I’m K.I.S.S.ing Everything

One of the best known acronyms for business, or for anything really, is KISS which stands for Keep It Simple Stupid.

I recently realised that I wasn't enjoying what I do and everything seemed like a chore.

So I’ve been KISSing everything.

One of the major changes I'm making to my online businesses is to get rid of most of my websites, especially my writing sties, and send all my visitors to just one writing site instead.

I’ve also set out a weekly article writing and online marketing schedule that is easy and quick to do and leaves plenty of time for book writing which is really what I want to do more of.

If you’re struggling to get enough writing done, try applying KISS to every area of life.

Look at everything you do and find a way to make it faster and simpler.

It leaves much more time for the things you’d rather be doing.

Finish Your Sh*t

The other day I read a really amusing - yet straightforward and honest - article by writer, Chuck Wendig.

He was talking about how aspiring writers are not really writers at all and was listing reasons why.

One of the things he listed was the bad habit that most writers suffer from, and that is not finishing things we start.

I’m just as guilty as anyone else for doing this and I have half-written manuscripts and short stories waiting to be proofed and edited, stashed away all over the place.

Chuck’s article was called “25 THINGS I WANT TO SAY TO SO-CALLED “ASPIRING” WRITERS” which I thought was funny to start with because of the way he called them “so-called”.

The part of it that made me laugh the most was this:

“I’m just going to type this out a dozen times so it’s clear: finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit! FINISH YOUR SHIT. Finish. Your. Shit. Fiiiiniiiish yooooour shiiiiit. COMPLETO EL POOPO. Vervollständigen Sie Ihre Fäkalien! Finish your shit.”

I especially liked “COMPLETEO EL POOPO”. Hilarious!

So if you’re a writer with things left unfinished, now would be a good time to Competeo El Poopo.

But seriously though, how much money are we leaving on the table through all our unfinished work?

I even have a series of 7 novels that have been left in the outline stage. Crazy, isn’t it?

Take a good look through all the writing projects you started but never finished and see what you can do to get them completed.

And I’ll do the same.

You can read the rest of Chuck’s article at:

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/02/21/25-things-i-want-to-say-to-so-called-aspiring-writers/

How Important Is Making Money From Writing?

Many purists will tell you that writing is an art form and so you should never be so vulgar to discuss money in the same sentence.

And to that I say, rubbish.

We all want to earn money from our writing and we want to earn enough so that we can quit the day job and write.

But how important should money be? Should you care more about earning money than about your writing?

No.

Writing and publishing should lead to money but wanting to earn money shouldn’t lead you to writing.

You should write because you love to write and not because you think it’s a fast and easy way to make money.

If you do that, your writing will never be good.

A perfect example of this is a writer I heard from who said she’d studied the market and discovered that the fastest selling ebooks were romance novels.

She wanted to write ebooks because, she said, they were a good source of passive income and so she could work once and go on earning money from her novels for years.

Her goal was to write 30 novels. By her math it would provide her with over $10k/month income through ebook sales.

To get the money faster she wrote her 30 novels in less than a year by writing each ebook in 10 days which is 3 a month and so she’d reach her income goal in a year.

The problem with the plan was that she was writing the books so fast and under so much self-inflicted pressure, that her novels were badly written, full of typos and the plots were trite and uninteresting.
The result is that 18 months later, her ebooks sales are still low.

I thought it would be a better plan to write one really good novel a month instead of 3 really bad ones.

But she wasn’t really a writer to start with. She just thought writing was a way to easy money.

There’s plenty of food for thought in that, isn’t there?

If you’re not a writer, and by that I mean someone who enjoys writing, then you’ll never make a lot of money as a writer.

Writing is a talent that some people have and many don’t.

Most experienced writers find it difficult to write under so much pressure which would make it impossible for a non-writer to do it.

But she tried.

And failed.

Just enjoy writing and keep doing it and eventually you’ll get faster naturally.

I know I did.

Just Write, Damn You!

OK, so this is going to be a mini-therapy session for me while I sit and whine to you about all the would-be writers (who like to call themselves aspiring writers) who never write a damn thing.

And then they ask me how to get started or how they can make money from their writing (that they never do).

So first I think I need to get one thing straight.

If you never write anything then you’re not a writer.

You see, you don’t need a college degree or any type of formal education to be a writer. And you can’t get a diploma or a certificate to show that you’re a writer the way doctors and lawyers do.

In fact, the only way that you can prove that you’re a writer is if you write every day.

And you don’t even have to write a lot. Many novelists only write for one or two hours day.

But the important thing is that they do it daily.

And what’s great about being a writer is that you’re no paid by the hour so your writing can go on earning money for years.

And it all begins with writing.

Every day!

So sit down and write, damn you.

Quick Cash Writing

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