Success as an author comes with challenges around managing money, setting boundaries, and living sustainably without burning out. Sacha Black/Ruby Roe talks about her lessons learned after five years as a full-time author entrepreneur.

In the intro, Content marketing for authors [BookBub]; Vineyard research [Books and Travel]; AI-generated voice cloning for select US Audible narrators [The Verge]; How AI is changing audiobooks and how it echoes changes in the music industry [Music Tectonics]; Blood Vintage; Comment écrire un roman — Joanna Penn;

<figure class="aligncenter"></figure>

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

<figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"></figure>

Sacha Black writes spicy sapphic fantasy romance as Ruby Roe, as well as books for authors. She's the host of The Rebel Author Podcast and an international professional speaker. Sacha recently did a solo episode on her lessons learned after 5 years full-time, and we discuss aspects of that in the interview.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Why pivot to a new genre — mindset and money shifts





• Finding freedom from writing under a pen name





• Publishing and business model changes required with rapid sales growth





• Learning to outsource as your author business grows





• Repurposing content across multiple social media platforms





• Your books are not your pension. Your pension is your pension — so invest! (Check out my list of money books here.)





• Avoiding burnout — spending time on hobbies and social activities

You can find Sacha at SachaBlack.co.uk or at RubyRoe.co.uk.

Transcript of Interview with Sacha Black

Joanna: Sacha Black writes spicy sapphic fantasy romance as Ruby Roe, as well as books for authors. She's the host of The Rebel Author Podcast and an international professional speaker. So welcome back to the show, Sacha.

Sacha: Thank you for having me.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on this show—I mean, you have your own show—but you were on the show in August 2022, when you had just celebrated three years full time. We talked about your lessons learned.

Now you're at five years and things have changed a lot. Now we are going to break this down into sections, but let's start with the genre stuff, the type of books you now write. Like what you were doing then and what you're doing now, and—

Why change your genre and the type of books you write?

Sacha: So when I left my day job in 2019, I had found some success sharing all the lessons that I'd learned as a writer and compiling those and putting them into craft books.

I was doing okay. I was averaging sort of 40,000 to 50,000 pounds a year across the business, but I'd also reached a plateau. I wasn't really growing and wasn't really earning anymore. With the type of business it was, as a nonfiction author, you have so many different streams that you can actually have too many different streams.

So I was getting really, really tired, and also kind of feeling like I was making a job for myself, rather than having left my day job to like, “live the dream.” Especially because I'd left my day job to write fiction, but the fiction that I had written up to that point was young adult fantasy.

I think that's like most indie authors that I meet do that, or think they're going to do that at some point, and then we all find the thing we're supposed to be writing.

So then I'd kind of gotten tired and felt like I was in this job instead of running a business. Then I stumbled upon a sapphic, so lesbian young adult book, and for the first time, I read and I had emotions. I was like, oh, my goodness me, is this what everybody else feels when they're reading?

Then, of course, I dived into binging everything that I could get my hands on, but it was all young adult.

I stumbled across a spicy adult lesbian book, and everything changed. I knew that that was what I wanted to do.

So that's what I'm writing now, adult fantasy romance, but for lesbians. Or sapphic people, I should say, because that's more inclusive.

Joanna: Or people who like reading those books. I think you don't have to identify that way to enjoy reading those books.

Sacha: No, absolutely. There are straight characters and all kinds of different characters in the books. I guess that's just the genre catchphrase is, you know, sapphic fantasy romance.

Joanna: You said there, so many indies do this. They start writing in one area, and then eventually they kind of find what they really want.

Why do you think it takes time to find what you really want to write?

Sacha: I think for me, it was dealing with expectations. I'm a bit of a people pleaser. Thank you therapy for knocking that out of me. So I was sort of doing what I thought I should be doing. Doing something polite, reputable, and that's also what I'd read.

I mean, as a queer person, queer fiction, up until recently, was really hard to find. There wasn't a lot of it. There certainly wasn't any of it when I was at school or in my formative years. So it just took me that amount of time to actually find it.

In terms of why other people do it? I'm not really sure. I think we all have our different journeys. Sometimes it's other people's expectations. “Oh, well, if you're going to write a book, you have to be traditionally published,” or, “Oh, you have to write proper fiction,” or, “Oh, write literary,” or whatever.

The more creative we are, the more we sink into that love of art, that love of the word, we free ourselves from those expectations and constraints.

That's really what art is, I suppose, and I do feel like writing is art. So, yes, I think it's a shedding of expectations. Especially as indies, we're naughty.

Joanna: In terms of those expectations there—I mean, obviously you use the word spicy, so we'll keep that word—and for me, it has been writing darker things, I guess. Maybe it's that those are the things that our parents or people who know us in real life or whatever, are like, “Oh, I didn't know you were like that.”

Sacha: 100%. Neither of my parents have read my books, thank god.

Joanna: Well, they told you they haven't!

Sacha: Yes, they told me they haven't. My mum keeps threatening to read it. I'm like, “Don't though. It's really okay, you don't have to.”

I think it's very difficult because you can tell things about an author from their words. People come up to me and go, “Oh, I'm really sorry about ‘blah, blah, blah,'” and I'm like, wait, what, how did you sort of work that out?

I think any type of writin