RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//One more pep talk on how it’s REALLY OKAY if you don’t like doing newsletters, examples of successful authors without them, and thoughts on reinvention, flexibility, and how this business is hard.
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Greetings from a gorgeous autumn in New Mexico!
This week at the SFF Seven we’re talking about preconditions – what must be true before you go to write.
I changed it from “sit to write” because I don’t sit – I work at a walking desk. So, that’s one thing for me, is that I’m happiest standing or walking to write. I’ve gotten so sitting to write doesn’t work very well. In fact, I’m super happy to have hit on a solution of a portable tripod and desktop to make a standing desk for a retreat I’m going on after Thanksgiving. I can stand to write! Perfect solution.
Otherwise…
It used to be that I had fairly elaborate rituals for getting into writing. I had LOTS of preconditions. I had to be sitting at a certain desk (not my work-from-home desk) at a specific time of day (morning) listening to a particular soundtrack (The Mission). I even had a favorite blue jersey dress I had to be wearing. When my husband, with considerable exasperation, pointed out that the dress had more holes than fabric, he countered my plaintive argument that I needed it, by saying “the writing comes from you, not the dress.”
That’s really stuck with me. I remind myself of that truth often.
(And I put the dress in the rag pile.)
All of those rituals helped me in the beginning, when I really needed help establishing a writing habit. But now I know they were just things to help me along. Because the writing comes from me.
The only precondition I have? Myself, present and accounted for.
//Building a writing habit and incremental work – when it does and doesn’t work for people. Also an update on loading my audiobooks on YouTube and thoughts on three decades in publishing.
//Quitting what doesn’t work for you and getting away from survivorship bias and reverse engineering success. Instead finding out what works for YOU & owning your process. Also putting audiobooks on YouTube.
//Marketing vs. promo, what traditional publishing brings to the table (and some examples of big fails), why all authors-regardless of publishing path-should learn promo, AND crunch their sales figures. This means learning to read royalty statements!
//I’m talking about debut author expectations, how to learn about the industry, and (hopefully) dispelling the myth that excellence = success = money. Also, exciting upcoming episode with Grace Draven!
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FAMILIAR WINTER MAGIC is out in the world, available as a standalone! A print version is coming soon (hopefully today). This is the same novella that appeared in the FIRE OF THE FROST anthology, so if you’ve read that, you’ve read this. The novella takes place in the Bonds of Magic world and occurs concurrent with BRIGHT FAMILIAR and just before GREY MAGIC. If you’ve read the Bonds of Magic or Renegades of Magic books, this is Han and Iliana’s origin story.
That’s what’s on my mind today!
//Series and the difference in approach to them between traditional and self-publishing, including some numbers on my own series sell-through. Also insights into my filing system for writing projects.
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//Some straight talk about group anthologies: what works, what doesn’t, why doing it for that USAT Bestseller badge isn’t worth it, and something I didn’t know before. Also, the perils of survivorship bias and how to transcend it.
