[DIGEST] Couch potato...

Your weekly stackable roundup

December 09, 2023

Hi friends,

Last weekend I went on an impromptu overnight trip to Palm Springs to attend a friend’s tree trimming at their new house. Okay, it wasn’t really new, but they bought it during the pandemic so it was new to me.

I love Palm Springs in the winter. For as hellish as it is during the summer, it’s just as green, verdant, and lovely in the winter. When we went to get coffee on Sunday morning, we saw the biggest range of clothing I think I’ve ever seen. Some people were bundled up in their winter fineries while others were in a t-shirt and shorts. We see that some in Los Angeles, but it was starker than I ever remember seeing.

We also got a new couch this week! I had to spend Sunday night moving our old sectional to the curb, and now I’m a potato for the decided future as I recover on my new awesome couch.

We went on a bit of a spending bender the last two weeks to the tune of $15,000 between business and personal expenses. On top of that, I put a huge deposit on my credit cards for our conference in February, so our robust bank accounts took a huge hit this month.

It’s funny because all year I’ve trying to train myself to not spend all the money in December, and here we are, repeating the same story I write every year, except in even more excess than usual.

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.

I’m still recovering this week, specifically from the couch moving we had to do to make room for our new one, but also our impromptu trip to Palm Springs. I’m hovering around a 2.5.

COME HANG OUT WITH ME IN LONG BEACH: I know it’s the holiday season, but if you happen to be in south LA, Long Beach, or don’t mind a drive, I’m hosting an official Long Beach Substack meetup at the Hangar Food Hall today from 2-4 pm. Hope to see you there!

I plan to meet in the circled area outside, but if it’s filled then I’ll go to the side gate and we’ll hang out over there. I’ll be the one who looks like me, and I’m planning on bringing a Substack sign.

WHAT WE WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote about how the universe is dumb and why capitalism is nonsense along with five reasons why it's very hard to start a creative writing business that might make you feel better or worse depending on your comfort level with embracing nonsense.

Additionally, wrote about clarifying your why even before you start writing.

Panda Penny, Inc. didn’t have an address we could find in any public record, and they generally came to pick up their shipments themselves. However, the dock manager was able to pull up a recent shipment they’d delivered to a warehouse across the city.

I always liked driving in new towns. While I had been to Seattle several times, I never brought Lily with me, so I never drove. She purred so pretty taking the corners and exploring the streets.

It didn’t take long to cross Seattle. Compared to LA, just about every other city was tiny, and you could make it across any of them in less than half an hour. Once, in Ithaca, I walked across the whole city in fifteen minutes. You don’t understand scale on a map or a Thomas Guide. A city’s size only sunk in when you were there.

“This is a bad idea,” Dexter said, looking out on the dark warehouse from the dashboard. “I’ll wait here.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Where am I going to go?” he said. “If you lock the doors, how can I get out?” He held up his little claws. “Remember, I have no thumbs.”

I didn’t like it, but I agreed. I pressed the lock down on the passenger side, locked my door, and then shoved the key in my pocket.

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.

UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m crossposting an article I wrote for The Author Ecosystems all about how to have success at conventions, conferences, and book signings for every ecosystem.

Authors who know me probably learned of me through Kickstarter, but Kickstarter was a relatively small part of my business until 2017, and even then it wasn’t until 2020 when I started doubling down on Kickstarter. Before then, the vast majority of my fiction income came from conventions.

Of all the elements of direct sales I teach, event sales is easily the one that the least people are interested in, which is wild considering they kept by business going through some very dark times.

I’m still bullish on conventions, with the caveat that conventions have an ableist problem that became starkly clear after my surgery last year before San Diego Comic-Con and reinforced after getting Long COVID last year. This is what I wrote about it last year.

ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.

Business-y:

Publishing-like:

Culture-ish:

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 seminal dark fantasy horror comic, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter.

Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter is a dark fantasy horror comedy graphic novel series that flips the chosen one narrative on its head. It deals with redemption, mental illness, and sacrifice. It is very violent.

Ichabod is a mental patient who has been convicted of killing many innocent people, but when he awakens in the Apocalypse he may just be the best hope for humanity to survive. If only he knew whether the Hell beasts he slaughtered were real or existed only in his mind.

Can Ichabod become the hero the world needs even after society decided they didn’t need him? Or will he devolve into the animal people always accused him of being? Enter the madness and find out.

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.