In the episode of The Indy Author Podcast that airs on June 30, I talk with Gordon McClellan of DartFrog Books about the key difference between a genuine hybrid publisher and a publishing mill, why a publisher saying “not yet” is actually the green flag authors should be looking for, how to evaluate a hybrid publisher’s marketing commitment before you sign anything, red flags in contracts, and AI-generated scam solicitations.

Gordon McClellan is a publisher and communications leader with 20+ years of experience building mission-driven publishing and content organizations. As Founder of DartFrog Books, he leads editorial strategy, author development, and innovative initiatives focused on authorship, ownership, and the future of publishing. His work spans books, digital media, and audience-building systems designed to support long-term author success. Earlier in his career, he held senior leadership roles in churches, shaping communications around governance, stewardship, and organizational change—experience that informs his focus on clarity, credibility, and trust in publishing.

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Interview video at https://tinyurl.com/TIA341YT

Show notes at www.theindyauthor.com/show-notes/341-austin-camacho

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In this conversation, Austin reframed conflict from a plot device into the deepest expression of who your characters are.

CONFLICT IS NOT VIOLENCE

Austin’s first disclaimer: conflict is not fighting. When most writers hear the word, they picture action scenes. What Austin means is far broader—two characters with opposing goals. Every story requires a protagonist and an antagonist whose objectives are in direct tension. If that tension is absent, there is no story. And the distinction matters because it opens up the entire range of human experience as potential conflict, not just the scenes where someone throws a punch.

He applied this to the smallest scale immediately: a husband and wife deciding when to leave for a road trip. They agree on the destination. They will disagree on when to leave, what to pack, when to take the first rest stop. That is real conflict, rooted in who these people are, and it reveals character at the same time. Every disagreement tells us something about the person who has it.

CONFLICT IN EVERY SCENE

Austin’s operating principle: every scene needs conflict, including scenes between characters who are ostensibly allies. The vacation planning example illustrates this, but so does any alliance formed between characters who have just met. Two people agreeing to pursue the same goal still disagree about when, where, how, and who leads. That friction is not a distraction from the story—it is the story, at the granular level.

He also described how scene-level conflict can mirror the story’s central conflict without being directly tied to it. A protagonist struggling to communicate with his mother can echo a larger story about a man who needs to understand his enemy well enough to stop him. The smaller conflict foreshadows the larger one, and both illuminate the same theme.

CONFLICT IS A FUNCTION OF CHARACTER

The conversation’s central insight came when Austin observed that conflict does not come from plot—it comes from character. The conflict exists because of something this person wants very badly, or fears very deeply, or cannot bring themselves to do even when it would help them. Strip away the genre, the setting, and the stakes, and what remains is a person who is defined by what they want and how far they will go to get it.

This principle applies equally to villains. Austin noted a common weakness in contemporary fiction: protagonists with well-developed internal conflict paired with antagonists who are simply evil, with no discernible motivation. The result is an uneven story where the reader eventually asks why the villain does not just give up. A compelling antagonist has to believe in what they are doing just as much as the hero believes in stopping them. He cited ROCKY’s Apollo Creed as the model: not a villain at all, but an antagonist with his own ego-driven need to win, which made the fight worth watching because both men genuinely needed the outcome.

INTERNAL CONFLICT DISTINGUISHES HEROES FROM VILLAINS

Austin described internal conflict as the primary mechanism for showing moral character. The villain, to oversimplify, will do anything to accomplish the goal. The hero has the same drive but will not take every available shortcut—and that restraint is where characterization lives. The hero knows he could win by cheating, and he does not. That moment of self-denial, especially when the cost is real, is what makes readers root for him. Austin extended the principle to villains as well: even a catastrophically bad person has something they love or something they are protecting and showing that complicates them in exactly the ways that make fiction worth reading.

MAKING HIGH STAKES PERSONAL

Matty asked how to make large-scale conflicts—bombs, world domination, civilizational threat—feel emotionally real to readers. Austin’s answer was simple: make it personal. The reason a character fights to stop a bomb is not that blowing up Manhattan is abstractly bad. It is that his parents live there. Once the stakes are connected to someone the protagonist loves, the reader can locate themselves in the story. The objective scale does not matter. What matters is that it is the largest possible stakes from the protagonist’s point of view.

He reinforced this with the observation that stakes only have to feel gigantic to the protagonist. A character trapped in a building with thirty seconds to reach an elevator that is not working faces stakes that are, objectively, small. But if the story has done its job, those thirty seconds feel enormous. ALIEN, by contrast, uses life-and-death stakes, but its power comes from watching Ripley fight to survive as a person—not from the abstract horror of the alien itself.

STATE THE GOAL PLAINLY

Austin closed with advice that cut against the instinct to withhold: let your protagonist state the goal plainly, even bluntly, to another character. It clarifies the story for the reader and anchors everything that follows. ROCKY does this in its most famous line—“All I want to do is go the distance”—and the rest of the film is the working-out of whether that specific, personal, clearly stated goal will be met. When protagonist and reader share the same understanding of what victory means, the conflict has somewhere to go.

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Transcript

TIAP Episode 341 — Austin S. Camacho

This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Austin S. Camacho. Hey, Austin. How are you doing?

[00:00:06] Austin: I’m having a great day, and I hope you are too, Matty.

[00:00:08] Matty: I am, thank you very much. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you: Austin S. Camacho is the author of eight novels about Washington DC-based private eye Hannibal Jones, five in the Stark and O’Brien International Thriller Series, the detective novel BEYOND BLUE, and the action adventure novel WHEN DOES BLOOD RUN COLD.

His short stories have been featured in several anthologies, and he is featured in the Edgar-nominated AFRICAN AMERICAN MYSTERY WRITERS: A HISTORICAL AND THEMATIC STUDY by Frankie Y. Bailey. He’s the past president of the Maryland Writers Association, past vice president of the Virginia Writers Club, and one of the creators of the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity literary conference, which I think is also known as C3. That is a lovely conference that I can highly recommend. I have not been able to go for the last several years because it always falls right at the time of a regularly scheduled vacation that my husband and I take—that was the one downside of scheduling that vacation—but I hope to get back to it.

[00:01:08] Matty: I had invited Austin on the podcast because I know you talk a lot to writers about tips for writing conflict. I wanted to start out by asking: when you’re talking about conflict, are you talking physical, emotional, or all of the above? Just give us some context for what you’re going to be talking about.

[00:01:32] Austin: You went straight to the first disclaimer I always like to give, because conflict is not violence. When I talk about conflict in a story—because I write thrillers, people think, “Oh, the fighting scenes and the shooting scenes.” No. Conflict is really about characters who are pushing against one another, and that’s what makes a story.

If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have a story. You have to have at least two people, or two groups, and there always has to be a protagonist and an antagonist with opposing goals and objectives. That’s what conflict is about: opposing goals.

[00:02:21] Matty: Do you assess conflict on a story level—like what the underlying conflict is between the protagonist and the antagonist—or do you need to drill down further than that?

[00:02:33] Austin: Both. When you’re outlining your story, of course you start with the big picture: the good guy wants to win the fight, and the bad guy doesn’t want him to, or whatever the conflict is. But to keep a story interesting, you also need internal conflict, usually for your protagonist. You’ll also usually have conflicts with other characters. So you have your external conflict, your internal conflict, and the conflicts with supporting characters. Wherever you can find conflict, you put it in. The worse you make your protagonist’s life, the more your readers will enjoy your story. So yes, I take it all the way down.

I tell people there needs to be conflict in every scene. Even if all the people in that scene are friends, you can still find something for them to disagree about.

[00:03:37] Matty: Can you describe an example of a less overt use of conflict? Let’s say we’re having a conversation between two characters who are allies. What might constitute conflict that will help propel that scene, even if it’s not immediately obvious?

[00:03:59] Austin: Let me try to take things out of the thriller and mystery picture. Say you have two characters—maybe a husband and wife—and they’ve decided to go on a vacation. Now, that sounds like all agreement, but they’re going to disagree about when to leave, what to take, where to stop, and so on. There are all of these possible options for conflict. It’s real conflict, but it’s also conflict that all of us can relate to. As a reader, it’s good to be able to think, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there.”

And the unintended positive consequence of doing that is that each time you unveil a new conflict, you are revealing character. You’re getting us to know that person better. He’s in a hurry and just wants to keep driving until he’s done—that tells us what kind of person he is. She wants to stop every hour—that tells us something too.

[00:05:18] Matty: Does the conflict at the scene or chapter level always need to tie to the conflict at the story level? I’m having trouble thinking of an example where it doesn’t. If someone is assessing a scene and not sensing the conflict, and they need to add it in, what are the parameters for doing that in a way that’s holistically supportive of the story?

[00:05:58] Austin: It doesn’t have to be connected to the story, but it helps if it is. How about this: maybe the bad guy we haven’t met yet is hitchhiking on that same road. Now you can have a conflict about whether to stop and pick up a stranger. That ties into your plot and also gives you avenues for more conflict further down the road, because now you have the option of, “See? I told you we shouldn’t have picked up that guy.” So it’s good if you can tie it in.

Another good option—even if the conflict is completely separate—is to have it mirror or highlight the main theme. Say the protagonist and antagonist used to be coworkers, maybe in the same Army unit. At the same time, your protagonist is having some communication issue with his mother. It can look totally unrelated, but then later in the story you can reveal that better interpersonal communication might actually help him get this guy to stop doing whatever bad thing he’s doing. Interpersonal communication becomes a theme, and the smaller conflict echoes into the big one.

[00:07:57] Matty: I think there’s a balance between having it tie in and not forcing it. If someone is assessing a chapter and it doesn’t have conflict, I think there would be a tendency to just insert some because they heard that every scene has to have it, and it could result in something that feels very artificial.

For example, if you have a scene where two characters become allies—two people who’ve just discovered each other, pursuing the same goals, deciding to team up—on the surface there might not initially be any conflict. I can see how that might be laying the groundwork for conflict down the road. Are there exceptions where that’s okay, or if you look carefully, should there really be something going on there beyond the two of them simply agreeing?

[00:09:01] Austin: There really should be conflict there, especially between two people who just met—conflict about the details: when, where, how, and so on. It has also become common in fiction for the conflict between a male and female character to be sexual tension. They’ve decided they both want to catch this bad guy, but his idea of how to be a team player and hers are very different. That is great conflict, and it can keep rolling through the plot.

Maybe this disagreement becomes an argument and one of them hesitates to do something they know they should, and that gets them into trouble. Or one of them is driven to prove they’re better, so they go after the bad guy alone. There are so many ways you can use that conflict to keep the story moving.

[00:10:18] Matty: Can you talk a little more about how you can use conflict to reveal a character’s personality and their motivations?

[00:10:26] Austin: Do you remember the movie DIE HARD? On the surface it appears to be a cops-against-crooks movie. But shot through that movie is the conflict between McClane and his wife. Whatever writer said, “Hey, we need this element”—it revealed his difficulty with just admitting he’s wrong about something, and his absolute determination to make things work out. When you see that determination in his domestic life, you think, “Here’s a guy who’s not going to quit no matter what you do.” It carries over.

It reveals character in a way that would be hard to do any other way. You always want to show, not tell. You don’t want to just tell the reader, “Our protagonist would never give up.” This is a way of showing just how determined and hard-headed this guy is, and how dedicated he is once he decides where he’s going and what he’s going to do. It’s a great character-revealing system.

[00:11:53] Matty: I really like that when different aspects and sub-storylines share a common driver. This is a guy who never gives up, and it plays out in every single aspect of his life. Because if you had him besting the bad guys because he never gives up, but he’s wishy-washy in some other part of his life, you’d better have a really good reason for that disconnect.

[00:12:19] Austin: On its own, that inconsistency becomes a whole storyline you’d need to delve into. Whereas if there’s synchronicity between the underlying conflicts, each storyline balances and feeds the other.

That’s why I always say that conflict is a function of character. The conflict comes from who that person is, because ultimately the conflict is about something this person wants very badly, or wants to do very badly, or somewhere they want to go very badly. But it has to be important to that character. It’s all about who he is.

A weakness I’ve seen recently in some of what I’ve been reading is that many writers are very good at doing that with the protagonist, but then they don’t do it with the antagonist. If the bad guy isn’t absolutely dedicated to his goal, and he’s coming up against somebody who is, the reader eventually thinks, “Well, why doesn’t he just stop?” You have to show it on both sides.

[00:13:32] Matty: I want to delve more into internal conflict for both the protagonist and the antagonist. In a recent conversation, I was saying to one of my guests that as a reader, I’m not interested in hearing stories about bad people doing bad things. I am very interested in stories about good people doing bad things, or bad people doing good things. Either of those can illustrate a tug within the character’s internal workings—they want to beat out the other person for the job, but there’s also something pulling them away from it.

[00:14:13] Austin: I think this is one of the ways we illustrate the difference between the good guy and the bad guy. To oversimplify: your villain is the one who will do anything to get what he wants.

Your hero should always have internal conflict. “Hey, I know for sure that I can win this race if I take this shortcut, but should I?” That’s where we show who the hero is. The bad guy is threatening my girlfriend, and one solution is I can just shoot him in the head right now. But should I? If I’m a good guy, I want to try to talk him out of it first. Will I negotiate? Can I do this without taking a life? The villain probably isn’t thinking those things—but there’s probably something positive driving him too. “I’m going to take over the world, but I’m doing it because I want to make my mother proud.”

You can work that several ways in the story to show that these people aren’t entirely black and white. Even the worst person has something they love, or something they’re protecting, and showing that complicates them in exactly the ways that make fiction worth reading.

[00:15:42] Matty: I think one of the things that makes a really compelling antagonist—and I think this is true of some of my own antagonists—is that you might have someone who is willing to kill other people to pursue their goal, but they’re also willing to die themselves to pursue it. There’s almost a nobleness, from their own point of view, about what they’re doing, because they’re willing to pay the same price they’re exacting from others. That obviously serves as the basis for conflict, but I think the combination of conflict with those seemingly disconnected commonalities is what makes the characterization interesting.

[00:16:30] Austin: On the surface they do appear disconnected. When I was in school I was a psychology major. We talked about character—and in that sense, character isn’t about whether you do the good thing or the bad thing. Strength of character is how consistently your behavior fits your beliefs.

So if you’re the bad guy, and you’re a big bad guy, you have to have strong character: “I’m going to do anything to accomplish this goal.” And in a way, we kind of admire people with that kind of strength of character, even when the goal is negative. “This person is willing to make any sacrifice to accomplish whatever the thing is. He’s going to get this bomb in place even if he gets shot in the process.” You want to have that on both sides. You want the hero and the villain to both truly believe in what they are trying to do.

I always end up using movies as examples because everybody’s seen them. I don’t think ROCKY has a villain. It has a protagonist and an antagonist. Apollo Creed, for his own ego-driven reasons, was just as determined to win that fight as Rocky was—and that’s what made it a great movie to watch, because there’s a part of you that’s kind of rooting for both of them.

[00:18:19] Matty: Yes. That’s a great example. I like that idea that conflict isn’t always one person trying to keep the other from gaining what they want. It can be two people going for a goal in a zero-sum game, where winning by definition means the other person loses. Even if you don’t bear them personal animosity, you’re nonetheless going to enter into conflict.

[00:18:43] Austin: And that kind of conflict feels very real to readers, because it’s close to the way real life works. I don’t necessarily need to win, but I hate to lose.

[00:18:56] Matty: Yes. And I think that also makes the concept of conflict clearer outside the genres people first think of, like thrillers. It’s easier to understand how this has to play out in romance, for example. These more subtle kinds of conflict—not the trying-to-take-over-the-world level—are just as valid.

[00:19:26] Austin: Using ROCKY as the example again: if it’s a romance, it’s the exact same story if you have two men in love with the same woman. Neither of them has to be the bad guy, but they both know that for me to win, he has to lose. So the question is, how far am I willing to go? Will I flatten his tires so he can’t make that date? Well, if that’s your choice, then we cast you as the antagonist. If you’re the good guy, you’ve got the internal conflict: Should I? No, that would be wrong. And that’s fun reading for people.

[00:20:10] Matty: Yes, especially if by not flattening the tire you know you’re risking your goal. That’s a very nice character beat for readers to sink their teeth into.

[00:20:21] Austin: You are putting your success at risk because of your deeper feelings. And that internal conflict is one that, at one time or another, we have all actually experienced in real life.

[00:20:56] Matty: You had said earlier about the importance of making the conflict itself relatable. That’s probably easier for more people to think about in terms of two people vying for the same love interest, versus someone trying to prevent a large-scale catastrophe. Are there ways to make those very high-stakes, cinematic conflicts relatable for the reader?

[00:21:22] Austin: Two things come to mind. One: if it’s a big, big thing—the bad guy is going to blow up the world, destroy the United States—the issue for your protagonist doesn’t have to be about the bomb itself. The issue is, I love my country and I don’t want to see it destroyed. Or: I don’t want to see a bunch of innocent people killed.

But to take that one step further—because this is all about emotional context—make it personal. The bad guy is getting ready to set off a bomb that will blow up Manhattan. That’s obviously terrible, and the good guy doesn’t want that to happen. But if his parents live in Manhattan, then it becomes a whole different drive. Now it’s personal: “This isn’t about stopping a bomb. This is about saving my parents.” That’s the kind of approach that brings the motivation down to a personal level. It’s more relatable. If you’re Peter Parker, it’s all about saving Aunt May.

[00:22:47] Matty: That makes me think of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which I’ve been watching obsessively. What I find very interesting is that the people who are nominally the good guys, over the course of the series—I’m now on season three of four—are moving in their motivation from a focus on individuals (their friends, their spouses) toward humanity in general. And for the people who are nominally the bad guys, I see the opposite: a move from a very wide view of “this is what’s going to happen to humanity” toward something more personal.

Those are both fascinating character developments to watch, and I hadn’t thought about it in those terms until now. Seeing how those shifts bring them into conflict with each other is really compelling.

[00:24:02] Austin: Motivation is so important to the conflict. The show you mentioned is an excellent example of characters with true motivations. The most disappointing stories are when a character’s motivation is simply their official role. “We have to solve this murder. Why? Because I’m the police detective assigned to this case.” That’s not a motivation. There has to be more to it than that.

That idea of justifying a character’s actions solely because of their role is very unsatisfying. It’s already a boring story. We want the motivation to be deeper and more personal—maybe he had some past experience with a very similar crime where the perpetrator got away, something that makes it personal.

[00:25:11] Matty: And I think this is a good place to tie it into another piece of advice we often hear about not info-dumping. If the police detective has a reason beyond his job for solving the case, that can be very fun to dribble in throughout the story. A reveal about what happened to his relative, or his own brush with the law, or whatever it might be—the more it unfolds gradually, the more propulsive it is. It keeps you reading to find out what’s really driving this character.

[00:25:44] Austin: Yes. It can start out simply: “I have to solve this case because I’m the cop assigned to it.” It can start there, and then over time you get down to the deep-down reason. With the villain, the same thing: you can start out thinking he’s just a sociopath who decided to kill somebody, and then over time reveal that he cares deeply about something.

They have to care deeply so that we can care deeply.

[00:26:16] Matty: That’s a great way of putting it.

[00:26:23] Matty: I did want to loop back to something you said earlier about always adding one more conflict for your protagonist to address. I always wonder what the signal is that the writer has done enough. I’ll use ALIEN as an example, since I love using it for pretty much anything. The crew’s mission is interrupted—that’s one problem. Then the John Hurt character dies. Then Ripley’s implied romantic interest, the captain, dies. Then everybody else dies. Then she gets into the escape pod with the cat, and even that isn’t the end. Do you feel like there’s a natural point where you think, okay, we’re done?

[00:27:23] Austin: That is so subjective. I’m driven to keep finding bigger problems for my protagonist, or to make existing problems worse, and I don’t know if there’s a natural stopping point unless you reach the place where you genuinely cannot imagine a way to make it any worse.

[00:27:52] Matty: I suppose it’s driven by a combination of factors, including genre. If your story is basically about someone finding satisfaction beyond their day job, you probably don’t need them to be tracking down a serial killer on top of that. The stakes are intrinsically different because of the story you’re writing. And sometimes you’re also constrained by format—a two-hour movie only has room for so much bad luck.

[00:29:44] Austin: I think the stakes only have to feel gigantic to the protagonist. It’s not really about whether they are objectively huge. In ALIEN, ultimately Ripley is just trying to survive—that’s it. That’s the entire movie. But in another story you could have a character who misses an elevator. He pushes the button, it’s not working, his office is on the eighteenth floor, and he has thirty seconds to get there. No matter what the stakes are, if they look gigantic to the hero and the reader is invested in that hero, the story works.

Now, I don’t read romance because I don’t feel those stakes personally—will he get the girl? That’s not me. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real stakes for the people who do.

[00:31:03] Matty: I think it’s helpful for writers to think very explicitly about what the final resolution looks like—what the triumph in the conflict actually is. If what you want the final triumph to be is whether the protagonist lives or dies, you have the first ALIEN movie. After that, I speculate the stakes escalate: it’s no longer just about survival, it’s about saving civilization or something larger. So if you went into the first story thinking you wanted the end result to be about saving civilization, you couldn’t just stop with her jetting off into space.

[00:31:47] Austin: You do have to make the stakes very clear—in the reader’s mind, but also in the protagonist’s mind. He has to understand what the stakes are and what he absolutely, positively needs to do. Did Rocky really desperately need to be the heavyweight champion? I don’t think so. Rocky really desperately needed to prove to his girl that he was a good man, and to prove to himself that he would not quit. And when they both fall down and Apollo Creed says, “Ain’t going to be no rematch,” Rocky says, “Don’t want one.”

[00:32:41] Matty: ROCKY is one of my all-time favorite movies for exactly that reason. Someone pursuing the goal of “I want to prove myself, I want to prove that I don’t give up” is so much more compelling to me. I watched one or two of the sequels and gave up, because it felt like the goal had shifted to simply: is he going to win the fight? I’m not very interested in that storyline.

[00:33:09] Austin: You are exactly right. The real objective in the first movie was not to become the champion. In the later movies it was just who’s going to win the fight, and they kept making the bad guy bigger and the threat bigger.

But the storyline didn’t move. I was more impressed by the story that ended with, “I accomplished my goal because I went all the way to the end and proved to everybody—and to my girl—that I am not just a bum.” That just felt right.

[00:33:51] Matty: Yes. And what’s interesting is that Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the script, was not at all subtle about it. Rocky says right there in the movie, “All I want to do is go the distance.” You can read a lot into that beyond the literal meaning, but even just taking it at face value: sometimes you don’t need to be subtle. You can just lay it out—here’s my goal, and I’m going to make it or not. And if you do your job right, you have people rooting for the protagonist to meet that goal.

[00:34:22] Austin: And I think it’s good in many cases for the protagonist to state the goal that plainly to someone. Because now it’s not just clear in the reader’s mind—it’s clear in the protagonist’s mind. This is what he’s trying to do, and then you don’t get confused by all of the other stuff that comes flying in.

[00:34:50] Matty: Well, I think our conversation is a really nice illustration of how intrinsically connected these things are. We started out with conflict, just as one angle, but how central it is to character motivation and interesting characters. So cool.

Well, Austin, thank you so much for humoring all my questions about character motivation and conflict. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work.

[00:35:14] Austin: You can go to my website at www.ascamacho.com. You can find me on Facebook—I’m there every day for some amount of time—and on Instagram. Or just Google me. I’m all over social media very often, either talking about my books, talking about my conference, or just making some smart remark.

[00:35:44] Matty: Would you like to put in a plug for Creatures, Crimes & Creativity? I’m sure people would love to hear more about it.

[00:35:51] Austin: Every September we put on a three-day conference, from noon Friday to noon Sunday. We attract writers, fans, and avid readers of genre fiction—mysteries, thrillers, horror, science fiction, fantasy, paranormal. After thirteen years, I’ve discovered that those writers have a lot more in common than most people realize. The process of writing a good mystery and the process of writing a good science fiction novel are not that different. You still need the conflict. You still need the suspense. You still need strong characters.

We have a lot of fun. There are panels, and we always have a couple of keynote speakers who give a talk at dinner. All of the meals are included in the registration fee because we want everybody to stay together and hang out with our writers. We have two big book-signing events, on Friday night and on Saturday, and these last few years we’ve had between 60 and 75 authors there at once signing their books.

[00:37:12] Matty: Before my calendar changed, I did attend a couple of times, and it is a super fun conference—a very warm, welcoming group of people. I’m going to have to move my regularly scheduled trip to Maine to some other part of the year.

[00:37:33] Austin: Thank you so much for inviting me. This was wonderful.

[00:37:37] Matty: Oh, thank you so much.

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Matty Dalrymple is the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with ROCK PAPER SCISSORS; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with THE SENSE OF DEATH; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. More at mattydalrymple.com. Matty also writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage, and shares what she’s learned on THE INDY AUTHOR PODCAST. She writes nonfiction books for authors; her articles have appeared in Writer’s Digest magazine; and she is a Partner Member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. More at theindyauthor.com. She also guides professionals in building their presence through a sideline or second act through her platform From Expertise to Authority. More at theindyauthor.com/authority.

Interview video at https://tinyurl.com/TIA340YT

Show notes at www.theindyauthor.com/show-notes/340-kristen-tate

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Summary

What is it that makes you feel like you truly know a character? Like you’re not just an observer but a fellow traveler inside their experience? In most contemporary fiction, the answer is interiority—the thoughts, feelings, sensory impressions, and interior life that prose can offer in a way no other medium can. In Episode 340 of The Indy Author Podcast, editor and book coach Kristen Tate returned to talk with host Matty Dalrymple about why interiority is the secret sauce of good fiction, and how to use it with skill and intention.

WHAT INTERIORITY IS—AND WHY IT MATTERS

Interiority, Kristen explains, is everything happening inside a character that only the reader gets access to. In the deep or close point of view that dominates contemporary fiction, we’re privy to a character’s thoughts, reactions, associations, and sensory experience—anything that another person standing in the scene beside them could not observe. It’s the interior life that makes a character feel like a real person rather than a figure moving through events.

That access is one of the great privileges of prose fiction. Screenwriters, Kristen notes, have to convey interiority through performance—the way an actor delivers a line, a shift in expression, a beat of silence. Audiobook narrators do something similar: their interpretation of a line adds a layer of meaning that the text alone doesn’t provide. But in prose, the writer can simply tell us what the character is thinking. The question is how to use that power wisely.

CALIBRATING INTERIORITY ACROSS POV CHARACTERS

In a multi-POV novel, Kristen points out, you have real creative latitude in how much interior access you give each character—and that variation can do meaningful work. Giving readers deeper interiority from one character can signal who your primary protagonist is. Keeping a villain’s POV chapters shallower can preserve mystery and protect the reader from dwelling too long in uncomfortable territory. In romance, where both love interests often have POV, the goal is usually to keep access balanced so we feel equally invested in both perspectives.

Genre also shapes conventions. Literary fiction tends to use more interiority; thrillers tend toward less, in the interest of pacing. But Kristen is quick to note that these lines are blurring—the rise of the literary thriller means books like Liz Moore’s GOD OF THE WOODS can sustain deep interiority across many POV characters while still delivering propulsive plot.

OVERT VS. SUBTLE: THE SPECTRUM OF INTERIORITY

One of the most useful distinctions Kristen draws is between overt and subtle interiority. The overt version—“She thought to herself, that was rude”—can feel clunky in deep POV, where the “she thought” tag is usually unnecessary. If we’re already inside the character’s head, we don’t need to be told we’re receiving her thoughts.

Subtler and more effective is interiority woven into the fabric of voice. When a character’s way of describing the world around her reveals how she thinks—what she notices, what she dismisses, what language she reaches for—the reader is getting interiority without being handed it directly. Kristen offers a vivid example: describing a street as “dumb” is a voice-y choice that tells us something about who this character is. That’s interiority doing double duty as characterization.

Interiority is also one of the most powerful tools around dialogue. Rather than relying on adverbs or action tags to signal how a character feels, a writer can let us into their thoughts in the moment—which is especially effective when what the character is saying diverges from what they’re thinking. That gap immediately generates tension, because the reader is now holding a secret that the other characters in the scene don’t have.

INTERIORITY AS PLOT GLUE

One of Kristen’s most useful framings is the idea of interiority as the glue of your plot. Think of plot events as a chain of cause-and-effect dominoes. Interiority is what bridges one domino to the next—the moment where the protagonist processes what just happened, forms a new understanding of the situation, asks the questions the reader is also asking, and determines what to do next. Without that connective tissue, plot can feel mechanical. With it, the reader understands not just what is happening, but why, and what it means to the person at the center of the story.

That said, Kristen is clear that interiority is not a substitute for plot. It can deepen stakes, but it generally doesn’t generate them. Action, dialogue, and external events are what set the story in motion; interiority helps us feel the weight of what those events mean.

PACING: USING INTERIORITY TO SPEED UP OR SLOW DOWN

Interiority is one of the most effective pacing tools a writer has—but it works in both directions. To slow a scene down and let readers sink into an experience, you lean into interiority. Kristen cites Layne Fargo’s THE FAVORITES, in which a figure-skating competition scene is roughly fifty percent interiority. Fargo’s goal isn’t to describe the routine; it’s to take readers inside the experience of being on the ice, inside a high-stakes romantic relationship, in a moment of intense pressure. The interiority is the point.

For fast-paced action, the approach is nearly inverted. In S.A. Cosby’s KING OF ASHES, a brutal and propulsive action scene uses interiority sparingly—but at key moments, a beat of the protagonist’s interior response—shock, disorientation, the absence of pain—heightens the reader’s experience of the action rather than interrupting it. It’s the difference between a rollercoaster that just keeps spinning and one that drops into a moment of eerie quiet before the next turn.

MYSTERY, UNRELIABLE NARRATORS, AND STRATEGIC WITHHOLDING

In mystery and thriller, interiority requires particular care, because information is the currency of the genre. Kristen’s advice: be very deliberate about which characters get POV access. Giving an antagonist a POV chapter can undermine surprise unless the interiority in those chapters is carefully controlled—short, oblique, and withholding enough to generate suspicion rather than answers. She cites Mick Herron’s SECRET HOURS as an example of this done well: a POV character whose identity is concealed until late in the book.

For writers navigating this tension, Kristen offers a useful distinction: feeling moments are almost always safe, even when thinking moments are not. A character’s emotional responses, sensory associations, and memories can deepen interiority without giving away plot information. Weaving in memory—the way a smell or a landscape calls up a past experience—makes characters feel fully inhabited, like people who exist beyond the edges of the page.

Interiority also shapes how readers calibrate their trust in a narrator. In unreliable narrator novels like YESTERYEAR (Kristen’s current strong recommendation) and THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, the reader is submerged so completely in the protagonist’s point of view that they have no external vantage point from which to question what they’re being told. The unreliability accumulates gradually through interiority—small moments where the protagonist’s interpretation of events doesn’t quite line up with what the reader can observe. Done well, as in GONE GIRL, the shift in perspective when it comes is all the more disorienting for how deeply we’ve been embedded.

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Transcript

This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.

Welcome and Guest Intro

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Kristen Tate. Hey, Kristen. How are you doing?

[00:00:05] Kristen: Hey, Matty. I’m so glad to be back.

Baseball Radio Fun Fact

[00:00:07] Matty: It is lovely to have you here, and because you are a returning guest, I’m going to use my new approach, which is returning guests get to, instead of me reading the bio, share a fact about yourself that we might not know.

[00:00:20] Kristen: Yeah. So I am based here in San Francisco, and I think actually not a lot of people know this about me. I am not a sports fan at all, but I am, however, a really obsessive baseball fan, and a San Francisco Giants fan in particular. And I especially love listening to baseball on the radio. For me, it’s like — some people like the sound of thunderstorms; I like the sound of baseball on the radio. I find it very soothing. We know what all the rules are. It’s like a very copy editor-friendly sport, because there are rules for everything. Everything gets squared away nicely in the end. It’s a very tidy package. So that’s my fun fact.

[00:00:57] Matty: On the radio — I always associate the sounds of baseball with the bat striking the ball and things like that. Do you get that level of audio experience on the radio?

[00:01:09] Kristen: Oh, you do. And for some reason it’s even heightened. The wonderful thing about listening on the radio is the announcer narrates it to you, so it’s kind of like a story. I got into this actually because I lived through this massive blackout that probably a lot of people remember in New York City, and the Yankees happened to be traveling out of town, and so the Yankees game was on, and that’s what I had on the radio for entertainment. And I was like, “Actually, I like this.” It kind of — I don’t know — I had this deep sense memory of my grandmother, who was a huge baseball fan and loved listening to baseball on the radio. And the thing I realized is that listening on the radio teaches you about the game because they are narrating what’s happening on the field. When you’re just watching it, I didn’t know what a balk was — when a pitcher is about to throw and then doesn’t throw. I learned all of that naturally just by listening to the games. And the announcers are just old school. Our announcers here in San Francisco — John Miller in particular — are just old-school radio guys, and they just tell fun stories. So it’s just like listening to people you feel like you know, and there are stakes because there’s a game, and you’re getting all these stories along the way.

[00:02:23] Matty: So cool. And I feel certain we’re going to find a way to tie that into the official topic of this week’s conversation.

[00:02:29] Kristen: We can do it.

What Interiority Means

[00:02:31] Matty: Interiority. So you had proposed the title “Interiority: The Secret Sauce of Good Fiction,” which I just love. And it’s interesting, because as you were describing the broadcaster describing what was going on in the game, you know, you can imagine a very literal story interpretation of that, which is kind of like the voiceover or something like that — filling things in that otherwise we would rely on something like interiority to understand. So I think maybe we can loop back at the end and talk more about baseball radio. But just to let us know, when you talk about interiority, what are you talking about?

[00:03:09] Kristen: Yeah. So interiority is — when we’re in deep point of view, close point of view, which is, you know, 90% of current fiction — written in this style where we’re kind of deeply in the point of view of a single character at a time — it’s when we’re getting the thoughts, the feelings, the kind of sensory experiences of that character. Anything that, if you’re in the scene with that character, someone else would not be able to see. It’s anything that’s happening inside, and we’re getting access to it through that interiority.

POV Balance and Genre

[00:03:45] Matty: Is that something that you feel needs to be consistent in a multi-point-of-view book? Like if you have three points of view, is there any expectation that the level of interiority is going to be consistent across the different point-of-view characters?

[00:04:01] Kristen: It really depends, and this is where you can have a lot of fun, actually. So one way, for example, if you have a large cast novel — I would say three-plus characters whose point of view we get access to — you can tip off readers as to who your primary protagonist is by giving us deeper and more access to their interiority and kind of less of some of the other characters. I see people do this a lot with the antagonist or the villain’s POV. Sometimes that’ll be a lot more shallow, in part because it’s — I don’t know — it can be a little unpleasant to be dragged into these motivations that are darker. But it’s also just a way to calibrate. I’m also thinking about rom-coms or romances where sometimes it’ll be single POV, but it’s also very common that both love interests will have point-of-view chapters, and in that case the goal is usually to keep them pretty balanced, so we feel like we are getting both sides of their experience.

[00:05:17] Matty: And are there any conventions with regard to genre — like different genres relying more on interiority than others?

[00:05:25] Kristen: I think it’s a tool that all novels really need, unless you’re doing something very avant-garde. I did hear that the Booker Prize novel this year, which is called FLESH — and I can’t remember the author’s name — one aspect of that book is that it doesn’t have much interiority, and that was the choice of the author, to write this character who doesn’t do a lot of introspection. So that’s interesting. But otherwise I would say more interiority is more associated with literary fiction. But part of what we’re seeing these days, which I personally think is so exciting, is that genres are getting more mixed up, and we’re seeing a lot more things like literary thrillers. I did a bunch of analytical work on Liz Moore’s GOD OF THE WOODS, which was on the bestseller list for months and months last year, and I would call that a literary thriller. It does indeed have a lot of interiority from a lot of different point-of-view characters, and I think that’s part of what makes it skew literary. Interiority does pause the action a little bit. It can slow the pacing. It can also intensify what’s happening on the page. The more there is on the page, the slower the read usually is, and so that’s something we also tend to associate more with literary fiction.

Overt vs. Subtle Interiority

[00:07:04] Matty: I think one conversation that would be helpful — maybe before we dive into things like genre — is when someone is executing on interiority, there’s the flavor that is, “Wow,” she thought to herself, “that was a really rude thing for him to say to me” — that kind of overt, in-your-face, on-the-nose interiority — and then interiority that might be implied by what the person says or what the person does, implied in a more indirect way. Can you talk a little bit about that, and what are the pros and cons, if any, of each of those?

[00:07:41] Kristen: Yeah. And this is where — I mean, we could honestly do an entire episode just on this question or write an entire book on it, because there are so many gradations. In general, unless you’re writing in omniscient narration and you kind of need to flag that this is someone’s thoughts, it’s kind of like filter words, right? We don’t need to get that “she thought” tag, because if you are in deep POV, we just know that this is something the character is thinking. Now, it can be useful to have a character very, very occasionally have a thought — say you’re writing in past tense — that is in present tense, the way it might be in dialogue. So it kind of sounds like they’re saying something to themselves, or they’re having a reaction inside their brain that they’re not going to say out loud, and put that in italics. You don’t want to rely on that too heavily because it’s just kind of a clunky device. It’s like a strong seasoning you can sprinkle in; it’s not something you want to rely on.

The other way I really like to see interiority come in is — when we talk about voice, sometimes what we’re actually thinking about is interiority, because we become familiar with the character’s voice through their dialogue but also through their interiority. Are they a very casual person? Are they thinking about things with curse words? How are they describing or narrating the things they are seeing? So sometimes you can get something that’s setting description, but we’re getting it through the character’s voice, so they’re interpreting it a little bit. You know, “there’s this dumb, quiet street outside.” Saying it’s dumb is a very voice-y thing. Like, why does this character think that — why is the street dumb? What makes the street dumb? That kind of thing.

[00:09:46] Matty: It makes me think of the whole show-don’t-tell thing in dialogue. I know that in one sense obviously anything can be taken to extremes, but there’s the whole “Close that door,” he said angrily versus “Close that door,” he said, crossing his arms — which I think is fine, but I get really tired if I’m reading dialogue and people have totally gone in on avoiding adverbs at any cost. I think we talked about this a little bit when we were discussing writing rules you can break, which I guess is more of a showing-or-telling interiority question.

[00:10:25] Kristen: Yeah, exactly. Especially around dialogue, your point-of-view character gets to reveal their inner feelings. For the other characters, you do have to give some other cue — about their facial expression or whatever — to pick up on what’s happening. But that’s not something you have to rely on for your point-of-view character, and I love seeing little hints of interiority woven in around dialogue lines. It’s another way to avoid a dialogue tag, right? You can have the dialogue line and then, you know, “Matty felt blah, blah, blah.” It’s also a really great way — one of the techniques I love seeing with interiority is when a character is saying something that’s at odds with what they’re thinking, and we get the dialogue line and then we get their thoughts, or vice versa. It just immediately adds a jolt of tension because then the reader knows something that the other characters in the scene don’t know, and that’s just kind of delicious.

This is partly why we like interiority — we get this kind of secret access. And it kind of raises a story question too, because we’re thinking about whether the character is going to be honest at some point about what they’re feeling. That can play into the plot in really significant ways. Thinking about romance, you don’t want characters who are lying to one another who are going to end up in a relationship together. So when is the truth of that feeling really going to come out? There are all kinds of ways you can add tension and raise stakes through interiority.

[00:12:09] Matty: Are there red flags that would say that a writer is being too explicit — too just laying it out there in terms of interiority? Like the tension created by someone saying something different from what they’re thinking: you could say, “Oh, that’s a beautiful dress,” she said, thinking to herself that it was the ugliest dress she had ever seen. Are there any general tips people can use to understand how to balance the overt expression of the character versus the interior thoughts of the character so that it feels elegant on the page?

[00:12:45] Kristen: Yeah. There are kind of micro levels, which can just be about paying attention to — it’s fine to occasionally have a big chunk, especially if a character is going to go into some kind of memory, or if we need to get — not an info dump, but a layering of some information that we need, and we’re going to get it via interiority. Part of that is thinking about where you’re positioning it. It can be really smart to position it between, say, a character being asked a question and then answering it. First we get this chunk of interiority, so the scene is kind of suspended, but we know there’s going to be movement. Or if you have some kind of continuing action happening in the scene, the interiority can be woven into that. I think the danger zone is when you open a scene with interiority and readers don’t have a chance to get grounded in a setting, an action, or a dialogue exchange. We’re just in the character’s head and we can’t visualize where we are. I’ve seen this happen in first chapters where an author is so eager to tell us so much about their protagonist that, you know, maybe the character is sitting in a room or has just woken up, and it’s really all interiority with no movement. That can delay our engagement with the story, and it can just be very flat and static and boring. Interiority in general doesn’t move, and it can add to the stakes that are already there, but usually — with some exceptions — it’s not generating the stakes.

[00:14:46] Matty: Interesting. I guess maybe at a micro level it is generating stakes, in the sense that if the reader knows the character is saying something that’s not what they believe, that’s sort of a micro stake. But you’re saying it’s not generating the major stakes of the story.

[00:15:05] Kristen: Yeah. I mean, there’s not a kidnapping threat or anything like that, right? We need action and dialogue and those other things to kind of set the story in motion. Interiority isn’t really necessarily good at conveying plot. If you think about effective plots, often we get surprises. The protagonist will get surprised. Well, you can’t generally be surprised by your own interiority, right? You can have those awakening moments — like at the end of Jane Austen’s EMMA, where she realizes, “Oh, I’ve been in love with Knightley all along.” But those are quite rare, and actually the reader knew that quite a lot earlier too. You need those other elements. It’s one tool, but it should never be the only tool.

[00:15:53] Matty: Yeah. The idea that popped into my head — and we’ll see if this makes any sense — is that one of the things you said made me think of the caution to writers not to use looking in a mirror as an excuse to describe the point-of-view character. After you’ve read three dozen of those, you’re like, “Oh God, not looking in the mirror again.” I think there’s maybe a similar hazard with interiority, unless the point-of-view character is having those aha moments.

Secrets, Plot Glue, and Mystery

[00:16:30] Matty: And so if you’re letting the reader into some of the character’s internal thoughts but holding some back — I’m trying to think of specific examples; I’m sure this probably happens all the time in mystery and suspense — at some point I think the reader would kind of feel cheated, like, “How come you only gave me one tenth of the explanation for this interior dialogue going on with the character, but not all of it?” Can you make any sense of that?

[00:16:57] Kristen: Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is really tricky. I do see this a lot. I’m thinking about Charlotte McConaghy’s WILD DARK SHORE, for example, which is a book where there are a lot of backstory secrets. All of the characters are keeping — they all have these monumental secrets. And McConaghy is very smart about how she trickles out that information, and part of the way it works is by having so many point-of-view characters. If we were in a single point of view for that whole novel, we would get impatient — we know all of these characters are keeping secrets — but because she keeps shifting points of view and keeps bringing in new story questions, she holds off the full explanation. We just keep getting hints. We know, for example, the kind of inciting incident: this woman washes up on the shore of this very remote island, and she’s nearly dead, but not dead yet. We start to understand that she experienced a traumatic fire in her past, but it’s quite late in the book when we get the full story of that fire.

So it’s partly about knowing the terrain — we need to know that there was a fire, but we don’t need to get all the blow-by-blow details about what happened to her in that fire and all of the effects until later in the book. The other thing I was thinking about is what interiority can do in your plot — and this is very much true in mystery and thrillers. If you think about plot incidents as cause-and-effect dominoes, you knock over one and it’s going to knock over the next. Interiority is the thing that can bridge — that can bring us from one to the other.

The protagonist experiences some kind of action or incident that surprises them or shifts the plot in some direction, and then we see them react via interiority. Maybe they’re processing it, maybe they don’t understand it yet, we know what their questions are, they maybe make a new plan about what’s next — and then that’s the thing that motivates the next action they take. In that sense, interiority can be kind of like the glue of your plot: it shows us how those pieces fit together and makes it feel realistic and understandable. We understand this character’s motives because we’re getting that kind of internal processing.

[00:19:39] Matty: One of the things I’ve spoken about — it might have been in previous conversations with you, and I know I’ve spoken about it with Renee Gutteridge, another multi-visit guest — is this idea that the option of using interiority is something that screenwriters are jealous of authors being able to do. But I was also thinking about this in terms of — so I’m watching THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

[00:20:04] Kristen: I just got through season two, and it’s very interesting — like what you were saying about at the end of the McConaghy book where everything sort of wraps up, all the secrets become revealed. I just watched the last episode of season two, and there was a lot of wrapping up going on, even though the series continues.

[00:20:20] Matty: But there were these points, especially in the last episode or two, where I was like, “Oh yeah, I can see it.” A character isn’t speaking, but they have a look, and I’m like, “I think I know what’s happening there.” So it’s almost like the filmmakers are finding ways to suggest interiority, even if they’re having to do it in a visual way rather than a textual way for their audience.

[00:20:44] Kristen: Yeah, I think about this all the time, because it’s fascinating to watch something filmed that you’ve read, and vice versa. And I think it really depends on the skill of the actor — to convey, you know, it’s the way they deliver a line, and their body language, and their expression — that’s how we intuit what they’re feeling, and that’s why that skill is so important. I’ve been thinking about this too with audiobooks, and the extra layer of information we get just through the way the audiobook narrator delivers a line. There is a way in which an audiobook gives you more of an interpretation, because it’s the narrator’s interpretation of that story. But we’re also getting extra information about their assumptions about what a dialogue speaker is thinking, just in the way they deliver that line, which is pretty interesting.

[00:21:48] Matty: Shifting back to genre-specific things for a moment — do you have any perspectives on a genre like mystery, where what people know and what they’re saying or displaying is very different? Any thoughts specific to that genre on how someone should or should not use interiority?

[00:22:10] Kristen: Yeah, I think here you want to be really careful about which characters get to have POV, right? Because that’s a big part of how you’re going to control information. This is the danger — another danger — of giving your antagonist POV chapters, because it can reduce that element of surprise. Unless you do it in a very oblique and stylized way. I have seen that done, where we get just peeks, and maybe we don’t actually know who the point-of-view character is. Mick Herron does this in SECRET HOURS, actually. There’s a point-of-view character whose identity we don’t know until the very end. We start to get some suspicions, and it’s part of the fun.

But he doesn’t linger there very long — those point-of-view scenes are very short, and there’s not much interiority in them, because you don’t want to — you know, part of the charm of mystery and thriller is having that information revealed to us and calibrating what the reader knows versus what the protagonist knows versus what the other characters know. The thing where you’re always safe is: you have to be very careful in those processing moments, but the feeling moments are pretty much always safe.

So if you’re writing in that genre and you’re thinking, “I want to deepen the POV, but I don’t want to give too much away,” the thing you can always do is come back to feeling — internal responses, associations, and memories. That’s another layer we access through interiority that can make our characters feel real. It’s very normal for us to operate in the world and see something and remember the last time we saw something similar. We operate by association like that all the time. And so even if it’s not especially relevant to that scene, weaving in memories like that makes your character feel round and whole, like they have lived in the world outside the pages of this book. So that can be another place to mine.

[00:24:37] Matty: I had a couple of chapters like what you’re describing with the Herron book, where I have somebody watching the protagonist, and they were very short chapters — but they were the most time-consuming chapters to write, because at each point in the book there was going to be some subset of people that the reader was going to say, “Oh, is this so-and-so or so-and-so or so-and-so, or somebody we haven’t met yet?” And so I would have to write the chapter and then go read it from the point of view of someone who thought it was person A — what hints was I giving or withholding? And if they thought it was person B, what hints was I giving or withholding? That’s very fun, but it’s also very tough.

[00:25:12] Kristen: Yeah, it’s high stakes for an author to do that.

Pacing Action with Interiority

[00:25:24] Matty: One of the things you had mentioned was the idea of controlling the pacing of a scene. We’ve talked about that a little bit, but how do you make sure that interiority isn’t slowing down a scene you want to move quickly, or how do you use interiority to elongate a scene that you do want people to linger in?

[00:25:37] Kristen: Yeah. I love studying this, so I have a bunch of scene studies on my website where I’ve actually just tagged every element of the scene and seen where they land. And I’ve done a number of action scenes now, and it’s fascinating to me to see different choices. I can think of two in particular that are good contrasts. One is from THE FAVORITES by Layne Fargo, and it’s a competition scene. This novel — it’s so fun; I think it should have been on the bestseller charts longer than it was — it’s basically WUTHERING HEIGHTS meets Ice Capades, and it’s about Olympic ice dancers. It’s fantastic.

In the first competition scene we get, the stakes are high and you expect an action scene, but what we get is very little action. Fargo narrates maybe three different beats of the actual routine, and most of the scene is focused — the scene is 50% interiority — because what she wants us to see is how Kat, who’s our female protagonist, feels out on the ice and how she’s thinking about the stakes of this moment. Kat is also in this very complex romantic relationship with her male competition partner, and so she zeros in on, like, the way his hands feel on her waist and moments like that.

This is an early competition scene, so there are later competition scenes where Fargo does not do 50% interiority, because she wants the pace to feel fast. Here, she’s doing a couple of things. She’s enticing us into the novel, fulfilling the promise of the premise: most of us are not Olympic-level ice dancers, and we have no idea what it feels like to be out on that ice. We can see it from the audience or on TV, but we can’t access the experience.

So she’s doing the thing that a novel can do — taking us inside the experience of this really crucial moment and what it feels like. There she really wants to slow us down, give us some backstory, focus on the emotions of that scene. That’s one pathway.

Now for a faster-paced action scene where you really do want it to feel fast and propulsive and exciting — I just keep talking about S.A. Cosby’s KING OF ASHES because it’s just very, very good. He has a scene — kind of the first scene where a lot happens; this book is very violent and very graphically so, in a lot of clever ways — but this is the first scene that is this way, and it really packs a punch. All of these things are happening: there are guns, someone’s gotten punched in the mouth, a character gets his pinky chopped off. There’s a lot happening. And so Cosby really focuses on the action.

But at really key moments, we get our POV character’s interiority to heighten the action — to convey that he’s in shock. He’s not even feeling pain. He’s feeling absolute shock at what’s happening. And so that gives us another layer; it actually heightens the tension of the scene, because we’re kind of shocked alongside him and getting to experience that.

And then later in the novel, when this character is participating in the violence himself, there’s no longer shock. So it ties into the character arc as well. But Cosby takes a much lighter touch with it.

[00:29:28] Matty: Well, the scene that popped into my head — just to go to the other end of the literary spectrum — is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. I think it’s at the beginning of the first movie, where Indiana Jones is going into the tunnel and terrible things are happening, and then he picks up the statue from the platform, and then there’s this moment where he has the realization that this is not the end of his escape attempt.

And then there’s a whole other set of actions of him trying to get away from all the other traps that have been set as a result of the statue being picked up. It sounds like — I haven’t read the Cosby book, but it kind of sounds like that — where there’s action, action, action, and then there’s a moment where you kind of step back for just a second and the point-of-view character is having a realization or assessing the situation or recalibrating what to expect, and then the action resumes.

[00:30:26] Kristen: Yeah. If you’re a rollercoaster fan — think about those moments where you come down from a bunch of spins or something, and then it gets quiet for a minute, and then all of a sudden, unexpectedly, you go take some other turn. The kind of whiplash there is really exciting, and that’s one of the things you can do with interiority — just have this little moment of pause and then get it started again. And just the movement of that is really fun for readers.

Unreliable Narrators and Wrap-Up

[00:31:12] Matty: I wanted to loop back one more time on one of the things we’ve kind of touched on, just to see if there are any other lessons we should be plumbing here, and that is shaping how readers judge or experience the narrator’s reliability. We’ve already talked a little bit about what happens when the character is saying something different from what they’re thinking. Any other thoughts about how we can use interiority — or avoid it — to support that kind of goal?

[00:31:22] Kristen: Yeah. If you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, the interiority is key. I don’t want to do any spoilers here because this is a brand-new book, but I just read YESTERYEAR a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still thinking about it. I think we’re all going to be talking about it for quite a while. This is something that the author does very well. The premise of YESTERYEAR is that this kind of trad-wife influencer who has a fancy farmhouse and makes her own bread and all of that — she wakes up and is actually living in 1855 Idaho instead of 2025 Idaho. It’s just a delicious premise. And really all the way through, we start getting hints that the way our protagonist interprets the world is not always consonant with reality. But we’re really at sea about how, because we don’t have any other points of view. So I think that’s a great example where the author is really playing with it and hinting at it. I’m thinking too about the novel that came out several years ago — THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW — where we are very deeply in that character’s point of view. And because we’re so deeply in her point of view, it’s kind of like being in this airless tunnel. We don’t have any gaps that allow us to make other inferences; we just have to go with the way she’s interpreting the story until we get some other characters that come in. GONE GIRL is another great example of really being locked into one point of view and then having this dramatic shift into another — and the contrast between what the protagonist thinks is happening and what’s really happening, and what another point-of-view character outside the story thinks is happening versus what we’ve been led to believe is happening.

[00:33:26] Matty: I looked up YESTERYEAR — it’s Caroline O’Donoghue.

[00:33:30] Kristen: Thank you. Yes, highly recommend.

[00:33:33] Matty: And I’m going to subtitle this episode “Matty Mentions Arbitrary Movies and Kristen Has to Try to Tie Them In.” Because the other movie that popped into my head, as you were talking about understanding more about the character, is PSYCHO — and Norman Bates sort of describing why he’s doing what he’s doing. I went into this conversation figuring that in general interiority was going to be a way for us to feel more empathy with a character. But there are certainly circumstances where the more you find out about the interior thoughts of a character, the less empathetic they are. The Norman Bates example is one that just popped into my head. Any thoughts about the extent to which you use interiority to pull the reader toward the character as opposed to distancing the reader from the character?

[00:34:26] Kristen: So two different things. One is that there are characters who may be antagonists, or just may be a protagonist who’s making deep mistakes, or just a point-of-view character who’s making some big errors. This is very typical in romance, but we see it all over the place. And the goal is to see them evolve — or not. Sometimes we’ll have characters, especially an antagonist, who can’t evolve. But part of what readers want to see is the why. How did they get like this? What happened in their backstory that traumatized them or led them to make these choices? Why is this character so greedy and focused on money? That character might not change and we might not like the choices they make all the way through — maybe they start the novel greedy and end the novel greedy. I’m thinking of Gatsby here — that grasping for fame and influence and power. If we understand why a character became that way, we do feel some empathy, but it’s more that we understand motivation. And I think this is partly why we read novels. Other people are a mystery to us, and that’s a tragedy in many ways — an impossible tragedy to surmount. We are only ourselves, so we only have direct access to our own brains. But novels give us this illusion that we can truly, deeply understand the motivations and feelings of other people. And so when you show us a character who’s maybe fatally flawed, we can not enjoy seeing that — but also feel moved by the portrayal.

[00:36:32] Kristen: I have to confess — this is another thing that not everyone knows about me — I am a little bit of a wimp when it comes to horror, and I have actually never seen PSYCHO. My daughter is really working on me and pushing my boundaries. Maybe someday I’ll be able to see it, but I’m not there yet.

[00:36:48] Matty: So I have to ask, what makes you able to read a very violent book like the Cosby book but struggle with a horror movie like PSYCHO?

[00:36:58] Kristen: I think for me it’s the jump scares. I have a really hard time with them. I can do violence for some reason. It’s creepiness — anything that taps into something I’m actually afraid of. I forget which movie we watched, but it definitely pushed my boundaries. There were two characters who were clearly not human, and they were getting ready to kind of come into a house, and I was like, “Okay, I’m out. I can’t. I’m going to have nightmares about this one.” Like vampires, though, I can deal with vampires. Or I have an editor I work with who was writing fantasy and is now writing zombie novels, and I have no problem with zombies — I guess I can understand them.

[00:37:48] Matty: That’s so interesting. I know for me — I’ll say to people that I can’t read books or see movies with a lot of violence, and then I’ll mention, “Oh, you know, I saw BAND OF BROTHERS,” where every other person is getting killed or dismembered or something. And I realize that for me the difference is it’s not actually violence — it’s intentional infliction of pain. Whether it’s physical or psychological, if something terrible happens to someone physically and it’s an accident, I don’t really mind absorbing that as an audience member. But I really have trouble stomaching things where the pain someone’s going through has been inflicted just for the purpose of inflicting pain.

[00:38:32] Kristen: Yeah, you might struggle with KING OF ASHES then, I’ll be honest. So — warning.

[00:38:39] Matty: I got to meet S.A. Cosby, as I think I mentioned last time we spoke, and he’s such a lovely person with so many great things to say. He was the keynote speaker at this conference I went to, and I was like, “Ooh, I wish I could read his books, but I don’t think I can. I think maybe I better not.”

[00:38:53] Kristen: Yeah, it was fun.

[00:38:54] Matty: Oh, well. But we’ll have to — I’m still working on getting him on the podcast, so I’ll clip this section out too and say, “Shawn, here’s another example of us talking about you.”

[00:39:05] Matty: So cool. Well, Kristen, the conversations with you are always so much fun. Thank you for humoring all my odd examples. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

[00:39:16] Kristen: There’s always something to say about interiority, I think. You can find me at — my business name is The Blue Garret — so you can find everything at thebluegarret.com. And I believe when this comes out, we will have just wrapped up a pop-up novel study of Freida McFadden’s THE INTRUDER. I’m going to have all of that packaged up. If you want some charts and graphs and to see how she uses interiority in a scene, that’ll be a free download on my website, so come check it out.

[00:39:46] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.

[00:39:48] Kristen: Thanks, Matty.

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Interview video at https://tinyurl.com/TIA339YT

Show notes at www.theindyauthor.com/show-notes/339-dale-roberts

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When listener Brian wrote in to ask whether Amazon KDP is really only profitable for authors writing in hot genres, Matty Dalrymple knew it was time to bring in reinforcements. She called on Dale L. Roberts—publishing strategist, YouTuber, and seven-time guest on The Indy Author Podcast—to dig into the question honestly. What they found is that the genre you write in matters far less than most indie authors think.

Marketing Beats Genre—Every Time

Dale’s position is clear: the authors who profit on Amazon are not necessarily the ones writing in trending niches. They’re the ones who market consistently and strategically. With millions of books flooding the platform every day, he argues, what differentiates you isn’t your genre—it’s how reliably you put your book in front of the right readers.

That means moving past the idea that a single social media post or one email newsletter blast constitutes a marketing strategy. Promotion is not a one-and-done activity. Dale points to his own career as evidence: his early fitness books now earn almost nothing, not because they’re bad books, but because he no longer promotes them. His self-publishing titles, by contrast, continue to sell—because he continues to show up for them.

The Problem with Chasing Hot Genres

Matty adds an important counterpoint to the “write to market” instinct: hot genres are crowded. When everyone chases the same trending category, readers only dig so far down the list. Unless you can break into the top tier of a massive genre, the visibility advantage disappears. More importantly, she notes, chasing trends often means sacrificing the creative satisfaction of writing what you’re genuinely passionate about—and for many indie authors, that trade-off isn’t worth it.

That said, neither Matty nor Dale dismisses writing to market as a strategy. Dale references Chris Fox’s well-known book on the subject and acknowledges that targeting a large audience has real upside. The catch: a bigger audience means even more competition, which means you have to work even harder on marketing to be heard above the noise.

Going Wide: The Amazon Alternative

One of the most actionable threads in the conversation is the case for going wide—distributing your books across multiple platforms rather than concentrating everything on Amazon. Matty shares that Kobo has recently outpaced Amazon in her own sales, driven in part by participating in Kobo promotions available to authors who distribute directly through Kobo Writing Life. She also notes that Kobo readers have a strong appetite for box sets, a format that converts exceptionally well on that platform.

Beyond Kobo, both Matty and Dale are enthusiastic about direct sales platforms like Curios and Payhip, where authors can capture a much larger share of revenue per sale. When Amazon’s algorithm increasingly rewards off-site traffic anyway—as Dale notes, citing analysis from publishing consultant Joe Solari—it raises the obvious question: if you’re already driving traffic yourself, why hand Amazon the cut?

The Four Amazon Page Essentials

For authors who do want to maximize their performance on Amazon, Dale lays out four non-negotiables. First, your cover must immediately signal your genre—a browser should be able to identify your niche at a glance. Second, your book description needs to sell, not summarize. The goal is to move the reader frictionlessly from the first line to the buy button. Third, reviews matter: not thousands of them, but a consistent, ongoing trickle that provides social proof and builds credibility with new readers. Fourth, pricing needs to be realistic for your genre and audience expectations.

Matty adds a practical note on the mechanical side of Amazon profitability: keep an eye on your royalty rate settings, especially when running sales. Dropping a book to 99 cents on Amazon automatically reduces the royalty from 70% to 35% and forgetting to reset the rate when the sale ends is an easy, costly mistake.

Building Your Community

Both Matty and Dale circle back repeatedly to the value of community—with peers and with readers. Dale recommends newsletter swaps as one of the most effective author-to-author collaboration tools available and encourages anyone without a peer network to start building one immediately through communities like the Alliance of Independent Authors or author Discord servers.

For building reader relationships and review profiles, Matty is a strong advocate for Booksprout, a platform that connects authors with readers willing to receive a free copy in exchange for an honest review. She appreciates that Booksprout’s community tends to be supportive, that readers who aren’t connecting with a book can withdraw from a campaign rather than leave a negative review, and that the platform makes it easy to direct review requests to specific retailers.

The Bottom Line

The throughline of this conversation is that profitability in indie publishing is not a mystery—but it does require consistent effort, realistic expectations, and a willingness to look beyond Amazon as the only path. Whether your book is in a massive genre or a narrow niche, the authors who win are the ones who keep showing up: marketing steadily, building community, optimizing their pages, and diversifying their distribution. As Dale puts it simply: just start.

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Transcript

This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Dale L. Roberts. Hey, Dale, how are you doing?

[00:00:05] Dale: Hey, Matty. Fantastic. We’ve already warmed up for about 20 minutes, so.

[00:00:10] Matty: We’ve already had a nice chat. And because this is, I think, your seventh appearance on the podcast, you know that I no longer read your bio. I ask you to share a fact about yourself that my listeners and I may not know. Oh, man — I didn’t even give you a warning about this. I normally warn people, but I thought, no, let’s just see what Dale comes up with.

[00:00:30] Dale: Oh, man. I’m not sure what I’ve shared with you yet, but not many people realize that I’ve played guitar since I was 13 years old and I continue to compose music to this day on the side, just for fun. That’s one of the areas I will not monetize. I like doing music and I just want it to continue to be a hobby of mine that I can have outside of writing and publishing videos and books.

[00:00:54] Matty: And do you share that anywhere where people can hear your songs?

[00:00:57] Dale: Rarely. With it being heavier music, I know it’s not everybody’s taste. And on top of that, I’m currently in the midst of producing a full-length album with a friend of mine, and we’re probably about halfway through it. I imagine it’s probably going to take another year because we do it very, very, very slowly.

[00:01:16] Matty: Well, it’s nice that you’re not monetizing it because it gives you that flexibility to just continue treating it that way — as quickly or as intentionally, as slowly as you want to.

[00:01:27] Dale: Yeah, I look at it kind of like some people would consider going bowling, like joining a bowling league. To me, there’s not too much money invested in the time that I spend on it. I’ve already got the instruments. I’ve already got the recording software, so I just sit down and play to my heart’s content.

[00:01:42] Matty: That’s very cool. I love that fact about you.

Listener Question on KDP

[00:01:45] Matty: Well, this episode is going to be a little different than others, because a long time ago — and neither one of us could even remember why we set this up — we set up a recording for the podcast and said, “Oh, let’s get together and talk about something related to indie publishing.” And so we were coming up to the recording date and we hadn’t really landed on anything very specific. So I sent a note out to the people on my email newsletter list. This is a reason to be on my email newsletter list, because sometimes I ask questions like this, asking if anyone had any topics that they would like us to discuss. And one of the listeners, Brian, sent the note: “Amazon KDP makes it very difficult for indie authors to profit unless they’re writing in hot genres.” And so I thought that would be a really fun topic to delve into. What are we seeing? What has our experience been? I think just to begin with: does that feel true based on your own experience or what you see among other indie authors? Is it hard for people to profit on Amazon KDP unless they’re writing in a hot genre?

Marketing Beats Hot Genres

[00:02:51] Dale: Well, I don’t want to invalidate how Brian’s feeling right now, because there are a ton of authors out there that are experiencing that. That’s the lens that they’re seeing it through. From my standpoint, I can tell you that you don’t just have to be in a hot genre. You just need to be good at marketing and promoting. That’s going to be the thing, because there are millions of books — there’s just a deluge of books coming in every single day. And the thing that differentiates you from your competition is your marketing and promotional strategy. That’s going to be the thing that makes the difference. It’s not about hot genres. Sure, if you’re in some random, small niche, you’re probably not going to make very much money — underwater basket weaving for dolphins, or any other thing that’s so random like that. But if there is a readership for your book, it’s going to be on Amazon, and it doesn’t always have to be a hot genre. You don’t always have to be in romantasy, or for that matter, just romance. You can make a decent living over on Amazon. You just have to be a smart marketer. But what’s your take on it? Matty, I’m always curious as to how you think about that.

[00:04:09] Matty: Well, I think that one of the downsides of looking to hot genres is that there is a contingent of indie authors who are doing that — and a contingent of traditionally published authors who are doing that, with their publishers doing it for them and saying, “Oh, romantasy, this is really hot, so let’s all write romantasy because we’re chasing the market.” And so there’s a downside of trying to get into the hot genres. Let’s say for the moment, for the sake of argument, that this is true — that it is difficult for authors to make a profit unless they’re writing in hot genres. I think the problem is you’re competing for those hot genres with a whole bunch of other people. And even if there’s a huge readership out there, that readership is mainly only digging down through the first dozen, the first hundred, even the first thousand of the titles in that selection. Unless you’re breaking in at that level, it’s not really going to help you. But I think the cost is more related to satisfaction with one’s creative life and giving up the satisfaction of looking for the people who are really interested in what you’re interested in, even if it’s a very niche topic.

[00:05:20] Dale: For sure. I just wanted to know what you thought, because you always bring a different approach to things, and I always love hearing what you have to say. I just hope that Brian never loses heart, because that’s one of the things — a lot of people rely so much on Amazon to deliver, but there are oftentimes when I ask what they have done to make their book more visible, to put it in front of more people, and it’s usually just, “Well, I posted on social media,” or, “Oh, I sent out an email newsletter about it.” Okay, that’s great, but marketing and promotion is not a one-and-done situation. If you want to continue to see sales and growth on any retailer or library or system, you absolutely need to continually and consistently promote and market your books. So for example, Matty, I think you’re aware that I broke into the business as a fitness author originally. Those fitness books draw barely any money now. Why? I don’t promote them anymore. I could sit here and say, “Well, why aren’t my books selling? They’re really good. I’ve chosen the right keywords. I’ve chosen the right categories. Why aren’t they selling?” Well, because I’m not actively putting those books in front of people. Oddly enough, the books I have about self-publishing — guess what? They are selling. Why? Because I’m actively marketing and promoting those things. So it’s super important, and you have to get past social media as the only avenue. I see a lot of people that just cling to social media believing that that’s going to be the answer to all their problems, and it truly isn’t. It’s one small aspect that you can incorporate into your strategy, not the only thing.

Beyond Amazon: Going Wide

[00:06:59] Matty: And I think that the other thing that’s important to tease out here is that not only is social media not the only way to promote, but Amazon isn’t the only platform to sell on. I look across — you know, I published my first book in 2013 and Amazon was where everybody wanted to be at the time, because I think it sort of conferred some kind of legitimacy. If people could say, “Oh, is your book on Amazon?” and you could say yes, then that was somehow a check mark in your favor. But I think that over time, with the rise of the belief about the importance of going wide — which I definitely agree with; I never want to put all my eggs in any one basket — there might be other platforms that will make it less difficult to turn a profit. The example that I always think of is that Kobo readers love box sets. I make way more money from my box sets on Kobo than I do from Amazon, and I’m not necessarily doing any particular special promotion sending people specifically to Kobo — that’s just what those readers are looking for. So I think that understanding what the readers who are going elsewhere than Amazon are looking for is another way of maybe boosting your profitability.

[00:08:12] Dale: Well, first off, thanks for that tip on the box sets on Kobo. As soon as we’re done here, I’m jumping over there and starting to load up with box sets. But do you think that since a lot of the indie author community is so focused on Amazon, and sometimes more importantly KDP, that they miss the bigger opportunities on platforms like Kobo Writing Life or even Kobo in general?

[00:08:34] Matty: Yeah. I think I am always trying to make the percentage of my sales that’s coming from Amazon as low as possible. Just coincidentally, over the last couple of months, I think because I do run Kobo promos — I distribute direct on Kobo and it makes me eligible for the promotions that they run — and unusually, while Amazon is usually the bigger chunk of my book sales, the last month or so it has been Kobo. So I’m not relying on Amazon for that. And I think there are other platforms — my listeners might be getting bored of this, but I’m going to mention Curios, because Curios is a platform where you can maximize your profits because you get 100% of the list price. That is really good for people who are super fans and who are willing to pay the list price, plus a little bit, to make sure that you as the creator get the most money. The same can be said for any kind of direct sales platform. The more we let Amazon control the direction of our career, the less we can adjust our plans in order to avoid the pitfalls of being in that situation.

[00:09:44] Dale: It’s so true. You often hear some people talking about how the algorithms have changed. Well, the algorithms continue to evolve and improve and get better. And then think about all the competition that’s constantly coming into that platform — there’s so much to work against. It’s no surprise that a lot of indie authors are looking for alternatives. And I think it was over the last year that Joe Solari — a good friend of yours and mine, a mutual friend at least —

[00:10:13] Matty: Yes, yes.

[00:10:14] Dale: Joe put out a great piece about Amazon’s algorithm, and how right now, more than ever, they’re looking at customer behavior and, more importantly, customer satisfaction. Are they buying the book? Are they reading the book? How long is it taking them to read that book? Are they posting a review? Are they sharing it? Are there certain excerpts within that ebook that they’re highlighting? There are small engagement metrics that really make a huge difference. And there are some people that are just like, “I just want to put my book over there. I don’t want to bother with all this stuff.” But the bottom line — something that Joe had shared — was that the platform is now responding more positively to off-site traffic than on-site. In other words, those days of organic sales are going to start to dry up. And I think the smart authors are going to know, “Okay, I have to market and promote this book if I want to see any traction on there.” But there are also other authors taking that one step further: “Well, if I’ve got to put all this work into sending traffic over to Amazon, why are they taking a cut? I might as well just drive that traffic over to another retailer” — or in the instance of something like Curios, or one platform I like to use, Payhip, send it over in that direction, because then we keep all of the money and all the credit. Although Payhip, I think, takes about 5% on their free plan.

[00:11:30] Matty: Yeah. I think that it really speaks to the idea of thinking not only about marketing and promotion, but also community building, because some of these other opportunities outside Amazon do require you to get over a little hump of resistance or unfamiliarity or something like that. I mean, you can’t beat Amazon for convenience. So if I order a print book and it shows up the next day, that’s fun. But what I think is more meaningful — one of the hardest reasons to pull people away from Amazon — is that I love the fact that if I hear about a book that sounds good, I go on Amazon, and it says, “You purchased this book in July of 2019.” I’ve saved myself so much money by not repurchasing a book that I already have on my Kindle somewhere, and that is an undeniable benefit. You have to convince the people that you’re trying to reach that it’s worth it for them to maybe leave behind those kinds of benefits if they’ve been a longtime Kindle reader, and create the relationship that makes them willing to make that little bit of extra effort or pay that little bit of extra money to buy your book elsewhere.

[00:12:42] Dale: Yeah, for sure.

Hot Genre Strategy and Collaborations

[00:12:43] Dale: Going back to the hot genre thing — something that jumps to the top of my head: if we were to consider going hot genre, what would be the best approach for something like that? In other words, let’s say Brian says, “Screw you guys. I want to go all in on a hot genre. How do I make this work?”

[00:13:03] Matty: Well, I think that regardless of the genre, you’re going to benefit by teaming up with other people in your genre. The idea that comp authors means comparable, not competition — whether you’re driving people to Amazon or somewhere else, hot genre or not, you can capitalize on the value of the genre you’re in by teaming up with other people in that same genre. What do you think about that?

[00:13:31] Dale: To me, the thing that jumps to the top of my head right away is newsletter swaps. That’s probably one of the best ways to work with other authors in your niche. And I think there’s still a misconception rolling around here, so let me just address this right away. When you do newsletter swaps, you’re not giving your newsletter over to another author. You are simply giving a spotlight to that author and whatever they have to offer, in exchange for the same. They’re going to share your book and you share theirs, or they’re going to share your post and you share theirs, and so on and so forth. The rising tide raises all boats — how perfect that I bring that up on this podcast. I think it’s probably the 50th time I’ve brought that phrase up. It just happens to be nautical, so I happen to be on the right podcast.

[00:14:15] Matty: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Profitability: Costs and Pitfalls

[00:14:18] Matty: And I don’t want to stray too far from the question Brian asked, which was specific to profitability. There’s also the question of what profitability means to certain people. Does it mean being able to pay back the expenses you put into the editing and the cover design so you’re not in the red? Or does it mean paying the bills with it? Your strategy is going to be very different in those circumstances.

[00:14:44] Dale: Yeah, absolutely. I hear profitability being thrown around quite a bit. What’s profitable? I mean, if I make a nickel, isn’t that profitable? So yeah, it’s understanding what you need to do to get your author business functioning out of the red, to where you’re getting compensated for that hard work that you’ve put into that publication.

[00:15:09] Matty: And I think also the idea that you hear people say that they’re six-figure authors, and that probably means before they factor in their expenses. This whole idea that if they sold $100,000 worth of books, but it cost them $110,000 in ads and marketing to do that — well, that’s not the model you want to be following. And how can you balance the investment you make in Amazon ads or Facebook ads pointing people to Amazon, or whatever that combination of expenses is? How can you always keep in mind that you need to be factoring that in when you talk about the profitability of any platform?

[00:15:46] Dale: Yeah, you can’t ignore those additional expenses. And I think a lot of people get very romantic about this business because they’ve watched a YouTube video of somebody who’s just like, “Hey, I made $60,000 by barely trying.” Come on — you see those types of videos, and you need to go into them with a degree of skepticism. And the other thing is: just remember that everybody’s journey is going to be different. You do need to get very clear with what you want to do with this business. You have to be very realistic about it. You can’t just say, “I’m going to make $100,000 this year,” when you just published your first book. Let’s walk that back. Let’s think about some of those systems and processes that we have to put in place to get to that point — to getting to six figures per year. That could mean breaking into Amazon ads, or even BookBub ads, or any number of paid promotional tools. There’s going to be some investment of time. I don’t think there’s any author out there — there may be a few outliers — who is able to just write something and all of a sudden they’re making money hand over fist. That’s a rare, rare, rare occasion. And a lot of times, indie authors are going to find out the hard way: this is not an easy business, and it’s going to take a lot of grit and determination, as well as a little bit of self-awareness to be able to step back and say, “Okay, what am I doing right and how can I double down on that? And what am I doing wrong, and how can I remove that from my workflow and process?”

Amazon Page Essentials and Wrap-Up

[00:17:19] Matty: Can you think of things specific to Amazon? Let’s pursue a little bit the idea that if somebody’s goal is really to be profitable on Amazon, but maybe with a book that isn’t in one of these hot genres, are there common pitfalls that you see people falling into that you can give advice on how to avoid?

[00:17:37] Dale: The biggest one — and I’ve been tooting this horn for a long time — is that there are certain fundamental elements, the foundation you have to put in place, regardless of whatever the niche or genre is that you’re in. You need to have a solid cover design that is indicative of the niche that you’re in. In other words, if someone looks at that cover, they should be able to say right away, “That’s the exact specific niche that you’re in,” and it needs to resonate with them. The next one: okay, you’ve got this great cover design, but now you have to provide context through a description. That description needs to sell them, and it needs to get them from the top of that description down to the bottom as fluidly as possible and with as little friction as possible, so that all they have to do right after that is click that buy button. And the other thing is reviews. Reviews need to be an active part of every author’s business strategy. You don’t need to get thousands of reviews, but having a consistent trickle of reviews coming in is going to make all the difference in the world, because that social proof is credibility that’s going to help other browsing customers make that decision: is this book right for me? Having a review profile or a rating profile of some sort is going to give you a little bit of that advantage. So have at least those three elements in place. One could probably make the argument that the pricing also needs to be realistic for the genre and the expectations of those readers. But if you get all those dialed in, that’s going to give you a better advantage. If you’re in a very small, very niche, very tight audience, you’ve got very few opportunities to make a good first impression. You need to make sure that those elements are all dialed in, so that when your ideal reader is landing on your product page, it’s an easy decision for them. So this means you have to be very focused on those four elements. Have a good, professional cover design — not just one that has been whipped together from a Canva template, and definitely not Microsoft Paint, although believe it or not, there are some people who have used it. Get that description dialed in. You’re not trying to tell somebody the story; you’re trying to sell the story. Stop spending so much time trying to break down what you’ve already broken down inside the book. We need to have compelling reasons to buy your book, and that description is where you’ve got to deliver. And then the reviews — stay consistent with getting out there and asking more readers. Send something in your email newsletter. Anyone who has gotten any of your books at all, you should be approaching them about posting a review. Get those reviews up, and of course make sure that your pricing isn’t unrealistic. Is there anything that you would say for or against that?

[00:20:33] Matty: Yeah. I thought of a couple of things, and I’m harking back to a conversation we had back in episode 302, “AI as Business Consultant and Coach.” Some of the things I’m thinking of are that there are some very mechanical things that you need to do to improve your profitability on Amazon. For example, making sure that the royalty rate selected is correct. Every month I put one of my novels on sale to 99 cents, and as a result on Amazon, I have to drop from the 70% royalty rate to the 35% royalty rate. And every once in a while, when I put it back to its normal price of $6.99, I forget to change the royalty back — and Amazon doesn’t remind you.

[00:21:15] Dale: They’re like, “I’ll take that.”

[00:21:16] Matty: Exactly. You forget to click one thing and suddenly you’re eating into your profit. So you might be able to feed data from your KDP account into a tool like ChatGPT and say, “Are you seeing anything weird here?” The other thing it made me think of — something you might be able to use AI for — is that I know that on different platforms, the expectations for book descriptions vary. I have used AI to draft sales descriptions for me, and then I tweak them as needed, but what I’m realizing might be valuable is asking AI to write different sales descriptions for different platforms. I don’t have specific information about how you would optimize it for Amazon versus Google Play, but I do know that on one of the platforms — I think it’s Google Play, but it might be another one — they actually encourage the inclusion of keywords in the description, like “Second Chance Romance, Western,” or whatever. They expect you to put that in, whereas on other platforms, that would be discouraged. So making sure you’re complying with the expectations that readers on each platform have, to make your book as appealing as possible on that specific platform.

[00:22:29] Dale: For sure. For sure.

[00:22:32] Matty: So do you think there are any pros to writing to the hot genre? Because I feel like writing to a hot genre would be soul-sucking for me personally — I wouldn’t want to do it for myself — but it is certainly a legitimate business decision for some people. Do you have any thoughts about the extent to which you can maximize profitability on Amazon just by consciously writing to those hot genres? What are the pros and cons?

[00:22:59] Dale: I mean, sure. If you’re going to go after those hot genres, you can write to market. Chris Fox has a great book about writing to market — he published it several years ago, and I believe it probably still holds up to this day. But I’m with you in that if something doesn’t resonate with me, I’m not just going to go chase after it. That said, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m trying to dissuade or tell people that they’re less than if they choose to write to market. The pros are definitely that you’re putting yourself in a position to have a larger audience. But with that larger audience comes more responsibility — coming back again to the marketing and promotional aspect of things. So there are your cons: you’re going to have to work even harder in a very hot niche to be heard above the noise, to even break any kind of profit. You need to make yourself as visible as possible, probably more so than someone in a smaller niche where there’s easier discoverability, less competition, but still a hungry reading base.

[00:24:08] Matty: Yeah. When you were talking about reviews, you said, “Make sure that all the people who have gotten your book leave a review.” I had two thoughts about how people can maximize that opportunity specific to Amazon. One is — putting in another plug for one of my favorite products — Booksprout. Booksprout is a platform that matches readers up with books. This is not paying for reviews; it’s paying for a service that offers the book to readers. You can get different levels of plans. One thing that I really like about Booksprout is you upload your book, the person gets the book for free, in exchange for reading it and leaving a review. I like Booksprout because I was getting a fair number of reviews on Amazon, but almost none on Apple Books and Google Play — books had been out for years and had only two or three reviews. So I really liked that I could encourage people to leave reviews on those other platforms. But if you really wanted to double down on Amazon, you could just say, “I’m only looking for people who are going to leave reviews on Amazon,” and Booksprout would help you do that. The other thing I really like about Booksprout is that it’s a kinder, gentler community than, say, Goodreads. What I’ve found is that a couple of times people have downloaded the book and then, in Booksprout terminology, withdrawn from the campaign. I think it’s because they started the book, thought, “Eh, this isn’t really for me,” and rather than leaving a bad review, they just returned the book, which was very nice. And you can communicate with the people who are leaving the reviews, so you have that kind of connection with them. The other thing is, if you can — because you’re never going to get the customer information for Amazon buyers the way you would with Curios or Payhip buyers — get people to your email list and then encourage them to go to Amazon and leave reviews. Don’t rely on the retail platform to be your connection, in the same way we advise not relying on social media to be your connection. Really lean into your email newsletter list. If you want to send them to Amazon, make that as easy for them as possible. If you want to send them to Payhip, make that as easy as possible, and so on.

[00:26:22] Dale: Agreed. Yeah, I’d nothing really add to that. That’s brilliant.

[00:26:27] Matty: So as the marketing and promotion guide, Dale, any final thoughts you would have on Brian’s overall question about the challenges with regard to Amazon KDP and it seeming to funnel everyone toward hot genres? Any closing thoughts on that?

[00:26:43] Dale: So what I would say to Brian and anybody else looking at this and saying, “Okay, I want to go in on this, but Dale tells me I’ve got to do the work” — just start. I’m not telling you that you have to get on Good Morning America to promote your book. I’m not even telling you you have to leave your house. But you do have to put some type of consistent effort into it, even if it’s small, even if it’s just a little bit. And I want to build on something that Matty said earlier: don’t do it alone. Work with peers within your network. If you don’t have any peers in your network, today is a good day to go over to a Discord community. You can even go to the Alliance of Independent Authors — they’ve got a great community. There are a number of places. Just get in a space where there are other authors just like you, because you trying to do it on your own, you versus the world — I hate to tell you, you’re not going to win if you try to do this on your own. Get other people to come along with you. I can think of my own network: Matty, you’re one of my close peers, Michael LaRon’s another one, Nick Thacker, Kevin Tumlinson — all these people are within my network. And if you don’t have a network right now, my next action step for you is to go meet somebody and make a friend. And oh, also — I love Booksprout. I wanted to add that as well. It is probably one of my favorite services. I’ve had a bad review on that platform, and I’m okay with that.

[00:28:09] Matty: Yeah. Well, the other tip I will add, just to encourage the community building, is that I always thank the reviewer regardless. Fortunately, I get almost all good reviews, but even if someone gives me a three or a four, I’ll still thank them, and you can tell that just that outreach is very meaningful to them and makes it much more likely that they’re going to leave another, even better, review next time. So yeah, I think it just loops back to community — community with your peers, community with your readers, keeping that connection alive wherever you can, even if you are selling on the biggest bookstore in the world.

[00:28:45] Dale: For sure.

[00:28:46] Matty: So cool. Well, Dale, always lovely to chat with you. Pretty soon we’re going to have to line up visit eight, and then we’ll get together and say, “What do you want to talk about today?”

[00:28:55] Dale: Exactly. Just throw something random on my calendar and I’ll probably just show up.

[00:28:59] Matty: So fun. Well, please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

[00:29:04] Dale: It’s super simple. All you have to do is look up Dale L. Roberts. The middle initial stands for Lewis, so that way everybody doesn’t forget. Dale L. Roberts — you’ll be able to find me on YouTube, Substack, and everywhere else. DaleRoberts.com is also my author website, which is going to be updated soon.

[00:29:20] Matty: Very cool. Thank you so much.

[00:29:22] Dale: Thank you.

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