Greet The Day: A Pep Talk

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there.

Our kitchen is a disaster zone at the moment, too. So is our bathroom, our living room, and my car. Our bedroom is relatively well-composed, although I’m behind on cleaning the CPAP machine and that’s taking a toll on my sleep. 

Other disasters: my writing process, my publishing timeline, my PhD deadlines, my planning systems. Invisible chaos that’s largely unnoticeable unless you’re inside my head and trying to wade through the detritus in order to get things done.

The great temptation of chaos is this: nothing is fixable unless everything is flexible, and if you let things slide long enough, the very notion of getting ‘caught up’ is the stuff of nightmares and wry laughter. So you sink into the chaos, doing nothing.

There’s a logic to it: if I don’t wash the dishes, I don’t have to solve the problems with my PhD thesis. I don’t have to email the authors whose books weren’t getting released because BWF ate all my available spoons and threw off all my plans.

I don’t have to deal with the really complicated feelings I have around leaving the Festival, even though it was the right thing to do, or my fear around what happens next.

Of course, I’ve been here before, and I’ve got some pretty well-worn habits that kick in when chaos descends. First and foremost, I reach for Dan Charnas’ Work Clean/Everything In Its Place, and revisiting one of it’s very first lessons.  

On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he’d see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn’t understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier? Wasn’t greeting your day better than fighting it? Why not make your kid’s lunch the night before, lay out your clothes, do anything you need to do so you can get up and not run around like a maniac so you can smile and enjoy your day? That was, after all, what LiPuma was beginning to do in the kitchen. Stress and chaos were a normal part of his job. But if he could control a little bit of that chaos—preparing for what he knew was going to happen—he could greet chaos, embrace it. His mastery of the expected would enable him to better deal with the unexpected. You plan what you can so you can deal with what you can’t.

Time to take a deep breathe and go back to first principles: Gree the day. Plan first, then arrange my spaces so they’re usable again. Clean as I go and focus on the next action, rather than extrapolating forward to the point of chaos and failure.

 I’m not a chef, but any writer knows that stress and chaos is a huge part of the job. You can’t control it, so your main job’s getting back to a space where you roll with the punches a little better. 

A little thought on my way out of the current day job

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

There’re occasional moments of second guessing the decision to leave my day job this week. The festival’s big a project, and one I’d like to see through, and we’re so very close that it feels slightly weird to be handing things over to someone else.

Sometimes the worst thing about a job that’s a poor fit — or a job where you feel like you’re ambitions are constantly thwarted by forces beyond your control — is the feeling there’s no other choice but to keep working.  There’s nothing we dislike more than constraint and a lack of options. It’s stressful to lack that control over. your life, and feel like there’s no other options.

The moment you give yourself another option, the things you dislike about a gig become easier to manage. 

Of course, this has been true of writing as well — half the reason I work a day job in the first place is so creative decisions aren’t being made at the behest of of the bottom line.  Working a day job gives me the much-needed space to fail, and a margin that keeps writing pleasurable.

I’ve been a full-time writer before, in spaces between sessional and freelance gigs, and it’s often proven to be a just as poor fit as some of my worst day jobs.

I finish up at Brisbane Writers Festival on Thursday, and the urge to write is slowly returning now that I’ve got some spare bandwidth in my day.

Lead Generation and the Evergreen Backlist

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

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 it exists, and there’s a sense of frustration when the newly released book (or books) aren’t generating the kind of visibitiliy and sales they’d like.

Truth is, all writers need to generate leads. We call it different things — running a newsletter, building a platform on social media, blogging, generating adds on Facebook or Amazon, newsletters swaps, and putting calls to action in the back of a book — but they’re all predicated on the same idea: get someone interested in you and your writing so you can further that relationship and build a sale.

It may be horrible marketing speak, but I actually like the phrase lead generation because it keeps me focused on high level strategy rather than immediate tactics and tools, which have a tendency to be less effective as more people use them.

In just the last year we’ve seen Facebook adds and Newsletters become a tougher method to use effectively because of changes Apple’s made to the way it handles privacy, while the cost of Amazon ads has increased as more and more authors flock to them. Meanwhile, Booktok and Instagram have become the hot new means of reaching out to authors… but they will grow less effective as more authors flock to those methods.

One thing I will stress — less effective doesn’t mean ineffective. It just means they’re no longer going to have the outsized impact, and you’ll need to invest time and money in learning to use those tools effectively.

Making effective use of your backlist will often come down to three questions:

  • What kind of leads are leading people into your backlist?
  • How are you using your backlist to generate leads for your other books?
  • What resources can you leverage to generate new leads?