So right now I am working hard on the affordable range for ebay, the shoes, and the Supermix project.

I am planning to release Supermix in stages, and in small amounts. This is for two reasons, one is that it is in test marketing phase, and I want to iron out any potential problems before any significant outlay, and the second is that I want to talk to Wolfe about my supply chain when the game is finished, since I am rather confident that he will have significant input on both.

I am doing this now, so that I have another store or ten set up whilst I am doing further immediate work to generate more working capital.  This is to avoid borrowing or outlay that I would rather spend on the house.  I have a number of projects to do on it before any further aggression from the scum family, and I do not require any input from stupid people.

I am also setting things up in case I manage to land a regular public speaking gig, which I think will help with the Wolfe side of the project – no I am not trying to distract him from his children, I am entirely confident that we can cope with putting things on a more professional footing once the work is actually done.

Everything I have done so far has been groundwork, and there is significantly more to be done before any question of money arises.

I do realise Wolfe will find this astonishing, however we do have tortoise versus hare situation here, and my tortoise is moving significantly faster in some respects than his hare. I think so far I managed to get him into several arenas he would not otherwise have covered, and there is still more work to do.

For those readers who fail to understand this, I am neither a superfan nor a servant, I am employing a complex and large scale strategy which costs nothing and covers a lot of ground, in order to lay a foundation for a taller construction in terms of the eventual outcome.  If you don’t understand what that means, it is probably because your brain is under developed because you do not practise the correct exercises in terms of development.  It is of great importance that you balance any academic or self development work with a three dimensional sense of how it eventually looks, if you want to create more advanced strategies.

Anyway, I happen to think the outcome of the project is worth it, so it is important to get all this stuff done.

I want to get a series of business books out, they will be quite abstract, the work for Boris needs to be moved along, and I need the current range of more immediate products to be sitting advertising my brand before I even think about doing anything else.

I have three jobs alongside the contracts, that I would like to be doing on top of this, each for different but important reasons.  It is important to have contingencies in place, for one thing, but for another it is very difficult to create if you are worried about stupid mundane things like money.

So, reasonably happy with progress now that I lack distractions.  It is lonely and tiring – I fell asleep mid sentence earlier, but come the spring, I think we will be seeing some positive developments from the Ina Disguise project.

Much affection,

Ina

One of my friends on Facebook is an writer from Australia, and this week he decided to ask about life changing moments.

Out of all the horrible, interesting things that have happened the first thing that sprang to mind was

David Wolfe’s wife blocking me on Facebook.

Now at the time, I was on a knife edge.  I was grieving for my father, uncle, 2 cats and my best friend.  I had just spent 2 years researching a huge book which morphed several times as I hadn’t written anything with any purpose before, and I wanted to speak to David about the direction and how it could be used to help him.

I live in a different continent but it just so happens that we were born 12 days apart and we are oddly similar facially in photographs, despite me being a small sturdy Scottish person and him being a slight, German-American-Iranian.  This was not sufficient however, it was the whacky yet compelling presentation of usually fairly mundane health information that I was interested in.

Anyway, after years of being told how shite I was by my friends, who really just wanted me to be shite because they (probably) still feel that they are shite, I had found over a very careful year dropping in on David’s page every fortnight that we got on very well, apart from sporadic flaming tantrums on both sides, so when I was blocked by a person on his page, I just assumed it was him and was duly devastated.

When I say devastated, I mean completely destroyed.  I had just spent 6 weeks working on an incredibly well thought out yet bizarre film about him and Durianrider and I was still waiting to have a conversation about the book I was intently working on instead of wasting my time playing Farmville.

This was 2011 or 12, I forget which.  I had got through a horrific family experience and lost about 160lb at the time thanks to him, so I felt I owed him, regardless.  It was not until probably two years after this happened that I accepted that I was terribly in love, with a random stranger who just happened to be extremely famous.

Anyway after a few false starts on projects that did not work out, I finally descended into despondency but had sponged up enough of what David had to say to say fuck it, nobody wants to listen to me anyway, I might as well be louder about it.  Hence Ina Disguise was born, sometime during the writing of Best Scandal Ever.

The only reason I wrote anything at all was because I could not speak to him, and I thought it had been him that had blocked me as I knew nothing about his wife.

So now, five years after Best Scandal Ever, this has become a pivotal moment in that having been so incredibly damaged by trying to compensate for whatever anybody said was wrong with me, no longer giving a fuck allowed me to finally speak.

Admittedly, I have just done what I felt like doing, when I felt like doing it, because 24 hour care for my mother has always come first and everything else took a second place to that.  Now I have the problem of day to day survival, and that has to come first.  However, I have put time in every day, whether that is:

15 minutes to write this blog,

half an hour to spam the books to a few million people,

a couple of hours on putting a story together ,

a month of intense sewing to create a handbag

three months of intense work to create a carpet,

18 months to create the resin pieces, due to money

conceptualising new ways of putting out work, although that has been scuppered by my lack of support from other people.

Within a year of putting out any artwork I was in GQ.  Tatler and World of Interiors, and I now, after five years and five months have about 80,000 readers.

I do not make money out of this, but I did it on the basis that I could not otherwise ever get the message across to David, and the notion of a subversive marketing strategy that didn’t actually cost anything.

There is far more that I could be doing.  I have been quite lazy.  I should try some of the other stuff that I have in the armory – for those interested January 2016 entries have a lot of useful links you can try.

There are an awful lot of authors out there who do not understand how the marketing in publishing works, because it is not at all obvious.  I have heard some horrific stories about people spending nine years writing a book and then squandering their life savings on trying to make it sell.

This is not how it works any more.  As an author, you should regard it far more as being a pop singer.  Nobody is going to pay a pop singer they haven’t heard before, and by far the biggest challenge is getting them to notice your name in the first place.

So, although I have not made any money, I probably have more readers than David now.  This in itself is not important, this is not the point. The point is that it doesn’t matter who you are or why you do what you do.  The important thing is that you do it. I have a friend in Slovenia, an international level political journalist, that is still resisting writing her first book, on the basis that she is concerned about how it is regarded.

“Use a pseudonym and get on with it.” is my response.

The general thinking on online marketing is that you have to get people to see your name nine times before they even read the byline, so focus on that.  Wolfe is crazy like a fox, not to put too fine a point on it.  I was open enough to figure this before I started the experiment, but not everybody gets the point of Wolfe. He is a complex creature.

By the looks of things, it is time I did some edits and took this more seriously now.  To start with, it was a case of spitting the words onto a page next to a name and then throwing it out there.  Now I definitely have some attention, it is probably time to up the quality and time somewhat before I even think about money.

For those authors who read me and think how dreadful I am for putting work out free, here is the comparison:

You can spend 3 or 4k per book on marketing on the basis of getting a small proportion of it back, put out only long titles and wait for 30 years or so for someone to notice, or you can accept that nobody knows or cares who you are or what you have to say.

I think my way is better, and it is certainly cheaper and more rewarding.

Discuss.