Life is Short, Art is Long

…quoting the old Greeks from so long ago. This isn’t an excuse, just reality.

Hi there ,

What your reading or listening to is a new format I’m trying out. Mainly because my emails are a little on the long side and my email coach liked when I created a podcast. So I can put stuff in here and tell you all about it. Best of both worlds for both of us.

Glad to have you here again.

Lots of stuff happening this week.

News:

Still expecting our last two calves to drop. [Update: just back from the evening pasture walk – found a nice bull calf getting its first meal from it’s heifer mother.] October is really late, but those they’re all fine. Any week now. Had some wild ducks on our pond which squeal instead of quacking. And they dive to surface on the other side of the pond. That’s a nice break. And I found the cows really like leftover apples, bad spots and all. But I don’t feed them more than treats. Hard to tell who’s training who…

Inspirational:

There’s an old Amerindian trick you can use to protect yourself from critical people around you. Did I mention that several people consider thoughts to be contagious? Well, it would be nice to have a simple solution that works for much more than critical thought infections – if you mentally draw a white circle around you, this will keep you from mental (and some believe even physical) harm. Claude Bristol shared that secret in his Magic of Believing.

Organizational:

This week, consider your ability to deal with life in a sort of 4-rung organizational ladder:

• At the top is your goal, that burning desire.
• Below that are your overarching strategies. The broad strokes of what you have to do to achieve, attain, or accomplish what you most want.
• Below that are your tactical plans that might deal with only one step of that strategy.
• The next rung down is your to-do steps, which you lay out daily to accomplish your planning.

The closer you are to the bottom, your work on each one gets more actionable and more specific. .

Goals:

Apply that ladder to your own goals this coming week. Do you have a set of broad steps that need to be in place for your goal to succeed? And plans for that next strategic step you should be taking?  And daily steps to get that planning done for real?

Try these and let me know.

…and now for the rest of the story:

The Farm:

Yes, that is one cute calf. That was her first and everything went well. Sometimes the calves have trouble finding what they should be sucking on, so this was a big relief. One more to go.

The Content Business:

This may cover a lot of ground to bring you up to speed. I haven’t been able to tell you everything as there is just so much and I hate to fill people’s email boxes up.

The Writing & Publishing Series

Is basically wrapped up, as far as the writing – well, the new stuff. I recognized that I needed to apply what I’ve been finding to my own books. After I got those two new books up to a 3rd proof, I saw that what I needed to do was to go back and update my first book in this series. And it was incredibly surprising to see how much progress has been made in just three years. Practically, the update will be a nearly complete re-write. Then I’ll give it away to get people into this series.

The whole area of teaching people how to write and publish has been over-saturated for years. The top”sellers” in this category are all free. So the real use of this area is to get readers and email subscriptions. I’ve got 7 books in this series, and I need to create a collection. That is where any income will come from. The main thing is to get this book series verified with proper keywords and descriptions and linked to each other. Also, I’ll update the reader magnets in the ads as well as the landing page they all go to.

Lots of work. All I’m not doing is to record the audio books for these. But I already have a podcast, so that just needs links.

Frankly, I’m wrapping up this area. Probably nothing new to come out after this. All the research is now complete.

Other Updates and the Belief Course

Next after that is to update a series I created out of an book I already had the audio for. It needs a new collection with audio linked to each chapter. Also verify the metadata for each book.

Finally, I’ll then get back to my Believe, Succeed, and Live Free book (yes, that’s a new title.) This will be 7 books and include the Living Sensical manifesto as a giveaway. I’ll go ahead and record all this audio as well, releasing a short audiobook for each ebook, and then compile everything together into one final book, which will be ebook, paperback, deluxe hardback, audiobook, and CD.

The Belief book will also become a course later, which is where we’ve been heading all this time.

New Projects Coming Up

Again, I just have to complete old projects in order to start new ones.

With this latest writing research, it tells me what is needed to actually create a bestselling book series.  I’m still slogging out some of the details to this, so its a bit rough. The skeleton of it is a longish series of short stories in fable-fantasy which tell morals. I haven’t worked out the actual production scene of it, but plan to start with the New Years.

Of course, you all get the previews, early releases, and special discounts. Just the people subscribed to this list. (Tell your friends to sign up if they aren’t. It’s going to be a helluva ride.)

The Rest of Life

Taking a steer to processing this week. Our last calf should be born tonight, with this weather shift we are in the middle of. (That’s mostly in God’s hands, you might say. A vet told me that it’s a joint decision between the cow and her calf.)

And I’m doing caricatures over at Columbia College in Columbia MO for their homecoming this weekend. Busy fall.

What to Expect

Coming up this week should be at least that first book updated (you’ll get a copy). Maybe I’ll publish one of those last two, although I’m tempted to put them both up at once. Books in a series do better released two weeks apart, interestingly. I’d like to get these out of the way.

That last research has gotten me quite hopeful about how any decent series of books can find their audience and start paying their way. I just have to test this on these existing books series I have, and publish the 7-book series that isn’t quite ready, and then something quite big with that fiction project.

Unless something changes, the Belief course will be off a ways. Just too many variables to consider that it will be able to be completed easily and then earn income. Plus, the muse is calling for more new books. I may feel different once I have all that audio done.

Well, that was plenty.

See you next time.

Robert

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