Hello friend, 👋🏾
This was a fairly busy week! I released a new book, Beastly Kingdom, the second in my dystopian paranormal romance series, while attending ApollyCon, a yearly book signing event where 1200 readers gather to meet their favorite authors. It was the best of times and the most exhausting of times.
But since writing is so solitary, and the people who read my books are usually, at best, just thumbnails on a screen, or more often vague notions of human beings at the other end of a royalty report, getting to meet them in person and share in their excitement of all things book-related is energizing.
Whenever authors get together, talk inevitably turns to the industry, and many of my conversations with author friends over the past weekend related to the tension of art vs. commerce. We’re all trying to figure out how to write books that feed our creativity while also being business owners trying to turn a profit. Regardless of whether you publish independently, traditionally, or both, this topic is never far from mind.
The creative and the commercial also show up in the links I found worth sharing. If you find this weekly email useful, please hit the ❤️ button and share it with a friend!
📝 Too Many Brains?
Author Mason Currey, known for the Daily Rituals books, confronted the question of “Why it’s so hard for writers to ask for money for their work”. He shares some really helpful ideas such as the fact that writing already requires a critical editor brain and an optimistic creator brain.
Asking for money introduces a third brain into the mix: the promoter! This is the excitable hustler-schemer within me, and though it can be fun to indulge this side of my personality, he has a tendency to: a.) scare away the creator side; and b.) bring on the full judgmental wrath of the editor side, which loathes his self-promotional schtick.
As someone who is constantly at war with the need to actually promote the work I spend so much time and energy creating, this resonated. There are plenty of very talented, business-minded writers and other creatives who have no problem being their own hype-people and selling their work. But I know enough who are like me, vaguely uncomfortable with it all and feeling like selling is not one of our strengths, that I think it will continue to be an ongoing struggle.
📝 The Origins of Creativity
This review in the New Yorker of The Cult of Creativity by Samuel W. Franklin (possible paywall) made me think about a term I use daily in a new way. According to the book, the very concept of creativity is relatively new. “In Franklin’s account, creativity, the concept, popped up after the Second World War in two contexts. One was the field of psychology.” This included devising ways to measure intelligence, including the IQ test. “Franklin says that, around 1950, psychologists realized that no one had done the same thing for creativity. There was no creativity I.Q. or SAT, no science of creativity or means of measuring it.”
Assessing creativity empirically had many inherent problems outlined in the article and tended to break down on the basis of race and class. “To put it a little more cynically, the tests seem to have been designed so that the right people passed them.”
The other context in which creativity shows up is the workplace, where it was a sought after attribute in both business and military sectors, possibly as a way to better compete with the Soviets.
Of course, the modern understanding and usage of creativity has expanded since its apparent origins. So much so, that learning how this concept developed was really surprising and definitely worth a read.
📝 The Thief of Joy
I found this short video featuring author Simon Sinek extremely relatable. It’s on what I’ve heard referred to as "comparisonitis," aka the tendency for us to compare ourselves to others.
Sinek tells a story about an author he constantly compared himself to, whose strengths he felt represented his own weaknesses. I suspect many authors can relate to his tale of comparing his Amazon ranking to another person's and rejoicing when his was higher and being upset when the other author's was higher. It's like we create our own personal nemeses and fight battles in our heads.
However, when Sinek met this "nemesis" at an event, he was very real and vulnerable and admitted how intimidated he was by this author's success. Only to find that this author was similarly intimidated by him. Would that we all could come to such realizations.
💡Create an Immersive Fictional World
Do you feel overwhelmed by where to start creating an engaging world for your story? Stuck on exactly how to make a living, breathing fictional world that exists not just on the page, but in the minds and hearts of your readers? Let me teach you an organized, proven method for creating a rich and vibrant world in my course Imaginary Worldbuilding.
🚀 Quick Bites
An inspiring Instagram reel on separating art from commerce by author & artist Susan diRende. My favorite part: “Light can act like a particle or a wave at any given moment, although it is actually both. So think of creativity as the wave; the artifact as the particle of your art… uncouple the selling from the creative spirit.”
And for those trying to sell your particles (and since I’ve nearly written a whole edition without mentioning ChatGPT) here is an 8 minute video on getting ChatGPT to create an entire Facebook ads campaign. Can the bot do all my marketing for me?
🎙️ My Imaginary Friends: Episode 215
The My Imaginary Friends podcast is a weekly, behind the scenes look at the journey of a working author navigating traditional and self-publishing, where I share insights on the writing life, creativity, inspiration, and this week’s best thing.
Watch on YouTube | Listen to the podcast
Show notes:
Scribecount for book sales tracking
Imaginarium Book Festival - May 20-21, 2023, Washington, DC
"Why it’s so hard for writers to ask for money for their work" by Mason Currey
Backwater Books "Meet the Romance Writers of Maryland" - Ellicott City, MD - May 4, 2023
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Image prompt: A penguin surfing a wave in a rainbow colored ocean. — Canva text to image.