『Writing and Selling Stories with Angelique Fawns』のカバーアート

Writing and Selling Stories with Angelique Fawns

Writing and Selling Stories with Angelique Fawns

著者： Angelique Fawns
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概要

 Season 2 of "Read Me A Nightmare" shifts its focus to conversations with writers, editors, and creators working in and around dark fiction — about craft, career, and the realities of making stories in the world.Visit www.fawns.ca to learn more. Please --if you enjoy the episode, leave a review!

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  • Direct Sales & Scare Mail with David Viergutz

    Direct Sales & Scare Mail with David Viergutz
    2026/03/28
    David Viergutz has dialed into something old made new again. It started with Scare Mail and is now a full story service at Epistolary Fiction.And he made $ 4 Million last year doing it.💰💰💰Prefer to watch?I was scrolling Facebook last year and froze the screen when I saw an ad for Scare Mail. What? As a horror fan and writer, I thought, this is sheer genius. Who wouldn’t want to find something that cool in their mailbox?Because, let’s face it. All I normally find in that green box outside my farmhouse is bills, ads for politicians and the occasional truly terrifying letter from the government.David Viergutz has a solution to one of my problems. The mailbox is no longer boring or just full of bad news.Plus, he may have solved another one of my problems… How to be profitable as a writer?(Give me six months and I’ll let you know how it’s going!)If you prefer to watch your interviews, here is the link to our chat on YouTube.These interviews dive deep into the truth of the publishing world in a friendly, accessible way for authors. To keep receiving all the best hints, join the next tier!AF: David, for people who are just discovering you, how did you get here? You’ve had such an unusual path into publishing.DV: My history is probably very similar to a lot of authors. At some point, you always wanted to be an author, then maybe you forgot about it, got a traditional job, and later found your way back.Along the way, I was in the service and in law enforcement, and that didn’t leave a lot of room for creativity. I became a personal trainer and had that business for a while. I remember standing over a client one day and saying out loud, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” At that point, I had written my first book.So I sold my gym. I was making about a hundred thousand dollars a year with it, and the year I sold it and published my first book, I made $220. My wife was thrilled to see how much money we were making.I’m a true overnight success. I wrote overnight for five years straight. (Authorial note: The more you hear the story behind successful authors, the more you realize there are almost NO overnight successes. It takes years of work to get to the tipping point.)I wrote 23 novels, stealing every second I could. I was always listening to podcasts on how to write better. I was reading books on how to write better. I got my master’s degree while standing in the evidence locker typing my thesis for six months straight. My chief gave me extra time so I could work on it.I spent a lot of time studying writing and the business of writing. I come from a true entrepreneur background. I come from sales. I come from selling very expensive personal training packages. So I’m kind of the reverse of most authors. Most authors are writers first and figure out the business later. I take a different approach. I’m a businessman who happens to do the writing, and I really enjoy that. If I want to write something, I think about how I can sell it first.I’ve spoken at Author Nation and at the Self Publishing Show in London. I’ve been featured in Indie Author Magazine and Writer’s Digest. And when you talk about ScareMail, really, that’s a brand, or several brands, that I own under a company called Epistolary. We are the world’s premier publisher for story letters and epistolary writing. As far as I know, I’m the only publisher on the planet focused specifically on story letters and epistolary writing. We don’t accept traditional novels. It has to be epistolary.AF: I love that. I’d also love to hear how far you’ve come, because I just listened to your interview with Joanna Penn when you didn’t even have your first warehouse yet. Your wife and kids were still stuffing envelopes. How did you go from that stage to where you are now?DV: I took the traditional approach like everybody else when it came to publishing. I had my books on Amazon because that was the easy place to have them. But I was always iterating on something different. Every single novel was something different, and I was always stretching the boundaries of where we are in sales, how we communicate with readers, how we sell to them, and what kinds of extras we can offer.So I spent about five years building an email list. My funnel at that time, right before I launched ScareMail, was to get free subscribers any way I could. Everything was focused on the subscriber. I didn’t care about sales. I cared about the subscriber.I spent about five years building that list and around a hundred thousand dollars to build it. I had 30,000 readers, and it was a cold list.AF: What do you mean by a cold list?DV: A cold list is a list where people come on, then disengage. They stop clicking on things, they stop reading, and you have to cull the herd. You get rid of them.If they’re not doing anything, you send them a series of emails asking, “What the hell are you doing? Why aren’t you clicking my stuff? Why aren’t you ...
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    29 分
  • Growing an Indie Brand with David Hankins

    Growing an Indie Brand with David Hankins
    2026/03/22
    David Hankins and I have been writing short stories and learning the industry together for several years. He’s helped me when I’ve gotten stuck with my Writers of the Future entries. (like, why are they rejecting me?!) Authorial note— he took a story from rejected to Silver Honorable Mention.I’ve been watching him sell multiple short stories, run Kickstarters, and self-publish two fun novels with avid admiration.David has been an inspiration as I forge my own path through the many ways writers find success. He’s not afraid to try new things while always coming across as a professional.I interviewed him when he first won several years ago, and he read one of his shorts!This is his second time on the podcast, and feel free to check out his books and learn more about him, here: https://davidhankins.comAngelique: You seem to have a real method to your madness. When it comes to indie publishing, what have you found works?David: Really the way I tend to do things is I find the people who have done very well, and then I mimic what they do because clearly it worked for them. Then I see if I can do what they did in order to reach the next level. With publishing and writing books, I took a look at some of the big names who moved from traditional publishing over to primarily indie, like Dean Wesley Smith and Kevin J. Anderson. Dean gave us a class on the history of publishing, and it really came down to publishing changing dramatically about every fifty years. Right now we’re in the middle of one of those changes. Once he did that analysis, he moved straight over to what was new and where that was going, and I said, all right, I’m going to do the same thing.Angelique: I love that. So when you decided to publish Death and the Tax Man, why did Kickstarter make sense to you?David: Dean Wesley Smith has done a bunch of Kickstarters, and a bunch of others I had followed had done Kickstarters, and I was like, all right, I’m going to launch my first book with a Kickstarter, which was a smashing success. My profit was between thirty and fifty percent. That Kickstarter made about eight thousand dollars, so I made a profit of three to four. Which is great because that means I started in the green.Angelique: That’s amazing. And for anyone nervous about trying Kickstarter, what do you think the real risk is?David: The worst that happens is it doesn’t fund and you’re out nothing but time. But if you do the things that you have seen work, and you’ve observed other people, just mimic what they’ve done. Look at people who have run that kind of Kickstarter. For nonfiction especially, you’re trying to hook people in a different way than you would for a novel. It’s not the adventure, the mystery. It’s, here, learn how to do the thing.Angelique: What’s one of the biggest things you’ve learned so far from indie publishing your trilogy?David: I learned that there are lots of different audience pools out there. Kickstarter is its own pool of readers. The people who are supporting me on Kickstarter are not necessarily the people who are finding me on Amazon, because they do their book shopping on Kickstarter. There’s some crossover, but the growth that I had in Kickstarter did not translate over into Amazon reviews.Angelique: That’s so interesting. What did that teach you about reviews and momentum?David: One of the things that I was always hesitant on and didn’t really do was giving away copies to get reviews. A friend of mine is rapid releasing an urban fantasy series, and she’s doing ARC copies and giving away the free books. I was like, I just had people pay for it on Kickstarter. But it’s a totally different audience. They never would’ve found me on Kickstarter, and my Kickstarter people aren’t the ones who are going over there looking for ARC books to read and review.Angelique: So are you wide, or are you in KU?David: I’ve gone wide, and I’ve loved being wide. I can sell through my website, and I’ve actually sold more through my website and through direct sales, like me going to conventions and fairs and stuff like that. That’s where I made most of my money last year. If I were in KU, I couldn’t sell on my own website.Angelique: That direct sales piece is really interesting. What do you use to power that side of things?David: My sales engine is Square. They have a storefront, which is very basic. Here’s your book, book, book, price, click, buy. And that’s all I need. It integrates via links, so I have my book cover on my website and say, click here for my shop. I use Square because I started with them for in-person sales, because they’re very, very easy for in-person sales. I wanted something that integrated all the same stuff. I wouldn’t have to maintain two different tracking systems. If I sell out of a book in person, then it shows on my website as not available.Angelique: Since you’ve had success with in-person sales, what have you found makes the biggest ...
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    35 分
  • The Unfiltered Truth About Indie Publishing with Mark Leslie

    The Unfiltered Truth About Indie Publishing with Mark Leslie
    2026/03/08
    Mark is a writer, an editor, a professional speaker, and a book nerd with a passion for craft beer.He’s also an ambassador for the Canadian publishing industry and my mentor.Prefer video? Watch this interview on YOUTUBE. It’s worth your while… I include a clip where I failed to hit record on our 1st attempt at this interview. My expression and shock might be priceless. I met Mark Leslie several years ago when we took the same short story webinar. When he found out about my short story blog, he invited me onto his podcast.Here is my first chat ever with Mr. Leslie:Since then, we’ve become fast friends, and I bump into him all over the continent at writing conferences.All sorts of goodies in this podcast…You can learn more about Mark over at markleslie.caAngelique: You’ve said failure is just a data point and writers shouldn’t be afraid of it. What do you mean by that in publishing?Mark: I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and I’ve failed thousands of times. I’ve screwed up, done the wrong thing, and made mistakes constantly. But if it weren’t for those mistakes, I wouldn’t have learned. Sometimes, if something works accidentally, you think you knew what you were doing, and that can actually teach you the wrong lesson. Failure gives you information. It shows you what didn’t work, and that helps you adjust.Angelique: A lot of writers look for the magic formula. Is there one?Mark: No. There’s no magic bullet. There are good strategies, yes, but every single book is different, even for the same author. Every platform is different. Every reader is different. You can’t just copy what someone else did and expect the same result. You have to learn and adjust it according to what you’re writing, who you’re serving, and how you’re releasing it. A hundred authors can do all the so-called right things, and only a tiny percentage may still hit that perfect timing where everything aligns.Angelique: So writers shouldn’t just chase whatever seems to be working for everyone else?Mark: Exactly. Too many indie authors act like a bunch of ten-year-olds playing soccer, all chasing the ball around. They’re following the latest trend without thinking strategically. You have to think more like Wayne Gretzky, skating to where the puck is going to be. You have to figure out where your puck is, and your puck is going to be different from someone else’s. Most of the time it still won’t work, but every once in a while you’ll get a hit. That’s part of the game.Angelique: Is publishing really that unstable, even when something works?Mark: Absolutely. You can have a good year and still be broke the next year. There’s no guarantee in writing. You have to be able to pivot. I put out maybe three books a year on average, and they don’t all make money. Some books are successful, some do okay, and some are complete duds. So I’m playing the odds. I’m not waiting ten years and hoping one book becomes a blockbuster. I’m producing the books that are meaningful to me and releasing them with passion.Angelique: How important is talent compared to persistence?Mark: Talent matters, but it’s only one part of the equation. Persistence is huge. The writers who don’t quit are the ones who win. You’re going to get bad reviews, rejection, disappointing sales, and things that make you want to stop. But if you quit, that’s the end. You have to keep going.Angelique: How should writers handle negative reviews and readers who don’t connect with the work?Mark: You have to remember that not every reader is your reader. My mother never liked my writing because she was a romance reader and I didn’t write romance. That didn’t mean my books were bad. It just meant she wasn’t the ideal reader for me. The same is true with reviews. Some people are simply not the right audience. That’s okay. What matters is finding the people who do love what you write.Angelique: Why does having a body of work matter so much in publishing?Mark: Because one book rarely gives you enough leverage. When you spend money marketing one book, the math is tough. Maybe people click, maybe a few buy, but the return can be small. When you have more books, even if they’re not all in the same series, a reader who likes one can go looking for the others. That’s where the value of a backlist comes in. If someone discovers you and enjoys your writing, they may go buy more of your books. That’s one of the best reasons to keep building a body of work.Angelique: Does the backlist only matter if you write in series?Mark: Series make it easier, but no, it’s not only about series. If a reader connects with your voice or your storytelling, they may want more from you regardless. I’ve done that myself as a reader. I’ve read one book by an author and immediately gone out and bought everything else they wrote. That’s the power of a body of work.Angelique: For writers with anthologies or story collections, should ...
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    32 分
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