I joined the Internet in 1994, only two years after it was opened to the public. One of the people I met online at that time was a (then) romance writer, Diana Stout. We have remained in contact ever since. Diana recently released a book: Finding Your Fire & Keeping It Hot: Discovering Your Why, […]
Tap Into Your Creative Core, with Dr. Diana Stout Read More »
I’ve had a long-running, on-again-off-again affair with self-discipline. I admire the iron discipline of dancers, and would love to have that sort of discipline myself. I’ve been working on it all my life. “Success” methodologies have been around since Victorian times, but my first introduction to the idea of creating one’s own success was in
Let’s Pull Self-Discipline Off the Garbage Heap Read More »
One of my terrible tendencies is that I’m a relapsing/remitting Perfectionist. So, writing about planning for the new year, in the New Year, instead of December 2023, makes me itchy and uncomfortable. Because planning now, my perfectionist brain argues, ruins the year. The year has already started, and now it’s already a mess because the
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The Productive Indie Fiction Writer now available everywhere! Today is the retail release of The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. The image, above, is a mock-up, but the number of pages isn’t a lie. There is just shy of 100,000 words in the book! I spoke about The Productive Indie Fiction Writer with Joanna Penn on
PIFW Now On All Retailers Read More »
Very rarely do I need to calculate the number of pages in an eBook. Most of the time, indie authors only care about the size of the file, and the number of words in the story itself (sans front and back matter). Besides, calculating pages in an eBook is an exercise in frustration; depending on
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Last week, I talked about batching: breaking up complex tasks into their component steps, then doing just one step multiple times at once. When all the steps are batched like this, the work on each step goes much faster than if you do all the steps in a complex task one after another, switching your
Chunking: Another way of saving time. Read More »
One of my very first jobs, after I left high school, was data entry. Thirty of us would punch in numbers from thousands of sheets of engineering reports that had been collected for a month, from across the state. Granted, these days, those same engineers would be punching in their own data on a mobile
A Henry Ford Efficiency You Can Use to Save Time Read More »
Did you enter NaNoWriMo this year? Did you win? Congratulations! What is NaNoWriMo? If you haven’t heard of this annual competition before, let me explain quickly; Every November, writers can set themselves the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of the month. NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month. The novel
What to Do with Your Story Now NaNoWriMo is Done Read More »
Indie writing is a peculiar profession. We want to write more – always – but the roadblocks and self-sabotage we put ourselves through is unique. General productivity sites don’t address our unique issues. You must find sites like the excellent Prolifiko, run by Chris Smith and Bec Evans, to find productivity advice specific to writers.
The Top 8 Productivity Sites That Help Writers Write More in Surprising Ways Read More »
Take Advantage of This Fantastic Discoverability Tool Do you do BookFunnel? If you do, are you participating in the BookFunnel (BF) promos? You should—they’re one of the most effective tools for discoverability, and they can build up your email list quickly, if that is a priority for you. If you are not yet using BookFunnel,
8 Industrial-Weight Tips to Maximize Your BookFunnel Promos Read More »
