Since I started writing fiction, I learned my design skills and art background make me really good at visualizing scenes. I even developed some mental tricks for creating powerful, resonant scenes that stick in people’s minds. I started thinking of each scene as one perfect picture, with a flash of color to draw the eye – an object representing the …

I got a negative review today. It’s not bad; actually it’s pretty good for a negative review… because it’s complaining about how I’m choosing to publish, while admitting the writing is good and she’ll probably buy the next book. Negative reviews like that are probably better than positive reviews. People don’t really trust 5 star reviews and most people will …

Yesterday I sent out an email about how I published 4 books in 3 months. I didn’t write them all in 3 months, they were all half written already and I finished them. Still, I got some skeptical comments, for example about how I skipped the editing process (oh the horror!). But I also got an email saying I was …

For the past 2 years I’ve been procrastinating on my PhD program. Classes were hard, but I finished my credits with a high GPA. That’s not the problem. One of the requirements for graduation is submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal and getting it published. This was a major hurdle for me. In part, because I don’t like writing …

This video is about some of the major platforms you can use to market your books – and how to use them (without being annoying or spammy). I also talk about repurposing content, using LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, answering questions on Quora, Reddit and Facebook, and using Goodreads to show up #1 in Google for your exact genre. Want to …

These could easily be three separate topics but I’m lumping them together because they form one branch of my marketing efforts… repurposing your content. Let’s say you wrote a great blog post and you want more traffic. Turn your blog post into a Powerpoint (I hate Powerpoint actually, I use Google Slides). Then make a video of you giving the …

A few weeks ago I got obsessed with adult coloring books, after realizing that about half of the top bestsellers on Amazon fall into this category, and that even the boring ones are doing pretty well (top 1000 or so, any are in the top 100). In contrast, my fiction is closer to 10,000, which means I’m selling about 10 …

A month ago I published my first fiction. I was stressed about it. I checked my ranking every 20 minutes. And I wrote two major tutorials chronicling the experience, including all the stuff I did to make my book a bestseller. Yesterday I published two more. And it was so .  much . easier … Firstly, I built a huge …

This blog has always been a place for random half-baked insights, but in 2018 I’m going to be more deliberate about what kind of content I share and post. I’ve also decided to focus on ONE long epic heavily researched article on each major topic or challenge facing creative entrepreneurs, instead of a hundred short articles. I’ve also decided to …

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