First off, Happy New Year! We hope your New Year is full of writing and publishing, and we also hope this chat series will help you in those endeavors during 2018.

This blog series will help us too because let’s face it, we all have issues finding content. We want to be interesting, but helpful. We don’t have to keep repeating topics over and over–there are thousands of bloggers blogging about the same thing. But when I realized that KT and I have a goldmine of relevant information at our fingertips, we decided to dive in.

Let’s follow KT while she edits and publishes Down to Sleep! We’ll dish about indie-publishing news, talk about things you need to think about before you publish, and obstacles that come up in the process.

This is our first chat. Thanks for tuning in!

KT Daxon
I’ll let you take the lead on the chat because I’m clueless. You mentioned going back to the start?

Vania Margene Rheault
Yeah. Let’s go way back.  When did you start Down to Sleep? Can we call it that? Were you still thinking about a title change?

KT Daxon
Nah … I think Down to Sleep is the correct title. Once you read the full story and have suggestions, I’m open to them, but as of now, that’ll be the title. Goes along with the next book’s title too.
When did I start Down to Sleep? Down to Sleep is a product of NaNoWriMo 2013. It’s come so far since that first draft, but yeah. The story idea is 4 years old. Life happened in the middle of rewrites that caused elements to change but it originally was crafted in November 2013.

Vania Margene Rheault
And I feel like I’ve worked on Don’t Run Away forever! I wrote that for a NaNo project in 2015. How did you learn to join Twitter? And what were your goals for joining?

KT Daxon
Well, I think timing will help us both pay off. Having just read Don’t Run Away, I think it was an excellent investment of time. ❤
When you asked me this earlier, about Twitter, I started to sweat. It’s a painful subject as to why I ventured onto Twitter and it involves me leaving Facebook for good. An incident led me to Twitter. Back then, I hadn’t fully engulfed myself in the idea of becoming a full-time writer, so it amazes me to this day how welcoming the writing community has been. It’s as if one day, I woke up and here I am. It sounds unreal but it’s the truth. I discovered hashtags and as the old trope goes, “the rest is history”.
Once I dug myself a cozy spot in the writing community though, I developed goals for my career.
I wanted to write and publish my stories. When I became serious about writing, it was an escape. A way to save myself from myself. I connected with amazing people, both good and bad, and decided I wanted to rebrand myself. I created a pen name, and set out to be a supportive force in the community. I’m still working on that part, but hopefully it’s paying off. I’ve always cared what people think about me, so I figured, be nice … who doesn’t like nice people? Ha!
Stop me or I’ll talk your ear off.
Should I be asking you questions too?

Vania Margene Rheault
That’s interesting because I joined social media thinking I was going to sell books, not join a writing community that would support me but not buy.
(If you want to, sure. As we get deeper into the process it will be easier for me to know what you need help with.)
I was thinking Twitter would be more of a marketing tool. It’s great that I found such a supportive community, like you said, but now I need to focus on finding readers. Thoughts?

KT Daxon
I’ll admit, when I joined Twitter, I too thought it was a platform to sell books. But, as each day passes, I’m realizing that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Not to shine a light on the negative right away, but I’ve noticed a bit of “do this for me,” but not a lot of giveback.
I agree that once you build a platform of support, the next phase is finding your readers. My question is, how do we do that? What’s the best way?
I have many of my followers tell me, “I can’t wait to read your book,” but I can only hope they mean that once my book is actually published.

Vania Margene Rheault
I have ideas on that, that we’ll talk about later. I think the best thing you can do before you worry about any of that is to concentrate on putting out a good book. I was going to ask you about your pen name. What made you decide you needed one? I’ve had a couple comments on my blog post that said I don’t need to worry about one (for my fantasy; I’m a contemporary romance author) but with genre-hopping, I feel like I should have one.

KT Daxon
I wrote a blog post explaining the meaning behind my pen name. I decided I wanted one because I wanted one. My name doesn’t pop on a book cover and I wanted one that did.
James Patterson has written different genres and doesn’t use a pen name. IMO, it’s all a personal choice.
Putting out a good book, or 3 is what I am working on now. Finding readers is pointless if you don’t have anything for them to read, so I agree there.
I researched reasons why people use pen names because I thought it was just to hide your real name because people didn’t want coworkers or family to know they wrote certain genres.  I never understood that though, if I write something, I want people to know it’s me who did it. LOL. I selected a pen name that was still me 100% and pops on a book cover. 🙂

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That was a fantastic first chat!

Some of our chats will bleed into other topics, so if you feel like we end a chat rather abruptly, it’s because we’ll be picking up during our next chat where we left off. KT and I will be posting the same chat, with perhaps a few differences in the intro and smoother closings at the end. Look for us Thursday, January 4th, when we discuss editing and betas!

I hope you all learn a little something, and for sure, if you have questions, please let us know, or tweet us at @v_rheault and @thektdaxon!

Other articles on pen names:

Should You Be Using a Pen Name? by Helen Sedwick

Why Using a Pen Name is a Risk that Writers Shouldn’t Take

JK Rowling is right – a pen name is a writer’s best friend