If you’re like every other human being on the planet, you have some fear of writing.

Why is this? Is it because we desperately avoid thinking too much (because thinking is what we must do to write)?

I think it’s because of our education. We were encouraged to write before we had anything to write about. We were asked to write what we thought of countless events, people, and historical facts before we even knew what they meant to others. How in the world would we know what they meant to us?

Writing is a form of critical thinking. It helps us put on paper how our brain works. Oftentimes, we don’t really think critically because it’s too much work (or because we’re afraid that others might think we’re dumb).

But in this day and age, we need writers and we need them now.

Here’s how to write something TODAY:

1. The golden age of the literati has passed. Write what you know, write what you want to know, write what you think. Really, it doesn’t matter if someone thinks it’s stupid, because the Internet is so vast, no one will call you out and kick you off the island. Sure, folks may disagree, but writing now is more about YOUR take on a subject, not the right take on a subject.

2. When you first write, it’s private. The first draft is for your eyes only. You just have to put it down. You can always edit it later, or you can throw it away and no one will ever see it. It’s a great reversal of risk to know that you will not show your first drafts around town. Don’t fret. All first drafts are shitty (thus sayeth Anne Lamott).

3. Pretend you are sitting across the table from someone who asked you a question and you write to answer them. Pretend you both are drinking deep mugs of coffee and it’s laid back and relaxed and this person doesn’t care if you riff, they are genuinely interested in what you have to say.

4. Consider that what you are writing may save someone’s life; not literally, but they are desperate to know the solution that you have in your brain. Write for them. Help them. The “Good Samaritan” gene is very strong in our psyches these days. You will be so happy to be helping someone, you’ll forget you’re writing.

5. Forget pretense. No one thinks you’re cool, no one thinks you’re good looking, no one cares what you say, no one gives a crap if you screw up. But really, people do think you’ve got it and you just have to write it. But the less you focus on what others think and more about how you feel, the better the writing will flow.

6. Focus on success. Say you write this and it’s good. Say you write and it goes viral. Say you write this and people flock to your blog to read it. How would that make you feel? Good, yeah?

7. It’s just words. You just need to put the words into sentences and the sentences into paragraphs and the paragraphs into sections. Really, you’re just organizing words. Perhaps an outline first would help? Then the words that are in the outline can keep you focused as you expand on them throughout the piece. I use a scratch outline: 1. a. b. 2. a. b. 3. a. b.

Action Tip: What do you have to write today? Use one of these quickstart techniques and get started! Any other quickstart techniques you’d like to share with your fellow writers? Leave a comment!

Really? You think so?

I don’t think so. Social media just takes the right mindset and skills.

And we all got skillz. Right?

A social media mindset requires a few key things from an individual:

1. Commitment to seeing it through. A lot of folks that don’t do well on social media give up way too soon. They are hesitant, they don’t dig deep, they only give 50% effort. The folks that do well on social media have embraced it as their brand builder. They’re in it for the long haul, they don’t intend to give it up unless under duress. Even without enough sleep, they continue to forge ahead, planning, strategizing, communicating.

2. Willingness to learn . . . everything. Even if it’s relearning everything they’ve ever known for as long as they can possibly remember. They will do it. They’ll put the time in, they’ll talk to the people, they’ll read the books, download the podcasts, study the courses. They’ll always be thinking about what’s next. They’ll never just sit back and rest on their laurels. They are serious. Don’t look away . . . these folks will be way ahead quicker than you can say Marco . . .

3. Courage. Shameless, brazen courage. A courageous social media user fears nothing. They have thick skin, are resilient to people ignoring them, don’t mind when people pester them (unless it’s prolonged), know what they’re worth, and know what they want. They get up every day knowing that it’s one more chance to enlarge their “web real estate” by giving out good information, helping someone find a good solution, and being as authentic as possible. They are not pushovers, but they are not mean. They just have courage. They have pluck.

These things can’t be gained from any Dummies guide to social media. A social media user doesn’t get these from a conference or from a book. It’s a mindset choice. To go or not. To make a move or not.

It’s this kind of social media prowess that makes people sit up and say, “wow, who’s that. I gotta know more about her!”

Action Tip: Is social media difficult for you? Is there a way you can take just one of these points and try to apply it to what scares you the most? Any of them will work, it’s all about what you choose to do . . . right now.

Email is the future.

Wait, is this 1995 or 2010?

Well . . .

The big discussion online this week is whether or not you should drop your blog in favor of an email newsletter or eZine. And the consensus is that for many online businesses and consultants, dropping the blog may be more beneficial.

I’m not sure I agree that this is a good approach for authors who are trying to become experts and build their brands online. I think authors (and most small businesses new to social media) should use both. Wondering how each one would work best for you?

Read on.

Either: You blog when you are trying to build a brand. Blogs can be added to search engines, can come up as search engine results, can be forwarded, liked on Facebook, Tweeted, added to Stumble Upon, and replied to with a comment.

Or: You send out an email newsletter when your audience knows so much about you that they don’t have to scrape the Google results to find the info they’re looking for. Say, you’re Lauren Conrad (who also has a blog, btw). Lauren Conrad could send out just an eZine once a month and still sell tons and tons of books. But pair an email newsletter with a blog and wowza!

Either: You blog because you are a writer and have a lot of extra tidbits to share with your audience that work well as a blog and/or eZine material. You blog because you are trying to sell a product, not just a consulting service. You want to sell books, not to just be a thought leader.

Or: You send out an email newsletter because you find that your product pitch for each newsletter gets you a 120% return rate the first week after sending out the newsletter. Think of how this is amplified for you with a blog. Say you send out an eZine issue and it is forwarded by a subscriber to a friend. They plug in the info from the newsletter into Google (or better yet, simply click from the newsletter) to your blog. They read about you, they read some of your posts, voila! They decide to buy the product too!

Either: You blog to become an expert. People are looking for a solution to their problems (be it organic gardening, how to travel well, how to take great photographs, whatever) and you’re it! The blog is proof to them that they have found the right person to turn to.

Or: You send an eZine to solidify your status as an expert to folks who read your blog and whose ears perk up when they see your name on Twitter. It’s a deep level of commitment to be allowed to send strangers email (with promotions, no less!). It’s an honor.

And if you don’t yet do it yet, well, it’s time to get with it!

Action Tip: Do you have a blog and no email newsletter or eZine? What are you waiting for? I recommend Aweber or Constant Contact for email list management (about 20 bucks/month). For folks who want to get started with zero cost, try Mad Mimi (free up to 100 subscribers).

1. You are on deadline and your book is really giving you fits.

2. You have no idea where to begin and no idea who to ask for help to begin.

3. You haven’t articulated your audience (even if you’ve written many books).

4. You’re really bad at project management. It’s a miracle you’ll get the book finished.

5. You feel that promotion and marketing are beneath you and that “real writers” shouldn’t have to shill unless there’s a new book coming out.

Can anyone point out the only valid reason for hiring help with your content?

Yep. You’re right. I’m glad to be in a company of such smart folks like you.

Now for my 5 reasons:

1. You are busy and your deadline is so tight. Your neighbor gal just graduated from college with a BA in English and can do research and write blogs for you for a hourly fee. You can hire someone to do the research, filing, typing, proofreading, scheduling. There are many options. Find someone you trust.

2. You get help finding out where to begin (Attend a Writer’s Digest University boot camp on social media strategy, for instance!). You can do this by signing up for my biweekly eZine. (Sign up form is to the right of this post. See it? There you go!) You get a game plan, you plan ahead. You begin.

3. You go find all your reader fan mail and email and you read it. What are the questions they are asking you? What are they sharing with you? There’s a major clue about what to talk about. If you’re not blessed with fan mail or email yet, you go do research. What do other novelists with similar novels to yours do for a blog? What do they talk about? Can you think of something you could talk about that would be like setting up shop next door (not plagiarism and certainly not to steal the audience away, but something complementary)?

4. You go find someone to help you with project management. Take a course. For novelists and memoir writers, use your advance to hire a publicist. (Heck, even non-fiction writers, think about getting some help, someone to line you out. For information on how real/brilliant can help with this, go here.)

5. You get over yourself. Ask the tough questions. Why am I writing FOR OTHERS if I have no interest IN OTHERS unless they are buying my book? Am I that arrogant to think I can be a writer without readers?

Action Tip: What can you (as a published author or a hopeful author) do today to prepare for your published author life promoting and caring about your audience aka readers?

The working definition of spam is information delivered to recipients that have no desire to receive that information. You’re in danger of writing spam if you do the following:

1. Don’t use double opt-in email delivery services (I recommend Aweber.com)

2. Abruptly change the focus of your email newsletter from something your double opt-in audience wants to read to something they have no interest in.

3. Send out bcc or cc’d emails more than once a month to a list of people who have no interest in (and who did not ask you to send anything) what you’re sending.

Guilty?

I’m a bit more lenient on the subject than some people. I don’t mind emails from other b2b (book publicists) or b2c (Nordstrom) providers. I do mind multiple or almost daily emails from anyone that didn’t ask my permission first, and I’ll frequently unsubscribe. The key for you is to remember your recipient’s feelings (even when they double opt-in) and steer clear of pushing anyone over the edge. Think about how you feel when you receive an email that gives you that icky feeling. Really. Think about it.

So, how do you create content that isn’t spam?

You need to do some research first. You don’t just get up one morning and decide you’re going to start writing about something without first testing. And you test by starting a blog about something you know (or even writing a personal blog that quickly morphs into something more niche). And then you figure out which posts get the most attention (and traffic) and which posts feel right to you and which posts come from your heart and which posts feel authentic.

There’s that word again. It’s all about what you know, what your audience wants to know, and your personality (your authenticity) stamped on that information. That’s content that avoids spam.

1. Have you been thinking about what you already know? If you need to learn more to know more, do it now. But start thinking about what you feel the most confident about. Is there some problem that you have found a solution for? Do you know how to help non-profits market better? Do you know how to grow perfect tomatoes? Do you know how to pay off credit card debt quickly? Begin to research your potential audience for that knowledge/problem/solution.

2. Who else is serving that audience? Who are the players already in the game? You figure out what solution others have offered your audience. Is there a consultant that has an ebook or seminar on non-profit marketing? What’s her solution? How does she do what she does? Sometimes you need to buy their product to really understand and sometimes you just need to take an hour at the local bookstore/library to study the competition. How about growing tomatoes and paying off credit card debt quickly? Same thing. Beef up your knowledge fast by studying what your competition is doing. Once you’ve got that covered, you’re 90% done.

3. Determine your USP (unique selling position/proposition). What are you going to do differently or the same? What other angle are you going to offer? What format are you going to offer? Print book, e-book, podcast, video, seminar, workbook, ecourse? Are you going to be more expensive or less? Are you going to drill down farther than others or pan out and cover more than just tomatoes? Are you going to enlist other experts or is it just going to be you?

It sounds like a ton of work. Really though, you’re creating more work (and a dead end) for yourself without this upfront research phase. Why create a product or choose a niche and have no idea how you compare to anyone else? Why do all that work of setting up a blog and trying to convert your readers to paying customers (buyers of your book) unless you know (sorta) where you’re going? That seems like a lot of work. Better to front load than scramble just to earn a dcent hourly wage.

Action Tip: You know what you need to do. Time to do it.

Yikes, so much going on over this ebook kerfuffle with iPad. An important update from Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch (if you don’t get his Publishers Lunch free emails–or his Publishers Lunch Deluxe paid emails–you SHOULD!):

We’re going to keep grinding our way through the idiosyncracies and challenges of life under the agency model, understanding that all of this is a constantly moving target. [emphasis mine]

While Random House has gotten all the attention as the biggest trade publisher whose titles are not available via the just-launched iBookstore, it should be underscored that so far, very few companies of scale outside of the Agency Five have a presence there. [emphasis mine] In addition to those already announced–Perseus, Nelson, Workman, Sourcebooks, and F+W–we found lists of titles from Hyperion and Kensington (henceforth known as the Non Five).

But the list of absent publishers is much larger. For now it includes Abrams, Andrews McMeel, Bloomsbury, Chronicle, Harlequin, Hay House, HCI, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Norton, Regnery, Rodale, Sterling, and Wiley. Also missing are prominent Perseus distribution clients like Grove/Atlantic, rising indie publishers like Quirk and Skyhorse, and all the big university presses. [emphasis mine]

We know that at least some of the publishers listed above are far along in their discussions with Apple and hopeful of reaching agreements soon. Among the issues are Apple’s hardcover price parity requirements balanced against Amazon’s reported unwillingness to negotiate changing to an agency model with any companies outside of the Agency Five, plus the time period Apple gives publishers to change their pricing with other customers to comply with Apple’s agreement.

While the Non Five we reached declined to discuss their plans and conversations about terms, the current state of play is more or less self-evident. Apple’s published terms of use indicate they are an agent for all books in the iBookstore, just as Amazon clearly denotes when the ebook is sold and priced by the publisher rather than Amazon. If you check the Amazon listings for Kindle titles from any of the Non Five, you’ll see that they are still sold by Amazon.

While the Agency Five have moved to agency terms across all their ebook retailers, the Non Five are currently driving a hybrid model: agency for Apple, and wholesale everywhere else. The big question–for the Non Five as well as for other publishers still negotiating with Apple–is how long and how well a hybrid model is sustainable.

And then this link from the Times on the green-ness of the new iPad (an interesting viewpoint considering over 300,000 iPads were sold in one day), but can we rejoice that over 250,000 EBOOKS were sold that same day? That’s a lot of books and not a single tree was used in their printing! Woohoo!

“Are you crazy?” most authors ask me. “Don’t you realize how much time I have to write? Not enough!”

And they drop their head in their hands and sigh. “How will I ever do all this?”

I know. The idea that an author now has to handle the majority of their own publicity and PR on their own (unless you’re Dan Brown and have a publishing assistant to do it all for you) is hard to take. Not only do authors have to write the book, they have to write a blog to go along with it, have to Twitter everything they think on an hourly basis, have to gather a Facebook following, send out an email newsletter, handle some direct mail to bookstores and book clubs to set up book signings and appearances, all while striving to protect what was once their precious book writing time is a hard pill to swallow.

So how is it done exactly?

1. First of all you need to take a deep breath and realize that you are not the only one feeling this way. Every single author who has brought a book into the world — a book! — is weary and ready for the publisher to do their part and just sell it to everyone and their sister. You’ve finished the book. Great job. Now gird your loins.

Ready? Okay.

2. Put on your marketing hat. It’s a different hat than the writing hat you’ve been wearing almost nonstop these past months (or years). This hat looks at your book differently. Looks at your book from the reading public’s point of view: what’s in it for me? Yep, that’s what they think. Not, lovely cover, wonderful writing (which comes later) but if there’s not something in there for them (that they consider you wrote just for them), well, I’m sorry to say it, but most folks won’t be interested. So, WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me?) What can you offer, what ARE YOU offering your readers? This is what you will be blogging about, talking about, speaking about, writing about, dreaming about, repeating over and over and over and over to everyone that you meet who wants to know WIIFM?

3. Don’t go overboard. Don’t go out and gather up thousands of Twitter followers right away, don’t start a blog yet, don’t do anything rash. Just hold for just a bit. What is your plan? How can you best execute your social media strategy for this book (and yes, for future books that may come later)? What is your goal? Monetary? Copies sold? Visibility? Speaking engagements? Consulting clients? You have to be clear before you start about what’s in it for you. Although it is MUCH less important than WIIFM. But it’s there. So figure it out.

4. Make a list of what you think might do the trick for WIIFM for your readership. Then make a list for yourself (your own WIIFM). Compare the lists. What areas overlap? That’s where you start. What if you don’t know what social media pieces will fulfill WIIFM for you or your readership? You’re thinking, “Ideas for what to focus on, please, Trish!” That’s why you may need more help with this. If you think you might need some help from a social media strategist, you’ll need to visit here. If you’re sure you don’t need help, read on.

5. Figure out the help you’ll need to do those social media pieces to ensure WIIFM gets fulfilled. WordPress or Blogspot? TweetDeck or Tweetie? Facebook Fan page or profile? Group page? How do you set up an eZine? How do you get a list of subscribers? My publisher sent me 1000 postcards to mail out for my book. Who do I send them to? My mom, my sister? Again, here is a place you can hire a social media strategist (read: me!) for help designing and implementing all this. But you can figure it out yourself. I know you can.

In future posts, we’ll talk specifics about putting together those pesky strategies and plans on paper and how to decide if you should hire a blog designer or if you should hire out your blog content or not. See you then.