Easton Livingston's Reality Imagination
Fiction is the reality of the imagination.
When I make decisions, I want to make decisions that will ultimately be good for my business and be a win-win for everybody involved. That means my fans, my publishing team, and myself.
Just recently, within the last month, I’ve made the decision that I was no longer going to be giving away free books… sort of. I explain what I mean in this post.
Fiction writers are in the business of words. We’re in the business of saying something. We are on a mission to say that in both our fiction and nonfiction. There is no such thing as a completely impartial writer. Every writer writes with the specific purpose of saying something specific.
The goal to be more productive is something that most people in business desire—or what most people that do what they love to do desire. It’s even more so for writers I think because our profession is only taken seriously when we’ve actually finished something. There is already the stigma that what were doing is not really work (which I can vehemently disagree with in one whole post alone). Add to that the fact that we are arduously committing effort and time to something where the reward is on the far back end if the reward ever comes at all. That reward is not really getting paid though that can be a part of it. No, the reward is actually finishing whatever it is that we’ve written and getting the thing published. The only way that that is going to happen is if you are cranking out the requisite amount of words to get to the end. That is why it’s so important to set goals in terms of word count. That is why mine has just increased.
How do you define success? If you ask five different people you just may get five different answers. Success – if we are looking at this with wise eyes – is a different metric for every individual. But it’s apparent that some people are more successful than others when it comes to that individual metric. People will give all kinds of myriad reasons why that is the case. The truth of the matter is, successful people have successful habits. In these habits have turned their lives into something worth living.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and pressing into different forms of literature to renew my mind so that I will also have success by creating an environment of habits that is conducive to that goal.
I don’t really like to write too much about self-publishing and the business side of things on my website for a couple of reasons. The first would be I haven’t arrived yet so I can’t be giving out to much advice on the matter. As a matter of fact, I’m restarting everything. However, I have learned much and sometimes when I see something that I know that I know and it can help out someone, I’ll give out my little two bits.
Contrary to what some people say, wanted to make money as a writer is not a sin. It’s not an obligation either. Being self-published, you have to work hard at it. Real hard. There’s nothing wrong with hard work. However, that should be coupled with working smart. That’s what this post is about. There is more than one way to make money as a writer and one of those ways has nothing to do with selling books. It’s has more to do with working smart.