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[DIGEST] Home alone...
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Hi friends,
This week Karen was gone for work, so I was at home alone from Wednesday afternoon until this morning. What’s fun about my chronic conditions is that my heart rate is wildly high and inconsistently so, but there is one constant. In general, the only time my heart rate is under control and I’m calm is when my wife is around.
I know she has a calming effect on me, but now that I track my heart rate every minute of the day, it’s wild to watch my heart rate go haywire in the evening when it’s usually such a calm time for me.
Don’t get me wrong, Karen walking around and doing things has less of a calming effect, but when we’re together in the evening, I’m almost always calm…except this week.
I’m trying, but calm is not my natural state. Frenetic energy would not be out of line to describe my normal vibe. I’m trying though, to embrace the calm.
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 feel like I’m actually kind of finally recovering from this year. While I don’t like being home alone, the quiet and ability to just read audiobooks all day has been kind of cool. Still a 2.5, but nearing a 3.
We have had a lot of technical difficulties this week and I wanted to apologize for and explain them. On Sunday, our site went down and I couldn’t get into the dashboard to pause our emails before our Monday email went out, and it caused some confusion until it was cleaned up on Tuesday.
This is because of an issue with our custom domain. My website host reset the settings on my domain, which severed the connection between it and my Substack publication. If you know websites, then the host deleted my CNAME, which prevented it from properly redirecting to Substack.
If you don’t know websites, then a CNAME is how you take a domain from one provider and make it look like it’s a website from another provider. Substack is the host for this site, but I want it to show as theauthorstack.com, instead of the authorstack.substack.com subdomain that Substack provided me.
In order to do that, you go into the domain (DNS) settings and use a CNAME so that authorstack.substack.com looks like theauthorstack.com to visitors. This is how it works for wannabepress.com, shop.russellnohelty.com, and more. We have CNAMEs set up for several of our sites, and we’ve never had a problem until now.
This wouldn’t have been a problem…except that the dashboard to the publication was tied to my custom domain, NOT my Substack subdomain. So, when there was a problem with the domain, it prevented me from getting into the dashboard to turn off the custom domain or do anything.
I had to wait until Substack support reset the subdomain for me. If I never hear the term DNS propagation again it will be too soon.
If I had a choice, I would have suspended our emails until it was resolved. Of course, if I could have gotten into the dashboard, I could have fixed the whole thing in a few minutes.
Ironically, my personal website also went down last weekend, so people who saw the outage and then checked my website might have thought I just stopped existing. For the record, I did not.
Finally, yesterday I shared a crosspost that seemed to be broken as it only shared a couple of lines with you. This is because of a different Substack issue.
Substack allows you to share free posts from other writers to your publication, and I have been playing around with it. I didn’t know that if a post stopped being free between when you scheduled it and released it, they would still send it…but only the free part, which in this case was only a couple of lines.
It should be noted that before I crosspost anything, I always ask permission first.
I’m sorry for all of it. We always strive to prevent readers from seeing under the hood and to fix all these problems before you see how the sausage is made.
It was not possible in this case.
These are the types of growing pains we’re going through right now. In 2024, we want to provide more value to subscribers and show a professional look to readers. Also, I’m less interested in showing up as a Substack domain after all the issues unearthed in the past week.
To do so, we are pushing Substack to the limits to test its boundaries and see how far we can go. Usually, our experiments happen in the background. In this case, they were all too public.
Also, for those who might be curious, it seems that the delivery and SEO discoverability for a custom domain is far superior to a Substack domain. Even with all the issues, I will continue with a custom domain once I know it is safe to do so.
WHAT WE WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I crossposted an article I wrote for our Author Ecosystems Substack about how to build a sales funnel and flywheel using author ecosystems.
“So, what you’re telling me,” the Elkman said, tenting his fingers, “is that you lost all that remained of Benny and burned down the warehouse that was your only lead to find his killer?”
“I think you’re picking and choosing my words. I didn’t burn down that warehouse. Some psycho Firestarter did, and it was the same psycho that nearly blew me up and killed two dozen of Benny’s men in Los Angeles. What I’m saying is that whoever killed Benny is working with the demon that set me up. They’re connected.”
“Hrm.” The Elkman leaned back. “It seems like a bit of a leap.”
I pushed out my chair and stood up. As I did, several guns locked on me from around the restaurant. “Are you kidding me? It’s the same chick both times!”
The Elkman furrowed his brow. “Understood, but if I’m not mistaken, you also worked for those demons, didn’t you? I mean, didn’t they hire you to retrieve the dagger?”
“Well yes, but—”
“And you also worked for us. By your logic, you are working to betray us, too. Is that right?”
“Well, no.” I had to admit his logic made some sense. Even the Firestarter had said she was working both sides of the aisle. “But—I see your point, I guess, I just don’t like it.”
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: Just one interview this week…while I’m supposed to be on break…but I’m busier than when I’m busy.
THE CACAO TOUR - I did a very interviews interview with about chocolate, slavery in the cacao trade, and chocolate hummus. It really blew my mind. READ IT
UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m crossposting another article from The Author Ecosystems Substack about how to have success at conventions, conferences, and book signings for every Author 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.
It’s been the better part of a decade since I wrote those words, but they are still true even today. It’s just that, in the ensuing years, we’ve created better systems to understand your author career.
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.
ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.
Business-y:
explains the power dynamics of Calendly, needs Twitter now more than ever, and gives the best growth advice of 2023.
wants the spoils of productivity to go to the workers again, goes from convalescence to career, and touts an Epic win against Google.
doesn’t want to hear about how great you are, checks off their EOY cash flow checklist and admires a phone tree.
Publishing-like:
succeeds in articulating journalism’s failure to deal with AI, wants Goodreads to do better by marginalized creators, and writes about how they write.
diverts publishing troubles, gives their honest thoughts about Substack growth after 3 months, isn’t complicit when a debut author acts abysmally and breaks free of the tortured artist stereotype.
chills out with some of the best lit mags of 2023, swings on a poetic trapeze, knows what it really means to be a successful writer, and gives three publishing tips.
isn’t going paid on Substack, learns six unexpected things from their first month on Substack, made a mistake, and removes their paywall.
sold 10,000 books without a publisher, shows how to make 9 million dollars on Substack typing in the nude whilst engulfed in flames, forgets the audience, and gives nuance to podcasts as a nuance medium.
chooses their word for 2024 and so does while is more entertained by an interview with Ridley Scott about Napoleon than the movie itself and offers their non-fiction book launch blueprint for free.
sits in a chair, shapes her writing life through sleep, treats TikTok like TV, and teach how to run an $80k Kickstarter campaign.
improves their writing by understanding themselves better, gives some thoughts on kishōtenketsu, and wraps up their book tour.
Culture-ish:
drops knowledge on half-baked knowledge and big feelings, switches to a dumb phone, values being slow and bad at something, and grieves weddings.
learns to trust, explores time and space the Miyazaki way, does it scared, and acts in good faith.
has a hierarchy of mugs, wrestles with Matthew Perry’s cause of death, doesn’t want to be independent, and explains why C.S. Lewis hated Christmas cards.
admires a “golden snail”, finds a touchstone, stigmatizes glitter, and makes a controversial statement about Harvard.
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 fantasy-horror novel, The Void Calls Us Home.
Rebecca never thought she was suicidal. However, that didn’t stop her from jerking her car off the side of the road last night.
Everybody thinks she swerved to hit a deer, but she knows the truth. She did it because a giant flaming being called from the void and beckoned to her to join it in the darkness.
Was it a manifestation of her unconscious desire to die? Could the being really exist? Did it have anything to do with her sister’s suicide just a year before?
When Rebecca starts seeing the creature every time she closes her eyes, she has no choice but to find out the truth before it drives her mad.
If you like H.P. Lovecraft, psychological horror, coming-of-age stories, or deep explorations of grief, loss, death, and junk, then you'll love this world.
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.