Three Ways to Make Resistance Irrelevant and Win the Struggle to Create and Market Your Art
You can read the blog in order, or refresh this page for three more articles about Resistance and writing and the struggle to create and market art.
Should Your Book Title Be Good Marketing?
Perhaps apocryphal: the three words that sell are free, sex, and win. Theoretically, if the headline of your ad was Win Free Sex, you’d strike it rich.
Obviously not.
While no rational person would go to that extreme to sell something they believed in, do you sometimes allow business considerations to affect your art? (more…)
A Foolish Consistency?
That’s Emerson, by the way.
I read a post recently about keeping a “series bible” so you’d always get the minutiae right as you add more books to the series.
I take a different perspective. I’ll meander toward it.
First, an excerpt from my very first book The Commonsense Entrepreneur. It’s about musicians, but in most ways it applies to authors as well:
A Myth and a Puzzlement
I’ve often heard creative folks claim that producing art quickly or in bulk leads to lower quality.
It’s not true.
Creativity is like a muscle. Use it more, make it stronger.
Yes, muscles get tired. When’s the last time you spent so much time in creative pursuits that you were in any danger of creative burnout?
I just spent February writing 25 songs besides working on my novel and writing here and at my personal blog. Being more creative leads to being more creative. I’ll be physically exhausted long before I’m creatively exhausted.
Quality? Sure, some of the songs I wrote aren’t keepers. That’s the nature of the beast: not every song is. But when I write 14 songs in a month, 3 or 4 are excellent. When I write 25 songs in a month, 7 or 8 are excellent. Not only more excellence, but a slightly higher percentage.
I believe that if I wrote 100 songs next February, I’d create 20 or more that were as good as anything I’ve ever written.
Are You Not a Writer?
The first thing writers tell me when I say “blog weekly, two or three times if you can” is “I don’t know what to write about.”
You’re a writer, aren’t you? If the goal is to get people to part with their money for your writing, how about showing them, often, what you’re capable of?
Wrote a nonfiction book? Blog about all the stuff that didn’t make it into the book, about everything you’ve learned since it was finished.
Fiction author? Easy: make up new fiction. No, I didn’t say write a batch of deathless prose every day. Just write.
Blogging regularly is not that hard—you’re a writer.