Writing, Selling, Platform-building & Micro-publishing Classes With Christina Katz Begin May 1st

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!