Podcast Interviews

Weekly interviews with authors, self publishers and others...

SPRT #156 – From trucker to bestselling novelist in two years – Wayne Stinnett

Play

Audio available for download or watch on youtube 🙂

Once upon a time a hard-working trucker picked up a pen and started his writing journey. That trucker was Wayne Stinnett and now two years later, he’s become a bestselling author of several action adventure novels. He’s also recently released a non fiction book Blue Collar to No Collar: From Trucker to Bestselling Novelist in Two Years (Self Publishing as a Business Book 1) to share his story and how you too can do it!

read more

SPRT #155 – Let’s talk about writing gay romance with Rosa Swann

Play

Audio available for download or watch on youtube ?

Everyone knows that romance is the most popular genre. What some might not realise is that gay romance has quite a fanatical audience as well. How fanatical? Well, we decided to find that out, along with what the audiences’ expectations are and is it as simple as replacing the female in the love story with another guy? So we asked Rosa Swann, author and co-author of many gay paranormal romances, to join us this week and she answered these questions and more!

read more

SPRT #154 – Impromptu roundtable of indie publishing stuff

Play

Unfortunately due to technical difficulties and link confusion our guest was unable to join us this week. Instead the SPRT gang covered beautifully by having a discussion about indie publishing stuff.

Our apologies for not having the expected guest but huge thumbs up to Wade, Robert and Chrishaun for saving the day 🙂

read more

SPRT #153 – Romance Writers of America Conference 2016 with Zoe York

Play

Audio available for download or watch on youtube ?

Every year the Romance Writers of America hold a big national conference. Romance writers of all flavours flock to the conference to mingle with their peers, participate in workshops, listen to speakers and panels and–apparently–drink margaritas 😛

Zoe York was not a member of the RWA when she attended–she is now though–earlier in the month but she traveled from Canada to the conference to take part–and drink said margaritas. She reported back on her first RWA conference, what she thought of it, what tasty morsels of information she gleaned, the two workshops she ran and more!

read more

SPRT #152 – Tough Guy Urban Fantasy with Domino Finn

Play

Probably the most well-known male Urban Fantasy hero is Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden–an unwilling hero in a contemporary urban setting with a lot of supernatural elements. Think John McClane (from Die Hard) but wielding magical powers instead of a conventional weapon.

Sadly, we were not able to interview Jim Butcher (he’s not indie) but we did have the next best thing! Domino Finn, author of the Black Magic Outlaw and Sycamore Moons series talked with us about Urban Fantasy, its tropes and how to write the tough guy protagonist–without making him an asshole.

read more

SPRT #151 – The Miracle Morning for Writers with Hal Elrod, Steve Scott and Honorée Corder

Play

Remember when we interviewed Honorée Corder? Well she’s coming back and this time she’s bringing Hal Elrod and Steve Scott with her. Together they’ll be talking to us about their recently released non fiction book, The Miracle Morning for Writers: How to Build a Writing Ritual That Increases Your Impact and Your Income (Before 8AM). It combines Hal Elrod’s global phenomenon with Steve Scott’s writing habit techniques (which helped him get on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list). You’ll learn how to take charge of your morning and maximize “the rest of the day” for your writing efforts.

read more

SPRT #150 – New Adult Fantasy with Jasmine Walt

Play

Audio available for download or watch on youtube 🙂

New Adult is a genre that only emerged within the last few years. It’s a genre where the protagonists and targeted audience are college-aged and, like Young Adult, is being crossed with many other genres. Jasmine Walt is a new author who writes Fantasy married with New Adult and doing extremely well at it! She’s currently ranked within the top 100 authors in Sci-Fi & Fantasy and Fantasy on Amazon. Did I mention she’s a new author?

read more

SPRT #149 – Super popular romance author Chance Carter reveals all!

Play

Audio available as well as Youtube recording.

We were surprised at how much of an introvert our guest was. He’s very down to earth, with a practical and motivated mind when it comes to making money in publishing.

There’s no doubt that romance is the most popular genre. The readers are voracious and will follow their favourite authors with a passion. Quite a number of those readers are currently enamoured with Chance Carter. A man writing Bad Boy Romances for women. While male romance authors aren’t unusual, they’re more likely to write under a female pen name. But not Chance, he’s flaunting his gender on social media and the fans love it. How much do they love it? Well, a recent release netted him 400 reviews in a week! So of course we invited him on to find out how he does it.

read more

SPRT #148 – Demelza Carlton’s Rock Star Mailing List Strategy

Play

Audio available!

Australian author Demelza Carlton joined us to talk about building her mailing list from very low to over 15,000 in just six months! We asked her to share with us exactly how she did it, how much it cost and how one would maintain a list that size once you’ve attracted oodles of subscribers. We also talked about her writing, publishing but not her fear of swimming with fish 😛

read more

SPRT #147 – JuNoWriMo with Becca J. Campbell

Play

We interviewed the founder of JuNoWriMo, Becca J. Campbell and learned how the challenge started, the effort that goes into running an event of this scale, about her own writing and a lot of other interesting things along the way.

JuNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 1667 words a day! It’s also a community of writers and aspiring writers to get together and offer support, motivation and friendship. It’s almost like NaNoWriMo except it’s in June instead.

Interview is available on both audio download and youtube.

read more

SPRT #146 – Sci-fi author TS Paul talks about his success selling short fiction

Play

TS Paul published his first eBook mid-February of this year. It was the first in his Athena Lee Chronicles, a short form sci-fi serial, which he followed up with a second book just two weeks later. Since then he has released one eBook every two weeks. The length of each instalment varies wildly from 34 – 148 pages and he’s charging $2.99 a pop! What’s even more interesting is that they sell!

So of course we invited him over to the podcast to tell us how he does it, why he does it and what he plans to do next.

read more

SPRT #145 – Prepping for the apocalypse with author Boyd Craven

Play

Boyd Craven has penned over 20 books over the last two years, only recently deciding to take the plunge into publishing. His “The World Burns” Series has hit the top 10 in the Dystopian Genre in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia. He joined us this week to talk about his journey, the post apocalyptic genre as well as breaking into mysteries.

read more

SPRT #144 – 20 Books to 50k: an interview with author Michael Anderle

Play

Michael Anderle is the author of the Kurtherian Gambit series. His first book, Death Becomes Her, was released in November 2015 and the series has so far sold a little under 20,000 books and has 9.5 Million KENPC read in the last six months. His first five books earned him 10,000 in just 90 days!

With the help of others, he has formed a group called 20booksto50k to find what story ideas authors have that will sell better and allow writing to become our main occupation. And that is why we invited him on the show.

read more

SPRT #143 – Interview with prolific author Amanda M. Lee

Play

Amanda M. Lee recently bought and moved into a four bedroom house, which she paid for with her writing. This prolific Amazon bestselling author currently has five series—with a sixth on the way—30 novels, 7 novellas, 8 bundles, 33 paperbacks, 21 audiobooks and 4 pre-orders out. Her release schedule is insane, alternating between four ongoing series and publishing at least one or two books a month. She’s both daunting and an inspiration to many authors and we got to interview her!

read more

SPRT #142 – What is Draft2Digital and what can it do for you?

Play

There are more places to publish than just at Amazon. Draft2Digital is one of the ways you can get your ebook out into the world. What is Draft2Digital? Well, think Smashwords but with a pretty website and no meatgrinder. They’re an ebook distributor which is handy for writers/publishers who can’t or choose not to go direct. Want to hear more? Good, that’s why we invited Dan Wood, Draft2Digital’s Director of Operations and Author Relations to the podcast.

read more

SPRT #141 – 21 day challenge and marketing the result with Chris Fox

Play

Author Chris Fox returned again, this time to talk about his 21 Day Book Challenge. He decided to write to market in Science Fiction, nutted out the plot, wrote the book, had it edited and published all within 21 days. Not only that but he took it one step further and decided to launch to market as well (marketing book coming soon) with the lofty goal of having the book stay under 10,000 in the paid rankings for 30 days. As of writing this post it is currently sitting at #677! Not only that but he decided to document the whole challenge via vlog, explaining what he did and his reasons for doing so.

read more

SPRT #140 – Erotica, erotic romance fiction and sexy business with Selena Kitt

Play

We thought we’d add a little spice to the podcast this week by inviting bestselling and award-winning author of erotica and erotic romance, Selena Kitt. Not only does this lovely lady have a successful career writing about the pleasures of the flesh, she’s been very savvy at carving a place for herself in the wider industry. Selena owns and runs a publishing company, an online erotic romance bookstore and two advertising sites. Other notable achievements include: surviving a couple of Amazon pornocalypses and cheekily marketed the affected books elsewhere as being Banned by Amazon, selling the movie rights to a book Babysitting the Baumgartners (it’s being made into an adult movie) as well as receiving many awards for her writing (see her site).

read more

SPRT #139 – State of Self-Publishing Roundtable address

Play

Because no one wanted to be on the show this week we thought we’d go crazy drunk on air! But none of us wanted to do that so we got together and decided we’d discuss the state of SPRT, the recent changes and additions we’ve made, as well as the multi-author cross promo giveaway. We also decided to torture you further by talking about our individual writing and publishing. Maybe you’ll get to find out what happened to FLOOD–or not 😛

read more