Ever wondered how someone with a full plate—a thriving business, a family, a neurodiverse household, AND a stack of published books—still finds time to sleep?
Or better yet… how they use their ADHD to power all of it? If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by your own creativity or wondered if you’re “too much,” you’re going to love this interview with returning guest and my SEO consultant, Meg Casebolt. Her approach to neurodiversity in business proves that ADHD can be a strategic advantage, not a limitation.
Meg is an entrepreneurial powerhouse who perfectly embodies the phrase “multi-passionate with a mission.” I’m talking about building a successful SEO consultancy while cranking out several romance novels, nonfiction books, and helping others find their voices—all with the magic (and occasional mayhem) of an ADHD brain. Her writing strategy and approach to creative writing offer a blueprint for managing multiple projects without burning out.
This is not a conversation about “doing it all.” It’s about how to let your brain’s unique wiring become your greatest asset. Meg shares candidly about her writing journey: from being a childhood word nerd, to losing the joy of writing through academia’s rigidity, and then rediscovering the creative spark during the uncertainty of the pandemic.
Ever felt like your nervous system is on overdrive? You’re not alone—turns out writing romance novels was exactly what Meg needed to dial down anxiety and reclaim hope. This is neurodiversity in business at its most authentic.
Here are my top 3 takeaways from our chat:
Creativity Needs Structure:
Meg breaks big projects like writing novels and business books into manageable, bite-sized sessions—30 minutes a day can add up to published work and reduced overwhelm.
Curate Your Input to Cultivate Your Output:
Both of us have found that reducing media consumption and focusing on our unique perspectives boosts creativity and clarity—whether you’re writing, building, or rebranding.
Honor Your Brain (and Your Needs):
It’s not about doing it all—it's about doing what fuels you. Speaker B balances left- and right-brain work, has learned to say no to platforms that drain her energy, and finds flow by following her interests and intrinsic motivations.
About today’s guest, Meg Casebolt:
Meg Casebolt helps experienced founders, consultants, and creators become findable in AI-powered search—not through keyword tactics, but through strategic authority positioning.
As founder of Love At First Search, she works with experts who don’t need more SEO advice but do need a new way to be understood by modern search systems.
Her approach focuses on helping people become quotable and recommendable: teaching them to claim specific expertise territory and build the signals AI uses to evaluate credibility.
Diann’s Note: After I lost 10k followers on social media accounts overnight due to hackers, I was determined to learn SEO and started working with Meg. Within 1 year, I rank at the top of all search engines in my niche, and 50% of my clients now find me through online search.
Diann Wingert brings decades of experience as a psychotherapist and serial business owner and is now a sought-after coach to entrepreneurs with ADHD traits.
Diann is a fierce advocate for self-acceptance and meaningful growth at the intersection of neurodivergence and entrepreneurship. She is the creator of the ADHD-ish Method and host of the top-rated ADHD-ish podcast.
H: You and I have been working together for, I think a couple of years now. You are my ride or die SEO consultant but recently you have developed a whole other identity, which the more I get to know about it, the more fascinated I am. And that is that you are also a writer and a several times published author of not only fiction, but also nonfiction. My ADHD brain is breaking a little bit over this. Your ADHD brain is capable of doing all of these things at once. So I want to kick this conversation off with this question. Have you always thought of yourself as a writer? Were you like a writer as a little kid and now it's just the manifestation of that years later, or is it a new obsession?
G: I was a writer as a kid, but I did not consider myself a writer until recently and I wrote a ton as a kid. And I think academia just stripped the joy out of it for me because I would love creative writing as a child and then it turned into like, oh, what's your thesis? What's the paper you have to write? What's your dissertation? Where's the research? Where's the citation? And it stopped being something of joy and started being something of work. And then, you know, 40 years old, I finally published a novel and my mom's like, well, finally you've always been an author and I'm like, well, thanks, mom, thanks. You couldn't have told me this when I was 20 and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, but I wasn't good at it then.
H: You wouldn't have listened because you had to go through your other iterations to get there.
G: Exactly. So I always loved language. I took classes in linguistics, but I didn't major in English because I looked at the syllabuses of what I would have had to read and I'd already read it all and I was like, I don't want to read classics again blah, boring. So I majored in political science instead and I went to non profits and I went into small businesses, and then I landed in marketing and I've been in marketing ever since. And marketing, especially like now in AI marketing, it's all back to linguistics. It's all back to words and choices and the ways that we phrase things and so it's all coming full circle in its own way.
But in terms of creative writing, no, I never really thought of myself as a creative writer or and like, write a book, publish a book. They say that like 80% of people have published a book on their bucket list, it wasn't on mine. I didn't need the validation of having the book on my shelf. I just wanted to read it. I wanted to write it, but or I didn't want to write it. I didn't think I could write it. I thought I would get bored with it. I never wanted to like be the author. I didn't think, oh, I want to get on the stage and sell books from the stage. That was never part of my like, strategy or where I saw myself. It was not the plan.
H: But you are a self professed word nerd, as am I. You are a lover of words, a lover of stories, a lover of storytelling, and a lover of specificity around using the right word for the right reason at the right time so maybe we could say it was inevitable. But one of the things that I think is so fascinating about the development of you as a writer and an author is that two things is that you're able to be pretty prolific. I mean, our last conversation, I think you confess to having currently three published novels and two nonfiction books. Or you've got three novels, one nonfiction and then several more in the hopper in each category.
G: Yeah, yeah. Three romance novels fully published, one nonfiction book published, two nonfiction books currently being written, one novel currently being written, all of which will be published within the next year.
H: And in your copious spare time, you also have a marriage to another neurodivergent person. You have a couple of neurodivergent kids and a full on very successful business where you help people like me with their SEO, both individually and as part of a thriving membership and I'm like, do you sleep? I mean, I just don't understand how you're able to do all this.
G: Would you believe I sleep better because of writing romance novels?
H: Tell me more, maybe I need to pick up a new obsession.
G: No, you have enough, like, hands on creativity in your life. I started writing romance novels during the pandemic because I was reading more of them as an escape from the fact that I was having this like struggle, spiraling anxiety all the time. And I wanted to have a place where I knew that there would be a happy ending because the world outside was a dumpster fire and that's not singular to me. I mean, there's studies that say that reading picked up substantially within the past 10 years. And a huge part of it was the pandemic and a huge part of it was romance and books about hope and growth and transformation. Not just romance, women's fiction right but people weren't reading horrors.
arted coming to me in October:
H: I know a thing or two about it yeah, I'd say so.
G: You're like, oh, I had this idea, but then, oh, but it's a couple who met when they were in high school, and they're coming back together as adults. So then we get the high school story so now it's dual timeline. But when we get into the dual timeline, then we get the siblings of one of them. So then when they get back together in real time oh, but they have to have a reason to get together. So it's one of the siblings weddings so I have to go write that couple first because I need a reason for this couple to get together. It's like watching a movie in my head.
H: In that one sentence, you have effectively talked me out of even thinking of writing creative nonfiction because of all the and I can do all the ever expanding complexity, but the fact that I then have to go back and redo something or go back and start some. The prequel, the sequel that would come. You're like, oh, that's what I’m like.
G: The revision.
H: I'm getting hives, dude. Like, that's not for me.
G: Or you write something into, like, chapter 40, and you're like, okay, where can I, like, foreshadow this in chapter two, chapter six, chapter 12. Like it that way you can sort of set it all up. So that way, when you finally get that build, it feels really satisfying like, I live for that, but that's also, like…
H: I get that feeling, but it's the executive functioning required to actually insert all that in some kind of sequence.
G: You should see the notion boards. Are there notion boards?
H: I think it would be traumatizing. I think I'd rather not see the notion boards. What I'm hearing, Meg, is it kind of happened organically. It's not like you had this compelling origin story I always wanted to be a writer. It's like I need to regulate my nervous system because nothing feels safe right now. And I'm locked up inside my house, and, you know, I got to do something, and you could turn to comfort food like I did. I still have the 20 extra pounds that I didn't have until or I could comfort myself in other ways.
And then you realize, no, as it turns out, I got a few ideas, too. I think it's incredible that it came to you in your dreams. That's like, oh, no, I can't ignore this. I have to do something with it. How did you develop your because every writer I've ever met or talked to or even read a biography of developed their unique writing process. And we'll talk about the marketing of a book later on. But, like, the process of writing, you can't just sit down and wait for the muse to appear. You have to have a system and a format and a process. How did you discover yours?
G: Well, I think part of it is that it is such a time constraint. So I know that I have maybe 30 minutes a day for writing max. Sometimes I'm able to carve out, you know, on a weekend, I might get two hours uninterrupted. And that's the fiction writing, that's the creative writing right. And so when I'm out walking my dog, when I'm driving the car, I'm thinking about, okay, what am I going to write when I get there? So that way I'm making the most of that time and not just sitting and tapping away and wait, you know, tapping my fingernails and going, what am I going to write today? What am I writing today?
H: Or listening to this podcast to kill the time.
G: Exactly. No, I feel like once I started writing, I needed to consume less, and that was a really good time in my life to consume less. When the news cycles, I mean, still, it's hard to take in all that information. And at the same time that I was starting to do creative writing, I was also starting to explore Social Slowdown, which was my first podcast, and go, okay, I need to get my ass off social media, because it's wrecking my brain. It's spiraling my anxiety. And so that was part of the process is, okay, when I pick up my computer, I'm not opening Facebook.
When I pick up my phone, I'm opening my Kindle, I'm reading a book. When I pick up my computer, I'm not opening Instagram. I'm not opening TikTok. I'm writing, I'm creating instead of consuming, and I'm giving myself the space to express instead of just taking in and having nowhere to, like, all input, no output. It didn't work for me.
H: That was a crucial thing for me, Meg, when I realized I had outgrown my previous brand.
G: Yeah.
H: And I knew I needed to grow into something new but I couldn't force it.
G: Yeah.
H: I trusted that I was gonna figure it out, it was gonna come. I hired several people to help me in different ways, including you but ultimately I had completely forgotten this component. I stopped consuming so much of other people's content. I unsubscribed from I don't even know how many blogs, email subscriptions, podcasts. I literally got really quiet and didn't pay attention to what anyone else in my space was saying. And I think it was absolutely crucial to me finding my own unique perspective, point of view, and voice, which is ultimately what led me to discover what became the rebrand. I don't think I could have gotten there if I had been paying attention to what everybody else was saying during that time.
G: Yeah, I think that's something worth validating. You know, I co host a podcast with Jessica Lackey, and you've been on it several times, and she is always looking around to keep her finger on the pulse of what's happening. And she's much more trend aware, and she's much more, you know, wanting to know. So that way, when her clients come in, she can be reactionary and be like, oh, I understand why you're coming to me with this concern. Whereas I'm much more like, put up the blinders. Keep your eyes on your own paper. I don't care what's happening in the online marketplace, because I know what I'm doing and what they're doing doesn't impact what I'm doing.
And part of that is that she's like a business strategist, so she has to know everything, versus I'm much more of a marketing specialist, so I can just like, okay, I need to know AI discoverability and that's about it. Like, I don't need to know what's happening on social media quite as much. And that was a conscious choice to say, let me not have to keep up with everything. Let me not be a generalist.
H: You know how much I, and this is part of my word nerdery, you know how much I love my alliterations and my…
G: I've seen your list of frameworks.
H: I know you've, you've been all up in my bishes with that stuff. And I'm, I have been a couple of my mantras lately which are alliterative are in order to cultivate your creativity, we need to preserve your peace. So if there's so much noise around you and in your head, if you are reactive because we are more sensitive beings in general, neurologically, we are more environmentally aware, we have more justice sensitivity. So this has been an extended period of time where most of us have an overactive nervous system and or no end in sight. So we can't be creative if we don't have any way to preserve our peace. And what better way than to just stop paying attention to all of the things that distract you from figuring things out. Now I'm wondering if you.
G: I just want to really quickly subvert that which is you said to curate or to cultivate your creativity preserve your peace and I would say to preserve your peace, cultivate your creativity. I think it goes both ways. I don't think it's a one way street. I think that if you want to feel more peaceful, you have to express yourself somehow. You can't just always be a receptacle. You have to also pour some of it out in some way. It doesn't have to be writing, it doesn't have to be artwork.
It can be pottery, it can be dance, it can be just like that. And dance would actually probably be a pretty good one for some of these like really activated nervous systems to just move and get it out of your body. You know, I'm a certified yoga teacher. I don't do it anymore because I'm like glaucoma. But like there are, there are things that I do that are just like the breath work of it all. You have to take care of yourself to preserve peace. And whatever that creativity looks like for you, whether it's somatic or written or like podcasting or singing, like you have to have some outlet.
H: I love it. I'm really glad you stopped me because that was a really, really good point. I find myself wondering, Meg, is your writing process because I mean, 30 minutes, first of all, I'm sure some people are listening, are going, I'm out. I'm not one of those people.
G: 30 minutes is too much. 30 minutes a day is too much or not enough?
H: No, listen, I've had a lot of people tell me the only way they can do any kind of creative work, they need to be able to shift into hyperfocus. And the only way that they can cultivate the conditions for hyperfocus is if they have a big ass chunk of uninterrupted time. You don't have that kind of life. You're not going to get a big chunk of uninterrupted time unless you're in fucking hospital or something. So even then the nurses won't leave you alone so you still don't have it.
G: Oh my God, they never leave you alone.
H: No. But if you can be creative on demand in 15 minute chunks. A lot of my ADHD folks would say I can't do that. Do you think anybody can learn to do it? That that's a mindset thing? Or is it really some people can shift into a creative state and back out of it in a small period of time and others, it's just not possible.
G: I think, you know, some of our brains are just wired to do it. If I could write it all at once, I would, you know, for my birthday, my husband gave me a writer's retreat weekend and he watched the kids and I went away and other people made my food and I wrote 8,000 words in a weekend and it felt glorious. I felt like I could really sink my teeth into it but I can't do that all the time. So would I prefer to have these uninterrupted windows of just being able to sit and drink coffee and not have anybody talk to me? Sometimes, yeah, but like, let's focus on what is the reality of my life and the choices that I've made.
And let's talk about like, writing is not yet profitable enough for me to establish that as my primary career. I still need to pay my bills while I'm doing this and that's why my publication schedule is 10 months per novel. It's not a novel a month. If I did that, it would either have to be my full time job or I would have to rely heavily on AI which is not something that I want to do for my creative writing because that sort of defeats the purpose of the creativity for me. You know, I use AI in my business, but to outsource my creativity to a robot just doesn't sit quite right with what the goal of my writing is for me.
H: And I think we have to shout out the podcast that you co host with our mutual friend Jessica Lackey, because the focus is this and that one is called and I'll link to it in the show notes, it's called Aggressively Human.
G: Right and it's about how to keep your business aggressively human and to have these human connections and human decisions in the age of algorithms, AI automations, where everyone is telling you do more, do it faster, do it harder, big scale, you know, like and what is the cost of that? And when should you choose to use these tools at your disposal and what is the purpose of using those tools that are now publicly available and when should you not. And how do you make those discernments and decisions? That's a choice. But also we as ADHD people and with our ADHD brains struggle with decision making right?
H: But you also have, and this is just a side note, but you also have that little bit of. I don't know if it's contrarian or. I mean, you're a non typical thinker. So you had a podcast about getting the fuck off of social media at a time when everyone else was saying, but you have to have social media and you're like, not me.
G: I can't, I couldn't do it anymore.
H: Yeah, they wouldn't. And I think an increasing number of people have come to that conclusion. For me, you know, that got pulled out from under me when I got hacked, which is one of the reasons that I got landed in your lap, started taking SEO seriously, which is one of the better decisions I've made in my business in the last five years. Because like everyone else, I was on the social media treadmill. So you have a tendency to speak about the uncomfortable things like you don't want to be on social media guess what, you don't have to. Here are alternatives, you want to, you don't want to, you know, give your life away to AI. You don't have to. Let's talk about being aggressively human so I think…
G: But also, like, it's not a black or white decision.
H: No, it depends.
G: And there's this like, way of the world right now, which is you're in or you're out. It's black or it's white, like bad or good. And I'm always trying to like, pull apart the reality of that, which in AI is how do we use it responsibly and ethically not it's good or bad or it's inevitable. It's like, no, but what are the choices that we're making? And, you know, pre AI, that was me doing the same thing to social media and saying, is this actually good for us? Let me go look at the research studies and I did a podcast about it.
Not because I had the answers, but because I didn't have the answers, and I was curious about the answers, and I was having conversations with people behind the scenes that weren't being recorded and I'm like, these are really fucking interesting conversations. What if I just recorded them and put them out? So I did 100 episodes of a podcast called Social Slowdown, and that was my first book.
I was recording these podcast episodes that were not, like, directly related to my services, but they were adjacent I would say. I wasn't coming out and saying, here's why you should do SEO and here's how to do SEO, because nobody wants to listen to that shit on a podcast oh, my God. I listen to those podcasts because I sort of have to. And after a while, I even stopped because I was like, it's too technical. Like, I know it's not the format in which I want to consume that information anyway.
So I thought, okay, what if I interview people about their relationship with SEO and talk about what they're doing? I'm sorry, their relationship with social media and what their relationship is and what their alternatives are, because it's not all or nothing ever with anything. And then after I got to about, I'm going to say, like, maybe a year, year and a half of recording, which would probably put me at like, 50 to 70 episodes, I was like, there's a book here. I'm seeing the same patterns. I'm hearing the same things. I'm noticing that there's a progression, there's a sequence. I'm the only one who seems to be in this space right now and if people want to learn this, I don't want them to have to go back and listen to 100 hours of information.
H: You know that ain't gonna happen, right?
G: No, we're not gonna make it past episode three. So that's when I was like, okay, I should distill this and turn it into a book. And the first book, I made a lot of mistakes, but the best decision that I made was I hired a writer to help me extract the gold from the resource material. So, Lacey Boggs. I don't know if anyone knows her. I hired her to pull together the outline, to pull together the pull quotes, to get, like, anatomical pieces that I needed so that I could then go in and write the connective tissue question.
H: Question and I will link to Lacy Boggs, I know of her reputation. Do you think you would have recorded those podcast episodes differently had you thought, I'm going to turn this into a book one day?
G: Do I think I would have planned to record them differently? Sure. I think I would have come up with an entire strategy where I would have said, I'm going to ask everyone the same series of questions so that when I go through and I collate the information and I can extract it out, then I can pull the most interesting one for each of these, and those can be the chapters. But let's be serious, Diann, I would not have done that.
H: You're right.
G: I would have chased what is the most interesting squirrel of the conversation, and that was what made people want to listen to it. It's not because I'm asking templated questions that I could have sent people as, you know, hey, fill out this form and I'll publish it. But the conversations were where the curiosity was present and where the more interesting pieces happened. Because, I mean, you know, as a former therapist, as a business coach, it's the throwaway things that people say that are sometimes the most interesting.
H: Oh, always, the thing that they didn't. They just tossed off something and then move on, I'm like, wait a minute.
G: Rewind, rewind, I need to go back to that.
H: Stop right there and people do that to me, too and I'm like, wait, did I say that? Like, I didn't even hear myself say it.
G: Right.
H: And it was like, oh, my God, that was the most impactful thing in this whole conversation. I'm like, okay, so you cannot plan those. You cannot predict those and I absolutely don't think your presence. We've done a number of interviews on both sides. I think your presence, which is largely fueled by your genuine interest in other people, your love of storytelling, and your curiosity. If you knew I'm going to ask this question, and then I'm going to ask this one, you probably wouldn't even be as present enough to hear that.
G: Why bother, who wants to look for that you know? And I think also, like, once I started to see a larger narrative though, once I started to see the forest for the trees. Then I wanted to synthesize and that's where it sort of took on a different life of its own, too. I knew that the podcast was not going to be a forever thing for me going into it. I don't know about this current podcast, that one might live a lot longer and part of it is that the scope of it is broader. Part of it is the technology is evolving.
Part of it's the co host so that way I have somebody there who I can rely on. There's a lot more things happening there. But I knew that I didn't want to talk about social media forever. And then I wrote the book, I published the book right around the time of about episode 90 and then my brain just turned off. And this, I'm sure this has happened to every ADHD person who's listening to this, where it's like, done. I have nothing else to say about that. And my joke is like, if I didn't convince you in 170 pages and 100 episodes, then you don't want to be convinced, so why keep going?
H: But now we got to talk about the marketing, right?
G: Yeah and then I went quiet. I went dormant for a while after publishing the book because I was burned out because I did the book poorly. I didn't plan the timing of writing the book well. I set a date without knowing how long it was going to take to write and then I, like, rushed to the finish line. And I'm still very proud of the book but I would have, I did. There are so many things that you make mistakes on the first time around.
H: Even with help and I want to, you know, emphasize that because you hired an expert.
G: Yeah.
H: To help you and you still felt like you made mistakes, and it was still fucking exhausting.
G: Yeah. Well, because I was what I should have done. I said, I'm going to take a hiatus. I'm going to finish this season, and then I'm going to devote the time that I would be spending on. So it's all time management right which none of us are good at, or time opportunity. But I should have paused the podcast and said, I'm going to go into my writing cave and write my book. And then when it's ready, I'll come back and I'll talk about the book writing process on the episodes and that's not what I did.
And so I was recording, recording episodes and going, that was interesting that should go in the book. And so the outline was ever changing and morphing and the excitement of the conversations and the, the extra version of me going, ooh, this is an interesting episode and you know, it was an ever changing process. So I felt like the finish line kept moving, but the deadline didn't move with the finish line, that kept moving.
H: That's painful.
G: And I was also writing the book and had the book publication deadline published so I was like, all right, it's coming out in July. And then I had PR firm that was pitching me to podcast that way I could promote the book and I should have done that separately. So now I know the sequences, write the book, promote the book, sell the book, market the book, you know, and they all that…
H: Wait, wait hold on a second, my brain is breaking a little bit. Write the book.
G: It's not a perfect way of saying it. Let me say it differently, write the book first. Write the book. Before you come up with the marketing strategy, would you stop just lay down, freaking dogs. Write the book first. Have a dedicated time to write the book. Have a deadline that the book needs to be finished. That is three to four months before you are going to have anybody buy the book.
And then that's when you have go on the podcasts, send the manuscript out to the advanced readers, make sure that the people are going to write the reviews, talk about it publicly while it's still in pre order phase before people can buy it and you can start to grow the audience at that point, tell people about it. But that's all like promotion strategy, that's big launch energy. And then when the book actually launches, it's one day it's a switch that gets flipped. It's not nearly as exciting as you think it's going to be. It's like so anticlimactic. And then you have this book and you're like, oh shit, now I have to market this for the rest of my life.
H: That's a classic ADHD thing. It's like, I'm so excited to create this thing and we create it and they're like, oh fuck, now I have to sell it to people and I have to talk about it indefinitely. I've moved on to the next thing already.
G: My brain has already moved on and it's almost like I compare it to weddings where it's like you spend all this time and all this money planning the perfect wedding and everybody gets there and you like have this glorious one day. And then you're like, oh, now I'm married for the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with my husband, I love him. But, like, there's all this hype and all this buildup and all this, like, planning that goes into this one day, and then you sell the rest of your life with it, you know?
And I think people put so much emphasis on the launch without realizing that, like, actually it's a slow burn, to use my romance language. Like, it has to be a slow burn, you have to build to something. And yes, there's a climax of the book, of the romance novel, but there's also the, it doesn't all happen at once, you know, and the royalties that you're going to make on the book do not all happen in one day. They happen over years and years and years and that's part of the process and part of the goal. But that's also like, really repetitive and boring for our ADHD brains.
H: I was you just, you anticipate my next question? Well, it's like, because the, we like to create things, we like to build things, and we also like them to be finished so we could go on to the next thing. But the whole process that you're describing, even just, you know, the 30 minutes a day of writing and imagining, oh, shit, means it's going to take me X amount of time to get this fucker finished and then I've got to have it edited. And then I got all the things like, how do you maintain your focus, your interest, your desire, your motivation? Like, all the things that are really so slippery for the ADHD brain, easily found and easily lost. Like, how have you trained your ADHD brain to stay interested all the way through because it's, this is an extended. Maybe that's why you have several going at once.
G: Yeah, that's part of it, right? That's part of it so I think it's both an internal and an external motivation thing. So I talked earlier about how internally, it's sort of like my inattentive ADHD escape of when I need to shut down, turn it off, I need to, like, think about something else. I can go like escape into the little, like, forum of my mind and think about what the characters are going to do playroom. Yeah, it's like my own little Barbie dream house in my brain.
H: I call mine the Penthouse suite.
G: Well, yours is obviously much fancier than mine, mine's apparently pinker.
H: In my mind, just in my mind.
G: But then there's also the external validation of having readers, of having people who are discovering the book and going, oh, my God, when is the next one coming out? I just binged all three books in three days. It's a thousand words that they just read, or a thousand pages that they just read, like, cover to cover, because they're obsessed and having those readers is also a huge dopamine hit. The reviews coming in and people who are hitting, you know, sliding in my DMs and emailing me and being like, wow, I was expecting Mallory to end up with Darius. And you set it up the whole time and now at the very end, you pull a rug out from under us. I can't believe you did that to us, you know.
H: And I love you for that.
G: And I love you for it, because you had me on the hook the whole time, and I still got the happy ending, and I was with you the whole time. And I've had readers send me pictures of them literally crying while they're reading specific sections. And, you know, there's these little wars breaking out that are like, well, I'm a Grace person, and Kate's my favorite.
H: You know, I'm Team Kate, and I'm Team.
G: Totally and there's, like, this small but growing fandom that feeds the dopamine, where there are times where I'm like, well, what if I just stopped? Like, no, but people need book, they're not ready for you.
H: They would come for you.
G: They would come in romance land. They would come, but they wouldn't come with, like, pitchforks. They would come with, like, chocolate and be like, what can we do? What can we do to help you?
H: We’ll babysit your kids. We'll have someone service your husband.
G: Keep writing. Yeah, we'll send the wheel tray and you're good yeah. It's like they don't even care that much about book four. They want book five because they don't know how good book, you know? Like, so they're just, like they're hungry, they're voracious and that would keep.
H: That would keep you going.
books are going to be through:
H: I think that is really important because you are so good at SEO, and now SEO, that includes AI and, you know, but this scratches a very different part of your ADHD brain in a way that probably, I'm guessing, like, fuels your ability to do your other work, which is a little bit more detailed, a little bit more. It's just different, right?
G: Yeah, it's very, like, left brain, light brain, right brain. And like, the fact that I have both of them, I think helps me stay more balanced. If I were in spreadsheets and documents and synthesis mode and analysis mode all the time, I would burn out on all of it. I have about a cap of maybe 20 hours a week that I can really spend on the business, no matter how much time I have, if I had unlimited time. There's just a point in my brain where it's like, nope,
H: That's your capacity for this work.
G: It is, because it's so rich and deep and requires so much brain power.
H: It gobbles up your executive functioning.
G: 100%. And that's why I have the podcast where I can have the conversations about it, and that's why I blog about it, because I'm also using blog posts that will become a book to process what the fuck I'm learning from all this so that I can then be able to synthesize it in my own brain, but I can't fully understand it unless I process it. So the nonfiction books take a lot longer to write because it takes me a year to figure it out, but I can't figure it out if I don't write it.
H: Why do nonfiction then because clearly, the fiction, it's really feeding you and nurturing you and stimulating your creativity and giving you massive amounts of dopamine. And you know who doesn't love having fucking fans? You know, like, fans you know I adore you but fans for your creative work as opposed to your strategic critical thinking, problem solving, it's just a different facet of you.
G: And I think also, like, there are people who know me in both places, but I kind of like having. I mean, I'm not quiet about my pen name, but I do write under a pen name, and I like that those characters and those stories can kind of live on their own without needing it to be me showing up live. And I think also, being a self published author has honed my marketing skills and made me a more efficient marketer for my own business.
H: You know, I can't leave that alone. Go on.
G: I'm thinking more about like the product as something that you're selling. You know, I, as a service provider, I'm selling high touch, high ticket offers where I am the central point. My brain is the thing that is the commodity right. I'm selling time with me, I'm selling my thoughts, I'm selling my strategy and like we just talked about, there's a capacity to that.
H: Yes.
ok, which will be sometime in:
H: That's another thing we have in common. We both have a deep, profound and abiding love for frameworks.
G: And frameworks translate really well into books Diann, I might be trying to convince you to write the ADHD book.
H: I feel like I'm getting dragged kicking and screaming. It will not be romance.
G: It can be a business book. But, you know, I'm writing these blog posts and as I'm writing the blog post, same with as I was, as I was recording the Social Slowdown podcast. There's patterns here, there's a sign here, there's a story here this is the sequence, this is the process. I feel the book being generated in the blog posts. And therefore, when it comes time that I feel like, okay, the blog posts are complete, which I think is probably another 10 to 15 blog posts that I can sort of like flesh out.
I know what needs to come next. I need to write more about brand voice, which is, you know, as a lexical fingerprint of like, how do you tell yourself apart from AI. I have a lot that I want to say still, but I already have 80,000 words in blog posts that are publicly available, that are indexed, that AI can already pull from, that people can already read, but that's a lot to read. And they're all independently written as if they're the entry point. And so now I just need to take some time, probably sometime this winter, which we're recording this in May.
So in six months, I'll probably set aside some time and go, okay, time to take these by that point, hundred thousand words, and turn them into 60,000 words that can be published and it's built on a framework. It's going to be called From Invisible to Unmistakable because I want that transformation in the work that we're doing. You know, and I know now, you asked me earlier, like, would I have asked the podcast questions differently had I known that there would be a book?
I know that this is going to be a book, but I also know that it's going to live independently as podcasts and as a separate body of work that won't be only available as a book. And it's just, it's more important to me to get the information out there and to get people thinking differently about, like, AI as a discoverability mechanism than it is to be the name and the author on the topic. Like, that's not that wasn't my goal, still isn't my goal.
H: I'm imagining the more books you are writing and the more books you are planning to write and envisioning writing, like your ADHD pattern recognition skills are probably just getting more and more and more refined and honed. And because you're prolific at writing and podcasting, and it's like you have to do. I'm just thinking you have to do enough of that, of those things, creating content and talking to enough people so that your brain has enough data points to start mapping those connections, seeing the patterns, identifying the frameworks, and then that naturally translates into improving your own processes, but also having a body of work that you can teach other people and teaser, you got another business queued up. Why am I not surprised?
G: Why are we not surprised?
H: Yeah, of course it's turning into another business because other people want to do this too, right?
G: Let's talk about that because I think that that's actually a really interesting case study here. So back in March, so this was about six weeks ago, I was on vacation with my family. I was scrolling through romance Instagram because we were on vacation, and I saw a post that was like, romance marketing sucks, but what else are we going to do the Amazon algorithm is completely unpredictable, right. And I am a person who in my day job studies how algorithms work and figures out how to get found in recommendation engines and algorithms. And I sort of did some research, I dug into it, I said, who's talking to romance authors about this? Nobody is.
Then we drove from Washington D.C. to upstate New York. We had about a seven hour drive and I just sat on my phone and I typed up all the things that I knew that I didn't see existing on the Internet. And by the time we made it home, I had an outline and I put it into AI because I'm like, who else is doing this? What else would need to be included and I had probably 80% of it there. And by the end of a week, I had 30,000 words written because I already knew it, I just had not captured it. It was all just stuck in my brain and because, Diann, because I'm an AI content infrastructure specialist in my day job and I teach people how to do this, I knew exactly how to build it.
H: No, hold on. Your day job is your very successful business.
G: Yes.
H: Let's be clear what she's calling her day job is not an actual day job.
G: It's not.
H: She has a business of writing and publishing two types of books. And now she's going to have a business teaching other people how to publish these books with knowledge of the algorithm on Amazon.
G: Because I think that's just a component right. How good and I think also, like you were just saying how like justice oriented and empathetic ADHD brains are. It's like I have this knowledge that is not publicly available to this audience and it doesn't feel fair or equitable to me that I'm literally seeing people struggle and say, why can't I get found for my books on Instagram trial reels? And I'm like, oh my God, I feel this like moral dilemma of I don't want to keep this information to myself. It doesn't cost me anything to put this information out into the world. I know exactly how to do it. I know how to sequence it, I know how to write it, I know how to organize it. And so that book will probably come out in September because it's already written, because it was all just in my brain and needed to come out. I didn't have to figure it out, it was just…
H: And because your husband was willing to drive for seven hours and you didn't have to keep him entertained.
G: Yeah, like, I played Mad Libs with the kids, I interrupted myself, I got the snacks together. But after a while, they had iPads and I had my phone, and he was happy with his podcast and I just sat and wrote on my phone. You know, like, sometimes that's how new things begin, is you just go, well, and I think also like, the pattern recognition of well, nobody's doing this. And I know enough about discoverability to be like, okay, what do I need to do to stake the claim? Nobody else has talked about this. How do I say I'm the go to for this? Great, here's the minimum viable investment of my time right. And what's the coin name and what do I and I built it all out. I had the whole thing, of course, within a day. Because of the pattern recognition, because our brains are wired to make these connections. So it's not like I don't want to say it wasn't a hard process, but it…
H: No, it's effortful.
G: Yeah.
H: But also, in a way, easy.
G: Yeah.
H: Because you didn't have to rack your brain. You recognized a need. You recognize that you are uniquely qualified to meet that need and it just kind of spilled out. You know what I'm realizing as you're talking about this, Meg, is that you really did the exact same thing that you did with Social Slowdown.
G: Yeah.
H: Because you were sick to shit of social media. You were like, God, there has to be another way.
G: There has to be another way.
H: And other people were feeling the same thing, and they were just, like, feeling stuck and fucked. Like, it's kind of I say it's like Listerine, I hate it. I have to stay on social media because you have to be on social media because if you have a business, everybody else who has a business is on site. So it doesn't matter how much I hate it, I just have to keep doing it and you're like, I don't think you do. And I think that there are alternatives, and I'm going to start to figure out what they are. I think something that's really special about you is that you love to learn, and then you love to share what you've learned.
G: Yeah.
H: And you've done that with Social Slowdown. You're doing what is the new business being called?
G: Happily Ever Indie.
H: I love that.
G: So romances have to be happily ever after. But we're doing independent publishing, so it's Happily Ever Indie. And it's really just like it's a continuation of what I was doing with Social Slowdown. It's just for a specific niche population. Because I think that it's unfair that they haven't been given the tools and the resources to say there are alternatives. It's just me niching and saying, hey, this particular audience, here's what you have as an alternative.
I'm not doing all the alternatives anymore and I'm not even talking about social media anymore. This isn't a social slowdown for romance this is, hey, here's one of those alternatives. It doesn't have to be now I'm also going to talk about getting into independent bookstores and going wide with your distribution. I don't want to be an expert on all of those things. I don't want to talk about conventions. I don't wanna do any of that.
I wanna pick my niche and go really deep for my people and become the person that shows up in the AI search results because I know how to do that. And I don't need to have a hundred thousand followers on TikTok because what would I even do with that? I will be on TikTok because I feel like that's the distribution mechanism. But I started it from my site because that's the way I learned how to do it. That's the core, that's the whole hub and then the social media can be the outpost. But it's not where I'm like spending my time. It's not where I'm spending my energy. I'm not, I can't. I know better that my brain just won't function like that.
H: Well, you know better and most importantly, you know yourself better.
G: Yes.
H: And you're working in your zones of genius. You know that you have to do things that are intrinsically satisfying to you. Not just jmeeting a market need, but meeting a Meg need.
