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Year-Long Workshop: Get Your Book Out of the Someday Box in 2014
What if I could lead you by the hand and promise that in 2014 you’d finally finish that novel? What’s more, what if I gave you greatly increased chances that it would be good? Is that worth paying for?...
View ArticleActing on 1 Idea (Guest Post by Chris Taylor)
Chris Taylor gave me the nudge I needed to start acting on all the books I read. Here’s some background on what he does, and why. I’m including the feature-length version of Chris’ bio because it’s so...
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What Are You Reading?
[photo by Zsuzsanna Kilian]Writers are readers. We get our ideas for stories, characters, complications and solutions from reading. We pick up new words and new ways to use old words. We absorb...
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Publishing Yourself is (One Part of) the Correct Choice (Guest Post by Ed Teja)
In last Friday’s newsletter I stated pretty emphatically that self-publishing was, both artistically and commercially, the right choice. Long-time reader and valued curmudgeon Ed Teja took a different...
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Can’t Hurry Love. Or Marketing.
Since I started the focused marketing of A Long, Hard Look, giving away copies in exchange for reviews and to get attention on Goodreads, the total results (over a the past 5 weeks) have been...
View ArticleHow Could Learning More Lead to Knowing Less?
I really miss the show Lie to Me. Chap named Cal Lightman (played brilliantly by Tim Ross) is a lie expert. He reads what are called microexpressions in the human face, and can determine whether or...
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Standing Next to Smart People
I used to try to be the smartest person in the room. What that means is I made sure that others knew how smart I was, and if someone knew something I didn’t, it was intimidating so I avoided them....
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Learn to Love Marketing, or Give Your Books Away (or Both)
Almost every author I talk to wishes someone else would sell their books for them. The few exceptions are those who, by nature or training, enjoy marketing their books. They’ve learned enough to have a...
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Following Every Rabbit Down a Hole: The Endless Search for All the Marketing
I started reading an article about how Amazon search really works and why authors need to know this. I had to look up “lemmatisation” and shortly thereafter my eyes glazed over and I gave up. Maybe I’m...
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Some Really Bad Writing Advice
I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve read this sentence: The best way to learn writing is to write. It comes mostly from pantsers who don’t want to learn story structure, who think it’s a...
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Why You Don’t Write and What You Can Do About It
To begin, tell me a little bit about yourself. How many of these have you experienced in your writing life during the past two years? I’ll include checkboxes so you can keep track. Never finding the...
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