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.
Progress. This is something that you work for as an indie published writer. Progress going in the right direction. Progress that brings tangible results. This is what has been happening to me as of late and I’m a little excited about the direction where things are going so I wanted to let you guys in on where I am in my progress. There’s gott abe at least a couple people that are interested. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
I am often involved in some interesting exchanges on Facebook. I belong to a couple different writers groups there and I try to help out as best I can if I have something constructive or helpful to say in response to writers and their questions. But a few weeks ago, a a topic was posted that really got the home fires burning. People came down on one side of the other and it was a powder keg topic. Some writers run away from those kind of topics because they don’t want to be involved in any kind of conflict whatsoever. I think that living in a dream world and that you sometimes just have to draw a line in the sand and give an opinion one way or another. This was one of those times and this is exactly what I did in reference to profanity and vulgar story elements in novels and having a rating system.
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.