Katie Kamala Haley, author and filmmaker, wrote three books on medicinal plants and indigenous healing: a memoir of six months in the Amazon with ayahuasca, a nonfiction account of two years studying Indian flora, and a guide to culinary herbs and essential oils. She moved from traditional publishing to self-publishing via KDP and IngramSpark, hiring professionals for covers and editing, and markets mainly through Amazon and podcasts.
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This is Author to Author. I'm Tim Trott. This channel is about authors for authors. As a writer, I like to discover how other writers find their inspiration and motivation. Katie Kamala Haley is an author and award-winning independent filmmaker and holistic health expert with a deep-rooted passion for medicinal plants and indigenous healing traditions. She honed her craft under the guidance of esteemed published authors including Robert Stone and Rosalind Brackenbury at the Key West Artists Studios. She attended Wildacre Summer Writing Residency in North Carolina, where she studied creative writing with novelist Susan Woodring. Additionally, she explored the art of poetry with Ali Shabbar in Asheville, North Carolina. In a moment, we'll meet our guest author. Author to Author is supported by Cybershoot.com, the right host for your author website. Welcome Katie Kamala Haley to Author to Author. Glad to have you.
Thank you, Tim. I'm happy to be here. When—
what is your newest book?
My newest book is called Messages from the Medicine: Mother Ayahuasca Speaks, and it's about my time living in the Amazon jungle of Peru and actually traveling around Peru. I took a 6-month sabbatical to explore the plants, a lot of magical and medicinal and psychedelic plants and the shamanic culture there regarding the plants and the sacred plants. So that's what the book is about.
Well, that's your latest book. There's another one that you've written before that. Describe A Diamond for India.
A Diamond for India is a creative nonfiction, but it's about my time, 2 years, going to India and studying studying the plants of India and my experience there. So really, both books are an immersion into two different cultures with the focus on the plants. But more than the plants, I would say both of them were spiritual explorations as well. And that's where I feel like even people that might not be into plants would enjoy reading them because it's a story about overcoming challenges and that heart of an explorer and an adventurer.
Another one of your books is Spice of Life. Tell me about that.
That book is more so a recipe book, but it also has some history about the use of plants and essential oils and herbs in culinary and craft cocktails, beverages, and how to safely and effectively use these food-grade essential oils in food and beverages.
You've been writing quite a while. When did you start writing?
Yeah, I had my first article published in 2000, so that's 25 years now. And I love writing. I mean, I've been writing since I was young, poetry and short stories, studied writing. And then in my 50s, I went to film school, so then I explored doing some screenplays, and I've done a few short films.
That gives you a very wide background. Do you have a publisher, or are you self-published, or some blend of the two?
This book, uh, The Messages from the Medicine, I self-published. And before that, I was published by Pepper Tree Press out of Sarasota, which is a small female-owned publishing company. And they, they did a beautiful job. I, I felt it was much harder to self-publish. I think a lot of people go that route because they think it'll be more affordable and they think, oh well, I can do a lot of this myself. But as I hired out different people with a cover designer and an editor and a formatter, I think I spent just as much money, if not more, than some of my friends that have found like a hybrid publisher. But I did learn quite a bit along the way.
A lot of writers find one of the most difficult things is marketing. How do you market your book? Goodreads, BookBub, or BookFunnel, any of those? What do you use?
Well, right now I've just been focusing on Amazon and going on podcasts and doing local things and local book signing. I don't mind the marketing. In fact, right now is my side hustle. I'm working in brand marketing, and the last 2 years I've been working in social media marketing. I wouldn't say I'm a total expert, but I, I know it pretty well. And because of film school, I know how to make videos. But you still have to, you know, have a plan and a lot of times things are, you know, trial and error. You don't know exactly what's going to work. So I'm still in that stages because the book's just been out 2 months now. So I'm just figuring out what it is and how I want to market. So I guess in that way I don't have a hard time with sales. Like a lot of people would rather be behind the computer, but I like going to the events and meeting people and telling people face to face what the book is about. Out. But I'm still learning about how to market my particular book.
You mentioned Facebook and Amazon. Do you actually buy advertising or you find your way around it?
No, right now I have not purchased any advertising. I did take a boot camp marketing course and they really recommend that you get at least 20 to 40 reviews before you start putting advertising dollars out. 'You know, that's what I was told.' So right now I only have 10 reviews, so I'm getting the people that have purchased the book, and you know how it is in the beginning, it's a lot of your friends and associates and people tell people, and then you really want to expand beyond that, which is important for people that don't know you and that just have an interest between the subject matter and how you presented it to people. But I would I do believe I am going to be advertising in the future.
So are these books all hardcover or paperback, or you go with EPUB? And I guess maybe not audio.
Yeah, not audio. People would ask about audio. I know it's so popular now that people like to listen, you know, whether in the car on a road trip or even just commuting back and forth to work. But my book I have now is really written like a novel, especially the half of it. Half of it takes place in Peru, and it's written like a novel with many characters. It's got some Spanish in it. A lot of the people that are in there, the characters, are European. So there would be so many characters, so many accents, so much that would have to kind of be acted out, I feel like, for the book to be good as an audiobook. So I haven't I haven't done that. And the books that I have out are paperback, and then I have, you know, the ebooks. The Spice of Life is just an ebook. I put that out because I was, several years ago, just trying the genre and trying to, you know, figure out how to self-publish an ebook. And I figured out that if you just put it out there with, like, no marketing, like, no one will find your book. So that wasn't, that was more of an experiment book.
Just between us, are you, and you're interested in the tools you used, are you old school like Word and Google Docs or new school, Atticus, Readsy Studio, any AI tools? What's your approach?
Well, I purchased for Mac, I purchased the Vellum software, which I thought was good for writing it because just the way that it, the way that it was laid out, it was, it was easy for me to write in it. But I did things really wrong because I was, the way I formatted things, and then I wanted to add the photos, and I really, then I was moving everything around. It took me much longer amount of time than it should have, but because, you know, it's a learning, a learning curve. So I did, I used, I used the Vellum software. And also though, I will want to say that I used that particularly because it said it was really easy to upload and you can do everything yourself. And then I found out when I tried to do it with KDP on Amazon, it wasn't, and I still had to hire a formatter even though I paid around $250 for that software. And that could have just been me, although I mean, I'm pretty, I'm pretty tech savvy. But for whatever reason, I felt it important to get a professional person to lay it out. So that did end up costing me more. And I'm going to upload to IngramSpark because I know to get in libraries and to get in bookstores, I have to do that. But right now I was just focused on Amazon.
The thing about IngramSpark is it's got to be the absolute last thing that you do, because if you have too many changes after that, it— after a while it can cost you. So that, that's one, one of the mistakes I made. I was a little too eager to upload to Ingram and then I'm faced with that $25 change fee because we found things later. So that, that can be probably—
Oh, that's good advice.
Speaking of finding mistakes and things, uh, do you hire an editor or do you use ProWritingAid or Grammarly or some combination?
No, I hired an editor because my edits were much more than just the grammar. I had an editor that really helped me. We were in a writing group together and we did writing, a writing residency workshop over one summer. So I knew her well. She's a really good writer. She's got, you know, she's got a master's in English, and she also speaks Spanish. And there was, you know, quite a bit of Spanish, not that my book is in Spanish, so it's kind of, you know, some Spanish words and then like the translation with English because it was Peru. And she was really, I mean, really great about that. But what happened is her edits, she likes to do edits in the manuscript. And then I had to type everything in and sometimes it's late at night, I'm tired and I found I made the mistakes. So when I was getting things back from the person that was formatting, yeah, it did cost me money because I found a lot of mistakes that I had to change. Yeah, it's such a learning process and I know it really can be frustrating, but that's just, I guess I had to realize that's just part of the process of being a writer.
Speaking of the process of being a writer, what is your most productive time of day?
I think for me, my brain works best in the mid-morning through the afternoons, although I did spend a lot of time writing at night. And I would— I like to go in, and, um, I know some people do every day, but I would go in these big cycles where I would just really be psyched up. And I mean, I would I would get up and stretch and maybe eat breakfast and lunch, but write for long, long periods of time rather than a little bit every day.
When you're planning out a book, are you a plotter or a pantser?
I think I— this book, I really saw the whole book, you know, more visionary. That's how I make my films, but then there's always room for twists and turns and surprises of how it unfolds, but I think I really see everything all in my mind's eye before I begin.
You've got quite a variety of books and a background that has a wide range also. Do you know where your ideas come from?
My ideas for these books have come from my real life, and the book The book In the Jungle, though, was— it was looking back really based on the hero's journey. You go to a foreign land and you are, you're a foreigner in a foreign place, and all the obstacles that come up against you and having to be brave, having to, you know, face things. And then you have helpers, and then you come back, you know, with the elixir. That's the whole idea. And then this elixir is there to serve humanity or serve your community. And that's, that's what it became, even with the book on India, because at the time— so I was a holistic healer for 23 years and an integrative therapist, massage, aromatherapy, and I was studying there to bring that back with, with my clients. And then also I was a massage teacher for many years, so I taught students how to use herbs and essential oils and So plants have been a huge part of my life. Plants have been my love, my passion for probably at least 30 years.
Speaking of plants, tell me about your website. The website is pineapplepeacegarden.org?
Yes, so partly in India, I was I was viewing for the first time, I mean, such a different culture. My first trip to India, I've been 4 times, but it was a real culture shock, but in the best way, seeing how the symbiotic relationship between the people and the plants and the animals and the culture. And I loved it. And I saw how nothing goes to waste and they, and not traditional recycling, but just how things are used and how things are built, and I was really interested in that. So we would call it like permaculture or permanent agriculture. So there's these forests, and this is what permaculture is based on. So here we see monoculture, so we see big crops of all corn or, or wheat, which is really not in balance with nature, because in a forest you're going to see all kinds of different things growing together. And that's how it was in Peru as well. Which was the little hut that I stayed in is, you know, made out of mud and the, you know, compost bathrooms and things like that. So you have to be definitely adaptable and you're living close to nature. So with learning all of that, I was guided when I came back to the States to get more into growing my own food. And I was at the community garden. And then during the pandemic, like many people, was a big shift. And I came to Central Florida from South Florida. In Florida on a quarter of an acre. So I started a food forest, and so far in 5 years I've planted 50 trees, and I've got about maybe like 75 to 100 different species of either medicinal plant, native pollinators for the bees and birds and insects, and then many varieties of growing food.
We've mentioned, we've touched on 3 of your books. You have some new books in your mind?
Well, you know, I wrote two novels that I did not feel measured up to how I wanted it to be. And for many years, I just considered myself— I was disappointed in myself that I couldn't bring them to fruition. But I finally realized that they were practice. They were— because my book now, even though it's a memoir, it's written like as a novel because, you know, you change the people's names in a memoir many times because you don't, you know, you don't want to get sued or you can't give away too many secrets. But I'd like to tell to authors out there, if you have, if you've done things and you haven't published it or put it out there, nothing with writing is ever a waste because I couldn't have written the dialogue that is in my memoir unless I had so much practice with writing those two novels. And both novels I got— I gave up at maybe about 50,000 words. And I even had some publishers interested, and then I just got in that whole mindset of, oh, I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough, I can't, I can't put this out there. But you never know. I mean, I might revisit those novels one day.
I was going to say, that sounds like something it would be worth going back to.
Yeah, I might because I feel like I'm definitely a better writer now that it, you know, it's all about practice, right? It's about honing your craft by practicing, just like my short films. I see, you know, I can look and see, you know, every single mistake, but I didn't make the same mistakes from film to film to film. I, you know, I learned and I, I expanded my creative process. And I feel like that would be the same with the book. And of course, now I know so much more because it took me— I thought that it would take me to this last book, I thought it would take me maybe a year. See, I had a lot of journals and I had a lot of writing. And I also had some short stories. And I thought, well, I'll bring all this together and I will put it, you know, into a book form, a memoir. But the book actually between the writing it, the formatting it, the creative part with the COVID all of that, it took a little, It took 3 years, 3 years and a couple of months. So that was pretty surprising to me that it, it took that long, but it did.
I talked to some authors and they say that finishing the book is only the beginning, because when you get to get everything wrapped up and tied up and you got it all together, congratulations, you've made it in the race to the starting line, because that's where, that's where it all begins. You talk, talking about your fiction, where do Where do your ideas come from?
Well, the books that I was writing came from my real life, but I decided I needed to study fiction. So when I— I had a magazine column for many years and it was about plants and it was in the Massage Magazine. And I wrote for a lot of holistic, you know, magazines. I got a few cover stories, which was nice, you know, $150 here, $100 there, not much. But it was a passion and it got my name out there for writing. So I wrote creative nonfiction, but I had to really go back and study fiction because when I first started writing, I realized if you don't do that, it just sounds like— when it's based on your own life, it kind of sounded like a diary or something. There was no literary flow to it because fiction, you know, good fiction writer, there's a flow. It's not just like writing a story that you're, you know, narrating with dialogue and characters. So that's when I really got into studying and going to writing fairs and workshops. And I got accepted to a couple writing residencies, and that was helpful. And I decided even if I never made it big as a writer, I, for my own self, wanted to feel like I was a good writer.
What is your opinion of— we'll get into the woods here a little bit— what is your opinion of artificial intelligence? Do you use AI as a tool? Do you see it as a threat to writers? What do you see in the future of artificial intelligence?
I'm definitely intrigued by, by it. I'm, I'm a little bit worried about it. I didn't use any of it for my book, but I have used ChatGPT as a tool., and it's, you know, for business writing, and that's been really interesting. I would say that the paid version gives a better response than the free version. I did the paid version for a little while, but what I'm seeing on social media is just all the posts and everyone expressing themselves through that, and it's really, to me, kind of obvious. You know, you see all the little emojis and you see a certain, a certain format, and you know that that person didn't write that. And then if everybody is using that to communicate and express themselves, are we really communicating human to human or are we communicating, you know, just with these tools alone? And also I know some people too now that just are putting out things for writing, but the AI can't live the story. I think that has to come from the imagination of the writer, but maybe eventually it will. So, I'm very intrigued to see what happens. I feel a little bit cautious, but more so not just for using it as a tool, but for other things that can happen, but that's a whole other story with the AI, but it's gonna be interesting.
I've heard AI described as a 10-year-old with an encyclopedia, with about that level of sophistication. Big words and not too much understanding. It can be very useful as an organizational tool. You can set out some basic ideas and say, "All right, I've got this basic concept." give me, you know, beats, story beats for this, and then you start out and you take the first through and then you take off on your own from there because it usually goes in the wrong direction. It'll be interesting, as you say, to see how it evolves. Katie Kamala Haley, thank you very much for being with us on Author to Author. Thank you for joining us for Author to Author. Please share this video with your friends on social media. Remember to click the like and subscribe buttons. Click the bell so you'll be reminded when it's time for the next chapter of Author to Author.
