SFA 102 – How to Keep from Stressing out as an Author While Still Achieving Your Goals

For this week’s show, we were joined by Mark Leslie Lefebvre, author, podcaster, and Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. He and Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn recently published The Relaxed Author, a book aimed at helping authors to chill out a bit and not be so stressed. It covers relaxed writing, relaxed publishing, relaxed marketing, and relaxed business, and we asked Mark a couple of questions related to each category.

Here they are:

Most of our listeners probably know you, but how about telling us a bit about yourself and what prompted you and Joanna to collaborate on this project?
When I’m writing a first draft, I love having daily word count goals. It’s something I did long before I published my first book and quit the day job, because I found it was really easy to just not get anything done when writing wasn’t a daily habit, but maybe that doesn’t work for everyone. What do you think?
I love that you mention to write in a series. Writing in a series (in the same series–not just multiple series) has been a huge key to my success, especially with a chaotic life. The advice frequently given is to write in a series because you’ll make more money. But I know several authors who hate revisiting the same characters and places over and over again–doing so is painful and boring to them, and thinking about writing series instead of stand-alones causes them a great deal of stress. First, what’s the general advice you give (from the book), and second, what would you tell authors who just can’t do it and are stressing over it a lot?
You talk a bit about scheduling time to refill the creative well and relax. This is something I struggle with. Particularly when sales are down, any time I’m not at least poking at the current writing project I’m freaking out about not poking at the current writing project.
If you have enough success as an author, chances are you’ll start getting approached by people interested in acquiring rights for things like audio books and translations. In the book, you talk about valuing your work and being cautious with what rights you sign away. Can you talk a bit about that?
Both of you are huge supporters of publishing wide. But in your book, you mention to publish wide OR publish just in KU. With the goal of being a relaxed author in mind, what sort of approach do you recommend authors from all walks of life and at all levels of stress take when it comes to picking retailers?
We recently had Dave Chesson on and talked about the Amazon honeymoon period, where he experimented and found that Amazon does treat new releases favorably. Because I’ve experienced that organic boost myself, I like to focus a good chunk of marketing efforts on the weeks around launching a new series, but I know this can be stressful for authors as they worry about lining everything up. What do you guys advise when it comes to marketing and book launches?
What advice do you have when it comes to simplifying your author brand and website?
What do you think are the bare minimum things authors need to do when it comes to marketing so that they can still have success?
It’s easy to get tunnel vision on the moment-to-moment challenges of being an author. Between meeting deadlines and stressing over sales, I know I’ve been hyper focused on the next few weeks and haven’t really been thinking about the next few years or decades. You talk in the book about focusing on the long-term. What sort of stuff should we be keeping in mind for the long haul?
I’d love to hear more about what you hit on when it comes to continuing working a day job and writing. I love that you mentioned the fact that so many people are focusing on quitting their day jobs and that that doesn’t have to be the goal. Would you elaborate on that? How does removing the goal of quitting a day job help an author be more relaxed?
For authors who are at the point where they’re thinking of quitting their day job, what are some things they should have lined up before taking that step?
What do you think the future holds for authors, and what can we do to be ready for it–without stressing out too much?

If you want to pick up a copy of The Relaxed Author, you can find a link to your favorite retailer here.

Thank you for listening, and thank you to Joshua Pearson for producing the show!

Six Figure Authors

SFA 102 - How to Keep from Stressing out as an Author While Still Achieving Your Goals

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