Authors Literally Don't Have Time To Chase Trends

I've been a professional writer for over a decade now, and I was an amateur writer for a good chunk of time before that. And over all the years I've been doing this, there has been a recurring refrain that I've heard over, and over, and over again... and it's people who tell you that you should write X, Y, or Z kind of story because, "That's what's really hot right now!"

This is terrible advice on two levels. The first is that a lot of writers can't shift outside their normal genre, style, length, etc. on a whim, and it's going to show through if they're creating something just to try to get on the bandwagon. Secondly, though, unless you're Chuck Tingle, you probably can't write anything fast enough to jump on top of a trend before it's gone.

Seriously... how the hell does he do it?

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Seriously... Writing Takes Time!

At minimum, a novel is 50,000 words. These days, though, most novels aim for 75,000+, with genres like sci fi and fantasy regularly going to 100,000 words when the books go to print. Let's be generous, and say that you can write 1,000 words per day... that's not impossible. So if you write a short novel you're going to take 50 days of work, without interruptions... a little bit less than two months. Or if you're going longer, 75 days or 100 days of work... so, 2-3 months for a meatier title.

But that's just the first draft portion!

There's also the scripting that happens beforehand (I usually take a few weeks to lay out the timeline of a novel before I start), as well as revisions getting the book ready for market (which can take another month or two, at best). If you're self-publishing then you have to do the layout, cover art, etc. to make sure your book is ready for the public, and if you're skilled and experienced this can take at least a week to get perfectly right. If you run into technical difficulties, it can take a lot longer. So, under ideal circumstances, you're looking at 2-3 months if you have rapid turnaround... probably closer to 5-6 if you can keep up the pace of that word count... or a year or more for a longer book.

And if you're going with a traditional publisher? There's the submission process (which can take up to a year in some cases), and even once your book has been accepted you're looking at months to multiple years for it to hit the market.

Given the trends these days last for somewhere between 7 hours on the short end, and a couple of months on the long end, authors really do not have time to allow what's currently popular to lead them around by their keyboard.

I gave this same advice for tabletop RPG creators over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel a while back, but I felt it deserved repeating. Because too often we take our shots forgetting that our audience is a moving target... if we aim at where they were, then we aren't going to hit them. We need to be out in front, leading them so that we hit where they're going to be by the time our book intersects their path.

No one can predict the future, and no one knows what will and won't get popular. So all you can do is to write the best books you can, share them as widely as possible, and make sure you understand who your ideal readers are.

Lastly... don't listen to advice from people who don't have any experience doing what you're trying to do. Your mom's bestie might really enjoy her book club, and your former college roommate might really think you would be a great fit for the romantasy genre, but unless someone is a professional book reviewer, an editor, a fellow writer, etc., it's just a bunch of hot air. Don't try to capture it in a balloon, hoping it will fly you away to the promised land.

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Marketing, Sales, and Insanity (A Glimpse Behind The Curtain)

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result."

- Rita Mae Brown

This quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, actually came from mystery author Rita Mae Brown according to Quotes Explained. Whoever said it first, though, the idea is pretty sound. After all, if you go through the same motions, and do the exact, same thing you can usually expect to get the same results time and time again, for good or for ill.

Unless we're talking about marketing, of course. Because when it comes to marketing (or just creating content in general), you've gone fully through the Looking Glass into a world where what seems like madness is now the order of the day.

It doesn't make sense... none of it makes any sense...

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

How Many Factors Can You Control?

The above sentiment regarding madness makes some assumptions, and they're assumptions that we don't always keep in mind when we start concocting our plans. The biggest is that, "doing the same thing," assumes that all the factors involved are the same every, single time. Because the same action, taken within the same parameters, should yield the same results... but a lot of the time we just feel like we're doing the same thing when, in fact, the only thing that's the same is our input as creators. Other factors (often factors we may not even think about, or which are drastically outside our control) play a part in this.

As an example, consider my Pathfinder Character Conversion For Batman.

Just stick with me, I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

Now, when I first wrote this piece it was published on Yahoo! Voices (a site that no longer exists), and it received something to the tune of 30k views the first week or so it was up. That put about $60 in my pocket, which wasn't bad for an article I'd put together in a few hours. However, Yahoo! Voices closed, and the article eventually migrated over to Vocal along with a lot of my other work. And even though the article was updated to reflect changes in the game, it barely received 800 reads, which was worth maybe $2 to me at the time of republishing.

On the surface this seems like the exact same action yielding wildly different results. After all I published the content under the original title and with many of the appropriate SEO tags, I shared it in the same social media groups who had proven receptive to my content, and I did all the same things on my end that I had the first time around. Yet the results were extremely different. Why?

Well, because other factors had changed, which created different results.

Firstly, say what you want about Yahoo! Voices, but it came with a built-in platform that provided high visibility and a lot more traffic than Vocal does. So right off the bat (pun very much intended) there was a huge difference caused just by the platform being used. Another factor was that at the time the original article went up, character conversions in RPGs were just starting as a trend in a lot of places, and as such they were quite popular. By the time this guide was re-posted, conversions had become sort of passe, and there were a lot fewer folks interested in them. It could even be argued that the colossal failure of Batman V. Superman coming out in between the original post and repost had made the public less interested in the character on the whole, and as such Batman himself was no longer a subject of as much interest to readers out there.

This is the sort of thing we often overlook as creators. Everything from which hash tags are currently the best to attach to your posts, to which platforms have the best visibility, to what kinds of content are most popular at a given time, all affect your marketing, your message, and whether your work gets shared by everyone who sees it, or drifts off into the void.

How Many Times Can You Hear The Same Joke?

There's an old story told about a wise man who tells a great joke. Everyone laughs. He tells it again, and some people laugh, but they're mostly confused. He tells it a third time, and nobody laughs. The moral is about how we often take less pleasure in good things, but allow bad things to keep being as powerful as the first time they hit us... but there's a lesson here for marketers, as well.

Just because something hits hard the first time, doesn't mean a follow-up is going to have the same results.

Trust me, I wish that wasn't the case.

I can give you another example for this one. When I wrote 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories over on Vocal, it shot up to over 5k reads. A pretty solid showing, and far-and-away the best piece of fiction I'd ever put on the site, performance-wise. The format was one of the things that readers said drew them in the hardest, so when I put together a sequel I narrowed the scope slightly and wrote 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition. While it didn't perform as well, it still netted just under 3k reads which was more than worth the effort to put the piece together. I decided recently to put out a third installment, and to keep the change-up going it was 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, SCP Edition. Following the trend I figured it might eke out about 2k reads at best, maybe 1,500.

The actual result? About 53 reads. Heck, the audio drama version got more attention than that (though not much more... but if you like it, consider subscribing to me on Daily Motion!).

Why did this happen? Too many factors to count, ranging from the popularity of the niches I explored, to the timing of the posts, to where I shared them, and what the algorithm supported or blocked. However, one thing that was clear to me was that the initial installment was something of a fluke. It happened to hit at the right time, in the right place, under the right circumstances. And while there was a positive reaction to the second piece, the format itself was not enough to support the series all on its own. The novelty has worn off, and attempts to recapture it by branching out into other arenas had... mixed results.

This can be extremely frustrating when it comes to our work, because (to put it bluntly) the public is fickle, and unpredictable.

As another example, when I first started this arc of my career, steampunk was huge as a genre trend. New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam took me a year to write, and another several years to finally get published. Steampunk was dead as a trend by then, but it hadn't been dead long enough that people were looking for nostalgia reads in the genre. I've released RPG supplements full of random encounters that folks said they loved and wanted more of, but then when I put out a second installment no one gets a copy because it's just "more of the same." Sometimes I pour time and energy into crafting a tale that I think will strike a chord with the audience, like Beyond The Black: The Emperor's Hand (a tale of the ogryn Gav Smythe as he fights the enemies of the Imperium), and it goes nowhere. Other times I'll just throw together something silly to fill space, like my article Let People Dislike Things, and it explodes for no reason other than it happened to strike a chord at that very moment.

It's Our Audience That Stacks The Deck

I say this time and time again, but at the end of the day it's you, the readers, who are the one factor that we have to count on. Because if there is support from the audience, it can force all the other factors surrounding our work and our careers into the proper, celestial alignment for success.

If you have a following of tens of thousands of fans on any social media platform, things you share are boosted by the algorithm purely because the audience made it known that you are a person of interest. If there's people buying your books in numbers large enough to hit the bestseller list (which really isn't as many sales as you think), that's going to make you newsworthy, and you'll get coverage from various outlets which will boost your sales even further. If you even have a couple dozen people who share your content around in a dedicated way, you'll start to see outsized numbers of new readers come your way because those readers are making a fuss over you. And even if your content is free to consume, if you regularly pull down a few million watches per video, or a million reads on an article, everything else falls into place.

But it takes numbers... and those are numbers we cannot do all that much about on our own. All we can do is produce the best stuff we're capable of, and put it out there. Which is why if you have a creator whose work you enjoy, help them out. Subscribe to their channels, share their posts, consume the free stuff, and buy their books when you can afford to. While it might not feel like you're doing a lot as an individual, remember that a blizzard is made up of a bunch of snowflakes that all fall at once.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

"Write What You Want" is Often Terrible Advice

There are a lot of misconceptions about what it's like being an author. From how much money we really make, to the hours we work, to just how much of the job is promotion to how much is actually writing, those are all things that can be corrected (if people listen to those of us who actually do this for a living). However, there is a piece of advice I keep seeing that I'd like to address today. Because it is both unhelpful, and it can actually be harmful to both your career and your mindset if you embrace it too hard.

The idea is, in short, that when you sit down at your desk to start up a new project that you should just do whatever your little heart desires! No matter the genre, no matter the length, no matter the style, you are the master of this ship, and it will sail wherever you want it to go!

Just grab an idea! I'm sure they're all good ones.

Before we get too far into this week's topic, remember that if you sign up for my weekly newsletter you'll get all my updates, releases, and news sent right to your email! And if you want to help me keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron... even a small donation makes a big difference.

Why This Advice is Misguided

To be clear, there are two circumstances where this advice is relatively harmless. The first is if you are here primarily for the experience of writing, and if your only real goals are to finish a project and enjoy the ride. The folks who just want a book out there who wouldn't say no to a juicy royalty check, but for whom that is a bonus, not the goal. The second is if you are an author who already has a dedicated fan base that will read anything you put out, so you can basically guarantee there's going to be a certain amount of support for your book no matter what it is, or where it goes.

For the rest of us, though, this phrase plants an idea that I've found can be toxic; it's the idea that you are always right, and it's your readers who need to get on your level.

The crowd decides... not you.

The advice Maximus was given in Gladiator is perhaps the best advice you can take to heart as an author. It isn't your skill with a blade that matters. It's not how fast you can complete the task. It's the show you put on, and whether you can win the crowd to your side.

Now apply that to your books.

Because you might be a proficient author with a flair for drama... but if you don't turn that skill toward telling a story people actually want to read, then nobody's going to buy your book. And to add insult to injury, someone who may lack your technical skill as a writer will probably have more success than you have if they are better at pandering to the mob.

Because at the end of the day, once you cut through all the faff and chaff, that's what your job is. Entertaining the masses, plain and simple.

So I'm Supposed To Hate What I'm Writing?

To get out ahead of the bold, italic text here, there's a big difference between working on projects you don't enjoy, and tempering your enthusiasm with an understanding of where the market is going, what drives reader interest, and how much energy it's going to take to turn what you're working on into a reliable seller.

As an example.

To be clear, I had a lot of fun working on Marked Territory... but it was not my first pick for my next project when I sat down to sketch it out. At the time I was considering working on a sequel for my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or perhaps writing a modern-fantasy story where a recently-reanimated Chicago detective has to solve the mystery of his own murder (while simultaneously allowing the readers to explore the bizarre underbelly of the world of the undead).

But then I brought copies of From A Cat's View to Windy Con, and that basically decided me.

For those not familiar with the novel, Leo is my heavy with a heart of gold who ends up getting his whiskers involved in other people's problems in New York City. But I debuted him in a short story titled Stray Cat Strut in the anthology of cat stories. I brought 10 copies or so to the con just because it was the newest book that I had, and within a day they'd all been sold. I didn't even have a table at the con, but they were out of my hands faster than I could say, "Film noir cats."

That's what I'm talking about in this case. My sample size was pretty small, but I asked around in writing groups, various social media groups I was in, and tried to read the room. The amount of interest people showed not just in the short story, but also in hearing more about Leo, his adventures, and the weird world he inhabited, meant that the smart money for me was to focus my energy on writing stories about him. Lo and behold it was that rather unique genre mash-up that got me noticed by a publisher, and at time of writing I've completed a second tale (pun very much intended) following our bruiser through the mean streets of NYC.

So while I still have other ideas and projects trying to catch my eye, it's important to hold your ideas at arm's length, and examine them critically. Don't just ask what would be fun to work on; ask which of them is going to get you the results you want. Because it's a lot easier to work on passion projects once you have an audience listening, and enough earnings rolling in that the next book doesn't have to make a massive splash in order to help you keep your lights on.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Evergreen Content, Book Sales, and You! (Making More Sales By Avoiding Cheap Gimmicks)

If you're a fan of genre fiction, then you've probably noticed how trends tend to wash through it from time to time. Vampires were big in the early 90s, for example, and on the heels of Anne Rice they were absolutely everywhere. Then they petered out for a while. Steampunk got really big around the time the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film broke, spurred on by books like Boneshaker. Dozens of series have aped the enchanted school setting of the Potterverse, now, and we were up to our ears in YA dystopias after the success of The Hunger Games.

Numbers are up! Quick, get into that slush pile and grab EVERYTHING with a zombie in it!

Everyone has their own taste in fiction, and sometimes you're looking for a very specific flavor. But if you read a lot of the books that come out in rapid succession after something hits big, hoping to ride that wave onto the bestseller list, you're going to notice that nine times out of ten the only thing they have to offer is they belong in the same genre. They've got brass gears and clockworks, zombies, romantic vampires, and so on and so forth... but there isn't much to make them stand on their own two feet.

The problem with a cash-in book is that it's trying to imitate the identity of books that came before it. These books often lack a strong identity of their own, and thus they can feel sort of like a good book's mildly attractive cousin; not a negative experience, but not one that really sticks with you. Certainly not one you'd review and recommend to others. Even if a writer didn't set out to write a cash-in book (perhaps they just clung too tightly to the established story structure and beats of a genre mainstay, such as how roughly 87 percent of hopeful fantasy authors think they need to write a Lord of The Rings homage) they'll wind up with the same problem.

Evergreen Content, and Telling Your Own Story

There's a concept I came across as a blogger, and it's one that is heavily steeped in the marketing side of things; evergreen content. Basically the idea behind content that's evergreen is that it never goes out of style, so people are always going to be looking for it. Because when something stops being relevant, and goes stale, the traffic's going to drop off, and it stops generating income. On the other hand, something that pulls a steady stream of views, reads, and sales is always going to be an earner, allowing you to get paid for it for years to come.

Which is, of course, the dream.

Give you an example of what I'm talking about, here. The article What Was The Satanic Panic? The Forgotten Witch Hunt of The 1980s is a piece of evergreen content because it discusses a period of time in history. This moral panic is over, so the facts about it aren't going to change. At the same time, though, it's a distinct event that remains relevant since it's tied to American history, pop culture, and the stigma associated with everything from Dungeons and Dragons to violent video games. As long as there are moral panics in the United States (a trend that goes back to the founding of the country, and shows no signs of stopping), then this particular article will be relevant.

Contrast that with the blog post 3 Ways Pathfinder is Losing Its Identity With The New Playtest. This post was a flash-in-the-pan piece that was a reaction to the playtest for the second edition of the Pathfinder roleplaying game, and it had a very short shelf life. The playtest was only out for a year, so anything this article had to say was only relevant for that brief period of time... on the other hand, there was a lot of interest in the subject, and in that short period it did draw quite a lot of views and reads. But no one's come back to it since the full game was released because anything is has to say is no longer valid.

So what does that have to do with your book?

Well, take a step back and ask what the primary selling points of your book are. Is it a solid story that stands on its own as a mystery, an adventure story, or a tale of the macabre? Or is your major selling point that you have zombies in it? Because if that's the case, then you're probably not going to get a lot of traction when that gimmick is no longer pulling in audiences the way it did when The Walking Dead was a fresh network success. You might see some renewed interest when the shambling undead come back into style, but it can take years for that tide to come back in.

What Makes A Book Evergreen?

Unfortunately, this is the part where I shrug my shoulders and gesture vaguely at the market. However, I do have a few general recommendations on how to hold off your book's freshness expiration date as long as possible.

- Don't Hang Your Story Fads and Gimmicks: The key here is that it's perfectly fine to include elements that might be part of a fad, but not to make that the whole of your story. Write a spy novel that happens to have vampires in it, rather than a vampire novel about spies, if you see what I mean?

- Keep Your Story Authentic: When steampunk first started getting popular, lots of people tried to get in on the genre by randomly including brass accents and gears in their setting descriptions and cover design to widen their story's genre labels. While this gave it the appearance of being part of the genre, it was the literary equivalent of just putting on a cheap plastic mask so you could say you were wearing a costume at the bar. Rather than gluing some superficial elements onto your tale, develop what makes it truly unique; people know when they're being pandered to, and generally they don't like it.

- Make It Stand Out: There's nothing worse for your shelf life than just aping what other books are doing, even if you're trying to follow in the footsteps of the classics. While it's important to be able to look at enduring books and ask what makes them last, it's equally important to spin those into your own story instead of just trying to trace them while changing a few minor details. For example, there are probably hundreds of Lord of The Rings imitators out there, but only one of them is Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Writing a Bestseller is Like Winning The Lottery (How Facing Facts Can Help You Beat The Odds)

Have you ever stopped to consider what the odds of writing a New York Times bestseller actually are? Well, in case you haven't looked it up yourself, both Forbes and Free Money Finance say that your odds are about 1 in 200. On the one hand, those odds are significantly better than winning the Powerball (about 1 in 238,000,000 in case you're thinking about buying a ticket), but those odds still aren't great. Especially if you've got to put in sweat, blood, creative juices, and years of hellish effort just to get that one ticket ready.

Come on, baby, papa needs a new laptop!

It's pretty easy to find that discouraging. However, if you can face the facts, and accept that you probably won't beat the odds, you'll actually find the game is a lot easier to play.

Ancient Greece, Acceptance, and Spinning The Wheel

In case you're not an etymology geek, the word happen comes from the Greek hap, which referred to chance and fortune. While today we think of happiness as something we have, as a commodity generated from inside ourselves, in the ancient Western world happiness was something that literally happened to you. It came and it went much like luck, ebbing and flowing with fate and favor. And while people still had bad times, the philosophy of the language was basically that you accepted what the gods and chance gave you, because there was nothing you could do about it one way or the other.

And you would be amazed at how freeing that can be in a professional sense.

Let me give you an example.

As a quick for instance, not long after I released my pulp fantasy novel Crier's Knife, I held an ebook giveaway for it. As promotional devices go, these giveaways are a smart bet. People like free stuff, it increases the traffic to your page, and you see a lot more action than you otherwise might. I moved 700 copies over a weekend, which at the level I work at was a pretty decent success. My previous giveaway, which was for my steampunk noir collection New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam barely hit 500 copies, so I was making clear progress.

Was I involved in that process? Absolutely. I was the one who decided when to host the giveaway, I was the one who made the social media posts, and I was the one who made sure the book was ready for prime time, so to speak. I kept the comments going on the forums, and I was the one who drew as much attention to it as I possibly could. At the end of the day, though, the downloads were only partially determined by my efforts; mostly, they were determined by raw chance.

Every part of this process was affected by so many factors that were outside of my control. Facebook and Reddit's group algorithms decided who saw my posts, and more importantly who didn't see them. I also had no control over the reaction people had to my post. If they were in a good mood, or a bad one. If they decided to download my book since they liked free stuff, or if they down-voted my post because they didn't like something about my description. I had no control over who shared the link with other people, who actually read the book once they downloaded it, and of the people that did read it who left a review.

I was tossing a message in a bottle out into the ocean, and hoping against hope that a YouTube influencer with millions of fans found it, then told all their followers to go buy a copy. That didn't happen, but at the same time there was no guarantee that it would. No magic assurance that my book would become a success if I just tweaked these words in the description, or posted it on this platform as opposed to another one. There is no magic formula to bring a stampede of people with their dollars held out for more of your story.

And the sooner you accept that, the easier it will be to keep trying to make that very thing happen.

You've Got Enough of The Burden as It Is

Don't misunderstand me, here; this is your job, and you are a big part of what goes into it. You're the one who writes the book, helps with the promotion, and who is the face of your brand. You're the one turning up at shows, making your pitch, and getting people interesting. You are, in other words, the one who is buying the ticket.

You simply have no guarantee that the ticket you buy is going to be a winner.

You can, however, stack the odds in your favor.

I said this back in If You Write One Story It May Be Bad. Write A Hundred, And The Odds Are In Your Favor, but it bears repeating. The more you create, the more your put out, and the louder your signal gets, the better the odds you have of people actually discovering you. Much like how buying one ticket might only have a small chance of winning big, but if you buy a few hundred, or a few thousand, well, the odds are looking better all the time.

Because if you put out one book, one article, one YouTube video, etc., your odds of going viral overnight are pretty slim unless you already have a massive fan base of people interested in your work, or you have a gigantic budget to pay for the advertising machine it would take to acquire all those eyes. However, little successes add up over time, and every person you win over as a fan is one more snowflake to stack on your mountain. You pile them up slowly, and eventually there are enough of them to cause an honest-to-goodness avalanche.

Sure, there are some people who buy one lottery ticket as a goof, and win millions of dollars by sheer happenstance. Just like there are people whose books just happened to be in the right genre, or who told just the right story at the right time to get everyone's attention. There's no rhyme or reason to it, because it happens to good books and bad, to books that are heavily promoted, and indie darlings no one has ever heard of.

But don't you worry about that. Because whether the odds are with you, or against you, doesn't matter. Because sometimes your luck will be good, and sometimes it will be bad. But if you focus on telling good stories, on spreading the word, and on cultivating your little crop of readers, you'll get there eventually. Even better, you'll get there without "what-iffing" yourself inside out, wondering why other books got more attention, sold more copies, or got more likes than yours did.

Are there factors you can quantify? Sure there are. But they're only a tiny slice of the pie, and the sooner you learn to accept that luck is a huge part of whether you succeed or fail, the sooner you can get back to work without that huge weight of worry on your shoulders. Do your best, and let the rest take care of itself, because you cannot force fortune to turn your way.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!