It’s challenging for creators to try to find an audience for their work. All advice for doing this amounts to: 1) find where people who like your sort of thing online are and 2) tell them about your stuff. When a creator first attempts to execute this, they find these people INCREDIBLY, and surprisingly, hostile. […]
Self Publishing
The Complicated Relationship Between Creators and Consumers
There was recently a release of outraged articles when George R. R. Martin called some of his own fans “internet assholes”. Further back, there were angry trekkies when William Shatner announced that he would no longer sign autographs outside of paid convention signings. During his baseball career, Barry Bonds was famously hostile to his fans. […]
Monetizing Communities
I’ve been a member of online communities since before most people had heard of the internet. Before internet access had reached the masses, bulletin board systems (BBSes) allowed computers to connect, one-on-one, and form local, small versions of what we’re all now apart of. One element of this has been the evolution of online communities, […]
BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, Prolific Works, and BookSprout
When people first consider writing, they believe that writing is the hard part. Then, once they have a written draft, they assume editing and getting it ready for release is the hard part. Once they’ve published, they find that getting people to consider reading what they’ve created is actually the hard part. A number of […]
Website Visitors
When you’re getting started with something, having a metric to measure your progress is important. At the lowest possible level, just your time devoted to the activity can work, but it’s better if you can manage a more sophisticated measurement than that. I’ve been trying to write commercially, and the ultimate measurement for that is […]
Merchant Magician Released
I’ve released an urban fantasy novella. This feels like it is, in many ways, my debut book. With Sunday Game Sessions I joined together all the web serial posts I’d made and put them on Amazon, but with this book I worked through the text with an editor, had proof reading done repeatedly, adjusted the […]
Beta Readers
I recently published what I consider my debut novella, “Merchant Magician”. As part of the process, I had a number of beta readers provide feedback on it. Overall, it was mixed experience. What is a Beta Reader? A beta reader is someone who reads your about-to-be-published work and gives you feedback from a reader’s perspective. […]
Getting A Cover For Your First Book
With most activities there is a problem of “expert blind spots”. The idea is that once you start understanding a domain of knowledge, you forget what other people don’t know. When you talk about it, you assume a background similar to your own – other experts. USUALLY, it would be reasonable to listen to the […]
Feedback on Creative Work
I’ve just finished the first chapter of a book I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m happy with how it came together generally, but had a feeling that I often have at the early stage of a creative project. “Why don’t I get some feedback and figure out if this is worth developing?” It […]
Getting Started With Your Mailing List
Starting and maintaining a mailing list is some of the first advice new authors receive, after “paying for a nice cover” and “hiring editing services”. What a mailing list actually entails usually isn’t detailed and I found the specifics somewhat confusing, so I wanted to write up what I’ve figured out so far. The general […]