Hey Jo. Just want you to know you're a big inspiration to me. Anxiety/Depression are messed up things, but it's very, very normal to feel them in the context of how crazy life is. Don't think it's not. I think it's a big stigma against authors if they work a job, but most of the people who spread the stigma didn't buy a whole house with their writing earnings. You've done awesome and are in a position I would KILL to be in. You clearly need a recharge -- you deserve it, you've achieved an insane amount.
I completely agree! I haven't gotten to the point yet of being a fulltime author and quitting my day job, but there are plenty of days when I think I'm not sure if I even want to ever do that. It is, indeed, a great security blanket to have a day job, and it makes writing and selling books less stressful and more fun when your entire livelihood doesn't depend on it.
Joe hang in there and Andrea salute for managing to keep it all together. Prayers going to both of ya’ll and hope things gotten better since this episode. Miss the show 😇.
Joe, your mental and physical health are more important than anything. Don’t beat yourself up. Nothing wrong with a day job. I really think it will help you. God bless you, brother.
Bravo on a great podcast! You’ve all been missed. I found your frankness and candor refreshing, because life does have a way of changing and sometimes getting in the way of our dreams. Pressing the pause button or going in a new direction for a while is healthy. I applaud that. Please do check back in with us periodically. Your collective honesty about what hasn’t gone perfectly is as inspiring as your success, because it encourages us to not give up, especially when our endeavors hit roadblocks. Best wishes for a fabulous 2023 for each of you, professionally and personally. I appreciate being along for the ride. ❤
Really get the life-brain-health-etc stuff. Haven't been writing since my mother's terminal cancer in 2020. Been bingeing these to help get me back in the mindset. Thank you all for sharing your stories here. REALLY appreciate it! Helps to feel less alone.
I was so happy to find another episode. Thanks for sharing your news. I have always found your podcast both inspirational and relatable, with all the ups and downs we all have in our author careers. Good luck with all of your next steps. Look forward to hopefully hearing from you all again in future. 🙂
Y'all have helped countless authors in countless ways over the years but this episode, with its discussion of mental health and taking care of yourself, might be the most important thing you've done. Thank you for being brave about your struggles and courageous about your solutions (like getting another job). Bravo!
Joe I love your books and I feel you, writing while juggling your mental anxieties/illnesses is a big struggle. Sometimes you need to make the difficult decision of what is going to pay my bills and bring me that peace of mind, and I think you made the right call. Whether that ends up being a long term or a short term decision remains to be seen, but just try and live in this moment for now. If you can pivot later that's awesome, but if you don't that's ok too, there's no shame in having a salaried job while being an author on the side. Your health/life should always come first. Let everything else come after that.
I just tried out Chat GPT for the first time to help me with a blurb, and it was so helpful. It didn't pop out a perfect blurb for me, but it certainly gave me a good starting point and some catchy lines the sprinkle into whatever blurb I do end up writing.
Couple of write to market series and Joe will be right back at it full time! You can do it and recoup Joe! Loving book of deacon book 1 right now! Joe you can totally give another crack at a written to market series! I think writing to market in also a way you love is so key to being full time like Chris Fox shares.
Thanks or your honesty. I call that state when you know what you need to do but can't being frozen. Interesting points on AI without the baggage of expecting it to be really good, or bad for that matter.
I know I shouldn't write this stuff in the comments on my favorite podcast on selfpublishing...but has Jo had a look at thiamine deficiency, which is exacerbated by lots of carbohydrates. Allithiamine (Vit B1) is amazing to fix any deficiency and the anxiety and depression. Hope you get through this really soon.
Interesting podcast. I have few thoughts. First, how can you write so fast? I've been working on my urban fantasy for about 5 years and I have rough drafted 2.5 books of a trilogy. Now I know I'm slow. but Someone mentioned "a book a month" or only "2 to 3 books a year". That just blows my mind. Second, AI as we know it is literally a couple months old. I think in a year or two it's going to be able to produce novels that are passable and all it will take is some creative editing to have them fool the AI detectors. That and the quality of writing already on the market by human writers is so utterly low, it won't take much for the AI to surpass the standard hackwork. The thing is, no one will actually admit to using the AI, so we won't really know. The market will be flooded, that is a inevitability I think. Also on the AI front, the moment it was released in late 2022, that was the moment the proofreaders died. I see no reason to pay a proofreader if all they are going to do, as a law of economics, is run my work through the AI machine. I'll do that myself and put the money towards a better editor. I've experimented with Bing Chat asking it to show me the errors and it's already better than any proofreader. (I believe it will be integrated into Word soon anyway) I did make the cover of my first book with AI, but not totally AI, I ran a philter over public domain photographs. I feel a little bad for cover artists, but the good ones will be fine and still charge a small fortune for their effort. The bad ones were little better, if not worse than AI is right now. In summary, A writer using AI to create anything is an attack on the profession of writing, and I hope those people are called out and shunned. However, using AI as a super-powered proofreader is fine. And using AI to create cover art is fine, since a cover shouldn't even matter to begin with.
Regarding AI, what many authors seem to forget in their breathless enthusiasm to train a corporation's software to replace them is that they don't OWN the software. They don't own the machine. They will not reap the massive dollars from freely volunteering their intellect, skills, intuitiveness and creativity to train AI to produce fiction that is virtually unrecognizable from human produced. Once it's all trained up (thanks to hundreds of thousands of creative artists) we can all go f*ck ourselves. No? Name one entity that didn't start out giving away the tech for "free" only to monetize the hell out of it later once they had all the data. For a bunch of "indie" authors banging on about protecting their intellectual property and rising up against the gatekeepers, y'all certainly folded pretty quick.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey Jo. Just want you to know you're a big inspiration to me. Anxiety/Depression are messed up things, but it's very, very normal to feel them in the context of how crazy life is. Don't think it's not.
I think it's a big stigma against authors if they work a job, but most of the people who spread the stigma didn't buy a whole house with their writing earnings. You've done awesome and are in a position I would KILL to be in. You clearly need a recharge -- you deserve it, you've achieved an insane amount.
I completely agree! I haven't gotten to the point yet of being a fulltime author and quitting my day job, but there are plenty of days when I think I'm not sure if I even want to ever do that. It is, indeed, a great security blanket to have a day job, and it makes writing and selling books less stressful and more fun when your entire livelihood doesn't depend on it.
Joe hang in there and Andrea salute for managing to keep it all together. Prayers going to both of ya’ll and hope things gotten better since this episode. Miss the show 😇.
Joe, your mental and physical health are more important than anything. Don’t beat yourself up. Nothing wrong with a day job. I really think it will help you. God bless you, brother.
So love the new vid! Thank you for popping in for updates and thoughts!
Bravo on a great podcast! You’ve all been missed. I found your frankness and candor refreshing, because life does have a way of changing and sometimes getting in the way of our dreams. Pressing the pause button or going in a new direction for a while is healthy. I applaud that. Please do check back in with us periodically. Your collective honesty about what hasn’t gone perfectly is as inspiring as your success, because it encourages us to not give up, especially when our endeavors hit roadblocks. Best wishes for a fabulous 2023 for each of you, professionally and personally. I appreciate being along for the ride. ❤
Really get the life-brain-health-etc stuff. Haven't been writing since my mother's terminal cancer in 2020. Been bingeing these to help get me back in the mindset. Thank you all for sharing your stories here. REALLY appreciate it! Helps to feel less alone.
I was so happy to find another episode. Thanks for sharing your news. I have always found your podcast both inspirational and relatable, with all the ups and downs we all have in our author careers. Good luck with all of your next steps. Look forward to hopefully hearing from you all again in future. 🙂
As a reader, please, Lindsey, please to more in the urban fantasy universe. They're so fun!
Y'all have helped countless authors in countless ways over the years but this episode, with its discussion of mental health and taking care of yourself, might be the most important thing you've done. Thank you for being brave about your struggles and courageous about your solutions (like getting another job). Bravo!
Joe I love your books and I feel you, writing while juggling your mental anxieties/illnesses is a big struggle. Sometimes you need to make the difficult decision of what is going to pay my bills and bring me that peace of mind, and I think you made the right call. Whether that ends up being a long term or a short term decision remains to be seen, but just try and live in this moment for now. If you can pivot later that's awesome, but if you don't that's ok too, there's no shame in having a salaried job while being an author on the side.
Your health/life should always come first. Let everything else come after that.
I just tried out Chat GPT for the first time to help me with a blurb, and it was so helpful. It didn't pop out a perfect blurb for me, but it certainly gave me a good starting point and some catchy lines the sprinkle into whatever blurb I do end up writing.
It's so good to see you all!
Couple of write to market series and Joe will be right back at it full time! You can do it and recoup Joe! Loving book of deacon book 1 right now! Joe you can totally give another crack at a written to market series! I think writing to market in also a way you love is so key to being full time like Chris Fox shares.
Thank you so much for this episode. It is good to hear what you all are up to, even if only once or twice a year.
Thanks or your honesty. I call that state when you know what you need to do but can't being frozen. Interesting points on AI without the baggage of expecting it to be really good, or bad for that matter.
Yay!!! Another episode!!! Thanks!!
Hooray! I really missed you guys.
I missed you guys ❤❤❤ thank you for this episode 🥰
Just clicked in, havent watched yet, but so excited to see you guys again :)
Ahhh! So excited to see another episode! AI is such a polarizing topic. I'm for it, but I try to be an ethical user.
You were missed🎉
I know I shouldn't write this stuff in the comments on my favorite podcast on selfpublishing...but has Jo had a look at thiamine deficiency, which is exacerbated by lots of carbohydrates. Allithiamine (Vit B1) is amazing to fix any deficiency and the anxiety and depression. Hope you get through this really soon.
Interesting podcast. I have few thoughts. First, how can you write so fast? I've been working on my urban fantasy for about 5 years and I have rough drafted 2.5 books of a trilogy. Now I know I'm slow. but Someone mentioned "a book a month" or only "2 to 3 books a year". That just blows my mind.
Second, AI as we know it is literally a couple months old. I think in a year or two it's going to be able to produce novels that are passable and all it will take is some creative editing to have them fool the AI detectors. That and the quality of writing already on the market by human writers is so utterly low, it won't take much for the AI to surpass the standard hackwork. The thing is, no one will actually admit to using the AI, so we won't really know. The market will be flooded, that is a inevitability I think.
Also on the AI front, the moment it was released in late 2022, that was the moment the proofreaders died. I see no reason to pay a proofreader if all they are going to do, as a law of economics, is run my work through the AI machine. I'll do that myself and put the money towards a better editor. I've experimented with Bing Chat asking it to show me the errors and it's already better than any proofreader. (I believe it will be integrated into Word soon anyway)
I did make the cover of my first book with AI, but not totally AI, I ran a philter over public domain photographs. I feel a little bad for cover artists, but the good ones will be fine and still charge a small fortune for their effort. The bad ones were little better, if not worse than AI is right now.
In summary, A writer using AI to create anything is an attack on the profession of writing, and I hope those people are called out and shunned. However, using AI as a super-powered proofreader is fine. And using AI to create cover art is fine, since a cover shouldn't even matter to begin with.
Regarding AI, what many authors seem to forget in their breathless enthusiasm to train a corporation's software to replace them is that they don't OWN the software. They don't own the machine. They will not reap the massive dollars from freely volunteering their intellect, skills, intuitiveness and creativity to train AI to produce fiction that is virtually unrecognizable from human produced. Once it's all trained up (thanks to hundreds of thousands of creative artists) we can all go f*ck ourselves.
No? Name one entity that didn't start out giving away the tech for "free" only to monetize the hell out of it later once they had all the data. For a bunch of "indie" authors banging on about protecting their intellectual property and rising up against the gatekeepers, y'all certainly folded pretty quick.
😂