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August 24, 2012 By 4 Comments

Creating Your Literary Ecosystem: The 6 Elements of a Fulfilling Writing Career

After forty years as an agent, here is the essence of what I believe you have to have for a fulfilling life as a writer:

Gaia, the Earth, is an ecosystem—a unique, miraculous, self-sustaining combination of elements that evolved out of each other. You can create a literary ecosystem: a balanced, organic, evolving, sustainable, inter-dependent, international, environmentally sensitive community. Your system will be unified by passion, interest, service, connection, and commerce. The six circular elements of your literary ecosystem will be

  • Products and services—as much scalable, first-rate work in your niche as you can generate in different forms and lengths that you re-purpose in other media
  • Pre-promotion–test-marketing your work in as many ways as you can
  • People—win-win relationships with engaged, committed, growing communities you serve who want to help you, because they know, like, and trust you
  • Platform–your continuing visibility, online and off, with your communities and potential buyers about your work   
  • Promotion—using your platform to share your passion for your work with your communities
  • Profit—what you need to achieve your personal and professional goals and maintain the system

Your ecosystem has to stay open to what it needs to learn from–and can contribute to–your communities, the human family, and the planet. Your system will continue to build synergy as long as you keep enriching the soil by producing content that sustains it. The importance of the six elements will vary, depending on what you write. If your mission is using words to create change, make cultivating your ecosystem a lifelong quest. You will accomplish more than you can imagine.

 

The blog aspires to help us both understand writing and publishing. To make the blog as helpful as it can be, please respond with your questions and answers. I hope you find it worth sharing.

 

Do one thing every day to make the world better .   –John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman

The 4th San Francisco Writing for Change Conference: Changing the World One Book at a Time

September 15, 2012 / Unitarian Universalist Center / Franklin & O’Farrell, San Francisco

Keynoters: Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism, and Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

The 10th San Francisco Writers Conference / A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community / February 14-17, 2013 / www.sfwriters.org / sfwriterscon@aol.com /

http://sfwriters.info/blog /@SFWC/ www.facebook.com/SanFranciscoWritersConference

San Francisco Writers University / Where Writers Meet and You Learn

Laurie McLean, Dean/free classes/www.sfwritersu.com/sfwritersu@gmail.com/@SFWritersU

415-673-0939 / 1029 Jones Street / San Francisco, 94109

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Getting a Book Published, San Francisco Writers Conference, Writing Fiction, Writing for Change, Writing Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,

Wribrid or Toast—Which are You?

April 13, 2010 By 3 Comments

There’s a New Yorker cartoon showing an editor sitting across a desk from a man who looks like Charles Dickens, and the editor is saying: “Make up your mind, Mr. Dickens. Was it the best of times or the worst? It could scarely have been both.”

As I wrote in my first post, now’s the best time ever to be a writer. But if you’re a new writer who wants a major commitment from a large publisher, it’s the most challenging time ever. One way to make yourself attractive to big houses is to reinvent yourself as a wribrid.

Wribrid rhymes with hybrid and sounds like it should be sliced and wrapped in cellophane. But it’s really the new model for writers. We live in the age of hybrids, the transition between gas and other forms of energy, between analog and digital, between the world and the Web.

Put writer and hybrid together and you have wribrid. Author Lee Foster rightly predicted that “This will be the golden age of the content creator.” But to succeed, you have to be a wribrid. You have to strike the right balance between

* Being online and off

* Writing for free and fees

* Writing short work and books

* Developing your ability to write for and promote in as many media as you can

* Writing, selling, test-marketing and promoting your work

* Doing work that generates income and building your visibility and communities to help you

* Receiving help and reciprocating

* Making a living and making a life

* Being a writer and, if you can get paid to speak, a speaker

I’m looking for someone to write a book about finding the best balance in life between form and content. Content is what you love to do; form is what you have to do. The goal: maximize content, minimize form.

If you love to write, your goal is to spend as great a percentage of your time writing as you can, and as small a percentage as possible doing everything else. There’s a tension between maximizing your writing time and all the other things you have to do to build your career. So you to keep fine-tuning the most productive ways to use your time to achieve your short- and long-term goals.

If this was easy, everyone would be doing it. You have what it takes but no time to waste. So if you don’t have comments or questions, resume your quest now.

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Filed Under: Book Publishing, Getting a Book Published, Literary Agents, Publishing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,