In this episode of The Write Podcast, host Sarah sits down with bestselling author Catherine Bilson for an inspiring and insightful conversation.

Catherine opens up about her unique path from writing fan fiction to becoming a prolific author with titles published in multiple languages. She discusses the power of storytelling, the evolution of her writing career, and how she’s successfully navigated genres and pen names.

You’ll hear how Catherine uses both traditional and AI-powered translation tools to expand her global reach, along with her strategies for marketing books in diverse international markets—like Brazil.

She also shares the behind-the-scenes realities of self-publishing, co-writing a series, and managing multiple income streams from her writing. Plus, Catherine offers her perspective on the growing role of AI in audiobook narration and translation.

Whether you’re just starting out or already published, this episode is full of practical tips and motivation to help you build a sustainable, wide-reaching author career.

Tune in, get inspired, and keep writing—because your stories matter.

Transcript:

 Hey there, scribe Sarah here, and welcome to the very first interview podcast of the Write podcast. I'm so glad you're here in spending this time with me because you are here. That tells me that you're a writer, whether you are dreaming of becoming one, or you've just started painting your first novel, or maybe you've already written and published a dozen novels.

You are a writer and you're in the right place. This show was made just for you, my friend. Do you remember that first moment you thought about writing a novel? Maybe it was because you came from a family of storytellers, or you had an inspiring teacher at school. For me, it was when my aunt let me take home an old romance novel, she had put in a box to give to charity.

Obviously she had never read this book or she would not have given it to her impressionable 14-year-old niece. But I spent that weekend devouring this book, and from that moment I knew in my heart I wanted more than anything to be a writer and create books that people could escape into. For my guest today, writing was always a beloved hobby, a hobby that led her to write fan fiction, and it was here that she learned about writing and reader expectations, and now she was running a business prolifically writing and publishing novels, not just in English, but in six other languages.

Let me introduce you to my dear friend, Catherine Bilson.

Catherine Bilson is joining me today. How are you, Catherine?

I'm great, Sarah. How are you? I'm good. Congratulations. You're the first person on my there you go. I don't think I could have chosen a more interesting person to have this conversation with. You and I are part of a local writer's group, so we do catch up at least once a month and we see each other at a lot of different events and we always have these interesting conversations, and I think you are one of the authors who inspires me.

So much in the growth of my business and what I do and if ever I have a question I sort of go, who would know the answer to this? Catherine would. Um, I'm so excited to talk to you and get you to share some of those words of wisdom. I have so much I want to talk to you about though, that I'm sure we're gonna have to break this into like three different interviews.

So don't think that's okay. That's okay. We can focus down later. Exactly. I would love for you to tell me how you actually got into this incredible writing career that you've formed for yourself. I know it was a, an interesting way that you started with Fanfic. I did start with Fanfic. It started long before online fanfic, though I was, my mom swears that I started writing pretty much as soon as she taught me to read, because the books I was reading weren't long enough for me.

So I kind of carried on writing them until I was satisfied with where they ended. So that in and of itself is fanfic, I guess. 'cause I was continuing famous five books or you know, so that, yeah, I would say that in and of itself was fanfic, but yeah. I had a very bad experience with a vanity publisher with my very first published novel way back when I was 20 or 25.

And that sort of soured me on, original writing for a while. And don't get me wrong, that novel was terrible and it didn't deserve to be published, but I didn't deserve to be ripped off over it. So I'm a very, very anti vanish publishing. But what happened there was I went away and I couldn't stop writing.

'cause I'd always written, I'd been writing forever. So I kept writing. But I did go back to Fanfic and I sort of discovered the online fanfic world. This was sort of in the early two thousands. And I became, I won't say I was a big, big name fandom writer. I wasn't a Cassandra Claire, or you know, El l James or anyone like that.

But I got quite a following. And I wrote millions of words of fanfic. There's over 3 million words in my fanfic still available on the archive of our own. Oh, wow. So let's just explain. It was an amazing training school. Yeah. Let's just explain in case the, um, the people watching this don't actually know what Fanfic is.

So can you explain that, how it came about? You are playing with someone else's characters really? Or in their world with your original characters? So you might, I actually wrote, uh, most of my work was in Marvel Fanfic. I was a huge Marvel cinematic universe fan right from when the first Avengers movie came out.

So I would write and I tended to not go for the obvious pair. He is like Steven Bucky was a very obvious pairing that a lot of people wrote. I actually wasn't really into writing queer Fanfic, so I would write a lot of Steven Natasha. Or I would incorporate Darcy Lewis from the Thor movies. And Darcy sort of known as the fandom bicycle.

She used to get paired with everyone. So, but I, I sort of then started incorporating agents of Shield characters, a lot more female characters, an interesting female characters in there. And writing primarily still in the Marvel world. A lot of people take Steven Bucky and write a coffee shop au.

So they're, they're both baristas or, so they might be, I don't know, rival chefs or something like that. So there's lots of different ways, or you can take the fan free world and write your own original characters into it. And I did a fair bit of that. Like I would create an original female character and pair her with Hawkeye or Steve or Bucky or someone like that.

And I did a lot of that. Um, and it got really popular. And the main thing for me was it taught me how to write to market because Fanfic feedback is instant. You don't have to wait for the book to be published. You don't have to wait for people to maybe to give reviews. You put up a chapter and people are gonna let you know what they loved about it, what they didn't love about it.

If they're waiting for the next installment or you know, they might just go, ah, stopped reading here. 'cause I was getting bored. So it really gives, it's a really strong lesson in how to write to market and how to write fast because they're impatient for the next chapter. Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think it was Al James, wasn't it?

She originally was writing Twilight Fanfic. Was that the days of what pad? Was it that platform or? Um, I think she she, I honestly think she was mostly on fanfiction.net, which is. Semi defunct these days. It's still running, but it's sort of very unmoderated and unmanaged and Yeah. Yeah. Most people use the archive of our own abbreviated to a O three.

Back then there were like, there were specialist Harry Potter forums. There were specialist twilight forums that most of the big fandoms had their own specialist ones, but a lot of them got aggregated into a O three. Eventually, when people. Just got out of the fandom and tired of running them and paying for service space and MM.

And that sort of thing, so Absolutely. So let's take it from the Fanfic and then where did you go after that? It was my fandom fans who said to me, you deserve to get, be getting paid for this 'cause you cannot get paid for fanfic legally. Unless it's fanfic of an out of copyright work. And I actually started writing Jane Austin Fanfic and Jane Austin has been dead for 200 years.

So you can legally publish anything you want using Jane's characters and World. Yes, he, he,

those books are my biggest sellers today. Fantastic. Um, there is a huge, they call it the Jaff fandom, Jane Austin fan fiction. It is a huge fandom and there are devoted fans who will read anything I write, and those books are still my biggest sellers today. Brilliant. And I still write at least a couple of year to keep those fans happy.

Yeah. Now, you obviously do have the English accent. Do you know the Yes. The rural countryside of China. Yeah. I, I actually lived in Hartfordshire for a while, just very close to where Jane Austen Wa was living. And, you know, sort of imagining those worlds and those characters. And I'm from the northwest, near Cheshire.

So, and this Eaton Hall, which was, which was Pemberley in the 1995. Pride and Prejudice is not far from where my dad lives today. So I'm very familiar with all of that. 1995 Bright Prejudice came out. I was. 20 And it had a huge impact on me at the time. I really fell in love with that story. Yeah.

Um, I'd read it in school and it hadn't really appealed, but the TV adaptation changed that for me. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah I remember I was still at school. I was just in the end of high school when that. Came out and it Yeah. Changed everything, especially teenage girls. And honestly, the two five movie adaptation has done that for a whole new generation of people.

Yes, absolutely. And now there's another, there's a Netflix adaptation coming out, so we might have a whole nother generation of people who sort of, you know, women most mostly who fall in love with that story. So we, we'll see. I hope it's a good one. Absolutely. I just can't really take anyone else seriously who tries to do Mr.

Darcy as well as Colin Firth. Like I know role funny that I was talking to someone yesterday, uh, on Sun, no, sorry, on Saturday. Who said, uh, Colin Firth or Matthew McFadden? I went, I'm sorry. Was that a question? What are you talking about, John? Oh, I don't think we can be friends if it's not Matthew and I went, oh, no.

It's nice, but it's just, it is a very abbreviated version of the story. Yeah. It's very aesthetically pleasing. Um, and I actually love Rosan Pike as Jane Bennett in it. She, she was, she's a fabulous Jane Bennett. But yeah, it's, it's, you know, the 1995 version will, was. My heart. Absolutely. It's, it's my, I'll watch that when I'm sick and I've got the flu and I wanna lay on the couch and be miserable.

I thought it was hysterical when in the Barbie, it features in the Barbie movie when she's literally watching it when she's miserable. Like, oh, I felt that in my soul. Absolutely. Oh, so of course the Regency isn't just the only thing that you write though these days, is it? No, I, I'm very a DHD as everyone who knows me know, and I don't stick well to one topic for long.

So, um, I started, I mean, I, as I was, when I was writing Marvel Fanfic, I was writing Contemporary Romance. It was set in the present day and I was also writing speculative fiction with magic and superheroes and those sorts of things. So. I have written in that for a long time as well. And yeah, I have written books in, in other genres, some that fit just pure contemporary romance and some that go in the sort of urban fantasy, supernatural, paranormal realm.

And I have separated those with different pen names. Mm-hmm. Um, just because I, I, I folded all my historical stuff under, under my real name, Catherine Bilson originally, and I decided to start a separate one for my straight contemporary stuff because they're often quite different readers. Yeah. I have never hidden any of my pen names.

I've always been public about all of them. I am Catherine Bilson, also writes as Caitlyn Lynch. Carissa Cole. And cmon, I have never been, never hidden any of them. But I do keep them separate basically for marketing purposes and for Amazon purposes, because Amazon does recommend. Books to you based on what you've also read and what they think you're going to like.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Does it ever get difficult though, trying to keep up with everything? Do you have separate websites and Facebook profile? I just redone my overall website. I recently decided to I, I used to have separate websites for every pen name, and they still exist, but I recently decided to have a, a publisher website.

And gather everything in there by genre. So I have actually just redone that this week because I then had to repeat that in seven other languages, which was hell. But it was easy kind of to do it once and then duplicate everything and just swap out. Yeah, the book covers and the, and the titles and the text and the link filings.

That sounds horrible, but it, it was easier to do it that way. Redesign everything from scratch every time. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, brilliant. So you do have a new book coming out very soon about translations and this is what I really would love to dissect with you is about translation. Well, we'll talk about, we'll focus on that one today.

Okay, let's, let's do it. 'cause I was about to ask which new book. I've got three coming out in the next three weeks. The translations one. Let's talk about translations. Let's talk about translations, and then if we've still got time, we'll talk about how you actually, and I did throw the book cover up. I don't have a physical copy yet because it only went live a couple of days ago, so, uh oh.

Hang on. I might, I will hopefully be able to pull a book cover up one second. So it comes out on the 26th of July. Uh, it does technically you can order the paper back now. Awesome. So, um, because I had to send it live to Amazon so that I could order stuff because I actually need some to sell at the Romance Writers in Australia conference.

Awesome. So, um, let's just see, is my tablet, my tablet might not gonna be playing play ball. I'll give that a minute and we'll come back to it. I'll might be able to show you the cover. Yeah. Pitched. I started doing translations last year. Mm-hmm. And almost immediately I actually started making quite good money.

Like it sort of, it was an income multiplier very quickly. And I decided to pitch a session to Romance Writers of Australia conference to talk about them, because they always put out an invite saying, what can you come and talk about? What do you think people will be interested in? And I thought, well, people might be interested in this.

And they said actually, yeah, we'd love you to come and talk about that. Please, you know, fill in the forms and sign here. And then I sort of sat down to plan it and realized that there was no way that I could share everything I knew in 60 or 90 minutes there. It was just not possible. All I can do is scratch the surface in that time.

Mm-hmm. So I wrote the companion book, which goes into a lot more detail. And it is a problem because the technology is in, is changing very fast and indie authors are very much at the forefront of figuring out how this works and how to sell our books into these other markets, which we as indies have never really touched.

Yeah. Until very recently, translation was a thing that you only did if you were a big name and you had a big publisher backing you because they paid for it. 'cause it's very expensive. Yeah, because we are talking about actually getting narrators to Yeah, actually do translators. Yeah. Yeah. Getting translators to actually do, and it's not cheap.

I looked into it first a few years ago. I had one series doing very well and a lot of people going, oh, German, you know, German's a great market. So I went and found, and I got three quotes from different German translators who people recommended and the cheapest for book one of a four book series. Was 2,800 Euros.

Wow. Euros. Not, not as Aussie dollars. That is an enormous amount of money. And I'm a major breadwinner in my family. My husband is partially disabled and I have to pay the bills. Yeah. And I was at the time, struggling to meet my mortgage and I just went, eh, no. Not happening. Mm-hmm. You'd have to translate the whole book series to be reasonably guaranteed.

And I'm thinking that, 10 plus Euros, it's. I might as well be asking for the A Porsche. Yeah. It's just not within the realms of possibility, so I just shelved it. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was not, and then. Last year I started hearing people talking about using AI to translate, and I was very skeptical.

I was very much, very, actually, very anti AI at the time. Mm-hmm. I'd just heard that the ai, um, models had scraped the entirety of a O three, which was 3 million words of my fanfic, which I'd written and given away for free, had been stolen. And then a, a list came out which had basically everything I'd ever published to date on it that had also been stolen.

And at that point I kind of went, you know what? So you guys, if I can get some use out of it, I'm taking something back. Yep. Uh, I got, I was quite angry. And I get that a lot of people are angry about AI and don't want anything to do with it. And that's fine. That's their choice. Absolutely. Totally fine.

But I got mad and when you owe me something. And I found out that I could use it for translation and some people were starting to say that it was quite good. So I looked up the program that people were using, which is called Scribe Shadow. Um, and it's still the one that most people are using today. And I found out that it's actually written by the algorithm that use it, it works on, is created by a romance author who's also a senior software engineer.

Oh really? Now there's been a translation program out since at least 2017 called. Which was written to translate technical papers actually for you might get scientists in Europe who wanted to read a paper in their own language, or scientists in Europe who'd written a paper in German and Americans wanted to read it.

So Deep was primarily used for that. But because of that, it's really technical and it doesn't translate fiction well, and it doesn't do tense well or colloquialisms at all. Whereas Scribe Shadow was programmed to do those things for fiction, it was programmed to look at how, how colloquialisms come off in different languages and to find an equivalent saying in French that they might use rather than what we might use.

Like we might say, oh, come hell or high water. But in Italian, and I recently found this out, they talk about Aqua Alta, which is actually a very specific term for when the tide rise is in Venice and floods buildings. Oh, wow. So it's, it's a very, it's kind of the same, but not the same at the same time. So yeah.

And those colloquialisms are really important for European readers because they would look at come hell or high water and go, I don't really know what you mean. Yeah. That doesn't make, that doesn't make any sense. Exactly. So yeah, the understanding those colloquialisms and getting things like tenses and pronouns, um, you as a pronoun has formal and informal versions mm-hmm.

In a lot of languages. Mm-hmm. And getting those consistent and correct is important. Yeah. And always that's very much been the job of proofreaders. Yeah, so when I got my first AI translation done, I hired some proofreaders in French and German. I actually hired local backpackers 'cause I live in a big fruit picking area.

And I put a notice up on Facebook going, any backpackers want a little cash in hand job for reading? And both the French and German readers came back to me and sort of said, what am I looking for? And I said, well, things that don't really translate very well, things that don't make any sense. Um, bad tenses, dodgy pronoun use.

And they all kind of went. Not really seeing any of that. It's there's a few things I might have phrased differently, but I'm, that, that's just language choice. It reads fine. So I kind went okay. And I published and my reviews on some of these books are better, average wise than they are in English.

Wow. And that, that's unreal. You can't get, I dunno, that you can get over a four star average on a book if the translation's bad. PE people are just, they're not gonna give you five stars ever if the translation's dodgy. Yeah. If they're not understanding well, absolutely. Um, and yeah, like quite a lot of my books have a 4.2, 4.3 star average in other languages.

Yeah, I will say that Italian is a very tough market for that, and it's hard to get even a four star average, but that's actually universal. I, if you go and look at books by trad authors who've clearly been done by a professional translator and actually use the bridge, Julia Quinn's Bridgeton series as an example, and you go and look at those in any language, there's always somebody going, this is a terrible translation.

Yeah. And that has clearly been entirely inexpensively done by humans. Yeah. So there, there's no winning in some ways, there's no pleasing everybody. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, that's, that's incredible. So you use the AI translation, is it incredibly fast or is it a slow process? It's minutes. You upload your book and you push a button and I come back five minutes later and it's done.

Yeah it, and it's quite sort of mind blowing. And then I, I actually, some people just import the output straight to Amazon, but I let my books look pretty so I reform at them. And um, for example, I'm not gonna translate the copyright page every time. Yeah, because um, you pay per credit and one credit is one word, basically.

Right? Yeah. So if I've got a 50,000 word book, a thousand words of that is probably the copyright and about the author pages and those sorts of things. So I actually strip those out and I only have to translate them once for each language. Excellent. And then I put them back in at the formatting stage.

And that does save me, especially, 'cause when you've got quite a few books, it adds up. Yeah, absolutely. So how many books have you translated now and what languages are you translating into? Languages first. Okay. Um, German, French, Italian, Spanish. And I specify European Spanish because I mark it to Spain.

Yeah. Um. Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese. Mm-hmm. And I'm just starting in Dutch. Ooh. Awesome. And I have in Dutch, I think there's nine books out That is the, the smallest one. Um, most of them it's 40 plus books. Wow. Working through, I've sort of worked through an entire back catalog and now I'm getting to the point where my front lists and my new releases, I just translate all at once and I release them in several different languages on launch day.

Yeah. Right. Which can, and you need to be organized. Yeah. And believe me, I have several spreadsheets with like translated titles and links and those sort of things. And I say you need to be organized. Like it's very easy if you don't speak these languages and not, I don't think a lot of people will speak seven languages.

Hmm. For example, to put the Italian copyright page in your Spanish book. Yes. No, I've never done that. Why would you ask? Yes, I did that and it was embarrassing and somebody pointed it out and then I went back and I fixed it. But it's really easy to do. Exactly. You need to sort of, and you need to be the person who is quality control in that.

Yes. You need to make sure that those are, you get to recognize, like I recognize. You know, the, you know, copyright, I know what copyright is in seven different languages now. Yes. And those sort of things, so I can see that it is the right page Yeah. When I do those sort of things, but yeah, you, you, you need to make sure of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there a particular type of genre that does better in any of those translations? Like, for example, Regency Romance, does that do better in Italian or French or, yes. It, Regency Romance does really well in Italian and French. Right. Not quite as well in German and Spanish. Yeah. Contemporary Romance does very well in Brazil.

And in almost all cases you do have to market, like I do Facebook ads for most of mine. I there is a certain amount of organic discovery. In France. In France and Germany. And if you are wide and you're doing things like first in series free, you'll get some organic discovery that way.

Yeah. I am mostly kind unlimited. I'm really only experimenting with wide because I launched Dutch, which doesn't have kind unlimited Yes. Um, so I'm really still figuring that out. But we've got a, first I put a first in series free and I am getting organic reads without advertising on that series.

Fantastic. So that's. It great. I don't have to do anything that I can leave that alone and maybe come back to it later if I have some ad budget for it. Mm-hmm. So are you seeing, um, running the ads like we have to run ads to the Australian marketplace or the American marketplace? It's still that same sort of pay to play a hundred percent.

In most marketplaces. Yeah. France and Germany, there is a little bit, and I do know people who have, are doing this very much on the cheap 'cause they don't have an ad budget. Mm-hmm. And I always say to them, do France and Germany first. Mm-hmm. Make some profit, develop an ad budget, and then try Italy. Yeah.

Um, because Italy you can get very cheap ad clicks. It's very easy to get your money back in Italy very quickly. Good. Um, like I'm talking two or 3 cents for a Facebook ad. Click. Yeah. And if you run Facebook ads to the US or, you know, you probably just fainted at that number because it's you, you've gotta spend 10 times that to get a result.

Yes. But yeah, you can get two or 3 cent ad clicks in Italy and in Spain. Yeah. And but yeah, you can break even in France or Germany very quickly. I'm talking in a month or two months without doing anything at all. Especially if you've got a series and you get read through. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of, like you were saying, the first free in series if you're wide, which is what I always do with my books, so that works the same very legitimate strategy.

Now, I can't say that it works in all markets because I dunno for sure. Yeah. But, um. I have co-written a series recently with Ebony Oton, and we are just launching a free prequel novella to all to the, the series in all the languages and putting it up wide and free everywhere. Now the rest of the series is in Kindle Unlimited, everywhere except Dutch, but, so we don't know if that's gonna get us any more page reads, but that's a wait and see.

That's the, that's the question we'll answer. And we may end up pulling the series out of KU and taking them wide at some point as well. So, because Amazon does not have the market share. In most countries that it does in the English speaking world. Mm. It really doesn't. Yeah. And I'm gonna quantify that with, except in Brazil.

Yeah. In Brazil, everyone seems to read eBooks in Kindle Unlimited. Yeah. But. At the same time, Amazon don't sell the paperbacks in Brazil, so you have to have your paperbacks widen it, it it gets complicated really quickly and you can end up uploading them to 500 different places and only making money on three of them.

Yeah. So it is a matter of choosing where to concentrate your effort. Yeah, don't spread yourself too thin. My, uh, my Brigadier station series was picked up by the Portuguese publisher, Liba. Yes. I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. Um, but that's been published in Portuguese for eight years, I guess, something like that.

And it's never really been strong. I think if I'd done it myself, I would've changed the covers and certain things like that. But again, it's. I went with them because I didn't know the first thing about publishing in Portuguese for Brazil. So, and it would've cost you a fortune to get that translation done.

Oh, absolutely. Even, even though, I mean, Portuguese is one of the cheaper languages just because the cost of living in Brazil is a lot lower than it is in Germany, for example. It would still have cost you thousands Yeah. To do that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's a hefty investment for something. You dunno if it's gonna pay out.

No, exactly. And, and it was certainly the same thing a few years ago when I looked into this and it was like, oh, I'll just wait. Technology's moving so quickly. AI was starting to make all these noises. No, I'll just wait. So, um, under your advice, I've put, um, my Brigadier Station series and a few of my other authors into German.

They've just been in KU again. I haven't had time to think about marketing. And so they're just kind of sitting there, not doing an awful lot. I mean, are you getting some organic reads? They're doing some, yeah. I mean, not translation. I put my entire backlist into seven languages for less than I'd have paid to do one book in German on those original quotes.

Yeah, absolutely. That is phenomenal. That is phenomenal. Yeah. Um, and I, I have seen, you know, a pretty big return from it. Yeah, no, that is absolutely fantastic. So I can't wait to read your book. That's gonna have as UpToDate as it can possibly be. Some of this stuff might have changed. I was, I was revising it the day before publishing, because a new law came into effect in the EU on June the 28th.

Wow. About having to have alt text in any images in books. Oh, any quote, informative images in books. So it doesn't really apply too much to fiction. Mm-hmm. But if you have something like a family tree or a map, you have to include that in your eu in your book, if it's being published in the eu. Oh, wow. And technically that means even if it's in English being published through the amazon.com market, if someone in France can buy it, it has to include those legally.

Yeah, so that's that. And that was a big thing. 'cause I'm like, if you're publishing to one of those primary markets, you really do need to include that. And I say it doesn't apply to a lot of fiction. A lot of the time you're just like, well, I don't have any informative images, so it's fine. You don't have to worry about it.

But it is a legal requirement. I have seen that little box now. Just popped up a week or two ago, uh, on Amazon. I'm like, oh, okay. There's another one. Yeah. If you've only got things like chapter headers or decorative page breaks, it's fine. You can tick that. All my informative images have all text.

Because they do. Yeah. And your cover also has al text technically, because anywhere they're gonna see your cover, they can also see your title page. Or the book listing on, on the ebook retailer where the title and your name are in there. So it, it has it in what they call nearby. Yeah, absolutely.

Which is fine. But yeah. And decorative chapter images and those sorts of things, they're fine. But if you've got a family tree or a map, which a lot of fantasy people have or mm-hmm. Even images of your characters. Plenty of people have, character images in their book. You need to include the alt text description for that.

Yeah, absolutely. So was this the first nonfiction book that you've written? Yes. I have written a couple of, I, I wrote a couple of other guides. I wrote a couple of a O three guides to about publishing fanfic and those sort of things back in the day. Yeah. But it's the first full length nonfiction I've written, and I'm not sure I'll do another one because that was hard work.

And I can also see that it's gonna get outdated really quickly. So I'm gonna have to be doing second edition, third edition like every, probably every six months. Yeah. Right. Which. Yeah, I, I dunno how long I'll keep it up for. That is a lot of work. It's a lot of work. You're prolific. Just how many books have you published?

More than 60, more than, um, it kind of depends how you count them because some they are fairly short novellas and I'd sort of group them into, you know, a three to call 'em a real book. Yeah. I've also published, um, anthology collections, right? Again, back in the day I was, I was one of the first sort of fanfic people in my circle to start publishing original and people like, oh, how do you do it?

So I ran a few Anth themed anthologies and said, well, I'll act as the publisher, but we're gonna walk through all this together. And yeah, so several of those which are no longer available. And so, but yeah, 60 plus. 60 plus is a real number. That's incredible. And then you multiply that by six other languages and it becomes over 300.

Yes. That's so, so I think there's 360 books on my Amazon dashboard reporting these days. Oh wow. That's incredible. It's a lot. A lot to keep track of. I love the One book Multiple Products Foundation. Mm. This is, this is what I run my business on. One book. You do it in paperback, ebook translations and all these different languages.

Audio book narrations. There's another one you can, yeah. Special editions, box sets, anthologies, all of these sorts of things. And it's just, I love this about books that it's such a passive income. You can make so much money off a story that you write once and yes, it's just amazing. Is is that always been a business plan of yours to, to do it that way?

Or is it just kind of, it's evolved into that, um.

Honestly last year when I started translations. Yeah. I'd always tried to get, you know, I'd always done the paperback as well as the ebook. 'cause it doesn't really cost you anything if you use it, free ISBN and published through Amazon. Mm-hmm. And that is always a trickle of sales, but it might be three or 4% of your income in the English language market.

Yeah. Definitely do paperbacks in Europe, because in France it's about 14% of my income really, and France is the highest one. But everyone else, even in Brazil, I still sell those Brazilian paperbacks actually through the US store mainly. Oh, wow. Despite the fact that you, you know, Amazon don't publish paperbacks in Brazil, the last series, it's, more than a hundred dollars profit just for the effort of publishing them.

Yeah. Wow. Now. It can get expensive if you're not doing your own cover art, and I am primarily my own cover artist as I know you are. Mm-hmm. If you're having to pay a cover artist, or your cover artist doesn't want to play ball mm-hmm. To change the text on them, it can get expensive and that you might think twice about it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's some of those shelves up behind me there. That one on the left is all French language, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian. I haven't any of the Dutch ones yet, but they're, they're on order. They're coming soon. They'll be on the shelf for them. Yeah. So, and that is a really nice sort of tangible reminder, but.

As you said, it's a business. Mm-hmm. If you're not treating your writing as a business, that's okay. It's totally okay for your writing to be a hobby. Mine was a hobby for 30 plus years. And that's fine. It's lovely. But if you want this to be an income stream, or in my case, my day job, you've got to treat this as a business, and that means maximizing your return from every product that you make.

Mm-hmm. Um, if you're a graphic designer, you might make stickers. T-shirts, mugs I don't know. I dunno enough about graphic design to know that, but print or whatever, there's lots of different ways that you can make one product pay you. And that's the same for books. Yeah.

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And of course you don't just do it with your books, you're also doing it with your voice. You are a narrator as well. Yes, but I'm also gonna say a lot less than I used to be because AI stole that stole my job there. Absolutely. Yeah. So the minute Amazon virtual voice launched to the US 'cause we only just got it here in Australia very recently.

My work totally fell off a cliff. That's great. I was doing two to three books a month. Mm-hmm. Back in sort of 20, 20, 21, 21, 22, and by the middle of 23, it had gone down to one book every three months. Mm. Mm-hmm. And I had regular clients who just sort of tapered off and then I'd see that they had a virtual voice book, and that's their choice.

And I'm not gonna get on there and yell and scream about it. But AI definitely stole that job. Yeah. Yeah. So I can really, and I really only narrate some of my own now and honestly, only the ones that I think are going to pay me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And now you'll have to learn all these other languages so that you can narrate them and Dutch and Yeah.

Honestly, I dunno. I dunno where that's going to go. I really don't. There are very few narrators in those languages anyway, professionally. They're all working for all the big publishers. Mm-hmm. I suspect we're going to see an awful lot of AI narration there and I have not touched that as of yet.

Yeah. I still have some lingering, um, resentment probably, but I'm probably gonna have to get over myself and start doing it. Because I think again, it's a business. Yeah. And I have to get past my emotional response and start saying, this is a business. Yeah. This is a business and that's money that I'm leaving on the table.

Um. Again, I want to turn out a quality product. Mm-hmm. Um, I don't wanna push the generate me a virtual voice book in Amazon and just say go. Yeah. I would probably look at using something like, I think it's 11 labs. Mm-hmm. You can choose multiple voices. You can create a multicast narration, you can do quality control on that.

Mm-hmm. As an audiobook narrator, I know how time consuming that's gonna be. Yeah. Just to put all of that together. Yeah. And I honestly think my time is better. Spel spent elsewhere at the moment. Yeah. I have looked into 11 labs and you can't upload them to Audible, so No. Yes. But again certainly for my own audio books, I found that I was making way more money off YouTube than I ever did on any other source.

Yeah. So I would probably be looking YouTube and Spotify. To monetize those rather than Audible or any of the other places where you, a lot of them you can't upload. Um, ai, audiobooks, some you can. Mm-hmm. But I don't think they're big monetary markets yet. I think Spotify and YouTube will be where that takes off.

And I do know people who are starting on YouTube. Um. Are finding it doing quite well in some languages. Um, again, funny enough, Brazilian, Portuguese. Yeah.

And they don't have a ton of necessarily perhaps free spending cash. So YouTube, which is free as long as you're willing to pay, put up with some ads Yep. Is a place where they do look for audio books. Yeah. That's a wealth of information that's so helpful for people who are coming into this and just going, well, I don't know.

Isn't, aren't we supposed to stick with Amazon? Easy.

I am busy and I have a ton of books and monitoring all this stuff. And the other thing with Amazon is you get real time reporting. It's making me very nervous with the Dutch stuff at the moment 'cause I have no idea how much money I'm making and I'm, I'm pouring $5 a day into Dutch ads. Yeah.

And I'm seeing about $20 a week. Return from Cobo Sales, but I have no idea. I think there's more sales that might be reported through draft to digital and Google Play and Cobo Plus. But I don't know. And I don't even know when, I'll find out. It might be two months. So I sort of have to pour this cash into the void and cross my fingers.

And that's very scary. Yes, very scary. At least with Kindle Limited, I can see in two or three days. Are people actually picking up the book and reading it? Yeah. Yeah. And that, that real time reporting is, is quite comforting. Yeah. So I fully get it, especially at the beginning. Um, you know, if you're putting your books in kind unlimit and they're making money, great.

Mm-hmm. Keep, keep doing that. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So one of the other things you mentioned is that you've been co-writing a series with another author. How long have you been doing that for now? Ebony and I have been friends for years. We have always run the indie bookshop at the Romance Writers of Australia conference and had a ball doing that, living out a frustrated bookshop owner fantasy for one weekend and then going home going, oh, that was too much people.

But Ebony has also run for several years mostly regency themed anthologies. And I have participated in those for years and thoroughly enjoyed it. But I also know how hard work it is. 'cause I ran those anthologies myself, as I said earlier. And it is, there's a certain amount of herding cats going on and some people don't pull their weight or they deliver their story later.

It's not well edited. And you think, oh God, is this good enough to include? Do we have to be rude here? Yeah. And some people don't pull their marketing weight and they never share, even on social media, they never talk about it. And it's like, come on guys. Something. So last year at conference, Ebony and I were talking and I said to her, you and me should just co-write a series together.

Yeah. And she went, that's a brilliant idea. And she pretty much went away and she went and looked up on Publisher Rocket, something about, and she came back and went, let's write series set in a bookshop. And I went, that sounds like fun. And over the next month we brainstormed it and then we sat down and wrote full books in six months together.

Awesome. Wow. Her writing, I would write a thousand words and then she'd write a thousand words. Yeah. And we had a huge plot sheet, which we had worked out together where we knew everything that was gonna happen. Mm-hmm. So we didn't have to go, oh, I wonder where she's going with this. We knew what was, what had to happen next.

So we could sort of say, um, occasionally I'd be like, how were you gonna transition that into this? And she went, actually, I got a bit distracted. Let's just, let's just cut that bit. Carried away with what was going on then. Okay, fine. And yeah, we, we wrote four, four books in six months and we always planned from the beginning to launch them in six languages.

Wow. We did it in a way that was entirely insane, which was we launched Book one on a Monday and then in German on Tuesday and in French and on Wednesday and Italian on Thursday, and carry on like that. And then book two launched the following Monday. So we had 24 book launches in 28 days. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. I can see. You're just thinking. Oh, I know. And it was to some extent madness. But we did preload everything and we did a lot of pre-orders. And even that in and of itself was quite stressful. But yet we preloaded, pre-ordered everything, set it all up. Um, and we didn't launch ads until book four was out in all the languages and it took off like a rocket.

Excellent. Like in some language in French, we were getting 11 times the return on our ad spend. Wow. For some weeks there, it's still, we're still getting four times return on our ad spend in most. I've just looked at Italian and be like, oh, it's only twice. I'm offended by that. And one has started tweaking the ads.

Just phenomenal numbers phenomenal numbers. And I dunno if it's, whether we. Hit a chord with the book. A lot of people in English have said, this is really good. This is really what I needed it. It's, you know, it's gentle, but it's honest and there's really, awkward things that happen and difficult things, but it's, at the same time, it's not painful and stressful.

Yes. The world is painful and stressful enough. Yes. So what is this? Yeah I, I think we hit a chord. It's called The Bookshop Bells. The Bookshop Bells, and it's about four, four sisters who are left to run their family bookshop in Hartfordshire in 1815 when their father goes on a book buying trip to France because he's heard about books being pulled out of chats and burned, and he's just like, he's like, I have to go rescue the books.

And the free prequel we've actually written is his adventures in France where he falls in love and, and falls in love as well. But these four sisters are sort of left behind to manage this bookshop. Um. In an area where women didn't really do that kinda thing. Yeah. It was respectable for them to help their father in his business.

But running the business themselves was a bit, dunno about that. And they've got a cousin who's sort of trying to get their father declared dead so that he can take the bookshop because it would rightfully revert to him. Right. And he's just being a bit of AD throughout the whole process. So they've deal with him, they've an arson trying to.

Half the town down, including the bookshop. Yeah. They've gotta deal with demanding customers who think they're dealing with their father and a bit offended with when a woman turns up with a box full of books. Yes. Oh, fantastic. And all sorts of other, other little things. And we gave each sister her own story with a sort of satisfying conclusion.

And in the back of all this, there's their father who's not come home from France and they're worried about him. Mm-hmm. And their cousin trying to take the bookshop. So there's sort of this overarching story arc, which we do resolve nicely at the end of book four. Yeah. And that sort of, I think, really encouraged people to keep reading through.

And we've had tremendous read through our stats show that if people. Finish book one, they're 60% likely to read through to the end of book four. Oh wow. That's amazing. That's in Great. That is phenomenal. Read through, phenomenal read through for the series. We are very, very happy about that. Oh, that is thrilling.

Well, where can we go and check out all of your books and all your back catalogs and all your translations? The best place to go now that I have spent all week fixing the website is actually my website Shenanigans Press. Shenanigans press, so shenanigans press.com and on the the front page in there you will see a bunch of little flags.

So click the English one if you're reading in English, and then it will take you by genre and you can select your historical romance, contemporary, my paranormal, and all those different things. So yeah, that's the best place to go to find out about all my books and all my current books. And you can. See what I'm up to in other languages as well.

Absolutely. And of course you are coming to the Sunshine Coast Fiction Festival, which is a proud so podcast. I'm so excited, so excited that you just get to drive there. I know. I sleep my own bed, which is quite nice. So, yeah, we are absolutely thrilled and so excited to see you there, and I can't wait to see your amazing display of all, of all the books that you bring.

I'm sure you're not gonna bring all your books with I No, no. I, I'll do pre-orders for some of sort of the, the older stock ones. But I will be bringing current lots of current stock and a couple of special editions, which I've been doing. So I'm quite excited about those. So yeah. Yes, you have beautiful special editions.

I know it's gonna be a weekend full of special editions and I know I'm de I'm going with more books than I take with Exactly. I've been putting off all these authors, I'm like, I'll be buying that. In March door. I'll be buying that at S CFFs. So thank you very much. So, well, thank you so much for talking to me today.

I am sure we could just go rambling on for hours and hours. I will definitely get you back and we will continue these conversations, but I really hope that the person listening has been inspired by what we've talked about today and your. Great wealth of knowledge and I am so grateful to have you as one of my close friends that I can call on for all my bookish problems.

You too. You say you're inspired by me and I am very inspired by you and, and honestly, your business approach it. It's something that's made me take a look at my business approach and go, Hey, I need to start treating this more like a business and you know, be more businesslike and less. Scatty Scatty probably very good word to describe me generally.

And, and, and it's, it's paying off. It's really paying off. So, yeah, it's, thank you. Oh, thank you. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed and were inspired by my chat with Catherine today. We have loads of other topics we could have covered and she is just a wealth of knowledge.

Thank you for taking the time to join us and please subscribe to the show. So I know that you want more of these insightful conversations. Until next time, my friend, keep writing, keep showing up because your stories matter and you are something powerful.