Justine Musk's Blog, page 43

why strong author branding = passion & soul (and should not be cause for despair)

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A writer's idea of what a writing career is has to change.

Jane Friedman said this in a webinar I attended recently, and I've been mulling it over ever since.

I'm also wondering if a writer's idea of what a brand is has to change.

I wrote about the importance of developing your author brand in my last post. Jane retweeted it (thank you Jane, you're fabulous) and I noticed that one of the responses was a tweet that said, This kind of thing makes me despair utterly.

So I wanted to stress t...

the online art of developing your author brand molecule global microbrand thing

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People don't respond to marketing. They respond to vision.

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In this engaging and well-written post, blogger Siddhartha states that "authors shouldn't have to be social media experts".

Writing and marketing are different, require different skillsets, and most artists just want to do their art anyway. So let the writers do the writing and the marketers do the marketing of it. The ideal would be a partnership between a writer and a social media expert.

And it makes a lot of sense.

And...

pave your way to creative domination: the writer as creative entrepreneur

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I was speaking on a panel at the Literary Orange writers conference the other weekend and heard myself say, "Writers are creative entrepreneurs now."

To which the guy sitting next to me responded, "That sounds hard."

I'm not sure it's any harder than writing an actual publishable novel. But it requires a flexibility of thinking and a different way of perceiving yourself and your work. (I for one am still working on it.)

What is creative entrepreneurship anyway?

From Wikipedia:

Creative...

the thing every artist needs to do

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In his book MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN Scott Belsky (founder and CEO of Behance) makes the point that a successful creative life isn't about (or just about) being genius or having genius ideas. For all the emphasis we put on the 'creative' part of 'being creative', an artist also needs to execute and ship.

Often it's the ability to adopt the discipline of shipping that separates the creatives from the wannabes.

Seth Godin talks about the importance of shipping in his book LINCHPIN. He quotes poet ...

fight like hell in the war of art

I was Twitter-tagged as part of a 100-people experiment involving Hugh MacLeod. I was delighted to take part.

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If you want to be a writer, or any other kind of artist, cartoonist, blogger and bestselling writer Hugh MacLeod has some advice for you.

It's easy to tell somebody to get into The Zone. Much harder to live it. But fight like hell to get there, regardless, every friggin' day, or else you'll never make it.

The idea of the artist as a fighter, a warrior, permeates Steven Pressfield's...

plot is a process, and how to work it

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There's something beautiful about plot.

Yet plot seems to be a four-letter word, associated with generic or formulaic fiction. But if there isn't any plot, there isn't any story (no matter how creatively it's been constructed), and story is why we read (or at least most of us).

Plot gives the juice and forward thrust to fiction, but more than that: plot is about pattern and meaning. Any exercise in storytelling is an exercise in making meaning: taking the seemingly random and disparate ...

the three key parts of your author platform framework

One of my goals is to learn about author platform through study, trial and error so that you don't have to.

If your tactics involve the actual tools you use (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), your strategy involves an overarching sense of how everything fits together: what Chris Brogan calls a simple presence framework or Michael Hyatt calls a social media strategy or many others refer to as a social media framework…and what you might come to think of as "that freaking platform thing."

I've b...

ten ways to break through writer's block (part two)

5. "Don't prepare. Just show up."

I know, I know, this kind of goes against #3, in which I encourage you to have an outline (and chunk it up). But if you're like me, you can overthink the story in a way that creates anxiety (and anxiety, in turn, triggers the 'freeze or flight' response that is NOT conducive to writing….) . You get stuck in the wrong part of your brain.

I took #5 from a book I read recently called IMPROV WISDOM (Don't Prepare, Just Show Up) by Patricia Ryan Madson. Madson...

ten ways to break through writer's block (part one)

I had a story due (minimum 6,500 words) for an upcoming YA paranormal anthology called KISS ME DEADLY and for the longest time I could not get it written. Writing – or more specifically, not writing – the story hijacked my life, so not only was I not writing the story, I also wasn't writing anything else.

Happy ending. I finished the piece on Monday, in a hotel suite in Mexico City, and sent it off to my editor. Several hours later she emailed her response: "Beautiful story…just perfect."

He...

ten hard-earned lessons about breaking through writer's block

I had a story due (minimum 6,500 words) for an upcoming YA paranormal anthology called KISS ME DEADLY and for the longest time I could not get it written. Writing – or more specifically, not writing – the story hijacked my life, so not only was I not writing the story, I also wasn't writing anything else.

Happy ending. I finished the piece on Monday, in a hotel suite in Mexico City, and sent it off to my editor. Several hours later she emailed her response: "Beautiful story…just...