Lessons from Goal Getter School: kristina bak
Episode 19
Lessons from Goal Getter School: kristina bak
Sue Campbell
transcript
Sue Campbell: Welcome to the Pages & Platforms podcast. I'm Sue Campbell, a book marketing and mindset coach. Lots of writers have goals but many writers don't have the healthiest relationship with their goals. Goal Getter School is a place where I teach writers to meet their goals without being an asshole to themselves and without burning out. Listen to students share their key takeaways from the program and get some gems for yourself.
Kristina, welcome to the Pages & Platforms podcast.
Kristina Bak: Thank you, Sue.
Sue: I'm so happy to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you write?
Kristina: I write just about everything, but recently I've been concentrating on young adult novels. I’m on the third book of a series of young adult novels that is reality-based, fantasy-flavored, near-future adventure, more or less that. I have a much better line for that, but I've put it somewhere else.
Sue: I love it. So it's the third book in the series. Tell us what the series is called.
Kristina: The series doesn't have an overall name, but the first book is called Nowever, the second book is called Cold Mirage, and the third one doesn't have a title yet. They all have the same protagonist who is Stevie, a teen girl. She begins at age 16 in the first book and is 18 by the time we leave the third book. She can heal pain with her touch — not illness behind the pain — just the pain. And her father has disappeared on a sailboat in Australia, she's gotten more or less thrown out of high school for behaving badly, and she's got secrets.
Sue: I love her already!
Kristina: A lot is going on with Stevie. I did not intend to write a series. I intended to write one little short little YA novel and Stevie just jumped out of the end of it and said, oh, you know, we're not done here. She definitely has taken over this series and I really enjoy that.
Sue: I love that so, so much. All right, you did our Goal Getter School cohort from January to March of this year. Do you want to tell us a little bit, actually tell us exactly what your goals were for the three months of Goal Getter School and then where you ended up?
Kristina: One of the fascinating things about Goal Getter School is you remind us who participate that exactly setting a goal is an important thing. I've always been pretty good at goals, but they've been pretty waffly. Like, ah, maybe I'll change that goal. I have to say, you kindly allow some flexibility within that process. But the exactitude has been planted in my mind now and I'm taking off on more of that from here on.
The first goal of the three that I had for that period was to do a successful kind of a mini launch reading of my second young adult novel at my favorite local bookstore, called Roundabout Books here in Bend. That came off beautifully. I hadn't done anything personally publicly since before the pandemic, so it was kind of an iffy adventure and it just turned out marvelously. We all had so much fun.
The second goal was to, I started out saying I wanted to get 10 podcasts to be on because I'd never done a podcast before. One little radio broadcast, but never a podcast. And you, Sue, so kindly said, up your game a little bit, let's go for 99. You know, or a hundred.
Sue: That was just to get the list to pitch, not to land.
Kristina: Right, but my obsessive personality says, oh, I've gotta get a hundred to accept me. You straightened me out on that. I didn't need to do all hundred within the month or two, the three that we had. But I also had no idea whatsoever. I mean, the whole podcast situation was a complete mystery to me. How do you find them? What do you do if you find them? How do you pitch them? Are they all just terrible people waiting to judge you for not being on the New York Times bestseller list?
I worked hard on that, possibly harder than the results actually showed, but very hard, day after day, looking, searching. Then there was sort of a breakthrough when I finally contacted five of them and four of them basically said, that sounds wonderful, let’s do it! Oh, well wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm not sure I'm ready for this.
Most of them, they schedule a bit further out, so it wasn't all at once, it didn't hit me all at once. But one guy's podcast, a nice person in Canada, his process was first to do a personal contact over Zoom to see if we liked each other, to see if he would enjoy talking with me, and I would enjoy talking with him. Well, it was like talking to somebody I'd known for 30 years. It was just wonderful. He said we were about two minutes into it, he said, I think this is gonna work. And it did. When we finally did the podcast, it was really, really fun.
From that point on, it was like the scales fell from my eyes. I suddenly understood, oh, there are a lot of really nice people out there ready to welcome me. And there's a lot that I can offer them. So I'm very excited. One of the things I'm gonna be doing over this summer break (so called), is to go into that list, make that 85 more people that I'm going to contact and talk to, besides the ones I already have scheduled. I'm just finding it tremendously exciting.
This is the mystery to me, how on earth you did this — turn this introvert who knew nothing about this, wanted nothing to do about it, just wanted to stay in my studio and write and leave me alone, please. You shifted everything around for me. I give you credit for that, it's a little bit life changing actually. Maybe more than a little life changing because now I'm always looking for opportunities to go out in public.
Just last week, I was invited to be a participant at the author room of the Oregon Library Association Conference here in Bend. There were about 30 of us, I guess, 30 authors, maybe a few more, and hundreds of librarians all in the same space. The librarians were parading through the room and looking at everything, and we were talking to them. I'm looking at this and going, this is not at all my concept of a gathering of introverted people, like librarians and authors happily typically are, because we were all in love with the idea of books. We were all in love with communication with one another. We were all in love with libraries. I had so much fun, I was ready to go back and do it the next day if they would've been doing it again. That's the kind of thing it never would've occurred to me to try to do before I did the Goal Getter program.
Sue: It makes me so happy to see these kinds of transformations where you have a whole expanded comfort zone. That not only means potentially more book sales, but just means that growth in your own confidence.
Kristina: Absolutely. I have a long way to go in terms of building my e-list and fully taking advantage of all of this, but I'm just totally on board with it now and I know how to do it. So, wow. I mean, who knew? I was only with Pages & Platforms so far for about a year and a few months, and a few months with Goal Getter, and I've been telling everybody like, hey, you should look into this Pages & Platforms thing.
Sue: Oh, thank you so much. So that was your second goal.
Kristina: The third one is in process, and it's not any delay that I've done. It's because various little viruses seem to interfere and I mean real viruses, not technical viruses. My third one was to have an audio book produced of the first book in my series. It was all going swimmingly. I found a 14-year-old, almost 15-year-old actress here in town who's got a wonderful voice and great enthusiasm for the work. I know her parents and it wasn't like I asked her because I knew her parents. I asked her because of her dynamic energy and competence.
Then a music producer, audio producer, and his wife moved to Bend from Nashville and became friends. So, okay, what could go wrong with this? We were all set to start recording about the time Goal Getter School was finishing. My actress friend finished a production of Chicago and lost her voice along with her energy and everything else, and that was oh, too bad, you know? And then my producer who had just come back from Mexico called and said uhh, I've got covid.
So those things happen. At first it's very annoying, like, oh no! But then it's like, oh, that happened, okay, now what do we do to make it happen the right way? That was partly from Goal Getter School too. Like you can't always pin down exactly what the results of your actions are going to be. I think you said that you can and you were quoting somebody too. Obviously it's a very wise thought that you can control your own actions, but you can't have too many expectations rooted in how they're gonna turn out because you just have to roll with it.
As far as I'm concerned, even though the audiobook isn't finished yet, it's scheduled to start next week and hopefully everybody will be healthy. If not, we'll try it again.
Sue: All of your legwork pieces were done, right? You did the rehearsals? You held up your end of the bargain beautifully, and it's still happening. I always say of Goal Getter School, it's like sometimes our goals have to change a little bit, or our timeline has to change a little bit, as long as we are not doing it because of self-sabotage, right? As long as we like our reasons for making these adjustments, then we're good. There's nothing to beat ourselves up about. I don't want you to beat yourself up, period. We have to allow for some flexibility. We just don't want the reason to be that we got demoralized and gave up.
Kristina: Absolutely not. Your encouragement in that respect, it definitely lives with me. Thank you.
Sue: Fabulous. So those were your three goals. Get that bookstore event organized, and get through it, and you did that back in February, and it went beautifully. You wanted to develop that list of podcasts and start reaching out to them, and you got four out of five booked right out of the gate, which is an amazing response rate.
Very, very well done. And then get the audio book complete. All of your legwork done, and you are starting to record that next week. So kudos to you. Those were three pretty big goals for a 90-day time period. How long had you been contemplating those goals before you joined Goal Getter School?
Kristina: Hmmm. Well, during the whole Pages & Platforms process, I've been hearing this word podcast over and over. I won't say I began contemplating it until very near the time I started Goal Getter School because, first I had to design a new website, which was major. Then all the different things to do with writing that's also going on. I was learning from so many directions, both the writing and the marketing part from Pages & Platforms. I had an enormous amount to integrate before I could even formulate the next project. I think that all culminated in the things that I set out to do through Goal Getter School.
The bookstore reading, I'd done that same thing before with other books at the same bookstore. I love the people there and they're very kind and we had a good turnout. That I had in mind for quite a long time, but I think the Goal Getter School kicked me into like, okay, so schedule it, do it, don't just think about it. Who knows? There might be another pandemic and you'll have to shut down again.
Sue: Right? Yeah, let's get those live events while we can, right?
Kristina: Exactly.
Sue: Then the audiobook. How long had that been in the works?
Kristina: That definitely came from being in your weekly marketing calls and the material that was on the website. Because I don't listen to audiobooks. I don't commute anywhere. It just isn't a part of my world. It hadn't occurred to me as an important thing. When you pointed it out and encouraged those of us in the program to realize that's a pretty important thing to do nowadays, that was when I started thinking about it.
But at the time, of course, this is another beautiful example of how you put something out, the intention. Be clear on the intention and then the way to make it happen sort of appears. I had no idea an audio producer was moving to Bend and I would like him. I had no idea that my 14-year-old, 15-year-old actress had gotten so grown up in the last six months or so since I'd seen her. I went through a lot of struggle in my mind. How am I going to get these things done? But I am gonna get them done and they appeared.
Sue: That is fantastic. Can you share some of the juicier lessons you learned that were important for you? I feel like Goal Getter School, I really try to customize it based on the needs of each individual that's in there. When we do these podcasts, Kristina's takeaways are going to be different than Gretchen's takeaways. Why don't you share one or two takeaways from the program that really helped you?
Kristina: Just the encouragement to put myself out there, which is a really tacky way of saying it. The encouragement to stand up in public and say, I have something to say and this is how I'm going to do it, and it's a win-win. It's not just an I want to sell my books and you're my instrument to do that. It's like the relationship. How can we have a friendly interaction and respect one another and meet goals that both have? I think this is one reason I'm enjoying this transformation of my own attitude so much. There's so many interesting, wonderful people out there doing creative things.
Sue: A hundred percent. One of the beautiful gifts of actually deciding to proactively market your book is you're like, oh, this actually isn't about me centering myself and having to talk about myself and sell myself. This is about immersing myself in an author life and getting to meet other amazing people and getting to learn about what they're offering.
Kristina: Exactly. I guess that love of it is contagious because I had no clue when I started this program, just no clue I was going to end up feeling like a different person in many ways. My strength training coach the other day, after a grueling workout of half an hour, had me adopt a yoga pose that I had never put my body in before. It wasn't particularly hard, it was just such a different way of holding my body and extending my limbs, et cetera. I said, I didn't know you were teaching consciousness raising here. I thought this was just exercise. That's a parallel with how I feel about what Pages & Platforms and Goal Getter school offer, for me at least. Maybe it's just me...
Sue: Well, I don't think it is based on the other feedback that I've received and that is why I keep doing this. 'cause if it were just about getting people to sell more copies of their book, I would get bored.
Kristina: I know you would.
Sue: I am all about the transformation piece of it. That is what keeps me showing up and smiling my face off when I hear stories like yours. So thank you.
Kristina: I think creative work, whether it's writing or art or music or dance or whatever, it's a transformation process for the creator and hopefully some of that transformation will go to the audience as well, whatever that audience is. That exchange, the energy that is generated from that, is so important and I think that's what you encourage very well.
Sue: Thank you so much. So tell the audience where they can learn a little bit more about you so that if they want to learn more about Stevie and your YA series, they can check it out.
Kristina: The absolutely best place is my website and that is at kristinabak.com. Everything is there. My books, history, blogs. I just posted a blog yesterday about my experience at the library convention and I try to have lots of pretty pictures that go along with those blogs. So it's fun to see those two. There's a place to sign up for newsletter connection. This is another thing that you taught me and my web designer did a wonderful job of it. You can sign up with your email address and get very occasional, non-intrusive newsletters and information.
Sue: You also get Nowever, an ebook version of Nowever, the first book in the series.
Kristina: That's right. It comes as a free gift with a signup there.
Sue: Well, I'll definitely be keeping track of what you're doing next, Kristina and thank you so much for sharing takeaways. Hopefully they will help another author out there as well.
Kristina: I hope so too. Thank you so much, Sue.
Sue: You are welcome. That's our interview for today. I hope you got some gems that will help you reach your goals. If you want to learn more about Goal Getter School and maybe even apply for the Fall 2023 cohort visit https://www.pagesandplatforms.com/goalgetter