First Cup of Coffee - July 5, 2024

My experience so far with putting a Romantasy series in KU and plan to have RELUCTANT WIZARD wide for preorder and into KU on release day. Also thoughts on patriotism, politics, and diverse reading.

Last day to bid on Personalized Author Coaching with Jeffe Kennedy to benefit the Romancing the Vote fundraiser! https://www.32auctions.com/organizations/74830/auctions/164081/auction_items/5468317

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Transcript

00:01.50
jeffekennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:11.47
jeffekennedy
Ah, delightful.

00:15.20
jeffekennedy
Today is, say it with me, people, it is Friday! Woo-hoo! And it's a long weekend here in the United States because yesterday was Independence Day. Today is Friday, July 7th. So maybe none of you are listening to podcasts today. Maybe some of you are. um Something that I don't know if I mentioned is I've put all of the bonds of magic and renegades of magic books in Kindle Unlimited. It kind of is an experiment since Romantasy is so hot right now. that's like what I always think of Will Ferrell in, I want to say Blue Steel, but that's not what it was called. You know what I mean. You're yelling the title at me. The Ben Stiller model movie. Anyway,

01:03.66
jeffekennedy
But, Will Ferrell is always going He's so hot right now. Now I distracted myself. Since I had to take a moment, I looked it up. Zoolander. Yes, thank you Kev. I know you know. um So anyway, um so hot right now. Oh, Romantasy in Kindle Unlimited. There we were. And it was really fun to see yesterday the page reads really jump up. It's like, thank you, holidays. Thank you, people reading on a holiday.

01:35.78
jeffekennedy
I am getting good patriots on those, more better than I've done with other books I've put into KU. So that's promising. And I think I've mentioned, i'm sorry for the industry speak for those of you who don't care, but when I release Reluctant Wizard, I am going to, I have it up on pre-order everywhere, right? um And as soon as it releases and everybody gets their books, I'm pulling it down wide and putting that into KU and we'll see if that'll build a alone little momentum. Putting these books in KU has made a difference because it's been so long since I've had a new release um for since November. So a long time, you know, never mind the 30 day cliff, the 60 day cliff, I have like the six months cliff. Yeah, more eight month cliff. oh

02:29.00
jeffekennedy
So um putting those books in Kindle Unlimited has goosed my um income on Amazon, considering that nothing else was doing it. so So that's cool. Reluctant Wizard is coming along. I have not quite as good of a week this week as I did last, but it'll be close. um I had ah a little bit of a slump at the beginning of the week because of SFWA nonsense but then I got hit my 2k word goal the last two days and I am at

03:12.94
jeffekennedy
um Well, I've passed 6,000 words for the week. So it's not spectacular, but it's good. And Reluctant Wizard is up to almost 58,000 words. So it's cruising right along. um This book is romantic, people. I did not expect it to be this romantic. But it is. It is sweetly romantic. Go figure.

03:43.60
jeffekennedy
So, um yeah, we've been doing lots of um sweet romantic things and now we will move into more of the the action sequence and stuff. But yeah, wow, love, true love. So, have a great holiday yesterday. I did write, obviously. I got my 2,000 words, my three one-hour sessions, but it was nice. It felt relaxed. um If you're on video, you could see I have my 4th of July nails. There's a lot of gnashing of teeth here in the U.S. over developments and

04:26.94
jeffekennedy
kind of hard to feel patriotic, but fun to still separate. I feel like it's really important for us to separate love of country from love of politics or leaders, right? And this is something we talk about a lot when we're um talking about other countries, you know, like you can condemn the Israeli government, but recognize that the Israeli people are not their government. um

04:58.32
jeffekennedy
You know, we we are the same that we are um You know what in some ways I Don't want to say helpless because we're not helpless but we are caught up and we can't always control things We control what we can right? That's one of my mantras um having pretty nails that make me feel like I I don't know, Fourth of July memories, right? All of those great memories over the years. David and I made hamburgers in the afternoon, hamburgers and baked beans. And I made a key lime pie. And we sat on the portal. It was a gorgeous day. It was like ideal weather. It wasn't too hot, stayed sunny all day. It was just um wonderful. It was wonderful. And we sat on the portal and we talked about all the Fourth of July's.

05:48.51
jeffekennedy
4th of July. All the independence days over the years, you know, we used to go camping with his family. His family would do a big camping trip every 4th of July weekend, like one or the other, depending on how it fell out. And, you know, so we never did fireworks because we were up in the mountains where things could catch on fire. But it was good times. You know David is one of five siblings or one of five kids and with lots of kids and grandkids and so forth and everyone would come and camp and we would play horseshoes and drink beer and hike and fish and hang out and it was we were talking about how sometimes it was just a major pain in the ass to get there you know like

06:34.86
jeffekennedy
so I remember one time I was flying back from a conference in New York and our planes got missed, we didn't make it, and we were you know it had like sir we'd had to ship our camping gear. I can't even remember what all we had to do. But you know sometimes it was a real pain to try to get ourselves together to do that. But a lot of really good memories. And yeah one of my favorite old memories of from from childhood is a picture of my stepdad, my first stepdad, my mom's second husband, ah on a 4th of July with sitting in a chair and my mom sitting on one knee and I was sitting on the other and we're all wearing like swimsuits and um it's just a celebration of of summer but also of freedom, um living our lives, having the quality of lives that we want to have and helping other people to have that too.

07:35.71
jeffekennedy
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? applies I haven't heard that phrase for a while. Everyone's minimizing that, I think, or the conservatives are because they don't really want, they only want certain people to be able to pursue happiness. But in truth, everyone has that right. So there's my little 4th of July sermon. Didn't mean to do that. ah One thing I've been seeing passed around, and I hesitate to say anything because I don't want to add to it, but I feel like it's being passed around in wide writer's circles, is there is this podcast that's doing like a four-part series on Neil Gaiman

08:19.94
jeffekennedy
um and these accusations that have made against been made against him of non-consensual sex. Interestingly, it's from two women many, many years apart. um Both of them were while they were in consensual relationships with him and said that it was like rough non-consensual sex, something like that. I mean looked at it really closely and of course the thing being passed around on social media is everyone's like, oh no, um not Neil Gaiman too, you know, he was my hero, all of this kind of thing.

08:56.15
jeffekennedy
and So the thing is,

09:01.36
jeffekennedy
and and i you all know that I'm absolutely, believe women, you know, not gonna question that, but this true crime podcast, true crime podcast, I'm putting that in air quotes, is the only place reporting on this, the only one. There's no other media reports anywhere about this. um And it's coming up out of New Zealand. And ah one of my author friends who lives in New Zealand says it's really weird that like the New Zealand press hasn't picked this up because when Neil Gaiman was living there with Amanda Palmer during the beginning of pandemic, she said they reported on him nonstop. So they haven't said anything. Also this true crime, little bit bad, I can't say it, podcast. I want to say podcast, which is probably not

09:51.97
jeffekennedy
and unreasonable. Apparently, she is ah the sister of, oh wait, hang on, I want to say Boris Yeltsin, is that right? Boris Johnson. I knew Yeltsin was wrong. There's too many Boris's. So yeah, um apparently she's the sister of Boris Johnson and she's very good friends with JK Rowling who is very famously a TERF. um And for those of you, hi mom, who don't know what a TERF is, it means a trans-eradicating radical feminist.

10:28.48
jeffekennedy
And basically the TERFs believe that ah anyone who has transitioned, who was not assigned female at birth, but is claiming female as a gender identity now, is not really a woman. um And that it is a it undermines feminism. It undermines the feminist movement um for men to pretend to be women. is kind of where they come from and I was putting air quotes around that because full caveat you all listen to the podcast this is not what I believe. um At this same time conservatives in the UK are going after David Tennant because David Tennant was wearing a shirt that was a trans rights shirt and you know basically

11:23.46
jeffekennedy
You know, like the TERFs can say, oh, well, you know, we're just defending true womanhood again in the air quotes, but it's it's trans hate. And I am seeing a pattern right now with elections in the UK and upcoming elections in the US where ah there are attacks against well-known liberal pop icons. And I think often of a line that a friend of mine said to me, a friend who tended to be more Republican um fiscally in the past, and he said that um nobody is pure enough for the left and nobody is too corrupt for the right. And I think there is

12:15.86
jeffekennedy
Well, it resonated. I think there's truth to it. um Nobody is pure enough for the left. It is, I don't want to say easy, but um those of us who hold liberal values, we do believe women. We do care about whether or not sexual assault occurred. We do care about, is this a problem? um is Is this particular issue a problem? Not obviously, overall it is. And it's It's a way to get us to turn on people who otherwise would be our leaders. So I don't know. I'm not that close with Neil. um He says that it's not true. um Who knows? It's a little odd. And then I saw somebody else saying that, well, even even if that part hadn't happened, that they thought it was weird that one of the women was so much younger than him. And it's like, well, yeah, it's weird. I don't know what's weird.

13:15.63
jeffekennedy
age gap, how wrong is it? um Yeah, we we have to be really careful with grooming. I think it's up to women to be responsible to protect younger women. ah You know, I do think that that metric of half your age plus seven works. I don't know what the age gap was in this situation. But um anyway, I'm just going to encourage everyone to

13:42.75
jeffekennedy
to take it with a grain of salt. um It is very easy. i'm I'm going to stick with easy. It is easy to do a podcast and say you have done months of research and sling accusations at someone. That doesn't mean they're true. they're They're trying to conduct this trial in the court of public opinion.

14:04.43
jeffekennedy
And I can tell you all that one thing that the individuals who love to troll CIFFWA, one of their favorite accusations to level at us is that we shelter pedophiles. And that is something that the conservative right uses a lot because everybody's against pedophilia, right? And except for the assholes who are actually doing it, who are almost always like, youth pastors and politicians, but we won't go there. ah So yeah, it's um it's part of their game. it's It's how they see lion things. It's how they um try to perpetuate this discord, right? So um that's the sort of like the gossip of the week.

15:00.60
jeffekennedy
There's been some other stuff going on kind of in romancelandia where a book box that very strongly features authors of color, um queer authors and characters, no divergent representation. posted some numbers where they showed that, because there's been ah accusations going around saying that the book boxes tend to feature white authors. And they said, you know, even though they work very, very hard ah to give this representation, they posted their numbers showing that their book box sales, when they feature Black authors, they also separated out by authors of color,

15:49.44
jeffekennedy
um you know, no divergent and so forth, how their sales take a hit. And their point was not that they don't want to do it. Uh, the book boxes, box is fox and wit. And I feel like it's important to, to mention them because they are really good people. They issued an apology saying that they hadn't meant to share these numbers to hurt people, that they would do better. It was a good apology. Um, and And I think they're absolutely sincere. They were trying to share their frustration that people level these accusations at book boxes like they level it at po and look publishing, which are not unfair because, yes, there's absolutely bias in publishing. There's bias in book boxes, in influencers.

16:41.21
jeffekennedy
I think I've mentioned on here a lot of times one of the things about influencers is they want to build their influence so they want to feature books by authors who are already big and so it becomes a vicious cycle. um

16:57.65
jeffekennedy
There are no easy answers but what Fox & Wit was attempting to show was they're out there trying to feature these authors And the readers are not buying those books. And so, you know, what we live in a racist society. There's systemic racism. Readers don't buy books with, some don't, with Black people on the covers or written by Black authors. um I think often of

17:30.29
jeffekennedy
ah Beverly Jenkins, who is um one of the lions of romance, an amazing Black woman, um senior, you know, she's won Lifetime Achievement Awards from RWA, and she's with my same agency. She's an amazing person. She's fantastic. And she has wonderful stories to tell of coming up through all the years, because she was like writing romance during the Civil Rights era and so forth. and you know like trying to write Black romances written by a Black woman and she told me that she had a reader come up to her and say how much she loved the book and that it had really opened her eyes because she hadn't known that Black people were capable of love. Yeah so you know racist society is racist

18:24.38
jeffekennedy
I think you know Fox and Whit had really good intentions. I would love to see everyone support them because you know they apologize for causing harm. that That wasn't their intention. Their intention was to show that, yeah, the there's a problem with getting the readers to actually buy the books. Now, what the solution is, there's been a lot of conversation, um a lot of disagreement. ah yo starting with, let's get rid of racism, which would be great if anyone could could figure out that solution, I think we'll we'll all chip in. um Until then, yeah, it's it's a problem. It's an ongoing problem. And you can tell readers that they should read these books, they should buy these books, but getting them to do so, how do you how do you get people to do that? How do you get people to to change their minds and give something a chance?

19:22.69
jeffekennedy
It's not easy. But food for thought. I hope that if you're in the U.S., you're having a great long weekend. I hope you're getting to just enjoy summertime. And if you are elsewhere, I did see um Kelly Armstrong posted a very funny ah thread, I think, saying inviting people to celebrate with her. She's Canadian. ah that She does not celebrate Independence Day, but she is celebrating freedom from

19:54.20
jeffekennedy
ah having four days during which she does not have to send anything that she owes to people in the US. And I was amused by that. She put it much more um articulately than that, but it made me laugh. It's like, yeah, US is on holiday, so you all, if you're not in the US, you don't have to worry about us bugging you for a few days. So go have some fun, enjoy some things, and I will talk to you all on Monday. You all take care. by Bye bye.