July 24, 2017

5 marketing victories I won and learned from

By your request! From eating forbidden apples to riding airborne sharks! While thoroughly naked! Here comes the companion post to the post on five marketing sins I committed and learned from. This time about five marketing victories. So, take off your pants, hold on to the fins (or the tail, or the sides, or the many rows of teeth), and let's take a wild ride into the vast marketing sky the color of nipple-pink.

Despite all my marketing mistakes, I have intuitively (at times), by accident (at other times), and finally, due to gained experience, done some things right. I attribute most of it to learning how to survive at home and on the street (when I was growing up as a kid in Russia, that is). At home I learned to read adults and predict their behavior to escape a spanking or worse. On the street I learned to ask people for things I needed and get them—like free food or free rides. My guide was patterns. I'd look for patterns in behavior, and I'd decide on my next action based on that pattern. This made me a people-reader, a human psychology watcher, and a social engineer.

June 9, 2016

Josey's story: Shards of Glass

by Ksenia Anske

This is Josey's story. I will let it speak for itself. Please read it, and please read other stories written by students enrolled in the Scriber Lake High School Writing Program, recently published in I'm Finally Awake: Young Authors Untangling Old Nightmares, stories of abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, stories that need to be told and heard and understood. These students are our children. Their stories are all that we are.

SHARDS OF GLASS

by Josey Lane Daniel

The ice cold water feels like shards of glass on my skin, causing my jaw to clench.

I swear they do that on purpose.

June 4, 2016

Call for stories

by Ksenia Anske

Send me your stories for Janna. Many of you have already shared your stories of sexual abuse privately with me, via email and messages and letters. I'm going to use some of them, anonymously and perhaps changed to fit the book, perhaps intact as you told them to me, unless you specifically asked me not to share them with anyone. I need more, however. I'm writing the last few chapters, and there is a courtroom scene where Janna publicly tells stories of other women who have endured the same pain that she has endured. I want these stories to be real, it's one of the reasons I'm writing this book. I have heard so many of them from those of you who don't dare to share them publicly, and it's because of this silence that so many of us are still unaware of the horrors that are happening right under our noses. I want to expose it, to make people aware, and so I'm talking for those who can't. I respect your privacy and, therefore, I always turn your stories into fiction where nobody can guess your identities. Moreover, I mix up certain facts that might be too specific and might make someone guess who's behind those stories, but these stories need to be heard and they will be.

May 30, 2016

Self-publishing to-do list

by Ksenia Anske

So Raychel Rose asked me: "Do you have a self-publishing to do list on your blog somewhere? Or plan to..." And I thought, shit, what a brilliant idea. I need to write one and then check back on it to know what the hell I need to do before I publish a book so I finally hit all the dates without holding it all in my head and forgetting stuff, like forgetting to create a Goodreads giveaway on time, or forgetting that printing an IngramSpark proof takes longer than printing a CreateSpace one, and so on.

Well then, I'll attempt to dump all my wisdom here, and if I missed something, go ahead and add it in the comments, or just share what your to-do list is, or ask me to clarify anything in detail, and together we'll get this puppy good and proper.

1. Finalize your book title (3 - 4 months before publication).

May 10, 2016

SHOW! DON'T TELL! Or I will kill you.

by Ksenia Anske

So, here we go again. I guess I just never say it enough. It's so easy to tell when you write, and so bloody hard to show. As a reminder, here is a wonderful write-up by Chuck Palahniuk about it, namely, about how to unpack your sneaky lazy telling into bold crisp showing, and it's hard work and you won't like me one bit for what you're about to read (and Chuck says the same thing at the very top of his lovely write-up, so it's okay, you can hate me too if you want).

Since reading theory is boring, let me slap you in the face with some examples so you can see what I'm talking about and start looking for these bastards in your own writing and kill the fuck out of them (this whole post, by the way, is as much for me as it is for you, because it's really me shouting at myself to be a better writer, and I figure you can benefit from my shouting too).