the mass soapbox that we have or whatever, the generalities that are out there. It's okay, I'm a brand new writer, I'm working on a series. It's gonna, there's gonna be multiple books. Should I do direct sales and should I make an audio? Should I do audio books as soon as these things are hot off the press? You don't need to make that decision if you're in an early stage, right? So that is a decision for later. So that's how I think that this will apply for writers who are in this phase of their writing.

SPEAKER_02 41:16

Yeah, especially when you're looking at does it cost me time or money and does it cost my organization time or money? Because when it costs me personally my own time, a lot of people are like, oh, it's free now, right? It's free now. So I can do an audiobook for free because I can use AI audio if they want to do that. And it's like, yes, that might be free, but it's not free to you. Like you still have to go through the process, you still have to QA it. Like that still is a cost of your time and energy. So it still counts as infrastructure in terms of now you have more assets you have to promote. So you have to create additional structure inside your business to make sure that those things sell themselves. So it nothing that we do is without additional work. Every opportunity creates more work for us. And I think part of why I do this with authors is that we make a lot of business decisions out of fear and we don't realize it. We're afraid of what happens if we don't sell. We're afraid of what happens if we don't take advantage of this new thing, if we miss this trend or whatever. And it's, but we don't have to be afraid of those things because the the people talking about them are speaking a different language than what you are probably speaking right now. So it may be a good thing for you to think about doing a Kickstarter or doing direct sales or doing audio or translations or whatever. And it may not be, but we want you to be able to make that from a place of understanding the decision a little bit better and not assuming that just because other people are seeing results from it, that's promise that you are going to see results as well. And just trying to be a little more kind of wise, like giving some wisdom about the structures that, but if you want to learn more about it, you can go to patreon.com/slash beckassime. And we have a series of workshops about the business phases themselves. And then obviously the book will come out probably in in late April, would be my guess, is when we're going to put that pre-order up for. And then hopefully, if you can't find information there, you can look on the quit cast that I do. We give away a lot of content for free there as well. But just hoping that this will provide some guidance for people to help them make some better choices for their author career in the future.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

Thank you so much for your time today, Becca. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I could listen to you talk for hours. You wrapped us up with where the listeners can find you and when they can expect this book out in the world. I think you said the pre-order was in April, but it might be sooner than that, right? Yeah. So I'll make sure to put a link in the show notes where people can find that if they want to take a look at it. And so thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Yeah, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 44:04

Thank you for listening to the Ride It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you next week.