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If you want to write for a living, you already know that getting published and staying published is no piece of cake...especially if you want to write fiction.
"So What ARE the Secrets to Making It
as a Career Novelist?"
Around the time I sold my first novel, would-be writers started asking me how to
get into writing. After I'd been making a full-time living at it for a few years, other writers started asking me how survive in writing, and sometimes how to survive
writing itself. |
Writing: The Scary Truth
200,000 books are published in English every year (as of 2006---it may be more than that now). An insignificant handful of those chart on the Times list or on the USA Today list.
Only about 20,000 of those books ever get to sit on a bookstore shelf, and most of the books that do, don't sell. The average book makes $500 in its lifetime---which means that half of all books published make even less.
If you're pitching your work to the pro markets, you have to realize as well that for every hundred books that crosses an editor's desk, about one sells.
That's 1%
If you're thinking One out of a hundred is way better odds than I thought, don't. That one out of a hundred includes all the writers like me who sell repeatedly and who are submitting our next manuscripts through our agents, as well as the handful of first novelists whose books survived pre-readers and the horrors of the slush pile to even make it to an editor's desk. Only one percent of THOSE books sell.
Major publishers may only buy a book or two a year from first-time novelists. Bigger houses may buy a dozen, or a couple dozen.
If you're going into this business unprepared, you might as well be playing the lottery.
Unfortunately, playing the lottery is a lousy career plan.
Writing Does Not Have to Be A Lottery
It CAN Be a Wonderful Career
- When you're a writer, you work your own hours.
- You're home for your family.
- You build the future you want, in which you develop your own products and find and nurture your own markets.
- You win your audience, and even if you change publishers, you can bring your readers with you.
- Your job won't go overseas.
- You explore your world in new ways, and discover amazing things daily.
- Best of all, you create. You CREATE. You bring your visions and dreams to life---and a day spent doing that is better than a day spent doing just about anything else.
Yes, crud still happens, problems still crop up. If you hit big right out of the starting gate, they happen sometimes.
If you live in the midlist, which is where almost everyone ends up, you have to be faster on your feet, more determined, more willing to try new things, more willing to take chances.
However, when you have a system, when you have a plan, when you understand not just how things work but WHY they work,
you roll with the punches. You bounce back. You keep going---and you
keep being able to love what you do, in spite of setbacks,
disappointments, and difficulties.
Enter How To Think Sideways:
Career Survival School For Writers
Breathe. Unclench your hands. You can have a career as a writer, even if you've never hit (or even tripped over) the Times list, even if you're not living in New York, even if you've never been a celebrity, a politician, or a criminal mastermind with that next hot "tell-all".
In the past 17 years, I've sold 32 novels to New York publishers, I currently have about a million books in print, and I'm still writing and selling full-time. I'm as much a live-from-the-trenches writer as it's possible to be---and I was a registered nurse working at a hospital in Laurinburg, North Carolina when I beat the odds and went full-time. You can't get too much farther from the center of publishing than that.
It's still possible to get and keep a writing gig, even when markets are tough, agents are hard to find, and editors reject almost everything they see.
Let me tell you why...
Because markets have always been tough, agents (at least good agents) have always been hard to get, and editors have always rejected almost everything that crossed their desks.
That is the nature of the beast.
I want this course.
The Beast Is Beatable
- Maybe you want to write full time. I do it, and it's the best job on the planet.
- Maybe you'd really prefer to supplement a day job by selling your stories. Also wonderful, and I did that before I did this.
- And maybe you're not interested in commercial publishing at all... but you would like to develop an audience for your self-pubbed work that's broader than your mom, your best friend, and your long-suffering spouse.
All of these are good goals, and they all have the same critical truth in common: You want to reach people with your words.
You have an achievable goal.
To get where you want to be, you need to be willing to work. You need to know what to work on. And you need a system that will allow you to get consistently good, that is, to produce repeatable results.
Repeatable Results.
Because that's what a writing career is---you writing solid, entertaining book after solid, entertaining book.
So What Gets You Your Writing Gig?
- YOU and Your MUSE:
You have to know how to get your conscious mind and your unconscious
mind---think of them as your YOU and your MUSE---to work together
reliably and consistently to give you a steady stream of fresh ideas, good characters, and compelling plots.
- YOU and Your Material: You have to have a solid grasp of how to consistently
put fresh ideas, good characters, and compelling plots---your
materials---into stories that start big, middle grippingly, and finish
huge.
- YOU and Your Audience: You have to be able to present your unfinished ideas for unwritten books to the people who might buy them, agents and editors---and if you sell, then you have to be able to consistently deliver what you promised, on time, and in the expected form and quality. Every time out of the gate, you have to win over agents, editors, and most importantly, readers. Your Audience.
Notice that emphasis on consistency? Writing careers are not one book. They are a string of good books. If you're waiting for lightning to strike, you might get lucky once. But the person who has the lightning rod is the person who can summon the lightning. Consistently.
How To Think Sideways Is Your Lightning Rod
My students and I are doing something different here, and I've added a handful of testimonials below to back me up in case you don't want to take a peek inside the classroom.
However, if you DO want to see one board with uncensored student comments being posted live, you can do that, too. The majority of the boards have been hidden from guests because they contain students working on their assignments, and helping each other with research, and discussing in a fair amount of detail the projects they're writing. I've left this one open to the public, though. It'll open in a new window, and when you close that window---after reading as much or as little as you'd like---you'll be back here.
Take A Peek Inside the Class
I have started work on the course and I have to say I'm completely surprised about the first lesson and how it relates to my life and making it better, not just writing. This first lesson seems more about helping fix the problems of the writer first, not just the writing. A lot of what I am reading rings true to parts in my life that are painful to acknowledge. The whole first lesson is phenomenal but the part about changing your way of thinking in your honest to goodness LIVING LIFE (not just the writing part of your brain) is the best part for me. You can't be a writer living free for a little bit of the time and creating incredible stories and then a victim in the rest of your life. I get that now. Rebecca D. |
And...
I got the sweet spot lesson yesterday . . . I
kind of felt a bit ho-hum, mind-maps, yeah yeah about it, but I duly
sellotaped my papers together and got going . . . .
"Ellsea" |
And...
In the past all the conflict I could ever come up with was in the characters' backstory.
"Sapphire" |
And...
The lesson on the 4 barriers to success was phenomenal. Oddly, it was all stuff I knew, once I thought about it, but you brought it together in such a succinct and easy to remember way that it was extremely powerful. I even shared two of the phrases with my middle daughter in a discussion about riding bikes...she is extremely fearful of falling, of hurting herself, of making mistakes, and though she is nearly twelve she barely knows how to ride a bike because of all this. I shared the "safe never starts, perfect never finishes" part with her, and told her if she never takes a risk, she'll never move toward her dreams, and if she never makes any mistakes, she'll never learn. I told her she couldn't get any better if she never practiced, and if she was afraid to get hurt or to make mistakes she would never get herself to practice--a viscious cycle. I don't know if it did any good, but it was a useful thing to use in one of those "mommy lectures". Megan Wiseman |
And...
I found one thing incredibly helpful -- and that was to stop looking at everything as a disaster and a problem and start looking for ways to make some good out of it. I have been in such a bad mood over the last several months that I stopped looking for opportunities to make things better. I
started changing that this morning. I was still up at dawn -- again --
and annoyed. Then I remembered how I used to be up to dawn quite often,
and I loved to go walking at dawn. So I grabbed the camera and headed
out, and I came home, went to bed, slept for a few hours and got back up looking for more things I could do to change the general annoyance into something positive. I
think it's going to transfer over to the writing side, too -- though
maybe not with the current project which is just a problem in general.
But Lazette Gifford |
And this one.
So I'm reading over Lesson 3, and my Muse starts knocking on my skull. I've spent a lot of time ignoring my
muse, and never realized it. Up until today, odd pictures or phrases
would pop into my head, and since they didn't appear to be related to
whatever I was working on...I ignored it, all in the name of 'focus".
Who knew?
"BrklynWriter" |
And ...
| ... Then came along Lesson 10. Read through the main article and the Muse started jumping up and down. By halfway through the Technique sheet the Muse took over, much too impatient to wait a second longer. Into a blank sheet we went, and there was the answer to the story, the buildup that HAD to happen as the book progressed, and the dramatic conclusion, ALL OF WHICH WERE THE LOGICAL UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE 2 BOOKS BEFORE IT! Okay, I'm squeeing in delight here. NOW I can go back and apply techniques from the other lessons, because I finally found my story! Who needs a sugar rush with a rush like this! WHEEEEEE! Razz "Julieann" |
And finally this one.
Holly, I've been writing professionally for a living for the past 9 years and your Lesson 1, Break the Thinking Barriers, made me think long and hard about what I've been doing all this time and what I'd rather be doing - and why I haven't been doing it all this time. Thank you for the wake up call - and thanks also for the brutal honesty. Lee Masterson |
Take me to the checkout.
Look at what you'll be learning:
In Month One,
you'll learn to clear out the four thinking obstacles that have stood
in the way of your success in the past, you'll learn how to discover
your own "genre" that you can take with you wherever you go in the
publishing world, you'll learn how to work with your Muse, and you'll
create ideas on a time limit---but without pressure---and not just
figure out which ideas are worth writing, but learn how to improve your
keepers.
Sideways Thinking: Ideas | |
| Week 1 | How to Break the Four "Thinking" Barriers to Your Success In your first week, you will:
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| Week 2 | How to Discover Your Writing "Sweet Spot" In your second week, you will:
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| Week 3 | How to Generate Ideas On a Deadline In your third week, you will:
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| Week 4 | How to Recognize and Build On Good Ideas In your fourth week, you will:
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In Month Two you will take the ideas you built in your first month and develop your system for planning projects that you need to write, that you can be passionate about, and you'll use your system to plan your project. (When I talk about projects, I'm mostly talking about writing novels, but you can adapt the material in this course for screenplays, short stories, non-fiction, and any other form of creative writing.)
Sideways Thinking: Project Planning | |
| Week 5 | How to Define Your Project's Needs In week five, you will:
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| Week 6 | How to Discover (or Create) Your Project's Market In your sixth week, you will:
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| Week 7 | How to Develop Your Personal Project System In your eighth week, you will:
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| Week 8 | How to Plan Your Project While NOT Killing Your Story In week eight, you'll:
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In Month Three,
you'll begin writing your project, you'll learn how to plan
serendipity, you'll learn how to put together selling proposals, and
you'll discover how to get from the first part of your story into the
middle (a point where a LOT of writers' stories die) without running
out of gas.
I can feel some of you thinking "three months?" and worrying if this
course is going to slow your work down. Let me put your mind at ease.
It doesn't take me three months to get up and running on most of my
books. Some, sure, but those are huge projects that require massive
worldbuilding in advance. Most of the time I can be ready to write in a
week or two. My delays come in waiting for the project to sell after I
pitch it.
Remember, you're learning a system for producing consistent results as well as writing a project in this course, and it's learning the system and its techniques and tools that takes the time.
Sideways Thinking: First Chapters | |
| Week 9 | How to Write From Inside Your Story In your ninth week, you will:
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| Week 10 | How to "Plan" Surprises that Surprise Even You In your tenth week, you'll:
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| Week 11 | How to Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, and Sample Chapters In week eleven, you will:
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| Week 12 | How to Create, Complicate, and Solve Problems In week twelve, you'll:
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In Month Four, you'll be into the second big hurdle of projects---keeping things interesting in the middle. I'll show you how to bring in fresh ideas, discover where your Muse hid those surprises from Month Three, you'll discover ways to bring your stories to life that you've never even imagined, and you'll learn how to tell when your project is going wrong before you've written the whole thing---and how to get it going right again.
Sideways Thinking: Middles | |
| Week 13 | "Can't I Just Kill Them All?" In your thirteenth week, you will:
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| Week 14 | How to Find and Use Your "Planned" Surprises In week fourteen, you will:
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| Week 15 | How to "Hire" Spies, and Why Your Project Needs Them In week fifteen, you'll:
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| Week 16 | How to Assess Your Progress and Make Mid-Course Corrections In week sixteen, you'll:
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In Month Five, you'll learn how to work with the people who need to have your change your project---without wrecking your project. You learn how to find the ending that fits your beginning, you'll learn how to adjust to some of those nasty career bumps that land on all writers sooner or later, and you'll learn how to write your ending so that you bring it in BIG. Because the beginning sells the book. The ending sells the NEXT book.
Sideways Thinking: Endings | |
| Week 17 | How to Use Story Gravity to Get to Your Ending In week seventeen, you'll:
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| Week 18 | How to Find the RIGHT Ending In your eighteenth week, you will:
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| Week 19 | "What If The Book Is Wrecked?"
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| Week 20 | How to Write the Ending That Sells the Next Book In the twentieth week, you'll:
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In Month Six, you'll learn how to plan your revision (no, you don't just print out a copy of your manuscript and start scribbling on page one), you'll learn how to keep the parts of the book that must be in there for it to be the book you wrote, you'll learn how to consistently hit deadlines, and you'll learn how to do the whole thing all over again. And again.
Sideways Thinking: Revision |
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| Week 21 | How to Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, and Artists, and Not Wreck Your Project In week twenty-one, you'll:
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| Week 22 | How to Plan Your Revision In week twenty-two, you'll:
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| Week 23 | How to NOT Fix What Ain't Broken (While Still Fixing What Is) In your twenty-third lesson, you'll:
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| Week 24 | How to Deliver What You Promised and What They Want On Deadline |
And in the grand finale,
Sideways Thinking: Doing It Again |
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| Week 25 | How to NOT Be a One-Book Wonder---Learn to Produce Repeatable Results In your last official lesson, you'll learn the single most important lesson of all:
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| Bonus Lesson | My current students are suggesting additional lessons they'd like to have thrown in. Not sure what the bonus lesson will be, but it'll be something cool. If this comment is still here (instead of the name of the lesson) it's not too late to join the course and put in your own request. |
You can take this course on your time, no matter where on the planet you live. Your lessons will be delivered to your private student page once week or every other week, depending on the schedule you choose. BUT you'll work at your own pace---the lessons will arrive once a week, but you are under no pressure to finish them on any sort of schedule. Take six months or two years---you won't pay a dime extra if you need extra time.
What you see listed above is just the lessons. There's more. A lot more.
That's okay. I'm convinced.
You'll also get:
- A monthly video introducing you to the month's big concept
- Weekly technique demos
- A monthly checklist of all the steps you take to work your way through that portion of the system
- A monthly Q&A where I answer the questions you've asked about the course on the board
- Private workgroups of no more than 20 students, where you can (IF you choose---the workgroups are entirely optional) brainstorm with colleagues
- And a class discussion board where you can network and research with all of your classmates
But if you've been looking over the site, you already knew about these things.
What you didn't know is this:
- I'm ALSO including some of my own proposals---ones that sold AND ones that didn't---in the course.
- I'm throwing in the occasional crit letter from an editor or agent.
- I'm giving you first drafts and final drafts of some of my published books, including but not limited to Hawkspar.
- You'll get the line-per-scene from the brutal Hawkspar revision.
- You'll receive some of my worldbuilding and development notes, and get a feel for the way things change as project development goes along.
- You'll get some of my sketches and maps.
- You'll even get copies of some of my brainstorming sessions from my notebooks.
In other words, you'll get a look at not just what I've done right, but what I've screwed up. You can learn directly from my mistakes instead of reinventing them all on your own.
But there's still more than that.
Charter Students who complete the course will be able to upgrade for free to Charter Graduate status.
- For just the price of the course, you'll get free lifetime upgrades---and
I'll upgrade the course with every new class that goes through, as I
add to the Q&As, find ways to improve existing lessons, think of
more things you need to know, add in new examples of my work that
illustrate specific points and lessons, and develop new techniques in
my own career.
- You'll have free lifetime access to your private workgroup board and to the network of colleagues you've created on the student discussion board.
I won't be able to keep lifetime upgrades and access free forever. Eventually bandwidth will require that I add a small usage fee for graduates who want to stay on. I'll keep it reasonable. But reasonable for later classes isn't the same as free for you.
Finally you'll get the Charter Member price on the course.
Because I will continue to add to and improve the course, the price will eventually go up. I don't know by how much, I don't know when. I'm not going to wave my arms around and scream "Buy, Buy, Buy Now!" at you.
If you're still reading clear down here, you've already decided you want the course. Now you're just waiting to find out if you can afford it.
Yes. Tell me now.
If you read the discussions on my weblog where I explained what the course was (though in considerably less detail than here, and without so much as a whisper regarding the bonuses I've added,) you read where I asked folks to tell me what they thought the course would be worth. If you missed them, here are a few quotes from the comments on my weblog:
A per month charge of $250 would be a bargain for something like this - six months would only be $1,500. Other courses on this scale can be $2,500 or more. Make it $100 a month, and it just might be the biggest steal on the Internet. Of course, can I afford that much? Not right now… I know a lot of the rest of you can’t either, and you probably want my head after seeing the figures I just posted. But remember, Holly is giving up a pretty good chunk of six months’ time for this. And putting a lot of work into creating the course, and the cost of creation. The need for smaller courses means the cost / hourly return of the course is spread among fewer people. Fair is fair. We just have to figure out how to be fair, and still get the course we want. :-) WanderingAuthor While I have bought three of your other courses, I have never bought the kind of big course you are offering here. So, as far as price goes, I have to defer to those who have bought that type of thing from other sources. It has been my experience with you that you go way beyond what others offer (I’m more familiar with books and free websites about the writing process). It’s my opinion that you need to price your course on par with these others in order to get a return on the tremendous amount of time, effort and creativity you put into it. I honestly don’t think $50/month is enough for the course you’re describing. You can’t shortchange yourself. Of course, having said that, I have never been able to put that kind of money into a writing course. I’m very tempted, though, because this is YOU offering it, so I’ll have to consider it some more. EKCarmel
"I’m up way too late, so no long comment. A few thoughts: while $100 a month does sound reasonable, I personally can’t afford it right now, even more so because exchange would make it more than that..." Wolverine Given the scope of what you’re offering, anything less than $100 a month seems to me like you’d be short-changing yourself and selling the program short. This in spite of the fact that $100 a month would be an enormous stretch for me personally right now, and I’d probably have to save up for it, and take the course the second (or third) time you offer it. Celtfiddler I was thinking about pricing, and when I was taking weekly harp lessons my classes were $140 per month. I think, given that, the $100 range would be not unfair, at least for the first small classes — that’s a bit less than the harp lessons, because they’re not one-on-one, but not too much less, because they require more prep for you (my harp teacher taught out of a book that she hadn’t written, after all).Coraa "I think I wasn’t really thinking of this in terms of the college-level online courses I’ve taken. Now that I’ve readjusted my view to include that, I agree with the other folks suggesting a higher price. For instance, I took a screenwriting course from UCLA Extension, that was about $2000 for two quarters (let’s see, that’s roughly 5 weeks or so?). So about $200 a week, I guess if I’m remembering the length correctly (I could be way off though; my memory is like swiss cheese…the parts that are there are tasty but there are lots of holes). "Hopefully, Holly can find some kind of compromise between the huge expense of a college-level course, and the minor expense of the small-to-medium courses and clinics she’s done so far. As celtfiddler said, she would have to charge at least $100 to really get paid anything close to what she’s worth…so I have a feeling she will end up charging something that is just slightly *below* what she is worth, making this course even more of a bargain for us given the high quality instruction she always provides." Wisemoon
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I Didn't Just Write The Book
I Invented The System
The folks above were trying to figure prices based on the bare-bones lessons, without any of the bonuses listed (or at that point even considered).
This is not guitar lessons (which currently run $200/month for one lesson per week where I live). This isn't a standard college course taught out of a textbook by a research assistant.
This is a one-of-a-kind course: how to create and survive in your own writing career, created and taught by a full-time writer doing just that.
The material in the course is not a re-hash of everything you've read in every writer's book you own. I don't work that way. You're getting unique content, nearly a quarter century of my hard-won experience in how to stay employed as a working novelist---because before I learned how to do this right and then spent 17 years doing that, I spent seven years learning an amazing number of ways to do the job wrong. I'll steer you around my many, many mistakes while getting you to the system, techniques, and processes that work.
So, yes, I could charge $2500 for this course, and know that I was giving you your money's worth. But I won't.
Nor am I going to charge $1000
$750...? $500...?
Still too much. How do you feel about...
One pizza per week?
Or a bit more than one movie ticket, but way less than two?
(Where I live, anyway.)
Option 1 for the course is $47 per month for six months. Over 26 lessons, that breaks down to $10.85 per lesson. A not-too-bad pizza without any drinks...and no tip for the delivery guy (poor guy). Or one movie ticket and maybe a drink. But no popcorn.
I wanted to keep the price down, so I did. But I kept adding goodies, extras, bonuses, features---this course has expanded beyond anything either I or my current students ever imagined. I have everything I can think of in here that will help you reach your career writing goals, whether you want to publish professionally, in small press, or by self-pubbing.
This is everything I know, nothing held back. A complete and total brain-dump on how I do what I do, laid out in step-by-step fashion so you can do it too.
And I know that $47 per month is
still out of reach for some folks.
So Option 2 is $25 per month for twelve months. This is the identical course you'd receive in six months, except with lessons coming once every two weeks instead of every week. If you're already scrambling for time and a new lesson on your student page every week would make you feel pressured to do it that week, this is also a great option.
Why You Shouldn't Buy The Course
How To Think Sideways: Career Survival Training For Writers isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone, and I won't pretend thatit is. If any of these describe you, you're going to be disappointed:
- Don't buy How To Think Sideways if you are looking for a magic bullet that will let you sell everything you write.
- Don't
buy if you're looking for a one-size-fits-all system that will plug you
into a generic career stamping out cookie-cutter book after
cookie-cutter book.
- If
the only writers on your map are New York Times bestsellers, and the
only career you'll be happy with is being the next Stephen King/
J.K.Rowling/ Stephanie Meyer, you are not gonna be happy with me.
- The
book market is going through some rapid and strange changes, and the
definitions of "writer" and "publisher" are changing. Yes, I've sold 32
novels so far to major New York publishers. But I've also
self-pubbed a line of writing books and writing courses. I'm equally
proud of both my publishing tracks. If you think new markets aren't
worth pursuing right along with old markets, you don't want this course.
- Finally, while there are wonderful opportunities all across the publishing spectrum, the writers who succeed long-term are the ones who work hard, learn their craft, constantly test themselves, and who above all else persist. If you're looking for instant or easy, you've picked the wrong career field, not just the wrong course.
This course is for the writer who wants to write, the writer whose idea of fun connects with time spent in front of the keyboard, coming up with cool ideas and bringing them to life, and then finding places to find the readers who will love your stories as much as you do.
If you're that writer, then this is the course you've been looking for.
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Yes, Holly! I want to learn How To Think Sideways in Career Survival School for Writers today. I have read and agree to the legal disclaimers below. You have two payment options:
You'll choose the option you want after you click the Subscribe button below. Click here for quick instructions on using a Credit Card through PayPal You will receive your first lesson instantly, even if it's 2:00 AM. Every effort has been made to accurately represent this product and its potential. Please remember that each individual’s success depends on his or her background, dedication, desire and motivation. As with any publishing endeavor, there is no guarantee that you will achieve publication. Disclaimer | Terms of Service | Anti-Spam Policy | Privacy Policy |
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Everyone says "Get A Mentor" ... but Did Anyone Tell You Where?
Just about every successful writer will tell you the quickest way to writing success is to find a mentor---someone who does what you want to do for a living and who is willing to show you the ropes.
But people who actually write full-time for a living AND who are willing to share what they know aren't exactly falling off trees. Yet that's what I'm offering with How to Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers.
Click here to get the help you've been looking for.
Holly Lisle
P.S. The course sells as a six-month subscription for $47/mon., or as a twelve-month subscription for $25/mon., and I guarantee your satisfaction. You'll be able to quit at any time. If you quit before the second half of any month, you'll receive a full refund for that month. If you quit later in the month, you'll receive a pro-rata refund for any lessons not received.