do what you love, but solve for distribution

Many of us spend our lives pursuing private acceptance through external success. But no matter the award or honor, our inner doubts will remain. True acceptance comes from inside us. It takes asking ourselves challenging questions like: What do I want from my work? What’s most important about it to me ? How would I create my work differently if I p... See more

"The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated." https://t.co/KfFpouh7Dm

In the months leading up to pub day, I sent approximately 8,613 emails out to friends, professional contacts, people I talked to once in a buffet line at a writing workshop 3 years ago, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who have never heard of me or my little book, offering them galleys and (in some cases!) directly begging them to cover ... See more

• As an author in 2023, unless you’re Donna Tartt (and even if you are Donna Tartt honestly, because even Donna Tart has a Public Persona), it impossible to sell books without selling yourself. I spent approximately 12,302 hours writing pithy Twitter posts, drafting earnest Instagram posts, creating fucking Canva graphics, and sharing Insta stories i

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surrender to the cringe

Take a moment to consider why you’ve heeded the call. What’s stopped you from doing the damn thing? A fear of being cringe? A fear of not being good enough?

It's all going to flicker out at some point with everything else.

When you first start out, life will be exactly how it was before you started doing the thing except now t... See more

As I prepare to transition from my “heads down building a product” era to “I’ve worked so hard to build this thing, get over yourself and engage in some cringey self-promotion” era I need to fully embrace Austin Kleon’s mantra: “it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.”

Along those lines, this quote stopped me in my

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self-promotion is important:

In the months leading up to pub day, I sent approximately 8,613 emails out to friends, professional contacts, people I talked to once in a buffet line at a writing workshop 3 years ago, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who have never heard of me or my little book, offering them galleys and (in some cases!) dir

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Branding gets a bad rap, but it’s heart work, which writers already do by default. It’s asking yourself, “what is my work really about, what is its essence, what is its purpose, what does it evoke?” Branding is just taking the answers to those questions and making sure each decision you make about your work stays true to them.