[DIGEST] Walking through hummus...

Your weekly stackable roundup

March 23, 2024

Hi friends,

I’ve been feeling pretty good the last couple of weeks, living on the high of the Future of Publishing Mastermind and launching Writer MBA Con. Then, a series of professional and personal setbacks kept slowing me down until I now feel stuck in my tracks. I don’t feel like I’m going backward, and I am still much further than I thought I would be right now in the grand scheme, and much further than anyone has any right to expect.

After going fast for so long, feeling like you’re stuck in hummus is very frustrating. Of course, it’s always been frustrating. Even when I felt stuck in hummus all the time it was constantly frustrating. The difference was that I thought it was normal to feel frustrated. Now, I know things can move fast under the right conditions.

Still, it’s unpleasant, as you would expect living in hummus would be. I have to keep telling myself “This is the whole point of life, not the other stuff. We are alive for these inbetween moments, so be content with them.”

It’s not really working for me, but I’m trying.

Making the Future of Publishing Mastermind almost always made me feel like I was stuck in hummus…until it didn’t. We spent a year basically stuck in hummus, and then we lurched forward hundreds of miles in a single week. However, because of recency bias, all I feel is the rush of wind in my face, and then getting stuck again all at once.

To succeed doing this work, you have to get really comfortable living in hummus, because as least you can move in hummus. At least it’s not calcified.

The truth is that you’re almost always stuck in hummus. I think for the most part we are given 1-2 times a year to lurch forward, and the rest of the year is just positioning, moving the pieces into place, little by little, until it all comes together or falls apart. I used to think you got as many bites of the apple as you could swallow without your stomach exploding, but there are a finite number of really good chances that come across your desk.

At the beginning, you kind of have to take on too much because you don’t know which opportunities are going to work well for you, but over time you get better at it and what stuff has really good ROI for your effort. You can’t even spot a good opportunity because you haven’t had enough of them. Once you know the feeling, you can chase bigger and better ones, but until you do, you just end up chasing your tail, or other people’s tails.

I don’t know, that metaphor got away from me.

Over time, as you grow in your career, you start to realize that it’s better to work on a couple of really interesting things than a bunch of pretty good things…

…but really interesting things take a lot of effort to pull off. Running a conference takes a lot of time to put together, but it has the chance to change your whole life.

Yes, while working on the big things, a lot of smaller opportunities pop up. They make you feel like you’re moving forward, but usually you find out that those things didn’t really move you forward much.

That’s not to say they aren’t worth doing. I’m all about working with interesting people on small projects that don’t take a lot of my energy because that’s how you meet new collaborators for bigger, more interesting things. Plus, the cumulative effect of them all together, if you keep at it, is pretty incredible, and it keeps you in people’s minds, which is important.

Really, you just need to take action, because taking action reduces fear, increases hope, and loosens the hummus. So, I’m trying to take action, because even imperfect action makes me feel a bit better when I feel stuck and gooey like I do right now. I realize that this is a wild turn of events from last week’s talk about pure, unadulterated joy, but that is why I think it’s so magical we were able to capture it because it is so rare.

Whenever I feel like this, I try to think back to good times, because they do exist, even when it feels like you’ll never have them again.

Long story short, maybe it’s post con letdown finally hitting me, or maybe I was just blind to some of the things that suddenly popped up, but I feel unmoored. Given that, this week I’m just going to share the first picture from New Orleans, of my wife and I eating charbroiled oysters at Drago’s, to refocus me. That was a good good meal.

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.

WHAT WE WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I (hopefully) helped you short-circuit the burnout cycle and showed you how to survive and thrive in the new media landscape.

This week has two tests, as I’m testing writing a second post this week because I was too prolific recently, and then also testing another awesome creator spotlight. I’d love to hear what you think.

Twenty-three minutes later—according to my watch—a light appeared at the end of the tunnel. A couple of minutes after that, the conveyor belt track ended inside a white, seamless room, with nothing but a large metal door directly in front of us.

The tunnel had collapsed behind us and the track beneath us disappeared, leaving Lily to crash two feet onto the ground. My head smashed against the roof when we landed.

“Ow.”

A woman’s voice spoke over an intercom. “Sorry about that.”

“You should be,” I snarled. “Lily is an innocent in all of this!”

“Show yourself, asshole!” Aimee added, pushing herself out of the car and banging on the door.

“Patience. We would like to speak with you in a civilized manner. I promise that if we cannot, we have ways of neutralizing you.”

“All right!” I said, exiting the car. “We’ll be good. What do you want?”

“You say that,” the voice said, “but your heart rate is still elevated. Once you have returned to calm, the door will open, and you will be led to the truth. And please don’t try to use magic in this room. It is ‘warded up the ass,’ to use your expression, Ms. White.”

“Goddamn it!” Aimee shouted. “This is bull!”

“I know,” I said. “But they hold all the cards here, and we can either play their game and find a way to cheat, or we’ll be stuck in here.”

“I like cheating,” Aimee said.

“Then we have to play the game.”

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 show you how to build an email sequence for a book launch

When I tell authors I send daily emails during a book launch, they look at me horrified. They tell me things like “I don’t have anything to say” and “My readers will hate that”. I can only say “Yes you do” and “No they won’t” so many times before it gets tedious. That amount of times is significantly fewer than the thousands of times I’ve had that conversation over the years. Today, I’m going to explain how you can send emails daily during a book launch without pissing off your audience, and give you the exact sequence I used along the way.

First things first. The number one thing I bet you’re going to say after reading this is “Well, sure Russell, but that’s for Kickstarter. It would never work with a real book launch” which, like, rude.

A Kickstarter is just a fancy preorder campaign for a book launch. Every single bit I use in my Kickstarter launches is cribbed right from more successful businesses, including authors.

Yes, if you launch into KU, a lot of this stuff is redundant because how much work do you have to do to get somebody to read a book for free except to show them that it exists?

If you’re wide or direct with your books, though, you are asking people to part with money to purchase your book, and functionally it is the same as a Kickstarter. You are presenting a case for why you deserve their money.

Further, I would contend that KU no longer works for most authors, and hasn’t worked for many years for the majority of authors. If it works for you, great, but by all metrics I have seen, and colloquial data straight from the author’s mouths, it works less well for almost everyone than it did in 2019.

ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week. We’re keeping Substack-eque this week and adding Lifestyle-oid. What’s the difference between Culture-ish and Lifestyle-oid? Well, they are squishy, but my thought is Culture deals with commenting on society while Lifestyle is commenting on somebody’s own or a specific life. I’ve felt like there were two different ideas in Culture for a while and this is my first attempt to define them.

Business-y:

Publishing-like:

Subastack-esque:

Culture-ish:

Lifestyle-oid:

Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? Let me know.

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 dystopian novel, The Vessel.

A million years ago the world ended. Since then a group of five have kept the City running. Now, one of them has died.

Every generation, the five most powerful people in the City transfer their consciousnesses into nubile, teenage hosts. This allows them to continue their important work of keeping the city functioning and protected from the nuclear wasteland beyond its borders.

When one of the Five dies, though, the others decide that their bodies are too fragile and decide to find new hosts earlier than usual. This triggers a competition, where children from across the City travel to its center to compete for a chance to earn a place as a Vessel for one of the Five.

If chosen, their families will be taken care of for the rest of eternity. There is great prestige in being a Vessel, along with enormous wealth for the families of the chosen, which means every participant has their own motivations for competing.

Althea is one of those competitors. She is from a poor farming family on the outskirts of the City, and with the money she receives from her sacrifice, her family would never have to work again. She is willing to risk her life for them.

So, she decides to compete, traveling from her home in the outer rings through the inner rings and finally to the center where the competition is held.

Along the way, she discovers the City she once venerated is a more dangerous place than she ever thought possible. Every turn is fraught with peril, and the competition could be the death of her, even if she doesn't win.

Join Althea for a story of friendship, love, struggle, and perseverance in the face of enormous odds. Perfect for anybody who loved Divergent, The Hunger Games, or The Maze Runner.

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