Today we learned that making money as a writer is actually pretty easy. The problem is that in order to make money as a writer, you have to be a business person also. Writing is your business and you need to treat it as such. The items Brandon went over were:

1. Think like a business person.
2. No substitute for practice
3. Networking.
4. Be proactive
5. Someone out there is better than you. Get over it.
6. Results matter
7. You cannot afford to waste time with writers block
8. You will sometimes do things poorly.
9. Luck
10. Just write — do it.

These all seem obvious, but I work with people every day that don’t see this. Talented people who will never go anywhere because their priorities are wrong.

Eric Flint then talked about the economics of writing. They essentially boil down to writing well and being prolific. It takes a while to get enough material out there, but once you do, then it is possible to make money off it. One other thing discussed is that when looking at the numbers of what an author gets with regards to the publishing company, it’s not all that bad. There are expenses. However, there are things to watch out for too.

** Giving up is the #1 career killer **

James talked about networking. i.e. Facebook and Twitter.

Indie publishing was discussed and self promotion with some examples.

It was a long day, but extremely fact filled and interesting.

Only one other gripe. Manchester, NH now has milimeter wave scanners. These useless piecces of junk purchased to line the pockets of government officials in the name of security theater. So, you can get scanned or groped. Now I’m not so sure where my next flight will be out of.

This should be a good week. I really hope so. I’ve met lots of interesting people on our facebook page and am looking to meeting them in person. It’s too bad I had to leave on my son’s birthday and I am getting lots of grief for that. I’ll make it up to my family when I return. I’m going to try to do a day-by-day as I have in confrerences in the past so people looking to see if this is worth it to them will have an unbiased data point.

Finally, Wifi aboard Southwest doesn’t seem to work too well in extreme turbulence. I did manage to transcribe my critique from K. D. and post it to the Writers of the Future Forums. Please take a look there if you’d like to see what a K.D. critique looks like.

Today we should be getting the tablecloth, the business cards (both designed by Emma). Also some more memory for her tablet to maybe speed things up.

We will have the first 10 pages available for perusing at Comic Con. I’m going to have to push her, because I want to get kickstarter going and have the comic available for sale at Granite State Comic Con on June 9th.

At Writers Day, I met up with some fellow writers who were starting a group in NH. We met for the first time this Sunday. It was a good meeting of like minded semi-professional members. Hopefully we all find each other at approximately the same level of achievement so we can help each other out. I feel good about this group.