Other Stuff

  I started this post years ago, but the topic came up again recently at a business conference in Saigon. The speaker, John Logan of Consulting Unleashed, said something like this: Why would you want to grind or hustle? Don’t force it if it’s not working. There was a lot of confusion in the room, because entrepreneurs are familiar with …

  There are generally two places when writers quit. The first is after their first, second or third book. They expected everything to be easy and found out that publishing is hard. They assumed their book would be successful on its own merits, despite having an unprofessional cover, blurb and website. They thought it would connect with readers even though …

If you’re thinking about becoming a writer, you might be asking yourself whether you’re “Good Enough” to go professional. The short answer is YES, because quality doesn’t matter. Let me explain: Readers read for content, not quality.  Yes, it needs to be clean and edited enough not to be distracting. I shoot for less than 1 typo in 10,000 words …

It’s really hard to describe how to make a great author website, so I made a video critiquing 15 real-life examples. These aren’t *perfect* author websites, but they are representative of the type of websites most authors have. If you watch the whole video, you’ll learn a lot about setting up a website for authors. However: None of it really matters …

  Optin Monster Form [thrive_2step id=’11978′]Thrive Leads Form[/thrive_2step] Sumo Forms Want to split a castle with me? At least once a year I spend a few weeks at an exclusive writing retreat in a European castle... and one lucky author gets a free spot. Sign up to win!   Want to make a living doing what you love? Join over 20,000 …

Tari Akpodiete made this awesome chart of cover design resources.  Click the image to view the PDF in Dropbox, then zoom in to see all the links and content.   Follow Tari on Twitter Want to split a castle with me? At least once a year I spend a few weeks at an exclusive writing retreat in a European castle... …

For the past year I’ve been using giveaways to build my platform – resulting in my shares, more engagement, more traffic, a huge email list and more book sales. It works great. Here’s the problem: Most authors don’t know how to use book giveaways well. Most software is expensive.  I now use KingSumo, which is best for viral sharing and …

This week a few issues have brought up an issue that needs mentioning. I think there’s a reluctance in high-brow literary circles towards money, or marketing, or sales. Many indie authors talk about craft or quality but hate the idea of marketing their books. “Profit” is not the intended result of writing and publishing, for many authors, even traditionally published …

My wife and I have been travelling full time for the last 5 years, and I’ve been living abroad since the early 2000’s.  One of the most important factors in our travel plans is connecting with friends in the digital nomad community; lifestyle satisfaction and productivity improves when I can meetup and talk business with like-minded individuals (people who love …

  This has been an interesting week for me. It’s snowing in Oregon, I’m nostalgic; Obama just gave his final speech. The future is uncertain but we need to decide the world we want to live in and take action to make it a reality. 2016 was a year of big wins and first for me, but a lot of …