Blisscraft Life With Christina Katz

This is a great video by Jane Friedman that provides some historical perspective on the publisher-author relationship and how publishers might improve it today. Her post is called, Do You Love Your Publisher? Author Survey Results.

I am going to summarize what I think is the biggest problem with the author-publisher relationship, from the point of view of the author.

I think it’s the same problem that has always existed with authors and publishers, and it’s an attitude I have been addressing for a long time.

When authors have a “take care of everything and I’ll just write the book attitude,” this does not serve them or publishers.

Jane does a great job in her video of showing how some of the most successful and lasting authors have historically taken books sales into their own hands. Or at least these authors have done what they could to move the needle on book sales with the resources available to them at the time.

The biggest problem potential authors have is a system that is still put in place to perpetuate the idea of “just get discovered and then everything will be all right.”

Look in two places to find this attitude and confront it. First, look for the myth of the rags-to-riches author in the media and in educational outlets for aspiring authors. Do you find stories of “my life was nothing but then I got a publisher, got published, and now I live on easy street and you can, too”?

This story is a lie. There is nothing in this story that is true, so reject it at once whenever and wherever you encounter it. Even if this was seemingly another person’s experience, do not expect to be able to imitate it.

The second place you have to look for this mythology is inside your own mind. If you have a “dream” of becoming an author some day, you will likely be disappointed with the entire process. Becoming an author is not a dream, it’s work, and very hard work.

Getting an idea out of your head and onto the page in a saleable manner and then getting various forms of books into readers’ hands is also a lot of work. It always has been and it always will be. And even then your job as an author is not done. Once the book is done and in people’s hands, you still have to solicit feedback and partner with others who can help you promote and sell your book.

Anne Lamott has a list of life-long advice circulating on the Internet right now. Here’s what she says in it about publishing:

Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and sometimes nearly-evil men I have known were all writers who’d had bestsellers. Yet, it is also a miracle to get your work published (see #1.). Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, will fill the Swiss cheesey holes. It won’t, it can’t. But writing can. So can singing.

At the end of the day, the “dream” of becoming an author comes up very short when the fantasy is compared to the reality. Do not take advice from anyone who is trying to sell you on the idea that authorhood is easy or that you will become rich from it. These are not reputable coaches. These are hucksters.

Jane shows us how there has historically always been a disconnect between the author fantasy and the author reality. Anne Lamott echoes the failure of publishing to make writers whole. Of course, publishing cannot heal us. But we have to be honest with ourselves about what we are trying to achieve by publishing in order to suss out this false hope in ourselves.

But in her video, Jane hints that the dynamics of publishing are shifting in the digital age. She suggests that independent authors are doing better at collaborating with each other than publishing houses are doing partnering with their authors.

The growth of the indie author movement is teaching authors what we always needed to learn: how to stop fantasizing about being taken care of and how to take business matters into our own hands.

I think it’s time for authors to take publishing off it’s pedestal and put it back where it belongs, where it has always belonged.

Partnering with a traditional publisher is one option a writer has. It is one option of many options. If you don’t have any skills besides writing when you partner with a publisher, then you need to educate yourself. You need to think big picture, not just little picture. You need to follow advice coming from people like Jane Friedman and myself to make sure that you have your expectations in the right place from the get-go. If your expectations are not healthy, your actions will follow them.

To say this another way, don’t let your personal power become dwarfed in partnering with publishers, writers.

Take a note from indie authors, and use any book publishing occasion as an opportunity to build and improve your business skills.

Do not jettison personal responsibility for your publishing success, just because you have a publisher. This will always lead to disappointment.

Better yet, if you have not yet taken 110% responsibility for your publishing success, do it now. And don’t ever let anyone take that responsibility away from you.

Watch Jane’s video and consider how much better your long-term writing and publishing journey will become when you commit to steering your ship, and not turning over the wheel to anyone else to feed an old fantasy that never had any basis in reality anyway.

That’s my dancing mouse, middle row, third from the left. She also play Little Fiona.

There are few things in life I enjoy as much as musical theatre. But if you think I mean simply attending shows, think again.

Of course, I enjoy attending a show. I love exploring musical theatre at a variety of levels: professional, festival, college, high school.

Believe it or not, I can even enjoy an elementary school show.

I am not sure which came first, enjoying musical theatre or enjoying my husband and daughter’s musical theatre. It seems like I did not see too many musicals on my own prior to marrying a theatre geek.

And now a writing nerd and a theatre geek have grown up and raised not just a musical theatre lover, but an arts enthusiast. Samantha loves doing all kinds of art: dance, singing, theatre, drawing, and writing.

I guess this makes sense, since Jason and I put self-expression and personal growth at the center of our marriage and our family.

And then there are those times when a show is up and running and everything is a happy blur. Like now. It’s opening night for my daughter’s show, Shrek, The Musical and I’ve been filling every spare moment helping with publicity, just like I always help my husband publicize his shows.

Lots of things make our family happy, but musical theatre is kind of our special thing.

What’s your family’s special thing?

Here’s a little taste of the fun in the form of my first musical theatre trailer for Shrek, The Musical. My husband has made them before, but this is my first time calling the shots.

Enjoy! And may you be happy being whatever type of family you are!

Between now and April 15th, everyone who registers for Power Up Your Platform Like A Pro and completes the course by then may ask me one question about their platform. I will get back to you within 48 hours with a response.

Please be prepared to provide more information, if requested. And do include ONE LINK to your primary website, if you have one.

If you have ever wished you could tap me on the shoulder and ask me to look at your online platform, now is your chance!

Take a risk. You’ll never know until you ask the question, “How could my platform perform better?”

I have 14 years of experience working with creatives and writers. Your sticking point may not be as unique as you think, but we won’t know until we take a look.

To take advantage of this incredibly low-priced offer, register for the course, jot down your questions as you take it, then hit me with your toughest sticking point.

I look forward to brainstorming with you!

Click here to learn how to power up your platform like a pro!

We are living in the best of times and the worst of times.

Truly, these are the best of times because we have so many choices and options.

But with so many choices and options comes the need to make decisions, and not merely one, but sometimes ten at a time.

And yet, even in these lovely times I notice that there are questions that simply do not get asked enough.

I can give you some examples:

• Who are you?
• Who are you really?
• When you leave the world, what do you hope to leave behind?
• What rocks your world?
• Whom could you not live without?
• Why are you here?
• What do people value most about you?

I could go on and on asking important questions that are not asked often enough. (And I do ask these kinds of questions in my Creativity Challenge, but that’s not really the point here.)

I am also interested in why we don’t ask important questions.

Is it because someone told us a long, long time ago that our important questions do not matter?

Are they not realistic, practical, and logical enough?

Do they seem childish? Silly? Ungrounded?

It seems to me that we are having a conflict between the new world that wishes to be more fully born and the old world, which really does not wish to relinquish it’s vice-grip on dictating reality.

If we do not start asking more important questions and answering them, things are not going to change.

Or they are not going to change quickly enough, which is where I suspect we are right now.

Things could change more quickly, but they don’t. And they won’t unless we start asking and answering questions.

Deep down, are we terrified of change?

Do we shy away from answering any questions because we like things to stay the same?

We need to let go of fear and embrace the answers to the questions.

This reminds me of this quote by Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters To A Young Poet in 1934:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

We need to start living the answers. But it’s never going to happen, if we keep running away from the questions.

Question false logic more. We are not questioning assumptions enough.

Even if you have always assumed some belief to be true, question it. What about now?

Question everything. And then live your answers. Do not try to live the answers belonging to someone else or to the past.

Do not live someone else’s truth. Live your truth.

Why be false when you could be true, and in being true, inspire the world?

Be strategic about your platform going forward and save yourself time and money.

A discussion was spurred on my Facebook page by my sharing a post by Carol Tice over at Make A Living Writing, Why You Should Stop Writing Blog Posts (And What To Do Instead).

In the process of sharing, I commented that I have been espousing this advice for years.

Let me just be clear about what I am saying. I am saying that blogging is the slowest path to credibility, if credibility is what you are after.

Blogging also comes with a lot of other responsibilities that can eat up a writer’s time, ultimately pulling the writer away from the projects she would prefer to be working on.

Bottom line for me, when I’m working with writers: don’t blog until you have products. If you don’t have a book or other products to put at the center of your blog, then blogging is the slowest, most inefficient way to build your credibility.

What’s better? Here’s a quick list:

1. Take classes that help you build your skills to a professional level. You might keep a blog, but if your skills lag behind, then you are not doing your platform any favors.
2. Get traditionally published in short forms. The quickest path to getting your name out on good work is to aim to write and submit short forms of writing. Don’t go straight to a book if you are completely unknown and you don’t have any street cred.
3. Once you have a consistent habit of getting published in short forms, up the ante and pursue some longer forms. Can you get a few features or opinion pieces published? If you have a track record established, they won’t be coming out of the blue.
4. If you are writing a book, build a community into it. Reach out to and include as many established experts in your book as you possibly can.
5. Get testimonials for your website and for your books and products. Credibility means others say people should listen to you.
6. Appearing in the blogs of established others is likely better for your credibility than only appearing in your own blog. But I would be selective about this or you will spend all your time guest posting.
7. Finally, pursue traditional publicity. If you can balance a mix of traditional publication and indie publication throughout your career without going to extremes with either one, you will be viewed as a professional who gets along with everyone.

If you blog, your blog can and should embody that you serve anyone and everyone interested in your topic and that you are open to the possibility of both indie and traditional opportunities. Blogs need to communicate, not isolate.

The bottom line for me is that your growth strategies as a writer should always be pushing you beyond your comfort zone and into territory where applause from new fans is possible. If you do all this while increasing your skills, and expanding your professional connections, you’ll always be more successful tomorrow than you were yesterday.

Questions or comments? Please put them in the comments below…

Photo by Morgan Sessions

The world is changing…sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. But if we are looking in the right places we will always find evidence of the change we’d hoped to see.

We can participate in the change we want to see and be in the world by following Sheryl Sandberg’s advice in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and leaning in towards our own vision.

Women’s leadership is needed in corporations, communities and government, and it is also needed at home.

Many women, like myself, run a home-based business. We are creatives and entrepreneurs. We don’t necessarily miss the workplace, crave the throng of working with others, or wish to make a political splash.

Our businesses are more personal. They have to do with helping people, often women, discover and flex personal power in order to be of better service in the world.

I’d like to carve out a little space in my blog to celebrate women who have done their “homework” so to speak and worked on themselves so that they could have more to offer themselves, their families, and the world. When you are a woman, it’s so easy to put everyone else first and forget to take care of yourself. I would go so far as to say that women are often raised to believe that putting everyone else first  is their mission in life. We are also often raised to feel guilty when we don’t put everyone else first.

This is going to become a regular feature in this blog. My hope is to remind women to put ourselves and our own needs first, so we can better express ourselves and contribute to the world at large. This month’s author is someone who specializes in helping women put themselves first, Dr. Christiane Northrup, M.D.

Since I am also a writing and platform coach. See what you can learn about your own career by checking out some of the highlights of Dr. Northrup’s career. It’s helpful to have role models but you don’t have to pursue a carbon copy of someone else’s career to feel like you are succeeding. In fact, I would encourage you to pursue the career you are meant to have rather than a career that resembles anyone else’s. You’ll know it’s yours because it will feel right when you are pursuing it. Every step you take will make your stronger, wiser, and more at peace with yourself and the world.

Christiane Northrup, M.D., board-certified ob/gyn, former Assistant Clinical Professor of ObGyn at Maine Medical Center , New York Times best-selling author, is a visionary pioneer and the foremost authority on everything that can go right with the female body! Dr. Northrup is a leading proponent of medicine that acknowledges the unity of mind, body, emotions, and spirit; internationally known for her empowering approach to women’s health and wellness, she teaches women how to thrive at every stage of life. Dr. Northrup stays in touch with her large community worldwide through her Internet radio show Flourish!, Facebook, Twitter, her monthly e-letter, and her Web site, www.drnorthrup.com. Click on the titles to learn more:

I like to listen to Dr. Northrup on Hay House Radio when I am working out. I like her tone, message, and style. I always feel we think alike and this makes me feel like I am in wise company.

If you like what you see in Dr. Northrup’s work, you may also be interested in a couple of my works that are similar in tone and message.

The Art Of Making Time For Yourself, A Collection Of Advice For Moms

Also in PDF and other formats around the globe

And…

Creative Knowing, 50 Self-reflection Questions For Women

If you enjoy self-discovery, you may enjoy participating in Creativity Writing Challenge that begins on the first Monday of each month through June 2015. The next one begins Monday, April 6th at midnight. Click on the badge to learn more. This is a perfect daily activity for spring. Hope you can join in the self-discovery!

Photo by Hartmut Tobies

I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes. Forgive me. I might be a little anemic these days, which always makes me a little bit mentally slow. It kinda sneaks up on me sometimes. Anyway…

The point is I now have three distinct video classes, and it did not occur to me until three folks asked to distinguish between two of them, because their titles were probably too similar.

Doink.

So I went ahead and changed the title of my first Udemy class from Writer Platform Success: Discover Strengths & Grow Confident to Writer Platform Bingo: Assess Your Strengths & Skills.

The natural order for the classes is:

1. Power Up Your Platform Like A Pro & Become Better Known Now Discount Link
2. Writer Platform Bingo: Assess Your Strengths & Skills Discount Link
3. Build A Better Bio To Market Yourself Easily Day & Night Discount Link

Power Up Your Platform is an overview of what platform means, a discussion of what it might specifically mean to you and your business, examples of the most crucial items to build to reach a global audience, an overview of how to incorporate multiple income streams into your business, and the seven qualities of thriving platforms. (I said that this course was introductory, but it’s really both introductory and comprehensive in terms of looking at your platform long-term whether you have one yet or not.)

Writer Platform Bingo is an assessment tool with 24 questions to help you discover the details about your strengths and skills, so you can leverage that information in your online platform and use it to create a bio as well as other crucial platform copy. (This course is comprehensive. It’s a comprehensive look at your own platform progress.)

Build A Better Bio is a how-to overview of the three most important types of bios to draft and polish, as well as suggestions for how to leverage your bio on social media. (This course is comprehensive. It’s an in-depth, how-to look at all the bios you need for an online platform.)

I just want to make sure that folks realize that these three courses do not repeat the same material. In fact, these courses all build on and compliment each other. That’s the whole idea!

I will figure out a way to weave this information into the course descriptions of each, so this is all more clear.

Thanks for letting me clarify! And special thanks to those three folks who asked for more info!

Photo by Maja Petric

Here is a list of reasons why I am more excited than ever about platform, platform development, and platform building for creative types who want to establish a global reach and serve the world with the best of what they have to offer.

1. There has never been a better time to be a creative person who wants to grow a passion for serving others into a business (notice I did not merely say “passion,” I more specifically said, “a passion for serving others”). Your dreams of serving the world are important. Listen to them!

2. There have never been more incredibly cool and affordable tools at our fingertips for creating a platform and amplifying our individual self-expression. I find cool new tools every single day!

3. There have never been more reputable businesses available to partner with to help creatives produce quality, share our work with the world, and earn money doing what we love to do. It’s truly an incredible time to be a creative person on a mission.

4. There have never been so many credible, reputable role models available (like myself or Jane Friedman or Seth Godin). Don’t be tempted by any of those other too-much, too-quickly types.

5. There has never been a better time to stop trying to fit into old models of business and to start creating your own original model of doing business instead. This is probably the best news of all for those who would rather serve their fans than spend all their time trying to please authority figures and gatekeepers. You should not be focusing your energy on pleasing gatekeepers; you should be focusing your energy on doing amazing work. And then if you end up partnering with others down the road, then that’s great.

6. The world has never needed new ideas more than it does now. The global mind is evolving at an incredibly rapid pace. And evolution typically creates crisis after crisis as the stage is set for the new that is to come. The world is not a mess; the world is changing. You can either jump in and be a part of a smoother transition or you can try to cling to what is known and familiar. But I predict the old will be ripped out of your hands eventually, whether your relinquish it or not, and no matter how tightly you hold on. Because progress does not care about tradition. Evolution is not sympathetic to your nostalgia. The world is making progress by leaps and bounds. You can be a part of it. Jump in! Being a part of progress feels exhilarating.

7. The Internet makes us all neighbors if we want to be. Not everyone can be as fortunate as we are in the US. However, it’s so easy to connect with folks on the other side of the world these days, and to find people to admire and appreciate elsewhere. Have you taken the time to think about what a global tribe might mean for your business? If not, I sure hope you will start thinking about it today.

I am now offering three video classes that can transform the way you see your business impacting the world. I hope you will take advantage of these special discounts especially for Christina Katz insiders:

Power Up Your Platform Like A Pro

HURRY! Only $10 Until Midnight March 31st.

Writer Platform Bingo

Build A Better Bio

Only $25 thru ChristinaKatz.com!

Click here to learn more about my new video course!

I have coached many folks on platform development over the years. And, as the years have passed, my ideas have evolved and gotten more helpful.

If you need a memory refresher of some of my popular pieces on platform, take a look:

Grow For It, Activate & Reactivate Your Perennial Platform Power for Author Magazine, June 2013

50 Simple Ways To Build Your Platform in 5 Minutes A Day for Writer’s Digest magazine, March/April 2011

Elements of a Successful Fiction Platform for Writer’s Digest magazine, November/December 2010

How to Build a Marketing Platform for Writer’s Digest magazine, May/June 2009

I think this new level of helpfulness is apparent in my new course, Power Up Your Platform Like A Pro. And this new course is fun, colorful and entertaining, as well.

As a Christina Katz insider, you have just a couple of more days to register for this course for only $10. I hope you will take advantage of the offer so we can work together or work together again soon!