In Conversation with Kate Schumacher: Planning & Writing Epic Fantasy
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Danikka: Hey there, welcome to the Snailed It podcast with Danikka and Erin, brought to you by Authors Own Publishing.
Danikka: Hey there, if you are tuning in because you’re a Kate Schumacher fan, welcome, and if you are a regular podcast listener, then welcome back. I'm glad you’re here. I am just jumping on, future Danikka, to let you know that this podcast episode was recorded a very long time ago, we are taking a lot about Kate’s first book in The Grail Cycle, The Call of the Sea, because we recorded it to help promote the release of that book when we were planning to launch the podcast a lot sooner than what we did.
But now as you know, listening in if you’re a Kate fan, book two of The Grail Cycle, A Song of Magic has come out, and Kate is starting to promote On This Broken Earth which will be book three in The Grail Cycle. So all of the links in the episode description, the show notes and the podcast blog on the Authors Own Website will be up to date with everywhere you can get Kate’s books. But we talk about lots of things in this episode, definitely not just Kate’s books, so without further adieu, here is the episode.Erin: Hi everyone, welcome back to the Snailed It podcast with Danikka and Erin. Today we have a guest on with us, Kate Schumacher, fantasy author. Welcome Kate.
Kate: Hi. Hello.
Danikka: And you guys will know Kate by now because I know about her books all the time Now you get to listen to the person herself. So it's exciting to talk to Kate because she's working on her second fantasy series now. The Fires of Elyrian was the first duology and now we've got The Grail Cycle. So I'd let Kate give you a bit of a spiel about where you can get The Grail Cycle, what it's about, even though I could probably do it, but we want Kate to do it.
Kate: All right. So the first, it's a four book series. Well, I've got four at the moment. I'm planning for four. I don't think it's going to go beyond four, but never say never. So the first book's called The Call of the Sea and it's released officially on the 1st of August. You'll be able to get it from Amazon. It will be in KU and it'll be pretty much everywhere else. I distribute through IngramSpark. So wherever they decide to put it, I am doing little book boxes and selling the book myself. So I might be able to give Danikka a link to that later. I don't know.
Danikka: Yeah. I've got all the links in the description.
Kate: Yeah. Cool. Cool. So yeah, I'm selling it myself just for anybody listening who may not be in Australia. I'm happy to ship it overseas. I can't give you any idea at the moment what postage for that would be, but it will be available from me and from Amazon and from wherever. Oh, it's ridiculous. I sent paper to Scotland for my sort of pre-order thing I did for Shadow of Fire and paper cost me $30 to send paper to Scotland.
Erin: What?
Kate: Yeah, I know. It weighed like nothing. It wasn't even a book. It was paper. 30 bucks.
Erin: 30 bucks. That is brutal.
Kate: Yeah, I know. We may as well be on another planet down here. It's true.
Danikka: Yeah. I feel like when I edit this, I'm going to have to have like a, let's get fucked button or something.
Kate: And then what did the guy at the post office tell me? Depending on where it goes, it's not just like a flat rate to go to the UK. It'll be wherever it actually has to go within the UK will change the price. Same with the States, but there's some countries that you can't even send stuff to.
Erin: Yeah. I was trying to send, like people won, I did a giveaway and someone won it who was in India. And I went to try to do it and it was during COVID and they were like, oh no, there's nothing going to India. We can't post there. I'm like, what do you mean?
Kate: Right.
Erin: What do you mean you cannot send?
Danikka: Yeah, that's ridiculous.
Erin: Like, no, we just don't have any planes going there because there's so like, there were few planes going on, whatever. And I was like, but, but I need to get this to India. And they're like, nah, you're going to have to come back. It was ridiculous.
Danikka: So much for globalization.
Kate: I know. I love the online shopping thing where, you know, you, you get the thing and you've got it in your cart and you're ready to go. And then, sorry, we don't ship to your country. It's like, um, planes come here. They do.
Erin: Yeah.
Kate: They do come here.
Danikka: They do probably do too, unless it's a landlocked country.
Erin: Indeed.
Danikka: But anyway, we digress.
Erin: Yes. I have a question. Yes. Question. How did you, when you started writing The Grail Cycle, did you know it was going to be four books from the start, or did they kind of, as you were learning more about the world, did it kind of turn into four books?
Kate: It kind of turned into four. I was sort of aiming for three because I thought I did two with the fires of Illyrian, I'll go for three. So I was aiming for three for the standard trilogy. And then, yeah, as I was planning, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And now it's four. And I mean, I could still, I could have still made it three and they just would have been pretty chonky, but I mean, The Call of the Sea is like 516 pages anyway.
Erin: It's pretty chonky.
Kate: Yeah. It could have been three, but I thought I want to give myself the space to fully explore the story. So four it is.
Erin: Yeah.
Kate: So far.
Erin: And so do you then, do you then plan from literally the start to the end before you start writing the first book?
Kate: I have an idea, like I sort of know where I'm going to start. I get my characters, things, ideas come in whatever order they come in. I'd always wanted to write sort of a reimagining of Arthurian legend because it's like my favourite myths and legends. So that idea was there. And then it was hard because I had to go back to the myths and there's so many different versions of the myths, depending on who's telling them and depending on when they were written. So things like the whole Lancelot, Arthur, Guinevere, love triangle didn't actually appear in the myths until sort of the romantic poets got their hands on it. So it wasn't there originally and a lot of characters weren't there originally either. And depending on what you, you know, what you read and there's a heap of sources and I've actually got them all listed at the start of The Call of the Sea because I did lots of, I mean, I'm very familiar with it, but I went and did lots of reading and just going over a few things so I could work out sort of what parts of the myths that I wanted to focus on. And then my own world sort of evolved around that as well and it just became a bit of, you know, bigger than Ben-Hur type thing and it was getting a bit wild and I had to kind of rein it in a little bit or we'd be looking at, I don't know, eight books instead of four. But yeah, so then I kind of, I had not necessarily a straight out, a linear plan. It was more like, this is what I want to happen in the first book. This is where I want to start and this is where I want to end it. And the same with the second and the third and the fourth. So I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to happen within each book but not necessarily in order and putting it into order kind of happened as I was writing it. I was like, oh okay, well now that idea can go there and that can go there and that will flow on from that.
Erin: Oh gotcha.
Kate: Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, so and it was only last week maybe, was it Danikka? I think we, I think I sent you a message. I was very excited. I've worked out where the whole thing ends. Like I kind of knew how it was going to end, like the entire, the whole series but I hadn't quite solidified that idea. So I've got that now.
Danikka: Yeah, there's a couple of different ways we were thinking it might go.
Kate: Yeah, so I know, yeah, I know sort of in each book what I want to happen and I've got a loose plan. Not necessarily, not necessarily in order but I know what I want to happen. I know where I want each character to go within each book but that may change because things, you know, you're writing away and it's like, oh there's an idea. I'll stick that in there and see what happens or no, I'll take that bit out because that's not working. But yeah, I have a bit of a rough idea of what I want to happen from start to end in each book.
Erin: Got it, yeah. And do they flow on like, does the second one pick up like from the second the first one finishes or is there like a gap between them?
Kate: Yeah, it kind of picks up pretty close. There's a small gap but not a big gap. So it does pick up pretty close from the end.
Erin: Yeah, okay. I'm always fascinated how people write series because I just kind of write and then would get to the end and go, oh. Like I, the first thing I wrote, I was saying this to Danikka last week, I wrote this like sci-fi fantasy thing and then ended up on a massive cliffhanger and then had zero juice to write the next book. So I was like, that's not going to go anywhere because I didn't plan on having more than one. So yeah, anyway.
Kate: Well see, Shadow of Fire was only meant to be one book.
Erin: Oh really?
Kate: It was never, it was never going to be more than one book. My initial plan was just one book because it was my first book and I thought, okay, one will do. But as I was writing it and it's got nine points of view. It wasn't meant to have that either. It was only meant to have like a couple. And I've got this very bossy bunch of people in that book and everyone wanted to have their little say and then yeah, as the world expanded and the characters expanded and their individual journeys expanded and the whole overarching plot expanded, I'm like, yeah, this is two books or one really, really fat, chunky book, which would have made it about nearly 900 pages long, which I thought that's a bit heavy.
Danikka: even for self publishing that’s a bit long
Kate: I actually looked at that. I thought, well, what's it going to cost me to publish? You know, what's it going to cost me to publish a 700 page book? What's it going to cost to print it? And what am I going to have to actually charge people for? And I'm like, no, that's it. So I'll make it two. Yeah. And the second book's about 200 pages more than the first. Yeah. And I could have just kept going, which I kind of have, but I'll talk about that later. Oh, the end is never nigh. You've just got to keep going.
Danikka: And if you didn't get it from the title of the episode, that's a really good indication of what this episode's about, is we're just kind of talking about what it's like to plan a multi-book series and the elements that go into it. Because in a recent episode, Erin and I were talking about plotting and the tools that we use to do it. And Save the Plot.
Erin: Save the Cat. Save the Cat Writes a Novel. Yeah.
Danikka: Yeah. Save the Plot. Save the Plot. Find my lost plot in my brain. Yeah. Save the Plot. Yeah. So those sorts of things come up. And then after we talked about that, I managed to finish the book as an audio book, and then I bought it as an e-book because it's only $3. I was like, oh, why haven't I bought this before? And kind of used it to plot out the individual arcs in my book. Because similar with what happened to you with Shadow of Fire, I started out with one point of view, decided to make it two, and then suddenly it's four, and now it's probably going to be five. So same thing kind of happened to me, as the plan kind of grew, then I had to sit back and be like, okay, well, I don't know if I can write any more until I know at least where these characters sit in this first book. And so, yeah, I planned out the first book to where I thought it would be a kind of clean ending for the first book, because I think it's going to be a duology. But it's like, when I first started...
Kate: I'm not the clean ending person. I'm the cliffhanger of doom person. And I quite like that. That's been the biggest... I got an arc reader message this morning on Instagram in one of our group chats for The Call of the Sea, and it was all capital letters. That ending! I'm like, sorry, not sorry. I will be from the power, the power you have.
Danikka: Oh, I'm not saying there's no cliffhanger, but like, a good spot to end it. Yeah, where there's enough threads to make people pick up the next book, but not such a sharp cut off that they're like, that's not fair. If that makes sense. But you still want them to be angry. And obviously, it will probably change. I think that's kind of where I get... I like the way that you work, Kate, and why I wanted to get you on, because I think a lot of people get really stuck into... they have to outline, especially if it's a multi-book series, where there's lots of threads tied together. They're like, I have to know everything before I start. It's like, well, you really don't.
Erin: No, you can't.
Kate: You won't. You won't ever. And I think if you think you do, and you make yourself stick to what you have outlined, then you're actually going to do yourself and your story a disservice, because you're not letting yourself be open to, well, where do these characters want to go? Or even just the, okay, I've got this idea. I'll just write that and I'll explore that particular idea and see what happens. And I do that a lot. And sometimes it's like, yeah, nah, get rid of that. That didn't work. Or, okay, I'll just keep going with that and see where it leads. And mostly, it's those things that are unplanned, that you might have something that you want to happen, but you're not quite sure how you're going to get there. And that unplanned thing will be the gateway to where you want to actually end up. So, just stay open, I guess. See what sort of rabbit holes you fall down, I suppose. And I know, I think, just like, I'm in a lot of Facebook groups, writing groups, and I think a lot of people, what I notice, people seem to get quite caught up in the, this many words, or, yeah, this is what needs to happen, and this is my outline. And you can step outside your own outline, like you're writing the book. It's your outline. You're not bound by blood to stick to it. Or anything. So, like, I don't set word count goals or anything like that. I just, like, I don't, I try and write every day, but I don't, I'm going to write 5,000 words today. Well, I did the other day, but that's pretty rare. But, you know, even if it's just little bits and pieces, and even, I think, going back over what you've written, editing or just reading what you've rewritten is still part of the process. And I think sometimes people go, I didn't write anything today. It's like, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Did you do some outlining? Did you do some plotting? Did you just work on that particular descriptive paragraph you wanted? Like, it's all part of the process. And I think, I don't know, there's no right or wrong way to go about it. And, like, I don't, I will write my outline, but it's very loose. It's, it is a skeleton. There's no meat on it. And then, as Danikka knows, I don't, I don't write in chronological order. I won't go, okay, chapter one's written. Now I need to move on to chapter two. I just write the story. And sometimes I end up shifting big slabs of stuff around, which can come to bite me on the ass when I'm trying to edit it. I'm like, what's that doing there? But, or I'll have an, I'll have an idea. It's just, just something like a conversation between characters. And I'll just write that. I don't know where it's going to go yet. I might not have an exact place for it, but I'll just write it. And I'll write it just as almost like a script. This person is, like, someone says this, next person, next person. Like, it's just a script of dialogue. And then that expands. And then you put your characters, okay, they're having this conversation. Where are they having this conversation? Or I'm going to put them in this place. Why are they in this place? They're there because this has happened. And then you can start to sort of tie everything together. But that's what I do for a lot of it. It will be a conversation between my characters. And everything kind of grows from that particular moment.
Danikka: That's really interesting because that's how you start writing as well, Erin.
Erin: Yeah, I usually hear the conversations as well. And then I'm like, oh, they're talking. I'll just write that down.
Kate: So, I think that ‘I can't, I don't know where to start.’ It's like, well, just start. It doesn't matter. It's a draft. You can go and put stuff back there. You can move things around. But I think also sometimes we get caught up in that idea that it needs to be perfect the first time we write it. And it's never going to be perfect the first time you write it. Or you get to that point where you're stuck. I don't know how to move the action on to the next bit. Don't worry about it. Do that later. Just write the next idea you've got.
Erin: Just write the next bit, yeah.
Kate: Just write the next bit. Come back, fill in the blanks later. We're not penning a novel by hand and going to have it scribed by a bunch of monks sitting in the dark. It doesn't matter. If you do things out of order, we have this lovely technology to help us. But on that, I do pen most of it by hand for the grail cycle.
Erin: Do you?
Kate: Yeah I do. I've got a notebook pretty much for each book that will just be full of scribbles and ideas for each book. There's apparently different parts of your brain will light up and focus differently when you write by hand as opposed to when you type it straight on to the computer. Like you're more connected to it.
Erin: Oh, you were saying–Danikka was saying that the other week. Yeah. Because I'm the same. Like if I get stuck, I do it by hand.
Danikka:I often will print stuff out to edit.
Kate: Yes. I hand write most of it. But that will be the small things like that random conversation. Oh, what's that? I'll just grab my pen and my notebook and just write that down. And then when it gets onto the Google Doc, then it will expand. But all the drafting stuff, the little ideas are just done in a notebook, which you can see it. No one else can. But it's full of them. I've tabbed my own notebook so I know what on earth I've written in what spot.
Erin: Because that's the problem when you write something down and then you're like, oh God, where was it? You end up having to, yeah, exactly.
Kate: Yeah, there it is.
Danikka: Those are my favourite notebooks too.
Kate: Yes. Composition books.
Danikka: They're so comfy to write in as a left-handed person.
Kate: They are lovely to write in. They're a nice size. They open. They don't have any hard binding bits or rings in the way. But yeah, so it's tabbed. And it will be just scribbles. And scribbles coming off the scribbles. I write in the margins and things go everywhere. But that works for me. But yeah, so it's like, I don't know, writing's a messy process, I think.
Erin: As you just said, like finding what works for you. I think you just need to find whatever works for you. You can get ideas from other people's process, but if they're not working for you, then just can them.
Kate: Yeah, absolutely.
Danikka: I think that's the thing I get most frustrated with with social media is people are always trying to be like, this is how you do it.
Kate: No, no.
Erin: That's how you do it and that's cool if that works for you.
Kate: Yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting because I've just finished the draft of the second book and Danikka's got that one now. And there are a lot of things that came in towards the end of that that I hadn't planned for, like my little Easter eggs that are going to... I like doing that. And this is what I like about, I guess, writing epic fantasy. It's like, oh, what's that? The skip it, don't forget it, because if you're reading my books, it's going to come back later. That's the bonus of, I don't think I could do this with just write one book and then not quite know where the last ones are going to go. Because with The Fires of Elyrian, once I realised it was more than one book, I'd actually written Heart of Flame before Danikka and I had finished editing Shadow of Fire. So, I knew where the story ended. I knew where each individual character arc ended. A lot of the details weren't fleshed out, but then I could go back to Shadow of Fire and go, I need to put this little thing in there because that's going to mean that thing that happens in the second book makes more sense or that's a clue for that thing. So, as I write and as I'm writing this massive series, I'm doing that. I've got a little page here that I'm looking at now where a few things have popped up in book two. It's like, okay, that's a clue and I need to come back to that particular thing in either the third book or the fourth book. So, yeah. Yeah.
Danikka: I was like, even while I was editing The Call of the Sea, you were working on the companion novels for Fires of Elyrian and then we were going back and putting easter eggs into The Call of the Sea for things that impact later on. So, it was like, there's all these surprises in store for people and I think that's why I love fantasy as well. I love romance and I think that's what attracted me to Erin's books. It's like all the characters are connected and timelines and things all kind of interconnect. So, even if they're individual stories, you can kind of get immersed in this world and each new book, even though it's a new book, it's like coming home as well. So, it's like you've got this element of uncertainty of what's going to happen in this book, but it's also somewhere that's really familiar. So, it's like, as a very anxious person, reading something new can be like a challenge. Yeah. We watch all the same TV shows all the time and everything.
Kate: That's right.
Danikka: So, it's a really cool way. It's really comforting, but exciting. It hits the sweet spot between the ADHD and the autism.
Kate: Yeah. I mean, that's the interesting thing. I'd finished The Fires of Elyrian and I'm like, right, done, finished, done with that world. But that was a lie because I just, out of nowhere, just had this idea for another book in the series, but I knew it couldn't be straight after Heart of Flame. So, oh, that's right. I'll set it 25 years in the future. Cool. Why not? So, then I started writing this other thing. So, it's got the characters from The Fires of Elyrian are there, like the main characters, but then there's new characters that we follow. So, I put a post on Instagram the other day, like how you actually read my books, because I'm going to have these eight books that are essentially one series, a companion series, and then the Grail Cycle series. And if you want to read them all, there's an order in which to read them.
Erin: You're going to have to have like a Marvel universe, like this is the order they were published in but this is the order you need to read them in.
Kate: Yes.
Erin: That's amazing.
Kate: And then, so, I'm working on the third Elyrian book, which I've called Children of Wolves, which was my working title, but I'm keeping that. And then I just had this, oh, what if this happened? And what if I could link that to a thing that happens in the Grail Cycle or to that world somehow? And I thought, I messaged Danikka and said, I've got this idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I said, I'm just going to do it and see what happens. And I did it and it works. So, now I have this linked world. And that meant I had to go redraw my map. So, I had like three continents on it. So, there's a whole new place that we're going to go in Children of Wolves, as well as being in Elyrian. So, now I have three continents and this world map and these eight books that all link together.
Erin: My God.
Kate: I don't know. It was just because I love that, right? I love the really detailed, really in-depth, I love the, oh my God, that's that thing. And oh, that's that world. I really, really like that. Because I think about what the majority of TV and film that I watch is fantasy and sci-fi. And I like having that little discovery and I like those spin-off kind of things when they're done well. Because again, it is that comfort of going back to a world that you know and to characters that you do know. But then getting to follow other characters as well as that. So, yes, that's what the plan is. That's what I'm doing. I mean, but as far as reading it goes, people will be able to read The Grail Cycle without having read the other ones. They're not going to miss anything. But The Children of Wolves and the second book, there's another one, Danikka, the second book after that, you won't be able to read those without reading The Fires of Elyrian because it just won't make sense at all. You won't know the characters, you won't know the world.
Danikka: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's continuing on.
Kate: It's continuing on. It's continuing on from that story even though it is, yeah, even though it is a different story, we still have those characters and you need to, yeah, you need to know those characters in the world and the relationships between everybody and everything that happens in the world. And Children of Wolves has become political again. The Fires of Elyrian is very political and that was not intentional but if the world was a giant wheel, whether it's this world or any world and whether it's this time in history or whether it's 2,000 years ago, nothing happens without politics because politics is what drives your relationships between people, your relationships of power, your relationships between the country next door and between this group of people and that group of people and this religious group and that religious group. So politics is there and it's at the heart of everything and I enjoy some politics in my fantasy. Otherwise, I'm like, well, where's the rest of the story? How does this world work? And that's something as a reader, I need to know that and I've actually, in the last 12 months probably because I've just got no time for anything, I have put down so many books because I'm just like, well, where's the rest of it? Where's the depth and where's the complexity and where's the world building? So I've actually DNF’d a lot of books and I never used to do that because I was stubborn and I'm like, I'm going to finish reading this book even if I don't particularly like it. But now I'm just like, no, I don't have time for that. So I just put them aside, no time for that. And yeah, I think because writing, I guess writing now and writing these quite complex stories and these complex characters and these individual plot lines and then an overarching plot line and having to tie it all together, I guess I've got more of an idea of my process at least that I have to go through to make that happen. And I'm sort of like, I'm looking for that now in other things that I read. I'm looking for that detail and I'm looking for that complexity and I'm looking for the symbolism and the Easter eggs and the clues and I'm not finding it.
Danikka: I think epic fantasy as a genre is a little bit misunderstood at the moment. I think a lot of people are putting it very much in like, it has to be George RR Martin or Brandon Sanderson. They write epic fantasy and everyone else writes just plain fantasy. And I think they think plain fantasy is like, just like they're getting it mixed up with romantasy and things like Legends and Lattes. It's like things can have a fantastical setting and they can be in the fantasy umbrella.
Kate: But there's so many sub-genres in there.
Danikka: Exactly, exactly. And that was our disappointment. That was our disappointment with Fourth Wing. Well, my disappointment, I think it was after we recorded.
Kate: See I haven’t read that
Danikka: Yeah, well, you won't like it. I know you won't. Yeah.
Kate: Well, at the moment, I'm avoiding it because that's been the thing. I've picked up so many books recently that have been quite hyped And that I've had a lot of chatter and a lot of, oh my God, this is the best book ever, around them on social media. So I'm like, okay. And then I'm like, did I read something different? So I'm avoiding Fourth Wing for that, I think. And I actually did it with Harry Potter back in the day when it came out, I think. I don't think I picked up a Harry Potter book until the fifth book was almost ready to be released because, I don't know, I was just being a rebel and I'm not reading that because everyone else is. So, and then I was at my mother-in-law's and it was wet and raining and she had the first four books there. And I'm like, I've read all my books, I'm bored. So I picked one up and it was like, okay, this is all right. But I resisted it for such a long time.
Erin: Yeah. I think Fourth Wing was just marketed wrong.
Danikka: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's marketed as an epic fantasy, when it's not an epic fantasy, it's a romantasy.
Erin: It's a good romantasy.
Danikka: There is, it's a very good romantasy, yeah. But I went into it expecting epic fantasy. I went into it expecting like this cool mishmash of like Eragon and a military school. Like that's what I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be like this epic, like politics and fighting and like military. And it was just a horny new adult book.
Erin: Well, they hint at it, but there's so much in there.
Danikka: Yeah, there's beautiful potential for like, but it just wasn't explored. It was sacrificed in favor of the romantic plot, which I think is probably partly because it was traditionally published and the traditional publishers know that romantasy has gone after them. So I actually would be interested to know, like not that I'll ever have contact with Rebecca Yarros, that's like something I'm putting out in the universe. But like, I would be interested to know if I did a podcast with her and she, yeah, exactly. Like if I talked to her about it and was like, what changed because you went traditional publishing route? Like if you had been able to self-publish this book, what would it have looked like? And I actually think we probably would have got a lot more of that kind of element in it if it hadn't been written to market.
Kate: That’s interesting. Because when I was planning the Grail cycle, I had this thing in the back of my mind, I'm going to do more of a romantasy because probably the biggest thing that's tripped people up with the fires of Illyrian, because I've got, because there is a romance subplot, but it is a subplot. However, without the romance and that relationship that develops between characters, the whole plot doesn't even work. So it's a subplot, but the romance element of it, I guess, is the subplot. But the relationship between the characters is part of the main plot. But I think because I've got Faye and because I've got like a little bit of that, and a enemies to Lovers vibe in there, I think a lot of people picked it up thinking they were going to get something different. And instead they got a really complex, epic fantasy with lots of politics and romance is there. But, so I thought, all right, I'll just try and keep it simple, stupid. And when planning the Grail cycle, and that didn't work because it just didn't work. It didn't work. I tried. I thought I'm going to write to market. I'm going to write to market. I'm going to just give it a go. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to write what the peoples want. And it didn't work. So, no, I'm just writing what I want.
Erin: Which is a, I don't understand. Well, no, I do understand why people write to market, but there's no way. I can't pump something out that fast. Like I just couldn't. And I don't think, I think I would get halfway through it and be like, I don't like this. I don't want to do this.
Kate: No, and that's what I was finding. That's what I was finding when I was writing it. I'm like, because there were those things in the background of the world that needed to be explored and that I needed to get into. And so we ended up with 516 pages instead of something a lot smaller and-
Erin: 390, yeah.
Kate: Complex, complex, twisty thing. And I think- We'll be even more complex and twisty at the end. Yeah, yeah.
Danikka: And I think that's the thing with like debut books and things like that is you're, because you're kind of unknown and you haven't built a fan base yet, there is going to be a lot of mixed reviews and things on a first book, especially in something like fantasy where all of the sub genres are kind of muddy because there's going to be all different people who are kind of tasting. But then as people get to know your writing, they'll, you'll build a more and more loyal fan base and then you'll find those people who enjoy what you write. Like it's, and that's something I'm kind of always trying to get across to new writers when I'm working with them is it's like, it's not going to be a one and done success. It's not going to be, you write one or two books and like you're making a full-time income as an author or anything like that. Like, I mean, it's not even like, even as an editor, as like in a niche business where there's like tons of customers out there, I, it's still a new business. Like new businesses don't make money until their third year or fifth year, usually if they survive that long. So like, it's just unreasonable to expect that you're going to be making money and like having this like huge reader base right off the bat. Like, it's about, you know, sticking it through.
Kate: Yeah, yeah. And I think the statistic I came across for writers was seventh book or something like that.
Erin: Yeah.
Kate: You know, it'll take that long, unless you manage to, you know, you know, go viral on BookTok or something because there's a couple of authors that I know in the fantasy genre who have been able to make it their full-time gig because of TikTok success. So, but you know, that's not, that's not going to happen to everybody at all.
Danikka: And I don't think, it's not something to aim for because then you run into like, there's this famous writer, I can't remember what his name was. You'll probably know better than me Kate, but he wrote one book and it was such a big success that he never wrote anything again because he felt like he could never live up to it.
Kate: Yeah, yeah. I can’t remember who
Danikka: So like, I actually think that that would be more of a curse than a blessing. But yeah, he was American and he went off and disappeared into the Greek wilderness and he went up and lived in like a shack because he was like, I can't deal with any of you because everyone was just always asking him when the next book was.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danikka: I can’t remember his name. That's so annoying.
Kate: Yeah, I can't either.
But he was really young too when he published that first book.He was in his twenties.
Kate: Yeah, no, it's just really interesting. The whole process and the whole, like the marketing element behind it all. Oh my God. I have an absolute love-hate relationship with TikTok.
Erin: You're so good at the marketing though. Your marketing's amazing.
Kate: Ah, no it's not.
Erin: It's so good.
Kate: Well, okay. All right, it's all right. But no, like no one sees it. Not enough people. Anyway, and I'm gonna put that down to what we were talking about in the very beginning. The fact that we live in Australia and we don't exist and social media, I don't care what anybody says, geography matters. The algorithm feeds your content to your local audience first. And then if it does any well, they will send it further, generally speaking. My local audience is 20,000 people. So, you know, Australia, we've got less people in our country than some people have in their entire cities. So, yeah, and we don't exist. So, it's against us, the marketing, the social media algorithms are against us.
Danikka: Well, Authors Own is gonna change that. We're gonna make it different.
Kate: Good, can't wait, can't wait, can't wait. But yeah, like I, it's funny, TikTok's a funny one. I've had some, I don't know, semi-viral videos, 13,000 views and stuff, but they took time. But a couple were for the call of the sea, but most of them have actually been about writing. I'm going, do this, do this. Here's some good words. You know, if you wanna have a scary atmosphere, use these words, which then, of course, I thought the algorithm, the TikTok bots were going to go, you can't have those words, so no views for you. But strangely enough, they did not. So, yeah, writing, anything I've sort of posted about, generally about writing, about publishing, actually does all right. But it's gotta make people feel comfortable.
Danikka: Well, there's an indie author on TikTok, I don't know if you follow her, Rebecca Thorne. She published Can't Spell Treason Without Tea. And so what she did was she mimicked her release thing for Can't Spell Treason Without Tea. She mimicked Legends and Latte's launch. But then once she'd done that, she literally, because it was her first book, once she'd done that, her whole channel has mostly become self-publishing advice and publishing advice.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, her videos are great.
Danikka: And she'll just do it, she just does it while she's holding her book. Yeah. So it's like. Yeah, it's not. That's what she does.
Kate: Oh, TikTok doesn't like my face or my voice, so I'm still trying to get it to like me. So most of my writing videos aren't me talking. They are some fancy visual thing. I've made with words on it because.
Danikka: But I think that's a really good example for people who don't like showing their face is that you don't have to show your face to get views. Because yeah, most of your videos, almost all of your content, you don't show your face. Yeah. So that's what I always say to people as well. If you don't want to show your face, you don't have to, but you do have to be creative.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting. So I have a love-hate relationship with it. Instagram, I find much better for actual genuine engagement. I think it's a very, TikTok's so, the booktok community is so saturated with content and saturated with people that you just get lost. You absolutely just get lost in everything that's on there. But I've, yeah, I've always found engagement on Instagram to be, you know, a lot better. And I've been able to create more of a community there than on TikTok, for example.
Danikka: I said that to an author yesterday, actually. I said, I kind of feel like Instagram, like what I'm kind of doing with my profile is I'm building like a village of bookish people around my Instagram. And it feels much more homey and community-based and like you'll make friends a lot easier. Whereas on BookTok, you just get lost in the algorithm. Like even once you follow people, even if you go in the following tab, you don't see them, yeah.
Kate: You don't see it at all. And I think when you look at your analytics for a TikTok video, like most people don't watch anything beyond two seconds.
Erin: Two seconds?
Kate: So two seconds. Two seconds. One, two, bored, moving on. Yeah, it's two seconds.
Erin: Wow.
Kate: At least, I think that's why I do prefer Instagram because it is a static image. You can write a big thing. I mean, apparently you can write up to 1500 characters on TikTok, but I can't because I'm in Australia and I haven't released that feature to us yet. Well, not to me anyway. So I can't write an essay with my videos. Whereas, you've got a little bit more space to do that.
Erin: As in on the video? Yeah.
Kate: Not on the screen, but in the caption. On the caption. Yeah, in your actual caption before you, yeah. Some people can't do it.
Danikka: I don't like writing in the captions for TikToks and Reels though, because when you expand them, you can't read them anyway because the image.
Kate: Yeah, you can't see it. Like, I don't,
Danikka: it could just be because I'm blind. But the algorithm and all the SEO systems around a lot of the search engine stuff will pick your keywords out of your caption, even if no one reads it.
Erin: Oh, good to know.
Kate: So they'll pull it out. So if you go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, lift all your tropes or whatever, the SEO system will pick those out. And then stick your TikTok in front of.
Danikka: So it's still worth writing a caption for a Reel.
Kate: Yeah, but then it changes all the time. So who knows, just when I think I've got it worked out, no, I'm going to do something different now.
Danikka: I've just been getting really annoyed lately because I've been seeing lots of Reels where it's like they have a really interesting hook and then they're like, read the caption, but I can't read the caption.
Erin: I've noticed that too.
Danikka: So that's been really annoying me.
Kate: Yeah. Well, my Instagram Reels are, Instagram doesn't like my Reels, that's fine.
Dankikka: Instagram doesn't like anybody's Reels.
Kate: Then you've got Facebook Reels. Like you can, I cross post sometimes and you can put Reels on Pinterest as well. Well, yeah. You can just, yeah.
Danikka: You can make your Reels discoverable on Facebook. So if you, when you're posting a Reel, you just, you say, yes,
Kate: it can post it on Facebook I've got an Instagram by the same people. So you can just cross post. Cause I'm all fancy now. And I use the business suite thing where I can do all my posts in there and then schedule them to either go to my Facebook author page or my Instagram page. Cause I've got them linked or both. And you can do them heaps in advance. Oh, what's the date today?
Danikka: Business suite is an awesome free tool. It's really, really, really good.
Erin: I don’t have an author Facebook page, maybe I need to do that.
Kate: It's interesting, like it's a lot, it's a lot slower to grow. I'll just, I'm just going to have a look on, like I can't, like, I think I've got,Danikka: It just depends how active you are on Facebook.
Erin: I'm not, at all.
Kate: Yeah, yeah. But see, I think a lot of, I don't know how many people look at Facebook for book content as opposed to Instagram or something else like Twitter. I don't know, I'm not going to go near that place. I'm not going to go near that.
Danikka: Twitter and TikTok both scare me. They sound like very savage places.
Erin: Yeah. I cannot with Twitter.
Kate: There was this poor fella, there was this poor fella. I think he's, I'm not sure where he's from, either Central or South America. This poor bloke on TikTok the other week, his name's Zach, and he's a guy who's reading books and talking about books, but he's sort of reading dark romance and fantasy romance and stuff. And he seems like a really nice guy. And he kind of went viral overnight. Like he got heaps and heaps of followers and he got crucified for it. Like people went for him.
Danikka: yeah because he was good looking
Kate: Yes, he was conventionally attractive. And I ended up making a video in response to it because I'm like, the dude's reading a book. Like do you know how hard it is to make people pick up books? I don't care what he looks like. I don't care where he lives. I just, like someone's reading a book and we should actually celebrate that. And all the other stuff.
Danikka: No, it was just all these people who get jaded because they're like, oh, no one sees my videos and you get to be good looking and everyone gets your videos. It's like, no, it's like a random selection of the algorithm.
Kate: I do think the algorithm favours pretty people.
Danikka: Oh it does
Kate: I do think that. So he did have that.
Danikka: I watched a whole deep dive about TikTok on YouTube the other day by someone who's like very good at researching all these things. And it freaked me the hell out. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, and I deleted my private TikTok account because I was like, it was really freaky. I was like, oh, no.
Kate: Yeah, it's kind of why I don't stick my face on it a lot. And I don't have any personal information on there really because I'm just talking about my book mostly. People are like, oh, talk about your day-to-day life. It's like, yeah, but that's boring. No one wants to know that. But apparently people do, but they don't. Not really. No one cares because they watch for two seconds.
Erin: They do. Watch for two seconds and then I don't see it.
Kate: Actually, one video, the first video that I got that got lots of likes and lots of engagement pretty quickly was actually, you can't even see my face. I am pouring myself a drink of whiskey and telling people to go and read Shakespeare if they want to understand how to craft a villain. And I'm like, I thought BookTok didn't like the classics. I'm confused. But it was just such a strange thing to actually get attention. I'm like, what? Okay, whatever. I don't understand this place. I'll never understand this place. But no. Yeah, cool. If people go and read Shakespeare after this, great. Excellent. Because everybody should, as far as I'm concerned.
Erin: You're an influencer. Kate, you're an influencer. Yeah.
Kate: Right. Yeah. I'll just laugh. Laugh. Laugh. Yeah, so on my Facebook page, I just put pretty much the same stuff that's on my Instagram and occasionally chuck some things I just download from TikTok but remove the watermark because otherwise Meta and Meta goes, oh, that's come from somewhere else. So you remove, strip the watermarks and then sounds another thing. Like Pinterest is pretty big on the sound stuff. If you just, cause I did it accidentally one day, I just put up a video I downloaded from TikTok and remove the watermark. But I forgot to take the strip sound out. And then they sort of, they didn't block the video or ban me or anything like that. But I got the, you've used a non sound from here. Sorry, I forgot. So a lot of the times when I put a video on my Pinterest, I just don't have any sound with it at all. Like they have their own sound bank, but it's a bit slim on the ground. But it's the same with Facebook. Like if you put a reel on there and you are not using their sound, they might go, no, no, and you could get in trouble. So I just take the sound from out of everything and just find another one or find the same sound on that particular platform. If that's-
Erin: Yeah, right.
Kate: So yeah, but it's complicated and time consuming. Yeah. But I don't, I like making, I like making videos. I enjoy it. There's all these apps that are easy to use. I'm not having to do it on my desktop anyway. But yeah.
Danikka: Hey guys, future Danikka coming to you again. Thanks to the nature of the Snailed It Podcast and our love of tangents, and the social media rabbit hole that we dove down, we decided to split this episode into two, and because we didn’t want to lose any of Kate’s amazing insights, we return to the world-building discussion and writing in part two of the episode, which will be coming to you on our next scheduled podcast release. Thanks for tuning in as always, and we’ll see you in the next episode.
Danikka: Thank you for listening to The Snailed It podcast with Danikka and Erin, brought to you by Authors Own Publishing, the home of indie publishing.
Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow us on Instagram at Authors Own Publishing. Music brought to you by Mckell with more details in the show notes.
Episode Description
In today’s episode of the Snailed It Podcast, Danikka and Erin are joined by fantasy author Kate Schumacher. Come along and learn with us about Kate’s writing journey, how she tackles intricate world building and so much more!
You can shop for Kate's books online here or here
Brought to you by: Authors Own Publishing, Danikka Taylor, Erin Thomson & Kate Schumacher.
Danikka’s Details:
Website: www.authorsownpublishing.com
Instagram: @danikkataylor or @authorsownpublishing
Erin’s Details:
Website: www.erinthomsonauthor.com
Instagram: @authorerinthomson
Kate's Details:
Website: https://www.kateschumacherauthor.com/
Instagram: @kate.schumacher.writer
Intro & Outro Music by Mikel & GameChops. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of Authors Own Publishing. Thanks for Listening!
