Success in any field comes down to a couple of things, and I’m going to give them to you because I’m sick of watching the SAME questions pop up on every forum I’m in, on repeat, every week. Are you ready? Here’s what it takes to have success in ANY field, or ANY platform, for
I love launch emails. Launch emails are when all the time you spend on your mailing list becomes worth it. If you stick with me to the bottom of this post, I’m going to give you my 17-day Kickstarter email strategy, but first I need to take a hard right tangent. If you just want
Since March, I have been on 81 podcasts, assuming I have not miscounted. In every one, they ask me how I became a writer, and I’ve answered a lot of different ways, but the one I keep coming back to is that I never knew that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. When I
A few days ago my friend said to me “I’m just so frustrated that when I try I still screw up.” I smiled at him and said “Of course you do. That’s the whole point.” And it’s true. Doing nothing leads to making no mistakes, but any time you try ANYTHING, you are going to
One of the interesting things about insomnia is that you have all sorts of extra time to do things that you would never imagine doing in your entire life, like adding up all the costs of your novels against all the costs of your graphic novels. But, that is the world I live in many
In the past couple of months, I’ve been on A LOT of podcasts, and most of them haven’t come out yet. I’ve been recording 3-5 a week, and sometimes up to 10 a week for the past few months. People have often asked me how I do it, so I’m just going to make this
I was just talking with somebody in a thread who was complaining about how nobody wants to help promote their stuff, even though they promote other people. Meanwhile, they were defensive to everybody in the thread, and their grammar was horrible. Like so bad that you could barely understand what they were saying. So, I’m
I was once unemployed for 99 weeks during The Great Recession, where I maxed out literally ALL of the additional weeks of benefit Obama gave to people. So, I know something about unemployment, if nothing else. So, here goes some UNEMPLOYMENT tips, which is different from work at home tips. 1 – Pick a
Question from a forum, and my response: Q: How important do you think it is to stick to a narrow genre as a writer? I’m looking at the next book and, somewhat annoyingly, it seems that the idea that keeps bubbling to the surface is a comedy/romance. I’m cool with that but do you feel
People often ask me if it’s worth crowdfunding your book to get the resources you need to publish. I generally say “no” – because Kickstarter won’t give you an audience, nor help you figure out how to package and position your book to appeal to them. Plus, first time authors drastically over-estimate how much it...
It’s weird to be on panels and have other panelists say “Wow, you know a lot about this topic. How did you learn so much?” Once I get over my assumption that they are mocking me and realize it’s a genuine compliment, I think about how many thousands of hours I spent studying publishing, and
The problem with being a creative human is that the act of doing a thing makes you better at that thing, so we will naturally think our work isn’t good enough forever, because we always get better in the making of it. Similarly, you will never be any good to most people, because most people
