What if the key to finding your authentic voice as a writer lies in exploring someone else's fictional world first? How can multi-passionate creators manage multiple brands without losing their sanity? KimBoo York reveals how fanfiction can be a powerful training ground for original fiction, and why being your “weird self” is more valuable than ever in an age of AI.

In the intro, Everything I know about self-publishing [Kevin Kelly; his interview on The Creative Penn]; KU library distribution [Dale Roberts]; Anthropic settlement on piracy [The Verge; Authors Guild; Writer Beware];Selling direct with ElevenReader; I'm talking about Creativity and AI on Brave New Bookshelf; I'm also talking about An Author's Guide to AI on The Novel Marketing Podcast; My final AI webinar of the year, Sun 21 Sept; The Buried and the Drowned short story collection.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

What is fanfiction?
How to transition from writing fanfiction to original fiction by identifying the aspects you love
Managing multiple creative brands under one studio umbrella without losing your mind
The legal landscape of fanfiction
Why fanfiction has been an innovation hub for story trends
How AI and generative search create opportunities for cross-genre writers

You can find KimBoo at HouseofYork.info.

Transcript of interview with KimBoo York

Jo: KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom. So welcome back to the show, KimBoo.

KimBoo: Hi, Jo. It's great to be back. I love talking with you.

Jo: Yes, and we had a good chat last July 2024 when we talked about intuitive discovery writing. So we don't need to go further back than that, but just give us an update.

What does your writing life and your business look like at the moment?

KimBoo: Well, I think I speak for everybody when I say that 2025 has been a challenging year. So I've had to take on a little bit more freelance work as I've restructured how I'm doing some of my business. You were an inspiration for that.

I'm kind of separating out my different brands now instead of trying to be one thing to all people, and that's taking a little bit of work. I've launched a new pen name, which I'm not going to talk about here, but it seems to be doing well off the launchpad.

Then, of course, I'm redoing some of my older works, doing the business end. We're doing new covers, doing some new links, doing some new giveaways. So it's been a busy year and I look forward to what's going to be happening in the future for me, especially as I go into 2026. So that's kind of where I'm at right now.

Jo: Well that's interesting. Just talk a bit about this separating different brands. Just remind us what are the different personas that you have and the different brands you've split into? I feel like a lot of people think about doing this, and I have done myself.

I've got my two author names and I felt that they were very different, so it was important to me, but I know how much work it is.

So talk a bit about that process of separating brands.

KimBoo: Well, I flopped back and forth, so for a long time I tried to keep everything very separate and that took so much work and energy, as you know. Then I tried to put everything under one banner, and that just became cluttered.

It became hard to identify my demographics, it became hard to do advertising. You can always do targeting in advertising, but with the more organic stuff, how do I post on social media? How do I talk about all my work?

So I am somebody who is a multiple project starter. I always have multiple things going on. So I have KimBoo York, me, myself, and I, who is the author and the writer, and I do fiction under that name.

I have Cooper West, which is one of my older pen names. That's gay male romance, romantic thrillers, paranormal romance. I have The Author Alchemist, which is kind of my podcast and my craft writing and writing coaching brand.

I have The Task Mistress, which is my productivity brand. I just published a new book, a collection of essays on holistic productivity under that brand.

I have The Skeptic's Inspirational, which is daily inspirational posts blog. That's going to be a book here soon.

Patience & Fortitude, which is my grief blog and mourning blog and book, which is the house where I published my memoir “Grieving Futures: Surviving the Death of My Parents.” And I could go on, but you kind of see what I'm getting at there.

They're very different things and I realized that what I needed was a studio type of branding. So HouseofYork.info is my studio home. House of York is my studio. It's the thing that produces all of these different brands, and so I do still have that brand. Everything is a House of York production.

It sounds a little ostentatious when you put it like that, but for me mentally, it's a great way to keep things separate and yet connected. So they're all me, they're all connected, and I can talk about different ones in different places, but they're also very clearly defined for marketing purposes. So that's what I really wanted out of that whole thing.

Jo: Yes, it is really hard.

But you don't have different email lists for all of those things though?

KimBoo: No, I do not. Right now I just have the House of York email list. I'm moving into segmenting them. So I will have some different email lists going down the line, and certainly my newest pen name, the secret one, is going to have its own separate email list.

So eventually, yes, there will be separate email lists, but I'm working on developing a way where I'm not having to do six email lists a week. Cycling is important, right? Planning things out, scheduling. Who would have thought? So I will eventually, and that is the goal, is to have these different segmented lists.

I would also be able to do a full blast to everybody if I had something special coming out that I wanted all my lists to know. So again, that's one of the reasons why I went with this studio framework of doing all of my brands and putting everything under one umbrella while keeping them branded separately.

Jo: No, I like that. I mean, I often have thought about this, because I have the two main websites—well actually now I have three. The Creative Penn, J.F. Penn, and Books and Travel. And so they're my main websites. Then I have my Shopify stores and then I have YouTube channels.

I have often thought, oh my goodness, I should have one landing page where I can send people to. Then I thought, well, who do I send to one landing page, because I actually have different people do different things.

I guess this is great to start on actually, because I feel like you are a multi-passionate creator, and so am I.

We have long careers and it's like, well, you can't just stay in your lane.

You know, I feel like some people say, “Oh no, you should just stay in your lane.” And we are like, well, it's not actually possible.

KimBoo: No, no. I'm a seven-lane highway. I can't.

Jo: Well, it's interesting though, because it's not a seven-lane highway. It's actually like three A-roads, we call them here, like three major roads and then there's some little back lanes, and then you might have one that's a bit of a cul-de-sac.

KimBoo: Sadly far more accurate. Yes.

Jo: But I think that's important too. I mean, I was actually looking at your grief one and the death of your parents, and I mean, that's like a whole completely different area that perhaps is almost standalone.

Different people may find that book than find your romance or your productivity or whatever, and that's fine. They don't need to find anything else. So I think that's really good too. It's having all these different things.

So just to make people listening feel better if you are a multi-passionate creator, so are we. You just have to manage it, right?

KimBoo: Figure out what works for you, but you've got to just try different things until you land on the system that works. I think that's the lesson takeaway here.

Jo: Yes. Or the way it works right now, and then you change things. In fact, let's get into the book because this is another one of these kind of quite random books to be fair, which is Out from Fanfic. I'm fascinated by this because obviously I've heard of fanfiction, but it's not a sort of world I am in at all. So just start by explaining—

What is fanfic? And what are the main sites?

KimBoo: Sure. So I'm going to start actually with the Wikipedia definition, which is “fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction.” And honestly, that is the basis for a thousand different arguments about what exactly fan fiction is.

It became very trendy there for a little while to look back and say Dante's Inferno, that's fan fiction. Bible fan fiction. Right? What is fan fiction? It's one of those, well, you kind of know it when you see it type of things, right?

I consider it to be the interaction of a creative person, whether it's writing, drawing, painting, creating videos with a property or fiction, a story that they love. It's them engaging with it on a personal level.

So that's really what fanfiction is. It's a hobby. It's the same kind of hobby as building Lego houses or model trains. You're taking something that exists and creating your own work, I guess is the word I would use, but creating your own world out of it.

So it's fun. That's the bottom line for me is writing fanfiction and reading fanfiction is fun.

Jo: So, yes, it's fun. Let's just be clear, you mentioned the word property and that it is fan labor, and it's unauthorized. Right up front we have to say, this is when it's not your character. So it might be, I don't know—

Give me some examples of what people have done.

KimBoo: Okay. So take any show. Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Game of Thrones, movies. The Avengers, that was one I was in for a long time. It's currently in a lot of Chinese dramas like Nirvana in Fire and The Untamed.

You take those characters and that setting and you write your own version of it. Say, a cut scene or a post scene, or you change some of the canon facts of the story and you say, well, what if this person hadn't died? Or what if these people had met earlier?

Or what if this one character had left when they were young and then come back 20 years later? And you just add in these elements and have fun with taking it in a new direction. But as you said, they aren't yours. They aren't your characters.

It's not your setting, it's not your story. You don't own that, in the sense you own your own writing. Of course, you always own your own writing in a creative sense, but in a legal sense, you do not own it. That's something people really need to be aware of.

If they're interested in fanfiction, if they're going to explore it, if they're going to use it as a writing tool, you can, but you can't officially publish. You can't publish and make money off of this.

This is definitely hobby level stuff, which I don't say to denigrate. I've read some amazing fan fiction that's truly life transforming, how beautifully and amazingly well done it was. But it's hobby. You can't publish it. You can't do anything with it legally.

Jo: I guess you can publish on a website.

So what are the places that people are publishing their fanfic on?

KimBoo: So they are posting it. The oldest site right now is fanfiction.net. It's still around, it still looks like it did in like 1998. Truly, I don't know how people use it.

The one that most people are familiar with is called ArchiveOfOurOwn.org. It is a project of the non-profit organization, Organization for Transformative Works that was started 2008, 2009, I think, for the express purpose of having a place for fanfiction to exist.

They've done a lot of work on the legal end to protect people's rights to write and post fanfiction online. I try to draw the line between saying that they publish fanfiction and they post it for that reason.

That's just a me thing. I don't think that that's really widespread in fandom, but for me mentally when I'm talking about it, you post your fanfiction to AO3, as it's known colloquially, and you share it and people can read it and comment on it and like it. It's a great site.

Their tagging system is truly a thing of beauty, but again, it's not publishing in the sense of you're publishing a book, you're publishing something.

There is fanfiction on Wattpad, but they've fought against it. They've taken down fanfiction in the past. They do allow it, it's kind of under the table on Wattpad, but there is a lot of fanfiction on Wattpad.

I think, going back a ways, the One Direction fandom really had its moment on Wattpad. That was a long time ago, but there's still people posting fanfiction on Wattpad. A lot of times people cross post, they post on Wattpad and they post on AO3. So it just depends on where you want to put your work.

Jo: Okay. A few things here. So it would be obvious to me, like if it's, I don't know, Captain Kirk from Star Trek.

KimBoo: Oh, classic.

A classic. You know, and a very obvious modern character. But think about Thor for example. So Thor obviously being Norse God, none of that is under copyright, as in anyone can write a Thor story. But then there's Thor, the movies and the things that are Thor-like in that are movie-based as opposed to the original base.

So how does that kind of work? Like how do you know? Especially when in people's minds, sometimes things might get mixed up. You know, you might mention Ragnarok now. Ragnarok is in all the ancient stories, but the way they did it in whatever Avengers movie or whatever it might be is specific.

So are there lines here that people need to watch out for?

KimBoo: I would say these days, yes. There's a little bit of a line you need to watch out for. I mean, if your story's about Thor being a member of the Avengers, then obviously it's like, yes. But if it's just an independent story about Thor and his brother Loki, or Loki himself, there are definitely tells to use to be able to differentiate.

Now, to be clear, on sites like AO3 and Fanfiction.net and Wattpad, people do identify. They say like Thor MCU, which is Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tips you off, or Thor mythology, right? So then, oh, this is based on the Thor lore of the old style myths rather than the new style myths, I guess you might say.

So there are definitely ways to identify that and I think a lot of fan fiction writers take care to make sure of that because you don't want somebody coming into old school Thor and Loki mythology, thinking that they're getting the fun Avengers good time, “let's beat up the bad guy” story, because they'll just get mad.

They're like, “Hey, this wasn't what I wanted to read.” So fanfiction writers are very careful about identifying exactly what they're writing for and how they're writing for it.

Oftentimes, yes, you wrote a riff on Little Red Riding Hood. Well, you know, okay. That's definitely in the public domain. They can post that on AO3. They can also publish that as their own original story because that is public domain that is not owned by somebody. So fanfiction authors are usually generally pretty careful about that.

Jo: Yes. I guess why I am emphasizing all this is because I still feel like many authors don't really understand what is in the public domain, what is fair use under copyright. Also, it differs. So there are some countries where copyright expires earlier.

I think, is Sherlock Holmes one of these where it's sort of—don't quote me on this, people go check it in your country—but it's like some of the Sherlock Holmes stories might be out of copyright and others are still within.

I think Tolkien's Universe as well. There's like different ways that things have been extended when they haven't in other areas. So I think this is really interesting and you definitely have to check all this before you publish it.

I did have another question. I mean, you mentioned the One Direction thing. Is this just all about having sex with different characters?

Is it all romance and erotica?

KimBoo: It is not, and in fact, gen—general fiction—is one of the most popular tags on AO3. Romance is very popular. They want the characters, their favorite characters to kiss, right? That is a very popular element of fan fiction, but it's absolutely not what it all is. It's not all written by 14-year-old girls. That's another stereotype that comes out.

In fact, if you go back in history, I would say the modern fan fiction era—and a lot of academics would agree with me—began with the Kirk/Spock fandom right out of Star Trek and that like those women were full grown women because this was the late sixties and the seventies. There was no internet.

If you wanted to share your stories, you had to have access to a Xerox machine. Remember Xerox machines, right? You had to have access to a Xerox machine or a mimeograph machine, and then you had to have access to the postage that would be required to mail these magazines out.

So like you couldn't be a 14-year-old girl and write fan fiction in that era. So it's always been, I would say, owned by older writers, and not teenagers, as the stereotype goes.

Yes, a lot of the fiction out there is romantic. Some of it's erotic, but a lot of it is also just general. I was just looking… what was I looking at the other day? Game of Thrones fan fiction. You look at Game of Thrones fan fiction and there's lots of different pairings that are popular in that. The “Time Travel Fix-It” tag is very popular in that fandom.

Jo: So people are trying to avoid the final series.

KimBoo: Exactly. Like they either want to avoid season eight, six through eight completely, or they just want to redo it, or they want to have something different. So they have one of the characters time travel, you know, the gods step in, whatever, and go back and fix everything.

It's really popular in The Untamed fandom as well, the “Time Travel Fix-It” tag. So it's not just about the romance. I have a current Untamed fan fiction in progress right now actually, and it's very alternative universe. I wanted to see what would happen if one of the main characters was actually given some autonomy and power earlier in her life.

I just wanted to see what would happen if that happened to her and how that would change all the threads of the story going forward. And is there some romance? Yes, there's some romance. There's also a war. There's also magic and killer slaughter turtles. It's just fun.

Jo: Yes. I think fun is definitely the focus here.

So coming back on the IP side, there are books—like 50 Shades of Gray is supposedly based on, I think, was it Twilight fan fiction? Not supposedly, very much absolutely.

KimBoo: Yes. Yes, it was. It was based on Twilight fanfiction.

Jo: So how did that become a publishable original novel that was basically huge?

KimBoo: So what you're talking about is what we call in the scene “filing off the serial numbers.” And a lot of authors have done this. E.L. James is not the only one. Cassandra Clare's done it. Naomi Novik's done it. Plenty of authors who don't want to be named have done it. And many I've known.

You take a fan fiction of yours that's very popular or that you just personally like, and you go and you file off the serial numbers. You don't just change the names. You change the setting, you change some of the dynamics, you change some of the character traits of the main characters.

You have to really file it down enough that if someone was coming after you to say, you based this on our story, versus you stole our story. That's really where the line has to be drawn. Again, it's not a clear one, but if you do it enough, you can get away with it. So that's what E.L. James did.

If you did not know that it was Twilight fan fiction, you would never realize it was Twilight fan fiction. Even if you've read Twilight, like most people, they might say, gosh, these characters are kind of similar, but oh, that's just tropes, right. So exactly. That's what she did, and that's what a lot of authors do.

Jo: Yes. So the tropes, I mean, tropes are kind of universal, right? As you said, I mean, the time slip, go back in time and fix things. I mean that could go in any world. It doesn't have to go in a Game of Thrones world, you know?

I never read the Twilight books or watched the movies, but I have read 50 Shades of Gray. It is obviously it's set in a modern world. There are no vampires, there's no werewolves. So a lot of it is different. So I feel like that's important as well.

So let's come back to you because I was really interested in the book you wrote. In talking about your own experience in fan fiction, you say, “My sense of shame was very real,” and I was really interested in that because I don't know you very well, but having talked to you before, I just can't associate that with you.

You seem very confident. So explain about that.

Why are some people embarrassed or even ashamed of being involved in fan fiction?

KimBoo: Well, you've kind of hit on some of the reasons earlier when you asked is it all romance and erotica? And I talked about also it's not all written by 14-year-old girls. For a very long time, these associations with fan fiction was that it was very similar to romance genre, honestly, not that different.

“Oh, that's something women enjoy.” “That's what those horny lonely women in their basements are writing.” You know, “sexy fan fiction,” and “it's not real,” and “it doesn't take any effort.”

“It doesn't take any work. It's just fake people. They're riding on the coattails of other people's work.”

So there was a lot of shame. I mean, there were a couple of people even up into the nineties that—you know, I won't give out names or anything—but whose careers were almost derailed or completely derailed because it was revealed that they had written fan fiction in the past. Publishers wouldn't touch them. It was a bad scene all the way around.

It's hilarious because one of the oldest forms of fan fiction that we have these days is what's called Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, and Sherlock Holmes Pastiches started appearing in the 1800s, like they started appearing not long after Sherlock Holmes stories were printed by Arthur Conan Doyle.

They were very popular up through the twenties and the thirties, right? They were all written by very educated men. And they weren't called fan fiction, they were called Pastiches. So those were okay. Those were fine.

Then you get up into the sixties and the seventies and you have women writing Star Trek fan fiction. Yes. A lot of it was Kirk/Spock, and some of it was truly terrible, but again, I've read some truly terrible books published by traditional publishers, so I'm not really sure that's a fan fiction only problem.

You get a lot of new writers coming into fan fiction, so there is a lot of bad writing out there.

I'll just be upfront about it, and you can see it right away. You're like, “ooh, that's not good,” but a lot of these people are writing for the first time.

I can't tell you how many times I've read an author's note at the start of a fic that's like, “This is the first time I've tried to write anything, but I was just so inspired. I wanted to do it.” To me that's beautiful. That's amazing. That is wonderful.

Even if the work itself is very clearly the first thing they've ever written, you're like, “Hey, you've started on an amazing journey,” and that's the beautiful part.

But the shame, the shame that's been associated with it. Like when I was first thinking about getting published in the nineties—because I don't know if anybody's listening, but I'm an old person—I realized that I would never be able to admit to having written fan fiction when I was younger. I was a Kirk/Spock girl in the eighties. I totally wrote that.

Jo: I've got to ask on this. Is this a gay romance thing with Kirk and Spock?

KimBoo: Yes.

Jo: Okay. Right. Yes. I'm checking, yes.

KimBoo: I assume everybody knows that. Yes. No, Kirks/Spock was one of the first, we call them “ships”. It's slang for relationship that grew out of, I think, X-Files fanfiction in the nineties.

The Kirk/Spock ship is one of the big motherships of fandom. If you go on AO3 and look up how many stories are tagged “Kirk/Spock”, there's a lot. There's a lot.

Jo: What about the mixed race? Because wasn't it the first kiss on screen with Uhura and Kirk? Was it those two that had a Black and a white actor?

KimBoo: Well, first interracial kiss.

Jo: Interracial kiss. Yes. That's the right terminology. I was like, what is the terminology here? But that kind of thing. Often this kind of fun writing can also push more boundaries.

We've seen so many things come out of indie that would never have started in traditional publishing.

I mean you, well, you think about romance, there's no way traditional publishing would have started this romance trend. It is so big now, and they sucked up all the big ones, haven't they? So, yes. Interesting.

KimBoo: Reverse harem or “why choose”, I think is what they call it these days, that pretty much came out of the One Direction fandom.

Jo: Of course. That makes sense.

KimBoo: Yes. The Omegaverse, I don't know if you're familiar with Omegaverse.

Jo: Some. Okay.

Kimboo: You know what, we don't have two hours, so I won't explain it, but look it up. Omegaverse came out of the Supernatural fandom. A lot of people don't know that they read Omegaverse now.

The gay male, the MM Romance publishing industry, which really got started when indies came on the scene, right? 2008, 2010. Almost all of those authors, you go back to 2010, the MM big names, they all came out of fandom.

One of the brilliant things about writing fan fiction and being in fan fiction is that you can see some of these trends coming. Like I knew reverse harem was going to be big. I knew Omegaverse was going to be big.

I knew romantasy was going to be big long before anything hit because it was being so popularized in fan fiction because in fan fiction you don't have to worry about whether it's going to make you money. All you're doing is you're having fun, you're trying out new ideas, you're throwing things at the wall, you're seeing what's interesting.

You're coming up with new ideas and new stuff, and sometimes it clicks and takes off. You have that freedom as a fan fiction writer because you're not worried about how much money is this going to be? And is this on market? And is this a niche? None of that concern is there. You're just writing because you want to write.

Jo: Yes, and it feels like you're part of a group, you know, if you love the same thing as other people love. Then as you say, it's part of the fandom for whatever that property is. I mean, your book is called Out from Fanfic, so it's kind of turning from writing fanfiction into more professional writing, I guess.

I mean, one of the things I was thinking is, of course there are a lot of writers who are commissioned to write within these universes.

So do those sort of companies recruit from fanfiction?

KimBoo: They do now. It was less common in the eighties, like when you had the Star Trek novels really taking off. And in the nineties when you had the Star Wars novels taking off, they still went with a lot of traditional publishers, even though the workhorses of the pulp fiction genres these days, it is a lot more popular and it's a lot more.

A lot of traditional publishers are looking to popular fan fiction authors to mine for the next big thing. There was a dust up recently. There were three Harry Potter fanfics, Dramione. That's a ship, that's a portmanteau of Hermione and Draco. So Hermione and Draco as a couple is actually incredibly popular in fandom.

There were three very, very popular fan fictions that are Dramione fanfic that have recently been taken and filed off—although they didn't do a good job filing off the serial numbers, everybody knew it right away—and then started being promoted.

They actually used Harry Potter references in their marketing, which of course, the Harry Potter people were just like, “You got to stop that right now, like you stop it.” But the reason the publishers published this is because some of these stories had a million, 2 million readers online.

So they knew this is a popular story. They could file off the serial numbers and make some money off of it. So yes, nowadays it's a lot more common for traditional publishers and agents to look at fan fiction authors who are very popular, who have a following, and who've done a lot of writing. So it is more common these days for sure.

Jo: And then I guess your other thoughts on Out from Fanfic, like for your own journey, it sounds like you are still doing a bit of both, as in you still write some fanfic.

How do people cross over if they're like, “No, I want to write my own”?

Is it just mainly a case of your own characters? And your own world, I guess?

KimBoo: Absolutely, so it's easier for some people than for others. I actually wrote the book because I did know quite a few authors who tried to write their own original fiction, and what I noticed in a lot of those cases is that they tried so hard that they went so far out of their lane that they weren't interested in their stories anymore.

They're like, “Oh, I just, I get bored by my own writing. I just want to go back and write fanfiction.” And I think, and the whole reason that I wrote the book is to try to help people who are used to writing about characters that they love and writing about settings that they love learn what those things are.

Like dial it down, figure out—well, I call them parameters—like figure out what the parameters are of those characters. You know? Do you just like wacky klutzy characters who are also geniuses? Well, that's more of a trope that you can put that in any story. It doesn't have to be Stiles Stilinski from Teen Wolf.

A lot of different things that you love, you can pull into your own writing out of your fan fiction without repurposing your fan fiction, without using other people's characters.

Learn what you love of those things and use them, because it is a transition. It is definitely not super easy to transition to writing original fiction if all you've ever done really is written fan fiction.

I, of course, had a little bit of a lift up because I had been writing original fiction for most of my life. So I was already familiar with some elements of it. I did learn a lot writing fan fiction. In fact, I think I wrote over 1 million words of fan fiction before I think I really found my voice as an author and realized what I really want to write.

So it can be a learning ground if you look at it that way. I also don't want to take the fun out of it. I don't want to say, “Oh, you should use this as a training grounds,” but you can, if your goal is to write original fiction and you find that challenging.

Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was reflecting then, I mean, I have thought before, I would love to write a Bond book. Which, I think they've all been men who've written the Bond books. Obviously there's lots of them written in more modern times.

It's really interesting because then I think, well, my thriller, my ARKANE series, you could definitely trace a lot of Bond kind of tropes, a lot of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft tropes.

You say it is taking the things that you love about the movies and the books and the TV shows and then picking them out and then creating your own stories where there is still elements like that. I mean, those are not the original things.

It's how you turn that into your own work, but it's skating that line, isn't it?

That remains difficult.

KimBoo: Right, and as we talked about a little bit earlier, tropes are more universal. So if you can kind of dial, like you said, the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft—well, what is that trope or the mummy? Like, oh, it's the archaeologist going on adventure and running into and finding cursed things and finding cursed items.

That's a trope, but if you're not looking for it, you could just say, well, I just like writing in Indiana Jones. I don't know how I'm going to write my own original story, but if you sit back and look at it like, okay, what is it about Indiana Jones or what is it about Kirk?

Or what is it about Wei Wuxian from The Untamed that I love? What is that? Can I pull on that? Can I introduce it into my own characters and my own stories?

Jo: That's cool. Then in the book, you have a brief section about how things have changed for indies over the last few years.

Obviously I always have to talk about AI, and you said, quote from the book, “What is the point of churning out repetitive stories written to market when an AI program can do it faster, better, cheaper?”

“What does it mean to be a human creator of anything?”

I love that because then you give people hope and you talk about how this is actually ideal terrain. That's your words for you. So talk about this. Because I get people emailing me all the time saying, “what is the point?” So respond to that.

KimBoo: What is the point? What is the point of anything? Okay. No, but I think there's so many moving parts, and Joanna, you talk so well about how AI is impacting our industry, but for me personally, it's opened the door to allowing me to write what I really want to write and allowing me to put my own humanity into the writing.

This isn't true for everybody, but for me, trying to write to market, trying to write to narrow down and stay in your lane, as we talked about earlier, felt like trying to turn myself into a machine. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to.

I tried and I tried and I failed abysmally over and over and over again. So the humanity is what we own as humans. Our experiences, our insights.

AI, and specifically LLMs—because I like to be specific when we're talking about that specifically LLMs—the training that they've done has been so broad and across so many genres and across so many types of writing and so many eras of writing that it's very generic.

Even at the point where you say you can push a button and have it write a book— which we're definitely not there yet as anyone who's played around with LLMs knows for sure. It's going to be median, it's going to be average, right? Because that's what AI is really all about.

Taking our own spark of creativity and ingenuity and allowing ourselves to grow into that rather than being worried about churning out the next pulp fiction, I think is an opportunity.

Now, some people who've made a lot of money churning out a lot of these books see it as a threat and I understand that, but things change.

Things change in our industry all the time now.

Like we had a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred years of things not changing at all. Then we had self-publishinga, nd indies changed everything. eBooks changed everything. AI is changing everything.

If we invest in ourselves as authors and writers, as creators, as people with creativity, I think it is an ideal terrain because then we can explore the things we love to write.

It's one of the reasons why I think that cross genre books such as Cozy Fantasy or romantic contemporary can start to bubble up is because people feel more confident that they can reach the readers they want and that they don't have to try to fit their round peg into a square hole type of situation.

So that's my thoughts on it. I mean, I know other people have different opinions, but that's where I'm at.

Jo: I actually think this is a better time for, coming back to where we started, around the sort of multi-passionate creator. For many years it's been, well, if you write cross genre—which I do—if you write all over the place, if you don't do series, if you write standalones, if you do this, that and the other, you are not going to make good money.

Many of us have made good money like that, but we've certainly felt like, oh, well I should do this. I should go into this one genre, or I should try not to write. Like I've got three books in my Brooke and Daniel series, and when I wrote them, I was trying to write a standard British crime and ended up with a male psychic character.

I was like, why isn't this selling? And I figured out over time that the British crime niche is not supernatural when it certainly doesn't have a male psychic in. So it's so funny because I love those books and I've always been like, why? Why can't the people who love this type of thing find these books?

I actually think they have more chance in a world of generative search, for example, where people can get much more granular.

They're like, “Well, I like this, I like this and this and this and this, and this. Find me something that I might like.” So I feel like that is much going to be much easier for our work to be surfaced than someone who just has one category on Amazon, for example, that they buy in.

KimBoo: Absolutely. I think one of the more hilarious examples of that is the search I did recently for Supernatural Cozy Apocalypse. A cozy apocalypse. That is a nice one, right?

There were books that came up in that search and I was just like, “Oh, this is cool,” because I wanted something that was like the end of the world, but also people coming together and found family and maybe a little supernatural. Like, dragons are coming up out of the earth because of climate change.

I found the book Apocalypse Cow. It's about a cow at the end of the world, and it's fun. These are great for us cross genre writers, which I'm leaning into more.

I think my serial Dragon's Grail is in a lot of ways still very much the epic fantasy Second World type of thing, ut I'm looking at it and it doesn't really fit into epic fantasy, it doesn't really fit into romantasy. It doesn't really fit in.

So I'm having to think of different ways of building up that explanation of it because it is kind of intrinsically cross genre and it's going to be a challenge, but I think it's a great challenge to have in this day and age.

As you said, generative search is really going to be a game changer. I don't think people are ready for how much that's going to change everything.

Jo: Probably for the last year now, I used ChatGPT to find books. I just find it so much better. I'm like, “Here's a list of things that I really like. Go find me some books.” I just think it's so cool to find much more weird stuff that just would not have been surfaced otherwise.

I guess where I'm going with this too is, and what I say to people is—

You need to be your weird self.

KimBoo: Well said. All of what I just said, that was what I meant to say.

Jo: Be your weird self. I can see that with your work across different things, like I bring up your parents' grief book again. I mean, a lot of people might not have expected a book like that alongside someone who also writes about productivity and this fanfic stuff.

So that breadth of humanity is, I think, what people who might come in one of your books and then they're like, oh, this person has a whole load of stuff that brings more depth is just a different side of them. I think this being the full human that you are is so important coming into this sort of new world.

KimBoo: I agree, especially coming out of the world where you were supposed to be just one thing, and do that one thing, and be there for only one thing. For me as a reader, I love seeing what other writers are working on.

I love seeing a writer whose romance novels I really love and they're branching into, you know, space opera. I'm like, I'm all about it. Like I love to read that. It's more about what I enjoy reading in the author's own take on those stories less than, “oh, this is space opera genre and that's all I read.”

I don't think readers are like that. Some are, you got your whale readers who never leave their niche, but I think a lot of us, we like a lot of different things. I think this is a great time for authors to be able to expand and take advantage of that.

Jo: Absolutely, and maybe realize that, sure—

You might not hit it out the park with every book, but then who ever did?

KimBoo: Like, I know there's readers out there who love your psychic British crime stories. Absolutely. I don't have a doubt.

Jo: Well the, what's so funny is they get the best reviews of all my books. They get the best reviews. It's just the number of people who actually like that kind of book are quite few and far between. But hey, I didn't know that when I started writing them.

I am writing this book about gothic cathedrals at the moment. Nobody asked for that.

KimBoo: They didn't, but I am certainly looking forward to it because I love gothic architecture and so I'm excited about that.

Jo: Oh, fantastic. Well, this is the thing, and I think we need to keep that in mind. So I guess as we close, write what you want to write and hopefully in this new world with AI search people, more people will find us.

KimBoo: The dream.

Jo: The dream. Happy times.

So where can people find you and your books online?

KimBoo: Okay, well I suggest that people go to my main hub studio website, which is HouseofYork.info, and that's all one word, HouseofYork.info.

That has links to all my sub-brands, including KimBoo York and Cooper West and Patience & Fortitude, the one about grief and mourning where they can read my dog's obituary as I just lost my pet. I'd love people to love my dog as much as I do.

So go check that out. HouseofYork.info, you can find everything there. If you want to reach out to me, I'd love to hear from people.

Jo: Great. Well thanks so much for your time, KimBoo.

KimBoo: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure as always.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone of the original interview.

The post Writing Fan Fiction, And Multi-Passionate Creativity With KimBoo York first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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