"How To Have A Writing Career
in Spite of Changing Markets,
Declining Brick & Mortar Book Sales,
And Life's Bizarre Sense of Humor"

From: Holly Lisle
3:49 PM
Thursday, July 17, 2008

I know I'm supposed to use marketing hype and hypnotic words and a load of other garbage in order to "sell" you How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers.

But here's the deal. You're hearing from me on a regular basis, you write to me a lot, we've developed a connection. This letter isn't going public. It's just for my folks---my blog readers, folks who get my newsletters. No affiliates or JV partners are selling this course, nobody is here who doesn't know me, there are no outside links coming in here.

So let's skip the hype. I'll tell you about the course, and you decide whether or not it's right for you.

Let me start by doing things really wrong:

Why You Shouldn't Buy The Course

How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone, and I won't pretend that it 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 writers who want to write, writers 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 ideas as much as you do.

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.

I've heard from various editors that getting-out-of-the-slush-pile odds are somewhere between one in 1,000 for some relatively open short-story markets to one in 10,000 for some moderately open novel markets. I've only discussed this with a few editors (some of my own) so industry-wide those odds could be a little better. They could be a lot worse.

But, out of the work good enough for agents to put their reputations on the line to represent it (yes, my agent shoots me down from time to time), and out of the first novels that so shone that they made it out of the slush pile and up a line of pre-readers and screeners and assistants to finally reach an editor---of THAT stuff, which is all probably pretty good---only one book in a hundred sells.

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.

So Why Would Anyone Want To
Make Writing A Career?

You have your reasons. So do I.

• 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.

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're 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.

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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

Let's look at what's in the course:

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Finally, 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.

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 per week (you'll get an e-mail from me reminding you when it's time for the next one). You'll work at your own pace---the lessons will arrive once a week, but you are under no pressure to finish them in that length of time.

What you see listed above is just the lessons. There's more. A lot more.

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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.

• Charter Graduates will 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.
  
  
• Charter Graduates will have free lifetime access to your private workgroups, boards and to the network of colleagues you've created on the student discussion board.

I'll keep this free for graduates of as many classes as I can. Eventually bandwidth will require that I add a small usage fee for graduates of later classes. I'll keep it reasonable for them. But reasonable isn't the same as free, you know?

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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.

I'm still figuring price, but it's going to be very good. My objective is to give you much, much more than you're paying for. I want to wow you. I want you to be thrilled by the quality and quantity of what you're learning. I want to see you reach your dream.

And I intend to make the course affordable.

On Tuesday at 12 NOON EDT,
the course will go on sale privately for pre-registered members ONLY.

When all 300 seats sell out, the doors will close.

That could happen in twenty-four hours. It could happen in two. I have no way of knowing, but I've made as many seats available as I dare. I won't add more.

However, I know How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers is going to be more affordable than most folks think, so it may well sell out before it has time to go public. All seats are first-come, first served.

If any seats not sold in 24 hours, they will become available publicly.

For you best chance to get a seat,
you need to pre-register.

Preregistration is now closed.

Holly Lisle

P.S. The course will sell as an affordable monthly subscription, and I guarantee your satisfaction. You'll be able to quit at any time. If you quit before the third lesson of any month lands on your private student page, you'll receive a full refund for that month. If you quit later in the month, you'll receive a pro-rata refund for all lessons not received.