If You Won't Learn Business, Don't Self-Publish — My Warning to Writers

Meet PK Stuart

PK Stuart is a romantic fantasy author living in western Colorado, where the landscapes are as wild and complex as the characters she writes. Her Time’s End series follows smart, strong women and the brave, loving men. A self-described pantser who lives for the next adventure, Pam writes fiction mixing magic, mystery, and humor. She is also a writing workshop presenter and serves as the Western Slope Programs Chair for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

Full Transcript.

If You Won't Learn Business, Don't Self-Publish — My Warning to Writers with PK Stuart

Laura Williams: [00:00:00] Ever wondered if total creative freedom is worth the absolute madness of running your own publishing business? Today on The Writing Biz, we're pulling back the curtain on the real tech, the massive headaches, and the ultimate payoffs of self-publishing. Joining me is Pam Stuart, a fantastic romantic fantasy author and pantser extraordinaire, who's built an independent platform from the ground up, and she's here to share the unvarnished truth about what it really takes to succeed on your own terms. Pam, thank you so much for joining me.

Laura Williams: How are you today?

PK Stuart: [00:00:31] I'm great, thanks, Laura.

Laura Williams: [00:00:35] I think this is going to be a great interview — there's so much we'll be able to cover here. You've described yourself as a total pantser, which is the opposite of what I am. I'm a fantasy fiction author too, but I need everything squared away.

Laura Williams: So you're letting the characters drive the bus without a strict plot. Does that free-spirited approach carry over into how you manage the business side of indie publishing?

PK Stuart: [00:00:59] No, not even a little bit. [00:01:00] By nature I'm an accountant — my first career was in accounting and business management.

PK Stuart: So that's probably closer to my true nature than the pantser thing is. The pantser approach took over simply because no matter how much work I put into plotting, my characters just went a different direction. I'm the kind of author who's learned to just follow them around, typing as fast as I can to keep up — so it's really two separate things.

PK Stuart: My structural work happens up front, on character. I know my characters inside and out — goal, motivation, conflict, backstory, weaknesses, [00:02:00] strengths. I know where I want the story to start, and where it needs to end, since I'm both a series reader and a series writer.

PK Stuart: By the time you're writing book two or book three, they do have to follow a consistent story arc — but I've found that really thorough character work, knowing those people inside and out, is what gives me that freedom later on.

Laura Williams: [00:02:34] It gives you something to build on.

PK Stuart: [00:02:36] Yes.

Laura Williams: [00:02:37] Especially during rewrites — that's another place a good outline helps. You can look back and ask, well, what was I thinking here, and actually have an example of what you were thinking.

PK Stuart: [00:02:46] Exactly.

Laura Williams: [00:02:48] So one thing we talk about a lot on this show is the learning curve for indie publishing, and how incredibly steep it can feel starting out. [00:03:00] What tools would you recommend to help with that?

PK Stuart: [00:03:05] The other part of my background is that I was an IT manager, so I do love my little tools. But I think probably the most important place to start is your network. I've been part of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers since day one.

PK Stuart: The amount of craft education, and the number of people more than happy to help you figure out all the ins and outs, makes that the first set of tools I'd recommend anyone develop. Good critique partners, someone whose career — in my case, as an indie author and indie publisher — within [00:04:00] my first year and a half, I had three or four friends who were genuinely successful indie authors, more than happy to answer questions and help me through things.

PK Stuart: There's also just so much education available online these days. As for the actual tools I use — I write in Scrivener, I format in Atticus. I've tried plenty of plotting tools, thinking maybe that was my ticket out of being a pantser, but no, I really just can't get them to behave, so none of those get much use these days.

PK Stuart: But there's one more, purely timeline-related, that helps me keep track of things. My most recent series is all time travel, and keeping track of it all required more of a visual [00:05:00] timeline than just writing dates down worked for me.

PK Stuart: I could look at it and go, oh right, that would have happened before he ever did this. You're constantly trying to keep straight what your characters have already experienced versus what they haven't seen yet.

Laura Williams: [00:05:22] Do you use a specific tool for that?

PK Stuart: [00:05:24] I use Aeon Timeline — A-E-O-N. It reminded me a bit of when I worked, about twenty years ago, as a scheduler on industrial construction projects — what's called critical path management scheduling, which lays everything out visually. I loved working that way.

PK Stuart: This program does something similar — you get an actual timeline, however you want to label it. [00:06:00]

Laura Williams: [00:06:01] I'll definitely check that out — I'm a very visual learner.

PK Stuart: [00:06:04] It works great for me. The other thing I love, for keeping everything in one place and at my fingertips, is Notion.

PK Stuart: It's this do-anything-you-want-with-it kind of database. The interface is excellent, and I've used it for years.

PK Stuart: And then — a bit controversial, but I don't really mind — I don't use it for writing itself, but for marketing and organizational work, I love AI. I use Anthropic's Claude for all kinds of things like that. Like I said, I don't think it'd even be fun to use it for the writing itself.

PK Stuart: But for those other tasks, especially marketing, writing ad [00:07:00] copy — it's so fast and does such a good job that it's genuinely made my life easier.

Laura Williams: [00:07:07] I don't know how I'd manage all the moving pieces of this podcast without AI.

PK Stuart: [00:07:12] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:07:13] Because I have to fit everything into a limited number of hours, since I have a business to run.

Laura Williams: It helps me tremendously with the smaller tasks — putting together ad copy, social media posts, exactly like you said.

Laura Williams: It gives you the ideas, and makes the writing of all that so much faster.

PK Stuart: [00:07:33] Yeah, I don't think there's anything I use exactly the way it spits it out. In fact, the strongest lines in a piece of ad copy always end up being the ones I wrote myself.

PK Stuart: But like you said, it's almost like having someone to work through it all with, so you land on what really works. It's like having someone toss genuinely good ideas at you [00:08:00] to build on.

Laura Williams: [00:08:00] It's like having an assistant in the office I can bounce things off of, and it really helps tremendously. Two minds are always better than one.

PK Stuart: [00:08:08] And talk about putting a spreadsheet together fast.

Laura Williams: [00:08:13] Yes —

PK Stuart: [00:08:13] Like, I want to track this, this, this, and this about my Amazon ads, and be able to look at it.

PK Stuart: I want to compare the top-line numbers on a monthly basis. It would normally take me half a day to put all of that together. Now it's fifteen minutes, including the tweaks I think of afterward.

Laura Williams: [00:08:33] Have you tried the button that turns it into a dashboard yet?

PK Stuart: [00:08:37] No, I haven't.

Laura Williams: [00:08:39] I just did that yesterday.

Laura Williams: We could go on and on about this, but — definitely check that out. And some people are going to disagree with me on this, but I feel like if you're not keeping up with what's happening in AI, and how it can help your writing [00:09:00] business, you're going to struggle in a few years.

PK Stuart: [00:09:03] Well, honestly, with any business — but this one especially — if you're not at the top of your game, you may as well forget making money as an indie publisher. The odds of actually getting noticed are slim to none, so you'd better be spending your time writing genuinely great books, rather than everything else.

Laura Williams: [00:09:31] Like you mentioned, you're involved with the workshop through Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, right?

PK Stuart: [00:09:36] Yes, yes.

Laura Williams: [00:09:37] You're a presenter and programs chair there.

Laura Williams: I want to ask — what do you see as the biggest misconception writers have when choosing indie publishing over traditional publishing?

PK Stuart: [00:09:53] That's probably as individual as the writers themselves, but [00:10:00] first, I think there's a misconception about the industry itself, about just how much traditional publishing has changed in the last fifteen years. There are what, five actual major publishers left at this point? And they own almost everything else.

PK Stuart: You can't even reach them without an agent, so the first hoop is finding an agent. Then your agent has to figure out which hoops to jump through to get you published, and even once you're published, you might be looking at two years before your book ever hits the market.

PK Stuart: In some cases that path is exactly right for people. But I also think indie publishing needs to be treated like any other small business. If you don't have the funding to start a new business, the odds are there's not much reason to try. There's a lot of upfront money [00:11:00] that goes into putting out a good book.

PK Stuart: And marketing is only part of it. Good covers, good editors, the software tools we were just talking about. Atticus is only about $189 or so, but otherwise you'll need to pay someone to format the book — or format it yourself, though I wouldn't want to deal with that.

PK Stuart: And that's just to produce the finished product. I figure I've got a minimum of three grand into a book before it's ever uploaded to KDP. Then you need a marketing budget, and if you're selling books at book fairs and similar events, a travel budget too.

PK Stuart: Just this [00:12:00] morning I was answering emails — fairly local events, but I'll have hotel rooms booked at three different festivals I'm doing this summer, all from emails I got just this morning. Each of those requires a hotel room. You start to wonder, am I even making any money on this?

PK Stuart: But it's how you get your name out there, and how you actually get things done.

PK Stuart: It really is like any small business, and that's the mindset you have to bring to it — you're starting a small business, and you need a fairly significant nest egg and a decent set of business skills to pull it off.

Laura Williams: [00:12:43] I come from a restaurant background myself, and I've done a lot of restaurant startups.

Laura Williams: One of the most common failures among independent restaurant owners is not having enough money set aside for those first six months.

PK Stuart: [00:12:57] Right.

Laura Williams: [00:12:57] The correct approach is to have enough set aside that you don't have to [00:13:00] worry about money for ordering, paying rent, covering everything, for six months.

PK Stuart: [00:13:05] After I stopped working for other people, I actually did business startup consulting for a while, alongside getting my writing career going, and the number of people who don't even understand the difference between cash flow and profit is a real issue too.

PK Stuart: Just because money's coming in doesn't mean you should be spending it. It's not profit until it's actually profit — otherwise it stays in the business, goes toward the expenses on the next book, that kind of thing. I genuinely think if someone isn't willing to put in as much learning around business, finance, and bookkeeping as they are around the craft of [00:14:00] writing, they're better off going the traditional publishing route.

Laura Williams: [00:14:06] Which is exactly why this podcast exists — helping people make that transition between the creative side and the CEO side of the business.

Laura Williams: You really have to take the time to learn how to do that.

PK Stuart: [00:14:18] Or have enough money in reserve to hire people to do it for you. But that's another significant expense.

Laura Williams: [00:14:25] Sit down and make a plan — what can you do, what can't you do, where do you need people, where's your money going to go, where's it going to come from. A good plan really does help build a good business.

PK Stuart: [00:14:37] Yep.

Laura Williams: [00:14:38] So on your website, you mention you have a real love for humor in fiction.

Laura Williams: I do too.

PK Stuart: [00:14:47] Yes.

Laura Williams: [00:14:48] My book has a lot of humor in it, and I read a lot of fantasy fiction — my favorites, almost without exception, have humor woven in. You also sound like a busy woman — hiking, touring on a Harley, just being out there and free.

PK Stuart: [00:15:04] I've got a whole passel of grandkids, and a retired husband — luckily golf is one of his passions, which I don't share, so he's out of the house playing golf a lot.

PK Stuart: But yes, we've spent a lot of time on our Harleys. We were actually complaining just the other day that we've both been so busy there hasn't been much Harley time lately. But we once rode from here in Western Colorado up to Glacier in Montana, then up into the Canadian Rockies — about three weeks with nothing but the Harley, traveling around, Airbnbs, hotels, that kind of thing. Doing the Canadian Rockies on the bike was really fun. We still get out once or twice a year for at least a three-day weekend, and we'll also just hop on it to go to breakfast on a Saturday. There [00:16:00] are actually two Harleys, a KTM, and a RZR in the garage — he loves his combustion engines.

Laura Williams: [00:16:11] Do you ride yourself?

PK Stuart: [00:16:12] I used to have my own trail bikes — when you're in the Rocky Mountains, there are plenty of great trails up high, and you get to do some really fun riding up in those mountains.

PK Stuart: But I haven't done that in probably ten years — I think I got rid of my last motorcycle about a decade ago.

Laura Williams: [00:16:39] I've always been the passenger — I sit in the back and watch the scenery go by.

PK Stuart: [00:16:44] I love that part, that's my job too. When we were younger — we've been together a really long time — I used to say, once I can afford it, I'm getting my own Harley.

PK Stuart: And by the time I realized I actually could afford it whenever I wanted, I thought, why would I mess [00:17:00] this up? I really like not having to pay attention to the road, being able to look around and enjoy everything, just be in my own little world. I've been on the back of a Harley so much at this point that I can actually fall asleep back there, the same way you would in a car on a long trip.

Laura Williams: [00:17:18] Wow, I can't do that — though I've never actually been on a really long trip, so maybe I shouldn't say that.

PK Stuart: [00:17:26] My husband, Jim, knows I've fallen asleep when my helmet starts bouncing off his shoulder blades.

Laura Williams: [00:17:33] Do you find those adventures help with your creativity, and also with burnout from managing the business — being able to step away and breathe for a bit?

PK Stuart: [00:17:44] Honestly, I've never not done that, since I started writing, so I can't say I've ever really felt burned out.

PK Stuart: I've only been doing this about ten years now. I think I've always made sure [00:18:00] there was plenty of room for family time. We spend a lot of time camping — we've got a cabin about two hours from here, up in the mountains, which is actually a great place to write too. I'm pretty good about starting from the question of what I actually want to do, and there are very few have-tos left in my life these days. It's wonderful.

PK Stuart: It's a great place to be.

Laura Williams: [00:18:30] Yeah, me too. As I've gotten older — I used to be work and work and work, trying to feed everybody, right?

PK Stuart: [00:18:37] Right.

Laura Williams: [00:18:38] But as I've gotten older, now I can make time for the things I actually want to do

PK Stuart: [00:18:44] Yes —

Laura Williams: [00:18:44] and still make time for everything else too.

Laura Williams: So it's a good place to be.

PK Stuart: [00:18:48] And I've got this incredibly self-sufficient husband, so if I don't feed him —

Laura Williams: [00:18:55] Always helpful, if

PK Stuart: [00:18:55] I don't feed him for days, he doesn't even notice. He just feeds himself. [00:19:00]

Laura Williams: [00:19:01] My late husband would've just shriveled up in a corner or something.

Laura Williams: So what was the biggest struggle for you in the early days of running your own writing business?

PK Stuart: [00:19:20] The writing itself was so new to me. I've always been an avid reader — I think I read my first chapter book in third grade, and I've probably had a book or two or three with me everywhere I've gone since.

PK Stuart: Kindles are wonderful, since I can bring seven or eight hundred of them with me at once.

PK Stuart: I always did a lot of business writing, newsletters, that kind of thing — I've always written. But it never occurred to me to try fiction until my sister, who was president of RMFW at the time, said, [00:20:00] ‘Diana Gabaldon's going to be the keynote speaker at conference this year.'

PK Stuart: And I was an absolute Outlander fan. She said, ‘You should come,' and I thought, why not. I'd actually been quietly playing around with writing for maybe a year at that point, hadn't told anyone. But I got there, and it was such a revelation, because as a reader you tend to put authors on some kind of pedestal.

PK Stuart: It was this real epiphany — hundreds of writers at that conference were just normal people. Some of them were just as goofy and weird as I was. There was nothing about any of them that said I couldn't do the same thing. I went home and got started, and that was really the decision — if those people could do it, so could I.

PK Stuart: There was a lot to learn — all the craft fundamentals we all have to pick up, [00:21:00] point of view, story arcs, showing versus telling. Every single one of those clichés was something I had to genuinely learn. The business side, on the other hand, was the easy part for me, since that was what I'd already been doing for twenty years.

Laura Williams: [00:21:21] It's funny, because when I started, I actually wrote earlier in my life, then stopped for decades. When I picked it back up, I had to recommit to relearning how to write, which I did through books on writing, but also YouTube videos and anything else that could help. I completely understand what you're describing.

PK Stuart: [00:21:40] And finding good critique partners — again, having a sister already in the writing world was huge, because she knew everyone and could connect me with all these people. My critique partners basically taught me how to write.

Laura Williams: [00:21:58] What genre does she write? [00:22:00]

PK Stuart: [00:22:00] She's written a lot of different genres over the years — she's not published. She started with historical westerns twenty-five years ago, then some fantasy, quite a bit of romance, and — have you read Lucy Score?

Laura Williams: [00:22:21] The name sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it off the top of my head.

PK Stuart: [00:22:24] It's fairly standard rom-com in structure, but even though that's not usually my genre, I've read everything she's written, because it's laugh-out-loud hilarious and just so enjoyable.

PK Stuart: So my sister Vicky decided to try her hand at that genre — that's what she's writing right now.

Laura Williams: [00:22:47] One of my favorite series is the Magical Midlife — oh, I won't remember the exact title —

PK Stuart: [00:22:52] There are actually a couple of those out there,

Laura Williams: [00:22:54] Yes —

PK Stuart: [00:22:55] but I enjoy all of them, honestly.

Laura Williams: [00:22:57] Hilarious. I got my [00:23:00] daughter reading them too, and she was just dying laughing.

PK Stuart: [00:23:01] K.F. Breene has a series like that too.

Laura Williams: [00:23:06] Yep, mm-hmm.

PK Stuart: [00:23:06] And so does my friend Lisa Manifold — she has one that's really funny.

Laura Williams: [00:23:13] I live with my daughter — she's upstairs, I'm downstairs, and she'll hear me laughing and just knows I'm probably reading one of those. So what was your biggest success? What did you do that made you think, look at me, I actually did this?

PK Stuart: [00:23:31] I think the biggest thing, and I hope everyone can experience this, is that to this day I can go back and read the very first book I ever wrote, and still genuinely enjoy it. There's a real sense of satisfaction in that, hard to fully describe. Every time you get a good review, it feels wonderful. Seeing strong read-through rates [00:24:00] feels wonderful too. It's not really about success or failure — it's about knowing people are genuinely enjoying your work.

Laura Williams: [00:24:09] So tell me about your books.

PK Stuart: [00:24:12] They're a little hard to categorize. Genre-wise, they're technically romantic fantasy.

PK Stuart: But there's a time-travel element too, and they're contemporary — not epic fantasy, I'm not building new worlds. In fact, they're mostly set in the small town of Fairplay, Colorado, which happens to be where I go write once a quarter, at an old historic hotel there. It's an old mining town.

PK Stuart: I'm also personally very environmentally minded — justice is a huge value for me. I don't believe people should be poor. There are just a lot of things I [00:25:00] genuinely work toward in my own life.

PK Stuart: This series is built around some of those same themes — it's why my characters travel back to the 2000s from two hundred years in the future, a future where we've unfortunately let those kinds of problems take hold. They travel back in time trying to solve those issues by changing history.

PK Stuart: I work really hard not to let it get preachy, so none of that comes through directly. There's a romance in every book, and the characters are time-traveling druids with elemental magic, trying to fix things.

Laura Williams: [00:25:45] I really like that premise. I do enjoy it when a story has that kind of justice-flavored undercurrent, some sort of moral dilemma running through it.

PK Stuart: [00:25:58] Yes, it's got a bit of [00:26:00] that save-the-world flavor to it.

Laura Williams: [00:26:02] So that's a full series — what's it called?

PK Stuart: [00:26:05] The series is called Time's End, and the first book is Inside the Tree Line.

Laura Williams: [00:26:11] That sounds like a lovely series, genuinely fun to read. And I'm sure there's humor woven through it.

PK Stuart: [00:26:18] Yeah, yeah — I love snarky women.

Laura Williams: [00:26:21] So do I, being one myself. Being one has definitely helped me write it, if not necessarily helped me through life.

Laura Williams: I really appreciate you joining me today, Pam. Thank you so much. I'll make sure all your information is in the show notes, along with the tools you mentioned.

Laura Williams: Is there anything coming up you'd like to share with us?

PK Stuart: [00:26:48] Not unless you happen to be hanging out in Western Colorado — I've got some small festivals I enjoy in Mancos, [00:27:00] Colorado, and Cedaredge, Colorado, mostly just excuses to get into the mountains.

Laura Williams: [00:27:07] I have friends from Colorado, and I know it's just a beautiful state.

PK Stuart: [00:27:13] It really is.

Laura Williams: [00:27:14] I'm in Eastern North Carolina myself, which is beautiful in its own way, but very different from Colorado.

PK Stuart: [00:27:19] I actually spent quite a bit of time living in Savannah, and in Georgia more broadly.

Laura Williams: [00:27:24] Okay.

PK Stuart: [00:27:24] Traveling up and down the coast between there and Virginia Beach — Savannah's lovely, and I got around quite a bit of that whole area.

Laura Williams: [00:27:33] Yep, that's pretty cool.

PK Stuart: [00:27:35] It really is.

Laura Williams: [00:27:35] Well, I really appreciate you joining me today. Thank you so much.

PK Stuart: [00:27:38] Thank you so much, Laura.

Laura Williams: [00:27:39] And I'll keep you in my back pocket, because it sounds like you know a lot about a lot of things.

PK Stuart: [00:27:44] Oh, thanks.

Laura Williams: [00:27:48] To learn more about this podcast, and to sign up to be the first to know when new episodes are up, visit thewritingbiz.com. Until next time, take what you've learned and put it to work in your own writing business.