ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished.  It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way that wasn’t useful; they could service clients in Europe or American at a reasonable price, but shipping POD products to Australia was…well, prohibitive. But the nice thing about the new job is having the spoons to dig and research/try stuff out, rather than staring at my to-do list in abject horror. Over the last few weeks, I dug into POD merch options and found a place that actually ticked all the boxes I had around POD products. And since Eclectic Projects exists to try out stuff, serving as Brain Jar’s

When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around. Back in January, mornings were a struggle, and I slowly worked through the stuff that’s changed to find solutions. At first, I blamed the issues on new medication that left me groggy and prone to dozing off in the mornings (aided, in part, by the addition of a daily Wordle). Going to bed earlier and shifting the Wordle check-in until after 8 AM has helped, but it didn’t quite get me back into a writing frame of mind. So I started tracking where else my day was going astray and quickly realized a common point: sitting down to work on my desktop right after I drink my coffee. The desktop in question is new, and basically a beast of a computer compared to my other devices. A massive upgrade, given I’ve primarily worked off laptops for a few years. I love writing on a desktop, and miss having a space where work can take place… but in January, with the unofficial lockdown that accompanied Australia’s Omicron wave of COVID, it’s also became the primary workspace for my day job at Brisbane Writers Festival. Working on a festival program is stressful, especially when you’re not in synch with the person who has

I recently waxed nostalgic about the heady days of 2008 to 2009, when it felt like my fiction writing career tracked along with far more promise than it does today. I was focused on my writing career to the exclusion of everything else, a host of stories were published and opportunities offered, and things felt possible in a way they don’t right now. But a quick survey of the context in which I did all that work is pretty illuminating: I was younger, newly single, and looking for distraction. I was newly involved in the spec fic scene, and therefore a novelty. Social media was relatively new, and work gained attention because it was easier to reach one’s friends and communities with news. My father’s Parkinson’s disease was newly diagnosed, and hadn’t yet hit the point of physical and cognitive where I was increasingly conscious of both spending time with him and providing relief for my mum as his primary carer. I was unemployed, providing both time and impetus to write. I’d just gone through Clarion South, and emerged from those six weeks of focused work with a lot of heavily critiqued stories to finish up and submit. That combination of time, necessity, and attention is a pretty powerful cocktail, and by 2011 its efficacy fading as my health, my dad’s health, social media, and my work situation changed. Nostalgia’s a constant tempatation when what was feels out of reach here and now, but always remember that context matters. No

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 core idea here is moving COLD readers (who don’t know anything about you) through a funnel of information that WARMS them up (gets them excited about your work) and eventually gets them HOT enough to buy. It’s the kind of thing that you’ll find in 90% of indie seminars focused on making a living selling books, so it’s not particularly awe-inspiring or original. But I was revising the slides for this portion of the workshop right before I sat down to write up my case study for a good reader funnel, then tackling the inevitable question of “do I put my books into Kindle Unlimited’s subscription service or go wide and sell from every retailer?”  This is the perennial debate in indie circles, and communities have split because of it. Some folks swear by KU and build their entire business around it, while others recoil from the exclusivity requirements that mean if you’re in KU, then your ebooks are only in KU. I’m very much in the latter camp, but I’m trying not to be prescriptive because there are folks whose lived experience and tactical approach will be better suited to KU than what I