The Publishing Performance Show

Martyn Ellington & Steven Stiefel - From Novel to Screen: Mastering Multi-Format Storytelling

• Teddy Smith • Episode 66

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Martyn Ellington and Steven Stiefel are trans-Atlantic writing partners who blend British and American sensibilities in their collaborative works. Through their production company MESS Productions, they create multi-format content spanning novels, TV scripts, and podcasts, with their international bestseller "Tomorrow's Flight" showcasing their ability to craft compelling cross-cultural narratives.

Martyn Ellington is the author of five published novels, including "The End of Everything," "Devolution of a Species," and the "Thirstonfield Halt" series. 

Steven Stiefel is a veteran of script development, having analyzed over 1,500 scripts and books. He's the co-author of "Making Rumours" about Fleetwood Mac's iconic album.


In this episode:

  • The dynamics of international co-writing partnerships
  • Adapting stories across different mediums (TV, podcasts, novels)
  • Managing cultural differences in writing for global audiences
  • The process of working with beta readers
  • Strategies for successful independent publishing
  • Navigating Kindle Unlimited and promotional strategies
  • The evolution of traditional vs. independent publishing
  • Building a hybrid publishing company


Resources mentioned:


Book Recommendations:


Connect with Martyn & Steven:


Connect with Teddy Smith:



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[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Hi everyone and welcome to The Publishing Performance Show. Today, I'm joined by Martyn Ellington and Stephen Stiefel, who are co writers and they write books together. Plus they have written books on their own as well. So welcome to the show, Martyn and Stephen. 

[00:00:17] M.E Ellington: Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. 

[00:00:20] Teddy Smith: So this is interesting.

[00:00:21] Teddy Smith: This is the first time I've done a show with multiple guests, but also the first time I've ever interviewed anyone that has co written a book. So could you just tell me a bit how that works? 

[00:00:31] M.E Ellington: yeah, well, well, me and Steve live in different continents, so Steve's in the US and I'm in North Yorkshire in England, which is a posh way of saying Teesside, and we got introduced in 2016 by my then literary agent, and Steve worked as an editor on my first published book back then, and we got together to rewrite a book that I had self published about five years Previous so process was pretty straightforward.

[00:01:02] M.E Ellington: Actually. Steve would, would, would write a chapter or, or whatever it is. We constantly talk over Skype. If this was before zoom became the thing back in the old days. Yeah. And of course he would send over, he would email over his ideas and what he'd written and this kind of thing. And, you know, I'd make notes, send it back to Steve and then we discuss it.

[00:01:26] M.E Ellington: So it was a fairly painless luckily we, we both had sort of very close ideas on the format of the book and what happens in the book. So we didn't have too many sort of disagreements. Steve always likes to say that it's whoever wants it more wins the point, which I think he's right on. So Steve's won some and I've won some.

[00:01:47] M.E Ellington: I think over, overall it worked, it works really well. It was pretty painless. Time consuming because of time differences and this kind of thing. But, and other commitments, because Steve has another writing partner and he's got his own projects. And the same for me, I've got another writing partner and my solo projects as well.

[00:02:06] M.E Ellington: Yeah, it was actually a very enjoyable process. Yeah, it was good. I enjoyed it, so we're doing it again. 

[00:02:13] Steven Stiefel: One thing that happens in that process is that, we send the file, we essentially send the master to the other. So the other writer becomes the possessor of the main document. And so when I, I'll do all my edits, and I might even add questions.

[00:02:30] Steven Stiefel: For Martyn to answer in the document, but now he owns that document. He'll go ahead and take that. Polish it up to his satisfaction. Send it back to me. I never look at my previous notes or questions or anything like that. I just then now, once it's back in my possession, I just take ownership of it. And essentially we don't use track changes.

[00:02:52] Steven Stiefel: It's just written into the file, but I started accepting the changes by not changing them. And then if I have additional questions, I'll put them in and send them back to Mark until, until nobody, neither of us have questions or. and so that's the thing if, if Martyn has a point that I don't like and I'm changing it, he'll change it back and eventually one of us will just stop because we want to stop sending it back and forth.

[00:03:17] Teddy Smith: So you don't go book a room together, for example, and work at the same time in the same zoom call or anything like that. It's very much one of you takes charge and then you pass over. 

[00:03:30] M.E Ellington: We have, as Steve said, when Steve was over here for six months we found a coffee shop that we quite liked. And we'd often go there and sit face to face and talk about projects and one in particular that we're working on currently.

[00:03:45] M.E Ellington: We've got a meeting with the production company next week about the TV adaptation of it. 

[00:03:50] Teddy Smith: Oh, wow. 

[00:03:50] M.E Ellington: So, and that's a novel that'll be out. Probably just after the, the new year, we think titled The Harvesting. 

[00:03:57] Teddy Smith: And so you're, at the moment, you're writing that book, but you're already speaking to TV companies about potentially making it.

[00:04:02] M.E Ellington: Yeah, we've, we've done it completely the wrong way around. So we've, we've, we've written the TV show and the pitch deck and, and, and the two pages, and we've pitched it to producers. And one of them suggested quite a, a well known producer suggested that we do a podcast for it, which we've, we've written half of and half of it's up.

[00:04:23] M.E Ellington: Yeah. Then we thought, gosh, you know, well actually it was Steve that suggested it and said, you know what? It would actually be a good idea to put, to write this as a novel as well. Why not? Why not take on the extra workload that we can't afford to do ? So, I wrote a first draft of, I don't know, Steve, what was it, 80,000 words or something, and then a little bit shorter than that.

[00:04:43] M.E Ellington: It was 60, 

[00:04:44] Steven Stiefel: 65. It works. 65 heading towards 80 now. 

[00:04:46] Teddy Smith: Yeah. And then after how long did you expect the final draft to be? 

[00:04:51] M.E Ellington: Oh, probably 85 ish, which, and it's going to be a trilogy. So we think for sci fi horror, you know, it's about the right length. You don't really want them much, much longer than that. 

[00:05:06] Teddy Smith: And when you were, when you're writing together, how did you find the difference between being in the same room and being able to, you know, bounce ideas of each other compared to doing it over, over zoom or sharing a document?

[00:05:21] Steven Stiefel: Well, we when we were together, we don't drill down real hard. We mostly talk. We don't really right. I mean, we'll talk about that. I mean, we talked about other things as well, but we, we talk mostly it's mostly planning, I guess, but it's, it's. Sometimes very granular, you know, planning this paragraph or that paragraph.

[00:05:41] Steven Stiefel: Then one of us will say, Oh, I'll fix that later. 

[00:05:43] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:05:44] Steven Stiefel: So we don't, I mean, we, it's the writing process, but it's not the writing per se. It doesn't usually go fully into the draft unless we're very far along and finalizing something. In which case we might do a final polish, usually of shorter documents like the two pages or whatever.

[00:06:03] Steven Stiefel: But another reason why we are writing this novel is because. In pitching and dealing with producers in Hollywood, the value of IPs become abundantly clear to us. What do you mean by that? Everybody wants their new project to be based on an existing IP of some sort. Right. Whether it's a podcast or a novel or a memoir or something else.

[00:06:31] Steven Stiefel: It's just, it's just for whatever reason very attractive to people with money. I guess it's sort of a proven entity, then they kind of have a better sense of it, but, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that the IP itself has to have had a huge financial success, but it's still, for whatever reason, very appealing.

[00:06:52] Steven Stiefel: And so we decided to do it not only for that reason, but because. A novel is something we can sell to individuals instead of having to look for that one person who can put together a multi million dollar plan. And so the selling of a book Becomes almost the advertising for the script that we wrote a long time ago.

[00:07:19] Teddy Smith: Yeah, I guess I have seen that in other ways where you've had a film, maybe that's become famous. Then a book has come afterwards, which is the story, but I think it's more unusual to do it that way around. It feels like usually there's a book and then that's what forms the plot for the TV show. 

[00:07:36] M.E Ellington: Yeah, 

[00:07:37] Teddy Smith: but 

[00:07:37] M.E Ellington: it's, it's an, it's an interesting, it's been an interesting exercise to take a script and then adopt that script.

[00:07:44] M.E Ellington: Into a podcast and into a novel. So it's, it's, it's been a very interesting exercise to do. I feel I've learned quite a bit from it. I don't know what Steve's experience was from that point of view, but 

[00:07:57] Steven Stiefel: Yeah, one thing, one thing we've seen is that we're not, the story isn't the same in each, there, it's actually diverging in all three cases, slightly differently, different things happen.

[00:08:13] Steven Stiefel: You know, we're trying to have things like character deaths be the same from one to the other, but there are small plot points that, you know, certain characters appear earlier in the novel than they do in the TV series and things like that. So 

[00:08:26] Teddy Smith: your editors are going to have a fun time having to look at the scripts and also at the same time.

[00:08:31] Steven Stiefel: Well, hopefully, they only need to have the sense of one for the other. You know, that if you're looking at the script, the script works in its own way. And of course, you know, you look at any movie, it's going to change a book as well. Especially cutting things out. And that's one thing that we're able to sort of We have more story.

[00:08:59] Steven Stiefel: In the sense of what's going on between the characters and more scenes, but the story we're telling is pretty similar in shape and size in the novel as it is in the, in the 

[00:09:09] M.E Ellington: scripts. Yeah, and the pursing is pretty similar as well, which, which is interesting. And it's, there's a, there is a big difference between writing a script and a novel, you know, so in the script, it's, it's, it's John enters the room.

[00:09:23] M.E Ellington: You know, but in the novel you can, you can actually write his sense of the room and his thoughts and how he feels and you can really drill down deeply into the characters. So I, I, I prefer novel writing because of that. But it was enjoyable to write the script for it as well. And it's won a bit, you know, it's placed well.

[00:09:43] M.E Ellington: It's, it's won a few awards, the script. It's, it's done pretty well. We have had, we had it at Sky TV at one point. It got as far as a development meeting, but they felt that the, the project that they had, John Wyndham's project, The Midwich Cuckoos. They felt that Whilst they're not similar projects in any way, they're slightly overlapped.

[00:10:07] Teddy Smith: Right. 

[00:10:07] M.E Ellington: And Steve managed to get it into Hulu at one point, and they were considering it, so, Yeah, it is, it's been very strange. 

[00:10:15] Steven Stiefel: We have we like this a lot, but we have something in the space. Yeah. 

[00:10:20] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Um, we'll, we'll come on to that sort of proposal for the production companies as one of my later questions, later questions, but I just wanted to chat a bit more about working together.

[00:10:29] Teddy Smith: So when you're working together, how do you resolve creative differences that you have, if one of you has got an idea and. The other one, do you have a way of dealing with that fallout? 

[00:10:42] Steven Stiefel: Yeah. Stephen's right. We use, uh, we use beta readers. Yeah. Yeah. And if everybody's saying the same thing, whoever that supports or if they aren't, if they, if they don't have any problem, you know, if I'm raising an issue and we do deal with some cultural differences.

[00:11:08] Steven Stiefel: And, and Martyn's pretty gracious about kind of bowing to the, I would call it American market as opposed to the American way, understanding that there's a bigger readership for the books, for the projects we're doing now, it would work the other way if we were talking in which we will be doing it to a British production company.

[00:11:29] Steven Stiefel: We would want it to be more British, but there are, there are small things. A lot of, a lot of times it's dialogue where an American just isn't going to understand. 

[00:11:39] Teddy Smith: Right. That's interesting. In 

[00:11:41] M.E Ellington: the, in the novel of The Harvesting, there's a comment from one of the, before the, the event, the inciting event happens.

[00:11:47] M.E Ellington: So we're getting to know the characters and three of them are work buddies. And one of them sort of says to the other, God, he eats like a JCB. 

[00:11:54] Teddy Smith: And I have 

[00:11:55] M.E Ellington: to explain in detail to Steve and he had to then explain in detail to the reading group in Los Angeles, what a JCB. And I just assumed that JCB was a worldwide product.

[00:12:07] M.E Ellington: I just assumed that everybody knew what it was. In America, it's cat. It's a cat over here. And yeah. So things like that. Now, GCB has ended up staying in. But there's other things where they've just said, look, it's too British. The American readers are not going to understand the reference. They're not going to get it.

[00:12:25] M.E Ellington: Some of the banks between them, we've dialed down quite a bit because British people are, the more they take the The, am I allowed to swear? You can swear, yeah. The more they take the piss out of each other, the more friendly and the more we think of each other. 

[00:12:40] Teddy Smith: Yes. But of 

[00:12:40] M.E Ellington: course, you know, in America, that is, that is, isn't the case.

[00:12:43] M.E Ellington: So a lot of the banter's had to be dialed down in the book. Right. But as Steve rightly said, in a British TV show with a British production, we'd be able to dial it back up a bit. 

[00:12:54] Teddy Smith: That's very interesting. I've never even thought, I have thought about cultural differences before, but usually it's been a bit more surface level.

[00:12:59] Teddy Smith: I've never really thought about specific examples such as JCB. I mean, that it's so famous in, in the UK that we've even got a song about it. There was in the charts once, so

[00:13:12] Steven Stiefel: also, you know, if you get all the way to production, regardless of which way, the other culture is much more forgiving. Of a final product than they are at the decision point of should we make this or is it too British? 

[00:13:27] Teddy Smith: Yeah, that's interesting once it's you know 

[00:13:30] Steven Stiefel: We watched baby reindeer which was huge in america at the same time that it was huge in britain And there's there's a lot of things in that show that are a little hard for the american audience the, at the sentence level, but in the broader picture, it's very easy to understand.

[00:13:52] Teddy Smith: Yep. 

[00:13:53] Steven Stiefel: It's a universal story in a certain way. 

[00:13:55] Teddy Smith: Some of the accents may be a bit difficult to understand, but 

[00:14:00] Steven Stiefel: yeah. But, you know, it just, it translated very well for whatever reason. 

[00:14:06] Teddy Smith: Yeah, no, that was, that was really good. One of the reasons I wanted to ask that question was because on, Martyn, on your website, you've got this quote, which I thought was quite interesting.

[00:14:15] Teddy Smith: You put, He describes his writing technique as unusual. Whilst most writers plan their plot lines and twists and make extensive notes, Martyn states that once he has characters figures out and the basic storyline planned, He prefers to let the story develop organically and he has no real perceptions, preconceptions on how the story will end or what fate the characters will have in store.

[00:14:33] Teddy Smith: And I was like, okay, that is firstly, that's really interesting to hear how writers write like that, but how does that fit in with working together? Because that must be quite difficult to deal with that sort of style. 

[00:14:45] M.E Ellington: No, I think we found a way around it. Steve's very structured and I'm not. So Steve's, Steve's able to, I'll, I'll just go off and say, Oh, wouldn't it be great if this happened?

[00:14:56] M.E Ellington: And Steve's like, well, no, that's even for science fiction. That's absurd. Don't be so stupid. 

[00:15:01] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:15:01] M.E Ellington: So we're very sort of good. I'll, I'll come up with sort of really out there ideas and we'll adapt them and we'll, we'll, we'll bring them in to, to make it fit within the story. But. Yeah, I just, the way that I look at writing in my own novels, such as, you know, Devolution of a Species, which is a climate fiction book that I wrote, I had the characters, I had the basics of the story, but, you know, this is a worldwide ending event, why not just let it develop as it would naturally?

[00:15:33] M.E Ellington: Give it, give it some legs and just let it run, and Of course, you've got to check back and you've got to, you know, you rewrite things and you, you figure things out ahead of time. And when I started writing that book, it turned into a, into a story that, that wasn't the story that I set out to write because of that.

[00:15:52] M.E Ellington: And I, I found that absolutely fascinating because suddenly I was doing research on carbon dioxide and, How the planet breathes and how we breathes and the Gaia hypothesis and, and all of these fantastic we and wonderful things. I mean that's now been disproven, but it ended up being the undercurrent for the book.

[00:16:14] M.E Ellington: But I didn't start off with the Gaia hypothesis. It wasn't until probably I was a quarter of the, we book through the book that I was doing research for something else that I stumbled upon it and I thought, oh, that's so cool. 

[00:16:26] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That's 

[00:16:26] M.E Ellington: now gonna be what, what this story's about. 

[00:16:30] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That's very interesting.

[00:16:32] Steven Stiefel: From my perspective, Martyn's a purposeful experimenter. I've, I've dealt mostly with edit as an editor, with not a co writer with people who aren't, and who will go off on tangents that you're like, this doesn't belong in the novel. But I think Martyn values his time enough not to do that. So he doesn't, he doesn't write himself off into, into little side rooms that have nothing to do with the main thrust of the story.

[00:17:02] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:17:02] Steven Stiefel: And so, there isn't, I don't feel like he's working too far away from a structured writer who outlines. And to be fair, I don't sit down and figure out a book from start to finish before I start drafting. I work back and forth. I like to know what's going to happen for the next, let's say, 30 pages or the next.

[00:17:25] Steven Stiefel: Five times I sit down to write. And I like to keep ahead of myself and not wander off into those little dead ends myself. And I usually have a pretty good sense of the ending. We did struggle with the ending on this one. But we think we found it and I've, we haven't written it fully. We've got it in the rough draft but not in a polished sense.

[00:17:48] Steven Stiefel: And I've run, I've pitched the ending to my beta readers and they They liked it. So, we feel like we, we don't know that we, we're hoping we can land the plane, but at least we know where the runway is. How, how do you find those beta readers? They're excellent. 

[00:18:05] Teddy Smith: No, I meant, how did I find them? Yeah, how did you find them?

[00:18:08] Teddy Smith: Not, not like how do you find their quality? 

[00:18:10] Steven Stiefel: They're writers I've known for a very long time. I have a writing group just just through the process. Some of the, the ones I know not as well, I've found through the pandemic on Twitter, Martyn and I are. Part of a pretty extensive writing network.

[00:18:27] Steven Stiefel: We're not super active in that, but, you know, if I put out a tweet saying, Anybody want to read a novel? I can, I can, somebody will come back and say yes. 

[00:18:38] Teddy Smith: Right, okay. 

[00:18:40] Steven Stiefel: And it might be an exchange, you know, I'll read your novel if you'll read this. 

[00:18:43] Teddy Smith: Yeah. What's the name of the network? 

[00:18:46] M.E Ellington: Yeah, and we have other readers, we have writer readers, as Steve said, who understand, The construction and the process of things, but we also have a couple of readers who are just readers that just buy books, so kind of the target audience 

[00:19:00] Teddy Smith: people 

[00:19:01] M.E Ellington: that we give for the harvesting, we've already given them what was essentially the first draft.

[00:19:07] M.E Ellington: Come back with any notes. Does it make sense? One of them came back with some really interesting points which I won't go into because I don't want to spoil it. But yeah, she came back with some really interesting points, which, which almost sort of, re pointed some of the, some of the plot points to it.

[00:19:26] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:19:27] M.E Ellington: So they're, they're, they're very helpful as well because that's your target audience. It's all right, you know, if you're building a car, it's all right. The technicians and the designers saying it's great, but you need the public to, to understand. To want to drive it as well. 

[00:19:40] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That is really interesting.

[00:19:42] Teddy Smith: I mean, a lot of people listening to this are maybe writing their first book, or they haven't got such a good professional network as you've got. What advice would you give to them for, for them to find that network and that beta group of readers that can help them in the same way that you've had help?

[00:19:57] M.E Ellington: First book. First book, if you look on the communities pages and, and just look for local authors, local writers, you know, people that are sort of maybe a bit further down the train track than they are. 

[00:20:09] Teddy Smith: So like local writing groups to your area, I mean. 

[00:20:12] M.E Ellington: Yeah, they're, they're, they're really, they're very, very useful.

[00:20:16] M.E Ellington: As Steve said, Twitter or X or whatever it's called, we still refer to it as Twitter, I think everybody does. Again, very easy to join the community that we're all really supportive of each other. We're not in competition with each other. You know, if someone wins something or gets something, it's fantastic news for all of us.

[00:20:34] M.E Ellington: It shows that, you know, it's still possible. So, yeah, there's a lot of it about you know, your local library. They'll have connections to local authors and groups. They might even have meetings there. Things like that. 

[00:20:49] Steven Stiefel: Yeah, and if you're really having trouble, you can Maybe put up, go to the groups and, you know, ask for some, you know, say that you'd be willing to pay a certain amount of money for editing your notes.

[00:21:03] Steven Stiefel: But you have to be careful with that. Cause you can get some really, you can get great stuff. You can get a, you can get an amazing. Response from somebody for a small amount of money. You can also have somebody charge you a fortune for nothing. Very helpful. 

[00:21:16] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Yeah, that's true The um, one of your books that you've written together is called tomorrow's flights and I love the premise of it talking about the these archaeologists that find like a, another archaeologist who's been buried from a previous age amongst like the bones of a dinosaur.

[00:21:36] Teddy Smith: Could you tell, I mean, it's such an interesting concept. It's kind of taking that time travel in a different way. Tell us a bit about that book, what inspired us and how you dealt with writing it together. 

[00:21:47] M.E Ellington: I'd had a story in my head for years, so, I'm much older than you, so you won't remember that on a Saturday morning on, on Tyne T's ITV, there used to be a show called Lynn's Looking.

[00:21:59] M.E Ellington: And it played opposite Swap Shop, which you won't remember either. But it always finished the Saturday morning off with some kind of Harry Houseman monster effects, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, or Valley of Kwanji, or something like that. And I, I consumed that stuff as a kid. Growing up and still do to this day and so I just had this story in my head for years about these scientists, these paleontologists that are digging up a dinosaur and they come across a fossilized human.

[00:22:30] M.E Ellington: Fossilization takes millions of years. So there couldn't be fossilized human remains at this point. And then they discover parts of an aeroplane, and they call in the National Transportation Safety Board, because of course it's set in America, because why wouldn't it be? And, you know, they discover that this plane hasn't actually taken off yet, because with time travel, of course, you can do what you want, you can pretty much make the rules up as you go.

[00:22:56] M.E Ellington: But there's a B story, or another, a double A side, let's call it. If it was a single from the 70s and that's about a group of passengers that bought a plane for a routine red eye and they hit some unusual turbulence and a flung into the past into the Cretaceous period. And so the story runs parallel with each other is that we've got these paleontologists and crash investigators piecing together what's happened, but we've also got the people on board the plane trying to survive.

[00:23:31] M.E Ellington: Yeah. And it, and it sort of climaxes and comes together at the end of the book with a very, what we think is open in case we got offered millions of pounds to write the sequel, but yet still very satisfying ending in case we don't. and I, I suddenly found myself in 2008 with some time on my hands.

[00:23:49] M.E Ellington: It was a huge personal and professional change for me. And so I wrote it, and I self published it, and it did pretty well. It became an Amazon Genre Bestseller. With very little marketing because I, I mean, I'm still not a marketing person. we'll come on to that in a second. so I got a bit encouraged and very, very, very long story short.

[00:24:10] M.E Ellington: I sold an old car that I had, which was a. Peugeot 607. Now remember that because it comes back in a second. And I hired one of Stephen King's former editors, a guy called Mike Garrett, who edited it. And as Steve was saying, you can, you've got to be careful. So I vetted him and blah, blah. And I think it was about 1, 800 to edit the book.

[00:24:30] M.E Ellington: So I got his notes back and I rewrote it. And I was able to find a literary agent in New York with it. And that's how I met Steve. She introduced me to Steve. and then after he'd done my first book, which I mentioned earlier on, which became the Marcia Ellis incident. And that was my first traditionally published book.

[00:24:52] M.E Ellington: We then got to work on what was called Yesterday's Flight. And we, we, Stephen pitched the idea of rather than just editing it again and making it further ready for the marketplace, let's just rewrite the whole thing. He saw a lot of potential in it. And he was right, because I was never fully satisfied.

[00:25:10] M.E Ellington: It was the first book I'd written, and it was the first fiction thing I'd written since leaving school. You know, it's pretty modern, comprehensive. And so we did. And that's, that's the book that we wrote starting in 2016, and we launched it in 2021. It came out 

[00:25:25] Teddy Smith: right. And how, how's the, how's that, how, how's the sales gone for that book so far?

[00:25:30] Teddy Smith: Has it been good since the rewrites and the, the change? 

[00:25:33] M.E Ellington: They've, we, they've, they've, they've been good as far as we can take them. Um, what I mean by that is that we shopped it around traditionally to literary agents and publishers, but we could never really get a deal that, that we were happy with. And so we'd already started this little production company of ours, and we thought, well, why don't we just have a publishing imprint as well and publish it ourselves?

[00:25:55] M.E Ellington: So what do you mean 

[00:25:56] Teddy Smith: by imprint? 

[00:25:57] M.E Ellington: So it's, it's, it's kind of part of the production company. So it publishes, it publishes through the name Mess, which, which is our two initials put together. So we published it and it's through, you can get it through Gardens or Ingram. So it's, it's a, it is a published book.

[00:26:14] M.E Ellington: It's not a self published title. We've done quite well. It's, it's, it's been a, an Amazon number one international bestseller twice. And it's also had over a million pages read in the Kindle lending library, but our expertise or lack thereof of marketing and the funds that we have available have really taken it as far as we can.

[00:26:37] M.E Ellington: So, so really to elevate it to what we believe it's full potential is we're now looking for investors to come on board with MESS. And help us take this book and The Harvesting when it comes out much, much, much further and also produce a short that Steve's written as well. So, there's a lot of things going on with different productions at the moment, but but that's the next stage, really, is getting investors involved and interested in this, yeah.

[00:27:07] Steven Stiefel: Right. For your, listeners, a couple things that I think have been helpful for the book were Martyn found a terrific image for the cover, and it's a pretty high concept, I'm sure you'd agree with that. 

[00:27:23] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:27:24] Steven Stiefel: And I think that the cover is really evocative, and my background's in publishing, so I was able to bring in professional Designers relatively inexpensively to do the covers and the, and the layout of the book, which actually take, that's one thing about self publishing.

[00:27:44] Steven Stiefel: That's a little unknown is that the inside of self published books are not designed, but other books are designed. And so tomorrow's flight is a designed book on the interior and it's been pretty heavily copy edited as well through my writer friends and beta readers. There are a couple of mistakes we're aware of, but pretty much.

[00:28:06] Steven Stiefel: In sync with what you'd find in any traditionally published book, but as far as sales go, we think that the cover and the premise are a big part of it, but we had a lot of success through the Kindle lending library. And we took advantage of that as much as, as possible. And we ran specials where we did giveaways where, which would just boost our sales tremendously.

[00:28:39] Steven Stiefel: And we believe that that's because, and this is a helpful tip, I think, is that when you are a member of the lending library. Every book download is essentially free to you because you've already paid for it. So when you see a free download, it's irrelevant to you. It's just advertising. And so you download it.

[00:29:02] Steven Stiefel: Well, we get paid for that Kindle lending library download where we don't for the one that we're offering. 

[00:29:10] Teddy Smith: Yes. 

[00:29:11] Steven Stiefel: But it's the same to the consumer. And so we would see a huge amount of increase in income over those what we run them three days, maybe. Yeah. Just over a weekend. Wow. And we, we'd get, you know, we, we had thousands, I mean, not like multiple thousands, but three, 3000, 4,000, 2000 over that period.

[00:29:32] Steven Stiefel: Just even borrow the first one that we did, 

[00:29:34] M.E Ellington: which took it straight to number one in about four countries. We, we got about 9,000 downloads. 9,000. Okay. Wow. 

[00:29:42] Teddy Smith: In total, 

[00:29:43] M.E Ellington: I was looking at the sales figures for flight, and in total we've had, I think it's just under 27,000 downloads. Well, we've run promotions with it, so, yeah, 

[00:29:53] Teddy Smith: yeah, that's amazing.

[00:29:54] Teddy Smith: And then 

[00:29:55] M.E Ellington: you see this, as Steve said, you see this huge bump then in the lending library, it follows on. 

[00:30:00] Teddy Smith: It's going to be super helpful if you ever do release a sequel as well, because you've got those 27, 000 downloads. Now the people have got those, those Kindles. Your, your sequel is going to be posted to those people like on the Kindle homepage and things like that.

[00:30:13] Teddy Smith: So. It's a really good platform for you building your, the second book we do, 

[00:30:17] Steven Stiefel: there was a, there was a key sentence in there. All you have to do is write a sequel. Just write a sequel. Yeah, . Just write another book, . 

[00:30:24] M.E Ellington: It's just, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, funny you should say that actually, because we did, we did embed Easter Eggs in the first.

[00:30:33] M.E Ellington: In case we wrote a second book. 

[00:30:35] Teddy Smith: Yeah, nice. So 

[00:30:36] M.E Ellington: anybody that's read Tomorrow's Flight look out for, or is planning on now reading Tomorrow's Flight, and please do, because it's available from all good bookstores. It's a really good book. 

[00:30:44] Teddy Smith: From all good lending libraries. 

[00:30:46] M.E Ellington: Yeah, you will, you will if, if, if you're reading it carefully enough, you will see Easter eggs that will work with the second book if we ever get round to writing it.

[00:30:57] Teddy Smith: Yeah, amazing. So what's your plans for that book? Have you got, so you've got your mess imprint. Are you planning on using that company to take it to TV production or anything like that? 

[00:31:07] M.E Ellington: That's the plan, Teddy, as I said, but the thing really now is, is, is what we need now as investors. We need, we need you know, none, none of what we're trying to do is cheap.

[00:31:17] M.E Ellington: and neither Steve or I are rich. So, we, we have a lot of plans. We have some good ideas. We have things that we know that work. We have a few marketing ideas that we're not sure of, but yeah, it's, it's what our focus now is we've got a couple of focuses and I'll lay them out very, very quickly, Steve's written a short.

[00:31:39] M.E Ellington: Based on the exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe, and I'll let Steve tell you about that, which, by the way, is super spooky and fantastic, and I love stuff like that. We've got this novel coming on. We've just signed our first client author, who's a local lad. So I'm now, I'm currently working on his book, doing the first round of close edits, and then it will go to Steve, and he'll do the, do a closer round of edits before we get it ready for publishing.

[00:32:06] M.E Ellington: And obviously we're writing, we're, we're getting finished off with our first book in the trilogy for The Harvesting. But really to push us forward now, we're at the, the, the sort of the investment stage. But and that would also include create, making, producing this short. Movie, we've got a producer and a director and all those things lined up.

[00:32:26] M.E Ellington: We just, you know, it's, it's, it's the same with everybody. Now you've just got to find the money to do it. 

[00:32:31] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Just before we go on to the harvest thing, I was just thinking about investors. So what techniques have you used to try and get any, have you thought about Kickstarter or anything like that?

[00:32:40] M.E Ellington: Yeah, we've, we've, we've spoke about that. It's something that we are looking at. It's very competitive, and we've got to figure out which is, which is going to be the best way to approach it. Much more than that we haven't done yet. Because we're just rolling into the end of the year now. And we've got some things directly in front of us now that need to be moved out the way.

[00:33:04] M.E Ellington: You know, finished. So, at the moment we haven't really done a lot. To, to look for investors or attract investors, but it, it is firmly up there on the to-do list. 

[00:33:15] Teddy Smith: Mm-hmm. Have a think about Kickstart. I spoke. Yeah, I spoke to, um, it's 

[00:33:19] M.E Ellington: just something in the new year that we'll be, yeah. We'll be placing as a high priority.

[00:33:24] Teddy Smith: I spoke to Kevin J. Anderson, who's, he's the author of the June books and he's had some really good success with Kickstarter. And for him it's all about providing extra value to the. Customers who are investing in the business. So I think it, you know, there's, you've got lots of avenues there where you could create short stories or something like that around the topics you want to get investment in.

[00:33:46] Teddy Smith: So 

[00:33:48] Steven Stiefel: we, um, exclamation, um, was a finalist in a short script competition and one of the awards was a detailed meeting about using a funding service. And it was really an impressive. Description and I know some of the writers on Twitter who who've done it and one thing I would say is that it is a job 

[00:34:17] Teddy Smith: to take 

[00:34:17] Steven Stiefel: that on.

[00:34:17] Steven Stiefel: So you have to, you can't just, you know, say, you know, it's my birthday and I'd love to get 20 bucks. You have to really sit together and put together a plan and you have to work your once you launch. Any sort of funding that becomes your job for the, for the window that you set up and they had all sorts of advice on what to do and what not to do in that meeting, I still have the notes.

[00:34:45] Steven Stiefel: I don't quite recall all the details on that, but everything they said made sense and essentially what they were telling you is do a lot of work, you know, and make it purposeful according to their guidelines. 

[00:34:59] Teddy Smith: Yeah, for sure. 

[00:35:00] Steven Stiefel: I think it's intuitive for some people, but it is a lot of work. 

[00:35:05] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely.

[00:35:06] Teddy Smith: Yeah. I mean, maybe you'd need a different approach to getting those investors. Now with the, with the new book, so the harvesting. So tell me a bit about that book and firstly, tell me what the book's about and, the storyline and how you wrote it, but then also let's go on to your plans for getting onto TV.

[00:35:24] Teddy Smith: Cause I know you've got some quite exciting plans for that book. 

[00:35:27] M.E Ellington: Yeah The Harvesting is a short book that I wrote in 2011, and I wanted to write an alien invasion, not novella, short story, but 

[00:35:37] Teddy Smith: yeah, 

[00:35:38] M.E Ellington: and again, as a kid, you know, Earth versus the flying saucers and all of these, I just consumed them and consumed them and still do.

[00:35:46] M.E Ellington: but the problem I've always had is, is that, is that, Independence Days is a spectacular film and it's Emmerich at his absolute best. I think we all agree that it's, you know, up there. The problem I've always had is I've never, ever, ever been convinced that if aliens came down to take over us, they would use, they would invade us traditionally with military.

[00:36:09] M.E Ellington: Now, with everything that's been said, In Congress and at the Pentagon lately, I might be proved wrong in a few weeks, but I've always thought that if they've got the technology to fly across, you know, the vastness of space. They wouldn't be relying on laser beams and things to, to, to beat us. So I came up with the idea of, you know, when we want to examine a tiger or a rhino, we put it to sleep.

[00:36:34] M.E Ellington: Why fight it? Why wrestle it to the ground when you can just put it to sleep? So I came up with the idea that that's what the aliens would do. And they deliver this, this sleep thing, whatever it might be, through, through a rain, through this red rain that, that, that saturates the earth and everything that's living.

[00:36:51] M.E Ellington: Goes to sleep. So the basic premise is it's set in the north of England between England and Scotland We've got three guys We've got three guys coming home from work the work on the oil rigs so the driving home from Aberdeen to The main character lives in Hutton rugby And this red rain starts, and they fall asleep, and the car crashes, and they wake up to this world that's now seemingly devoid of human life.

[00:37:19] M.E Ellington: So, of course, we've, we've got the traditional tropes of he's gotta get back to his family. So we've got Rick from The Walking Dead now. And of course they come across other, you know, survivors, or whatever you want to call them. But, but we've also introduced a new horror threat, which are called the Rejects.

[00:37:35] M.E Ellington: So the Rejects A people and animals that have, that have directly consumed the red rain, either through drinking it or through a wound or whatever. And it sort of turns them into a 28 day, sort of, rage virus. So they're not zombies, they're living people, they're not, they haven't come back from the dead.

[00:37:56] M.E Ellington: But they can be rescued, it's an infection which can be You know, that can be taken from, but they'll remain, they'll remember what they did while they were in the reject state. So, two of the main female characters, one becomes a reject, and she tries to kill the other one that isn't. and later in, later in the series, you know, she gets rescued, and she, she gets treated for it, and of course she's no longer the reject, but she still remembers trying to kill this other character, and of course the other character, it, So, we've built a lot of layers into this story.

[00:38:28] M.E Ellington: One of the biggest ones is that all the women suddenly become pregnant, and we've got this strange boy that keeps appearing to different members of the group, if you like but in different, at different ages and things like that. And we've got government coercion in with what we've called the owls, which are the other world life forms, so they're the aliens.

[00:38:50] M.E Ellington: But there's no big battleships, there's no big Independence Day battles, it's, it's very, very micro, so it focuses, it's, it, it's basically, if you can remember the season one of The Walking Dead that Frank Darabont did, and how confined And how tight and grounded that sure was. That's kind of the feel that we've gone with for the harvesting.

[00:39:13] M.E Ellington: So it's, it's, it's early invasion and abduction, but, but on a worldwide scale. and with the added twists and dangers. And one of the big benefits we think is that, is that because it's on a worldwide scale, rights can be sold to any other country that wants to make it and tell their version. Of the story as well as they've done with Bird Box for instance.

[00:39:36] Teddy Smith: Wow. That's super interesting. I mean, it does remind me of The Walking Dead a lot. Like that, as you say, that first series where it was really like intense and difficult. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah. Wow. That sounds very interesting. So what's your plan with that, with the production and getting it for TV, if, if, if you're able to get that far?

[00:39:53] M.E Ellington: Do you want to take that, Steve? 

[00:39:55] Steven Stiefel: Well, we kind of touched on that a little bit earlier, but yeah, I mean, we've got this meeting next week. will be interesting. I, I, I'd say we're kind of on hold for that meeting just to kind of read the room on that. Now, they've already this production companies, a British company, and they have already indicated that they're probably not interested in the, the project and in buying the project.

[00:40:18] Steven Stiefel: They just wanted to have a conversation with us as a general meeting to see what else we're up to. So they like the project well enough to, to meet with us. And so I think our next move will probably come out of that meeting pretty exciting. I mean, in terms of moving forward without that, our next objective is to publish the novel, which again, we're targeting early next year.

[00:40:45] Steven Stiefel: Yeah. Um, we've got the launch of that using that as sort of a way to springboard into additional cold calling or approaching production companies or whomever. Yeah. It 

[00:41:01] Teddy Smith: is interesting. It does sound from just the way you describe it, that it's kind of come from almost like a TV approach first, and then the idea is for a program and then you're doing the book afterwards and you can really feel that from the way you're describing it, which is so interesting because I've never, haven't really seen that too much.

[00:41:19] M.E Ellington: Well, it's not by design. It's sort of Well, you shouldn't say that because 

[00:41:24] Teddy Smith: it comes across well, so 

[00:41:26] M.E Ellington: Does it? Oh, well, take that bit out. 

[00:41:28] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:41:30] M.E Ellington: Yeah. 

[00:41:32] Teddy Smith: It was all the plan all along, yeah. 

[00:41:34] M.E Ellington: Yeah, it was. It was, yeah, it's a very intricate plan that we've been hatching for the last 10 years. 

[00:41:38] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:41:41] M.E Ellington: We didn't just stumble on it, I promise.

[00:41:43] Teddy Smith: Yeah, no, it's really exciting. Yeah. So, I mean, the last thing I wanted to talk about was, um, we did again, touch on it just a bit earlier, but with your mess flicks productions, you're now helping other writers who, you know, you might want to put into print and to get their work shown as well. So what was it that got you started with that?

[00:42:01] Teddy Smith: And where where are you with that project? 

[00:42:04] M.E Ellington: Well, we're not looking for submissions. It says on the website that we're not taking submissions, but this, this is a guy that I met through someone else that I know, who came up to me and introduced himself, a really, really nice guy called John, and he said, I've got an idea for a book.

[00:42:22] M.E Ellington: Every writer's heard that one, I don't know how many times. So, you know, I'm a nice guy, I think. So I said, oh, okay, well, well, tell me about the idea that you've got for a book. And it was a really interesting premise. He, he has two areas of history that he, that he loves. He, he loves the Second World War and he loves the 1066 era with the Vikings and the Hastings, Battle of Hastings and the French Invasion and this kind of thing.

[00:42:49] M.E Ellington: And what he came up with was this young adult book I don't know if you can hear it, but there's an ice cream van just coming. 

[00:42:58] Teddy Smith: Yeah, so you could just hear it, yeah. 

[00:43:01] M.E Ellington: It's just banged right outside my door as well. Just right outside. Anyway getting back to it. So, the premise of the book is that we've got an evacuee called Eric, who gets taken from home and put into Riddle, just outside of York.

[00:43:16] M.E Ellington: And one stormy, horrible night, he runs away from where he's been placed, because it's a horrible family. And he slips and almost falls into the River Ouse, and as he's grasping at the riverbank, he gets hold of this magical axe from the Northmen. It was lost in a battle there many, many hundreds of years ago, and it transports him back to the time of uh, Harold and, and this kind of thing, and, and he has this wonderful adventure with him before he ends up coming back into his own time.

[00:43:47] M.E Ellington: And it was just a really interesting premise and I said, well look, send over what you've got and we'll have a read and Steve was still over so we both read it and, you know, it was okay, this is his debut novel, it's his first book so I went back to him with a few notes after Steve and I discussed it and he sent back his second draft and I thought, when I very first started with Yesterday's Flight before I sold the car to pay for it.

[00:44:15] M.E Ellington: Mike Garris I got helped a lot by a publishing company called SHN, a guy called Stephen, who was really helpful. He really mentored me a lot. And, and made it quite easy and simple for me. And I just wanted to kind of pay it forward. And we saw promise in this story. So, I've spent probably the last four months working on the book for him.

[00:44:41] M.E Ellington: Going back with notes and having meetings and getting together over a coffee and exploring different ways that we can use the time sequence and different ideas of how we can do things. And we've now got what is a pretty good first draft. Manuscript story's pretty tight, it's in good shape. So I'm, I'm currently going through a first round of edits on that, which I'll then send back to John, because the thing that's very tricky, and having been traditionally published myself is, what you don't want to do is take John's voice.

[00:45:15] M.E Ellington: Out of the story. This is his story, and it's his book, and it has to be in his voice. But it's going through our publishing imprint, so it's got to be of a certain standard. So it's a very fine act. Very fine balance act, to get correct. So, when I've made the changes that I've made And I'll send it back to John.

[00:45:33] M.E Ellington: I need him to accept them willingly. And assuming that he does that, then it'll go to Steve for the second round. And then it'll come back to me, and I'll go through it again, and I'll send that to John for him then to sign off. So we're probably looking at the March Spring launch for the book. And it's called Eric and the Axe of the Northmen.

[00:45:55] M.E Ellington: And it will be our first external published book and it will be young adults, which is unusual for us because we're adults. And when I say adult, I don't mean sexy time adult, I mean grown up adult. So yeah, and it's really exciting and I, and I'm really help, uh, enjoying the process of seeing this, this.

[00:46:13] M.E Ellington: You know, this new writer coming, coming through and seeing, seeing his confidence growing you know, with each draft that we get. 

[00:46:21] Steven Stiefel: Brilliant. So the traditional publishing route is very painful these days. You know, let's say you want an agent. Well, getting an agent's really difficult and it feels like a real win, but really, all you've really done is, Got somebody who said that they'll take 15 percent if they can sell it.

[00:46:43] Steven Stiefel: You know, you haven't, you haven't really accomplished anything concrete yet. Now that agent has to then go out to publishers and find one of them to take on the book, and if they publish, they generally give you about 15%. Of sales, you know, and advances are all over the map right now, including asking authors to pay advances.

[00:47:07] Steven Stiefel: And so you pay to get published now instead of getting paid on an advance. That's pretty standard for mid level houses who don't see that they're going to make their money back. Because that's one of the unfortunate aspects of publishing now is that most books don't make money. 

[00:47:26] Teddy Smith: So 

[00:47:27] Steven Stiefel: the way that they make money is by, or the way they don't, they lose less money is by charging the author sort of a Retainer feed for the publishing.

[00:47:36] Teddy Smith: And 

[00:47:36] Steven Stiefel: this is on print on demand, even through traditional houses now. So they're not publishing, you know, 3000 books and setting them in a warehouse. They're still doing it. They're doing it the Amazon way of, you know, you order a book, they ship it off, make it and send it to you. and so we're doing is kind of.

[00:47:57] Steven Stiefel: Creating a different model for writers who don't want to go through that. And writing those cover letters is painful. That takes two or three hours to write one of those and you've got to write 50 of them. So, I mean, it's almost more work than writing the novel itself. I have three friends who have books that I really like, and they're sort of in the queue after this.

[00:48:19] Steven Stiefel: And I've always, I've extended that offer to these people because I'm familiar with the books I've read them. I, you know, it's like, if you ever get tired of going the traditional route. We have an option for you to publish this. We can get this published for you, and you'll be on our imprint. And eventually we'll have a website and a full catalog of all the publications that we'll eventually do.

[00:48:40] Steven Stiefel: Yeah. 

[00:48:41] M.E Ellington: Yeah, it is, as Steve said, I mean, you can, it's three or four hours work to, because every agent that you approach wants a different type of format. They want it double spaced, single spaced, the first three chapters, the first 10, 000 words, however they want to do it. And very often not, you actually get ghosted.

[00:49:00] M.E Ellington: As an experiment, actually, last year, I wrote to three or four agents with Tomorrow's Flight, bearing in mind the success that it's already had, and every one of them ghosted us. 

[00:49:12] Teddy Smith: Right, well, okay. 

[00:49:14] M.E Ellington: So there's a book that's had over a million pages read, that's been a number one international bestseller twice, has got nearly 900 reviews on Amazon at 4.

[00:49:21] M.E Ellington: 6 or whatever it is. And we couldn't even get a, it's, it's a ready made market and we couldn't even get a response on that book. So that's, that's where it is at the moment. That's where the industry is. And that's why as, as, as difficult as it was for us knowing nothing about it. That's why we went the route that we went.

[00:49:44] Teddy Smith: Well, it's been great. And 

[00:49:46] Steven Stiefel: so there's hope in that message that, you know, there, there is a way to do this. It's just maybe not the traditional way. Yeah. 

[00:49:53] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That, that, that sort of hybrid model is, is becoming a bit more popular now, but you're right, sometimes people. Let's do that initial investment upfront, which is obviously outreach to some people.

[00:50:04] Teddy Smith: So it's good to see that there's other options for people who are looking at these things. I mean, it's been great chatting to you. I've been, it's been absolutely fascinating, like hearing about your projects for the books and where you're going to take them. If people want to get in touch with you or to follow you around the internet, where's the best place for them to do that?

[00:50:20] M.E Ellington: They can go through my website Martynellington. com or through messflix. com. We're both on twitter. It's at steve steven stiefel and at Martyn ellington if they want to get it. I'm at steve stiefel. That's steve stiefel Yeah, 

[00:50:35] Steven Stiefel: yeah, steven stiefel is another guy who I actually follow we've we've had experiences He's interestingly he's a writer So it's a little confusing.

[00:50:45] M.E Ellington: Good God, Steve, there's not two of you, is there? I don't know whether there are. 

[00:50:50] Teddy Smith: It's like that guy on Twitter called John Lewis, and every Christmas he gets loads of messages about the John Lewis advert coming out. Yeah, 

[00:50:55] M.E Ellington: yeah. Great. 

[00:50:58] Teddy Smith: So, yeah. Pardon 

[00:50:58] M.E Ellington: me? So it's, it's at Steve. Steve at Martyn Ellington. Great and brilliant.

[00:51:03] M.E Ellington: Then, as I said, we'll there's the, the two websites. 

[00:51:05] Teddy Smith: We'll put links to all that stuff and also all the books in the show notes there. So yeah, thank you very much for coming. It's been a absolutely fascinating conversation. Just before we head off, just got one more question for each of you. So what book do you recommend everyone should be reading?

[00:51:19] Teddy Smith: We'll start with Martyn 

[00:51:21] M.E Ellington: from our catalog. 

[00:51:22] Teddy Smith: No, no, just one that you like. 

[00:51:24] M.E Ellington: Just my favorite book of all time is The Fog by James Herbert. 

[00:51:30] Teddy Smith: Interesting. I don't know that one. How about you, Stephen? I, 

[00:51:36] Steven Stiefel: I 

[00:51:36] Teddy Smith: would 

[00:51:37] Steven Stiefel: do something a little more American highbrow. Henry James is a good choice because he's, he seems very British but he's American.

[00:51:47] Steven Stiefel: I've written an adaptation of the aspirin papers. Which is a terrific read if you can get past the first 10 pages. He, every sentence seems to be, I dare you to stop, I dare you to stop, I dare you to stop. Yeah. Once you get past it, it's a, it's quite an interesting little thriller. It's about a, it's about a, a scholar who discovers that his, that the, the writer he studies died many, many years ago, that the widow is still alive and she has all Aspern's papers.

[00:52:21] Steven Stiefel: And so he hatches a scheme to go to, to rent an apartment from her in Venice. She owns a big palazzo on the canals. And so he moves in with her and tries to scheme on how to get the letters. 

[00:52:37] Teddy Smith: Right. Interesting. Well, we'll put links to all those things in the show notes. 

[00:52:41] M.E Ellington: Yeah. One, one quick note on the fog is, is that it's not the film.

[00:52:45] M.E Ellington: It's not, this is, this is an entirely different story by James Heard. 

[00:52:50] Teddy Smith: Okay, I have to check it out. Well, thank you very much both for joining us and we'll speak again soon. 

[00:52:56] M.E Ellington: Yeah, that's great. Thank you Thank you. 

[00:52:59] Teddy Smith: Thank you so much for tuning into the publishing performance podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring I love chatting to authors writers and people in the publishing world now just before we wrap up Let me tell you about Publishingformance, the number one platform for authors who want to increase Amazon book sales, but I'm not really sure where to start.

[00:53:18] Teddy Smith: Now, this show is all about helping you to sell more books. And if you're looking to boost your publishing game and to maximize your book's potential on Amazon, then Publishingformance is designed to help authors just like you to grow your readership and to reach a much wider audience. Now, I know that Amazon ads can be slightly complicated, which is why Publishingformance is like having a personalized ad account manager to create your ad campaigns, to choose your best keywords and to make adjustments in real time.

[00:53:47] Teddy Smith: Now, if you're investing in ads, you really want to make sure that your investment is being used effectively and Publishing Performance does just that. It aims to make your budget go further, improve your organic rank and target keywords more effectively. Just go to publishingperformance. com to get started with Amazon Ads for just 1.