#AmWriting

Hi all! Jess here. I met performer and voice educator Cate Frazier-Neely through a mutual friend earlier this year, at a Sungazer concert. I was at the concert because my son is a massive fan of Sungazer bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely and Cate was there because she’s Adam Neely’s mom. When the topic of conversation turned away from my son’s hero worship of her son and toward writing and publishing (doesn’t it always?) she revealed she’d made ALL THE MISTAKES when self-publishing her first book, and, of course, I sensed an opportunity for an episode.

As this is a podcast all about flattening the learning curve for writers, I asked her to come on and tell us all the ugly details about publishing her book so we could learn from her mistakes.

Links from the Pod

Cate Frazier-Neely: https://www.catefnstudios.com

Episode 185: #AudioExplosion with Tanya Eby

Singing Through Change: Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause, and Beyond by Cate Frazier-Neely

The Authors Guild

We had such a great time chatting we didn’t even get a chance to discuss what we’ve been reading!

Want a “coaching call” of your own? Email us at [email protected]. We can’t promise to respond to every email, but we might answer your question on an upcoming episode—or invite you into the hotseat!

Think you’d be pretty good on the other end of a coaching call? Then you should consider becoming a certified book coach through Author Accelerator’s book coach training program. It’s everything you need to know to begin working with clients on writing, planning, revising and querying (and then learning more and getting better with every new client and with Author Accelerator’s support and team behind you). Choose a fiction or nonfiction specialty, study with a cohort and design a new business or side-gig that works for you. Learn more at bookcoaches.com.

Ever want to know “how she did it”? This episode is our little version of How I Built This, in which we ask Zibby Owens—whose name you surely know by now—about how she turned a desire to be part of the world of books into a one-woman mini book empire.

Zibby Owens is the host of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read, a daily podcast featuring interviews with authors that has over 900 episodes. She’s also a Bookstagrammer with 16K followers, the host of a second podcast—Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Sex—the editor of two anthologies, Moms Don’t Have Time To and Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids—KJ contributed to that last one—and now the CEO of Zibby Books, a new publishing home for fiction and memoir. She’s a regular contributor to Good Morning America, she’s been called “America’s Top Bookfluencer” and she has two books coming soon: Princess Charming, a picture book, and Booked, a memoir. She’s also got four kids, and they’re kids—elementary and middle school age, not a bunch of independent high schoolers wandering around

But.

Five years ago Zibby was none of those things (except a mother of four). And that’s what I want to talk about. She’s built a massive literary life, a community, a reputation in just a few years, and—after totally owning the fact that she has help with her kids (heck, not just help, they’re completely gone every other weekend because, divorce sometimes works like that) and also that this isn’t how Zibby earns a living— we go back to the beginning and talk about what it took to get there.

Because no matter who you are, you can’t wake up and say, I think I’d like to be America’s Biggest Bookfluencer, and whip out your Amex card and make it happen. You can’t even take your Kardashian self and decide this is what you want and ask your assistant to set it up. This takes work and desire and passion, and we dig into how Zibby started, and how she made things take off.

Links from the pod:

Lee Carpenter: Red, White, Blue and Eleven

Andre Agassi: Open

Zibby Books

Zibby Books Ambassadors (at bottom of Zibby Books page)

#AmReading

Zibby: Going There by Katie Couric

Hungry Hill by Eileen Patricia Curran

The Husbands by Chandler Baker

The Last Season by Jenny Judson & Danielle Mahfood

KJ: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

Jess: Speaking of Race by Celeste Headlee

Hey cupcakes, KJ here. Tonight I chatted with a writer who has a memoir that might—or might not—be ready to pitch. It’s hard to know the answer to that as a writer without getting some professional feedback (and you don’t want to pitch before you’re ready). So of course I pointed them toward Author Accelerator’s book coach matching services. The right coach can help get your project ready and then help you pitch it to the right agents. It’s an investment—but you’ve already invested HOW many years in this? I say go for it. And if you’d like to be the one to help writers make that leap, look into book coach certification. I loved the process—and I love knowing how to really help.

Part two of the memoir conversation: yes you do need an idea for a memoir. Gotta narrow things down, figure out what you want to share and why and most of all, why anyone would want to read it. There’s a difference between a memoir, and a memoir that the market will embrace—and we tell you how to find it.

Good news for memoir writers! Y’all probably know how much I love Jennie Nash’s Blueprint books. They really are the closest thing I’ve found to a guide for getting through draft after draft. I start with them, and I go back to them when I’m stuck. The Blueprints keep me on track and help me write the book I set out to write for the readers I hope to reach.

Her newest, Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace is out now!

I think this Blueprint is Jennie’s best yet, with insights into story-telling that I’ll be using in all my work.

Hey you! Are you following KJ on TikTok? YES, KJ. Please do so now.

Two years ago, Jennie Nash and I (this is KJ) got into a debate about what was the best, most helpful book for a writer’s bookshelf. Almost instantly we realized that we couldn’t choose just one (although if we could, I suspect it’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel for me and Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit for Jennie, but even as I write that I’m having second thoughts in favor of Big Magic but I’m just SO ANNOYED with her right now because of the whole take-back-my-book thing) and, yeah.

Anyway. It’s summer reading time, and to my summer reading list I’ve added a few books about writing, starting with Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being and, yes. Twyla Tharp’s book (it’s taken me this long to get over my resistance but JENNIE IS ALWAYS RIGHT about these things) and adding, for a practical note, Save the Cat Strikes Back by Blake Snyder and The Trope Thesaurus from Jennifer Hilt. (Want my non-professional summer reading list? Subscribe to #AmReading.)

If you’re looking to add to your own professional summer reading, you can’t do better than going back to the series of summer episodes that Jennie and I recorded as a result of that first debate. They’re all listed and linked below, along with the books we discussed, and I’m putting the first of them (Episode 269) here—in which we debate, yes, Big Magic versus The Creative Habit.

Since then, Jennie’s published two Blueprint for a Book books: one each for fiction and nonfiction and, coming later this summer, memoir. They’re all EXCELLENT and highly recommended as well.

Working Bookshelf Episodes:

Inspiration (Big Magic versus The Creative Habit)

Plotting (Save the Cat Writes a Novel versus The Situation and the Story)

Productivity (Productivity with Deep Work versus From 2K to 10K)

Up Your Game (The Practice versus The Bestseller Code)

When You're Stuck (The War of Art versus Dear Writer You Need to Quit)

Getting Published (The Essential Guide to Getting Published versus