[DIGEST] Song 2...

Your weekly stackable roundup

Woo-hoo, this week has been a blur. My head feels like heavy metal and I’ve been on pins and needles waiting for September to start.

For the six people reading this who remember the 1997 hit “Song 2” from Blur, that was for you.

Literally, whenever I hear the word blur, that song runs through my head. If you were born after 1990, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but I find it fascinating what songs stick with you.

Like, anytime somebody says “I've created a monster”, which happens more than you would think, I immediately start singing the rest of the verse from Eminem’s “Without Me”. I haven’t listened to Eminem in 15+ years, but I can’t get that song out of my head.

And yes, in about 3 weeks, I’ll be humming the Green Day song “When September Ends”.

How about you? Do you have any songs that have inexplicably stood the test of time with you? Ones you haven’t listened to in a decade that you can’t stop singing?

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.

This was a busy week, and I think it’s just going to keep being busy until December now. I was hoping this month would allow me to recover, but life has other plans. 2.5

WEBINAR CATCH-UP: On Wednesday, we had the second part of our two-part webinar series. You can watch both parts below.

If you’ve been thinking of applying to our Future of Publishing Mastermind, then pricing goes up on September 6th from $2,500 to $3,000. You can find out more information by clicking here, or you can apply now if you’re ready.

As long as you have your application in by the 6th, we will honor the pricing even if we approve you after that date. Additionally, if you have questions about the mastermind, you can book a free 30-minute call to discuss them. As long as you book a call by September 6th, we will honor your pricing, even if we don’t meet until after that date.

What I wrote on Substack: This week, I cross-posted my article about Maximizing Substack for each ecosystem.

Substack can work for any ecosystem, but they will each find different advantages and challenges from the platform. Here, we lay it all bare.

Candy could barely hold a cup of tea without spilling it everywhere, her hand was shaking so violently. She was white as a sheet, muttering to herself, and jerked away from me whenever I caught her eye. Humans were never meant to learn the truth—that demons walked among them, that monsters were real, and that they were right to fear things that went bump in the dark.

“We have to get out of here,” Candy said, raspy-voiced. “We can’t—we can’t—”

“Candy,” I replied softly. “Do you know where you are?”

I had wrapped her in my arms and carried her out of the shop over an hour ago. She was sitting in one of the few safe places in the city, Ginger’s Diner. I brought all my strays to Ginger, and she took care of them. When I needed my space, she never asked questions, and since I never had answers, it was a perfect arrangement.

I bought Candy a plate of waffles, and the butter and whipped cream melted off of the top of it as it went unattended. She did take a sip of black tea, her favorite, but that was all I could muster from her without force-feeding her. I wasn’t a hospice nurse.

“Hell,” she whispered, finally finding my eyes. “I’m in Hell. We’re all in Hell…and there are demons.”

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.

SPECIAL WEBINAR REPLAY: Book Brush Spills The Details On Hourly Concepts

Wish you had some affordable help with your Kickstarter campaign, book swag, A+ content, TikTok videos, advertising images and copy, interior page design (for print special editions), and more?

That's why we were so happy to have Kathleen Sweeney from Book Brush do an exclusive presentation for our community about their new program. Hourly Concepts helps you get affordable custom graphics for your various needs, including (but not limited to):

I’m Mr. Do-it-Yourself, but even I think everyone can use a little bit of design help now and then. I love Book Brush as a user, but I absolutely adore being able to offload graphic design to somebody else at an affordable price. You can hire Hourly Concepts for $25/hr (with a5 hour minimum). That’s bonkers cheap and the work is so good. Click below to book a call with Kathleen to learn more about what they can do for you.

FREE GUIDE: I got sick of linking to the same five articles during office hours, so I decided to create a guide for Substack growth at every stage of your journey. I’ve unlocked all my best Substack articles and you can read them all for free. I’d love to get your opinion in the comments about what you think if you get a chance to check it out.

Please let me know if something isn’t working right because Substack does love to paywall things after I unpaywalled them.

Upcoming article: Next week, I’ll be writing about the 5 biggest mistakes writers make when turning their books into comics

Transitioning a project from one medium to another is about translating the meaning, connotation, subtext, and style in a manner that would be most appealing to a new audience.

In the case of comics, instead of the new audience being readers in another language, it’s about translation into the language of how another medium works. I’m not going to show you how to understand or make a comic in that article. Scott McCloud already did it better than I ever could with Understanding Comics and Making Comics.

If you are thinking about making comics and haven’t read those two books, I would highly suggest you add them to your queue right now.

Instead, what I thought I would do is talk about the biggest mistakes authors make when translating their work into comics (aside from not reading those two books I mentioned).

Don’t get me wrong, there is a ton that comic creators have to learn about novels, but in general, those are problems of time and not money. The craft of novels is mostly learned by writing a bunch of novels and that doesn’t take a lot of money to do.

You can’t just jump into writing a novel with both feet without actually writing a book. Whereas, authors love to jump headfirst into comics, spend a ton of money on an artist, and end up with a subpar product at the end of the day.

You can drop a ton of money in comics and make irreparable mistakes that could tons of money to repair. I’ll likely write an article about translating comics to novels at some point, but this feels like a dire need kind of situation, so I’m focusing on going from novels to comics first.

I have watched writers make $10,000-$20,000 mistakes with their comic books. Worse, the books end up ranging from passable to embarrassing. It’s one thing to blow a wad of money and create something exceptional. It’s quite another to waste a ton of money on something unusable.

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

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 YA dark fantasy 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.