Welcome to The Productive Novelist Podcast

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com, and today I'm gonna do an intro to my podcast called The Productive Novelist. So if you're listening, this is the first episode, and I just want to give you an idea of what the podcast is about, what I'm all about, and just give you an intro to everything. So I have my notes here. Um, the first thing is that I have 3 series under The World Needs Your Book. The first one is called The Productive Novelist, which is my main series, my flagship series, my pillar content, whatever you'd like to call it. There are always lots of different marketing terms for that, um, but basically it's the step-by-step basics of how to go about outlining, writing, editing, publishing, launching, marketing building a business around your book. And so it, it's pretty comprehensive, I guess, is what I'm getting at. It's 13 books planned right now. I'm hoping to do a couple more, and I'll kind of keep adding to the back of that. And each book focuses on a small problem that you might have. So for example, if you are struggling to outline your novel, whether it's your first novel or even later novels, that could be a reason to get the first book in the series, which is called Novel Writing Prep. If you're struggling with writing habits, I have The 8-Minute Writing Habit. So each book really goes deep into solving one problem that you may be having on your writing journey. And it's a series that's great for beginner novelists, or maybe you haven't even written your first book yet. This series would be great for you. It's also really great for 6 and 7 figure novelists, which sounds crazy, but I have a number of authors who are at 6 or 7 figures and they read my series still. It's pretty helpful to them still. Now, you're probably not looking at like the first couple of books. You're probably looking at later books in the series if that's you, but it can still be really helpful. And I think the biggest reason that it's helpful is because I have a master's degree degree in business and, um, lots of experience in marketing. One of— so, um, I got my MBA and I have a concentration in marketing strategy and entrepreneurship. So I guess that's 3 concentrations. But because of that background, um, and because of time I spent in tech startups and time I spent copywriting, time I spent studying virality, all of those things really seep into my books as well. So that could be really helpful to you if, say, you're a great writer, but you want to take your business to the next level. So my second series is called Book Sales Supercharged, and this series is new. It's different from my other series. So my other series is very evergreen. This series is a little bit less about strategy and solutions. It's more about tactics and the Book Sales Supercharged series. It dives into one platform or one format and tries to give you everything you need to know about that in terms of selling and marketing your book. So for example, the series starts with just the idea of like, how do you sell books on each of the major ebook retailers? So I go through Apple Books, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes Noble, and then also your website because that's an important retailer. Then after that, those first, you know, that takes you into 7 books 'cause the first book is just about selling an ebook in general. So after that, then it goes into all the different places you can sell in print and then all the different places you can sell an audiobook. And so it helps you hone in on each platform. There are lots of different platforms, different formats. It will also likely eventually go into social media at some point. That's kind of a couple of years down the road. But the series is really meant to help you just figure out the tactical stuff around each platform, each format, because that's becoming— that's very important. And it's becoming more and more important as an indie author to understand all those different spaces and how you can make more money in all of them. So that's that series. It's, it's an ambitious series. It's one that I'm kind of in the middle of working on right now. So I don't have a lot for that right now. But definitely look for that on retailers. It's called Book Sales Supercharged. And you can see where I'm at depending on when you're listening to this. The third series I have is called Book and Business Coaching. And right now that series is a little bit Hold. So it has 3 books in it. And it is primarily for nonfiction authors and specifically women coaches. That's the main target audience for it. So it's great if you have read those books, if you found my podcast based on that, but I do want to say that this podcast is going to be focused on fiction. So you can, you can listen to it still if you're doing nonfiction books. A lot of my experience is in nonfiction. I'm kind of like half and half on fiction and nonfiction, but I'm going to be focused more on novels and on fiction through this podcast. Hence why it's called The Productive Novelist and not The Productive Author. So now let me tell you a little bit more about me. My name is Monica Leonelle. I've been publishing since 2009 independently. My first book was published in November of 2009. It was a nonfiction book that we do not speak of anymore, but it was actually somewhat successful for the time period. So, and writing that book and publishing that book, learning all sorts of publishing stuff through that book really gave me the confidence and the drive to publish more books. And I kind of got bitten by the book bug. I'm definitely specifically passionate about books. I don't know why. I just love everything about the publishing process and everything about building a book business. So it's just what I'm passionate about. I published my first fiction book in 2011, February. It was actually my birthday, so go me. And since then, I probably published, gosh, at least 30 books. It's hard to keep track because I pull, you know, I pull stuff down, I put stuff up. Since— so I'm recording this in April of 2021. And since September of 2020, I published 9 books alone. So it's just, you know, and some of them were republishes where I had like cleaned them up and republished them. But it's very hard to keep track. I know that other authors out there have this issue, but it's always hard when people ask like, how many books have you written? It's like, I don't know. They're spread out across pen names. They're like in different formats. Like some of them are getting redone, like so they're pulled down. Some of them have been republished, but it was a massive overhaul. So it's just, it's hard to say. So what's unique about me? Like I said, a lot of people are teaching you know, how to write books. It's great. I think it's awesome. I've learned so much from other people. Like I said, I have an MBA, so that's really my background. Tech startups, MBA, more of an analyst perspective, and also a far more strategic perspective than I think a lot of people have that's out there. And part of that is just that that was what I was trained to do in my graduate program. The other thing is that I am on both sides of the aisle. I have 3— well, I have 2 fiction pen names, soon to be 3. And then I have 2 nonfiction pen names. So this is one of them. You're watching it right now. Monica Leonelle is one of my nonfiction pen names. But I have a second nonfiction pen name that is not about business, not about books, not about writing. It's in the spirituality niche, and that I have 4 books under. I also, I have another podcast. I have, you know, a whole brand around that, and that is, um, kind of just starting to take off. So I haven't really done a lot with that aside from write the 4 books, and I'm still kind of building that out. So, um, I'm also aggressively wide and aggressively diversified So again, the pen names and then the aggressively wide part is that I'm on all the platforms. I'm looking into all the different ways you can make money with writing and primarily through books, of course, but certainly digging into lots of different things, always experimenting with stuff. I also run a Substack called Aggressively Wide. So you can go find that if you want. I think it's— I don't know the exact address, but it's substack.com. And then you can search for Aggressively Wide by Monica Leonelle. So I encourage you to subscribe to that. It's free. And then there is a paid subscription that you can grab as well. But a lot of the content is free. So it's worth subscribing to. So here's what you can expect from this podcast, because I don't really do podcasts the same way a lot of people do. So the first thing is that I tend to write evergreen content. I also tend to do evergreen podcasts. So I'm not really going to talk about something unless it is evergreen in that like 5 years from now it can still be useful to whoever's listening. So that's a little bit different than what some people do. Now, a lot of people do have podcasts like that, but I'm definitely more of like a build things slowly type of person. I'll also— I'm kind of like a burst of energy type of writer and creator. So I'll record a ton of podcasts in a row and I'll be posting them out pretty quickly. And then I might take off a month or two. And so there's— I do try to keep things somewhat consistent. But if I disappear for a couple of months, it doesn't— it, it just means that I'm not there for a couple of months. That's it. It doesn't mean I'm quitting the podcast. It doesn't mean I'm never going to post again. Like, I probably am going to post again, truthfully. But sometimes I'll just take a couple of months off. I also have a young child, so that's a big part of it is that my schedule is a little wonky. And then I tend to, because I have a number of brands that I'm working on, a number of pending I tend to jump around to those. So I'll pour a lot of energy into one for several months or even for like a year, and then I'll kind of let that ride for a little bit and let it, you know, grow and percolate on its own while I'm working on a different one. And so that— it's not the most efficient way to do things. I agree with you because I know you're already saying that to this, um, this video into this podcast. It's not, it's not the right way to do things, I know, but it is just kind of how my creative energy flows at the moment and how my schedule flows at the moment. So that's where I'm at on my journey. And I, you know, when I'm, when I'm here, I'm pretty consistent. When I need to take a break, I might just be gone for a couple of months and, you know, I'll probably have a certain amount of content that posts through those couple of months I'm gone and then there'll be kind of like a dead zone. But don't— never fear. So that's another thing about me is that, and about this podcast, is that I tend to love my creations into their next evolution. So with my Productive Novelist series, for example, a number of those books— I started writing that series in 2015, it's now 2021 as I record this— so a number of those books were written, you know, 6 years ago, but I've recently taken those and revamped them, gone through them, um, you know, listened to feedback that I've received on them and created the next iteration of them, created the next evolution of them, and put it back out into the world, um, so that it can reach a new generation of writers. So I tend to do that with everything. So, so for example, as, as these episodes kind of age and maybe, you know, maybe they're not as strong 5 years from now, I would take the same topic and record it again. And so I'll kind of, I'll kind of like keep loving this podcast into its next evolution, into its next iteration. I've never really abandoned it. I'm very much the type of person who's going to just keep pouring my love into these creations and making them better and better and then putting them back out there so that people can catch up on them, so that people can learn from them, enjoy them, and just so that they continue to have new life. And I think that this is really important in this career. I know a number of people who, they write the book and they publish it and then they're done. And that's great if that's you, feel free to do that. Just having been in this business, you know, for— I'm going on my 12th year of publishing independently. I've just found that, you know, some projects are meant to be abandoned. Don't get me wrong. But then sometimes you really have a good thing and you just need to, like, give it a little bit of love and then send it back out there and, it will really take on a new life again. And I've seen that with my series. It did pretty well when it was the Growth Hacking for Storytellers series. It's now actually doing, um, even better in many ways as the Productive Novelist series. So, uh, that, you know, that's been something encouraging for me, and it's a big reason why I'm doing the revamp of my fiction as well. All right. I'm also getting off track. So that's the other thing about this podcast. It's going to be a little bit rambly and I don't edit much. So you're just going to hear every little thought that comes out. So apologies. Oh, good. This is what— this is my next point. I talk a lot. Unlike— oh, I'll read. I'm just going to read this to you because it's funny. There are— there's unlikely to be a ton of other guests because I'm not good at interviewing others. Because I talk too much. I'm used to being the one interviewed, so I won't have a ton of industry experts on here. It's going to be mostly just me talking to my camera, and I post these on YouTube and then I repost them on my podcast feed. So then the last thing is that I know that people— most podcasts, they have an industry expert, they have you know, they have a single topic and then the next week it's a different topic and then the next week it's a different topic. So that's not really me. I'm the type of person who's going to dive deep into one topic and probably record like 5 episodes on it, or maybe, maybe even more. Like, I get very interested and go very deep on one little thing and I will post those all at once. And then I will move on. So there may be periods where you're not really interested in the topic and you're like, all right, I wish you would talk about something else. And the answer is that I will talk about something else pretty soon. So just, just wait it out, wait it out a couple of weeks. I tend to— I just don't hop around topics very easily. So I tend to just kind of like create a bunch of stuff at once. And about whatever I'm interested in at the time. Of course, it's always useful to you. I don't just talk randomly. I mean, aside from, aside from this, because it's an introduction, but I don't like tend to talk for no reason. So it'll be useful to you if you're looking for certain topics. The archive is going to be a good thing. You can go back, you can find a bunch of videos on the one topic. So again, this podcast is more meant more for evergreen. It's, you know, you can listen to it as the episodes come out. That's great. But I'm really creating this podcast for people in the future who are, you know, maybe there's 100 episodes and they are looking for specific information about like, I don't know, like writing habits. Let's say they're looking for that specific information. And so they find 5 episodes about that in the podcast feed. And so that's the kind of, um, style that this podcast will be. So I hope that has been helpful to you. If you want to find some organization for this podcast, so you can look at the podcast feed, of course. You can also, if you go to YouTube, which my YouTube channel is at theworldneedsyourbook.com, youtube. That will always link to my YouTube channel. You can find playlists there if you're looking for something specific. And then I will also update my blog. So theworldneedsyourbook.com/blog will have the content as well. So typically I'll record it, like I make notes on it, then I'll record the video in kind of my rambly style, and then I will write the blog post. Eventually and embed, you know, the video and the podcast episode in there. So it is all organized there, and hopefully you'll be able to find what you need that way. I hope this was helpful to you. Thank you so much for watching and listening, and have a wonderful day.