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- [DIGEST] Catchup and catnaps...
[DIGEST] Catchup and catnaps...
Your weekly stackable roundup
If last week was a wrecking ball of excitement and experiences, this week was all about catching up from all the things that happened last week, and trying to get ahead a little bit before the holidays. I’ve been talking with a lot of amazing writers about writing for my publication, and I locked down a couple of awesome ones at 20books.
This week we had to get them onboarded, while I finished a novel and kept the ball rolling on a hundred different things. Usually, my schedule is pretty light, but when you are scrambling to do two weeks of work in one week, it becomes a bit much, especially when next week is a three-day week.
While Karen doesn’t mind when I do work while she sleeps, I basically need to not be doing work most of the day during the four-day weekend, which I am happy to do. It’s just a lot of things compressed at once.
Meanwhile, I’m so tired that I’ve been catnapping almost every day. I do love it though. I keep putting all this on myself, so I only have one person to blame.
If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.
1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.
2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.
WHAT I WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote a glossary of all the nonsense terms from tech and how authors can use them to get ahead in their own career.
We also published a great post from the incomparable , founder and director of Alli, The Alliance for Independent Authors.
Gino’s was close to the water across Seattle from Ratinger’s Drug in the circuitous maze that was Pike Place Market, a mesh of poorly planned buildings where buskers sold everything from fish to jellies.
People looked at me funny as I walked through the marketplace with the rat carrier. Shop owners would be fined and downgraded by the health inspector if they came across a rat in their store, and here I was swinging one gently like it was my pet. It wasn’t, but none of them knew that. I took the stairs down to the basement and passed onto a rickety walkway with a perfect view of the water. The rat squeaked. I didn’t have to speak its language to know that it wanted to see the water, too.
“It’s pretty,” I said to him, even though I knew the rat couldn’t understand me. After a moment, I continued on the path past a used bookstore and several other shops. Every few dozen feet, the architecture changed completely, from mod to art deco to the bones of a condemned building. Eventually, we snaked around to the Italian restaurant cliché that was Gino’s. Two burly ghouls stood on either side of the door, blocking the entrance with their brute bodies.
“Can I get inside, please? I have something your boss really needs to see.” I lifted the rat carrier. “Do you recognize Benny? Because this is all that’s left of him.”
All chapters of The Godsverse Chronicles are now free for all subscribers. You can read the whole series from the beginning right here.
You still only get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog by becoming a paid member. You can start your membership with a 7-day free trial.
WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME THIS WEEK: I wasn’t everywhere this week, just one really amazing place.
THE CREATIVE PENN - It’s been a dream of mine for years to be on Joanna Penn’s podcast and we were finally able to connect right before 20books. Also, I had lunch with her and she’s the nicest human. Definitely meet your heroes. Highly recommend. LISTEN
UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m releasing an article about how to avoid getting lost in the flurry of new Substacks flooding the site.
There has been a lot of talk from newer writers on Substack about being drowned out by the recent flood of well-known authors like
, , and many more that seem to have joined the platform in droves recently.
(all of whom I adore and subscribe to so this is no shade on them on the minuscule chance they are reading this.)
Luckily, I’ve got a lot of experience with this topic, specifically from my experiences on Kickstarter. During the pandemic, publishers like Boom Studios and Top Cow started using the platform while bookstores were closed and even joined with actors like Keanu Reeves to make seven figures on the platform.
Creators were not happy that they were taking focus away from them in the only place online they had where they could reasonably make money from their comics.
The influx of fiction authors like Brandon Sanderson created a new wave of this conversation on Kickstarter. However, it’s a conversation that goes back to the dawn of publishing. Every time a celebrity gets a book deal, authors talk about the same type of thing.
And yet, writers survive in all this turmoil and new authors do break through, even almost 600 years since the invention of the printing press and over 5,000 years since the earliest known uses of the written word.
One of the hardest parts of struggling against being drowned out by new, often more successful, voices is to accept that it will absolutely happen, and repeatedly, throughout your career.
It will happen at every level of your career.
ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week. I had particular fun with this one as some of the headlines begged for alliteratives. Also, this seemed to be a particularly robust week for the Publishing-like section, which has more links than the other two combined. Maybe because 20books set people’s writing aflame.
Business-y:
makes an extremely odd thing, delivers a manifesto for posting online in 2023, and learns how Freetrail carved out a media niche for one of the country's fastest-growing sports.
confirms that working from home is good for business, isn’t afraid of superintelligent AI taking over the world, and talks about the AI problem that almost no one talks about.
explains Meta's new referral traffic bait-and-switch, is sick of not being able to have an opinion online, and dissects why Youtube advertising is complicated.
explores the restaurant of mistaken orders, unpacks why survey researchers don't want "other" responses, but include them anyway, enters the ARPU stage of subscriptions, and explains why the old indie model failed.
Publishing-like:
wants to bring back the membership site on Substack, believes the newsletter winter is coming, and deals with Substackanomics.
navigates a literary world that doesn't look like them, writes, shares, and overwhelms, and is an essayist.
interviews comic book legend Matt Fraction, writes whether it’s art or not, and explains the highs and lows of the sensitivity read.
writes a good pitch email, translates Taylor Swift’s business plan for Substack writers, and changes their thinking about burnout.
Manifests the stories they want to see, makes friends with money, and gives 15 ways smaller publishers can save time & money.
breaks down the launch week for our Direct Sales Mastery for Authors Kickstarter campaign, gets official about their writing name, and sets up their home on Substack.
messes with creative spaces, allows for the possibility they might mess up, and makes art just for them.
collapses context collapse collapse, meets their heroes, and prepares for the coming content backlash.
creatively creates creative non-fiction, demystifies choosing niches and topics on Substack, teases tropes and tassels.
Culture-ish:
learns things about integrity, creates a guide to nourishes themselves, and plays grief on hard mode.
makes life out of death, tries to answer the big question about front door etiquette, and only likes the beginning of things.
embraces serendipity, follows her shriveled up heart, and depends on a batch of pancakes.
kills a superhero, shows off a bunch of Coraline art, and lets tenderness do the work.
reflects on the day their dad asked them to help him with lifting weights, swims in the afternoon, and practices practice.
learns the art of saying goodbye, stops putting up with situationships, and goes chasing waterfalls.
Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? Let me know.
LIVE ON KICKSTARTER: If you care about direct sales at all, you must have this two-volume guidebook to mastering direct sales for authors.
and I have been working on this book for basically our whole careers. This book contains a combined 25 years of hard-won practical experience from building our own direct sales empires and helping hundreds of authors build them, too.
If Author Ecosystems is the lens by which you look at direct sales, then Direct Sales Mastery for authors is the guidebook. Whether you are just thinking about direct sales or you want to take your business to the next level, this is a must-read book, and it’s available exclusively to Kickstarter backers. It won’t be on retailers for several months after we deliver it to Kickstarter. If you want to get ahead of the curve and hit 2024 running, then we hope to see you behind the backer wall.
If you like what I’m doing around here and want to check out the archives, you can do that with a 7-day free trial, or simply go straight to being a paid subscriber. You also get access to my newest non-fiction project, This is NOT a Book.
This is NOT a Book is a collection of essays on creativity and writing written on Facebook and in emails between 2015-2022 and we've now compiled them into one place for further introspection. It’s 70,000 words, but it’s not a book.
This is NOT a Book is messy. It circles back on itself. It dances around truths, and, at its best, hits upon something true about the universe, even if only in fits and starts.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.