Hi, everyone. We're glad you're here. This is the Three Lesbians and a Pen podcast. Get ready to have your world rocked. As we dive into the wild and sometimes wacky world of self-publishing. We are three fabulous bestselling authors. I'm your host, Kimberly Todd with my best friends.

K. C. Luck

and Jamey Moody. 

Join us as we discuss the joys of writing, challenges of self-publishing, and anything else that tickles our fancy. 

Hey there and welcome to episode 26 of the Three Lesbians and a Pen podcast. I'm Kimberly Todd, and I'm here with my fabulous friends, KC Luck and Jamey Moody. Today we're talking about Ask Us Anything, Part One. But before we start, how is everyone's week, KC?

Pretty good actually. My girlfriend came back, I don't know if I told you that last week, So that's all great. Everything's roses and, It's been spending a lot of time together. And other stuff. Yeah, exactly.

Good.

Let's leave it that she actually was here just last night. She just left. So I'm in a great mood.

Yeah, exactly. So, other than that, I've been still been writing the two projects I'm writing on, you know, the novella and the full length fixing hearts. But I'm also focusing on marketing a lot because I'm not releasing a book this month. and that means this month is gonna be very low earnings.

So I'm pushing the marketing really hard, and what I'm pushing is Darkness Falls because I have noticed a pickup in people reading this dystopian novel, and I think it's because of the climate. So for some reason people are really drawn to this. I've been selling a lot in this series compared to all the other books.

So I'm kind of pushing Darkness Falls that it's on discount right now for $2 99. And, in my newsletter, I said it's on discount until things improve. 

I was gonna mention your newsletter because I get it and, I watched the video you included in it this time.

Mm-hmm.

Where can people that don't, get your newsletter, catch that?

Yes, on YouTube. If you Google KC Luck, you'll find it. It's public. 

Okay. Well it's really interesting, listeners, if you haven't, seen it talks all about the Darkness Falls. I thought it was really good. 

I did too.

Yeah. Susie Carr did it actually. 

Yeah. So how about you, Jamey?

Well, let's see. It's been a good week because I just find it so interesting how, if it's sunshiny and the weather's warm, how much better my mood is. I don't know if that happens to y'all, but it does me. But anyway, yeah, we, Leo and I had a great week walkin’ and everything 'cause it was nice. But here's something that interesting that happened over the weekend.

I received a box from my cousin who, I don't really know how to explain this. You know when people die in your family stuff gets passed from generation to generation. Well, I got this box and it's from probably two generations ago in my family, and so my sister and brother and I opened it up and started looking through this stuff and we found my great grandfather's wallet.

And it's made out of this leather, it's, it's really tiny compared to the wallets that men carry today. But inside it, we found his driver's license and all kinds of old papers in this box, and old pictures of people. The problem is some of them we recognize because we heard our parents talk about 'em, but a lot of the pictures we don't recognize, they're black and white.

But I came across one that made me very happy and I think I may end up putting it in my newsletter sometime. But there's this woman and she's wearing a tie. Like a man would and a vest and she's got on pants, but they're like knickers and she's got on like white hose other than that. And I was like, yeah, that's where I came from right there.

That's my direct descent right there.

I know, and I think her name may be Fannie, so I love it. I'm gonna do a little bit more research about it.

You can write a book, historical novel about Fannie.

Yeah. But man…

Everyone in England is just dying right now.

But all these old papers, It was just crazy, the things they documented and bought, and I mean, the pictures too, but golly.

Anyway, it was just very interesting. I tell you, I did have one thought. I know this doesn't have anything to do with the podcast, but it made me think as I was looking at those old pictures, because I've got old pictures from my parents generation and stuff too. But how do we take pictures now? They're all on our phones and things like that.

Very rarely do people, at least we don't print pictures anymore. So I wonder about the generations going forward, how they're gonna know their gay Aunt Jamey. ' cause there's not gonna be pictures for my great, great nieces and nephews to come across someday. Think about that folks.

Well get some printed of you in your little tie and vest. 

I'm just saying, isn't that interesting?

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Yep.

Kimberly, how about you?

That's actually a perfect segue because, we were getting ready for, a breast cancer pickup. They go through our town and, you know, you donate stuff. So we were going through a bunch of things that we had here and I actually found, some pictures that I forgot about in a box of my mom and dad.

It was a wedding photo of them. And my mom has a 1960s bouffant. It is the coolest thing. And my dad looks like his hair's all slicked back. It's very cool picture. So I was happy to find 

that. 

There you go.

So KC, do we have any texts this week?

Yeah, we got one from CeeJay and it's responding to how we were talking about who the first, lesbian romance or sapphic romance, author that we read. And so she wrote that, Robin Alexander was her first sapphic book. And it was The Trip, and I don't know if you two have read The Trip, but it is a hilarious novel. So if you haven't read it, but she's relatively new to Women Loving Women novels. Only two years in.

And Stephen King, of course, because she's from Maine.It's the law, and Jeffrey Dever, so obviously she likes those kind of darker thrillery ones, but yeah, so that's what I got. 

She would love your Darkness series then.

I don't know if she's read 'em, but yeah, let's plug that.

I don't have anything dark. I'd be plugging it. You know me.

How about emails?

We did have one email from Manishka and she was excited to find out that, KC and I started writing after 48.

And, it's never too late to do something that you have a passion for. It was nice for her to hear us talking about how we have goals for writing every day, like certain, word counts and things like that.

And that we, try to make 'em, but if we don't get there, it's not that big a deal, but it still fulfills us.

We had one other email from Evie, but it came in too late to make this Ask Us Anything episode. So we'll put her questions with the next group.

And as far as Instagram, we got, an ask us anything from Jules, which we will incorporate also, in the next episode.Today we're talking about Ask us Anything Part One. KC, do you wanna start us off?

Well, yeah. So the one that most intrigued me was when, we were asked how and when did the three of you meet and get closer? And so I had to really think about it. Okay. I know when we met, I met Jamey, at P-Town and I met Kimberly at the GCLS conference.

Yeah, I love this listeners because we have a doc on what we're gonna talk about and, KC put on there, I think we met through, I Read Indies, how did we get so close? But I do remember that, yes, we did meet on, I Read Indies and if you'll remember, we used to do meetings like once a month and you would do Zooms. So that was one way we met and kept in touch. But then you and I met in P-Town and shoot man, we hit it off and became buds.

Yeah, we did. We were definitely buddies. 

Yeah. And then we went to Albuquerque to the GCLS conference and Kimberly comes walking up and we're both like, who is that tall blonde? Yeah. Exactly and she's really tall. Yeah, she is.

I am an amazon.

And we met her.

I just remembered from then on we were hanging out together, the three of us.

And then also, we had a event here for GCLS in New Jersey and, Jamey came and stayed with me for a weekend during that, and so we got close there too.

Yeah.

And KC was there and stayed with her cousin. But it was just a one-day conference. But that was great. I wish, we could do more of those, but yeah, we just hit it off and became friends. Kimberly's wife is a Texan, and so we had that in common. So then fast forward a year and we go to Denver to the GCLS conference and all hung out.

Mm-hmm. 

Yep, and then Kimberly was the one that, pitched this idea and she said, hey, y'all, or she didn't say, hey, y'all, that'd be Jamey. But she said, hey, New Jersey accent...Mm-hmm. 

Alright. That's pretty good.

And wanted to know if we wanna do a podcast, and that's kind of how we got even closer.

Yeah, and we all just get along. We have the same sense of humor. Sometimes it's a little dark. Yeah...

Y'all are. Well, the sunshine is..., Jamey Moody.

Yeah, I have to bring them out of their darkness occasionally, listeners, And this podcast though, is a great way for us to get to visit once a week. Well, more than once a week, but we get to see each other while we're recording it.

But even before that, we were, talking, amongst ourselves when we needed help with, whatever we were working on author wise. 

Bouncing ideas off of each other.

Yeah, so you could call us colleagues, but really we're friends.

When it comes down to it we're buds, 

 our group chat is called Pod

Pals. So. 

 And don't mess with any of our pod pals. You'll have to… 

That’s right. 

…have the wrath.

Yes.

Yeah, well see. There they go, getting dark again.

So yeah, that's awesome. 'cause I didn't quite remember exactly how this all came about, but I do love having you guys as my besties, so, perfect.

I know. Yeah. 

Same here. Hangin' out is 

Fun.

So next question was, how has your writing style improved or changed since your debut book? And—grammar's gotten a lot better for me after working with my different editors.

I've had three editors but my most recent editor's been really good about helping me learn better grammar and not starting every sentence with, Elle said, da, da da or, Elle went to the store. And then, Logan went to the store with her and so every paragraph starts with the person's name.

That's what I'm saying. Or she, so you don't start it with the same pronoun every time.

But the other big change for me, has been my entire mindset about being an author. You know, when I first started out, I, was really kind of shy. Not shy, but I was just kinda afraid, I guess, about what will people think and will anybody read this? And so of course a lot's changed there. And then I went through the whole cycle of, imposter syndrome and wondering, am I fake because people are reading this and now I'm just kind of chilling, you know?

I know some people will read it. Not everybody's gonna like it. So I've come to learn to accept it's gonna flow, but that's been a big change for me. Definitely.

Yeah, for me, I've learned more about story structure and the romance formula because honestly, I'd been reading romance for years and stuff and I didn't know that there was an actual formula. I just, knew how to construct a sentence. I knew a little bit about grammar.

But you don't write the formula, you don't have the breakup. You don't have girl leaves girl. 

No, I was gonna say, I found out about the formula, but that doesn't mean I write to it. I occasionally do. You know what? I don't mean to do it, when I do it. It just is the way the story works out. But I've learned more about story structure and the different, parts of a good story because I didn't really know all that.

Yeah, but it came naturally to you, and that's the true gift of a storyteller is that you might not understand the structure yet, but your beginning stories are great because you just knew how to tell a story.

Oh my god, KC, that just melted my heart.

Awe, you're a story teller.

I'm serious. I've never really been told I'm a storyteller. I kind of like that. Thank you, pal.

Well, with grammar, yes. And it's still always grammar. Thank goodness for my editor. But I'll tell you the dreaded passive voice, I didn't even know what the hell passive voice was. And my editor's like, Kimberly, what is this? I was like, okay. So, I still work on that. And then of course, I like to try to, read a book on writing all the time to try to help with my grammar.

Just things like that and the show, not tell got a lot better with that. You know, you don't get them picked out as much by your editor as you grow. So that's for me, that damn passive voice is what I find annoying.

But see, that's why I got a good editor that first time too. I knew about first person, third person, things like that. But I didn't realize that's what I was writing and that's gonna be an, ask Us Anything question in another episode is, point of view, how we write, those.

But getting that was out of there. That's when you know you're writing a passive voice. And so my editor always highlights it in blue. Yeah. With blue sharpie or whatever, And so the first ones I go back to, and I was just, those first ones were covered with it. She was listening and she was talking and she was, and she's just like, she needs to know to stop doing the was. 

I'll tell you, I love my editor I'm only at the first page and she'll say, please fix the 798 was's. Not now, but you know, at the very beginning. And I was like, why? I didn't understand why. And she's like, wrote me this big thing.

I was like, oh,

Yeah. No clue.

Yep. Yeah. Gotta make it active. you. 

You learn. What I've, improved is I've become more confident in my writing now that I know people are actually gonna read the books. I'm like, let me try to tell this little story. I think this would be good. And I know I can do it.

I'm suffering a little right now because what I'm trying to write, but still.

But Kimberly, how have you changed as an author? Not necessarily your skills, but just as an author mindset.

I feel a lot more confident as far as writing a book. Like I can just think of an idea now, and it's not like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? And how is this gonna, you know, 'cause I don't plot. But writing the blurb really did help me. And so now I'm much more confident I have the blurb and then I feel like, okay, I just need the time to write the book. And also as far as confidence, I don't know what it is. Like you get the book, you read it, you think it's good, your editor tells you it's good. You're like, okay, here it goes. But again, pushing that damn publish button on Amazon. Does it ever go away? I mean, how many books you have to write before that freaking goes away.

Well, that leads to the next question, What is the scariest thing about self-publishing that once you actually did it was no big deal? Well, for me, pushing that publish button the very first time was, is just like you're almost in a panic attack. You like you're sweating and you're just like, oh my God, this, here we go.

Is this gonna work? Are they gonna kick me off Amazon? You know, and, and so it does get a little better. I mean, I don't quite have the panic attack now, but every once in a while you do kind of go. Boy, I hope this doesn't suck. 

Then you push the button. 

Yeah. Scariest thing, for sure.

And you just hope that the people are gonna like the book. 'cause your first book and you're like, I wrote a book and now I just push the publish button and then you're just sitting there like, what I do, I hope people like this thing.

Exactly.

Yeah. 

That’s what scared me the most. I was like, okay, you're doing this. And I don't get so scared actually hitting the publish button. But it's like, whew. Is anybody gonna read this?

Why are you doing this, Jamey? What makes you think that you can hit that published button and who do you think is gonna read it?

And I was like, well, maybe my family will pick it up. You know?

If one person reads it, that's not related to me. It's a success.

Exactly. 

That’s what I said for book one.

Uhuh.

I don't want my family to read it. What are you talking about? Mysex scenes? I don't want my brother or my niece or someone to read it.

I'm like what... 

My, family won't read it.

I told my mother. Do not read it, mom, and don't tell your church friends about it.

Back to the, how did we meet question… when we were in Denver, my sister went with us. And I remember one of y'all asking her, well, do you read Jamey's books? And, ' cause I mean, she is my biggest cheerleader, but she has never read one of my books and won't, and she reads books all the time. One of my best friends did though, she doesn't read romance, but she read my first book.

She did it as a, good friend and it worked. I mean, she'll tell people, yeah, she can do this. It's just not my genre. So I really appreciated that.

Okay, here's one for you. My girlfriend reads my books, right? She does. She very much enjoys them and she was telling her son about the fact that I was an author, KC Luck, and…

Oh no. 

He went and got one.

Oh no.

He got Lesbian Billionaires.

Ohhhhhhh erotica!

And so he read apparently like the first three pages and he comes back to me and he goes, there's a lot of sex in these.

That's all he ever said. I don't think it got past that like first or second page. 'cause I have sex like right away now. It’s like, great. So now when he looks at me, I'm kinda like, shamed a little bit. It's like, I don't just write sex dude. So.

Oh my gosh!

We have another part of the question here. What is the one thing you thought would be easy, but later on you found out it was something that was really hard to do? 

I think that actually selling the book and finding ways to get reviews was a thing that I thought would be easier, that I really thought, you know, there's something called “Hope Marketing”. That's when you put a book up there and you just “hope” people will read it and you don't know anything else.

And you always kind of think, well, it's gonna be so good and so popular that I don't have to worry that much about marketing. And then after the first couple weeks, and no one reads it, you're like. Okay, maybe I should tell people about this book. So, and it's a lot of work. Marketing is a huge, huge task for authors.

Yeah, that's with me too. I didn't think anything would be easy to be honest with you, but, yeah, the marketing's the hard part with me. But I'll tell you one thing that did surprise me. Back to that last question on, publishing the book is how, other authors are so, glad to help you get the word out about your book, because I think that's what helped me.

With the very first book that I published I had a little author group, of friends on social media, and when my book came out, they told others and that kind of helped it. But, that's one thing that I really, guess I was surprised about, but I just thought it was a really nice thing.

And for me, I really thought when I saw the back cover blurb, it's only a couple paragraphs. I thought the blurb was gonna be easy to write.

Oh my gosh. 

Oh, that's gonna be, you know, just, you just see 'em on Amazon. They're so great. And you think, oh, that'll be easy part of the book. I just gotta get the book written. The blurb will be easy. So after the first attempt, I realized writing the blurb first is much better. Not waiting till later.

That's a good strategy. I don't know. Cause a blurb is hard. The blurb is definitely hard. Get, you know, get your 300-page book down into, or in your case, 500 page book into, you know, 250 words is not easy. 

Do you know, I actually had someone complain, one of my books went to 350 or something instead of 400. It was like three 20 and someone wrote to me and said they didn't like that the book was shorter. So there.

She’s got those long readers.

And the other thing that I thought, for me at least, maybe not for you girls, but I thought that making the website was gonna be easy. And I spent more time doing that thing and it's such a simplistic website and it was still a pain that I just was so annoyed by it. That was really frustrating for me. 

Mm-hmm. 

In the beginning, that was hard, but I've got a new website and I will say the website industry has made things, more user friendly. My new website was so much easier to create than the first one.

Not something I really thought about in the beginning. But another thing that's harder than you might imagine if you're a new author is getting that mailing list up and running. You know, putting those automated, emails coming out and people subscribe, and then getting people to subscribe and having reading magnets.You know, there's a lot of work to that. 

Sometimes it's a little frustrating, but you just gotta take a breath and keep going. 

I have noticed that it seems like the things I worked the hardest on are the least likely to get likes. And then you have randomly throw up a picture of a tree or something. You're just like, and there's 300 likes. It's like, what?

So true. 

I stopped looking at those statistics on Instagram that's like right there, easy to click on. 

Oh yeah. 

I don't look at it anymore. I'm like, no thank you.

Mm-hmm. 

So sad. 

So, what's the worst advice you've ever been given, when you started writing?

So it wasn't given directly to me, but I'm in a group called 20 Books to 50K. I think you both are as well. It's kinda like the big self-publishing group. It's gigantic and there's tons of posts in there, but I actually started getting on it before it was that huge, about five years ago, six years ago now.

God, that long and, there was some people posting about, grammar questions and someone wrote in and asked, you know, does the parenthesis mark go on the outside of a period or something like that? And the person wrote back in the comments and said, you're an indie author, you don't have to worry about that, just right from the heart and the readers will love it. And I was just like.

Oh my God.

Okay. I guess I'll just do that. And then of course, that first book in mine, Rescue Her Heart, even after the editor went through it was horrible. So I've had it re-edited by the editor I use now because I didn't pay enough attention to what's important.

And readers do care that it's a well-written book, I do know authors who, don't put editing as high on the list of important things as they should. They do just write a book and think, I've written the book, it's good enough. I've read it myself, and I've had someone proofread it kind of, and it's good enough to put out there. And that is not enough. That is not okay anymore. It might have been okay just 10 years ago, but it's not ok now.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So as your Three Lesbians and a Pen, we're telling you that probably the most important thing is get a good editor. I thought about this too, on what bad advice I've been given and I don't know that I've been given any bad advice, but the thing that came to mind was someone said, don't read your reviews.

And I know people, you know, some authors do and some authors don't. I find them helpful? So I do read my reviews. So that would've been the advice maybe that wasn't so great.

I read like the first five or six that come in, even if they're not great, because I wanna see if there's something horribly wrong. 

Yeah.

So if they’re like chapter 11 is missing, but otherwise, it's a good book.

I'd be like, I'd like to know that. Thanks.

Kimberly, have you gotten any bad advice?

No, not really, but I also read my reviews as well. 

What's some good advice y'all got?

I had, just to sit down and get the words written. Make sure you get a full manuscript before you start worrying about everything else. That doesn't mean that you are gonna ignore grammar or skip the editor, but to get the words down and complete the book so that you can have a book to publish.

Right. And in case you don't know how to do that, our last episode, episode 25, is about write the fucking book, which is what Kimberly's talking about is you've got to write the book before you can actually do a damn thing with it.

What comes to mind to me though is just believe in yourself. You started this for a reason, so believe in yourself and keep writing. And one thing I wanna say here is, just because you're an indie doesn't mean you're not good enough.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And then I also had, for good advice, which I think was smart and I wouldn't have known, one is to start your newsletter if you can, before you even launch the book. And then two is to make sure that you have some type of thing, whether it's at the end of your book or you do a prequel where you can give it away a short story or a bonus chapter. Like for my first book, I had a bonus chapter and that really helped me build my mailing list. right from book one and a lot of people just publish a book and don't think about that part of the building your list. And not waiting.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.   

That was good advice I got from someone.

And I think book funnel is so helpful in building, your reader list.

And definitely networking because we wouldn't even know about these things if we didn't pay attention to some of the different author Facebook groups that are out there. Like the Sapphic Quill by Jae has one.

I think iHeart SapphFic has an author group and those are really good to get in there and you can ask questions and find out, what you might be missing and how you can get some help.

And also our wonderful podcast.

Uh, yeah. 

I was gonna say, I learned most from, Lesbians Who Write, it was a podcast and now that it's not there, that's one reason we started is because we wanna help new authors the same way that podcast helped us.

Mm-hmm. For sure. 

Okay. I think that's it for this week. Next week we're gonna be talking about book conferences. Do we have a question for the week? 

We do actually, we have one for readers. Is there a book conference that you would really like to attend? And of course, authors, have you been to a conference or is there one you'd really like to attend? So give us a heads up on those you've been to and those you'd wanna go to.

Okay. That's it everyone. Thank you.

Thank you everybody. See you next week.

Thanks for listening. Bye. 

Thanks for listening. If you'd like to reach out to us, you can contact us by email at contact@threelesbiansandapen.com with the number three spelled out or on Instagram, Facebook and X at Three Lesbians and a Pen using the number three. And finally on our website, at threelesbiansandapen.com, we look forward to hearing from you, see you next week.