Surviving Burnout with K.B. Wagers – WNP 131

Sarah Werner:

This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner.

Sarah Werner:

Welcome back, listeners. I am so excited to be here with you again this week, and I am super double amazingly excited to have with me a very special guest to interview on today’s show. I have with me K.B. Wagers, who is just an incredible person. I have a very official bio here. So K.B. Wagers is the author of the Indranan and Farian War trilogies from Orbit Books, and the NeoG Adventures from Harper Voyager. They are a fan of whiskey and cats, Jupiter Ascending and The Muppets. So, I just know that we’re going to have such a fascinating conversation. You can find K.B. Wagers on Twitter @kbwagers and on Instagram @midwaybrawler for political commentary, plant photos, and video game playthroughs, and I will make sure to have those links available for you in the show notes for today’s episode. Until then, in the meantime, welcome to the show.

K.B. Wagers:

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Sarah Werner:

It is great to have you here. Is there some cat ruckus going on?

K.B. Wagers:

That was like half a second after that intro and the cat launched himself off the desk.

Sarah Werner:

They can sense it.

K.B. Wagers:

Pretty much.

Sarah Werner:

For those of you who are listening, which is all of you, we both have very active cats here with us tonight, so there might be some rumblings going on cat wise. So, I’ll try not to trim those out so that you can get full cat enjoyment.

Sarah Werner:

So hi, I’ve welcomed you to the show, and then just we immediately devolved into talking about cats, but Katy, also known as Katy, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe how you got into the whole writing thing in the first place?

K.B. Wagers:

Oh wow.

Sarah Werner:

You know, no small thing.

K.B. Wagers:

Right? We said we were going to be here for two hours.

Sarah Werner:

Oh yeah, yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

So, that’s why.

Sarah Werner:

Oh, I’m ready. I’m ready.

K.B. Wagers:

I have been writing basically since I was old enough to start writing, and it has always been something that has fascinated me and always been something that I enjoyed. I started writing more seriously with an eye towards publication when I was in high school, so all the way back in 1999, 1994.

Sarah Werner:

Something like that.

K.B. Wagers:

That was like 10 years ago, right? Is that the …

Sarah Werner:

Yeah, yeah. Very recent.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, so it’s fine. It hasn’t been that long.

Sarah Werner:

No.

K.B. Wagers:

And yeah, I mean, I was very lucky. I grew up in a farm in Northeastern Colorado and some of my fondest memories are my mother taking us to the library in town to get books, and then you come home with a stack of books, half of which you’ve read on the 20 minute drive.

Sarah Werner:

Yes. I remember that.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah. I got to give a talk at Brush Library a couple of years ago, which was such a surprisingly emotional event and also very delightful to kind of be back

Sarah Werner:

Like a homecoming.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah. Then yeah, like I said, I started writing more seriously in high school and trying to get published, starting about ’99 and yeah, wrote like 13 books or something. Queried out like about five of them before I finally got my agent in 2012. Then all of a sudden this whirlwind of publishing six books for Orbit in the last five years, and then the new books for Harper Voyager. The first one came out last year and then the next book comes out just next month, in July

Sarah Werner:

Ooh.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah. It’s very exciting.

Sarah Werner:

Ooh, I love this. I love this. So, I love that you just casually dropped yeah, I wrote 13 books. Tell us, what did that look like? Was that just go to school, come home, and just write straight into the night or what did that look like and what prompted that?

K.B. Wagers:

Pretty consistently. It was yeah, just while I was in college was probably where I wrote the bulk of them, and then also when I was working after I graduated from college. So, go to school and then write in every spare second. Go to work, write basically before work, during lunch break, after work. I didn’t do a whole lot else. Yeah, I am happiest when I am writing. So, for the longest time that was it. There are only a couple of times in my life when I haven’t been writing, like now, which is not great, where I get really kind of depressed and despondent, and it’s just I don’t like being in this place, so.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah. So I pumped out, yeah, something like half a million words, I think, before I got published. I took the long slow road to being published, I think to say, which is partially why I just kept writing books, like I’d query stuff out, and while I was querying I’d start a new book and just write on it.

Sarah Werner:

Gosh.

K.B. Wagers:

A lot of times I was just writing for me too, so.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah. Oh, I have so many questions because of this. But first, I’d like to ask, you talked about you’re happiest when you’re writing. Is that really what drove you to sort of like … Because I know how exhausting it is to be a college student. I know how exhausting it is to have a job and to come home with that energy and that fire to create. Was that driven by that search for happiness or was that driven by something else?

K.B. Wagers:

No, I would say that it was legitimately something I enjoyed doing. So, that’s a big chunk of my free time was spent writing and reading, and that was about it. So yeah, that’s currently sort of in the process of trying to figure out where that joy went and if it was just wrestling with the burnout, like we were talking about the other day, of-

Sarah Werner:

Yeah, let’s talk about that now if we can.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah.

Sarah Werner:

If that’s okay with you.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah.

Sarah Werner:

So, you were initially, and I think this is going to resonate with so many listeners. You initially wrote for the joy of it, it felt free, it felt good, it felt happy and right. Right now you’re in a place where it doesn’t feel great anymore, and you talked a little bit about you’re not writing. You’re maybe in some depression. Can you tell us what happened or what transitioned there?

K.B. Wagers:

So, I think there were a number of things. I learned some very valuable lessons about when you’re a brand-new writer and your debut, and you have a new contract, and everything feels shiny and new you don’t want to say no to people. So, I’ve learned some very valuable lessons in the last four-ish years about the value of saying no and the value of being just aware of how much work goes into not only writing a book but publishing a book. When you write your very first book you have all the time in the world, right? You write it, and you polish it, and you query it. Once you sign a contract and start writing books much more regularly, especially kind of in the pace that I was doing it, which was a seemingly easily one book a year initially, and then two books a year because past Katy had poor ideas about how easy that would be. That you are not only writing a book usually but you are also editing a book, copyediting a book, doing promo stuff for books, doing final pass pages for books, answering questions about books, dealing with the sales for other books, depending on where you are, if you’re … Thankfully, I have an agent.

K.B. Wagers:

I am traditionally published. I don’t have to manage all of that other stuff by myself, but there is quite a bit of marketing that we still do on our own. So yeah, so you’re doing all of that in addition to writing. Learning how to juggle sort of the business side of it is a lot of work.

K.B. Wagers:

So, initially when I signed that first contract and I was like, “Yeah, I can write these books.” I joke a lot, I wrote the first book in three months, but then I spent like six years querying it and revising it, and doing all these stuff. I wrote the second book in the Indranan War series in three months and then we edited it in like three months and then we published it.

Sarah Werner:

Oh wow. That’s a huge difference.

K.B. Wagers:

Markedly different experience. One of the things that people are frequently told not to start writing the next book in a series because so many things can change. If I hadn’t started writing the second book in the series while I had been querying that other stuff out, even though some things changed extremely dramatically, I’m not even sure I would’ve been able to hit my deadlines, because I basically had 45,000 words of material that I was able to pull stuff from to write that second book.

Sarah Werner:

Wow, wow.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, and then we jumped right into the third book, and then I sold a contract for three more books and it was like a book a year, kind of at that same pace. Then as I said, past Katy, I got an offer from Harper Voyager to write this NeoG and develop this NeoG series. I don’t regret saying yes, but I certainly probably should’ve sat down with the timetable a little bit more and been a little bit more realistic about what working a 40 hour plus day job and trying to write two books looks like.

Sarah Werner:

My gosh.

K.B. Wagers:

It’s not a lot of fun, so. That way, kids, leads to burnout. That’s what we were talking about.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

So yeah. Since late 2016, basically all I’ve been doing is writing and working. There are some other, there was a lot of personal upheaval and stuff going on in my life. So, it has been extremely exhausting. This is the first time in a long time that I only have one book due at the end of the year. I have not had to write at that same pace, and I’ve kind of been trying to write again, but it’s mostly just a lot of laying on the couch, flopping around, wondering if I’m going to be able to do this again.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Which I think I will, but yeah. It can be an exhausting business, especially if you … Creatives, we like to spend a lot of time, and it’s hard to train yourself out of the idea that if you are not actively putting words on a page, you’re not being productive, and that’s not the case. Sitting, staring at the wall, thinking about what the characters might do in this particular scene is still writing work. Making playlists is still writing work. Eventually you do have to sit down and write the words. Don’t get me wrong, you cannot spend all your time world building. You have to actually write the book, but that stuff is still work, and it is still writing work, and it is still valuable time spent.

Sarah Werner:

I appreciate you saying that so much. I went through this point where I, and I think I’m probably speaking for a lot of folks who are listening, I only counted the word count production as “real” work, and this is really how I burned myself out, was I was like, “Oh, the daydreaming, that’s for fun, and even sometimes the writing is just for fun and I can cram in all these other stuff.” Then yeah, you get to the burnout place, and it is the bad place.

Sarah Werner:

So, I know you and I were talking the other day, and we were talking about how do we rediscover joy, right? Because that’s I think for you and me, I had to think for a second if it was for you and I, but I think it is for you and me grammatically. A lot of our work success came out of the fact that we were writing for fun, and that it felt good to write, and we were creating things we loved, and that’s what made our work resonate with our audience. So, how do we infuse that joy back into it, especially since you’re on a deadline and you can’t be like, “Oh, I’m just going to take a quick six months sabbatical and heal up”? Have you made any headway in rediscovering or reclaiming joy in this process?

K.B. Wagers:

I have, and one of the ways I’ve done it, which seems sort of ironic, but I do have a Patreon, and I do try to post pretty regularly. I have not, prior to this year, written original stuff for the thing, because there was just no time to do it, but I decided at the end of 2020 that I was going to take a trunked novel and basically clean it up, and I’m releasing it as a serialized weekly chapter book on the Patreon.

K.B. Wagers:

It’s one of my favorite. I call it the space opera that was 10 years too early, because I wrote it, and queried it, and the response I frequently got back was, “This is awesome, but I have no idea how to sell this.”

Sarah Werner:

Oh.

K.B. Wagers:

Because it really was just too … It’s like Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Battlestar Galactica, meets Jupiter Ascending before Jupiter Ascending existed [crosstalk 00:13:44].

Sarah Werner:

Yeah. That’s all my favorite things.

K.B. Wagers:

Right? All sorts of weirdness and all sorts of fun. So, that’s actually been a lot of fun, and once I kind of got in a groove where I was editing. I have it scheduled so that it posts on Saturday mornings, but on Saturday mornings I sit down and I edit the chapter for the next week so that I’m-

Sarah Werner:

Oh cool.

K.B. Wagers:

… ahead of the game a little bit. That’s actually been a lot of fun, because I really loved that story, and there wasn’t anything to do with it sale wise, and my agent could, and he might yell at me for not sending it to him again, but we can always do that later, but for right now I’m like, you know what? This is just for me and the folks who are on my Patreon, and we’re just going to have some fun with it. It really has been a lot of fun to go back and read it, and not be super critical. I’m like, it’s a 10 year old book. It’s not as good as some of my current writing. There are some obvious flaws, but I’m not really paying a whole lot of attention to edits or trying to make sure that the plot narrative is super tight or anything like that, and I’m like [inaudible 00:14:57], I warned everybody, there will be holes in this, we’re just going to roll with.

Sarah Werner:

Aw. That’s fun though, it almost makes it like everyone’s in on it, you know?

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, so that’s been one thing. Then yeah, the other is really just like man, the worst thing about burnout is reminding yourself that you are burned out, and that’s why you’re not doing the stuff that you feel like you should “be doing.” So, I’m just like no, you don’t have to sit down and write. If you would rather go to bed at 7:30 in the evening, then go do it. Your day job kind of went up in smoke, and I’m training somebody new, and that takes a lot of effort, which I always forget how much effort it takes to train somebody, but you’re trying to remember how you do all the things that you now just do automatically, and you have to explain it to somebody in a manner that they can understand.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

And then you have to be patient, and explain it to them 800 times. So yeah, I’m trying to listen to audiobooks, which I traditionally had never had a whole lot of success doing because I get really easily distracted, but I’m hoping that that will maybe make it so that I can actually start reading again, because that was kind of one of the other things that took a ax to the face.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Thanks, burnout.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah, seriously. I appreciate you talking about and talking candidly about your experience with burnout so much, because I think that a lot of people are in it right now or coming out of it right now, or maybe even just entering it, and it’s so good to hear a relatable story. I think it’s also going to surprise some listeners that despite having multiple book contracts you’re also still working a 40 hour a week full-time job, and I think that there is this, I don’t know if I want to call it like pervasive, but there is this dream that I can’t wait till I sell my book, A, and then B, quit my job, like they go hand in hand. Can you talk to us a little bit about the reality of what that looks like?

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah. I still remember when my agent called me at my job, right? On Twitter people were talking, and this was a couple years ago, I think, about where were you when you got the call that you had sold books, and I was at my job. Every single time I have gotten a call about my book stuff, at my job.

Sarah Werner:

It’s at work.

K.B. Wagers:

When I got a call about hey, about the movie option, or the TV option that they did, I was at my job. That’s just the reality of it. My agent said to me, “Don’t quit your job.”

Sarah Werner:

Wow.

K.B. Wagers:

That was probably his, I think, maybe the third thing he’d said to me after he said, “Are you sitting down?” And then told me that Orbit had made an offer. Yeah, I remember joking with one of the drivers at my work, he was like, “Oh, you write books. Why are you still here?” And I said, “Well, I did the math on the sale of my first three books, and the rough hours that had been put into it, and I made something like a quarter an hour on it.”

Sarah Werner:

So, a living wage.

K.B. Wagers:

So, a living wage. Not even remotely. While I got a far better advance for my debut trilogy than a lot of other people did, and I got paid very well for the second trilogy, and I got two very good contracts from Harper Voyager for the NeoG books, there’s so much. My partner was out of work for five years, so I was the sole provider in the house. We had a number of other kind of medical emergencies, and then everybody knows how fast that eats stuff up, even when you do have insurance.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

So, there’s been a lot of basically just kind of trying to get by and trying to continue to survive and have health insurance. Although SFWA, the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers of America now is able to offer health insurance.

Sarah Werner:

Oh.

K.B. Wagers:

So their members, which is that just happened in the last 18 months.

Sarah Werner:

Wow. That’s a big deal.

K.B. Wagers:

It is a huge deal. It essentially opens up that avenue for me to actually consider leaving my day job, because I no longer have to worry about where am I going to get health insurance.

Sarah Werner:

Oh my gosh, yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

So yeah. A lot of it’s just stability, and for me especially there is a calculation of I like the stability of a regular paycheck, because publishing is notoriously uncertain, and my publishers are both awesome and they pay me on time, and my agent is very awesome and good at keeping track of what he is supposed to keep track of. It still almost always takes three times longer than you think it’s going to for you to get paid for stuff, and for me the calculation of how much does not having the certainty of a regular paycheck impact my stress levels, and thereby impacting whether or not I can create, which is really something people have to take into account. As lovely as it would be to have an extra 40 hours a week on hand to do stuff and to sleep in, although let’s be realistic, I probably still wouldn’t sleep in.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

That is just like that type of stress is not something I do well with, and I know I don’t do well. So yeah, I’m kind of currently trying to figure out where do you draw the line on that. How much money in the bank account is enough to make you go, “Okay, I feel like I can actually do this now.” Because I can reasonably be assured that I’m going to get another contract in the next six months. Yeah.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Which hey, nobody knows, you know?

Sarah Werner:

Right.

K.B. Wagers:

The book dropped, what? The week before the pandemic hit, and boy, there were a lot of other writers in 2020 whose debuts. That wasn’t my debuts.

Sarah Werner:

Oh no. Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

But it just it really can put a crimp in what you’re trying to do.

Sarah Werner:

And there’s no way to predict that. So, having the stable income that you can rely on, oh my gosh, absolutely.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, yeah. It makes a huge difference, and that’s why so many authors out there either have spouses who are employed and thereby providing a stable steady income and some sort of health insurance, or they’ve gotten to the point where they’ve either sold enough books that their royalty checks are coming in on a regular basis or they have enough contract kind of spaced out that they know that money is coming, and you don’t get paid everything upfront too. That’s always like-

Sarah Werner:

Well, that’s tricky.

K.B. Wagers:

That’s stuff that you don’t think about. You get paid. Orbit’s stuff was a little bit different versus Harper Voyager, so it also varies by publisher, how they break that stuff up, but $60,000 sounds like a lot of money until you realize that it’s spaced out over three years.

Sarah Werner:

Ugh.

K.B. Wagers:

And broken up by like initial signing contract, turning in your manuscript, getting published type of situation. So, it’s still not, and taxes, and your agent’s commission, and how much money you put-

Sarah Werner:

It goes away real quick.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, paying for your website, paying for conventions, paying for travel, paying to ship books out. There’s all sorts of budgeting stuff that you have to then kind of factor back in to what you’re making.

Sarah Werner:

Oh wow.

K.B. Wagers:

So that’s yeah, like 90% of my book money has been filtered back into survival or my actual career.

Sarah Werner:

Wow.

K.B. Wagers:

I did set a pretty hard and fast rule, which is to buy yourself something absolutely ridiculous and whatever you consider expensive with each paycheck that you’ve got, so that it didn’t all feel like it was just going towards bills and stuff that’s not necessarily any fun and nobody wants to use their money for that, but yeah, that way it’s like oh, okay. I know this is coming, and now I have this X shiny thing that I [crosstalk 00:23:37].

Sarah Werner:

Yay, treat yourself.

K.B. Wagers:

So yeah.

Sarah Werner:

Oh my gosh. This is so enlightening and so helpful, and so I don’t know, I hope that that kind of steers people in the right direction but also doesn’t crush their dreams. I hope that a little dose of reality is helpful and good. That raises so many more questions for me. So, I’m going to ask real quick. For you, why science fiction? Is that what you started writing with your original 13 novels and is that a place where you feel called to? Tell me about your relationship with sci-fi.

K.B. Wagers:

I have also always been kind of a sci-fi geek. We lived out in rural Colorado, so we did not have cable when I was growing up. We watched PBS, we watched Sesame Street, we watched The Muppet Show. We watched a lot of British television on PBS, including Red Dwarf, and Doctor Who, so I was never more excited than when Doctor Who came back on the air, because I watched the old school classic Doctor Who, so it was like coming home again.

K.B. Wagers:

I was always also fascinated with Alice in Wonderland, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and all of that type of stuff. So, my very first fully finished novel was this absolutely terrible alien invasion novel that I wrote when I was in high school.

Sarah Werner:

I love it.

K.B. Wagers:

And it was such a mess. There was a cast of like six million people because it covered the whole globe, and all of this horrible time travel. The plot was so terrible. It’s been a bunch of adults acting like teenagers because I was 16.

Sarah Werner:

Because that’s where you are, yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah. I kind of dabbled back and forth in urban fantasy, because when I started querying the second book that I queried was actually a fantasy novel, and yeah, it was about a young woman who ran away from home to become the first female knight of this order of knights.

Sarah Werner:

Oh heck yes.

K.B. Wagers:

[crosstalk 00:25:54] like the White Rose knights, and yeah, it was-

Sarah Werner:

I would read the heck out of that.

K.B. Wagers:

It was such a good book and it’s one of those trunk novels that I wish I could figure out how to resurrect it and make it good enough, and I don’t think I … Maybe some day when I have a lot of time to really sit down. So, that one got queried out quite a bit, and then it was sort of the rise of the urban fantasy stuff.

K.B. Wagers:

So, I wrote several urban fantasy novels that were almost but not quite good enough, which is sort of the thing that you hear a lot from agents as you start to get better and better in your writing, and you present better, and you go from form letter rejections to actual requests for stuff. Then this is great, but I couldn’t resonate with it. It’s also subjective, and I tell people all the time you can’t take a lot of those rejections personally and you can’t take a lot of this personally because writing books for a living means spending your entire life where you’ve just kind of bared your soul and people are like, “Yeah, it’s not for me.”

Sarah Werner:

Ooh. How do you deal with that or how do you learn? This is a slight tangent, but like …

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, you just have to let it go. You have to recognize that art is so subjective and everything is just because somebody doesn’t like something doesn’t mean that it’s not any good. I was actually just talking about this today on Twitter because I’ve been trying to play Mass Effect, which the release of the Legendary Edition meant that it was finally available on PS4, and I could finally play it.

Sarah Werner:

Yes.

K.B. Wagers:

And I was so excited because I know so many people who love it. I have a cat named Garrus.

Sarah Werner:

So perfect.

K.B. Wagers:

People are always like, “You’ve never played Mass Effect and you have a cat named Garrus?”

Sarah Werner:

A little disconnect.

K.B. Wagers:

I’m like, “I know.” It’s a very long story. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I’ve kind of slogged through the first game, and it was fine, but it wasn’t like this is calling to my heart, which I always use Dragon Age: Inquisition is kind of the standard for that, because I played it and it was just like, and I have kind of slogged and spite played my way through Mass Effect 2 because I keep getting so angry because I have issues about the difficulty settings. I’m not immediately drawn to any of the characters. Even Garrus, I’m just kind of like, “Yeah, he’s fine.” But you don’t get to spend a lot of time talking to them, and I think that I expected that based on what everybody had, like their reactions. I finally met Legion and I’m like, “Is it wrong that my favorite character is the Geth?”

Sarah Werner:

Oh no, I love Legion.

K.B. Wagers:

I was like, “Why was he not here the whole time?” I don’t like it because it doesn’t have a lot of the stuff that I really like in games. So, I like having an open world game where I can just go and play for a while, and this is very mission oriented. You can’t just go to a world and land and fight Geth for an hour. You go and you do a mission, and 20 minutes later it’s done.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Or you die 18 times and then you rage quit.

Sarah Werner:

That was me.

K.B. Wagers:

And you’re like, “I’m never playing this game again.” And you walk away from it for two weeks, and then you come back super grumpy and maybe finally figured out how to beat this stupid thing. Oh my gosh, and so oh, we were talking about how do you deal with that. So yeah, when I was talking about it today I was like I don’t think that Mass Effect is necessarily a bad game, it’s just not for me. It doesn’t ring the bell that I want it to ring. So, that is something that you always have to remember, is that in writing there’s always going to be people who don’t like your books. There’s always going to be people who love your books. There are always going to be people out there, like other writers, who do better than you, who get more recognition, who have better contracts, and there are always going to be writers who don’t get that same thing. So, you want to be very aware and very focused on your own stuff, and telling the stories that you want to tell, and learning how to articulate in this business, because it is very much a business. Learning how to articulate the soul of the art that you want, and tell the story that you want to tell.

Sarah Werner:

Oh, that’s so beautifully said. It was interesting. You were talking about, I’ve written these other novels, and they’re not “good enough.” Was that your own standard, it just didn’t speak to what you really wanted to create or it was more like oh, this isn’t going to sell?

K.B. Wagers:

It was mostly that they weren’t going to sell, and from somebody else’s perspective.

Sarah Werner:

Okay.

K.B. Wagers:

Looking back on it now, I’m super grateful. I’m really thankful that I did not sell that very first book, because my career would’ve taken an entirely different trajectory.

Sarah Werner:

Oh, interesting.

K.B. Wagers:

And would not have written the books that I have written, and I wouldn’t be where I am now. Yeah, looking back, 10, 15 years later, at some of my old writing I can see the progression. So, when I say those aren’t any good, in that sense it’s just I’ve grown. It’s been 15 years, I’ve learned how to write better mostly, still, commas. I’ve learned how to tell a pretty darn good story, whereas some of the early stories were just a lot of collections of vignettes or things that were happening versus any sort of cohesive plot being tied together, so.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, that’s just kind of the way things go and I really am thankful to be here now and doing the work that I’m doing now, because I’m getting to tell stories that I really do love.

Sarah Werner:

I love that. I know we’re creeping up on our time here. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

K.B. Wagers:

I do.

Sarah Werner:

Oh, wonderful. Good, because I want to ask, during that time you develop as a writer over 10 years. Can you pinpoint or talk about what some of that development looked like? Did you get better simply because you were writing more or because you were reading, or did you take classes, or what did that development look like?

K.B. Wagers:

Mostly I did a lot of reading and a lot of writing. I consistently tell people on my Twitter that I don’t believe there’s anything, there’s no such thing as wasted words. Any writing that you do is development for future you to build off of.

Sarah Werner:

I love this.

K.B. Wagers:

I am very much a solitary writer. I never went to any of the big like Clarion West or those sort of … Are they workshops? I’m not even sure what to call them.

Sarah Werner:

I think so, yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Where you do some intensive work and then you have a bunch of other people do it. Mostly I just wrote by myself, and I was very lucky to have a pretty core group of critique partners and beta readers who were able to kind of pull out that no holds barred type of we’re all relatively brutal with each other about this is terrible, where are you going with it.

Sarah Werner:

That can be so valuable though, from someone you trust.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, it really can, and it is very important. You want people to be like, “I love this book.” But now I at least know when Lisa says, “I love this book.” She means it.

Sarah Werner:

Yes.

K.B. Wagers:

And she means it in the sense that you fixed all the problems that were previously existent.

Sarah Werner:

Right. Oh my gosh.

K.B. Wagers:

So yeah. I just kept writing, and the one book didn’t work and didn’t get me an agent, so I was like, “Okay.” Rather than … I didn’t believe in the particular value of trying to rework the same story over and over again.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Rather I did think that it was a good idea to just move on and start telling a new story. The only time that that has not been accurate is my agent read the original draft of Behind the Throne and rejected it, but with a very lovely letter that was like, “I see the story that you’re trying to tell here and I know you didn’t do it.”

Sarah Werner:

Oh my gosh.

K.B. Wagers:

If you want to revise it and resubmit it, I would be happy to take another look. And then with some more detailed notes about how do you fix this, here’s what I see you trying to do, here’s where this has completely failed type of thing.

Sarah Werner:

Wow.

K.B. Wagers:

There are only like five people in the world I think who have read the original draft of behind the throne. The first 10 pages of the book though are exactly the same as they were. I basically tore the entire thing apart and reworked it.

Sarah Werner:

Wow.

K.B. Wagers:

A lot of the character’s the same, and the setting’s the same, and the general tone is the same, but everything else got completely torn apart, but those first 10 pages are exactly the same with one detail that got added, and that changed the entire book. That’s always fun.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

That’s always a fun thing to look at and how you add one thing to a story and it completely changes everything that happens from that point forward. Yeah, so I rewrote it and I submitted it, and then he offered me rep, so. Then we spent another 18 months out on submission. That is a whole other show.

Sarah Werner:

Oh yeah. Oh, we both just laugh ominously.

K.B. Wagers:

Right. It’s never-ending, that’s the other thing.

Sarah Werner:

Yes.

K.B. Wagers:

It’s a never-ending waiting game. You’re waiting to hear back from agents about your queries, and then you’re waiting to hear from your agent about submissions. Then you’re waiting to hear from other agents about potential projects, and then you’re waiting to hear from movie producers about options, and you’re waiting to hear from a lawyer about something else. Get used to waiting, kiddos.

Sarah Werner:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). It is, but that gives us something to write, hopefully.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, basically, yeah. When you’re not like don’t sit there and obsessively refresh your email box, you just go write something.

Sarah Werner:

I love that. This is so eyeopening and so valuable, even for me listening to you say these things. I mean, especially about moving on and not rewriting and rehashing the same story over and over again. I think that’s something that I needed to hear too personally because it’s hard to let those pieces of ourselves go. Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

It really is. I look back, even this project for Patreon, I look back and I’m like, “I loved these characters. I loved these characters with my entire being.” And it’s such a delight to play with them again, but I am, again, so grateful that I moved on, and so grateful because I had a whole new set of characters that I now love and treasure, and then another set after that that I got to love and treasure. I mean, it’s the same I think as reading books, right? We pick up books that we really love, but you’re never just going to read the same book over, and over, and over again for the end of time.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah.

K.B. Wagers:

Right? You might come back and revisit it and be very happy. It’s such a delight. I’ve had readers tell me that the end of the Farian War is the end of Hail’s story essentially, but they love being able to go back and pick it up again, and it’s like revisiting old friends, and that’s, you know, yeah.

Sarah Werner:

That’s good. That’s a good feeling.

K.B. Wagers:

That’s what you want to hear.

Sarah Werner:

Yeah. Oh, that’s beautiful. Oh my gosh. You talked earlier about writing isn’t just writing. Writing is you’re spending your time not only producing words, and brainstorming, and outlining and all of that stuff. You’re also responsible for marketing, and maybe doing book tours, and all of this other stuff. Is there anything that you’ve learned from that process? I know that a lot of people listening kind of figure that if they get traditionally published, the publishing house just takes care of all of that, when it sounds like you’re doing a lot of this yourself. So, what’s something that you’ve taken away marketing wise or PR wise or anything like that.

K.B. Wagers:

There are a couple things. I am very lucky to have PR folks, and oftentimes they will handle a lot of stuff, which infinitely makes things easier, right?

Sarah Werner:

Good.

K.B. Wagers:

Because you get emails in your inbox that are like, “Hey, so-and-so wants to do an interview with you. Are you up for it? Do you want to do it?” I am nowhere near popular enough for book tours, I’ll just throw that out there, right now. Honestly 90% of authors out there don’t do book tours. That’s such a sort of fantasy author thing, I think. There’s so much kind of calculations and things that go on behind the scenes in publishing and with traditional publishing houses where I don’t even know half of it, how they make the decision of who to put on book tour, how they back certain books and why they decide to back book A over book B or that type of stuff.

K.B. Wagers:

So, I have learned a lot of times you want to make sure that you are actually communicating with your PR people and with your editor, and with your agent, and not just assuming that things are going to be done. Not everybody gets cover releases.

Sarah Werner:

Oh.

K.B. Wagers:

So, if you want a cover release you either need to talk to your PR folks and see if that’s something that’s actually going to happen. If it’s not, you want to reach out to people in the book community, book reviewers, and bloggers, and people who do YouTube and stuff like that, and make contacts there, and then you have kind of a pool of people to talk to about. You’re like, “Hey, do you want to do a book cover release for my book?” Kind of the same thing for release parties. Hold Fast Through the Fire comes out the 27th of July and the situation being what it is, I don’t feel comfortable enough to have a party, but also if 2020 showed us anything, it was that the ability that we now have to do things online and it opens up the accessibility for so many people, that’s actually kind of awesome.

K.B. Wagers:

So yeah, we’re doing Old Firehouse Books, which is sort of my local bookstore up north in Fort Collins. We’re doing a panel, I want to say it’s the 29th, and me and a couple of my author friends are going to get together to talk about speculative fiction, and space opera, and superheroes, and Mass Effect probably. Exciting.

Sarah Werner:

Can’t avoid it.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, at least two of them were like, “Let’s talk about Mass Effect.” And I was like, “I will try not to rant too much.” So, but that was solely because I contacted the bookstore and was like, “Hey, you guys were so lovely to put on.” We had a party in March, the last time I saw people basically, we had a party for my book release, the beginning first week of March. Hey, do you want to do something online for it? And they’re such lovely folks that they were like, “Yeah, we’d love to.” So.

K.B. Wagers:

Yeah, so you want to be aware and kind of proactive about your marketing. You cannot control your book sales. I will say that again. You have zero control over your book sales. You can scream about your book on social media all day long, it will have little to no impact on your book sales. You can’t obsess about your book sales, you can’t worry about why nobody is talking about your books. All you can do is try and keep writing the next book and do what little things you can to kind of try and get the word out and stuff, but the whole time knowing that this is a large percentage of luck and a large percentage of whoever your publisher decides to back in terms of their promotion, because their reach is obviously so much bigger, and then also purely how many people it really resonates with, and if it decides to go completely off the rails, then that’s great, but otherwise no.

Sarah Werner:

Wow. Thank you for this. Thank you for all of this.

K.B. Wagers:

You’re welcome.

Sarah Werner:

This is so valuable. I love honesty and honest advice, and just you sharing your experience is everything, so thank you.

K.B. Wagers:

Good.

Sarah Werner:

If people do want to, I don’t want to say have some control over your book sales, but if people want to purchase your books, if people want to find out more about you there will be links in the show notes, but also tell us, where can they find you, and yeah, what should they do? Where should they go?

K.B. Wagers:

So, I am currently trying not to be on Twitter too much right now. This is another mitigating-

Sarah Werner:

I get that.

K.B. Wagers:

… can I start writing again. Well, part of the task of writing is keeping your butt off social media, but you can find me on Twitter, it’s @kbwagers. Then the other social media platform that I’m on the most really is Instagram, which is @midwaybrawler, and that’s seriously I don’t do a lot of book promo there. Mostly it’s pictures of the cats, and pictures of my plant collection, and occasional other things that I find really interesting, so. Then you can also visit my website, it’s just kbwagers.com and it’s got links for all the books, if people want to go check them out.

Sarah Werner:

Yay.

K.B. Wagers:

That is always awesome. We always appreciate it.

Sarah Werner:

And you should, because they’re wonderful, yes.

K.B. Wagers:

I do like them quite a bit, so. Yeah, you want to love what you do and you should love your writing and you should love the act of writing, despite all claims to the contrary, art is not about suffering, it’s about joy.

Sarah Werner:

Thank you. I want to end on that note. That is beautiful. Thank you. Oh my gosh, Katy. This has been an absolute joy, which is what we’re searching for, so thank you for guiding us to that. Thank you for being here with us today, and those of you who are listening, please visit the links in the show notes for today’s episode. Connect with Katy Wagers, aka Katy, on Twitter and all of the places, and I will see you all next week.