Ask The Expert: Author Coach with Melody Owen

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Hello hello Amplify You family Michelle Abraham here your house and have I got a Greek as for you today. And today we are doing an assay expert interview with Melody Owen from founder of author nation. So Melody, how are you doing today?

I'm well thank you. Thank you for having me. Michelle, I'm excited to be here.

You are so welcome. Well, what's really cool, so we've actually got to meet in person and give each other a hug in real life over the last few years, which is we actually met in person before we met online how we're just sad. That doesn't happen anymore, does it?

No, that's so unusual, isn't it. But it's true. That's I forgot about that.

It's funny, it's funny, because now everyone we meet, we meet online first, and then we meet in real life. But we actually got to meet in real life first, which was super cool. We used to go to the same networking events, and it was dynamic women, which was super awesome. We've spoken at conferences together, we've spoken on stages together. And it's been a lot of fun. And let me tell you a little bit more about melody guys. She's the leader, the go to the go to expert for speakers and leaders and entrepreneurs to help them I help her help them pull out their expertise, and put them into a book and finish reading that book and then build their business and take their business to the next level. And so she does the publishing of the book she does helps you with the writing of the book, and she helps you with getting a book that people actually want to read and review and recommend to other people. And so she is the go to person on all those things. And she's created a community called author, nation and a podcast called other nations. So, so many great things we're here to dive into today. But melody before we do that, why don't we just dive right in with like, why become by helping authors? Like what what made you be so passionate about helping, helping helping leaders and speakers become authors?

Yes, I think the truth is, I'm addicted to story. That's the truth. And I'm not. I love fiction, and I read fiction, but I actually don't help any fiction authors with their stories, because I'm fascinated with real stories. I'm absolutely fascinated with everyone else's life. But I guess I don't want to be that nosy neighbor. So instead, what I do is I help people who've lived interesting, fascinating, you know, challenging, inspirational lives and have an expertise, bring their stories to the forefront and actually integrated into their business, whether they're writing memoir, or a business book or self help book because some people think, Well, I'm writing a business books. I don't need a storyteller. Oh, no, you need a storyteller, right? We need to tell those stories, your stories or client stories, we need to dig into people's lives so that when people are reading the book, they're excited about it, they see themselves in the story, they see a path to their own future. And that's the key to having a book that people read, review and recommend. It's not an information dump. It's about all those other factors. And so that's why I do what I do

love that, especially the business books and actually bringing that storytelling into the business books because there is so much story around it yet. We feel like we need to, I think, need to get to the facts. And we get to get to the business part of it. But I think some of those lessons are actually like, involved in the book. Like I think back to like one of my favorite like all time books is the selfing prophecy by James Redfield, and the goddess speak on a stage with her just recently, which was super cool. It was a virtual stage, but we were like on the same stage. So to me that was like, Oh, so cool. And so exciting, right? Yeah. I think about that book and my book is got like so many business lessons in a year. It's like an entire it's all story. It's all a story. And I think that was like so well done. The way he's had been able to do that. So it's not just like this is step one, step two, you know, like think about some of the business folks I think I've only so far.

No boring and stories, what connects us to stories, what heals us stories what teaches us so story actually, if you think about it, it's embedded in our human existence and with out debt, you know, even think way back, you know, your people, you know, the tribe around the fire, you know, it's like teaching them lessons about, you know, they went on the hunt and they met this beast that you need to stay away from. And, you know, so story is really embedded in who we are as human beings.

So true. I just saw a really great play in Vancouver, Granville Island with my mom. It was called Rubber rubber boo. And it was by Andrew Menard. And she I met her through Canadian Association of Professional speakers and we ended up booking her on some podcast. And so I went to watch her play and it was exactly that it was like a rubber Boo is like a meaty like stew. And so it's got a little bit of like everything in it. So this like play has like Legend and storytelling. And it also had like, really amazing. Like, amazing music in it too. And just it was like this whole like experience right? And then by the end she had the audience involved to the audience was singing and it was really cool. So I think I think of that like that was the first thing that came to my mind as you were sharing like how you want to like have your book like resonate with people like that was just it was like a such a good it's it probably was such a good like word for it. So it's like stew like it's a stew is a little bit of everything in it all. And it's around that fire and the tribe was around the fire is super cool.

And there it is, how did she pull you all in to be resolved singing you were together one unit, people who didn't even know each other coming in. And at the end, you are one unit singing together? If authors can do that in their books, they have one right they have you know they've done right. Yeah. And

So cool. I think of what's the other book the you know, she goes to she goes to three different countries. Italy is one of them. Yes, either free free love. I'm like think about all the people that have been like United because of that book because they're on that same sort of like, Eat Pray Love journey.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

So cool. What's your favorite book?

Oh, my favorite book? Oh, I have so many. I I really liked Seth Godin for business books. He's, you know, I just love how he does business. I love how he packages books. So I think, you know, pick any Seth Godin book. That's probably one of my favorites. And then I actually really liked literature as well. So I studied literature in university. And so I love Jane Eyre. And like, kind of the old classics, you know, even like Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad like that. That kind of thing. I like Ernest Hemingway. I mean, he's sexist, misogynist, horrible human being, but I love his writing. Isn't that terrible? So there, you know, I like the literary classics. And like the other thing I really like are cozy mysteries. I love Louise Penny, that kind of like just fun, relaxed, you know? You know, I want to call it a guilty pleasure, like just just hanging out, feed up glass of wine, enjoy a good mystery. So my reading and my favorites are all over the place.

I love it. And so when you're working with you're mostly because you work with speakers and entrepreneurs, are they mostly business related books then?

Yes, absolutely. So I work with academics, people in the medical world, speakers, entrepreneurs, podcasters. Anyone with a level of expertise and a set of a set of knowledge, right that they want to impart in a way that makes it really readable? Yes, in fact, we were voted best for early stage nonfiction. We named named it by a book Linker. So that was really exciting. This year, we've only been around. I've been in publishing forever. But alternation is kind of a newer a newer business than we were already named Best in early stage nonfiction, just because we're so good at pulling out all the best bits of a person and getting him to put it in the book. Right. So I'm super excited about that.

Yeah, congratulations. That's huge. It was so cool. So I think some of our podcasts or you know, when we're talking to our podcasts or watching their show, sometimes you're like, Well, okay, if I want to write a book, and some of them want to write a book, but they go to the podcast first because they prefer speaking, that's why I went to podcasts first. But then when they speak the book, or they want to speak some things into the podcast, can that then go back into the book? Or like, what's the process? Like? Do we really need to go back and rewrite all that? Because it's like, now sounds weird, because we've spoken. What does that process look like? Yeah,

So I think there are lots of ways to go about going from book to podcast, I think the most important piece to think about is everything I do whether it's a podcast, or a book, or a course or a workshop, or I'm speaking on stage or whatever it is, this is all content. And I think that's the number one thing because people or it's a book, it's a product that sits in the stores. It's like, no, it's part of your content suite. Right? It's part of your intellectual property. It is a marketing asset. It's part of your content marketing plan. And I think when we start shifting how we see books, then we can see more possibilities. So sometimes people say, I'm going to podcast a book, like, I'm going to think about the structure of a book, and then I'm going to podcast it, and I'm going to speak it out. And then I'm going to put that in transcripts. And then I'm going to turn that into a book, perfectly awesome thing to do. You can also say, you have you have like, well over 100 200 episodes. So now what you could do is say, Okay, I'm gonna look at my podcast, I'm gonna look for themes. And I'm gonna look through all the different episodes, and I'm going to pick out the most important themes. And then I'm going to take those episodes, and I'm going to put them together, and I'm going to transcribe those, then I'm going to pick out the best lessons, stories that go with it. And I'm going to create an outline from that. And then I'm going to build a book from that. So there are so many ways you can go from podcast to book, one thing you don't want to do is just say, Oh, I'm gonna grab these 10 episodes, because they're episode 20 to 30. And I'm going to slap them in a book and put a cover on it. That's what you don't want to do write books or thematic books have lessons, books have flow. So you do want to make sure however you do it, that you it has a flow, you can work with, if you have guests on the podcast, you can work with your guests and say, Hey, I've got 100 guests, I've had 100 guests, go back to them and say, who would like to put together an anthology of ideas based on the topic of the podcast, and then work from there as well. So there's lots of ways you can approach it, what you want to do. And what I do with every client, before we write a single word is we say, what are your goals? Why are you writing this book? What do you want to accomplish with this book? How is it going to fit into your life? How is it going to fit into your business? How does it match your goals? And once you can figure that out? Then you can figure out who your audiences and say, Okay, why would they bother reading my book? What's in it for them? What problems do I solve? What fears do I lay? What desires do I bring to the surface and help give them like, what, what's in it for them, because people aren't gonna buy your book and spend 510 hours reading it unless there's something in it for them. So we're really a book is a marriage of the author's goals, and the readers goals. And once you understand those both deeply and you put those together, there's a marriage of those two, the concept of the book and the content of the book can become very obvious. And then you can take that and go through your podcast and say, okay, where, where is that information? And pull that out and create a book from there. Right? So there's lots of ways to go about it. But first goals and your goals, audience goals, because if not, you'll end up writing a book that nobody wants to read, or you think it's going to help you build your business. And then it doesn't, because you haven't been clear about. And I don't mean vaguely I want this to build my business. No, specifically, how is that going to happen? Right? That's something I do with my clients.

Yeah, I bet. I can see that being valuable too. Even if you know you're gonna write a book. But like, even before you start the podcast, having those things in mind. I know some of our clients that ask the same question, during an episode to their, to their guests. Those are crazy, because they've asked the same question over 100 Guests have answered that same question that makes some really good content. And there's this new AI, this new AI software we're teaching about the other day called rumble sitio. And basically, you can ask like, five or six questions and email it to like 100 people, and they can email back there are five or six answers to that question. So like, oh, that's even good for a book writing, not even necessarily from podcasting. But like, that's really great way to like, you know, get some content from other contributors to without having to sit down and interview every person.

Absolutely. And the other thing, you can take your podcast and put it into AI and have it summarize, which you could then pull out the important piece pieces, right, it'll summarize it'll timestamp, it'll do the quotes and the highlights and, and that's great for book writing as well.

Yeah, absolutely. makes it so much easier to see like questions like we have a Fathom attached to this call and it's going to pull out every question I asked you and the timestamp of it and then summarize it and transcribe it. So great. So great. Love those tools for helping us like just make the podcast experience better and then also help with repurposing it afterwards.

Absolutely. Yes.

And the new love tech. And so have you found that the pod that like chat GBT, and things like that have been a help to authors? Or do you find that people are now trying to use too much of that in their book, and it's not making it as good.

So I think that AI can be really helpful for authors, it can help you outline a book can help you figure out what the right content is, it can help with ideas, I think it can do a lot of good for authors, the one thing it can't do is put in your personality, your values, your sense of humor, your stories, your ideas. So, you know, if you want to use use AI, absolutely go ahead and use AI. But don't use it to build the entire book. Because then you're leaving yourself out of the equation. And the most important part of your book is you and a lot of people are like, you know, people don't want to read about me, they just like, you know, this, they they want the information, they want the steps and that's just not true. We want you we want your quirkiness be weird, be you be whoever you are, put it in your book, and your clients and other stories as well. But your podcast guest stories, that's what we want. In a book, we want to, to see other people, right. So AI can't do that for you. Right? It can't just go and take everyone else's stories, because it does doesn't know who your clients are, right? So we can help you. They can tighten up writing, you can do lots of things. Now, caveat. There are organizations like Amazon going, well, we just don't want a whole bunch of AI created books dumped onto our platform. Because that's you know, that you can't copyright AI, by the way, right? So. So if you do a book with AI, and then you put it out in the world, you don't have copyright on that. And so there are some things around AI that if you are going to write a book, talk to somebody about it so that you understand the limitations how it can best help. Yeah, so nothing wrong with with AI, I had one author tell me very guiltily. Well, when I want to have writer's block, and I don't know what to read, I usually just pop something into AI. So I don't start with the blank page. And you can tell she felt guilty. And I thought that's beautiful. That's wonderful. Let AI support what you're doing. But it won't do the entire job for you. Not yet. Anyways, I imagine. I imagine the children being born right now if everything of their entire life is put into ai, ai can probably just lead their lives in the future.

Not yet. Even like putting in so I was trying to train chatty PT the other day to do some coffee and stuff. And I put in like my link, here's my LinkedIn profile. And I here's our website, here's what we're trying to do. Here's who our audience is. And it was it was good. It was a good a good idea. And then it started spitting out some things. I'm like, that sounds like that sounds like it's like soulless and doesn't have like heart in it. And I was like, Okay, can you rewrite this with a little bit more bubbly? nears, hard, fun, kind of fun way. And then it's spat out a whole bunch of stuff. That sounds exactly how I say things. I was like, that's better.

There we go. There we go. I, I was trying to get GPT to mimic my sense of humor. Successful.

That would be really hard unless like your sense of humor is like, written out. Yeah, so fun. So cool. So tell us a bit about your podcasts and how you know, this is obviously going to ask the expert interview. But we want to go behind the mic for a second to find out a little bit more about your podcast.

Yes. So I started my podcasts with the intention of supporting nonfiction authors. That's what I wanted to do. And there are two ways I do that. One, I invite nonfiction authors onto the show to talk about their books, and their author journey. Because as we know, when you are on a path, we like to hear stories of other people on the same path, their successes, their failures, what they did. And so that's part of the show is just that author journey, and talking about their books. And then the other in interviewee I bring on our experts. So this just past this week, I had somebody talking about building a community around your book. So this person was a community expert. And they were helping people think about building a community. So if your book transforms people, then you can have a community to help with that transformation. So those are the two types of guests. I have all nonfiction authors and experts in an area that would support nonfiction authors. And we have a lot of fun, just, you know, learning about the guest telling the guest story digging into the expertise and you know, it's it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy it. And the point is to support nonfiction authors.

Yeah, that's awesome. Have you like what we're doing right here bringing in experts that can support podcasters? In what they're doing too. So? Yeah, very cool. And how long have you been doing your podcast far?

I am just wrapping up Season Two.

Who? The seasons? How have your seasons?

I started in September and I go to gym. Nice, big long season. Yes. I take the summer off

school year. Yeah, let's get. Let's think about doing that to actually. That's great. And do you record your episodes like one at a time? Where do you batch a whole bunch of them together?

So I go live on, pardon me, I go live on YouTube every Thursday with my guest. And then after the live interview, it becomes a podcast and is sent out. So I do it

every every Thursday. Cool. I like that. And do you find out where do you find your guests?

Oh, everywhere. So I actually have a forum on my website that says, you know, if you'd like to be a guest, I get a lot of guests through that. And then I sometimes I there's a particular topic I want. And so I will search for a guest on that topic. And then other times, I'll be out somewhere networking, and I'll meet someone, and I'll think, oh, they would be a great guest. So I'll approach them. I get emails from people who want to be guests. So they come to me in so many different ways. And I'm actually booked to the end of the season, and I have a waitlist for next season as well.

Amazing. So it's so many it's not hard to find a guest. Although speaking about Chechi PT I did I was teaching a workshop this week on it. And I was like, Hey, guys, so you can actually like find out who you should interview on your podcast based on your topic. And so we went in there like, Okay, who should we interview about such and such topic spat out 100 names and it was like, okay, so if our audience is this, and this person is this expert, what questions should we ask? And it's find out some really good questions. And I was like, these are great. I'm like, actually, can you go a little deeper? We will these are kind of surface level questions. What are some deeper questions you could ask to keep some really good questions. So they have you're not sure what to ask your guests on a show like are not sure what kind of guests to have on your show? That sounds great. That sounds like not a problem you have. Like, you've got so many options to choose from. There's so many great guests out there for you.

Yeah, I love that, Michelle, because this is something I tried to do is go a little deeper. So a lot of guests after they come on my show. They're like, wow, that was like You ask questions that nobody else asked. And so you know, for everyone listening, please, if you're not sure what to ask, go to chat. TPT, ask what to ask and then say what are the deeper questions I can ask? Because that's where the magic lives. Right. I love that.

There's some really good questions in there. I thought I never thought about those. So yeah, it was, it was really important to put in who my audience was and what they would who they were to, so that it got the idea like Okay, so we're talking to podcasters and melodies, book experts. So a writing expert, what questions to ask her. So I should have done it for you. Because that would have been great. You say see what questions I could have tested out my questions on you.

It's so much fun, right?

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. So we're speaking about that. Where can we so we've got your author, nation podcast, and your author, nation website, you want to give them the domain link for that too?

Absolutely. So you can find me at author nation tube.com. And if you're looking for resources, hop over to author nation dot online, I have a resource for every stage of the publishing process. So wherever you're stuck, I have a resource for you.

Awesome, sounds good. Now, any words of wisdom melody before we let you go for our podcasters that are out there thinking like, hey, yeah, I do want to do a book too. That seems they seem to go hand in hand together. And we all know that we kind of need the book as a business card to is kind of one of the one of those things that sets you apart not only for speaking engagements, but also to be guests on podcast, I always pick the authors first because they know their topic, and they know what they've done. They've done the work to get into what they want to talk about.

Yes, because it takes effort to write a book. It's not an easy and easy thing, right? So if you've written a book, you've really dug into your knowledge, and you've really thought about it, and found a way to express it that people don't have to ask you questions right away, right? So my final words, if you want to, if you're a podcast, and you want to write a book, sit back and think it through, think about why do I really want to do this? What's in it for me? What's in it for the reader, and then take your time and plan it out? You don't something that sometimes people are like, I want to write a book and then they jump in, take a step back. Think about why for you think about why for the reader, and then plan it and think how can I integrate the podcast and the book together? How is that going to work? And reach out to me, call me. Email me say Can we just chat for 30 minutes? I just want to make sure I get this right. I'm happy to have that conversation with you. Is this is the most important piece before you move forward with the book.

Yeah, I love that and love how methodical that you are with it, because if like, I'm in the process of writing a book, and I'm like, I feel like I got a loss partway through going like, oh, shoot, what was cool again of this and having to go back again. Maybe getting a call from me seems

Very common. Lots of people call me halfway through going I don't know what I'm doing. So it's like it's uh, hey, I can help you and your pages and

I forgot what we're doing. That's awesome. Very cool. Well, thank you, Melody for spending your time with us. As far any amplify you finally go out and check out author nation podcast and all of the resources Melody's got on her website is Well, thanks again for being here with us today. It's been a pleasure. And we'll see you again soon.