Tanya Lisle

  • With more and more people getting into audiobooks, and with Audible advertising just about everywhere these days, I’ve seen a lot of conversations about whether or not authors should make their books available in audiobook format. It’s a new and exciting thing, so should you get in on it?

    Why you shouldn’t make audiobooks

    It’s expensive

    There’s a bit of cost upfront if you are hiring a voice actor to read your book. Hiring someone will ensure that you have someone who can help you create a quality product, but the cost can be daunting.

    People don’t consume audiobooks in the same way as ebooks or physical books

    This is not to say everyone, but generally speaking, audiobooks are more likely to be played in the background while the listener is performing another task. The focus is often not entirely on the book in the same way, which means that more complicated narratives may not work as well in the format.

    Why you should make audiobooks

    You could do it yourself

    If you have a good reading voice and the ability to produce quality audio, you could do your own audiobook reading. It is time-consuming, and you will likely need to learn how to produce your own audio, but it could be done!

    You’ll reach a new audience

    There’s a growing audience of people who consume only audiobooks. This can be viewed as an entirely new audience, one that might have never checked out your work before without access to this format of your books.

    There’s less competition

    Currently, the audiobooks market is not as flooded with content as either the paperback or ebook markets. It’s still largely considered early for the market, which means getting in now will provide more opportunities for anyone trying to get in.

    Will I be doing audiobooks?

    I will not be doing audiobooks of any of my novels any time soon. I have certain auditory processing issues that make it really hard for me to listen to anything for a long time, which is kind of required for audiobook production. It may happen one day! But I don’t see those coming any time soon.

    Also, I just don’t have a very good reading voice. I would need to train a little if I were to produce it myself, or I’d need to sell a whole lot more books if I were going to hire someone.

    Write Your Story: Unlock Your Creative Potential

    Are you ready to embark on a journey into the world of storytelling? Look no further! Introducing Write Your Story, a comprehensive resource designed to fuel your imagination, enhance your storytelling skills, and bring your characters to life. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or simply someone who loves crafting stories, this workbook is your ultimate companion.

    This Workbook Contains:

    • Story planning spreads
    • Setting and location spreads
    • Character spreads
    • Writing session tracker

  • I have been bullet journalling for years, but I’ve never really looked at the book from the guy who started it all. I looked at the articles and now have a significantly different system in place than the ones I started with, but I figured might as well get a refresher on what the actual system’s intent.

    The book takes a bit of a sandwich approach to explaining the method. At the start, it’s a lot of very practical tips, tricks, and steps to set up your very first bullet journal. The ideas are great, and it gets you set up to start with the habit and start to see the ways in which it can work for your life. The end also has a lot of practical advice, particularly when it comes to talking about the boom of the aesthetic bullet journal practice that makes it look as if you have to be an artist in order to do it.

    You don’t, by the way. You just need to find a way to make it work for you.

    The middle took a bit of a strange turn. The framing of it is to talk about the other ways you can use a bullet journal other than just keeping it as a planner and to do list. It feels like a loose framework to talk about how the method has been motivational and substantially changed the lives of the people who have used it, which felt weird. It’s a way to keep organized, which can be life changing? But it felt like a bit much.

    Overall, it’s great for if you want to get started and try it out. Now is a fantastic time to try out new things, and this is one of the rare self help things I think can actually be practically useful.

    Get it now

  • Another year done and this last year brought a lot of reading! I am pretty surprised, but the year has been pretty mediocre if I’m being honest. But it has also been a year of more random reads without properly vetting them first. Here are my favourite reads of the last year!

    House of Hollow

    Probably the most entertaining of the surprising amount of books I read this year involving the concept of cuckoos.

    Bad Blood

    My non-fiction favourite! And with the trial happening, it was great to know what led up to it.

    Feeder

    I didn’t know I needed an eldritch horror novel, but I am happy that I got one.

    Hench

    After putting out a whole trilogy about heroes and villains, it was great to see how other people did it.

    A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking

    This one was so cute and I think you should also check it out. I’m on the hunt for more by this author after checking out this one and I’m looking forward to reading more.

    The story behind me starting to make bottle charms was an accident. I got the bottles to put paper stars into. The problem was that they are too small for the stars to fit inside.

    I saw something online. Somewhere. I think it was an idea posted to a wedding group as something to put on tables for the guests to take at the end of the night. Some kind of decoration. Hopefully they weren’t making enough of these for everyone to take home, or that they had a very small wedding, because these are not as easy to make as I’d hope for a wedding.

    On the other hand, they’re very relaxing to make. And they’re pretty cute.

    Unfortunately for me, I have no idea what I’m going to do with them all. Please take them from me.

    Get your bottle charm

  • Last book review of the year and I opted for something that I’d been hearing good things about! Cult stories and a hint of something supernatural sounded just about right for me, so I figured this one would be great.

    The story follows Lo, a young woman who has not seen her sister since a tragic accident killed her parents and left her scarred. Lo has been working for a journalist and aspires to be one herself, but has also been trying to get in touch with her sister who has been stuck in a cult for the last several years. When the cult leader, Lev, offers to give her exclusive access to her, she has an opportunity to achieve both things: Find her sister and get her byline at last. But the cult is alluring and her sister is far more elusive than she bargained for.

    This story is slow and makes the choice to not include many chapter breaks, which is a new trend that I’m not fond of. It’s meant to show how cults trap desperate people in them, but it takes a very long time to get there. We have shifting perspectives between Lo in the present and her sister, Bea, in the past which… well, I figured out one of the twists pretty early on from that context alone.

    I think I would have liked this a lot more if I didn’t already have an interest in cults and a general understanding of options. There was a point early in the story where I wondered why, when Lo wasn’t able to get her byline, she didn’t just pay the $6 for a Medium subscription and publish there. That she is completely isolated without even an online community, and the only communities talked about are Instagram and Facebook, which she explicitly does not have ((Instagram, at least)) for reasons that are not listed felt bizarre. It feels artificial and like a lot of the circumstances around her actions are contrived to make the story work.

    And don’t get me started on that turning point where the cult is suddenly good actually because there is a child. The last third of the book felt like things were happening because there was a place this story was meant to go and didn’t feel like the logic connected with the first half.

    Overall, it was probably fine. I think I was just not in the mood for it and found myself poking holes in the premise where I wouldn’t if I was. The writing is still good, so it might be more for you.

    Get it now

  • Since I’ve dipped my foot into the writing superheroes ring, and because I fully intend to go back to it again, I have been wanting more superhero novels. And when I can’t find those, I’ll happily take a recommendation for a villain one instead.

    The story follows Anna, a temp henchman who ends up taking a job that goes horribly wrong. When she is actually brought into the field, she ends up injured by one of the heroes so poorly that she loses the job and ends up out of commission for months. In this time, she starts to put her spreadsheet skills to the test, doing the math on how destructive heroics really are in terms of the cost of the lives caught in the crossfire. Her skills are eventually uncovered by another villain who brings her into his employ and gives her the resources to bring the heroes down with the power of math.

    I really enjoyed this book. It feels like it hits a sweet spot between Powers and Doctor Horrible in the portrayal of the mundane elements of superheroes that can be taken to an extreme with the right motivation. You do have to accept the premise of the universe, which I’ve seen a lot of reviews unable to do, but if you can it’s really a lot of fun. Anna is not someone who is supernatural and portrayed very much as someone who is working a corporate job that just happens to be evil.

    I will grant you that I work in tech, so evil for hire is just something I find relatively believable. I would still say it’s a great read if you’ve liked something like The Boys or Invincible or any of those other 2000s comics that are being made into media franchises now. It has a lot of the same ideas, with a few small updates.

    Get it now

  • When working on your worldbuilding, adding a few distinct subcultures in your fictional populations can be an easy way of making the world feel richer and larger than it really is. But how do you create them?

    First, a definition:

    A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles.

    Wikipedia

    Subcultures can take a lot of different forms, from something as large to other races to something as small as a family. If you’re doing a fantasy story, it could be those with learned magic, those who were born with magic, and people who do not use magic at all. So long as there is something about this group that differentiates them from the wider culture that also makes them similar to one another.

    The interplay between the subcultures is what tends to make this interesting in fiction. Seeing how their values or norms conflict with or complement one another can help to make the world seem larger, and give the implication of history without having to come up with specific details that might distract from the main story you’re trying to tell.

    Here are a few elements you can use to differentiate people in a subculture:

    • Fashion choices
    • Language
    • Religion
    • Food
    • Stereotypes the larger society places on them

    Do you use subcultures in your worldbuilding?

    Worldbuilding Workbook

  • I used to go into the library and start series in the middle, usually because my library was really bad about actually having the first one available for me. I always used to like the feeling of being able to understand what was going on in a story even when I didn’t have the full context. And so I feel a bit of nostalgia with this, book 7 of a series I have never read.

    The story follows primarily Irene, a Librarian who has apparently been dealing with a long string of assassination attempts that have no intention of stopping. The people targeting her shift throughout the book, and we follow as she and her companions try to understand just who wants them dead of their past foes and how some of them continue to come back after they have most definitely been killed in the past. There’s also a lot to do with the relationships between the Library, the Fey and the Dragons, which I don’t think I ever fully grasped.

    I am fully aware that this is the second to last book in the series, and therefore is mostly setting up the climax and conclusion in the final installment. Regardless, there’s a lot of very interesting ideas in here. I was hoping for something like the Thursday Next series and I think I was pleasantly surprised. It’s significantly more straightforward and less surreal than that series, but there are a lot of elements in it that I found hit that sweet spot of fiction about fiction that I like.

    Overall, I really enjoyed it but I would suggest maybe starting at the start of the series. If this book is any indication, there are a lot of really interesting plot elements that would be a lot more fun if I had a fuller context of what was going on.

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  • While I work in tech, I have no desire to work for one of the prestigious FAANG companies, and after this book I know for certain I do not want to work at Netflix. This is a book about how Netflix creates and maintains a culture of high-performing employees who have the autonomy to make decisions without the need for oversight. It’s an interesting look at how to create a culture that thrives on innovation and easily trims out those who are not performing as highly as the company needs.

    There’s also a few uncomfortable things that happen in the book. The radical candour they talk about and the constant feedback appear to be entirely negative and involve calling people out in public settings, sometimes being placed in a room so that you and your coworkers can all do that to each other. There’s a part where a woman gets feedback from a man that she’s been talking too much. If you are a woman in tech, you know why that bothered me. There’s also the insistence that they are culturally sensitive, but then insist that other cultures bend to their way of doing things.

    If you’re curious about what tech is like, the attitudes expressed by the voice of this book are not uncommon. The “We are doing everything right, if it’s not working for you then you are the problem, the people who left just couldn’t handle us or weren’t good enough for us” is what you’re walking into with the many companies.

    I’m certain this book is full of embellishments and exaggerations to make Netflix sound more interesting and innovative, but there are a few interesting ideas. If you are in tech, it is an interesting read. If you think this is a book to live by, however, please lose my number.

    Get it now

  • It’s important for most people to make sure they are not reliant on only one income stream, and authors are no different. If any of the retailers you rely on decides to shut down or change their policies in any way that’s not ideal, it is good to have another source of income to fall back on.

    Merchandise

    Creating merchandise around your books has a few benefits. First, it means that you are giving your fans something that they can get to show off their favourite books and author. It also means that you, as the author, have something that you can use in giveaways and to promote your books! And, of course, having all of this available in an online shop can create another income stream for authors.

    You can use something like Redbubble, Art of Where, or Society6, which will handle creating and shipping the products if you don’t want to keep those items yourself.

    Beta/Editing/Proofing services

    If you’ve been writing and managing a lot of your own editing for a while, you could start offering your services helping other authors refine their books. This does depend on where you think your skills are the strongest, but you could offer your services as a paid beta reader, an editor, or a proof reader that helps other authors get their books ready for publication.

    Coaching or teaching

    Self publishing is very overwhelming for people who are just getting into it. Many successful ((As well as not so successful)) authors offer services that help new authors walk through the process of publishing and marketing their first book. If you can spare the time, you could sell your expertise to authors who are early in their process and help them get their career started on the right track.

    If you don’t want to offer one on one sessions, there is always the option of creating classes! You can create and sell a course where you can teach a group of people, or even pre-record several classes that you can then give to anyone who is looking for help.

    Alternate formats

    If you have already published a book in ebook format, you can expand into other formats with the same content. Paperbacks and audiobooks are very popular, and will reach a different audience than just the ebooks. If you have artistic skills, you could also look into creating comics or other visual mediums as well!

    Articles

    If you are knowledgeable in a topic, you can write articles for sites like Medium, where you can get paid for your work. You can use this as a way to direct people to other ways to find you and to your books if the articles are related as well! It’s better to do this on a site that will offer you a payment structure rather than your own blog, since it will be more discoverable.

    Copywriting/Ghostwriting

    Writing text for other people can be a great way to earn some extra money, and give you a chance to write something else. Whether this is a whole other book for someone else, or just a few articles about a topic that you have some knowledge on, writing for someone else on contract can be a nice, stable way to generate more income.

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