The first week after break (even a small one) is hard. This is when Murphy’s Law is in operation. You are already behind in your schedule and everything else starts going wrong.
We are becoming victim of our own ambitions. We are fixed on productivity that we fail to enjoy the little pleasures of life such as little breaks, meeting friends, having free time. It might be because of years of being on the go, that I can't handle not having any free time. Or may be because it is my time and hence I want to do do all that I ever wanted to do in one go.
I am wondering why I was staking so much of my self-worth on my productivity levels.
The strategy I have come up with is to slow down. Seriously. Rather than working frantically to get back on top of the things, use this time to figure out what really matters and what I can drop. I am pressing the RESET button.
This newsletter is staying. So is writing on Medium. But for the next three months finishing the first draft of the novel will be priority number one. To make room for that I am dropping website upgrade, non-fiction books and … for the next three months.
100-day of posting something on social media is staying. It is too much fun.
Authorpreneur Journey Step 6
I avoided social media as long as I could. Even though I had a Facebook account and I created a LinkedIn account because everyone was saying I should be on it to connect with other writers but it was not until the cartooning course I was doing had the requirement to publish my daily homework that I started using it regularly.
I opened an account with Instagram. The process was simple, take of photo of my drawing, publish it on Instagram and then get out of it as quickly as possible.
After a while, I started getting encouraging comments on my ameterish skeches and I started leaving comments and likes on to other people’s work and I was hooked.
Social Media is a two edged sword. On one side it provides community and friends who might never have met in real life, people who ‘get you’ even if they live on the other side of the world.
On the other side, it can also be a huge time suck with hours spent on pointless rabbit holes and has significant privacy issues and toxicity.
You don’t need social media to be successful as an author, but it can be used effectively if you set your boundaries.
For authors it has several benefits:
You can build your community.
You can be friend other authors.
You can advertise to potential readers.
A great way to connect with influencers.
It is also a brilliant form of marking for introverts and most writers are introverts. You can choose when you interact and who to interact with. Rather than going to networking events and standing in a corner, you can be at home and yet still be ‘out there’ connecting with people.
Social Media is a brilliant way to market organically.
This is how the marketing principle AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Actions) works for social media.
Attention is hard to get in this speedy online world. There are books, TV, podcasts, and streaming. Yet people spend a lot of time on social media and the best thing about it is that it is the only medium where there can be two-way interaction.
Interest: Once you have captured peoepl’s interest make sure they sign-up to your newsletter on your website. The aim is to get people to notice you and be interested enough to follow you or click through to your website. Social network rise and fall. You don’t own that real estate, you only borrow it for a little while.
Desire: Social Networking is about people knowing you, liking you, and trusting you enough to let you have a slice of their time and attention. By being out there you build desire in people to find out what you are up to. Once they find you and are interested in what you’re doing, they might follow your blog, maybe listen to your podcast or an interview and continue to read your story in snippets. Authenticity is important as it is a long term thing.
Action: Once people know you, like you and trust you, they are far more likely to try your books or recommend you to others. There is no hard sell necessary. This method is about attracting people who might be interested in what you have to say.
Once you have their attention, and they are interested in what your are doing, and you have built up a desire in them to see your progress, now you can ask them to take action and buy your book.
Tips on How To Use Social Media:
Think long term.
Figure out what you are going to share in advance. Hobbies, side-hustles, writing project progress, little stories of overcoming your struggles - all these make good read. Couple it with your own photos or sketches and you have a winner.
Make friends rather than push products. Friendship will bring you much more rewards than the little financial gain you will have from selling a book or a course.
Build trust. Share bits about your life, your interests, and your work so that people get to know you before they decide to buy something from you.
Be honest and be yourself.
Have fun.
Your homework this week:
Figure out which social media platforms you are going to use. Do not start on all of them as it will be difficult to learn them all at once and you won’t have enough time to have meaningful interactions. Twitter is said to be great for writers but I am not on it. I prefer Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Out of these, I have found LinkedIn has biggest congregation of writers. And it is very easy to approach with them within the portal.
Figure out what you are going to share on social media. I have started a 100-day challenge to post something and I normally share a sketch with up to 150-200 words write-up. I post the same thing on all three platform. Check it out at any one of these Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
If you are stuck with ideas see what these people are sharing. Even simple and silly things work as long as you are authentic.
This guy has a fiction of fizzy drinks. He started posting a short video each day telling people whether he had any fizzy drink that day or not. He gets thousands of views. People left encouraging notes. Soon he started losing weight. Why not start sharing our exercise regime or weight loss journey?
Don’t want to get personal. How about this idea. David Lynch’s ( an American filmmaker, painter, musician, writer and actor) online series, “Today’s Number Is …”
Every day Lynch holds up a jar of 10 balls, each marked with a number form one to ten. He swirl the numbers and then he picks a ball and announces what today’s number is — sort of like lotto drawings on the local news. Finally the screen cuts to text: “What Will Tomorrow’s Number Be?” The whole thing lasts less than a minute. But he has a huge following. People try to guess the number and leave their opinion. So many people find it very soothing.
David also had a Weather Report, a brilliant example of making something fun from something totally banal.
Of course, all these videos are to get your creative juices flowing. I am sure you will come up with something unique of your own.
I, on the other hand, thinking about starting reporting on my binge eating.
Writing Industry News
Did you know Amazon sold its first book in 1995 and since then it has dominated not only the bookselling business but online retail in general. In 2017, Data Guy reported that half of all print books and 90% of all eBooks were purchased on Amazon. Because Amazon has literally millions of books for sale, something that was meant to be an easy way to self-publish and sell books has become another mountain to climb. While there’s no silver bullet to guarantee bestselling sales, Indie Reader has come up five simple strategies you can employ to stand out from the pack.
Wattpad has been bought by South Korean company Naver. Naver is the “Google of South Korea.” Wattpad, the Canada-based writing and publishing startup was founded in 2006. With 90 million users Wattpad-open and free to all-is a reading and story-sharing platform. It is considered a home for aspiring authors. It is chock full of fan fiction written by Millennials and Gen Z women around the globe. It includes a lot of writing that’s considered amateur by professional and published authors who have accused the writers on the site of plagiarism and copyright infringement. But it is a profitable platform, believed to be generating revenue of around $40 million annually. (Source: Hotshot)
#1 NY Times bestselling urban fantasy author, Ilona Andrews, shares why going indie is such a good idea. It is worth a read. They give the maths to illustrate why they will be self-publishing from now on, at least for a year.
US publishing had its best year in a decade in 2020 according to NPD Bookscan and Overdrive (Source: The Hotsheet).
What Am I Up to?
It is almost the end of the first month of 2021 and I thought I will stocktake. This month I started four significant things:
Started my own publication on Medium Authorpreneurs and wrote four articles for it - Authorpreneur — A New Publication For Writers, Write For Authorpreneurs, Understanding Authorpreneurship, and Are There Any Social Media Etiquettes.
Started the practice of spending a minimum of 40 minutes on my novel every day. It is going to be much more than 40 minutes in the coming months as the first draft is due for submission on 11 April.
Started a 100-day challenge of posting something on three social media platforms - Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
I can add to it, going back to the gym and walks after slacking for eight months in 2020. I am in fact keeping a tracker for these three in my diary.
Here is a view:
What Intrigued Me This Week?
Rob Walker, writer of The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy In the Everyday had an interesting story in his newsletter about having a new perspective.
He takes it from Tom Vanderbilt’s new book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning in which Tom recounts his experiences learning a series of new skills in his 40s: chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling.
Tom writes:
“… try and look at something as an [insert profession here] would. This is a bit inspired by Geoff Manaugh’s book on burglary and the city. So for example, if you walked through a shopping mall, what things in the environment would stand out to a thief? Sometimes you don’t really know, but even guessing enhances looking.
I found it really intriguing.
Sketching has completely changed the way I look at things. I am always trying to figure out how to capture a three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional sketch. With cartoons, I am trying to figure out how to put Ms. Jolly in everyday but funny situations.
While writing fiction I am training myself to see everyday things from my main character’s point of view. What will my protagonist think when she is caught in the rain. What will she notice when she walks into a supermarket especially if she comes from a place where there are no supermarkets. How will she arrange her clothes in a wardrobe where there are no shelves, only the hanging space and she has never hanged her clothes before.
Learning new skills is bound to make you notice new things.
“Learning to draw famously changes the way you look at the world; it trains you not to see things as categorical objects but the way they actually look — an ear that really looks more like a seahorse.
Learning to surf is in part knowing how to ‘read’ a wave, to see if a shoulder is rideable, to discern good waves from bad amidst a field of sunlight-filled glare, to look past a wave to see what else might be coming.
Learning to sing changes the way you hear music; you’re paying attention to breath control, to phrasing, to a singer’s particular choices in a passage.
Learning to play chess, as you get better you stop focusing so much on individual moves and begin to see larger strategic possibilities at play. A master craftsman will see errors where we simply see a beautiful object.”
It is an interesting exercise. Try it.
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
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