Justine Musk's Blog, page 40

should you post your fiction on your blog?

Should an unknown, unpublished writer post her fiction on her blog in an attempt to build her readership and perhaps get 'discovered' by an agent or editor?

Well.

Maybe not so much.

Because even when your fiction is free, it isn't free.

It demands time and energy with no guarantee of pay-off.

There's also the opportunity cost, the thing the person could have been doing instead of reading your stuff.

Remember that attention is the currency of the Internet. No matter how advanced technology gets, there's only so much attention to go around. The human mind can only focus on one thing at a time. So the price of your fiction is two or five or fifteen minutes in attention-dollars, and that's a lot to ask from a stranger who doesn't know you and doesn't yet trust that you are worth the investment.

First you have to close the trust gap.

You can start to do that by giving the reader something she already knows she wants.

Remember that people tend to have very different reasons for going online than they do when they're picking up a novel (or downloading it onto their iPad or iPhone or Kindle). They might be bored, or kind of lonely. They might be looking to kill time. They want diversion, connection, entertainment. But generally they're also looking for information. For an answer to a question, a solution to a problem: some kind of takeaway that will make them feel productive for going online in the first place.

Which is why the most popular and best-known blogs tend to be prescriptive (Get Rich Slowly, Problogger, Copyblogger, Zen Habits) even if they lean toward the personal and confessional (Brazen Careerist). Even the more personal bloggers will draw upon their life experience to find some nugget of life wisdom to impart to their readers (Cleavage, Communicatrix) and they'll do it in a quick and breezy way.

People online tend to skim, to scan. They're not reading closely (are you reading every single word in this post? thought not!).

The stuff that does best online is the stuff that is blatantly and obviously useful.

This is also the stuff that gets shared.

And you want readers to share your stuff, to pass it around their networks: tweet and retweet it, toss it on their Facebook pages, link to it in their blogs and email it to friends. You pull in new readers this way. Some of them will come back to your blog again, and then again, and turn into fans. And this, when it happens, is awesome.

Someone might read your fiction, and enjoy it, and even comment on it. But chances are they're not going to share it. If you pay attention to the blog posts circulating around your network and bubbling up in your Tweet and Facebook streams, you'll see what I mean.

The purpose of your blog is not to sell someone on your fiction. It's to attract them into your orbit, and then to keep them there — keep them returning to you — long enough to develop a sense of trust and familiarity.

People will buy books (and other things) from people that they like. From personalities that they resonate with.

(If I like a blogger/author, I'll often buy their books even if they're not my thing and I have no intention of reading. But I want to support them. I know that I can always give them away to someone much more likely to be their Ideal Reader.)

It's possible to write about your novel, or to write about writing your novel, in ways that other readers will find useful and interesting. But this segues into the whole question of Well then Justine, then just what the @(#*$ do I blog about? and that, my friends, is for another day.

(And also for the comments section below. If you have any thoughts on the matter, please share!)

image by Sergey Konyakin

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how to develop a creative practice (and why it actually does make you more creative)

When my life underwent massive upheaval (a.k.a. divorce) I started an obsessive search for answers about how to live and who to be, reading my way through the self-help books I used to scorn and the personal finance books I'd never bothered to examine beyond the first few pages.

I read about addictions and personality disorders and the creative process and the creative life. I read about blogging and social media. I read about feminism, wealth-building, spirituality, emotional and social intelligence. And as all this stuff cross-fertilized in my head, I began to see how certain ideas crossed disciplines; how they connected, supported and reinforced each other. Some of the same things came up over and over again in books about very different topics.

Everything connects.

Which is why I've come to believe that doing creative work is about living a creative life, in a way that goes beyond the technical details of how to structure a scene or mix colors on canvas. Knowing about the craft is very different from actual, day-to-day engagement with it. Reading an issue of Writer's Digest is easy. Sitting down to actually write — overcoming your built-in resistance to do so – is hard, sometimes very hard, so much so that the biggest dream-killer of all isn't lack of time.

It's procrastination.

We are wired to resist creative work. We are programmed to take the easy way out. The easy way seems like the known way, the safe, secure way, and that's what the ancient part of our brain is always seeking. Avoid danger. Avoid, avoid, avoid! Live to love another day, so that we can mate and produce offspring. We do the same things in the same way, follow the same patterns of behavior, because that primitive part of our brain seeks out not what's necessarily in our best interests, but what's familiar. The brain thinks that what's familiar is in our best interests: if it's managed to keep us alive so far then hey, it must be working, and if it's working, it ain't broke, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right?

Creative work is dangerous. Creative energy is constantly in flux; we are going into the unknown, we are doing new things, we are making it up as we go along. We are gathering material and transforming it and, in so doing, transforming ourselves. So no wonder that the decision to sit down and write often triggers the part of the brain known as the amygdala, on the constant lookout for fear and danger. The amygdala doesn't care about writing the great American novel (or even a very bad American novel). The amygdala senses change, which translates to predator, which translates to something very big and very bad is about to eat you right now so you should go shopping instead. Or watch TV. Or hang out with friends. Or clean the kitchen. Or surf the 'Net. Those things are known, familiar. They take away the anxiety, ease the strain and tension. You don't have to deal with the fear of making something out of nothing, and then the fear of showing your work to the world. You're safe to live another day…and another…until you wake up one morning and realize that all your novels remain unwritten, your songs unsung, and now you're out of time.

Which is why, to do creative work, we have to figure out ways to sidestep that part of our brain, to engage its higher and more evolved elements, to tap into the parts that create rather than judge or evaluate or censor — or freeze, or run like hell. Creative intelligence is fluid and dynamic, calling on different forms of your intelligence simultaneously. So call it your higher self, your mojo, your spirit, your divine spark, your inner goddess, your cosmic energy, your spiritual cowboy, your funky flying spaghetti monster: whatever it is, it wants and needs to serve you. But first it needs to move through you, and for you to get out of its way.

Check it out.

(Incense is optional.)

LOOK WITHIN

Originality is rarely found in the idea, but the execution of the idea. It's about what you bring to it and how you interpret it, use it as a vehicle to deliver your life philosophy, your worldview.

Howard Gardener developed the idea of multiple intelligences. He identified eight forms of intelligence, verbal and nonverbal. Each individual is stronger in some than in others, creating a cross-profile unique as a fingerprint. Scientists have also discovered that neural intelligence doesn't just exist in our head; it's in our hearts, our guts, our spines, so that body and mind are more like a bodymind. We 'know' things and process information on different levels. Add to that the unique personal history that each of us carries inside, the layers of memory and experience, of fear and obsession and neurosis and joy, bake it all together, and you have what some might call a 'soul'. Souls are like snowflakes: even though they're all over the place, common as ants, no two are alike.

The challenge of creative work is to develop and know yourself as a person even as you learn about yourself as an artist; to form a deep and authentic worldview, and the courage and skill to infuse that worldview – that soul – into your work. What results is your voice, your signature style, your brand.

And that is what's original. It doesn't come from anything plucked from external sources; rather, your influences and inspirations are sifted through your interior world, and transformed into something that is (hopefully) familiar and accessible, yet also strange and new. Something the reader can relate to and resonate with even as it makes her adjust her perspective and see the world in a different, deeper way.

It is fine – and normal and good – to imitate others; it's how we learn. But the end goal should be something uniquely your own, and to be smart and confident enough to follow where it leads you.

BE IN THE MOMENT

So much of what we think of as thinking is actually not thinking at all, but a form of automatic pilot. We stick to the familiar; we develop habits, patterns and routines; we fall into ruts. And when we don't have to pay attention to what's around us, we free up the mind to roam into the future or the past, to fret about things that will probably never happen or already happened long ago.

And yet, so much of art lies in the details. The specifics. The tones and textures, shadings, scents and sensations. The ability to catch a moment and convey it. We create our own reality through what we choose to focus on, the details we choose to notice or ignore. In life, so it is in your work: you create a vivid and concrete reality, an other-reality, for the reader through the artful use of detail. It's the small things that gesture at the larger things, that bring those larger things into being.

But you won't collect them in order to use them judiciously in your work…if you don't even notice them in the first place.

Bring your mind back to the here and now. Live the moment. Live it deeply. Then live it again in your work.

SET YOUR INTENTION

Here's the thing about your brain: it makes an excellent servant but a lousy master. We are not our thoughts but the consciousness behind our thoughts that has the ability to evaluate, observe and guide those thoughts – so long as we deliberately choose to do so.

Otherwise we put ourselves at the mercy of a kind of random chatter that tends to zero in on the negative: what we don't have, or what we have but don't want, or the mistakes that we made, or might make, or somebody else made: all those things that appear on our mental radar as that ancient part of our brain scans for danger, danger, danger and tries to anticipate and prepare for it.

We also subject ourselves to what's called a bottom-up awareness. We create our reality through what we choose to focus on; what we put our attention on, grows. But if we move through life without intention, without goals, then things leap out at us randomly to consume the precious resource of our attention. We're easily distracted and somewhat oblivious, reacting to what's thrown at us.

The simple act of stating your intention programs your brain to notice things that support that intention and ignore or discount the things that don't. This is called top-down awareness, where you might notice, for example, a specific kind of bird because you are proactively scanning for it. You are walking your mind through the world rather than vice-versa.

When you set your intention, you direct your awareness in ways that help you achieve your goals, whether it's finding a great seafood restaurant for dinner or envisioning and writing the next chapter of your novel.

FIND YOUR TRUTH

Two people will have radically different experiences of the same event because each of them will notice different details and focus on different things. Your attention is like a flashlight in a dark room; you can only shine it in one corner at a time.

What you choose to notice, and how you choose to assimilate it, to weave it through your interior loom, is unique to you. And creative work is not about seeking meaning so much as making meaning, about finding the patterns and connections and relationships among things, how they fit into a larger picture and why we should care.

Pay attention to what resonates for you; what rings out as authentic and whole. That's your truth. Bring it into your work. Don't let other voices talk you away from it, or make you doubt or destroy it. Don't let other people define your experience for you, or impose their 'reality' over yours. That will contaminate your work and wound your soul.

USE THE POWER OF RITUAL

Ritual marks the experience of liminality: of boundary or threshold. The liminal state is a kind of suspension, a "betwixt and between": a crossing of boundaries that divide the sacred from the profane. It is a space of creative energy where the usual norms dissipate and new, alternative states can be experienced.

When you move into creative work, you're crossing from one state of mind into another. Consider creating some kind of ritual that will signal both your body and your brain that it's time to let go of pragmatic concerns, release the inner critic and surrender to the creative process. Make your workspace a sacred space, a writing altar: keep it clear and decluttered (since clutter pulls at your brain and distracts it), place within it a few items that have personal meaning for you, that inspire you in some way, and make it pleasant and inviting, so that you want to spend time there. When you take your workplace seriously, you take your work and yourself seriously, something I realized when I finally made the connection between my dissatisfaction and ambivalence about what I was writing at the time, and the fact that I was writing while sitting cross-legged on my bed, or sometimes on the couch downstairs. I had three published novels by two major traditional publishers and no designated workspace. It was a sign, to me, that as much as I wanted to be a writer, on some level I didn't consider my writing important or significant enough to take seriously. And if I didn't, how could I expect anyone else to?

The power of ritual also derives from a neurobiological fact: neurons that fire together, wire together. An amazing thing about the brain is its plasticity: even as it shapes our perceptions and experiences, we are shaping and reshaping it through the experiences we choose to provide it, the neural tracks that we lay down. By repeating the same set of behaviors, we link them together so that we create our own mental automatic drivers. The more strongly neurons are linked (through repetition), the more automatic the behaviour becomes. An established creative ritual activates that linkage of neurons that guides you to your creative self.

After all, you don't need willpower to write. You need willpower to sit down and start writing, to transition from one state to another. What's at rest tends to stay at rest, and you want to get yourself into creative motion. Creative rituals help you with this, triggering your creative state in a way that doesn't freak out the amygdala and flood you with the anxiety and paralysis of procrastination.

Try it. Say an invocation, as elaborate or simple as you like; light a candle; play music; clean off your desk; fill your favorite mug with green tea; meditate. Then get to work. It doesn't matter what you do so long as you do it over and over again, consistently, across time, until your creative rituals and habits become so ingrained in your brain that you're compelled to work even when you'd rather watch TV.

MEDITATE

Sure, meditation makes you look within and live in the moment; it improves your focus and concentration, and becomes a ritual in itself. But meditation also slows…you…down. It relaxes you. And when this happens, your brain downshifts into the alpha brain waves that generate creative thought. A passageway opens between your conscious and your subconscious minds and allows you to bypass your creativity-killing judge/censor/critic and tap into a different state of being. We enter the creative trance, the waking dream. We flow.

Incorporate some meditation into your creative ritual, and the results could surprise you.

PPRACTICE EVERYDAY (or every other day, or three days a week, or whatever works for you).

A practice is something you do on a consistent basis, whether you want to or not. It's not about how you feel, it's about what you do; thought and attitude have a way of following behavior, not vice versa.

When you're building your financial portfolio, it's important to make a practice of investing a certain sum of money every month, like clockwork, so that you're not catching the market at its up or down. It's also important to take a long-range view: those ups and downs have a way of stabilizing over time, so that you'll come out way ahead of inflation and taxes. When investing in your creative self, slow and steady and consistent — not succumbing to mood and emotion, the whims and fears of the moment — beat out streaks of inspiration alternating with long gaps of doing nothing at all. Growth accumulates. When you do something over and over again, it becomes a habit. Habits rule and dictate our lives. Even if it's just twenty minutes a day, staying in frequent contact with your creative self will ensure that your creative self keeps mulling things over and developing them behind the scenes as you go about your life. Things in motion tend to stay in motion. Develop your creative habit, and you're golden.

CONNECT TO SOMETHING BIGGER

Human beings are wired into each other in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. We develop "mirror neurons" in the brain that allow us to feel and relate to someone else's experiences as if they were our own (a.k.a. 'empathy'); we are constantly absorbing and transmitting nonverbal messages, through gesture, stance, tone of voice, facial expression, whether we intend to or not. We were built to connect and communicate. Which means that to truly understand others, you must work to understand yourself, and vice-versa. When you fuse this understanding with skill, soul and art, you take the personal and make it universal. By showing other people yourself, you can show them certain aspects of their own selves, sometimes for the very first time. You say the things they want to say but can't, or didn't even know that they knew.

Everything connects.

photo by Elena Ray

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how a writer (or other creative) can develop multiple sources of revenue, part two

"There is a home," says Kevin Kelly, "for creatives between poverty and stardom."

Amen to that.

Kelly's idea is that an artist can strive not (just) for bestseller-dom but direct contact with 1000 True Fans (surrounded by concentric rings of Lesser Fans who might one day convert into more True Fans). True fans are the fans who will support you and sing your praises and buy anything you make. And if you have 1000 fans who will spend $100 a year on your work – which you sell directly to them, and thus collect all the profit – then you can lift yourself out of the Long Tail and into a viable creative life.

So your first goal is to build out your audience and find those True Fans. (Which is easier said than done, of course, and not the subject of this post.) This requires an online home – usually your blog. The main purpose of your blog is to offer frequent, entertaining, useful content that will pull readers into your orbit and keep them there. In this way do you promote yourself, your work, your services, whatever it is that you offer. As you build your audience and get to know them better – their likes and dislikes, how they respond and what they respond to – you'll start to develop a sense for the kind of content that you can spin off into paid or "premium" content.

It doesn't happen overnight. It requires patience, hard work and a long-range view. But it is possible to create your own creative ecosystem: multiple streams of revenue that leverage off of one another. (The idea of multiple streams of revenue, by the way, is a key principle behind wealth-building in general. As Keith Cameron Smith points out in one of his books on finance, millionaires have multiple sources of revenue. The middle class has only one or two, so if they get yanked out from under you, you're kind of screwed. Don't be screwed.)

When people fall in love with your work – and you – they will want to support you. Here are some ways to allow them to show the money.

DONATIONS

Asking people for donations – or, as Kelly called it, putting out the "tip jar" through widgits and plugins like this one – is kind of like the Internet version of busking. Somehow I doubt it's very effective. (When was the last time you made a donation to a random artsy website? Thought so.)

It's human nature to want to reciprocate, but it's difficult to invoke that urge in someone who's just breezing through and has no connection to you or your work. Hence, I think you'd want to be careful and strategic in how you ask. Be like Mozilla and offer some kind of token in thanks. Align yourself with a relevant nonprofit and say that a percentage of the proceeds will go to a good cause. Make people feel like they're part of something cool, a community or movement.

Someone who does use the donation model effectively is David Rowell, whom Chris Guillebeau writes about in his Writer's Digest article "Make Your Passion Make Money For You." Rowell has amassed over the years a large and devoted following. Once a year – exactly once – he puts out a call for donations. His fans appreciate his work and will donate a range of sums in order to ensure that they continue to have access to it. (The rest of the year, Rowell doesn't mention donations at all.) The thing to note here is that Rowell put in the time and effort to earn those donations through the consistent creation of worthwhile content over a period of time. (There is no escaping this.) And because he only asks once a year, he makes sure that he gives more – and more frequently – than he takes. (A good general rule for promoting yourself and your work online is: give. Give. Give your freaking face off. And then give some more.)

Some artists will seek donations to fund their projects. Through sites such as KICKSTARTER or INDIEGOGO or their own variation thereof, they present the concept and hope you like it enough to help fund the piece. If you're going to get people to buy in to your ideas this way, you might be more successful if you offer opportunities to include them in the process itself. This form of online collaboration is known as crowdsourcing and artists such as Aaron Koblin are particularly known for it.

Along a similar note, Chris Guillebeau offers up Robin Sloan who benefits from his "crowd-sponsored fiction". Sloan first hooked readers through a series of short stories which he gave away for free off his site. Then he announced that he was writing a novella and anyone who donated to his writing enterprise would get a copy. As Chris observes, "He set an initial goal of raising $3,500, but ended up bringing in more than $13,000 in just a few months thanks to his free short stories' engagement of eager readers who wanted more.."

SERIALIZE

A variation on this idea of get them hooked, then start charging money (just think of yourself as a friendly neighborhood drug dealer but, uh, the good kind, the really really good kind) is that of a book serialization. Give chapters away, and then, once the reader is hooked, charge them to download the rest of the book. Catherine Valente has profited this way. Likewise, Smashwords allows you to download the first 25 percent of any novel for free, then charges you for the rest. Baen allows you to download an entire book for free in hopes that you'll get hooked on the series and buy all the sequels.

(Paperback Writer mashes up her free and paid content in order to promote awareness of the latter: she offers certain books for free, and includes in the back excerpts from her for-pay novels. Handy marketing trick. )

ADVERTISING

When most people think about how to monetize a site, they tend to think advertising. Bloggers can use programs like the highly popular Google Adsense, which tailors its advertising to your content so that it appears at least remotely relevant. But be warned that people are getting better and better at tuning out "intrusive" advertising, and some may be so annoyed that they're being so blatantly marketed to at all that they'll leave your site and never come back. Another drawback to Adsense is that it requires a great deal of traffic blowing through your site in order to get any kind of click-through rate that will make you any money. Also, the ads suck aesthetic ass.

An alternative is to sell individual adspace yourself, which gives you control over what gets put on your site and its overall relevance to your general content. You can also engage in affiliate marketing through programs like Amazon Associates. You can connect with bloggers whose work you admire and join the affiliate programs for their products, whether it's Danielle LaPorte's Firestarter Sessions of any of Chris Guillebeau's Guides to Unconventional Living. When you're able to tailor the products you sell specifically to your audience, the emphasis is no longer on the quantity of traffic but the quality. What's the point of 50,000 visitors if no one clicks through on an ad? You're much happier if you get 500 visitors, 50 of whom might actually buy something that you are selling – and from which you get a cut of the profit. The key here is to know your audience.

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Many creatives not only sell their creative work through their site but also hire themselves out as copywriters, editors, speakers and consultants. The blog becomes not only a way to promote your work and develop a relationship with your readers, but establish your authority and credibility within your field and your genre. Hang a shingle on your blog, let people know that you're for hire (and what they can hire you for), keep an open mind about how you can package and repackage your various skills, and there's likely one or more streams of revenue just waiting to make themselves manifest.

This might even happen accidentally. You might wake up one morning and discover that somebody, somewhere, thinks you're an expert on something (remember that expertise is relative, it's a spectrum, you don't have to be the absolute best at something, just better and more knowledgeable than a bunch of other people who are eager to know what you already know). They might ask to interview you for a publication or have you speak at a workshop or conference. (If it's happened to me, and it has, it can happen to you.) Which means that there's probably something there, some body of knowledge that you were possibly taking for granted, that can be monetized.

"Teach to reach" has long been a powerful form of content marketing. You reach people through providing useful content that acts as a gateway to your more creative work. (I'm a longtime Lawrence Block fan, for example, and I love his Matthew Scudder series. But I initially discovered him through his books on how to write fiction.) An established blog and a developed audience provide you with the opportunity to take your teachings and turn them into information products. These products can be as simple as ebooks or white papers, or as elaborate as an entire e-course. Many of them tend to be multimedia affairs that combine video, text, audio and sometimes personal consultation sessions via Skype or your humble landline. Check out Danielle Laporte's The Firestarter Sessions, Chris Guillebeau's World Domination Guides, or the World-Changing Writing Workshop for a sense of what's possible – and what's in demand.

And don't forget webinars and teleseminars. You can gather your audience online and hold a tutorial without even leaving your bedroom. You don't even have to wear pants.

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stories are medicine

There are two kinds of power:

power to (influence, inspire)

and power over (intimidate, oppress, to rule through fear and bullying).

Creatives engage in the power of the first kind. This is a shortened version of a speech by Nina Simons which calls on us to use our power with fullness and wisdom. So I wanted to reprint it here (and I've taken it in turn from Gloria Feldt's NO EXCUSES.

Of all the ways we might cultivate our leadership to address this intensely changing time we face, for me, increasing my awareness, will, and compassion seem the most essential.

How might a heightened awareness of all that currently threatens life inspire us to act more boldly, more purposefully, and more courageously to shift our collective course?

I believe the way through is by reclaiming the underworld parts of ourselves.

Emotions that have been banished, trained away, and anesthetized — the anger, loss, and grief we have no rituals for anymore are needed to heal our relations with ourselves, each other, and this endangered and sacred Earth.

Stories are medicine for our false isolation; a way to forge connection and community and help shift our course.

Stories are the seed form of culture we carry around within us. They define how expansively or tightly we offer the gift of our lives. We decide how far we can go, how large a stand we're willing to make, or what risks we're willing to take, based upon the stories we tell ourselves.

Sometimes they stem from our family and social conditioning, and we carry them unwittingly, unaware of how they shape our lives.

About ten years ago, I began unearthing my own hidden stories. I discovered that I thought of myself as "the woman behind the man" (and as you may have heard, "behind every great man is a woman, rolling her eyes.")

It was shocking to realize how self-limiting my inner narrative was.

It required the reflection of a colleague, friend and mentor, a savvy man whose opinion I trusted to help me believe in a new story to replace it.

He told me that he saw my contribution as being of equal value…It took me a while to wrap my mind around this new narrative. Once I did, I understood that I held the keys to my own liberation.

We're all indigenous to someplace, and have community embedded in our cellular and ancestral memory. In some deep corner of our hearts, don't we all yearn for it?

But in a quest for certainty, seeking an illusion of "safety", criticism and judgments reinforce our separateness.

The invisible stories embedded throughout our culture lead us to ruthlessly rank ourselves, and each other, hardening our hearts to empathic connection.

May the soil of our souls be sown with seeds that expand our capacity for compassion,

Watered with the grief that strengthens our commitment, and fired by the outrage that fortifies our will.

May our roots entwine underground like aspen trees or seven sisters oaks, whose underground networks of connection offer the resilience to weather hurricanes and storms.

May we leave with stories carried like seeds in our feathers, to sow them wherever, and with whomever, we next connect.

May we savor together some visceral taste of beloved community — so nourishing, so enlivening and desirable that our hearts and hands take it on, and the flaming light of our purposes will not be quenched.

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how a writer can develop multiple streams of revenue: part one

1

I'm intrigued by phrases like "portfolio career" and "multiple streams of revenue" and how they apply to the idea of the 21st century writer.

A "portfolio career" is when a person manages a portfolio of part-time jobs that combine (hopefully) into a full-time income. Writers tend to have to do this anyway. So how can the 21st century writer create less of a portfolio and more of a writing eco-system, where each stream of activity (and revenue) feeds into, promotes, leverages off another stream?

Once you've built up your author platform and developed your tribe of True Fans — those people who will pay for your work and follow you anywhere — a number of things become possible.

2

The Internet changes our sense of how content is packaged and delivered. Those of us who are not digital natives grew up with a definite yet oddly arbitrary sense of what a movie is (two hours long) or a television episode (30 minutes) or a novel (300 pages). (And as for short stories, novellas, poetry, well, it's not like anyone really reads or publishes them anyway, and the exceptions only prove the rule. Right?)

Content was product.

Now content comes streaming at us. It doesn't have to be bound by any restrictions of form other than what it itself wants to be. You have the freedom to upload anything you want, regardless of length, and thanks to the ease of technology we can no longer – and no longer afford – to fit ourselves into just one role. We are not just writers but curators, producers and publishers of content. Which means we have to figure out how we're going to reach into that stream of ours and find or spin off the content that we can shape into something to pay the rent and put food on the table.

3

Publishing and Self-publishing

I don't think, in the future, this will be an either/or proposition. J.A. Konrath is an excellent example of someone who uses both traditional and self-publishing to his advantage. As he puts it, his self-published books featuring his series characters act as a "gateway" to his traditionally published novels featuring those same characters.

The introduction of Amazon's Singles platform give writers the chance to publish the kind of works – the really long short stories, the really short novels – that traditional publishing has always looked at askance.

Traditional publishing gives you a level of prestige and credibility that self-publishing perhaps never will. But self-publishing allows you to experiment with different forms and ways of storytelling that traditional publishers might not be willing to risk on your behalf. Once a writer has built a significant platform – like Konrath has – I think the most exciting aspect of that platform is the chance to complement your traditionally published novels with more experimental fare that you can sell directly to your readers.

In a best-case scenario, your published and self-published stuff works together to build out your audience (and your income). In a worst-case scenario, you take a risk with some self-published stuff, it doesn't fly, and you're not that much worse for wear (ie: you won't be dogged with poor sales figures that send your career into a downward spiral). One of my favorite quotes is from David Bowie, who in turn attributes it to Brian Eno: "Art is a plane crash that you can walk away from." A strong author platform, a devoted following of True Fans, makes that kind of risk and freedom a genuine possibility.

4

If there's anything we can learn from the porn industry – and, according to Nick Bilton, there's a lot – it's this: people will pay for quality content.

They will pay monthly fees for that content. They will subscribe. The porn powers-that-be recognize that the revenue from one-off purchases can pale beside the recurring revenue from subscriptions.

As Alan Murray of WSJ.com points out here, a mix of free and paid ("premium") online content can be a powerful business model. Free content attracts readers and catches them in your tractor beam by closing the "trust gap": proving to them that you're worth the time and money.

For this reason, your most popular online content should be free. You use it to build traffic.

Premium content, like your self-published novels and novellas, should appeal to a niche – the narrower the niche, perhaps the better.

Several years ago I subscribed to Caitlin R Kiernan's storytelling "service": for ten dollars a month, I got a short story delivered to my email. Kiernan is an accomplished novelist with a unique and lyrical voice published under both major and independent publishers. She has a devoted following. These stories combined fantasy and erotica: decidedly niche, and hard to find in your typical Barnes & Noble.

Another possibility is subscription via iPhone application. Look at the McSweeney's app. It's pretty cool. It sells for $5.99: a buck for the app, the remainder for a 180-day subscription to an exclusive selection of McSweeney's iPhone content which you can't get on the Web. You can renew your subscription in 180-day increments through the app itself. The app also exposes you to the publisher's full offerings, which makes it not just a service but a cool marketing tactic. So as a content provider, you could hold back certain forms of content and push it out to paying iPhone subscribers as part of your own exclusive digital channel.

– TO BE CONTINUED –

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the importance of vision: what we can learn from total narcissists (even though they suck)

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If you've ever been in an intimate relationship with a classic narcissist, you learn this the hard way: Narcissists suck.

Their charming façade turns out to be just that: a façade, shaped and molded to get what they want from you. They are punitive, controlling and emotionally abusive. They don't allow you to have an identity of your own (you are an extension of them). They fall into rages over the smallest of things. They distort the truth. They have a complicated and often bizarre sense of logic.

They like you when they have use for you, or when you reflect well on them. When they're done with you, they cut you from their life as completely as flicking an OFF switch. If you're lucky, you'll get out with enough self-esteem left to build yourself anew.

And yet there's no denying that some of them accomplish great things in the world.

Amazing game-changing things.

The paradox of what Michael Maccoby calls "the productive narcissist": he who is an asshole to people in his private life is a hero to people in his public life.

Which is why, though assholes they may be, there are some lessons we can take from the best of them: the ability to remake a world.

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The term "narcissist" is one of the most misunderstood words this culture likes to throw around. People understand 'narcissist' to be a wholly negative state of being, a self-obsessed, self-loving egomaniac who won't think of anyone or anything other than himself….much less want to change the world.

But productive narcissists are the greatest visionaries you'll ever come across.

They are also the most infuriating, because they never listen. They shut you out. They negate your opinions. They discard your thinking….unless it somehow aligns with their vision of how their world should be.

To deal with a true narcissist is to deal with a kind of alien consciousness, which is why relationships with them can be so crazy-making: you are constantly trying to interpret their actions in a way that makes sense to you, filtered through your sense of reality. Most of us share this reality, or at least enough of it so that we can get along with each other — or, when we don't, understand the reasons why.

But a narcissist lives in a private world completely of his own making. A true narcissist, my therapist once explained to me, "is like somebody on a drug trip. It's like you're dealing with someone on acid. It's an altered reality. It is not the same reality that you are in."

(For example: much has been made of the movie The Social Network and the fact that it doesn't seem to ascribe any true motivations to the Zuckerberg character, that, as one reviewer put it, "there is no why there".

Which makes me want to say: Dudes. The guy – at least as he's portrayed in the film – is a freaking narcissist. And narcissism makes up its own why.)

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Michael Maccoby, referring to the productive narcissist as a "change the world" personality, writes:

A true narcissist is the kind of person who 1) doesn't listen to anyone else when he believes in doing something and 2) has a precise vision of how things should be. A narcissist possesses this dual combination of traits, not one of the other; plenty of people who aren't narcissists never listen to anyone else (they are negativistic, closed-minded, or arrogant), and plenty of people have an idea of how things should be (they are often just know-it-alls or big talkers). It is the combination of a rejection of the status quo, along with a compelling vision, that defines the narcissist.

….the difference is that the most productive narcissists, the ones who do change our world, have the charisma and drive to convince others to buy in to their vision or embrace a common purpose. They communicate a sense of meaning that inspires others to follow them, whereas the unproductive types retreat into their own world and blame others for their isolation.

Productive narcissists, he continues, "have the ability to change society. They are the people who take the risks that others can't, or won't dare; the most productive transform our world through politics, business, social action, or the arts."

Lots of people like to talk about changing the world.

Narcissists believe they can do it.

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So what's my point?

Simply this: productive narcissists – from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Gates to Frank Lloyd Wright to Mother Theresa to Picasso to Steve Jobs — are walking, talking, breathing examples of the driving power of visualization to achieve huge goals.

As well as the importance of shutting out the naysayers.

What you put your attention on, grows. You become what you think about most.

Narcissists are not in love with themselves (narcissism is an escape from self, from deep shame and self-loathing instilled at a very young age). Narcissists are in love with an image of themselves that they hold in their mind and feed and nurture in as many ways as they can. It's not that they "fake it til they make it"; in their private, altered reality, they already are it, and the best of them can assemble the skills and people required to make their vision come to pass.

They have no empathy, so they're not afraid to make the tough decisions that success so often requires. If they hurt your feelings, tough (it's probably your fault anyway).

They are always right, so 'failure' and 'risk' mean something entirely different to them than to the more 'normal' person. It's not just that they know they will succeed; in some part of their minds, it's like they already have. Success is the foregone conclusion. Any 'failure', no matter how massive or mortifying it might seem to others, is just another bump in the road, another part of the learning process, another stage that must be endured on the way to final victory.

And because their image is a matter of psychic life or death to them, they channel themselves into their work with incredible discipline and drive.

They are focused and passionate.

If they need you, they'll do almost anything to draw you into their world, which means that they're almost always big charmers (if only when they want to be).

And they absolutely do not, will not quit.

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You don't need me to tell you that writing, or any creative pursuit, is a long and winding and difficult road (and if you haven't learned that yet — you will).

People will tell you that you're crazy. They'll laugh off your dreams, refuse to take them seriously, pat you on the head and smile politely.

You will meet with failure and rejection. Lots and lots of both.

You'll need to constantly be learning something, whether it's technique or craft or promotion or marketing.

You'll need focus and discipline.

But most of all: you need a vision.

As vivid and precise as you can make it.

Keep it front and center in your mind. Nurture it. Refine it and believe it and live it. Work that cliché – "fake it til you make it" – with every inch of your being.

Go forth and do epic shit.

I just remind you to also do this:

Be good to people.

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