resources Archives - K.V. Fischer

Publish Don’t Perish Tip #14 — OPEN THE DOOR TO YOUR POSSIBILITIES IN 2021!

As we thankfully close the door on 2020, in Publish Don’t Perish Tip #14, we open the door to your exciting possibilities in 2021. Will those possibilities take us back to this world as we knew it prior to COVID – 19? No. The world will probably never be exactly how we knew it — we’ll have a new “normal,” but the possibilities will still abound in 2021 and beyond! As writers, let’s take a look at a few of those possibilities.

Take Your Passion to the Next Level

We write because it is our passion. It’s not easy — it takes courage. It’s a lonely road we often question. As writers, we want to make a difference in the lives of others. What we write can change a life, save a life, provide an escape from the difficulties of life … .

Persevere in your dream, your passion, and take it to the next level!

Persevere in your dreams, your passions, and take it to the next level!

Take Your Business to the Next Level

Writing is a business. As in any business, you need to gather your resources so that you have access to all the tools of the trade. Take it to the next level!

Have you set up a limited liability company or corporation? If you have, are you truly treating it as a separate entity so that there are no blurred lines from you personally? This is critical to avoid “piercing the corporate veil,” thereby increasing your exposure to personal liability.

If you have not set up a separate company and treat your writing business as a sole proprietorship, you may want to talk to your tax consultant to explore the tax benefits available with a limited liability company or corporation.

wedding, wedding planner, books, Hidden Bloodlines, wedding budget — Karen VDH Fischer, MS, RD, JD

If you independently publish your work, you may want to consider setting up a company to limit your personal liability regardless. If you live in Colorado or Florida, I can help you, since I am licensed in both states and understand the passion of a writer and what’s needed to protect a writer’s interests. Feel free to reach out to me at kvdhfischer@gmail.com. My legal website, www.KVFischerLaw.com will be launched shortly. At this site, you will be able to find helpful articles for educational purposes among other things.

Get to the End

Do what it takes to finish your book — get to the end. Amanda Cabot wrote an incredible series with the acronym APODS that will help you do just that. In Tip #5, Apply APODS to Your Life, I provide a brief summary of the articles in Amanda’s series along with a link to each so you can delve deeper. I can’t recommend this series enough for every aspect of your life!

I am excited about the possibilities that 2021 will bring! What possibilities do you see?

Publish Don’t Perish – Tip #13: Gather Your Resources

As writers, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the process of getting that story from your head to “paper.” However, in the publishing environment we find ourselves in today, it’s important to gather your resources. Authors need to know how to edit their work, set up a business, get that book published (traditionally or independently), and market their book, among other things.

The purpose of this article is to present you with a resource page that will provide you with additional tools to make your journey easier. You’ll find experienced authors and professionals who can coach you, assist you with your writing, editing, technology, and business as well as marketing tips.

The Author Toolbox — Candee Fick

writers, authors, resources, toolbox, encouragement, fun, romantic suspense, journey, writer’s journey, adventure, tips, direction, research, joy, funny, inspiration, thyme, time, Focus on Love — Author Candee Fick

Author Candee Fick accumulated over 100 of her favorite tools for authors and shared them in The Author Toolbox. She also provides mentoring, hands-on advice, and personal coaching in person for those in the northern Colorado area, or via Skype, or phone for those further away. Candee is also the acquisitions and content editor for a Christian press.

Watch your grammar – Amanda Cabot

Since the mechanics of writing is critical, it’s essential to watch your grammar. Amanda Cabot’s R & R: Raves and Rants provides you with that essential tool that will help you avoid those inevitable mistakes. In my article, Publish Don’t Perish – Tip #12: Watch Your Grammar, I provide a brief description and link to each of Amanda’s invaluable articles which can be found on L.A. Sartor’s blog, An Indie Adventure — another invaluable resource.

Pageant Wagon Publishing — Kathryn Ross

clove, lemon oil, cinnamon, garden, harvestwriters, spice, fall recipes, editors, healing, manuscript — Kathryn Ross

If you’re interested in a Christian writing mentor or an independent publisher who can help you develop your book idea into a print publication, you may want to reach out to Kathryn Ross, Author, Book Shepherd, Independent Publisher, Pageant Wagon Publishing, 856-205-9334.

Time management & the multifaceted solution to getting to the end -apods

Amanda Cabot’s APODS Series is an incredible must read for not only authors, but EVERYONE. In Publish Don’t Perish – Tip #5: Apply APODS to Your Life, hI provide a one stop post that provides a link with a summary of each of Amanda’s articles for your convenience. You won’t want to miss it.

legal advice for your business

If you live in Colorado or Florida and need assistance with your business, intellectual property concerns, or estate planning, see what Karen VDH Fischer LLC has to offer or email me at kvdhfischer@gmail.com.

If you have any recommendations for our fellow writers, please feel free to share!

APODS – Priorities: The Opportunity Cost by Amanda Cabot

This month we’re going to conclude our discussion of priorities by talking about opportunity cost. Are you familiar with the term? The basic concept is that resources, whether time, money, energy, or something else are finite and that the cost of something is not absolute. Rather than measuring dollars or minutes, opportunity cost measures what we give up when we make a choice.

Consider a child whose allowance is enough to allow him to buy either the video game he wants or the T-shirt with his favorite sports star’s picture on it. If he chooses the game, he cannot buy the T-shirt. Therefore, the opportunity cost is the T-shirt. When he buys the video game, he’s making the decision that it’s more important to him than the T-shirt.

As writers, we make the same decisions each time we set (or ignore) our priorities. In our case, the precious and finite resource is time.

If you remember one thing from this post, I hope it will be the following:

Time to write is not free.

You might want to print that out and post it everywhere you posted the picture of your goal, because it’s equally important.

In your quest to reach “The End,” you should ask yourself two questions.

(1) How important is writing to me?

(2) What sacrifices am I willing to make?

You can say that writing is important, but as the adage reminds us, actions speak more loudly than words. If you procrastinate, if going to a movie or (shudder) cleaning your house is what you choose to do rather than finish your chapter, you’re demonstrating that writing isn’t as important as you claim it is.

opportunity costs, priorities — Actions Speak Louder than Words

The second question is where opportunity cost becomes critical. I used the word “sacrifices” deliberately, because there will be not simply tradeoffs but true sacrifices if you make writing and reaching “The End” your highest priority. There will be times when you’ll have to turn down an invitation you’d like to accept, simply because you need that time to write. The cost of that invitation is finishing the chapter. Don’t mislead yourself by saying, “just this once won’t matter.” Each choice you make is significant.

As you accept the fact that time is finite and that you will have to make choices about how to spend your time, it’s important to decide what will not get done. I recommend the following three steps.

Review your current time use analysis. Remember how you tracked your time for at least a week and categorized how you were spending it? That analysis is an invaluable resource and a key to establishing priorities.

pain, Natural pain remedies, NSAID, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, Motrin, Advil, Aleve, Ecotrin, Bayer, Ecotrin, aspirin, naproxen sodium, and ibuprofen, inflammation, Arnicare — Warning — There May Be Side Effects

Differentiate between urgent and important tasks. If your child has broken her arm, taking her to the doctor is urgent. Doing laundry may be important, but – unlike an urgent task – it can be delayed.

Substitute writing for the least value-added tasks. Did you discover that you spent a lot of time watching television or reading tweets and Facebook posts? While you might consider those important, are they more valuable than writing another chapter? The opportunity cost of the time you spend on them is time you didn’t spend writing.

Establishing and following priorities isn’t easy, but it’s essential if you want to reach “The End.” Each time you make a decision about how to spend your time, consider the opportunity cost. And, one final bit of advice: “No” is an acceptable response when someone asks you to do something that will interfere with your writing time.

Amanda Cabot is no stranger to getting to “The End.” She juggled a sixty-hour a week job with nonnegotiable deadlines and building a house long-distance at the same time that she wrote two books a year. Whether or not she kept her sanity during that time is debatable. Amanda is the best-selling author of over thirty novels, eight novellas, four non-fiction books, and what she describes as enough technical articles to cure insomnia in a medium-sized city.

Her most recent release is A Tender Hope, the third in the Cimarron Creek trilogy.

Amanda Cabot, Cimarron Creek Trilogy — A Tender Hope, by Amanda Cabot

You can find Amanda at:

www.amandacabot.com
https://www.facebook.com/amanda.j.cabot
https://twitter.com/AmandaJoyCabot/
http://amandajoycabot.blogspot.com/

So Little Time to Conquer This Mountain with Candee Fick

I am so happy to have Candee Fick as my guest today on Thyme for Writers! Candee Fick is a multi-published author in both fiction and non-fiction. She is also the wife of a high school football coach and the mother of three children, including a daughter with a rare genetic syndrome. When not busy with her day job or writing, she can be found cheering on the home team at sporting events, exploring the great Colorado outdoors, indulging in dark chocolate, and savoring happily-ever-after endings through a good book.

So Little Time to Conquer This Mountain

by Candee Fick

Most writers fall into the “I wish I had more time to write” camp while those lucky few who seem to have plenty of writing time are still members of the “My To-Do list never ends” club. The pursuit of publication or a writing career can seem as daunting and exhausting as scaling Everest, but every year thousands put their fingers on a keyboard…only to discover—or rather remember—that everyone has the same limited amount of time in which to get it all done.

And by all, I mean life. Take me for example. As a wife and mother, my days get filled with cleaning, cooking, laundry, homework, carpools, and sports. Relationships with family and friends require regular interactions and if I’m not taking care of myself with enough rest, exercise, and mental growth, I can fall apart quickly. Add in a day job and my calendar is stuffed to overflowing.

Except I’m also a writer with a coaching business. I dream up adventures and arrange words on a page in order to bring characters and settings to life. Once those polished stories are in the capable hands of my publisher, I do it all again. It might be easy to squeeze in an hour or two per day before the kids get up or in lieu of television in the evenings, but crafting stories is only one side of this mountain.

time, mountain, writing, perseverence — So Little Time to Conquer This Mountain

The other side of writing’s Everest is marketing. It’s the side that beginning writers don’t see in the excitement of starting a book, but soon the rumors swirl as old-timers drop words like social media, platform, website, tax deductions, book launches, and blog tours. The faint of heart stick their fingers in their ears, yell “Lalalalala,” and revise their first chapters again or jump from idea to idea, never finishing anything. Those who are serious about writing perk up and listen for tips about how to navigate the trail ahead.

There are two main reasons that I wrote The Author Toolbox. First was to share what I’ve learned the hard way so newer authors can work smarter as they build their books, platforms, businesses, and careers. But mostly, I wrote it all down in order to give writers hope. It’s a long climb, but there is a way to get there and you are not alone in the journey.

If you know what the next steps of your personal journey involve, then you can deliberately and strategically focus your limited time on the activities that will move you closer to your goals. Your writing goal this week might be hitting a first draft word count or editing another chapter. You might even block out an hour to pre-schedule the week’s social media posts or organize office paperwork.

We have so little time available to conquer the mountains in our lives, but my hope is that you find your next steps…then take them. Because the view from the top is worth every moment of work.

You may reach Candee or obtain her works at the following links:

www.CandeeFick.com
www.TheAuthorToolbox.com (shortcuts to a page on my site with the index of blog posts)
www.Facebook.com/Author.Candee.Fick
www.Twitter.com/CandeeFick
All of my books: https://www.amazon.com/Candee-Fick/e/B0056B94VE/
The Author Toolbox: https://www.amazon.com/Author-Toolbox-Practical-Platform-Business/dp/099920100X/

The Author Toolbox is filled with over 100 practical tools to help today’s author build a book, a platform, a business, and a career. Why? So we can get it all done while freeing up both time and mental energy to do the one thing we really desire…write.

Thyme for Writers

Thyme for Writers is a new blog series for writers and book lovers. As many of you know, my website focuses on adding spice to your life, whether it be with nutrition and health tips, delicious recipes, or through Hidden Bloodlines, my romantic suspense novel and associated adventures in creating it and its sequel.

Most of us are writers in one form or another (whether by choice or necessity). The purpose of this series is to help you along the way with

tips,
direction,
encouragement,
inspiration,
the research and adventure behind some of your favorite works, or
just something interesting and fun to bring a smile to your face.

While I may be authoring some, my goal is to invite fascinating guests with different life experiences and areas of expertise.

The Author Toolbox

My first guest will be Candee Fick, author of The Author Toolbox. She is the reason I am able to create and maintain my own website. As a genuine techno-idiot, I volunteered to be Candee’s beta test project. Our goal was to determine if it’s possible for someone like me to gain the skills necessary to build a website and how long it would take. Needless to say, Candee is a miracle worker. In fairly short order, I learned the skills necessary and have continued merrily on my way.

Candee is an incredible writer and teacher and painstakingly created a blog series meant to help writers in all stages get their work created and a website begun. She compiled and added to this series in The Author Toolbox. Keep in mind, the tools provided and skills taught aren’t just for writers of books. Many pursue different artistic careers and businesses, but in today’s business environment, websites and social media dominate the marketplace if you want to succeed. The days of the telephone book are over. The reality is that websites and social media require writing.

Where to Start

There are thousands of writing guides and resources out there, but where should one begin? I have personally found that The Author Toolbox is the best first stop. Candee not only provides “how to…” information, but makes recommendations on easy to use resources to make life easier. On September 7 I am excited to have Candee Fick as my first guest on Thyme for Writers. Stay tuned… .

If you have something to share and you’d like to be a guest, please email me at karen@KarenVanDenHeuvel.com.

Take Your Passion to the Next Level

Take Your Business to the Next Level

Get to the End

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The Author Toolbox — Candee Fick

Watch your grammar – Amanda Cabot

Pageant Wagon Publishing — Kathryn Ross

Time management & the multifaceted solution to getting to the end -apods

legal advice for your business

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So Little Time to Conquer This Mountain

You may reach Candee or obtain her works at the following links:

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The Author Toolbox

Where to Start

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