Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

One of my goals for 2016 was gathering data about my writing process, so I could better anticipate what was actually possible in terms of planning my writing time and figure out how to patch the holes where writing hours seemed to evaporate. A lot of my grander plans associated with that goal fell apart, throughout the year, since one of the big holes in my process was basically depression and insane levels of stress. Gathering data fell by the wayside and I focused on just having a process at all, rather than refining it. That’s starting to change now, very late in 2016, thanks to the combined effects of antidepressants, a new job, and a restructure of my writing time in order to eliminate some of the temptations that usually distract me from writing. I implemented the goal of devoting 21 hours a week to my writing career a month ago, and started tracking it pretty religiously. Then, back on

I keep meaning to sit down and write another extended post about writing and business plans, but the topic is large and tangled and crazy, and my time for blogging is short and controlled and subservient to the task of getting things written. So I have not written a blog post about basing your business plan off what you actually sell as a writer, not what you think you sell, but I have written 22,000 words of a novella in the space of seven days and stand a good chance of finishing the whole thing over the weekend. I am comfortable with that trade-off, right now. But the short version of the long and tangled post that I did not write goes something like this – if you are building a business plan about your writing, you need to forget about the book as the thing you’re selling and start considering the other things. First, that you’re actually selling permission to

Hardworking. Prolific. Savvy. Surprising. Great. I figure I can lay claim to maybe one of these words, if I’m on-point with my writing, on any given day. More often I aim simply aiming for one, and falling frustratingly short. But as of today they’re taped to the wall, beside my projects list. A reminder of what I’m striving for with this whole writing thing. Not necessarily in the work, but in terms of what I’d like to think when I look back over my career. They’re not set in stone yet. I’m going to live with them for a few days, stare at them the same way I stare at the active projects list. Ponder whether each word is right, and change it as needed. Savvy was originally smart, for instance, when I wrote the first draft of the list in my notebook. Smart didn’t cut it as a long-term ambition. Savvy worked better, captured that feeling of knowledge put

Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving me feedback, which largely came in two camps: How, exactly, do I do this business model thing? GIVE US DETAILS; or Dude, I’ve got a business model, but it’s not working the way I want. I’ll address both of those eventually, but given that I’m Melbourne today (and I’ve gone three days without medication and CPAP, thanks to poor packing on my part) I’m going to hold off on answering the first. Mostly because I started and it got very, very long. As for the second: well, I’ve worked for a bunch of small businesses where exactly this has happened. This is the nature of running

I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The re-read is where I slow down and take notes, reworking ideas and responses as I figure out how to make best use of what I’ve learned. And I will admit, this post started with a what-can-learn-that-will-be-useful-as-a-writer post, because most things do, in my head. I gathered up my notes, started putting them in shape. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. “Just find the writing angle.” There are lots of writing angles in Work Clean. It’s a book about understanding time, as much as offering a business process, and it tipped the notion of the most productive thing I can be doing right now on its head. Then

Eleven years ago, I kicked off a small indie publishing company to put out RPG products written using the d20 system. To my surprise, I wasn’t awful at it, and between 2005 and 2007 I worked pretty continuously at producing stuff that would earn me money instead of finishing my PhD. Don’t get me wrong, I made plenty of mistakes in those two years– the worst being an utter failure to adequately back up my creative work and business files, which is one of the three things that finally killed me off – but I had a metric for success when I set out and I hit it, pretty religiously. It also taught me two important things, when it came to writing. The first was the realisation that I was running a small business, rather than just being a writer. This was obvious enough, right from the beginning, that I actually looked at some small business advice and bought a

There are things you want to sit every new writer down and tell them, right at the start. Things you’d like them to understand, because they’re things you didn’t understand back when you were starting out and they would have been useful to know. Or things you don’t understand now, even though you’ve been at this for a while, and it would be nice to spare them that particular slice of pain. You want to tell them its going to take work, and when they nod like they understand, you want to grab them by the arm and really make them comprehend what you’re saying. “No,” you want to hiss at them, “it’s going to take work. You think you know what you’re getting into, but your head is full of dreams and lies and myths that are fucking with you. It’s going to take so much more work than you’re thinking, and none of it is as fun as you’re

One of the things I like about working a day job is its tendency to provide nice, clean habit triggers. When 7:30 rolls around and I know that I need to be on a train by 8:30, its an immediate flag that I should sit down and write things. When I get into the office at 9:00 AM on a Monday morning, it’s a trigger that I need to sit down and do my weekly checkpoint while all the information I need is right in front of me. And when I get home from work, three days of the week, it triggers that little habit where I check my writing email and do a hundred words or so, just so it’s fresh in my mind that I’m meant to be writing things before I go cook dinner or do evening things. And I know, three days a week, this is when I put down the rough drafts for blog posts. I

There is this meme that pops up on Facebook from time to time. It usually runs something like this: Authors do not earn a lot of money, really. If you’d like to help your favourite author, post a review on Amazon. Given enough reviews on Amazon, MAGIC THINGS WILL START TO HAPPEN IN THE AMAZON ALGORITHM. And every time I see it, I cringe a little. Don’t get me wrong – I like reviews. I would like more reviews of my work out there. But the focus here isn’t necessarily on reviews, it’s on manipulating the Amazon algorithms. The numbers change, as do the MAGIC THING, but the gist remains the same: get 50 reviews, and the book will start appearing in the recommendation algorithm; get 20 reviews, and you’ll be included in the “others like this book footer.” Amazon reviews = good things for your favourite book. I am not against Amazon. They are exceptionally good at what they do,

THE SHIT YOU WRITE AFTER TAKING A SERIES OF JABS TO THE FACE Some days, I get punchy. I sit down at this blog and I start writing, only to discover that there’s nothing new in my head. I’ve been fighting the fight too long, taken too many hits to the face, and I’ve got nothing left in the tank but a kind of dogged resolve to keep swinging and hope I get lucky. I’ll start drawing together ridiculous concepts, seeing what I can connect. I’ll throw words at the page and squint at them, wondering if there’s something there. Some days it works. Some days it doesn’t. But if you take most writing advice on the internet to its core principles, digging beneath the layers and seriously looking at the what is being said, it will generally come down to one of two things. One: the best thing you can do for your career is keep on fucking swinging. Two: