Middle Grade Books with Shannon Lynn (New Author series)

281 / Shannon Lynn, middle grade sci-fi author and educator, shares how she found time to write while working full time, insight on launching your first book, and small marketing steps that add up over time. 

• Balances a day job with writing
• Tips for middle grade authors: marketing to parents and kids 
• Lessons learned about pacing 
• Print formatting and getting set up with Ingram Spark 
• Making strategic choices–and sometimes saying no–to new opportunities
• How Shannon found her editor, cover artist, and illustrator 
• Adding skills as you need them 
• Building an audience without burning out

💙 Become a supporter of the podcast https://wishidknownforwriters.com/support

• Access to backlist of exclusive supporter episodes
• Private slack group
• Shoutout on a future episode. 

⚡Links:

• www.ShannonLynnAuthor.com
• https://www.jamialbright.com/authorworkshops

Transcript

Sara 0:05

Welcome to the Wish I Young Men podcast. I'm Sarah Rosette.

Jami 0:08

And I'm Jamie Albright. And this week on the show we have Shannon Lynn. Yes, we do. It is a fun interview. And she is a new author and she writes middle grade. And so we've had a lot of requests for middle grade authors.

Sara 0:26

Children's authors, yeah. And she writes sci-fi. So that's one that we don't talk about a whole lot. So we get to do both the middle grade and some sci-fi. We discuss both those things. So it was really good, interesting interview. Since she's a new author, we talked to her about how she found her editor, her cover artist, and illustrators since middle grade. It's a big deal with the artwork, the interior artwork and layout and design. Yeah. And she works full time. So we talk about balancing a day job with writing in the spare time she has. It was really good.

Jami 1:00

Yeah, it was good. What's been going on with you this week?

Sara 1:04

I launched the book two in the Egypt series today. Finally out. And it's I launched it this afternoon. It took me forever to hook up all the little extra bells and whistles that I'm doing. I'm doing two things that if they order for me, they get these exclusive printables, they get bookmarks, and then that newspaper article that I did as a background catches them up. But I had to figure out how to hook all that up. It's easy for the ebook and audiobook, but for the paperback and hardcover, I wasn't sure how to do it because it they're going out through book vault. And I certainly didn't want to charge anybody twice or have, you know, or mess up the book vault delivery. So I finally figured that out. And so if anybody wants to send a bonus PDF to somebody when they order from you, you set it up exactly the same way as you would an ebook or an audiobook, but you just use the ISBN as your SKU. And then it's just exactly the same. But it took me a while to figure that out because I had to email, I had to email and double check with BookFunnel to make sure I was doing it the right way. Yeah.

Jami 2:15

So well, so you're launching it on your site. Did you launch it on the retailers yet or just exclusive?

Sara 2:22

This is the special edition. So only all four formats on my site first, and they'll be on my site at least through the middle of September exclusive. And then probably at the end of September, I'll put up a pre-order on the retailers for their retailer edition, which is just it'll have one or two maps in it. And I think that's none of the other special things, like the you can't do the ribbon bookmark and the you could do the color, but I'm just doing it plain. And yeah, and it's gone well. I've had orders right away, and I there's always that little nerve-wracking moment when you're like, oh, because I sent it out, I sent out the email to my list, and I was like, nobody's ordered anything because I usually get an email and I thought, okay, don't panic, just wait a little bit. And what had happened was I'd set up all those filters in my email a couple months ago. So those are all going into a certain folder. So I wasn't seeing them. And then when I went and looked at my Shopify store, I was like, oh, people have ordered. So no need to panic.

Jami 3:27

Yeah, that's good.

Sara 3:28

Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing I have going on is I'm getting ready when this goes out, I will actually be at podcast movement. So I'm getting ready to do that, leaving in a couple of days to go up there and spend time. I'm gonna see my kids because it's in Dallas this year, and I figured it's probably never gonna be closer than that.

Jami 3:47

Yeah, I'm excited for you to go. I wish I could go, but yeah, I have a writer's retreat that I'm going to. I'm leaving in the morning. This we're recording this on a Friday night, so I will be coming home from that writer's retreat when this goes out. Yeah.

Sara 4:04

That's important too. That'll be a good time. You need to do that.

Jami 4:07

I'm looking forward to it. It'll be really fun.

Sara 4:09

Yeah. What else have you had going on?

Jami 4:12

Just working on the workshop that I'm gonna do for launching. So that workshop is we're gonna have a link in show notes. We're gonna do I'm gonna talk about some things that I've seen in the industry so recently, some things that other people have seen. Because I'm a KU author, so I've been looking at things that white authors have been doing and stuff like that. And then we're gonna brainstorm, we're gonna talk about things that other people have found that worked, and then we're gonna brainstorm some ways. If you have no money or very little money, you can do these things. If you've got a little more money, or if you don't have any experience, you can do these things. If you've got a little more money, a little more experience, you could do these things, and then so we'll t we'll do break it out into tiers.

Sara 5:00

That's smart.

Jami 5:01

So if you're interested, the links in the bio, it's gonna be on August the 28th. It's noon central time, but you get the replay. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I spent all day Monday, part of the day Tuesday, uh just doing the copy and the graphics. Since so bad at graphics, I do not have an eye for that. And so graphics are hard.

Sara 5:23

They're hard for you and me.

Jami 5:24

Some people can whip them out in an tired when I was done. It's funny because like writing is like that sometimes, but not really. Like, I I usually feel energized after I've been writing, but doing graphics and that kind of the art creative work not in my using a muscle you haven't used in a while, and it's very it's painful at the at first.

Sara 5:49

Painful, yeah.

Jami 5:50

But anyway, that's other than that's about all I've had going on.

Sara 5:54

Okay, we have a new supporter. We have H Y Hannah, and she chose the cat emoji, and she is she's been on the podcast before, she's a fellow author, she writes cozy's and almost all of her covers. I think all of her covers have cats on them. So I thought that was cool. She picked that emoji. So thank you to her and to all our other support supporters. Some people have been so faithful and sponsored for so long, and then we have some new people, and we just appreciate you all.

Jami 6:23

We do appreciate you all, but and if you have gotten value from the podcast, we just asked that if you've gotten value and you feel like supporting us, we would really appreciate it. It lets us know you appreciate what we do and that you want us to keep doing it. And that's a lot when especially when you're doing a podcast, because you are speaking into the void, and it's hard to know sometimes who's listening and who's if we're having an impact.

Sara 6:49

Yeah, we appreciate it. And if this is one thing we're doing, the value for value, if you've received value from the podcast and want to give back, we appreciate it if it's one month or several months or a year or two. We're just so thankful. And if you do want to support the podcast, you can go to wish I'd known for writers.com slash support, and you get access to exclusive supporter episodes, and you'll have your own private RSS feed for that, and then there's a private Slack group, and you'll get a shout-out in a future episode. So thank you to everyone who's joined us.

Jami 7:25

Exactly. And one more thing, real quick, we don't ask for these hardly at all, but reviews. If you enjoyed the podcast and you and you haven't reviewed it, we would love it if you would go and review it. It is we're okay. Like our view, our ship, we're not hurting. It's doing well.

Sara 7:43

But it's okay, but another couldn't hurt.

Jami 7:45

It helps Apple and the other and Spotify, yeah. Yeah, to know to know that people like us and want to hear more of us. So they push us out to other people. So we would really appreciate it. If you haven't done that yet, please do it.

Sara 8:00

Yeah, and if you would like to support us, but you're not able to financially a review is very nice, or just telling your writer friends that you may hey, you might want to check out this broadcast. So we appreciate it all. And thank you to everyone who has helped us get this far. So we are this is episode 281.

Jami 8:20

Oh my gosh.

Sara 8:21

We never look at the number episode.

Jami 8:23

We never look at the numbers, we don't know, but that is amazing. That's amazing. We love doing it, we love getting to know you guys and at conferences and stuff like that. So yeah. Or when you text us, we love that. Do all that.

Sara 8:40

Yes. So I guess that is all we've got, and we should get on to talking with Shannon, right?

Jami 8:45

Yes, let's do it.

Sara 8:47

All right. Today we are really excited to talk to Shannon Lynn. Hi, Shannon, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Hey, I'm doing great. Glad to be here.

Sara 8:53

Shannon Lynn is the author of the Vesta Chronicles series. Her middle grade stories are classic adventure, full of realistic sci-fi plot details, dangerously exciting action, and relatable characters. She holds a BA in English and creative writing and an MA in liberal arts from Louisiana State University. After many years teaching high school English, she currently coordinates writes and edits K through 12 English language and reading curriculum in the state of Texas.

Jami 9:20

That's impressive.

Sara 9:21

Yeah. You're busy.

Jami 9:23

It's exhaustive.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

It's a lot of work. Tell us how you got into writing. So I guess technically, the first time I started writing for the purpose of an audience would be high school. I was in the journalism program there. And at the time, our journalism program at the high school had a partnership with the local paper. So we were able to publish in the local paper. I believe it was on a monthly basis. I can't remember now. And that was technically my first writing for an audience, thinking I was going to go into journalism in college. I did a journalism scholarship. Got about half almost through that first year of hard news writing as you do with journalism. And I was like, this isn't as fun as I this wasn't exactly what I was anticipating. This is all facts, all reality, and no fun, right? And so I switched my journalism major to English so I could do what I really cared about, which was creative writing and creating stories and characters and scenes and wanting to explore things that can be as opposed to just what is, which I think a lot of us are into as writers, right?

Jami 10:27

Yeah, absolutely. That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

So that's how I started. And then I ended up getting enough degrees so that I could go teach. So many of us that want to be able to write full time, you need that day job. And I would have gravitated towards teaching and maybe a professorship for the summers off, I promise. But for what it's worth, you do get a lot of school holidays, and you do get those summers off when you're in the classroom. And that's where I wrote my first manuscripts was during those summers. At the my I like to say my primary genre is women's fiction and something I call bayou noir, because I'm from Louisiana. And those first stories that I wrote are all kind of mystery detective, almost thriller type stories based in the deep south in Louisiana. And that's what I was writing all those years when I was teaching. And I still, even though it's hard and teachers are worn out by the end of the school year and you don't function for the first couple of weeks into the summer, it still proved really helpful to be able to flesh out those manuscripts and go to writers' conferences. And if I hadn't had that, I wouldn't be in the position I am now where I'm able to have a full-time job now year round and still write on the weekends at night in the morning and really make have traction and be able to get from point A to point B pretty quick.

Sara 11:46

That's yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're a fairly new author, right? So tell us when your most recent book came out and your series that you have now.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Yeah. So the Vesta Chronicles Sun Chaser is my debut novel and it is a middle grade novel. And it launched at the very end of May. So I'm just now entering my third month of launch season. And it's been a really exciting process. And I'm just now at the point of being able to catch my breath a little bit with the timelines of launch month and the month leading up to the launch, the actual launch, and then okay, what's the plan now going forward? Three months, six months in advance, 12 months in advance. So this is the first novel of the series. I'm expecting the second to come out late 26. Again, having the day job, I think I'm going to be a one book a year author. And at least that's my goal going into this. And so it's a fun series. I'm really I'm really happy with the launch. I was able to achieve a top 10 ranking in my category in Amazon that first week. And I was able to hold on to it for a bit and also able to hang on to that top 50, which puts you in the list for the entire first month, which I've, for me, as a debut and not having a huge following or anything like that, no one knows I exist, no one knows the story exists yet. I was really, I was really happy with with the response. Yeah. It's a sci-fi. Yeah, it's a sci-fi story, but I like to say it's light on sci-fi and high on adventure. And it splits up between, and you guys are Texans too, it splits up between space and a dystopian Texas hill country. We have a little bit of land out in the Spicewood area west of Tex, west of Austin. And I just find the you guys have been out there. The hill country is just, it's beautiful. And I find it so inspiring. And I really wanted to use that location and that setting and what the way I feel when I'm out there and the way my nephews feel when they're out there and depict that, but in a little futuristic situation with a lot of adventure and fun stuff going on.

Jami 13:49

So why middle grade?

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Why did you do that instead of my women's fiction that I love writing? Yeah. So I was in the, I was in the middle of this manuscript for my women's fiction, my little bayou series, and my nephews, I'm an over, I like to say I'm an overly involved aunt. My my sister followed me to Austin and moved two miles away. And after those first couple of weeks of her knocking on my door every morning, thinking, oh, this is really close that we are sitting here, not only in the same city, and she's an early bird and I'm a night owl. And so those early morning uh knocks on the door at first felt felt, oh wow, we're really close. But really quickly, whenever she got pregnant and had kids, I told her, if we're gonna live in the same city, we have to live within three miles of each other because you don't want to be in the situation where you're having to travel an hour to go 10 miles, which you have to do in Austin and all of our metro areas, right? And so it was really a blessing. And I'm so grateful that she did follow me and that she didn't move just down the road because she encountered some major health issues whenever she had the second. And I bedridden on and off. And because I was so close, I was able to help out a ton. And I was still on the teacher schedule, summers off. I had a lot of holidays off. And I ended up spending even more time with those kids than I had anticipated, which is awesome and great. I joke sometimes that I have joint custody of them because I have them at least once a week. And growing so close to them, we went on these adventure walks a lot and in the woods. It's not hill country, it's the suburbs and suburban area. I don't know if Houston's this way, but in Austin, there's just trails everywhere in your neighborhoods, just down the road. And we would be on these little trail walks and we would always role play, and we would always come up with stories and characters and ideas. And the they're now 11 and turning nine. And two years ago, you get like everyone does who has kids or kids in their lives, all of a sudden they were just growing up so fast. And you knew that just in a moment they were going to be 16 and 18 and gone. And I thought, all these stories and some of these characters we've come up with, I want to document them. I want to write them. And I had from one of our little walks, I had this idea for a middle grade story, and I had written it down four or five years ago. Brief plot, a brief outline of what this story could be. And then I put it in a drawer and didn't touch it until I had that moment of these kids are gonna grow up and they're gonna be gone and we're not gonna have this time again. And I was actually at an impasse with my women's fiction. I couldn't get from this one scene to this next scene, as you do. I was in between act one and act two. And I thought I'm gonna take a break. Let me just go ahead and write this book. Let me write this book that I had drafted. And I did it fairly quick, the first draft, and decided, I talked to my mom, who's an artist, and I said, Hey, if I put this book together, would you be willing to maybe do a small chapter illustration? And she was coming off of cancer treatments. She's doing great now. And I think it also created a positive thing that she and I could do together and became a little family project to an extent. And it just grew and grew. I had the intention of publishing, but as it completed, as I went through the editing process, I got even more excited. I was like, okay, I think this could be a four or five book series. I'm gonna keep going with it. And I'm gonna go ahead and make this my first project now. I can always go back to my adult fiction, but I need to do it now. You get that. I don't know if you guys have this, I get the sense all the time of I'm running out of time. And it's like it publishing takes time. And so it really made me want to start now because I knew the day I said I'm gonna publish this, I knew I was at least a year out. And I'm like, okay, they're gonna be 10, they're gonna be 11, they're gonna be 12. And I want them to read it while they're young and it's actually written for them. So that's great.

Jami 17:49

That's fantastic. What do you wish you'd known about writing in crafts when you started?

SPEAKER_00 17:53

I'd go with two things on that. One, I did not realize that once you get to that final proof, after all the editing, after you've looked at the manuscript 50 plus times, that once you see it in the layout, that you know, your left and right page layout, your PDF, that some things will pop out for some reason in that page format in a different way than when you're looking at the Word document manuscript. I was so surprised by that. And it made me want to shift what I do with book two as far as looking at it in that format first, in that left-right page, seeing the chapter page, how many sentences actually end up on that first chapter page. I don't know what it is, and I didn't anticipate that would tell me and show me some things, almost in regards to pacing a little bit. How much do you get on that first page? That was a surprise. A bigger surprise that caused a little bit of frustration was I didn't know how long it was actually going to take for little structural business things like your Ingram account being set up and being approved. You know, there's language out there and there's information about, oh, give yourself two weeks. Mine wasn't two weeks. It was about four weeks before I don't know what backup there was. There weren't any problems, but it just took a while for the account to become active, which it was too close to launch for me. Yeah. For that to feel comfortable. So now I know going forward that any new accounts, new processing, just double or triple the time you read online.

Sara 19:30

Just might as well do that because then that way you give yourself extra time. And since you're doing middle grade, a lot of your sales are probably print, right? Yeah, absolutely. So Ingram was like an essential part of it. Yeah, you had to have that.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah, Amazon's still number one, and I love Amazon. The experience has been great, but yeah, you have to have that Ingram so that for anyone who doesn't buy from Amazon, there's that option, right?

SPEAKER_03 19:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

And luckily, I'm really happy. I've had I've had my first bookstore stock a couple of books, which is always fun. And they're buying, they're gonna buy from Ingram. So you have to have it up there and ready.

Sara 20:06

Yeah, that's great. What about marketing? What do you wish you'd known about marketing since bookstores have come up on topic?

SPEAKER_00 20:13

For me, I can't speak for other people, but for me in my debut year, also having the full-time job, I went into it not planning to do any ads, at least for the first six months, mainly because of bandwidth. Having my learning curve, as a lot of people go through, has been straight up over the past year. And I'm really at a point of I can't handle another huge, right? I can't handle this other bucket of information that I have that I know nothing about. And two things are in that category right now for me marketing ads and email list subscription world. I know there's a lot of different avenues to go. And so I had to at some point say, you know what, that's gonna be an add-on, and that's gonna be an extra, that's gonna be six months down the road, 12 months down the road, or with book two. And I'm sure that's gonna limit me in a to a certain extent, but it's allowing me to get day to day and week by week right now. And so it works for me. However, to that end, I need to I need to know more than I know about marketing and the ads. I've done some research already, and it seems extremely complicated. And so I wish I had more information even at this stage, preparing for that next step and that next tier. I've studied so many. I love your podcast. It's been super helpful. Thank you so much for having thank you so much for having it. It's I feel like it's this little college course that I take on on my two hour commutes every day.

Sara 21:45

And there's that we started it because that's how we learned about indie stuff was right through podcasts. So that was one reason we were like, there's people who are still learning to publish and wanting to learn these things. So that's why we do it.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

It's so helpful. And I know it takes time and I Appreciate your time. I know a lot of other people do too. The conversation and the communal spirit of indie publishing, I just think is great. It's all good. Yeah. And so I've learned picked up some things here, but I haven't targeted if my searches let me let me see what podcast they had about marketing and ads specifically and that sort of thing. It's it's numbers and it's business, so it's a little less interesting for creatives sometimes. So which might be also be why it's last on the list.

Sara 22:27

But you still have time. And I like the way you phrased it as that's an add-on, like later you can because it it is very much an incremental career. Like you start, you got to write the book, you got to learn how to publish the book, and then you can add these other things in as you go.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Yeah. And with marketing, I don't think you can put too little emphasis on that building tier structure. Your first tier R is your launch, your friends and your family, and then friends of friends and friends of family. That is your first group. And it actually isn't a guarantee. Whenever you reach out and share your book, and it's okay, do they like it? Okay, they're loving it. Great. But that's still that's not a guarantee. And so once you go from there and you can build in your maybe you have a bookstagram contact or you have bookstore contacts. To me, that's all marketing too. And once you have those, and once those relationships are established, you have them forever after, right?

Jami 23:26

Marketing is about more than ads, that's for sure. What do you still need to figure out?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Definitely, I need to figure out more about the ads. That is the one thing I don't know a lot about. I do eventually need to look at the email subscriptions. I decided I started to get a little overwhelmed by the choices. Sometimes when you have a lot of choices, it's hard. You're looking at pricing, you're looking at what's easy. And the thing is that here in launch season, I do have a hundred emails. I have I have the emails from those who were invited to the launch, and I call those my tier one emails. And yeah, I'll have also as I've as you go through your first couple months and weeks, people will reach out to you who heard about the book from a friend, or or you might get I got my first fan email on my from a kid two weeks ago, which was really fun through my website asking some questions about the book. And so I have there, I have that parent's email who may want to know about a future the next release. And so it's a curated list a little bit that just by that comes out naturally. And I think that's okay at the beginning of a career. And then I think later on I can add to that, but I need to know more about the email options and the subscriptions and cost and things like that. And then the whatever whoever has the secret for ads, that would be helpful too. Yeah, sign us all up for that.

Sara 24:52

We'll all take that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah, exactly. They change daily. Yeah.

Sara 24:55

What's the most unhelpful advice that you've received?

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Thinking about this question, my easy answer is there's really no unhelpful advice because I think you learn from all of it. But I guess one answer would be okay, so you get an I got an invitation to go basically sell direct live at an art walk. And but the way this particular art walk and bookstore work together, the individual author is the P has the POS and does the transaction as opposed to it being through the bookstore. That's a whole nother bucket of work in regards to, oh, let me register for sales tax with the state. And then what the day you do that, you have to submit monthly reports, right? And you have even if you don't have any sales, my understanding is you have to log in and say I had no sales. That's just one more task on the ever-growing task list, right? And so I don't have that set up yet. I don't have the POS device. All of the everything they're in, I decided I don't have a table, which is a small thing.

Sara 25:58

Physical things you need to physical things like they're on in person, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:02

And they all add up. And so I this one person was saying, if you get in a just say yes to everything, just say yes to everything. That sounds like a really good piece of advice. And I was really tempted, okay. I just need to say yes and go through these next 10 tasks really quickly and probably a frenzy. And maybe I don't have to do that. And maybe that's something I can do later in time, but it really doesn't make sense right now. And that's okay. And it might make sense for other authors, but for me right now in this season, it doesn't. So I'm I can say no to that, and that's not necessarily a bad decision. I think that's so wise.

Jami 26:38

That's so you just and we all do this, we get ahead of ourselves and we get I did them, I've done it multiple times, but I certainly did that when I was with my first newsletter builder. I had nothing set up, I didn't even know you had to set anything up, and then I had to scramble to do it, but it paid off, but it was still a lot of stress that I didn't have to put myself under at that moment.

Sara 27:02

Like you could have done it very much differently, like more incremental.

Jami 27:05

Literally take a weekend to stop doing everything just to figure this out. How did you find your editor and cover artist?

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Oh, so editing, or you guys you may or may not be a member of the Writers League of Texas, but I became a member. It's a great organization. I tell any anytime I'm talking to someone who's wanting to publish or thinking about publishing or already querying, I say, please, especially if you're in Texas, join because it's not very expensive. It's an extremely well-run organization. I joined back in the 20 teens, somewhere in there, and they do an agents conference every year. And so at the time, my my first manuscripts, I was entering the manuscript contest every year because if you place, if you win, you get a free 10-minute pitch with an agent, right? And so I was really drawn to that. But even outside of winning the pitch, you can also at the conference, you can pay for a pitch. I did that too. I paid for 10 minutes with agents and practiced the verbal pitch and had some interest. It that can lead to send me your first 50 pages, send me your first three chapters if you're going the Trad route. And I really spent like between 2010 and 2018 that going that route, just exclusively looking for a Trad published deal. But those conferences are awesome. They're the panels are all run by agents and published authors and editors and designers. And I went to as many of those conferences as I could during that era, and I learned a ton. This was before the podcasting era. So, you know, you really had to show up in person somewhere to find out information or read the books.

Jami 28:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

And so the Writers League of Texas, obviously, as an organization, has partnerships and vendors. And year after year, I they had a couple of different editing, either individuals or firms that were there at Booth in a vendor booth. And one of them that was there every year was Yellowbird Editors. They're Austin-based. And I visited with them and I kept the card. I had it, I had it in my little writing desk for all these years. And I had just decided, knowing who I'd met the editor, I'd met the owner and the editors who worked there. I was like, this is a great organization. There's a lot of talent right here. And how great would it be to work with an editor that might even be in your hometown? And so I kept the card. And when I was ready to go forward with this project, looked them up. I assumed they were still in business. They were very actively, very successfully. And so through Yellowbird Editors, I chose a, and the owner made some recommendations, but you can with them, you can look at all the bios and choose someone and see if they're available. I chose Kristen Simmons was recommended and was on my list. She's a published author, both Trad and Indy. And she was my developmental editor through Yellowbird. And then David Aretha, he's an award-winning children's novelist. I also worked with him online editing and proofing. And they were great. I can't recommend that organization enough. And then that's where I found them though, through the Writers League of Texas. The of the entire, if you were to write down all the steps of the publishing process, finding a cover artist was absolutely the hardest step. The hardest. I think I interviewed six different cover artists before I landed on Tammy Dever, who's out of her company is TLC Book Design. Lots of award-winning covers. She's also based in Austin, but I only found her through a Google search. I'm sure if I had been listening to a podcast here or there, because she's really active in the industry, I may have heard about her another way. But for me, it was through Google. And she's been awesome to work with. I can't recommend her enough. Very personal, one-on-one, very collaborative. And I like, I feel like I couldn't have finished the project without her, really, because with every other designer I I interviewed, there was something that just wasn't right. For instance, it was really important to me. I'm not taking a political stance on it. It's just me. I didn't want any AI associated with any of my cover design at all. I wanted very original artwork and concepts and designs. That's just something that's meaningful to me. And she was 100% on board with that. And I don't, and she said she's in this industry too. A lot of people are using AI for coming. And that's fine. I was, I just wanted someone who'd be willing to go old school with me.

Sara 31:31

And did you have conversations with the different people you interviewed? Did you like do a zoom call or something with everybody, or was it just over email?

SPEAKER_00 31:38

It was either an email or a phone call or email. I don't think I had any Zoom calls. I think it was all phone call or email. And like, for instance, there was this one cover designer that only operated over email through the entire process and would not, and that was like part of her, that's part of her business. And I was like, that's gonna work for me. It may work for someone else, but it's just not gonna work for me. I need to be able to at least talk to you on the phone. And so there was just a little something with everyone until I met Tammy. So she was great.

Sara 32:07

It's amazing what you can the feeling, or maybe it's just Jamie and I were both intuitive people, I think. And sometimes just that phone conversation is just enough to go, yes, let's proceed, or no, I don't think so. It can really clarify things. Yeah.

Jami 32:24

Honestly, a Zoom call is even better because it needs to be in somebody's face.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yeah, and Tammy zooms with me all the time, and she's open, she's a she's an author herself. So I really loved working with someone who she has 30 years of design and experience, and but she also knows what it's like to be on the writer in too.

Sara 32:41

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that, let's get back to the writing stuff. Writing middle grade. What do you wish you had known about that? Is there anything that comes to mind about that would have been helpful to know?

SPEAKER_00 32:53

I knew going in that while you're writing for kids, you're in a to an extent, you're writing to the parents and grandparents too, in that they're the gatekeepers.

Sara 33:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

And they're an important gatekeeper. And so something I realized too with writing back copy and promotional copy, you have to write it, even though you're in your heart, you're wanting to write it for that 10-year-old kid and that 11-year-old kid, but it has to speak to mom and dad and aunt and uncle and grandparents too. And I didn't realize that I knew it conceptually that this is a true thing, but it it's it complicates, I think, the or at least it nuances the final product a bit. And I think that's true for also social media posting. What's I have I have my accounts and you're looking for that mom and dad, and you're looking for that grandparent, and you're wanting to write things that are exciting for a kid to see on a poster in a way, but the things that are exciting for a kid to see on a poster, they're never gonna see on that Instagram account. Mom and dad are gonna see it. So it's just a I think that's an interesting dynamic that middle middle grade writers have to consider. And that it starts to change with YA, I think, because kids they're getting online at some point in time and they're able to see some of this. I think, yeah, that that'd be my answer to that. It's just that dynamic of how do you sell a product and pitch a product to the person who's not necessarily going to read it. However, what's been really fun is a lot of grandparents and parents have been reading with their because the younger, I would like to say this book is it really is true middle grade. Those eight to 10-year-old young readers in the or what's I guess considered early middle grade, they're reading it and enjoying it, but they're reading it with a parent, with a grandparent. And then those kind of 10 to 12, even 13-year-olds are reading it independently, and it's speaking to both of those groups. So I can't say it's really just upper middle or just lower middle, depending on the person. But what's fun is when I get a grandparent or a parent would say, I loved it. When's book two coming out? And I'm ready for the next book. I'm really enjoying that. And maybe I'm doing something right with the marketing there, and it is speaking to some of those other age groups. Um I've started using the phrase multi-generational read.

Jami 35:14

Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's a good one. That's good. What do you wish you'd known just in general about publishing a middle grade book besides the needing to appeal to two audiences basically? Yeah, two audiences basically. Was there something like how much did you have to change your writing from writing women's fiction to writing? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

That's a good question. So I think pacing. And in one of my final edits, my sole purpose was pacing. I was only looking at moving from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, because I started thinking about our kid, our young readers, the reluctant readers, readers who are who are struggling. They don't like to read because it's hard. So from an educator standpoint, and I'm really proud of that last edit. Because, for instance, I mean, we were almost done. And I went in and turned, I think, three different chapters into six chapters. So I broke them up and and and called my and this is like the 11th hour. This is this probably should have happened before the at this stage. And I called my illustrator, who's also my mom, said, Hey, I need three more images. I need three more illustrations. How quickly can you do them? Don't, but take your time, I don't want to rush you. And she had them done in I think it was 36 hours. And they were the most intricate to me of all of the other illustrations she did, and the most interesting that it all worked out well. And I have a great illustrator. And but the I was really proud of the pacing. And I think thinking about that kid who's going to get lost in too much context or get lost in too much description really contributed to a solid final product. That now I want to, I'm going to use that same thinking when I go back to my women's fiction because it matters to adults too. And so I feel like I learned something there by thinking like a kid and thinking about what it's like to read as a kid that's going to benefit all my genre writing. Great answer.

Sara 37:16

Yeah.

unknown 37:17

Yeah.

Sara 37:18

What about your teaching background? Did that help you at all since you've had so much interaction with older kids? But did that help you as you were writing to give you a different perspective, maybe than somebody who hasn't been around kids as much?

SPEAKER_00 37:30

Yeah, I think so. From a literary stand, I taught American Lit and primarily. And that was so that was juniors. I love juniors. That's like the best high. It's the best to me. I was a secondary teacher, and the junior level is great because they've really matured and they're working hard, they're taking their ACT, they're getting ready to take ACTs and SATs. They care about their GPA all of a sudden. Yeah. But they don't have senioritis yet. Yeah. I think seeing the kids over the years and having and them having to read really difficult text, even reading things from the 1920s for a modern day kid, the language is difficult. I mean, it's verbose, it's dense. And watching the kids struggle with the complex sentence structure and also seeing what they gravitated to, what they cared about. Just adults too, those big plot points and those characterizations are meaningful. And ending ending with suspense, I saw too, I had this desire to try to end each chapter with some sort of real suspenseful feeling or thought that that is kids love that, whether they're 10 years old or 16 years old, that excitement factor and keeping that in to an extent. It's like I feel like I have two different ways I like to write because a lot of my women's fiction is more contemplative. And if anything, it's less, it's less dramatic, kind of like French film. I don't know if you French film tends to be that way. It's like the plot's very simple in a lot of those French films, and there's only so much movement from point A to point B, and it's all in the emotionalism between characters and things like that. And I really enjoy writing that way with some of my women's fiction, so it's opposite, but keeping that kid in mind, that interest in action and in adventure and what's gonna happen next. And oh my gosh, I didn't know this was gonna happen. I think is I think was really helpful. And again, same answer. I'm gonna I know I'm gonna use that when I go back to my women's fiction too. Those are great tools to have.

Jami 39:24

Yeah, this has been really fun. Have we had a middle grade author on before? Maybe I don't think we've had middle grade before. This has really been great and very interesting. I think it will we get requests for it all the time. So I know we have people who are gonna be interested in hearing it. But we like to ask all our guests, what do you think you is the best thing you've done to set yourself up for success?

SPEAKER_00 39:46

Okay, for sure, the the not the daily effort. I wrote I wrote a Facebook post recently on this, but the daily execution is really, I think, where why and how I am where I am right now. Because you have this big to-do list, you have these goals, you have these targets, it can be overwhelming on any day of the week. Like, how do I get there? How do I even get the book published? How do I get a stranger to read it? How do I have uh how do I have good reviews? And when you think about it all at once, it's overwhelming. And like maybe cleaning a garage that hasn't been cleaned out in a while. I really do believe in the daily effort. And because having the day job and having a lot of other responsibilities, maybe I only have 30 minutes, but what can I do in 30 minutes? And as long as I do something, I am moving forward. Yeah. And the only reason I was able to write the manual, I think I wrote the first draft in about three months. And that was all before work. It was all in at the time I thought, how do I work this into an already full day? And for me, I was like, what do you do every day that you could somehow do two things at once? Because that's what it is. And I thought, you know what? I drink coffee every day. And I drink coffee for 30 to 60 minutes every day, even before work. I can drink coffee and write. And so that was the first step of okay, every I drink coffee every day, I write every day. And it will, and it might be 30 minutes, it might be 60. On the weekend, it might be two hours. And I think that incremental execution, guess what? If you do that every day in four months, you have a draft.

SPEAKER_03 41:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

And then when you get to the business side, it's okay, for instance, right now, every day I either write a library, I write a bookstore, or I respond to a correspondence that's already happening. I write a podcast and say, Hey, y'all want to talk? And but I do something every day, and they don't all produce. But if you're putting, if you're making an effort two weeks down the road, three weeks down the road, someone writes back, someone calls back, and then that that then you have a book event and you have you have an event to go to. And so I think I'm gonna keep doing it. That's it's a method that was worked for me, and it makes you feel productive, like you are moving forward, even though you're not accomplishing everything at the same time. Yes, great answer.

Sara 42:09

Yeah, yeah, and really good advice to just do if you can just do one thing a day, do your writing and then do one marketing thing.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Yeah.

Sara 42:16

At the end of the year, think how many words and how many marketing things you will have done. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 42:20

Yeah, and then you have a list of oh, I contacted these at the you can put it all together at some point as its own task one day. These 10 libraries loved it and bought the book. I need to make sure they know about book two when it comes out, and then you have all that set up for the future. Yeah, yeah.

Sara 42:36

That is a great note to end on, I think. I think it's good advice, and I think this will be really helpful and interesting to people. So, where can people find out more about you and your book?

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Shannon Lynnauthor.com is my website. I'm using that as the hub. Little events I have around Texas, I'm putting there. For instance, I'm gonna be at the art walk in Galveston. I don't know if you guys have ever gone to but with then and now bookshop, I'm gonna be there with my mom on September 14th. I think is the September art walk there. It's I think it's the second Saturday of every month. So as events come up and I'm gonna be around, I'm putting them on the website. The info about the book and info about me is there. As I get closer to publishing book two, I'll make sure that there's some updates there. And then on Instagram, I'm Shannon Linther. And on Facebook, it's the Vesta Chronicles book series.

Sara 43:25

Perfect. Okay, this has been great, and thanks for being here. We appreciate it. But thanks for listening today. We'll have the with all those links in the show notes, and you can find those at wish I know your writers.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you can go to that same link, and we will see everybody next time. Bye.