[00:00:00] hi, everybody. What’s up. Welcome back to another episode of hear and now podcast. I am so excited that you guys decided to join me this week to hear more about hope writers. It’s a wonderful community that I’ve talked about a lot over the last year since I joined, but I’m very excited to actually have a member of the hope writers team on today to kind of talk about hope writers, how she got started in it.
All of that fun stuff. So Mary Kate, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience? Sure. Yeah. I’m so excited to be here with you today. My name is Mary Kate Brown. I work on the team with hope writers. I’ve also been a member for coming up on four years this year. So I’ve been around for a little bit.
I’ve kind of seen some growth there. And over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the team. And what I get to do is I get to talk with people who are maybe considering if they’re even a writer. I talked to a lot of people who were like me a few years ago, who filled their journals and just kind of felt like they had a message to share and had something to say.
[00:01:00] And so I get to meet and talk with people and help them get some clarity on their next best steps in moving their writing goals forward. I love that. Why don’t you talk about your writing journey, how you got started, what is something that you write about and that you’re passionate about? I love that question.
I had the opportunity to connect with collaborative blog called kindred mom. And I contributed for them and was able to help next year. So that was quite a journey. And over the past several months, I’ve kind of pivoted my writing a little bit on my personal blog to focus more on my journey with autoimmune disease.
And that was kind of something I was living through after the birth of my second and third children. That was really big journey for me and just really learning what it means to be well. With chronic illness. So that’s kind of where my personal writing is going now. And it’s something that I am also really passionate about.
Just talking about our bodies and healing and wholeness. I love that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the focuses of my show too, is journey with hearing loss. So perfect match [00:02:00] it’s was always a struggle, but I love how we can use our struggles to kind of offer some sort of advice or just kind of sympathy for people.
So how did you get started in hope writers? How did you actually find it? That’s funny because I was not a huge blog reader a few years ago, but there were a small handful I followed very closely. And one of the writers I had followed Adrielle Booker. I loved her writing. I just always felt like whatever she was going through in life, it really seemed to be applicable to me.
And she was the first one who had mentioned hope writers. And so that was the first time I heard of them. And it was interesting because I was personally going through the struggle of why not a journal. And I love to write for myself to just process, but I don’t know if this will be meaningful to anybody else.
I don’t even know if I could call myself a writer and she had written a series of blog posts, right. At the time I was kind of going through all that. Contemplation about you might be a writer and it was just kind of like the confirmation I needed. So I checked out the hope writers podcast and shortly thereafter had joined and realized [00:03:00] I could never not be a part of this community.
I remember when I joined, I think October, 2019, so it’s been over a year at this point, but my mom had been around since like the whole biology day. So it’s, it’s been a long time coming. So it’s kinda cool to be like a second generation hope writer in that case, but I love it. Just the community and really, cause it’s not just for writers.
And I think that’s something that a lot of people miss is that I’m a podcaster. I mean, I do write my scripts and things like that. So writing kind of just goes in many different ways and it’s just the medium that you use for it. So what are your favorite parts about hope writers? Oh, hands down the community of people.
I think that writing can feel really lonely and it, when you’re first starting out, you can feel like is this even worthwhile? Can this amount to something I never had in my mind that I would write or contribute to a book. And when I joined hope writers and I saw people in the community doing it, I heard their stories and I was able to see the hope writer pass and that really diminished.
Defies a lot of [00:04:00] those questions because the whole brighter path is very clear. It’s it helps you pinpoint where you’re at today, where would you like to be? And here’s the training and resources to get you there. And I realized, Oh, this is how people do it. It is doable. But having the support of other writers just makes the journey less lonely.
There’s always room for someone else at a table. And that’s just the beautiful thing about this community is it’s never a thing of like, Oh, there’s too many books about that topic. You know, I, I heard it. Yeah. One of the tradings I was listening to recently that as long as there’s people with unique stories and we’re unique individuals with there will always be room for more.
And I think the community is just a beautiful part of that. So. Yeah, I think one of my favorite parts is definitely the Facebook group. And just being able to kind of contribute with whatever people have to offer is probably the coolest thing. Especially when you get to meet people from all over the country and the world, it’s probably my favorite part and it definitely brings a positive spin to social media.
That’s often miss, but I guess I should [00:05:00] ask what exactly is hope writers for people who don’t know if you’ve never heard, this is your first time. We are a community of working writers and we believe that everyone has a message to share. We really believe in the value of writing meaningful words without sacrificing our meaningful lives.
So our community. Like Sophia said is people all over the world, writers, podcasters, whether they want to publish a book or not bloggers, devotion, writers, poetry, screenplay. I mean, I could go on and on. So we’re yes, a community and we come together and support one another. We’re really big on connecting in small groups, finding accountability, learning from one another networking, but we also provide the tools and training.
So if you wanted to become an EMT, for example, you would go get training. You’d go to. Cool to learn how to do that. And when you want to right. So why wouldn’t we need that as well. And so we have an entire library of resources dedicated to helping our members make [00:06:00] progress. And for each individual that is something totally different.
And what I had already mentioned was the hope rider path. That’s key because if you get started in writing. You could spend hours just Google searching. How do I start a blog? What is a lead magnet? How do I write a book proposal or reading Reddit threads? You could waste all kinds of time. I know. Cause I’ve been there.
So the whole brighter path, really, like I said, helps demystify the writing journey. It helps you identify where are you at on the writing journey? Where do you want to be? And then provides the path and the tools and the training and resources to get you there. So, yeah. You have clarity in how to get to where you want to go in your writing career.
And you also have the training to help equip you to build a really solid foundation for writing career so that you could do this for as long as you want. And I talked to a lot of people who are like, I want to do this for the rest of my life. I can’t picture myself not. And so that’s in a nutshell, what we offer with the tools, the training, the community, every Tuesday, we’re live [00:07:00] streaming interviews with industry experts into our group.
We’re archiving those in the member library. So even if you join coming up here to our next launch, you not only have access to all of those trainings. You have access to the archive of all the ones you’ve done in the past. So it’s pretty robust. Yeah. I love the tuesday teachers, especially because they are so diverse and they have so many people.
I remember there was a podcast management company. There was people who’ve written fiction books, memoirs. Beth Moore was on. I’m just thinking of people who are, and the writing industry, and to have access to their genius and their expertise. Probably the coolest thing. There are people we look up to and you want to be able to be like them.
But one of the things I did want to touch on is how does, or what does making progress in your writing mean, especially if you are following the hope brighter path. Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, like I had briefly mentioned, not every writer has the same writing goals, right? Some people want to [00:08:00] publish the book.
Other people, they don’t necessarily want to publish a book, but they want to contribute to magazines or they’re doing other types of maybe professional grant writing. Right. So making progress just means. Moving yourself forward, not staying stuck where you are. I mean, if you’ve been like I was an avid journaler and you filled pages of journals and you’re starting to think, I think I have a message that I want to share to help people.
A lot of conversations, I have looked like someone saying, Hey, I went through this really tough thing and I’d really love to encourage and help other people do ABC. And even if it’s just one person to impact, that’s worth it. Those are very common conversations I have with people and making progress means you’re moving from filling the pages of your private journal to figuring out how to get your message in front of the eyes of your reader.
Because whether you realize it or not, if you have a message on your heart, you have someone who needs to hear that there’s someone that needs to. Learn from your experience and your [00:09:00] expertise and to be encouraged by your story. And so we want to help you make progress by getting that message in front of the eyes of your people.
And if that happens through a book, great, if it needs to happen through a podcast that’s great too, or contributing to other publications, we want to help you do that. So whatever progress means, whatever your goal is for the next nine to 12 months, we want to help you do that in your way. We’re not saying there’s only one way to be a writer.
This is what it is. We’re saying. What is the most essential, important thing for you? And we want to help you move from where you’re at today. So a year from now, you can look back and say, wow, I actually did it. See the progress. One of the best things for me is most of my clients for web design and building social media, and trategy come from hope writers and.
Not only is it rewarding for those people to actually see themselves grow. But it’s rewarding for me to know that I helped contribute because of hope writers. I helped these people grow their blogs and get their message out in front of people. And those are the exact [00:10:00] clients that I want to help. It’s those people who have a message on their heart, that God gave them to be able to share that with the world, because you never know who needs to hear it.
So as a followup question to that is hopefully there’s for everybody, for every person. And is there kind of a limit to who can join. No, this is a good question. This is a common one. Believe it or not. It’s a floater. Are you a writer? Do you have a desire to write? Are you afraid to tell others you have dreams of writing?
Do you have a message to share? Do you write ideas and scraps of paper? All of these are common questions. If you’re a person who’s like. I have a lot of thoughts. I process my thoughts through writing. If I write a short social media post, a lot of people are commenting and saying, wow, this is really meaningful.
Or maybe you have other people in your life who said, you should write a book or you should do. If you have a message, if you have something you want to share, I wholeheartedly believe this is the place for you. I would say, if you have no desire to write what’s the lever or to share, so we need you to, but if you have a desire to get a message out there to [00:11:00] connect with other writers, to figure out how you can make progress on your individual journey, whatever that means to you, then I would say hope writers is for you.
You don’t have to be a woman. You can be a man or a woman. You can be a teenager, or you could be a parent of teenagers. You could be. Someone who works full time or someone who’s home full time, you can be of a faith background or not have a faith background. I mean, whoever you are, if you have hopeful words that you want to share with the world, then I think hope writers is the place for you.
But yeah, I remember when I joined, I was. Just 18. And I was like, I’m so young. And there’s all these people that were maybe in their forties, fifties, sixties. And I was like, wow, there’s just so much we can learn from each other. People are like, I need a question from you. And I’m like, Oh, I can answer that.
Or I need to ask you something. So all the wisdom of the community is probably the best part, but I did want to go back to something you said earlier, Is about the stages and paths of hope. Writers. Can you just break that down into the six stages? How [00:12:00] we discover that and what’s the best way to go from there?
Yeah. Great question. So the six stages are something that our co-founders have kind of helped identify their writers. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They’ve been published and they’ve been helping people for a long time with this. And so the six stages. Beginning as number one, that’s the writer stage.
That’s where our members are focusing on establishing craft of writing that habit. I’m going to start calling myself a writer. I’m not going to be afraid of that anymore, and I’m going to do it. And then stage two is what we call the hostess stage. This is learning how to serve your reader. Well, right.
And what does it mean? What is your message building your community and identifying who is the person that you are trying to help? And stage three is what we call the entrepreneurial stage. This is a lot of focus on growing an email list, creating what we call a lead magnet. Right. And getting you on the way to earning your first dollar.
If that’s something you want to do, we want to help. Writers create a writing career that’s sustainable for them. And a lot of times, not all the time that looks like being able to turn an [00:13:00] income from their writing stage four, for as we call the author stage, this is where you’re kind of focusing heavily on the book publishing process.
Right. And there’s a lot of interviews. From editors and agents and a lot of resources about what’s a book proposal. And like you’ve already said, Sophia, we’ve heard from expert memoir writers, a devotion writer. So this is kind of like that author publishing stage and stage five is what we would call the marketer stage.
A lot of times people will say, Well, what happens after I write the book, I was like, you’re just getting started on a new thing, because you’ve been working on your craft, you got the book published, you want your people to get it. And so how do you Mark it in a meaningful, genuine non-slimy salesy way?
Right. And that’s a super important part of being. A working writer and then stage six is called the centralist bore, the writer who has career that they’ve established. They’re like, I’m in this for life. I want to keep serving my people. I want to grow my business [00:14:00] perhaps, or kind of look at other things like a membership site.
Maybe. I don’t know. Everyone’s writing journey is different, but for most of us, we know we’re going to be doing it for life. So this is taking you beyond. And I think too, in my personal journey, I’ve seen sometimes you don’t work through stage one and then you get to stage six and then you’re finished.
It’s kind of like a cycle. A lot of times you write multiple books or for me, I was moving up through stage three. And when I had to pivot in my personal writing, I’m like, I need to revisit stage two. I need to go back to some of those things. So I would say it’s not something you work through in a linear fashion.
This is something that’s. Very cyclical. If you’re like, I’m a writer for life and I’m doing this. Absolutely. Yeah. I was going to add onto that as well. I still have to revisit things in stage one, even though I’m moving to four or five and six right now, and it’s kind of cool to see that growth that we have, but also knowing that it was okay to go back to square one and have to rebuild your things up again.
And there’s always room for everybody to learn and grow no matter where they are, whether you’ve published 10 books and you [00:15:00] forget how to build an email list. You’re just really starting again and that’s totally okay. So how can people figure out their stage? What’s the best way for them to know that?
Good question. So we have a really great quiz. There’s a short version of the quiz on hope writers.com/quiz, or as a member, right in our resource library online. You have access to all of these stages. All of our resources are divided up among these stages and there is a longer quiz in there. It’s 36 questions.
I believe it takes a few minutes to do. And it kind of gives you a good starting point. And what I like to tell people is take the quiz in the start here module. See what it says. If it says you’re at stage two or stage three, my recommendation is to skim through stage one, skim through stage two. Don’t just skip it completely because you never know if there’s.
Something that maybe you missed or didn’t know every time I’m going back into those beginning stages, I’m learning something completely new because this isn’t a static thing. We made the stages, we made the training and now it’s done. [00:16:00] We are always adding to the library. Things are always changing. The industry is growing.
The industry is changing. Immersing ourselves in your module as a new member is accessible to you at any time, it’ll give you a really good idea of where to start to ask some really thoughtful questions and we’ll pinpoint where it might be a good place to begin. But my recommendation is always just to skim through and just see if anything piques your interest.
And then I like to, we have an app download library on, and I like to make sure I go through, I complete one of my lessons. It checks it off as complete. It shows my progress. So it’s really encouraging to kind of have that keeps me accountable. And so, yeah, I say once I kind of delve into that data, I want to work through, it’s easy to keep track of where I’m at, but that quiz is a really good place to begin.
Yeah, absolutely. The three things that I love about her writers are obviously the community we’ve touched on that is the accountability. And then just ability to have evergreen content just really be flowing with the industry as the industry is growing. I feel like that’s super important for any business, for any writer to be able to adapt.
Social media is constantly changing. The algorithm’s constantly changing hope. Writers stays on [00:17:00] top of that to be able to give us the best and latest up to date information. So by the time everybody’s listening to this hope, this will be open for membership, right? So I know they only opened three times a year.
So if you’re thinking about it right now, you might want to join on, but what are some of the things that the membership to include? And if they want to get in touch with you and kind of figure out where they are in their writing journey, tell us all of that. Awesome. So, yeah, as you said, we’ll be opening up for new members, January 25th through the 29th.
That’s fast approaching. And if you are thinking you might be a writer and this might be the place for you, I encourage you to just jump in. I will answer your question. But one thing I didn’t mention earlier when, when I should have is that we really are committed to our members making progress in their writing journey.
And we want each and every member. To feel like they’re in the right place. This is a good fit for them. So we do offer what we call a 60 day, tried and applied guarantee, which means within the first 60 days of your membership, if you happen, it’s like a small checklist. I joined the Facebook group. I introduced myself, I [00:18:00] created a profile of the member directory.
I listened to this many trainings and if you’re taking what you’re learning and you’re applying it. And before the end of your first 60 days, if you feel like this is not a good fit for me, I did not make progress at all. This is not what I thought it was. You’ll be eligible to reach out to our team and receive a refund on the first 60 days of your membership, whether you join monthly or annually.
So we just really stand behind the fact that that’s what we do. And I just want your listeners to know if there’s any hesitation, please feel at ease because we really stand behind what we say and we want you to be sure it’s a good fit for you. So. Your question was what’s included in membership, and that would be access to our whole member library, which I kind of talked about the writing stages, the writing stages quiz, and then the resources within each of those stages, you will also have access to our private Facebook group.
And if you’re not on Facebook, what I like to tell people is. Create a profile with a name or maybe a pen name, and you don’t have to add any of your real life friends, but just do it to join hope writers, because there is such rich community that happens [00:19:00] there. The conversations, the ability to search through past threats, we have Friday shares of the week.
We can share a link to your own work somewhere on the internet and. Returned for sharing links into every week on Tuesday. So you can happen. Live, ask her questions while they’re alive on the call and get them answered. We have small group hope circles as well. So the Facebook group is a great place to ask some questions.
Crowdsourcing attend the Tuesday teacher. Whether it’s live or on the Thursday night replay, but also those small group hope circles are a place to kind of plug in with accountability. So the example I like to use to say you are ready to build an email on it in the next few months, add a hundred people to my new email list.
Start a hope circle.see if one’s open to join and say who is going to be growing your email list over the next six months. Let’s connect check-in once a week with one another. And keep each other accountable for the girls, share strategies. We’re learning, maybe work through some of the resources in stage two, three to try and do this, to make this email list happen, the resources and training in the library, the [00:20:00] Facebook group hopes their goals, Tuesday teachers, which again, those are archived in the library.
So even if you can’t attend live and the last thing, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it all is our member directory. This is a newer feature we rolled out in the fall and this is a public facing profile page. So as a member, You’ll get hope, writers.net/your state, your city, your name kind of thing. And you’ll get to put your headshot up there.
Links to your website, links to your social samples of your writing. If you’ve published a book, you can put an Amazon link to your book. This is an amazing resource because not only can you search other members who might live local to you. So it’s a great way to connect with other people who write in the same genre as you.
And we’re hoping that this would be a resource that perhaps agents might like to refer to in the future. We’re still growing it. Our members are still happening, learning and creating that profile, but it’s just a really great professional looking page. If you feel overwhelmed by how do I start a website?
Well, Hope writers gives you a member directory page. And what you can do is put some of your writing on there. For starters, it’s very simple, very [00:21:00] straight forward. We want to give you all of the tools that we possibly can to equip you to get your message out there. So our resources and our training, our community, our small groups and our member directory.
Those are all included with annual and monthly memberships. Absolutely. Yeah. The last thing I want to ask is can people connect with you and get, go one-on-one session with you to kind of learn if hope by there’s this the best place for them? Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. If anyone’s ready to hop in now and they’re like, I’m in click the link in the show notes and get in there, but if you.
You want someone to bounce ideas off of or talk one-on-one I would be more than thrilled to take meetings. I’ll give you my personal calendar link here, Sophia. So you can share with your listeners, you can snag a time on my calendar about 20, 30 minutes long, and we’ll just kind of maybe walk through some of the things that you’re thinking maybe where you’d like to be 12 months from now.
And I would just love to help you. Get more clarity on your next best step to move those writing goals forward, whatever that looks like, as well as answer any questions you might have about hope writers. So I would be more than happy to [00:22:00] give you my calendar for your listeners and they can grab the time there.
Yeah, absolutely. You guys can get all the information about how to join hope, writers, how to get a time with Mary Kay in the show notes below. But Mary Kay, thank you so much for joining me today. I really hope to see one of you guys or many of you guys in hope writers. It really is such a wonderful place, but again, thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, you’re so welcome. I’m so excited for all the people listening today that have maybe just had that writing dream. They are feeling that nagging inside. Well, I’ll just say and leave them on this. If you have that nagging feeling, if this is something you’ve thought about for a long time and you can’t ignore, don’t ignore any longer, no matter how long you do, it’s just not going to go away.
So I think that this is a great time, great opportunity to take advantage of this open door up in, and it’s pretty it’s that Libby will help you make progress in, wait to connect with you. So if people wanted to connect with you personally and read some of your writing, where can they do that? Oh, thank you for asking.
My website is Mary Kate b.com. You can also find me on Instagram at [00:23:00] Mary dot, Kate dot Brown. And I’m also in the hope writer groups. You can always say a little hello there too. Wonderful, Mary Kay. Again, thank you so much. And I hope you guys can consider joining hope writers. Remind us again what the enrollment window is for this month.
Yes, it’s January 25th through the 29th. So definitely put it on your calendars. Get on our email list, wait, lists, get on my calendar. Anything you need to do and be there. We’re really excited to meet you. Absolutely. Yeah. And if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to Mary Kay. Reach out to myself.
We are happy to answer anything you have, but I really hope you guys do join hope writers. It is such a wonderful place. So again, thank you. And thank you guys for listening and we will see you guys next time. Bye bye. [00:24:00]