Now writing: How To Invent and Use Your EXCLUSIVE Self-Publishing Genre

By Holly Lisle

Lesson 7 (and a peek at the HTTS Kindle Cover Art)
Lesson 7 (and a peek at the HTTS Kindle Cover Art)

I’m now writing the first of the special Self-Publishing lessons for HTTS.  It’ll be Lesson 7 in the public course (Kindle-Nook-iTunes if possible-print).  And Lesson 6B in the Legacy course, because I’m a complete wuss and I don’t want to have to totally rebuild the entire course across 12 variations every time I add one of these four new lessons.

This lesson is about how to keep yourself out of the genre box of only writing one character, one series, and one kind of story for your entire career (unless, hey, that’s what you want to do, in which case, have fun with that).  How, instead, to write every book you’re passionate about, love madly, dream and breathe and hunger for, no matter what each of those books is about, where it fits in any marketer’s Big List Of Crappy, Confining Genres—and how to still bring most of your readers along with you.

You can’t bring them all.  But even if you write one character, one series, and one kind of story, you aren’t going to keep every reader you get.

So if you’re hungry to write everything you can imagine, I’m writing the walkthrough now on how you can keep your core readers as you leap from genre to genre, story to story, and universe to universe.

And you don’t have to change your name every time you change your genre.

I’m excited about this lesson.  I paid big-time to learn it, but the price was worth it.  I hope to have it done and available in Legacy HTTS by the end of this week.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Think Sideways Self-Publishers’ Bulletin

By Holly Lisle


Okay. How To Think Sideways for Self-Publishers is a go. I’ve figured out how to do it, how to keep the price way down, how to put it up on the big platforms (Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Createspace), and how to get the essentials like worksheets that won’t work in e-book readers into the hands of the people who buy the course.

So this is going to be my first BIG course on anything other than my own site and my own platform.

If you’re interested, and you want to know when the course starts going live on the various platforms, sign up for the notice list below.

For folks who can’t see the Javascript version of the signup box above, I’ve created an alternate page where you can sign up on the HTML version of the form…which won’t, of course, work on the page of WordPress…

The Alternate Sign-Up Form

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


The special SELF-PUB modules for How To Think Sideways Self-Pub

By Holly Lisle

I took a break from putting together a cool HTTS Hotseat today with a writer who needed to know how to create a villain for her story.

Got out a notebook, wrote out the existing modules in How To Think Sideways, and figured out how to streamline the HTTS Self-Pub course.

URGENT!

All current Think Sideways Classic students, as well as all Think Sideways grads,
will get ALL the new modules, and will keep all of the old ones.

If you are in Think Sideways Classic
or have graduated from the class,
DON’T BUY HTTS Self-Pub!

HTTS Classic students and grads
get ALL the old modules
and ALL the new ones.

The modules I’m removing from of HTTS Self-Pub are:

  • How To Discover (Or Create) Your Project’s Market
  • How To Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, And Sample Chapters
  • How To Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, And Artists, And NOT Wreck Your Project
  • How To Deliver What You Promised And What They Want On Deadline

I’ll be replacing them with:

  • The Special Skills of Self-Pub Market Creation
  • Identify and Connect With Your Target Reader
  • What To Do When You’re Writer, Publisher, Art Department, and Marketing And How To Schedule Your Time
  • How to Deliver What Your Readers Want

 

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


A low-priced Self-Pub version of How To Think Sideways?

By Holly Lisle

Self-pub has become the way to go if you want to write and make a living at it. The last few years, my self-pub has paid the bills, and my commercial pub hasn’t. Among commercially published writers, I’m not alone. The majority of commercially published novelists are working a “real” job just to survive.

Successful self-pubbed writers are doing better. You can read sites like http://jakonrath.com/ and http://lethalbooks.com/ and those of other self-pubbed writers who are making a full-time living publishing themselves.

If you aren’t a big name, online self-publishing is the new midlist.

This is the thing I wanted to do with Rebel Tales

…but what grew naturally out of improving tech and online markets is a million times better than what I’d planned. Why? Because YOU control your career, and you get to keep all the money. You’re not splitting it with a publisher who takes almost everything, and an agent who takes 15% of what’s left.

Sales of Kindles and Nooks and iPads (and iPhones) are all up, and these are all instant-gratification bookstores you carry around in your pocket. Or purse. Meanwhile, print book sales are falling, and brick-and-mortar bookstores going out of business.

What You Need To Know To Self-Publish

There are two types of knowledge you need in order to self-publish successfully.

The first is the technical stuff—how to get ISBNs, how to format your own book or hire someone to format it for you, how to price it, etc.

You can learn that ANYWHERE.

The second knowledge you need is a thousand times more important. You need to know how to write books worth reading.

I can teach you that.

So I’m putting together a stripped-down, just-for-self-publishers version of HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS: Career Survival School for Writers.

How To Think Sideways for the Self-Publisher

The objective of this course is to be about half the price and about 60% the size of HTTS, and to give writers who KNOW you want to self-publish:

  • the writing skills you need to succeed at it, without all the Japanese Bowing Etiquette involved in commercial publishing,
  • to give you the contacts you need to publish your own work professionally,
  • and to get you out there doing it.

Lean, mean, focused.

HTTS Self-Pub will contain none of the stuff on query letters or dealing with editors. NOTHING on manuscript formatting for submission. Nothing on how to write a synopsis or an extended editor outline. None of the walkthrough. None of the frills I threw in like first drafts of my novels. Well, maybe ONE first draft.

It also won’t include on-site workgroups.  To keep the price low, I have to cut somewhere, and setting up and maintaining private workgroups is a major pain in the kiester.  You’ll meet lots of folks in the community.  If you want to create a private workgroup via e-mail on on a password section of your blog, you can certainly do that.

HTTS Self-Pub will include:

All the writing lessons, writing techniques, writing checklists, and writing course videos.

You’ll also get full member access to the following Writers’ Boot Camp boards:

  • Eureka HTTS (you can read this board now to discover what students learn from this course)
  • Renegade Marketing
  • Help!
  • Questions About Your Lessons HTTS
  • Writing Discussion HTTS
  • Idle Chatter HTTS
  • The new Resources for Self-Publishers board, which will hook you up with the folks who do professional e-book formatting, packaging, cover art, editing, and copyediting, writing blurbs, any anything else you need to help you succeed.  (If you OFFER these services, contact me now about getting your place on this board.  Currently I have about 2000 active writers in the private community.)

My objective with this course is to create successful professional career writers in the new Yes-You-Can-Live-On-Your-Writing online midlist.

The full course, with the walkthrough and future upgrades and a multitude of other cool things, comes in two speeds (6 month and 12 month)  and three flavors: Single Payment $399, 6 month subscription 69.95/month, and 12 month subscription $37.95/month.  If your dream is to publish commercially, (or if you want the BIG boost in help you’ll get from the Walkthrough upgrade) this is the course you need. 

The stripped-down HTTS Self-Pub will have one speed and one flavor.  6 months, $37.95/month.

If you’re not, no reply is necessary.

If you are, please post a YES. What I’m trying to do here is get a rough level of interest to decide whether setting up the extra site and revamping the course materials is worth my time.

So all I need to know from you now is, are you interested?

IMPORTANT!

If you’re already an HTTS student or HTTS Grad, you’re getting EVERYTHING in the Self-Pub course, PLUS the walkthrough, the private workgroups, and the Walkthrough boards, blogs, etc. Just log in to get the stuff as it goes live.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Three Weeks Of The Think Sideways Walkthrough

By Holly Lisle

I forgot. I’ve just been swamped, and I forgot to post here to let folks know that I have three sampler pages from the How To Think Sideways Walkthrough available for everyone to use.

You get the complete content, including audio and downloads, for the first page of each of the following three weeks:

Week One: Break Thinking Barriers

Week Two: Create Your Sweet Spot Map

Week Three: Calling Down Lightning

I think you’ll find these help you work through areas of your writing, from what you can’t get started or keep writing, to how to figure out what to write about, to how to get story ideas when you have NO ideas.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Bracing For The Storm

By Holly Lisle

I’ve been doing HTTS Walkthrough prep and setup all week.

Site set-up, lesson template setup, student set-up.

Today I did workflow setup. Because I’m doing two projects at once, and because one is nonfiction and one is fiction, and because they are inextricably locked together like Siamese twins—and because both are MASSIVE projects, either of which could sink me if I don’t plan well—I built something different.

I made organizer wallpaper for my desktop. I then set up my desktop with all my templates and files and folders either to the side, or right on the spot where I’ll need to use them. Workflow is top to bottom, and left to right.

And Saturday is my day off, dammit. Except for today.

Organizer Wallpaper for Desktop

A bit of organizational coolness against the coming storm. I’ll let you know how it works.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


The Last Moon & Sun and the Think Sideways Walkthrough

By Holly Lisle

More than a month after I intended to start, (due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control™), today I’m beginning The Last Moon & Sun…which is not the title of the book, but I have to call it something until I have a real title.

This is not a little project. This is…well, mammoth.

Why?

One: I haven’t written in the series since I finished Book II, The Silver Door, in June of 2008, so I’m going to have to go back and redo my research in the first two novels—but this time I have to look for different things.

Two: I have to toss all of my outlines and plans for the series—I’d carefully planned out seven tightly-woven books. Unfortunately, I have to END the series with book three. Which means I have to come up with a whole new story for the ending.

Three: By the time readers have the chance to buy this book, it will be several years since the previous one. So The Last Moon & Sun cannot be part of the linked sequential series I’d laid out.

It has to answer all the questions I asked in Books 1 and 2…but because of the time gap (caused first by me having no clue how I could end the series in one book, and then me spending all of last year with either family health problems and emergencies, or my own) I now have to REINTRODUCE the questions, so readers who didn’t know Books 1 and 2 existed will still get a complete story in The Last Moon & Sun—while at the same time making sure readers who DID read the first two books will get all the answers they were hoping for, a fresh story that blows them away, and something good to remember when they finish the final page.

What I have to do:

The book is going to need some elbow room. The first two ran about 100,000 words apiece.

I’m aiming for 150,000 words for this one to keep it within bounds, but it may go longer, if I need more than that to tell the story.

I have a huge risk going into this. I don’t have (or want) a contract. I want to be able to do this the way it needs to be done, and that means I don’t want an advance that has to be paid back hanging over my head if the publisher doesn’t like the story I come up with, or doesn’t like the length of the book and wants me to rip out half of it and remove one of the two main characters, for example (because, gee, THAT’s never happened to me before), or wants me to change the story in ways I don’t like.

I’m hoping to write something magnificent, something my editor and publisher will love. I want to absolutely blow their socks off. But if I end up with another Hawkspar situation on my hands, I want to be in the position to say, “Fine, thanks but no thanks.”

This is going to be a challenging ride. Big book, tough development cycle, compressed writing time—the sort of book that will generate a lot of learning experiences for me.

And, if you come along with me, for you.

I’m going to be adding mostly-weekly demonstrations on how I apply the techniques of How To Think Sideways to my own work to the course.

Why mostly-weekly? Because if it takes me longer than a week to work through one section of the process, I don’t want to half-ass the information I put up on that section, and I don’t want to screw up the book. So if it takes more than a week, it takes more than a week. The full lessons are already in there here, and if you get ahead of me, you can drop back to previous lessons to see what I did.

As happens with every book I write, I’ll make some discoveries on how to write better, more richly, more efficiently, more passionately, and more deeply while I’m doing this book. Anything I discover, I’ll pass on to you. Any tools I come up with, any worksheets I create for my own use, any techniques…you’ll get them as I figure them out.

I’ll make time to be on the boards to answer a few questions, to ask a few questions, and to set up some specific discussion topics.

And I’m adding one other thing. Each week that I post my own Walkthrough, I’ll also be offering a one-hour brainstorming session to one student. I’ll record that session and include it in the course so you can see not just how that week’s techniques work for me, and how they might work for you, but how another student can apply them to his or her work—getting that third perspective can be enormously helpful when you’re facing situations you hadn’t anticipated.

Any active HTTS student or course grad will be able to apply for a brainstorming session. (Once you’ve been picked for one, you can’t apply again, though.)

I’ll pick the student whose question and story problem will make what I think will be the best demonstration for that week.

The brainstorming sessions will be free.

Now here’s the thing.

I haven’t raised the price on How To Think Sideways ever. It’s been at its debut price since I opened the doors in 2008 and the first class started through with me.

I didn’t raise the price when the course I thought would take four months to present took six months, and then seven.

I didn’t raise the price when I added the How NOT To Write A Series (And Why You Don’t Want To) course as a graduation gift.

I didn’t raise the price when the private Think Sideways writing community took off and became this amazing place where dedicated writers gather to work, to brainstorm, and to send off and frequently sell what they’ve been writing.

I didn’t raise the price when I added in the core elements of Grad Novel, including a marketing forum and a lot of private development work I did on the currently-sidelined Dreaming the Dead. (The book I’m finishing after I do The Last Moon & Sun.)

But this is going to be a MAJOR upgrade, so I’m going to raise the price.

Through the end of April, you’ll still be able to get into class for $25/ month for 12 months or $47/month for six months. When you join at that price, you’re grandfathered in at that price, and as long as you don’t quit, you stay at that price all the way through to the end of the course.

May 1st, though, prices are going up.

If you’ve been wanting to take How To Think Sideways this is the last time you’ll be able to get it for the introductory price.

I hope you’ll join me on what promises to be a wild charge into the deep, dark thickets of novel writing.

 

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


NovelWritingSchool.com coming in November

By Holly Lisle

I have the temporary front page up here: http://novelwritingschool.com/

I have beta testers going through a free plot-outline course (a major upgrade on the current version done via e-mail on THIS site). We’re finding bugs and getting them out of the way now. Once we get the bugs out, this will go live for EVERYONE, well before November. Probably next week. I’ll post here with a link when it does.

I’ll have some of the simpler existing courses ready for you in November, and will gradually build out until all of my courses and existing freebies are transferred to the new school—and then I’ll start adding new courses.

The reason? Site maintenance on a bunch of different platforms and at a bunch of different domains has become too much for me to handle. So Holly Lisle’s Novel-Writing School will free me up to concentrate on course building, NOT web work.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


What My New Year’s Resolution Means For You

By Holly Lisle

The path that brought me to this moment started exactly 25 years ago today, when in my diary I wrote, “Before I turn 25, I want to write a book.”

25 years later, I’ve written 33 novels (plus one I did anonymously as work for hire), am working on a couple more, and intend to keep writing novels as long as I live.

I’ve also written 100,000+ words on writing on my website (a very fat nonfiction book), five Writing Clinics (“Scenes” is also a clinic) with a sixth, “World” in progress, one massive course on writing/creativity/career creation, and I’m working on the second massive course, “How To Revise Your Novel.” I’ve done some smaller writing projects, too, both fiction and nonfiction.

I built and ran the free writing community Forward Motion for years. Have a much smaller writing community growing now inside the ThinkSideways/HTRYN course umbrella.

So that writing thing turned out pretty well.

But in ten months I’ll be 50. And I have a resolution.

Before I turn fifty, I want to show people how to FIND their dreams, how to dream BETTER dreams, and how to turn those dreams into reality.

This is a resolution that, like “write a book”, entails much more than anyone can hope to accomplish in ten months, and I know that. I’ve been writing with intent to sell since I was about 23, and I still love the work. “Write a book” became a lifetime calling for me.

It’s also a resolution that, in many ways, I’ve been working toward my whole life. Some of the ways I hope to accomplish this are already in place—the writing courses and the writing community and my website help writers who already have their dream in place figure out how to make their dreams real.

But my daughter wants to create handcrafted jewelry. My father-in-law is a public-school science teacher looking for a different way to teach science. I have one son who wants to make movies, and another who currently wants to build robots.

I have friends who want to leave jobs they hate, but aren’t sure what they could do instead. I know hundreds of writers who are looking for a new way to break into publishing and get paid for their work.

And I know people who have no better dream than just to get through the day. And so do you.

Over the past three years, I’ve been quietly investing in training and education, learning how to create businesses, how to create products, how to reach the people who want those products. Most of my life, I’ve been learning to teach. I’m studying professional publishing.

And I have projects that have been pending while I work on other things, or on hold because they’re in software development. I offered an e-mail course for a while called Money To Write. I’ll be bringing that back with some serious bells and whistles—it will focus on letting writers create businesses that will free them from day jobs so they can write.

Margaret is making good progress writing the software we call “the seller piece,” the engine that will allow me to PAY writers for the Rebel Tales serialzine, and PAY product creators with the Money to Write program. When that’s done, we’ll get Rebel Tales and Money To Write going.

But it all starts with DREAMS

Our reality, both good and bad, begins as someone’s dream, someone’s vision, someone’s abstract idea that “this could be different.”

Some dreams are magnificent, some are terrible.

Grocery stores and skyscrapers, cars and computers, paintings and literature, music and movies, roads and silverware and dishwashers and clothes and shoes and agriculture and every other form of creation and production all started as someone’s dream.

Nursing and medicine, education and food service, telephones and the Internet all began as someone’s dream.

So did the genocides of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, and other monsters. So does every murder, every molestation, every enslavement. Drug cartels, prostitution rings, and street gangs all arise from someone’s dream, too.

We live in the reality created by the people who act on their dreams, whether good or bad.

There is no way to force people to dream better dreams, to want better things. “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” (Alfred in “The Dark Knight).

There is no way to dream for others—anyone whose dream is to “make your life better” is imposing a his dream on you. And what is better for him will not be better for you.

You can only dream for yourself, you can only change yourself.

But you can provide the example of your own life, the tools and the teaching, the means, and the direction, to others who also want to dream better dreams, make them real, and in the process, live better lives.

This, then, is my dream. My resolution. To be the person who does that. To create ways to help you, if you choose to use them, live the life you dream.

Happy New Year.

May 2010 be your best year yet.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


I GOT MY RESOLUTION!

By Holly Lisle

All caps… Yes. I’m shouting.

You know I wanted to come up with some magnificent challenge for myself to pledge as my New Year’s Resolution, to have going in some beginning fashion before I turn 50 in October of next year.

And I was standing in the shower just minutes ago, and thinking about TalysMana and Becky’s NOW-limited-to-50-EVER TalysMana Viewer, and about Rebel Tales and what I want to accomplish with that, and about all my novels, and about my How To Write A Novel And Build A Career Course, and about the novel revision course, and about FM, which I started and then ran for years, and about the Clinics, and the other smaller projects I’ve done.

And about the 33 Mistakes Books, and why I produced those.

And my thoughts turned to themes. The theme at the heart of TalysMana. The theme of my life. How everything I’ve done has been related, how it’s all been pointing toward something.

There was this ‘click’ in the back of my mind. A moment of clarity. An understanding of what comes next, and why it matters, and how to do it.

This is the biggest thing I’ve ever imagined, the biggest dream I’ve ever had.

I’ll have an interesting post for you on New Year’s Day.

Watch this space.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved