Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

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 the most oversight. Factor in the last few months, which featured key staff departures, two months of frustrating my partner with work-from-home routines, and then a flood, and my stress levels were off the charts.

All this happened just as we were sheduled to go back into the office, post-Omicron, but the premises flooded along with the rest of Brisbane, earning us another week of work-from-home just as I was looking forward to getting out of the house. And with that, my morning routine has basically become wake up, make coffee, sit on the kitchen floor and weep at the futility of it all, after which I had no genuine desire to write.

So I started working off this theory: the desktop is an emotionally laden hotspot, where all my anger and resentment towards the job and its myriad difficulties overwhelm me. Given that I have nightmares about programming and schedules in the late stages of an event, it’s also hard to fight the feeling that I should work twenty-four seven in order to make the stress go away. In short, it’s an emotional trigger, and every single one of those emotions is an obstacle to getting writing work done.

The best way to sidestep all those emotions is to take the desktop out of the equation, so I adopted a double-barreled approach. First, I moved my pen-and-paper Journal to the space my keyboard occupies and tucked a writing notebook in behind it. They became the first thing I went to after waking up, and I got to spend spent the first hour of the day working with tools not-yet-contaminated by day-job anger. 

For the first time in 2022, I started the day focused.

This change was backed-up with a second choice: pulling the USB Wi-Fi from my computer, so I physically couldn’t log into work after I turned it on. A subtle change, but it edged my brain back from the desktop=work equation it was running and meant I could get a little writing done at the keyboard before connecting to the internet and its myriad distractions. Plus, the nice thing about starting focused: it’s easier to break the automated routine of mail-Facebook-Twitter-check book sales that’s become my habit at the start of the day.

Physically disabling the internet is always a good starting point if you’ve got urgent brainwork that doesn’t require it. I only wish I had a career where I didn’t need to be online as much through the bulk of my day.

But the lesson here: if your day isn’t running smoothly, trace your morning routine and look for the emotional surge that derails you from your intentions. We tend not to wake up in a high emotional state unless there’s an early trigger, and if you can figure it out, there’s always a simple work-around.

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 part of my life resembles the circumstances in which all that work was possible, and I’m unlikely to recreate them. Why expect the work to emerge at the same rate and quality as it did way back then?

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 do. 

So I broke the debate down in terms of the larger pricing discussion and how price means different things when a reader is at a different point of the funnel.

• For an author where I’m a COLD reader and no nothing about the work, I’m going to be price sensitive. The risk of getting a book I won’t enjoy is weighed up against the cost of the book. Risk is high, reward is unknown.
• Once my interest has been WARMED up by samples, reviews, recommendations from friends, newsletter opening sequences, etc, then I’m willing to spend a little more money because the risk of getting a bad book is lower.
• For an author where I’m a HOT reader, I’m willing to pay a premium because I know I’m probably getting a book I want to read. Getting it cheap is a steal when it happens, but I’m generally there to pick up a book on release. 
• For an author where I’m a SUPER HOT reader, I’m willing to buy a hardcover or special edition. I’m definitely getting regularly priced paperbacks or ebooks on day one.

The appeal — and challenge — of subscription services is pretty clear when you break things down like this. They’re great at lowering the cost of entry for COLD readers, who can try a whole range of stuff at a low subscription cost. 

That’s great if you’re looking to bring people into a funnel, but once they’re warmed up and ready to be hot? Suddenly you’re making far less money per book across the length of your backlist, and need to find significantly more readers to make up for the shortfall. 

Which doesn’t make subscription models a bad thing, but does contextualise the trade-off you’re making. 

And, as I pointed out again and again int hat workshop, you’ve got a long time to court readers as an indie author. If you’re in a place where you can be patient, the lifetime value of those readers could well be higher than you’d get rushing to get them onboard now.

Of course, sometimes you can’t afford that tradeoff, and the dollars in the hand are worth more than the potential lifetime value if you take your time courting the reader. But given the choice, I err on the side of the slow burn, if only because I’ve seen just how long my books can earn me money.