October 17, 2017

Utilizing your Patreon, or building a tribe of loyal hamsters

Many of you have asked me in the last few weeks about how I use Patreon and how to do it if you’re just starting out, or how to grow your audience if you have none, or how to grow your small audience THIS MUCH BIGGER.

So here are my thoughts.

Number one: I’m learning as I go, so all wisdom I’ll dispense here is “wisdom in process.”

Number two: My Patreon is slowly growing at a rate of about $100 a year (so 3 years ago it was at $100 per month, and now it’s at $300 per month). It's growing because I haven’t given up and keep posting there weekly, but I also haven't been focused on growing it. Who knows what will happen once I do.

July 31, 2017

"Unpacking" yourself in your writing

by Ksenia Anske

Kely Sarmiento wrote: "I'm writing about experiences I've lived through. It's hard because the problem is not writing, it's facing myself and putting myself out there, being vulnerable. I start writing, and it's like I open a Pandora's box. I can't seem to finish the frigging thing because I want to put everything in there. It's this "all or nothing" dynamic—I tiptoe around myself, work on the corners, the edges and all around. I don't go to the core of it all. It might be about having the patience to somehow "unpack" myself, but how do I do that when I have a storm inside me that is screaming to be put somewhere? It certainly feels like I have to write or else I'll go nuts, but at the same time I'm not accomplishing much."

Dear Kely, thank you for this. This is beautiful, what you wrote. So here is the thing.

Start small.

May 14, 2017

10 tips on turning your book writing into a business

by Ksenia Anske

After writing full-time for five years and making intermittent sales (they would happen randomly, without my understanding of why at that particular moment, and why that particular book), I finally got fed up with being poor and have told you (or rather, screamed at you from various Internet roofs) that I'll be treating my book writing as a business from now on. Starting tomorrow, to be exact. Because tomorrow, on May 15th, it will be exactly five years since I began writing the first draft of my first trilogy, Siren Suicides. Many of you have asked what I meant by this, some have misunderstood that I'll be betraying my past mantras (like concentrating on the craft and letting your readers sell for you), and some have cheered me on with the rightful, "FINALLY." Yeah, finally.

So, why now?

January 28, 2017

I'm so tired of being afraid

by Ksenia Anske

I need to make a stand, but I don't know how. I have allowed one of my followers on Ello troll a woman, an amazing artist, whose post I have reposted to support her—a picture of her standing astride a motorcycle with a sign that read: IF YOU GRAB MY PUSSY, I WILL RIP OFF YOUR DICK. I have reposted it because I often told men face to face I will do exactly that if they tried putting their hands on me. I told it half-jokingly and half-seriously, that exact line, and they got it and backed off. So when I saw it, I was ecstatic. Here was a woman bold enough to say it. I felt we were sisters. And then I did everything wrong. I was sleeping in Moscow while that shitface of a troll started weaving his game. And when I woke up and checked the thread of comments, it exploded. So I thought, "I'll reason with him. I will be kind and give love. Trolls are the ones that need most love." What I didn't see was what my inaction was doing to the woman whose post I reposted. Not only did she have to suffer through his harassment because I didn't immediately block him, she ultimately had to delete it, and she felt used by me and demoralized, and she's right. I was helplessly watching the harassment evolve while doing nothing, afraid of somehow hurting the troll while he was hurting her and other people, and when I did finally block him, after many of you have asked me to do so, it was too late.

November 16, 2016

What’s it like to live under fascist dictatorship

by Ksenia Anske

I am writing this post at the request of my writing mentor who said "We all want to know!" Irkadura was supposed to be the book that drew from the wealth of information I'm sitting on, having grown up in Soviet Union, lived in GDR in my teenage years, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having returned to Moscow where shortly after snipers were shooting people from the roofs, and the country as I knew it ceased to exist. This was the book he asked me to write. It didn't turn out the way he envisioned it, as I was still going through lots of personal pain which spilled itself out in Irkadura. I wasn't ready. Nor am I ready now. TUBE is not what I thought it'd be either. I'm still healing, still trying to find the ground under my feet. Hell, I'm not even supporting myself financially yet, after turning my life upside down and giving everything up to write and finding happiness where I didn't think was any. But I will try. Because these are the times when I must speak, and speak I will.