The Author Revolution® Podcast

Transforming Tales: JV Hilliard on Multiplatform Storytelling

• Carissa Andrews • Season 1 • Episode 253

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Get ready for an inspiring journey as we welcome Joe, a best-selling fantasy author and entrepreneur, who swapped a career in defense lobbying for the imaginative world of epic fantasy. From the creation of his Warminster Saga during the COVID-19 pandemic to its unexpected success, Joe opens up about every twist and turn. He shares the nuts and bolts of world-building, the art of crafting a series, and how real-life elements like ghost stories and personal experiences breathe life into his dark fantasy narratives.

Ever wondered how to take your storytelling to the next level? Joe breaks it down by exploring the rich intersections of sci-fi, horror, and steampunk within his work. His background in political science adds depth to the governance structures in his fictional realm, making them as intriguing as they are believable. We also explore how his love for Dungeons and Dragons acted as a cheat code for his intricate world-building. If you're curious about diversifying your projects, Joe's insights into transforming novels into graphic novels and multi-platform gaming experiences offer invaluable advice.

This episode isn't just about storytelling; it's about revolutionizing your author career. Joe delves into the entrepreneurial side of being an author, from modern marketing techniques to the importance of recognizing personal limits to avoid burnout. Learn from his experience in revitalizing Altered Reality Magazine, making it a hub for speculative fiction and poetry. Whether you're an aspiring author or a seasoned writer, this episode is packed with strategies to help you expand your literary universe and captivate

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Go forth and start your author revolution!

Carissa Andrews:

Welcome to the Author Revolution podcast, where change is not just embraced, it's celebrated. I'm Carissa Andrews, international bestselling author, indie author coach and your navigator through the ever-evolving landscape of authorship. Are you ready to harness the power of your mind and the latest innovations in technology for your writing journey? If you're passionate about manifesting your dreams and pioneering new writing frontiers, then you're in the perfect place. Here we merge the mystical woo of writing with the exciting advancements of the modern world. We dive into the realms of mindset, manifestation and the transformative magic that occurs when you believe in the impossible. We also venture into the world of futuristic technologies and strategies, preparing you for the next chapter in your author career. Every week, we explore new ways to revolutionize your writing and publishing experience, from AI to breakthrough thinking. This podcast is your gateway to a world where creativity meets innovation. Whether you're penning your first novel or expanding your literary empire, whether you're a devotee of the pen or a digital storyteller, this podcast is where your author revolution gains momentum. So join me in this journey to continue growth and transformation. It's time to redefine what it means to be an author in today's dynamic world. This is the Author Revolution Podcast, and your author revolution starts now. Well, hi guys, welcome to another episode of the Author Revolution Podcast.

Carissa Andrews:

This week, we are going to be having an interview that is really, really fascinating. So not only is my guest today an author he is a best-selling author, he is a best-selling fantasy author but also he is an entrepreneur at heart. He is someone who understands the business side of being an author in a way that a lot of us I think in the indie sphere don't really grasp, and some of the things that we're going to talk about today are going to help you align your author career in a way that maybe you've never even dreamed of before. He talks about his fantasy series and all the different areas and aspects that he's been able to diversify his world, including things like AR and VR, graphic novels. There's a whole bunch of things that you're going to want to listen to and kind of wrap your head around, even if you're not a fantasy author. This is definitely going to be one that's going to give you some insights into how to make your author career an even bigger thing, right? But if you are a fantasy author, he gives some great tips on that as well, including world building and things that you're going to just want to wrap your head around.

Carissa Andrews:

So this episode is so juicy I know you're going to love it, so without further ado, let's get into it. Well, hi Joe, welcome to the Author Revolution podcast. I'm really excited to bring you on to the show today. We have so much fun stuff to discuss. But before we get started, can you tell my audience just a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Joe Hilliard:

Sure, and again, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure. I'm looking forward to our engagement here and in our discussion. And I am a fantasy adventure author and, to get more specific, I write in epic fantasy and dark fantasy. So if you're a fan of Game of Thrones, that's more dark fantasy, or if you're a fan of Lord of the Rings, that's more epic or classic fantasy. You'll find a nice mesh of those two. I like to say mine is Lord of the Rings meets Dracula.

Joe Hilliard:

You know, the good guys don't always win and there's a little gothic spun up in there and that's who I am and what I do and my novels. I've got my first series finishing up here in the next 45 days with the launch of book four. So the quadrilogy of the Warminster saga will be over and all officially available publicly, and just looking forward to getting that done and then a few fun things happening after that.

Carissa Andrews:

Right, there are definitely fun things happening after that. So you mentioned your series, the Warminster saga. Can you describe what that was like to go from an aspiring writer to now best-selling author with this series? How was that?

Joe Hilliard:

You know it was unexpected. I started writing during COVID and prior to that I was a defense lobbyist. So I spent a lot of time in DC working with defensive tech companies and that's what I had done for 20 years of my life and what I had known. But COVID shut down not just DC, it shut down everywhere and this was always on the bucket list of things to do, and every day I wrote something. So whether it was a speech or a grant or a contract or something, I was always writing. But there's a big difference between writing nonfiction and fiction. There's things like pacing and dialogue and other things you don't have to worry about when you're writing the stuff that I do. But the practice of writing was something that was easy to stay involved in and I didn't mind clacking away at a keyboard to get this done. And I'm a busybody I own a couple of companies so for me, not having anything to do is the worst thing in the world.

Carissa Andrews:

You know, an object in motion tends to stay in motion.

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, so I was able to um, I was. I made the silver lining, as you described, the best, uh in this case, out of a really horrible situation and uh ended up writing what I thought was going to be a standalone novel and when I went to go get it published, my eventual publisher said now, you know, fantasy is all series. Everybody writes series. It's expected you do too much world building not for it to be a series and people are going to want more. So she signed me for what I thought was going to be a trilogy and now has kind of bled into a quadrilogy, which is a lot of fun, you know. And, uh, you know, finally coming to the, to the end of it, we're going to the last rows of editing and, and you know, book four here will be launched, probably sometime in june.

Joe Hilliard:

So fingers crossed that that goes across line and that's. That's kind of how it started. And you know, and I've used a lot of my nerdy dungeons and dragons experience, uh right, to help me with story building and things like that. But it's been a lot of fun and and I'm not looking back this has just been so much better than what I was doing. I don't mind, I look at it as a golf course. I'm on the back nine of my career.

Carissa Andrews:

I want to finish it doing this yeah, why would you want to go back like?

Joe Hilliard:

really no, you're in a different world now come on oh I have a funny story about that.

Joe Hilliard:

Like, my first interview, uh, I did with a radio show host when the books came out and, uh, I prepared almost like for a day and a half for the interview, because in my previous life, my previous iteration, my profession, there's always a gotcha moment and they always have a point counterpoint and always like and I didn't know what to expect. And I got on moment, and they always have a point counterpoint and always like and I didn't know what to expect. And I got on there and the guy asked me so what season of the year do you enjoy writing in the most? And it was at that point I realized, hey, this guy's trying to help me out. Like, what is he doing?

Joe Hilliard:

Like I, I expected to have this, you know this, this moment where it was, because in the past that's what it had been for me and all of a sudden it was like wait, instead of being a competitor, you're collaborating with me and so it's a lot of fun, you know. And I, and at that point I was like, oh, I get it. Not everything's like the stuff I do every day and, uh, I'm not looking back.

Carissa Andrews:

This is just so much fun oh right, I love writing as well. It's like once I switched my own like I was in graphic design before I started writing, and it was like as soon as you start doing it and you start envisioning these new worlds and all these different ways things can come together. It's like why would you want to go back to? Like corporate world, like that? Just no, I'm right there with you on that.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, so you mentioned that your worlds, you know, have elements of dark fantasy, but you also entwine real life ghost stories, so could you share how you've incorporated them into your narratives and maybe perhaps share a ghost story that inspired one of your novels?

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, sure, so I you know, for me, I find that when you build a world that's entirely fantastical, you need to inject real realism into it for it to be more believable. You're bringing people this entire world that you've built and you have to ground it in something you know is there gravity, is the sky blue? You know what kind of vehicles do they travel on, the technology they have currency, pantheon of gods, like all that kind of stuff. So you build it out and it's brand new. You have to define it for them and you define it by things that they're comfortable with, uh, and so I used a lot of norse and native american and african, uh, mythology, uh, to build up my monsters and the characters that were in it alongside what I would say is kind of trope-ish, typical l's and a tolkien dungeons and dragons kind of a background, because our readers in fantasy adventure expect that that's what they want to see. They want to see some semblance of a medieval society with magic thrown into it, and so I started to look at that. However and I'm a big fan of Bram Stoker I used Dracula for a reason before he took real life events and placed them into Dracula, to make them more believable, and at the time he set Dracula in a place in London where there were Jack the Ripper murders, and it made it scarier for people in contemporary time for him, or this ghost schooner that had arrived, literally, in real life. There was a russian schooner that sailed into a port with nobody on it and they have no idea what happened, uh, and he used that, that event, to kind of bake into the story, because it happened and it scared the people of whitby, this little village where this was uh, and so I'd want to do a lot of the same stuff. So if you find real life ghost stories that make things scary or things that people are like, oh, that reminds me of something that I've read or something I've experienced and that brings them into it, because it's easier for them to accept in this entire fantasy world that you're creating.

Joe Hilliard:

And so, for me, I took something that was as simple as a recurring nightmare I had as a kid when I was between 16 and the ages of 16 and 20. So, like you know, late puberty and early adulthood, I had a series of these nightmares that didn't. They weren't the same nightmare, but they were all connected and it would start where the last one stopped. And they weren't every night, they were once every three months, once every six months. But in my dream, this creature that claimed it was my guardian angel was telling me to do things, and if I did them in real life, he would reward me in my dreams and or if I didn't do them, he would attack me and try to convince me to do it. And all of these things and I used that experience, which, for a man, that should be like. When you're that age, you shouldn't be afraid of your dreams anymore. They were scary, so I created my own.

Joe Hilliard:

The main character in my novels, damus Alaric, is a prophet and he sees things coming from the future and he sees this fallen keeper, one of his own, that used their, their, their site, their prophecy in a bad way, where the God cursed them and stole his, his site and his ability to see, and, as a result, these two come to clash and damis is the only one that could see him coming back.

Joe Hilliard:

He has a clear line at it and I kind of cast my own dream experience as the villain, because it scared me. I knew it was going to scare everybody else and so great taurus, mad. This, this creature I created was based on that. I also, uh, used a local cemetery here where there was a civil war battle that was fought not far from me in Pittsburgh and long and short of it there were names on grave sites that were there and there was this six-year-old girl named Lily Beissner and it just had her name. She lived from 1900 to 1906. And then underneath it said only sleeping, and I was like, oh, that's a story, right, like and the idea that the civil war there.

Joe Hilliard:

there are folks that always go to this graveyard and they're always camping out ghost hunter types that are there to capture some of the civil war ghosts, like things that go on there. And all of that I kind of put aside and my eyes, as an author, just gravitated to this lonely story about her and what could have happened to her in her story and in the middle of the. So all these German settlers, and there's this pillar in the middle that says Beissner on it and you're like, oh, this is one of the families, and you go there and you see this little tragic story and I'm like, how do I take that and bake that into my books? How do I make that something? Because not only will people remember that, but also you know that's, I think that's something that will scare people.

Joe Hilliard:

And so you had this whole graveyard ghost hunting thing going on with that. That I watched pretty much every weekend from the time I was growing up. You know people going into there and doing their ghost hunts on the weekend to uh, you know, using that for my book. So so those are two ways that I baked them into my book. One is just a character arc and a theme for the book, and the other is sort of a hidden ghost story, which I'm not going to. No spoiler alerts, I'm not going to tell you where it pops up.

Joe Hilliard:

But you'll find that in there.

Carissa Andrews:

I love that. I love that and I love the concept of bringing something that is realistic into your stories and giving it a bit of that gravity, because I think that's probably where urban fantasy comes about, like where we can take the urban real life world and then overlay magic on top of it and see what happens, because then it gives that realism to like what if magic were all around us too. But I think that's really a cool idea. Yeah.

Joe Hilliard:

Sony, and that's why I think that's so super popular. We mean, we see a lot of urban fantasy and magical realism and stories these days and people don't even know that they're seeing it. But you know, if they step back from it and say, oh, twilight, I get that. Or your hunger games, I get that, you know what I mean. And there's a dystopian or a sci-fi kind of flair. And I've done that too, like I, you know, to create the baronies in my realm.

Joe Hilliard:

Look, there's no better field in which you can learn this than political science, right, and I spent, you know, 20 years in DC.

Joe Hilliard:

So I see how domestic government, how international governments work, how they treat one another and then how they work with one another or become enemies, and I use that as not just the basis of the governance of the realm of Warminster, but I've also baked into it my own form of currencies and also what I would describe.

Joe Hilliard:

As you know, I have my own version of the Pentagon called Abacus, which is this city of scholars where you go to develop new technologies that allow me to put a little sci-fi thread into my novels. I kind of liken it to Q and James Bond, where every now and then the heroes or the villains make their way to some Avicunian technology that they take and they use it in the field. Because I think one of my if I had a pet peeve, it's the fact that in all of these novels these societies have been around for like 3,000 years and there's still no scientific advancement. So I don't blow it up, there's no spaceships or ray guns or anything like that, but I bring into it just a little bit of this advancement, for maybe it's now. This is a Renaissance technology, this doesn't post the medieval, but it's just enough to give the good guys an advantage or the bad guys something to fear, and I think that's part of it too, and it's just real life stuff that I've kind of baked into it.

Carissa Andrews:

That's really clever. I think that's a clever usage of being able to, in a sense, almost genre bend to like you're taking like elements from different. I mean, you're already doing that with the paranormal, almost horror-esque aspect of things as well, pulling everything kind of in. Do you like a lot of different genres? I'm assuming you do, because you're able to pull so much in.

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, I assuming you do, because you're able to pull so much in. Yeah, I, you know. I think that you know if you're a fantasy buff, like I am, you're also going to like sci-fi or dystopian or steampunk or horror. There's always some element of that that grabs your attention because it's something what I'm reading is all unreal, and then in other things you see things that are unreal adjacent, right.

Joe Hilliard:

So like yeah, yeah, before urban fantasy, like, of course, I'm gonna like buffy the vampire slayer or I'm gonna like some of these other things you're just because it's, it's cool, the librarians or any of those kind of shows that you see, uh, you know, on netflix or you go to the movies, uh, because it's, it's close enough, right, and and I think that for me, even though I write in something that is entirely epic, fantasy, slash, dark fantasy, little injections in there are cheats that'll satisfy the whims of those that have the same kind of curiosities.

Joe Hilliard:

I do, cause I've always wondered why Jon Snow is still fighting with a sword and shield, right, or you know why, why certain characters? It's like, well, you have magic, but you can't create any technologies with that magic, and like, how does that work? Or you see, like steampunk or cyberpunk, and you're like, all right, well, this is, this is kind of cool. And you know, like arcana, for example, I mean love that show, but it's, it's kind of like this dystopian, futuristic, ready player, one world that goes awry, and, and you know, you just kind of grab little elements of that and sprinkle them in so you're not upsetting the balance of the fantasy. You know, you know your meal that you're trying to cook, but enough that it's an appetizer for those like me that appreciate that yeah, absolutely well.

Carissa Andrews:

It ties in so nicely because then you're, it creates that intrigue in a story, especially when it's something that not every author does. It makes your voice stand out more. You know what I mean. It makes it more interesting, especially for those of us, like you said, who like the the genre bent aspect of things and being able to see elements from different genres in the same story. I personally enjoy that myself, and it's so nice to see when other authors can do it successfully and are doing it intentionally. It's so cool. I love that. So so how was it? How was the creation? How did that work for you when it came to the world building aspect of Warminster, like, what did you? What was your process? What did that look like?

Joe Hilliard:

So for me it was a bit. I had a cheat code, right, and my cheat code was I'm a nerd and I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons for 20 years. And if you asked everybody I work with in DC that I wrote a fantasy book and play Dungeons and Dragons, everybody would laugh at you. But I played Dungeons and Dragons every Sunday night six to 10 PM with my friends. I am a DM.

Joe Hilliard:

There we go. So I now have. You know, I've got 20 years since I was 10 years old I started playing Dungeons and Dragons and you've got these great stories. And so there are so many strong fantasy authors out there that have done the same thing Margaret Weiss, tracy Hickman, ra Salvatore you see, they're littered in my Barnes and Noble. They're all people that have taken their D&D-ish characters, some of which have license to write under the D&D moniker, which I don't.

Joe Hilliard:

So I created my own realm with my own rules, but it's again it's, it's close enough that people get it right. It's that trophy kind of thing with also creating my own races and characters and stuff. But I was able to do that because you know, once you play dnd a few times, you can make up your own. You figure out that there really are isn't any rules and you can make it up how you want, and so I was able to take what I thought were some of our best adventures and the best responses I got from my player characters related to villains and you know situations and plot arcs and things that you build as a verbal storyteller, as a dungeon master, and then just now putting them in writing and you're telling it now in a different medium. In this case it's through a novel, you a novel, or a series of novels, and so I was practiced in that vein and I also had battle-tested stuff.

Joe Hilliard:

And then it was a matter of taking what I would describe as our group's favorites over the year, meshing them together where it made sense, smoothing it out a little bit, but then making a real brand new story out of it. Like some of the characters, my friends get a kick out of seeing their characters names come to life, but they're like well, that's not my character and I'm like it doesn't matter, does it really? I mean, I'm just using a character's name. You know, you know that kind of stuff, but the you know the idea behind it is yeah, you know, like I, I want to go out and do like take as much from what I've done that's had the best response that I know and put it into a three, now four, book series, because people, you're gonna like that too, or like.

Joe Hilliard:

My assumption is it's already gotten a little bit of a head start. Uh, and so the worlds I've created, coupled with the tropes that people expect, coupled with new stuff that everybody wants and expects, and with battle-tested stories, like. Like I said, I got a little bit of a head start. That's my cheat code, suns and dragons.

Carissa Andrews:

How do you keep track of everything? Nerds, do you? Do you have?

Joe Hilliard:

oh my god I am the world's biggest plotter and planner like I can't. I love it the the pantsing thing. I I'm so horrible. So I've memorialized everything we've done, just for my own obsessive compulsiveness about it, you know. And over the years and I went back and looked at some of our old adventures, relived them and like laughed about stuff that you had forgot about, hadn't played in 10 years, uh, and then take, you know, the heart of those stories and inject them into the, into the book. So I've I've had this library of dungeons and dragons, adventures that I've saved, whether in part on line, and or you know, old school Dungeons and Dragons sheets, character sheets, and have them cobble them all together and then sat down. And for me, I'm a whiteboard freak. So I've got a couple in my den, I got a couple of white boards and it looks like a like a March Madness bracket with all of these plot arcs and character arcs coming together and then when I'm done with them, I erase them so I know what's left and so I have everything on the boards and then when they finally get, you know, woven into the novels, at that point I could take them off the board. If not, if they're still there. That means I got to do something with them and if someone came in and erased them, I would be in a world of hurt Cause, even though I do have like. I'll show you that you probably won't be able to see it, but I've got papers here that I'm writing the bullet points of stuff that I need to do on them as part of things. So I'll print them out so they know where I'm going, or I'll have them up on one screen and then writing on the other screen. So I've got my system and it's not the best, but it works for me. Yeah, yeah, no, that totally makes sense.

Joe Hilliard:

What are your, what are your friends who play dnd with you? Like, what do they think of the novels? Have they read them? Uh, you know they, of course, right, like most of them, out of curiosity, uh, but also there's a fandom from it. Right, like they, they, they know that they're gonna see some stories that are familiar with them with new spins on them. They're gonna see where I wanted to take them, uh, and a lot of them, you know, give me ideas there.

Joe Hilliard:

I have a. They're good beta readers for me because they all like the genre. They all read the genre, you know, and I think that's important for it. And they also helped me, you know, break up a writer's block a little bit where you know they, you know if I'm stuck somewhere, I can brainstorm with them because they're all used to playing and you know for them, this is what I thought was going to happen and it didn't. And then I can say, oh well, that's what can happen in the story.

Joe Hilliard:

So you know, I've had a group of probably 10 to 12 over the years. Six to eight of them I stay in close contact with and three or four of them have really helped me brainstorm some places in here where it makes sense for them. So yeah, I mean, and they get excited about it and they wait for the new one. And now that I'm kind of beyond, like when Warminster ends, everything else is going to be brand new. So for them it's, they're not going to see some of their characters in it and they're going to wonder where I'm going with stuff, so that that I think the element of surprise will help them kind of string them along too. Plus, you know I am shameless and asking please buy my book, don't buy one and give it to your family so they can borrow. Buy three of them so everyone has a copy. You know, like that kind of stuff.

Joe Hilliard:

We're asking for reviews. You know that guy, so I always depend on them for that kind of stuff to help me as well. So I love that that's great. I can't help it yeah.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And then you kind of hook them with the first, the first series and they're like you're kind of in it, haha, and now it's like now you have, now you're sucked in, now you have to read everything that's right now.

Joe Hilliard:

You want to know what happens. You know, does your character live or or die, right?

Carissa Andrews:

and with the new series. Now it's like you just gotta like trust me, man, you've followed me this far. Yeah, that's going along for the ride, you know what I mean.

Joe Hilliard:

That's exactly's great Come along for the ride. You know what I mean. That's exactly right, yeah.

Carissa Andrews:

Come along for the ride is absolutely the way it should go. So, with Warminster transitioning into AR video games, which is really cool, what excites you the most about this new format and how do you envision this melded reality enhancing the storytelling experience for both gamers and readers?

Joe Hilliard:

experience for both gamers and readers. Well, you know, any author wants to see their art in other forms of media, right? Whether that's a movie or a TV show or, in this case, you know, you know, a video game. You're, you're excited about that. I mean the concept that what you've written has inspired someone else to basically do their own version of fan art on it. You know what I mean, and that's what this is, has become. So for me, excited is not the word I would use as much as anxious, because you never like.

Joe Hilliard:

There are days where I'm like, uh, like, is this really going to go well, are they going to crush my story and handle it poorly? And other days where I'm just I'm on the sideline laughing as they go through this stuff. So you know, my role in all of that is storyboarding. You know, hey, here's the rubric in which you can work. Here's some general rules about these characters. But you know, as anybody knows, it's a, that's a gamer. You know characters, I mean, especially if you're creating your avatar, you're, you can, you can go off and do whatever. You don't have to follow the rules. You can side with the bad guys if you want, and things like that too. So you know, for them they're putting together. They've got a whole host of headaches I've never had Cause. Mine's very linear. I know the story, I can I control 100% of the outcome of the story and that's the way it's going to happen. Where here they've got to take in variables from outside influence as part of that?

Joe Hilliard:

So for me, storyboarding has gotten me the most excited to see how they, you know, create these code written avatars of people and you know, sometimes they're like police sketch artists. They're like right bank tap dead center, like, and that's like, oh yeah, that's ritter or that's adeline. In other cases you're like what's that like?

Carissa Andrews:

what do you do with that? Well?

Joe Hilliard:

this is how I expected. Again, I was like, and I was like no, it doesn't work that way. But you coach them. You do as best you can, and what I've learned is understand that they know their medium better than I know their medium. If they were walking into mine and asking me to take their video game and make it a book, let me write the book and I'll ask you questions. But the books it's just in a different form, and what I've learned in the short time that I've been doing it is let them do what they do best, because they're experts at it, and just be there to help them. So I went from really being the coach to the offensive coordinator, right Like I get to help make calls and game plan, but it's all them. They're the players on the field on this one, and so that's got me excited and anxious.

Carissa Andrews:

So that's, how did that whole process get? How did it all start, like, were they? Did they approach you? Did you approach them? Like, how did that all come together?

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, the CEO of the company uh, ceo of the company read my novels at a geekathon. I went, I was selling them at a convention center or at a GalaxyCon, and he came, he bought it. Didn't know who I was, I didn't know who he was and he's like I love this. Is it a series? I was like, yeah, you just got the first two, should be four. He's like, let's go. And so we teamed with a couple of other groups to do that. His company is called Melderverse and it's both augmented and virtual reality games, and he's teamed with Big Cat, which is a very well known video game company, to create the you know, one of the first melded reality games where you could play it on your computer, or you can also play it on your phone, or eventually you'll be able to put on your goggles and play it that way when it gets to VR in a couple of years years. So that it was. You know, it was just serendipity is the way I would describe it yeah, yeah, that's so.

Carissa Andrews:

It sounds so cool like for for me. I've talked on the podcast before about like the direction, a lot of books, I think, like in the future, how things can go ar and vr are definitely a part of it and then also having like the, the audio visual novels, and like seeing them come to life and like almost like a like pick your own like ending kind of scenario type situation too, and it's just really interesting to see how we're almost mixed, mediaing our stories and how it's like continuing to go. We kind of did that, obviously with film and and television, but at the same time this is like almost a different, a different animal.

Joe Hilliard:

It's just so cool yeah, I mean, I'm enjoying watching it develop and I like the idea of it being in multiple places, because if you're a gamer and you play the game, you might read the books. You know, if you're a reader and you read the books and you find out it's a game, you might go buy the game. All of which is good for me. Right, and that's what you're trying to do is, you know, see this in as many different forms as you can with, with the notion that it's not going to be perfect. I I tell people, everybody has the same thing where they read the book and then it goes to the movie.

Joe Hilliard:

What do they always say? The book was better. Well, of course the book was better because it was 100%, perfectly imagined in your mind the way you wanted to read it and the way you interpreted it. When you go to a movie. I use this example all the time. I'm a big Jack Reacher fan and you read lee child's 20 plus novels of jack reacher and then tom cruise, at five foot six is cast as the six foot eight john reacher and you're like what is?

Joe Hilliard:

this, yeah, and you just don't get. It wasn't anything against his performance. He did a really good job, but he's not jack reacher. That's not jack reacher, you know. And so for me you're like, uh, and you get that same angst about seeing this in other places. I, I mean, does the characters in the video game? Are they going to match up well within your head? And as long as you have some level of artistic license with that, then you're, you know. You let them do what they need to do, while also giving them the guidelines. You know, I look at it as guardrails on a highway. Anything you do within those guardrails, you're fine. Just don't go outside those guardrails. Let me set them for you, and then you work your magic and I'll just stand back and enjoy myself.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, that's a good way to look at it, because otherwise you're going to go crazy. I mean, when you think about it, reading most stories is going to take you anywhere from six hours to, in some cases, 20, some odd hours, depending on how long the story is. So there's no way anything that you're going to create like outside that novel is going to match up, and so you kind of have to just let it go and enjoy it for what it is, the new format for what it is. So, speaking of enjoying new formats, you've also got a graphic novel format with anime style graphics that you're considering. Right, you're just in the consideration phase. What led you to that decision?

Joe Hilliard:

yeah, I have a yeah, go ahead.

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, well, first of all, I'm a you know again a comic nerd. You know, growing up I loved them right. And I was approached someone who was doing fan art for my novels. I really enjoyed his art and we eventually connected online and I said to him you know, you're really, you know, bang on with some of these characters and he's like, well, I, you know he bang on with some of these characters and he's like, well, I, you know, he's a, you know, he does graphic novels and he's like I, I do the black and whites, and then I've got a colorist and then we just need to find a house to publish it. So I talked to my publisher about it, because she doesn't do any of that stuff. But what I thought was interesting was I already had a guy that I liked, that I already had experience doing it that was just doing fan art that I put on my website and stuff like that, and he was doing coats of arms and you know just pictures of certain you know certain characters and sending them to me just to have fun with it, because he was enjoying reading the novels. And that's really where it came from.

Joe Hilliard:

And then the concept of having something and let's face it. I mean, mean, there's a lot of novels that become graphic novels and there's a lot of graphic novels that find their way onto the silver screen or back into a novel format. Uh, and so it's. They're really close to one another, but there's stark differences in them. You know, by way of example, you know, some of my chapters are five to eight thousand words long. Uh, and on, you know, when you open up a comic and you're reading that chapter, you basically have two pages. You know what I mean. And you've got these cells and then those 48 cells and then you get words like pow and wham, you know. And so you have to tell that story. That is epic fantasy. And you got to narrow it down to words.

Joe Hilliard:

And you know, almost what I would describe as camera angles where, like, you see a character from a certain way, or there's an exaggerated feature or something crazy, or there's a wobble to the character, showing them that they're nervous or scared. You know things and I don't have to think about that when I'm writing it.

Joe Hilliard:

I just tell you, right, this is the other character does something that you know it would tip you off, that they're scared, and you try to do that with an epic fantasy novel and you're like, oh my God, this is going to be like a hundred comics deep before we get done with book one. And that's the challenge there, right? It's like how much do you cut out, how much do you leave out, while also telling a good enough story that people will buy them? There can't be big gaps in them. So there's going to be things that are omitted for the sake of space and time, and that part's frustrating, because there are big parts of those big swaths of the story that are just going to go by the boards and there's nothing you can do except let it happen so that you can get a novel like that. Sure.

Carissa Andrews:

That makes sense. I wonder if at some point you could always do like little spinoff ones where it's like here's a little side story that you missed in the like the main, the main event. You know, just little little side things to give your fans and your audience a little glimpse into some of the things that they obviously still enjoy in the novels. Part of it, but that's really cool. The concept of graphic novels is very interesting to me. It's kind of combines the the world of, obviously, graphic design in my head and then, but it's not something that I've personally delved into. So it's really interesting to hear how it goes and obviously that makes total sense about having to boil things down how long are the novels?

Joe Hilliard:

The graphic novels.

Carissa Andrews:

They're going to be standard your actual novels.

Joe Hilliard:

Oh mine, they're about 150,000 words, maybe 450 to 520 pages. Um, so a little on the light side for what would be described as epic fantasy. They're not 800 pages deep or anything like that, but they still qualify for that. And, um, you know, I think the the fact that there's a history and there's a future and there's a now, and I've built an entire world out of it. It's not like a conan, the barbarian setting, which is more sword and sorcery, or classic fantasy, where you're episodically going from place to place. There's a real entire world that's built around it. You know, religions, politics, history, all that kind of stuff in a very tolkien-esque way.

Carissa Andrews:

Uh, that I think um would also make sure that it's firmly within that epic fantasy camp sure that's yeah, and so trying to boil it down into even the game would be difficult, because it's still I mean, that's still a lot of words and it puts, you know, the reading time. What is that? Probably between 25 and 30 hours to read.

Carissa Andrews:

So it's like yeah trying to trying to boil that down and into a game I mean games at least, have you know you can have that be longer or it takes, takes you on a different scenario, but you know graphic novels are a lot easier to stuff, yeah, and so it's like, oh goodness, okay. So, as the owner of altered reality magazine, which is another crazy cool thing that you're doing, can you explain what motivated you to create the magazine and how does this platform support other emerging authors?

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, sure. So Altered Reality was a magazine that predated me. I actually wrote for it and had submitted a serial that I've now turned into a young adult fantasy novel, and during the time that I was there I became friends with the owner and she had started it and it was really a for love of kind of thing and it had been around for a good 10 years but needed a facelift, and I think that people visiting the site thought that it might have a tired look to it. And she got in a situation with her at home. It just didn't make sense for her to have it anymore. And she approached me as one of the I don't want to say the few folks, because I don't know that to be true, but one of the folks that had some business acumen and said Look, I think I've got something here that, in the right hands, you know, will pay for itself. And then some. I just am not that person. I just put this together as a forum for authors to come and express their art. Would you be interested in taking this over? And so the entrepreneur in me, you know I was like oh great, just another business for me to get my hands into.

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, and I looked at it and I said to myself there's a few things here that I saw that had real value to it. One is you know the site has like 180,000 visitors a year. I mean it's really popular and it's and there are some legacy authors there that write and have been writing for years, you know, for the magazine. But you know there was some some restrictions that the previous owner had put on it based on religious stuff. She didn't want to have undead or vampires or things like that, which are some very popular speculative fiction categories, and so with that kind of lifted I'm now able to add things about cryptids and gothics and fae and other things like that, and that opened it up even broader. And secondly, with the viewership, the folks of the visitor base, the unique visitors that we get on a monthly basis, we have everybody that is award-winning authors, like real big awards, all the way down to first portal of publication. For many, like it was for me, my novels hadn't been published before, my serial was on altered reality, so I saw it as a way and not as a giveback, but as a portal, like I mentioned before, for authors.

Joe Hilliard:

So we accept, you know, an eclectic mix right and we don't pay for anything. People don't expect to get anything from us as they do, and as a result, you know I have it sponsored by a few sponsors that help pay for the site and we make some money on it, and or authors that want to promote their books on the site. You know we'll do that for them as well and that's how we make money. But I've also made it in her and left it in her spirit in the sense that it's. It's not there for us to make a ton of money on it. It's there as a resource, and so I invite people that I have on my podcast and on my blog talk radio show and people at immediate conventions, all to write for the magazine, and some are highly established and you'll know the names if you just go on the site and look at them and say, oh, I didn't realize this person was there. But in other cases it's hey, you need, you need something, let's take a look at it, let's edit it together and if it stands the test of an editorial red pen, yes, I'll be your portal, but I'm not paying you for it, and so you could take it down whenever you want If you want to keep it on the site eternally. It'll be there forever More than happy to do that.

Joe Hilliard:

And so after we refreshed it, we put some money into kind of rebuilding the site.

Joe Hilliard:

We relaunched it last year and now this fall will be our second year in business and it's kind of grown not only in popularity but it's also making money for me and my two business partners, and so they're happy and I'm happy, while we're also providing a service to many that are looking for a place to say I've got something that's publishable. Look what I've been able to do here. Put it on their resume, put it in their letters to agents or their query letters to publishers. You know you can find me published here at a credible source that's been around for over a decade. It's not just some blog I put together. So I think that's helped and I also think it's a way for me to give back to the community that helped me. If it wasn't for Kelly, I wouldn't have, you know, I wouldn't have had my published work or found my publisher. So, like there's a variety of those things that I saw that I'm now helping to provide for others that used to be me just a short four years ago.

Carissa Andrews:

Right, that's amazing. What kind of genres do you accept at the magazine?

Joe Hilliard:

Speculative fiction and speculative poetry, and so speculative is pretty broad, right. So you can find things in there that are the standards the sci-fi, the fantasies, the dystopians, the horror. The sci-fi, the fantasies, the dystopians, the horror, the gothic, the cryptids, monster stories We've had. You know, fae, like you name it, you'll find it within there, and you know we don't. I mean, there's a few things in there that are fan-arty a little bit, but nothing that would get anybody in trouble us or them for the stuff that they do. We've even expanded. We're now doing quarterly specials where it's a pdf that you can download, uh, and we're looking to see if we can get some printed copies, although I'm not sure we need to do that. We're budgeting that right now and those printed copies in those quarterlies we have a theme. So december's theme was dark fantasy. This, this theme coming up for spring, is no theme. You know, prior to that we had done cryptic currency, so it was all monster stories for halloween, and in the summer it was summer camp, horror stories around the fireplace, that kind of stuff, and, and so we've had cosplayers, we've had artists put stuff up. You know anything that we found? Um, that is a is.

Joe Hilliard:

So it's not just me writing a poem or me writing a short story or a novel or a serial. Rather, it's now open to other artists too, and so we're getting folks that are volunteering to do our cover art and have a lot of fun. We're challenging people to do that. Here's some of our covers. Do you think you have the stuff to do it? So go ahead and submit and maybe you'll be our cover artist of the month or whatever. So we have a lot of fun with it because we create the rules. There are no rules, right, so I want to put something in there. I can. Right, I had the funny. The craziest thing that happened to me was I had a retired catholic priest write a novel. Uh, that had a little bit of religion, you know, buried into it, but it was basically an exorcism kind of story, right oh?

Joe Hilliard:

my god he's like is this going going to be a problem and I'm like, no, that's a perfect thing for us, we'll take it. You know what I mean, cause it's horror. You know what I mean? It's kind of it's not really, and I was like it's great, let's just do it. And the fact that you're a retired priest tells me that, you know, maybe there's. I like the idea of alluding to the fact that maybe there's some of the weird funky stuff that happened.

Joe Hilliard:

You wrote a story about it to protect the innocent. You changed the names and even if it's not true, even if you just made it up, let's run with that, because that will get people to come and click on it. So I didn't even know. Until I started this. I didn't know that there was horror poetry. I read our first horror poetess on, you know. She then took a. She'd made a book out of her. I don't they're not called books. I can't remember what collections of poems are called, but that, whatever that is, she's now going to publication for that. But it started with her coming on the site. We did an interview for her. She was our poet of the month and we had horror poetry.

Joe Hilliard:

That's so cool, apparently that's a thing and I was like, ah, all right, you know. And all of a sudden now I got you know 15 of those submissions every quarter.

Carissa Andrews:

How cool is that? Oh, I love that. I love when you can take like what seemingly almost ironic and like create something from it, like the priest writing the horror stuff or, you know, horror poetry. I mean, I've always loved that kind of concept. I think Joss Whedon definitely like tainted my brain.

Joe Hilliard:

Oh yeah, no, no, no.

Carissa Andrews:

I get a lot of brains Right, so we're okay, yeah, yeah, so okay, what advice would you give to writers who are looking to build their own unique worlds and possibly venture across the different media, like you are with games and comics?

Joe Hilliard:

The first thing I would give them from basic advice is you know, read and deep read the genre you want to write in right Like, know what's contemporary, know what is expected, know what readers want. If you want yourself to sell, if you're doing it just for the sake of the art, then it really doesn't matter what I'm about to tell you, because you're just doing it and you're getting it out there and your family and friends will like it and you know a few nerds like me will probably read it and love it too. But you know, ultimately, if the goal is to make it as an, as an author and artist, any kind of creative, you know you have to know what's what's what's hot right now, and it's okay to go back to the future every now and then. But ultimately there's landmines out there that you might not recognize, and I'll give you one example.

Joe Hilliard:

I mean, tolkien wrote the most popular fantasy novels of all time. Hands down by far was the granddaddy of them all. But when you read them it's mostly white European guys, right, and that would never fly in today's fantasy adventure. There's an expectation of sexual orientation, there's expectation of of of races, there's an expectation of a variety of things. But if you're not reading today's novels, you wouldn't be aware and you might step in it right and so read your stuff and then know what readers are reading, because they're going to want more of it. It it's not an by accident. Did you see all these novels coming out that are that oh, this is similar to Sarah Moss. Well, no kidding.

Carissa Andrews:

Right Romanticism.

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, so let's, you know. So, like you see a lot of romanticism. That might not have been a thing 10 years ago, but because Sarah's super popular boom, you know. Or Brandon Sandersonerson, you know, and the way he he, you know deeply builds his worlds. Or you know the fact that he went out, for whatever reason, and said, doing a stick kickstarter campaign, he didn't need to do, but everybody bought in and so now everybody's doing their own kickstarters to help their own indie authorship. You know that kind of stuff, just know. Know what's happening now and where your art fits into that. I think. Think that's important. And then behind that, recognize that not all these things happen by accident. You know like I work my butt off, this is my job, this is my business, I am an entrepreneur and my books are my brand. Right, and if you look at it through the eyes of your owning a business, when you start this, people forget, you know, because, oh well, I can just put a book up onto Amazon. Yeah, that's great.

Joe Hilliard:

So did 80,000 other people in April alone and in March alone, and so by the end of the year you have millions of new pieces and then 10 years of Amazon's existence and you're just floating out there with your one piece of who's going to find you right. So you have to make noise and you have to call attention to yourself, and you do that through a number of ways. You can use social media because it's free, and if you stay vigilant on it you'll get promoted by the algorithms. If you're creative on it, that's even better, because people will pay attention to that and then draw into that. I'll give you an example of a romanticist here in a second. I just found out I didn't see it, but someone said that to me over the weekend, one of the women I was at a convention with, and I was like, okay, whatever, I didn't get it but it worked, and I'll get back to that in a second. You know you'll go to conventions, go to book fairs, go to literary festivals, go to libraries, go to, you know, call in the bookstores and go there and sign, sign, sign. Even if there's three people, who cares? That's three more readers that bought your stuff that you didn't have before that night and grab those emails, because those emails are going to be important to you and as an indie author, you have some things you can do that I can't as a traditionally published author. People will give stuff away in order to get their emails through BookFunnel and other groups like that, things like that I would use. Avail yourself to all of those resources, because that's how you're going to build your readership. And if you set your expectations, just like a business, it's an investment.

Joe Hilliard:

In book one, I'm not going to make any money. In book two, I'm not going to make any money. In book three, hopefully I break even. In book four, I could start making money. Now, all of a sudden, you're looking at it and you're like, oh yeah, now it's just like I invested in a business. I have a storefront and employees and all this money that came out of me first, and then when I get it back now, all of a sudden it's paid down and there's equity that comes with that. And I think I would ask any author, traditionally published or not, any whatever treat it as a business, and if you treat it that way, you'll be successful at it and use the resources that are out there for you.

Joe Hilliard:

Now I'll go back to this romantic thing because it really jumped out at me. I didn't know this because this isn't for me as you can tell, I have a voice for radio but there was this. Apparently there's a guy that you know our face for radio I should say. There's this famous British guy that got like a half a million views because he wrote a romantic novel. I don't even know his name but apparently was he filmed himself and I guess he's a sexy british guy with a british accent, all that kind of stuff, and he just took his suspenders off and that was enough to get him a half a million followers on on tiktok or whatever, and it was just like in the first place.

Joe Hilliard:

Well, apparently it was like he was. It was like a um, it was the way she described it to me was.

Carissa Andrews:

He was in a tuxedo but the jacket was already gone.

Joe Hilliard:

He was still wearing a bow tie and they was like I'm going to drop these and all the ladies follow, follow, follow the sexy British guy. Well, I'm not a sexy British guy, so it's not going to work for me, but that's what I'm saying. He got all these followers because someone noticed him. What I'm saying he got all these followers because someone noticed him, and so if you do something different, like my, you know I spent a little money on it because I wanted to. But when I did my book trailers, I went out, I found a cinematographer and I invested and we did some 3d modeling and behind the scenes stuff and I had the behind the scenes uh Instagram post that he did about making the castle that he used in the book trailer got a quarter of a million views and the trailer itself maybe 20,000, right.

Joe Hilliard:

Like it wasn't even the ballpark, it was the fact that it was behind the scenes and people were hashtagging Hogwarts. And I'm like that's not Hogwarts, that's a castle. It's going to be a tax soon, you know, and it's like they didn't care, like it was just fun and so, like that kind of stuff gets you noticed and being noticed. People do your downloads, listen to your books, buy your books, whatever it is that they're doing these days, and I think that that's the kind of advice I would give, because it will help to launch you. It'll get you to that next level. There's a lot of groundwork needs to be done. If you do that well enough and your stuff is good enough, with the right kind of promotion, boom, you're at that next level.

Joe Hilliard:

And then you just keep building from that.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah, for sure. I've had a conversation recently with Roy Ozing and he he talks about like his branding is all about be different or be dead, and so he's a marketing professional and it's so great because, like it literally is like find that, find that piece of your creativity, of yourself, of your brand, that you can really push, that no one else has, and just like go all in with it and do something that's really interesting, that catches the eye. It's so important. Yeah, it's. It's interesting because we don't think that we kind of. I think a lot of authors, especially indie authors, they have a little bit of that worth um question like they're not quite sure, like will people really want to read this or do they really want to know about me? And it's like, who cares? Just make a big make a big deal about it. And they'll be like oh okay, let's make a big deal about it, you know.

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, it's that. It's that imposter syndrome. That might be another piece of advice that you can give to them too is like your stuff's good enough, people will read it, right. So, you right, so you know, and you, I don't care if you've written one piece or 500 pieces. The minute you write something and you throw it out into the ether, uh, and you know, into the interwebs or whatever you want to call them. Now, all of a sudden, you're an author, you could be an indie or the most you could be stephen king, it doesn't matter.

Joe Hilliard:

People are curious and they'll find something that they've googled, something that's crazy. They want to read something that's nutty. And you know, I, you know fantasy comedy. I had a guy send me his Douglas Adams kind of thing and I'm like this is funny, it's really, really good, and I would never read it any other way. But it was because it was like on a show like this, he's like would you read my stuff? And I'm like sure he said that, dude, this is really good, let's get you on a radio show. We did some stuff and it was a lot of fun. But that kind of stuff I, you know, I was like, don't be afraid of it. There is no imposters out there. If you've written something and you've put it out there and you've had it edited properly and with people that are being truthful with you, then that's not imposter syndrome. That's just being an author and you're going to work for it. It's not going to come to you by accident.

Carissa Andrews:

Right, absolutely Well. I mean, you've done the hard part anyway. It's like you've written the thing that most people say I want to write a book one day. I wish I could write a book. And it's like you've done the thing like make a fuss about it because it's a big deal. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Joe Hilliard:

I mean, how many other people do you know that have written a book, right, yeah, so, like, take credit for what you've done and you know, and and live off of it and and make sure that people, uh, you know, you know, like not everything's going to be a rousing success, uh, but do what you can do, and you know, and just keep working at it.

Joe Hilliard:

Not everything I've spent money on or time on has actually worked for me, uh, but if you don't try it, you don't know, and it might work for some person and not for someone else. Don't try it.

Carissa Andrews:

you don't know, and it might work for some person and not for someone else. That's so smart. I agree with that. Okay, so, with the final book of the Warminster Saga soon to launch and other projects on the horizon, what are your aspirations for the next few years, like, are there new genres or formats that you're going to be exploring with the next series?

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, so I have a couple of things that that are happening.

Joe Hilliard:

I'm going to be doing another trilogy as a follow-up to the quadrilogy, but in the interim I've got three smaller um stories of the more popular characters in the novels, kind of giving a behind-the-scenes look at at um where they came from, because I get a lot of those questions at shows and at book signings and things like that.

Joe Hilliard:

Uh, but we're also in concurrence, going to be working on the video game and the graphic novel development and then, while all these smaller books have been launched, that gives me about a year to get a headstart on the next epic fantasy thing, which I already know how it's going to go. But like right now it's like, oh, like I just don't have the juice to get that done. I need that extra year to kind of get that ready and rolling, and so I'm working on that. And so 2025 will be the year of the standalone origin stories, coupled with working through video game and and and a graphic novel. And then 2026 is going to be the next Warminster trilogy and hopefully I'll have it all done. I'll be able to rapidly release it as rapidly releasable as epic fantasy is, maybe get it done in a year, year and a half, yeah.

Carissa Andrews:

Yeah. Well, it's so smart that you've recognized for yourself, like the capabilities and your creative juice, as you say it, because there's a lot of authors who are pushed through like that burnout aspect of it, because they think they have to do something in a certain timeframe, but it's so smart like that you can recognize. Nope, I'm going to need to use this year as this and then go into it. Is that something that you've always kind of like innately seen or done?

Joe Hilliard:

So as a planner, yes, I have.

Carissa Andrews:

Good point. I can't help myself. Good point.

Joe Hilliard:

Ego Scout, be prepared. Whatever you want to say. Like I, yes, but the problem is I can't. Like if you said you know I've seen those like challenge, 24 hour challenge no, that's not for me. Here's three words, you've got two hours to come? No, no, it's not me, because I'll ask dumb questions Like where? No, no, it's not me, because I'll ask dumb questions Like where is this story going and where am I coming?

Joe Hilliard:

I might be able to come up with a really cool idea or a scene that could lead to something else, but to stop at that is not me, and so I've tried to learn how to write small Like. I use Kindle Vela to write a young adult episodic serial which I released, which I'm now putting into a three-part series as part of that, just so I can walk away, so I can challenge myself not that I have to write epic all the time and I can write something that's more digestible for someone that's on a train on the way to work or has kids at a soccer game and I think that those kinds of things are important to recognize too, and that kind of training I've used so that I'm not always having to write something. That's that way. I'll tell you what I hate it. I'm not good at it. I always I love the.

Joe Hilliard:

I love the grand sweeping, sweeping domains, and let me tell you the saga. That kind of stuff, these little bits and pieces, not for me, it's not for me. I like reading them but I can't write them. It's just so. I'm trying to train myself and it's. It's a struggle, but you know, I think there's some note I'm trying to say, Joe, you're being noble by giving it a run and seeing if you can make it work and it's okay. I mean, people like it, but like, I also recognize the fact that I'm better at something else, so I think I'll just stick with it, Like you said earlier.

Carissa Andrews:

You don't know until you try it, and so you don't know what kind of lessons you're going to end up taking from that aspect, even if it ends up ultimately not being the thing that you're going to do forever and ever. There's lessons being learned here and you're picking them up and going. Which tools do I want to keep from here? That's really cool. That's a smart way to be able to look at it. Not a lot of authors do that either. It's like I love the way that you're embracing, like all the things just to see which parts of this author creation world like you want to incorporate and how it gets to be a part of your um, your entrepreneurship, of your like everything, your brand, whatever. Because that's that's, I think, the way the industry is going to celebrate authors. It's going to really encourage authors to go that direction, because at some point, storytellers aren't going to just be writing books.

Carissa Andrews:

You might be doing that, but I mean, look at the way that ChatGPT is, you know, revolutionized everything. It's like we're we're going in new directions that some people aren't willing to quite yet let go of. You know, like the old ways, and so it's really cool to see how diverse you are with everything that you're doing. That's really neat. Speaking of those diverse creations, how do you hope your work influences both current fans and future generations of writers and gamers with all the things that you've done, because you've got so many diversified aspects?

Joe Hilliard:

So I started this conversation by telling you what I used to do in the real world, you know, and my world was filled with 20 years of very real stuff. For me, fantasy has always been my form of escapism, right and, and escapism tells me it's entertaining. And so what I want, this first and foremost, is I want it to entertain people. It doesn't have to be their favorite, but were you entertained and would you come back and buy the next? And I think that's really what I hope for. My goal is you walk away and say, oh, that was really well written, I enjoyed that novel, I'll read the next one. I'm not trying to be Tolkien, I'm not trying to be some classic overnight Stephen King. My goals are set in a sense that if you read it and you're happy with it, you're going to buy my next and the next and the next, and so I think that that also plays into that middle part of our conversation about being a bit of an entrepreneur. So I want to put product on the street that people are enjoying and are entertained by, while also providing for my family and making money and the things that I need to do in that respect, and I think if you do those things, everything else will come with it.

Joe Hilliard:

Like, and I think that you know, I did entertain someone that just happened to have a video game company that he owned. Or I did entertain somebody who did fan art, and then we connected and he's like, oh yeah, I'm a comic book guy, so let's, can we put this together? And I know people and I think that comes when people are willing to go out of their way to do something. And if I just read a novel and I never met the author or I didn't know how to get ahold of them, or didn't see them, they didn't explain it to me I was looking at the cover and, oh, should I buy this, should I not? You know, as you know as somebody, as long as you read it and you're happy with it, you're entertained by it, and you walk away saying that was a pretty good book and leave me a four or five star.

Carissa Andrews:

I'm not saying, just saying but those are the kinds of things that you want.

Joe Hilliard:

You want people to do Cause that. That makes that really kind of. You know, that motivates me as an author to write the next, but it also motivates you to buy the next, which I think is important. So I would say entertainment is the top goal and then the business success that comes with it is ancillary but important if you're trying to be an author as a career.

Carissa Andrews:

Absolutely, absolutely. I agree 100% about that. I love that outlook. Okay, joe. So then where can my audience go to find out more about all the things that you do, everything from your novels to the graphic novels, to what's happening, everything like the magazine? Where do they go?

Joe Hilliard:

Yeah, so I'm really easy to find. So jvhilliard, h-i-l-l-i-a-r-dcom, and that'll take you to my website. Or, if you want to purchase the novels or download the ebook or download the audio books, you could find me pretty ubiquitously. Like I'm available on every platform, go to my publisher first, because I get more money. If you go to the publisher first, go to dragon moon presscom First.

Joe Hilliard:

But if you're an Amazon shopper or you listen to audio books, you want to download them on iTunes or audible, or you're uh, you want to have that book in your hand. You want to walk into your Barnes and Noble. You'll be able to find me in all of those places. Uh, and, of course, on socials I'm really easy to find. I know this might be surprising, but at JV Hilliard books we'll put you in front of me and we're just at JV Hilliard. You'll be able to find me. I'm the only one out there and you can find me on Twitter, instagram, tiktok, youtube, facebook and Discord. So so pretty easy to find and I always try to get back to people within 24 hours. So if you want to email me at joe at jvhilliardcom, I will try to get back to you in 24 hours. If not, that means I'm sick or there's a deadline or something else is going on and I can't. But I usually try to get back to folks.

Carissa Andrews:

That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, joe, thank you so much for being here, for explaining your wonderful series, the world that you're creating, and then everything that you do, obviously, is helping other authors who listen to this podcast episode like get a bigger grasp on like different ways to be able to come at their author career. So, thank you so much for being here.

Joe Hilliard:

Oh, it's been a pleasure and I would love to you know come back on anytime you want to have me. This has been great and I've enjoyed it, and I hope that your listeners, your viewership, your readership, everybody that's involved in this also enjoys it as well.

Carissa Andrews:

Thank you very much for having me. I have no doubt they will Thank you. Well, there you have it, guys. Isn't Joe amazing, amazing? He is just a fund of knowledge.

Carissa Andrews:

There was so much that came out of this podcast interview that I wasn't even anticipating and I found myself just mesmerized by all the different ways that he's been able to diversify his author creations and just get so excited about all the ways that he does things and, obviously, like having years and years of dungeons and dragons experience being a DM, it's going to help him, like, wrap his head around some of the fun storytelling that's happened. So this has been a long time in the making, even though it's only been four years writing. He's always been a storyteller, right. So if you're an author who's been doing a similar type of thing, right, you're making games, you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, you're a DM. Similar type of thing, right. You're making games, you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, you're a DM. We internalize story in such unique and different ways, whether it be television shows or movies or other people's books. That's an integral part of how we create, how we interpret the world, how we understand our craft, and he had some great points right about being able to understand what our genre is doing in a contemporary setting, so that we understand what contemporary readers are looking for. Like what is the reader expectation right now? And it's got such good timing because, for me, I've been thinking so much about authorship and about how we, as indies, need to really embrace this idea of being like the entrepreneur, the personal brand, the ones who are the expert really in our books and our world, in the way that we craft, and that, like Joe said in this interview, all of us are creating something that is consumable. Now, whether or not it's going to be mass market consumable is a different story. If you're not intentionally creating, it might not be, but if you don't care about that like my husband Colin, when he's writing he doesn't care, he just he has a story to tell and he tells it. And if you're like that, that's perfectly fine too, but someone out there will read it, someone out there will enjoy it. And so it's up to us to take a closer look at how we be as authors, how we present ourselves as authors and how we show up to the world, announcing to those readers who we are, what we do and why we're so amazing.

Carissa Andrews:

I think that's a really big thing that I've been absorbing, I guess, this year, and I've been in the process of integrating and starting to include not only in the way that I handle author revolution but also the way that I handle my books. It's been such a mindset shift that has been going on and it's actually becoming something even bigger. Like I'm in the process of building out a new strategy for authors, because marketing to me has always been a little bit like wonky. I like the aspect of using ads, I like using the aspect of newsletters and newsletter swaps, but there's always been this social aspect that has felt a little bit weird or like I knew that there was something more I wanted to say through social and I couldn't figure out what I was missing. And so I've been in the process of delving into, like the psychology of why buyers buy, why readers purchase right, and creating a strategy that is going to be in alignment with the buyer phases, and I think it's really going to be a game changer for authors when it comes to social selling and then also the automations and the things that go on behind the scenes that will continue to generate sales for us. So just keep in mind. Nothing is available yet. I might have a beta launch out, possibly at the end of September, but just know that there's something really big in the works and it's going to be amazing. And if you want to kind of get a flavor of how it's looking, feel free to like, check out the way that Author Revolution or Carissa Andrews or Carissa Knight are showing up on Instagram or TikTok, because that's where I'm actually posting the strategy and testing things out and playing around with the different things.

Carissa Andrews:

But the strategy itself I'm going to start teaching once we get past the masterclass that I'm teaching. This coming Friday, so September 20th, I'm teaching a masterclass on the energetics of multiple pen names. If you're an author with multiple pen names and are trying to wrap your head around how to align energetically with both or multiples, you're going to want to join this masterclass because it's going to be a game changer for you. I will make sure that the link is in the show notes today and so just make sure that you check that out. Head over to authorrevolutionorg, forward slash 253 to learn more about that, and then, of course, I will have all of the links to Joe's, like his magazine, his site, his socials, all the things. So if you're wanting to look for Joe head over, like I said to authorrevolutionorg, forward slash 253. It's all going to be right there. Well, guys, there you have it. Here's another great instance, another great interview, another great discussion about how we can be the game changers of our author career. So go forth and start your author revolution. You.

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