writing fiction

What Flavor of Success Do You Want

Lynette M Burrows

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines success as “favorable or desired outcome.” That’s like trying to eat a large designer cake in one bite. There are as many interpretations of that as there are people on the planet. And there are traps within personal definitions of success—traps where you give the responsibility away to others. As a result, it’s hard to pin down what success means to you. If you don’t define success for yourself in a realistic way, you may inadvertently say no to success. Think of success in simpler terms. What flavor of success do you want? What does it look like? How do you measure success? Is success a book published, a book sold, a certain number of books sold, a certain amount of money earned? All the usual definitions may leave you unsatisfied. Why? Because most of those things are not in your control. What You Can’t Control You can’t control readers Not how many you get nor how they respond to your book. Even when you do mega-research on your genre, you have no control over a single reader.  You can’t control sales. Certain marketing maneuvers will increase the possibility of sales, but you cannot control the number of sales […]

Hits, Misses, and Challenges

Lynette M Burrows

It’s the beginning of a new quarter. Time to review the hits, misses, and challenges of my intentions for the last quarter. And as everyone knows, the last month of the last quarter was a doozy. This whole first quarter challenged me in unexpected ways.  1st Quarter Intentions If you recall from my post describing intentions, I make a list of intentions for four areas: Making, Managing, Marketing, and Home. At the end of each quarter I review my intentions so I know what my hits, misses, and challenges were. So you can follow my analysis, here’s my list of intentions for the first quarter of 2020. Make:  Resolve problems with the first half of my WIP.  Finish the first draft.  Blog three times a week.  Publish three monthly newsletters. Manage Change to a different email service. Finish an online copywriting class. Read a book once a month. Make regular Social Media posts. Market Complete a second class on Amazon ads. Get new covers for My Soul to Keep and Fellowship.  Print new bookmarks. Increase the size of my mailing list. Home Bring my husband home from the rehab center. Rearrange the bedroom to make it more caregiver friendly. Prepare a […]

Are You Aiming for Their Writing Success?

Lynette M Burrows

These five women authors are the top five of the Best Female Novelists of All Time (adapted from Ranker)  On your road to success, you may wish to follow the path of someone who has been there. In this series of blog posts, we’ll briefly review the writing lives of these authors. When you are aiming for writing success, understanding what others’ success looked like helps.  Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 British author, Virginia Woolf, produced at least ten novels, many short stories, plays, essays, and reviews. Virginia started writing in 1900 at eight years old. Her first published piece appeared in 1915. This home schooled author wrote about artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. Her novels fall into the women’s literary fiction category.  Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. Virginia Woolf While working on her first novel, she asked friends and relatives for advice. Thereafter, she allowed no one to see her manuscripts.  She wrote standing for a while because, like a painter, she wanted to step back from her canvas to get a better view. And she experimented with different […]