Author: Dan Blank

Loneliness, Depression, and Developing Your Writing Career

It can be lonely to be a writer. It is often a second identity, where even your friends and family define you by your family role (mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter) or what pays the bills (your day job), and not by your passion – your writing.

You sneak away writing sentences in stolen moments, as a squirrel stores away nuts for the winter. Your year is filled with resolutions to get back on track, to find a system that works to really finish your book, to really grow your audience.

I love social media, but do notice that my feeds on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere are filled with mostly positive affirmations. We update Facebook to tell people we just ran 4 miles, not that we just at an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s, then ate half a bag of potato chips. And then had a slice of cold pizza.

We don’t talk openly about things many writers face on a daily basis: the loneliness and depression of developing your craft and of building your audience.

Writing can be a lonely endeavor, with many ups and downs that those around you never see. You are creating something from nothing. You are trying desperately for an idea to be born, to grow, to spread. I often look at writers as entrepreneurs because of this. Most businesses fail. Most writers’ work goes unpublished, or worse yet: unread.

I work with writers to help them build and engage an audience for their work – to grow their author platform. Now, when you hear about a successful writer – you often imagine that they started with more than you did. What you don’t see in their story is the long lonely months and years of effort that went unrewarded. My favorite website is Mixergy.com, where Andrew Warner interviews successful entrepreneurs, telling their stories of how they went from a lonely idea to really having an impact in the world (and often earning millions of dollars along the way.) Here is a 30 second story that is not unusual, about how one interviewee’s wife’s blog went from nothing to something. Does the first part of this story sound familiar?

That’s Rand Fishkin talking about his wife Geraldine’s blog http://everywhereist.com.

This applies to most creative endeavors, and certainly to many writers. No, we don’t talk about it often, but it’s there. I like how Rand talked about the need to start with a small team – just a few people around you, supporting your work. I spoke about the importance of building a team in another blog post about how writers can learn from Weight Watchers. That we often need support and accountability in order to reach our goals.

A profile of author John Locke makes a similar point. He wrote his first novel only three years ago, and has since sold more than 1 million ebooks on Amazon. Even after he went through the process of writing and publishing his book, it was a lonely road:

“It took nine months before anyone bought anything. It wasn’t a matter of price point but word of mouth, people telling others, one sale at a time — just like insurance.”

How many would-be successful writers would have thrown in the towel at month 3 or month 8? Just moments before they would have found their audience and had their dreams become reality?

I recently came across some blog posts from the startup world about how to help reduce depression & loneliness when developing something new. I think writers may find lots of helpful tips here, things such as:

  • Get an advisor/mentor.
  • Be open with those around you about your challenges, not just your successes.
  • Create rituals.
  • Create stability in other parts of your life.
  • Connect with colleagues.
  • Sleep.
  • Break large projects down into smaller milestones.
  • Know when to step away and recharge your batteries.
  • Focus on one thing at a time.

Here are the articles, be sure to check out the comments in those posts as well for other stories/tips:

I work with a lot of writers via online classes, workshops, one-on-one consulting, and a mastermind group. I have found that these types of things often provide the structure and support to help folks stay on track in developing their craft and grow their audience. They provide not just a framework, but a team that works with you. This is not a pitch for my services, but just an observation about it’s value. LOTS of folks offer classes, groups, workshops, and events that may help you in your writing career. Find a partner that speaks to you, aligns to your purpose and goals, and take that step to reach out.

And of course, if there is any way I can be of assitance, just let me know:

-Dan

Building Your Author Platform Should Be Like Joining Weight Watchers

A primary reason Weight Watchers works is that it is inherently social. You are encouraged to show up to a group meeting for a weigh-in, to chat with other members, and the Weight Watchers staff. This process offers encouragement, you learn how others are finding success in losing weight, and you build powerful relationships with those who have similar goals. Over time, you may want to lose weight not just for your own sake, but to ensure you don’t let the group down. Your purpose has become communal, and you feel a sense of accountability.

If you are a writer trying to grow your audience and develop your platform, there is so much to learn from the Weight Watchers model. Here are three lessons:

You Need a Team

It is hard to find the time and ability to grow the audience for your writing. When you bring others into the process, it can provides so much benefit. These relationships may be informal: friends, colleagues, those you meet at conferences or on social media, mentors, etc. But when you check in with different people on a regular basis, they become a part of your team.

This is the team you need to help work past challenges, brainstorm ideas, align tactics to you goals, and ensure you stay motivated and accountable. This process helps you build positive habits – it is harder to get off track if you have to speak to a mentor or a colleague once a week to check in on progress. You can even work with other writers with similar goals.

Differentiated Learning Matters

We all learn differently, and build behaviors and habits differently. In education, this is called “differentiated learning,” and is meant to provide multiple avenues into course material to ensure that students with different educational styles can effectively learn. Another way to look at this is the 9 types of intelligence, of which we all leverage in different ways.

All this to say that: Weight Watchers offers multiple ways to be a part of their program. Some prefer to follow along online instead of in-person, others focus primarily on managing points, whereas others find the meetings and weigh-ins to be the primary driver for staying in the program. Either way, Weight Waters developed their program to ensure it works for different types of people.

When you develop your platform and try to grow your audience, you need to consider this for yourself. How do you take strategies and tactics and personalize them to fit your style, personality, and goals?

The Value of a System that Keeps Improving

Weight Watchers has points system for food, giving you a model to follow. Different food has different points, and rules around what you can consume to be on track in their system. What is neat about the program is how much flexibility is built into the many ways of using points. Instead of becoming something restriction, it allows the point/food relationship to become part of your lifestyle, not a separate activity that you need to squeeze into your already busy life.

When you develop your author platform, you need to do so in a way that is sustainable. Iteration is often key to this, that you are always learning and improving what works in growing and engaging with your audience.

It is always inspiring for me to hear about people’s experiences in programs such as Weight Watchers. I see how life-changing it can be, and the ways it has positive effects in many other areas of peoples lives, such as family and relationships.

When I develop my courses for writers, I always try to remember the lessons listed above. That my courses need to be accessible to those with different learning styles; that it needs to provide a system that is flexible for different types of writers; and that the courses need to provide a team that helps writers grow and engage their audiences. What is most amazing to me is the long-term relationships that form in these courses and groups.

If you have been through programs that have positively shaped your life such as Weight Watchers, I would love to hear more about your experience.

Thanks!
-Dan

Announcing: Build Your Author Platform 8-Week Online Course, Spring 2012

Are you a writer who is passionate about your work, but find it difficult to build an audience? What you need is an author platform – a strategic way to communicate your purpose to the world and establish trust with those who can help make you a success.

I am excited to announce the spring 2012 session of my 8-week online course: Build Your Author Platform. The course takes you through the critical steps of how to develop your audience:

  • A clear statement of your purpose and description of your work that will resonate with those you hope to engage.
  • An understanding of who your target audience is, what they find compelling, and where to find them.
  • How to blog, leverage social media, and share content that people care about.
  • Ways of measuring what is working, what isn’t, and a process to constantly optimize how you grow and connect with your audience.

But the course delivers so much more than just information – you build powerful relationships with myself, other writers in the class, as well as guest experts. This is the team you need to help work past challenges, personalize the material to your goals, and ensure you stay motivated and accountable.

This online course runs from from April 4 – May 29, 2012, and provides the structure and skills you need to build the foundation for your writing career. The The full course includes the following elements:

  • 8 career-shifting lessons that take you step by step through the process of how to develop your author platform.
  • Personalized feedback via weekly homework assignments, where I directly address your challenges and opportunities with advice to ensure you are on the right track.
  • The ability to ask questions 24/7 via our private online forum. Here, you can discuss key topics in developing your platform with myself and other students in the course.
  • 8 Exclusive Insider Calls, where I get on the phone with the entire class and you can ask anything. Here you have a chance to brainstorm ideas; dig into specific challenges you are trying to move past; and build close relationships with myself and the other writers in the course. All Exclusive Insider Calls are recorded, so if you miss a call, you always have access to the recording.
  • 6 Guest Expert Calls from leading publishing professionals. These experts get on the phone with the class, and allow you to ask them any question you want. They provide personalized insight that helps you build your author platform. All Guest Expert Calls are recorded, so if you miss a call, you always have access to the recording.

You can read full details about the Build Your Author Platform course here.

The spring session also includes some exciting changes, including three plans to choose from. If you have any questions about the course, please feel free to reach out.

Thanks!
-Dan

Build Your Legacy Now, Before It Is Too Late.

“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
– Chuck Palahniuk

How will you be remembered? If you are a writer, involved in publishing or other creative arts – do focus on building your legacy only after a laundry list of other activities are done, including the laundry itself? Is it something you leave to those few spare moments you find each month? Are you investing in your dreams every day, or letting them slip away?

I found this incredibly compelling: The top five regrets of those who are dying, as described by a nurse who worked with those in their last three to twelve weeks of their lives:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

(Source: Avinash Kaushik, Guardian, and Bronnie Ware.

The author, Bronnie Ware, explains more fully:

“When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made… Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice… Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content… When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying. Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.”

I work with writers every day, helping them through their challenges of balancing everything on their plate, and finding the time to create their legacy and grow their audience. To live a life that inspires them, and touches others in a way that leaves a lasting impression.

With many successful people I have spoken with, I find that their passion helps them work past barriers we all face: not enough time; too many conflicting priorities. Their passion helps them clarify their vision, and make the hard choices. Not to work MORE, but to focus on what matters most. This, of course, is different for each of us.

For those who feel that their writing or work needs to have an impact on the world and build their legacy, the time to do that is now. Little by little, every day. This is a challenge I have addressed for myself recently. My priorities: I love working with writers and publishers, and I want to be present in my 1.5 year old son’s life, as well as be there for my wife. This is why she and I made enormous changes in our lives in the past three years:

  • I left a corporate job of 10 years to start my own company.
  • We had our first child.
  • My wife quit her job as an art teacher to be home to raise our son.

Each of these decisions is filled with risk, and we have prepared for years in order to make choices like these. In a deep recession, we both left “safe” jobs, stable paychecks, and gave up amazing health insurance benefits. And we couldn’t be happier about it…

My days are spent working with those who inspire me: publishers and writers, and I am never far from my wife and son who I can spend moments with throughout each day. For me, my legacy will be built helping writers and publishers achieve their goals, and in being present in the lives of my family.

What will your legacy be? How are you working to build it every day?
If I can be of assistance in this process, just let me know.
-Dan

How to Reach Your Goals: Focusing on Intention vs Measuring Effect

Do you measure your success by the amount of effort you put into it, or the outcome? Will your legacy be: “Gee, she tried to accomplish these goals, but these three things got in her way,” or “She accomplished so much, here is what we learned from her.”

Today, I want to talk about the value of focusing on the EFFECT of your work, and how to begin considering how to measure that.

 

Process vs Outcome

This is a phrase you see over-used on so many resumes: “Results-driven.” What this is meant to convey is that you won’t be someone full of excuses. That we all face challenges in the process of reaching our goals, but you won’t be the person who will spend your time telling your boss about the many reasons why you couldn’t reach your goals. That excuses aren’t good enough for you.

I am a HUGE believe in the value of process. I was an artist for much of my life, I married an artist, and have always been lucky to have many creative friends. Process is critical in creating true art – something that breaks boundaries, that builds a body of work full of meaning. Sometimes it takes years to go through that process.

But the key is: do you come out the other side? I know many folks who were artists or musicians or writers years ago, who today are accountants, managers, administrators today in other fields. They no longer create art, music or writing. It is an identity they gave up a long time ago, but also an activity they let go of as well. They reflect fondly about how they were these things a decade or two ago, but no longer.

For some, their lives and interests changed. For others, the process never lead to an outcome they dreamed of. They never connected their process for creation with the dream they hoped to achieve.

Yes: there is TONS of value in the process alone. The experience of creating art can help one evolve their life, work through issues, etc. And that in and of itself, is awesome.

But if you want more than that; to not spend your future talking about how your writing career never panned out; to not talk about how you intended to make a professional leap, but didn’t; to not be focused on the challenges that stopped you, but how you moved past them; then focusing on measuring and accomplishing outcomes needs to be addressed.

 

Milestones & Measurement

How you measure progress before you reach your goal is critical. Few people go from being a nobody to total success in one single step. As an outsider, it may seem that way, but the reality is that you simply never noticed that person as they struggled towards their goals. You only noticed them when the succeeded.

Create milestones that lead up to your end goal. Specific thresholds that you focus on reaching that, when strung together, bring you to your end goal.

The idea here is to break down the larger goal into smaller more easily achievable steps. Measuring each of these steps gives you insight as to whether you are on the right path or not. When you are working hard towards a goal, it can be easy to get disoriented and miss the big picture. Maybe you feel as though you have made no progress, or not understand how much progress has been achieved. Or maybe it’s the opposite: you feel you are doing AWESOME, only to find out when you look critically at your effect, that you haven’t made the progress you hoped. EG: a business that people talk about, but don’t buy anything from. That you haven’t made any measurable progress towards your goals, you are just spinning your wheels. That maybe you didn’t know how to translate all that awesome stuff you do into truly building a business or career.

Consider what measures you will use to show accomplishment of goals beyond just launching a project, website, career move, or any other goal. There is a huge difference between someone saying: “I want to start a coaching business, my goal is to launch the website by March 1st,” versus someone saying: “I want to start a coaching business, and want 3 new clients to sign up via my website by April 1st.” One shows intention alone, another the measure of their effect. In the second example, it will be clear to measure success or failure to reach that goal, and they can easily create milestones to help ensure they get those 3 clients.

I work with a lot of writers, and often see them focused on the wrong “goal.” Merely “getting published” is not a goal, but a milestone. The goal should be something that shows your effect and builds your legacy: “I want to sell 3,000 books; I want to build a following of 1,000 fans; I want to help 500 people feel better about their lives.” These are specific, measurable, but mostly: these are goals that matter. And these are goals that will make an impact and build your legacy.

 

Return on Investment & Iteration

Another example of focusing on effects not the intentions: so if I am going to a job interview, the goal is not to “dress professionally, bring resumes, talk slowly and clearly…” the goal is “impress the hiring manager, get the job!” Think of the effect you want to have in others and how that will be measured. Yes, those other tactics are necessary. But they are merely one part of a larger process.

Focusing on goals and not intentions allows you to adapt quickly as needed. You aren’t following a rote process in that interview, you are adjusting based on new information, on the personality or requirements of the interviewer.

Intentions are filled with excuses. “I would have gotten the job if only I hadn’t stumbled on that answer,” or “I would have gotten that job if only I were five years younger.” But focusing on goals – you find a way.

We all have limited resources. I see people work long hours, juggling multiple functions in their jobs that used to be handled by two or three people in the past. Our challenge is no longer to do more, but to have a higher return on investment from our resources and processes. When you focus more on the goal, and not the intention, you are more likely to learn, evolve, and iterate your way. This, instead of being entrenched in a single mindset, a single task, trying to prove that a single idea will work. That you can get trapped in process because you don’t see the forest for the trees.

This is not to devalue process. But I have seen people focus SO MUCH on process, that it justifies any result. If things didn’t pan out, there is almost no measurement. You will hear them say: “Oh well, I did my best. Time to move on.”

If this is your hobby, that’s fine, you can afford to fail. But if this has to feed your family, or if this is the ONLY way you will achieve a lifelong dream, then this is much more serious. Failure is not an option.

And perhaps that is the first question in this process. Whatever your goal: is this a hobby or is this something you NEED to accomplish in order to build your legacy? In order to feel as though you have left your mark on the world.

If I can help you do that, please feel free to reach out.

-Dan