#AmWriting

Struggling to put a price on your time? Jess and Sarina (an economist and former trader on Wall Street) help your find that elusive number.

A listener asked Jess for advice on consulting fees, so in order to find an answer more satisfying than, “It depends,” Jess and Sarina get down to economic brass tacks. Sarina explains how publishers or anyone else who wants to hire you for your writing value your time, and how you can propose a figure that takes everything from opportunity costs to fungibles into account. In an attempt to make pricing your time less complicated and emotionally fraught, Jess offers a simple formula to nail down a number that represents your hourly worth.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, January 20, 2020 is ONE OF THE BEST YET: Top 5 Ways to Win at Newsletter Subject Lines. So sign up, support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. (If you’re on KJ’s mailing list and have been impressed by her style lately—she read this early and took it to heart.)

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LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Jess: MasterClass and The Collected Schizophrenias Esmé Weijun Wang (and her Twitter feed)

Sarina: The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, where January is Become a Book Coach Month. Sign up for mighty and wondrous Business of Book Coaching Summit here—or visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

NEWS ABOUT US

Watch KJ’s latest in the #BooksThatWon’tBumYouOut series on Instagram HERE.

Find more about Jess here and Sarina here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

The image in our podcast illustration is by TK

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ: 00:01 Hey writers, it's KJ this week. Jess and Sarina recorded without me, but you'll barely even have a chance to miss me because I'm both right here and back next week. While they recorded I was off to a hockey tournament in Ottawa, but it didn't mean I wasn't writing. You have heard me talk about Jennie Nash's Inside Outline before and this was the tool that's really pushed me through a tough novel writing spot and has me feeling like I'm able to move forward, even if the muse is not present and mine definitely doesn't do Canada. Even if the hotel is depressing, and the weather is dreary, and I'm really not feeling it. Because I know where this book and I are going, I can still sit down and at least nudge us both in the direction of getting there. And if things change along the way, as they do, and have, and will, I can see where t...

Hey campers—I hate reading you all a canned intro to our authors every time, so I’m winging it with our guest, Sonali Dev. I’m a fan of hers, so I feel like I know all the things. She’s the author of four straight-up romances, but her last-book-but one is the start of a series written in homage to Jane Austen, as is her latest, both set among the members of a politically ambitious Indian family in California. Why Jane Austen? Because, as Sonali says, “those were the first books I read about women wanting things and getting them. Instead of ending up crazy or dead.”

We talk the pros and cons of writing from such revered material, whether readers are “looking for Lydia,” the need to make your heroine “likeable” (pro tip: the female Darcy is hard sledding) and supplying recipes for hungry readers.

Links from the pod:

Sonali Dev on IG

Newsletter with a recipe booklet, recommendations, and a really bad joke.

#AmReading

Sonali: Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

The Kingmaker by Kennedy Ryan

KJ: The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory

Perfect Happiness by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

Sarina: Pale Rider by Laura Spinney

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry

Thanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:

But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00

Hello fellow writers, we have an interview for you with Sonali Dev whose Bollywood romances have always reflected her love of all things Jane Austen, and whose latest books are all in on that passion. If you're all in with books, reading, and writing, you might want to check out the latest book from Jennie Nash at our sponsor, Author Accelerator - Read Books All Day and Get Paid For It: The Business of Book Coaching. You can find that and more at authoraccelerator.com. Is it recording?

Jess Lahey 0:30

Now it's recording.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:33

This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.

Jess Lahey 0:37

Alright, let's start over.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:38

Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting the weekly podcast about writing all the things, fiction, nonfiction, short pieces, long pieces, proposals, pitches, you are allowed to start to write things that do not start with P, although I may not list them here. And in short, we are the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done.

Sarina Bowen 1:14

I'm Sarina Bowen, I am trying to get the work done this week on romance novel number 36. And you can find more about me at sarinabowen.com.

KJ Dell'Antonia 1:25

And I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of the novel The Chicken Sisters, and you heard it here first, I don't know when it's coming out. We've just delayed that puppy from this summer into the future. Not the indefinite future, but I don't know what kind of future. So everybody's talking me off the ledge because I'm not super happy about it, but it is what it is and when it comes out, it's gonna be great. It really is. I'm also the author of How to Be a Happier Parent, which did come out in paperback this summer. I'm a former editor of The Motherlode blog at the New York Times and still sometimes a contributor there. And you'll find me bookstagramming on Instagram at kjda. And we have a guest today that I'm really excited about. So I hate reading everybody the canned intro to the authors all the time, where I sort of just suck pieces off of their ...

This week, Jess got a message from some family members who’d read the draft of her forthcoming book, The Addiction Innoculation. They had ... thoughts.

Those thoughts turned out to be nothing drastic—but the emotional roller coaster Jess rode while waiting to hear more was a doozy, and got us all thinking about how much of ourselves is exposed when we write non-fiction with a memoir element, how real memoirists do it, and how often readers—especially those closest to you—read our fiction looking for hidden truths. It’s a fun conversation that also covers pool floats, parents, dream offices we probably wouldn’t use and more.

Links from the Podcast

Yard Pods

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley

Mrs. Everything by Jen Weiner

KJ and Sarina’s Pool Floats

#AmReading

KJ: Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Jess: Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford

Sarina: Don’t You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane

Thanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:

But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00

Hey there. Before we embark on a new episode, I get to tell you about our new sponsor, Dabble. I wrote my last book in a mad combination of Word and Scrivener and it worked fine. But putting the whole thing together in the end was hard. And I accidentally left a chapter out of a draft, confusing everyone. With Dabble the whole book is always just sitting there, already compiled and together as a unit, but still easy to navigate around in using chapters or scenes. It's magical, and I can't wait to make full use of it this time around. Give it a spin at dabblewriter.com and let us know what you think. Is it recording?

Jess Lahey 0:38

Now it's recording. Go ahead.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:41

This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.

Jess Lahey 0:45

Alright, let's start over.

KJ Dell'Antonia 0:46

Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting, the podcast about writing all the things - fiction, nonfiction, memoir, essays, proposals, pitches. In short, as I say most nearly every week, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your writing work done.

I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming Addiction Inoculation that'll be out in April 2021. And currently writing some stuff for The Washington Post and Air Mail. And yeah, I guess that's about it.

Sarina Bowen 1:31

And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 35 romance novels. And I'm currently writing nothing and it is glorious.

KJ Dell'Antonia 1:41

I'm KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of How To Be a Happier Parent and the novel The Chicken Sisters, which is coming out this December look for it in bookstores near you if you can be in them and goodness knows I hope you can, but I'm not holding my breath. I am the former editor of The Motherlode Blog at the New York Times where I sometimes still contribute. And I write things for other places. But I am primarily now focused on fiction, kind of, mostly, more about that in a minute maybe.

Jess Lahey 2:12

Speaking of being able to go into bookstores, I was able to go into one for the first time recently, they're limiting their customers. I went to the Phoenix Bookstore in Burlington, and I was able to ...