Tag: productivity

• November 6, 2024Guest Interview, Writing Craft & Editing

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP473 – Interview with Cathy Yardley

  This is a fantastic episode for writers at all stages of their careers. Cathy covers writing in your unique voice, writing your truth and how to ROCK YOUR PLOT.

• March 26, 2024Guest Interview, Writing Craft & Editing

  SPA Girls – EP441 – Discovery Writing With Kimboo York

  In this podcast we talk to KimBoo York about her latest book Secrets of Discovery Writing. We dive into how you can successfully use discovery writing when crafting your novel. It's an awesome podcast and one the pantsers among us will really enjoy.

• March 6, 2024Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity, Guest Interview, Mindset, Health & Writing Life

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP438 – Overcoming Procrastination – with Kathryn Burnett

  Procrastination takes many forms for writers, and it holds us back from writing, publishing and promoting our work. We discuss how to get out of your own way with our guest today, Kathryn Burnett.

• January 30, 2024Guest Interview, Mindset, Health & Writing Life, Self-Publishing Process & Tools, Selling Direct To Readers

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP433 – Selling Direct With Katie Cross

  In this episode we chat to YA Fantasy author Katie Cross. She has so much passion and enthusiasm for what she does, and loves her readers!  We talk about direct sales and how to relate to your readers, and these are just two of the topics we covered. It's action packed and full of information!

• January 3, 2024Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity, Mindset, Health & Writing Life, Self-Publishing Process & Tools, Writing Craft & Editing

  SPA Girls EP – 429 – How To Create Your Author Business Plan

  Today we discuss business plans. Need help creating yours? It doesn't need to be complicated, just download our simple SPA Girls template in the show notes.

• November 22, 2023Mindset, Health & Writing Life

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP423 – Turn Setbacks Into Success

  Bumps on the publishing path are unwelcome yet inevitable. So how can we reset ourselves when the wobbles and disappointment set in? Today we’ve got a SPA Girls 6-Step Guide to turning those setbacks into success!

• October 24, 2023Guest Interview, Mindset, Health & Writing Life, Self-Publishing Process & Tools

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP419 – The Best Mindset for Organisation and Productivity with Sarra Cannon

  Self-publishing since 2010, Amazon top 100 best-selling Amazon author with 1 million books sold, Sarra writes magical contemporary fantasy novels with both teen and college aged characters (and lots of twists you'll never see coming). Do you feel like a hamster on a wheel? Sarra talks to us about her solution to planning without all the heartache and leading us to be more joyful. “When we sit down to plan we see the perfect scenario. Then Life gets in the way.”

• September 27, 2023Self-Publishing Process & Tools

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP415 – How To Get Unstuck

  There are many ways we get stuck as authors. Some ways you can get stuck is in the writing, editing, time management and making decisions areas. Getting unstuck is much harder and yet easier than we think. Letting go of perceptions of our writing or our characters helped Trudi a great deal when she put off writing the last book in a series - for years! Cheryl had to get past the fear of getting edits back and find a way to embrace the process to get them done. For Shar, it’s being done with the book and accepting it. No one wants to put up sub-standard work and we all do our very best to make sure that happens, but agonizing over a book doesn’t move you forward. We discuss how to do these things while facing fears and preconceptions, as well as the overwhelm of too many ideas and choices.

• May 3, 2023Guest Interview, Mindset, Health & Writing Life

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP394 – Career Sustainability with Brenna Aubrey

  From mindset and productivity, to branding, social media and your writing community – we cover the gamut of how to sustain your author career long term.

• March 8, 2023Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP386 – Productivity Hacks For Writers

  Ten proven productivity hacks for self-publishing authors!

• July 27, 2022Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity, Mindset, Health & Writing Life

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP354 – It’s Time To Question The “Hustle”

  This week we discuss burnout, protecting our creativity, being productive and not buying in to the hustle culture.

• June 7, 2022Self-Publishing Process & Tools

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP347 – The Power Of Writing Sprints

  Are you struggling to get your words down each day? Why not give writing sprints a try? You can do them alone, however, you might find they work better with others like we did. Listen to the podcast for more tips regarding: • training yourself • how to set up a sprint group • the power of structure • what length of sprint? • top of the hour sprints • tracking

• December 9, 2020Writing Craft & Editing

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP269 – What To Do When You Run Out Of Steam

  What do you do when you're running out of steam and you're only in the middle of the book? Or you're just running out of steam in general?

• February 19, 2020Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity, Guest Interview

  SPA Girls Podcast – Ep 227 – Elana Johnson Part One – Productivity

  Ever wondered how you could get more writing time in your day? Today in the SPA, we talk to uber-productive USA Today bestselling author Elana Johnson, about what she does to get her writing goals completed. She writes adult contemporary beach romance and christian cowboy romance under two different pen names and is currently publishing at least one book a month. And just so you know that her work ethic is paying off... in January 2020 Elana hit a 6 figure month for the first time. Join us for another excellent interview with a top indie author!

• October 31, 2018Guest Interview, Marketing, Advertising & Sales

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP159 – Interview With Kathryn Le Veque

  This is a powerhouse episode! Be warned - it'll inspire you SO much to knuckle down and get to work, you may not come up for air for days! Kathryn is a force of nature whose incredible work ethic has seen her publish her 93rd book this week ( Bay of Fear (Battle Lords of de Velt Book 3) ). She has been self-publishing since 2012 and talks about how she initially launched her career with an incredible number of already-written manuscripts after being rejected by traditional publishers.

• October 9, 2018Mindset, Health & Writing Life

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP 156 – The Kindness Factor

  This week Wendy, Cheryl and Shar talk about “the Kindness Factor” – how we can achieve more but put less pressure on ourselves. Impossible you say?  As we push ourselves to write more, to learn more and to get up to grips with this self-publishing world, there's often an unwanted side effect: a lot of us are really hard on ourselves and we're not enjoying our writer's life. Research shows that the happier you are, the more productive you are, so with that in mind we have our SPA Girls Top Five Kindness Factor Tips. Read on ...

• October 11, 2017Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP103 – How To Find An Extra 30 Mins Writing Time Every Day

  This week we delved deep into our writing habits from the last ten years, and brainstormed all the ways that we've managed to squeeze an extra 30 minutes of writing out of our days. We're all busy - work, family, other commitments take our time. But even adding just an extra half hour of writing every day can make a big difference to our monthly totals. It's a trap writers often fall into - the belief that you need several hours of uninterrupted writing time to be able to produce anything worthwhile. It's just not true - even just a half hour can move you significantly forward in your manuscript. Here in the SPA we know that it's about regular, sustained writing over time.  This show is about being mindful, thinking about where you're spending your time every day, and looking for the loopholes where you're losing precious time you could be using for writing. :) 

• September 27, 2017Guest Interview, Marketing, Advertising & Sales, Mindset, Health & Writing Life

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP101 – Interview with Katie Cross

  This week we talk to fantasy and young adult author Katie Cross about being a military wife, learning to be a nap-time authorpreneur, and making every moment count. She also gives us some amazing productivity tips for authors who are trying to squeeze their writing career into already busy lives. Katie impressed us right from the start of the interview when she talked about having done some writing before we got on the call. My paraphrasing summary of her words: "It was a choice between going on Facebook for ten minutes, or doing some writing. I decided to do some writing, and managed to get almost a thousand words done in that time." It's always good to be reminded of the things that we can achieve if we pay a little more attention to what we're doing, and how we choose to spend our time!  It's a great interview, Katie is hilarious, and we loved chatting to her. (And we're totally impressed by everything she's able to achieve in her day!)

• July 25, 2017Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity

  SPA Girls – EP91 – How to Keep Your Focus

  This week we talk about the best ways to find and keep your focus. We've talked about it in general terms before, so this time we aimed in on the mental stuff around focus, and how to avoid self sabotage in your writing career. This episode was all about crawling into our brains to understand why we do things that make us lose our focus, take us out of our 'zone' and destroy our productivity.  We talked about self awareness, ie knowing what's going on inside your head that's letting your focus go, as well as the overstimulation and desensitisation that exists in the technological world we live in, and then finally dun...dun...dun...the deathbed test. Listen in to find out what that means... :) 

• February 21, 2017Goal Setting, Planning & Productivity

  SPA Girls Podcast – EP70 – Productivity Hacks for Writers

  This week we give some of our best writer productivity hacks - ie a big ole list of tips to increase your productivity, based on things that we do each week to help us write more! From exercise tips and the best writing apps to use, to setting routines and ways to stay in the flow, we give you the best tips that we could find to help keep you writing!