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[DIGEST] At one with nature...
Your weekly stackable roundup
This week has been all about taking stuff off my to-do list. A couple of months ago I made a bunch of promises that came due in the last two weeks, right when I was trying to recover from NINC. Combined with being in pretty much constant launch mode since May, I’m spent. I get a couple of weeks of light work, combined with a trip to Oakland to see friends, before 20books at the beginning of November, and the launch of my last Kickstarter of the year.
We have printed the books for the One Damned Good Thing campaign (and packed about half of them) and launched my last fiction campaign of the year, White Rabbit/Black Jack: The Wonderland duology thrillers.
Hopefully, I can finish fulfilling the One Damned Good Thing Kickstarter next week, and then this current campaign before 20books. My overall goal is to basically be done with my year after 20books, and just be able to take some time off to really recover.
Right now, I’m doing my best to recover when I can, but things are hectic until mid-November, chaos mostly all of my past self’s making. In my effort to recover, Karen and I went to the Japanese Garden at CSULB to get some peace and quiet last Sunday. We love this little garden tucked in the middle of the city. It’s a lovely little escape.
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 so excited to be done with the superstring of presentations I had to give for the past couple of weeks. It’s been really, really hard on my body after NINC. I know it seems like it should be easy to just sit and talk, but I find it really hard.
I’m a 2.5 this week. Better than last week, which is nice, but not by enough.
How are you doing?
ANNOUNCEMENT: My last fiction campaign of the year is now live on Kickstarter, but it’s only available for one week.
Do you love thrillers? Are you enamored by twisted fairy tales? Is Alice in Wonderland one of your favorite books?
Then you'll love my Wonderland duology, White Rabbit and Black Jack.
Wonderland.
Dark. Grimy. Unsavory.
It didn’t use to be this way. It used to be fun. It was downright enjoyable once upon a time, back when the Red Queen had her way.
When the Red Queen ran things, everybody was happy. Yeah, everybody was high as a kite all the time, seeing things that didn’t exist, but at least it was a gay old time.
Since the city council arrested the queen and outlawed White Rabbit, the drug she used to lace the water supply, was banned, all that has changed. Now, the NARCOs run Wonderland with an iron fist.
Alice Liddell has joined the NARCOs, the most powerful police force in the land, to keep drugs off the streets, especially White Rabbit.
But now, a new dealer has exploded onto the scene to claim the throne of Wonderland, and it threatens the fragile peace that has existed since the Red Queen’s imprisonment.
WHAT I WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote about how to reframe capitalism to work better for your writing career. Every few months these frustrated gasps of writing must be birthed, and this is one of those.
Carl forced me to finish watching Jaws before we started the job, which didn’t bother me one bit. I needed a moment of big, dumb fun since my life recently had been filled with too much big, dumb idiocy and danger. When it was done, he wrote down the address for me and sent his men to get their weapons, just in case. When he handed me the address, I laughed.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t a police impound. This is Jing Hai’s warehouse, biggest heroin dealer in Los Angeles.”
“All right.” He shrugged. “You got me. So what? Are you going to tattle on me or something?”
“That depends. Is there any other way to get my wand back from you without killing you?”
He held the wand at either end between his hands. “I guess if you want it broken. Otherwise, you get the wand when we get the goods.”
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WEBINAR REPLAY: I had a great time at NINC talking about Author Ecosystems and sharing all our findings about how to use them to take your career to the next level. Everyone in the room seemed super excited about it, but that doesn't do much good to people who weren't there, like most of you. So, last week I hosted a replay of the talk with additional commentary from
We went into way more detail on this call than we could at the in-person talk, and we answered a ton of your questions about Author Ecosystems. We keep learning more about this system every time we talk about it! So even if you saw the talk, this is worth a listen. We hope you enjoy! Excuse the lack of polish—we just wanted to get this one out into the world for you.
WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME THIS WEEK: In my effort to be everywhere all the time at the expense of my sanity, here’s where you can catch me this week.
FUTURE MARKETING ACADEMY 3.0 - TODAY - I’m not sure when my interview will be live today, 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
#SELFPUBCON23 - OCTOBER 21ST - 6 AM PT/9 AM ET/1 PM GMT - I joined the ALLi advisory board earlier this year as their crowdfunding expert, and I was super excited to join their virtual conference to talk about author ecosystems. REGISTER FOR FREE
THE BOOKFEST - OCTOBER 21ST - I’m so honored to be giving my first keynote address at one of my favorite online conferences, run by a few of my favorite people, all about the Future of Publishing. REGISTER FOR FREE
HOW TO WRITE THE FUTURE - For the last couple of weeks, has been releasing a fascinating conversation we had about The Author Ecosystems. It’s a conversation in three parts, and I recommend checking it out. PART 1, PART 2, PART 3
MEMOIR JUNKIE WANNABE AUTHOR - I had an awesome conversation with about the Author Ecosystems as well. This one is a written interview, and I highly recommend you check it out. READ THE ARTICLE
LADY'S ILLNESS LIBRARY/INNER WORKINGS - I did a very personal interview about my chronic illness that was handled incredibly well by . If you are interested in exploring how I learned to keep doing this work while chronically ill, I recommend checking it out. READ THE ARTICLE
I spent so much time this week talking about Author Ecosystems. If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, you can do so here.
UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m writing about setting up your direct sales environment. In it, you’ll learn how to find your perfect customers, develop a process to help them fall in love with your work, and keep them happy for the long haul.
Direct sales can be an overwhelming monster if you don’t know where to focus your energy. Even though there are only five major components (website sales, landing pages, crowdfunding, subscriptions, events) within those categories are thousands of success paths.
Even just setting up a mailing list comes with hundreds of options from hosting to designing your email sequence. However, there are some major components of every direct sales environment that help foster success.
While I can’t tell you what email platform to use, I can show you the elements you should put in place before you can start scaling your author business.
This stuff is hard and most people run away from it instead of digging in. Just remember, things grow where you exert effort. Additionally, there is evidence to support we find joy where we exert effort.
ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.
Business-y:
and explore the rise, fall, and rebirth of the #girlboss, reveals the secret to getting your movie made, and debriefs us on what makes a perfect creative brief.
and future proof their SEO strategy, plays newsletter moneyball, and works hard at work worth doing.
likes that Taylor Swifts likes to work, explains why Jay-Z can’t sell out stadiums and how they use it to their advantage, shines a light on the thriving Creator Economy company you've probably never heard of unless you’re a media junkie like me, and explains why revenue goals don’t work for them.
detects AI, risks ruin, doesn’t know what streamers know about who watches their shows, and gets press for business projects.
Publishing-like:
has good news for publishing, is disgusted that she must start working again, doesn’t make all their money from Substack, and outlines what an author-centric publishing company might look like.
wonders whether they should become an agent, gives tips on writing humorous personal essays, pitches their new novel, and explains why they left their editorial job.
has a visceral reaction to being asked what her book is about, wants you to meet your fellow writers, talks concretely about abstracting a comic art style, and tells an even stranger story about Jekyll and Hyde.
takes sixteen years to write a book, goes deep into the data of their first two years, complete with subscriber and revenue numbers, and gets weird with celebrity worship.
Lifestyle-ish:
outlines 11 everyday uses for AI voice and vision, gets meta about the celery man, wonders why every company that adds AI functionality looks terrible, and sells their soul to AI chatbots and doesn’t even get $5 for it.
thinks you should take a lover and move to Scotland, has people really upset with them, and reexamines the meaning of “in sickness and in health”.
screams to cope with these crazy times, almost fried their cat, takes care of nice things, and doesn’t trust you.
loves garbage, perseveres as love turns to grief, and talks to trees and they say nothing back.
starts their New Year’s resolutions in October, pens a six-word memoir, explores the patriarchal origin of why women are getting their maiden name tattooed on their body, and celebrates the humble bookmark.
Two amazing humans revealed two horrible stories behind two different douchy men that landed in my inbox within minutes of each other. gives a harrowing account of the physical abuse they and others received by former Last Podcast on the Left's Ben Kissel that still haunts them. Meanwhile, reveals the terrible tragedy of five victims who filed suit against OUR founder and child sex trafficking advocate Tim Ballard, and how they threatened to bury Meg when she came out to advocate against them, with serious potential ramifications to her career.
Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? 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 myLGBTQIA+ YA fantasy novel, Anna and the Dark Place.
Anna cannot escape death. It follows her everywhere. First with her aunt, then her father, and now her best friend Katie has died after a long battle with cancer.
With her best friend gone, Anna is falling apart. So, when Katie’s ghost returns from beyond the pale talking about a tear in the barrier between the living of the dead, Anna is sure she’s gone crazy.
She denies Katie at first. However, eventually, Katie turns Anna to her side and convinces her to help. Now, together they must learn a spell that will save the world before the dead invade and destroy everything.
Join Anna and Katie on a fantastical quest that introduces them to trolls, gnomes, dragons, and much more as they discover that death is stranger than they ever imagined.
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.