Last Friday I went out to do a presentation at a local school, talking to kids aged ten to seventeen about becoming a science-fiction and fantasy writer. I’m not usually the guy who gets asked to talk to school-age writers, as evidenced by the notes at the top of my presentation – don’t swear, and don’t mention Horn – and I was actually pretty impressed  when I succeeded in obeying one of those edicts. Talking to kids about writing is kinda weird. See,on the surface, almost all writing advice boils down to three basic tenets: read a lot, write a lot, submit your work. The rest is really a matter of nuance and how to apply that knowledge, neither of which was a strength of mine way back when I was eleven or twelve. Mostly what I ended up thinking about, in terms of the presentation, was the difference between the advice I heard that was actually useful, and the stuff that did actually help me figure out how writing worked. ONE: LEARN TO TOUCH-TYPE WHILE YOU’RE YOUNG When I was thirteen and first faced with the possibility of selecting my own study topics at high school, my mother sat me

There’s nothing like teaching a workshop on something to both clarify your thinking and beliefs, then inspire new insights on a topic. Here’s a little something I puzzled through while writing my workshop for RWA last year. In indie publishing circles (and a lot of other marketing), you’ll often find people talking about sales funnels. The core idea here is moving COLD readers (who don’t know anything about you) through a funnel of information that WARMS them up (gets them excited about your work) and eventually gets them HOT enough to buy. It’s the kind of thing that you’ll find in 90% of indie seminars focused on making a living selling books, so it’s not particularly awe-inspiring or original. But I was revising the slides for this portion of the workshop right before I sat down to write up my case study for a good reader funnel, then tackling the inevitable question of “do I put my books into Kindle Unlimited’s subscription service or go wide and sell from every retailer?”  This is the perennial debate in indie circles, and communities have split because of it. Some folks swear by KU and build their entire business around it, while others recoil