Know Thyself. 7 Truths About Writers

A guest post by Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn, one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers

Claiming the word ‘writer’ for yourself can be a big step. You may have been writing all your life but do you actually call yourself a writer?

Know Thyself was inscribed on the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi. People would go there to seek knowledge of the future or to find revelation about themselves. The words were a reminder that the first step to truth is to look inside.

Fundamentally, writers write, they put words onto a page or screen. But there are other aspects to writers. Do you recognize yourself in these traits?

1 We are loners

Writing is a solitary art. Even writers who collaborate create their pieces separately and knit them together later. We are not naturally team players. To be a happy writer is to enjoy solitude for creation. Writers are often introverts in the sense that they are energized by time alone with their minds. They may love being with people but it tires and drains them. I spent many years thinking I needed to be a team player, that it was essential to being a rounded person. Then I did the Myers Briggs test and found that introversion is just a natural state for some of us and certainly more dominant in writers.

2 We want recognition

Writers have egos and our desire to see our words in print or type stems from this need to be recognized. We want the six figure book deal. We want to be on Oprah or the New York Times bestseller list. We want to write words that change people’s lives. We want to be read. For all that to happen, our writing needs to be out there in the world.

3 We are scared and doubt ourselves

We want people to read our words but at the same time, we fear criticism and negative reaction. We compare ourselves to others and we often come up short. We doubt that we are original or that people will even want to read our words. We worry that we have opened ourselves up too much to the world, and then we fret because we haven’t been truthful enough.

4 We are deeply creative but sometimes forget this

When I was working as a corporate IT consultant, I found my creative side withering and dying from lack of exercise. I wanted to write a novel but I couldn’t imagine even starting one. I didn’t believe I could find that creativity in myself. So I started saying an affirmation on the daily commute. ‘I am creative, I am an author’. I said that over and over, and gradually I began to explore ideas and start to write. Four years later, I have two novels available on the biggest bookstore in the world. Although we may spend years in the wilderness, we can resurrect that creativity.

5 We know execution matters

Ideas are abundant. They swirl in the air about us and we pluck them down. We form them into finished works. People talk to us about the ideas they have, for this book or that story, but they don’t execute on the idea. We write, and we finish what we started.

6 We are always improving

Writers are readers. We learn from others by their words and we constantly try to improve our own ways of expression. We take courses on how to improve our writing. Sometimes we spend more time on reading books about writing than we spend actually getting white on black. We are obsessed with understanding why this works and why that is successful and we put what we learn into practice.

7 We know there are dark places within

Inside us are memories, emotions and an imagination that runs deep. We go there to tap into the experiences that make our writing resonate. Sometimes what emerges may be violent or horrific, resonant in truth and raw in emotion. We write with the knowledge that most people feel these things but they don’t admit to themselves that they exist. We have the ability and the strength to write those words without apology.

Do you agree that these are truths about writers? Are there any more?

Joanna Penn is the author of thriller novels Pentecost and Prophecy. Her site TheCreativePenn.com helps people write, publish and market their books and has been voted one of the Top 10 Blogs for writers 2 years running. Follow Joanna on Twitter @thecreativepenn

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A Radical Approach to Launching a Book? Interview with Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing

Do you plan to write a book at some point in the future?

Writing a book is a big challenge. But there is another hurdle at the end: you have to launch your book. Danny Iny of  Firepole Marketing came up with a radical strategy of creating and launching a book when he created Engagement from Scratch. Read about his new strategy in this no-holds-barred interview with Mary Jaksch:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the book, “Engagement from Scratch”?

A: It started with my own experience building Firepole Marketing, which I started really working on about a year ago, in January 2011.I read and studied everything that I could, and everything that I found about building and growing an audience seemed to assume that you’ve already got one; if you were starting from scratch, there really wasn’t a place for you to go and be pointed in the right direction.

Further down the line, as Firepole Marketing was starting to get some real traction, I wanted to create that sort of “jumping off point” for people who are getting started, but I noticed something interesting – there were a lot of successful people doing what I was doing, and we were all getting good results, so clearly our way worked – but then there were lots of other successful people who were doing different things, and also getting results, so clearly their way worked, too.

I realized that this isn’t a “one path up the mountain” sort of endeavor, and the only way that I could do it justice would be with input from a wide array of audience-builders, which is what I ended up doing with the book.

Q: The book is a great collection of individual articles. What’s your experience of putting together a multi-author book? Do you have tips or warnings?

A: Putting the book together was an amazing experience – I was really blown away by how helpful and considerate the contributors were, and by how much I learned from the the contributions that they sent me. At the same time, I learned that it’s a lot more work than it looks.

For this sort of book to be really good, each contribution has to be “meaty”, which means that you’re going to have to push back with the contributors asking for more content and more information. It also takes a lot of editorial and organization work to make it really flow, and that’s something that I hadn’t really accounted for in my initial timelines and projections.

Q: You’ve come up with a great mind map of how to create a book. Your first step includes writing a great book – and building relationships. Why is it important to build relationships?

A: Well, I should clarify that I came up with the content, strategies and ideas, but the actual map was designed by my friend Matt Tanguay at Fluent Brain. But yeah, the first step is to write a great book, and building relationships. The relationships are important because they drive everything else; for one, without relationships, this book would never have happened, because nobody would have agreed to contribute.

I didn’t build relationships with the intention of asking for something in return, but I did invest a lot in building relationships, right from the start (for example, with Guy Kawasaki – and having him on-board made a huge difference!). Even if I was writing a book on my own, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the exposure, or resulting traction, if I didn’t have great people backing me every step of the way.

Q: Your second step is ‘Learn from others”. I’m especially interested in your strategy of research engineering other book projects. Can you please say more about how you went about that?

A: There’s a story about a disciple who goes to a Zen master and asks him to write down some advice for success in life. The Zen master takes a piece of paper, and writes the word “Attention”. The disciple says that he was hoping for a little more, so the Zen master takes the page, and expands the text to read “Attention! Attention! Attention!”

There’s a lot of wisdom in that, particularly in this day and age when so much happens in public; the first and most important step is to just pay attention to what people are doing, what you’re finding impressive or persuasive and why, and what results they’re seeing. The rest is reverse engineering, but honestly, that’s the easy part – the hardest part is to just pay attention in the first place.

Q: What was the one most critical thing you learned from others?

A: That there is no single insight or trick or strategy to success; rather, building something real is about learning, absorbing, integrating and synthesizing a lot of different insights.

Jim Collins explains this very well with the metaphor of a flywheel; you push the wheel and push the wheel, and each push adds a bit of momentum, until it’s spinning quickly and powerfully. You can’t point to a single push, though, that made the difference. It all comes down to committing yourself to buckle down and do an enormous amount of work – that’s the only way to really get substantial results in the big picture.

Q: Your third step is choosing your launch plan. What worked and what flopped in your launch?

A: It’s hard to answer that question with certainty, because it’s hard to say that results came from this tactic and not that one – they all kind of blend together. I can definitely point to some things that feel more successful and less successful (i.e. I fumbled them), though.

On the more successful side, I think having close to 30 guest posts on major blogs around the launch made a huge difference in terms of the initial spike of traction, and giving the book away for free was of course a cornerstone as well. I also had a very structured follow-up sequence in place that solicited feedback, shares, and reviews from people who had read the book, and I think that worked pretty well, too.<

In terms of stuff that I goofed, the top of the list would be my video trailers (I copied Tim Ferriss’s tactics instead of reverse engineering the strategy), and my Nominate Your Engagement Superstar contest (I live in Canada, and goofed by scheduling the contest for American Thanksgiving weekend). Oh well, live and learn. ;-)

Q: Step number four is to give yourself a lot more time than you think. The mind map mentions the Gantt chart in order to organize a project. What tips can you share?

A: The thing is that well experience a sort of Doppler effect with regards to our projections for how long things will take, the further into the future we’re expecting to do them.

There are lots of things that we have to take care of day in and day out, that don’t really get scheduled far in advance; there’s this doctor’s appointment, that meeting with the accountant, these phone meetings, that client engagement, and so forth. They add up to a big chunk of your week, and if I ask you how much time you have to work on a project next week, you’ll be able to tell me fairly accurately, because you know more or less what’s coming.

Looking a few months out, though, we don’t think of these things, and expect to get a lot more done than is probably realistic. We also don’t realize how many different things we may be planning to do in a given month, so creating a Gantt chart helps to visualize the timeline and see where there might be bottlenecks that could trip us up along the way.

Q: What about the actual launch week? What are your suggestions or warnings?

A: Heh, all I can say is that if you’ve done a good job of laying the groundwork, it’s going to be intense. Clear your schedule, don’t plan anything for that week that you don’t have to, and expect to spend your days answering commenters, fixing problems, and hitting refresh to see your stats go up. ;-)

Q: You offer the digital version of the book for free. What’s the rationale behind this strategy?

A:  They are low ticket items with terrible margins, so unless you’re in a position to sell tens of thousands of them, there isn’t a real financial up-side to selling a book. And realistically speaking, unless you have a significant platform already, you can’t count on sales figures like that.

At the same time, the relationship with the reader (and their opting in to an email list) is more valuable than the few dollars I’d get on a book sale, especially since I can probably get 15-20 people to download it for free for every one person that I could get to buy the book (selling a few hundred or even thousand copies is nice, but not that valuable ultimately, whereas having 5,000-10,000 people download it and subscribe to my list is worth a lot more to me).

Ultimately, my goal for this book is more to grow my audience than to sell lots of copies (though I think people who download it and like it are more likely to buy a copy – who wants to read 240 pages in a PDF?). That being said, if it were just an e-book, it wouldn’t be perceived as being as valuable. Also, the physical book just feels different, and I think that makes a difference for contributors, and for reviewers.

That’s my thinking behind it – I’m pretty sure that it will turn out to be either smart strategic thinking, or a gross error in judgment – one or the other. ;) The bottom line is that the business model of traditional book publishing is fundamentally broken, and this is just one example of authors getting creative about publishing.

Q: What was the most important thing you learned from creating and launching ‘Engagement from Scratch”?

A: Any big project is a marathon, not a sprint. Things will get difficult at times, and that’s okay. You’ll stumble and fall from time to time, and that’s okay, too – you just pick yourself up and keep on going. It’s the cumulative energy and momentum that you invest in the project that will ultimately determine its legacy.

Q: What are three main things that writers can learn from reading “Engagement from Scratch”?

A: If I had to boil the book down to three main takeaways that could each fit on a fortune cookie, I’d say that they are (1) Know your audience, (2) Create epic stuff, and (3) Get to work. :-)

Dany Iny is a co-founder of Firepole Marketing. You can read more great stuff by Iny on the Firepole Marketing blog. Click here to download the free version of Engagement from Scratch.

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Categories: Blogwriting, Business, Craft

Is Your Writing Career Missing This Single Most Crucial Element?

A guest post by Josh Sarz of Sagoyism

I read a story a while back about a farmer who was sowing seeds by hand. He would bring his pouch of seeds, go out and start sowing. The farmer threw the seeds everywhere. At first, one would think that he is losing so much because he throws handfuls of seeds on the ground. To the extremely hungry, those seeds could make a decent meal. Why would he be throwing them away like that? But when you look at the big picture, the farmer really does lose handfuls of seeds, but in time he gains bounties more.

I was reminded of this story when I was out fishing with my girlfriend and her family. I’m not good at fishing, but I love the quiet atmosphere of the place.

The rules of the park were that you throw some type of bait that they provided in order to get the fish to come closer, and then you can then hook them with your fishing rods.

My girlfriend’s niece, was a little girl by the age of 4. When she got a hold of the bag of fish bait, she tore it open and got handfuls of the stuff and threw them out to the water.

A lot of us told her that throwing handfuls of bait was not the right way to do it. She then said that the reason why she threw a lot of the bait on the water was so a lot more fish would come closer and every one of us would catch one. She said the more bait, the better.

Wisdom from a 4-year-old

Do you really want to be a writer?

If you do, then you should be open to the fact that you’ll need to throw away lots of seeds. This means you need to be prepared for a lot of sacrifice on your end.

You should be ready to sacrifice money. As a writer, one of the best tools to have at your disposal is a blog. Getting your own domain name is going to cost money. Certain tools to market your blog cost money. Writing courses cost money. Getting professional web design can be costly, unless you’re willing to learn how to do it on your own.

Then there’s time. Time is golden, but you’re going to have to be ready to sacrifice a lot of your time to work on your writing. Say goodbye to long nights of sleep. Say goodbye to spending all day every day with your family, or hanging out with friends. You can still do these, but not as much as you would want to.

There’s a significant amount of sacrifice that you have to make if you want to be a writer.

So, do you really want to be a writer?

You’re not alone

But one thing that you have to know is that you’re not alone in this.

Writers everywhere also learn that they need to sacrifice time and money for doing what they love. They understand that they have to sow their seeds.

But it’s not just writers. Every one is involved. In order to succeed at something, everyone has to sacrifice some part of their old routine. Their old lifestyle. Their old habits.

I know a lot of people who had to sacrifice spending time with their families to work on other countries, to get jobs good enough to pay for their family’s needs.

I took up a  bachelor’s degree in Nursing when I went to college. I personally know hundreds of fellow nursing graduates who had to leave the country to work in greener pastures. Their biggest sacrifice is that they can’t spend as much time with their families as they want to.

How many seeds are you willing to sow?

With sacrifice done wisely though, comes great rewards.

Like the farmer who throws away handfuls of seeds across his farm, he earns bounties more in time.

So would all your hard work. All your sacrifices will bear more fruit than you’ve ever dreamed possible. You just have to make a few wise sacrifices at first.

This  will be your big dream reward. Whatever you want, a book deal, thousands of subscribers and readers, a teaching course that will let you earn money, anything. Not just a goal, but a dream that you would work your ass off for it to come true.

I also heard a passage from the Bible related to this.

He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. He who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

No seeds to sow

I loved reading stories as I was growing up. I’ve read books from Robert Ludlum, John Le Carre, Franklin W. Dixon and a whole lot more. I got back to my roots. I loved reading books as a child, and come high school I was writing my own fantasy/adventure short stories. Ten of them, actually. I titled them ‘Hollow Dreams’. That’s why I decided to get back to writing again.

But I had a problem.

There are lots of writing courses on the Internet. Courses that I couldn’t afford. My current writing job could only provide for food and rent, and some little savings.

But I wanted to learn more. I wanted to write better. I wanted to tell stories. The same stories that inspired me as a kid growing up surrounded by paperback novels. I decided to start sowing some seeds.

I tried learning how to write by reading and studying a lot of writers’ blog posts. I’ve also got back to reading A LOT of old books that I haven’t read yet. It may not be the easiest method, but it’s what I could obtain at the moment.

Journey to be a great writer

We’re all on our journey to achieve writer immortality.

Whether we take writing courses, or dissect other people’s writing, or read books, we’re all sowing our seeds. And the more seeds we spread across the soil, the more rewards we get, in time.

A writer’s job isn’t easy. There’s a lot of sacrifice involved. But these sacrifices help us grow and improve our trade, in order to give us the opportunity to live out the dreams we had as children.

How do you sow your seeds as a writer? Let’s share our experiences and struggles in the comments section below.

Josh Sarz is a Freelance Writer, Blogger and the founder of Sagoyism, which talks about Epic Content Marketing and Storytelling . He also likes punk rock and metal, among other things.

Categories: Craft, Habits, Productivity

Writers: How to Avoid Stagnation

A Guest Post by Meredith Resnick of The Writer’s [Inner] Journey

When my kids were in middle school they got a lot of make-work for homework and classwork, stuff that kept them very busy but that steered them away from real creativity and by proxy, real learning.  This make-work gave the illusion that students were busy and oh so productive. Wrong. What they were really doing was chasing their tail—in other words: stagnating.

Being busy, compulsively busy even with journaling and writing and revising does not always spell productivity. As far as I’m concerned it’s a form of stagnation which is worse than writer’s block. Why? Because you have the illusion that you’re being productive—just like my kids with all that make-work in middle school.

This is my story about how to avoid stagnation. Actually, it is a post about growth.

I love getting a piece of writing to work. And by work I mean flow—which actually implies that I’ve stepped back and let the words—the work—happen. My fear, on the other hand, would like to take credit for working a piece to death and, in the process, grinding my creativity to pieces. It’s true. I try not to let my fear do my writing for me anymore. Sometimes I succumb. It’s usually the result of comparing my work to someone else’s. I would have hoped to have grown out of that by now but, oh well. If I share my experience with you it will help me, too. So, here goes:

My cautionary tale

I was the kind of writer that went out and found the right words. Really dug for them. I could spend hours researching a term. There is a place for this type of finishing-touch treatment and—lo and behold—it comes somewhere in the final stages of editing. In other words, it happens best, for me anyway, at the end, after the bulk of writing (story finding) is complete.

If I go out and dig for words too quickly, or scour my brain or dictionary for the perfect metaphor before I’ve found the real story I’m writing, I go insane (and eat too much candy). Once I’m in the insane place I keep trying this approach. Over and over. The insanity comes, not only in the seeking of the perfect words but after I’ve stepped back and realized the words I’ve chosen don’t fit or mean anything to me. If you’ve ever gone on a binge of any kind, you know what I mean.

The holding-on problem

But because I worked so hard and dug so deep for a string (gossamer) of beautiful (pulchritudinous) words, I’m likely to not want to let go of them—ever. I start trying to find ways to keep a certain sentence, to mold the story around a turn of phrase. I often fall into the trap of overdoing the flow part.

Well, yeah.

That’s the flip side.

It’s what happens if every writing session is about letting my mind and pen just go wherever they want, all my work turns into a disjointed slew that requires hours of dissection. So instead of finding the perfect words out there in the dictionary, I’m on a treasure hunt across 10 new journals I’ve penned. I may look busy. But I’m spinning (in place).

Same stagnation, different disguise.

Granted, I’ll unearth a few gems waiting to be polished (or maybe they come ready to use). But the time I spend untangling the jungle of roots (beginning of ideas) instead of growing those ideas is more stagnation. I waste more time and energy trying to surgically extract the phrases that work from the stuff surrounding it. I get bogged down, pent up and tired. The joy of sitting down to accomplish turns into make-work that keeps me from moving forward. For a writer, this is stagnation.

So what to do? Here’s what I do:

Be nice (to myself). Understand that when I sit down to write I’m treading two paths: I’m simultaneously finding the story and relaying the story with language that moves the story along. In the beginning and middle, I keep my eyes on the finding the story, not on finding the words.

Listen (to myself). I resist the urge to be seduced by teachers and books and workshops and websites that tell me to focus too soon on technique. (My ego likes those.) Instead, I pay attention to teachers who say simple things like: “Keep going.”

Trust the process. I don’t get bogged down in “the language” and “the turn of phrase” and “the big brush strokes” and any number of other writer catch phrases I may have heard or read about. That comes later. And later always comes as long as I dedicate myself to the process in the correct order: Write first, edit (word find, cut, revise, finesse) second.

Remember. Understand that I do have a story to tell. As do we all.

Meredith Resnick’s personal essays have been published in Newsweek, Los Angeles TImes, PsychologyToday.com, JAMA, Culinate, Santa Monica Review and many more. Visit her at The Writer’s [Inner] Journey, a finalist in the 10 Top Blogs for Writers Contest 2011/12, Meredith is mesmerized by all facets of the creative process.

Categories: Craft

Writers – Have You Developed THIS Skill?


By Mary Jaksch, Chief Editor of Write to Done

These days, if you want to make it as a writer, you need to do more than just write well.

It used to be enough, but …

Before we all went digital, every writer’s dream was to be discovered by a publishing house. The publisher would then take care of editing, production, publicity, public relations, distribution – in fact, nearly everything, apart from the act of writing.

Now, aspiring writers are free to publicize their stuff on blogs, in digital magazines, or in eBooks. They can control when and how their material is published, how much it’s sold for, and how it’s publicized.

With this freedom comes a challenge. We need to take up some of the tasks that used to be the domain of publishers.

The most important task is to connect with readers.

How to do it?

We can learn from how publishers connect writers with readers. Publishers get the writer’s face out there any way they can: they arrange interviews with magazines and  TV programs, create news items, and organize book signings and speaking engagements.

You need to put YOUR face out there.

Yes, this can feel scary. But it doesn’t have to be. Learning to create videos can be a lot of fun!

Watch the video below… (if you’re reading this by email, click here to watch the video)



If you want to learn how to create videos in a fun and easy way, join our Bootcamp: How to Blog with Video. It’s a 2-week interactive course.

  • Learn how to relax in front of a camera.
  • Get confident at creating a ‘talking head’ video.
  • Learn how to shoot, edit, and upload a headshot video (both Mac and Windows users).
  • Get all the tricks and tips on how to light your video so that you look like a star.
  • Learn how to create a PowerPoint or Keynote slide show
  • Turn your slide shows into stunning screencast videos
  • Learn the secrets of how to trigger  emotion by adding voiceover and music.
  • Know how to publish your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites, and embed them on your blog.
  • Have fun creating videos!

    • We start on Saturday, 21 Jan.  Click here to to find out more.

    Categories: Craft

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