Kobo Writing Life Podcast – 370 – Live at the Toronto Indie Authors Conference with Tao Wong

In this episode, the Kobo Writing Life team attended the Toronto Indie Author Conference and recorded a live podcast with speculative fiction author and conference founder Tao Wong! We had a great time interviewing Tao in front of a live audience and getting to answer listener questions in real time. We’re excited to present the complete interview to you now (with all the ambient sounds you might expect from a conference… it’s as if you’re really there)!

We spoke to Tao about his writing career, why he started the Toronto Indie Author Conference, his thoughts on book marketing, the challenges Canadian indie authos face, and much more! Thanks again to Tao and all of the organizers involved in making a wonderful weekend of indie author-led talks, workshops, and roundtables happen – the KWL team had a great time and we are looking forward to next year.

If you are a Canadian indie author interested in learning more about the Toronto Indie Author Conference, there's no better place to start than an interview with Tao!

In this episode:

• We asked Tao about his writing career, and how he went from owning a game store to becoming a full-time indie author in 2019
• Tao talks about his experiences working with editors, and how advice from editors really helped with his craft of writing
• We hear about Tao’s experience publishing with KWL and working with Kobo
• Tao talks about the inception of the Toronto Indie Author Conference, and his motivations for starting this conference
• We ask Tao about marketing, and what changes and trends he has noticed in the book marketing space in the last few years
• Tao talks about challenges that are unique to Canadian indie authors, and how Canadian indie authors can work towards overcoming such challenges
• Tao talks about the LitRPG genre, its growth and expansion, its popularity, and why he writes in this genre
• We get some great questions from the live audience, and hear Tao’s helpful answers
• And much more!

Useful links:

• Tao’s website
• Tao’s books on Kobo
• Toronto Indie Author Conference

Episode Transcript

Transcription by www.speechpad.com

Rachel: Hey, writers, you're listening to the "Kobo Writing Life" podcast, where we bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. We're your hosts. I'm Rachel, author engagement manager at Kobo Writing Life.

Tara: And I'm Tara, director of Kobo Writing Life.

Rachel: Today's episode was recorded live at Toronto Indie Author Con as we chatted with Tao Wong, a Canadian author who is based in Toronto and is known for his contributions to the LitRPG genre. He became a full-time author in 2019 and has since published multiple series and Tao is also one of the founders of the aforementioned Toronto Indie Author Con.

Tara: We had a great conversation with Tao, and it was nice to have people live to have questions from. We chatted about his writing career and how the industry has changed in the past few years, also about what motivated him to start the Toronto Indie Author Con. Spoiler, spite is a great motivator. And then we also chatted a little bit about the importance of community and why it's really great to find authors in your area or in your genre that you can connect with, especially in person, where possible. So, it was a really great conversation and we hope you enjoy.

Rachel: All right, welcome to this live recording of the "Kobo Writing Life" podcast. We are very excited to be joined by Tao Wong, who is a Canadian fantasy author and one of the great minds behind the Toronto Indie Author Conference, which is where we are recording. Tao, thank you so much for hanging out with us.

Tao: Thank you for having me.

Rachel: Now we're going to start off really easy here. Can you share your journey into writing? What inspired you to become an author?

Tao: Pure chance. I mean, like most authors, I've been writing bits and pieces throughout my life. I think I finished my first couple of terrible, terrible books when I was in my early 20s, kind of thing, and I shelved them because they deserve to be lost. And then I did some short story writing in between, but I basically continued with my career, corporate career kind of thing, and started my own business and stuff. I didn't really do anything up until 2017.

And I came across a website called Royal Road where you could write... It was basically free fiction, right? And I read a whole bunch of LitRPG works on that site. And I went, "Oh, hey, this is kind of cool." And just purely for fun, I wrote in that site and I got feedback from readers. It was all being posted for free. And because it's been posted for free, I couldn't send it out to trad pub. And I really had a career, and I didn't have time to go and do that dance.

So, when I had a book, I went, "Okay, I'll just put it up and I tried to sell it." And then pure chance, people were looking for that type of book at that time. It started selling and I'd still been writing in between all the editing and everything. And so I just kept doing it because people were giving me money.

Tara: It's a good reason to keep doing something.

Tao: Yeah, I was having fun. You know, I didn't really care. And I just ended up with a career.

Tara: Nice. That's awesome that you kind of found your way into something that you were able to make your career.

Tao: Yeah, I am incredibly lucky and I always say I have been super lucky.

Tara: So, you talked a little bit about the start of your career there, but I wonder if you can tell us about any challenges that you had at the beginning and how you overcame them.

Tao: So, I think a lot of my challenges were very different than other people's. I had my own business beforehand. I was running my own business at the same time. The business side was simple for me. I never had any concerns or worries about that. I knew how to do that. It was the balancing and learning everything else about the publishing side like, "Oh, what's a copy edit? What's a line edit? What's the difference between a copy and a line and a proofread? Do I need these things? That's a lot of money." You know, it's just basic things like that.

I didn't know how to format a book to go and publish. I remember sitting down one evening for about four hours with Smashwords' little outline document on how to format a print book. And so I had to do all of that and bang my head against the wall. So, those were the things that I tripped over, things that I think people who had more intention to go into these things would understand. And I had no clue. I didn't even know things about proper formatting for dialogue. You know, it was just... You don't learn how to write dialogue properly in school. At least I didn't.

Rachel: And what kind of resources did you find to help learn all of these things? Was it other authors? Were there places online?

Tao: My editors. The editors I hired, I was very lucky at this. And I got people buying my books, even though they weren't very well-written back then. All properly edited, I would say. I mean, I hired some editors. They weren't very good. I didn't realize, but they were still being sold because the genre was so hungry. I took a lot of that money, and I hired better editors. And I was lucky to find some really good editors early on who were very good at putting little comments in the notes going, "This is not how you do this. Specifically, this is how you do things. I'm going to stop editing this particular mistake here. You need to go and fix the rest." But my editors really taught me a ton.

I also learned a lot. I went to Kristine Kathryn Rusch, WMG Publishing. They have an incredible resource on the business of publishing, which is how I found out about them because I'm a bit of a business geek. But they also have a whole bunch of craft stuff, and I took a lot of their craft classes online at that time and learned from them.

Rachel: And you mentioned when you started out as an author, you had a full time gig. But correct me if I'm wrong, that's no longer the case. You are now a full time author.

Tara: Whoop.

Rachel: When did you decide to make that leave?

Tao: 2019. I was making enough the year before, but I owned a game store called Starlit Citadel. And we had a retail lease that was coming up to an end in 2019, and I had to decide if I was taking out another lease for another 5 or 10 years with the retail store or make this my full time job. And because it was based in Vancouver and retail rates in Vancouver is just a little expensive. They basically were tripling my rent. And I went, "I don't want to pay $25,000 a month in rent." It just didn't make any sense, so I shut that business down and just went writing. It was also a lot less stressful. There's a lot more fun writing and telling people stories than selling people games, which, you know, it's a lot of fun too. Don't get me wrong.

Tara: And you're a Kobo Writing Life user.

Tao: Yes.

Tara: So, could you describe your just general experience on KWL and Kobo?

Tao: I actually really like Kobo. The people...

Tara: Thank you.

Rachel: We did not bribe them.

Tao: [crosstalk 00:08:10.063] cooperation, right? I love the promotional dashboard. It makes a lot of sense. It works. And the fact that you guys choose who you go with really is nice. I do like the new Kobo Plus system. I really wish that KU was non-exclusive as well. But it seems like subscription services are the way to go, right? But being able to have Kobo as well as the other retailers so that I'm able to touch all across the world is important.

Tara: And that kind of ties into the next question that we have. You're talking about subscriptions, but what do you think about the current state of the indie publishing industry, which I guess is kind of a large question. And then also any trends that are exciting or concerning that you see coming up?

Tao: I mean, concerning, I will say that at least with a lot of the older authors I know, burnout has been an old and constant conversation, right? Anyone who's been in the industry for four or five years on, there's a lot of discussions about burnout, you know, and people are just... Even if you're very successful at this, some of that has been success at the cost of personal time or energy or just spending a lot of time writing and not enough time being consumers of entertainment. And that creative world has to be refilled at some point.

So, I think Becca Syme has been leading the charge on that. But it's become a constant conversation, at least among a lot of my friends and the people that I know about figuring things out. But I think it's also kind of exciting in some ways about the industry, because people like Spotify, you know, Kobo Plus, Storytel and even Google Play to some extent has been actually putting money into books and entertainment now. And so we have this triangle hold on Amazon and Amazon-affiliated companies are shrinking. We're seeing a lot more direct sales. People are looking at ways of stepping outside of the conglomerate, which is really nice because it's really dangerous to be entirely reliant on one single company.

In my previous business, we lost over $100,000 because of one mistake by someone in Amazon's CSR site. And it had nothing to do with us, but they clicked the wrong button, they shut down our store and we're done for the entire Christmas season.

Tara: That's scary.

Tao: Yeah, that's the reason why I'm on Kobo Writing Life and other places like that. We fixed it, but that was after Christmas and I was selling games.

Rachel: Well, that kind of leads into my next question, which is given the current state of the industry and the trends you're seeing, do you have any advice for those authors who are just starting out on their indie publishing journey?

Tao: Those are tough questions to ask because everyone comes in with different goals, right? If I'm going to give any advice, I would say learn the business side. I know too many authors who focus heavily on craft but they don't understand the business side at all. And that comes around to bite them. Yeah, bite them. And when I say that, what I mean is things like understand copyright law, right? There's some great books and articles about what copyright is. There are some really tricky aspects of copyright that if you don't understand and you don't keep track of, it can hurt you in the long term.

Understand how contracts are written. I spent a lot of time with friends and sometimes random strangers reading over their contracts because they don't understand their own contracts. And then I have to tell them, "You cannot sign this because of this, this, this, and this." And even if you don't want to read the contracts, get a lawyer, right? But a lot of people refuse to do things. And then two, three years down the road, they're like, "I didn't realize I had signed that thing and it's causing me problems and whatever," whether it's a non-compete clause or a clause that has given this company access to all your rights or that you're now stuck with this company for all your next books. So, that's probably the thing I would say to almost any author.

Tara: I think that's great advice as well that authors might not realize sometimes that contracts are negotiations too, that you can go back and ask for changes and maybe they don't grant them, but you can certainly... It's a conversation.

Tao: Oh, yeah. Every contract is a conversation. And if you understand what your own red lines are, you know, you can also walk away. You don't have to take a contract. And sometimes not taking a contract now is very important. I nearly walked into a bunch of problems. If I hadn't read the contract properly, I would have been in trouble, right?

Tara: So, you've talked about being, kind of, business minded and a business geek. How has that affected your marketing strategy and has your marketing changed since you sort of started writing at all?

Tao: Yes. I mean, when I first started writing, all I did was write, right? The old advice and it holds still true to some extent is you do need at least three books in a series, nine books, if they're standalones, to be able to do paid advertising and make it work for you. Now there's certain ways that you can get around that like Amazon ads. If you know what you're doing, you can kind of make it work sort of. Kobo's promotions are really good. The newsletter promotions are really good where you can generally make them work for you.

But really my first two years, all I did was write. I sat around. I had a newsletter and I just wrote. And I built up my backlist. And then after that, I started adding things like advertising with Facebook, advertising with Amazon's newsletter. Actually, newsletters were the first. And then I didn't know about Kobo's promotion tab until I went to the old 20Books, and that's where I found out. I think it was Mark who told me about it.

Tara: Well, yeah, we got to get better at our jobs.

Rachel: Yeah, apparently.

Tao: As I said, I had my head down. I wasn't looking for information like that because I needed the books out. So, it took a while.

Rachel: And we've talked a bit about how the indie author industry has changed and evolved. And if anything is evolving faster, it's technology. And I'm curious if you think the way technology is changing is also altering the way indie authors publish and market their books. A big question, no pressure.

Tao: I think definitely new markets are coming out. We've seen TikTok in the last few years, and that's kind of faded a little bit. You know, Instagram reels are coming in there. There's the AI, I don't know what you want to call it, insert your specific word of choice. And that's coming along. And as people who think that they can write and are throwing up books on that and are probably running into the same problem as normal indie authors are running into, which is getting eyeballs on your books has always been the big problem rather than actually writing the books, right? So, I think figuring out how to get eyeballs in an increasingly complex and crowded marketplace is a struggle. And I think I've seen a lot more push towards individual connections, right, to go and get that.

Tara: I mean, I think connection in the indie community is so important, especially... Well, in the writing community, full stop, because I guess it's such a solitary thing that is at the end of the day, you sitting down and writing a story. So, I think connecting and events like this are really important. So, as one of the founders... Do you say founder/creator of the Toronto Indie Author Conference?

Tao: I'd try not to say any of it.

Tara: Well, what inspired you to start this? Can you talk a little bit about that? For the listeners, this is the second year of the conference.

Tao: The usual answer for why I do things is spite.

Tara: There's nothing like motivation from spite, you know?

Tao: It really was a case of I was annoyed that there wasn't anything like this in Canada. I have been incredibly lucky to be able to afford to go down to places like 20Booksto50k before it became Author Nation, Superstars, NINC and all of these, you know, great business conferences. And there wasn't anything in Canada. And I know I'm lucky. So, the other side of the equation as well is that it's great going down there, but sometimes some of the things they talk about makes no sense to us. We get to point and laugh at them about things like we get free ISBNs. But they get they get media mail. So, you know, it's just frozen cons, right? To some extent, we needed something where we could talk about very Canadian-specific stuff that made more sense for us. So, I thought, when we do one, how hard could it be? Not very hard if you have very good help.

Rachel: Well, and I remember, I think it was September 2023 under the warm Tampa Bay sun, you, me and Steph were having a nice little chat and you mentioned...you know, we have an idea that we might do a conference in Toronto, and I'm curious how it went from that idea and that conversation, sweltering in that heat to where we are today in the second year of this conference.

Tao: Really? I mean, I had the idea... Stephanie Starrett is my marketing manager and business manager and really, you know, my right-hand woman. And she's the one who really should receive all the praise involved in this. I'm the money bags. I know some authors, and I call them up and say, "Hey, come up here to do this." But she's the one who organized everything.

We actually had a part-time person come in initially to help us set up a bunch of this work. And then we took some of the work that they had because they had event management experience and launched it up in the YMCA last year. And we sent out surveys, questions and got back some good feedback about certain things that were lacking and tried to improve on it. And hopefully this year is better than last year. And we kind of want to continue improving on it. A lot of the format and things like that, certain things we just have outright stolen from other conferences like the office hours in here has been stolen from Superstars. The round tables was stolen from NINC.

Rachel: Inspired by.

Tao: Shit. But yes, so whatever...if we can get a good idea, you know, from other people, we are happy to use it.

Tara: And for the people that are attending the conference, what do you hope that they take away from it?

Tao: Whatever they want, I guess. I hope that they learn something, whether it's, you know, craft items, whether it's marketing and how to sell their works or sometimes it's just one idea. Like, sometimes when I go down to a conference, I walk out with only one thing, but that one thing can be a huge difference in my business for the next year. I think special editions was something that we came up, that we realized was really important two years ago, talking to someone else at a conference. And I got a connection to a logistics company to help us with that and to figure out how to do that.

And, you know, we've now done two sets of special editions. We are looking at doing a mixed batch, you know, later on. And it's a large chunk of our business. A couple of years before that, it was translations, right? That was the one thing that we came out of it going, "We need to do this." So, sometimes it's just one thing, but it's that one thing that really can add to your life. And, you know, friendships. I'm hoping people are making friends here because, as you said, it is such a quiet, solitary environment. It's tough sometimes.

Tara: And I guess the one thing is different for everyone, and we can't give it away, because I wanted to ask you like, what is the one thing from this? You got to be here to find your one thing.

Tao: Yeah. I mean, it is very much. I think the one thing that you can get as much is in-person contacts. I understand the need for virtual conventions, but there is something to be said about just seeing someone in person and the random conversations that you have hanging around a table or something.

Tara: Yeah. And so if somebody here in attendance or a listener is interested in putting on their own conference or events, would you have any advice for that?

Tao: I think the first answer would be don't. But, no, start small. Like our first one, Steph and it was Kate. People were kind of looking at it and going, "Hey, we can get 200 people in." And I was like, "No." If we can get 60 people in, I'm going to be happy, you know? Realize you're going to lose money on it. There is no way, at least in the first year, you're going to make a profit. We have been incredibly fortunate that we have been able to get sponsorship from Kobo, from Draft2Digital, from Book Report, you know, from Becca, [inaudible 00:23:47] Publishing. Great companies have sponsored us, but even then last year we lost money, right, which is fine. I knew going in, I was going to lose money. It wasn't a concern in that sense, but you have to know that you're not going to make money on this. Eventually maybe but a lot of it is... That's not what you're getting out of it as the conference organizer.

Tara: That's really nice to hear it, because I think sometimes you also want people to come and for cost to not be a barrier of entry. So, I like that your tickets are pretty affordable to come for two full days of talks. So, yeah, I think that's... Congrats to you for keeping that front of mind or just making it accessible to people.

Tao: Yeah. We have discussions on how much we're charging people and trying to figure out where it is without, you know... There's things that we want to give people, but then we have to sacrifice whether or not we can get coffee for everyone throughout the day. That's expensive in a place like this. So, sacrifice that so that costs can be lower for people. Not everyone drinks coffee either too, which is what's one of the comments we got last year.

Rachel: Well, I appreciated the coffee this morning, so thank you very much for that. I'm kind of curious because you mentioned that one of the motivators was spite. And because we don't have a lot of indie author conferences here in Canada, and I'm curious if there are any challenges that you see are unique to Canadian authors in this space.

Tao: There's a lot of talk about doing direct sales these days and it's still doable, but we are much more heavily focused towards digital sales direct. You can kind of do it by having people do the shipping for you down south, but then that's an added cost. So, that's one of the things I think Canadians have to handle and deal with. Sorry, I'm laughing because the other thing is making sure that we figure out what language we're writing in because the Americans continue to be the largest market around. Unfortunately, if you're using Canadian spelling, sometimes they can get really grumpy about it.

Tara: I have to say, because I'm Irish, so it's like, you know, Irish/British English, and then coming here where in Canada, they're like, "We accept both." And my email is constantly underlining things. And now I'm like I never know when I'm spelling anything correctly.

Tao: I get that completely. I'm from Malaysia originally. And then I studied in England for a few years, so I have no idea what I'm spelling.

Tara: Never.

Rachel: If it makes either of you feel any better, I went to school for editing and I had to buy a textbook called "Editing Canadian English" because even I don't know what's going on.

Tao: I think the funniest side story was... I was writing a description of my character traveling in Canada, in the Yukon. And it was very much the case of, "Yeah, so I went 50 kilometers down this road, and turned right at the 5th mile, mile 5, and kept going for another 1.5 klicks," and it was just like... Oh, yeah, it was just all this mixture of things and it made no sense. But, yes, that's the way that we talk sometimes.

Tara: So, can you tell us about any writing projects that you're working on at the moment?

Tao: Oh, God. I have a sequel to my series, "A Thousand Li," which is a new series. It's an epic fantasy, and that has been driving me insane because it's an epic fantasy and it's my first true epic fantasy. And it's at 205,000 words and it's not ending yet. I keep saying, "Oh, it'll be done in another 10,000, 15,000 words." And that 15,000 words just keeps being 15,000 words.

Rachel: And as somebody who has been writing for, since you said, what, 2017, and you mentioned the burnout and the emptying of the creative well that you've seen your colleagues deal with, how do you stay inspired to keep writing?

Tao: I borrow wisdom from people who have come before me. If you look at... I think it's Ursula K. Le Guin's. She has a very regimented work schedule, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch has the same thing where there's an actual section in their work schedule which is two hours of reading or three hours of reading, where they just stop and they read and it's refilling the creative well. You need that. I read not as much as I need to. I don't do as much two hours, but I watch TV. I refill it that way. I listen to music. It's very much making sure that that creative well is constantly being refilled.

The other side of the equation is because I run my own business, I burned myself out on that business multiple times and in my previous career, too. And so I've learned to recognize when I'm edging towards them now. So, I've so far managed to not burn myself out mostly because I noticed signs now and I'm like, "Oh, that's..." Let's edge it backwards a bit, you know?

Tara: It's good to recognize it's hard that the recognition comes from having gone through it, but at least you're getting better at knowing when to stop.

Tao: Yeah. It is experienced to some extent unfortunately.

Tara: So, like last one of our kind of questions here, what message do you want to leave our listeners about the indie publishing journey in general and the importance of events like this one?

Tao: It's a marathon, right? I got lucky and got successful early on. I've had bad releases though. Part of the presentation I did earlier, I have a name for those series. I call them corpse flowers. And it doesn't matter what I do to them. They're dead. You'll have those. It's all a marathon and all you can do is just keep going. And coming to these events, you meet people who can inspire you, who can teach you, who can sometimes just show you a different way of doing it. I've met co-authors from these programs quite a few actually, and some of my best friends like literally some of my best friends now people I've met at these events.

Tara: That's so nice. And where can listeners find you online?

Tao: I have a personal author website at mylifemytao.com, and my publishing company has a website called starlitpublishing.com.

Rachel: Awesome. We will include links to both of those in our show notes. And, Tao, thank you so much for chatting. And we're going to throw it out to our audience here at Toronto Indie Author Con, if anyone has any questions for Tao.

Tara: We'll repeat them, if you're scared to talk out loud. You don't have to be...

Rachel: Yeah, you won't be on the podcast. It'll be us.

Tara: All right. So, the question was if you could try a different genre, which one would you choose to write in next?

Tao: Write in well or write in general. I had been joking that I need to write erotica mostly because I do not know how to write a sex scene. And so one of the best ways of getting good at something is do it a lot so you know... But I do kind of... I have an idea for a crime thriller work. And so at some point, I want to write that...

Tara: With a sex scene.

Tao: Maybe, you know? Hey, it worked for Lee Child.

Rachel: I actually have a question about genre for you because you mentioned you write LitRPG, and I'm curious if you could let us know, for the listeners who aren't familiar with the genre, what LitRPG is.

Tao: So, it stands for literature RPG, which means role playing game. And it was a term coined in about, I believe, 2012 by a couple of Russian authors who were writing these works that combined game screens and game stats and game mechanics as basically the magic system. So, these were hard numbers as a game mechanics, game system inside a novel format. So, it's not a choose your own adventure game, but it is a novel with the game mechanics and game system as the magic system. A lot of the early works were similar to Sword Art Online and Log Horizon where people were trapped in the game. And so that's what, you know, the game mechanics were. Later works started just going, "Hey, the magic system is very similar to your role-playing games or your computer games, and that's just the way it is. Nope, we're not answering questions. Just deal with it."

Rachel: And so when it comes to the world building aspect and the writing process of LitRPG versus the epic fantasy that you're working on, how do they differ or are they pretty similar?

Tao: One's a lot crunchier, and I think crunchier as in it's very much more stat-driven. LitRPG can be very, very stat-driven. One of the jokes is that we all have Excel sheets filled with numbers because if you establish that your character gets five points of strength, every time he levels up, you need to be able to keep track of it because your reader is going to come back and go, especially the readers in the RPG will come back and go, "Wait, your calculation is wrong. It should be 103 strength, not 101," you know? And so you have to have all of this exactly right. And some of my...not my co-authors but peers do everything, including calculations on damage and everything like that. So, it's very much more hard in that sense. Whereas, epic fantasy, you can be a lot more flexible in where the magic system goes. It's depending on how hard your system is. RPG is right at the opposite end where there's almost very little flexibility. And then, you know, you've got Gandalf at the other end where he waves his wand and something happens.

Rachel: Our question asker was at the conference last year is back this year and is curious how the vision is for year 5, year 10 and how the conference will grow.

Tao: I would love to see more industry representation. You know, Kobo's here. Draft2Digital's here. Book Report is here. I would love to see more indie author people in here. It'd be amazing to see the Canada Arts Council actually show up and recognize that, frankly speaking, the indie author scene in Canada is probably the most vibrant and profitable scene. We don't get grants for the most part. And there's some of us who are making really good money.

Tara: Yeah, our CEO likes to call it like the dark matter of publishing. It's like the unseen area because it's not reported on a lot, unless you're sort of working within it and you see it but it's really thriving. The question is if Tao is a gamer.

Tao: Yes. I used to be, actually, much heavily. Now, I'm just spending way too much time writing and doing other sports. But I used to play a lot of video games—Diablo, Civilization, Sid Meier's Civilization, things like that. And a lot of tabletop games. And I owned a game store selling board games. So, I had 250 plus board games at one point. It's reduced a lot. I live in a tiny condo in Toronto. There is no way I'm fitting that in. But, yeah, I used to. And I think one of my proudest achievements is I have a short story coming out with Shadowrun next month.

Tara: I'm wondering if you have a... I mean, this is maybe a selfish question, but we actually, as a team, did a team building to a board game café. We went to Snakes & Lattes, and it actually brings out the worst in me because I'm too competitive. It was my idea and then...

Rachel: We had to play co-op games, and yet it still got competitive.

Tara: I had to be reminded several times that there was not a winner, that we were playing together. But so, my question is: is there a tabletop game that you really like for somebody like me who does not like to learn new games?

Tao: Oh, doesn't like to learn. That's tricky.

Tara: The one that we did play, if that's helpful, we played like a CLUE...

Rachel: So, we played two.

Tara: Okay.

Rachel: We played like... It was like a CLUE escape room. So, it had the same mechanics as CLUE, but you, like, unveiled pieces of the board as we went. And then we played one that was like a horror co-op game, very similar to Pandemic just with less 2020 bad energy.

Tao: I mean, co-op games, the game that I really like recommending is Ghost Stories. You do have to learn it. But the one thing I like about Ghost Stories is that, unlike Pandemic as an example, it's a game where all the information is clear on the board. So, you can get one person who can just take over the game. Tara's nodding.

Tara: My role in this game.

Tao: The nice thing about Ghost Stories is to go and get rid of... To banish the ghost, you have to roll a dice, right? And so there's a level of uncertainty to every single decision. So, there is an argument to be said that someone else's choice could be just as good, because it just depends on risk factors, right? Are you willing to risk deaths compared to this? And so I find that, as a game, that's much better to do the co-op side of it. But in terms of not learning...

Tara: It doesn't have to be the trouble.

Tao: That's a little harder. I know mostly niche designer games, right, because that's what I sold. I do like Resistance. That's a very easy game to teach people, very, very fast. It plays across six or seven, and you get into big arguments in that. So, it's always a bit of a fun thing.

Rachel: If you've never heard the podcast again, you know how it went.

Tara: Yeah. So, the question is around technology that's changing really quickly and how authors can kind of just advice to balance new technologies with writing really good books.

Tao: I'm a bit of a Luddite in that sense, right? I don't use any of the things like Scrivener or Plottr or anything. For my books, I have a Word document, and that's what I use. I use headings to go and create sections in it to go and know where my plots are and all the series Bible information. You don't need a lot of all of that. The basics of writing a good story haven't changed. Reading a lot and understanding how those stories interact in different mediums might change, because what I would write for a visual novel, as an example, would be completely different because I have a visual aspect to it compared to how I would write for audiobooks, because audiobooks are very audible. And so, using a lot of "he said, she said" starts becoming a problem. So, that's where that slight change is based on the medium. And so, when you know what you're writing for... And you can sometimes choose. I purposely choose not to concern myself too much with writing for audio. I like writing for the book format. There are things I can do to reduce the "he said, she said," and that's good writing technique in itself, but I am not focused on writing purely for audio, right? And some writers, gizmos are fine. Fun stuff is fine. The craft of writing itself is so deep. I think you could just keep delving into just that, and you'd never get to the end.

Tara: Yeah. And I think learning what other authors are doing is really important for kind of changing technologies as well. So, coming to things like this and having those conversations in the hallways about what are you using or what are you doing, I think that could be beneficial to be on top of what seems to be the trends. Oh, well, thanks so much, everyone, for joining us for I guess our first live. Thank you. And thank you, Tao.

Tara: Thank you for listening to the "Kobo Writing Life" podcast. If you're interested in picking up Tao's books or interested in learning more about the Toronto Indie Author Conference, we'll include links in our show notes. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're looking for more tips on growing your self-publishing business, you can find us at kobowritinglife.com. And be sure to follow us on social media. We are @KoboWritingLife on Facebook, X, Instagram, and Threads.

Rachel: This episode was hosted by Tara Cremin and Rachel Wharton, with production by Terence Abrahams. Editing is provided by Kelly Robotham. Our theme music is composed by Tear Jerker and a huge thanks to Tao for being our guest and to the Toronto Indie Author Conference for hosting us for this episode. If you're ready to start your publishing journey, sign up today at kobo.com/writinglife. Until next time, happy writing.