A few years back a woman scheduled a consulting session with me. She said she was a website developer. I asked her about her competition. “I don’t have any competition.” Wow! I had found the only website developer in the world. Amazing. In truth, I was just a wee bit taken aback. There had been…
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The writer’s voice in fiction is often expressed through the main character or narrator. In more complex novels, the perspective may change from character to character or to a narrator but there is one main entity that is the voice of the author. (The rest are just the voices in our heads…) The overall tone…
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I work for myself and because of that, my schedule (i.e., time) is pretty much my own. I seldom set an alarm. The first hour or two of my day is spent sipping coffee on my lanai, looking at the water, and thinking. Sometimes I write or make a to-do list, but it’s all very…
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Fame Many people dream of becoming an author, writing best-selling books (usually novels), chatting about their book with Oprah, and generally living a life of elegant leisure, dining with friends in Paris or fly fishing like Papa Hemingway. When we picture the life of an author, those kinds of images pop into our heads. (What?…
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I was reading the Sunday paper (yes, some of us still read the paper) and there was an article about a woman who had played in the women’s baseball league back in 1942. There was a picture of her team, with the women all named and I thought to myself, “There was a lady from…
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Branding your business is probably not your first priority as a solopreneur or small business owner. That spot is usually reserved for scrambling to create positive cash flow. But branding your business is a powerful tool that can help create that positive cash flow. How? First, let’s look at what brand is. Brand is the…
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A compilation book is one in which many authors each contribute a chapter. In general, each author’s chapter covers a different aspect within the same broad topic. Usually there is a “name” author – someone with a following whose name will go first on the cover. Then each person who contributed a chapter gets their…
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Did you know Voltaire wrote Candide in three days? IN FRENCH?? Now that’s talent. (And for the record, it’s also not true. But a great story, yeah?) You can write your own book in three days. It probably won’t be the Great American Novel. It probably won’t be your Signature Book. (I sincerely hope you…
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Baby Boomers and every generation after them have a hard time settling on just one thing. We want it all. “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Americans want to experience as much as possible and have as much as possible. Shiny object syndrome was invented just for us. I…
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Setting the scene, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, works to draw the reader in. When people refer to books as boring or dry, it’s because the author didn’t set the scene properly, if at all. We learn best through stories. Whenever I find myself trying to haul too much stuff in one load, my…
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