[DIGEST] Vacation, all I ever wanted...

I'm headed to Tanzania for safari, but can't wait to hear how you're doing when I get back to an internet connection.

June 10, 2023

I’m starting a safari in Tanzania today, which means I’ll be mostly out of communication for the next couple of weeks. However, I still want to hear about how you’re doing when I make it back to a wifi connection at base camp.

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 have no idea how I feel right now, because I’m writing this in the past, but I hope I’m doing good, and have seen some cool animals.

Another chapter of Magic dropped this week. Whoever was trying to kill Ollie has been foreboding enough to put the fear of the gods into some of the most powerful monsters in town. New chapters are free to read. Paid subscribers can access the archive, along with all our bonus stories.

This week’s article is about one of my favorite types of marketing, virtual conferences. This is an article I originally posted on my old blog after running Alt-FCD, Wannacon, and The Online Writer’s Conference. If you’re a forest, grassland, or tundra, this might be the perfect kind of marketing for you because it’s all about excitement, connection, and depth.

Next week, I am revisiting a popular topic at The Author Stack, namely where to invest your time when building your audience.

Here’s a preview:

This single concept changed a lot for me. In fact, it turned my marketing around completely. Instead of pushing my message out to everybody endlessly, I planted my flag into the ground and pulled the right people to me.

This idea is the basis for The Good Human Strategy.

In it, you start by putting good into the world and acting like a good human. Hopefully, you are already a good human, but even if you only act as a good human, you will find that you eventually become that kind of human. It is very important that you are at the very least helpful and kind because those are two qualities people respond to, especially if you are helpful and kind to them.

These qualities do not work as well as fear when it comes to building loyalty quickly, but it does create a better class of fan, who is loyal because they want to be loyal, instead of loyal because they fear not being near you.

The most important part of this whole process is that you put good into the world without expecting anything in return. What you do is your karma and the only thing you can control. What other people do is their karma, and that’s on them to handle. The world will beat you down in every way possible, but if you can find a way to still put good into the world even when everything is going against you, then you win in the end.

I should be enjoying my vacation, but I just love reading Substack too much, so I found a quiet evening to dive into some great ones while I was holed up in Doha waiting for my plane to Tanzania.

Sorry, no pictures of Qatar b/c I basically laid in bed all day with wicked jetlag. I feel like I failed you, but I can’t think about it too much bc I have a plane to catch. See you on the other side :)

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