Posts by Dan Blank
I take a nap every day.
That seems like something of a confession, because I find that there is a strange fixation in our culture of a certain kind of productivity. One where you have to be “always on,” always “crushing it,” always stressed, always available, always buried by email.
Too often, this creates the expectation that “overwhelmed” is the only reasonable state of being. That, if you aren’t overwhelmed, that somehow, you aren’t doing it right; if you aren’t overwhelmed, you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough.
Yet, I find the following to be true:
I work with a lot of writers, and in a recent course I teach, 30+ writers were sharing their short/mid/long term goals. One writer mentioned a short-term goal of writing four books per year. A few others had similar goals. This goal – write four books next year – was amidst a list of many other responsibilities, both personal and professional.
When I pointed out how bold this goal seemed, the writer explained how within their genre, writing/publishing four books per year was the expectation.
Now, if you want to write 4 books next year, that is awesome. I support you in that.
BUT…
If you are doing it because it is “what is expected,” that’s simply not healthy. It is no more healthy than corporations that expect their workers to pull 12 hour shifts everyday… to give up weekends… to work on Thanksgiving Day… to spend time away from family… to cut their maternity leave to the bare minimum… or to diminish the value of personal health by adding on more hours, more responsibly, more pressure.
Read MorePhoto by Toby Oxborrow
Many people bemoan the self-involved writer on social media, the one who is constantly vying for attention and over-promoting their own work. This puts other writers (you, perhaps?) into a conundrum: you WANT attention for your work, but only in an elegant manner. Self-promotion, with grace.
This week, I read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. He tells stories about people managing complex situations, where thousands of small actions mean the difference between life and death for those around them. The most compelling stories in the book revolve around surgeries where a patient’s life was dangling on the line, or flights where something goes horribly wrong and hundreds of people’s lives are in jeopardy.
Giving (Not Getting) Attention
The author posits that in cases of extreme complexity (air travel, modern surgery, massive construction projects), the individuals responsible for them needed to strike a balance between simple automated actions that helps prevent mistakes (checklists), and the nimble self-direction that a top surgeon, pilot, or construction manager have earned as experts.
The author made the case for simplicity and established process amidst great complexity.
This had me considering where I put my attention. Gawande made a compelling argument about how simple mistakes are overlooked in a surgery, resulting in the patient dying over something that should have been routine.
When I consider the goals and challenges of the writers I work with, it had me thinking more about how we give attention, and less about how we get attention.
Overwhelmed
Most people I meet are overwhelmed in some way. The complexity of their lives seems to have hit a breaking point whereby the common refrain is “there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”
As I sit here and write this, I just glanced at the cover of The Checklist Manifesto and noticed the subtitle: “How to Get Things Right.” This seems almost like a backhanded reference to the famous “Getting Things Done” concept – where we don’t just worry about “done,” we worry about “correct.”
A qualitative difference.
This definitely seems to resonate with the worldview of writers I know: less interested in ‘anything’ that works, and more interested in grace during the process.
Read MoreWhat is your capacity to create?
Many people I know tend to express some aspect of their lives as being OVERWHELMED, and that they wrestle with ANXIETY on a daily basis. In developing your craft as a writer, in publishing a body of work over time, in connecting with your audience in meaningful ways: how do you create greater capacity for these things to happen?
How can you create more expressions of accomplishment (“I am working on my fourth novel!”) than you provide excuses for procrastination (“Oh, I haven’t written for weeks, the kids started soccer.”)
Creating capacities is an obsession of mine: how to develop skills, processes, and strategies that address the overwhelm and anxiety that spreads through our lives like a virus. Capacities can have exponential potential: they can be honed (as a craft); can be reused again and again in different ways as your writing career grows and evolves.
This is a mindset I default to when considering authors: you are not just publishing a book, not just creating a product and putting it into the marketplace; you are developing capacities as a creative professional. Because for many authors I know, the book is one of many that is inside them.
Creating Habits That Build Capacity
I am writing my first book. After years of planning, outlining, and failing to do so, I am now just doing it (hat tip to Nike.) I have been working with a friend who is a book coach to help frame what it is about, and then she had me start writing it.
Then something unexpected happened, something she didn’t ask for: I started writing 1,000+ words a day for the past 20 days. When I sent her the last batch of pages, she responded with this:
“87 pages???? Do you SEE that? 87 pages?? Weren’t you the guy struggling to write a 3-page article about 3 months ago?? I’m sort of baffled by what’s happened — and awestruck and thrilled for you!! But I also sort of don’t get it. This never happens….”
My friend is book coach Jennie Nash, who was recently featured in a Writer Unboxed interview here, and who has published seven books of her own, plus working with goo-gobs authors. So that feedback from her, admittedly, feels good.
My response:
“Honestly, I don’t see it – the 87 pages. I see 1,000 words every morning. The habit has made it easy to see this – work through it – and move on. I just wrote my 1,100 words for the morning, which I needed to get through before I could read and respond to email. That is all I see. ”
And I wrote 1,000 words towards the book before I was allowed to work on this very blog post.
If you would have asked me a couple of months ago about writing a book, I would have told you that there is no room in my life to write a book. It’s not even about time, it’s about creative energy, which all goes into working with writers and developing these blog posts, and other material. Realistically: there is no room to write a book.
Yet… there clearly is […]
Read MoreBefore we get to today’s post, I wanted to make you aware of an offer by a group called Writer Mamas. These women are trying to raise funds so that several WU community members can attend the Writer Unboxed Un-Conference in November. To that end, they’re selling $200 worth of writing books and guides for half cost. Click here to learn more about the offerings.
“That’s putting the cart before the horse, isn’t it?”
This is probably the metaphor I like the least, yet hear most often. In what context do I hear it? Things such as:
Why do I dislike this phrase? Because it simplifies to a romantic narrative of how to succeed as a writer. It nearly always whittles it down to:
Romantic thing about writing vs creepy horrible spammy businessy thing.
It’s easy to feel wise and pure by saying things like that. I mean, I would love to say:
“Filing a joint tax return before hugging my wife is like putting the cart before the horse.”
Or
“Waking up early to change the cat’s litter box before writing a poem about my son is like putting the cart before the horse.”
For the context of a writer, when we talk about success as a PROFESSIONAL – things are often more complicated than simple romantic contrasts. You have to do a wide range of tasks concurrently; you are unsure of what works; the world you WANT to live in (where cupcakes have no calories and where a book naturally finds its way into readers hands), differs from the world we DO live in (where it may actually take effort to help get a book into the hands of the right reader. Don’t even get me started on cupcakes…)
Now, before I go further, I want to be clear about two things:
But I worry that these simplistic phrases and encouragements: “don’t put the cart before the horse” mask the reality of how complex success really is:
Read More
There are so many entities that seem to put themselves between you and the folks who read your books: retailers, Amazon (they seem to be a special category all their own), publishers, agents, publicists, media, social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc), communities (Goodreads, Wattpad, etc), just to name some of the most obvious.
In other words, there is:
You, the author –> some other entity –> the reader/audience.
Now, for the most part, these entities add value. Loads of value. Twitter allows you to do things you couldn’t do on your own, as does a publisher, agent, Amazon, Goodreads, etc. And of course, you get to CHOOSE which of these PARTNERS you want to engage with. Because that is what they are, partners in your professional process of having a writing career. That choice is entirely up to you. (yay freedom!)
Today I want to explore one way to forge a DIRECT connection with your audience. One where there is no other entity creating a ruleset as to how and when you can connect with your audience. In other words, a connection where no one is changing an algorithm, or terms, or saying you can do X, as long as you follow our parameters and use our proprietary system.
THE LEAST CROWDED CHANNEL
I remember author Tim Ferriss describing how he spent thousands of dollars for marketing his first book: he pursued the least crowded channel: IN PERSON RELATIONSHIPS (he mentions it here). He spent his money on airfare to try to establish relationships with people he thought could help his book find an audience. He felt that shouting more messages into crowded channels wouldn’t differentiate himself, he knew that sitting face to face with someone is the least crowded channel.
Possible ‘least crowded channels’ for you connecting with someone?
That I’ll only end up drowning in the sea of online voices. That no one cares. That I’m not interesting enough, attractive enough, young enough, clever enough, or technically adroit enough to catch and hold anyone’s attention no matter what I blog/post about, when, where, how, or how often.”
This is how Karyn Henley, an author I am working with described her fear of promoting her books. I had two reactions when reading this:
And it made me consider: why do we often hide these fears? From ourselves, and from the world, perhaps because they somehow seem shameful?
I have heard a lot of quotes akin to “the brave aren’t those without fear; they are simply those who feel fear, yet move ahead despite it.”
Too often we avoid talking about fear because it seems like an embarrassing debilitation – something that if we pretend isn’t there – if we don’t discuss out loud, that at least we can give the illusion that we are brave and unaffected. But bravery is usually FULL of fear in the mix. So let’s talk about it.
I think that the more we try to pretend that fear doesn’t and shouldn’t exist, the more we hurt our own chances to create whatever it is you dream about.
I have been talking to writers about this – what are their fears as authors. I mean the stuff that keeps them up at night. The stuff behind why we procrastinate, and why we do or don’t take actions to create or share our work.
Today, I would like to explore what I have been hearing. Here are a few of the fears we discussed:
APATHY
This seemed to be the number 1 fear among writers: That no one will care, no one will read their books, no one will feel any sense of enthusiasm about this thing they created.
Read MoreWhat if you stopped reading this right now. What if you didn’t read to the end of this post, didn’t allow yourself to be sucked into the potentially awesome thing I am about to tell you? What if…
… if you became willfully ignorant.
This all came to my mind this week after reading that Ira Glass had no idea who the editor of the New York Times was, and hadn’t even heard about the recent drama with the paper’s leadership:
Interviewer: Jill Abramson was fired.
Ira Glass: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Interviewer: Jill Abramson got fired from the New York Times.
Ira Glass: Okay. And she was who?
Interviewer: The executive editor.
Ira Glass: Okay. I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble. When did that happen?
Interviewer: Wednesday. And it’s been a massive … the blogosphere is going wild.
Ira Glass: I hate reading media news so I actively sort of — I’m not interested in someone getting fired. No disrespect to people that are, but I literally had no idea who she was, or that she got fired until this moment.
Interviewer: Really?
Ira Glass: Yeah. I live in my own little world and we’re putting together a show that we’re putting up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; I was rewriting the thing here at the Peabody’s that I’m doing today and we are doing a radio show, so it has been pretty busy. I’m so sorry that was either the worst possible quote or a possibly useful quote. Am I, like, the only person in New York who hasn’t heard this?
Interviewer: Maybe.
Ira Glass: Well, I take that with pride.
Interviewer: She was the first female editor of the New York Times.
Ira Glass: Okay.
Interviewer: It was this big unceremonious firing.
Ira Glass: Honestly, like, I’m a superfan of the New York Times, but I know nothing about how they put it together and I really don’t care.
I found this via Jason Kottke, who commented:
“There is very little about the Times’ story that isn’t just straight-up gossip. And for someone like Glass who traffics in ideas and is busy producing something of high quality like This American Life, media gossip just isn’t that important.”
Now, there is a flip side to that reaction in that the Jill Abramson story represents a deep fissure in our culture, and that knowing about it is critical to resolving many unaddressed issues about how women are compensated in the workplace. That this is an important issue, and knowing about it raises awareness that leads to progress and change, and gives voice to the […]
Read MoreA meetup group I help organize – this week we talked about RISK.
“Even if you have something really good. Even if people really like it. It takes so much MORE in order to succeed.”
These are words from my friend Andrea, at a meetup I helped run last night that brought together local creative professionals.
The group shared stories of their own journey to craft a creative life & business, and observations from friends and colleagues.
Andrea shared another quote, from a local shop owner who, after opening her doors and struggled to develop a clientele:
“I didn’t realize how hard it would be to just bring in $100.”
This is akin to an author dreaming of their book launch, and wondering how many hundreds or thousands of books they will sell, and plateauing at 75 books sold.
It is so difficult to write a book, and to then publish a book, that the concept of developing an audience and selling books can be downright paralyzing to any reasonable author. (luckily, most authors live in a dreamworld, to their credit!)
:)
There is so much risk in choosing to write and publish a book:
Just to name a few. The discussion last night, luckily, also touched upon success that comes with risk as well. That failure is part of a PROCESS to success, not an ending. A comma, not a period.
Read MoreIsn’t that old fashioned.
Spending hours.
Days.
Weeks.
Months.
Dare I say, years.
Creating. Honing. Crafting. Editing. Exploring.
One’s own purpose. One’s craft as a writer. One’s ability to understand who they hope to reach, and how. And what they hope the effect of that connection will be. The legacy of the work.
Old fashioned to send a thank you letter in the mail, instead of merely “favoriting” a tweet.
To send a long email response to a Facebook post.
To ask to meet for coffee instead of having a phone call.
To focus less on gaming an algorithm (be it Amazon or Google), and more on publishing when it makes sense to you, the author.
To measure value in generations, not daily sub-genre bestseller lists.
To become AWARE of trends, of tools, of new opportunities, but not allow them to drive all of your actions. To balance the new, with the old, in a way that is personal to your challenges, and your goals.
To realize that “best practices” are often simplified lists of things that work only 30% as good as they used to.
And that enthusiasm is a better driver for action that skepticism.
That the demons you must battle to create and share your work lie less in understanding the ins and outs of metadata or social media or blog tours, and more in the bad habits you won’t give up, the excuses you cling to because they protect you from ancient fears.
Dan Blank, Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, and editor Christine Kopprasch
Today I would like to take you into the year-long book launch process of one author. Since the middle of last year, I have been working closely with Miranda Beverly-Whittemore on preparing for the May 2014 release of her novel Bittersweet from Crown. We have been sharing our process publicly on a blog about the launch: sharing strategy, tactics, and emotions around preparing to connect with readers. When Therese Walsh mentioned this month’s theme on staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud was “Inside Publishing,” it was as if the 100+ blog posts from the launch blog existed solely for the preparation of this very article!
What I share here will be taken from that blog and from the many long conversations Miranda and I have had. What I like most about this case study is that Miranda is a fiction author, and has been described as writing “literary fiction.” This is typically the type of writing that many authors worry if typical platform, marketing, and audience engagement rules apply.
We’ll explore that in-depth below. Also: it’s worth noting that Miranda is being published by a “traditional” publisher, and yet, everything that is shared on the blog illustrates how much work she does, and highlights the many other folks involved in the process. Publishing is a team sport (a phrase I believe I have heard Jason Ashlock say more than once.)
(note: because I have a lot of source material to pull from, this post will include a lot of links to the Bittersweet book launch blog. I do not mean for it to be a link-fest, but merely to give you access to more depth on each topic.)
I will break this post out into a few key themes, and then include quotes from Miranda, links to the blog posts where she or I discuss the topic, and then add additional thoughts and context.
THE MOTIVATION FOR A YEAR-LONG BOOK LAUNCH
Miranda has tasted failure (she may explain it that she swallowed failure whole.) Bittersweet is her third novel, and she has been very open about talking about her career thus far. A recap, all quotes from Miranda:
Read More
You want to find a group of ideal readers for your books, but do you ever feel like you are herding cats?
The truth is: your audience is unorganized. They do not stack neatly, they don’t always form logical groupings, and they do everything possible to obscure their tastes and behaviors from your view.
They are a Rubik’s Cube with 10,000 squares on each side. I know, you want to feel like an audience-finding ninja, where you immediately crack the code:
But it’s hard. It takes time. And that is frustrating. You hear of others’ success and begin to feel that there is a secret that they found and no one told you about. So we begin to look for best practices, shortcuts, and magic buttons.
As if there is some secret place your readers are hiding: some mysterious section of Amazon or Goodreads, or some social media hashtag that no one told you about, and these things have already done the hard work of bringing together EXACTLY the right people who want to buy your books. And once you find this magic button, all you have to do is press it.
But beware of jolly candy-like buttons:
This button mentality aligns with our escapist tendencies: the idea that you can easily find your ideal audience, shout at them about your work, see your message spread with little effort (eg: “going viral”), and then you are free to run back to shelter.
That doesn’t happen too often though. It is hard work. And while your ideal audience isn’t pre-organized for you, the individuals who comprise it ARE out there. In fact, it is your job to bring them together, to connect and create that audience.
Read MoreI regularly hear from writers who say that they are overwhelmed, and unable to understand how to fit the idea of connecting with readers into their lives. One writer reached out to me the other day saying that she works 40-60 hours per week on her own business, and just can’t find the time or energy to not just WRITE, but to also develop her audience.
I want to address this head on for the busy writer, and also share some simple end-of-year tips for ALL writers at the same time.
Okay, it’s a very short checklist, after all, you are busy. Just two steps here:
Boom. Done. Right? Okay, okay… let’s dig into each:
Shore Up Your Messaging
When is the last time your checked your Twitter bio, your Amazon profile or the About page on your website? Did you just cringe because it’s been so long? I thought so.
Step 1: Get your messaging down, keep it simple, make it consistent wherever people find you. I know you are busy, so this is what I recommend: Give yourself a single hour, and a single cup of coffee, tea, or wine. Yerba Mate will do as well. Write a letter to your ideal reader as to what you write, why you two should be besties, and a bit about who you are. Write from a blank sheet of paper or digital document.
Now: post that to wherever you have a presence online. What you want here is two things:
Where do you do these things? Some places to start:
Bella Andre
So I had a chance to speak with Bella Andre recently, and she pretty much shocked me with two things she said. To me, each of these three things contain important lessons that any writer – or really any creative professional – can find value in.
The first time I saw Bella speak in person was nearly three years ago. At the time, she explained the process she developed to have her books translated into 8 languages and introduced to new international markets. Beyond being insightful and positive, you had a wonderful sense of her business acumen, and what it took for a writer to brand out to find new opportunities.
When I spoke to her recently and mentioned this, she immediately told me that this initiative failed. She said: “I did what should have been the right work. Unfortunately… almost across the board it turned out the translations were not good. I had to pull every book I paid for.” And the entire failure cost her tens of thousands of dollars, and clearly a lot of her time. Evidently, it is very difficult to get decent translations. And she said now – three years later – she is finally able to implement a system that she feels addresses these challenges.
If she finds incredible success in this initiative, likely her three years of effort will be washed away and hidden by quick tips for other authors to follow in terms of translations and expanding to international markets. But for her, she had to not just have the initiative to explore, but the gumption to learn, to try again.
How do you launch something? Whether it is a book, a reading club, a blog, a bookstore, a business, or a magazine?
Launching something is a theme that has come up again and again for me this week, and I want to share some examples of what it takes to bring your project to life. But let me get something out of the way up front:
If you are looking to mine this article for tips on how to provide more certainty, less risk, and less fear in the process of launching something, you can stop reading right now. Because I won’t diminish the risk, assuage your fear, or paint soft fluffy clouds around the picture of launching something. (sorry)
In fact, it often looks like this, an image my friend Sarah Bray shared recently:
She captioned this: “celebrating failure,” and in an email, she described her process of writing a book: the success of writing a first chapter she loved, and then a second chapter she hated. The “hooray” was simply meant to recognize that she at least wrote something.
Today I want to share a couple stories from folks I know launching things.
Read More
