Some Final Thoughts

Posted by on at 11:21 am

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cefeida/In my adult life I have built several businesses. Each began with a cluster of questions about a topic I wanted to learn more about. As I answered my own questions, I created a business model based on helping other people answer those same questions.

Five years ago I started Creative Content Coaching, the most recent iteration of this cycle, to find out how to scale individual influence while maintaining integrity and authenticity. It was a writer’s dilemma, at a time when publishing options were multiplying and the social media landscape was exploding. After two years of deep research and immersion in the alt publishing and author platform space, I found my answers and systematized them into a program that I could teach to others.

I did this successfully for two years, and could have kept going. But meanwhile I was offered the opportunity to take my career in another direction, with another set of questions to answer and an exciting new landscape to conquer. This new direction is a better fit for me now, so I am moving on from Creative Content Coaching.

I still work with a select few clients on big picture, media and messaging strategy. I may still blog here occasionally. But the landscape for authors who want to scale their presence is more settled than it was five years ago, and there are multiple, excellent resources for those who want to find out more—several of which I have linked to in earlier blog posts.

The good news overall is that quality writing still trumps social media ubiquity. If you have something important to say, can say it well, and have a way to reach people, your platform will grow. Publishing, to a large extent, is about who you know—and half the fun is meeting people along the way. So get out of your shell and share ideas, develop friendships, and enjoy yourself. As Tim O’Reilly would say, bring more value to the ecosystem than you harvest from it.

If you are on my email list, you will continue to hear from me occasionally when I have interesting things to share. And I will continue interviewing people on my Dream Talk Radio podcast and YouTube channel. But for now, bring me that horizon.

Social Media’s Ugly Shadow

Posted by on at 7:57 am

200-yr-old cottonwood tree

This article was shared with my email subscribers earlier this month. If you’d like to subscribe, click here.

In this season of All Hallows Eve, when what normally stays in the shadows comes out for all to see, I want to bring up a topic that we don’t often talk about. Namely, that not all online attention is positive. Achieving your goals by growing your platform can also attract negativity: people who use online anonymity to spread cruelty and lies, destroy reputations, and threaten physical harm. For fun. Meet the “trolls.”

Trolling is bullying, plain and simple. It can happen to anyone who gains a large following, especially in tech. And unfortunately, women are often singled out for the worst abuse. Continue reading Social Media’s Ugly Shadow →

Scratch Magazine: Explaining the Business of Writing

Posted by on at 8:15 am

Scratch MagazineAre you looking for a book contract for your nonfiction, genre or literary fiction work? Here is what three very different, successful literary agents have to say about author platforms:

Platform is really about fame, and there are two different kinds of fame. One is fame among strangers, and the other is fame in your community. And either of those can be a great base for a book project. We all get people coming to us who say, “Hey, get me a book deal, and then I’ll be famous.” And our reply is generally, “No, get famous first, and then we’ll get you the book deal.” There are lots of ways to be famous in the important communities of interest for the project that you’re working on. (Ted Weinstein)

Continue reading Scratch Magazine: Explaining the Business of Writing →

Bare Bones: Platform Basics for Authors

Posted by on at 4:53 pm

Bare Bones Platform

At the San Francisco Writers Conference last month I had the opportunity to speak with many authors about their platforms. The variation was stunning, and inspiring. Even among writers in the same genre, there were no two identical approaches to building visibility and community around their work.

As most authors know, a platform isn’t just “I have a Twitter account.” It is as much about individual preference, goals and creativity as it is about the tools themselves. Yet seeing all the rich variation in fully-built platforms does beg the question: where do you start? What are the essentials, the bones, that all good platforms need? Continue reading Bare Bones: Platform Basics for Authors →

Being an Author for the Long Haul

Posted by on at 7:41 pm

Jon Rawlinson, cc license

As inspiring as it is to read about indie authors who make it big selling ebooks on Amazon, such reports can obscure the fact that most authors work for years before they become an “overnight” success. There are two imperatives for writers who want to take this long road to publishing success: keep writing, and keep building your platform.

Platform-building means marketing not just  your books but  you—as an author, and (yes) as a brand. Marketing oneself requires a completely different mindset than writing a long work of fiction or non-fiction. Yet the two activities go hand in hand, and both must be sustained over a period of years, not months, to get the kind of sustainable income most writers dream about. Continue reading Being an Author for the Long Haul →

N is for Niche

Posted by on at 10:51 am

Finding Your NicheI can still remember the first time I walked into my college’s main library. Before me were six huge floors, each one filled floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. Looking at all that accumulated knowledge, my heart sank. “Everything important has already been written,” I thought.

I was surprised by my own reaction. Why despair? I didn’t consider myself a writer then, but that moment set me on a long journey to find out what I had to say that was different enough, and special enough, to deserve a place on those shelves, too. I was searching for my niche.

Most writing on niche marketing and niche publishing assumes a professional adult audience, but the search for one’s niche begins far earlier than that. In many ways, it is a continuation of the adolescent drive to find our place in the world, to translate what is inside of us into a unique offering that is valuable to others.

Seen from this perspective, finding your niche is not just about streamlining what you do but about adding back some of those early interests you may have dropped along the way. Here’s how this two-part process works. Continue reading N is for Niche →

Why I Will Never Break My LinkedIn Rule Again

Posted by on at 12:19 pm

LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for all kinds of professional networking. With over 259 million users in more than 200 countries, it is often the very best way to network with leaders in your field. Over half of LinkedIn’s revenue comes from the talent market, so if you are currently employed or would like to be in the future, there is no better place to have your résumé.

I use LinkedIn in a more low-key, professional way than Facebook or Twitter. When I meet people at events and want to stay in touch with them, I connect with them on LinkedIn afterward. LinkedIn groups (there are over 2.1 million of them) are also great places to approach people for interviews, ask and answer questions on important topics, and let people know about relevant articles and events.

LinkedIn ConnectIn using LinkedIn, I have just one cardinal rule: never accept a connection request from anyone who does not add a personal note to that request. Even if I do not know someone, if they have taken the time to study what I do and write a quick, well-stated reason for wanting to connect, I will generally do it. People who don’t go to this trouble are typically just interested in marketing to me, so I have gotten pretty good at ignoring their requests.

But this week I made an exception to my rule. Here is what happened. Continue reading Why I Will Never Break My LinkedIn Rule Again →

The Challenge of Author Education

Posted by on at 1:16 pm

With so much great information available on how to publish and build a platform, the challenge for authors is finding the right advice at the right time. Most authors I speak to struggle not with finding reliable information but knowing which advice is right for their particular situation. Adding to the confusion, even sound advice can become quickly outdated with the rapid changes in publishing, social media, and web technology.

One solution is to find a few names you trust in the industry, follow them, and filter out much of the rest. But curation requires that these trusted voices to be clear about who their audience is for each piece. This is key, because right now there is a wide range of both needs and expertise among authors.

Just how wide this range extends was brought home to me recently when I interviewed Kristen McLean, CEO of Bookigee, about author education and book marketing. Always articulate and insightful about publishing, Kristen identified five different groups of authors with very different needs: Continue reading The Challenge of Author Education →

Social Media Tip: Turn Your Rants Into Pin Boards

Posted by on at 11:49 am

Sometimes you don’t know how you’re going to use a social media site until you’ve been on it for a while. In my case, a lightbulb went off about Google+ and Pinterest one day as I was silently fuming about a full-page book ad in the New Yorker.

The ad didn’t make any sense from a marketing standpoint, and the more I looked the more questions I had: Who exactly was the ad targeting? Why did the publishers choose this magazine for this book? Where was the publisher’s brand, anyway? And how did they hope to sell the book or track the ad’s effectiveness without a single URL?

All I wanted to do was have some fun with the ad and jot down a few offhand comments. But where? This wasn’t Facebook or Twitter material because I had too much to say, yet it wasn’t quite right for my blog either. That’s when the lightbulb appeared. It was perfect for Google+! Continue reading Social Media Tip: Turn Your Rants Into Pin Boards →

How to Blog and When Not to Blog

Posted by on at 12:46 pm

Blogging is a great way to find out what you love to write about. This may seem like good news, but it is not always welcome if you’ve started blogging for reasons other than love (i.e. to make money).

Here’s how the process works: you start a blog thinking that it will be all about Subject X. But somewhere along the way, Subject Y starts to seem like a much better fit for your interests and imagination, maybe even for your career goals. You find yourself flush with ideas on how to write about Subject Y, and how to market it to people who want to hear what you have to say.

What do you do then? Do you write about both things? Start a second blog for Subject Y? Repurpose your blog to focus on Y, while still hoping to keep readers who started reading you because of X? Continue reading How to Blog and When Not to Blog →