The Great Writing Business Challenge

Fresh start means new challenges. Segmenting work by work-days is its own habit to instill. Not so good on this for last couple of years, as I’ve been fighting cultish habits…

The Great Writing Audience Challenge – Week 02 Results

Metrics

Subscribers:

Instafreebie/PW: 50/167 (30%) 3 non-IF/PW, 13 no-openers moved off.
StoryOrigins: 0

Overall Total: 2804 – slight increase.
IF/PW subscribers remaining after a year: 1321/7775 (17%) Percentage back to the norm. Note: I keep these more to see how IF/PW retention is moving. Overall 5% acquisition/retention rate after a year.

Book Sales: Next sales analysis was Jan 15 for December sales. Overdue.

Books (pre-)published:

The Healer Chronicles (anthology)

Fiction Books In Progress:

Erotika Jones (series) -> Book Four
Growing Up Felicity (series?) -> What Their Eyes See -> Book Five
Two Ghost’s Salvation Book Two -> Book Three
Wolfer’s Nation -> Book Three
Ghost Hunters Anthology 09 & 10, New Voices Vol. 009
Case of the Sand Dune Demise, Death and the Dreamcatcher

Non-Fiction Books In Progress:

Think Rich and Grow Richer
Breakthrough Copywriter (update)

Courses in Progress:

“Strangest Secret” (now in beta),
“Get Everything You Want Out of Life”, (now in beta)
“If You Can Count to Four…” (now in beta),
“Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds” – still in alpha.

Analysis

Main approach is in getting more organization to things. One habit that will need replacement is one of not setting a daily to-do list, based on a weekly to-do list. Mainly I quit doing this as part of eliminating a corporate cult training I’d had for 20-some years. I generally had things to do each day, but had more concentrated on rewarding my unconscious inspiration to rule my production lines. And have been very productive – as you’ve seen.

What makes me work into a regimen of setting up certain production for certain days of the week is so compartment or segment my week for those types of production. Yes, they overlap, as certain production lines need additional preps.

I did find mention of an older “creative triune” of having three projects going simultaneously – as described in a dug-up video of Gene Schwartz. Essentially, when you’re consciously editing on one project, the you are unconsciously creating on the others. (And I’ll see if I can’t get this excerpt posted for you.)

I do have several fiction works (as you see above) in the hopper. My First Reader and I have been brainstorming on various works. And I keep our emails saved as notes in those Calibre folders. In many cases in the past, I’ve got so far as to create the cover and then do nothing with them – losing the muse, as it were. However, nothing is ever lost, just misplaced. I do keep all my artwork. So occasionally, I set up these various books all over again, once I have a story that fits them.

This current organization has me creating the cover just before I’ve given them a start for a particular week. Or maybe a week in advance, so I can set the project on one of my many back-burners to create on.

I figure that I simply need to force in this schedule for a month or two to replace other schedule-habits.

Other Works

As mentioned, I’ve started working on courses this week. Taking my top-selling marketing book and doing the necessary work to upgrade it, as well as writing a mini-course based on it – the first of a series of four courses in this area, based on what is selling. I can’t tell if the other classic books are not selling because of too much competition right now. Getting these four up will be the key point.

I’ve also got a non-fiction book that’s working in the background. It’s based on my top perennial podcast, Think and Grow Rich. This will be actually distilling all the Nap Hill books to update his own top-seller with a guide book that pulls all of his data into a simple format.

Both of these projects are worked backwards from the course. Essentially about a thousand words per lesson, so I’ll have somewhere around a 5-minute video for each lesson. 3-5 lessons per module, 3-5 modules per course. But the first one is the overview and a mini-course which will stand on its own. Later, I’ll come back with the other modules.

The overall course production plan is to build mini-courses for all the top-sellers, and fill out mini-courses for the books in their category. Working backwards from the course, which will often be a guidebook to the (much) longer text.

December Sales Report

Coming this week, promise. It may or may not show a holiday bump. I’ve already clued you into what I expect from the year-end analysis. Just quite a bit of work to do. As a note, the February payments are usually for December sales, although I generally can get the last month’s sales on most platform, regardless of whether I was paid for them or not. Some are harder to get than others, Amazon is the worst.

Last week’s to-do’s:

This analysis & emails – Yup
New fiction book published. – Yup
Re-queue podcasts. – Nope
Define and start next year’s challenge. – Yup
New course added in spare time. – Nope

This week’s to-do’s:

Sun: This analysis & emails, re-queue podcasts –
Mon-Tues: New fiction book written and published. –
Wed-Fri: Copywriting course produced and online –
Sat: Syndication to Wattpad, Medium. –