Blisscraft Life With Christina Katz

Ooo, I love me some freelance writing books. You know I do!

And I have read plenty over the years, both for personal use and as research for my own books.

This is my list of the clear stand-outs in the creative freelance writing category.

Some are dated, but I don’t care. They all have a special place on my bookshelf.

Writer For Hire: 101 Secrets To Freelance Success by Kelly James Enger LINK

Six-Figure Freelancing, The Writer’s Guide To Making More Money by Kelly James Enger LINK

Ready, Aim, Specialize, Create Your Own Writing Specialty & Make More Money by Kelly James Enger LINK

Starting Your Career As A Freelance Writer by Moira Anderson Allen LINK

The Renegade Writer by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell LINK

The Renegade Writer Query Letters That Rock by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell LINK

The Writer’s Workout, 366 Tips, Tasks & Techniques From Your Writing Career Coach by Christina Katz LINK

The Beginning Writer’s Answer Book edited by Jane Friedman LINK

102 Ways To Earn Money Writing 1500 Words Or Less by I. J. Schecter LINK

Freelancing For Newspapers, Writing For An Overlooked Market by Sue Fagalde Lick LINK

Make A Real Living As A Freelance Writer by Jenna Glatzer LINK

Writer Mama, How To Raise A Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz LINK

Writing Articles About The World Around You, How People And Places You Know Can Spark Ideas For Hundreds Of Saleable Articles by Marcia Yudkin LINK

Oldies:

Writing Articles From The Heart: How To Write & Sell Your Life Experiences by Marjorie Holmes LINK

How To Be A Successful Housewife Writer by Elaine Fantle Shimberg LINK

Write Where You Live, Successful Freelancing From Home by Elaine Fantle Shimberg LINK

Sell & Resell Your Magazine Articles by Gordon Burgett OUT OF PRINT

View the entire list of best creativity books.

If you have ever heard me speak, you have probably heard me refer to the years I spent in coffee houses in Chicago reading about being a writer before I was ready to dare to become one.

This is always the danger inherent in a world with so many well-written books about the writing life.

Do you want a writing life or do you simply want to read about the writing lives of others? Today, you have ample opportunity to do both.

Of course, you know me, I am going to encourage you to have your own writing life. But I don’t think it will do you any harm to read these gems. In fact, I am sure that they will inspire you in  all the ways that only they can. Why not keep them on your shelves at the ready for a rainy day?

These are some of my favorites. What are yours?

Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg LINK

The Right To Write by Julia Cameron LINK

Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott LINK

If You Want To Write by Brenda Euland LINK

Writer Mama by Christina Katz

The Writer’s Workout by Christina Katz LINK

Pen On Fire by Barbara DeMarco Barrett LINK

Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman LINK

Writing To Change The World by Mary Pipher LINK

View the entire list of best creativity books.

I am pretty creative these days, but I didn’t get here overnight.

I started out, way back in the day, reading awesome books by highly creative artists and authors.

Here’s the beginning of a new list for my site on “The Best Creativity Books Ever.”

These are from my shelf. Feel free to chime in with your favorites in the comments!

I am focusing here on raw creativity or creativity in the raw, as opposed to polished or entrepreneurial creativity (we’ll get to these later).

Here are my top creativity books so far:

Everything by Julia Cameron LINK

Everything by SARK LINK

Everything by Eric Maisel LINK

Everything by Keri Smith LINK

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp LINK

Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott LINK

Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg LINK

The Writer’s Workout by Christina Katz LINK

Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain LINK

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon LINK

The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield LINK

View the entire list of best creativity books.

As professional creatives, we all know that search engine optimization is something that we all need to learn. But how do we translate it from something we should do to something we actually do?

This is where Lela Davidson comes to your mental and emotional rescue, bringing her hallmark sense of humor and intelligence to what can seem like a daunting task, but turns out to be not that intimidating, after all.

Let Lela’s new guidebook be your introduction to SEO if you are unfamiliar with the topic. If you are already familiar–indeed if you know too much and yet still do nothing to improve your SEO–you’ll find the task is easy and manageable after you read Lela’s e-book.

And if you finish the e-book, and you still feel like you could use some real-time support, you can call on Lela to personally walk you through a test-drive, so she can show you how search engine optimization can make your website sexier, smarter, and more search engine friendly.

Thanks for helping me welcome Lela Davidson, as she makes a daunting task not only manageable but also fun. And please help me introduce Sexy, Smart, & Search Engine Friendly: Get Found Online Without Losing Your Mind or Wasting Your Time.

Sexy and smart aside, what made you decide that it was important for your business to become search-engine friendly?

I wanted my website to become more search engine friendly so that I could reach more people. I wanted to create more points of connection for people who did not already know me and who would not likely be exposed to my work through social media.

Most folks strongly resist learning about search-engine optimization. How did you figure out how to make it so sexy?

Things are sexier when they are easy. What I really wanted to do was make this process easier for myself, and to make it a habit because I’ve never resisted learning about search engine optimization, but I have strongly resisted applying that knowledge in a consistent way.

Traveling as I sometimes do in the blogger circles, I know I’m not alone. A lot of us know too much. We know so much that the basic job of SEO starts to seem overwhelming and we decide not to do any of it. The fundamentals are not overwhelming and with a little guidance, they are easy habits to incorporate.

Can I optimize my site even if I am basically technically illiterate?

I’m not sure if you can optimize, but you can certainly better-ize. If you know how to update the content on your website, then yes, you have all the technical skills you need to improve search results. What I stress in Sexy, Smart, & Search Engine Friendly is that most of the work that goes into good SEO is offline. Most of the work lies in thinking about who your target audience is and what they are looking for when they hit the keyboard.

So many folks who work online spend a lot of time on social media, making new connections, and networking—are you saying that becoming search-engine friendly is just as important as being social?

Being social is increasingly a part of being search engine friendly so I would encourage readers to continue connecting with people they know in social media, of course. But you can reach a lot more people who are not in your online social circles through search. Search gives us all a way to reach those people we don’t already know. That’s a first step to making a sale.

These same folks, who spend a lot of time online, spend an awful lot of time on social media and yet they don’t see the results they’d hoped for in terms of exposure to their work. Can your e-book help?

Hope is not a strategy. The expectation that putting something out there in social media is going to cause everyone in your network to tell two friends, and then they tell two friends, and so on, is ridiculous. I talk in this guide about repetition. A lot of us (myself included) do not like to repeat ourselves. But repeat ourselves we must if we want to sell. And we must learn to do it in the right way. If someone is spending a lot of time on social media—in anything, really—and not getting the results they expect then they need to try something new and adjust their expectations.

I am sometimes disappointed with the page views I get in my blog. Often, my readers will love a post but it just doesn’t seem to get much wider play beyond my current readers. Does your e-book address this frustration?

Absolutely. There are so many reasons our loyal group of readers may or may not share something with their on social circles. The only control we have over that is to pay attention to what they do share and decide if we want to create more content like that. What we also have control over is making it easy on people who don’t already know us to find what we’ve posted, written, and listed for sale. This can be accomplished through search.

Can I become permanently search-engine friendly, and if so, what kinds of habits do I need to develop?

The world is changing fast, and so is search technology, but as I mentioned before, half of what you do in search is offline. When you get into the habit of thinking strategically about the audience you want to reach with search, everything you create online gets more focused. The value of the content you enrich with this new knowledge is yours and the more you practice the more natural the process becomes. Learning to see through the SEO lens forces you to think in niches and it’s usually easier for the small business to win a niche.

I understand you are offering search-engine friendly consults for individuals running their own businesses online? What does this service entail?

Yes, the consults are very simple and I’ll go so far as to say fun! I ask website owners to answer a few questions about their website’s performance, their goals, and any past efforts with search optimization. With that information I am able to research strategies I think are the best choices for them right now. We have a 30-minute phone conversation to go over my recommendations and answer any questions. So far, the consults have worked really well after someone has read the guide. This is a chance for them to get custom insights based on my years of experience. The consults are not a replacement for reading the guide, but once someone understands the basics, we can dig a little deeper into the specific strategies for their website at this time.

Okay, Lela, for the sake of argument, let’s say that I’m already sexy and smart. Can you give me four or five quick tips so I can also become search-engine friendly during my lunch hour?

First, obviously, read Sexy, Smart, & Search Engine Friendly: Get Found Online Without Losing Your Mind or Wasting Your Time. You can read through the whole thing in one lunch hour and then start practicing the strategies in ten-minute time chunks.

Create a Google+ profile and link your website to it. Post new content to Google+ even if that’s all you do on the social network.

Before creating a post, think about one ideal customer sitting at her computer with a need you can fill. Brainstorm the words she might type into the search bar and then use the Google Keyword Tool to select a few of those phrases to include in your post.

Think ten. Ten minutes is plenty of time to refresh old content. Take ten minutes in Google Analytics and make a list of the ten most popular pieces of content on your site—posts or pages. Spend ten minutes a day for ten days in a row beefing up the SEO quality of that content.

Thanks for coming by to learn more about Lela Davidson’s new e-book, Sexy, Smart, & Search Engine Friendly: Get Found Online Without Losing Your Mind or Wasting Your Time. You can learn more about Lela Davidson and her e-book as well as about her fun and funny humorous essays for moms at http://leladavidson.com/. Please join me in spreading the word about a great new e-book that every creative professional needs to read.

We threw our daughter a big slumber party for her birthday to make up for the fact that she got her room re-decorated last year instead of a party.

Bad idea to skip a ten-year-old’s birthday party. We learned our lesson and how.

I had a couple of birthday slumber parties when I was a kid, too. So, of course, I did what I always do when something is a challenging process and has a lot of picky details—I wrote a how-to article about it. The article has been picked up a couple of times already, and now that I have actually survived the sleepover, I can already think of ways to improve and expand upon the article.

What’s cool about writing for Regional Parenting Publications is that you can often draw ideas from your own personal experience. I teach this skill and many others in my upcoming Writing & Publishing The Short Stuff class. What sets my classes apart from all of the rest, is how seriously I take them. A recent comment from a student underscored this:

Your support and mentoring means a lot. The other courses seemed so impersonal in comparison and they were over in the blink of an eye and I wondered what I got out of them. I’ve always liked your newsletter and your kind, down to earth, honest approach so I knew your course would be a good one and I was right.

I’m not a hired hand around here, I’m holding the bag. So the class had better be good, or it’s on me and my reputation. That’s one reason I take my job so seriously. The other is that I love what I do. No matter how I’m feeling before I work with my students in classes, I am always buoyed up afterward by their creative energy and ongoing growth. It’s an honor and a privilege to work with as many awesome writers as I have over the years. And I am always eager to start each class, no matter how many times I’ve already taught it.

My students have taught me a ton over the years, and if you have ever thought that my writing books contain any kind of insight whatsoever, now you know why. It’s because I’m not theorizing, I’m reporting on my experiences working with real, live writers. I’ve learned that many writers do have some things in common, but it’s really not appropriate to over-simplify or generalize too much about writers. And it’s certainly not okay to talk down to us, as though we were part of some kind of tribe of misfit toys. We are unique and complex people, and the better you understand that about writers, the easier it is to understand and accept that expressing ourselves is what makes us tick. If you exploit or disrespect us because of the way we innately are, we’re not going to very quickly or easily forget it.

I am optimistic about the future for writers but I am not naive. It takes real skills to navigate the complex world of writing for money and publication. Anyone who acts like it’s all about luck or who you know is just obnoxious. When it was time for me to buckle down and learn all of these skills I now teach, I didn’t always want to learn them. But I’ll tell you what, once I got the hang of something that I had really resisted, I felt great about myself and my business expanded because of my willingness.

I don’t write one kind of thing; I write a variety of types of things. And just like you, I am always growing, too. I have specific goals and strategies for my students that have evolved over the years as the publishing ecosystem has changed. The landscape used to be simpler and more straightforward, but I embrace the complexity of where writing for publication is right now. And when you work with someone who can do that, the whole process becomes a lot more Zen and a lot less about the sky falling or the evil editors or whatever else it might be convenient to kvetch about today.

Something I said to one of my students today was: you can only control what you can control, and you can’t control other people. And amazingly enough, as soon as you look at what you can do better and how you can improve or how you might better serve your clients or editors, the clouds part and the sun comes out and success turns out to be not as far from you as you may have imagined it was.

Our minds create obstacles that are not even there. This is human nature, and writers’ minds do this in spades. But the steps to success are actually quite simple. It takes some practice to learn them. But so what? Isn’t this just like everything else in life?

Why should writing career growth be any different than life? It isn’t. How could it be? It’s not.

I will be teaching five classes beginning Wednesday, May 1st. You are welcome to join us if you are ready to settle down and get to work because that’s all we do in my classes. We like results. And it takes focus and action to create them. And we sure do create an impressive amount of them collectively.

The classes I’m offering this round are:

Writing & Publishing The Short Stuff LINK
Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform LINK
Pitching Practice: Write Six Queries In Six Weeks LINK
Micro-publishing For Mom Writers LINK
Become Your Own Imprint: For Serial Micro-publishers LINK

I hope you can join us this time, or in the near future.

I’m no longer offering advance payments to former students because it has come to my attention that Paypal will give you six months to pay off your class interest-free. I can’t really compete with that and I don’t think I should try.

I think I’ll just stick to what I do best and teach and train writers and leave the financing to someone else. I hope to work with you soon!

I am launching a new initiative because because, you know me, I like to launch initiatives.

The latest, greatest idea from Christina Katz is The Womenpower Movement.

Like many ideas I have been pulling together and dusting off this year, this idea is not new for me.

I have been teaching writing-for-publication skills for writers since 2001. You have heard this a hundred times by now, but did you also know that before I became a professional writer, I used to facilitate a women’s empowerment circle in my living room?

It’s true. I was a tie-dye skirt wearing, drum-banging, caffeine-free hippie for a while there. And you know what? It was awesome and I would not trade that period of my life for anything. It was very healing and profound, and it changed the trajectory of my life.

Then I met my husband, got married, moved to the Pacific Northwest from the Southwest, had a baby, and decided to get serious about my writing career.

Fast forward a few years until I started offering writing-for-publication skills for writers based on what I had learned. This eventually morphed into offering writing skills from beginner to book deal. And then my teaching morphed into offering writing skills from beginner to become your own imprint.

As I grew as a journalist and author, I started expanding my services to include writing challenges, writing career classes & training groups, books, e-books, and workbooks, and phone consultations.

And that’s where I am today. I am my own imprint now. This means I still partner with folks in traditional publishing, but I also get it — I am 100% responsible for producing my own writing and publishing success, just as I have been saying to all of you for years, and I encourage all women writers to view their career trajectories this way.

So, the first initiative of The Womenpower Movement is encouraging women to be more expressive not only as professionals but in every area of their lives. This is the part where I get to take everything I have learned thus far about how to express yourself to yourself, then to small audiences, and eventually to global audiences, and share it with you.

I am excited! And I am going to start by weaving this initiative into what I already do, beginning with the Every-Day-In-May Writer Mama Book Giveaway LINK.

Therefore the theme for this year’s giveaway is expressiveness. How do women express ourselves, what prevents us from expressing ourselves, and how can we become even more expressive and transform the world through our individual contributions?

I have always been passionate about this topic, ever since I was a little girl. So I hope you will join me in supporting The Womenpower Movement and by participating in The Writer Mama Every-Day-In-May Book Giveaway LINK!

There is much more to come. So if you have fallen off my e-zine list for any reason, now would be a good time to subscribe or resubscribe to my e-zine, so you won’t miss any important announcements about the upcoming giveaway.

Thanks for participating! And get ready to express yourself more in May! We’re going to have some fun, as usual.

For most fiction writers, the true definition of that buzzword “platform” has always seemed a bit fuzzy. While writers of nonfiction can draw upon their subject matter in seeking opportunities for their work, theories on how aspiring novelists should promote themselves abound. Many fiction writers have a vague understanding of the need to network online, but are unsure of the specific and tangible benefits of doing so. Can time invested in platform development up front really help sell more novels later? Does offering craft tips or glimpses of your personal life succeed in leading people to your fiction?

Without having a clear idea of which methods of promoting yourself and your work are really worth the investment of time and money, you might be tempted to avoid the subject entirely. After all, you’ve got a novel to write! But in today’s publishing world, neglecting your platform—even before you have a book deal—can be a big mistake. Simply put, writers need readers. It’s an undisputable fact that many of today’s most successful fiction writers are those who’ve developed ways of creating lasting fans—and of reaching out to new ones every day. And aspiring writers who’ve developed budding fan bases have an advantage when it comes time to appeal to publishers and agents.

So as much as you might want to, you can’t afford to wait to create an online identity. The kinds of connections that translate into devoted readers of your work take time to build. “First and foremost, I try to remember the brand is me, not my latest book,” romance novelist Gwyn Cready says. “My efforts go into building a connection between the reader and Gwyn Cready, the writer.”

The key is to get your name known early on and then work at continually increasing your visibility as your career progresses. But knowing you need a platform and knowing the best way to go about building one are two entirely different matters. The good news is that when developing a strategy for beginning—or strengthening—your own presence and outreach, you don’t have to spend valuable hours starting from scratch with your own trial and error. Many notable novelists have succeeded in building large networks of fans over time—and are willing to share what they’ve learned along the way.

What does a successful platform really look like for a fiction writer? Read on to find out…

Continue reading this article by Christina Katz at the Writer’s Digest website.

This is an excerpt from the section header for the first section of The Writer’s Workout, my third book from Writer’s Digest, which is called, “Spring.”

Learn more about The Writer’s Workout here.

Check out reviews on Amazon or add your own.