I’ve been thinking about this because someone recently asked how writer with full-time jobs could publish four times a year. I’d recently posted my drafting heat-map, so I could reasonably break down wordcount and expectations in my answer.

Then came the question that surprised me: was I dictating, or carrying a laptop around? 

For the record, I’m firmly team laptop. I’ve tried dictation a time or two, and it really isn’t my jam. My storytelling brain works differently when I’m putting fingers on a keyboard, and I’m way less socially anxious about being “seen” on the page compared to speaking out loud.

To me, laptops are a no brainer.

That said, I’m the guy who bangs on about infrastructure and writing awful lot, and it’s worth noting that my choice to cart a laptop to work everyday is predicated on building infrastructure that supports that choice.

Here are three important steps that really helped make my commute work as writing time.

LEARN TO TYPE

I touch type at a pretty decent clip – around 86 words a minute if I’m worrying about accuracy, but faster when I’m rough drafting and focused on getting a rough skeleton down. I don’t need to pay much attention to the screen while I’m typing, which is an advantage on a crowded bus when you’re potentially sitting at an odd angle.

This was my mother’s doing. When I first talked about writing for a living at age 10, my mother’s first response was “take typing classes” and she made sure I followed up. 

Sending five years of highschool as one of three dudes in a typing class instead of doing  manual arts (shop class, if you’re American) has paid off again and again in the thirty years that followed.

In terms of maximizing what little time I have to write when working full time, my typing speed is probably the biggest and best reason I can make things work.

If you’re angling to become a writer and you’re still a hunt-and-peck typist, the most beneficial thing I can recommend is putting aside your work in progress for a few weeks and investing in a touch typing course. 

TEST, INVEST, AND ITERATE

Folks who’ve been following my blog for a few months probably recall the process of testing my writing methods when I first started work. 

Was working on a laptop better than working on a notebook? I tried both, along with index cards, typing stories on my phone and tablet, and even used tools like Notion to see if they worked better. I’ve worked in Word, in Scrivener, and in Google Docs.

When I eventually settled on the laptop as my tool du jour, I set about maximizing my use of it. This meant looking at the days where I wrote less and asking myself why, then iterating from there. I figured out my 2017 Macbook air (weighing in at 1.35 kg or 2.96 pounds) was a better choice than the newer-but-heavier PC laptop that technically has more grunt. (1)

Analysing patterns suggested that sometimes I wrote because I was stuck, but other times the barrier to entry was pulling my laptop out of a crowded backpack, which wasn’t easy when buses were packed. 

That seemed an illogical reason to stop writing, so I invested in a smaller laptop bag where the whole side panel opened. I could sit on my lap, unzip, and the computer was ready to go. It meant carrying a second bag for my lunch, but also resulted in a lot more writing getting done.

As an aside: I’ve been watching the commentary around the new MacBook Neo with interest over the last few months, since lots of folks decry its comparative lack of memory and power when stacked up against other Mac Laptops.

To my amusement, the Neo has more memory and power than my Air, and will probably be my replacement when the ten-year-old laptop finally stops running the handful of programs I need it to run. 

EMBRACE PRODUCTIVE INEFFECIENCY

The public transit route I take to work isn’t actually the most efficient path, according to my local translink app. Technically speaking, I could shave 10 to 15 minutes off my journey by catching a train into the city and jumping on an express bus that stops right outside my work.

I used that route for a few months after I moved, and so decided against it.

For one thing, the connections between bus and train proved unreliable.

For another thing, both bus and train were inevitably crowded, especially when Brisbane train workers began ongoing industrial action earlier this year.

The route I take is a little less direct, but it’s on two buses that are very rarely crowded and always connect on time. It’s inefficient for getting to work, but it maximizes my writing efficiency by ensuring there’s somewhere to sit. 

Also, turns out taking the extra ten to fifteen minutes is just fine when I’m writing. That’s another couple of hundred words when I’m really on fire.

Most days, that trade off is definitely worth it.

PROCESS SUBJECT TO CHANGE

Of course, all of this is just the latest iteration of my process when it comes to writing around a day job. In the past I’ve used other strategies: going to work two hours early and writing in a food court, for example. Or writing a short-story a week on my eight minute train ride to work by using index cards to handwrite a single beat of a story every trip in.

What I’m doing now is what works best for me, in my personal circumstances which involve a long commute, a job with minimal brain-drain compared to my prior gigs, and a work that allows me to adjust my start and finish times to make maximum use of the public transport options that suit my process.

I can’t guarantee my process will look the same a year from now. Every new job kicks off a new round of iteration and testing, figuring out what works best.

But I am certain that I’ll have a process that works around the day job, and gets a certain baseline level of activity done. I’ve written books under adverse conditions before, and managed a story a week while working one of the worst day-job gigs of my life (which is saying something).

As I wrote earlier this year, a big part of figuring out how to write around a day job is focusing on fixing one thing at a time.

The post Writing While Commuting appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

Dash calls out technologies like email, blogs, and podcasts as great open tools. Both are platforms where you may rely on a piece of software to engage, but you aren’t beholden to that software. I may start my email newsletter on Mailchimp, but if I want to move it, I can. 

On the flip side, the trend of social media is moving towards closed tools where the platform can be owned (and sold). Twitter is the case study here. We all gathered there and built streams and networks, and then it was sold to Elon Musk.

Who immediately used that network to highlight the content he wanted to highlight and hide the stuff he wanted to hide.

And we all quickly realised we couldn’t just port our Twitter followers to a new tool. We had to rebuild from scratch, posting links and hoping folks would follow us along.

The other platform du jour that gets a lot of interest is Substack. I make no bones about the fact that Substack is my personal bugbear in the writing space. I hate the fucking place and and have done for a while.

It enticed a bunch of writers I liked to migrate their newsletters over, then promptly ceased to make those newsletters accessible without engaging with their app. In fact, they’re quietly pointing out that Email is no longer the heart they do, and migrating people to the app is the preferred mode of engagement.

So increasingly, folks who moved there no longer have a newsletter. They just have a new Facebook. One with a greater tolerance for Nazis and folks in charge who make Mark Zuckerberg seem like a reasonable guy with everyone’s best interest at heart by comparison. 

To Quip or Not To Quip

Two things happened in close succession last month.
First, I got a ton of creator-oriented emails from Patreon of late, hyping the changes they’re making to creator accounts and the introduction of new discovery tools like Quips. I’ve found myself engaging with the back-end tools with new eyes for the first time in a long while, figuring out what they mean for me as a writer.

Second, after kicking a lot of cans down the road under the guise of “I’ll deal with that when I’ve got more capacity” for the last year, I’m finally hitting the point where I have capacity. 

Coming back to Patreon was a compromise when I started engaging here in July 2025. I’d spent the first half of last year getting kicked in the teeth financially, and I wanted a platform that could host GenrePunk Ninja when I had to changeup my newsletter and store systems as a publisher.

Things are not quite “back to normal” yet–there are still debts to pay off and tech that needs replacing, not least the ten-year-old MacBook I write on that is increasingly refusing to run software or share files on virtual drives. 

But they’re stable enough that I can start looking ahead because I know how all the expenses will be covered, even if it’ll take around six months to finalise.

And so I’m thinking about Patreon and the compromises made during the pinch. I like Patreon. I actually like a lot of what they’ve set up while my attention was elsewhere. I have no immediate plans to leave.

But I find myself looking at the introduction of new tools like Quips and considering they’re obviously an attempt to match the discoverability benefits of Substack’s closed systems and retain Patreon’s market share.

Which reminds me that Patreon, for all the things I love about it and the respect I have for its founder (Pomplamoose’sPomplamoose’s Jack Conte), is still a closed system. It’s owned. It can be taken away. That it’s owned by someone who, at the very least, seems artist friendly and well-meaning now doesn’t actually mitigate the fact that it won’t ever be thus.

Nor does it prevent the platform from doing things that are…misguided (see Patreon, Tools, Tactics, & Strategy in You Don’t Want To Be Published for more).

Closed systems will change because capitalism demands they change, and venture capital needs to be repaid.

Which means I find myself ready to return to first principles: open systems I can control. Blogs and newsletters as the primary means of distribution, Patreon as the secondary spoke where content moves to instead of the central hub.

I’m not a quipper. So I’m slowly rebuilding newsletter systems and refining the website that’s sat dormant for the better part of the last nine months. Re-envisioning where the hub of my writing will lie.

Closes systems that can be taken away should never be a hub. They’re role is to serve as a spokes that extend the reach of the hub, giving it more juice.

It’s not a simple thing to do. It requires time and attention, and the pay-offs are long-term rather than quick fix. I certainly took my eye off that ball when I didn’t have capacity over the last year, but I’m with increased personal bandwidth comes a greater capacity.

The post Cleaving to Open Systems as a Writer appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

The podcasts focuses on how people survive in a creative economy in a time of profound technological change, and frequently starts each interview with a really telling question: when did you last worry about paying your monthly expenses?

The answers–especially among people who you may think have “made it”–is pretty telling.

Recommended Episodes

What Happens When the People Building the Technology Stop Being Fans? with Anil Dash

I’ve been high on this podcast for a while, but I’m recommending it now because the latest installment with Anil Dash is outstanding and an episode I wish every writer working today engaged with.

Dash is a writer and technology comptentator I’ve been following since his “Don’t Call It A Substack” essay. He expounds on Substack a little further in the podcast, and lays out why Substack’s problems with nazis are perhaps the least worrying thing about engaging there.

The substack section is useful, but even more useful is his explanation of the philosophy that makes some forms of technologically driven media useful to artists and others…not. I took a ton of notes, and will probably be referencing this episode for months to come.

Check It Out Here

How Many Jobs Make a Creative Life? with Mary Robinette Kowal

Many years ago, I caught Mary Robinette Kowal’s first guest spot on the Writing Excuses podcast and was blown away with how she looked at a writing through a new lens. She’s routinely been one of hte smartest writers on the topic of writing for years since, whether it’s on her Patreon or becoming a regular Writing Excuses host or teaching courses.

Her episode of Past Due did the same thing with tools like Patreon, taking something I thought I understood and inviting me to think about it new ways.

Check this episode out here

The post Recommended Listening: The Past Due Podcast appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

To celebrate, here’s a little behind the scenes look at some writing data.

I’ve attached three images to this post. The first two are the RescueTime report for this project, tracking when I sat down to write for the period between April 26 and May 2 (a good writing week) and May 3 to May 9 (a not so good writing week). I take a look at these once a week or so, treating them like a heat map of my week that shows me when I’m likely to get work done and recognise patterns.

For the first half the week, you can pretty much see where I’ve got my schedule down: write on the first bus to work, then transfer and write again on the second. Make up some words on the lunch break, then write again on the way home.

The growing pattern here is that I’m terrible at writing on the last leg of my trip home. This is partially because I need to pay more attention on that leg of the trip – it’s the only time I don’t need to disembark at a major transit point. It’s also becuase I’m on a different bus home most days, due to the inconsisten schedules Brisbane is running right now.

Still, those day are largely sorted. I tend to hit my projected wordcount comfortably and advance the project in predictable ways.

My trouble spots are the last four days of the week, Thursday through Sunday. Thursdays and Fridays I work from home at the moment, and that disruption to my routine is playing havoc with writing. I do less in the morning, I don’t write through my lunch break, and I tend to get pulled into household chores right after I finish work instead of getting a last burst of writing in before I get home.

Weekends and public holidays like May 4 are the other tricky point. As I mentioned a while back, the stuff that outranks writing on my priority list are my spouse, my family, and my cats. Weekends are a prime time to devote attention to all three, especially given I’m either at work or commuting for eleven hours a day during the week.

In the past, the wee hours of the morning are usually a pretty good way to squeeze writing in before other folks are awake, but my spouse recently had a change in patterns and started waking up early with me. Saturdays are spent going to the local market and picking up fresh fruit and vegtables (also, coffee and food truck breakfast). Plus, it’s cold, and I don’t want to get out of bed any earlier than necessary.

The heat map is handy as I start looking at how to tackle this, since it’s a reminder that I don’t need big blocks of time to write in. Drastic action like “I’ll set aside two hours to write every Saturday” may actually be counter-productive, since my pattern leads towards short sprints. A solid block of time may be less useful than four short 20-minute bursts spread across the day in terms of hitting my word count goal.

The third image is the project as captured in my word count tracker, which provides some extra data like calculating my average WPH per session. It’s a useful reminder that not all writing sessions are created equal – some days I’m flying, and others things move at a crawl.

The post The Drafting Heat Map appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

Writing’s an uphill battle at the moment because the world–once again–is trending towards chaos and laying disruptions in my path. After spending the first six months of my new job training myself to write on buses, we’ve now got a global fuel crisis looming and my regular public transport became standing room only.

I will not lie: I didn’t handle this well at first. I grumped and railed at the unfairness of it all, and cursed the inability to break my laptop out and push forward on various projects. I spent March engaged in a kind of writerly petulance, telling myself (and anyone else who would listen) that everything felt hopeless.

I wrote very little over the last few weeks, and it frustrated me.

Then I hit my limit on wallowing. I picked a small target–writing a flash fiction for an upcoming opportunity–and experimented with ways of getting words down.

In doing so, I turned to a piece of technology ordinarily regarded as the writer’s nemesis: my phone.

The Hardest Lesson: Thumbing Words Into A Google Doc Doesn’t Feel Like Writing, But It Is

After spending the last twelve months working in all-in-one Scrivener workbench, I migrated all my active projects into Google Docs. It’s an option that gives me the one feature I really love from Scrivener – damn near constant autosave – but opened up the possibility of moving seamlessly from desktop to laptop to tablet to phone.

And right now, my phone is a damn good option for getting words down on a crowded phone.

Tapping stories out with my thumbs on a phone keyboard isn’t as quick as typing or handwriting, and it feels like sacrilege to call it “writing” because it’s so foreign to the way I work. I “type” into a phone at about half the speed and make considerably more typos than i do when touch-typing.

But what it does is get words down, because there are damn few circumstances where it’s impossible to pull out my phone. Thumbing out 250 words of a story is a far better use of my commute time than scanning Facebook or doomscrolling the news.

I figured it would take me forever to get anything written, which is one reason I focused on clearing a 1,000-word story by end of week.

Hitting that would be a big win after all the wallowing and gnashing of teeth.

Getting something done would be a decent consolation prize.

To my surprise, I wrote 3,000 words this week

I finished my story draft, but actually wrote half a second story that was set aside because i knew it would blow past the word count for this submission. It’s waiting in the wings, ready to become the project du jour after I finish editing the fourth story down.

This burst of productivity wasn’t entirely phone driven – today, I experimented with catching a different set of buses to work, and while they add 20 minutes to my commute, both legs of it were on blissfully empty vehicles that allowed me to bust out the laptop and work interrupted

I’m still crediting my phone with the assist on those words, though. Picking up speed at the end of the week was bliss, but it wouldn’t have happened without the phone springs getting me into my current projects.

Projects build momentum when you work on them, and even the small bits of writing i did on the phone put me in the headspace where I was excited to write again. I found myself looking for more gaps where I could get a few words in.

I even squeezed in an evening writing session – something I’ve only done a handful of times since starting the day job (and Cthulhu knows I’ve been lamenting that, so it was nice to carve out that time).

And now I’m up in the wee hours of the morning, doing my newsletter work before the rest of the house rises. Not something I’m likely to do from a cold start, but easy to convince myself to do when my writing process is already in motion.

All of this is just the latest iteration of an ongoing process

I’m doing the same thing I did six months ago, looking at what’s possible instead of feeling trapped. If the laptop isn’t workable and notebooks are impractical, why not use the phone as the next iteration of my process?

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about how far I could take this mode of working. Bullet Journal creator Ryder Carrol recently did a video about using his phone as a primary work station when on the move, rather than carting around a laptop.

He invested in a stand and a spare Apple keyboard, and his iPhone became the primary writing tool that was lighter and easier to transport than a laptop or tablet. It also meant engaging with his work on a small screen–a boon, given many of us now read on those same screens.

I’m intrigued. Not only because it’s a lot less to cart around than my current set-up, but because I can see how it will both reduce the friction when I write and further transform the phone into a tool rather than a distraction.

It might not be how I’d prefer to work, but these are interesting times, and I’m trying not the ideal prevent me from making progress. And I find myself thinking of Jeff VanderMeer’s notion of abandoning the fetishes of process:.

“I’m for whatever creates the least distance between thought and capturing the thought, that provides the least friction between “eureka!” and writing down “eureka!” before it becomes “What the heck was that brilliant phrase I was just thinking of a second ago and now have forgotten?”

My younger self didn’t understand this truth. My younger self kept putting obstacles between me and the act of writing. Every minute spent fetishizing the process instead of simplifying it cost me moments of creativity. (VanderMeer, Jeff. Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer).

Given I’ve had multiple conversations about pen and notebook preferences in the last week, and I’m looking forward to a friend’s updates about falling into the world of Japanese stationery and fountain pens, I’m obviously someone who likes a good writing fetish.

When presented with a choice, I wouldn’t write on my phone. Nor would I use Google Docs–a software that is just unintuitive enough that I find it frustrating on many levels. Given the choice, I’d be handwriting books in nice notebooks with good quality pens for hours of the day.

Given the choice, I’d do a lot of things.

Thing is, I enjoy getting stories out into the world far more than I like my fetishes process, and thus far my ramshackle “solve the next problem” approach is adding up. The last time I had four stories on submission at the same time was back in 2012, and while I’m submitting a little slower than I’d like, I can feel the inertial of the last few years giving way to forward momentum and little wins.

The post An Unexpected Writing Tool Gets It’s Moment In The Spotlight appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, we recently moved house, trading our tiny one-bedroom flat for a two-bedroom, two-story townhouse. It’s been a considerable amount of work to move in—and the job’s still not done—but we’re already seeing the impact of our new home on our step counts.

My spouse and I both wear health trackers to log our daily steps and sleep, although we’ve never been diligent about hitting the 10,000 steps a day goal (which is, itself, less a health thing than a marketing gimmick from one of the earliest wearable step trackers). We mostly want to know how well we’ve slept and how much we’ve done, not least because my wife has some chronic health issues that mean overdoing it will lead to a pretty major crash-out.

Since we moved, both of us have noticed that things have changed. 

THE POWER OF INCIDENTAL STEPS

In the old place, it was rare that I would do over 6,000 steps a day. Often, on a heavy writing or meeting day, my steps would sit under 3,000 until I forced myself to leave the house and go for a walk. I didn’t think much of it after living in my flat for a decade. Getting steps meant setting aside time to physically leave the house and go for a walk. 

I didn’t consider the implications of where we lived on this mindset, but it makes sense. When it’s only twenty-six steps from your bathroom to your office, racking up a step count is hard.

In the new place, on a “non-moving” day when we’re simply pottering around the house or going to work, it’s rare that I’m doing less than 8000 steps a day. More often, I’m hitting 10k just before dinner. This is partially a function of leaving the house for work — the new job definitely dragged my step count up when I started — but also just the fact that it takes more steps to get around our new home. Going up and down stairs also adds up.

Through the simple act of getting up and making coffee in the morning, I’ve moved more than I would have in half a day at the old place. Going to the bathroom requires twice as many steps. It’s small, but when you do a few extra steps every time you move around the house, they add up fast.

Even better than the space inside the house is our proximity to other locations. The closest shops are an eight-minute walk away. Lots of our friends and family live within a twenty minutes walk. There’s great takeaway just around the corner. My wife’s new favourite microbrewery is five minutes down the street. Multiple bus and train routes are accessible within a ten-minute stroll. 

So we don’t just walk around our house more—we walk everywhere a lot more. Without setting out to increase our step count, the size and location of our house set us up to do more without realising it. 

Which brings us to writing. 

STOP LOOKING FOR EXTRA HOURS TO WRITE

Most writers, when faced with a desire to write more, go in search of more hours in which they can devote to writing. They lament giving their time to a day job that steals them away from their projects, or wish for an extra day crammed into the week that they can devote to writing. Me, I long for the cash to pay someone to clean my house, which will free up all the time I devote to doing (or avoiding) chores.

Problem is, we rarely have extra hours in our day. Finding an extra hour—let alone several hours—often means giving up other things. Sometimes those trade-offs seem easy—I’ll happily give up an hour of social media or TV a day in order to write—but it’s harder than it seems. That TV time is where you hang out with your family. Social media connects you to friends you don’t see as often as you’d like. Giving them up means you need other ways of feeding your need to connect with your spouse, your kids, and your peers.

Finding extra hours is hard, which is why I often talk to new writers about the power of just a few extra minutes. Squeezing fifteen minutes of writing into your morning routine doesn’t feel like it will have the impact of an extra hour of writing a day, but a) a spare fifteen minutes is easier to find, and b) you’re more likely to do those fifteen minutes consistently while you’re finding your groove.

And fifteen minutes you don consistently do over the course of a week is worth more to you than an extra hour you’ll only do oncea week.

SHORT BURST WRITING

Mystery author James Scott Bell often talks about the “Nifty 350” in his writing guides—a habit where he encourages people to write 350 words first thing in the morning, before they start their day in earnest. I scoffed the first time I encountered the suggestion — I wanted to get up and write 3000 words, not 350 — but the impact when I finally tried it was significant. A small burst of writing—little more than a paragraph—set my mindset and made it easier to get back to the keyboard throughout the day.

When I found myself in situations where that was possible, I went smaller: write a single beat of a scene on an index card while catching the train to work in the morning. Rarely over 150 words, yet it soon added up into a flash fiction every week, then full-length stories as one eight-minute writing burst made it easier to find another with minutes, then twelve, then twenty.

We like to think we’ll set a goal, then take action, but action guides our goals and mindset far more than we’d think. When you use short bursts of time—eight minutes here, fifteen minutes there—it doesn’t take long before other brief windows open up. Eight minutes on a morning commute soon led to sixteen minutes a day as I started writing on the ride home. Then thirty-two minutes, as I used the gap at the end of my lunch break.

SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SHORT SPRINTS

These days, the bulk of my writing happens on my commute. Eighteen minutes on a train. Twenty-six minutes on a bus. Eight-to-fifteen minutes here and there as I sit on a platform. Another short stint during my lunch break. Doesn’t feel like a lot, but it often nets me a thousand words in a space I would otherwise spend staring at my phone. The days I write least are the two days a week when I drive to work after giving my wife a lift to their office. 

Life is full of incidental gaps where writing could happen. We’ve just trained ourselves, as a culture, to see those little gaps of time as not terribly valuable because they don’t fit the idealised version of how a writer “should” work.

Sometimes seizing these moments means setting yourself up to do so. In the past, that’s meant working on index cards rather than notebooks or computers. They were small enough to be portable, and easily braced against a moleskin or wall if I couldn’t get a seat on the train. These days, I use a laptop because buses aren’t as conducive to neat handwriting as trains are, but I’ve still done the hard yards of figuring out how to make writing in those gaps as easy as possible.

I’ve bought new laptop bags that’s easy to fill open, so I don’t need to rummage through a backpack. I’ve also worked out how to keep the bag light, so I don’t feel weighed down and tired when carting it about. More importantly, I figured out where I’d keep my phone that wasn’t my pocket. Training myself out of checking social media when there’s a gap in the schedule is a big part of filling the gap with writing. 

I’m not alone in this. Other writers invest in tools like steering wheel desks, which allow them to write in the car while waiting for kids to emerge from sports practice or music lessons. Or they carry notebooks. Or they narrate stories into a voice-to-text program while driving to work. 

The trick here isn’t to look for big chunks of time, but to look for the small gaps in your schedule that your life and routine already provide you, then asking yourself if you can make use of those incidental moments to fit some writing in.

A QUICK EXERCISE

These days, folks aren’t really surprised to learn that their phone takes up more time than they think. Smartphones have been around for twenty years now, and we’re increasingly pondering our relationship with them (to say nothing of the periodic craze for going offline).

I’m not anti-phone — mine is incredibly useful — but there’s often an exercise I recommend to people who are trying to find incidental writing time. Secure a small notebook or stack of index cards to the front of your phone with a rubber band, so you physically have to remove an analogue writing tool from the phone in order to use it. When you reach for the phone to kill time, try to write a few sentences in your notebook or card before you thumb in your passcode and start the doom scroll.

Putting analogue writing tools in front of your screen adds a point of resistance to break the habit. Even if you don’t write anything, this exercise makes you conscious of just how many short bursts of time there are where you brain goes looking for distraction.

But if you do write — even if it’s only a handful of times — it’s getting you words you wouldn’t otherwise do. If you do it consistently and reach for you phone as often as most people do, you might be surprised to find yourself writing a couple of hundred extra words or more. 

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post What Moving House Reminded Me About Getting My Writing Done appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

Readers believe this too, although they rarely articulate it that way. And it’s not entirely wrong, because reading is a social activity, even if it’s a rather solitary one. Books that get talked about get read, and if they’re talked about enough they become a cultural phenomenon. 

It’s one reason that bookstores and publishers are so enamoured of BookTok at the present moment, where conversations about books can take off fast. 

It’s also the reason reviews are so powerful, and being placed in certain review outlets (especially the ones who are seen to drive conversation) is such a big part of the marketing plan for traditionally published books.

The problem is, it’s hard to manufacture that conversation. There are steps writers can take to encourage it, but you can’t make it happen.

And so the fundamental belief that good books find their audience feels true, even if it means the converse side of the coin — that books that don’t find their audience aren’t good — is going to haunt far more writers in the long run.

Over the years, I’ve met with a lot of writers who lament the fact that “traditional” publishing doesn’t do any marketing. 

I don’t disagree with that statement, but I think it overlooks what old-school velocity publishing does well: creating a buzz about a book before it launches, and selling a good chunk of its print run in the first month.

They don’t do that by running ads or engaging in mass promotion, but by doing their best to get conversations started and whet a reader’s appetite before the release date. 

This can mean they look like they’re not doing anything, especially when viewed through the eyes of slow-build indie authors who have a very different business model (or aspiring authors who dream of getting a big push, and fear that the lack of conversation around their book means it isn’t good).

Which brings us to two of the key issues of author platform: 

1) Publishers know it can create conversation and sell books, but they didn’t always understand how. This led to a few years of authors being told to follow tactics (Blog! Run a newsletter! Be on TikTok!) because it had worked for other authors, with no one really thinking about why it worked. 

2) When new social media emerges and gets hungry for engagement, it will frequently benefit early adopters who use the platform to find new readers. As those platforms are enshittified, the later adopters are working twice as hard for half the impact, but a cargo cult forms around the tactic because everyone knows they need attention and they can’t think how else to find it.

Getting readers talking is essential to what we do as writers, but in the absence of reliable methods (and the presence of big dreams), we fall back on tools that give the illusion of control.

The Problem, As In So Many Things, Is Our Tendency to Mistake Tactics for Strategy

One of my favourite writing books—now dated, but still useful—is Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. In it, he notes the essential problem with most writers careers.

Because writers often work organically and hate doing mechanical things like detailed novel outlines, they sometimes also shy away from creating actual lists of long-term and short-term career goals… Many writers never progress in their careers — except in a shambling, two-steps-forward-one-step-back way — because they always focus on the moment, and the moment after that. Their maps lack all kinds of details essential for finding their way toward a destination. 

I feel like this is especially true with the way writer approach platform. Ask most writers why they are on social media, and they’ll tell you they need to be there to sell books.

Ask them how their presence sells books, and they may mumble something about building a platform, but very few of them have a plan for transitioning folks from social media audience to active reader.

If you’re lucky, they can point to a tactic previously deployed (and turned into a course) by a particular writer. “Such and such used Facebook adds” or “I did this person’s course on TikTok”. 

Nevermind that the existence of a course usually means that the enshittication of the platforms nigh, and the tactic will be less effective in time.  

Writers either build around social media systems haphazardly and trust in the fates to generate the conversations and interest that eventually leads to sales, or they follow the marketing hooks of someone who is great at marketing and sells them a course.

If we step away from the immediate, tactical question of which tool to use and inst4ead focus on what we typically want from those tools, the strategy behind most author platforms is pretty easy to break down: 

1. Generate leads that introduce new readers to our work

2. Nurture those leads to turn interested readers into book buyers

3. Nurture those buyers to transform them into readers.

4. Build those readers into a community (or fandom) that generates conversations that, in turn, creates leads for more readers. 

Indie authors who have been inundated with newsletter advice might have a lightbulb go off reading that list, recognising the basic philosophy of the newsletter sales funnel. 

For everyone else, here’s how that plays out:

• A writer sets up a newsletter and invites people to join said list. Often this involves offering an enticement, such as a free book, which serves as a lead magnet. This magnet will draw a small amount of attention from folks already interested in your work, but you can multiply its drawing power through tools like advertising, newsletter promos, and other marketing that puts your offer in front of fresh eyes.

• Readers who join the newsletter get the free book and then hear from the writer semi-regularly (or very regularly). Often writers will establish an automatic welcome sequence, or a series of emails that go out to new subscribers, gradually introducing unfamiliar readers to the author’s works and the author themselves.

• Once these readers are integrated into the newsletter readership, they’re dipped into a series of offers as details about new releases, sales and other discounts, and the occasional timely reminder of backlist titles. Some readers may not stick around after the initial few emails, but that’s fine—you’re aiming to speak to the readers who do, turning them into fans.

It’s one way of implementing the core strategy I talk about above, but not the only way. 

The same strategy is in play when writers attempt to sell books on social media (create leads by posting content people repost, gradually convince people to follow you regularly, and then direct your audience to the books you release).

Ditto the way traditional velocity publishers use reviews (create leads by giving arcs to taste-makers who have an audience, who then create leads with potential readers by reviewing about the book. If enough reviews and conversation starts, you generate buzz in the core community of readers for that genre, which then spills over to readers on the fringe and the general public. 

Same core strategy, very different tactics. Which leads us to the core question that few writers really ask: 

What tactic generates the strongest leads for your business model with the least expenditure of resources?

For some people, this might be social media. I hesitate to say it, because some folks hear that and think they’re going to be the exception to the rule, but there are routinely authors who leverage social platforms and take off. 

Often they’re there early, before the enshittification kicks in, or they figure out how to make use of a newly introduced feature or approach to the platform. Social media can also work if there’s strong, existing communities on the platform who can be enticed into checking out your work.

But if you’re a writer who doesn’t particularly enjoy social media—or, worse, a writer who easily falls down the algorithm hole and doom scrolls when you’d rather e writing—then the resource cost is probably not worth the leads your generating.

Because here’s the thing about social media, when viewed as a broad swathe: most platforms are great at generating conversation, but they’re terrible for organic lead generation. There is value to them in being the place where people gather and spend time, but much less in giving away the kind of attention that lets people off the platform.

It’s the step that lots of writers miss when they bitch about the algorithm sending their stupid, random-thought-at-two-AM tweet viral then chokes down the attention when they try to post about their books.

Which means that an organic social media presence still has a part to play in your author platform, but it’s best considered as a secondary tool. A method of nurturing readers, rather than generating leads. Social media works best with the people already interested in you, especially if they’re engaged enough to magnify your reach and repost when you do reach out to newer readers.

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA AS A WRITER, BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE A PLAN TO GENERATE LEADS

So, the good news is that you don’t need to be on social media as a writer. The bad news is that you do need some way of generating leads and connecting with new readers, especially if you’re an indie author.

Fortunately, it’s possible to generate leads without social media. When you really think about it, social media platforms and review generation and a host of other marketing methods really revolve around borrowing someones audience. 

If Facebook was used by 200,000 daily visitors, instead of two billion, then it wouldn’t be as valuable. They have an audience of users, and marketers (authors and otherwise) want access to that audience, so they pay the toll in the farm of cold hard cash (ads) or sweat equity (organic content) in order to access these readers.

But magazines have readers. Reviewers have readers. Your local community hall has an audience, as does your local book club. Conventions and events are places where hardcore readers gather, and they’re much more likely to buy books than a hundred folks you spruik your book to on social media. 

Generating leads is basically putting yourself out there in front of audiences, and they don’t need to be large. In fact, a small, passionate group of people who are close to perfect for your book can be worth as much as a large crowd where only a handful of people might be on your wavelength. 

One of my focuses for 2026 is writing and submitting short faction to magazine markets, because a) those folks have audiences who are predisposed to like what I do, and b) has secondary effects beyond finding new readers (I get paid, I’ve created stories that can now be collected into books).

Is it guaranteed to work? Not at all. I could invest a whole lot of time into writing some stories, and its possible none of them will be picked up by an editor. That’s always a risk, but it’s mitigated by the fact I can always use stories in other ways (lead magnets for newsletter promos, collections, free giveaways to nurture my existing readers).

That, for me, is the key of those options. It’s considerably harder to re-use a less-than-successful social media post in the same way (although not impossible — having a second life for popular social media posts is pretty much the modus operandi of my mech store).

Stories aren’t the only outreach I’m doing. Blogging is a method of lead generation too—slower, I’ll grant, but occasionally more useful as years of people linking to various blog posts have shown. I’ll be making use of newsletter swaps. As we get towards the second half of the year, and the expenditures of 2025 are paid off, I’ll even start getting back to paid lead generation in the form of advertising.

All of them take less effort than “being on social media,” and typically offer more bang for my back in terms of the time I invest in doing these things versus the number of readers they actually attract.

There’s nothing wrong with making your lead generation an online feed, so long as you’re conscious of what you want your online presence to do and you’ve got the time and resources to invest in it.

It’s not what I’d recommend, outside of riding the new user wave of the occasional platform, but every writer finds their own path.

What’s important is remembering that social media is a tactic, not the entirety of the strategy. If you’re not enjoying being on Facebook, Threads, TikTok, or whatever the lastest site is—or, worse, you’re discovering that it eats into your writing time—there are other methods of generating leads that can be just as effective.

You just need to think strategically, and find the tactic that works best for you.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post You Don’t Need Social Media To Sell Books appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

I last wrote on my last full day at work two weeks ago, and I’m picking this draft up on the 5th of January (coincidentally, my first day on a bus since moving house in late December).

The version you are reading now didn’t actually get finished until the end of January, three weeks after I thought I’d figure out the final draft. Things, my friends, did not go to plan.

Which shouldn’t surprise any writer who has gone through a holiday season more than once.

I’ve touched base with many writer friends over the last few weeks, and “less than expected” is a pretty common refrain when talking about their holidays.

Very few folks actually planned to do nothing over December and January — writers are exceptionally bad at taking weekends off, let alone extended breaks — but no-one seemed to have the knock-it-out-of-the-park kind of holiday season they’d hoped for.

If you’ve thought something similar, let us talk about why the holidays are hard on writers and the December/January period is not as effective as we’d hoped. 

1) OUR PRIORITIES ARE NOT WHAT WE THINK THEY ARE

When I sit down with new writers I mentor, one of the first things I get them to do is build a priority pyramid with some index cards. I want them to physically move around their commitments and ambitious and create a hierarchy because sometimes we all need to see that writing is not our immediate priority. 

Sometimes, it’s not even our third or fourth most important thing on our list.

This is important because the social narrative around writing and creativity makes it seem like it must be an all-consuming thing. The first and most important priority in your life. To do otherwise is to risk being seen as gasp an amateur, or even someone who doesn’t take their creative practice seriously.

When that narrative gets its hooks into you, it’s easy to feel guilty about taking a day off or putting Christmas shopping ahead of getting your word count done. It’s easy to feel like your failure to be writing all the time is responsible for any lack of success you’re feeling, and things would be better if you just dropped every other commitment in your life and wrote to the point of burn-out twenty-four seven.

This narrative sucks on its own, but when you combine it with the social narratives around Christmas, which tells us family and togetherness should also be your top priority and you’re a bad person if you don’t get into the holiday spirit….

Well, the conflicting messages can be a source of anxiety if you don’t examine them. I know from experience that writing is often in the top five things that I care about, but I also know what it’s not more important than. My wife trumps writing. So do my family and my cats, and—often—my friends. 

I can maintain a writing routine steady against things like day jobs, but I will down tools in a heartbeat to manage a crisis related to any of the above.

Even beyond that, priorities are flexible and contextual. Moving came with a deadline, made life better for some of my top priorities (my wife and cats), and required a shit ton of effort and attention. It outranked almost everything else while we were transporting furniture (even then; we ditched moving for a few hours to take a cat to the emergency vet when she got a bloody nose and we couldn’t determine the source).

Moving trumps writing, and even a lot of Christmas commitments, over the last two weeks. It will trumped a lot more through to the end of January, when we got the last of our stuff out of the old place. Preparing the old flat for someone else to inhabit will probably kick my writing routine in the teeth a few times through February as well.

And that’s okay. 

I’m knowingly setting writing aside in order to get the moving done, knowing that it will improve a whole lot of other things and, ultimately, open up more opportunities to write than I’ve had in the past.

It’s surprisingly easy for us to lose track of what’s really got our attention, which is why I use tools like priority pyramids and regularly journaling to see what’s on my mind and what I’m really focused on. It’s ever-changing and far more malleable than many folks think, and the end-of-year holiday season hits harder than most. 

2) WE LOSE OUR KEYSTONE HABITS

Like many folks, habit and routine sustain my writing process. I write when I get on a bus these days, and it feels weird when I can’t. Getting to that point has been a process, but I focused on it because I’d identified my commute as the window with time for writing. 

I used to write first thing after getting up, or when I got home from work. Other times, I set alarms that let me know it was time to begin. Comics writer Kelly Sue Demonic used to talk about lighting a candle in her office when she started work, then blowing it out when she finished. A simple ritual that trained her brain to be “on” at the start of a writing day, and turn “off” the narrative instincts when it was time to shut down.

There’s a lot of books about habit formation out there these days, and much of it talks about the way we string unconscious, habitual actions together.

If we drive to work on the same roads every morning, eventually the route becomes muscle memory. If we write every day after getting home from work, eventually we don’t have to think about writing—it will just become a thing we do after walking through the door.

But habits acrette over time: they all have a trigger, and if you remove that trigger, the habitual behaviour needs to be replaced by conscious effort. Encounter road work on your usual route to work, forcing you to find an alternate way in, becomes an annoyance because you have to think about something that used to be routine. 

Sitting down to write without the trigger of coming home (or stepping onto a bus, or lighting a candle, or setting a pomodoro timer) takes more cognitive energy. We have to think about writing rather than simply doing it because that’s when the writing gets done. Instead of sitting down to write because we encontered the trigger that said hey, it’s writing time, we have to physically coax ourselves to the keyboard and remind ourselves that writing needs to be done.

That’s harder.

It takes more energy.

And holidays often break our routines in messy ways. 

Not only are the rituals and habits around getting to work gone, but we’re packing new things into our time. Exceptions to the norm become the norm. Habits don’t stand a chance.

The trick here isn’t lamenting what didn’t get done—it’s about looking at what habits you need to re-establish (or build from scratch) now things are returning to ‘normal’.

3) WE’RE ALMOST NEVER A FULLY OPERATIONAL DEATH STAR ANYWAY

Another truism of many writers: we think we can do more than we actually can. I often plan out my year under the assumption that I’ll write 600,000 words—a perfectly feasible amount if you looked at my “good” writing weeks and extrapolated outwards. 

In practice, I can write about 300,000 words a year because the “good” writing days are not common. I estimate based on optimal conditions, but in practice conditions are never perfect. I’ve got the occasional bout of rocky mental health or exhaustion, courtesy of my sleep condition. Or I’ll need to cover household duties when my partner’s chronic illness kicks in and takes them out of commission. 

There’s a trick I’ve been using for years, originally pulled from Maggie Stiefvater’s late, lamented Tumblr. I start my day by assigning myself a “percentage of optimal” score, with 100% being in a state that feels like I’m firing on all cylinders and 10% being “barely functional”. I then set my expectations against that percentage – for example, if I think an optimal day is 2000 words, a 40% day would be 800.

After a few years of tracking how I feel in the morning, I usually wake up feeling somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. It’s a damn good week if I find myself in the seventy to eighty percent band more than once. 

I’m almost never 100%. I will never be a fully operational Death Star. 

When I sit down to plan out projects with mentee, I always ask them what they think a “reasonable” amount of time is to finish their project. Then I tell them to double it when we lay out our plans, because things will never move as fast as you think. 

We’re almost never a fully operational Death Star, which is perfectly fine. Even a half-built Death Star is dangerous as fuck (and, hopefully, you’re using your Death Star plans for something more productive than blowing up planets and terrorising the galaxy).

The post I Am Not A Fully Operational Death Star appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

This quote from Archimedes bounces around the internet from time to time, highlighting the power of leverage. It’s been stuck in my head for over two decades now, ever since Commander Sheridan quoted it while escaping from an alien prison in a Season 5 episode of Babylon 5 with the power of a lever and sheer, protagonists gumption.

But here’s the thing: it’s wrong.

The full quote is, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Thing is, the full quote isn’t as poetic as the first version. It lacks clear imagery and rhythm, and the poet in me recognises such things are a hindrance to recurring repetition.

But make no mistake: the fulcrum is important. Leverage without a firm pivot point to work against is weak. The fulcrum provides the power. 

I’ve got an interest in leverage, as long-time readers will know. Thompson’s five levers that move the publishing industry are pretty foundational to my thinking and planning as a writer and publisher, and help me figure out what moves to make as I pursue my goals.

Increasingly, though, I’ve pondered the other half of the equation. If the five levers can help you get things done, what is the fulcrum you leverage against in order to generate greater effects?

AN UNCERTAIN ERA

Personally, if 2025 has a theme, it would be uncertainty. The year started with some pretty epic storms that revealed a leak in our wall and a thick layer of mould beneath our carpet. We contacted our insurance and the body corporate, and figured we’d sort things out in short order.

Then it was still there when the cyclone hit Brisbane in March. Still there in June, when we originally planned to move out. It was still there in October, when our insurances started wondering why we hadn’t replaced our carpet yet. 

It’s still there today, as I wait for a team to come do a flood test on the wall to figure out where the leak is, in the hopes we can get this fixed before the 2026 storm season begins in earnest.

It’s a precarious way to live, and I haven’t enjoyed it.

2025 was also my third year of freelancing, and the year I decided it was time to wrap up freelancing and get a “real” job again. Cashflow was irregular throughout the year. At least twice, I put serious thought into quitting the whole publishing malarkey and just doing something less stressful (in the end, that’s what sent me back to work with a regular paycheck).

I took solace in the knowledge we were delaying our moving plans rather than cancelling — seven years in a one-bedroom apartment is just a little too long — but it took months to work out exactly when it was going to happen. At first, we thought late December. Then early January. Then late January.

It’s been an interesting year in a lot of ways, because I had a considerable number of things I could leverage to get things done. A lot of time, for example, which is an underrated resource for a writer. A lot of knowledge that I’d built up over the last few years. Some really outstanding books pitched through various contacts.

And yet, I did nothing. I had the leverage, but the sheer amount of uncertainty meant there was no fulcrum. No firm place against which I could apply the leverage and generate a greater response for my efforts.

The entire year became a tedious struggle. Everything ground to a halt as more and more uncertainty piled on top of me. 

Then…the move went from being uncertain to certain. It’s happening in about six days, on shorter notice than we thought. We’re ready, but not ready, if that makes sense. Cramming a six-week plan into two weeks is stressful.

And within the space of twenty-four hours, I was acting. Not just on the move stuff, but on publishing and writing gigs. That surprised me, given everything else going on.

Moving on short notice sucks, but having a fixed moving date provided me with a necessary fulcrum. Instead of having dozens of plans, based on how certain things happened, I had one sure thing to build around, and all the other decisions became easier. 

My spouse and I have never moved house together. We’re pretty sure it’s going to be an unpleasant experience given our respective responses to stress. 

But we’re also crazy excited about eager to get into the new place. In fact, despite all the stress, it’s the happiest I’ve been all year. 

YOU NEED A FULCRUM

In psychology, there’s a concept dubbed the locus of control — AKA your inherent belief in how much you control events versus ceding control to external factors beyond your influence like luck, fate, or the decisions of other people. It describes the feeling of agency you have over your own life, and having a sense of control is often linked with motivation, happiness, and health.

So it’s no wonder that the simple fact of having a move date has made me so happy, because we’re now able to make decisions and control what’s happening around the move. We may have stared down the barrel of moving in two weeks, rather than eight, but the energy with which we’re taking the challenge is considerable.

What’s amazing is the speed with which having the date also affected non-moving things. I started sending emails again after being quiet for the past few months. Newsletters got written. GenrePunk ninja is picking up speed again. So are various writing and publishing projects. 

Living with a sense of uncertainty, and feeling like there was very little I could do to influence things, actually seeped into every aspect of my life. Having certainty, in turn, has given me a lot of energy that bleeds into other areas.

Which brings our core theme of writing and publishing, and what this move reminds me of. 

Leverage is good, but in a lot of ways your locus of control is the fulcrum against which you apply the levers you’ve got access to. 

All of this has got me thinking about what my current fulcrum is, and whether it’s really serving me.

THE POWER OF KNOWING THE NEXT STEP

I’d been a working writer for about ten years before I started producing science fiction and fantasy stories. Not out of a lack of interest—I’d always loved the genre—but simply because I couldn’t figure out what to do with the stories afterwards. 

I got my start in the self-addressed stamped envelope era, submitting printed stories via post. I ended up working in areas other than fiction because, frankly, they embraced digital submissions earlier than fiction magazines did. As an Australian, there were only two local publications I could track down, and one of them focused on comedic SF and fantasy. I’d write the occasional story, but the lack of opportunity kind of thwarted my ambition.

Then, in 2007, Angela Slatter introduced me to the late, lamented Ralan.com right as the era of digital submissions arrived in the spec fic space. Within a few years, I’d clocked up a pretty decent run of publications, simply because writing stories now meant there was a statistically greater chance that other people would read them.

It shifted my locus of control. Prior to Ralan, I believed that writing short stories wasn’t entirely worth it, because I would submit to a small pool of publications (one of which was really not interested in my brand of spec fic). Now, there were huge lists of places to submit, and the limits of location gave way to a sense of excitement as I realised I controlled how much I wrote and submitted.

So, I started writing stories. A lot of them. And I submitted a lot (at one point, I tried for 100 submissions mailed out a year, even if all 100 resulted in a rejection). I moved from a place where I felt like I had control over my career, and every publication rewarded those efforts.

I always loved stories, but I couldn’t get into writing them and submitting them until I knew the next steps. Doing all the work of figuring out how to write a good story, only to then find myself in yet more unfamiliar terrain, didn’t excite me.

Brains are fundamentally lazy, you know? They don’t like uncertainty.

PICKING YOUR “CERTAINTY POINT” WHEN STUCK

I’m not the only writer who has experienced this feeling. When mentoring, when people are truly stuck on a project, I often ask about what they’re planning to do after it’s done.. If they don’t know—and most don’t—I recommend picking a target. Sometimes it’s a magazine they’ll keep submitting to, one story after another. Sometimes it’s a single anthology with an upcoming deadline. If they’re a novel writer, I get them to sit down and create the shortlist of agents/publishers to submit to. If they’re an indie, I’ll get them to pick a publishing rhythm (one or two books a year, new releases every quarter, one book a month).

What they choose doesn’t matter. What we’re doing is clarifying that finishing doesn’t become synonymous with figuring out what to do next. We’re giving them a certain next step. Knowing that you’ll be submitting somewhere gives you a destination to head towards. It helps you make both creative and practical decisions about your work, because there’s a finite amount of time to work towards.

Of course, you have no real control over the publication of your work (unless you’re going indie), but aiming for it means the work gets finished, and even if the original destination says no, you can keep on submitting afterwards (sometimes it takes a lot of submission to get a yes).

Meanwhile, you’re freed up to work on the next thing. And if the place you wrote for says no, you’ve at least got finished work that can be submitted elsewhere and open up new opportunities.

MY FAVOURITE FULCRUM: THE SHIPPING RHYTHM

My preferred Fulcrum sits at the intersection of two ideas.

The first comes from Thomas Woll’s Publishing For Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers. It’s a dry-but-useful book on setting up a traditional velocity publisher that offers a really interesting insight:

“Whatever your market, you must make sure your (publishing) program runs on a consistent schedule so everyone knows what’s going and when it’s coming. There must be consistency to the commitment…” (4). He alludes to an often-overlooked aspect of writing and publishing, where predictability is an asset. If you have books coming out at the same time every year — even if you’re only releasing 2 a year — then people (booksellers, readers, reviewers, etc) learn to look for your titles.

The second comes from Seth Goddin, in his book The Practice:

When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can focus on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship. 

This is why my advice for struggling writers is, essentially, giving yourself a shipping date. Getting into the habit of shipping work is powerful. It’s one reason why, when my time got very limited a few years back, I devoted my efforts to publishing a short story a week through the Patreon. Often—to borrow Godin’s phrase—the stories went live because it was 11 AM on a Saturday rather than because I thought they were ready, which meant there were a few stories I was uncertain about (spoiler alert: they were often the ones people responded to the most)

FOCUS ON WHAT’S IN YOUR CONTROL

The most useful advice I’ve ever been given, as a writer, is: focus on things you can control.

Part of the problem with writing through 2025 was the simple fact that I was angry at capitalism and its manifestations. It felt like nothing I was doing through the year was getting meaningful results, and very little was in my control. All I wanted to do was run away from home and find a nice quiet corner of the world to write in, but my publishing business was hemorrhaging money and everything I finished felt like a reason to sink deeper and deeper into debt.

A thing we don’t talk about often enough in writing: publishing is a space where it’s easy to feel helpless—to see the locus of control as fundamentally external and outside your influence. The correlation between the folks I know who work freelance and folks who experience significant bouts of anxiety is high. 

My locus of control was fundamentally external this year. I focused on the things I couldn’t influence. I told myself that there was no straightforward solution to my problems, not least because my last few stints with full-time work had not been pleasant experiences.

What I’d forgotten — what I could have done, but didn’t — is the power of establishing a shipping rhythm with my work. Keeping the flow of submissions going to one short story marketing; locking in on the posting rhythm for this pattern; setting my eyes on a specific submission opportunity for longer works and aiming to hit it. 

Maintaining a rhythm isn’t easy. Sometimes, maintaining it means letting go of work that isn’t as polished as you’d like. It means you’ll occasionally do something stupid in public. It means committing to the rhythm in suboptimal circumstances (like this week and next, when the move is in full flight)

The rhythm has perks. For instance, re-committing to the GenrePunk rhythm allowed me to recognise a fundamental mistake in my process. I used to post entries every Wednesday because it was the best fit for my freelance schedule — I had very little mentoring work on Wednesdays, and lots of time to edit entries and schedule the post.

Increasingly, with the day job, Wednesdays are my busy days where I have very few spoons. I kept missing my posting window, despite acknowledging that it was important to me in every prep week. Moving my weekly entry to the weekend made things much easier. 

So I’m trailing Sundays for my weekly post. Not forever, but as a short-term focus. A rhythm for a month. A small experiment to see how it works and where the resistance points are.

The key thing for me is getting a rhythm in place. 

Establishing a shipping rhythm doesn’t have to be your creative fulcrum. It’s what works for me because the things I mechanics and strategy of putting things out into the world. I like the act of releasing ideas and designing covers and shaping work for an audience. I enjoy contributing to my community of readers and fellow writers.

Your fulcrum — you firm anchor point against which you apply your leverage — could be something else. A commitment to a process. A daily word count. Dedication to finishing a specific project. Writing to amuse a small groups of readers.

 The important part isn’t what serves as your fulcrum, but that it’s something within your control. You don’t have to rely on other people to make it happen.

Leverage is often generated by the interplay of agents within the publishing field — you as the writer, yes, but also publishers and editors and reviewers and bookstores and fans and everything else. You can use it to great effect, but chunks of it aren’t entirely under your control.

The fulcrum — the shipping rhythm – is entirely under your purview, and it often works because work that doesn’t end up where you thought finds homes elsewhere instead. The important part isn’t landing at the publication; it’s getting things ready and keeping them out in the world until they find their readership.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post Leverage Needs A Fulcrum: How Do You Build Certainty Into Your Writing Practice? appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

For the next week, I busted out my laptop and brought it along each day. Unfortunately, it didn’t get used. My old laptop bag was for a different phase of my life, where I had plenty of writing time and often travelled by car or train. That was fine for the last eight years, but isn’t the writing season I’m in. Using it on a train was awkward because it’s basically a backpack, and pulling out a laptop meant digging through my lunch, notebooks, and other paraphernalia.

So, I’ve been pondering the problem since I started the new job five weeks ago, and two weeks ago I bought a new laptop bag. Specifically, this bag. Smaller, lighter, easy to open. I can basically rest it on my lap and unzip it, and the laptop is ready to work on. It’s a small but essential infrastructure change that opened up opportunities to work, and it only cost me twenty bucks. 

Instantly, I have about 30 minutes of extra writing every day, so long as I can get a seat on my bus (about 85% of the time).

Between the commute and the hour lunch break at work, I’ve arrived at a satisfactory answer of when do I write rough drafts while working? An hour and a half is usually enough to get me a decent stretch wf words each weekday.

Which means I focus on the next problem: when do I edit? Rewrite? When do I get these posts live? When do I design book covers?

Important problems, to be sure, but not essential until I had the question of when do I write sorted out. 

WRITERS ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

It would be easy to turn my current morning writing routine into a pretty cliché piece of advice about finding the time to write if you really want to be a writer. It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this kind of experiment. Back when I worked long hours for a writers festival, my available writing time was basically an eight-minute commute every morning, before the rigours of the day burned me out. It seemed an inconsequential amount of time to devote to writing, but I did it, and actually wrote a story a week for my patron for the space of twelve months.

But that’s not what I’m banging on about here. There’s plenty of times in my life where I’ve found the time to write like this, but just as many where I’ve let writing slide. Sometimes, writing isn’t that big of a priority. We’re not supposed to say that out loud as creative types, but it’s absolutely true. 

What I want to focus on is a very different lesson: solve one problem at a time. (Switching to my lunch break here, if you’re curious about what a 15-minute commute generates on the writing front)

Writers aren’t encouraged to think of themselves as “problem solvers,” but I’d argue that almost everything in writing is just solving one problem after another. What is figuring out the opening of a story but asking yourself, “how do I get people interested in what’s going to happen?”, and what is an ending but asking yourself, “how do I make people care about everything’s that just happened?” and “what do I want people to feel and think right now?”

Fixing scenes? Solving one problem after another, often by asking yourself the right questions. Same with rewriting and revision (David Madden’s excellent book on editing is just a series of questions one can ask about one’s manuscript and figuring out ways to solve the problem).

So we fix problems all the time. One after the other.

But because we don’t self-identify as “problem solvers”, we don’t think to apply that approach to the rest of our lives.

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

When the internet and author platform boomed into existence in the last nineties and turned into the “be online and do social media” advice circa 2007 or so, I used to spend time around more experienced writers who lamented the fact that new authors kept trying to solve the wrong problem.

The really days of the internet were filled with advice about building a blog or being on social media or establishing an author platform, and lots of folks rushed to follow that advice even when they didn’t have books to sell. The Q&A section at festivals, conventions, and author events became a litany of folks asking how to be online better, but when prompted to talk about their book, newer authors would admit they focused on the social media first.

They were solving the problem of finding and nurturing a readership before they had books or stories for that readership to engage with. An absolutely fine approach if you were keen on being a blogger, but very cart-before-horse if you intended to make your living writing books.

These days, I notice the same tendency among the folks I mentor and tutor. They want to rush ahead to strategies and tactics, caught up in the latest online buzz about the things writers “must” do in order to succeed.

My advice begins with a simple question: is that the problem we’re solving now, or is it a distraction?

FINE TUNING 

If you’re struggling to find time to write, then adding a social media stream to promote your books probably will not help you unless you’ve already got a massive backlist of 20 or 30 books. There is nothing you can do on social media — paid or unpaid — that doesn’t pay off ten teams better if you’ve got books for people to buy, and your limited time is better spent finishing your first series (if you’re an indie) or getting new books out (if you’re traditional).

If you’re not writing and you don’t have a deep backlist, then the far more pressing problem is how do you get writing again.

Note that I’m saying nothing about quality here. How do I write better? is a problem that’s worth tackling after you’re in the habit of getting new words on the page. How do I get these books into the hands of an audience? is a problem to solve after you’ve got polished books to put in the audience’s hands.

(My lunch break ends here, cut short because I need to leave the office)

Even within these broader questions, focusing on the right problem for right now can be important. Changing my laptop bag was an important step in getting more writing done each day, but it wasn’t the first problem on the list. Before it was writing during my lunch break and maximising the time available there. Our break room at work is busy, so I trialed working in the local food court for a bit…then realised that losing ten to fifteen minutes walking there and another ten to fifteen coming back was a lot of lost words.

From there, I tried different lunch breaks to find the period where the break room is at its most usable. After that, I kept a log of days where I didn’t write for my entire lunch break, and the things that disrupted me. Some of those were unavoidable (dealing with insurance and body corporate calls after some recent damage to our flat), but some were things I could address (feeling like I needed a pick-me-up and ducking out for a coke or coffee). Those I addressed by purchasing a vacuum-sealed mug that lets me bring coffee to work and keep it warm all morning, or by bringing a can of soft drink and bonus snack into work as my afternoon treat. 

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

I bang on about infrastructure a lot when I talk about writing, because it’s often the invisible underpinning that guides how much we write and what we can do with the finished product. Building a readership overseas was incredibly difficult in the days before the internet, which naturally limited what I could achieve as an Australian writer. Even now, my career is shaped by issues of geography and resources: I don’t go to conventions, for instance, because Australia is vast and empty and even our local sci-fi conventions locally are expensive for me to attend from Brisbane.

This doesn’t mean that my career can’t advance, but it limits the strategies I can use to connect with readers and sell books. 

(Another morning stint. 465 words written)

Whenever someone mentions they’re having trouble writing, I start by looking at their infrastructure. Where are they writing? When are they writing? What tools are they leaning into? Where we go from there will often vary, because nobody starts the writing game with a level playing field, but those small logistical issues matter. 

I started my new working routine by trying to get writing done before I left for work, but it just didn’t work. There’s too much going on in our flat, from cats demanding food to a spouse getting ready for work, and my attention keeps fragmenting. It would have been easy to despair at how little I was getting done, but I’ve been at this a long while and I know it’s better to experiment.

Ergo, I focused on the problems one by one. Figured out when and where I could get work done, and refined those windows to let me do more.

It took a few weeks to get right, but once I did, I had a pretty consistent process I could rely upon.

TOMORROW’S PROBLEMS

Are other parts of my writing business suffering while I work this out? Absolutely! I haven’t sent a promotional newsletter in weeks, and managing the Brian Jar Press store has been a little slower than I’d like. Figuring out when to do store stuff was one of the early problems I worked on (early mornings, before I head off to work, which wasn’t being used as effectively for writing as I’d like), but others are just on a list I call “Tomorrow’s problems.”

They’re things I need to solve, but they’re not the most urgent things I need to address. They’re simply further up the Writer’s Hierarchy of Needs than I’m at right now. Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which suggests that concepts like Self Actualisation and Community are less important when you’re struggling with lower-order needs like safety and accessible food, tomorrow’s problems are more important once I’ve got the lower foundation problems sorted.

I had them down a few weeks ago, before I started the new job, but my habits were built around freelancing and spare time. The big change in available hours moved my attention away from the higher-order issues and towards the more basic ones.

Writing new words

Making them good

Getting them out into the world.

Everything else can come after that. I need to nail down the foundation first.

THE SAME PHILOSOPHY WORKS FOR CREATIVE PROBLEMS

Incidentally, I use the same philosophy when dealing with story issues as well. I often tell my mentees that there are three phases of writing: coming up with ideas, putting them on the page, and making them good. We often think the process is linear, but it’s not. What kills many writers’ momentum is some combination of trying to ideate, write, and edit at the same time, or trying to apply the solutions of one phase when the issue is another.

I’ve written about this a bunch in the past. A few years back, when drafting my story The Rise And Fall of Darnell Royce, Cartographer, I stalled out on the draft and got log jammed for over a week. I kept trying to write new sections, but they didn’t work. I tried editing sections, and that didn’t work either. Everything kept coming out awful and disappointing.

So I stepped back and asked myself what problem I was really trying to solve, and it turned out I had an ideation problem. The solution wasn’t writing more; it was sitting back and creating a pool of concepts and ideas to pull from. Once I had the ideas, I could write the end of the story pretty easily, but coming up with them while I was at the keyboard was always going to be harder than ideating on its own. 

THE POWER OF SMALL, CUMULATIVE SOLUTIONS

Over the years, I’ve learned that the solution to problems is rarely a large change. I’ve changed my lunch break and used a different bag. Bought a sealable coffee cup that will allow me to bring coffee to work. Between them, they’ve nearly doubled my daily word count over the last three weeks, even though I’ve had a few days when things went really off the rails.

That’s the power of solving problems one by one—the effects accumulate and add up over time, while simultaneously being easier to implement than big changes. 

I’m keeping this in mind as I try to solve the editorial problems, because I often feel like editing should be big chunks of time, when in reality doing one or two fixes a day will quickly add up.

It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like I’m delving into the world of mass productivity advice, since so many books aimed at business and entrepreneurial types home in on this idea. “A cumulative 1% improvement in your productivity every week adds up to something huge” is a very common promise, and often assumes that continuous improvement is always possible and there’s no end point to the exponential curve.

I don’t want to reinforce that. I simply want to acknowledge the core truth of solving writing problems: start with the little things. 

Too often, writers get caught up in the idea that writing is big, because the cultural myth around art is that it’s all big sweeps of inspiration and dedicated perseverance.

When you focus on the small—what you can do with your time and resources, instead of what you can’t—the opportunities that open up may surprise you. 

WRAPPING UP MY SECOND LUNCH BREAK

I’m finishing today’s entry from the break room at work, having just broken a thousand words for the day (and a little over two thousand words for this entry). Two morning commutes, two short writing bursts during lunch. This is pretty solid confirmation that the new system is working for me. Momentarily distracted by some work colleagues getting literary questions wrong in their lunchtime quiz, but otherwise trucking along pretty well for a Tuesday. There’s even twenty minutes left to give this a once-over and a polish, getting ahead of the next problem on the list.

And while I’m focused on solving the main problem in front of me, I do occasionally brainstorm possible answers to later problems. We’ll be moving house in January, which means my daily commute will basically double and feature a switch from train to bus halfway through. Editing will become the train portion of my commute. Buses will be the writing portion. It may not work, but that’s being tested and iterated in a few months when we actually make the change. 

Until then, everything is theoretical. Solutions for tomorrow’s problems, which aren’t the problems of today. Right now, I’m looking to move from getting things written to getting things out into the world. Building up my writing habits and career step by step.

ADDENDUM

It’s worth noting that a lot of what I’ve been experimenting with starts with a much older experiment, where I challenged the notion that I needed big blocks of time to write. Since then, I’ve gotten much better at using the time I’ve got, rather than cursing the fact I don’t have the time I think I need.

I am, by nature, a short sprint writer. Even if you give me three straight hours to write, odds are I’ll write about three hundred words and pause, pottering about for a few minutes before figuring out what happens next and starting the next chunk of story or blog post. 

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