The World Needs Your Passion

Merry Christmas from us! 🎄

2024 has been a transition year for us in so many ways.

We added a whole entire new human to our family, and much of 2024 involved all four of us acclimating to our new normal. It's been a beautiful period of grounding especially as our family feels complete!

Patrick and I have been working on our companies as always. It was a meh year for me in terms of creativity, stability, and growth. I did pull off my first large event in New Orleans this year with a 3-month old thanks to a team of smart, awesome, hard-working people and my business partner.

I spent a lot of the year catching up on things I wanted to get done in 2023 (and 2022!) so it's been hard to celebrate each win as they come. In truth it feels like I haven't had a win in a while! Which is not necessarily the vibe I want to end the year with. I hope to do more in 2025, as I'm so close to clearing the decks on previous projects and ready to move on to the next season of my business.

The kids are growing along on schedule and have their own lives and activities. Teddy has been enjoying school and growing so mature as a leader in his classroom. Edith has been bonding with her family and is getting ready for walking, talking, and overnights with her big brother. We are a Montessori family so that guides the way we raise them. I remain committed to helping all four of us learn, grow, and love, and I both teach and practice healing principles that make it all possible!

Much love to you and yours this holiday season! 💓💓💓

📷:

Happy birthday, Edith!

We did homemade smash cakes at both of my kids' first birthdays and they did not like them. As it turns out you just need to get the regular sugar ones and they will eat them. Edith couldn't believe her luck with this! 🎂

📷:

Edith is one! She is curious, sociable, wickedly smart, sure of what she wants, communicative, a little mischievous, even-keeled, and most importantly, happy!

Thank you for these beautiful pics of our sweet baby. (Before she moves on from babyhood!)

One year old (almost). A perfect summer-fall transition day. She's at the age of, "This is probably the last time she'll wear this dress," but every day! 😭

Loved the incredible knowledge and inspiration from so many savvy business women!

P.S. Texas is synonymous with tacos and queso for me. This was a short trip and I didn't get my fix without my normal Texas crew. Thankfully there's a Velvet Taco next to my gate!

Every day I think, "oh yeah we have a Kickstarter campaign" and the think oh this must be what it's like to write and schedule things ahead of time.

Anyway, go back our Kickstarter campaign. The book is actually done and so is everything else in the campaign, because we (mostly me) are actually ahead on it.

12 Concepts for Authors to Make $8333/Month (6-Figures/Year) 12 battle-tested, proven strategies to help authors write great books, grow their audience, and scale a thriving business in 12 months.

It's officially "keep track of small socks" weather 🍁

Still my very favorite season!

I’ll be sharing a series of posts over the next few weeks that are specifically about passion, and that will include the who, what, where, why, and how of how I actually operate in life and my creative business.

I’m absolutely terrified of sharing this deeper level of me, especially because so many of you are here to learn about marketing and selling your writing.

But I also think this series is pretty much about sales and marketing and building a creative business still. It’s just a few layers deeper on how I think about the topic.

Lastly, beliefs are hard to discuss so explicitly. It’s why we as a society avoid talking about politics, religion, and more. That said, if you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you have been holding space for my potentially differing beliefs about the publishing industry, along with the creator economy, for a long time.

I offer this post to you with the hope that you can hold space for me to share my beliefs about passion here, so I can connect with readers—possibly you!—who are interested in the future of publishing, the creator economy, and how to build sustainable systems for their life and business that can meet the challenges we are facing going forward.

https://theworldneedsyourpassion.substack.com/p/what-does-the-world-need-your-passion

Dolly Parton sent my kiddos books! Just in time for the summer reading program. Thank you!

Chapter 4 in Story Symmetry is about turning an idea into a concept and premise.

To me, a concept is the external protagonist and conflict, while the premise is the specifics of a book.

So the concept is 24 impoverished teenagers battle to be the lone survivor of the yearly Hunger Games, ensuring their status and wealth for the rest of their lives.

The premise is the specifics of each book, whether it's The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, or A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

This is the first place we see symmetry in storytelling—the concept is essentially what the series is about, while the individual books are individual stories that follow the blueprint of the concept.

You need to understand both concepts to succeed in fiction.

And there are three key things you need to understand about a concept:

1. Concepts can be high or low—high and low concept are at opposite ends of a spectrum.

You can move concepts up or down the spectrum using two types of psychological triggers: button pushers and pleasure/pain inducers. For example:

A love triangle with two guys fighting over one girl (Twilight)...

Can become two best friends...

Then two brothers (The Summer I Turned Pretty, The Vampire Diaries)...

Then two identical twin brothers (which creates Princess Switch opportunities)...

You've thus taken the love triangle concept higher with each iteration. You can use the same ideas to take the concept lower and simplify it. Cozy mystery, cozy fantasy, and sweet romance are all examples of doing so! There's a lot of demand for simplicity these days.

2. Concepts are time-sensitive and require the context of the time period.

All art says something about the moment.

For example, Jane Austen is one of the original regency romances that most people will encounter in their lives. Bridgerton cannot succeed without elevating what Jane Austen has established. Bridgerton needs to be higher concept than Jane Austen.

Someday, Bridgeton will seem trite. To catch attention as a beloved television show, the next regency will need a higher concept.

3. The trope twist is possible, but only in established, mature genres.

When do you throw in a trope twist? When do you just elevate or simplify an established concept? This can make or break your series.

This chapter is a starting point for many Author Ecosystems types, but specifically Deserts, Aquatics, and Forests. There's a systematic way to elevate or simplify the concept for your series, using proven psychological triggers. You can use this framework to predict what has a good chance of succeeding next in the write-to-market space!

Not resonating just yet? You may first conceive of story somewhere else, like characters, world, plot, theme. There's a section in the book for people who start their stories in each of these areas!

Already know this stuff? Well, when was the last time you read a craft book? And why not read one written by someone trained specifically in marketing? :) You've almost certainly read a story craft book by someone who wasn't!

Revisiting these craft books has been both a joy and a surprise this month.

First, a joy because it's pretty fun to talk about and think about story craft. Especially in the context of marketing. These are probably two of my favorite subjects in the world, if I'm honest!

Also, a joy because Russell and I are putting together our new and likely last big course for Writer MBA called StoryUrge. (More on why it's our last big course at some point.)

At the end of the day, when we sell books, we are really selling products. And while we primarily teach marketing, sales, and business, a lot of the time when we collectively look at a sales and marketing problem, we are really looking at a product problem. Because marketing, of, course, starts with the product (and Product is one of the four Ps). And when you are building a content-based business, the product is an even greater part of the ultimate marketing.

Long story short... If you are new to this, the best way to market your book is to write a great one. And if you are an old hat at this, when was the last time you read a craft book or took a craft course?

Okay, now to the things that have surprised me.

I wrote these books a while ago. They were first conceived in 2015, nine years ago. Obviously, I've learned a little about storytelling since then 🤣 But the biggest thing is *how* I wrote them... Because I really did write them after trying to make sense for myself of all the best literature on story craft.

Most of this literature came from traditional publishing, and it's crazy to think about how little of it actually addressed marketing. Independent authors had to collectively develop almost an entirely new language to talk about story craft, and it's a completely different way of thinking than what is instructionally available out there.

A lot of the language comes from fandom, serialization, and fan fiction. It's bubbled over from AO3 and Tumblr and gained prominence on TikTok. It's based on a conversation with readers, rather than the intellectual elite. We are closer to our readers than traditional publishing is.

As I've been reading through and taking extensive notes on the books again, there is so much to explicitly make connections between. Story craft instruction is a bit stodgy these days. But bringing fans into the conversation brings the content back to life. That's something major that I'm looking to do in these books - bridge the gap between the critical and logical architecture of storytelling and the fluid and intuitive desire we have to give readers what they want.

The last surprising thing to me about these books is just how much of our marketing work applies to them. Author Ecosystems, for example? I have a lot of thoughts about how different types might approach story craft differently. I can't wait to share.

Today is the last day for the Story Marketability campaign on Kickstarter and I'd love for more people to hop on board! What's it about? These two books, Story Symmetry and Editing For Marketability, are getting a facelift with new editions.

When I wrote Story Symmetry, I had done a deep dive into about 80 story craft books. I encapsulated everything I read into one single framework so you don't have to read all those books! I called it Story Symmetry because it focuses on the relationships between story craft concepts... And I specifically noticed early on how many twin concepts either mirrored each other or came in multiples.

I started to see storytelling in clear patterns and shapes that could be translated from one concept to another easily. And I noticed that when writers honored this symmetry and kept their story in alignment with itself, the story's popularity rose and rose.

Editing For Marketability is basically the supercharged add-on to Story Symmetry. It takes many disciplines of marketing (for which I hold a master's degree in) like copywriting, public relations, gamification, word-of-mouth, and more, and explains how to use them to elevate a story. Inside, I talk about the Book Virality Stack, or how you can stack storytelling elements to give your book a better chance of reaching a larger audience.

You can get the newest versions of both books through this campaign! Sure, the old versions are on retailers, but it takes me a while to trickle out new versions everywhere, and backers are going to get the new versions first.