Ariele University: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Zen in the Art of Writing was actually one of the first books I read on my educational journey (click here to learn more). It is a book of essays about creativity by Ray Bradbury, one of the fathers of modern science fiction, and I have to say I enjoyed his ramblings quite a bit. They were less useful than, say, Steering the Craft by Ursula K leGuin, and less loquacious than Stephen King’s On Writing, but it was definitely worth the read.

As my assignment for this book, I wrote three responses to three of his different essays, and I’m going to share those as well as a few of my favorite quotes from it. I’ll start with the quotes.

Quotes from Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

In his essay titled, “How to Keep and Feed the Muse,” Bradbury talks about what the muse is, how to find it, and how to use it create beautiful works of fiction.

He says, “And when man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry. I have had this happen not once but a thousand times… Oh it’s limping crude hard work for many, with language in their way. But I have heard farmers tell about their very first wheat crop on their first farm after moving from another state, and if it wasn’t Robert Frost talking, it was his cousin, five times removed. I have heard locomotive engineers talk about America as they ride it in their steel. I have heard mothers tell of the long night with their firstborn when they were afraid that they and the baby might die. And I have heard my grandmother speak of her first ball when she was seventeen. And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.”

“And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.”

And a bit later, in the same essay, he writes:

”The Feeding of the Muse, then…seems to me to be the continual running after loves, the checking of these loves against one’s present and future needs, the moving on from simple textures to more complex ones, from naive ones to more informed ones, from nonintellectual to intellectual ones. Nothing is ever lost… Do not, for the vanity of intellectual publications, turn away from what you are—the material within you which makes you individual, and therefore indispensable to others.”

This next quote is from his essay titled, “Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle.” This essay is about some of his life experiences and how they influenced the stories that he wrote. Mostly, I just loved this quote because of the lyrical language and the image it evokes.

“I was in love, then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs, and, at last, the red planet, Mars.”

And the last quote comes from an essay titled, “The Secret Mind,” about his foray into script writing. He says, “We are all rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom… We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

Responses to Zen in the Art of Writing

The Joy of Writing

The first essay in Zen in the Art of Writing is called “The Joy of Writing.” In it he gives a couple of childhood anecdotes and explains how his joys and fears as a child influenced him to love writing and to take it up as his career. In response, I simply wrote a list of my own joys and fears from various points in my life.

A List of Joys and Fears

Mattress. Beaver skull. Dumpster divers. Boisterous strangers that swear loudly. Chainsaw. 7th grade English class. What’s under the ocean. Tree branches. Stretching. Pond. Hunters. Bears. Buttercups. Porcupine quills. The tiger. You bitch. Sunsets. Being chased. Trapped. Pebbles. Raindrops. Green grass. Rock turtles. Rats. Rat tails. Cat tails. Fresh herbs.

I’ll let you decide which ones are joys and which ones are fears ;)

Run Fast, Stand Still…

In his essay titled “Run Fast, Stand Still, or, The Thing At the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts From Old Minds,” Bradbury discusses honesty as a writer and his strategy of writing down ideas based off of his loves and hates using word association. In response, I wrote a list of things I love, which I will share with you, but not until after another quote from this chapter:

“Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next—life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was—a whisper.”

List of Things I Love

• Goblin’s paws

• Bricks

• When the leaves turn upside down

• Water droplets on the window

• A crunchy leaf

• Lettuce and strawberries

• Octavius’ droopy cheek flaps

• Smooth legs

• When Josh laughs

• Ducks

• Ripples on the pond from the wind

• The way ice in a field smells

• A snow wind

• Crisp air

• When you can’t hear cars or airplanes

• Piano music

• Riding on boats

• Sitting in the sun, on the grass, specifically

• The way bees feel crawling on your hand

• Beekeeping with Dad

• Colors in planed lumber

• Orange soda and ice cream

• Birds

• Skeletons of dead things

• Root systems, particularly of trees

• The way gardenias smell

The Long Road To Mars

The first sentence of Bradbury’s essay, “The Long Road To Mars,” reads, “How did I get from Waukegan, Illinois, to Red Planet, Mars?” This is the essence of the essay, how he first began making money at his writing and got to the current point in his life. In response, I wrote my own list of firsts.

Firsts

First injury: when my umbilical cord broke
First friend: Gary, Sarah, and Evan
First novel: The Mystery House
First airplane ride: to New Hampshire to visit my ailing great grandmother
First pet: Ginger
First country besides the US: Jamaica
First car: Hyundai Elantra, she was a good car
First accident: with Ryan and Nick (I wasn’t driving)
First time driving through rural West Virginia, dinosaurs; and the garden upstairs with a lilac tree where Sarah always got stung by bees; water lapping against the beach as we drifted towards Blueberry Island; and the musty smell of kindling and tobacco as I learned how to light the smoker and bring the wood stove back to life from red hot coals; noticing the spidering cracks in the sidewalk and the way ducks fly and the shape of a heron from below; the smell of the earth after the rain.

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Ariele University: Storytelling & Pebble in the Sky

The next installment in my fake master’s degree (click here to learn more about what I’m talking about), is a book report on Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov. Part of my goal is to read works by the late and great scifi writers (okay, not all the great ones are late) to get a sense of first of all how science fiction and fantasy have changed over the decades, and secondly to see how they haven’t changed.

EARTHMAN BEWARE is my absolute favorite backcover copy I’ve ever seen lol

There is some debate over when science fiction first started. Some say ages and ages ago, with stories like Gilgamesh or A Thousand and One Nights. But most agree that modern science fiction as a genre was started (or restarted) by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein in 1818. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells made the genre balloon even more (not that they were the only scifi writers, just the biggest), and catapulted us into the 20th century.

Of course, we are now in the 21st century and have a wonderful foundation of writers and stories to build upon, and Isaac Asimov is one of the best and most revered.

I grabbed Pebble in the Sky for $5 at a used bookstore and its been sitting on myself for years, so I figured this was the perfect reason to finally pick it up.

And I loved it.

Isaac Asimov is a world-renowned science fiction author, and even though my first foray into his writing was with one of his lesser-known works, I can see why. He reels you right in, makes you curious, and builds tension right from page 1.

But for this essay specifically, I want to focus on storytelling and plot structure—two concepts I’ve been working particularly hard on of late; and even more specifically, I wanted to narrow down to one particular decision he made regarding the overall story: I strongly disagreed with the way in which he communicated the primary climax. But let me start from the beginning.

The story is written from an omniscient viewpoint, and as such, Asimov is able to tell us the goings on of a wide variety of different characters, including Joseph Schwartz, the main character; Affret Shekt, a scientist; and Rola, the scientist’s daughter. There are a few other one-off perspectives (such as Rola’s love interest), but for the most part, I would call these the three primary characters.

The main idea behind the story is that Schwartz is somehow transported to the future and then subjected to a procedure that makes him incredibly intelligent. This is set against a backdrop of interplanetary warfare that centers around the people of Earth revolting against the Galactic government.

Right from the beginning, we see Schwartz’s post-time-travel confusions—he is portrayed as a simple man from the mid-1950s, changed into a not-quite-so-simple man—and we see his subsequent escape from the scientific lab, his fear and astonishment at how different the world is, and his desperate attempts to understand exactly what’s happening to him. His emotional state is quite clear, right from the beginning.

Despite the omniscient narrator shifting from character to character, we always come back to Schwartz—how he’s feeling, what he’s doing, and what he wants.

Then the climactic moment arrives. The main characters are working to prevent the release of a terrible virus that will decimate the population of Earth, but we don’t see anything from Schwartz’s perspective. He is the primary actor, the only living human intelligent enough to see all the moving parts and make the necessary decisions to prevent the end of humanity. And yet we are excluded from his perspective. We don’t get to experience his emotions—the fear, the doubt, the hope, the racing heart and clammy hands—up close. I believe this storytelling choice on the part of Asimov diluted the impact of the ending.

To play devil’s advocate (against myself) I tried to put myself in Asimov’s shoes. Why would he make this decision? Aside from things like social pressure, because his agent or publisher said so, or because he was rushed to put out a draft, I think he believed that showing Schwartz’s side of things would give too much information, and as such decrease the tension of the ending. So instead, he shifted to showing the final excitement from the perspective of the other characters.

I still disagree, however. Because he wrote from a distant omniscient perspective, he didn’t have to show us exactly what was going on inside of Schwartz’s head, only what his actions were, with maybe a few hints at his emotional state. Schwartz’s plan could still be revealed slowly, maintaining the climactic tension, but the reader would still have been there each step of the way. Instead, we are left to find out exactly what Schwartz did after the fact, from the perspective of one of the other characters.

Other than that, I thought the book was excellently crafted, with each of the character perspectives purposeful and relevant to the main conflict, beautiful, lyrical prose, and an exciting premise that made the story hard to put down. I found the book to be engaging, exciting, and entertaining. Asimov’s skill at crafting language is unparalleled—I even learned a few words I didn’t know before (parallelopiped, monomania, macadam, effete, and I knew this one but love that he used it, especially given the modern hatred towards adverbs: freezingly).

But, had I been one of his editors, I would have recommended taking a closer look at the end.

Thank you for taking the time to participate in my fake master’s degree! Have you read Pebble in the Sky? If so, comment on what you thought of it below.

For regular updates on my fake master’s degree, the universe, and everything, sign up for my blog below!

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Ariele's Writing Life: A June (Very Nearly July) Update

Things are rushing along at the speed of time, as you probably could have imagined, so I figured I should stop in and give a quick update on all the things that are going on.

I have my hands in a lot of buckets, all at the same time, apparently.

Bucket #1: Land of Szornyek

I know I haven’t stopped talking about this project since I started working on it, but it’s still kicking! Tentacles and Teeth has been published (March 28, yay!) and I had an excellent promotion that has resulted in a good number of reviews already—hopefully, there will be more to come.

Most of my work on this has been focused on the next two books: City of Dod (Book 2) is currently in production, and Book 3 (Untitled) is being drafted. I’ve also been working on my Patreon, doing updates, illustrations, ordering postcards, that sort of thing—as well as a super secret surprise.

Here is a video update for my Patreon that you can watch:

Bucket #2: Fairy Tales IN SPACE

When I quit my freelance work (did I mention that I did that? I’m a full-time author now. It was back in April. A lot has happened since then lol.), I jumped right into a brand new project. I’ll be releasing a series of fairy tale novellas, all set in space—more specifically, all set in an intergalactic space city called Rove City—sort of my fairytale kingdom in space.

I’m well on the way to being able to release the first one—a retelling of Cinderella (Untitled, thus far), and have two others mostly or partially drafted (a version of Jack and the Beanstalk, and a version of Beauty and the Beast). I’ve already scheduled my cover designer and my editor, so things are looking good!

Bucket #3: Yellow Arrow Publishing

Did you know I’m the Vice President of the Board of Yellow Arrow Publishing? Yup. Also something that’s been in the works. YAP is a local (Baltimore) non-profit that seeks to support women-identifying writers. Currently, we publish a biannual journal, host a reading series, have a writers-in-residence program, and run workshops for writers. We will also begin accepting submissions for full-length manuscripts very soon.

A couple things I’d like you to know:

1. We have a HUGE event coming up on August 2nd. If you’re in the Baltimore area, PLEASE COME. It’s Literary Night in Highlandtown, and we will have authors at wonderful venues all over town (art galleries, restaurants, bars, etc.) and a live readings by some of our very own, MD-local writers. There will be free books, free food, free alcohol, so bring all your friends, family, children, and dogs!

2. We need funding! If you are willing to make a small donation, CLICK HERE. (This is pretty much my entire job as Vice President, so you will likely be hearing more from me on this lol.) We are a 501(c)3, so your donation is tax deductible. If you are a business and want to sponsor this event, a future event, one of our writers, or anything at all, or you want to partner with us in some way, email me! ariele [at] yellowarrowpublishing.com

3. That’s actually all, but I really like things to be in 3s, not 2s :D

Bucket #4: Discord

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Discord chat platform (mostly for gamers) but I’ve been running a server made entirely of writers and authors! If you’d like to join, let me know. We run sprints, talk about writing, editing, marketing, publishing, and all kinds of things, and we’re always looking for people that want to participate. We have trad- and indie-published authors, writers that are just working on their first manuscripts all the way up to those who have a good number of books published.

Bucket #5: Workshops & Conventions

A newish thing I’ve been doing is running workshops and speaking at conferences. I co-ran two workshops with YAP in January and February, spoke at the Eastern Shore Writers Conference in March, and ran two workshops with the Maryland Writers Association Montgomery County Chapter in May and June. I have three workshops with YAP planned for this fall, and will be speaking at the Hallowreads Convention in Ellicot City in November. I’ve also been doing Conventions—Awesome Con in April, GalacticCon in June, and Shore Leave coming up here in July.

Deidre Brown Prescott <3

Bucket # 6: Life

And of course, life stuff in general keeps going, regardless of whether my books get written or not. Josh is in business school right now, we spent a lot of money on getting our roof fixed; next up, we are dealing with drainage issues in our yard (hurrah for landscaping!). We went to visit my parents for a weekend, and Josh’s parents, aunts & uncle, and sister & boyfriend also came to Baltimore to visit. My mentor passed away (I’m a little sad she won’t get to read this—she loved getting all my blog post updates), so I made a whirlwind trip to NH for the service in the middle of everything. But Josh has a nice, long, 6-week break coming up in August, so I’m looking forward to having a little time to breathe.

Honestly, when I type it all out, it sounds exhausting, but the truth is: I’m loving every second of it.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the dog.

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Building A Single Marketing Strategy for Authors

Welcome to the blog of Ariele Sieling, author! If you would like to learn more about her, click here to sign up for her newsletter. She also offers publishing and marketing consulting services. Click here to learn more.

Another version of this article was shared on the Revision Division Vault.

We authors are at war. We have at our disposal the books we write, our author network, and a few tools that may or may not work, depending on the day or the time or the mood of the universe as a whole. We are fighting for the attention of a few—10 or 100, maybe 1000 people that love our work, our words, our stories. But we have to compete for their attention against life in general, the entire internet, all of television, and every other book that’s ever been written (just to name a few things).

In addition, each of us is just one author, with a finite number of tools, a finite number of hours, and a finite number of dollars to use in the war to reach the hearts and minds of those people who are going to love our books. But too often our marketing feels like we are just flinging paint against the walls and hoping to paint a picture.

So how do we decide exactly where we are going to spend our time and dollars? What do we invest in?

How do we build one, holistic, marketing strategy that we can use to keep us on track, moving forward, and overcoming all odds in this crazy world of modern publishing?

The short answer is: I don’t know. But I do know that a lot of the “strategies” that are out there, aren’t really strategies. They are tactics. Single activities. Once-in-a-lifetime strokes of luck. I might not have a solid, single answer, but I do have some suggestions.

If you’d like, I’ve created a template that you can use to walk through the process along with this blog post.

1. Decide your endgame.

Whenever I ask people, “what’s your goal as an author?” I usually get back the same answer from everyone: I want to make money. I want to pay a few bills. I want to send my kids to college. I want to be able to quit my job. My response to that is: Yes. I know. That’s what we all want.

The truth is, your endgame can be anything you want. And if money is what you want, build your marketing plan around it (and maybe try becoming a lawyer or investor instead of an author lol). But there are a lot of other ways to be successful as a writer, and I think it’s worth considering the bigger picture.

So, what else do you want? What impact do you want to make in the world? What lifestyle do you want to live? Why did you start writing in the first place? Where do you want to be in five or ten years? If you were to die without having ever made a cent on writing, what do you hope you will have achieved?

Here are a few examples:

• I want to have one TRUE fan that loves everything I write.

• I want to create resources for teachers to help improve the XYZ part of children’s lives.

• I want to leave my story behind for my grandkids.

• I want to check off an item on my bucket list.

• I want to increase diverse representation in literature.

• I want to write a TV series.

• I want to run a personal training/SEO/cooking/consulting business.

• I want to start a movement.

• I want to write body and sex positive books.

• I want to help people solve a problem in their lives.

• I want to inspire teenagers to pursue the sciences/arts/cooking/etc.

• I want to tell the stories of a particular group of people.

• I want to help other people achieve their goals.

Now, when I said earlier that your endgame can be anything, I meant it. It can be the same as someone else’s endgame or it can be so unique and crazy that everyone else thinks you’re insane. You can have one or two or three endgames. You can change your mind about your endgame five years from now. Or maybe, your endgame is simply this: I want to write books every day.

Whatever your endgame is, it will determine the choices you make as you piece together your marketing strategy. Every marketing activity you participate in, every marketing choice you make—it should always point back to this.

2. Determine your objectives.

As I said, we are fighting a war. So what do you need to accomplish in order to win the war? That depends on what war you’re trying to win, what your endgame is.

Objectives should be reasonable, specific, and measurable—you need to know when you’ve accomplished it. But again, they can be anything you want.

For example, if my endgame is to conquer Canada, my objectives might look like this:

• Invade Saskatchewan.

• Win Saskatchewan.

• Invade Nova Scotia.

• Win Nova Scotia.

Or maybe it would look like this:

• Overwhelm Canada with bears (or alligators since they probably have their own bears).

• Win the hearts and minds of the Canadian people until they ask to be invaded.

• Slowly move the US/Canada border north until they are completely encompassed and maps list them as being part of the US.

• Convince enough US citizens to move to Canada that we’ve basically occupied them.

Okay so, clearly military strategy is not my thing. But let’s take a closer look at author marketing strategy instead. If my endgame is to increase diverse representation in literature, I’m going to focus my time and efforts in two areas: first, I have to write books with diverse characters (so I’ll create a separate strategy for that, but that’s writing, not marketing). Second, I have to get my books into the hands of people that want to read about diverse characters.

So who do I think will want to read my books?

Objective 1: Determine my target audience.

Once I know who to focus on, then I need objectives to keep myself on track and moving in the right direction.

Objective 2: Get 100 pairs of (new) eyes on my books every week.

Once I know for a fact that lots of people are seeing my books, I have to draw them in.

Objective 3: Create a sales funnel.

Once they’ve been drawn in, I have to keep them around.

Objective 4: Create audio/visual experiences that enable my readers to invest more emotional energy into my books and my worlds (and make them want to buy later books in the series).

I could go on like this for a while. These objectives are HARD to write. Impossible, sometimes. And honestly, I’m not sure there are right or wrong, good or bad objectives. It’s all about what works for you.

Let’s try another example. Say your endgame is that you want to provide resources for teachers to help kids learn math.

In this scenario, you already know your target audience: teachers. And getting 100 teachers to look at your books every week seems like a bit of a stretch. Besides, in order to get buy-in from teachers, you don’t just want them to see your work, you want the opportunity to get up close and personal with them—you want them to experience your work.

Objective 1: Build a network of teachers that are interested in your product.

Once you’ve found the teachers, you have to convince them to at least try your work.

Objective 2: Create a sample product that you hand out for free for teachers to use.

Teachers are now actively engaging with your work. How do you get them to buy the curriculum?

Objective 3: Approach principals and superintendents and offer discounts for bulk sales.

Now you have your books in a few schools. How do you get them to keep using it, and wanting more from you?

Objective 4: Schedule school visits, workshops, and conferences to connect teachers with ongoing support and resources (that you provide).

Objectives are the things you need to accomplish in order to reach your endgame. You can have as many or as few objectives as you want. Maybe you start with two or three and add more as you go. Maybe you write down a few, hate them, and try something else later. Whatever works for you and for your endgame. After all, once you’ve started moving forward, you’ll probably keep moving forward. It’s the first law of physics!

3. Develop your tactics.

Tactics are different than objectives in that objectives are what you are trying to accomplish and tactics are the actual actions that you take. When I really, truly understood the difference between objectives and tactics, that’s when my marketing completely shifted. Most of the things people tell you to do to market your book are tactics. When someone says, “The best way to get book sales is to post in Facebook groups!” —that’s a tactic. When someone says, “The best way to get book sales is to do book signings!” —that’s a tactic.

But, there are bajillions of possible tactics you could use. So, the best thing to do is to write your objectives FIRST and then choose tactics that are going to move you in the direction you’re trying to go.

Let’s pick an easy objective to begin with: Get 100 (new) pairs of eyes on my books every week. This is something most marketing plans probably have in common (if not 100 eyes, then 10 or 50 or 500). Basically, you need to reach your audience.

So, what tactics can we brainstorm to get 100 eyes on our books every week?

• Post on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc.

• Make a Youtube series about your book or topic

• Put your books in Free Little Libraries

• Donate a copy of your book to your local library

• Go to comic cons, book signings, craft fairs

• Set up paid ads (Facebook/Amazon/Bookbub)

• Start a word of mouth campaign

• Put out new books

• Get people to sign up for your newsletter

• Go on a blog tour

• Pay for impressions

• Do a giveaway

• Post on Wattpad

• Make book trailers

• Get a short story in an anthology

• Build a website/Google ads

• Make a video game

• Win a writing contest

• Get on a podcast/start a podcast

• Do radio/TV interviews

• Pin images or set up boards on pinterest

• Pay for a billboard

• Put flyers on cars

• Make a banner and have it dragged behind an airplane

For this particular objective, I could brainstorm hundreds of ideas. Pretty much anything you do out where people can see you will get at least one or two pairs of eyes on your books. The next issue becomes how to choose between all of the possible tactics.

Simple! You vet them.

Vetting Marketing Tactics

Not all tactics are created equal. Some are interesting or fun ideas, but will get you nowhere. Some are a huge time suck and some cost way too much money. For example, getting Beyonce to come perform at your book launch party is a great way to get new eyes on your books.

Lol.

So, here are my tips for vetting:

1. Brainstorm as many ideas as you can. No idea is too crazy. No idea is wrong. Let your brain go wild.

2. Check back in with your endgame. Cross off anything that doesn’t point directly back to that.

3. Cross off anything that is literally impossible. Although, I would pay a lot to see alligators performing a spoken word pop-up version of your self-help manual.

4. Cross off anything you can’t afford. [Note: you SHOULD have a marketing budget. Even if it’s only $10 or $20 a month.]

5. Cross off anything that is going to make you have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Seriously. If you hate doing something… DON’T DO IT.

6. Cross off anything that you’ve tried that you know for a fact won’t work. Note on this: try to be a little objective about this one. Before you completely eliminate an idea, ask yourself “why didn’t it work?” Could it be that you did it poorly? Or that you did it the day the world ended? Or that you did it but forgot to include a link to your book? Only cross it off if you know for a fact it won’t work. I know for a fact that spamming my book in FB groups does NOT work on scifi readers. So I don’t do it.

Even after working through this list and crossing off possibilities, you’ll may still have quite a few options left. So the next step is to prioritize.

1. Prioritize anything that is directly and obviously related to your endgame.

2. Prioritize anything that you already have the skills to do. [In fact, I highly encourage you to try to be creative—make a list of skills you have, like gardening or accounting or music or art, and see if there are ways you could use those skills to market your books.]

3. Prioritize anything that will help you push forward more than one objective. For example, if you have five objectives, and creating a Facebook group is a tactic that will help you achieve 4/5 of them—do that!

4. Prioritize based on your time and/or resources. If you have money but not time, prioritize things that might cost money but take some of the work off your plate. If you have time but not money, prioritize things you can do but that aren’t expensive.

Let’s talk through another example, with the endgame being to help teachers teach math more effectively to their students.

Here is your objective: Offer bulk sales discounts to schools.

Here are some tactics to consider:

• Reach out to teachers you know, and ask if they can put you in touch with their principal

• Go to teacher or administrative conferences and network with principals/superintendents

• Send out cold emails or make cold phone calls to principals/superintendents in your area

• Pay for a vendor table at a local event, a school event, or a conference

• Pay for Google/Amazon/Facebook ads targeted at principals, teachers, and superintendents

• Make videos of you demonstrating your technique, and post on Youtube (with the appropriate keywords attached)

• Build a website and post a blog with information about the technique, math, or related content

• Start a podcast where you talk about your technique and other related techniques

• Hire alligators to do a spoken word performance of your math technique outside the house of principals from your target area

If it were me, I would never cold call because I hate talking on the phone. I probably would make a video series, because I have the skills to do that. And I would probably be a vendor at events, because I like talking to people face to face. I would seriously consider the alligator performances, but probably end up crossing that off the list as it would be too expensive.

Whatever tactics you choose should always point back to an objective, which should point back to your endgame. If you do this, you’ll never sit around wondering, why am I even doing this? You’ll know exactly why. As you get more involved with this sort of planning, you can start to add layers—hire people to do some of the work for you, improve your methods of measuring what tactics work and don’t work, learn where is best to invest actual dollars. And you won’t get so caught up when a tactic fails, because you’ll have a plan, and know exactly what to do next.

And hopefully, before long, your marketing plan will be chugging along, and carrying you with it.

4. Get started.

Don’t wait until you have a perfectly thought out, perfected marketing plan. Seriously. Don’t wait. Start now. The longer you wait to get started, the less time you’ll have to enact all parts of the plan. We all have limited hours, days, minutes, so don’t wait.

A couple of extra thoughts on book marketing for authors:

1. It’s work. It’s hard. I hear/see a lot of authors complain about how it’s not working, or ask for the easiest ways to market their books. If you want to be a career author, then you have to be all in on the marketing as well as the writing, whether you’re trad published or indie.

2. If you go through this whole thing, get to the end, and think, “I don’t want to do all this. I just want to leave a legacy, or cross an item off my bucket list, or leave behind a book of memories for my grand kids,” then do that! Don’t worry about all this other nonsense. Write the book you want to write, and give it to your grandkids. Or cross it off your bucket list. Or donate it to your library. Put in exactly the amount of work you want to put in, and not a bit more.

3. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, consider this: do one thing at a time. We all have lives. We have jobs or school, families and illnesses, volunteer work and chores at home. We can’t do everything. So start by picking one thing. And do that one thing. That’s enough. And when you feel ready, pick a second thing. It’ll figure itself out. And don’t feel like because everyone else is doing this, that, or the other thing, that you need to be doing that too. Just focus on your endgame, on your plan. And be consistent.

4. This system I just wrote out might not work for everyone. It’s not a hard and fast system. It’s just an idea, a suggestion, a guide. Do what works for you, ignore the rest. If anyone ever tells you that their way of marketing (or writing) is the only way, or the best way—they’re wrong, and just trying to pull one over on you. Do what works for you. The people that go viral are the people whose approach to marketing is as unique as they are, as unique as the content they produce. Be unique. Take your natural creativity and apply it to your marketing.

5. Get started. Seriously. Do something.

Every time I share this blog post or give a workshop or presentation on this topic, there is always someone that comes up to me/messages me and says, “Okay, this is great and whatever, but what am I supposed to do?” Which is of course annoying because I just wrote 3k words (or gave a 1 - 2 hour presentation) telling you exactly what to do, step by step. But I think I know what they mean. They mean, “please just give me one thing that I can do today, while I’m working on building out this wonderful, beautiful, and absolutely exceptional plan you’ve just outlined for me, Ariele, a thing that won’t be a waste of time.”

So, I have four suggestions. If you need something to DO, do one of these four things. And if you’ve already done these four things, then just build the damn plan already! ;)

1. Build a website. Pay for it. Building a website is so easy these days that there is literally no reason not to do it. Weebly, Wix, Squarespace (that’s what I use), whatever you want. Just do it. Minimally, it would be helpful for your website to have: information about you, links to your books or information about what you’re working on (if you don’t have books), links to your social media if you have them, and contact information—a form, an email address, your choice.

2. Set up an Amazon Author Central account. This is for those of you that have a book available on Amazon. Include a photo, a bio, and make sure to claim all of your published books.

3. Choose one social media platform and learn how to use it. Use it as a user, not as an advertiser. Learn the ins and outs, tips and tricks. And use the tools it offers. Don’t skip hashtags because they’re ugly. Use them! Don’t skip stories because you don’t like your face. There are lots of other things to video (plants, your dog, the sunset).

4. Set up a newsletter. Remember there are laws about newsletters (more info here) so use a service like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or MailerLite. And commit to sending out an email once a month, or once a quarter.

Final thoughts on marketing:

• Writing is for you. Publishing is for you too. Marketing—is for your reader.

• Marketing is work. Complaining doesn’t make it less work. It also doesn’t make it easier.

• You don’t have to ever market if you don’t want to. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

• If you want your marketing to be successful, be consistent. Keep at it. And keep learning new things.

• And above all: write more books.

Sign up for my newsletter, email me any questions you have, comment below if you have any thoughts. If you don’t like the system, forget about it and find a different one. I promise it won’t hurt my feelings :) .

Don’t forget your towel. And good luck.

Additional Resources

How To Market A Book by Joanna Penn

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini

Write. Publish. Repeat. by Platt, Truant, Wright

Let’s Get Visible by David Gaughran

…there are a lot more.

It's About You: The Metamorphosis of A Writer

Today, enjoy this guest post on writing from my good friend and colleague, Zoe Cannon.

A few years ago, I read this series of posts about the stages every writer goes through. The posts had some interesting insights, especially about what really matters on a page-to-page and paragraph-to-paragraph level in any given story (hint: it’s not the words), but for the most part, these stages didn’t match either my own experience or what I’ve seen other writers go through. I didn’t give it much further thought, until recently, when I found my own relationship to my writing changing. I started thinking again about writing stages and whether there really was any kind of path that all writers follow. Of course there are no true universals—no two writers experience writing quite the same way—but when I looked at my own personal experience, what I’ve seen in various critique groups, and the lessons and life stories of writers far beyond me in skill and experience, I was able to see some definite commonalities.

Stage 1: It’s About the INSPIRATION.

“Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.”

Anna Quindlen

You love to write. And when you don’t love it, you don’t write. Writing is about that glorious feeling of flow, where you see the story unfolding in front of you in your mind’s eye and the words pour from your fingers almost effortlessly. When that feeling stops—you hit a difficult part of the story, or you’re not sure where to go from here, or you’ve made it through your whole first draft but when you reread it you discover that it doesn’t get your story across nearly as well as you had hoped, or maybe your creative well has just run dry for the moment—you walk away from the story. Maybe you go through creative bursts followed by periods of not writing at all, or maybe you flit from new idea to new idea, chasing whatever calls to you at the moment.

Most people stay in this stage. You’ll hear a lot of people maligning this type of writing, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with staying here if you don’t have any goals for your writing beyond having fun. All the other stages involve pushing yourself to write even when the inspiration isn’t there, and if all you’re after is a way to keep yourself entertained and let off some creative steam, then why force yourself to keep going when it’s not fun? It’s a lot harder to finish a story if you don’t move beyond this stage, but a finished story doesn’t necessarily have to be the goal. If you just want to play, then let yourself play, and don’t worry about the rest.

Nevertheless, most people generally won’t consider someone a “real” writer—whatever that even means—until…

Stage 2: It’s About the STORY.

You have stories that you need to tell, and you’re willing to slog through the not-fun parts of writing in order to make that happen. Maybe you have that one great idea that you’ve been trying to get down on paper for years. Or maybe you’re bursting with more stories than you could write in a lifetime, and have no idea which one to work on first. Either way, getting the story onto paper is worth pushing yourself through the times when you don’t feel inspired, because now the story matters more than the feeling of inspiration.

This is when many writers start establishing goals and routines—something external to push them forward when the inner motivation isn’t there. Maybe you decide you’ll write every day. Maybe you get up half an hour early and write before you do anything else for the day, or write on your lunch break, or after your kids have gone to bed. Maybe you set a daily quota of words to write, or tell yourself you can’t watch your favorite show until you get an hour of writing done. Maybe you participate in NaNoWriMo (this is what pushed me out of Stage 1).

Most writers, unless they prefer to focus on short stories or have a deeper-than-average well of inspiration to carry them through Stage 1, finish a major project for the first time here. Some writers stop there; they had one story to tell, and they’ve told it. Others keep going. Some writers learn to revise here; for others, that doesn’t come until Stage 3 (ahem, looking at that writer in the mirror with the 5+ untouched first drafts from her stint in Stage 2). Either way, finishing a project is an amazing feeling, not only because you’ve accomplished a major goal, but because of what your stories mean to you. They’re your babies; they’re pieces of you set down on paper. Which is why it can be so nerve-wracking to send them out into the world. And that brings us to…

Stage 3: It’s About the REACTIONS.

You’ve started sharing your stories with the world. Or maybe you were already sharing what you wrote back in Stage 1, but the stakes are higher now. Because you don’t just want to write anymore—you want to succeed at writing, whatever that means to you. Maybe you just want to learn how to polish a draft until it tells the story you want to tell, but this stage is when most writers start thinking about publication.

You join a critique group, and studiously revise your story based on their notes. You try to eliminate adverbs, and give every character a flaw, and follow all the other rules you learn about as the wider world of writing opens up to you. You write and rewrite with the goal of getting positive feedback—a “this is much better than the first draft” from your critique group, “good” rejection letters (the ones that come with a personal note instead of just a form letter), a publishing contract.

If you do publish a story or several, whether traditionally or by putting your books up for sale yourself, this stage doesn’t end there. Now success—or failure—is measured in average star rating on Amazon, number of newsletter subscribers, followers on social media, the size of your royalty checks. I think this is the most stressful of the stages, because it’s so dependent on things you have only limited control over. You live for that five-star Amazon review or the notification that you have a new subscriber. If the numbers aren’t as high as you expected, you wonder what you’re doing wrong. If you get a one-star review, you consider revising based on the reviewer’s feedback, or completely changing your plans for your next project, or maybe giving up on writing entirely.

A lot of writers give up here, disillusioned. You thought your story was good when you put it up for sale, but despite all your marketing efforts, it’s only selling one copy a month at best. Or you’ve collected dozens of rejection letters without a single personal note to show for it, let alone a publishing contract. Or you haven’t even gotten that far, because no matter how many times you tweak the story, your beta readers keep finding problems. Even if you find success here, however you define it, you might start feeling burned out by the efforts to make sure your growing fanbase likes your new book as much as the next one, or to keep your sales up so your publisher will buy your next book. But of the writers who persist through this stage, many move on to…

Stage 4: It’s About the PROCESS.

This is where many writers refine their personal process. Or if you already developed a system that works for you back in Stage 2, you lean into it instead of trying to change things up based on advice from your critique group, or the writing guru of the moment, or Joe Schmoe on Facebook who sells more books than you. Maybe you start writing as soon as you get your idea, while it’s fresh, and then write three or four drafts, each one focusing on a different element of the story. Maybe you write page by page, polishing each page until it’s perfect and then never looking at it again. Maybe you use the Save the Cat structure, and like to plan out five scenes at a time but no more than that, and don’t need any high-level revision but have to go over your draft three separate times to catch all the typos and grammatical errors. My own process is a two-part outline (scene-by-scene and beat-by-beat), a first draft, a revision for story and narrative issues, and a line edit. There are as many ways to write as there are writers—more, really, because no writer writes every book exactly the same way. But there’s always one common thread, and that’s what this stage is about.

“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong.“

N. R. Narayana Murthy

In this stage, you write a story, and you send it out—mail off your query letters, email your completed manuscript to your agent, upload the files to the ebook retailers, post it on Wattpad, whatever—and then you move on to the next. That’s what this stage is about—the act of writing itself, sitting down at your keyboard every day (or however often you write—in this stage you often no longer need to follow a one-size-fits-all rule like “write every day” in order to write consistently), and starting and finishing and starting again. That story from Stage 2, the one you’ve spent years trying to perfect? You still love it, but it’s out of your hands now, and you’re on to the next thing. That book that sold hundreds or maybe thousands of copies out of nowhere, and you still don’t know why? You pour yourself a glass of champagne and keep working on the next story. That book that got dozens of one-star reviews on Goodreads? You still cringe when you think about it, but you also know it doesn’t really matter, because you’re writing a new story now.

Because in this stage, writing is about the work, not the works. The act of writing, not the finished product. When you sit down and do the work, the finished product takes care of itself.

At this point, you may find yourself outgrowing your critique group—not because you no longer need outside eyes on your stories, but because you’re less concerned with revising to other people’s preferences. You solicit more targeted feedback now, often from carefully-chosen beta readers and paid editors. You might start experimenting with new genres, no longer as concerned with meeting expectations, or you might stop feeling the need to experiment and instead settle into writing the things you know you love.

This is where writers often move beyond the basic skills they learned in Stage 2, and the more advanced, but still universal, skills of Stage 3, to specialize in the things they’re best at or that are the most interesting to them. Some writers focus on building characters that readers connect with, others on prose quality, others on plot structure, others on genre tropes and writing to market.

Sometimes you’ll sit down and the words will just flow out of you, and the story will carry you along the way it did when you were writing purely for the fun of it. You’ll still love all the stories that you write, and every one of them has a piece of you in it (if that’s not the case—if you’re choosing your projects based purely on external factors—you’re in Stage 3). And you’re still putting your stories out there and receiving external feedback (if you’re unwilling to let your stories go, you’re in Stage 2), although you might have stopped reading your reviews and might be checking your sales on a schedule instead of whenever you have a free minute. But the thing that distinguishes this stage from all the others is that you see all of those things as transient. Today’s inspiration will be tomorrow’s slog. Today’s fascinating new idea will be tomorrow’s boringly familiar project. And today you may wake up to hate mail, but tomorrow you’ll more than likely wake up to a five-star review on the same book. The work is the only constant—but the work is all you need.

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Zoe Cannon is the author of the Internal Defense series (a YA dystopian series with a dose of realism) and the Catalyst series (genre-breaking post-apocalyptic paranormal-ish YA). She is currently working on an urban fantasy series about a black-ops agent for Hades in the secret war between the gods. Click here to learn more about her.