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[DIGEST] Fair Faire Fare...
Your weekly stackable roundup
After spending the week recovering from NINC, what better way to celebrate than to do another show? Last Sunday, I was at OC Kid’s Book Festival talking about our book Cthulhu is Hard to Spell.
It was super fun, but I didn’t quite realize that kids were kiiiiiiiiiiiiiids. Like, picture book kids, not early reader kids. We have books for early readers, but not picture books.
So, we didn’t do that well, but I did hang out with two good friends all day and then got dim sum afterward, blowing all the money we made during the day. Still, it was super fun. I would say it was a more than fair time at a book faire that charged a fair fare.
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 am still so tired from NINC, and then doing a ton of presentations, and also the festival. I know it’s boring to keep saying I’m a 2, and I know I keep doing this to myself, but still…I’m a 2 this week. Hopefully, I can start recovering after next Wednesday.
How are you doing?
WHAT I WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote about why you probably need a break right now. I know I do.
I also wrote about Kickstarter for every Author Ecosystem. Of all the platforms, Kickstarter is the one that can change the fate of a writer's career the quickest, but there are specific strategies that will help you succeed depending on your ecosystem.
Phil led us out of the basement and into the kitchen. He pulled a string behind the fridge. A medical table lowered from the ceiling and spread across the counters on either side of the room.
“Up,” he said to Candy, patting the mattress. It wasn’t so much a demand, but a strong request, and Candy acquiesced without question. She hopped onto the table and laid down. Phil opened the fridge and pulled out a collection of nodes that he placed on her temples, across her chest, on each wrist, and along her stomach and thighs.
“They’re so cold,” Candy shivered as he placed each one.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Phil said. He blew on the last node and shrugged before he placed it on the middle of her chest. “Unfortunately, I am cold-blooded, which means that didn’t help much. It was a performative show at best.”
“I still appreciate it,” Candy said, bracing herself for the chill. “Sometimes, all we have is the performative.”
“How right you are,” Phil said. He opened the freezer and started typing on a computer console inside the door. A long metal cartridge as large as Candy descended from the ceiling. “Don’t move. This won’t hurt unless you move. In which case, it could lead to a nasty case of dead.”
“Is it safe, then?” Candy asked. “If it could kill me?”
“Oh, gods no,” Phil said with a smile. “Let’s begin.”
New chapters are free, but paid subscribers can access the archives. You also get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog.
UPCOMING WEBINARS: Only three webinars in the next week. It’s like a vacation, really. At least one was prerecorded.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7TH @ 3:10 PM PT/6:10 PM ET - I’ll be doing a talk on Kickstarter for the Emerald City Romance Writers virtual conference this afternoon. They have a ton of great speakers, including my dear friends Emilia Rose and Dylann Crush. GET YOUR TICKET
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10TH @ 12 PM PT/3 PM ET - I’ll be rerunning my very popular presentation from NINC all about Author Ecosystems, revealing all the information we’ve learned up to this point about them. REGISTER FOR FREE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14TH - I’m not sure when my interview will be live this day, but I did a really cool interview for Fiction Marketing Academy 3.0 all about how to use Author Ecosystems to supercharge your author career. There are over forty awesome presentations. REGISTER FOR FREE
Hope to see you there!
UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m talking about how to reframe capitalism to make sales and marketing work (better) for you.
Capitalism is the dominant economic force of our time. Even if we wanted to escape it, unless we lived in a yurt on a remote island, catching our own food and making our own clothes, we’re probably not going to get far without engaging on some level.
Additionally, let’s face it, capitalism has its benefits. The fact that a climate apocalypse is currently knocking down our door aside, things are pretty okay for most of us. Depending on the metric you use, capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any driver in modern history.
Of course, those are the same people who will be climate refugees in the coming years, but capitalism is not without benefits. We live better today than kings did two hundred years ago. Honestly, I would probably take my life over a king’s from even a century ago.
That said, capitalism might not be the enemy of artistic expression, but it is certainly not a friend to it, either.
The fact is that capitalism forces almost everything to be monetized and productized, which is antithetical to most people’s idea of artistic expression.
ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.
Business-y:
loves product people, slowly diversifies their income streams, and explains the DALL-E nonsense.
wonders if they should still post on the internet for free, has chutzpah, and cuts five things from their life to regain control of their business.
and provide the definitive SaaS homepage framework, sees the shape of AI’s evolution, and slides down a slippery slope.
spends half their waking hours devoted to entertainment, hyper-personalizes everything, and thinks about data, not evaluation.
Publishing-like:
explains the post-MFA slump, talks about why newsletter graphics are important, has a day, and asks if the decline of social media traffic is really bad for publishers.
reveals what they learned from 100+ serials, explains what they learned from 3 years in the newsletter mines, creates the space to create, and gives 6666 tips for 66616 subscribers.
shows how to conduct a virtual book tour, chooses soul over brand, shows three ways the Beatles wrote a song, and battles for fiction relevancy on Substack.
knows that making art takes a lifetime, changes their definition of editorial success, knows it’s okay that your book is not for everyone, and debates what to call a Substack.
Lifestyle-ish:
has no memory of this place, gets their emotions to help them, and knows she is a disagreeable woman.
is definitely not altar bound, tries to fix the broken economy of price fixing, and stops journaling.
explains why Shakespeare survived, explains why fairy tales are still important, bids adieu to the cheap stuff era, and isn’t bad, they’re just influenced that way.
is worthy of taking breaks, stays open to delight, unplugs for 30 days, and takes a breath.
doesn’t mean what he says to their children, lets them eat piecaken, dates sports fans, and visits a Scottish book town.
converses with their dead father, reclaims their regret, survives the upgrade, and turns lousy days into lousy days with cookies.
allows reality to be on their side, hopes one day maybe they can do it too, laughs and cries at the same time, and finds truth in nature.
Find anything you loved? Let me know.
UPCOMING KICKSTARTER: Get Your Book Selling Direct to Readers
Monica and I have been talking about direct sales for a long time, and many of you have asked us to put together another definitive guide like we did for Kickstarter.
So that’s what we did, and it’s coming in November.
Learn how to sell from your website, crush it on Kickstarter, make a profit at conventions, and generally succeed at direct sales. It’s going to be a monster book, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
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 action-adventure graphic novel, Katrina Hates the Dead.
What would you do during the Apocalypse? How would you survive?Those are the questions that have plagued Katrina for years. All the good boys and girls were raptured up to Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to ask a single, solitary question: “Why not me?”Hellspawn rose from Hell and rampaged across the world, eviscerating all they came across. It was bedlam, Hell on Earth. There was nothing anybody could do to stop it. Then the Hellspawn got bored and settled for a quiet life in the suburbs. They squatted in the homes of the people they once mercilessly murdered.And yet humanity is strong. They persist. But everything has a breaking point, and after watching friend after friend dies at the unforgiving and unjust hands of fate, Katrina’s had enough and sets out to face off with the Devil to earn back her old life.
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.