Hey there! I'm Janeen Ippolito. I help ambitious authors create & grow book businesses that they love. On this channel I share brain-happy, market-focused tips, tricks, and encouragement for authors. This includes how-to videos, author interviews, quick blasts of encouragement, and book features & reviews. Stick around--it's a lot of fun! ___ Janeen is an award-winning author of 23+ books, a professional educator and coach of over 14 years, an in-demand conference speaker, a massive info-junkie, and was the CEO of an award winning small press for 7 years. She’s infamous for helping her students/clients achieve clarity, focus, renewed joy in storytelling, finished manuscripts, book requests, signed contracts, published books, and increased sales.
Good for you! I have been amazed at the quality and quantity of what you put out… Please take a break and recharge. looking forward to whatever you have next!
30:00 (takes drink of water) I realized I think dehydration is the source of my weight gain and maybe even my media consumption. Literal thirst. 🥵 🏜️ desert life!
Really enjoyed this! Great tips and lots of fun! I especially like the writing in layers idea. I do something like that occasionally but this gives me ideas for expanding it, so thanks! This was sooo much fun to watch/listen to!
I want to be an author so so bad. I think I'd be great at it. I've even started to write a few things. And made books as a little kid with paper and thread 😂. But I always give it up because how can I make actually books? How can I make a book, get it published, get copies made, have a storage place for them, and sell them and make a profit some how? It seems impossible, but I want it more than any other job. Help please. This is a dream I've crumpled up and tossed in the bin, but would very much like to uncrumple it and make it a reality.
Nice video that reinforces what I think I'm doing in my story universe. :) I have slowly gravitated toward preferring my secondary characters to be strong/interesting/deep/rounded/human enough to not only carry a scene on their own but could be the MC in their own story one day.
The antagonist who outshines the villain. Yikes! This is so the last book or two of my series! That sneaky antagonist (well, one of them) really wants to take over. Got to work on beefing up my hero for those books. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who struggles with the antagonist who wants to take over the story. :) (BTW, mine wins... he doesn't have to die at the end of the series and will live on to get his own stories where he finally gets to be a hero, hahaha).
Nice, finally got around to watching. Re feedback, I liked it, but anything over 8-10 minutes usually ends up in my watch-later list where it languishes until I get a round-toit. I suspect there is some research out there about optimum video lengths for engagement. Maybe a subject for a future video... :)
Thanks for the feedback! There are actually a lot of different opinions about "optimal" length from experts. The lack of agreement is shocking, I know. ;-)
I keep thinking "I should implement a Kickstarter for my next series." BUT I'm also planning on launching my first indie book. I believe doing both would be a disaster. A kickstarter will have to wait.
LOL, Oh my gosh, "Think about your ideal reader... and what kind of sweater he wears?" Totally cracked me up! Yeah, I'm not good at conjuring up readers in my mind. I'm too busy making up characters to entertain those readers. Thanks for this super helpful video! I'm getting ready to send my novel to my editor in a little over a month, and I'd like to get ideas on how to market it later on. This is all useful info, especially for someone going indie with $0 for marketing coaches. :D
I've never seen this channel before, but this video is exactly what I needed right now (as a new epic fantasy author who made a lot of mistakes in publishing his first book). Praise be to God, and may He bless your channel and your writing. 🙂
I have this really intriguing antagonist. When the protagonist's love interest vanished, leaving only a few scant clues behind for her, she visited the antagonist's kingdom to search for him. That antagonist was soooooo charming and romantic, part of me was so tempted to let my protagonist run off with him instead! LOL. What helped me process through it was to write my own (private) version of the story in which that actually did happen--so I could remind myself of WHY the situation wouldn't work. Then I was able to write what I'd intended, and the protagonist found her love interest and left Mr. Antagonist behind for future drama and even more bad blood. :D
Similar to the 5% attack is an approach I think I picked up from Dr Petersen and it doesn't involve math. :) It boils down to "what is one thing that I WILL do." Doesn't have to big, meaningful/important, or complicated. Just one thing. Anything. It just has to be something you know that you'll do and then do it. E.g., Fix that one sentence that has been bugging me? Pick a random word in my word-frequency list that doesn't have a ginormous word count and review its usage in the MS? Write that email? Go through my to-do list and cross off everything that I know isn't going to get done no matter what? Re-read a scene and if that's too much, how about only a paragraph, a sentence? Watch and comment on Janeen's latest Y/T? :)
Haha, sounds good! Especially if you have the WILL to do it. Sometimes I have zero executive function or gumption to try, so making it 5% makes it more of a "just do this" and less of anything requiring me to really want to. Always appreciate a comment being a "will do"!
I’m reading this book now and I agree most of it is basic story structure, scenes, sequels. What I’m really getting out of this book is the finer points such as speeding up and slowing down, dialing up drama, conflict and suspense. Especially finding value in his tips on how to fix and improve a scene, and links scenes / sequels together to create rising action, climax and conflict. Than you for taking the time to make this video, I enjoyed it.
Thanks! I was speaking with an upper tier copywriter about AI earlier this year and he didn't think it would impact him but would take jobs away from the mediocre, non-fulltime, and inexperienced writers. Which to me sounded like copywriting would slowly shift into (almost) full AI as the experienced/good writers retired and there are fewer and fewer human replacements.
I wouldn't say it will go all the way to AI. I think that, as you mentioned, the less-skilled and inexperience positions will likely be replaced, but I think that even at its best, AI will always need human oversight - and should always need human oversight. There are plenty of nuances that AI simply can't capture, and I think tech people are far too optimistic (dare I say arrogant?) about their ability to duplicate those nuances. And even more so, people who skip over that middle ground of oversight will not fare as well as people who can customize the formulaic and often wrong usages of AI and tweak them to work. This is similar to how, even now, if two people buy the same package of pre-made hooks or copy, the difference in effectiveness will come down to the individual and how the copy is modified and best used.
@@authorelevate Even if human oversight is maintained, it still seems like the quality of the oversight will decline as the experience base is hollowed out. Or at least my pessimist mind side thinks. :) And from a business perspective, good enough at a cheap or almost free price is attractive compared to really good with a premium price. Interesting times...
My schedule changes this year because all of my books are turned in for the holidays and I can take them off and enjoy my time with family. I might actually decorate, lol! Merry Christmas!!
