When I was at university, I lived in houses of threes and fours.

They were fairly typical student houses. To get any work done, I had to shut the door to my room or be distracted. People cooking, playing guitars, watching TV, swearing at Mario Kart.

At the moment, I live in the countryside. My space is my own. Yesterday was about as sunny and warm as February in England can be, so I worked with the door open. Here, working in the kitchen with the door open means I hear the birds, see the sky, feel the sunshine. Rather than distract from the work, it helps.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t potential distractions, mind. Five open windows in Chrome, Twitter running in the background, checking status updates on Facebook – they’re all open doors that let in noise.

There are two challenges, as I see it.

First is having the discipline to shut the door on things that distract you while leaving open the ones that help you do your work.

Second, and just as difficult, is being able to tell the difference between the two.

So far in 2012 (two days shy of two months into the year) there have been 18 posts on the brilliant Zen Habits blog, run by Leo Babauta. That’s between two and three posts a week.

Zen Habits has over 240,000 subscribers. Surely, then, to build a sizeable readership I should post or publish two or three times a week. That’s what Leo does.

Last week, though, I looked over what Leo did when he first started Zen Habits.

His first real week of blogging, he wrote 18 posts – the same as in the whole of 2012 so far. The next month, there were 69 posts. The month after that, 36. There were guest posts, a series or two, tips and tricks, hints and lists – all the hard graft of building an audience.

The techniques Leo used have been so imitated that they may no longer work they way they once did.

But what’s clear to me is that he, like everyone else, had to earn his audience. Now that he’s earned that audience, he’s also earned the right to post whenever he wants, these days.

To me, focusing on Leo’s techniques isn’t the takeaway here. Learning from Leo’s work ethic – that’s the lesson.

You and I both have people to whom we look up. Far better than looking at what they’re doing now, though, is to look at what they did to get there. What they did when they were at the size and stage you are now.

It’s easy to see the chicken and forget the egg.

Online, where tweets move at the speed of seconds, weeks and months mean very little.

The Micropublisher and In Treehouses are published every 5 weeks. Creating two magazines a month was just a little too tight, would have meant a compromise in quality that I wasn’t willing to make. So I threw out the calendar and went with what felt right.

The Domino Project challenged the traditional book turnaround schedule. What usually takes 18 months was achieved in a matter of weeks.

How much of your working and publishing schedule is dictated by the factory model of five-days-on-two-days-off?

Perhaps you’d be better working half a day, every day. Or dedicating yourself for twenty days in a row, followed by a whole week off. Your audience might want to hear from you every day for a year, or prefer a big update every few weeks.

Discovering what schedule’s best for you and for your readers is a worthwhile experiment, one that shouldn’t be bound by a calendar that you didn’t draw up.

Gumroad lets you sell things by sharing a simple link.

No sales page, no shop, just a clickable link that can go into a tweet, status update, or blog post.

The natural home for Gumroad is on the social networks. If you have your own website, blog, or micropublishing house, then you can just as easily sell things through a link to a cart like E-junkie. Gumroad is an alternative, but no particular improvement.

Selling direct from social networks, though, feels akin to selling on a busy high street.

And no matter how much I trust a company, there are many things – an iPod, jeans, furniture – that I wouldn’t want to buy on the street. Too much noise, too many distractions, too much risk. I want the elegant, air-conditioned store, the whole package of buying from an environment in which I’m comfortable.

Of course, some products are best sold on the street. When you buy a newspaper, speed and ease are your priorities. Screw comfort.

If you’re making the digital equivalent of newspapers, then – low risk, low price, no explanation needed – Gumroad is perfect.

If you’re making something higher up the food chain, though, it’s still worth investing in the air-conditioned store.

Look around – at the blogs you read, at the websites you frequent – and you’ll find that overnight success is rare.

Sure, Joshua and Ryan had a great first year with their site. So did Derek. But these are right-time-right-place-right-quality exceptions.

Chris Brogan has been at the blogging thing since 1998. Leo’s a relative baby in comparison, but scroll to the bottom of this page and look at just how often he was posting in his first year. He put in the hours, fast.

Time, in fact, is one of the very few common factors between the big blogs. You could never mistake a post from Brian for a post from Seth. Clearly, then, success doesn’t seem to be about your headline or your post length or any other secret ‘content strategy’ beyond producing high-quality work.

Instead, it would appear that success is simply about doing the right work over a sustained period of time.

Two takeaways:

First, shortcuts would appear to be futile. If success comes swiftly then it’s a nice bonus, but it’s not something you can force.

Second, you’ll get there in the end. In time, the drip, drip, drip of quality work will see you home. The drip becomes a puddle becomes a pond becomes a lake.

This doesn’t just apply to blogs, of course. Whether you’re starting a freedom business or becoming your own publishing house, it will take time to get where you want to go.

The good news, though, is that simply by sticking with it you’ve got a great chance of getting there.

The word ‘everyday’ has come to mean normality, the unexceptional. There’s nothing scary about the everyday.

Waking at 4.00 in the morning to sit in front of half a dozen cameras and talk live to the world would be alarming at best, though, to you or me. For your local news anchor, it’s everyday.

It’s not the simplicity of the act, then, that makes it everyday. It’s the process (clue’s in the title) of doing it every day.

Running two magazines, I need to write a lot.

I’m exploring how to make this writing as everyday as possible. Rather than it being a special event, I’m adding it to the list of things I do each morning. Wake, read, exercise, shower, dress, drink coffee, drink coffee, drink coffee, write.

Writing becomes something that doesn’t require its own routine or magic – it’s just next on the list, every day.

So far, it’s been a good way to get the work done. The coffee helps, too.

Above: an unfinished photograph of yours truly (looking surprisingly grumpy).

A couple of weeks ago, Matt asked me a not-unreasonable question: “do you change your web design every other day?”.

I’ve fiddled with this website a lot. Content, layout, font size – it’s all fair game when I have a spare moment or an urge to procrastinate.

What’s more, I can’t see a time when I don’t fiddle with the site. I think that’s a good thing.

What I did

Around the launch of The Micropublisher, I made some significant changes. The font size went up from 10 to 20. The home page was stripped down to simple text and links.

Today, I decided explore how the site looks without sidebars.

Why I did it

For one, my work is constantly evolving. What made sense last year won’t necessarily be tickety-boo today.

I’m planning an overhaul of how readers can enjoy In Treehouses. This will mean a few navigation tweaks, new pages, and so on. Rather than being bound by my current layout, I’ll see what fits best. No restrictions.

Other changes, though, come from necessity.

I do most of my blog reading on a (somewhat battered) iPod touch. These tablets and smartphone chappies have changed how we read. A size 10 font doesn’t make much sense on a micro screen.

And yes, some of these changes come about for no greater reason than trying something on for size.

As long as I don’t lie to myself that website tinkering counts as doing the work, there’s nothing wrong with playing around a bit.

How it went

Because the site is kept fairly minimal, the changes were easy. I don’t have many plugins or widgets running. A simple design is a flexible design.

Because I was able to change the design myself, the only cost was my spare time. It’s a price I’m always happy to pay. Time spent redesigning the site helps me to clarify my work, to ask why things are as they are. It helps to polish the system.

Because I’m not paranoid about converting every last visitor or grabbing every last click, I didn’t let greed dictate the design. There are no pop-ups, no split tests, no optimised sidebars. Ain’t how I roll.

Something interesting: through the dozens of redesigns I’ve done over the years, my conversion rate for In Treehouses has always been between 15% and 18%. All the changes, they don’t make that much difference. Because of this, it’s been a long time since I designed with conversion in mind.

What you can learn

Don’t be bound by your website.

Whether through your own tastes, the evolution of your work, or the necessity of a changing web, your design will want to change as time passes.

The stores on Bond Street change their displays with the passing months and seasons, to keep things fresh for visitors. In the same way, your website is a shop window that can always be in a state of flux.

As with so many things in life, it comes back to a couple of simple truths:

Keep things simple, and be adaptable to change.

It was for The Micropublisher, the second magazine I’ve released here at Mountain & Pacific. The first edition was published at the end of January and for the launch I tried something a little different.

I ignored strangers.

No affiliates pushing readers in my direction. No requests of my peers to promote to their own tribe. No big social media awareness push.

The result?

Well, I had a target number of sales in mind for the first week and, without being indelicate and going into dollars and cents, I ended the week 32% above that target.

As for why this worked, it’s simple. Instead of chasing strangers, I focused entirely on those delightful folks who have given me permission to talk to them. Blog readers, email subscribers, Twitter and Google+ followers.

While I didn’t turn anybody away, I certainly didn’t go chasing strangers to whom to sell.

Because I didn’t sell to strangers, this website was kept as simple and enjoyable as possible for existing fans rather than worrying about things like SEO, traffic, click-throughs, and conversion.

Because I didn’t sell to strangers, the launch emails were simple – just as a few lines saying, “there’s a new magazine, here’s where to go if you’re curious”. No shouting or pushing.

Because I didn’t sell to strangers, there was no need to ‘be everywhere’ on social media. Over the course of the week, I wrote only 2 blog posts, 5 tweets, 1 post on Google+, and 3 emails. Enough to notify fans, but not so much as to annoy them.

It’s not about being deliberately obtuse. I’m not anti-selling, not at all.

I still included an element of scarcity in the launch, and I still want people to buy the magazine. The Micropublisher is my main project this year. All told, each edition takes over 100 hours of work.

Naturally, this means I want people to read it.

But the truth is, I never really sell to strangers. Running a podcast, having a YouTube channel, or writing list posts might be nice ways to get more traffic and become a big internet name, but they don’t interest me. And if I’m not selling to strangers for 51 weeks of the year, I’m not going to change for a launch.

So, if I ignore strangers, how does my business grow?

Well, by not doing much promotion, not podcasting, and not making videos. Not doing those things leaves more time to create better publications for my existing fans. I try to improve, every month, and aim to delight them.

I don’t get it right all the time, of course, but that just forces me to do better work. And when something does hit, friends and fans tell their friends and fans.

Rather than chasing strangers myself, these wonderful readers spread the work for me.

Call it naive, if you want. Call it idealistic.

I call it a business built on mutual respect. I call it the type of business I want to see in the world.

Since summer 2011, I’ve experimented with being a one-person publishing house. A micropublishing house, if you will.

What exactly does that mean?

Simply put, it means taking those things that a traditional publishing house does and shrinking them down into a one-person operation. The technology you have available to you right now allows you to write, edit, design, produce, distribute, promote, and sell publications.

The picture above is what a publishing house can look like today. That’s a micropublishing house, right there.

Of course, self-publishing is nothing new. Nor is putting your work out online – bloggers have been doing that for years.

So what makes a micropublishing house different to a blog?

To answer that, it’s necessary to step back and see that self-publishing is becoming more legitimate by the day. Rather than a last resort for the delusional or desperate, it’s now – thanks to ebooks and the Kindle and the web – a lucrative destination in its own right.

This legitimacy means that more people are self-publishing and more readers are reading those self-published works.

And, in turn, this means it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out. Without the filter of the publishing house to curate the quality work from the rubbish, readers are faced with the slow, tricky process of discovering for themselves what is worth reading.

The aim of a micropublishing house is to make work stand out by upping the quality.

It requires you changing your mindset away from that of just another self-publisher and applying the standards of a traditional publisher to your own work. Professionalism. Quality.

No, you don’t need a traditional publishing house any more, but that doesn’t mean everything a publishing house does is worthless. Investing effort into design, editing, promotion, and so on – this makes your work more valuable to readers and hence more lucrative for you as a writer.

Rather than being a blogger, pumping out ‘content’ to get traffic and clicks, a micropublisher creates quality publications for which she can charge. You might still have a blog on the side, but it’s support for your works, not the focus in and of itself. You’re not a blogger who publishes, you’re a publisher who blogs.

That’s the approach I’ve been taking with Mountain & Pacific. My aim with In Treehouses and The Micropublisher is to make publications worthy of the name. To produce work of a high standard and be my own publishing house.

So far, it’s been enjoyable and it’s been successful. But the journey’s only just starting.

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about micropublishing, making a living with words, or being your own publishing house, you might want to take a look at The Micropublisher.

To discover what that means, and to learn more about the magazine for yourself, simply head over here.

Here’s to the year ahead. It looks set to be a big one.