We Make Books Podcast

Hi everyone, and thank you for listening to Introductory Episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between!

We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves.

In this kick off episode, Rekka and Kaelyn take a few minutes to introduce themselves, talk about their vision for the podcast, and tell the story of how each of them ended up here.

We Make Books is a podcast for writer and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and any theories you may have about “The Rise of Skywalker”.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to this introduction, the first batch of new episodes drops on May 14th, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.

A transcription of this episode can be found below.

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap

Instagram: @WMBCast 

Patreon.com/WMBCast

=== Transcript ===

Music: 00:07 [Music]

Rekka: 00:07 Yeah I'm ready are you ready?

Kaelyn: 00:07 No, but let's do it anyway.

Rekka: 00:07 Fist bump, we can do anything.

Rekka: 00:16 All right. Inauguraguh-gull [stumbles and laughs]

Kaelyn: 00:23 God, we publish books. [laughter]

Rekka: 00:25 We don't read them out loud though, that's not our job.

Kaelyn: 00:27 That's a good point. Yeah. Inaugural episode.

Rekka: 00:31 I'm gonna leave that to you to say.

Kaelyn: 00:32 Okay. It's not actually the inaugural though.

Rekka: 00:37 Mine doesn't count. I was alone.

Kaelyn: 00:39 No but I mean it's the intro.

Rekka: 00:41 Oh, fair.

Kaelyn: 00:41 So, all right, let's just get started and we'll, we'll see how

Rekka: 00:46 We'll see how it goes and whether this ends up the episode nobody ever hears.

Kaelyn: 00:51 The black file, we're going to have to start one of those.

Rekka: 00:54 Exactly. That's what Patreon's for.

Kaelyn: 00:55 Yeah. Yeah. Are you already recording this?

Rekka: 00:59 Mm-hmm.

Kaelyn: 00:59 Okay.

Rekka: 00:59 I have been. Of course I have, this was, this was the deal. [laughter]

Kaelyn: 01:02 [laughter] Okay. So, hello everyone listening and welcome to the introductory episode of the We Make Books podcast. My name's Kaelyn Considine--

Rekka: 01:15 And I'm Rekka Jay.

Kaelyn: 01:16 --and we both make books. Um, I work for Parvus Press, which is an independent publishing company, as their acquisitions editor and also editor of various books that we publish and...

Rekka: 01:31 ...and Rekka Jay writes science fiction as R. J. Theodore and I happen to also be published through Parvus Press. A little bit of nepotism here. That's fine.

Kaelyn: 01:42 No, it's just, we're just lucky that we got to publish some of your amazing books. One out, another two coming.

Rekka: 01:48 Yes that's true.

Kaelyn: 01:48 We know it. We definitely know how lucky we are. Um, so Rekka, why don't you go ahead and get us started with what we're doing here?

Rekka: 02:00 Well, I mean we, are we starting into the backstory? Is this the origin story of We Make Books?

Kaelyn: 02:05 No, we'll save that for once we've got them hooked, I think.

Rekka: 02:08 Okay.

Kaelyn: 02:09 Yeah.

Rekka: 02:09 We want them to already think they found something of value.

Kaelyn: 02:11 Yeah, no, we're gonna--we're gonna save that for after we [laughter]

Rekka: 02:16 So, We Make Books as a concept is something that, I mean really, it should already exist.

Kaelyn: 02:24 It should. I was, we were actually both very surprised that it didn't

Rekka: 02:29 and we were looking, we didn't we weren't taking this lightly

Kaelyn: 02:32 --we looked, yeah, we--we spent quite an amount of time looking

Rekka: 02:34 We were looking for a reason to say, oh never mind, someone's already got it covered, we don't need to do this.

Kaelyn: 02:38 So what we wanted to do here is I work on the publishing side. Rekka works on the writing side of making books, but both of us are crucial and essential to the process of making a book. Um, however, there is not much out there that discusses not just the writing process but also what goes into actually creating and publishing books. So as you said, we really looked, we found a couple of things that weren't quite ...

Rekka: 03:08 Tried to approach it

Kaelyn: 03:09 yeah, and weren't quite what we thought we wanted to do. So our goal here is we want to talk about the writing, publishing process from both sides of it. Um...

Rekka: 03:25 as a creative, I am someone who comes up with a story and I'm so involved in the story that when I come up for air, I finished my draft, I could be completely lost then. I have this, I have this chunk of paper that I printed at staples. Like what do I do with it?

Kaelyn: 03:42 And I on the other hand, am the one that gets the chunk of paper that has been printed at Staples, although, okay. I mean–

Rekka: 03:47 yeah, we're dating ourselves. There's no paper involved at all.

Kaelyn: 03:50 Well, I'm still shocked that you actually print these things out.

Rekka: 03:54 That's another episode.

Kaelyn: 03:55 Yeah, that's another episode. But um, no, I get electronic submissions, thank God, because I couldn't even imagine. Um, what we're looking to do here is to kind of walk people through that. And our mission statement, if you will, with this was we want to be accessible. We want to not be, you know, kind of ratchet down the intimidation factor that goes into this. And we want this to be fun and we want it to be engaging and interactive and we want to hear from the people listening to it. Because as we were talking about this podcast and what it was going to be about, we realized, you know, both of us from when we started doing this, like you're hearing words you never heard before or like words used in completely not the context that you're used to hearing them. And it's like, what is that? And in some cases you're like embarrassed to ask–

Rekka: 04:41 right, cause you think you're the only one in the room who doesn't know.

Kaelyn: 04:43 Like, "Oh my God, I don't know what that is." Um, when the first time I kept hearing the word 'ARC,' I was like, well, what, what is an ARC? And like I already knew what advanced reader copy was. I just had never heard it abbreviated to the word

Rekka: 04:55 And then spoken out loud.

Kaelyn: 04:56 Yeah. To the word ARC. So, um, yeah. And then you're like, you're afraid to ask because you're like, "Oh God, should I already know this? Like everyone's gonna think I'm an idiot."

Rekka: 05:04 Right.

Kaelyn: 05:04 Um, so two facets. One of course, you know, kind of pull back the curtain a little bit, see what's going on, but then also open everything up to 'here's what is happening, here's how a book gets made. And here are the people that are involved in making it.' Um, you know, we're going to go through the whole process, not linearly. We're going to jump around a bit.

Rekka: 05:28 Right.

Kaelyn: 05:29 we'll have some guests on where appropriate. Um, and we're really looking forward to interacting and engaging with everyone

Rekka: 05:35 Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of this, like we want to talk to each other. We also want to talk to the people who are listening and who have questions because unfortunately there's no way to rewind and remember what I didn't know at the time. So there's–

Kaelyn: 05:51 I've got a list actually. [laughter]

Rekka: 05:54 You've got a list of what I didn't know at the time? [laughter]

Kaelyn: 05:56 No! Well you you too. But now I've got a list of like, every now and then I'll hear a word and it's like I'll have a flashback to like the panic attack I had when I was like, Oh God, what's that?

Rekka: 06:03 Sure. There's, there's some things that we very vividly remember not knowing–

Kaelyn: 06:07 [laughter] Yes.

Rekka: 06:07 –And being worried about, but you know, sometimes it's like you learn these things as you go and you learn them in an organic sense. There's not a book that's going to teach you.

Kaelyn: 06:17 Well, there isn't a resource.

Rekka: 06:19 Right.

Kaelyn: 06:19 And that was even something that I was looking up online and I think in, I mean, you can speak more to this than I can, but like how did you figure, you know,

Rekka: 06:28 Did I figure it out?

Kaelyn: 06:30 Going online and digging around different websites that say things is not necessarily the most cohesive or really in some cases helpful way.

Rekka: 06:41 I mean, the, the advice is not to diagnose yourself using Web MD. And I mean, that applies to everything. It's just a little bit more critical when it comes to whether or not you have cancer. [Laughter] But, um, by the way, when MD says you do

Kaelyn: 06:53 You always have cancer.

Rekka: 06:55 It's always cancer. Um, so when people go to the Internet to find information, sometimes they stop with the first source. Sometimes they stop when they find the source that tells them what they wanted to hear. Other times they never find the answer and they give up and go home frustrated. And some of it's just like, there's a term for that and you don't know it yet. That's okay. We're happy to explain it to you. It's not a forbidden knowledge, but it's like you have to know the right search term.

Kaelyn: 07:23 Yeah. Um, so you know, when we kind of sat down and wrote out, you know what we're going to go over in this introductory episode is what this podcast is, which I think we just kind of talked about a little bit. You know, this is conversations between both quote-unquote sides of the publishing world, which I'm going to try not to make it sound like it's sides because I really, something I really want to emphasize here is everyone's a team. They're just doing different things. Um–

Rekka: 07:50 It really is a symbiosis.

Kaelyn: 07:51 It is. It is. And we're gonna talk a lot about that. Um, because I think that is one of the major misconceptions a lot of people coming into this have, is the sort of like, and you know, I'm coming from the publishing side, so I will say there is this, like "it's me and the publishers."

Rekka: 08:09 It's, you know, "me, the writer and how do I protect my book against what the publisher's going to try to do to it by default."

Kaelyn: 08:15 Yes. Yeah. And I'd really like to kind of work a little towards dispelling that because that's, that should not be what's, what's happening here. But at the same time, we also want to kind of quickly say what this is not going to be.

Rekka: 08:28 It's not all the answers.

Kaelyn: 08:29 It's not all the answers.

Rekka: 08:32 We don't have them.

Kaelyn: 08:33 We have some, some answers, but it's also, it's not a roadmap. This is not, "do all of these things in your book will get published" because as we're going to talk about, there's so many factors that go into whether or not a book gets picked up by someone and that's a later episode, believe me, we will have a lot to say about that. But ...

Rekka: 08:53 I mean we are coming at this from two individual human consciousnesses, in two individual bodies and so we can't say this is what a publisher at XYZ Publishing House is going to agree with, but there's an insight that we can give you from having been through it and knowing what has worked or not worked from the process. And then of course, as we said, we'll bring in guests if we don't know the answer to a question that has come up on our outline for our topics or um, you know, listener questions, which we hope you'll engage with us–

Kaelyn: 09:34 We're really, we're really counting on that. And we're very much looking forward to that. We really want to hear about people who are either dipping their toe in the water or people who are well into it and you know, please feel free to send us anything or even a like, "I wish I had known."

Rekka: 09:49 Yes.

Kaelyn: 09:49 Um, those are, those are great. So anyway, that's, um, that's what this is. That's, that's where this is going and we're really excited to do this. Again, we were shocked–

Rekka: 10:01 Yeah.

Kaelyn: 10:01 Shocked that that didn't already exist

Rekka: 10:03 And the closest things that came to it sort of existed for like 10 or 15 episodes and then went away or were college projects and stuff.

Kaelyn: 10:12 Or it was a very specific thing that it was doing. And it wasn't like a broad appeal to a lot of a lot of people.

Rekka: 10:20 And again, we're genre fiction.

Kaelyn: 10:22 Yes.

Rekka: 10:22 One of the ones we found was all very nonfiction focused.

Kaelyn: 10:25 Yeah. So that's another qualifier. This is most, this is genre. This is fiction. It's, um, but you know, some of this advice, no matter what is going to apply across the board.

Rekka: 10:36 Mm-hmm

Kaelyn: 10:36 But that's, you know, that's where we're coming from. But I think it'll be entertaining and educational regardless.

Rekka: 10:43 Yes.

Kaelyn: 10:43 Even if it's just one of those, "Oh I always wanted to write a book."

Rekka: 10:47 Or if you're at the other end of this and you're going, you know, just commiserating like, "oh yeah, I remember when I learned that one."

Kaelyn: 10:53 I mean, yeah. So, so that's, that's what we're aiming to do here. Um, I mean how, how are we on time right now? Do we want to hear the story?

Rekka: 11:01 I mean we might as well tell the story.

Kaelyn: 11:03 We'll tell the story. Okay, cause this is, this is the story of how all of this started. Um, I was out one night with some friends and one of them brought a new boyfriend around and um, you know, he was, he was good. He was trying to talk to everyone and trying to be friendly and we were just talking and you know, of course, as soon as I tell people, "oh yeah, I work in publishing and I publish books, I'm an editor" without fail, the first thing I always get is "I've always wanted to write a book."

Rekka: 11:31 You kind of say what you are and then you go to your happy place for a moment.

Kaelyn: 11:34 No, you know, it's fine, you know what, honestly, because whenever people always say, 'Oh, I've always wanted to write a book', my response is, 'So do it'.

Rekka: 11:40 Yup.

Kaelyn: 11:40 Give it a shot. Maybe don't, you don't have to finish. Just, you know, see how it goes. Um, but he didn't say that. He said, "you know, I always think if I wrote a book, I wouldn't even know where to start with it."

Rekka: 11:53 Mmm

Kaelyn: 11:53 And I said, "writing the book?" And he said, "no, like, assume I wrote it. I don't know what to do then." And he asked, "so what do I do?" And I was like, "well, there's this," there's, you know, and I'm bullet pointing all of these steps. And then I'm going back and going, like, I will qualify, we were at a bar and I'd had a couple of beers at this point and I'm– and he was like, "wow, that's, how do you like figure this out?" And I'm like, "you know, I don't know."

Rekka: 12:17 [laughter]

Kaelyn: 12:17 Um, you know, so we were just kind of sitting at the bar and like I just had my phone out, I punched, you know, 'book publishing steps' or something into Google and um, there was nothing. And he was like, well, "how'd you figure all this out?" I was like, "I learned along the way, that's how you do this." So I went home that night and I had this like reeling through my head and I sat down and I got a piece of paper out and I, I won't say drunkenly but–

Rekka: 12:47 It was legible. I saw the papers.

Kaelyn: 12:48 It was legible. Yeah, slightly intoxicated-ly wrote down all of this stuff of just like, okay, so there's the submissions process and then a bunch of steps about that. Then there's acquisitions, a bunch of stuff about that. Talking about things like royalties, what are they and how do they work, you know, rights, like things like that. And then the next morning I woke up and I was like, you know, this is actually kind of useful. Like this isn't like my usual woke up in the morning and find something that I did. [laughter] "What if birds had balloons attached to them so they don't get tired?"

Rekka: 13:22 Aw, see you're helpful.

Kaelyn: 13:23 Yeah.

Rekka: 13:24 You just really want to help everybody.

Kaelyn: 13:25 Yeah. But then I was thinking like the balloons pop, it's going to choke the bird

Rekka: 13:29 And the sea turtles.

Kaelyn: 13:31 And the sea turtles.

Rekka: 13:31 The turtles are going to start choking on balloons.

Kaelyn: 13:33 Yeah.

Rekka: 13:34 And birds. We don't like this future.

Kaelyn: 13:35 So I was like, well this one's actually kind of useful. So I went to some of my colleagues at my publishing company and I talked about, you know, what if we did like a limited series podcast about this? And for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with time, this just wasn't going to work. But then I was talking to Rekka about it.

Rekka: 13:51 Well you put the bug in the ear of someone at your publishing house.

Kaelyn: 13:54 Yes.

Rekka: 13:55 Who knew that I had recently found myself without a cohost.

Kaelyn: 14:01 Well wait, maybe, maybe you should backtrack and explain a little of like your history with podcasting and where you're coming from.

Rekka: 14:07 Um, well I got into, I was working on a book and I knew that I am an impatient person.

Kaelyn: 14:17 No, see "impatient" has negative connotations.

Rekka: 14:19 But, these are negative connotations that I'm speaking of.

Kaelyn: 14:23 No, you're like, enthusiastic, excited, and you get shit done.

Rekka: 14:26 Fair. I accept. Thank you.

Kaelyn: 14:29 [Laughter]

Rekka: 14:29 So for those reasons, those very wonderful reasons, um, I knew that I was not interested in entering whatever my draft became into the grinder of 10 years of submitting it to agents and 10 more years of submitting it to publishers because you know, there, there was this impression of how you get a book published is by basically waiting and crying a lot. And that's something we're going to talk about.

Kaelyn: 14:57 We are, yeah. That's going to be the title of the episode, "waiting and crying."

Rekka: 15:03 [Laughter] And so I um, and now it's not going to be because you declared it.

Kaelyn: 15:07 No, no, no. I know or will we throw them for a loop and it is? Always play with their minds.

Rekka: 15:15 The thing is, the listener already knows, but we don't know, cause the listener's from the future--

Kaelyn: 15:20 That's a good point.

Rekka: 15:21 --where we've already titled and released the episode [sings: "A paradox, a paradox..."] Okay. So I started listening to self publishing podcasts because I said, "Okay, well I'm just going to self publish this." When I started writing my story, self publishing wasn't even a thing. Vanity press was barely a thing.

Kaelyn: 15:36 Okay.

Rekka: 15:36 There was no kindle.

Kaelyn: 15:38 Yeah.

Rekka: 15:39 That, that makes a big difference.

Kaelyn: 15:40 Yeah, 10 years ago. Yeah, that's...

Rekka: 15:44 Um, well, HA! I appreciate that. Thanks. 14 years ago.

Kaelyn: 15:48 Okay. [Laughter]

Rekka: 15:48 Uh, actually, um, the original incarnation of my book, um, was begun in 2003. It was a graphic novel.

Kaelyn: 15:58 For those who are listening right now, Rekka has taken a book off the shelf and is showing it to me, it is some impressive artwork.

Rekka: 16:05 And it's a lot. And I got 90 pages into it before I nearly destroyed my wrist. So, um, so at one point I said, "I need to take a break". And then at that point I, I, I knew it needed structural changes and then I was like, "Well, what else can I do to it?" And so, um, apparently the answer to that was eventually write it as a novel instead of drawing it because writing doesn't hurt so bad. So, um–

Kaelyn: 16:27 Little did you know!

Rekka: 16:28 Little did I—well, no, it hurts in new ways, but my wrist is fine. And, um, so I started listening to self publishing podcasts to learn how you go about doing that thing when the draft is done. Because like we said, you figure it out. And I knew that I would have to figure it out and I knew that if I started collecting knowledge in the moments, you know, while I was driving and I couldn't be writing that I was, you know, getting ahead a little bit. So that was sort of my introduction into publishing. And um, there's a, I don't know if you're aware of this: self publishing folk have a bit of a bias against publishers.

Kaelyn: 17:03 Yes, I know that. Um. [Laughter]

Rekka: 17:04 Okay. So when I, when I finally decided that I was going to submit this, it felt like a morality choice

Kaelyn: 17:14 [Laughter] God.

Rekka: 17:14 You know, we talked about we don't want to talk about sides. It felt like I was saying a line like,

Kaelyn: 17:19 Do I go over to the dark side?

Rekka: 17:22 You know, do I want to be the scab that goes and takes all the knowledge that she learned about self publishing and takes it to the traditional like, skeleton-basically-gasping-for-breath-side because of the impression I had. Um, and around the same time I was listening to podcasts and interviews and I had a friend who was also into writing though, not at a pace that matched mine, but we were having a conversation and we listened to the same podcasts. So while we were listening to one podcast about how podcasting might help with grow your audience as a writer, I got a text and it said, "so when are you going to start a podcast?" And I said, "I don't know, when do you want to do it?"

Kaelyn: 18:04 [Laughter]

Rekka: 18:04 So that's how I got into my first podcast and hybrid author podcast. And I started with a cohost and we recorded for a year and change before that, uh, cohost started a new job and lost all the free time that he had. So then I was on my own,

Kaelyn: 18:20 [Sympathetic noise] Lost to the, to the waste of productivity.

Rekka: 18:23 Yes. And so there I was by myself and I was not really sure how to continue the podcast. And Colin from Parvus, the publisher at Parvus, uh, called me up and said, "You know, this is the same thing you're doing on Youtube." And I'm like, "Yeah, it is." He's like, "You need a cohost." And I was like, "Yeah, I know." He's like, "So what you do is–" and I'm like, "Thanks, Colin. Thank you for the unsolicited advice, you are a dear person.

Kaelyn: 18:47 I was gonna say did he call you up just to tell you this? Or I'm assuming there was another purpose to the conversation.

Rekka: 18:51 I think did some kind of title layout. Um, there's always a pretense for the phone call and then we get into something,

Kaelyn: 18:57 Well, you know.

Rekka: 18:59 So, uh, he mentioned offhand that the editor at Parvus that I knew from, um, a couple of author conferences and other events–

Kaelyn: 19:10 Various things.

Rekka: 19:11 –we'd interacted on a light level, you know, um, that you wanted to start a podcast.

Kaelyn: 19:16 Let me rephrase that. I kept threatening that our publishing company should do a podcast. Here's the thing, I didn't necessarily want to be on it that much. Um,

Rekka: 19:27 [Cackle] You do know when you share the idea, you own the idea. Unless it's a really good idea, then it's someone else's idea.

Kaelyn: 19:32 Yeah, yeah. Then it's someone else's idea.

Rekka: 19:33 So knowing this was a bad idea, they said, "All right, Kaelyn, go for it."

Kaelyn: 19:36 Yeah, no, I mean we're pretty good at Parvus that it's like, "all right, you know, are you, are you interested in that? You want to, you want to tackle that? Go for it. We'll give you whatever help and support, you know, from your fellow Parvus people as, uh, as–"

Rekka: 19:48 They'll come on and appears guests and such.

Kaelyn: 19:51 Um, yeah, so I didn't really necessarily want to do the podcast. I just thought it was a good idea.

Rekka: 19:57 You wanted to produce or write or suggest.

Kaelyn: 20:01 Yeah. Do something.

Rekka: 20:02 You just wanted to see this baby birthed into the world?

Kaelyn: 20:04 I'd be like the quiet, you know, like I'd sit in the corner and doing, you know, the whatever needs to be done over there and occasionally jump in.

Rekka: 20:11 Well, too bad, you're sucked in now. So eventually I said, "Okay, so Kaelyn, uh, Colin tells me you want to start a podcast." And um, I think a week later we, we pretty much confirmed that we were going to do this.

Kaelyn: 20:22 Well, we were texting because you were coming into the city the next day. So we were meeting up and then you were like,

Rekka: 20:27 We were like, "We should have a conversation."

Kaelyn: 20:28 Yeah. So let's, let's, let's talk about it. And um...

Rekka: 20:32 We didn't really, it was a very nice social visit, but we didn't really get too much.

Kaelyn: 20:36 Yeah. Most of our work was via texts of like "and this" "and this" and "also this other thing."

Rekka: 20:42 Yes. We have lots of ideas.

Kaelyn: 20:45 Yeah, and so, you know, I'm, I'm a little like more cautious with things. I would go so far as to call it nervous. So I'm like, "Okay, well maybe, and okay, well let's come up with a plan. And Rekka's like, "No, I already got the website, got the pointer things set up, we're doing this." And I was like, "Okay, I guess we're doing this."

Rekka: 21:03 Yep.

Kaelyn: 21:03 So here we are now.

Rekka: 21:04 Yeah.

Kaelyn: 21:04 And we're really excited to do this. Um, we're really hoping that it's going to be exciting for people to listen to and engage with.

Rekka: 21:12 Mm-hmm. And give you hope.

Kaelyn: 21:12 And give you hope. And we're really also hoping that this can become a resource for people that are interested in getting into this. Or maybe you're already in it and you're feeling a little lost or maybe you've done it and you just want to relive it.

Rekka: 21:26 We already had someone pointed out to us that there's not a lot of advice even after you've already been in the publishing industry for a while as either side. Like what do you do when you are an author with a series to write? Or um, or you end up leaving your relationship with a publisher or an agent and then you need to seek a new relationship. Like how do you, how do you do that now that you have credits to your name and what changes and stuff like that. So, um, I think there are plenty more topics than we even have planned.

Kaelyn: 22:01 We've got quite a bit planned already.

Rekka: 22:02 And if listeners chime in then we'll have even more. So, um, do follow us on Twitter @WMBcast and you can direct message us they are if you have questions that you want to be anonymous or feel free to shout out loud on the internets and tell us what you'd like to hear us talk about or like, you know, what resonates with you as we're speaking.

Kaelyn: 22:20 Yeah, definitely. If anything is kind of like, "oh, I'd love to hear more about that." Let us know. We're really hoping for feedback.

Rekka: 22:28 Yeah. We want to know that this is helping. We want to know how it could help more and uh, we want to know what your experiences are and if you create a, sort of like that, that echo back then other people will see that they are not alone in needing this information. And when we realize we're not alone in this whole process gets a lot easier.

Kaelyn: 22:48 Yeah. It's, I mean, once you just have even like the first friend and that you can kind of use as a sounding board or talk to about this stuff, it's such a weight off your shoulders.

Rekka: 22:58 It changes the feeling of the entire process. It really does.

Kaelyn: 23:01 Yeah, it's really a significant step in the process. So, um, I guess, I think we're gonna wrap up there.

Rekka: 23:08 Yeah, we should probably just plug the Patreon.

Kaelyn: 23:11 Plug the Patreon.

Rekka: 23:11 Uh, so we have a Patreon account—of course we do cause we're a podcast—

Kaelyn: 23:16 [Laughter]

Rekka: 23:16 But we would appreciate your support if you find this valuable. If this is something that shows promise to you or that you are already like, "Yes, absolutely. 100%. I need this; or I know someone who needs this," please head over to patreon.com/wmbcast (that's w-m-b-c-a-s-t). And if you support the podcast, you will have access to some bonus episodes when we–were not going to talk so much about like secret publishing stuff. Cause this is all about not having secret publishing.

Kaelyn: 23:43 Shhh!

Rekka: 23:43 We'll just talk about like stories, probably a movies and, and uh, the kinds of media that it's easier for everyone to be consuming so everyone's on the same page with us. But um, we'll have episodes like that. We might have other content for the most part with, oh, we're just asking you to chip in and help us pay for the hosting. And, um, the audio production, we'd like to bring in a professional producer, uh, transcripts, which are so important for accessibility and also so that other people can find us when they're searching for the kind of terms that come up in our conversations. So please, if you love what we are promising or, um, if you're listening and you've already heard a few episodes cause you're coming in a little bit later, patreon.com/wmbcast to support the podcast and we really appreciate it if you could. And if you could leave a rating and review at iTunes, that will also help other people find us.

Kaelyn: 24:30 That's always, uh, that's always fantastic. And you can find us on Twitter.

Rekka: 24:34 Absolutely.

Kaelyn: 24:34 As well. I'm @KindOfKaelyn. That's my name is k-a-e-l-y-n.

Rekka: 24:39 And I'm @BittyBittyZap. And if you go to @WMBcast on Twitter, our profiles are linked in the bio for that. (Cause I know that Kaelyn has made everything complicated by spelling her name that way.)

Kaelyn: 24:49 I, yeah, I did this purpose. [laughter] This was my decision. Um, so I think that's, that's what we've got for now.

Rekka: 24:58 Yep. So we are launching the podcast because this is our preview episode.

Kaelyn: 25:01 Actually, yeah. We do have one more thing.

Rekka: 25:01 We should mention that.

Kaelyn: 25:02 Yes.

Rekka: 25:03 So we are launching the podcast on May 14th. So that's coming up soon and we will have a few episodes loaded in.

Kaelyn: 25:09 Yeah. So for instance, if you're heading to the Nebulas–

Rekka: 25:13 mm-hmm!

Kaelyn: 25:13 –and you want something to listen to on the way there, you can listen to us talk.

Rekka: 25:19 Yep, as you fly in–we will have those episodes up Tuesday of that same week–so you can listen on the plane, you can listen in the car, you can listen in a boat if you somehow manage to take a boat to LA.

Kaelyn: 25:28 I wonder if Mareth's taking a boat to LA?

Rekka: 25:30 Mareth may take a boat to LA.

Kaelyn: 25:30 Mareth might take a boat to LA.

Rekka: 25:30 So Mareth, if you're listening–

Kaelyn: 25:35 and you're taking a boat, let us send us a picture.

Rekka: 25:37 Oh yes, absolutely. Mareth's photos are always amazing. So, um, so there will be episodes at, uh, available the week of the Nebulas. And if you were at the Nebulas, come find us.

Kaelyn: 25:48 Yeah.

Rekka: 25:49 Maybe we have a conversation because we are bringing our microphones.

Kaelyn: 25:51 We are bringing everything.

Rekka: 25:52 So, uh, we want to have a couple people to pull aside and, um, get some of these opinions that people need or experiences to share.

Kaelyn: 25:59 Yep.

Rekka: 26:00 So that is something else to look forward to. And, uh, once our podcast launches, we will begin airing new episodes every two weeks.

Kaelyn: 26:08 Every two weeks. Kaelyn and Rekka coming through your headphones or stereo or–

Rekka: 26:12 Whether you like it or not.

Kaelyn: 26:13 Yep, we're there.

Rekka: 26:14 All right, folks, we'll talk to you next time. Have a great–

Kaelyn: 26:17 Thank you so much for listening.

Rekka: 26:18 –Experience in writing.

Kaelyn: 26:19 Thank you. Bye.

Music: 26:19 [Music]