Tagged: freelance
Now in bookstores!
Setting myself an unbreakable 90-day deadline to finish the book worked! Albeit with one day off (Christmas day), some very hard days, and about one time a week where I wanted to pitch my laptop out the window. But after 89 days, the Kindle, Print Replica, and paperback editions of 100 Days, 100 Grand are all on sale now!
I’m chuffed to see the idea I had four years ago finally making a thump on the desk. (A big thump – the print edition weighs in at nearly 3kg.) Throughout its creation I’ve remained a working copywriter, and far too often the book took a back seat to my clients. I’m still taking clients as a working writer – man’s gotta eat – but this is the day my business changes a bit.
The plan now is to coach budding six-figure freelancers in the book’s methods, and I’m planning a series of small seminars and presentations to encourage as many freelancers as possible to aim for a six-figure income and share the book’s threefold philosophy.
What is that philosophy? First, that everyone has a saleable “signature move”: some combination of what they love and do best they can offer to the market. Second, that in our superabundant global economy there are customers for that offer: somewhere in the world’s $100tn market there are people with a mere £100,000 to spend on you. And finally, that technology – the true driver of the global economy today – can help you define, find, and connect with those people at low cost, across the wires and waves that link three billion people to information, applications, and resources.
That’s the life-affirming message of the book I wanted to write: you can build the life you want, in 100 days. After nearly four years of effort, I think I achieved it. Now buy the book!
Up for pre-orders on Amazon today
Happy to report the Kindle version of 100 Days, 100 Grand is now available for pre-order at Amazon! It’s been a long and hard journey, but the (next) finishing line is now in sight. (After which the real work of getting 12,000 people to buy it starts.)
Take a look at my shiny new Author’s Page, then pre-order your copy now!
I love to go a-rendering
It’s only a mockup, but this is basically what the print book will look like (perfect-bound A4 paperback.) Getting closer…
100 days and Xeno’s Tortoise
Xeno’s Paradox lives!
It’s the old Greek tale that demonstrates it’s logically impossible to overtake a tortoise if you give it a head start. Because to catch up, you’ve got to travel halfway to him first. And when you get there, he’s a bit further ahead. You’ve now got to cover half the remaining distance. As you do, the tortoise plods a bit further. And so on.
Of course, it’s a fallacy. But it has some parallels to the writing process of 100 Days, 100 Grand.
In the middle of 2016, I spent three months solid on a big surge of content, with enough now there to start testing it as an actual work plan. (In other words, becoming a six-figure freelancer myself.) Did it work? Yes – and how. A single sales letter to a small list (fewer than 40 prospects!) led to a fully-booked September, with initial projects turning into new retainer clients at the rate of one a month. A situation still in progress now, six months later. (One reason I’m blogging on a Saturday afternoon.)
But of course, each new client took up days on the calendar…days I couldn’t spend on the book. In fact, September to December I completed barely one chapter a month. This has happened several times in the long slog to publication, and I expect it to happen again. It’s great for my own freelancing business, but no good for yours.
The book’s now 80% done: 235,000 words of 250,000 or so and 1096 pages of a planned 1200. (I know that’s not 80%, but I expect a great deal of current content to disappear in editing.) But each time I test a process, it reduces the amount of time I can spend on that last 20%. Pure Xeno’s Tortoise stuff. It’s both frustrating and exhilarating. Because I can see the finishing post… but my own actions are preventing me from reaching it.
Afterword: working in from both ends
Both Parts 1 and 10 of the book are complete (I work from both ends inwards!) and among the flotsam and jetsam bookending the main text is this Afterword. I’m not sure quotes from graphic novels and musings on cosmology belong in a textbook for freelancers, but the self-actualised part certainly does. Don’t worry, it’ll all be edited down before the final cut.
Freelance framejack!
In tribute to the freelancer’s art, I habitually work in a T shirt, today a grey one I got as a gift from Australia. Symbolising my much-travelled life, my lower half is today clad in the trusty travel pants that have trekked over Saharan dunes and swum the Nile. As a declaration of how I live, far removed from the sheeplike commuting hordes of train and Tube, I did not shave this morning, and my hair is a little unkempt.
My personal style is a joyous celebration of the indie life: fiercely independent, proudly self-actualised, and accountable only to those I choose.
So, Mr Delivery Guy, your cheery “Sorry if I got you up” statement just now was a stab in the soul of truly monumental proportions.
Over 1,000 pages so far…
The four-digit barrier’s broken: as expected, the book so far runs to over 1,000 Letter-sized pages. That’s a lot.
While there’s still plenty to write – each day has content, but the last third of the work largely involves connecting the dots and improving the experience before a final month-long editfest late this year – I don’t expect the page count to increase much from here on in. Since each chapter is already planned out, with page and section breaks in place, and most of the content there in rough. It’s now a case of carpentry, not growing a forest.
The pages you can see behind the popup, by the way, are on the web too: they’re the same text as What the book’s about. And yes, while I’d usually do a long piece in Scrivener or Snowflake, the linear nature of 100 Days, 100 Grand makes good ol’ Word the best choice for simply cutting and pasting all the bits together. (The book uses as source material a stack of notes and files I’ve used in my work going back over 15 years…)
A selection of pages from 100 Days, 100 Grand … with typesetting marks. Looking colourful!
Typesetting will obviously move to InDesign (or, since I’m increasingly seduced by the beauty of whole-paragraph justification algorithms, LaTex). For the reason why, just look at the example paragraph and the table below it – comparison by Zink Typography.
Zink’s comparison of Word, InDesign, and LaTex
See how LaTex looks at the whole fruit? Instead of cramming as many words as possible on each line (the way Word does justification, which hasn’t changed since 2008), LaTex (pronounced lay-tek) averages out word spacing across an entire paragraph. Reducing the hyphenations (I have a hatred of hyphenating) and giving the block of text a far more consistent colour. Best of all, look at that SD. It means a much larger number of words in the paragraph have a similarly-sized space between them in LaTex.
LaTex is basically a bunch of macros for textmongering app Tex, which itself has an incredible pedigree – Tex’s creator, Donald Knuth, has a reasonable claim to be the greatest programmer of them all. I’m seeing whether I can apply LaTex style before the book goes to print.
Second prelaunch email out
The second prelaunch email leading up the book’s publication date went out today! If you’d like to receive the next one, join the mailing list here, or take a look at the email first…
Readership into five figures for new LinkedIn article
It’s not news if that’s how you found this site, but an article I wrote for LinkedIn’s Pulse is among the most-viewed articles on the business networking site this week, with over 25,000 views in its first 48 hours…
Two months to go…
W
ell, the Chris does Content office (a converted garage in southeast London!) currently makes a beehive in midsummer look more like a convention of lazy bums; with the whole 100-day plan mapped out from June, July’s been about pulling together my thousands of pages of notes and checklists going back over a decade, flipping through with a critical eye and deciding what works.
It’s a lot of effort – especially since my own copywriting business hasn’t let up for the summer, and a guy’s got to eat. But I’m pleased with progress so far. Not with the text overall – I thought the book would run to 60,000 words, and it’s looking like well over 150,000 – but with the way each chapter feeds into the next, building piece-by-piece towards a single goal.
Each chapter’s working out around 1,000 words of instructional text – everything from writing your sales website to building your campaign letter – and a set of tasks, usually between 3 and 8, that take between half a day and a day to complete. Oh, and there are now 10 sections rather than a planned 9 – List-building, while vital, can be learned in one week rather than two, so before it now comes a week devoted to networking the 100 Days way (i.e. not involving cocktails with strangers). I’ve also realised “the numbers” will be different for everyone – that £8,000 a month figure we’re aiming for may be 100 clients for someone selling web subscriptions, just 2 or 3 for a freelance writer like me – so in the second week a whole day goes on building a sales funnel and populating it with figures appropriate for your industry sector.
Of course, big news of the week is that the cover design‘s now done!
100 DAYS, 100 GRAND - be earning six figures as a freelancer... 100 days from today! 