https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is5nKUjAuDc

How much of your time do you spend doing valuable things that move your author business forward? Do you think it's 10% of your time? 50% of your time? 80% of your time? It's certainly never 100% for anyone. And a lot of that is because you're doing things you don't need to be doing. And in this episode with Shell Honaker from Indie Author Magazine's and author automations and author nation. She does she's involved in so many cool things in the publishing industry. Shall I be chatting with us all about how you can plan for publishing success in 2025, specifically how you can automate parts of your business and save a lot of time doing things that honestly don't really move the needle. Certainly not as much if you have the ability for, you know, an automation to be able to execute that for you. And likewise, Shel's also going to be talking about how you can actually decide what needs to be automated or if that thing doesn't need to be done at all. Because there's kind of pointless building automation for something that doesn't need to happen. So we're going to talk all about how you can plan for your business. Now, upfront, I just want to give you some context on the difference between automation and artificial intelligence. Because it's a crucial difference and AI kind of comes out during that conversation, but that's not the focus of it. at all because artificial intelligence is, you know, an intelligence process that's able to generate things for you. It's not necessarily automated, right? If you're talking to ChatGPT, that's AI, but that doesn't mean like ChatGPT is an automation, if that makes sense. The reverse is that an automation is just getting a task done over and over again automated. It could be using AI. Like you can actually have like ChatGPT generate like a custom response automated based on something, right? So there's ways to integrate AI into automations, but they're separate yet overlapping, right? Because you can also have an automation that sends folks an email when they join your list. That's an automation. That's one of the most basic forms of automation. Someone joins your email list, they then get an email from you and you didn't have to press send on that email. It just happened. So we're going to explore how you can automate a lot more than just sending books and sending emails, but automate a lot of the crucial parts of your author business. I'm super excited for it. And before we officially dive into this episode, I just want to say that if you want to also really spend your time doing the things that matter most in growing your publishing business, the Reader's First Challenge might be for you. It's at readersfirstchallenge.com, it's launching in about six, seven weeks. It's my flagship education program. I'm putting everything I know about marketing and all the insights that I've used to help authors make over a million dollars a year in memberships and now helping authors grow from zero to Oftentimes, $1,000 a month in just a couple months by using these strategies. I'll be sharing more exactly about what the Reader's First Challenge is in a later podcast, but the TLDR is that it's a cohort-based course that helps you sell your story, then write it. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is investing a ton of time into a book that isn't going to sell. Myself, I've done this. I spent $6,000 plus publishing six books that did not sell. sell. They were all in one series. I rapid released them. I thought this was it. I was wrong. And instead of trying to write to market, we can actually test if you're writing to readers first. We can actually test if your Storadia is going to sell. We can test at the beginning of your book actually engages readers so that you can spend all of your time trying to get story market fit. Story market fit is that magical thing where your stories both engage a specific target audience and you're able to market to them profitably. And once we reach that, we can actually scale your story. And one of the biggest things that we have is we try and sell books as authors, but we don't try and actually systematically understand why our books selling so we can replicate it. And Story Market Fit is all about understanding why our books are selling, building a system around that so that we can then sell books when we sleep and actually be able to not be on this crazy treadmill every month of trying to just hit our royalties and hit this. We have some predictability. because our story has been proven and has three market fit. So that's what this is about. It's helping you save time, hundreds, if not thousands of hours, save money, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, and save tons of stress in marketing your books by approaching this from the reader's first way. It's a radical approach, but it's really awesome and you'll get lifetime access when you join. It's like a full marketing ads and business course for authors mixed with some group coaching. So it'll be ton of fun. Again, Constant time until it's officially launched. But if you want to join the wait list, I'll give you a special little discount. Don't tell anyone, but you're here in this podcast. I feel like the podcast is kind of like the close author friends I have. So thank you for joining. We're gonna get this episode with Shell now.

This will be awesome.

It's dramatic content as always. But Shell, I'm so excited to chat with you. We go back a long way, but I don't think we've ever officially done a podcast together and I was so excited to see you start your new newsletter, which is that's a little bit of a tongue twister, Author Automations. And I'm just curious, people may know you, people may not know you, but what's your arc in the CUNY as an author to, you know, starting to now starting a newsletter called Author Automations. Like how did you come to this point?

I have always been a geek in heels, right? I've always been a technology and training person back in the travel industry, really way back. I was an old travel agent long ago. And, and really I sort of fell into that because I was the one in the office that could fix the printer. So they started sending me to all of these training sessions and I really just kind of developed a career and a consultancy from that. And so technology has always been sort of my lens that I look at everything through. It is the thing that I love the most. And training is the thing that I'm really passionate about, especially in this industry, because I feel like all of us come to it with different soft skills and different hard skills and different things. And then we come into publishing and we have to sort of translate and figure out what those skills mean in the context of I'm a publisher that writes books, right? I have a business and how do I take my marketing background or how do I take my education background or how do I take my lawyer background? Like whatever our backgrounds are. And so I sort of saw when we started Indie Author Magazine that I was always going to love the technology part more than with a craft or anything else. So I leave those articles and and that section of the magazine to people that are much smarter and much more attuned with those parts of it. And the technology has always been my passion. What happened about a little over a year ago was I, because I have no hobbies, right? I like try artwork and it doesn't work and I try doing Cricut scrapbooking and it doesn't work. You know, I don't have any hobbies. So I started this authorautomations.com newsletter as a hobby, which sounds so funny to say, but it was just a passion project because I couldn't really fill everything that I had in the magazine with all of this stuff. So yeah, it was kind of a, hey, I'm bored. Let's start writing about automations and make.com and Zapier and show people what I was doing. Plus I was getting a lot of questions and so I felt like it was just easier to answer questions in one big space. So that's how it got started on Substack. And also, I do have to give a shout out to Russell Nolte because he was the one that said, you should start a Substack. And I went, oh, okay, I was now starting a Substack. So that's how it happened. It was not a planned thing.

No, that's awesome. It's a very Russell thing to say. And he shared a lot about how to start one. And I'm so curious, like zooming out. What do you, because technology is so broad and focusing on automation is kind of like a specific way that technology can help others, which I love that you are sharing that with the world. But how do you define an automation? Like what is an automation at its core?

Yeah. So at its core, an automation is anything that can help someone either streamline a process to do something faster or to increase capacity, meaning you were never going to do this, but now there's an automation. You can have two machines talk to one another, and now you can automate your social media. Sorry, my coffee maker fell off. Okay, that's done. So again, at its core, an automation is essentially something that can streamline a process or a workflow for an author so that they can either do something faster or they can do something they weren't going to do before. So for example, if you hate social media or you just want, you know you need to post more on social media to feed the algorithm beast, it might be too much for you to do that, right? To sit down and do that. It's a time suck and it takes you away from writing so you can automate that. Or you know you need to maybe do a developmental edit and automate the tasks that you're giving your editor. Again, those are sort of automations that you can set up and make it more streamlined and simple.

Love it. The dichotomy between tasks that you're already doing and helping speed it up, and then new tasks you wouldn't normally do, I don't actually normally think about that when I think about automation. I think about, oh, I'm already doing this. How do I make this faster? So opening up the whole new category of things you could be doing that you aren't yet through automation. is really fascinating. Now, let's start with the things that we're already doing. And more specifically, before we even know what we're doing, we kind of have to start to plan things out. And I know so many of your really, like, articles that I love the most are about planning. And you have this method called, like, the para method. Do you want to describe what para is for folks? might not know because I loved it.

Yeah. So para is actually a term coined by Thiago Forte. And so I can't claim that, but it is, it is. And, and even to back up, I use para, but I also use GTT. David Allen's getting things done. I also use Mel Robbins five second rule. Like, I pull from a bunch of different methodologies because I have found in the course of my long years, there is not one thing that works for anybody. And so if you are trying to, and, and what actually happens, I found is that I will follow a methodology for a period of time, and then I drop off or it doesn't work or it's not sustainable or something doesn't work long term or priority shift or my life changes, and then I stop using that thing, and then I get into, like, this shame spiral where I'm like, oh, I'm such a failure because I didn't get these, you know, 65 things done, and I'm real sad about it. So I have learned that I had to do a couple of things. One is I implemented the Para Method, and that stands for projects, archives, resources, and activities. So it's P-A-R-I. Wow, that was a brain twister. And so you basically set up a framework of knowledge that you accumulate. So for example, in the practical world, when you have your website website browser open and you're going along through the day and you're opening up tab and you end up with 65 tabs because you think you're going to go back and read those, right? What Para does is it trains you to archive that page so that you come back to it when you're ready to read it or when you're ready to need it. And so you click a little, there's an, I have an automation. So I click a button and it saves it to my notion and then I just say what it's about. So as I'm going along in my day, if I see something about marketing or read an article that I want to come back to when I'm doing something later, I have it archived in my knowledge manager, which I use Notion for everything. And then it gets it out of my brain and it frees my brain RAM up to keep going and doing more stuff throughout the day. So because I have Bright Shiny Object Syndrome, and so I will, I'll go, oh, this is a great article. And then, you know, four hours later, I'm gone. My day's lost. So that's the first thing I did. The second thing I did was I looked at my energy and how my energy moved through the day. That's the best way to describe it. And so I learned about something called, there's circadian rhythms, which are sleep, right? And people usually know that. But there's also a different rhythm. Oh my gosh, and I'm forgetting what it's called. Let me come back to that and I'll tell you what it is in a second. ultradian rhythms. There's a thing called ultradian rhythms, which are your energy waves throughout the day. And so if you can sort of monitor, like after lunch, I get a big burst of energy and I'm kind of creative after lunch. But then in the afternoon, I sort of die off. So what I did was I monitored throughout the day and then also throughout the week and figured out when I had the most energy. and then I split my schedule into maker versus manager. And maker time is writing time. It's the sacred thing that you need full 100% brain power to work on. It's when you're creative. For a lot of people, it's first thing in the morning. That's kind of why people say get up early and write first thing in the morning. There is science behind that because we get our first wave of an ultradian rhythm in that first But then we usually crash, right? And then we have another wave, and then we crash, and then we have another wave, and then we crash. So if you can sort of figure out what your ultradian rhythms are, and then you match the task energy with that, you are far more likely to finish the things that you want to finish, and you're far more likely to get done all the things that you want to get done, and the quality of work will be much, much greater. yeah, I'm.

Wow. The ultradian rhythm. I never had heard that, and I definitely feel that myself. Like, in the middle of the day, I know I have a lull, and I try and, like, get outside or exercise. And the morning, oddly enough, I'm always like. Like, some people say they go to the gym in the morning. I'm like, no, I want to work in the morning. Like, I wanna. Yeah. I wanna get creative right now. So that's. That's very valuable, and it's so interesting.

And I think the thing that everybody has to figure out is what their energy levels are and what their cycle is. And don't try and twist yourself and fit into someone else's box. You're just gonna end up frustrated. It's never gonna work the way you want it to work. So that's why some people stay up all night. I have a writer friend that stays up literally all night and goes to bed at six o'clock in the morning. I'm like, I would die. I would die. I could never, ever do that. But she is. her peak rhythms dictate that's when she's most productive, that's when she's most creative, that's when she gets it done. So I just wake up to, you know, 10, 000 emails and a bunch of stuff from her. That's great.

I'm fine with that. That's fantastic. Wow.

Yeah.

No, that makes total sense. It makes me desire, like, sometimes I'm like, I want a quiz. I feel like I want a quiz for this, where I get to be like, this is what I am, and I'm this type of, you know, this is the type of rhythm I have. And then I can follow these steps to then really follow that rhythm. Because I feel like sometimes if you have a day job or you're in school, whatever your environment is, those are environments that kind of force you into a rigid way where you might not even getting to see your natural state because you don't have a ton of the ability to do it. So you have to have that extra step of awareness of what are the right questions to ask yourself to even know what your right environment is because so many of us too might be like children and family responsibilities we have that are like maybe pulling us away from like what our natural state is. So it's gotta fight for it. That's so interesting. Now, you mentioned about realistic and like not setting like 65 things to do and being realistic. That one is I think rather hard. How do you go about being realistic when you're setting goals, planning what to do.

So there's, for me, there's a couple of things. I have a checklist that I call win the week. And those are the three things that I, if I do nothing else, then I've won the week. It is the three sacred things that I must get done. And, and, you know, there's always these cute little, they have to be smart goals. Mine are pretty, I'm pretty in tune with what I need to get done. So sometimes those are big. projects and sometimes those are small projects. But in my mind, if I cross those three things off, then everything else is fine. Everything else can be adjusted. I will sit down on Sunday night and I'll go through all of my priorities for the week and I'll choose those three win the weeks. Then it's kind of like the analogy where you put the big rocks in the jar and then you put the smaller rocks and then you put, then you fill it with sand and then you fill it with water, right? It's the same thing. It's just habits stacking and stacking things, priorities. So I get my three big rocks, which are the win the weeks. Then I go in and I say, all right, if I got these things done, that would be really cool. And then I go, if I got these things done, that would be really cool. And I'm pulling from across all of my areas, my para areas. And so that's going to be projects for Indie Author Magazine. That's going to be projects for Indie Author Training. That's going to be projects for direct to readers. that's going to be projects for author nation and it's going to be projects for author automations. Those are the projects that I'm working on currently. And then within that, I also protect family time, right? Because I have a grandbaby that must be loved on continuously. So I also love the analogy of spinning plates or juggling balls, right? That we often talk about work life balance. I don't think there is such a thing as work-life balance. I just think it is work and it is life and you just sort of navigate all of it. But I do love the concept that I heard where someone said, what are as you're juggling, what are the glass balls that you're juggling versus the rubber balls versus the paper balls? The glass balls are the ones that can never drop. You can't drop them because you will break them. But what's rubber, right? What'll bounce, what'll recover, what can you get away with dropping? And then paper is like, oh, it fell. Oh, no, that is terrible. You don't care. So if you think about what is absolutely sacred to you, right? My family time is the first priority in that sacred, and then move from there, then you can kind of set your priorities in the right order because the end of it, you know, you have to define success. And so whatever metric you're going to use, you're the one that's going to have to live with it. So think about what your highest priorities are. Everything else will, no one's going to, like, I, we have, we often, you know, come across hard deadlines in the magazine and, and Nicole's like, oh, gosh, you know, we can't get this. I'm like, listen, no one's going to die. Literally, no one's going to die. We are not heart surgeons, right? So it's going to be okay. If we have to put something out a day late, no one's going to die. If your book doesn't come out on the day that you think it is, no one's going to die. It's, it might suck, right? You might have pre-order issues and some, some other stuff, but no one's going to die. So what are your highest glass ball priorities that you need to pay attention to?

Protect that really good one and. I think folks listening should really write down what those are because I think so often we ignore some of what are probably our glass ball priorities or at a minimum rubber balls and maybe trade them out for something that actually is a rubber ball. Like you're saying, your deadline is probably certainly a rubber ball. It's probably not a glass ball, but your health, your family time may very well be a glass ball. So that's huge insight. Now, with this whole goal of productivity in really pursuit of happiness, it still begs the question to me, when should I choose to automate something? Because there's obviously been the how question, which is a lot to dive into, but when is it typically a good idea to automate something? Some things feel like you can't automate, but maybe you're going to tell me I can automate almost anything.

You can automate anything. I have an automation that when my granddaughter, by way of her mother's phone, gets within 15 feet, it plays, Welcome to Mimi's house. I mean, you can automate literally anything. Music plays when my granddaughter walks in. Yeah, no joke.

You can automate anything.

Yeah, you can automate. Yeah, you can automate literally anything. So when you say, what should you automate? That also begs the question, what shouldn't you automate? Because you can literally automate everything. And if you have a neurospicy brain, you will spend like hours automating everything and you probably should not do that. But I come back to the concept of what I call the suck list. And basically throughout the week, I kept track of all the things I absolutely hated to do. What do I absolutely hate to do? What sucks? And for me, that was social media. I really hate social media. A lot of people really hate social media. They hate the fact that they have to post. They hate that they have to feed the algorithm beasts. They hate coming up with ideas they hate, like they hate it, right? And millennials even more so than picking up a phone, statistically they say, you know, millennials don't like to answer phone calls, right? Just as we're making generalizations, but they hate social media even more. And so that was, for me, low-hanging fruit. I just wrote down all the stuff I didn't like to do and I started with that. And so social media was first, email, was next, finances was next, making sure that all my finances were coming into the same spot, direct sales delivery. Like I have automations for literally everything. But then the second thing, so the suck list was first. The second thing was, what do I need to do to protect my business? And so the next thing that I automated was backups of my newsletter. email addresses. And so when you come to the website, when you jump on my mailing list, you don't, you're not getting added to an email service provider. You're not getting added to mail or light, you're not getting added to mail poet mail chimp, you're not getting added to any of those. You're filling out a form that I own on my website. And then I actually have a zap, a zapier zap that validates that it's a valid email address. It runs it across a X email verify. and if it's a good address, then it gets added to my email service provider, but then it also goes on a Google sheet with the date and time of subscription and the IP address that that person subscribed from. If I get hit by a bus, right, I have this, I have this Ichabod plan in case I get hit by a bus. If I get hit by a bus or we get locked out of MailerLite, we can take that list and we can go to MailChimp and we can start a new email service account and we have validation with the IP address that they gave us permission to email them. We can prove that we didn't buy that list. It's just one more level of protection. The other reason why we validate the email address before we add it is because in certain email service providers, you have what's called the success tax. You pay for the more email subscribers that you add to your list. So you want to be sure that that's a good email address before you add it to your list, right? So that you're not paying for dead weight on your list. So there's lots of things that you can do to protect your business. You backups are another way you can do that. The other third way that I did it was I wanted to see how I could streamline my workflow. So I dictate into my phone as I'm walking. that's my first thing that I do when I'm writing a first draft. So when I dictate, I dictate into Otter AI and I'm just getting the sound file. I don't use Otter's transcription for this part, although I could, but I'm just using it to record an MP3 sound file. When I finish that, I send it to Dropbox and then I have an automation that watches that Dropbox. When it gets into that Dropbox, it then transcribes it It runs it through Whisper and then once it's transcribed, then it runs it through ChatGPT because I use assistive ChatGPT and it will create it to with all the punctuation and it'll do copy edits and line edits and it will put it into another folder which then sends an email to my editor that it's ready to proof that first pass through. And so I've got the sound file as a backup, then I have the workflow that automates it and then In the afternoon, I can go in during my next maker block of time and I can edit that.

It's just, you literally just recording it done.

Yeah.

The whole flow happens.

The whole flow happens. And it's, and really it's because I wanted a way to streamline my workflow. I wanted a way to streamline my process. The other thing that it does is it adds that transcript to Notion and it assigns the task to my editor. so I have a task management system that's continuously running in the background, and it's all done just by way of the one thing that I'm doing. The other, you know, and again, in, in terms of workflow, the way that we do our newsletter is I write one blog post, and from that one long-form blog post, it sends it to an automation that will create social media captions for each of the social media networks in the tone of voice and based on what we want to say on those channels. So LinkedIn is different than Facebook, Reddit is different than Twitter, right? So we have captions that are written for each of those in that one place and then it will pick it. This is nerdy. It'll pick up the RSS feed and it will send the newsletter when a. When an RSS feed hits. So we write one blog post, and it does all the syndication and sending up the newsletter automatically.

Wow. Okay. Okay. So this is incredible.

I I have left Michael Evans speechless. Oh, my.

I want to dive into. one of these automations in detail. But before we do the step by step, what across all the automations that you've not only done yourself, but you've shared with other authors, what tend to be the top one or maybe two or three automations where if I'm listening and I don't have any automations going on right now, but I want to get started, what tends to be the best place to start in terms of automating something very specific.

So something very specific, I think, is the blog post to your newsletter. That is pretty, it's pretty simple to set up because most email service providers are set up for that. So, for example, if you use WordPress, there is an RSS feed just when you post a blog, and then you can give that RSS feed, which stands for really simple syndication, you can get that RSS feed and you can give it to mailer lite and mailer light will set it up and send it out for you automatically. MailChimp will do the same thing. Send Fox will do the same thing. They have a mechanism already. You don't even need zapier between those two or make.com between those two. There is a direct connection between a blog post and you can use sub stack. I mean, you can use medium.com, you can use whatever you're using to block Wix Right? Squarespace, it's sort of agnostic because all of them generate from a blog post what's called an RSS feed. And that's just a machine learning, you know, talking machines talking to machines. And so you have that whether you know you have it or not, you do. And then you can set it up to send out to your newsletter. So that's basically a one-step simple automation that you can set up.

Love it. That's great. That's a great place to start. And now when it comes to all these tools, I hear you throwing out Zapier, I hear Make, which I know those are two, they're a little bit interchangeable. There's, I know Airtable, Notion, there's a lot of different tools. What tools do you recommend and for what purpose? Because it sounds like you have this whole, like, we'll call it automation stack. So what's in your automation stack and why is it there?

So my automation stack, I start with notion, right? Notion is sort of my one ring to rule them all. And with notion manages. Not notion is called my PKM, my personal knowledge manager. It's where I keep everything. So that's where all my tasks are. That's where all my areas with research and information, that's where all my notes are. That's kind of my second brain. Right. That's where notion lives. And then from notion, I automate out in like a concentric circle. So my next sort of stack is air table and I use air table for, I mean, I use it for articles and I use it for my writing and I use it to keep everything there. The reason why I don't keep it in notion is because notion can get really slow with, with a lot of information. It's not quite there yet, but. Airtable is robust and has just a ton of speed and it has some automations built in, but I don't really use those too much. Right.

If you can apply for startup credits on Airtable, I can't guarantee they'll give it to you, but they gave it to me. They might give it to you if you're a small business out there where you can get it free for a while.

Yeah, it's fantastic. It's like Google Sheets on steroids, right? And so you can sort things and find things and it's just There's a lot that you can do with Airtable beyond what you can do with Notion. Oh, you can do it with Notion. I just found it frustrating because I'm pushing a lot of data. And then I use a combination. I use both Zapier and Make.com, and there's specific use cases for both. So Zapier is kind of the, Zapier is the OG. It's the one that everybody kind of knows, and it's a no code. Connect this with this. So in its simplest format, connect stripe with book funnel, which don't natively talk to one another. And actually I have a newsletter going out tomorrow that shows you how you can connect stripe, sell ebooks on your website and deliver them with book funnel using Zapier. It's really easy and it's free. You can use it with the free version of Zapier. Make.com is I call it Zapier's nerdier cousin, right? Because it does a lot of the same stuff, but it also does a lot more stuff. It has what are called API capabilities built in. So it can call Mid Journey or Ideogram or some of these generative imagery services. It can interface more cleanly with Google to create templates and imagery that you need. It can place things on a Google sheet. It, I mean, it can just do more precise things and, and its pricing structure is a little bit different because you pay for the number of executions there. So its pricing is a little bit different than Zapier. But then Zapier has other features that does more, say, with RSS feeds, because with Zapier, you can create your own custom RSS feed and grab things from different places. So, for example, I have one that grabs from hash tags that I monitor on Instagram, good news, and it also does hashtag Romanticy because I want to see those. And Zapier will combine those two together into one feed and then I can send a newsletter based on that. Disparate knowledge sources and hubs come into one place. Zapier does that, make.com doesn't do that. It's sometimes trial and error, which sucks. I'm not gonna lie. Because I'll. 20 minutes into it, I'll be like, oh, this doesn't work.

I gotta start all over.

Yeah.

But this whole zap is.

We have to zap it.

It's not gonna.

We have to zap the zap. Yeah.

The zapping zapping.

Yeah.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's so interesting. So. And now you. Now you can see why I have no hobbies, because I'm sitting here figuring.

Out these puzzles all day. No, but it's. It's. Because it's. It's. Something that when you don't the rabbit hole is so deep and you do kind of need someone to guide you in a sense through it because you can you can get lost very easily now Air table notion is there any other tool sites I have this point we got make Zapier notion air table that's the main parts of your workflow. Do you end up?

That's the core I mean those are the core right there's I mean you can There are other systems like for example, I use WordPress for a lot of different things, but then I also use Ghost for the for subscription services, right? Because I own Ghost, it's a self hosted installation, so I don't have to worry about anything spicy. I don't use another alternate service. I can host my own subscription service using Ghost and I don't have to pay for plugins and there's a whole plethora of reasons for that. Ghost also has email services built into it, which is kind of cool. So There's, yeah, I use Ghost for some things and then I use WordPress for other things. And then I, I wrote a WordPress plugin because I got bored on the flight to Alaska.

So I wrote a, I was gonna ask you about that. What is StoryLink? Cause I know, I know what it, it's, I know what it's, I know what it is, but share with the audience, cause I think it's, first of all, hilarious, the story of how it.

Came to be, but it also serves a very useful purpose. So I am a huge proponent of owning your own tech stack. I'm just really, really big on owning your own transactions with your customer, owning your own real estate, right? Not building on rented land. So with that in mind, I'm always looking for ways that I can streamline those kinds of things that I need, but own it myself. And so this, the necessity was Bitly came out with the change where when you use a Bitly short link, it will now route people to an intermediary page. They have to watch an ad. so if you have a bitly short link, they're not going to go to your link that you want. They're going to show an ad first and then send them onto the link. And I just thought, yeah. And I just thought, okay, well, again, if I'm not paying for it, then I don't have the right to dictate what they do. But at the same time, if I had my own, then no one could tell me what to do. I'm. I'm basically a toddler with tech skills because no one's going to tell me what to do. So the problem that I solved with this plugin is I created a link shortener with your own URL. So you can go to writelink.to, that's the domain name that I chose, and then you can create a link shortener to go to wherever you want to drop people, and it will create a QR code that you own that lives on your website that won't ever expire. The other use case was Google used to have short links, and then Google just decided one day, no, we're not going to do that anymore. so it was frustrating to kind of see these things that we were using when we were basically renting, we were renting links from them. And so I said, all right, how can we own that? So what this plugin does is you load it onto a WordPress site, and then you have the ability to create your own short links attached to your domain name that you own to create QR codes, and then you can put in all of the booksellers end link. So you could put in your Amazon, your Kobo, your books to read, your own link, your direct sales link, whatever link you want, and it'll come up with a landing page and then you can direct your reader to wherever you want them to buy your book from. It'll also do geolocation. So if you're in the UK, it'll serve up amazon.co.uk or wherever you sit, Australia, India, Japan, it'll find what storefront they should be directed to and it knows that. And then it keeps track of all the analytics, it'll create a landing page for people. So you can brand that and it's free. I just did it on the flight because I was really an eight hour flight to Alaska and back.

I think for most of the time, they're gonna be mind blown that that's all possible on a website.

And yeah, I've been a web, a WordPress developer since like 2003. It's five, six in that range back when it was a fork off of K2 and I loved WordPress so much. So I've been a developer for a really long time. But again, I have no hobbies. I have no, I don't do anything outside of technology weirdness.

That's, we're grateful for it. We're, we're all great for it. We don't judge. We're just grateful.

You listen and don't judge. I do travel. I mean, I can't lie. I do travel. You know, I'm, there's not a lot to do on train trips from Scotland down to London. So you just sit there and work and look outside and it's beautiful and talk to people. It's cool.

No, I, I get it. I tend to be the same way. Like, I don't, I have a different sort of hobby than you do in the sense of, I love that you go deep into automations and building things. I tend to be more like creating weird marketing things, but I, I, I love to just create things. I wouldn't know what to do with my time if I wasn't creating. I think we all feel pretty similar. I think it's actually tough is that so much of the time to create things, we sometimes have to spend things doing things that we don't want to do. And I am curious because I know you're running between Indie Author Magazine, Direct Reader, all these things. You have a lot of different website builders using. And I know there was last year, which feels weird to say, but a couple months ago, I suppose there was the whole WordPress debacle.

Yeah.

Which was pretty, pretty major. And I, a lot of people started talking about ghosts. I love ghosts. I know ghosts as well. I've, I've used WordPress though, so I should say that I've used WordPress the last like seven years now. So I'm, I've been in with the WordPress ecosystem as well, but there's also not just WordPress.

There's Square, there's Wix, there's all these different website builders for authors looking to start their website. What do you recommend using? So I recommend using whatever feels most comfortable for you to keep up with. That's, that's the short answer because a lot of people will sell WordPress as it's so, so easy. And it is, right? If you have some tech skills and you want to keep track of plugins and make sure that you don't have security breaches and all of that stuff. So there is at least once or twice a month some maintenance involved. so whatever you start with, you want to keep up with. Wix is pretty simple. Stuart Grant's digital. Oh, gosh. Stuart Grant, he's in the UK. I can. I'll put his link in the show notes or.

Author marketing toolkit or something. Yeah.

Digital.

Digital author toolkit or something.

Digital author toolkit. Yes, that's it. Stuart Grant knows Wix inside and out, and he is just a brain on Wix, and he. helped simplify that for authors. And he did, he was very generous and did a product tour of Wix for indiethaughtortraining.com, which is, that's kind of the purpose of indie author training, is to just have all of these people walking through and product tours and showing how users can use them and then authors can come and watch these videos and then make it, you know, an informed decision. So he does Wix and he's fantastic at it. And he's talked about how It can be set up to do drop shipping, especially with Book Vault. And we've got all kinds of automations and connections with lulu.com. so whatever you're going, the thing that I say is look at your big objectives, right? If you want to sell direct, there's a couple of things that you need to think about. If you just want to set it and forget it, then Wix might be or Squarespace might be your Huckleberry. If you want to do some more things with events or if you want to do live streaming or if you want to do virtual events, then, you know, I think WordPress is the way to go. So it depends on really two things. What are your objectives long term and what's your bandwidth for keeping up with it? Well, and, and if you don't have the bandwidth, who's your resource? Because you can, you can Outsource it. It's always important, I think, for people to understand what how to do it and then Outsource it so they're not paying someone five thousand dollars a month to fix two plugins a month.

Like, that's ridiculous. Yeah. There's more. More of that goes on than probably anyone would like.

It's tough. Yeah, it is. It's tough. I get these solicitations all the time. I'm like, are you kidding me? That is just rude. How do you sleep at night charging that for that little task?

It's just silly. Yeah. Yeah, I I think. I never understand people like that because I tend to, and I think a lot of us tend to do the exact opposite, which is under value. But regardless, it's tough when you don't know what you're getting into. So it's really nice too, to hear from you that all of this is approachable. No matter how deep you want to go into it, it's not scary. Automations can be fun and automations are really useful. And I think that's really inspiring. Now, you mentioned indie author training and you have indie author magazine. You have this whole Like indie author empire, really.

I do. It's an ecosystem.

It's an ecosystem. That's a more friendly word. What, you know, walk me through what it is and then how do you as one person, I know you have a great team, but maybe that can be part of what you share. Like how do you build teams to help run these things? Because so many of us as authors are looking to, if we're not automating, we might be looking to also build a team to get something off our plate. Yeah.

So I've been very, very lucky to have an amazing team from the jump. And so the, The genesis of all of this was Indie Author Magazine, and that came together because there were 22 of us that were sprinting every day. There was a group of authors, and we were sort of adding context to conversations, and some of us wanted to dive deeper. And so we came together to have deeper conversations and made it beautiful. And that's Alice Briggs, our former creative director. That's all her. She's fantastic and made the magazine. beautiful. And we carry on in that vein. But then Indie Author Training sort of started because we ran a tech summit and we had Reidy and Plotter and a bunch of, and Kickstarter, Oriana Leckert, Kickstarter and several others came together to help us teach about a lot of these MailChimp and MailerLite and all the different. So we had this tech summit and at the time, Everything that I do sort of follows this funny trajectory. And that is, I say, okay, well, let's just see if 25 people sign up for it. And then we have 705 people sign up for it overnight. I'm like, oh, clearly there's a problem that we must solve. That is legitimately how things happen. I'm generally surprised by how many people respond to it. And then we go, all right, well, let's figure out how to solve that problem and keep going with it. So the tech summit turned into indie author training. and what Indie Author Training is, is a marketplace for all of the different instructors to come and teach their courses. So you're going to see Amazon ads from Janet Margot, and you're going to see Storygrid from Joe Nocera. All of the different really smart, smart, smart people have brought their courses in under one big tent because we were all teaching in silos and trying to get people to go over and teach or take classes on this teachable side or this thinkific side or this website or YouTube or wherever. So we just brought everything into one big tent so everybody's there. And that's the idea of Indie Author Training. And we're in full-blown launch phase. And again, I thought, well, I'll just put the call out and we'll get 15 people that want to teach. I've had 119 people sign up to teach. I just was like, Wow, wow. So we have 119 instructors that are currently bringing courses over or developing courses or getting ready for big launches of courses. So if you go to indieauthortraining.com, you'll start to see courses populate. And then from the top down, we as Indie Author Training, Karen Guyler is the ops manager there. She and I said, well, how can we support the instructors. So we have a whole instructional design team that will help those instructors. But then we also said, you know, we're all reading these really interesting books on productivity, on mindset, on time management. And so we created the book club summaries for all of them. And those are going to be books like Thiago Fortes' Para Method and GTD by David Allen, but also Stephen King's on writing and the Happiness Factor by Shawn Achor. So we have book club summaries for people to come and read. And then we also have webinars and product tours from all the different technology people. So we wanted to have this one stop shop where people could come and evaluate tools and think about things and ask other people and talk about wellness, talk about longevity, talk about sustainability, talk about all the different things that are part of an indie author's career. So yeah, so that's that's indie author training, and then just kind of thinking about how to solve problems. One of the things that's been really out there for a long time is how can authors protect their business? And in my mind, it's always been direct. It's always been direct sales. Direct sales is where it's at. But then again, thinking about how hard it is for an author to bring a product to their website and then get people to come to their individual website and to get to people to come and buy something from them, it's prohibitively expensive and it's hard, right? So we came up with directtoreaders.com and directtoreaders.com, when you come, when a reader comes to that site and they find a book that they want, the author has decided where they want to sell that book. So they can send them to any of the retailers they want, or they can sell it on their own website, or they can Give them a books to read link and they can use, you know, a short link to go to any one of the retailers. So we're trying to bridge the gap and make that a directory of sorts where readers can come and find their next great read and find their next favorite storyteller, but then buy the book from the storyteller direct. And the storyteller author gets the email address from the sale and they get the contact information from the sale and they make whatever commission they want to make on the sale of that. So everything we've done in this ecosystem has been to bring a bunch of smart people together, band together, and then do the thing. And so we're using collaboration and leverage as opposed to each of us trying to do these things in our own silos. So that's the ecosystem. So we have information with the magazine. Education with indie author training and then marketing and awareness from director readers.

It's a great ecosystem.

It's a great ecosystem. And I really do have to shout out my team. I mean, I cannot, I can't, I mean, I cannot function without them. I'm very, I've got the best and the brightest people that do the most amazing stuff. Nicole Schroeder is our editor in chief and she's just nominally smart and she keeps us on the journalistic track.

Right?

So everything is on, from the perspective of journalism as opposed to thinly veiled marketing or kind of untrustworthy hyperbole. I get redlined more than anybody because I will turn in an article and it will say, this is the greatest product ever. And she'll go, no, it is a product and this is what it does. And so it's a journalism article and not a marketing piece shell. Yeah, she's fantastic.

No, having that space is really important because it's, it's nice to have an opinionated, you know, this is this person's, like, who's writing it? Like, this is their view, but it's, it's nice to have a journalistic perspective as well in the space and also to have a magazine that legitimizes the space as well. I have a friend who runs the Creator magazine, which is for YouTubers and digital creators, and it does a similar thing for that space. Like when you get to be on the COVID of a magazine or see someone, you know, or see someone who You've read their book in a cover magazine. It's like, oh wow, this is a serious thing, right? You could tell your family, being an indie author, this is a real thing. It's just a pipe dream. We have a magazine. I think it doesn't fall.

I wish I'd named it differently. I wish I hadn't locked it into indie author magazine because we kind of have a two, we're fighting two battles, right? Because indie author in a lot of people's minds, is self-published right. They really feel like it is self-published but in my mind, it's taking charge of your career. Yeah, it is taking charge of your career. And so we have readers that are Trad published, we have hybrid published.

Right.

We have people that don't even publish. We have editors and we have narrators and we have technology and lit RPG and filmmakers and audiobook narrators. Right. So Indie really is a spirit instead of a definition of how you publish something. And then, you know, now just as an aside, we have Storyteller Showcase Magazine, which is actually a new magazine attached to Direct to Readers, and it is a reader-centric magazine. And we're starting with a Romantasy version, but our distribution has always been the same, right? We are distributing through conferences and through in the swag bags of attendees at different conferences and cool, cool events all around the world. But it is, it's the same, right? Because at the heart of it, we're storytellers. And at the heart of it, we, however we choose to put that out there, whether it's a graphic novel or, or a serial or whatever it is, it's a story. So we're going to showcase the storytellers. And there's so many stories to tell. That's what's been most gratifying and exciting for me is I get to hear the coolest stories of how people overcame things or how they survive things, but also just how they make the world a better place, how they're constantly challenging people's ideas and beliefs. I mean, it's just, we are in the coolest industry ever. Ever.

Oh, yeah. That's by far. Like, yeah. The fact that you can write almost anything. and as long as you are able to entertain readers, can share any world you come up with, and the people, the diversity of the people here in terms of their backgrounds, what they're interested in just leads to so much really fun stuff. It's awesome that you get to be in kind of the nexus of it all.

It is. And, you know, we change the world. We really change the world.

Oh, yeah. Without stories, we wouldn't be human. No, I don't know what we'd be, but we wouldn't. We wouldn't be able to function as humans.

No.

Agreed. This has been so great, Shal. I am so glad that I was able to chat with you. I feel like I learned a lot about automations. I hope everyone here learned not only a lot about automations, but all the amazing things that you're doing and that really lies ahead for us as authors, because I'm. I'm very optimistic about the future. I know there's a lot. and rightfully so, it's always weird times in publishing. It's never Rose, just Rosy. And I don't want to be too Rosy. The future won't be perfect, but I.

Do think it'll be better. I think it'll keep getting better. I think it'll keep getting better. And I think that's, it's because of the, you know, resistance and, and resilience of this industry. We've had a lot of things thrown at us. Right. We've had a lot of things thrown at us, but we have 100 track.

Record of, of making it through it, so. Yeah, it's going to stay around. I think we only go extinct if humanity does. So, you know, we're hopefully staving that off as well. And where can we find you online if we want to learn more about Shell and all the ecosystems?

Okay, well, so obviously the newsletter is authorautomations.com, that's kind of where I write most of my nerdy stuff. And then of course, indieauthormagazine.com is the jumping off point for everything else. indiauthortraining.com and direct to the number two readers.com and then of course I am the program director for author nation so if you want to catch me in person I will be in Las Vegas November 3rd through 7th hanging out with the smartest people I know in the whole whole world that are coming to share their insights and all of their fantastic education resources ideas and their take on how to make this a fantastic industry and make the world better.

I will be there as well.

I know.

I love Team Autonation and I hope to see you all there as well. I don't know if I'll be announcing this outside of the podcast, but I have like a Barbie house that I'm doing that seats are most likely sold out to, but if you want to come to the Barbie house, it's a retreat. in Vegas the weekend before AuthrNation for folks coming to AuthrNation. Just send me an email and you could come. I'm like, as this podcast is being recorded, I'm like collecting the RSVPs and I need to find the time to send out invoices. But the Barbie House is rented. It's Friday, Halloween night through Sunday, and there'll be a mastermind, small group, 15 of us, and just starting to plan for the new year. We're going to talk about going beyond the book, expanding our IP, and it's one of the things that if you're coming to Author Nation, it's a no-brainer if you're not coming to Author Nation and you want to come to this, you should just come to both, because that's a great idea. And then if you, sadly, most people probably won't be able to come to this, you should still come to Author Nation. And then, I don't know, I can't, I, maybe you could stop by the.

Barbie house for like an hour. I don't know. No, yeah. Let's do a little tour. We'll get in our Barbie dream cars and just race on over.

And that's the next thing I got to figure out, right? transportation with the cars. Like, we gotta. It's only three miles away from where, you know, the conference will be.

So you've got a couple. I'm sure you have some options, Michael.

Yeah, it's Vegas.

Well, oh, oh, there's definitely options. There's some. There's some weird options.

But there's. You can. Yeah, there's weird stuff. I was like, out of all cities.

This city has to have a Barbie house.

And it was like, oh, sure.

It does. It does. Stole. Give it to you. That's phenomenal. That's fantastic. I just have this image of you and for good. It's like hanging at the Barbie house together.

There's gonna be quite, yes, we have a fun group gonna be at the Barbie house.

I just think that's fabulous. Yeah.

I'm gonna try and get Joe as well, who runs Author Nation. He said he might come for, like, he's obviously super busy, but he'll stop by.

He's got a good team too. He's not as busy as you think at that point. He's handed it over to all of the boots on the ground folks at that point. He can just take his victory lap and walk around. cause it was, last year was phenomenal. It was such a great conference. I knew it would be good, but I didn't, I really didn't expect that it would come together so, so phenomenally, so great.

It's a great time when you can have a first year go that well.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I think it's just the continuity of the team, you know, we've worked together before and I have a fantastic, I have a fantastic programming committee too. They just, they've really dug in and so we've got a lot of great, great sessions this year. Longer sessions. Yeah, we're going to dive deep into some cool stuff, cool, cool stuff. Automations, a lot of automations.

I love it. It sounds like I need to get to automating. I think a lot of us do. Yeah. But Shelle, thank you so much for being here. It was fantastic chatting with you.

Thanks, Michael.

All right. That's it for this podcast. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to have Shell back on, I feel like me and Shell could just go on forever. So if you want Shell back on, let me know. Be happy to have Shell back on. If there's any guests you want to see in the podcast, always very happy to do that. I have some awesome episodes releasing soon, so I hope you enjoy it. In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. And as always, as always, don't forget, together we are boundless.