There’s nothing like teaching a workshop on something to both clarify your thinking and beliefs, then inspire new insights on a topic. Here’s a little something I puzzled through while writing my workshop for RWA last year. In indie publishing circles (and a lot of other marketing), you’ll often find people talking about sales funnels. The […]
Elizabeth George writes a journal for every novel, logging thoughts, ideas, and problems before she starts her writing day. Every day, she runs through the same pattern: read an entry from an old journal from previous novels, then write a new entry about the book she’s currently working on. This habit gives her the scope […]
For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and […]
Some weeks, everything works smoothly. You stick to your routine, your projects progress smoothly, your business runs like clockwork and delivers, just as it should. Some weeks, everything is chaos. Work demands sudden and necessary stretches of overtime that throw your routine into chaos, just as deadlines come due on other projects, and your support […]
Lead generation is basically marketing speak for “how will you initiate interest in your product or service.” It’s not something many writers are encouraged to think about — there is a mindset, more prevalent in other genres than here in the romance community — that once the book is done, it generates interest simply because […]
Today I turn 45, and in lieu of the traditional god-awful birthday selfie, you get a semi-awful birthday close-up of my cat saying Good Morning. Gods, it’s been a year. The last twelve months have seen plagues and floods, a bunch of books getting published, a couple of ambitions projects started (and, currently, shelved for […]
One of the most useful parts of Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is the breakdown of the five modes of capital used in the publishing industry and its adjacent fields. I’ve used these to build a publishing company, guide my writing career, and solve all manner of problems. But I also see a gap, born of […]
The yellow smiley face was first designed in 1963. State Mutual Life Insurance hired the designer, Harvey Ball, to create the logo attached to a company-wide “make friends” campaign after a merger decimated morale. They paid him $45 for the creation of two eyes, a smile, and a yellow circle. Nobody trademarked the smiley face, […]
We’ve been watching Doom Patrol, a television show that riffs heavily on Grant Morrison’s ground-breaking run on the comics in the late eighties and early nineties. Naturally, this sent me scurrying off to revisit Morrison’s philosophy of narrative as a hypersigil—an extension of the chaos magic philosophy of creating a glyph that codifies your intention […]
The narrative poetics of comic books are driven by the stories relationship with the physical page. Everything must be in a particular page-count, with each scene allotted a certain number of panels and pages, and certain narrative beats work better at the bottom right of a two-page spread just before we flip the page. Prose […]
We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your […]
It doesn’t take much to disrupt a habit once it’s established. Our habitual behaviours are often context specific, triggered to run in response to a particular form of stimuli. Go on a two-week break from work and those routines that run like clockwork go out the window — making it easier to adopt new habits […]
