Category: New Business Development

A publisher
CCed my private email address
in a message
to 9 other writers.

That was a mistake,
one that anyone could easily make.
The field likely
autofilled.

That publisher shared
my physical address,
information only they had,
in the body of that email.

That was a conscious decision.

I asked for my rights back
that same day.

There are mistakes
caused by typos or autofilling
or other ‘accidents’
and
there are mistakes
caused by someone
not knowing wrong from right.

The first type of mistake
happens to everyone.
Hey, we’re human.

But if someone doesn’t know
the difference between
wrong and right,
that’s a huge problem,
one that will resurface again and again,
causing pain and loss in the future.

Sever ties
or limit your interaction
with those type of people
as soon as possible.

They’re showing you
WHO they are
and that type of error
in judgment
WILL happen again.

A loved one,
whenever he gets close
to a comfortable place
in life,
does his d@mnedest
to f*ck it up
and, because he’s intelligent,
he always succeeds.

He insists he doesn’t do this,
that it is just bad luck
or fate
or the world aligned against him,
but, having known him
for decades,
I see he’s responsible.

Currently, he’s in the best job
he has ever had.
He was doing well
until management talked
about giving him a promotion.
Now, he’s fighting with his boss,
making silly yet damaging mistakes,
doing all he can to self-sabotage
himself.
It’s a unionized job
so it will be difficult
to get fired from
but I suspect he’ll manage
to do that.

His belief about himself,
about success,
creates his failures.

Seth Godin
shares

“The world is real,
and opportunities
and pain
are unfairly
and unevenly distributed.
At the same time,
our narrative
and our habits
are real as well,
and they work to prove themselves
right.”

Your beliefs are powerful.
Ensure they are aligned
with your goals.

And if the same result
happens
over and over
in different situations,
examine your beliefs
or have someone you trust
look at your situation.
The issue is likely
to be
your thinking.

I am a child
of an abusive relationship.
I did my research.
I knew children
of abusive relationships
usually ended up
in their own abusive relationships.

I avoided getting into
ANY relationships
for a long time
and I deliberately surrounded myself
with people who were in healthy relationships,
seeking to learn from them.
to recognize what a healthy relationship
was.

At first,
being around those healthy relationships
felt strange and awkward
and not-at-all comfortable.
There was none of the yelling,
the hitting, the emotional manipulation
I expected.

But eventually those healthy relationships
became my new normal.
They became my expectation
for a relationship.

Today, I’m in a wonderful relationship,
have been in one for over 20 years.

What we’re accustomed to
is what we often try to get back to.

As Seth Godin
shares
“Credit card companies
have discovered that
if a person carries $2,000
in debt
with a $3,000 credit limit,
they’ll probably have $4,000
in debt
if the credit limit
gets raised to $5,000.

People who live with
drama at work
will almost certainly
invent new drama
(of any scale)
if the existing drama
fades away.”

If you’re seeking to change,
consider surrounding yourself
with people
who are already living
the way you want to live.

Make THEM your new normal.

When I have my stories formatted,
I think about
all the things that
might go wrong
for the reader.
I also think about little ways
I can delight them.
I think about extras
and functionality.

My primary goal
is to make
reading my books
a great experience
for my readers.
This could be as simple
as ensuring
clickable links
are underlined
or
the table of contents
is at the beginning of the story.

Seth Godin
shares

“Too often,
“customer service” has come to mean
“answer the phone and give a refund.”
But customer service begins long
before something breaks.
It’s about a commitment
to the experience.
Creating delight
before it’s expected.
Building empathy and insight
into the interactions
that people will choose
to have with you.”

Customer service
starts with product design.
Think about your ideal customer
while creating.

I have over 40 stories
Indie published.

Something breaks
every d@mn day.

Newsletters aren’t received.
Listings at booksellers
go down.
Prices randomly
increase or decrease.

As I increase
the number of books
(products)
I produce,
the rate of things breaking
also increases.

This is why
it is often recommended
that business builders
look at their product/service offerings
and trim
the non-performers,
the resource suckers,
the easily broken.

This is more challenging
with writers.
We earn money
from backlist sales.
The more books in our backlist,
the more money we usually make.

But there are also costs
to those sales
and that has to be taken
into consideration.

Continue to develop
new products/services
but evaluate
the older offerings.

Ensure they aren’t breaking
more than
they are working.

The target market
for one of my pen names
is a niche reader.

This niche is large enough
to make me very happy sales-wise.
I enjoy writing in it
but my creativity is greatly restricted.
The niche has defined expectations.

I don’t vary from those expectations
much
because that would make
the readers unhappy
and I’m writing those stories
for them.

I have another pen name
whose target market is me.

It is my vanity pen name,
my indulgence.
I don’t expect it to make
vast amounts of money
because I don’t plan
to buy my own books.

I write whatever I want
under that pen name.

Seth Godin
shares

“If you shipped it to the world
(or even showed it
to a colleague)
it might be because
you liked it.
You made it for yourself.

But if your music,
your graphic design,
your website
–whatever your work is–
isn’t resonating
with the market,
it might be because
you forgot
to make it for them.”

If you design a product
purely for yourself,
don’t expect to have
many more customers
than that.

We all search for
the secret to success,
whether we admit
to it or not.

And many gurus sell it.
They claim
they have a magic formula
that will guarantee success.

But human nature being
what it is,
if they DID have
that secret,
the first buyers
of their formula,
once they had achieved
their own blazing success,
wouldn’t keep it a secret.

Seth Godin
shares

“It’s hard to trust
someone who has
a secret method.
While this might be
a competitive requirement,
it’s more likely that
the person has simply had
a lucky streak
(streaks are statistically likely).”

Secret methods
that are successful
don’t remain secret methods
for long.

They quickly become
new methods
and new methods
DO emerge all the time.

A reading buddy
was complaining to me
about how many books
are written
now
to be read only once.
She supposedly hates this,
wants books she can
re-read.

She borrows most
of the books
she reads
through KU (Kindle Unlimited),
a system designed
for readers
who only want to read
books once.

People will say
a lot of sh*t.
They will repeat
what they think
people like them
SHOULD say.

Then they will do
something
completely different.

Trust their actions.

If there are plenty
of deep read books,
using the above example,
and they read the books
that were crafted
only to be read once,
those read once books
are what they truly want.

People say
all sorts of sh*t.
Their actions
tell us
what they truly want.

I make it a goal
to implement at least one change
after taking
a workshop
or a class.

It could be a slight tweak
like using a specific keyword
or
it could be something larger
like playing with
a new social media platform.

But taking action
on a lesson
lessens the probability
I’ll forget it.

Forgetting a lesson
negates the time
and other resources
I used
to take the workshop
or class.

Seth Godin
shares

“The reason that
most online videos
and blog posts
seem to come and go
is because we use
a browser
to interact with them.
“What’s next?”
is asked too often.
Perhaps it would be more useful
to imagine that
this is the very last thing
we get to engage in
before we have to commit
to our work…”

Take action on lessons learned.
Get a return
on the time and energy
you’ve spent on them.

Most of the people
who read
Romance Novels
are women.

When I craft
my stories
(my products),
I craft them to
appeal to women.

I DO have a few male readers,
however.
After crafting my stories
to appeal to women,
I re-read them
to ensure they don’t
repel those male readers.

Seth Godin
shares

“Without generalizations,
it’s almost impossible
to begin to serve people.

And there lies the trap.
If we stick with them too long,
or insist that they are absolute,
or fail to seek out
the exceptions
that all generalizations have,
then we end up
excluding or ignoring people
who need to be seen.
Which betrays
all the work
we set out to do.

We begin with a market
or an audience,
but we ultimately serve
the individual.”

View your products,
your marketing campaigns,
your other projects
at both the target market
and the individual customer
levels.

Try to satisfy both.