Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

The Three Pillars of Marketing

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in Marketing

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is what I call the Three Pillars of Marketing. Everything you will ever do to market your novel falls under one of these three pillars. But let’s deal with the elephant in the room first…

All Novelists Hate Marketing

Yes, all novelists. At least those with a conscience, and all the novelists I know are good people who have a conscience. None of us wants to be a marketing weasel. And all of us have run into marketing weasels. 

For the last few months, a robo-caller has been calling my house many times every week, claiming to be from “The Home Improvement Group.” I’m not interested. I have talked to a couple of the actual humans behind the robo-caller and asked them to put me on their Do Not Call List. But they keep calling. Over and over. And they fake their Caller ID, so it’s not always obvious that it’s them again. 

Let’s define a marketing weasel. A marketing weasel is somebody trying to sell you something under one of the following three conditions:

  • You don’t need it. 
  • You don’t want it. 
  • You can’t afford it.

So how do you avoid being a marketing weasel? It’s really pretty simple. You aim your marketing ONLY at your Target Audience. Let’s review the meaning of that term.  

Your Target Audience

Your Target Audience is the set of all the people in the world who would love your fiction, if only they knew you existed. Let’s be clear that some fraction of your Target Audience actually does know you exist. But not all of them. Most of them never heard of you.

It doesn’t make sense to market your novel to people outside your Target Audience. They’re just not that into the kind of fiction you write. Some of them might like your novel, sorta-kinda. Most of them just won’t see the point. Some will actively hate your novel. 

It makes all kinds of sense to market your novel to people inside your Target Audience. By definition, they want your novel—or they would if they knew it existed. 

And if someone wants your novel, then they also need it, because all humans need Story. Story is how we make sense of the world. Story is what keeps us alive and helps us thrive. Story is the rocket fuel humanity runs on. 

And books are pretty cheap, as compared to most other stuff. If somebody wants your book and needs it, they can almost certainly afford it. 

I strongly recommend that you market your work ONLY to people in your Target Audience. They want it; they need it; they can afford it. If you tell them about it, you’re not being a weasel. You’re doing them a favor.  

But then how do you actually do your marketing? There are three things you need to do, and only three things. But you have to do them in the right order. I call these the Three Pillars of Marketing. Here they are:

  1. Attract your Target Audience—let them know you exist.
  2. Engage your Target Audience—earn their trust by being trustworthy.
  3. Convert your Target Audience—ask for the sale.

The First Pillar—Attracting Your Target Audience

Most people in your Target Audience don’t know you exist. They don’t know you wrote a novel. They don’t know what your novel is about. 

Attracting your Target Audience just means that you somehow make that connection so they know those basic facts about you and your novel. There are thousands of marketing tactics to make that connection. We can talk about those later. I’ve talked about some of them in previous posts on this blog and in the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine that I used to publish. I’ll continue to teach specific marketing tactics in future blog posts, because tactics come and tactics go. But the principle is forever—do what it takes to Attract your Target Audience and ONLY your Target Audience.

The crucial thing is that any marketing tactics you use to make the connection should be honest. They should make it crystal clear to each person that one of two things is true:

  • They are in your Target Audience. 
  • They are not in your Target Audience.

When choosing marketing tactics to Attract people in your Target Audience, give enough information to repel people who are not in your Target Audience. That’s right, repel them. You want to drive them away. You only want people who are in your Target Audience. If somebody is dying of thirst and you don’t have water, don’t try to sell them pretzels. Point them to somebody who sells water. 

As a side note, one reason for writing a One-Sentence Summary of your novel is that it Attracts people in your Target Audience and repels people who are not in it. Both sides of this coin are important. 

The Second Pillar—Engaging With Your Target Audience

Assume somebody knows you exist and that you wrote a novel that would interest them. It’s way too early to try to sell them your novel. 

That’s like asking somebody you just met to marry you. They may be attracted to you. But they don’t KNOW you. They don’t trust you. Yet.

Engaging with your Target Audience means that you spend time earning their trust. You earn trust by being trust-worthy. This may take a long time or it may happen quickly. If you were selling them a big-ticket item, like a life-insurance policy or a ticket to the moon, you would need to spend quite a lot of time. Big-ticket items require a lot of trust. 

A novel is a smaller-ticket item. The money is probably not the main issue. If your book is priced in the $5 to $25 range, that’s usually not a big deal to a reader. Readers pay that kind of money all the time. 

The main issue is the reader’s time. It may take 5 or 10 hours to read your novel. Your reader can never get back those hours, if you waste them. So you need to show that you can be trusted to give 5 or 10 hours worth of value. 

You have many possible tactics to Engage with people in your Target Audience. I’ve talked about some of them in the past and I’ll talk about many of them in the future. But the principle is the same for all these tactics—you must show that your potential reader can trust you with several hours of their precious time. 

The Third Pillar—Converting Your Target Audience

Assume you’ve Attracted someone in your Target Audience and you’ve Engaged with them enough that they know they can trust you. Now what? 

Ask for the sale! Don’t make it complicated. Give them a way to buy. 

Converting your Target Audience means that you make it easy for them to buy your novel. There are a number of ways to do this. The principle is always the same. Make it obvious how to buy your novel, and make it as simple as possible.

Three Marketing Rules To Live By

Let me summarize with three rules to live by:

  • Don’t try to Convert somebody you haven’t Engaged with. 
  • Don’t try to Engage with somebody you haven’t Attracted. 
  • Don’t try to Attract somebody who’s not in your Target Audience.

Homework:

  • Think about the last novel you bought. How and when were you Attracted? How were you Engaged and how long did it take? How were you Converted? 
  • Have you ever bought a novel, and then it turned out you were not in the Target Audience? What went wrong that led you to buy a novel that wasn’t right for you?

Using AI Effectively

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in Technology

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. My topic today is the very controversial question of how novelists might use AI effectively. 

Why Blog About AI?

AI is massively controversial. So why am I blogging about it? Because you, my Loyal Blog Readers, asked me to. I recently asked you all to let me know what topics you’d like me to blog about. Just about half of all the questions you raised had to do with AI. Some of these questions were specific, and some were open-ended. 

I have huge trepidation in tackling this subject. Nothing I say will make everyone happy. But my thinking is that this is important to talk about. AI is part of our future, whether we like it or not. There are a lot of issues, and my space is limited, so I can’t cover everything, and I don’t intend this as the final word. Some caveats first.

Let’s be clear that AI is a huge resource hog. It uses massive amounts of water and electricity, and for some people this is a show-stopper. If that’s you, then I respect your opinion. I agree that this is a gigantic problem that is extremely urgent. But this blog post is not about environmental issues of AI. 

Furthermore, AI may well be a threat to humanity. It’s plausible that AI could take over the world and decide that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. If you refuse to use AI because it’s a potential Skynet, then I respect your opinion. Again, this is extremely urgent. But this blog post is not about the doomsday prospects of AI. 

Some of you have decided that, despite the very real downsides of AI, you still want to use it, because it also has some very real upsides. But you want to use AI effectively and ethically. The rest of this blog post contains a few thoughts on that. (Only a few. Whole books could be written on this, and I’ve got limited word-count.)

First, we need to distinguish two very different ways of using AI.

Two Ways to Use AI

Amazon’s content guidelines distinguish between “AI-generated” content and “AI-assisted” content. 

  • Content is “AI-generated” if an AI created the content, even if you made revisions afterward. 
  • Content is “AI-assisted” if you created the content and then used AI tools to help improve it (editing, error-checking, etc.) 

Amazon requires you to disclose AI-generated content, but not AI-assisted.

For me, personally, AI-generated content is a hard no. I have no interest in reading a novel written by an AI. I have no interest in writing a novel with AI. I think most authors agree with me on this, but a few don’t. If you use AI-generated content, then you have an ethical responsibility to let potential readers know that. 

I don’t have a problem with AI-assisted content. AI can be useful in doing research, in brainstorming ideas, in editing. Let’s talk about that.

Using AI for Research

AI is well-known to “hallucinate” sometimes. “Hallucinate” means that it gives a wrong answer to a question, often very emphatically. 

In my experience, this is more of a problem on topics that are “fuzzy” than on topics that are well-defined. I have seen more hallucinations when I ask questions about history than when I ask about math. 

If you’re going to use AI for research, then treat it the same way you’d treat a human who has read a lot of books but has a fallible memory. Humans will sometimes reconstruct memories based on what they think “ought to have happened.” I do that. You do that. It’s how our brains are wired. AI does that too.

So check everything you possibly can that an AI tells you. Ask for sources. If the reasoning seems fishy, push back on it. Most AIs will apologize when you catch them in an error. But they may then give you another wrong answer. So never blindly trust what an AI tells you. AI is a conversation partner. It’s not God.

Using AI for Brainstorming

Some people think better about their story in dialogue with someone. That’s how my brain is wired. I “think by talking.” So I sometimes need to solve a story problem by talking it out with somebody else, even if they’re not a writer, even if they don’t understand my story. The act of trying to explain things to them helps me understand it better myself. 

AI can be a sounding-board, if you need this kind of help. I have sometimes used an AI to talk out an issue in my story. There are a couple of points to be wary about. 

Some AIs can be very sycophantic. They’ll tell you what a genius you are, what a marvelous story you’re spinning. Ignore this. The AI is designed to keep you chatting. The more flattery it heaps on you, the longer you keep talking. 

Some AIs will offer up suggestions for how to improve your story. Take these with a huge grain of salt. The AI doesn’t fully understand the world we live, much less your fictional storyworld. It may hand you a mediocre idea. Be ready to say no, or to argue with it. But also be ready to see a useful idea when it comes up. Sometimes a bad idea is a stepping-stone to a good idea. 

Some AIs will then offer to write the scene for you. I always reject this offer flat-out. No, I don’t want an AI to write my story. Even if it could write better than me (I doubt it) I don’t want AI to do my writing. The joy of writing is in the writing. 

Using AI for Editing

A lot of writers use AI to read their manuscript and make suggestions for how to improve it. I have not done this myself. However, I have used an AI to critique software I’ve written, and this has always been useful.

Once again, you should be wary of the sycophantic AI. It will tell you that your work is a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A little of this is helpful, if you’re like most writers and think your writing is the worst drivel imaginable. If you need a little positive feedback to get you through the day, then this can be a good thing. But when you start believing you’re a Staggering Genius, that’s the time to tell the AI to dial it back. 

In general, the critique an AI will give you has variable quality. Sometimes it will nail a serious problem. Other times, it will confidently tell you something that’s plain wrong. It’s on you to use your critical thinking skills to tell the difference. Treat the critique from an AI the same way you’d treat the critique from a human. Push back and explain why. This will force the AI to try again, and sometimes it gets it right on the second try. Or the tenth. 

Homework:

  • Are you OK with using AI at all? Why or why not? 
  • Are you OK with AI-generated content? Why or why not? 
  • Are you OK with AI-assisted content? Why or why not? 
  • Do you know enough about your storyworld to be able to do research using AI and check its claims? 
  • Do you need a sounding board to help you brainstorm your fiction? 
  • What types of editing might you allow an AI to handle, and are you able to tell good editing from bad? 
  • If you’d like to discuss this with me, feel free to email me. This is a tough subject, and I know some of you have strong opinions. I’m here to listen, and you may well change my mind or teach me something. I’m OK with that. 

Why Your Story Question Matters

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in Craft

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. My topic today is: the “Story Question” of your novel.

What is a Story Question?

Every novel has a Story Question—a central question that drives your reader to keep reading. A novel that doesn’t have a strong Story Question is a boring novel, and it’s easy to put down “for later.” But later may never come. A novel that has a strong Story Question keeps the reader turning pages, no matter how late the lying clock says it is.

A central part of your task as a novelist is to create a Story Question in your reader’s mind—a Story Question that won’t quit. As we’ll see, there are naive Story Questions, and there are Story Questions that make your novel unforgettable. 

Examples of Story Questions

A few examples should help clarify things. 

In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf tells the hobbit Frodo very early in the story that the magic ring Frodo has inherited is toxic. It’s so morally dangerous that nobody can be trusted to keep it. The Ring will corrupt all who own it, and the most powerful will be corrupted fastest. And the evil Lord Sauron is looking for it now, because it will greatly increase his power over Middle Earth. The only solution is to unmake the Ring—to cast it into the Crack of Doom where it was forged, many hundred miles away in the evil Land of Mordor, under the watchful eye of Lord Sauron. The Story Question is “Will Frodo destroy the Ring of Power—or will it destroy him?”

In Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin is a six-year-old boy living in a future version of Earth obsessed with fear that an alien ant-like race (the “Buggers”) will return for a Second Invasion. The First Invasion failed, thanks to a once-in-a-millennium military genius named Mazer Rackham. The home planet of the Buggers is many light-years away, but the First Invasion was many years ago, and now the time is growing short. When the Second Invasion comes, who will save the planet? A Battle School orbits the earth where genius children are sequestered in an unnatural environment where they are trained in military arts. The greatest honor any family can have is to give up its son (or occasionally its daughter) to be trained in Battle School. The Story Question is “Will the commanders of Battle School be able to train Ender before the Buggers arrive—or will they break him in their mad rush to beat an impossible deadline?” 

In Outlander, Claire Randall is an English nurse vacationing in Scotland in 1946 with her husband Frank. They were separated for most of the War, and now they’re trying desperately to reconnect. When Claire touches a mysterious standing stone at the mystical site Craigh na Dun, she finds herself transported back in time to 1743. She’s immediately kidnapped by some Scottish rogues and taken many miles away from the standing stone. The Story Question is: “Will Claire find her way back to her own time—and will she go back if she can?” 

How to Raise Your Story Question

So how do you raise the Story Question in your novel? Should you just say it straight out?

You can, but if you do, it’s likely to be very simple and on-the-nose. Readers prefer a complex Story Question, one they participate in, one they figure out for themselves. Once a reader fully understands your Story Question, they feel an ownership in your story, and they’ll be deeply invested in your novel. For hundreds of pages. Maybe thousands.

It’s important to note that the real Story Question is not the naive one that the reader initially sees. A naive Story Question is one-dimensional—a will-he-or-won’t-he proposition. A strong Story Question has a hidden gotcha buried in it.

In The Lord of the Rings, the naive Story Question is: “Will Frodo destroy the Ring of Power?” This assumes that destroying the Ring is easy. Just take it to your nearest Crack of Doom and drop it off. But the Ring corrupts all who touch it, and Frodo has touched the Ring. The nearer Frodo gets to the Crack of Doom, the stronger the Ring’s power, and the greater his urge to keep it. The reader soon realizes that Frodo might not have the moral strength to destroy the Ring. And now it’s a real Story Question, with teeth of iron. The Ring might very well destroy Frodo.

In Ender’s Game, the naive Story Question is: “Will Ender be the Chosen One, the next Alexander the Great?” But all the clues from the first chapter onward scream that he will. So this is not a great Story Question. However, even in the first chapter, it’s clear that Ender is being manipulated by the adults—put in danger from other kids, bullies who are much bigger and stronger. Ender is smarter than any of the others, but brains only go so far in a fight. Can he keep winning, even as the bullies get stronger? And if he keeps winning, will he lose his goodness—that thing that keeps us rooting for him? That’s a much stronger Story Question. Will we still like Ender when he becomes the next Alexander? 

In Outlander, we get a hint of the Story Question in the brilliant first two sentences of the epigraph: “People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman.” So the naive Story Question is “Who is going to disappear?” Soon enough, we guess that it’s Claire, the lead character of the story. When she does disappear, going through time at Craigh na Dun, the Story Question evolves to be a bit more interesting: “Will Claire get back to her own century?” But we’re not done evolving. Claire quickly finds herself attracted to Jamie Fraser, a handsome young Scot. She can deal with mere physical attraction. But then she’s forced to marry him, and she soon realizes that he’s her soul mate. So now the Story Question becomes a terrible dilemma. Maybe Claire doesn’t want to go back. She loved her first husband Frank, yes, but he’s not here. And he’s definitely not Jamie. In a situation like that, what would you do? Now there’s a Story Question to keep you reading until your nails are chewed right through.

Homework

  1. If you subscribe to BookBub, you get an email every day with short summaries of half a dozen novels at great prices. Read through today’s list and look for the Story Question. Is it a naive Story Question or a complex one? Or do you have enough information to even make a guess at what the Story Question is?
  2. Pick your 5 favorite novels of all time. For each one, write down the naive Story Question and any more complex Story Questions that emerge as the story evolves. What is the dilemma that the final Story Question raises?
  3. For the current novel you’re writing, what is the naive Story Question—the one you show the reader first? How far into the story are you before you reveal this Story Question? Do you evolve it later into a more complex Story Question? Can you sharpen it to have a more powerful dilemma? 

Why I’m Switching to Substack

by 2 Comments

in Marketing

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is Substack, a marketing platform for writers. 

What is Substack and Why Should You Care?

Substack started out as an email service provider that was free to all writers. Most email service providers let you start out free, and then they start charging you when you have “enough” subscribers. But Substack is free to all writers, no matter how many subscribers you have, with one very important caveat. 

What’s the caveat? Substack makes no money unless you also earn money. If you earn money, they take a percentage. And Substack makes it easy for writers to “monetize” their writing. Writers can split up their content into a “free tier” and a “paid tier”. The hope is that they’ll attract fans with their free content and then some of those will find it worthwhile to pay for the premium stuff. This model is a lot like Patreon. Substack handles the money transaction and takes a 10% fee, plus the credit card charges. 

The most successful writer on Substack is said to be Heather Cox Richardson, an American history professor who writes a daily column on history and politics. She has more than 3 million subscribers, and is said to earn somewhere between $500k and $1M per month. Yes, per month. 

Substack is More Than Just Email

But Substack has evolved quite a lot over the years. It’s not just an email service provider anymore. It allows you to organize your content into “Publications”—each of which is effectively a mini-website, hosted right there on Substack at no charge to you. Part of that “Publication” can be a blog. Part can be a podcast. You can set up Chats with your subscribers. You can do Live Video. You can post “Notes” in a social-media feed hosted by Substack. And you can use Substack’s Recommendation feature to recommend the Publications of writers you like; writers who like you can in turn recommend your Publication. Substack itself will recommend Publications to readers who might be interested. 

The important thing is that all of this is free to the writer, unless they’re earning money. That’s what caught my attention a few years ago. Free is good. I have used a number of email service providers over the years. I used to use MailChimp. Several years ago, I switched to ConvertKit. Both of these are expensive. I have a bit more than 1000 subscribers for my fiction newsletter and blog. This blog, the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, has around 6600 subscribers. And with the features I currently use on ConvertKit, all those subscribers costs me a fair bit. 

I do like ConvertKit. It’s a powerful tool for serious marketers who produce a lot of content. But I haven’t been producing that much lately. So I don’t get much value out of  the terrific features ConvertKit has. I use just enough of those features that I have to pay. So I’ve been thinking about other options for the past few years. 

Switching Takes A Lot of Work

Let’s be clear that setting up a Publication on Substack takes some serious effort. Recently, I’ve had a lot more time for my writing. I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to take a hard look at Substack and see if it would be worth all the work to switch. 

So I took a couple of hours and did some online research. What I learned is that Substack has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. As I noted above, it ties together email delivery, a website, a blog, a podcast, live-streaming video, and social media. With that pesky “monetization.” 

But it all looked very confusing, so I decided to invest in a course. The one I chose is Substack for Authors, created by a fiction writer named Jaime Buckley. That link will take you to the sales page for Jaime’s course. That link is not an affiliate link. Jaime is not paying me a dime to recommend his course. He doesn’t even know I’m recommending it. But I do recommend it. Very highly. 

I worked through the course in about a week. It’s got 11 modules, each containing multiple videos plus PDF downloads. The transcript of the videos is provided online. I took a lot of notes. What I particularly liked is that Jaime tells you both the why and the how. Both of those are important. You need to work out your why first. Jaime has a very nice marketing philosophy, very much in line with the one I’ve held to for a long time—marketing is about helping people. Once you understand why you’re doing stuff, Jaime also tells you how to do it. Without a lot of fluff. If it only takes 5 minutes to explain something, he doesn’t stretch it out to fill up half an hour. I really appreciated that. My learning time is valuable. 

I’ve created two separate Publications on Substack under my account. One of them is for fans of my novels, and I named it Randy Ingermanson Novels. The other is for people who want to learn how to write and market their novels, and I named it Advanced Fiction Writing. Don’t look for either of these Publications yet. I’ve made both of them Private while I’m setting them up. There’s nothing worse than a half-baked Substack Publication that doesn’t have anything yet. 

Transitioning my Fiction Newsletter/Blog to Substack

I decided to work on the Substack about my own novels first, because that one is simpler. I don’t have any initial plans to monetize it. I’ll simply use it for my existing fiction newsletter and my existing blog about my novels. One thing I’ll be adding is a weekly post with a chapter of my novel-in-progress. Then I can get feedback from my True Fans as I’m writing the book. And I’ll have weekly behind-the-scenes posts about things that my True Fans would find fascinating about the most recent chapter posted. 

I will also replicate my occasional blog posts about my fictional world on Substack. I found it extremely easy to import the existing 60 blog posts that I’ve written over the last 8 years into Substack. It took about 2 seconds to pull them into Substack. Then I took a couple of hours to tweak the content on each post, mainly to insert a note saying that the post was originally published on my blog. But I also added what Substack calls Custom Tags that help the Substack search engine know what content is in each post.

So my Substack Publication for Randy Ingermanson Novels is almost done. It’s taken me a total of about 22 hours, spread out over the last couple of weeks. I think I have about 2 hours left to go, and then the Publication will be ready to launch. (Launch means that I’ll import my email list from ConvertKit into Substack.) I’ll hold off launching for a bit, because I also have a whole other Substack to create, and that’s going to take a similar level of effort. 

Right now, I don’t have any paid tier set up for this Publication. Maybe I will in the future, if I can think of something my True Fans might want to pay for. Some of my True Fans have been reading my fiction for many years. They might want to support the cause, and they might have ideas for cool things I could put in a paid tier. But I’m not too concerned about that right now. Mainly, I want to stop paying for email delivery. 

Transitioning My Advanced Fiction Writing Blog to Substack

Now that I’ve figured out how to do stuff on Substack, the transition of my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog will be fairly easy. But there’s still a lot to do. I expect that I’ll get it all done in about 25 working hours, spread out over the next couple of weeks. 

It’s nice that Substack can import hundreds of blog posts in an eyeblink, but I don’t want to import everything. I’ll focus on the most relevant blog posts over the last few years, the “evergreen” content. 

My regular free content will be very similar to what I’ve been doing already. My current plan is to post one blog post every week—on Organizing or Creating or Marketing. That’s a level of effort I can manage quite well. I will do all in my power to maintain the same standard of quality that I’ve always had for my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog (and the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine before it). 

Will I have a paid tier on Substack? Yes, I will. But the content will be different than the free content. I still need to work out the details, but the core idea is to do what I call “Deep-Dives”. Each of these will go a lot deeper than I can go in a 1000-word blog post. I would like to produce a Deep-Dive on a regular schedule. I’ll decide the precise subject of each Deep-Dive after getting input from paid subscribers. And I’ll keep an archive of all the past Deep-Dives, so paid subscribers will have a growing library of material they can’t get anywhere else on the web. Because the Deep-Dives will focus on the things that I do best, that nobody else teaches. 

I can imagine other payware products that fans of this blog might like, but I’m not going to promise what I can’t deliver. One thing at a time. I have a nice list of “maybe someday” ideas. But I won’t do anything without consulting the loyal fans of Advanced Fiction Writing. Because you know what you need most. If I can deliver what you need, that’s a good deal for both of us. 

Is Substack For You?

You might be wondering if I recommend that you try using Substack to market your own work. I’m agnostic on that question right now. I’ll have a better answer in six months or a year. I’m don’t like recommending things I haven’t tried. 

Almost all of you are novelists, so I think you’ll be interested to hear how my Substack Publication Randy Ingermanson Novels works out for me. I have no idea how it’ll do. I don’t have any immediate plans to monetize it. But I do hope to do a better job in interacting with the True Fans of my fiction. From what I’ve seen, Substack gives a writer all the tools they need to create community. So we’ll see. I’m eager to try it and find out. 

Probably a few of you also write nonfiction. If that’s you, you’ll be able to watch me run my nonfiction Substack Publication Advanced Fiction Writing in the coming months, after I launch. You can’t see anything yet, as I said earlier. I’ll keep both my Publications in Private mode for at least another couple of weeks.  

Once I’m convinced I’ve worked out all the kinks, I’ll do a launch on both my Publications. And then you’ll see what can be done on a nonfiction platorm on Substack. I will make mistakes. I’m human, and mistakes are a particular skill of mine. I trust you, my Loyal Fans, to push back graciously when you see a mistake, and to help me get things on track. I would love to have a fabulous Substack Publication that helps you reach your writing goals, a place where we can all learn together. If that happens, then the project is a success. 

Stay tuned…

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