oh and of course i screwed it up they screwed up the title slide oh hold on i’ll just put it in there and then
we’ll take out the audio hold on oh god
all right you know what we’ll put it in a post so welcome everybody my name is joe
cohen uh and uh we’re happy to have you here at another installment of the queen’s
podcast lab learning series um let’s see here
sorry about that and uh we have a great lineup for you today
uh clayton childress from the university of toronto who is author of uh between the
covers it’s a book that uh studies or that follows the
life of a piece of fiction and sort of unpackages the uh writing business uh
that’s underlying it and dana weinberg from uh here at queen’s college who is
an expert on digital publishing has published both industry and uh academic
studies on the topic and is a russian spy thriller novelist i don’t
know if that’s the uh i don’t know if if that describes you correctly dana
we’ll get you to introduce yourselves in a moment and today’s session we are going to talk about the writing business
if you have ever been interested in uh in uh the field of writing and wanted
to know what the professionals do how the business works and all those aspects
of uh you know the writing business that are not immediately apparent to
uh those who are starting out well this is the chance to get familiarized with the uh the
business familiarize with the industry and uh so we’re very grateful to have
you here i just also wanted to uh introduce my colleague
here at the queen’s podcast lab jason tuga is uh here uh as well and uh ryan sperry
and uh we have some other collaborative so without any delay
Introductions
let’s uh get started welcome dana welcome clayton it’s great to have you
here um let’s let’s get started maybe can we start with like a short introduction
uh from each of you just so the the audience knows who you are where you come from clayton do you want to start
maybe tell us about your book tell us about your research sure uh i’m clayton tiltras i’m an associate professor at university of
toronto i study uh creation production and reception of culture usually all
split up but uh in this book i followed a novelist for about a year while she worked on a book and then worked in the
publishing house that was publishing the book through the full publishing season while they were practicing it putting it together and fundamentally changing it
also um and then i followed that book into 21 book clubs across the united states and studied people as they read
the book um so uh today we’ll be talking about uh obviously authors and their creative
processes so i wasn’t just studying this one author i was also interviewing other authors uh and uh creeping around and
betting myself in the world of authors but uh uh there’s uh the whole publishing house and reception too
clayton is too modest to brag but his book was recipient of the
uh culture was it the did you get the culture book prize from the american sociological association which is
which is a very very big deal that’s something that i think all of us aspire to have happened to us one day uh have
our works get received with a major national award so and it’s a great book
uh so it’s it’s a real pleasure to have you thank you for coming and joining us today clayton i have to reflect and say
co-winner of that prize oh okay well fine well it’s you still won so well
and then dana beth weinberg aka d b shuster is both a sociologist of culture
and a thriller uh fiction novelist dana do you want to
tell us about i mean it’s you got quite a scope of work but uh tell us uh your work in in the field of writing
yeah so it’s been a little bit of a crazy journey um i started studying the publishing industry because i had
Studying the Publishing Industry
started off writing and was interested in getting published and my other work had just come to a natural conclusion
and so i that was around 2009 that i really started to look at what was happening in the industry and i had a
front row seat to major changes in this in this industry where you know we saw changes
in the ways that books were published and the models with which publishers worked with authors
and then also just the the exploding rise of self-publishing and the potential for democratization of
a field that had really been um closely uh
controlled by gatekeepers you know which is a lot of what i think clayton’s gonna be able to speak to in terms of how things get into that
um you know special focused realm when it’s the the publishers and the agents and all of them deciding what gets
published indie publishing which is another name for self-publishing is where the authors just go and they do it themselves and
the change in technology has made it possible to do that all of these online platforms you know and for the students
who are listening now this goes back a little bit before your time in some ways but you know in 2009 and 2010 we started
to see the closures of bookstores especially borders books and there’s been a big change in the the
brick and mortar stores they used to have a lot of of books there used to be a lot more bookstores there would be
more titles circling through but you really had to have gone through traditional uh distribution in order to
get there now you go into a barnes and noble and it’s it’s coffee shop and toy store maybe even more than it is uh
bookstore and the super stores can hold up to 100 000 titles but places like bnn
online or amazon online can hold every title that’s out there with no limit so
my dog is barking i apologize for that um but but so it like it leads to a
question of how do we find the books that we’re interested in how do people get discovered and so that was a lot of
the work that i was doing 2013 to 2015 i was working with digital book world and writer’s digest to understand the
self-publishing industry um and in the meantime i was writing my novels and publishing them myself which
i’m happy to talk about a little bit later and i got into writing russian spy novels i became very fascinated with
this um and basically did the equivalent of like two masters theses on soviet russia and all
of a sudden have been able to turn this into a new project where i’m looking at social media influence operations
so i’m still in that field of culture i’m still looking at media and digitization
but i’ve moved away from looking so much at the publishing industry on the other hand i still have some work that my
colleague adam kapelner and i are finishing up where we’ve been looking at discrimination in the industry we had a
big article in 2018 that came out looking at um the pricing for for male and female
authors both by the traditional publishers and the self-publishers and we actually this week just wrapped uh
experiment that we’re doing looking at racism and sexism on the part of consumers so um can you preview that
is there a price premium charged for male authors or there wasn’t which so so you know we
have this industry that is largely white that is largely male um you know and you’ll you’ll if you
read the veda accounts and things like that where women are often overlooked last year in 2020 there was the hashtag
publishing paid me that talked about how black authors receive less you know smaller advances and less
prestige and less publicity from their publishers and the only rational argument for this
kind of thing would be well maybe maybe consumers feel the same way and so if the publisher is going to invest all
this money in the book maybe they won’t recoup it if people won’t buy a book from a woman or from a black author
but we surveyed over 9000 people and didn’t find any evidence that consumers were really
all that uh concerned about about these things so i won’t say more about that until that
paper comes out but but basically we didn’t we didn’t find a rational justification for the the
discrimination in the industry good well we’re starting off with some positive news all right so let’s get
right into it and for those of you on the zoo first of all for those of you on youtube live if you’d like to ask a
question just put it in the chat box here on zoom you can ask a question in the chat box or you can raise the emoji
hand and ask a question but i want to start off by asking you both the same question
when you first got into writing i guess before you got into it
you had some ideas of how the writing business worked what surprised you about what you were
wrong about your preconceptions of the writing business how did they change over the course of researching what
surprised you i start with clayton sure um you know i think i
Psychic Rewards
was trying to go back a long time ago now i think i overestimated how much money was in it
i like dramatically overestimated how glamorous it was
there’s not you know so it’s like the old publishing saying it’s the best way to make a small fortune in
book publishing is to start with the learning one right yeah but there’s not you know like if publishing
uh it’s like breaking even sometimes is doing really well um even for authors
breaking even is sometimes doing really well uh you know and the publishing world the writing world is like
it’s mostly what are called like psychic rewards right uh feeling good about being a writer and
being read to the degree that you can find anybody to read what you’re writing right um it’s not a very glamorous world
it’s very small it’s very clicky um it’s not at all fair um
so i think those are all really uh surprises to me just how mundane
it is it sounds a lot like the academy just without the steady without the steady
job in health insurance exactly dana how about you what’s the price i would have to echo just about everything
that that clayton said um those were my experiences as well but just to put a little bit finer point on it um
i i was a member of a writer’s group back a couple of years ago and there was a
director who was interested in doing a reality tv show on writers and had been talking to us about it
and eventually the whole thing just blew up it didn’t happen which shouldn’t have been a surprise for anyone because what
would they have filmed right a bunch of us sitting around in our pajamas at our laptops you know typing away it’s like
very not glamorous and you know maybe if you did a secret life of walter mitty kind of thing where you were like you
know looking at what was in our what was going on in our lives and then how it translated onto the page maybe that would be fun
but you know it’s not like the day-to-day stuff that you’re doing is full of drama
and excitement it’s actually very solitary it’s you and your your notepad or your computer and you know
it’s one of the reasons that it’s really really important to find a critique group um just so that you’re not so
isolated dana you got attention i think for publicizing the fact that there was not
a lot of money in publishing and you got a lot of blowback on that do you want to like mpr level
blowback on that would you like to tell that story oh sure i mean so this is when i was
writing when i was working with um writer’s digest and digital book world
and we had been surveying authors it was not a scientific survey it was a voluntary survey but it was some of the
best information that was available about what was happening in the industry because nobody knows how many authors
are out there i mean some of us are just in our you know in our bedrooms or whatever we’re writing things and we stick them in our nightstand but we
still call ourselves writers where then you have other people who are out there trying to get published and then you have the people who make it to the
shelves you know and so what was this universe of people who were writing and and how did it play out
and you know we know from sociology studies of art worlds that
very few people make it in any art world it’s you’re talking about like one or two percent of artists who are making a
living at it and as we started to survey the authors who were responding to our survey we had
tens of thousands of surveys over three years and the story was consistently the same that most authors were not making
money like you know in the like very little at least the median was
like almost zero so you know very very few people were making money and then the people who were making money there
were a small proportion who were actually making like a living wage at it and you know at the time with the
explosion of amazon and the ability to be out there publishing a lot of people who had been denied by the gatekeepers
or who had these stories burning in them and now wanted to put them out had that available and it was it’s very exciting
to be able to do that but there was a sense of when you know being being able to win the lottery of all of this money
coming to you we were all going to publish our stuff and be rich and that’s what people wanted to hear that’s what
they paid for conferences to hear how do i get rich at publishing how do i become a big name and for the indie authors
even more so than for the traditionally published authors the name of the game really was about the money so i had been
involved with the romance writers of america which is a ten thousand person organization that had that is devoted to
helping writers um in their profession and you know we would go into these meetings and it was stigmatized to be an
indie author because it meant that you know you really probably just weren’t good enough for the big leagues was sort of the way that people thought about it
in the first few years that i had been involved with them that was definitely the story and then something changed
some some authors showed up and all of a sudden they’re making a quarter million dollars or two million dollars or three million dollars and that’s much more
than the 2500 advance that your best-selling author was getting um and
so it changed the the dynamics and it changed the stigma and people who were self-publishing
wanted to believe that everybody had that ability and certainly i mean it’s a lottery so we’re all buying
tickets and there is a chance that you’re the one who’s going to get your number called but if you were thinking you’re going to
quit your day job and and go for the gold rush this was not the moment to do it um and so my sort of cautionary
pieces about that looking at what the odds really were did not land well for an audience that that was either
starting to see money for the first time from their work or was still aspiring to you know live those big quit my day job
kinds of dreams you know i it’s funny it’s reminiscent
earlier this month i uh one of my podcasts featured uh rasmus cost hartman
from copenhagen business school we talked about entrepreneurship and he made the point that a lot of the money
Monetization
in entrepreneurship is made selling to the entrepreneurs themselves it’s like monetizing their dream clayton i see you
uh does this resonate with what uh you’ve seen yeah i mean absolutely in terms of i
think it happens it really depends on what type of writing we’re talking about right but uh for self-publishing and like book length works um absolutely in
terms of uh selling uh you know author services like the web
selling services to authors is a better way to make money than big companies and if you want like a stable guaranteed
income that’s the way to go you know and it’s like one of the things that i think has happened to is that um
you know with uh self-publishing or like transitions to sub stack and like uh individual like institutional
entrepreneurship we thought about this as a way of like democratizing income and like democratizing money but that’s
just like not the way that cultural markets work um and so uh as we see
across every single creative industry um you end up with a few massive hits
right um a ton of flops and it was this weird thing i think uh we are many of us are trained to like dislike bureaucracy
dislike the man but um the old publishing model was kind of accidentally redistributed it right like
uh you didn’t have people making a ton of money because publishers were keeping
that money and redistributing it to other people who like didn’t win the lottery right they got 50 000 advances
but um you know the same way the music industry works too right like um like rihanna has been ripped off her entire
career but a lot of her money ended up going to people who could have been rihanna
right who got advances for their albums right uh so it’s uh i do think uh we are transitioning to a uh less equitable
system um uh even moving away from these like giant bureaucracies which are not great and which have tons of problems also
it’s also you know the the industry is is going through yet another set of changes right now so you know the the
the problem when i was writing about this was that there was this explosion of authors who now could be on the
market in a way that they couldn’t before but if you looked at our our data from
you know the us census bureau and things like that people weren’t spending more on on reading materials there weren’t
more readers all of a sudden who were getting involved and in fact when you think about our lives where we’re you
know glued to our phones and everything else we’re consuming so much digital media that we’re not even necessarily
reading books the same way that we were before and so you have this market that’s either the same or shrinking
where you have the supply that has just absolutely exploded and so you know if you just do the math
you know even if even if everybody was was making something it would be it would be nothing um and then so you do get these
blockbusters you do get these runaway hits and they take most of the attention and we all look at them and think that
could be maybe that could be me yeah and for a while facebook for example was a really great place for authors to find
new audience you could do a lot of micro targeting you could see if there were people who liked your like a book that
was like yours you could go after that audience of an author who was in your area um but as more people started to do
that and of course also to the point about the training there were very expensive trainings that you could do that they would show you how to do this
great micro targeting on facebook and get more sales but as more people did it the cost per click or the cost per conversion started
to increase also and it’s one thing if you’re selling like nike shoes and you’re you’re you know profit you’re
looking at a hundred dollars for your your sale and you’re getting like a good amount of
profit chunk back from that but if you’re you’re an author and your book is you know 4.99 on amazon and they’re
taking you know they’re taking their 30 and you’re paying on the clicks and there’s going to be a lot of clicks before you
get a sale it’s very very hard to break even and it’s gotten even more so amazon
has their own advertising as well and it’s gotten more and more expensive for people over time to to do well with those kinds
Making a Living
of um those kinds of advertising defined market we have a comment
no google play no no i was just gonna say you know it’s like so you know
most it’s it’s not like how do you make a living writing it’s how do you make a
living how do you make a living that allows time for writing right um you because you’re very likely
not going to make a living from writing so how do you make a living a lifetime for writing and it’s those other
sideline activities so like most people who make their living from writing are teaching right um many of the like
bylines you’re reading are people who make their living like editing um
indexing right and researching for other writers right it’s uh the actual writing
is the is it’s this it’s the glamour part of the job it’s what you’re doing it’s why
you’re jobbing all day to do that one glamorous thing that you’re not getting paid very well for them
so let me talk about the glamour of the writing thing though because we’ve been a little bit down on it um and so you know i’ve been i’ve been a
thriller writer for several years now um i have the the wonderful
good luck to be part of a writing group and we meet like you know once a month to talk about our stuff so there’s a lovely community of writers that’s out
there you know and when you can find the people who you trust to read your stuff it’s very very exciting
i’ve had the great good fortune to be able to have my work read by book clubs and be able to talk to them about it
which is really fun because here’s a project that you just love that’s so close to your heart and you get the
honor of being able to have other people react to it and discuss it and then as a thriller writer
i went to the thriller writers conference there’s lots of writers conferences and they’re very exciting to go to
one time they had an fbi day that i went to which was just fascinating to go inside the fbi in new york and see how
things work and how they they think about stuff i’ve also gone to a writer’s police academy where i learned how to
shoot a gun and how to write about blood splatters and things like that um and so there’s lots of fun like tangential
activities that support the work that that we do as writers um the other thing that i’ll say is you know as we’re
talking about writing we seem to be a little bit focused on the on the fiction part of it which is where the real
creative fun comes in a lot of ways but there are just as many if not more non-fiction writers um even in the
self-publishing space and there the the um the books serve a different purpose in
some ways it’s not to get your story out and have people share it with you the way that it is if you’re writing fiction
um it can be almost like a calling card so if you’re a yoga teacher and you’ve written about yoga or you have a
cookbook or you know you’re a doctor and you’re writing about some special treatment that you’re doing
it’s not that you’re expecting to sell so many books but the books give you a kind of legitimacy that is part of this
other business stream that you have um and so that’s a whole other thing that comes out of the writing as well you can
be going to speak at places you can be you know convincing audience about the need for your other services
because you have this book that’s out there so you know if we just focus solely on did i get to be a usa today or
a new york times best-selling author and did i get to make enough money to quit my day job then this looks like a very
you know dull and depressing kind of field but when you think about it from
the sense of the joy of creation the excitement of sharing that with other people and even the other activities
that can wind out of it um you know very exciting things happen and so i have you
know from the from the new york times best-selling author stuff i am not a successful author at all
um but i’ve been able through learning how to market my books to turn that into classes in our master’s program um
teaching about social media marketing and through my study of russia i was able to pivot to looking at foreign
influence operations and so you know there’s so many ways that this can feed into other things and the other part of
it is that i started writing at a time when my life was just out of control i was up
for tenure my kids were little there were just so many problems going on um
and this was my escape it just i had control over the universe i could torture my characters however i liked
however i wanted them to happen and really at the end of the day if that had been the only thing that came out of
it that i had this outlet that you know at night after everybody was in bed i could just pour my heart
out and it made me feel better that would have been enough you know that first of all i wanna
that’s such a great point i do want to follow up on that i do want to get in some interesting comments that were made though uh first from uh anahi vlad rich
uh sociology it’s great to have you here ani uh she says the issue that the quit my
day job selling point repeats is is that the sell uh quit my day job
selling point repeats the story of the coach making money by training coaches and not getting actual coaches clients
so it’s almost like a pyramid scheme some of this educational stuff and then uh
mara einstein from immediate studies great to have you here says even traditional authors make their
money from speaking books no from speaking gigs not book sales wasn’t it did anybody read a story where i think
it was like the new yorker all of the writing staff had to get jobs at columbia university to get health
insurance it was something like that it was like a really big magazine people rated at the
top of their their subfield and they’re still having to scrounge around for health insurance
uh so it’s crazy let’s let’s go to the next sorry i just i just want to trust hi
dana so good to see you um you know my my book was
my last book was reviewed in the times um three weeks after trump was elected
so i mean this is the other thing that happens even with traditional publishing um so i got so lost in in the mix
um what also happened was that i was with a sort of medium press
um and they didn’t realize they were going to get the review in the times and they didn’t have enough copies of the
books the week the month leading into christmas so the sales of my book didn’t
happen so these kinds of things happen with with quote unquote traditional publishers as well but what i’ll also
say to you is the ability to be able to go into speaking gigs you know i can get
five thousand dollars for a speaking gig um which is more money than i’ve made from a lot of my books
and um i feel like dana you know i’ve had some really interesting opportunities like um i did
a marketing talk for the episcopal church and got to meet the first female bishop of the episcopal church i mean
those kinds of experiences that the writing opens you up to is really exciting
thank you for sharing that mara let me just say that to have those experiences if you were an author you do
not need to pay people out of pocket yeah you do not need to pay people for author services to have them to have
connections with readers or to you can if you want but uh you should not do so expecting to
earn back on that yeah it’s uh
if you don’t know who the mark is it’s you type of type of thing so let me ask you this let me ask you
our first one more one more comment from ryan uh ryan uh well ryan do you just want to make the the point verbally
sure um i was just kind of thinking about our work on the podcasters and like there’s so many similarities you know it also
brings me back to like becker’s art worlds too right the thing i was pointing out all art worlds and all kinds of content
creation they have very few people that actually make it people do it for a lot of reasons very few rise to the top
and for becker it was about like these distribution systems that people get into that make it popular but
uh you know it’s just kind of very similar across a lot of different art worlds and different fields and the
writings is the same the only thing i would add to it is that like maybe amazon even though we all like to hate
amazon they’re kind of giving some visibility to the people that were just doing it that never got to that
visibility point even if they’re not going to be rich right i would i would argue that it’s not the visibility it’s
the opportunity to connect directly to your audience and the problem is that there’s so many books out there that
it’s it’s hard to find them you know discoverability is the name of the game in a lot of ways how do readers who are
interested in your stuff find your book when there are millions of other books and i forget
what the the um number was i think that at some point there was like 40 000 books coming out a
week um wow wow and so you know when you think about that it makes it it makes it
really tricky i have authors that i love that i follow um and sometimes their new books come
out and i don’t know about it until months later because you know you just these things are not so in front of us
so it’s not that the the e-tailers have given us the opportunity to be visible they’ve given us the opportunity to be
available and visibility is where we come into this almost money game of like
you know are you are you pushing the time in on social media where you’ve got a following or a platform you know if
you’re an influencer or something or are you advertising it in some way um and
you know this is where like the traditional publishers still have a little bit of an advantage because they’re putting more money in
in many cases than the indie authors would on their own so you know it’s this
it’s not clear um you know where the advantages are and certainly traditional publishing has been hammered in the last few years
Indie publishing
where you know indie publishing has has come up as one of the big the big publishing houses in a way um if you look at it we
went from just recently from six to five and now i think we’re almost at four so
in terms of the the big new york publishing houses yeah so it’s only one step above putting
it in the drawer really is what you’re saying
you can think of amazon the same way you think of the app store right which is like uh the value that amazon is
providing to the system is profiting off of network effects right um like they’re not investing in
any of this they’re just they’re extracting a lot of money from this system for
having set up the playground that everybody decided to play um you know so i do think it uh it uh it does uh create
a pathway from independent authors uh to readers um but the toll bridge on that
pathway is something we should be very careful to uh
promote or feel good about so i want to push forward i have another question to just uh pivot from the
business to the uh you know to the tools required to succeed
in your mind what differentiates a successful from an unsuccessful uh
author it can be on any criterion that you feel are important not necessarily money or popularity but to your mind
what’s the key to being a successful author let’s start with dana on this one well so i’m going to pick a first metric
of success which is actually finishing your book i mean you know you meet a lot of people
who say i’m going to write a book or they’ve got the great american novel that’s hidden in their desk so you know
to have any other kind of success the first thing that you have to do is actually finish the damn manuscript
so there’s there i have three words in terms of that you need to remember to be successful for that
but in chair you need to just you need to sit down and do it you need to to get it done
and you know the big thing is to give yourself permission to write crap nora roberts uh who’s a very very famous
romance author and extremely well published she has over 200 novels to her credit and she’s been you know an
ongoing best seller she says i can fix i can fix i can’t fix a blank page
so the first thing is really just to get it done um in whatever format that looks
like and know that after that is when the the work begins that’s when you start the editing
process and so you know a lot of writers um you know once they get over that hurdle of finishing they vomit onto the
page and then they’re like ta-da i’m done and they put it up on amazon because there’s absolutely no barrier to
doing that um and the stuff is not good because it’s not edited it hasn’t been worked for you know coherence and
quality and you know whether it’s really pulling in readers or not so if you want to really be at that next level of sort
of professionalism in terms of of your writing not only do you need to finish it but then you need to understand that
the editing process is one that really takes a lot of blood sweat and tears
and some people actually enjoy the editing process more than they like the writing process i’ve heard writers say
i write just so that i can get to edit um because that’s where your story really you know starts to shine and take
on um it’s it’s luster and i mean even in non-fiction writing those of us who are
academics know i mean for my own papers it takes me almost seven drafts to get to the one that’s finally published
and so you know this is one of those those other parts of the writing life that people don’t talk about a lot but
so it’s not just that excitement of creation and like what are my characters gonna say and what’s gonna happen next
there’s a whole craft aspect to it that happens once you finally finish that first draft
clayton yeah i would go back to uh you know what dana was saying earlier and that um
people write for so many different reasons that like our the definition of success
has to be really personal as well right but because people are you can’t have a one-size-fits-all model of success when
like everybody’s doing this for such different reasons um i think uh the important part is um defining what
success is for you and sticking to that um right because these are you know
these are like uh even if writing is a career these are not like straight line careers right uh they zigzag they go
back and forth you have highs that you think are that you know i made it on johnny carson i i’ve done it right and then uh and then you know you’re back
working the coffee shop at three o’clock in the morning again right um so i think um like figuring out what
one’s personal definition of success is and then like but now if you make that goal like you have made it right and not
like constantly redefining up what success is for yourself um because i do think that is uh
it’s like it’s like a like it’s like like he’d done a treadmill of dissatisfaction right matter what
The treadmill of dissatisfaction
right it’s like almost not enough i mean academics do the same thing right like we get tenure and then we like can’t
turn that hunger off right so like the like academics version of a midlife crisis is like deciding that the mass
public should adore us too right like tenure wasn’t enough i like now want to make it in the trade right um so like uh
i i think for all writers for all people in these fields it’s like why am i doing this what is it about it that like
brings me pleasure or brings me joy or brings it if i accomplish that thing i have made right and like full stop and
that’s just all kind of bonuses from them you know i would even go a little bit further
than that you know because i’m a i’m a mindfulness practitioner myself and so you know sometimes we focus on
the goal and we miss the moment that we’re in so your goal might be to finish the manuscript but if there’s no deadline on
that it doesn’t matter when it happens you don’t have to say i’m unsuccessful right now because i didn’t finish the manuscript yet you can just enjoy
working on the manuscript right and so the goal really should be to derive as much as clayton said as much pleasure or
joy out of the entire process wherever you are in the process as you as you as you can because that’s the stuff that
you give yourself and that’s the stuff that you have control over you know whether your book makes it to a list
whether people review it well whether anybody ever reads it you have no control over that so if you’re going to
put the hours and hours and hours in that it’s going to take you to write something you should be you know pulling all of
the rewards out of it that you can along the way mike menna wrote uh uh uh gives a
comment here i’ve assisted a couple authors to promote their books via social media these were prestigious
university presses i was shocked at how little effort and money they put into marketing they essentially give 99 of
the responsibility to the authors to promote their book that is certainly my personal experience
as an author uh anybody else have any uh any comments on that
well so even when the publishing houses will will do things they’re for they’re going to work it in the first six months
i mean for six weeks that they have your book and so after that if things haven’t taken off there’s no more money coming
you know if some big social story comes up that that links with your book there you’re not going to see more promotion
so and also now you know when people are writing to agents or to publishing houses one of the questions that they’re
asked is what is your what is your marketing plan so authors have more and more over the past decade been asked to
really get out in front and you know in terms of the marketing which is part of the reason also that a lot of midlist authors moved over to self-publishing
they figured if i have to do all of this work anyway why should i share all of the rewards with the publishers um and
so you know yeah that’s definitely become become an issue for for everyone and
then you know also this has to do with not just how much advertising there is but how many copies
of your book are going to be out there whether it’s going to be available at a certain time or not whether it will stay
in print um or not and of course now with the way that we have on-demand printing a lot of things stay in print
for forever because we don’t have a backlog of all of these all of these books on the shelves
but yes i mean marketing is a big part of it because it’s that discoverability issue it’s not enough to just have a
book that’s published and be able to hold it in your hand right the publishers have a business model and they need to make money on the books
that they’ve they’ve put the money into and so they have their amount of time and their budget that they spend for
each of the books and if the thing doesn’t perform beyond that it’s over and the author might not get another contract to write the next book
so i i want to move forward just to to make sure that we have time for discussion at the end
let’s step away from uh promo and business and talk about the
creative process itself the act of putting the words on
the text from what you’ve gathered how do people succeed at that aspect of the
writing business the actual writing if i want to take that just jump
in you want dana you want to kick us i’m happy to talk about that this was the big discovery for me in
terms of moving from academic writing to fiction writing you know in academic writing we worry
about making our arguments and being really clear and whether we’re you know in the literature and you know do you
understand what i’m saying and this is it in in fiction writing your goal as an
author is to manipulate your reader the only thing that you the thing that you want the most is to have them keep
turning the pages right so as a fiction writer it’s not about my getting my
getting an argument across to you or communicating what i want it’s about my playing on your emotions right can i get
you pulled into this into this story can i get you invested in my characters can i get you to the end of the book and
What works for your readers
make you feel something and even more than that can i get you to read my next book um and so learning that this is what
it’s really about um is a very interesting kind of thing because also you know again in this realm of there’s
so many um services out there to teach people how to write and they’ll tell you that there’s all
these rules you know don’t jump heads and don’t do this and don’t do that it turns out though that somebody will come
along like um uh what’s her name um jillian flynn the gone girl
right and and she did some things that had been we’ve been told you know you’re not supposed to do and then she did it
very successfully turned out the it turns out the only rule for fiction writing is what works for your readers
um and so the more you’re in touch with like who your audience is and and how you can
get the the responses out of them that you want the more successful you’re going to be with your stories
clayton yeah i mean i think um
two things i think first um like acknowledging that what you’re doing is uh even if everybody wants to tell you what
you’re doing is art it’s a craft right um this and so like all of the like artistic pretensions of this thing that
will then later perhaps be interpreted as art are actually not useful to you and your craft most of the quote unquote
successful writers have interviewed treat their writing like it’s a shitty day job
like full stop um and if you um do if you are not excited to treat
writing like it’s a bad day job you might be in it for different reasons and that’s fine but like uh it is like
nobody you know there are very few people who um enjoy the act of writing like people you
know so one of the things i said my book uh which you know a couple people have committed to me it’s like oh like most writers enjoy having written they
they don’t enjoy the act of actually writing that’s not fun right um and uh you know so like as um
we are you know um you kind of you get in a routine you
like develop a hobby out of it right so it’s the same thing as like uh starting to exercise is impossible and if you can
keep it up for you know so it’s like writing for an hour or two a day it’s the same as exercise right where it’s like almost impossible to start but
after a couple months and you know if you don’t exercise one day uh you feel all achy and weird right because like
you’ve developed like the callus and the hobby of it um so it’s like kind of converting yourself into that happiness
you know so it’s like i think not thinking of writing is an art it it takes so much generational wealth to
like have a muse right yeah and to be like oh the muse like that it’s like general generational
wealth to believe in immunes right um a lot of this is just sitting down every day um and then the sentencing i would
say in terms of uh successful writers is that um
getting by on talent is like so hard it’s an incredibly hard
growth i believe there are people out there who get by on talent right but uh
talent is really fickle and there’s no shortage of talented people out there so the people who are making a career out
of this it’s like so it’s like a hurdle model right it’s like step one have some talent now there’s way too many people
with talent and where are we gonna start making our cut points among the people without um and among the people with
talent it’s like are you dependable are you like not difficult to work with
right because you know i did ethnography in a publishing house right um like are you an easy person to
work with like do you um take criticism well um are you uh like willing to like
uh can you hear what people are saying uh when they’re uh maybe not offering a suggestion and kind of giving you an
ultimatum um and can you like uh deal with that in a reasonable way right it’s like those types of things if you uh
assume like okay from the starting gate everybody here will have talent right my
talent’s not going to get me by right that’s why all these other things
i would just i would just argue i love writing and i know a lot of writers who do um and i mean i think
it’s different if you’re you know if you’re writing every day because this is your day job and you’ve got to do all
eight hours you know at your desk trying to get things out on deadline um that definitely changes the the feel of it
but for those of us who have the day jobs and this is the thing that we’re doing on the side it’s a very different
experience and so when i finally get to sit down to go back into my world of fiction and plug into it it’s it’s it’s
exciting it’s fun it’s you know it’s pleasurable um and so you know that’s one of the things that keeps me coming
back you know especially even through you know i wrote these books and then nobody read them or nobody knows that they’re
out there what keeps somebody coming back and for the writers who are really committed through the vagaries of the of
this market um you know if you’re not if you’re not making a living at it if you hadn’t have
had a taste of that external success it’s because you really just have it in you that you have to do this thing and
What keeps you coming back
so you know at one point i came to the conclusion that i was gonna have to see this whole project through whether or
not you know anyone other than my 15 fans that i know of for sure we’re going to read it um and so
you know that’s that’s a big part of this also when you’re working you know in this area that’s you know not not
necessarily at that level of of high success and a claim you know which which we’ve just told you it’s even smaller
than you think because there are a lot of people who are getting paid for their writing um but who are not making you
know wait they’d be doing they’d be better off as i like to say they’d be better off working at starbucks for the number of hours that they’re putting in
um but you know the the the excitement of it and the the
experience of it is what keeps a lot of writers um coming back
my ex if i could just chime in my experience uh i mean as a
non-fiction book author is that when it’s going well it’s a lot like parenting when it’s going well it’s
amazing it feels so good and when it’s going bad you curse it and it’s like
maybe part of the problem is like you just get a really big emotional investment in it either way so like good
days are amazing and bad days torture you is that sort of what it’s like
i think i think for me it’s about that experience of being in flow you know everything else kind of just falls away
and you’re like they’re interacting with your page and and things are happening
and that experience of being in flow is such a wonderful one it’s it’s like a high um and the days that we’re having
trouble where the writing isn’t working out whether it’s your fiction writing or your non-fiction it’s because you’re having trouble getting back into flow
right you’re fighting with yourself you’re fighting with your words the ideas aren’t coming and the frustration
then is because you’re not in that effortless seamless place where everything is just you know pouring out
mara made a really good comment that jason agrees with and we we have some accomplished authors in the
audience mark i’d love to just get this on the youtube live uh can you make the comment verbally uh
oh that i like writing when i’ve been been struggling and yeah yeah you know i
i think it’s the kind of thing where um and when you do a lot of the research and you
really get going with it and you know what you want to say it’s exactly what dana was saying when you get it into the flow it’s really terrific
uh but when you’re at that point where you’re not really sure and a great example i could give was when i was
writing black ops advertising i thought like big data was going to be key to what was going on in that book and i
went down this huge rabbit hole with it probably for months and then i suddenly
realized it’s like no this is part of it but it’s such a small part of it i don’t need to go there and when i realized
that it was like everything else done so i so i think i wrote the book in in like less than a year
um so you know when when you can do that and you get into the flow and you
realize that there’s um you know look you’ll go down especially if you’re doing non-fiction running you’ll go down
a rabbit hall and then you’ll realize it’s not right and then all of a sudden it’s like eureka and it’s off to the races which is great
jason did you want to chime in on this oh jason you’re muted
yes i i would love to i i dana the way that you were describing flow i think was just incredibly articulate and
helpful and i teach in our i teach in the queen’s college mfa program in creative
writing and i i all my advice to students when they get stuck is always work on the thing
that you’re able to work on right now that will flow don’t try to push that thing that that’s not flowing right now
because if you work on the other part it it may make it so this thing you’re
stuck on will start to flow once you do something else right kind of like what mara was just describing but i also want
to say our students in the mfa program are all trying to figure out how to have writing
be part of their lives or how their lives can be about writing and so we have a lot we have a lot of
visiting authors and we are we are more and more trying to get our visiting authors to talk to our
students about how the business of writing is integrated in their life or what their trajectory through it is
because they’re just so many different ones and i i never knew that you were doing
this work i don’t know anything i never knew anything about the sociology of writing and i don’t think any of my colleagues
in the mfa program do and i think it would be amazing to make those connections
so yeah one that’s awesome yeah totally uh well it’s awesome that you’re here for for
those of you who don’t know jason jason is uh an accomplished author uh in his
Advice for aspiring writers
own right and a professor of english here in uh at queen’s college uh so
all right i i another parenthetical sort of side note about getting into flow uh
one of my podcasts top-rated episodes features me and clayton where i went to a sports psychologist to deal with my
writer’s block and uh he he prescribed that mahali chicks
in the holly flow book and the basic thrust of it was like don’t
worry about the book don’t worry about the story just sit down and enjoy writing enjoy each session
and you know and it was actually quite helpful i’ll put it in the show notes
but i want to get in one more question before we open it up last question for me what advice would
you offer somebody who hasn’t even started writing they want to get started
and they want to get that you sort of put their the proper foot forward what what what advice would you give to
aspiring writers who haven’t started uh start with uh clayton
you know i mean i would say it really depends on the type of writing you want to be doing right um so there’s
not really i think for some people the uh idea or
the label or the identity of being a writer is like kind of that’s what they’re in the market for
and like that’s okay right and that’s just writing right uh and that’s and so they’re it’s that’s free uh all that
takes is time right and you can do that um i do think um
i would start uh for fiction or memoir writing i would start with journaling um
in that like i think it can be a really treacherous road um to try to work out
your problems right um and i think um uh you know it’s like you want to do
memoir writing about like traumatic events in your life or this or that like uh purely like that’s that’s okay so
there’s a very this is going to sound very callous and pragmatic that’s not writing you want to give away for free earlier in your career
right um those are like not stories you want to sell on the cheap because you don’t have a lot of those stories i mean
that’s like very pragmatic advice i understand how um and you also like it’s um
if you are like working through your issues while writing it’s very hard
to have it’s if you’re just writing something that doesn’t mean anything to you it is hard to have everybody say no
if you are um working on something that’s deeply meaningful to you and that like is like your trauma and what you
think made you to have everybody say like no we already have 40 of those stories like this is mediocre that is like very hard so um i would say um
don’t like um by the time you get to writing if you’re writing like that type of
memoir or that type of fiction right
from it a little bit right uh and sometimes that takes a lot of personal writing um before it becomes public
that’s awesome dana you gotta got a tip so yeah so for both fiction writers and non-fiction writers if you’re committed
to finishing a project i recommend starting with 10 to 15 minutes a day and you know working and i’m not the
first one to give this advice aruba velvet gives it for uh phd dissertation writers but the nice thing about working
at 15 minutes a day is that it’s not daunting you just sit down you do a sprint you know whatever it is blah blah
blah if it’s fiction or non-fiction it doesn’t matter but if you’re in it every day you don’t have that problem of
restarting and trying to get back into it it’s working in the background in your head
as you go and you’ll be amazed at you know it’s an incremental kind of thing but you’ll be amazed at how much you can
finish even just with that and then if you are in flow and you have more time sometimes that 15 minutes
because it’s it’s not such a barrier to get to do it becomes the entryway into something that that you know goes even
longer so you you can give yourself the permission that way the other thing i would say is you know
once you really get into it it’s important to start to understand what your own process is and honor it so
in the fiction community we talk a lot about panzers versus plotters you know some people have no idea what they’re going
to write about and they just kind of walk into the mist and see what’s there and they get surprised by what shows up
on the page and it’s a very you know fun and exciting thing they end up having to do a lot of editing on the back end
because it’s this messy thing you know by the time they’re done with it but they but that’s their process and then
for other people every scene is plotted out before they even start they know what’s going to happen
um and you know you you might be in in between those even for academic writing some of us just sit down and start
writing to figure out what it is that we want to say and then we have to hammer it back into shape and other people start with very extensive outlines about
what their arguments are so it’s important to kind of understand what works best for you and you know full
disclosure i’ll tell you that in my fiction writing i’ve come to find now that i’m on to my fourth or fifth novel
that um yeah but uh uh halfway through i feel like there’s nothing there the whole thing is falling
apart why did i even start this it’s terrible three quarters of the way through i
think this is the worst thing i’ve ever written um and and i’ve come to the point where now i realize as that’s starting to
happen i’m like oh i must be at the three-quarter point and the trick there is to write the list
of all of the things that i hate about the novel and treat it like a punch list because it turns out that as soon as you
can articulate what the problem is those are things that you can fix um and then you know you get to the very
end of it and i think there’s a lot of us even in academic writing you finish that manuscript you’re like this is so
great it’s wonderful right and then for us academic writers we send it off to our peer review right and then there’s a
whole process that might be rather depressing as that goes through its cycle until the thing finally gets accepted um and you know similarly i
think for for if you’re going into publication you know not in the academic realm you know as people start to
respond to your work um there’s a lot of highs and lows in it and so
you need to feel that what you’ve written is your best effort but also to understand that that’s again
that’s what you control is your your effort and how you feel about it you don’t have control about the kind of
reception that it gets and so you know there is something that’s that’s really brave about putting
yourself your stuff out there i mean even for academic writers as we go through that peer review process and all of a sudden the things that we thought
were brilliant somebody else comes back and says why are you wasting my time with this um you know and so there’s a
there’s a a kind of um you know ego that you need to develop where you can keep putting your stuff
out and defending it even as it’s going to get you know all kinds of reception whether that’s somebody loving it or
somebody hating it or telling you that you’re a waste of space or whatever it is you have to be
tough enough and in love enough with what you’re doing that you keep coming back
that’s awesome all right let’s open it up does anybody have anything to add i’d also love to hear
from jason and mara about sort of tips for aspiring people we got bernard bernard would you like to have a comment
or a question oh you’re muted bernard
hi uh i had a a few things uh and i’ll get to them after other people have had a chance to say something i don’t know
how long ago but i mentioned that i had this great statement from neil gaiman
which will take me about one minute to read neil gaiman i think a lot of you know
sandman is referred to you yesterday was a bad writing day i spent
a lot of time staring at a screen lots of tumblr replies lots of twitter
lots of being grumpy at myself and convinced i couldn’t do it anymore the script was a mess i was doomed this
morning i printed out what i had to fix picked up a pen made a few notes and started typing it was fun and easy and
straightforward i finished it and sent it to the people who needed to see it and just got an amazed call from our
script editor saying she was laughing while crying and couldn’t work out how i’d done everything in one day
and i hadn’t done it all in one day all of the being miserable yesterday was necessary for it to fly today all of the
knowing it was insoluble and awful made the work today relatively easy i had to get out of my own way and had to read it
freshly without being attached to anything and then i just did the notes and to make the thing that worked today
a lot of the stuff that didn’t work or sort of worked had to be written too it’s always easier to fix stuff that
exists anyway yesterday was a bad writing today day today was a good
writing day i thought it was worth telling people in case there was anyone else out there who was having a bad
writing day today so i i was amazing i just think that’s one of the greatest things i’ve read
about that was amazing
by the way first of all it’s funny that you have that i just uh got his uh comic book uh because somebody was telling me
that he this is one of the biggest comic books ever and i wanted to see what’s up in comic books so excuse me graphic
novel pardon me pardon me it is uh it is i think it’s one of the
great literary works for the last 40 years and jason knows i do a lot of stuff on dreams it’s the great uh
creative word of engineering i mean aside from fellini’s eight and a half
for those of you who don’t know bernard bernard is uh studies uh dreaming uh i think that
like a kind of a cultural study of dreaming bernard yeah pretty much but i also train people in uh keeping dream
journals and dream sharing so i just kind of want to plug and say that for me a thing that really helps writers get to
that flow and keep that flow is being in touch with the material that comes out of dreams and i know that jason and
that’s how jason and i met and i know he feels the same way that’s awesome
jason yeah absolutely i mean when i have a writing project that i
really am invested in that’s something big um i do a variation on
on what dana was describing in terms of process which is that i’ll i’ll devote
let’s say three days a week three hours a day to it and you know in if i can get five pages done
on each of those days or even three pages that adds up quickly but i always start
by waking up and writing down any dreams i remembered and
then just kind of like spitting onto the page you know just whatever comes out
just to get it so that i’m like in the groove you know and then usually that writing turns to questions
of like what am i going to work on today what do i need to fix what do i want to work out you know and then i have a
concrete list and it becomes a practical thing i think making writing pragmatic
is super important um but there’s always this interplay of
intuition and intention there’s so much of it you can’t control you don’t know what’s going to come to you or not but
once it comes to you then you have to assert some control and do something with intention but i
think the dream part of it kind of helps you tap into uh the unconscious stuff that has to
happen in order to get the writing done i would add to that that if i’m really
struggling i will also consciously say to myself before i go to sleep i’m
struggling with this let me see if i can get some answers about it um and
sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but but it’s actually really surprising um that things can sometimes
end up being clear but it’s also i think you know what jason was saying um you know getting and i think clayton
said it too you know getting up and just journaling for 20 minutes every day and not
not about anything in particular just doing the the the sort of um
stream of consciousness writing just to one connect to your head i mean i also studied with po with neil postman he
wrote every single one of his books with a pen um you know so there is something i
don’t write my books that way but there is something to at least um printing the work out and editing it by hand i think
that that for me certainly that that makes a difference uh but i do do the journaling by hand and i think that
that’s really important with connecting about you know where you are and what your thinking is and some of your
unconscious thoughts i i can’t write at a computer it’s too distracting
everything i i i’ve ever written has been on pen and then transcribed after
that’s that’s right other other oh we have a question uh it came up in the chat and in on youtube live
what software do you use for writing can you describe the software that you all use and what you like about it uh start
off with dana so i mean for for my non-fiction writing i’m in word
not you know but for these big novels uh with all of my characters and the notes i am a big fan of scrivener
um and you know it makes it really easy to move around your chapters to put
scenes in different places um the stuff that i write is highly the fiction is highly convoluted and complex
you know i have these these spy stories going on with multiple um main characters and so scrivener for me
has been really really fantastic for the kind of work that i’m doing and then because i’m indie publishing
they also have a really good you know way to output whether you want to go straight from there to epub or you
want to go through something like vellum which lets you make the the books look really nice and gives you you know
another little set of bells and whistles um but though you know for the fiction that would be my process would be
scrivener to vellum um and for the non-fiction you know um unless if i were writing like a book
again i think i would go back to to scrivener for that even because it works so well
but for um you know articles and things i think word is you know combined with a
uh endnote kind of software i use zotero but there are other ones also that would
be my recommendation clayton what’s your sense of the tools and uh
um for me i wrote most of my book
um in gmail windows and in um
at the time i posted it a lot on a 49ers message board uh so i would write like paragraphs in like as if i was going to
post it on because it just felt like a place where writing didn’t feel high-speed for me so i like found uh
different platforms where writing felt like a normal thing not just like stakes fraught um my entire identity is
a scholar and quite frankly my ability to pay my rent moving forward is based on this thing
um so i just places where writing felt normal and comfortable and then i did like the reddit writing that made me
really sweaty there i also ended up for some reason and then i would cut and paste it back into the word um then i
started uh there was a period where um well first i was like i have to write
for x number for a certain amount of time a day and then i was like the time thing is not working i find ways to not
be writing during this writing time so then i would uh do a certain number of words a day and for whatever reason
counting up to words felt more brought to me than counting down from words so i use how the shareware program i’ll put
in the chat called why edit um and it’s just a little text editor where you put
in like 500 words and each word you write counts down like 499 498 497
and for whatever reason cognitively that just like felt better to me than counting
so basically the encouragement here is like if you want to write like act like a crazy person it’s fine just go like whatever works
for you do that thing yeah that’s the honoring figuring out your process and honoring it
yeah so it’s personalized you’re saying it’s like just because it works for an author
that you admire doesn’t mean it will work for you personally and there’s a process of discovery to find out what
conditions you need to start getting words on papers yeah and it can even be something simple like you know i find
that first thing in the morning i have a really good run of writing um afternoons are trash for me when it
comes to writing anything other than email um and then you know after dinner i have another another place where it’s
it’s easy again and so you know finding where those where those entry points are
for you where it’s a little bit easier you might find that you know you have certain times of day
um you know some people it’s lunchtime um at their day job is a great time you
know because they need that transition and that like escape right there and so that noon time is gold for that 15
minutes and i mean so it’s finding where is the room and the space where you can get into flow most easily
bernard i’m me again so i was just saving up a little so other people could talk uh but
i know we’re drawing to a close i’d like to say i think three things one is about flow and getting into it uh and we
haven’t explicitly addressed free writing which almost everybody does in freshman composition classes but i i
always tell this to students that i have never hit a bump while i was writing something that couldn’t be at least
pushed along in seven minutes with free writing and the one thing is finding flow as dana has said it’s just really
important but the other thing about free writing is that you get to that flow by facing the thing that you’re not willing
to write about the thing that’s been you know hanging on and keeping you from
moving forward because generally it is something that you think is too stupid or too obscene or too simple or to
everybody else knows this and usually that is something you have to get and that gets to a second thing that i i
have a lot of experience of friends getting to this and i think jason was sort of talking about something like
this right in the genre that you’re drawn to you know you might have gotten to a point where you were like uh i don’t
want to do like a sandman graphic novel because that’s not serious enough i have to do academic writing and i just
cite the example of a friend of mine who is very very erudite and you know
totally knows french literature in and out and he is making his living writing bdsm pornography
uh that sells on kindle and and it is good i mean it’s interesting to read i don’t
a little disclosure i don’t care about media but i read him because he’s just it’s
just so good and he’s gotten to his list there and the third thing is you know
we’ve been talking about almost like fans as consumers but the
non-quantifiable glamorous thing that happens when you put writing out there is
well it’s like now networking but we used to call it friendship or community
um so the the thing about like having people to talk to like you know for the most part if you’re not in this really
really big world out there like neil gaiman is or stephen king is uh
a lot of people who who really really connect with you are going to be writers and they’re going to be thinking about
writing and you can encourage them or they’re going to be more established than you and you can be encouraged to
buy them so it’s really the great joy of i always think of it as
the the alternative academy we don’t have to do academic writing but we have this intellectual community that’s
building these days on the internet uh through doing our writing and paying attention to each other and that’s a
very great reward thanks this issue about finding the right genre
is is a really big one i had started out romance writing and it turned out you know in academic writing i don’t mind
following rules we have lots of rules for academic writing and it’s very very structured um but in the romance world
where i was told you know there had to be this meat cute that this thing had to happen and the characters had to be like this and it had to have this kind of
thing i completely rebelled i could not make it work and i found that as soon as
i said i have a secret there’s a gun um like that that was where you know it
became really exciting and that thrillers were what was really ex was really fun for me um you know even with
the rules of of the thriller genre like i could i could deal with that where i couldn’t deal with the other one as
easily and so that is definitely another piece of it and i know joe i’ll put you
on the spot here too you know even with the the academic writing there’s very different kinds of it you know some is
for a very highly um you know scientific audience and the other stuff is more uh trade publication
and some of us really enjoy writing more popular kinds of things then we enjoy you know writing these more scientific
things joe do you want to talk about your your book about that why in that way yeah i mean i love writing
for regular people and it’s just what i want to do and it’s not yeah it’s i
don’t know if it’s strongly it’s very prestigious or particularly admired in
my field to do popular oriented stuff but like the that’s what i like and
that’s the joy of doing it and i think as long as you can keep your head above water financially and not get fired
doing what you like then i think then you’re the winner the you know you end up being the winner when you get to do
things your way and fill your day with things you enjoy uh so i i i strongly
believe in that now unfortunately we gotta wrap up i have a couple announcer i just gotta thank you both before we uh
wrap up to say this was amazing this was so great so thank you a million clayton
and dina uh i love this i got an announcement before we uh get go a couple announcements
uh first one is if you enjoyed uh this talk
please join us uh on the uh queen’s uh podcast lab learning series we have uh
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all right so i’m going to end hold on i’m going to stop this share
and i’m going to say goodbye to all of our friends who are on uh youtube thank
you very much for joining us and we’ll catch you next time
all right just give it a second all