00:00

Welcome to make more money without selling your soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

00:36

Welcome to the show. Today, we have a guest, Annie Ridout. Annie is a non-fiction author, journalist for nationals, sometimes viral poet, Sunday Times Best Selling ghost writer and creative entrepreneur, and on a personal level, she’s somebody who’s incredibly important to me. While this is the first conversation I’ve ever had with her, that you’re about to hear, well, first proper conversation. I did meet her briefly at a book launch earlier last year. But most importantly, the way Annie came into my world was via her book The freelance mum, which my dad gifted to me when I was a single parent with two kids, not even at school yet, I think three and a half and one and a half, and I was trying to find a job in marketing, and I was failing, and I was worrying. And he was like, Polly, you’re too good for this stuff. Look this book, I think it might be helpful, and who knows if I’d even be recording this podcast right now if it weren’t for the fact that I picked up that book, and that book gave me hope and courage and confidence to pursue working for myself fully, and also introduced me to Annie’s Wonderful online community of other women in a similar boat, and observing Annie’s journey over the last few years has been nothing short of inspiring. So, I just had to invite her on the show so you can learn more about her too, if you’ve not yet learned about the fabulous Annie.

Without further ado, let’s dig in. Welcome Annie to the show. I’m so genuinely, very personally excited to have you on the show. I don’t know if I’d be sat here right now if it wasn’t for the freelance mum that was popped into my hands a few years ago. So I’m sitting here with one of my heroes and Annie. I’ve just kind of listed off the laundry list of all the incredible things you’ve achieved, from being a sometimes viral poet to an author, a journalist and a creative entrepreneur, but what was the journey that led to here? What was the kind of pivotal moment where everything had to change and you threw yourself into entrepreneurship?

02:51

Great question. I think I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and I studied English at university and then did a master’s in journalism, so I was quite clear on my path, but I didn’t realize that you finish your BA, Ma, whatever, and you’re not just gonna necessarily walk straight into a job in Well, they didn’t tell you that bit. Do. They don’t tell you that. So I remember finishing my BA and thinking that maybe I’d like to do it. I think it was even an internship, not even a job for a film company, and maybe I’d get into the sort of research side. And I filled out my job application, sent it off, and then I don’t think I even heard back. So I wasn’t even rejected. I just never heard anything. And that was my first experience of proper rejection. And I was really surprised. I said, Oh, wow. I thought you just I’ve got my certificate now, and I’ve completed my debate. And so now I’ll get a job. I didn’t, and then I did start writing for newspaper, local newspapers. I was living in Hackney, so I wrote for a local Hackney paper, loads of articles. I did loads of interviews with, like, some quite big names as well, and I wasn’t paid anything. And then I started speaking to the editor and saying, you know, I’m doing a lot of work here, any chance I can be paid. So, no, we don’t pay our writers. And then they hired a male journalist, and they did start paying him, and I decided I’d had enough, so I went to study journalism, and I would always did lots of online writing. So I published my own blog. You know, I had a blog and published my own writing that way, but I wanted the validation. I wanted to be not only published by a newspaper, but paid to write, and, you know, their bills to pay as well, and all that. You know exactly, yeah.

04:29

So then I finished that degree, and probably, if I’d have stayed in London, I might have, I would have worked really hard to get a job, and I think I probably would have, I think I would have filled out enough applications, done enough interviews to eventually persuade someone to hire me, but instead, I left London to move to Somerset because I had fallen in love, and we hadn’t been together very long. So we’ve been together, I don’t know, four or five months when we decided we’d live together, and then six months into our relationship, we were living together in Somerset. We. Is no job opportunities at all, so and then work for free on another local paper, before realizing it was just ridiculous and getting a job. And then eventually moved back to London and I became a copywriter, because I did have a little stint of trying to be a freelance journalist, and I just hadn’t I couldn’t work it out. I wasn’t prepared for how much work you have to do, how much you have to pitch to get commissioned, to start to grow a profile, so that then people see you as a journalist, and then start to eventually the like magical moment is when they start coming to you, and you’re not having to just feel like this unknown writer who will never break through. So, I did try it for a bit. It didn’t work.

So, I became copywriter, and I was earning lots of money working for a Tesco owned film streaming company. And it was really easy, because I was watching films and writing copy about it, these films, it was such a sweet job. And it was regular. There was a full-time job. I was like, on a kind of contractor, working full time on a running contract, so I had plenty of money, but I also was quite soulless, because you just go into the office, and it’s that office thing, we were in Farringdon, and at first it felt quite swanky and exciting, but I would have stayed on, because I was earning money to write, and I did enjoy parts of it. But then I became pregnant, and they quickly decided they would told me they would terminate my contract when I left have my baby, which really surprised me, because I I know that they valued the work that I did there. They there was lots of sort of movement within the company. Lots of people lost their jobs. I always kept mine, until this moment where I became pregnant, and then suddenly my value or my worth was going to disappear. Too common a story, unfortunately, yes, too common a story. But we, I didn’t know of anyone who it had happened to. None of my friends had had babies. And it wasn’t spoken like Instagram wasn’t even really a thing that 10 years ago, it wasn’t. It was a thing. I wasn’t using it in the way that I am now, and I don’t think people were using it for activism.

06:58

Yeah, and it’s a vulnerable place to be in, to be pregnant and to have that situation forced upon you, yeah? Anyway, yes, that wasn’t the end of the line. No, that was the beginning. So then I had my baby and had a little bit of time with her, but knew that I would go back to some kind of work, and started looking into what I could do for working from home. I was clear that I wanted to be working from home. Now I also had this feeling that I didn’t want to have a boss, because I didn’t want anyone to have the power to take my job away. And I’ve been raised by my dad, an entrepreneur. My mom’s self-employed, and I had seen the freedom that comes with that and how empowering it can be. So then I thought I’d get back in journalism and do freelance journalism, and do freelance journalism. And this time I did start to get commissioned and to be paid. And then I decided that I was having so many I had so many ideas. I always have so many ideas. And I found it really frustrating that I couldn’t action them all because I wouldn’t be commissioned to write them all. Yeah, all the articles. And so I launched a digital platform, which I’m no longer using the name in public, because unfortunately, I closed it and someone took it over, and it’s now a gambling website. I don’t want to send traffic there.

The Guardian emailed recently, and they were like, Oh, do you realize that your old website is now a gambling website? They because it was listed on their website under my profile there. So yeah, I launched this digital magazine, and that feels like that was the beginning of my career as it is now. That was me taking the reins, and then I could interview people and publish whatever I wanted to publish. The money side was trickier, because you didn’t, it wasn’t easy to add in a pay wall. I thought about doing that, but I couldn’t see how it would work. Yeah, and I will maybe also I liked the idea of it, but I didn’t believe anyone would pay now, I know they definitely would have, because it was a lot about parenting, and I think there’s a huge appetite for content doing that, because it was quite early on as well. Like you say, these things have become more mainstream and more done, but you were kind of one of the first people to have a website like that. Wouldn’t you say there weren’t many.

09:00

There were individual bloggers who were referred to as mummy bloggers, which I find, I think it’s quite patronizing, but some of the people use the term for themselves, which is fine, there weren’t many websites I was having. Lots of my journalist friends would write articles, and I was interviewing lots of different people. So it was, it was different to that blogger space. Yeah, it was a bit broader, yeah, I suppose there wasn’t so much of it. And so it grew really quickly, which was really exciting, yeah, and this was also in the lovely era when you’d put something on Facebook and everyone would see it, rather than before the algorithm properly existed. So yeah, that took off. And then the newspapers started coming to me and saying, Would you write this piece on early mornings or on parenting, anything linked to what I’ve been writing? And then my profile started to grow a bit as a writer. And then I got a book deal, which actually took a really long time and lots of rejection to everything else. But eventually I got a book deal to write the freelance band, which you. You told me your dad gave you a copy of Yes, I love that story. Yeah.

10:03

No, he did. I was a single mum on benefits in a flat, and, funnily enough, trying to get a role in marketing, which I had extensive experience in. I mean, it was really weird, actually, how much our stories were so similar. I’d had a parenting platform in Gibraltar, which I’d created, and I’d also got together journalists and other specialists that I would interview, or they would submit their own pieces. So there were so many funny crossovers, and similarly, I was made redundant the moment I got engaged, because they were like, well, we know what’s going to happen next. We want you to be the girl in the short skirt the bar talking to the kind of bank owners and people who would, you know, come in and become clients. And I never wanted to be that person. But the moment they recognized that I wouldn’t have that long term allure. They let me go, and he was, I mean, it was awful. So yeah, there are so many things I resonated with in terms of your story. And yeah, when that my dad gave me that book, it really opened my eyes to how I could do things on my own terms. So yeah, forever grateful to you for that. Oh, that’s so nice. But yeah, so what happened after that?

11:04

After your website, the Yeah, so I kept going with the digital magazine and had a book published, which was exciting. I think I always thought as a writer, I wanted to be a journalist, and then I thought I’d always love writing poetry. So I probably the dream had been to get into journalism and then eventually to be a poet and a novelist, and non-fiction hadn’t featured in this dream, or wasn’t a step that I had incorporated at all. So it wasn’t the dream to write a non-fiction book, but now I can see that it’s such an obvious step from journalism into non-fictions, yeah, type of non-fiction I’m writing, which is, like, factual information, sharing, teaching something. And I did really enjoy, I really enjoyed writing that book and the community that started to form around it. And it wasn’t like I was just create at the head of this community. There were, it was that lots of people, you lots of other people, were in a similar space, with young kids freelancing, and we all sort of came to Instagram and started networking through the platform. So the community was like all these different people who wanted to say something, and then people who wanted to hear and then it all sort of started to build up in this lovely supportive way, and I think made a lot of us feel less lonely, as you know for sure, mothers to young children for sure.

12:27

Oh my goodness, yeah. One of the things I really like hearing about what you’re sharing, is the fact that, you know, a lot of the time we look at the end product. We look at someone who’s kind of got the creative freedom you have in your business as you kind of move between things, but ultimately, where we desire to be. There can often be a lot of kind of compromises we make along the way to get to where we want to be. And there are always valuable learnings in you know, it may feel like a compromise at the time, but very often there’s something in it, a kind of hidden gem that we weren’t necessarily expecting. So beyond the freelance man, one of the things that really kind of brought you even more to my attention was that you then started selling online courses during was it with the pandemic that promoted that? Were you doing it prior to the pandemic? So I was doing it before. I think what’s always important to remember when we speak about our journeys, because it can look as if, you know, we decided to do this thing, and then suddenly, boom, there was a business and it was successful, and we’re making money and have all this freedom, and obviously, which is why it’s important, I think, to talk about like the failure and the rejection along the way, because there’s so much more of that than there is success 100% but we have to keep pushing through it and believing and having it’s not even like an end goal. It’s just a keep going goal for me. So the book, the freelance mum, came out my advance, that I wasn’t an advance that I’d be able to live off. It was five grand. I was paid to write that book, and you don’t also, I didn’t receive it in advance of writing the book. So I had this idea that you get, like, I don’t know, 50 grand to write a book, and you’re given 50 grand, and then you can spend a year writing it. It’s not such in France, in the morning, yeah.

Pause all other work. But instead I carried on doing little bits of copywriting. I was doing a bit of PR. I was working for a company, but I was each month, I was earning like two grand a month, and once I’d paid my part of the mortgage and bills and everything, I just I’d never had plenty of money. I just had, I had just enough. And so things like, if a friend was getting married and there was a hen party, or if friends wanted to go out to eat, even it always felt like a stretch and like, Oh, I’ve got to think about not I would go, but I would feel resistant and reluctant to go because I just didn’t have lots of extra money. I didn’t have any extra money. So then I came up with this idea. I was starting to hear people talk about online call online courses, and lots of people have been saying to me, the part of the freelance mum that they found most useful was the chapter on how to do your own PR. So all these women were starting businesses, and then when they were like, I’ve got this business, but how do I get featured in newspapers? Because I know that will help to get the name out. So I decided to. Go deeper on the PR side of things, of growing a profile and getting press coverage and to package it up in a very basically packaged online course, which was I had a WordPress website, and I just password protected pages and gave people the password once they’d signed up. It was so basic, but I think I charged 200 pounds. It was a four week course, and each week, I would give some homework, and the students would submit a pitch to send out to newspapers or whatever, and I’d edit it and give feedback. And 10 people signed up, which was an extra two grand, which would double what I was earning, which felt incredible. So then I launched the course again the following month, and this time, 30 people signed up, because the first cohort had been so generous in going on Instagram and saying, I’m on this course, and I’ve just been featured in The Times, and this is going to so it kind of word of mouth, and Instagram helped me to spread word of this online course. And then I started creating other online courses, including one on how to launch your own online course, which quickly became really popular. I think I bought that course over here.

Yeah, and then this was 2019, the summer of I had my third baby, and then in the March, we went into lockdown, and everyone suddenly needed. A lot of people needed to transfer their skills online yoga teachers and interior designers and all these people who would normally be doing in person work needed to go online. And so that course just went wild. And then my husband was working with me by this point, and then we came up with a course on how to sell spaces on your online course, going deep into like funnels and marketing and stuff. And that one was sort of more expensive and was also really popular. So financially, things really picked up in a big way. And ironically, then I did have spare money, and I would have been able to go on the holidays and nice things, but we were in in lockdowns, back to back lockdowns. But what that meant is I did manage to save for the first time ever, I had like, 30 grand in savings, which felt amazing. But then I also wrote a book, shine, my second book during that same period. So I had three young kids. Annie, where do you find the time? How do you make this because when you casually drop three kids in there, I’m just like raising and because I’m imagining they’re all quite small, particularly during this period where you’re doing all of these pieces, your husband came in on the business, which is also pretty huge, right? Yeah, but yeah, what did your average day look like at that point? I mean, I guess no, day probably looked the same. But how did you juggle all those pieces?

17:39

Well, when we, when I started the online courses. So in the autumn of 2019 the My husband was working with me, we had a new baby, but the other two were in school and nursery. Okay, so it was just a baby who slept a lot, and that’s always helpful, which is, yeah, in the day, you know, you’d get them off to sleep and do a couple of hours. But also, my husband would help with he did a lot of cooking during that time, and he take the baby off to nap while I wrote an online course. And then I take the baby, and he would work on the marketing side of things. So it was, it really flowed in in quite an incredible way. We’d have, like our morning meeting over a coffee go to the coffee shop with the baby. It was really nice. It was a really nice work life balance for a brief period. Yeah, and then in the November of that 2019 I wrote my book, shy in one month. So I didn’t, I closed the on I didn’t close the online shop. I maybe I did. I can’t remember I, but I wasn’t doing anything online course related. Maybe my husband was, and he looked after the baby more. I wrote a book, and then it was meant to come out in the spring, but was delayed by a year. But then when the kids were at home, that’s when it got hard. So from the March, all three of them were at home, and my husband did more of the childcare. So he found the pandemic much harder than I did, because I would escape up to the loft and write online courses and feel there. But then he’d come up, and we’re holding a baby, set up a camera. He’s like, good with cat, he’s filmmaker, and he’d set up the camera with, like, the baby, sort of in his arms. And then I would speak to camera, and we just hope that it would be okay, because he wasn’t there to actually watch what’s going on, and then I’d take the baby and he’d edit the film. So there it was, like a lot of sharing and working together, yeah, which was lovely, but also just got too much. So by as the pandemic at this tail end, my book came out, it was a bit underwhelming, because I couldn’t have an in person launch. And it’s just weird when everyone’s we weren’t in lockdown, but you weren’t. There was limits on how many people you could see, and that kind of thing. So yeah, my book came out, and it was like, this felt like a non event.

And then it got a bit of press, which was exciting, but I had, by this point, become probably just really tired, and I had this. Period of feeling like I had just crashed and couldn’t do anything I had no ideas, which was the first time that I’d ever experienced just having this blank mind with no ideas. I wasn’t feeling like entrepreneurial and so I said to my husband, it’s, I think you need to go and, like, do separate work to me. So yeah, I can everything could just like, blurred in together, and I needed a bit of separation and different things going on. So he did that, and he went off to do his own thing out of the house. And that was really nice. And I had this quite nice period of, like, writing poetry. I trained to be a coach, and then we moved to Somerset, which relieved the financial pressure, which meant I was talking about this with my brother yesterday. He runs his own business, and I think that financial pressure is interesting because on the one like one thing that I’ve noticed is that when I’m under financial pressure, I start to become really innovative and creative, because I’ve got to find a way to make the money, but I also feel stressed. And sometimes when there’s this big buffer, a chunk of money savings or whatever, which I suppose in that period there was because I had the savings, which then slowly went down, that 30 grand just disappeared, that can feel to be relaxed, can also aid creativity. So I can kind of sit from both sides, yeah, what’s a challenging one. I definitely find that I had a similar Year to you, and I had a kind of bumpy year around, kind of just after the pandemic, and then so the following year, I just really took my hand, hands off the reins, because I was probably a bit burnt out. I think a lot of people were right, because, yeah, it’s a lot juggling, like like, you say, juggling, raising small kids. And it’s kind of quasi addictive, or not even quasi. It is addictive to be online and to kind of get, you know, that kind of recognition and and, you know, I’m also pretty introverted, so to be able to do it hidden behind a screen can come across a lot more confident than I probably would be in a big, busy room. There was lots of elements to it that felt amazing, yes. And of course, the money coming in is also kind of life changing. Life changing. But the following year, I just didn’t I just Yeah, similarly, Lent back into like a big wad of savings, and didn’t push myself very hard. And it showed the year, right? It was fun. It was fun. And I think I kind of needed it. I think it’s okay to also honor having seasons and businesses, right, right? Where, you know, sometimes we just need to have those kind of fallow seasons to allow for the right ones on the other side, whatever the context. But tell me more. So you went to Somerset, and you kind of created a bit of space for yourself to kind of allow those ideas to drop in. What did that look like on the other side?

22:34

So I committed to being a poet for a year, that was my plan, and I was going to make money from it, and I did. So I self-published some poetry books, and I got a market store where I sold the books. That was a bit awkward. I enjoyed it, but I don’t love I can sell online. As you’ve just said, There’s something about working online where you feel quite protected, and you can appear on your Instagram stories as someone who’s really confident and outgoing, even if that’s not how you feel. Whereas when you’re on a market stories, you’re so exposed, and people are coming up and saying, What’s this? And I’d have to say, it’s my poetry book. It felt a bit embarrassing, but also it sold, and it was fun. It was an experiment in in person selling. And then I lasted six months. I did have got some corporate commissions as well to write poetry, which was nice. And then after six months, I realized that I just didn’t want to write poetry anymore. It was focusing on making money from it and maybe just focus deciding that I was going to be a poet. The pressure made me feel really uncreative. And so I Yeah, after six months, I decided to not be a full time poet, and then I thought, maybe I’ll try launching a course. And I had this idea that we all needed to be revived after the pandemic, all of us women who’d burnt out because we’d been looking after kids and running businesses and everything else. And so I created a course called revive, which is a coaching a series of coaching workshops, and I offered, like, email coaching alongside it, and had a nice, lovely bunch of women sign up. And I really enjoyed running that. And then, and then I got another book deal to write, raise your SQ which, again, was like a really long process. It wasn’t that I decided I’d write this book and I got the book deal. It was a really long process of speaking to different agents, speaking to different publishers. Sort of getting a near Yes, and then realizing it was a no. And so maybe it took the best part of a year to get that book deal that had started. I’d started putting out feelers when I was in London, and got the book deal eventually, when I’d moved to Froome in Somerset, and then had this lovely time writing this book, because it’s all about SQ is spiritual quotient. So it was all about different ways to raise your Sq, and when you have a higher rescue, when you’re more spiritually connected, you just feel better, because maybe it includes things like practicing gratitude each day and doing breath work and walking innate. Bucha and connecting with people. Maybe it’s using tarot cards or gemstones. I’ve actually got some in my pocket. I go through stages with this, and I’m in a big gemstone stage. I love the sound of those gemstones. Yeah, I am. I am interested in the meaning, but I also find stone gemstones that just feel really nice in my hand, the size and the text. So these are really smooth and quite big, and they fit in my hand. And I use them almost like worry beads. So I pick them up and just roll them around. So I was writing this book, and again, I wrote it quite quickly. This was took six weeks, and it was quite a big book, a 70,000 word book, but you’re a machine.

25:39

Well, I’m a writer, so I do write fast because I’ve been doing it for a long time, which sometimes people forget, because not everyone writing non fiction is a writer. There are lots of coaches or entrepreneurs or people who work in a specific field who write a book, and that’s different to being a writer. Yeah, Annie, I’m always going to take you off track here slightly, because hearing what you’re sharing here, it raises a question for me. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs right now being encouraged to write their own books. What’s your take on that? What being published? Publishers approaching them to write a book?

26:11

No, not publishers, as in, there’s a lot of kind of conversation around if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, the one thing that’s really going to help you is self publishing, having a book, it will get you more stages. It will get you more you know, it’s kind of positioned as a kind of but I’m also, when you mention the whole thing of I’m a writer, so I can do it in this kind of time frame, recognizing that there are a lot of people out there who may be very skilled and talented in various ways, but not necessarily as a writer. And I sometimes see very this is me being a bit honest and maybe a bit rude. But sometimes I see books cropping up, and I just think, why none of yours? Obviously, because you’re a writer. And what I think about, what’s beautiful about your books is they’re all very true to your journey and experience, so as somewhat a reflection of your own personal kind of growth, and very much connected to your own talent, skills and insights. But there are some things I see out there, and I think it’s partly people are doing it because they feel like it’s a tick box exercise to succeeding as an entrepreneur.

I think that’s such a good question, and I don’t really know the answer. I think that it what I do know is it can be really disappointing when you put a lot of yourself into a book, your time, your expertise, and it doesn’t like none of my books have been best sellers, and now I’ve, I’ve made peace with that, but I assumed not the freelance mom. I had no expectation of that, and just was excited to be published as a writer, as an author. But with the other two, I was like, right now, I understand the industry shy will definitely, my second one will definitely be a best seller. And then it wasn’t. And then I thought, well, now I understand it even more. So razor rescue would definitely be a best seller and it wasn’t. So I think if you’re going to write a book, you don’t know if it’s going to be a best seller when you write it, if you’ve got a massive audience, niche following, so I don’t know if you’re a coach and you work with new mums, and you have a massive following of people, of new mums. They’re not going to be new mums forever, but okay, they keep rolling in, and your community is growing, and then you write a book on how to get back into work after having a baby, and you’ve already got an existing community who are going to buy your book. Then your book might become a Sunday Times bestseller. Then it’s going to raise your profile. It’s going to help you to get on those stages. If you write a book and you don’t have a community, it won’t sell so well, yeah, no, it won’t. It’s less, much less likely to some books do just like through word of mouth, just go wild. And if you have a big community, but you write a book that they’re not interested in, because it’s not within subjects you talk about on Instagram, if it’s like a separate I don’t know, you speak to women in business, but your book is on happiness or something that’s just not really closely linked. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. I think those are really useful insights. And I also like that you reflected on community there, because equally, earlier on, when you were talking about your business journey, community was a big feature there, in terms of the freelance mom supporting you to create a community of women who all had something particular in common. And I very much think one of the things about you and your journey is you’ve taken everyone on that journey as you’ve grown so your community. Would you say? Do you feel like the same community that has been there with you from the beginning? Are the same people who are there with you now? Or has that evolved in your kind of journey as you’ve obviously published more books? The spiritual thing is interesting as well, of course, because that was the side of yourself that you hadn’t shared before, necessarily. And the shy thing, I guess, like and what role has community played for you in your growth as a business was as an entrepreneur.

There are definitely people who, well, people tell me, but also people I’ve seen popping up since my first online platform launched in 2015, so that’s quite a long time ago now. And there are people I’m like, wow, they’re still like people now who have subscribed to my sub stack, who’ve been around since the beginning. And I, and I have formed relationships with them online, and I feel hugely grateful to those people who still show an interest after all these years and after all this kind of morphing and pivoting, because I haven’t if I had written the freelance mum, so my digital platform was for parents, if then I’d written the freelance mum and grown a community on Instagram, what happened is I started to grow a community of women who had young kids and maybe wanted to freelance, or were freelancing and wanted tips. If I’d have stayed in that niche, that would have been really sensible. Online courses were speaking to the same people, because they were sort of business courses. But then I wanted to write a book on shyness, which is not anything to do with business, really, and then one on spirituality. So I, I have written about the things that interest me, but I’m I annoy publishers. I like publishers and agents. Want someone who’s just really niche, and I’m never going to be that person. So I actually no longer have an agent, because I want to have full power over my work, and I don’t want to have to ask someone. And I truly believe that if you really want to have a book published, if you have an idea and you really believe in it and you can write, that you will make it happen. I have a book idea at the moment, and I believe in it so much. It’s just come it hasn’t just come to me. I had it before Christmas, and then I sort of paused it for a while, and now it’s just come back in a really big way. And I’ve been told, you know, it’s your fourth book. Now it’s going to be hard to get a book deal, because your others aren’t best sellers. I’m like, No, it’s not. I’m going to get a book deal. I really believe. But in terms of community, yeah, maybe I’m really lucky that people allow my community, allow me to make changes, and that some of them disappear and some stay. And I don’t think we should be feeling the word luck here. Go ahead. It does feel it does feel lucky to be able to experiment and for people to trust you enough to still want to be a part of it. Because, yeah, yeah. And other people disappear because suddenly I start talking about shyness and that doesn’t resonate, or I talk about spirituality, and they’re like, Nah, it’s not my thing. But then also new people come in, and what I have noticed is I have a lot of women in the community now who don’t have children, either by choice or that’s just how it’s happened. And I really love that it’s not just mums. I love having a community of of women who do have children, but I like that it doesn’t feel exclusive.

32:31

Yeah, yeah. I mean, as someone who’s been observing your journey from the other side, I think one of the things I find really compelling about kind of I mean, with the algorithm, people always coming and going, and I lose track of what’s happening. But I if I ever don’t see anything of yours for a while, I always check back in because, because you’re you’re very, from my perspective, what I see you doing is brave because you’re very authentic. I mean, you’re authentic as well, which I think it means, whatever you do, I’m curious to know how you’re exploring it, even if I don’t entirely resonate with it, because it’s coming from you and and because you’re not being led by, you know, what necessarily makes the most financial sense, necessarily, but actually you you trusting that it will ultimately make the most sense because it’s authentic to you, is, is really kind of, you know, there aren’t many people doing that. So when you mentioned that about publishers and making sense for them. Similarly, you landed on a fantastic formula for your courses and were making sums of money that enabled you to create savings, and you still bravely pursued, you know, making money from your poetry for a period before kind of evolving into the next stage again. And that’s really, you know, I read books like by Patty Smith about her creative journeys. And I think there aren’t people like that in this world anymore who are just living for kind of creativity and poetry and connection with other creatives. And when I see you, it’s kind of like the closest thing in the digital marketing landscape to it really so I think it’s really exciting to watch. And actually I think it leads us really nicely onto where you’re at now, because essentially, you have pursued creativity at every single angle of this journey and tried on different things for size to kind of see what fits. And I’m really excited to see where you’re at now. But please do share more about you know what your kind of adventures into sub stack and your kind of current way of running your business as a creative entrepreneur? Thank you.

34:19

You’ve said lots of kind things, and it’s really, I’m really grateful. Thank you. So I think back, kind of going back to your question about, should everyone write a book? I think something that people feel is that a book, a book is validation. You do feel validated when someone says, I want to publish your book. It just does feel good, but it’s very fleeting, that feeling of success and validation, and actually what I find more thrilling in a more consistent way, is like creating courses and selling them and growing the community and having like holding the reins, having full power over what I launch when I launch. Launch, how I do it, and not having to answer to anyone, not having to tell anyone what I’m doing. Now, even when I was working with my husband, I’d have to say, I’ve had this idea, what do you think? And he might say, I don’t know. And whereas now I don’t tell anyone and I launch it, nothing doesn’t sell at all. Some things obviously don’t sell as well, and some things fly. So after my third book came out, I had a period of feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing. I needed to earn money. I was fed up with the process of trying to get book deals, because I could be pumping out like two or three books a year, but it’s not. It won’t happen with traditional publishing, because those books then compete in the market, so there has to be space between them, and so I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in terms of online courses. I’d launched that course, revived that I mentioned, and then I just didn’t have any other ideas. And then I came across sub stack, and I thought, this sound, this platform sounds quite good. It’s like the blogging days, where you are publishing your own work, except if people like it and are able to they can contribute a small fee each month. It’s a subscription model, so you can start to earn a recurring monthly income. So I liked the idea of just being able to write freely, and I thought I’ll launch on substack under my own name and just see where it goes. And I started publishing some pieces on business and feminism and femininity and creativity. And quite quickly, people, you can add this option on substack, you sort of tick a box, and people can pledge to start paying you if you turn on the paywall. And no, not a couple. One person said, if you turn like, pledge to pay if I turn on the paywall, which was enough, and so I turned on and then people started to pay three pounds, 50 a month to read my essays.

So I had complete freedom in what I was writing. And I would write one essay a week, publish it on a Wednesday. And then I added you can it’s all very easy to set up on sub stack. It’s really user friendly, and you just literally drag in a pay wall. So I’ll write my opening paragraph, and then just as it gets the juicy bit, I add in the paper like and last year, what I ended up earning was payable. And so people started signing up, and I were it was amazing, and it started to grow. And soon I was earning, I don’t know, 1000 pounds a month directly from my readers, which felt amazing, and that I did for so it started in March 2023, and then by the December, I had decided to leave Somerset and move back to London, which is another big transition. But what I found is that I landed back in London. I was really excited. I’m from London. It was like a homecoming. But also London has the energy of London, which I know some people find very intense, but I find very exciting, and it makes me feel more entrepreneurial to be around like people and busyness and culture. So I came back to London. I was doing my sub stack had this nice, like recurring income, building up each month, getting to write about what I wanted. I wrote about the move from Somerset to London, and people were quite interested in that, because lots of us were moving around post pandemic and working out where to settle. And then I had this idea about a course. I had come up with this idea that there was this kind of creative ecosystem you launch on substack, you build up a community of followers who want to pay for your subs. Actually, it starts on Instagram where you just share share creative content.

So for me, I was sharing lots of poetry at the time, and then some of the people interested in my poetry on Instagram were coming over to sub stack. Some of them were becoming paid subscribers. Some of them would just read the free essays that I sent out accessible to anyone. And then I must have launched another course, and I could see that people were coming over to this online course. So I started to see this sort of business model that all felt quite organic, but also made complete sense, because it’s kind of like a funnel and ends with one to one work starts on Instagram, where everything’s free, and then some people commit a bit of money on substack, and then some people pay more, like, 100 to 300 pounds for an online course, and then some people will pay, you know, a lot more to have coaching or consultancy. And so I decided to package this up in a course called the creative way to earn a living online, and teach other people how to work in this same way. So you have these multiple income streams. One of them’s recurring, and it can build up really nicely, but at the heart of it is creativity, because you’re sharing so much creative content on Instagram and sub stack and in your courses. And so I launched it and had no idea what would happen. And in fact, this was one of those moments where I had, like, 200 pounds in my account. I had bills to pay. It was one of those moments where I had to do something, and I wasn’t sure if it would take off, but I launched it, and really quickly, people started signing up, which is always a good sign. And I talked to about it a lot on Instagram, because I felt really comfortable talking about business through this creative lens. Yeah, it was just the language I’ve been speaking to a friend, actually, who similarly, like. Creative and really entrepreneurial, and can’t work out where she wants to sit. And can you be both at the same time? Are they in conflict? And through our conversation, I’d realized that I want to talk about business and teach business, but from a creative Yeah, through this creative lens, and that’s what, where I got the idea for the creative way. Launched this course and sold 100 spaces, which was the most I’d ever sold, certainly on first launching something and had this big lump sum in the bank, which was amazing. And I was also doing some ghost writing at this time, and so that I was also being paid, like a big chunk of money. So financially, things really came together. And it was the combination of earning as a writer and earning, as I guess, an entrepreneur, this sounds like a kind of fairy tale Happy Ending again. It’s still just another beginning, but to kind of Yeah, it’s such a beautiful accumulation of all these things all coming together.

40:51

It wasn’t really Yeah. It was a really good year, and I felt really comfortable because I was when my business was really successful in the pandemic. It was because I was focusing just on my business, the way you will find the greatest success, I think, is to narrow everything down and have a really clear focus. If you want to run an online course business and be a poet and do the ruler, which is what I’m doing now, I don’t think you will find the same level of success. I don’t know, at the same time, when you’re doing all the creative stuff around the edges, it can feel really inspiring. But what I found on that particular year was that being able to be the writer, so I had that kind of going on, and that box ticks, if you like, and the being the entrepreneur is where the money lies and where I have full power. There’s something like really important for me about being in control of my career and with book writing, I’m not really at all, whereas with running my business, I am, and it feels more like a more sustainable career. Running my own business feels like I grow this community and on sub stack, one of the most amazing things that, like people sort of love it for the pay wall and earning some money. But what’s even more important than that is that you can either start from scratch on substack, or you can bring over an existing email list, and the algorithm sends more people your way. So my email list has more than tripled in two years. Oh, my goodness, from like 3000 to nearly 10,000 because if you think about the ways, traditionally, you would try and grow an email list through marketing funnels and setting up lead magnets like forgotten all this language that I didn’t do any of this stuff anymore. So we rich, my husband and I worked so hard creating all these different ideas for how we could draw people to the website and get them to sign up. And then we growing this email list, because email lists are so valuable.

Then suddenly substack arrives, and just by writing a regular newsletter, your free subscriber list, just, oh my god, okay, I need to go check out substack. It’s been I should look at this list for a while now, and I haven’t quite explored it. So if anyone else is also thinking like me, oh my goodness, I need to check out substack and give it a go. What would be kind of like, what’s one of the biggest things that you feel you’re kind of doing that kind of makes substack work so well for you right now, aside from the fact that you’re obviously a fabulous writer, anyone’s thinking, I’m not a fabulous writer like Annie. So how do I make it work for me? Is there any advice you’d give anyone start there are different ways to write on substack, like people like the kind of click baity lists, but it doesn’t have to be these long, sort of flowery essays you can write.

I think really simple copy is good if you have, like, if you’re running a business and you’ve got some really good ideas for marketing, let’s say, to go on there and to share, like, really simple marketing concepts, you know, in an essay. But I have a course on how to launch and grow on sub stacks. So that’s like, very detailed and starts helps you to set up and to do everything. So that’s on my website, anniewidot.com, but what can I share here? If you create a niche sub stack is going to grow more quickly? I’m kind of quite anti niche because I want to be able to do whatever I want to do, as I said earlier, like if I could be narrowed down, if I could just do one thing and focus on one niche, I know that it would be more successful, but it’s just not how my brain works. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. So I’ve done an experiment, an accidental experiment, which is that I have had one stack under my own name, and I would write about home and feminism and work and love and, you know, just lots of different things, not niche, with maybe me being like at the center of it as the niche. And then I had another one that I launched, called Raising neuro divergence, and that is for parents of neuro divergent children, and that one has just grown so steadily. Hardly anyone ever leaves, because they know why they’re there, and they still need to be there.

And I’ve really seen the power of a niche through that one, and then the accompanying Instagram account for raising neurodivergence, the piece I wrote, has just gone viral, and every time I go in, there’s like. 100 new followers, 150 new followers. And is this somebody shut down? No, I paused it. This is, this is the joke. I paused it because I was like, This is too much. I can’t do. I can’t do all these different things. I need, like, for my not mental health. I don’t have bad mental health, my mental state. I need to just simplify a little bit. So I decided I’ll pause the work on neuro divergence and just focus on creativity. I changed the name of my personal sub stack to the creative way. And I was like, right? This is now about living and working creatively, because under that I people know what they’re coming for, but I can also write quite a lot of different things. I can write about, like motherhood and business and feminism. So I paused, raising neuro divergence, and then some stuff came up for me at home in terms of neuro divergence. And I just wanted to share if I was conversation actually I had with someone, and I just wanted to share this thought that I’d have off I’d had off the back of this conversation. So I thought I’d just do a quick Instagram post, even though I’ve said I’m not doing it anymore, and I, you know, don’t have the capacity. So I share this Instagram post, and it goes bloody viral, of course, like my quick tiptoe back in and so now it’s just reminded me of the need for content about neuro divergence with in children and in general that makes people feel less alone sense of solidarity and hope. So I’m happy to hear that, because I’ll have to die. I only heard about it as you shared that you were pausing it. So I kind of thought, oh, right, but as a parent raising neuro divergent kids, I will definitely be diving into that. Ania. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. I feel like I could talk to you all morning, but I’m conscious that we’re approaching it at the end. So if anyone has been listening to you, and if they’re not enraptured by you and excited to learn more about you, then Have you even been listening? But where can they find out more about you? So my website is annieridout.com and then my sub stack is annieridout.substack.com or you can search the creative way on substack, and that’s the new title of it, or raising neurodivergence also on substack, and then on Instagram, of course, so many different accounts, we’ll be popping all those links in the show notes, so it’ll be impossible to miss them. And so if you’ve forgotten anything, we can also add that back in as well. But do go check. I mean, one thing I’ll also say to anyone who’s listening is, if you’ve not looked at Annie’s Instagram account, do, because Annie’s breaking all the rules over there, and it’s really refreshing to see. So do go check out her wonderful illustrations and the kind of content she’s sharing there, because it’s fabulous.  Thank you so much for your time today, Annie, it’s been really fun talking with you. Thank you for having me.

Well, what a woman, what a conversation and what a full circle moment for me to be interviewing the very same woman who started this whole journey for me, I just loved that. That was one of my absolute highlights of my professional career so far, getting to speak to the woman who got this all started for me. If you found that conversation inspiring, and if you’re creative, how could you not then please do share this with others who will also find this illuminating and exciting, and show them just what is possible for them. And of course, all of Annie’s fabulous links are down in the show notes so that you can go on and connect with Annie and get involved in all the wonderful things that she’s doing over on sub stack next week, I’ll be back in your ears with another solar episode. If you ever have anything that you would like to hear me talk about, do reach out to me on Instagram. I always love to hear the problems you’d like me to solve on this podcast, I’ll be in your ears then.