The Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast Changes to Better Serve Indie Authors

The Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast is changing, and this episode gives you an inside look at the exciting new features planned for 2025. Join ALLi Director Orna Ross, Campaigns Manager Matty Dalrymple, and Content and Communications Manager Howard Lovy as they discuss the new name, revamped structure, and fresh approach to delivering expert insights across all seven processes of publishing. With contributions from advisors, expanded guest appearances, and a focus on fostering both virtual and in-person connections among indie authors, the podcast is set to provide even greater value for ALLi members and listeners.

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About the Hosts

Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

Matty Dalrymple podcasts, writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. She has written books on the business of short fiction and podcasting for authors, and her articles have appeared in Writer’s Digest magazine. She serves as the campaigns manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Matty is also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with Rock Paper Scissors; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with The Sense of Death; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, including Close These Eyes. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.

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 on his website.

Read the Transcripts

Orna Ross: Hello everybody and welcome to the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast.

Today we're going to be talking a little bit about changes that we have been slowly making to the podcast. You might have noticed over the last little while, including the name I just said, and lots of other small changes, which add up to a little bit of a transformation to the podcast.

If you've been wondering what's going on, just to fill you in on what is going on and why we've been making these changes.

So, I am here today with ALLi podcast manager, Howard Lovy. Hi Howard. Well known to regular listeners and Matty Dalrymple, our campaigns manager, becoming very well known to regular listeners.

Hi, Matty.

Matty Dalrymple: Hey, how are you doing?

Orna Ross: We're all good. So, let's start with you, Matty, actually, because you joined the ALLi team this year under the auspices of Campaigns Manager, which you've seen is the biggest umbrella in the world because it has covered so many things, among them, the podcast.

So, talk to us a little bit. You, of course, are a very experienced podcaster yourself. How long has your own Indy Author Podcast been running?

Matty Dalrymple: Since 2016, and then I think it was in 2020 that I went on a more regular schedule of bi-weekly, and I think 2022 when I went weekly.

Orna Ross: Wow. So, that makes you one of the longest podcasts in the space, right? Along with us.

Matty Dalrymple: Yeah.

Orna Ross: Great. So, when you came on board as campaigns manager, you had some thoughts about lots of things and you had some thoughts about the podcast. So, share a little bit about why you felt the ALLi podcast needed an upgrade.

Matty Dalrymple: I think one of the things was that the relationship among the different parts wasn't entirely clear to me as a listener.

Also, I sometimes had a little bit of difficulty finding it on my podcast player because it didn't actually have the word ALLi in it. So, the previous name was Self-Publishing Advice and Inspirations. I also realized in digging into it that there was also this sort of news aspect to it. Should it really be Self-Publishing, Advice, Inspirations and News? That starts getting a little bit too much. And after some discussion, we decided to rename it as Self-Publishing with ALLi, which I think is great, very clear.

It gives us maximum flexibility about what we cover: advice, inspirations, news, whatever else strikes our fancy.

And getting the ALLi name in there, I think was important too, so that ALLi members can easily find it.

Orna Ross: Yeah, it's always interesting when you get somebody else's perspective, and something so obvious that has been missed by everybody for over a decade, that ALLi's name wasn't in the ALLi podcast.

But also, we'll be changing up. We have always really drawn on the ALLi team for the podcast and the advice blog as well, and in the past year or so, we've been transitioning very much to this whole concept of the many faces of ALLi.

We've always had an advisory board and various ambassadors who have been charged with both keeping us informed about what matters to the community and also telling other people about what we do and how we do it and so on.

So, one of the things that we are aiming to do with this upgrade is to bring those people in a little bit more.

So, Howard, can you talk a little bit about the structure of the podcast now, what people can expect and what's different?

So, we're going to have hosts now and guests from outside the actual ALLi team.

Howard Lovy: Yes. We're going beyond just us sitting behind a microphone and telling our opinions. There are so many ways to be an indie author and so many ways of doing it that each of us are going to have guests. What's going to not change is everybody expects Dan Holloway, our news editor, to give us a news update every Friday, and he's always a very dynamic person who stands alone, and he always has just an interesting, fascinating take on the news coming up.

So, that stays the same on Fridays, and also every other Sunday, you'll hear Inspirational Indie Authors from me.

And I'm just looking at my page here, and the last one that ran on Sunday was inspirational indie author interview number 171. So, I've been doing this a long time.

Orna Ross: A lot of inspiring authors.

Howard Lovy: A lot of inspiring authors, and they inspire me too. They come from all walks of life, all nationalities, all genders, all young, old. People who have dreamed of being writers all their lives and some people who just stumbled into it, and everything in between. So, it's really fascinating.

Now, what's new are the different, internally we're calling them streams, but you can call them whatever you want, it's all part of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, and one of them is Dale L. Roberts, who does branding, marketing, and promotion, and if you've heard his previous podcast with Holly, he's a very energetic person who really can get you fired up about ways of branding and marketing and promoting your work.

He's very big on video. He's our resident YouTube star, I think, and he has lots of wonderful, realistic ways that you can market your own work, and he has fascinating guests.

From Australia, we have Anna Featherstone, and she goes into the production and distribution aspect of self-publishing. She has incredible guests telling us, the last one was how to save money when you outsource some of your publishing tasks.

Then there is our own Matty who talks about editorial and design, and I always learn a great deal from her guests and what she has to say. So, those are the main streams.

In addition, we also have our monthly Q&A with Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black, where you contribute all your burning questions, and they do a wonderful job of making sense of it all. And if they don't know the answer, they'll tell you where to go. Where to go to get the answer, not where to go. They have a great banter together and they're wonderful together.

Speaking of people who go well together, there's also Joanna Penn and Orna Ross. Quarterly, they deal with creative self-publishing, and it's always wonderful to hear how those two, just at the beginning of the show, everything they're doing, they do more in one quarter than I've done in five years. So, it's wonderful to always get updates from them.

Orna Ross: Just on those last two, just the slight changes that we've made to both of those in addition to the other changes we're talking about there, is that Joanna and I now, from 2025, we're going to be focusing more on lessons learned from our own quarter.

So, in the previous quarter, what's happened for us and what are we planning for the quarter ahead, with a focus on creative planning and just giving people more of an overview of what goes on behind the scenes, because very often it's so easy to give tips and advice, and so hard to follow tips and advice. And just getting very real about what is happening for each of us in our quite different types of books and genre and so on.

The other thing that's changing then with Michael and Sacha and the member Q&A, is that we have a live webinar for the Q&A now each quarter in the member zone on the SelfPubConnect forum, our member forum, and that is a really great opportunity to come along and actually engage.

It can become more than just, here's the question, there is the answer. We have the ability to have a little bit more of a conversation about some of these things, because again, sometimes it's a black and white answer, but sometimes it takes more than that.

Sorry, I just wanted to fill in on those two. I cut you off.

Howard Lovy: One more, and last but not least is Joe Solari, who focuses on publishing for profit. Some of us would actually like to make money from our work. So, he'll show us the way there.

I think we have a little something for everybody in this podcast, and I'm very happy with all the changes.

Orna Ross: Yeah, I'm excited for 2025 definitely, and thanks to Matty for inspiring us.

Speaking of Joe, Joe did a couple of sessions with us in 2020 and for those of you who may or may not know, Joe, with his team, took over the 20Books conference and transformed it really into a type of conference called AuthorNation. Matty was there for ALLi and herself at the actual conference.

So, do you want to just let people, who weren't able to go or who weren't there, do you want to just give a little bit of a rundown on what happened there?

Matty Dalrymple: Yeah. I think that entree of talking about Joe as now one of our new podcast hosts is a great one.

One of the benefits, just to go back for a moment to the podcast is, this is really giving us a chance to tap much more actively into our team of advisors. So, Joe being, as of January 2025, our business advisor, we recently added Mark Leslie Lefebvre is going to be our new advisor on bookstores and libraries.

We have a whole host of people there that we want to be tapping into as much as possible, and so within each of those processes of publishing, and I think another great thing about the new organization for the podcast is it's much more explicitly tied to the seven processes of publishing; editing, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion, and selective rights licensing.

So, if people are interested in a particular part of the process, they can find those episodes, or they can look across the entire podcast and see an overview of all those processes.

But, yeah, Joe became one of our advisors, holding off on that until after Author Nation understandably because he was up to his eyeballs in Author Nation until very recently.

I did attend. I gave a couple of presentations, and I also hosted a meet and greet for ALLi on one of the mornings. It was 7am, but it was very well attended and energetically attended, despite the early hour.

I thought AuthorNation was a great experience. Hundreds and hundreds of people. As I think Joanna has talked about on her podcast, those things can be overwhelming, but well worth it, especially in terms of networking with folks.

It also gave us another opportunity to tap into our advisors to help answer questions that AuthorNation attendees at the meet and greet had about ALLi and their areas of expertise.

So, we had Joanna there. We had Maggie Marr, who's our advisor on book to screen, Russell Nohelty, who is our advisor on crowdfunding. Ricardo Fayette, who is our advisor on marketing, and Sacha Black as the team member who's responsible for strategy and communication.

So, all those folks were there chatting with people about ALLi, and that was a great experience.

One of the things that I thought was interesting is that, I think the thing that got people most excited, is the knowledge that for members, they have access obviously to our private member forum and on there, if people choose to share their location, you can actually go on and say, find people who are near me and it'll start out with people, like for me, people who are right down the road from me. And then, as you scroll through the list, the geographic area it covers becomes wider and wider.

So, that was really cool because a lot of the people were very excited about the idea that this was going to be both a virtual community, but also, they could make it into an in-person community as well if they wanted to reach out to those other people who live near them.

Orna Ross: Yeah, it's a really nice feature of SelfPubConnect, I must say, because that was a missing link when we ran the forum on Facebook. And in lots of other ways, the SelfPubConnect forum has really made the community, brought it much closer together, I think, and that's a very good example of one of the ways in which it does that.

So yes, I think that's our overview. We just wanted to fill you in and tell you what to expect in 2025.

We are, as ever, interested in hearing from you. So, if there's a particular session that you would like us to run under any of the streams. If there's any comments you'd like to make about the podcast. While we're in upgrade mode, if there's other things you think need an upgrade, please let us know.

We're always interested in your feedback, and we do our very best to implement solutions to problems that you identify. So many things happen at ALLi because some member came along and said, I think you should do such and such. So, if you are thinking that way, we'd really like to hear that from you.

Any last thoughts, Howard or Matty?

Howard Lovy: Just, if you are an inspirational indie author and you're a member of ALLi, feel free to send me an email at [email protected], and let me know what inspires you and I'd love to have you on the show.

I also want to give a quick shout out to BookVault and Gatekeeper Press, our wonderful sponsors for helping us do this in the first place.

Orna Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Matty?

Matty Dalrymple: I would just invite people, since the business focus that Joe Solari is going to be doing for the podcast is a little bit new, we had a couple of pilot episodes, but if there are business topics that you would be interested in having Joe talk about in 2025, you can drop notes about that to me at [email protected].

Orna Ross: Is it Matty or campaigns?

Matty Dalrymple: Either one will work.

Orna Ross: Oh, either. That's great. Fantastic.

Alrighty. Thanks, Matty and Howard for coming along today to fill people in and thank you as ever to you, the listeners. Happy writing and happy publishing. We'll talk to you next week. Take care.