I want to invite you to a free program I am running from January 14th through the 18th,  it’s called “Social Media for Writers.” That week, I will share advice on four steps to develop your author platform via social media in a manner that encourages meaningful connections with readers. You can join me in this program by simply joining this Facebook Group.

This simple system will help you establish and grow your social media presence. But this is about more than just getting followers and likes; it is about knowing how to share your creative vision with the world, and engaging in meaningful ways to real people. In this free one-week program, I will share daily videos and prompts to help you:

1. Identify which social media channel(s) to use.
2. Figure out what to share on social media that is both authentic to who you are, and strategic to your writing goals.
3. Grow your audience on social media.
4. Get deeper engagement beyond just ‘likes’ and ‘follows’.

You will also be able to engage with other writers to brainstorm and get ideas to establish and grow a social media presence that feels authentic to who you are. I will end the program with a Q&A session.

How this works:

• Click here and join this private Facebook Group. (this is the same group I used in the Fall for the Reader Connection Project, so if you are a member of that, you are already in!)
• Each day starting Monday January 14, I will upload a video to the group that outlines my advice and suggested actions you can take, which aligns to the four areas above.
• Throughout the week, you can share your questions, your progress, and learn from how others are doing this.
• You will have the chance to submit questions for me to answer on a final video to be shared at the end of the week.

That’s it! As context, I will say that I have been thinking about social media is changing, and how the way in which writers think about social media needs to change as well.

What I want to share in this program is not just ‘the usual advice’ on the mechanics of social media, but a new vision for how you can not only make social media a part of your career as an author, but actually have it feel good, and like you are connecting with real people.

So many writers I speak to worry about social media — they are told they must do it, but then they feel like they are shouting to the wind.

The program I share next week flips all of that on its head.

I hope you can join me.
Thanks!
-Dan

A lot of writers I speak to want to engage an audience online. Today I want to share a case study of the exact way that I helped one of my clients do this. Her goals were similar what many writers want when developing their author platform and growing their audience:

• To truly help her audience tell their own stories.
• To find a way to grow her audience (without spammy tactics.)
• To develop a meaningful connection to colleagues (eg: readers, writers, agents, and editors.)
• To learn how to leverage online media to do this, something which may have been unfamiliar.
• To potentially earn revenue in the process.

What I share here is the work I did with author Alison Taylor-Brown.

While she is primarily a historical fiction writer, she also runs the Village Writing School, and is even considering writing a memoir of her own. You may remember her story from my post last year titled, “Choosing the Writer’s Life.”

This Summit was a way for her grow her audience as a writer, support the Village Writing School, and establish some wonderful connections with writers, agents, and editors.

Will you ever run a Summit yourself? Probably not. So I framed everything below in a manner that could help you consider how to engage your audience, even if you never run an event like this.

Okay, let’s dig in…

What We Did

Let’s start with the results of what we did. We created an event called the “Memoir Success Online Summit” that was an online event where writers were given access to:

• 7 expert interviews, all focused on various aspects of what it means to write, edit, publish, and promote a memoir.
• There was a special limited-time offer from one of the agents who would read the query letters from any of the attendees.
• Registrants were given access to a private Facebook Group where they could meet other memoir writers, and ask questions of Alison and some of the other speakers.

More than 600 people signed up, which was much higher than our expectations.

Earlier in the year, we had created another summit, the Historical Fiction Online Summit. We took what we learned from that and then evolved it. That is perhaps the first big lesson here: if you only do something once to grow your author platform, then you don’t have the chance to refine it. The Memoir Summit allowed us to try new things, we saw significant growth in terms of results.

One of the things we changed was the price. The first summit had a registration fee to access it. For the Memoir Summit, we made it a free event. You could register for free and access everything. After a week or so, we shut it down, and if you wanted lifetime access, you could purchase that for $45.

That was a scary decision because it meant there would be no certainty of a return on investment. I think that is second big lesson to take away from this: take a chance by doing what feels right, even if you don’t have any certainty that it will work. That is the only way to learn, by taking that risk.

How We Did It

These were the steps we took to create the event:

1. We brainstormed ideas for the theme of the event. Having already done one summit on Alison’s core focus, historical fiction, we used this as an opportunity to dig into memoir, because she has been considering that so much for herself. She had also noticed that a lot of other writers she spoke to were interested in memoir. We created a long list of ideas, and just went with our gut on this. Could we have driven ourselves nuts by trying to get data to prove to us which theme would have the widest possible audience. Sure. But this just felt right. Alison chose a topic that she was curious about, and wanted to invest her time and energy in.
2. We identified the structure and picked a date. This is where our earlier experiment with the historical fiction summit gave us something to work from. Also, I have run quite a few other summits in the past, using various formats. In the end, we tried to pick something that was ludicrously simple. Keep it simple for us, simple for the speakers, and simple for those who registered. The system we used to run the event? Password protected blog pages. This is technology that is 15 years old, and really easy to setup. That removed about 100 potential technological barriers.
3. We brainstormed ideas for speakers. At first, we considered the types of speakers we hoped to get: authors, agents, and editors. Then we figured I could run a session too, so that would cover the topic of marketing a memoir. Then, we started to brainstorm ideas of potential speakers that we knew of, and did research for others. A lot of time was spent on Google and Amazon, on blogs and podcasts, on social media, just trying to identity potential speakers and seeing if they would be a good fit. In the end, the decision was hers if she felt that someone should be a speaker. I can say we were soooooo happy with the roster that Alison ended up with in the end!
4. Alison invited the speakers. Without question, this was Alison’s event, and she is the face of it. It was important that she do all of the outreach to potential speakers. She sent short email invites, explaining what the summit was, what the commitment would be, and why she felt they would be a perfect fit.
5. Alison recorded the speakers sessions. The format for the sessions is that Alison would research each speaker, and then interview them on video for 45 minutes. I was 100% certain that Alison would be amazing at this. But this is how she put it: “You dragged me into interviewing when I really didn’t want to.” See what a perfect team we make?! In truth, Alison did have to get comfortable with a lot in this process. She (of course) did an amazing job, but for me it was just so cool to see her get more and more comfortable with the process. I think that is another big lesson here: if you want to get comfortable with learning a new skill, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable first.
6. We planned for promotion and launch. Honestly, we kept it simple here as well. We crafted a simple email and some resources for the speakers if they wanted to share with their audience. Alison shared it generously on her own email list and social media, and that of the Village Writing School. I think the fact that it was a free event, very focused on a specific topic, and filled with incredibly accomplished speakers made it easy to market.
7. We ran the event! Once again, you will notice the theme of simplicity. Since all of the sessions were pre-recorded it meant that we had reduced the risk of any technical issues on the day of the event. We had prepared all of the sessions ahead of time, and on the morning of the event, we simply sent an email to invite the registrants to access it, we kept an eye on email for any technical issues, and we encouraged conversation in the private Facebook Group that accompanied the event.
8. We turned the event into an evergreen product for the Village Writing School. After a week or so, we closed down free access to the sessions, and shared that people can get lifetime access if they purchased it. We didn’t make a huge deal about the offer, instead looking at this as an evergreen product that Village Writing School can offer. Here too, we kept it simple. We used a company called e-junkie as the shopping cart to make it easy for someone to purchase and access the summit via the Village Writing School website.

Alison sent out a survey afterwards to help her understand how we can improve on things for 2019. Right now we are quietly sketching out a series of new Summits and workshops.

Why We Did It

By now you are likely thing, “Um Dan, if Alison is primarily an author, why is she doing all of this? How does it help her?” The fact of the matter is, Alison is still months (or potentially years) away from the release of her books. But this is what she has gained in the process of running these events:

• She helped people learn how to share their own stories. Alison had a deep desire to help others tell their own stories, and the summit was a new way for her to do that. That is why she founded the Village Writing School, and it is a driving force behind much of what she does. The Summit was a new way to realize that vision.
• She greatly expanded her audience and established her author platform. This is easily measured by newsletter subscribers and social media followers. But there are qualitative measures here too: she has had soooooo many conversations this year with readers, writers, agents, editors, all about books, writing, and what it takes to succeed as an author.
• She has established meaningful connections to colleagues: bestselling authors, agents and editors. She isn’t just sitting in the back of the room of 300 people at a writing conference — she is having long 1-on-1 conversations with these people, learning from them, and actually establishing professional relationships with them. I’ve said this many times before, but if you don’t have colleagues, you aren’t a professional. Here she is stepping outside her comfort zone to create human connections with those who know publishing and books inside and out.
• She is mastering skills like interviewing that will come in handy throughout her career as an author. Imagine that 18 months from now, she publishes a historical fiction book and is being interviewed on podcasts. Instead of being nervous about how to do that, she will have had dozens of experiences of knowing how to talk about books in an engaging manner, how to pace the interview, and she will have zero fear of the technology. Oh wait, that should be it’s own bullet point…
• She will have zero fear of technology. Long before her books are published, Alison has been getting comfortable with social media, blogging, newsletters, video, events and so much else. What that means is that she no longer looks at these as “scary marketing things,” but rather tools and resources that are a natural part of what it means to connect with readers.

But perhaps the biggest thing she has gained is that she has learned how to share her passion for writing and books with the world, and engage in meaningful — human-centered — conversations around them.

What You Can Learn From It

This is the work I do with writers day in and day out. No, 99% of them never do a summit. Instead, we identify a custom plan for them to grow their author platform, and reach their ideal readers.

What will work for you? That will be personalized to who you are, and how you want to manage your career as a writer. The case study above is just one way it can happen.

I think the key is to not just sit back passively and hope it unfolds for you. Take the wheel. Put your foot on the gas pedal. And go in the direction that celebrates the words that you write, and connects them to readers in the most meaningful way.

Thanks.
-Dan

P.S.: If you think I can help you do that, you can read about how we can work together here.

Celebrate the Stories That Matter to You

As we look to the year ahead, I want to encourage you to capture, share, and celebrate the stories that matter to you. Sure, this can be by writing a book, but it doesn’t have to be that big. The other day I recorded an interview:

… with my dad. I have done this dozens of times over the past 10 years. I pick a topic about our family history, and then just record our conversation. I have hours and hours of tape with his reflections.

The simple act of capturing that story allows me to share it in many small ways throughout the year.

I want to encourage you create and share the stories that inspire you. That may indeed be your story, but it may be one that you make up, or it could be you amplifying someone else’s story.

Don’t just assume you will get to it next year amidst your otherwise busy life. Prepare and plan for it.

It’s Later Than You Think

I encourage you to share your creative vision now, because it’s later than you think.

It’s later than you think, to create the body of work you hope for.
It’s later than you think, to affect the lives of others in a meaningful way.
It’s later than you think, to craft the identity you dream of.

In 2012, Bronnie Ware shared an article titled: “Top 5 Regrets Of The Dying.” She was a palliative care nurse who described what she learned from people in the last 3 to 12 weeks of their lives. I come back to this article again and again in considering why we write, why we share, and the effect it has on people’s lives. These are the regrets she described people having in the final days 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 didn’t work 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.”

When I work with writers, I often see them implicitly addressing some of these. They are seeking to express themselves more honestly, more publicly, and create a space in their lives that creates meaning for themselves and others.

If you are waiting to begin creating the vision of what you hope to share with the world, what are you waiting for?

No One Can Write Your Story Except For You

This past week I shared my podcast interview with New York Times bestselling author Thomas Greanias. What jumped out at me the most was his advice to writers: how they have a power that they often don’t fully understand. Unlike screenwriters and filmmakers in Hollywood, writers have greenlight authority on their own ideas, and also have final cut. He encourages you to use that power.

He ended the interview by saying, “Don’t lose faith and quit on yourself.” As this year winds down and the new one begins, his reminders are powerful: give yourself the authority to share the stories that matter to you.

Too many writers wait. They wait for creating to be easy. They wait until they feel they are ready. They wait for an opportunity.

But waiting means that you are rolling the dice. That your creative vision may never happen.

Recently, I became obsessed with this photo of a storefront from 1940, the one right in the middle:

It’s a bar, and the owner seems to be standing right in the doorway. What is his story? I have no idea. His story wasn’t told.

Here is a photo of the same storefront in the 1950s, the scene of a police investigation:

What is going on here? I have no idea. That story wasn’t told.

This guy took over the lease to the storefront in the early 1970s and in addition to the bar, he opened up a stage that was one of the few places in New York City where musicians could perform original music. His name is Hilly Kristal:

A few years later, these guys played a show there to some surprised onlookers:

The story of The Ramones is an incredible one: how these four unlikely guys from queens completely revolutionized music.

Today, this is that same storefront:

It’s a faceless street with retailers and banks. Stories aren’t being told here, instead transactions are being made.

I think a lot about writers and artists from the past, of the stories of their creative work. The power of story cuts across time. But there are two critical steps:

1. Create
2. Share

When I look at photos of the past and consider the lives writers and artists who inspire me, I realize the potential that we all have. That you can turn a typical storefront into art that effects a generation.

But I also feel an imperative: Capture, share, and celebrate the stories that matter most to you.

Right now is the best time to be a writer. Why? Because right now is your opportunity to write.

Don’t take that for granted. You can completely inspire someone with what you create.

The choice is yours.

Thank you for all of your support of my creative work this past year. I can’t possibly express to you how much that means to me.
-Dan

P.S.: Here is the link again to my Creative Shift Mastermind: https://wegrowmedia.com/mm

As we close out this year, I want to encourage you to spend 2019 having meaningful conversations with those who inspire you. If you are a writer, that may be readers, other writers, booksellers, librarians, and those who support and celebrate books.

For the past three years I have lead a small group mastermind for writers and artists. This group is the support system, brainstorming partners, and the team of collaborators for the people who join.

Instead of worrying about marketing trends, and “going viral,” we focused on the work that professionals do: finding more time to create, defining your creative identity, and developing a plan to reach your audience.

The deadline for my upcoming Creative Shift Mastermind is Friday December 28th. This is a 3-month program where you work directly with me, and a group of 10 other writers and creators just like you. Full details are here, and if you are interested, I encourage you to register as soon as possible.

What I have found is that when you collaborate with others, momentum begins to take hold with your creative goals. That is the message I hear again and again from the inspiring writers I talk to in my weekly podcast. Here are four recent conversations:

• “I trained myself to write anytime, anywhere, in a split second.” My Interview With Author Elizabeth Spann Craig
• “I rewrote that book for six years, and it never sold.” My Interview with Author Jessica Strawser
• “If you are not making things, you are not impacting people.” My Interview with Jennie Nash
• The Essential Ingredients of a Writing Career: Hope and Perseverance, My Interview With Author Therese Walsh

Each conversation is nearly an hour long, and filled with insights and wisdom about what it truly takes to succeed as a writer. If you feel that you haven’t reached the place you hope to be with your writing, I would encourage you to take two actions:

Listen to the stories of other writers and creators.
Engage writers in conversation and collaboration.
Thank you for being a part of my creative community.

-Dan

One year ago I set a goal for myself: finally learn how to properly play the guitar by practicing every single day for a year.

Today I want to share what that process has taught me about what it takes to establish a creative habit, reach your goals, and share your work. The insights below be applied to any creative craft, including writing.

If you are like me, you may have found it difficult to establish a solid routine with your writing or creative work amidst an otherwise busy life. In March of 1991, my parents bought me my first guitar. For a quarter century I dabbled with it off and on. Sometimes I would learn a few of the basic chords, then I would take three years off, forgetting everything I learned. The guitar would sit for years in storage, only to be brought out again for a feeble attempt at learning it.

My days are spent with writers, helping them to put writing first, and then developing meaningful connections to their audience. This year of playing guitar every day has taught me a lot about how to ensure you can reach your creative goals.

Let’s dig in…

Step #1: Get Out of Your Own Way.

Working with writers and artists, I have seen the clever ways that we can distract ourselves from creating. Creative work can scare us, inviting in judgement and fear of who we are, what we are capable of, and how the world sees us.

So sometimes we avoid the real work — writing and sharing — with all kinds of smart-sounding excuses and activities.

For me with guitar, I had become a Jedi Master of sabotaging myself.

In college, I was in a band, where I mostly made strange noises on a keyboard, or would repeat the E and A chord on a guitar with lots of buzzing and mistakes.

My friends and I would practice twice a week, but most of that time was spent at local music stores checking if any interesting used gear came in. The ease and thrill of the hunt for gear was more enticing than trying to learn how to play.

I would get caught up in the planning and preparing to make music, fiddling with knobs and dials, all at the expense of craft.

Nowadays, these distractions are compounded by the web, where we can immerse ourselves in blogs, podcasts and videos that feel like we are learning.

For my goal of practicing guitar every day this past year, I needed to get out of my own way. So I told myself that I wasn’t allowed to buy new guitar gear until I have practiced every day for a year. That removed a lot of distraction, and allowed me to put my full focus on  the next step.

For your creative goals, I want to encourage you to remove your biggest distractions, even if you can justify that they somehow help. Often, we describe our barriers as outside of ourselves, yet the opposite is often true. Analyze what really keeps you from creating, then challenge yourself to rewrite the script.

Step #2: Practice.

To help me learn guitar, I have relied on some instructional videos  from four or five different teachers. Every time a guitar instructor talked about how they learned to play, I heard the same line again and again: “I would spend 10 hours a day practicing. For years.”

They would share stories of how they would struggle with an aspect of guitar, and the only way to solve it was hours and hours of rote practice. To me, this was terrifying because it was a reminder that the only thing standing between me and my guitar dreams was  practice.

There wasn’t a shortcut, a piece of gear, a hack, to what I wanted. That made me resign myself to focus on the basics: practice.

Step #3: Create Ridiculously Simple Rules to Succeed.

I created a simple rule to define my year of guitar playing: I must practice each and ever day for at least one minute.

That’s it.

The one minute rule was meant to make it ridiculously easy for me to find success. There isn’t a single day where I couldn’t justify picking up the guitar and strumming a G chord for 60 seconds. Some days, that is honestly all I did.

To make it easy, I placed a guitar within arms reach of two places I am very often:
1. In my home office
2. In my private studio

In fact, I own four “good” guitars, meaning there is never an excuse to not be near one. In the attic, I even have a few crappy guitars that I picked up at yard sales. The kind of guitar that I could take somewhere and lose it and never worry about it.

When I speak to writers who are able to write book after book, they tell me about all of the ways they surround themselves with tools to write: a laptop, an app on their phone, in a pocket notebook, dictation software, and the like.

No matter where they are or what they are doing, they make it possible to write because they make the creative process easy and accessible.

If you tell yourself that you can only create on a single computer, with Scrivener loaded, with access to all of your research and notes, when you are alone, at a time of day when you are inspired, and when nothing else is going wrong in your life, you are basically setting yourself up for failure. Because every star has to be aligned in order to write.

Instead: take control of your ability to create and identify small ways you can create wherever you are.

Step #4: Track Your Progress.

In the first weeks of practicing, I would see how many times I could move from one chord to another. What I found is that on the first day, I could switch from an A chord to a D chord 15 times in a minute.

A week later, if you asked me how I felt about my guitar playing, I would tell you that I was still horrible. But my feelings overshadowed my true progress. When I looked at the chart where I tracked progress, I was astounded: I could now play the same chord change 41 times in a single minute. For that one skill, I had improved nearly 300%!

That is the power of tracking things. Don’t just rely on your feelings to measure progress. I have spoken to writers who have published multiple books who still say, “I’m not a real author yet.”

For my “minimum of 1-minute per day” rule, this was my reality on many days:

It seems silly to see how little I practiced on some days. Yet, one thing I don’t feel is any shame that I haven’t practiced. When I look at this chart, what I know is that I showed up each and every day to this craft. While I may sometimes feel progress is slow, I am reminded every day that progress must be happening.

It took me eight months to feel, “OMG, I’m actually going to learn to play guitar!” That is 240 days in a row of practicing before I finally felt that.

Do you have to be obsessive about tracking? No. But I have found that helped me stay connected to my craft, even when I worried I wasn’t doing enough.

Step #5: Invest in Collaborators

After a year of playing every day, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m hitting a wall in my guitar practice routine. I have all of these disparate skills that haven’t allowed me to feel fluent in my playing.

I have plateaued because I’m falling into familiar routines with my playing, and I’m not sure how to break out of them.

I thought about buying new gear, but I realize that what I need is an expert to guide me and accountability to help me keep momentum.

So I am investing in a collaborator.

I hired a guitar teacher whose videos I have enjoyed on YouTube. He literally lives on the other side of the world from me in New Zealand, but once per week we have a live session together via video Skype.

What I’m realizing is this: access to information is not what is tripping me up. In fact, I’m drowning in information. YouTube is filled with tens of thousands of high quality instructional videos.

What I am missing is a guide: someone who can pull together my skills and give me a clear direction, and provide accountability.

That is the value of working with a collaborator or support group.

It’s funny, everything I’ve been experiencing above is also what I bake into my Creative Shift Mastermind. It’s a great reminder that making your writing a priority is really a process of: clarity, simple steps, accountability, mentorship, and a true creative community to help you get there

Thanks.

-Dan