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In this episode, Mark has a chat with Leah Cutter who writes page-turning, wildly imaginative fiction set in exotic locations, such as a magical New Orleans, the ancient Orient, rural Kentucky, Seattle, Minneapolis, and many others.
Prior to the main episode content, Mark shares a quick personal update that includes details related to his writing income for 2019.
2019 Writing Income
64.97% Self Published
15.03% Traditional Publishing
20.00% Mixed Self and Trad
Mark then shares a word about this episode’s sponsor.
You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.
In their discussion Leah and Mark discuss:
- Leah’s choice of doing the interview and some writing at a local coffee shop
- How Leah does the majority of her writing during the week in the tiny house she lives and works in during the week
- Leah’s 8 year old document that stated that when she grew up she wanted to be a writer
- The way that Leah only writes on one specific project at a time (despite writing broadly in multiple genres)
- How each new project she works on must pass “the giggle test” and how she can’t write something that she’s not truly excited about
- Leah’s writer tagline as “Writer/Traveler”
- How many projects Leah publishers in a given year
- The decision Leah made to publish something new once a month every month for the past three years
- How Leah knows if a project is going to be a story, a novella, or a novel
- The fact that Leah has a seperate writing computer and a separate writing desk in her tiny house where she divides up the different types of work
- The “Business for Breakfast” books that Leah has published
- The strategy of publishing to the 30 day Amazon pulse while still publishing wide to other platforms
- The two flavors of newsletters that Leah produces based on things she learned from Tammi Lebreque’s Newsletter Ninja course
- …and more…
After the interview, Mark reflects on Leah’a positive attitude, her passion, and the dual newsletters that she produces each month for her followers.
Links of Interest:
Leah Cutter writes page-turning, wildly imaginative fiction set in exotic locations, such as a magical New Orleans, the ancient Orient, rural Kentucky, Seattle, Minneapolis, and many others.
She writes fantasy, science fiction, mystery, literary, and horror fiction. Her short fiction has been published in magazines like “Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine” and “Talebones”, anthologies like Fiction River, and on the web. Her long fiction has been published both by New York publishers as well as small presses.
Read more books by Leah Cutter at http://www.KnottedRoadPress.com.
Follow her blog at http://www.LeahCutter.com.
Leah’s conversation was full of so much good stuff. Never heard of Amazon Pulse. Now I got a goal to work towards.
I will say I was interested in her answer to how does she handle juggling all the projects she has. I was sorely disappointed when she says she just does it serially and fast. It goes to show that we are bad at multitasking and concentration on one thing at a time is the best way. I now look over at the 4 outside of work projects I have on my plate this week. Time to wrap some up and not continue on others so I can focus.
I like her idea of a separate writing computer. That way it isolates your writing and you can’t be like oh well it just so happens that this fun game or Facebook is just a click away. By just having a writing computer with nothing on it except writing programs is a good isolation technique.
Again, I am curious if there are any author’s out there that aren’t writing full time but selling author non fiction. I feel like that venn diagram is small enough that it is hard to find. Especially since if you aren’t writing full time you have very little time to do any writing so a non fiction book would not be in your best interest. Ahh well, Maybe once I get the groove of publishing down I’ll write one up since I can’t seem to find any examples except maybe James S Aaron.
Thanks for a great episode, Mark. I’ll see you at the Career Author Summit.