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Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Anne E. Beall. From Market Research To Fairy Tales

Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Anne E. Beall. From Market Research to Fairy Tales

My ALLi author guest this episode is Anne E. Beall, an author and entrepreneur who grew a successful market-research firm, then wrote a book that helped grow her business. She’s published a range of nonfiction works, from an in-depth look at the hidden messages in fairy tales to guides on how to find calm and self-compassion through meditation.

Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Anne E. Beall

On the Inspirational Indie Authors podcast, @howard_lovy features Anne E. Beall, a psychologist and entrepreneur who built a market-research firm, then became an author. She discusses her books on fairy tales, and self-compassion. Share on X

Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Anne E. Beall. About the Author

Anne E. Beall is an award-winning nonfiction author. She has written eight books, including Cinderella Didn't Live Happily Ever After and Only Prince Charming Gets to Break the Rules, which explores the hidden messages about gender in fairy tales. Her books have been featured in People Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and other periodicals. Anne's creative nonfiction delves into the psychology of relationships. Her stories and essays have appeared in literary journals such as Minerva RisingThe Raven's Perch, and Grande Dame Literary Journal. She holds a PhD in social psychology from Yale University and is the founder and editor of Chicago Story Press Literary Journal, which publishes creative nonfiction. You can learn more about her at www.AnneBeall.com and you can learn more about Chicago Story Press at www.ChicagoStoryPress.com

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About the Host

Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.comLinkedIn and X.


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Read the Transcripts

Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Anne E Beall; an author and entrepreneur who grew a successful market research firm then wrote a book that helped her grow her business. She's published a range of non-fiction works, from an in-depth look at the hidden messages in fairy tales, to guides on how to find calm and self-compassion through meditation. I'll let Anne E. Beall tell her story.

Anne Beall: Hello, my name is Anne E. Beall. I am an author and entrepreneur. I owned a business for about 21 years, and I have an interesting story about how a book played a role in that business.

I have also published several other books, nonfiction books, things that explore hidden messages in fairy tales, and ways to be calm through meditation.

Then I also am the founder and editor of Chicago Story Press Literary Journal, and I publish non-fiction in that journal every single week. So, that's a little bio for me.

Howard Lovy: That's great. For everything from the business world to the fairytale world. There's a lot to unpack there. Let's start with how you began. Where did you grow up and was reading and writing always a part of your world?

Anne Beall: I grew up in a great place, Worcester, Massachusetts. My family were academics, and reading was certainly always something that my family did. I recall as a kid reading Gothic romances in the hammock in the backyard for hours on end.

I always kept a journal. For my whole life, I've kept a journal. So yeah, reading and writing has always been important to me, and it's always allowed me to travel to places that I couldn't go physically, and writing has been a great way for me to understand the world and make sense of my own life.

Howard Lovy: Now, you eventually earned your PhD in social psychology at Yale. So, how did you choose that as a profession?

Anne Beall: My family were academics, and they said study what it is that's interesting to you. So, I ended up studying psychology because I've always been interested in people and understanding people, and I'm still interested in that today. So, I ended up going into social psychology, which is the study of the influence of groups on people and people on groups, because I think we are individuals affected by our society and we also affect the society we live in. So, that's what led to that degree.

I should have gone into an academic position with that type of training, but I really didn't want to, and I was very lucky in that I had an opportunity to go into the business world. So, I ended up joining a company in Philadelphia after I got my degree and did market research for that company. We did surveys and focus groups and that kind of thing for very major clients.

So, that's how I ended up in the business world.

Howard Lovy: Social psychology is a big part of market research, I'm assuming?

Anne Beall: It is perhaps not applied quite as much as it could be, but it's something that I certainly applied, and it was some of the reasons why I was quite successful in that field.

Howard Lovy: Eventually you started your own market research firm. What led you to launch the business?

Anne Beall: I was a little unhappy with working for other people. I didn't really always like being told what to do and I had lots of creative ideas. So, finally I just struck out on my own and went into business for myself in 2003.

I had that business for 21 years, as I mentioned. In its heyday, it was a multimillion-dollar business with 16 employees on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. We had very extraordinary clients, very well-known companies we worked with, and we helped them answer strategic questions. They really wanted to use research to do better business, basically.

So, that's what we did.

Howard Lovy: Can you name some of your high-power clients?

Anne Beall: We worked with the Boston consulting group. We worked with companies, major companies, like Bridgestone and Blue Mercury, and companies like that. We worked with a lot of different companies.

So, probably if there's an industry that you name, I'm sure I've probably done a project in it. But the interesting part of that story actually isn't the successful part. It's actually the part of it that occurred right after I started the business. I had a few clients, actually did a lot of work for Sealy Posturepedic Mattress Company, and I'd won a couple of projects and then what happened was the bad times occurred in 2008 and a recession, and all of a sudden, my emails weren't getting responded to and I suddenly had no work. I had just signed a lease with a real estate company in downtown Chicago and I was looking at paying rent for the next three years.

And I thought, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? Most people got very worried at that point. Some people went out of business, and I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to write a book. So, I wrote a book, and it was called Strategic Market Research: A Guide to Doing Research That Moves Businesses, and it took off. The book sells to this day. It sells two to three copies a day on Amazon.

Howard Lovy: That's amazing. That's not ordinarily something you think about if you're in hard financial times, let's write a book and make a million dollars or whatever.

So, was that something you felt you had in you for a long time and that was just a good opportunity to do it or was it a business decision?

Anne Beall: It was certainly a business decision. It was also an effort to deal with the fact that, if people aren't answering my emails, what am I going to do with my time? I'm not going to do projects. So, what am I going to do?

I think it was like a mental health and a business decision all at once. So, I started writing the book and I think I did a hybrid publishing type of thing where I published with a company that really went through and helped me make it better, but it was one of those things where I thought if I give somebody a book, that might be something that would differentiate me from my competition.

So, we're all trying to win some projects and maybe if I hand them a book or mail them a book or something, that could make a difference. My hunch was absolutely correct. It generated millions of dollars in revenue.

Howard Lovy: Yeah, that's great. That's what we try to emphasize at ALLi a lot of times. It's not just about the book. It's your calling card, especially in business. The book is the start of the conversation.

Anne Beall: Exactly, and what do you want sitting on someone's desk? You could put a cheap pen, or you could put your book there. There's no better advertising than to have something sitting there.

Something what happened in a lot of cases was, the client would then give it to their underlings, and then they would end up buying the book and it ended up snowballing. So, I had a lot of credibility because I had written a book and it's actually very well reviewed book. I think it has 130 reviews on Amazon, and I've never marketed it. It's marketed itself.

Howard Lovy: That's wonderful. So, that kind of really got the ball rolling on your whole writing career, and then you just started putting out book after book. Was this your initial confidence booster, and then you thought, I have all these other ideas too?

Anne Beall: Yeah, it was certainly a confidence booster.

I will be honest that none of my other books have quite surpassed that initial one, but I've marketed them much more. So, it was definitely a confidence booster, and it was definitely at that point, when I started writing about some of the things that I really love, like for example, Cinderella Didn't Live Happily Ever After, which is a data analysis of fairy tales, I thought, oh, everyone will want to read this. So, it got me pushed into some other areas. Again, those books haven't been quite as successful, although they haven't done poorly. But there's never been quite the demand for that as there has been for the business book.

Howard Lovy: I guess they all can't be bestsellers, but it sounds like you went into self-publishing after all this, or did you continue to use the hybrid?

Anne Beall: I did hybrid for, I think, one book after the initial book. I did a hybrid book on reading hidden communications, because I got interested in non-verbal communications, because we read them in research a lot, especially in focus groups.

So, I did another hybrid book there. But then after a while, I got pretty unhappy with hybrid publishing, and I was unhappy with the particular publisher I was using. Then I discovered KDP, and I was actually able to do another, I think I did the second edition or maybe the third edition of Strategic Market Research with KDP and I was pretty happy.

I was able to control it a lot better. I was able to do the kind of cover I wanted and things like that. And I thought, wow, I'll never go back to hybrid publishing, certainly, because I just like the level of control, and I was also making a lot more money. So, basically the hybrid publisher was making most of the money before, and then I started making money on the self-published book.

Howard Lovy: Exactly. I don't know a lot about business, but I know that the money is supposed to come to you and not away from you. That's all I know. So, you began writing about a range of topics from market research to cats and horses and animals and fairy tales. Was there a method to the madness?

Anne Beall: Yeah, I did exactly what you're not supposed to do. I think you're supposed to really just specialize and write only books about cats or only books about fairy tales or whatever, but unfortunately my mind is just a little bit too interested in too many things, and so I go where my passions are and when I get hold of an idea, or usually when an idea gets hold of me, I really can't let it go, and that's what I do research on and then end up writing.

So, I think the thread that ties it all together is I'm particularly interested in the psychology of people, whether it's the psychology of their relationships with animals or the psychology that's implicit in the cultural stories of fairy tales, or whether it's the psychology of us not being compassionate towards ourselves. I'm really interested in understanding how it is that people think and feel about different topics, and so that's where I go.

Howard Lovy: Let's talk a little bit more about the fairy tales. The title says it, Cinderella Didn't Live Happily Ever After and Only Prince Charming Gets to Break the Rules.

That sounds like the book in itself, but elaborate on that a little bit.

Anne Beall: The Cinderella book is actually a data analysis of the Grimm's fairy tales. What we were actually looking for, because it was a couple of researchers and I were actually coding the Grimm's fairy tales, with over 200 of them, coding things like who's powerful in fairy tales, and what emotions do people express, and who gets punished? We looked at a lot of different things. Who marries up? All kinds of stuff.

For example, we found that both male characters and female characters marry up in fairy tales about equally. But when men marry up, it's for feats of bravery and when women marry up, it's completely because of their looks. Just how they look. So that's a hidden message. We're giving the message to children who read Grimm's Fairy Tales, that for girls it's all about your beauty, and for boys it's all about how you behave.

We looked at things like, who's powerful in fairy tales? So, we found, for example, there are quite a few powerful female characters, and powerful male characters, but powerful male characters are always good and powerful female characters are usually evil. So, we give another hidden message that we're giving to children; powerful women tend to be bad, do not elect them whatever you do.

So, there's lots of hidden messages implicit in, there's no such thing as a nice stepmother. I'm writing an essay about that for a literary publication. There's not one nice stepmother in all the Grimm's fairy tales. So, poor stepmothers that live in this world today, we have to deal with that stereotype. The Prince Charming book is interesting because I got interested in that after the last election where there was a lot of unhappiness over who broke the rules and who gets away with breaking the rules and who doesn't break the rules and who can get away with it.

What we found is that in fairytales and folktales all around the world, not just the Grimm's fairytales, but all around the world, male characters break the rules much more often than female characters. But when they break the rules, they tend to be either rewarded or not punished, whereas female characters tend to be severely punished. So essentially, we're giving the message that females should not break the rules, and when you do, you're going to be punished severely. So, that's what we found there.

Howard Lovy: Yeah. Now, many of us, or many kids, experience these fairy tales not through the original Grimm's version, but through the Disneyfication of them. Does that come into play, or are the messages changing at all?

Anne Beall: They're not really that different. If you look at the powerful female characters in Disney films, if you look at The Little Mermaid, it's still the cruel sea witch under the sea, who's ugly and powerful and evil. So, they're not that different in general.

There are some changes to fairy tales. Frozen is not a traditional fairy tale, but certainly the idea is that she's not going to try to find Prince Charming, she's actually going to go save her sister. That's a new thing that's certainly unusual and different in fairy tales and folktales, but for the most part, the traditional fairy tales, the regular Cinderella that we know and love, that tale does much better at the movie theatres than Moana and other ones that are non-traditional.

Howard Lovy: Oh, interesting. Yeah. So, the old tropes still sell.

Anne Beall: They do.

Howard Lovy: Now, you've also written about something we could all use a little more of, which is self-compassion and calm, especially these days when everybody seems to be very loud in society, in politics, everything. What inspired you to create these guided meditation journeys?

Anne Beall: I think that most of us would love to sit down and meditate, but I think a lot of people generally find it very difficult to do that. Your mind tends to race around, and you start thinking about, oh my gosh, I didn't put the laundry in the dryer and, oh my goodness, my child's having issues with this, should I fix it in that way?

It's just very hard to tame your mind. So, what I was trying to do is create guided journeys where you could essentially take a break from your mind and go on a guided journey in an effort to calm you, bring some peaceful feelings to you. That's certainly the case in the meditations for inner peace, the Embracing Calm book.

The next book was the Embracing Self-Compassion, which is really about taking different journeys. They're all guided journeys. You could go to a crystal palace, or you go to a magical castle, or you could go to a beautiful ravine or an old redwood forest, but in each one you take a journey. It's very vivid. It's very imaginative, and then you deal with some part of your life.

Maybe it's your finances. Maybe it's your family relations, or maybe you need to forgive yourself for something, or maybe you need to forgive somebody else. It takes you on that journey where you think about that issue. As writers, I find this to be exceedingly useful to be compassionate towards oneself, it tends to deepen our writing.

That's why I'm now writing a book about having more compassion in writing, which I'm working on. If you look at a part of your life, if you're a memoir writer like me, you tend to write it as well, this person was all bad and I was all good or vice versa. But when you go back and have compassion for yourself and others, it deepens the characters and it makes you see life as a little bit less, shall we say, black and white and more grey, which is.

Howard Lovy: You're not settling scores. Somebody recommended I read The Power of Now and try to not be embedded in my past and think too much about the future. But to me, being angry about the past is something you hang on to and write about, and it gives you passion. Thinking about the past and the future is where you get your material.

Anne Beall: Yeah.

Howard Lovy: I think I might be getting that wrong.

Anne Beall: No, I actually believe emotions are extremely important, and I'm a huge believer in harnessing them for writing. But I also think that as you think through that angry episode, and I've done workshops with writers where I say, talk about someone who disappointed you, and they'll write about how this person did this terrible thing, and oh my goodness. Okay, now let's go back and have compassion for that person, take them through a guided meditation, and then they go back and now it's become a less flat story and it's actually got a lot of stuff where there's some interplay, and here's the role I played and here's the role that someone else played and suddenly it's more interesting, I think, because it's more real.

Howard Lovy: It's more real. There's no absolute evil and absolute good.

Anne Beall: No, there certainly isn't.

Howard Lovy: Your books have also been featured in major outlets like People Magazine and Chicago Tribune. You've been interviewed at NPR. How did you get such visibility for an indie author?

Anne Beall: So, I actually hired a public relations firm, and within a week of hiring them, I got into People Magazine.

It's like the only thing that ever happened with that public relations firm, they got me to People Magazine and then every other thing they tried to get me into didn't really work, but it was like this amazing thing. I think you can still find that today. It's still up on People's website.

Then I've got other interviews as a result of just connecting, networking with people. I ended up, I think, writing a book for a tree house humane society, and it happened that a guy who was on the board ended up being at WGN and he got in touch and said, I'd love to talk to you about your book.

So, just lucky in some cases, and then some of it just occurring through networking.

Howard Lovy: So, the big PR firm got you one mention. I think that's a dilemma many indie authors have. Should you hire somebody or go by word of mouth, and how do you do it? And also, how much good does it do?

Do you measure increased book sales after you're featured in a major publication?

Anne Beall: Yeah, I have looked at that and I've never seen any effect of it whatsoever. Like I said, I hired two PR firms. One of them got me to People and they did that press release, which I think can still be found to this day. So, did that make a difference in book sales? Certainly not at the time, maybe over time it does.

The other PR firm I worked with, I thought was really good, and they ended up submitting me for a couple of different awards and I actually won one of them. They did a bunch of different things for me that made a difference, but I never saw any huge impact with book sales, never seen any specific event lead to more book sales.

The one time I did see this was when it was around Valentine's Day, and I had just published in Chicago Story Press, I had just published a book, an anthology of stories about love.

I went on WGN and talked about my own love story, because I had a pretty lovely love story of my own, and then I mentioned that I had just published this book and it was a collection of authors who had their different stories about love, and it was all different kinds of love, not just romantic love, and I think the guy said something like, Oh, this is a good Valentine's day gift. And right after that, the book sales went up for the next few days, and that was one example where it really did. I hit the right holiday with the right message with the right book.

Howard Lovy: Absolutely, yeah. That's great. I don't know how reproducible that is, it seems like something very specific to your book.

Anne Beall: The other thing is, when Meghan Markle left the throne, when they moved and left England, that's actually when I got the NPR interview, and I actually got an interview at a TV station in Florida. They flew me down to talk to me about it because they said, Meghan Markle is leaving and you have a book that says Cinderella didn't live happily ever after, you have something to speak to on this topic. And I said, I sure do. And book sales went up on that one as well, but again, I had the right timing for the right book.

Howard Lovy: Yeah, then you can go with that, you're the expert on love. Every Valentine's Day, you can pitch yourself.

Do you have advice for other authors who are looking to gain visibility or is it pretty much a crapshoot?

Anne Beall: I would say that we sometimes underestimate the degree to which other authors are our customers. So, I would say that's one area of opportunity. I would say that visibility can be anything from doing a talk at the local library to being in People magazine and everything in between.

I certainly do a lot of author fairs. I do a ton of them, and sometimes I go to author fairs and someone will say, I've heard of you, I know who you are, I saw a newspaper article about you or something like that.

I've been doing this for 15 years at the minimum, but you think over 15 years, you just slowly chip and chip away on it.

I think you just have to follow your passion, and you cannot give up and you just keep at it. If you have something to say, just keep putting it out there in the world. Like I said that first book I did, I never marketed it and yet it sells like two to three copies a day. So, I put something out there, I self-published it eventually, but it's not like the hybrid publisher did anything to market it. They didn't.

I put it out there in the world, there was a desire for it and still there's a desire for it. So, you just keep following your heart.

Howard Lovy: Now, you also help other authors gain visibility. You have a literary magazine. Can you talk about that?

Anne Beall: I started that literary journal in July of 2024. It was named the number five best nonfiction literary journal.

Howard Lovy: What's it called?

Anne Beall: It's called the Chicago Story Press Literary Journal, and you can find it at chicagostorypress.com. It is a free subscription, and we publish creative nonfiction.

I'm passionate about getting people published, and that's certainly something that makes a difference. I know that agents read literary magazines. I know that people have gotten, by that type of exposure, they gain credibility when they go to pitch themselves to traditional book publishers and whatnot.

It's a wonderful literary journal. We primarily publish things that have a psychological bend to them. They have something to say, not surprising given that I'm the founder and editor of it. Everything from people exploring relationship issues to sexuality, to aging; there are stories that give you a really different perspective on something.

Howard Lovy: That's great, we'll have to check it out. So, as you look ahead, what new projects or goals are on the horizon for you? You've done a little bit of everything. What's next?

Anne Beall: I continue to be working hard on the literary journal. We published last year about 40 pieces and probably this year, hoping to do more like 80 or 90 pieces, so that's great.

Then I am working on a book all about the compassionate writer, how to bring self-compassion to your writing. The whole idea being, how can we be more self-compassionate with ourselves so that we can overcome writer's block, deal with the inner critics, have critique groups that are kind, write dialogue that feels real, deepen our characters, and all kinds of stuff.

So, I'm working on that project now. I'm actually starting to work with refugees to help tell their stories as a way to bring compassion to their lives and help them process some very difficult things.

Howard Lovy: Yeah, more difficult times are ahead. I'm not going to get political on this.

But thank you so much, Anne. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. We covered business, we covered fairy tales, we covered marketing. I think we've got it all.

Anne Beall: Yeah, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you and I'm really so honored to be on your podcast and also to be a member of ALLi.

Howard Lovy: Thank you, Anne. Bye.

Anne Beall: Bye.

Author: Howard Lovy

Howard Lovy is an author, book editor, and journalist. He is also the Content and Communications Manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors, where he hosts and produces podcasts and keeps the blog updated. You can find more of his work at https://howardlovy.com/

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