On the Horizon

I've been busy, and not just the usual busy of juggling work and training with my personal life and my not-so-secret love for video games. I've been my favorite kind of busy: busy building, busy creating, busy putting things together that make me excited to write and share. You will be hearing a lot more about these projects soon, but I wanted to give you a preview.

• The Cauliflower Chronicles. I am releasing a new edition of The Cauliflower Chronicles.This edition will feature new cover art, new illustrations, and the addition of author commentary. For each chapter in the book, the new edition will include a brief reflection added at the end. Since so much of the book is about learning about myself and about jiu-jitsu, I wanted to provide a perspective that encapsulates what I've learned since those days in Hilo, how I've changed, and how my thinking has evolved in the time between 21 and 27, between white belt and purple belt.

• Precision Social Media. Having worked with a range of clients in a variety of industries, I have started to see commonalities in misconceptions as well as challenges, and these hurdles are complicated by a wealth of misinformation spread by consultants that want to make a load of money managing social media accounts. In the first volume of this e-book series, I run through the no-nonsense basics of picking and managing a social platform whether you are a small business or an international corporation.

• White Belt Problems. If you haven't been following my work with Artechoke Media (you should be!), you might have missed the launch of White Belt Problems. White Belt Problems aims to make it easier for white belts to start and stick-with jiu-jitsu by answering every question they are likely to have about the sport, from getting started to what gi to buy. The book exists both as a free wiki and as a paperback so that you can share it as a quick URL or make the gift of jiu-jitsu more meaningful with a physical book. Read White Belt Problems today.

• Gym Owner Support. With the Artechoke Instructor of the Year contest behind us, I have been thinking more deeply about what it means to support the organic growth of jiu-jitsu, so in the next few weeks we are going to unveil a pilot program designed to support instructors so that they can spend more time on the mat teaching and less time fiddling with the back-end of their business. This won't be a full release at first, so be on the lookout for the announcement that we are accepting applicants.

As always, I am eternally grateful to have the opportunity to do the work that I do. Thank you for your support, and thank you for your valuable feedback.

Rethinking the Freelance Life, Part One: Our Work with Clients

Freelancing has been my life for the last eight years. My unwavering passion for all things writing—a career path not exactly known for fulltime, long-term employment—collided with an economic trend toward hiring contract workers and temporary employees, one of the many job-related challenges facing my generation.

For me, it’s worked out, and I’ve come to enjoy the freelance lifestyle. I have a calendar full of appointments and assignments. I’m paying my rent. And I’m working with interesting, passionate clients on a variety of projects.

In that time, I have also had the opportunity to collaborate with other freelancers, from designers to programmers to fellow writers. In every case, I learned a lot from these people and have had very few bad experiences. I’ve noticed, though, a common line of thinking amongst many freelancers (not all): they compare themselves to pirates.

The philosophy, as it was explained to me once, goes like this:

“We’re pirates. We sail from project to project collecting treasure where there is treasure to be had. We join forces with other pirates when the treasure is too big for one pirate, we go our separate ways when the project is done, and since we are all pirates, we will mutiny if the leader isn’t doing his job.”

It’s a romantic view. Pirates are free and independent. They chase adventure. They are risk-takers and visionaries because they have chosen the freelance path. It’s a sink or swim life, so if you meet a veteran freelancer you know that he or she has had the chops, the creativity, and the mettle to succeed in a challenging environment.

I’m fine with being proud of and enamored with the independence and challenge of freelancing. Where I get uncomfortable, however, is equating clients with treasure. In the pirate metaphor, this starts to suggest that clients are ports to be plundered. Do the job, get the loot, and get out.

Fans of the pirate metaphor may rightly argue that they never meant it that way, and I would believe them, but I argue that the picture you paint of yourself can easily become your reality if you’re not careful. If you’re a leader, the young and impressionable around you may buy into the picture as well, taking the painting for face-value regardless of your original meaning and its caveats.

The best freelancers I’ve met and worked with behave less like pirates and more like helpful neighbors. Their permanent business residences may be their own, but they are active, contributing members of their communities. They go where they are needed and fill the gaps. Sometimes the projects are big. Sometimes they are small. Sometimes the freelancer is the leader of the team because he or she is the expert, and sometimes he or she is following the lead of someone within the company. The freelancer could be there for a month, or maybe a year, or maybe he or she pops in and out for the foreseeable future.

While they are doing their work though, the most effective freelancers aren’t fixated on plunder like a pirate might be. They are getting paid, yes, but their focus is on doing what’s best for their clients. They want to leave their clients better off than when the project first began, and they are respectful of client limitations like budget and bandwidth. They might be able to squeeze a few more coppers out of the deal, but they establish reasonable scopes for their work because the clients are often better off.

A pirate asks for more budget for the sake of a bigger paycheck. A neighbor asks for more budget for the sake of capitalizing on an authentic, viable opportunity.

It may not sound romantic or exciting, but people are more likely to trust and collaborate with a neighbor than a bandit that sails in, fills his ship with treasure, and disappears when there is nothing left to loot.

The Motivation to Write

A few weeks ago, I asked my followers on Twitter and Facebook to send me their questions about writing. One of these questions inspired last week's exploration of revision. This week, I wanted to address another question that I received:

Anytime I run a workshop or give a seminar or participate in a guest lecture, I know that fielding a variation of this question is inevitable. I secretly wish that it won't happen, but it always does. And when a timid freshman in Composition 101 raises her hand and asks what motivates me to write or what inspires me to write, I have to admit:

I don't get inspired to write, and I am rarely motivated to write.

Sharpen the Axe: 4 Strategies for Revising Your Writing

Last week, I wrote a post about how revision should make-up the majority of your writing process because when you have a piece of writing in front of you, rather than a blank page, making improvements and changes is generally easier than drafting a piece of perfect prose on the first try.

When it comes to revision, one of the challenges is identifying what is important. What do you keep? What details matter? What do you modify, and what do you cut?

These are important questions to ask as they each aim to achieve the same goal: a piece of concise writing free of unnecessary constructions, where every sentence builds toward a powerful and effective conclusion. The following steps are what I personally do in the revision process, and they assume that you are free of constraints like length and assignment direction. That's not to say that what your editor wants is irrelevant (it is relevant). In this case, removing those variables simplifies this particular conversation.

Your Writing Process is Wrong

I don't really mean that what you do is wrong, but sometimes I have to say eye-catching things like that to get your attention. What I really mean is that some parts of your writing process could probably be improved based on my experience of working with writers and aspiring writers. When writers struggle to be productive, the culprit is usually the way they divide their time across the writing process. They put too much time into some stages and not enough in others. As a result, their project stalls or falls well-behind schedule.

153,000 Readers and Knowing Your Audience

While I continue to publish books, the most recent of which are Mastering Triangle Chokes and Don’t Wear Your Gi to the Bar, much of my writing as of late has been for companies and brands. I manage social media properties, I write copy for websites, I develop ads, and I do anything and everything in between. If it has words on it, I write it.

Ultimately, I love telling stories, and I got to thinking about just how many people are hearing the stories that I tell. I’m not at liberty to disclose sales figures for my books because of certain contractual agreements, but we can talk about the clients that I work with (in general terms) and the stories that I tell on their behalf.

Currently, I am writing for:

• A social entrepreneurship that sells jewelry to raise money for various non-profits.
• A healthcare non-profit in San Diego that works with non-profit leaders in their community.
• The brand behind a reality television series, which includes managing their monthly magazine.
• A New York Times bestselling health author.
• A financial services firm.
• A web and mobile development agency.
• A creative communications agency.
• An industrial equipment manufacturer. 

Using the low ends of my estimates and not taking into account my various publishing projects, my writing reaches a conservative estimate of roughly 153,000 people a month. In the first draft of this post, I broke down the audience for each client so that you could see how I reached that figure, but I eventually opted to err on the safe side of my non-disclosure agreements (because I love working with my clients!).

The audience for each client varies greatly, and it wouldn’t make sense to tell a story to a financial services client using the same approach that I would use for someone shopping for a new piece of equipment for their job site, and neither approach would work for a Facebook fan of a health leader.

When you write, the most important variable to consider is your audience. Whether you’re writing the next great travel memoir or sending an email to your boss, audience is paramount. You choose your tone, your pace, your word choice, and your structure based on your audience’s needs and perceptions.

Know your audience, and think about what is best for them when you communicate.

A Wild Writer Has Appeared

The challenge of being a writer: Everyone fancies themselves writers.

On the rare chance that I am invited to a party, someone inevitably tells me about the novel they have been working on for 15 years or about their niece’s plan to self-publish a series of fan-fiction. While I am supportive of people having creative hobbies—like painting or sculpting or writing—the sentiment that anyone can be a writer makes it difficult to convince clients, readers, or the people gawking at you at parties that your work as a writer is anything of consequence. After all, they could do what you.

They could write a book, if they had the time.

They could query a magazine and pitch an article, if they felt like it.

They could develop a content marketing strategy matched against an editorial calendar, if their job wasn’t already so demanding.

If you ever meet a writer or find yourself working with a writer for some professional purpose—perhaps your company hired an agency to develop copy for an ad campaign or perhaps your non-profit hired a grant writer to win a new source of funding—here are three points to help you get the most of the interaction.

Introducing My Portfolio

I’ve been a freelance writer since I was 19. The benefit of being a freelancer is that you can set your own schedule and work on a variety of projects of your choosing. The challenge of being a freelancer is that you have to set your own schedule and work on a variety of projects of your choosing.

To maintain that freedom without sinking into the horrible reality of the over-romanticized starving artist lifestyle, you have to hustle. You query magazines. You submit proposals. You network with advertising agencies and with corporate executives. Even when you have work, you have to look ahead to the end of the project, lining up your next assignment and the one after that as you complete your current task. If you don’t, you will soon find yourself without work, eating ramen for dinner, and asking your landlord if you can pay him in short stories (he will say no).

As soon as you stop hustling, you lose.

In my sprint to land the next assignment, to find bigger and bigger challenges, I haven’t taken the time to reflect. Writing has given me the opportunity to work with great people, and each project has taught me a great deal about my craft.

What started as a personal exercise—cataloging my work history—morphed into a detailed account of every assignment and client that I have taken on in my career. You can view the portfolio directory by clicking here, and from there you can explore individual projects at your leisure, complete with descriptions and work samples. For other writers, perhaps this will give you an idea of how to present your work. For anyone else viewing this portfolio, let me know if you have any questions about my work or if you see a way that I can help you tell your story.

The Eye Gouge That Went Viral, and Lessons Learned

Early last week, one of the companion videos for Don't Wear Your Gi to the Bar: And Other Jiu-Jitsu Life Lessons (my newest book) went viral. The video, a tongue-in-cheek montage about eye-gouging vs. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, racked up 10,000 views in three days, and the numbers are still climbing.

Viral content is a powerful way to spread a brand, and having the eye gouge video make the internet rounds has driven a significant volume of traffic to the Artechoke Media site, resulting in increased downloads of our e-book and driving sales of the softcover. As a content creator, seeing my material reach a massive audience is both gratifying and rewarding, intrinsically and financially. It fuels my motivation to continue creating, and it grows my brand.

Developing viral content, however, is not easy. After years of creating content, here's what I've learned, and I hope that it helps you in your content development.

1. The vast majority of your content will not go viral.

And that's okay. Between the Artechoke Media YouTube account and my personal YouTube account, I have uploaded 104 videos. Eight have broken 10,000 views, with the highest having over 600,000 views. I've written 75 blog posts for this blog, about 20 blog posts for Artechoke Media, and over 400 posts for Lockflow.com. Lockflow received a lot of traffic to begin with (2 to 4 million hits a month). Taking that into traffic volume into account, we had maybe twenty posts that went viral, shattering our average view numbers, over my two years there.

For a piece of content to go viral, it will likely have to connect to an audience larger than your immediate target, which is certainly good for your brand and your content, but maintaining a meaningful, consistent relationship with your audience is more important in the long run than a big surge of traffic in the short term. Your loyal core will support you, so continue to keep them happy with content that they enjoy, even if every piece isn't a record-setter. A few quality fans are more valuable than 10,000 fans with short attention spans (Kevin Kelly's piece on 1,000 true fans really drives this home).

2. Designing viral content is a matter of knowing what your audience likes to talk about.

Of the content that I've created that has gone viral, that accumulated a large volume of traffic over a short period of time, I had a pretty good idea beforehand that the content would stick because I was in tune with my audience. As a fight journalist, I am a part of the audience that I write for. I know what they'll like because I know what I like. When I see something that gets me excited, I can reasonably assume that the people that share my interests will get excited about it as well.

So when I interviewed Ryan Hall for Lockflow and he expressed some seemingly controversial views on jiu-jitsu technique, I knew that the combination of Hall's high profile and the discussion-potential of the interview would set the fight community a-buzz. When the article (and interview transcripts) went live, we were concerned that the server might not be able to handle the traffic. Our forums were on fire and communities around the net were discussing the article.

When I selected which behind the scenes videos to share from the making of Marcelo Garcia's Advanced Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I chose the ones where Marcelo expressed his views on incorporating certain techniques instead of others into his game. These perspectives are somewhat controversial in jiu-jitsu terms, but chasing controversy is not the key here. Chasing discussion is the key. Marcelo teaching a technique will definitely attract an audience, but videos worth talking about breed a stronger level of engagement. To prove this point, a video of Marcelo discussing Wrestling vs. Jiu-Jitsu garnered ten times as many views as a video of Marcelo simply teaching a crab-ride. The discussion in the comments of Wrestling vs. Jiu-Jitsu continues even still, two years later.

In the case of the eye-gouge video, we picked a topic that was both entertaining and discussion-worthy. Viewers would laugh, and they'd talk about the too-true events that inspired the making of the video.

3. Plant your content in active communities to create viral champions.

To get your content to go viral, you need to hand it off to vocal fans. These vocal fans, your champions, are the ones that are truly responsible for making your content go viral. If they love it enough, they will share it to their networks, write about it on their blogs, and post it to other online communities. From here, the snowball grows and grows as other vocal fans pick it up and do the same. Having a platform like a blog or a YouTube channel is an okay place to start this process, but to truly succeed, you should find online communities that would be interested in the content and share it there as well.

For the eye-gouge video, we posted it in /r/BJJ, a growing jiu-jitsu community, and the video spread from there. It's important to note, however, that I am an active member of /r/BJJ. I participate in discussions. I answer questions for new members. I upvote and share the content that other members post. I am a contributing member of the community because I am just as passionate about the subject matter as the other members. If I wasn't an active member, any posts I made to my own content would soon be seen as self-serving, and rightly so. Community is about giving, so if you want your planted content to grow, you should do the right thing and give as much as you can to the community first.

4. No matter what, focus on serving your core fan-base.

The more popular you get, the more people you will find that despise everything you do and write as though they would happily hit you with their car if they had the chance. I've received hate mail, 1-star reviews, downvotes, angry YouTube comments, and even a few viscous phone calls. Because of the eye-gouge video, dozens of martial arts groups and message boards are writing some pretty nasty things about my intelligence, my martial arts ability, and my credibility as a journalist.

This is inevitable. When you grow your audience, you will inevitably unearth more haters. Do your best to ignore them, focusing instead on the people that represent your target audience (if the majority of your target audience is critical of your work, consider their feedback). The internet is a haven for negativity, and part of growing your brand is learning to cope with that element.

Good luck with your content.

4 Steps for Launching Your Writing Career

My writing mentor, Alan Natali.

Mentoring new writers is an important part of my life. It’s a tradition that I take seriously because my mentor, Alan Natali, bestowed it upon me. His mentor, the late Ron Forsythe, had passed the tradition on to him.

“Don’t thank me for helping you,” Alan once told me. “Someone did for me what I did for you, so it’s your job to pass it on to someone else now. That’s how it has to work.”

And so, like a jiu-jitsu lineage, I work to give to others what was given to me.

I have helped a few young writers get their start, and one fight writer has worked with me closely over the last year, but I am interested in helping more. As much as I would enjoy teaching a class on writing, that’s not a possibility right now, but I can teach you how to begin establishing your writing career. It’s not easy, but having an idea of what to do and where to start puts you ahead of most aspiring writers. These four tips are a start, a jumping off point.

1. Learn to write.

You can learn to write without going to college, but the structure of a class guided by the insight of a professional writer will advance your writing far more quickly than trying to trial-and-error your way to being a better writer. Learning to write by reading great writing is certainly effective, but that approach requires a bit more effort than simply reading. I plan to cover this topic in a future post.

2. Establish a professional presence.

Setup a LinkedIn profile, a website, and become proficient in the query letter. Your LinkedIn profile and your website should present you in a good light and should be used as tools for expanding your network. The query letter is an art in itself, but you should be able to write an email that succinctly and expertly introduces your content idea, explains why that idea is an ideal fit for a target publication, and then demonstrates why you are the best writer for executing that idea.

3. Build your portfolio.

Your portfolio will begin with high quality writing samples that you created for pleasure. Then you will most likely write for free to amass a collection of published clips. With those published clips, you have the foundation to seek out and demand paying assignments. Rule: once you get paid, always get paid. Do not go back to writing for free after someone has paid you, no matter how small that pay may have been.

Finding places to publish your work for free is not terribly difficult. You should be able to find multiple websites and independent publications within your target genre that are looking for quality content but do not have a budget to pay writers. Pitch some ideas to their editors and start to grow your portfolio. The process for finding paying work is some similar, but start with small publications and work your way into steadily larger and larger publications.

Think of the well-paying writing jobs as the point of a pyramid. You have to lay a lot of stones in multiple levels to build a pyramid of work that reaches as high as that point. Do some people skip to the top? Yes, but you should never count on being the exception. Keep pushing to outdo your last publication, keep pushing to get published in larger, more prestigious markets.

4. Treat writing like a job.

Treat your writing more like a job and less like art. If you are going to be a career writer, you cannot wait for inspiration (for the record, I have not been “inspired” to write since April of 2008). You have to develop the discipline and the process to write without a muse speaking to you so that you can consistently develop content over long periods of time. For this reason, I tend to avoid settings where the more spiritual writers gather, like writing groups or workshops. To me, it’s not about “feel” or “flow.” Good writing is a craft, like carpentry. When done well, it’s beautiful and artistic, but very particular factors make a table a successful table.

So learn to step into your workshop and to start planning and measuring your pieces. I offend many writers when I talk like this. Art can come from work; lest we forget that the Sistine Chapel was not a product of inspiration but rather a commissioned project. If I didn’t make myself think about writing this way, I would not be able to write for 50-60 hours a week.

Good luck. If you have any questions, please ask via the comments below or via my Facebook page.

How to Write a Book in 30 Days (5 Tips)

My career as an author had only recently begun. The Cauliflower Chronicles was published the month before, and I had finished writing Marcelo Garcia's Advanced Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Techniques and Neil Melanson's Mastering Triangle Chokes. Marcelo's book took me about five months of full time writing, and Neil's book took about four.

Over lunch, Erich Krauss (CEO of Victory Belt Publishing Inc and the author of Got Fight? among a slew of other titles) and I discussed process. We both agreed that the classic author model of spending five years on a book was not professionally sustainable, especially in today's competitive market. Erich then revealed that it took him roughly seven weeks to write his first bestseller, Got Fight?.

To me, that seemed like an impossibly short amount of time, and when I said as much, he chuckled.

"I wrote Wave of Destruction in about a month," he said.

Wave of Destruction chronicled the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. Erich, a professional Muay Thai fighter and world traveler, spent a great deal of time in Thailand and jumped on the opportunity to  share the story of the tsunami almost before the waters had completely receded.

"My bed in Thailand was right next to the computer, so that while I was writing I could fall from the chair right onto the mattress."

Erich, in the literal sense, wrote until he collapsed. When he woke up, he would resume writing and push until he fell asleep again. It was an intense pace, but that pace allowed him to tell the story well before any other writer.

When I turned in Mastering Triangle Chokes a few weeks after that lunch, Erich asked me how long it would take me to write another book, saying that Victory Belt had a backlog of planned books that needed written as quickly as possible. I remembered our conversation from before.

"One month," I said.

"Really?"

"Yes." I really had no idea if I could do it, but I would try.

I tried, and I succeeded. Here's how.

1. Research is everything. Going into this book, which was BJ Penn's Open Guard, the research had already been done by another Victory Belt author that was needed on other projects. I had the photographs, and I had the fodder. It was well-organized, and it was thorough. From writing a travel memoir and from writing countless other articles and pieces, I know that the research is essential. It provides the lumber from which you build your house. If you don't have all of the lumber you need (and extra is always nice), it's very difficult to half-ass the construction without something going horribly wrong.

2. Plan your process. I knew that I had 30 days to write the book, and I had a rough idea, based on the research material, of how many chapters (6) the book would contain. On a big whiteboard, I plotted out the month, day by day, chapter by chapter. I gave myself 5 days for each chapter. 2 to draft, and 3 to revise everything I had written up until that point. If I shaved half a day off of that budget here or a few hours off of that budget there, I dove right into the next chapter to keep the project moving forward and to save up time, just in case I hit a major roadblock. With that schedule laid out, I could craft very specific daily and weekly goals, which kept me organized and motivated (small victories go a long way).

3. Your best work is in revision. With a tight schedule to keep, I could not lose a day pondering a single sentence, at least not initially. My first draft of every chapter was a word dump, an extremely rough idea of what I needed to say and accomplish put to paper through a stream of consciousness writing approach. I just kept writing and did not look back to adjust word choice or sentence structure. With that very rough pass done, I had material to work with, to refine, which is much easier than trying to draft the perfect sentence on your first try. Having something there that you can critique and evaluate allows you to accelerate your writing, and as long as you dedicate ample time for revision, you won't sacrifice quality for speed.

4. Rhythm and focus are essential. I had an office to write in, an environment that I designed around what I found comforting and creatively stimulating. Thanks to that office, I could hide from distractions and shut myself off from the rest of the world so that it was just me and my book. I relied heavily on music to keep my energy level up, especially in the drafting stages. While this will vary from person to person, I use mostly techno (Erich's suggestion) or instrumentals to accomplish this. Music with words interrupts the conversation in my head, which disrupts my ability to communicate with my manuscript.

5. Time and ruthless determination are your fuel. My whiteboard was always a glance away. It loomed over my desk, reminding me every second of every day that not only did I have to write, but I had to write enough to keep me on schedule. For me, that was motivating. I had a promise to keep, which was more important than anything else. I can't see keeping a 30-day pace without that sort of motivation.

I fell into a routine similar to the one that Erich had described. I wrote until I could not physically write anymore, and then I would sleep. When I woke up, and it was easy to pull myself from my bed when I knew that my whiteboard was in the other room, waiting for me, I set right to writing. In that 30 day period, I had no semblance of a sleep schedule. As the hours ticked on, I stayed up later and later, writing until 6am and waking up at 1pm to start again. I checked off my milestones and plowed forward.

Toward the end of my third week, my girlfriend (and soon to be wife) Caris demanded that I go to dinner with her and her friends. In fairness, I had hardly seen her because I was always writing. I wasn't feeling quite right, so a night out for fresh air sounded nice. On the drive to the restaurant, I was quiet, and when we sat down, I realized that I couldn't read the menu. I couldn't focus on the words. They seemed to swirl and spill and dance just out of reach. When Caris's friends spoke to me, I had trouble forming sentences. I stuttered (worse than usual) and slurred my speech. I gave up on talking, and Caris had to order for me. That night, I cashed in on the bonus time that I had saved up and slept for 24 hours.

I returned to my keyboard the following morning and continued my process, finishing a 72,000 word manuscript in 30 days. I now use this project all the time, on projects big and small. I hope that it helps you too.