Productivity concerns are not the exclusive province of writers, although we tend to agonize over such matters because we’re self-employed and have no one to prod us back to work when we wander off-track.
We’re also creatively effective at procrastinating ourselves into the ground.
I could have made this blog about productivity for everyone in general, a la David Allen.
Only, that would mean I’m helping everyone in general, a little bit, including writers.
I want to help writers a lot, not just a little bit. Specifically, I want to help writers who write fiction and self publish it.
Why such a specific, narrow niche?
Specificity means I can deep-dive into the most arcane areas of productivity, and still provide relevent information of interest to indie fiction writers.
It’s a world I know very, very well. I’m living it every day.
I have spent years studying productivity systems in an effort to arrange my own life in a way that would maximise my writing time while I worked a day job and had a semblance of a life in between.
All that research and study has taught me that writers have a unique set of productivity challenges and no single “system” out there addresses those challenges.
I’ve been stealing snippets from David Allen, Brian Tracy, Leo Babauta, Steve Pavlina and more for years.
I won’t say I’ve studied at the feet of every single expert out there because I haven’t — I don’t have that sort of time and besides, I finally came to realize that learning yet another new system was a fancy form of procrastination all on its own.
There is no single system out there that suits everyone.
There is no single system out there that will magically solve all your problems, and give you the life you want. Sorry.
You have to make your own system, cobbling it together a bit at a time from hundreds of sources, and tweaking and reiterating as you figure out the details.
Then you keep doing that, over and over again.
I can help you build your own productivity habits, because you and I have the same type of problems to deal with, that anyone who is not an indie fiction writer does not.
Why Not “Author”?
I badly wanted this site to be named “The Productive Indie Fiction Author” for a couple of reasons:
- It rolls off the tongue easier than “The Productive Indie Fiction Writer”.
- I tend to think of myself as an author — it’s what I put on my tax returns and what I tell anyone who asks the eternal question about my occupation.
The domain name was available. I could have taken it.
However, there far more reasons why “Writer” is better.
“Author” has a specific meaning.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “author” as
the writer of a literary work (such as a book)
Short stories, blog posts, novellas and novelettes, flash fiction, fan fiction, collaborations, series, serials… none of the myriad types of fiction a writer can produce and publish these days as a stand-alone, commercial piece of work looks like a book as we all understand books to be.
“Author” implies a writer who produces and publishes a novel-length piece of fiction.
It’s limiting.
Google search keywords show that “writer” is used for searches far more than “author”.
As I want to help as many writers as possible, I went with the popular phrase, instead.