At the beginning of this year, I went on a serious novel craft binge and read or re-read nearly 50 books on the art of storytelling. This month, I’m hosting a giveaway of my very favorite storytelling and craft books—yay! If you’ve been struggling to write your book, or struggling to revise it, enter here to […]
Why You Can’t Take Reviews Personally (#28)
When I worked in payments, we found that there’s no real way to convince a client to switch to your gateway for their credit card payments. It was a lot of work to get on a new gateway, and for the most part, as long as a company could accept payments, they didn’t think much […]
How to Deal With an Unending Shift in Priorities (#27)
Do you ever feel like even when you’ve figured out what you’re doing next, life decides to throw a wrench in your plans? At the beginning of the year, I had this incredible plan to build my business in 2015. It felt so right and I was so confident in it. I lined up my […]
Four Tips To Make Your Transition From Solopreneur To Hiring a Small Team Go Smoothly (#26)
I recently posted about my newest project—(slowly) hiring and building a small team. In that post, I gave you four rules for prioritizing your projects and deciding what to outsource. In addition to these four rules for determining what to outsource, I’ve also kept a list of tips and tricks that I refer to every […]
How To Offload Your Writing Admin When You’re Still Getting Started (#25)
I’ve recently pulled the trigger on hiring help for my ever-growing list of tasks I know I should be doing. Last month, for example, I was hoping to get Facebook ads set up… but the process is such a huge undertaking and so time consuming to get right, with landing pages, covers, images, copy, auto-responders, […]
Three Things You Must Do To Transition To Full-Time Writing (#24)
A few days ago, I had the chance to talk to a transitioning entrepreneur who has had a side hustle for years and is now considering leaving his cushy full-time job. His biggest concern, understandably, is money—as in, could he quit his job and make enough money to do his side hustle full time? Up […]
The One Shift in Mindset That is Probably Keeping You From Building Your Business Faster (#23)
I experienced some guilt this week. An acquaintance of mine is attempting to raise money for a product he created. It’s a good product, I think, though I don’t fully know because I’m not the target demographic and have no idea if the pain point he is trying to solve is real. He asked me […]
Does Your Content Need To Be EPIC? (#22)
Yes, some of it does. But know the difference between: 1. Epic Content (with a capital ‘E’) that is meant to attract an audience 2. regular content that is meant to build a relationship with that audience Most of your content doesn’t need to be epic in any way. Most of your content should be […]
Don’t Start a Vlog, Podcast, or Blog to Promote Your Books (#21)
A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with a group of authors and we were all discussing how we should vlog more. On one side of the argument, people were saying, “Just start”—don’t worry about tools, form, or content presentation because those are all barriers to entry to you actually doing something. In […]
The Realities of Writing Better, Faster (#20)
I recently did an interview over at Stephen Campbell’s AuthorBiz podcast (fantastic, must-add for all indie authors!). The most interesting segment of our conversation was about the realities of writing faster—what it actually looked like on a day-to-day basis. You can listen to the interview here: http://www.stephenrcampbell.com/using-growth-hacking-to-write-faster-and-better-with-guest-monica-leonelle/ If you read Write Better, Faster, you know […]