The Author Stack

I have been listening to Kesha’s music since she was making trashy club songs and I was a trash panda getting wasted in bars every weekend. Her work provided the theme of my early adulthood. She transformed her career into deeper, more soulful music at a time when all my bar friends moved away and I started to contemplate my life more deeply. While the legal case surrounding her lawsuit broke my heart, her fight to control her career, her IP, and her life resonated deeply with me as a creator...

Hi, What if your first (or next) $10K month wasn’t just possible...but closer than you think? That’s exactly why we created $10k Secrets — a brand-new book packed with the real strategies that helped real creators hit their first (or most successful) five-figure month. And today, you can get it 100% FREE when you sign up for our new newsletter, 10k Secrets. We asked a dozen successful creators a simple question: "What’s the ONE strategy that helped you have your first (or last) $10K month?"...

I read a lot of tech articles, specifically about growth and scale, two words that are as exhausting as they are enthralling. I am the first to admit that these articles are filled with nonsense terms and acronyms that make no sense. It’s almost as if they have chosen the most complicated series of words on purpose to make sure laymen won’t understand them. Well, while I am not exactly a layman, I have spent my career translating business terms to creative people, and this might be my hardest...

I have been overwhelmed recently with the deep, guttural need to scream. I have no idea why, but it bubbles up several times a day while I’m simply going about my life. I have a mouth, and I must scream; at nothing in particular, just the overwhelmingness of existence. Not even the burden of existence, or the pressure of existence. Just the existence of existence fills me with the need to scream. Things are not even going poorly. They are going as well as a human living in a hypercapitalist...

I made $50,000 more in 2023 than any other year in my whole career before then, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to keep it all together. I don’t say that kind of thing lightly. I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, and a myriad of chronic illnesses for years. While I am prone to hyperbolize, I don’t ever joke about having a breakdown. The only thing that saved me was that I was so burnt out I became numb to how close I came to complete and utter collapse. Fun start to an article,...

There is a darkness that comes with growth. It's as if you are consumed inside an abyss because there is no light to guide you. This is because you have not set a beacon yet. Once you have figured out the path to get what you want, your mind places a little light there. Every time you return, the light gets a little brighter, until it is as bright as the sun. However, in those moments of growth, when you haven't reached your destination, you are in the dark. Your little flashlight can not see...

Direct sales can be an overwhelming monster if you don’t know where to focus your energy. Even though there are only five major components (website sales, landing pages, crowdfunding, subscriptions, events) within those categories are thousands of success paths. Even just setting up a mailing list comes with hundreds of options from hosting to designing your email sequence. However, there are some major components of every direct sales environment that help foster success. While I can’t tell...

I think about whisks a lot. Yes, those kinds of whisks. The ones you use to whip eggs and do basic cooking tasks. Did you know that before the 19th century, whisks were basically just a bunch of sticks and thatch bundled together? Think about how inefficient it would be to use a bunch of sticks to stir ingredients together. It took forever, and it severely limited the types of recipes that could realistically be executed on any given day. Then, in the 19th century, this magical invention came...

I find it hard to develop a shared language about how difficult it is to create and launch creative projects. I’ve called it “soul-selling”, which is NOT selling your soul, but that’s what everyone equated it to, so I stopped saying it. I’ve called it heart selling, emotional selling, and a whole lot of other things that fell on stone-faced creative people over the years, mostly because when you combine the word sell with creative work, half the people (and nearly all the people who need to...

I’ll be honest. The thought of creating a content calendar makes my jaw clenches and every hair on my body stand on end. Then, Bo Burnham's song Content starts playing in my head. But look, I made you some contentDaddy made you your favorite, open wideHere comes the contentIt's a beautiful day to stay inside -Bo Burnham Now, I love that song quite a bit, but only because it mocks the idea of creating random content for mass consumption. Yet, here we are, talking about how to create a content...