First, I wanted to have a little shout-out. I was on Facebook on Saturday for a few minutes and noticed that some of my past students had made some major accomplishments:
- Martin Shoemaker’s hard science fiction novel The Last Dance hit #1 in its category on Amazon.com and stayed high through the Christmas season, garnering 722 ratings—the vast majority of them being 5-stars. For those who don’t know, hitting over 500 ratings is a major milestone. It ensures that Amazon’s algorithms will bump up the book’s publicity. I’m interested to see how high his sales climb over the next few years. He’s a dedicated writer with a very promising career path.
- Monalisa Foster got a novel contract and an acceptance check for Christmas. Great timing!
- Rebekah R. Ganiere’s romance novel Rekindling Christmas is being made into a film and will start shooting this week! I’m excited for her. Well deserved!
- James Dashner, whose successful Maze Runner movies series recently ended, is getting ready to spring some major news on us. I’m hoping he’s graduated to the level where he has a book-movie joint announcement.
- Brandon Sanderson went to his local Barnes and Noble on Saturday and was asked if he would sign some of the books on his “wall.” Now a lot of popular authors get a little extra shelf-space at the bookstores, but you’ve got to be moving huge numbers of books to merit your own wall! I’m including a picture of it. Wishing him great success!
While on Facebook, though, I happened to see a post by a young woman who had set a goal of publishing her first fantasy novel in 2020. She asked how to go about it and was getting lots of bad advice. Yes, some of the advice would lead her to get published—either self-published or traditionally published, but not published well.
If you do it wrong, getting published can be dangerous. Going to a small publisher who can’t get distribution into bookstores, for example, might cause you to make nothing in royalties, lose your rights to your novel for as long as you live, and waste years of your life. Going to the wrong agent—one who is crooked or just plain incapable of connecting with a publisher, can once again waste years of your life.
Even self-publishing may be a total bomb if you don’t know how to go about it.
I really wanted to help her negotiate the path ahead.
Yet this poor young woman had dozens of tips from people who had no idea that their advice sucked. I suspect that much of it came from people who had never published.
So, I suggested that she go to my website to read some of my posts on the topic—and was blocked by the site administrator for “self-promotion.”
I could have offered the writer a free video that might be helpful. I have a seminar on How to Publish in 2020. (It’s in my writing Compleat Writer’s Program but hasn’t been put up for sale elsewhere.) But I suspected that the site administrator would have deleted that post, too.
I realized that I often feel blocked. I don’t want to tell you when another author is giving you bad advice. They’re my friends and peers, after all, and they’re trying to be helpful.
There are things that publishers, film distributors, bookstore chains, agents and social media companies do that are kind of dangerous to talk about—but that you need to know.
I’ve decided that I need to start a closed group. How cliché. It seems like everyone who works in a counseling business starts something with a lofty title, like “The Billionaire’s Club,” and they usually charge an arm and a leg for it. So I’ve been resisting the idea for years.
I want to share this information only with authors who are driven, who are ready to take the steps forward, who are trustworthy, and who are also willing to share information.
I’m going to call it the Apex Writer’s group. The goal of the group is simple: I want to help take you from wherever you are in your career, (whether you’re just beginning or are in your mid-career) to become an Apex Writer. An Apex Writer is one who sells books by the millions, whose books get wide advertisement, and who understands how to leverage the advertising from the film industry to make major deals before their books are even released.
One study years ago said that it took the average writer seven years to break into publishing, and it took another seven to become a bestseller. What if you could do it in three or four years? What if we could save each other a decade of struggle? I think that we can do it.
It will take more than just good advice. You’ll need to be in a closed group of writers who are learning how to work within the system, and it will be easier if we share information and work as a team.
Now, you might think, “Ah, but I want to self-publish. I don’t want to work in the traditional publishing field.” That’s fine. But you need to understand that even if you’re a self-published author, you’re working inside a field controlled by Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and other mega-corporations.
It won’t be expensive to join the group, but there will be a small charge because, heck, there are costs. There’s my time and expertise, maintenance for websites, and costs for administration. So it will cost a couple hundred per year.
You will have access to a closed group on Facebook, to my Compleat Writer’s Program, to the new bulletin board system going up this week, to regular meetings held online—and to further program benefits as it grows.
If you are interested in applying to the Apex Writer’s group, Click Here to learn all the ways this mastermind will help you write, publish and market your books that’s all included in your membership.
