Dealing With Change And How To Build Resilience As An Author With Becca Syme

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There are more options for publishing and reaching readers than ever before, and the indie author business models are splintering and diverging, so how do we know which path to follow?

How do we deal with the changes due to generative AI, and how do we manage the grief and anxiety about these shifts? Becca Syme gives her perspective.

In the intro, Kobo Plus launches in Ireland and South Africa [KWL]; Authors Equity [Publishing Perspectives]; Selling direct insights [Kindlepreneur]; Claude 3 [Anthropic]; Spear of Destiny.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. 

Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of The Better-Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the ‘Dear Writer' series of non-fiction books.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Saturation causing a shift in the indie author business model
• The importance of having certainty in your own process
• An ego shift when selling direct
• Deciding on a business path amid uncertainty
• Choosing your ‘hard'
• Adapting the vision of your future in an ever-changing industry
• Finding readers in an evolving publishing industry

You can find Becca at BetterFasterAcademy.com.

Transcript of Interview with Becca Syme

Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of The Better-Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the ‘Dear Writer' series of non-fiction books. So welcome back to the show, Becca.

Becca: Thank you for having me, again. I love being here.

Joanna: Now, you've been on the show a few times. So we're just going to jump into the topics today, as we've got so much to talk about now.

I've really wanted to talk to you about some of the things I'm seeing in the community right now. You're so wise, and I think people need help and guidance. Sometimes I'm just a little bit blunt about stuff, and you have a different manner.

So the first thing I want to talk about is a shift in the business model for indie authors. You and I were both at the last 20Books Vegas, the last ever one. It feels like what used to be one clear path is splintering into all different things.

What changes are you seeing in the indie author business models? How is it affecting the authors you coach?

Becca: The upside, I think, of some of the changes is that we're seeing a real trend away from this expectation of as many books as you can possibly produce — because we've hit the saturation point, basically, everywhere.

There are always going to be these niche genres that pop up that aren't fully saturated yet, but they get to a saturation point pretty quickly. So when the whole of the industry is saturated, that changes the problems that readers have.

So when readers were having a problem in 2012, there just weren't enough books. Like there weren't enough books for them to choose from, and New York sort of kept it that way on purpose, right. They kept the water blue on purpose.

Now that we don't have that problem anymore and readers have different problems, then the way you solve them as a writer is different. So it becomes more and more important to find the people who are going to be your people that you're going to write for and to try to maintain some sense of having people that you are pleasing.

Not that you have to write to market, not that you have to write for anyone but yourself, but we've lost this sense in the industry, I think, of like all you have to do is publish a book and it's going to sell.

By the way, again, I always like to remind people that still wasn't the case, even in the Gold Rush. There still were plenty of books that weren't selling.

We're facing that more now than we ever have because there are so many people who are having the experience of like, “Well, I came in and tried to do this model, and it's not working for me, and so now I have to think of something different.”

The indicators are all there that the problems readers are having are different. So there's no more expectation, in my opinion. It's only grown over the last four or five years that what we're seeing are people who are writing fewer books a year and who are selling more.

The faster and faster and faster you write, you have to know you can produce a product that people want to read if you're going to write that fast. Otherwise, writing that fast is not the way to go.

Joanna: It's funny, I'm actually, as we record this, next week I'm speaking in Seville. I've kind of put a sort of tongue-in-cheek title on one of my slides, which is—“1BookTo50K,” instead of, “20BooksTo50K.” Do you agree with that?

Becca: Oh, yes. I mean, I would say the problems that readers have are always the things that dictate the market, like the way the markets going to function.

When there's too many books in the market—which obviously we're going to talk about that later on in this session as well—but when there's too many books in the market for readers to choose from, they have different problems.

This becomes curation, right? Like, how do I find the books that are going to be the best for me to read?

So putting more and more and more books and just not caring whether they meet reader expectations, not caring whether readers want them or not, that's not the way to solve the problem of curation.

The way to solve the curation problem is to write a better book, and specifically to write a book that people will want to read.

So I really believe that despite all the things that are happening in the industry, that for writers who want to write books, craft is going to become more important.

Storytelling and pacing are going to become more important.

There's going to be this resurgence almost of like, well, okay, now the pendulum has swung all the way to one side, in terms of like just creating anything just to put things out in the market, and we're recognizing that that's just not what readers want from us right now.

Readers want better. They want books that they want to read, and however you personally can produce that is the model. Again, I would argue that has always been the model.

Like the model for, let's say, 20BooksTo50K. For the people who can produce a lot of books, then that was the model. But for people who couldn't, there were still people who were only producing one, two, and three books a year, who were making a living writing, even during the gold rush.

Joanna: Like me!

Becca: Yes, like, it's always been that way. However you can produce a book people want to read is how you should produce it, and not pay attention to what other people are doing.

Again, in an industry that's very competitive, it's hard to have that certainty about your own process. So I guess that's always what I'm hoping that I can do is to help people increase their certainty in their own process.

Joanna: So I guess that's one thing, is the writing a lot of books. Especially, and we'll come back to AI, but there's a lot of ways to produce a lot of books very fast. So we can't compete on being a machine in terms of production.

Another change, I think, is that the focus up until reasonably recently, I guess, was Amazon. Then, of course, there was KU plus ads, that digital-first model.

Then even authors who go wide were focusing very much on retailers in general. It seems like there's also the shift into the selling direct model in different ways.

What are those other business models you're seeing?

Becca: I mean, I would agree with all of those, just in terms of the more reader-focused that we can become. I think the more we can think about how to solve the problems that readers are actually having, the more likely we are to maintain sustainability long-term.

If what readers want is more of your world, then you giving them more of your world via something like Patreon, or doing Kickstarter or something like that, is going to be what will keep them invested in your platform, over choosing to go to other people's platforms.

So there's this element for me of when the world shifts, we can't control what happens in the world, so you can either react to it or not.

When the world shifts, and we move towards that people want curation, people want more good books, people want to go deeper into the things that they really like, they want more community, like those are problems that we can solve for them.

Again, like not everybody's a community builder, I get that, but those are problems that we can solve for them.

Using things that are more personal, that offer more access, that give us more control over the data, that seems to be the pendulum swing that we're in right now.

Joanna: Well, can I just ask you then on the psychology side, because you're really good at this stuff, and there is a big ego shift when you move to selling direct. Like your Kickstarter, Shopify stores, Patreon, Ream, any of this stuff, there is no bestseller list, no one else can see how much money you're making.

In one way it's freeing and in another way, well, no one can see your sales. Like most of my sales are now no longer tracked by any industry metric. They're kind of invisible.

There's this invisibleness of selling direct.

Which on the one hand, as I said, is great, and on the other hand, the ego sort of is blasted by this. A lot of people ask me this, they say, “But you can't hit a bestseller list this way.”

What do you say to people who are like, well, I need to be seen in that way?

Becca: I mean, I do think if you're a person who needs to be seen in that way, and that is genuinely something that you would say, “You know, I've never hit this list before, and I want to hit this list.” I would say it's fine to go ahead and do that.

You just need to know that that is a model that's not necessarily moving forward in the future, especially as a lot of places are starting to get rid of their bestseller lists.

Like we're not 100% sure that the USA Today list is going to last forever. We don't know what's going to happen with the New York Times list in the future. There's so much of that that we don't have control over.

When I coach people individually about this kind of stuff, I'm super clear. Like there are still a lot of people who would benefit from being in trad publishing. There are still a lot of people who would benefit from doing the sort of older model of trying to hit a list because that's something that really is a marker for them, it's something they've always wanted.

Similarly to, you know, talking about other topics that we're going to talk about, there's a level of grief of, well, that industry doesn't exist anymore. Like the industry that we had in 2012 and 2014, or in 2016, that doesn't exist anymore.

So we can either be really frustrated by that and be caught up in this, “but I need it, but I need it,” or—

We can shift into trying to find other ways to meet our ego needs.

Just on a side note, because so much of this psychologically is when it meets an ego need for you, is it actually meeting a beneficial need? Or are you in survival mode when you think about not getting that thing, and you don't realize it?

This is part of why I'm encouraging people to read Claire Taylor's books about the Enneagram because she deals a lot with that subconscious fear that's underneath. Like, what happens if I don't get what I want?

I think a lot of us are caught up in ego stroking that is not coming from, let's say, a strengths place. There are some strengths that do need to be seen as being successful, and that's a beneficial thing because it motivates them and makes them successful.

When it's coming from a place of fear, like I won't be okay if I can't prove to other people how much I'm selling, then that's a really different conversation from like, no, seeing those markers motivates me and helps me to compete with my peers and stuff like that. Those are two super different conversations.

If I'm coaching someone and it's very clear that this doesn't feel beneficial, like this feels like a fear-based thing, I usually will refer them to Claire's book.

Joanna: Well, Claire will be coming on the show soon. I haven't spoken to her yet, but—

Becca: Yay.

Joanna: On that, this is something I have been thinking about. There has been some things happening in the community where I've been then questioning, what if I let this go, this podcast go, and I let go my desire and the status I do get from being visible in the author community?

Sometimes it's very difficult, as you know, because you're in a similar situation. Sometimes I just think, well, could I be just a writer and shut up and stop talking about it and just do it?

I do question, like, is it coming from a place of fear? Like, could I survive that way? Or is it that, actually, I do want to be part of a community, I want to help people.

Actually, this podcast helps more people than my books do.

It's something I struggle with all the time. I mean, how do you deal with that?

Becca: I have similar questions, too. Like, is it coming from a beneficial place for me? Here's how I internalize it, because I know you also have futuristic as one of the Clifton Strengths, right?

I'm constantly imagining my paths forward and then living in that future of like, what would it feel like to exist as a writer, as a novelist, in an industry where I do have so much knowledge about how this works, and I have so much context about what success and failure looks like, and how to help people, could I sit back and watch people struggle?

I'm never going to not be in community with writers if I'm a writer. I'm always going to be at conferences, I'm always going to be talking to people. Could I sit there and watch people struggle and know that I could be helpful and not help? Like, is that possible for me to do?

When I imagine that future, I think, no. Like, I don't think I could do that. But what is it about my current situation that I don't like?

I've been talking a lot lately about building a house that you want to live in, in terms of sustainability.

What I've done in my nonfiction career is I've inadvertently built a house that I can't live in. It takes too much personal connection for me, it takes too much of my time, etc.

So as a futuristic, what I'm trying to do is think about where is the level of energy that I'm willing to give to this business and this industry that is sustainable for me? And then how do I get from where I am now down to that place? That's what I'm navigating currently, and then what I'll do when I get there.

I have some like metrics for my hours per month. How much time do I want to spend coaching? How much time do I want to spend writing? How much time do I want to spend on nonfiction content?

Once I get to those numbers, then I'm going to stop and reevaluate and be like, okay, is this a house I can live in in terms of if I stay in the industry and I'm less visible than I used to be, can I imagine myself forward from that place?

I do feel like the future changes so much from different vantage points. So I may not be able to tell, if I quit completely, if I'm going to be okay 10 years from now, but I can tell better if I minimize what I'm doing. Then I can pause in a year or pause in eight months, and say, okay, now am I okay? Then I'll ask that question differently at the end of 2024.

If I were to say, zero is not possible. Otherwise, I'd have to stop writing if I was going to do zero nonfiction work at this point. So for me, I'm constantly thinking about, if I was doing it this way for the next 10 years solid, would I be able to maintain that? Then that's kind of how I set my expectations.

Joanna: Yes, and I think for both of us, so people listening know, neither of us are going anywhere.

We both feel like we are committed, it's just that there are ups and downs in the process.

It is interesting, this future-casting. As you say, both of us have futuristic in our Clifton Strengths, but a lot of people don't.

I feel like this splintering of the business models—I mean, I get emails every day right now, and I'm sure you do too, where people say, “I've heard that I can't just publish on Amazon and sell a book anymore. So what do I do? Like you're talking about Shopify and Kickstarter, but I don't have an audience.”

Someone talks about Ream, or Patreon, or Substack, or now someone's doing a trade show or whatever. Like, how do people deal with the uncertainty? And it's, like you said, building for 10 years’ time, because that's what I say.

It's like, well, if you started now on whatever path, in 10 years’ time, you're going be somewhere. So which path do you want to do?

I mean, there is no single formula anymore, in terms of self-publishing, or marketing, or any of these things. There are so many choices.

How do people deal with uncertainty around this? How can they choose the path?

Becca: That is a great question. So I have a couple of different answers.

The first is, any person who cannot commit the time or feels just really insecure about doing all of the direct sales and all of the in-person events and things like that, there still are a portion of people who are selling well on the retailers alone.

It's harder to do that. It's much, much harder to get just your ads to deliver and to just sell ebooks only and to make a living doing that, but it's not that no one is doing it. It's just that it's much more difficult than it's ever been before.

So I would say, if you know that that's the only thing that you can handle, then you want to set your expectations for that. You've got to think, well, I have got to do something to make sure that I am pleasing my audience.

Whether that's writing the best book for me, like making me perfectly happy, or writing to market or whatever it is that you're doing —

I have to be willing to take the lumps that come with the path that I choose. There's no lumpless path. There is no silver bullet.

So whatever path I choose, I'm basically choosing the hard that I want to continue to replicate.

So if it's too hard for me to imagine having enough self-confidence to do direct sales, to put myself out at a trade show or something like that, then I'm choosing a different version of hard, but it's still going to be hard.

I've been doing a lot of listening to athletes and actors, just like interviews recently, trying to find these little snippets of conversation about things like luck and timing and hard work and talent. Like how do we balance all of the things that are necessary, and how do we increase resilience?

If what we're expecting is that there's an easy button to hit, or there's an easy path, or a path that will not be difficult, then we should not be doing this job because that is definitely not the case.

I mean, I don't think it was ever the case. I just think there are people who like hard work more than others, and so it seems easier for them because they really enjoy the hard work. For those of us who don't like hard work, we have to know that the path is going to be difficult.

So that's kind of the one thing I want to start off with is there are still people who can sell on retailers only, but then you have to make the decisions that are the best for those retailers.

So if you're going to go into KU, you have to make decisions that align well with KU. If you're going to be wide, you have to make decisions that align well with wide.

You have to find the people who are talking about those strategies, and pick one strategy, and do it.

This is the second thing I would say about the potential choosing of the path. It is so unlikely in this industry that you're going to have success, period. Like, it's just so unlikely that you're going to hit full-time author income that there needs to be some level of resilience in that space.

So if you're going to work until you hit that, that you know that it's possible to not sell, and not sell, and not sell, and not sell, and then sell. So the commitment to just doing whatever it takes to hit that space is what I think is the missing piece for an awful lot of where I'm seeing the industry going right now.

There are a lot of people who came in with the belief that it should be easy because the way that it was often talked about was how easy it was. I just think it's never actually been easy, though.

I think we have to understand how much hard work is going to be involved in it, and we have to be willing to do that if what we want is that outcome.

Of course, and I'm sure Claire will talk about this when she comes on, but not everyone should be shooting for full-time income. That's not what's going to make everyone the happiest, especially because—and I talk about this from a strengths perspective a lot—especially because trying to write full time for some brain wirings is actually not beneficial.

For some people, putting the amount of pressure on yourself where you're tying your stability and security to your creativity is going to make your creativity go away. It's going to become harder and harder to produce, the more difficult the sales become.

So there are a lot of people in this industry who, for reasons of safety and security being the number one goal, need to have at least a part-time job bringing in money so that writing never becomes the thing they rely on to pay their mortgage.

If not, eventually the creativity is going to become inaccessible because the pressure will get to be too big.

That's something we don't talk about a lot because it's not sexy. You're not going to make a class talking about how you shouldn't quit your day job.

The reality is that an awful lot of us will function better in our creativity, and write better books, and make more money, if we don't have to rely on the books to produce our mortgage payments.

Joanna: Yes. I mean, I've always talked about multiple streams of income.

I do make good money from book sales alone, but like you, I have other forms of income. This podcast is one of them. I like having that. It makes me feel more secure.

I love how you talk about choosing the hard you want.

Because I also still see people who are like, “Oh, well, you know, it's easy to self-publish, and that's what makes it like almost worthless. Whereas getting a traditional publishing deal is hard.”

You're completely right, like—

Being a successful indie author is just as hard, just in a different way.

Becca: It's a different kind of hard.

Joanna: Yes, and it's so funny because at the moment some of the emails I get, I'm like, look, I think you should just go and pitch a publisher.

If you're not willing to do the work around reaching readers yourself and you think a publisher will do it for you, then go pitch a publisher.

I mean, do you find yourself saying that now? It's so weird. I haven't done that for a long time.

Becca: Yes, and in fact, I regularly still have coaching calls where I'll say to someone, “I do think trad is a better fit for you.” Especially the people who are not in a place emotionally where they can handle a lot of attention.

As an indie, you have to be your own salesperson. There are a lot of people who cannot do that for themselves because they just don't have the emotional tools for that right now.

I have a Patreon/BeccaSyme where I write blog posts every once in a while, and I'm constantly saying in my Patreon, we need to increase our emotional resilience skills if we're going to remain indie.

There's always going to be pain and difficulty, and you're going to get into fight or flight mode about things.

If you don't have the capacity to regulate yourself, like your own nervous system, then you're not going to survive in this industry because it's so competitive, and it's so painful.

Even in the places where it's like, “Oh my gosh, yes, it's so supportive and we're all talking about how supportive it is,” and by the way, if you have to talk about how supportive it is, I question how supportive it is.

We're constantly having these conversations about like, yes, where there are these supportive corners. And yet, if you're talking just to individual authors, we know how difficult this job is.

People who are trying to get into this job need to understand, like, I have to have emotional resilience, I have to be able to put myself out there in front of people.

That might mean there's a skill that is not being executed in my brain right now that I might have to work on. I might have to reparent myself, so that I can have a better chance at doing well at this job.

There's nothing shameful about that. That is actually really excellent self-management and self-leadership in knowing, you know what, I'm not great with criticism, so I'm going to go work on getting better at criticism because I want to write better books.

Right now, every time my editor sends me feedback, I get triggered so bad, I can't read the feedback and work on the book. I have to put the book away.

Then I'm like, great, let's work on some emotional resilience skills there then, so that you can take that criticism so that you can continue to grow and get better.

That's definitely the key long-term in this industry: emotional resilience and growth.

Joanna: Oh, so much there. Well, talking about resilience then, another big impact right now is the discussions around generative AI.

I mean, you and I have been around this industry a while. We've dealt with some of the big waves of war within the community. I mean, there's been a number of these.

There's also been some kind of real hate at different points around various people's choices. And a lot of, again, splintering. I feel like it's quite a relevant word around people's attitudes around generative AI.

I mean, my listeners are at least AI-curious, or AI-positive. The anti-AI ones have gone away, generally, by now. So we sit in between the thing, but a lot of people are going through a difficult time.

We mentioned grief earlier. I do want to come back to that because I feel like I faced some of these existential questions around AI a year or so ago. I feel like I've been through some of this, and there's a recalibration of what it means to be an author and why we write.

There's this focus on craft and the process, rather than the outcome. Can a machine do this better than us? I mean, these are some big questions.

How do you see people dealing with this change badly, and how do we deal with it well?

Becca: I mean, there is so much grief around this process because, of course, so many of us grew up with these dreams of having a room of one's own and writing full time, right? Like so many of us grew up with these very vivid pictures.

So when we hear about something like AI, and we think about the shift in the market, or even just you hear me talk about saturation in the market, and it's like, oh, there's this piece in my head, that's like, am I going to have this outcome?

I would say, the important thing about this industry is that it goes through changes all the time, and no one is ever 100% correct about what's going to happen.

If you are sort of struggling with this, I would read the book, Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. He goes through these really brilliant examples after examples of the things that change the most are the things that surprise us. It's never the stuff that we are prepared for that is what we really need to practice resilience for.

This is what I would say to people. The changes that we know for sure are coming, in terms of we know there are going to be splinters right in the industry—okay, great—

How do I make myself splinter-resilient? How do I find people around me that are going to be positive forces in my life relationally? How do I make connections with people?

I can't change how other people feel or think on either side of this debate, pro AI or anti AI.

I can't change how people think, and I can't change how people are going to act. The only thing I can change is myself.

So I need to deal very quickly with whatever grief I'm having about whatever picture I had in my head about what the future would look like because the faster I can get to acceptance, and the faster I can recalibrate what my future could now look like, the better for me.

So thinking about the larger industry—not from a Joanna and Becca perspective, but from like an individual author perspective—if I can't affect change in the larger industry, then I have to be willing to deal with whatever happens.

That means I have to increase my ability to do emotionally resilient things. I have to increase my ability to feel successful no matter what happens.

I have to increase my ability to be able to pivot quickly and release the future that I thought was coming, without releasing my hope for the future.

Regardless of what happens in the industry, people are always going to want to read books, people are always going to want to write books. Like people people, not just machines, but people.

So as long as I know that I'm always going to write no matter what happens, even if that means I have to get a day job to support it, even if that means that I have to change my expectations about the future in order to support it, I know I want to keep writing.

Fixating on whether or not I can have this very specific picture of what I think the future should look like, that's only going to make it harder for me to adapt to the industry. It doesn't mean that I have to release any expectation of how I will feel because that's usually what the picture is going to produce for us.

The picture produces freedom, or the picture produces gratitude, or it produces security, and there are other ways to find that other than the very specific picture that I have in my head.

That's what I would say is I want us to all be as quick to accept and pivot as we can, and then as quick to provide ourselves with the needs that we have, rather than waiting for the industry to change back or waiting for the industry to catch up.

Whatever it is that we're feeling, we have to take agency for ourselves and be responsible for our own emotions.

Joanna: Absolutely. It's interesting, I mean, just in terms of practical steps. I mean, I'm an input person as well, so I input a lot on all of this stuff, and even I get overwhelmed sometimes.

So my two things are I get off social media and the internet in general, go for a walk or something, and then also, I write. As in, I create. I find joy in the process of writing.

We are writers. We write, and we love creating, and that's not going to stop.

If the whole world loses their jobs to AI, everyone will be on universal basic income, and we'll still write. I think it's like, okay, this is actually amazing. It could be really amazing. So just thinking about it that way.

I wanted to ask you about social media because we talked earlier about finding the people who are your people, finding readers. A lot of people are having to step off social media right now—

How are people meant to find readers if things are changing so much?

Becca: I would say every avenue that's open to you, I would use it as strategically as possible. So for instance, make sure that it is exceptionally clear how people get on your newsletter in every single book that you publish. Make sure that your funnel is super, super intact.

I'm not talking about the 45 steps of creating a perfect funnel, I literally just mean if someone picks your book up, and they want more from you, is it easy for them to figure out how to get on your mailing list and how to get more from you?

This is maybe the bigger piece for me about longevity and sustainability, is —

We have to be willing to build slowly if that's what it's going to take to have a long-term sustainable career.

It's possible that me getting a BookBub every once in a while, and me running some ads, and me sort of chugging along in my book sales, and then building my newsletter organically, or building my community or my Patreon organically, is going to be the way that I'm going to function the best because it allows me to not be as present on social media, if that's what I need to do.

Then what I want to make sure that I do for myself, again, I need to practice agency with my own feelings and not allow myself to feel preyed upon by whatever is happening in the larger industry. That is where the most unhappiness and ineffectiveness comes from is where I get stuck in a space where I miss the fact that I can choose to do something different.

I can choose to feel different. I can choose to look at different data. I can choose to not be present in some of those groups. I can choose to not listen to some of those people who are creating a lot of fear in me. I have agency over my own story.

That's what I want us to remember. As long as I don't quit, as long as I don't give up, there's always more possibility in the future for me to grow more, to put more books out, to have more readers to make more money. There's always a possibility for that, but I have to be willing to do whatever it takes and not give up.

Joanna: Yes, and it just comes back to what we love about this process.

Like we talked about earlier, you and I back away sometimes, but we come back to this because we really do love it. We love the writing, we love the community. So yes, people listening, we're not going anywhere.

You've mentioned sustainability and resilience a few times, and—

You've got this brilliant digital conference coming up. Tell us a bit about that.

Becca: Yes, we're going to do something a little different in this digital con. We're going to have a couple of days of presentations on the first weekend. It is going to be the second week in May is when we're going to start. Then we're going to give you a week off to go and do some homework. Then we're going to come back for a day and half on the second side.

So the conference dates—and when you see the website, you'll see what I mean—but the conference dates are going to say something different. The goal is we want to give you a chance to put some of this into practice and to go and do some of the analysis, in terms of like my own stability, my own skills.

What am I expecting from myself that I can't continue to produce for forever? How can I build a sustainable business? It is basically the question: how do I build a house that I can live in?

So that's the big question for me in this conference. We call it the QTP Con, The Question The Premise Con. Basically, our goal this year is to talk about building sustainable author businesses.

Joanna: Brilliant.

Where can people find that, and you, and your books, and everything you do online?

Becca: BetterFasterAcademy, all one word. BetterFasterAcademy.com. All of that should be in various places on that front page.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Becca. That was great.

Becca: Thanks for having me.