Interview with Book Camp's Chad Allen

Training and support for an author's journey

One of the many challenges facing an unknown, unpublished novelist is getting your book out there in the world to an audience ready for it.

It ain’t easy, not by a long shot. It takes planning, work, and commitment. And not a small shot of persistence.

Any author needs help because putting a book out into the world is not something anyone can do completely alone. In my journeys through the writing of several novels, looking for a community of writers that have been there, done that, I’ve run across several groups.

One of them is Book Camp, which was started six years ago by Chad Allen. It is currently a community of about 220 people who are all on the path of becoming writers and published authors, some of them much further along than others, some already published.

We spoke for about twenty minutes, covering various topics, including building a platform, self-publishing vs. traditional, using AI, and more.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

Tim: Tell me a little about Book Camp.

Chad: We serve writers, both fiction and nonfiction, who are everywhere from just getting started to have already had multiple books deals and multiple books in the world. The way we help them is to essentially help them get their books into the world and that language is intentional. I could have said we help authors get published, but that's only part of it because, listen, you and I could publish a book before dinner tonight if we want.

Tim: Yes, we could.

Chad: But it wouldn't be a very good book. Maybe it'd be better than many people's books, but it wouldn't be our best work. It's not enough to get published. What I am interested in is helping writers get the audience; the attention that it deserves. So I talk a lot about building an audience. I talk a lot about refining your book concept. We talk a lot about fiction and becoming a better writer. Soit's not just about getting published.

It's about helping writers get their books into the world. In fact, we just added -- this is late breaking news, because we haven't even announced it, Tim -- we just added four new trainings in the members area on how to create a website and communicate with your subscribers via email. Why? Because I know if Tim Patterson has an email list, he will have an order of magnitude more impact with his book or books than he would without one. And so that's, that's really what book camp is all about. It's helping authors have the impact that their work deserves.

Tim: As an aside, a couple of weeks ago, you asked on the FaceBook Book Camp page what are you working on this week. And I said my website. It's a one-page site. That's all it needs to be right now. So now it's up, and I have the email capture and all of that. And I've got links to Substack, which is also, of course, an email platform as well. I feel like I've got a lot of the pieces in place, and I'm moving in that direction, which is why, you know, I thought off I post once a week in Substack, that'll be great. But it turns out I've got so many things that I need to get down on paper and get out.

Chad: I've seen people grow their subscribers into the hundreds. And that way, every time you publish a new Substack, you send out an email saying, Hey, I just did this, this new thing; go take a look. You'll get so much more attention than you would. Now, maybe you want to practice in relative quiet for a while.

Tim: I'm at the point where I'm thinking, okay, I need to go and start sending personal emails to people, as you suggested, and I think that's really what I'll start in earnest in the next week or two. And so, yeah, I can double-triple, or quadruple that small list I have right now. I have picked up a few through social media, but not many. I have picked up a fair amount from Facebook that people just know me, like cousins and colleagues. I know there are some unexplored avenues. What are some other tips for unpublished authors?

Chad: It's never been easier, more accessible, less expensive than it is right now today to have a way of communicating with a worldwide audience. That's astounding. I mean, if you had told people 30 years ago that they would have a way of reaching a worldwide audience that didn't cost an arm and a leg, they would have thought you were crazy, you know? Access is no longer an issue. The issue is, are you going to show up? Are you going to show up and do the work and serve your readers? And if you're willing to do that and do it consistently, you could have a huge impact. And so that's the message that I would give people. Now we can get into all the tactical, the granular, the ground level. But at a higher level, that's really what it's about. relentlessly serving your audience. And if you're willing to do that, you can have a big impact.

Tim: I watched a video from an author, Russell Nohelty, the other day on building an audience, which was illuminating. He said to find your audience, go where they already are, and get in front of them.

Chad: One of my favorite things is pitching yourself as a podcast guest.

Tim: Yes, I agree.

Chad: There are any number of podcasts that focus on urban fantasy or at least focus on fiction and with urban fantasy as a part of it. Imagine you being able to pitch yourself to those podcasts, those podcasts are looking for guests and you show up with something of value for their audience and in the process, their audience learns about you and your Substack and they subscribe. Imagine sending pitches like that once or twice a week and just how quickly you could get in front of a lot of people.

Tim: Yeah, and I don't want to put the cart in front of the horse because my book's not published yet. It's still going to be a while and I'm still trying to navigate all of this. Another question is: Do I want to try and go traditional versus self-publishing? I’ve submitted queries to several agents, and I haven't gotten much attention. Although I've gotten some interesting feedback from some agents. But from all I read, the traditional publishing route is very difficult, so I probably will end up self-publishing. That's why you want to build the platform is to the best of your ability. I don't want to get on the podcast and do all that without having the product yet. So I'm just navigating all of that and making sure the pieces are in the right order. And I think that's what I'm finding very helpful in Book Camp. Here’s another topic that occupies my mind: How is AI landing in writers' camps? What’s your perception? I welcome it because it's helpful. And I'm curious how you're reviewing it and then how you're seeing writers view it.

Chad: Yeah, it's awesome. All over the map, I appreciate the question because it is this brand new revolutionary technology that is not going anywhere, is only going to become more influential. In some ways, it harkens back to every other major technological shift we've seen in history when the internet became a thing.

I mean, there were all these dire predictions about the internet. I remember that Katie Couric, that clip that sometimes gets thrown around where the world web is a brand new thing and she's going, there's this thing called the world wide web.

And at that time, there were all these dire predictions about it. And we're seeing the same kind of thing with AI. It kind of feels like this big thing has dropped onto the playground of the world. And we're trying to figure out what it is and what we can do with it, and what we shouldn't do with it. I respect Austin Cleon a lot, and he'll say things like, I want machines that help me feel more human, like this bicycle. And the implication is that AI makes him feel less human. And so he would be, he would be critical of it. Then you have a guy like Cal Newport who wrote deep work, who's also a computer scientist, who some people would refer to him as leaning toward the Luddite side of things, even though he's a computer scientist, but he's actually okay with AI. He says, I use Google, so why wouldn't I use AI? I talked with a friend who runs a podcast in Hollywood, and he's got to write some scripts, and I said you should use ChatGPT for that. And he said, well, the big concern with SEG-AFTRA, this big protest that's going on. Their big concern is that AI will take over their jobs. So he told me if it got out that if he used ChatGPT to write scripts for this podcast, that would not go well. And so there are all these concerns about it. But I'll say that I personally find it to be a very helpful tool. You have to use it responsibly. I'm still figuring out what that even means.

Tim: I agree. I'm putting together a longer form article that I'll publish on Substack, probably in the next four to six weeks, about AI and how I'm using it and how to ethically use it. In fact, I asked ChatGPT how do you ethically use ChatGPT in writing. And it gave me a great list which I thought was fun. One of the things I come up with is I pasted a passage from a story of maybe three paragraphs in ChatGPT and asked it to go through and identify all of the verbs and then give me two alternatives for each one. Then it creates a chart, so it’s a thesaurus on steroids.

Chad: I'm trying to remember the author of this new book, Excellent Advice for Living (Kevin Kelly). He's the co-founder of Wired Magazine. On a podcast with Richard Raul, he said, I think of ChatGPT like an intern. We all have our own personal intern now. Well, it would be embarrassing to take an intern's work and send it into the world, right? That's probably not a good idea. But we didn't all have an intern before, and now we do.

Tim: That's a useful metaphor. Virtual assistant. I think wraps it up, Chad. Thank you for your time!

Chad: Thank you, it was a lot of fun!

Find more about Book Camp here.