When a major life event makes you re-evaluate your career, with Chris Stead

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business

Hello again, Rachel. So good to see you again. We are talking about trauma today and how to use it to change your business and maybe, I hate the word, but pivot or re-look at things. Have you ever had a major event that’s changed your perspective on work? 

Rachel: Nothing hugely major. Just some toxic workplaces, I think. But it probably doesn’t come under that umbrella, but I think all our experiences are reflected in our work for good or bad. What about you? 

Lynne: Well, I have written a few stories about different events in my life, and I think that as writers, we do bring a lot of lived experience and it must change our work a little bit, our perspective. Even like me writing about renovating all the time.

Rachel: That can be traumatic.

Lynne: This is my eighth house. I have renovated and flipped a lot of houses in my time. It is an interesting topic and one we are going to explore today with our guests, Chris Stead, are you happy to introduce Chris? 

Rachel: Yes! Chris Stead has worked as a journalist in print, online, social, and video forms for some of the biggest brands in Australian and international media. He’s won multiple awards, including journalist of the year and editor of the year, published over 20 books, hosted TV shows, and launched multiple media brands as editor-in-chief before moving into content production. So welcome to the podcast, Chris!

Chris Stead: Thanks for having me, guys. 

Rachel: Welcome, Chris! You’ve had such an interesting career when I started to delve into all the different things you do, I was just like, wow. Take us through how you started writing and everything to do with your career. 

Chris: Well, listening to that intro, it does sound like a lot when you kind of sum it up like that. But I guess could say that I didn’t really choose a career in writing, but rather my writing chose a career in many ways, and I’ll explain why, but I was writing stories from a very young age, early primary school. I used to win all the creative expression awards when I was a kid and we’d go home from school and play footy in the neighbour’s backyard, then I’d go and write a review of each game that we ever did. They’re still sitting in a folder somewhere with the old printer, with the holes down the outside binders. But really old printer. It’s all faded somewhere in a closet somewhere. 

Rachel: Do you ever read those reviews to your fellow footy buddies or were they just like, that’s weird. What are you doing? 

Chris: I did it for myself, like my brothers read them and mom and dad read them, but I was very young. I was 11, 12, 13. When you go back and you read them, I think as a writer, whenever you go back and read your old stuff, you’re always like, oh, that’s terrible. You’re improving, just always improving. They never really got published, let’s say.

Lynne: Maybe a good thing. 

Chris: Even around that time, the internet first came into the house, and I made a website, and I started posting opinion pieces and poetry and so always been a writer. But when I left school, I actually did a four-year degree in molecular biology and genetics. 

Lynne: Wow. 

Chris: I was never like looking to do a career in writing but when you’re at uni, you’re trying to find ways to earn money, and I was working at the servo at nights, and I was doing freelance articles for local video games magazines. Video game was just becoming a thing and so by the time I finished uni I was already working as a staff writer for ACP. I never did anything with my degree other than absorb all that scientific knowledge and use it in the way that I write and understand things. But from there, I just climbed the ladder so from across numerous publishers. I was a deputy editor by 23, editor by 24, editor in chief by 27, and then by 32 I was just burnt out on it all. I was having my second kid and those kinds of insane hours that you do when you’re running major magazines. I was running a massive international magazine at the time, and the demand was so huge, and I couldn’t do it with it to a second kid. So, I quit the big seat and formed my own business, and I’ve been freelancing contracting ever since, although obviously the content I create nowadays is a lot more than just words. 

Lynne: Interesting, isn’t it? The computer titles at ACP back in the day, there were quite a few of them too, because I was there then too, but I was working on all the girly lifestyle mags. 

Rachel: That’s like me! Movie reviewer for all the TV mags and stuff. 

Chris: I remember all the women’s magazines very vividly because they always smelt fantastic.

Lynne: That was us. 

Rachel: They had big beauty wardrobes, full of beauty products everywhere. 

Lynne: I remember that too. 

Rachel: Those were the days.

Chris: Back when there was money. 

Lynne: Yes, exactly. There was so much money when I think about it. But anyway, I was doing the sealed sections at Cleo. So, there you are, it’s the same. We wanted to talk today, Chris, about you had a bit of a traumatic event that affected both you and your family. You mentioned you have some kids and how it changed the work, the way you work. Do you want to take us through that? 

Chris: In early 2023, January 2023, an e-bike exploded in our house, and you won’t believe it, but it was an e-bike that was sent to me to review. 

Lynne: Oh no, God. 

Chris: And the freelance industry bit back on me that day. So lucky my family and I went there. I’m pretty sure we’d be dead if we were in the house at the time, and it created a huge amount of damage. It took about nine months to fight with insurance and get that over the line and then another seven months to rebuild. So, the business all, what fell over during that time. There are all kinds of different types of trauma in our particular trauma. You just lose so much of every single day of logistics. Just phone calls and builders and lawyers and insurance and just trying to find somewhere to live. 

I remember the first day that the kids had to go back to school. You realise you’ve got no Tupperware, and you’ve got no drink bottles, and you’ve got no school socks, and all those little things you just kind of take for granted and it takes so much of every single day. I reckon we’re losing about 80% of every single day just to getting through that day. The business just fell over and since then it takes so much motivation away from work because so many other things become so important, and that hustle of freelancing, the part of it all where you’re just hustling for work, I just couldn’t find the energy for it. So, it changed the way that I work in a big way. 

Lynne: Wow.

Rachel: Wow. Talk us through how things changed for you. What was your work like before the fire and then how did it kind of evolve after that? 

Chris: Big question. So beforehand, I was doing a lot of contracting, I was out and about in the city a lot consulting, contracting for big companies. I had fingers in so many different pies. I had lots and lots of things that I was doing at once. We just got a grant to lift our children’s book publishing company up to the next level, which I guess I think we’ll talk about later, but we were going down the road of really bumping that up to an international level and we were all super focused on all those – what we’ve been building to over a long period of time and then when the fire came through and all that stopped and started to reassess what we were actually about in our lives, which was about being a family and being with the kids and this small window of opportunity that we had to do things with them. We were spending so much time in the grind, in the hustle of freelancing contract work. When you’re working for yourself and you’re working from home, you spend so many hours beyond what you do for a nine to five and you spend so much time doing stuff out of that nine to five so, we reassessed all of that and that’s when I doubled down on travel content, which, I do a lot of nowadays.

Lynne: Well, you didn’t have a home for a while there, did you?

Chris: Well, that was a big part of it. We got to a spot where in the course of a week after nine months of fighting, I caught the insurance company out on a legal technicality and managed to squeeze them into paying. And then I had a local builder who had thankfully saved a space in his calendar for us in October, which was amazing of him because a lot of people want their stuff built before Christmas and he saved us a spot. And then we got kicked out of the rental that we’d been put into by the insurance company for six months at that point because they wanted to sell the house. So, this compliment of things happened all at once. We literally just bought a one-way ticket to Indonesia and just left the country. Came back nine weeks later, having backpacked around seven countries with a 7-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 12-year-old and just started producing content in a completely different way.

Lynne: So interesting because something huge like that really just makes you question everything, doesn’t it? 

Chris: I had long been questioning the idea of being in a machine. I think if you’ve gone down the path of being a freelance writer or working for yourself or a contractor or something like that, you’ve already kind of baulked at that system. You’ve baulked at being a hamster in the gears.  I was already down that path. When you have a trauma like we had, you can either just sit back and go dark and reminisce about what you lost and whinge you at it, I guess, in a lot of ways and you’ve got great grounds to do so. Especially in our case where it was a complete and utter accident. You know, like the e-bike wasn’t charging or anything like that, just decided to blow up one day. Or you can just see it as an opportunity. So, we tried really hard to embrace the change as an opportunity and it’s so mentally challenging to do that. It’s not like you just decide that and the next day, hey, I’m now a killer travel journalist travelling around the world with my kids. There’s a lot of dark times, but anything else just seems redundant to me to look at it in any other way.

Lynne: What about the kids? 

Rachel: How has it changed all of you as a family, looking at it now? 

Chris: Well, I guess we’re world wise in a way that we probably wouldn’t have other otherwise been. A big part of doing that Southeast Asia trip was to try and give the kids a sense of perspective because they lost everything that they owned and when you’re young and you don’t have much, that’s your world. Your stuffed toys and it was three weeks after Christmas, so all the Christmas presents and everything and just the room, just having their own room and space, just losing all of that.

By heading over to some countries and we’d go out the back of Indo and just look into a valley and just see it just piled with rubbish. Or go to the markets in Hanoi and just see kids in their school outfits working a stand at 11 o’clock at night and six kids piled on the back of a moped trying to get through, just give them that perspective of how awesome it still is to be alive and to have what we still have.

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: When you started, you came back, and you started writing more travel stories. Is that where you started the YouTube channel or how did that all work? 

Chris: I’d been consulting for a company called Finder. A company that probably many Australians are aware of. A really great company. I’d been actually consulting for them for nine years and working on a lot of their innovations and helping them launch new content pillars and also trying to help the staff and a lot of really intelligent young people at that company, especially when I joined and I had a lot of experience and that was different to the type of world that they live in because they live in a very SEO world, whereas I lived in a very journalist world, chasing stories and breaking exclusives and all that kind of stuff. So that’s how I got involved with the company. At one point I was encouraging them, you’ve got to get into video, we’ve got to get into social, we’ve got to push the company into this new space.

As the innovation’s editor, I guess, that was the role that I called myself. I took a lead in that and there was very low resource, so I just started mucking around with video, doing the scripts, posting the shows. We launched a couple of online TV shows through that time, and I was just in front of camera and just skilling up while helping them find their way.

I was still working for them when the fire happened, but I just didn’t have the time to give them what they needed. So anyway, at this point we had a channel going, it was under my name because it was an experiment, and I was doing all this content for Finder in video form. When they said, look, we just can’t keep going with this because we just don’t have the hours available. I said, well look, what are you going to do with the video channel? And look, we’re just going to put our resources somewhere else. I said, look, can you give the video channel because it’s got my face all over it. It’s got my name all over it. If you’re not going to do anything with it, I don’t want it to let it just rot and they were generous enough to say yes. So, they gave me the channel and I just kind of kicked on with it. Then said to myself, well, what happens if I do a video a day for a year? And I set out on that mission and accomplished that mission through 2024, and a channel built up to a point where it’s generating a decent residual income, but also a lot of opportunity to get access to things early and to interview people and to see people and that provides further content for my other freelance outlets. And that’s how I fell into video, and I just taught myself, schooled myself up and now I can produce and host, I think, world class video, which is great. 

Lynne: Oh, fantastic. So, you’ve got a number of income streams. You’ve got the freelance work, you’ve got YouTube, and you’ve even got your own publishing company, haven’t you?

Chris: Children’s book publishing company.

Lynne: They all complement each other to a point. 

Chris: I basically moved from a mindset of wanting to make other people money. When you’re starting off as a writer and you’re climbing a ladder, and you’re swept up in it all and I was lucky enough to have some very high prestige jobs and that offered up a lot of great opportunities global. I was travelling the world. I was going to sip a fancy red-carpet party and getting access to all these things that no one else is getting access to. You get swept up in it all, and you’re not getting paid great money, but it’s a great time and learning everything. Then at a certain point you get to an age, you’ve got kids, you’ve got a mortgage, you just need more money. At a certain point you realise you’re just getting leveraged by someone and they’re taking all your experience and all your skills and all your ability and what you’re creating and they’re making a great income out of it and you’re making a not-so-great income out of it.

Lynne: That’s magazine really, isn’t it? 

Chris: I was just like; I’ve got to start making money for myself.  So, I started working out ways that I could use the skills that I had to basically monetise my experience and skills in different ways while still doing the freelancing and there’s been mags that I’ve been making as a contractor. One of the mags I’ve been doing for 25 years now, every single month. I still do all that because it provides that baseline income. And now I’ve just been trying to build different income streams, videos, one, the children’s book company was another one, and it came about, I guess. 

Lynne: Interesting.

Rachel: Where does most of your energy go with all these different income streams? Or does it just change from month to month? 

Chris: It changes from month to month. At the moment, I’m super focused on travel, that’s where I’m putting a lot of my energy. It’s mostly because I feel like I’ve got a small window of opportunity to do some travel with my kids. I do family travel content, but I can’t afford to do the great things that we do so in order to be able to take my kids on these experiences and provide this, I need to be able to produce content that’s relevant to the people so that they’re willing to host us.

Everything remains independent. It’s all still an opinion at the end of the day, but it opened the door. Because that’s a big focus for me, I’m putting a lot of energy into it and trying to experiment with producing new content experiences that you can have with travel that no one else is really doing. I’m not sure there’s too many people out there. I certainly haven’t come across them and the feedback I have from the industry is that there’s not too many that can produce editorial video and also written video and then also go and make a children’s book from a resort experience or a cruise or whatever it happens to be. So, trying to produce a unique portal of content for the people out there that are seeking content. 

Ultimately the goal is to also inspire other Australian families, especially those who have gone through any sort of trauma, to look at exploration and travel and destinations as a means of, as a key part of recovery, but also just life. 

Lynne: Is there something that, is a favourite part of this work, or is there something you really love doing? 

Chris: Always loved travelling. I’ve travelled my entire life. My parents were huge travellers. I might be getting the countries wrong, but I’m pretty sure it was, India to England or something. They went in the seventies, a classic and I followed in their footsteps. My now wife and I, when we were 21, went over to Europe, bought the kombi, drove around for 18 months, survived on an apple a day, so I’ve always loved travel. That’s a big part of it, and I love seeing the kids’ faces and the way that they are. There’s so many fantastic moments if you’re just sitting there looking at a massive mountain that you can’t see anywhere in Australia or feeling giant snowflakes coming down or snorkelling, through aquatic waters with manta rays and sharks and, those moments that you can just have with these kids. I love doing it now, and I just can’t wait to see how it shapes them as they grow up. 

Lynne: You certainly get a sense of wonder of all these things when you are with children. 

Rachel: Well, I’m really interested in whenever I see someone with a thriving YouTube channel, I’m always thinking how do they do that? And what are the nuts and bolts between making a YouTube channel pay? How does that all work, and what kind of kit do you need for your video. I know that’s like a two-part question. 

Chris: You don’t need too much in terms of the nuts and bolts. My main piece of tech at the moment, I’ve levelled up as I’ve experimented and come to understand it better, but I’m using a DJI Pocket 3 which is ten centimetres tall, and it fits into your pocket. Then I have this tiny little mic, which also just fits in my pocket. And between those two things, I can shoot 4K quality content. It’s well lit, sounds great, and is even on a gimbal. So, isn’t chop and changey. In an instant I could pull it out of my pocket on a plane and do a plane review and put it back in my pocket and that part of it’s all done in 15 minutes.

Often, I’ll be going somewhere, and I’ll say, I’m going to shoot a hotel, or I’m going to shoot you resort or what happens to be, and they’ll say, oh gee, okay, so how much camera equipment do we need to deal with? I say, no, it’s really quite small and I shoot photos now on my phone. I used to carry around massive. $7,000 camera with a $3,000 lens on the back of it and it actually got to a point where I’d come back from some of those trips and the phone photos would actually be better quality, because you lose quality to the distance. That’s the biggest problem because you can’t zoom in with quality. 

For those more intimate shots, the phone’s enough, so you can actually do it quite light. And I think a lot of potentially freelancers who do a lot of content based on activity, whether that could just be going to an event in the city or going to a live show or going down and speaking to somebody to get some quotes or whatever, probably could benefit by just having that on them and just being able to go, look, do you mind if I just shoot this? Or, just take a little bit of video and finding little ways to just kind of get that live. 

Where it becomes quite time intensive is in editing. A lot of times when I talk about video with almost anyone their minds immediately go to shorts. In my particular sphere with travel, the immediate thought is, like jumping out of the pool in a bikini, flash, food, flash, hotel room, flash, sunset, flash, music, all inspiring and everything that lasts 30 seconds. Whereas I go in and I just put a review yesterday of a resort from the Maldives and it’s an hour and six minutes long video. It’s a really intensive, deep dive into the subject and the benefit of that on the YouTube side of things is for the nuts and bolts that you mentioned, is that it’s highly engaged. You get long watch hours, so you drive your watch hours up. There’s multiple opportunities through that for YouTube to sprinkle ads in a way that’s not massively invasive and then that kind of generates your revenue and the SEO side of a video that’s long, especially when it’s narrated the entire time, is massive. They rank really well, so you’re not only just appearing on YouTube, but you’re also appearing on Google search. A lot of my video content will not only be at the top of YouTube, but also at the top of Google and then it gets shared as well into Reddit and Facebook posts and things like that. So that seems to be what’s working well for me in terms of building it up, but that’s where the work comes in at that backend. 

The actual filming side of it, once you’re comfortable with the technology and comfortable talking to the technology because as a writer, as a journalist who’s looking at looking to a product, you probably know it better than anyone else in the world at that moment, other than the people who made it. You can usually just talk about it without having to think too much about it. 

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: I know a few like writers who have got YouTube channels, but like you say, they’ve experimented, like I know at Rachel’s List we did just shorts, and we’ve done that with the podcast as well, haven’t we, Lynne? We’ve just done short things to try and promote it. It’s really interesting you say the longer that you can talk for or the longer videos, and obviously that’s where like video comes in for the podcast, say, if you put that on YouTube, then things start to move. So that’s really interesting.

Lynne: So, was it about the certain amount of videos that you have on your channel or is it about views that you get the income from YouTube. How does it work? 

Chris: Look, it’s interesting. You get your money out of companies putting ads against your content, right? So, you could do like a great video of an elephant for ten minutes in Africa or something like that. But who’s advertising against that? Maybe some African tours, but if it’s an elephant in a zoo or out at Dubbo, something like that, you’re not going to get strong advertising against that. But if you do something like a car review, then you’ve got the different car, you’ve got the car insurance companies, you’ve got car accessory companies, Autobarn, those types of things. You’ve got all these companies that might want to advertise their product in front of that kind of keyword, if that makes sense. 

You don’t need necessarily a ton of videos if the content you’re doing is very niche specific, has strong advertising support behind it and you’re doing it well. You don’t need to have a thousand videos. You can have 30 videos, but if they’re the best 30 videos on those 30 things against something that’s going to get advertised against, you will make money. 

Having said that, obviously the more videos you have, the more things you’ve got out there in the world. I always think of it not just in video, but when I was running magazines and building websites and everything about, it’s like a spider web, right? The more tendrils you can throw out into the ether, into the internet and capture an eye or capture and pull it into that centre, then the more you’re going to build and the more money you’re going to make and the more subscribers you’re going to get or the more views and traffic you’re going to get. So that’s where shorts come into play and things like that. So, you might, for example, do a resort review like I did yesterday, and then I’ll do a bunch of shorts on some of the things that we did on that and throw that out there to feed people back into the longer, bigger review because the shorts don’t make money. You’ve got to get millions of views to get money from a short. They’ve got to go viral to get money. So, you can make more off a thousand views on that good hotel review than you can make off a hundred thousand views on a hotel short, if that makes sense?

Lynne: So interesting.

Rachel: So, are you really strategic in what you decide to review? Do you think about the advertising side of things and how that might translate before you choose what your content strategy is going to be? 

Chris: If I was smart. I mean that’s one of the post-fire effects, right is that I’m finding it less and less easy to find the energy to do the stuff that I’m not interested in. I can see the analytics; I know what videos are making money. They’re things like mattress reviews, air fryer reviews, guides to getting the camera to work. I’ve got a video on how to fix a broken zipper on a mattress, which gets a great amount of traffic and makes good money. That’s a chore. 

Lynne: That’s not the content you want to make.

Chris: Whereas pre-fire, I just would’ve been whatever, I’m just grinding here. I’m in the game. I’m making this, I’m trying to create multiple residual income streams here. I just would’ve been at it like I was every single day for a year. Every day I’m doing video. But now I’m just much more focused on doing what I enjoy.

The reality is, to answer your question, yes, you can see the analytics, yes, you can see specifically what’s going to make you money and yes, you can push the button twice, three times, four times. I have done that video, for example, of a review of the Dyson Wash G1, which was a stick vacuum that came out last year. The video blew up. It’s got over a hundred thousand views. It’s a 20-minute-long video or something like that. It’s made heaps of money for me. So I went, okay, well I’ll do another one on this where I’ll just burrow in on something small, like, how good is it on carpet? Or how do you clean it, and they also do really well. 

Lynne: Yes. 

Chris: How many times can you do a video about a vacuum before you just. 

Rachel: I suppose that has to be a mixture a bit, doesn’t it? Make money, do stuff I love, passion. 

Chris: I need to be smarter about it. But I’m just so hyper focused on the travel at the moment that I’ve actually just split my main channel off and created a channel specifically focused on travel because the travel and the tech and entertainment combo was, it started off as an experiment, like I said, with Finder and then it built to something that was significant. Then I had two really different types of content. So, I’ve just split the travel off. Now I’m going through that original grind again of having to get enough content on there that YouTube acknowledges that I exist, and Google acknowledges that I exist, and people find it and help spread the word. That’s why I’m just at the moment just trying to do travel, travel, travel, travel, travel. 

Lynne: Makes sense.

Rachel: Apart from the kid’s book stuff. Talk to us about your self-publishing company, how that came about and how you operate it. 

Chris: Sure. Look at the top we were talking about the early days, ACP and that kind of thing, and all the money there was around back in those days, when you had things like a sub editor? 

Lynne: Yes.

Rachel: Yes. 

Chris: Art directors. Whoa! 

Rachel: I’ll leave the subs.

Chris: And a freelance budget. When by the time I got through to the GFC and moments like that. We had was it, Y2K and then the internet, and then phones, and then the GFC, and then influencers, and then COVID. You know, there’s all these things that have happened, so you can never really rest on your laurels. And through that time, especially in the GFC, so much budget got pulled back from the magazines we were making. I started taking a much more hands on role with the production of everything. I was no longer just a writer. I was no longer just an editor. I was soon a designer, I was soon in marketing, going out, pitching for ads with the sales guys and pitching a mag basically, and taking on multiple roles. By the time I got to 32 I was so proficient in a lot of those skill sets that I didn’t need someone else to do it. 

I could just design the magazine myself. I had a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, roughly, and we were in the car one day driving back from the Blue Mountains and I used to just come up with stories to just entertain the kids when they were crying and whinging in the backseat and you are just trying to get home.

Lynne: Yes. 

Chris: I told this story one day to my kids, and they both loved it. They were just silent, and they were just listening to the entire story. And then later on I was talking to them and they remembered parts of the story, and it really resonated with them. And I went, well, why don’t I just make a story? I can do this, I can all the skillset to completely create this. So, I did it. I wrote the story. I went and found an artist from the Philippines. I did up a whole bunch of image briefs and we worked together to create some art and built a cover. And I learned how to do Amazon. I learned how to do Apple. At this stage, I was doing apps, so we’d built digital magazines for the last couple of magazines that I’d been running, and I’d learn how to build an app and launch an app. So, we turned the books into fancy apps for iOS and I did it and it was such a fun process, and I was able to read the book with my kids and this is great. I was making money on Amazon and so I ended up just doing more. I did four or five books in that particular series, and I started making it a one shot and all the creative ideas I was having for kids, book stories I just started doing. 

Sadly, there’s still about 40 books sitting on my computer with all the art, all done, all written, everything, just waiting for me to design them and, and upload them from that era. But what ended up happening was that I saw that there was this massive hole between how much it took to self-publish a book. How much effort I had to put in, and how much it would cost for me to do it if you were going to pay me versus what the industry was charging. So, you had traditional publishers, you had these kind of boutique publishers that were coming out, helping people self-publish as Kindle became a thing and Amazon started punching books out and Apple was taking books and there was like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars difference. Not only that, they then demanded pieces of the pie. We want royalties, we’re going to own 30% of this, you don’t get to choose the cover. We are taking this creative control and everything like that. So, I came in and went, well, we can just do this for you for a fraction of the price. I’m still going to make a good income out of it, and then we can give you guys a book that’s realistic to what the indie publishing scene is like because 95% of people, 99% of people aren’t going to make millions of dollars out of their books. They might creep into the thousands over time and started building these products for people that were just about the passion of creating it, the hobby of creating it, and just being able to read something to their kids or grandkids. And so that built into something that started to grow and grow to a point where I didn’t have time to make my own books anymore because we were getting these authors from all around the world that were hearing about us and coming to us and saying, well, we want to do this kids book, and I’ve got no idea how to do it and we would just basically slot in and make that happen for them. 

Lynne: Oh, so interesting. So, what sorts of people come to you for help with self-publishing? Are they people with that idea? Do they have a big plan or hope that they’ve got a bestseller, or they just want something to read to their grandkids?

Chris: A bit of a mix. You do get people that like, we’ll jump on chats with people, and they’ll be like, these are my plans, and this is when we’re going to sell the movie rights, and this is when we’re going to do this. And you’ve just, got to bring them back down and say, look, it’s highly likely you’re going to end up disappointed no matter how good your book is. There’s probably a thousand self-published books that are way better than Harry Potter out there that no one’s ever going to see.  That’s just the reality of this scene. You’ve got to have a smaller bar for success. We always say, build it to world class quality. Build it so it’s good enough that if someone finds it and it gets shared and it builds to something that it’s not going to end up going past Oprah Winfrey’s desk or something and then just look like it was made by. 

Lynne: Somebody in a shed. 

Chris: Somebody who didn’t know how to do design or did something literally in a Word doc and then just published it, which is what people were doing. Bring people down to that level. But more and more it’s just about people who want to either share a message with their kids or their community or their group. We are working with someone at the moment who is an OT, and she’s created this really lovely book to help people with anxiety, kids with anxiety. She’s done such a great job. So, we’re putting that book together for her it’s part of her profession. She wants to get this book out there. I actually released a free book at the start of COVID called Superheroes Wear Masks. I had this idea about trying to work out a way to help kids deal with this foreign, alien phenomenon of having to wear a mask everywhere. I just did this little children’s book about Batman wears a mask, the doctor wears a mask, firefighters wear a mask, just try and dumb it down for them. And then the feedback I got, and I just released it for free. It wasn’t a money-making thing, I just put it out for free and the feedback I got was, it really helped kids with autism. There was a lot of parents who were with children with autism, who reached out and thanked us a lot because the book really helped. I think that’s where it really works well. But we also do a lot of nonfiction. We’ve done stuff with like divorce counsellors and historians and things like that. So, people who just have a wealth of knowledge and they just want to get it out there.

Lynne: So interesting.

Rachel: It is! How much are you part of that process? Are you doing everything from helping them with the concept and an idea that’s going to actually work out there? Are you editing it for them and designing it and doing print on demand, getting it into Amazon? Is it a whole package that you sell, or do you have multiple ones? 

Chris: No, it’s the whole package. So basically, we have a chat to the author. You get some authors who are just really hands off. They’re just like, you’re the experts just tell me what to do. I’ve got this loose story idea, and I don’t know what to do next. I just want to go live and I’m happy to pay someone to help me make it happen. You’ve got other people that really want to learn the process. So, they’re much more tech savvy. They’re happy to go in and watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials on how to use InDesign or school themselves up, and so they’re just looking for almost a coaching experience. I’m going to do this book with you in the hope that the next book I can do myself kind of experience. You suss out what they want and what they need. We get a lot of authors, for example, where someone’s written a story and they’ve got a family member who’s an artist, so they don’t need the art.

Generally, I don’t like writing the stories for people because then that becomes my creative work. But we do a lot of what I call developmental edits. People will give us a story and they’re just not writers and so there’s lots of story arc issues, lots of conceptual issues, but especially when you’re making kids’ books because you’ve got the visual that you’ve got to play into. You can’t do something as simple as have two different action sequences in one stanza because you can’t visualise that very easily. Then we’ll create image briefs if they don’t have an artist already, find an artist, get the art done. I’ll design the entire book up. We’ll create marketing plans. We will upload the book to the process that they want. But our big thing at the end of it is we then give all the files to the author. As a creator of content, probably like yourselves, nothing grinds my gears more than being held for ransom on your creative product by someone. 

Lynne: Yes. 

Chris: I can’t stand the idea. So, for us you get everything all the InDesign files, all the PSDs, everything and if you want to use this again, great, we’re here. But you don’t have to because you’ve got everything. 

Lynne: So interesting. Do you love this juggling all these different income streams? Because it seems to me that your career has really reflected the way we all need to move, having different income streams, different mediums. Do you think, especially as a former journalist, do you think that’s where we all need to go? 

Chris: I didn’t end up here by choice. Look, it’s not great juggling so many different income streams. But it facilitates a life experience. I don’t like sitting in an office when the surf is pumping or when the kids want to go fishing or need to kick a ball or be picked up from sport. I didn’t want to be sitting in an office for those moments anymore. It’s more about, I piece together a living by finding ways to monetise what I’m willing to do in the cracks between what’s most important, which is my family. 

That’s how I’ve ended up with multiple income streams. So, is it somewhere that I think many people will end up in or should consider? I think that’s probably where a lot of people will end up in, and it frustrates me when I talk to former colleagues who are, the first thing they say is, well, oh no one’s got any freelance budget. Like, oh God, so-and-so’s not doing content anymore. Or this, it’s so hard. You know, it’s just a common bit of feedback and I’m like, mate, you’ve got so many skills, you don’t have to just pitch a story, write that story, and then walk away from everything that that story could have also offered you. It could have offered you all this insight into writing a little book, or it could have offered you all this insight into doing a video or a podcast or whatever it happens to be. I think it’s going to become ever more challenging, especially with AI to just be super focused on the hustle of pitching an article and then writing that and then moving on to the next article. Especially if you’re a newcomer, you don’t have those relationships. 

Rachel: That’s definitely what we’re seeing at Rachel’s List as well. What does an average week look like for you? Is there one? 

Chris: No. I’d say there’s no weeks that are the same. No two weeks that are the same. 

Lynne: That’s fun in itself, isn’t it? 

Chris: It’s challenging. You have to be super disciplined. It becomes harder and harder to be disciplined the more that you get older and the more that other things take your fancy and more that your kids grow into what they need you to do. So, the only consistencies in my life are that I’ve got to deal with the kids in the morning. I’ve got to deal with the kids in the afternoon and night. So, I do a lot of work from nine to three or four and then I’ll work again, say from seven thirty/eight to ten thirty/eleven at night. If I was better, I would be getting up at six and I think just punching out a couple of critical hours in the morning. But I’m just out of that routine at the moment, and you’ve got to work, you got to really push hard to work that into your routine to just get your body clock to function like that, and the late nights then impact your ability to do that in the morning. So, there’s no average day. I lose a stupid amount of time to emails.

Lynne: Yes. We can relate to that.

Rachel: But it’s also what you actually are good at. Lynne, you are very good at getting up at  six am and doing all the things and by nine o’clock when I’m just starting my day, I have gotten up before nine o’clock, but I’m doing drop school drop off and I might have an exercise workout or something, but you’ve done so much by nine o’clock, whereas I feel like I’ve done next to nothing and then a lot of my stuff happens at ten o’clock at night when my brain is dead. 

Lynne: Oh, yes. I get up at five thirty to do a Pilates class at six.

Rachel: That doesn’t compute for me at all. There’s no way. 

Chris: But you bring up a good point there with the exercise, especially easier getting older, like I just said, it’s a job that you do sitting at a computer. So, finding the time to also get moving eats into every day a lot. Walk around the block once every couple hour or getting up for Pilates. That’s amazing. I think that’s fantastic, Lynne. I wish I could do that. 

Lynne: It keeps me moving. Keeps me upright. So that’s important. 

Chris: And it probably ends up being better content because you’re going to have that exercise. It gets the blood flowing. It gets the brain working. 

Lynne: My brain’s good after Pilates. It’s not so good when Rachel’s getting into hitting her straps at ten o’clock at night though.

Rachel: And sending all my emails and she wakes up and goes, what the fuck? But anyway, it’s good, we cover the whole 24-hour period. 

Lynne: We do, we do between us. We’ve talked a little bit about this, about that whole cash flow thing. Seems to me that the sort of things you are working on quite large projects, is that hard to maintain a decent, cash flow, particularly when you’ve got kids, and you’ve probably got a mortgage and all that sort of stuff. How do you manage that? 

Chris: Look, I’m lucky from the perspective that there’s been certain contract jobs that I’ve been doing for a couple of decades now. So even though it’s a challenge to be motivated to do, I think I’m working on issue 261 and I was on issue zero of one magazine I do – Crash magazine’s, it’s kids’ magazine. To get motivated for it, but that base level of money’s going to come in, it’s going to pay for the food or chip into the mortgage or whatever then that gives you that bit of freedom to then experiment with the other freelance options that are available or creating new income streams. If you’re just starting along that path, you got to do both and then as the income stream starts to get a little bit more significant through the things that you might have monetised in your life, whether it’s the podcast or the YouTube or the kids’ books or whatever you found, how to do it, the more you can back away from the hustle of the freelance world. That’s how I’ve managed the cash flow and in recent times, been more supportive of my partner doing work.  Through a lot of our lives, my wife and I, because of this horrible situation that we are in this world, I was getting paid more and she was getting paid less, which is really frustrating for both sexes I think and because it didn’t allow us to flip. At a point where I was more creative and had the ideas for these monetisation things than to flip around so that she could be more of a breadwinner because she’s brilliant at what she does, she’s fantastic. Monetarily it wasn’t feasible. But then once I got that cash flow stone to come in from those monetised avenues, then we could flip it a bit more. And so now she’s been able to take on more contract work and because I can spend more time doing the day to day that then also helps. So, the dynamic between your household’s income also changes, if that makes sense. 

Lynne: That does make sense. Interesting.

Rachel: It’s a constant juggle. Definitely. I know that my husband and I try and share that child stuff, but so often I might be doing more drop offs, or he might be doing more pickups depending on if he’s just in back-to-back meetings, like endlessly because he works in IT and. 

Lynne: It’s a juggle. 

Rachel: The eternal juggle. Oh my god. Well, we could talk to you all day, Chris but it’s really interesting to talk to another journo and how they’ve carved out, a totally different career and that’s just fascinating to me. But we do ask a question of all our guests, and you’ve talked a little bit about some of your tech kit, but do you have any other digital tools that you’d be really lost without that help keep you organised and that sort of thing. 

Chris: Look, I think you never underestimate the value of a good computer, and I think a lot of us, we might be working on laptops that are four, five, six or even longer years old, and especially PCs get really bogged down and old and tired. And so doing strategic upgrades on my computer. In fact, I’ve got all the parts to build a computer at the moment. I’m going to build a new computer, which is going to halve the time it takes to do my work. The video that I just uploaded, the video that is an hour and six-minute-long video was in 4K. It took five or so hours to render. It’s five hours that I can’t actually do another video on the computer at the same time. You find other things to do, but come September, I don’t know how much of your audience will know this, but come September, the NBN is unlocking the internet fans. So, they’re basically fattening a pipe opening a bandwidth, and all the internet fans for fibre to the premises homes will be going up dramatically. So, a hundred-megabyte download, twenty-megabyte upload plan is going to five hundred and fifty at no extra cost.

Lynne: Wow!

Chris: So, I would recommend making sure you’ve got fibre to the premises. So do whatever, go negotiate with the ISP, get that happening, and make sure you’ve got a router system in your house that can handle those speeds. So, WIFI seven, it’s a bit of an investment, but once that internet speed’s really gone up, so much of what you’re doing from just sending emails, uploading files, all that stuff is going to become massively quicker. Having that kind of computer and that internet connection optimised can save you half an hour, an hour, even more a day and that makes a big difference over the course of a week and obviously a year. 

Rachel: That’s a great tip.

Lynne: It is, particularly when you’re working with big files like videos. I mean, we obviously have big files with the audio with the podcast as well.

Chris: Or images or design files, any of that stuff. 

Rachel: Amazing. 

Lynne: Well, thank you Chris. It’s been such a good chat. I think we’ve learned so much. That’s really interesting. It’s made me think about my career and all the different options out there, I think. Tell us where our audience can find you. 

Chris: So, Old Mate Media is the publishing company for the children’s book stuff. Anyone who wants to get a book made, please feel free to reach out. I’d love any of your listeners that are inspired to travel, especially parents, to come and help me out by subscribing to that new channel I mentioned earlier. So, we’re about to embark in two weeks on a two-month trip around Europe which is all about getting content together and that’ll all be going live. So that new channel is at Motivated Travel – youtube.com/@motivated_travel and the name comes from what motivated us to travel which was the fire and that idea of getting out and pushing our boundaries and seeing the world. So, any support that, I can get on that channel would be greatly appreciated at the moment because like I said, the grind of building things up from scratch, is something lots of us will be experiencing more and more in the coming months and years, especially with AI.

Rachel: For sure. On a completely different note, I’d love to know how you get it over the line with the school taking the kids for two months. 

Chris: You know what? I wrote an article about this yesterday for the New Zealand Herald, so specifically about this. So, the school is actually really positive. I think the educators, especially post-fire, they understood our circumstances, but I think that educators understand how much you’re going to learn from that experience and it’s amazing how much in the moment to moment of doing that, because I’ve done it before, we did after the fire, we did the two months around Southeast Asia, you just involve the kids in the moment to moment. So even if it’s something like, okay kids, where the car’s going eighty kilometres an hour and it’s one hundred and thirty kilometres to the hotel, when am I going to get there? Or you know, this fried rice costs eighteen million Vietnamese dong or something, and one million dong is worth five dollars, how much is the fried rice costing us? That kind of stuff. We get the kids to write a daily diary. They’re expected to write at least a page on their experiences that day and interpret it and then you’ve got all the geography of working out maps, where you’re going, how long are you going to get there, finding things to do. You’ve got the history and the culture of visiting places. We went to Angkor Wat on that trip. You’re doing puppet shows in Ho Chi Minh, you go out the Mekong River, Ha Long Bay, all the kind of cool stuff that we did just informs them so much. Learning new languages, new religions, the smells. Being out there and walking through a street market or a night market and learning about all these new things that can happen out there. I think they learn so much more anyway and then also just picking that right window, so you are not going over a start of a new year or so you’re not going over, obviously exams, an exam period or sport finals or things like that are important to the kids. You find a window and you go for it. 

Lynne: Fantastic.

Rachel: Amazing. Well, thank you again, Chris, for being our guest this week. That brings us to the end of the show, but we appreciate everyone out there who’s listening and who is leaving ratings and reviews for us.

Lynne: Fantastic. And I’ll put all of Chris’s details in the show notes in your podcast app. Head there to get all the details and connect with him and follow him and his family around Europe. 

Rachel: That’ll be some great content, for sure. 

Lynne: Alright, thanks a lot and we’ll be back next week. 

Rachel: Okay, bye. 

Lynne: Bye.

Chris:  Thank you. 

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Credits:

Connect with Chris via Old Mate Media, https://oldmatemedia.com/

or Motivated Travel https://www.youtube.com/@motivated_travel

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co