We have them in spades and so do our fellow humans: an abundance of needs — many of which can’t possibly be addressed all the time or even some of the time. We all have limited time, resources, networks, awareness.

Businesses are all about filling needs. We know this. It’s basic stuff, but we can so easily forget it and overlook that potential in the busy-ness of life and performing our roles. I like returning to the contemplation of needs periodically to re-focus and re-energize my business offerings and attitudes.

• It’s caring — demonstrating concern for others and being present…

As a longtime book publisher, I’m an obsessed fan of best-selling author William Hazelgrove’s ridiculously long email newsletter. I haven’t read a single one of his 17 books, but I regularly pore over his emails and have directed several friends and clients to his newsletter for inspiration and tough-love perspective. My industry knowledge plus years of experience helping authors promote their books and build cottage industries around them give me an insight into how this prolific author and promoter succeeds as a full-time author.

And anyone working on making a full-time living as a creator should study the model revealed…

I come from a long line of gearheads, but for reasons that are even now opaque to me, I personally remain fascinated with the humble minivan. Something about the particular calculus of practicality that goes into the design priorities of a minivan has always appealed to me, so when it came time to buy the vehicle that I would drive from my ancestral home of Albuquerque, NM, to my girlfriend’s place in Missoula, MT, I knew exactly what I wanted.

And I found the perfect one: A 1991 Toyota Previa. A crucial detail about the Previa was that from 1991…

Last month I wrote a business story about a key takeaway from Influencer: The Power to Change Anything (Mc-Graw Hill, 2007). Authors Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, and Swtizler found that one of the problems with bringing about real change in the various areas of our lives is that we only try a handful of methods and our desired outcomes don’t stick. The most successful influencers, by contrast, can employ 30, 40, or more strategies in their efforts.

It got me thinking…if I were the boss of this country, if I could snap some fingers and issue some decrees, which 30…

I’ve been forging and living a hard-to-describe typical workday since I first started hybrid self-employment mash-ups when I was 16, 36 years ago. A book serendipitously discovered early on in the pandemic gave me names and concepts for how I’ve already been living: Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose! Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams.

Models of ‘Refusing to Choose’

Three work-life models from Refuse to Choose aptly describe how a day in my life as a creative multipreneur and coach/consultant is oriented.

The Good Life

Sher says jack-of-all-trades “have many talents, but they have to admit that…

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

An on-the-road, RV lifestyle for authors and writers makes sense right now. Imagine storytellers, poets, journalists, creative documentarians, original thinkers, astute observers, and their literary kin crisscrossing the country en masse, practicing their craft, bringing their words to towns and cities — coffee shops, bookstores, libraries, open-mics, classrooms, auditoriums, and open-air forums. Regrouping nightly with new configurations of peers around a blazing fire, under the stars, in the nation’s campgrounds. Reading their work out loud and getting feedback. Sharing event…

What is an author event? Any situation in which you’re using your status as an author to increase visibility for you and your book/s and/or to make money from that status, your books, or some combination of each. Whether you have one self-published ebook, a dozen traditionally published books, scholarly and professional titles, or a mishmash of book formats and publishing types, you can do author events, and this article is your primer to developing an income stream from that world.

Know the wide world of author events.

• Parties. Every book needs a launch party or series of parties, even a belated party if this was accidentally…

This Accord was adopted at age ten, when its owner’s previous car died in rural Illinois on Thanksgiving night. While somewhat the worse for wear (its left taillight was cracked and held together with mailing tape), it was somehow still a step up from that previous car and served its owner well, providing a smooth drive on her many trips from Chicago to Cincinnati, her hometown. It was on one of these visits — when its owner was in town to help her parents when her mother was undergoing a mastectomy — that her trusty Accord had a fateful encounter…