Every one of us has an inborn talent. Some are already visible at a young age, but some are just not that apparent until they grow up and discover it for themselves. Tasha L. Harrison, our guest today, knew writing was her passion and was confident that she could do it well. Tasha was burned out when she decided to build a community of writers and launch a Patreon. She then came up with a challenge for the members of the community to write #20kIn5Days, which provided motivation and new fresh ideas for the participants. Find out how Tasha is dealing with her writing and her community in this episode.
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A Healthy Community Challenge: Writing #20kIn5Days With Tasha L. Harrison
We are here with Tasha L. Harrison. She is a romance writer and Creator of #20kin5Days and the Wordmakers Writing Community, where we come together five days a week to do the writing work. Thank you so much for being here, Tasha.
Thank you for having me.
I’m so glad you are here. 20K in 5 Days are words, not money. It is #20kin5Days, and this is, in particular, about words. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your author’s journey before we jump into everything else?
Now looking back, everyone would probably say that they are not surprised that I’m a writer. When I was a kid, I used to write little short stories. When I was in middle school, I created a comic book for my friends and me that I would make new ones every week. Writing was probably the first thing that I felt confident in, and I knew that I could do it well but I did not decide to do that as a job.
I graduated from high school and went to college. The first thing I thought. I was like, “If I want to go to college and read books, you get an English degree.” I did, but the thing about an English degree is it is only good if you can teach. I discovered it was like, “I don’t think I like other people’s kids.” Is it too hard? I didn’t know. The whole governing of the classroom seemed like too much for me. It was like, “I can’t teach. I’m not writing either. What am I going to do now?”
I ended up joining the military, and I was in for six years. My husband met was there. He was in for ten, had some kids, got another degree, and ended up being a nurse for several years. I started writing when I was a stay-at-home mom but it was more of a hobby because I had read every romance book that was already on the shelf where I live. I was like, “What do we do now?”
I read a bunch of serials online. I started reading fanfiction online, and I was like, “Maybe I can try my hand at writing this.” I did. I wrote my first romance novel. It was horrible. It was 120,000 words long. I joined a writing group, and they helped me corral that thing into a trilogy. From then, it has been something I have done. Writing was what I did when I was not working. Eventually, I picked up editing as well and did that for a long time. That was what made it easier for me to quit my job because it had got to the point where I was turning away from people because I couldn’t work it around my schedule anymore.
In 2019, right before the pandemic hit, I lost a patient and put in my notice. I was gone. In January 2020, it was Coronavirus. I was like, “I can’t believe I’ve got out in time.” It was a blessing because I was burnt out on that job and was turning away so much work that when I quit my job, my side hustle caught me. I was able to transition into working from home. Since then, I have changed that into something else. I am no longer editing. I’ve got rid of that, and now I’m doing the writing community but all of that would have never happened if I had decided to step out on faith and be like, “I’m done working for other people. I want to do what I want to do.”
I relate to you so much on that. When you said, “I don’t like teaching other people’s kids.” I was a teacher for a little while too. I do like other people’s kids but I am not good at imparting educational information to them.
I homeschooled my own kids for a while, and that was interesting. My youngest got smarter than me. I was like, “You need to go to school because I don’t know what any of this is, and I’m not going to be a part of it for you.”
The other part that I relate to is that I decided a long time ago that I don’t like other people telling me what to do, especially if I’m smarter than them.
This is a powerful thing to say, “Working in a healthcare job, there is so much bureaucracy, and you discover that people are not smarter than you. They just have been in the job longer than you, and nothing they do makes sense. Every time you try to do things that make sense, you get punished for it.”
I had a boss, and I would be like, “We should try this.” He will take part in the idea but not all of it. It is enough to make it not work and then say, “Bad idea.” I’m like, “I am done with this. I want to do my own thing.” I’m proud of you and acknowledged the stepping out because doing your own thing, no matter how appealing it is when you are in the middle of another job, is also not a big deal. It is like, “I’m doing my own thing. All the responsibility for all my financial, what have you? Rests on me doing whatever.” Do I like it? Do I love freedom? Do I love it? Yes. Are you still writing and doing the community?
I’m writing and doing the community. I also had a Patreon. First of all, I had a whole existential crisis because it was one thing to be home. Another thing is to be home and told, “I can’t go outside.” That was difficult for me. I was like, “I want to go outside.” There was so much anxiety tied to going outside. I would go out and then spend the whole day laying on the floor, trying to recuperate. I wrote a lot because I’m the type of person that, if the world is crappy, I’m going to try to escape. I wrote four books that year.
The only thing that was holding me back was my job. I can do this. I’ve got this handled. I can be four books a year author. I thought I had it down. No, I did not. I burnt myself out because I was editing a bunch of books, and I was writing a bunch of books. I didn’t have a community at that time. I had a couple of people that I used to get together with every day, some friends that we would get together and write with each other during the day. That was great but it got to the point one of them had to go back to work. She was on a sabbatical. She is a professor. She went back to work after the summer was over. The others with their kids home all the time.
It got to the point where everybody couldn’t jump on all the time. I was like, “I need people to write with me.” I was already doing the writing challenge but I did not have the community. They wanted the community badly. They pushed me into it. I was like, “If I build a community, you are going to have to pay me for it.” They were like, “Where do we send our money?” I was like, “This is the thing.”
Be confident in your writing, and you’ll do it well.
I focused on building the community while I was burnt out, and that turned out to be a gift. I’m probably back to the point when I started back writing again because I only wrote one book in 2021. I was like, “I need to figure out a way to slow this process down.” I don’t like deadlines. It is in the same line. It is that people telling you what to do, even when it is, we do.
Even when you are the one telling you what to do, my brain is the type of brain to react like, “I’m not doing that.” I don’t like deadlines. I can’t even set deadlines for myself. I decided, “Let me start this, Patreon because then I can slow down the process.” I have been serializing my books over there. I’m still writing. I’m just not publishing books. Once I have tapped the well, all I have to do is hit publish on everything, and that is great.
I have a few things that I want to know about. For one, when the pandemic, I’m like, “It is still happening.” I’m in Idaho.
These people are acting like there is no pandemic.
Nobody is wearing masks, and I’m like, “I feel for the nurses.” Good for you, like timing. How lovely the first year you burned out because I had the same thing. I was working from home, and I didn’t mind time alone but I realized, “What is it that I was missing?” Short little interactions with strangers, mini ones like at the coffee shop, and not being able to go to the coffee shop and say, “Hi, thanks.” Oddly, I didn’t know this about myself. How would you know?
Introverts discovered that. I still feel the same. I like my alone time. I like myself. I’m perfectly fine spending days only spending time with the people I created in my house but, like you said, having little nonsense conversations and small talk, which I normally hate. Now, if someone says hello to me, I’m like, “Hi.”
I’m terrible now. I have zero filters anymore. I’m still isolating. I’m like, “All those nurses. No, I’m not going to be the one.” A community because many of us writers were already isolated, but especially to the extreme somewhat now, to have a community because maybe people were not getting together in the writing groups in person. Maybe people were not having this opportunity to exchange social, anything to start a writing community and work with what worked for you after learning what did not work for you. That is awesome. That is good for you. Where did the #20Kin5Days come from?
Even though I have always had a full-time job, I’m a Gen X-ers, so you always have a side hustle. My mom has always had three jobs, even though she worked for the school district for years. She is always doing something on the side. That is how I grew up. My parents were always hustlers and having one job was not a thing that I was ever going to do.
The editing was my side job, and there was a community of online entrepreneurs that used to meet once a month here. I had two friends. We used to call them our Saturday masterminds. We would meet at the library after these meetings. It got to be pretty regular, and we were challenging each other in ways that I probably would not have done if I was doing it by myself. I like to advertise more, do podcasts, write articles, and all stuff that I probably would not have done. I probably would have sat here and waited for the work to come to me.
They are a big part of the reason why I was so successful as an editor. I remember I finished my fifth book, and it was a heavy book. It took me a year to finish it. I had a bunch of ideas but I could not get started. I was like, “I need someone to write with.” They were like, “What do you want to do?” I was like, “I was thinking about running a writing challenge, 20K in 5 days.” My one friend, Latoya, was like, “Now you have said it out loud. On Monday morning, I’m going to look at your Twitter and see if it is on there.” I did.
I dumped it on there, and this was when I was still working. This was the September before I quit. I immediately closed Twitter. Normally, I would stop and look at my phone all day long. I did not look at this phone until I didn’t have to work. I was sitting in the car, and I opened it. It was all of these responses, “How do we participate? Where do we go? What are the rules?” I was like, “I just made this up now.”
That is what I was going to do. I overdid thinking like, “No one is going to respond. I’m going to screencap this tweet, send it to her and say, ‘No one cared.’” I couldn’t do that. I ended up figuring it out as I went, “We can beat on Zoom.” I was like, “I don’t have a Zoom account. Let’s get a Zoom account.” I was like, “I will do a hashtag.” We did a hashtag. The hashtag is linked to Zoom on Twitter. Anyone could have joined. It was chaos.
Now that I look back at that, because we are such a tight group. I was like, “I cannot believe I was dumping open Zoom links on the timeline.” Surprisingly, we never had any mishaps but I did the first two iterations. In January 2020, when I quit my job, they were like, “Since you are home all the time, now we can build this group.” I was like, “Ruby? Who’s we? Do you know the plans? I didn’t know.”
Honestly, all the time I tell them, I was like, “This is our group.” I created it. I run it. I create the content, I schedule the events and all that stuff but nothing moves forward or even as considered within the group until I run it by you all. I want everyone to be an active participant in the community. I do not want to ever exclude anyone.
I did a little research but I want to ask everybody who is reading. You say, “We are going to do 20K in 5 days.” Do you set a start date like day one? Do you get together on Zoom at certain times? Can you tell us a little bit more about what it looks like?
This past one, I did it three times a day, which was a little nutter. Three times a day with three Pomodoro sprints. We got together at 11:00, 3:00, and 7:00. There are other people in my group who run later rooms too. Now the responsibilities are on all of my shoulders. On the West Coast, and now we have some members who are in the UK. I have another member that opens up super early to get them in the room.
We do it for 5 days, 3 times a day. The goal is 4,000 words a day. We do the 3 Pomodoro sprints, which are 30 minutes on, and 5 minutes off. At the end of those sprints, we chitchat. If you need to brainstorm, we can brainstorm. If you want to share your workout, you can show your workout. If you want to complain, you can complain. It is what writers do.
One of the things that I have found about writing communities, whether they were in real life or online, is that writers tend to get into their woes very easily. You can have one person complaining about how hard it is to write, which of course, is hard. It is work. It’s hard for all of us but you have one person who continuously complains about that. It becomes, “This is all the group is about, is complaining.”
It’s because of all my time spent in those entrepreneurial groups, I have mastered a thing where you were like, “Let’s look at this from a different perspective. Trying to get people to see things in different ways or instead of complaining about where you are stuck, let’s talk about why you are stuck and how we are going to get by it.”
That has helped a lot. I’m not someone who likes to complain. I’m solutions-oriented. I journal a lot. When I get stuck in writing, I will journal about being stuck until I’m unstuck. I have been trying to pass that on to the members, and it has worked well. Our group is super positive and not to the point where it is like toxic positivity. It was like, “No, we do not do that here type thing.” It is like, “Tell us what is going on. We are here for you. We are here to talk to you about what is going on and try to help you see a way out of it.”
The members started doing this on their own, where they started including Wordmakers and Tasha L. Harrison in the back of their books. When I sit back and think about how many books were published in the last several years that have my name in the acknowledgment. It makes me weepy because all I did was say, “I need people to write with.”
Growing up reading books and you get to the acknowledgments. I was always like, “I want to be in the acknowledgments of some author’s book. Who are these people? How do I become that person?” Now you are. It is, oddly, for me. It’s like a dream come true.
Why do I care so much? People were like, “I finished my book. Here are the acknowledgments.” They will post a screencap of the acknowledgments and the group. Every time I get weepy like, “Where are you guys? We did it well.”
We both can appreciate how much work goes into making a book.
That is what people are gravitating to. Everyone knows writing books is hard but seeing people at various stages of their careers like best-selling authors, newbies, people who are mid-list authors, people who were traditionally published, people who were self-published, all of us are going through the same shit. Especially a newbie author to come into the group and be like, “This best-selling author is having the same problems with plotting as I do. They have the same issues with organizing as I do.” Everything feels more attainable.
I do want to say something because you were like, “All I wanted to do is find people to write with.” Yes and no. Yes, all you wanted to do is find people’s write with but you were already talking to these mastermind ladies that you had, that you had already been building a community for yourself with these things that are apparently part of your values like the positivity, the solutions-oriented.
Yes, that is all you want to do but you already had people who were invested in you, getting value from you or both. I want to talk a little bit about when you had the idea and you put it on Twitter. Is it a group primarily made of people who are following you on Twitter? Do you already been doing Twitter for a while? Is that part of your community?
I have been on Twitter since 2009.
Are you active?
Yes. My friends and I were talking about it because I was like, “I swear to God. The next time I sell a book, and it does this, I’m getting off Twitter.” At first, it was, “Once I get to 5,000 followers, I’m getting off.” I’m almost at 7,000 followers. The next time, there is a big brouhaha, and I get pulled into it. I’m getting off. It never happened. Twitter is my special brand of hell. I’m addicted to it. How I’m supposed to break the habit? I have no idea because it is on my phone.
I am curious because I got into Twitter when it first came in, and I lost. I was like, “Not for me.” I’ve got busy with other things. I don’t think it was not for me but I have not met anybody in a while like me personally, and part of it is I have been living in rural. Tell me about Twitter and this community you have. I love to know more.
When I joined Twitter, I was like, “I do not know what this is.” I joined in, and I followed a couple of authors that I knew, people that I have in the community on Facebook or whatever. I’m piffy. I went one-offs like tweeting into the void or, as I say, “Blowing up the timeline and walking away.” It is a talent for me. I found a bunch of people, they found me, and it grew.
Focusing on building a community while you’re burnt out can turn out to be a great gift.
As an editor, I’ve got into a habit of tweeting advice. I was running a blog, and that was pretty successful for several years. Sharing the blog and talking about writing on the timeline, I have become a trusted voice in the community. My friends were like, “People respect you. Everybody likes you.” I’m like, “I do not know if it is like or respect.” In smaller circles, I’m more well-known. I would like it to be more well-known for books but you get what you get. I was already pretty active. There is a lot of time tweeting and interacting with authors and readers.
I have a big vocabulary but my recall for anything, and it takes me three days to come up with, “This is a clever thing that I should have said three days.” I’m terrible at it.
You are the person who gets into an argument, and weeks later, you are like, “I should have said that.”
I’m the person who is in the argument, and it is like, “That is not right.”
I’m the person who is like when I get angry, there is a clarity that comes.
My sister does that. I always lose our arguments, which is why this show is good for me because I have enough space to say what I need to say, even if it takes me a long time, and a lot of words and a lot of like, “You know what I mean? You can get the gist of what I’m saying by my tone and the other words surrounding it.” I know a lot of people want to be on all the social media platforms. If you find one that feels right for you, whichever it is, whether it is Facebook, TikTok or Twitter.
I was on Facebook for years, and I feel like there are Facebook authors, Twitter authors, and Instagram authors. I’m a Twitter author. Facebook is high touch. On Twitter, I can send stuff out into the void, and people respond. They respond if they don’t, they don’t. I still got my rocks off. On Facebook is like, “You have to engage these people. You have to say something that makes them want to interact.” I’m not good at those small types of interactions like that. I tried for years, and then the Trump election happened. All on Facebook blew up. I was like, “I quit this place.”
I have found in my experience as somebody who teaches writing stuff. Twitter is better for reaching other writers. I do think Twitter is harder for reaching readers in a meaningful way. That has been my experience.
When I first started at that time, I was full of writers, writers, editors, and agents. It was all business side of stuff, which was fine for me because I was not focusing. I was writing one book a year. I was not focused on selling books. What changed that was interacting as a reader on Twitter, like talking about books that I love and TV shows.
There are lots of fandoms that are active on Twitter. Getting into hashtags, and I’m nerding out. Everybody has that one thing that they get nerdy about. I’m probably sure it was a scandal that tips me over the edge. We started talking about scandals and talking about books that were similar. I was bringing in readers that way and less writers. Still writer-heavy, no doubt.
I’m curious about the Twitter thing because it is not my main interest in you because you are a Twitter person in authority. I went on a little tangent but what does make a lot of sense to me is to focus on the fandom.
When you are writing a book, I find it useful. I will put out some, “What if a character did yadda yadda yadda? What if blah blah blah or ask questions like, ‘What are some of the best marriage and trouble books you have read?’” That will bring readers in. They are never good at recommendations.
I love recommendations, but I have to go. Sorry, everybody, but there are too many books out there that I have not read for me to spend time reading books that are not the ones that I want to read.
You said a recommendation like, “I want these three specific things. Here is this thing that is like the thing you asked for, not at all but I enjoyed it. Why is this America?”
“That is not what I asked you and wanted.” I love that piece of advice about interacting on Twitter like a reader instead of a writer. A lot of writers, especially when they are starting, get confused. I can’t tell you how many authors that I see on TikTok or Instagram who are trying to market their books but they are all talking about their writing processes, editing, and stuff. You are selling to the wrong audience.
When you talk about your writing, you need to talk about your characters. It is a skillset. You have to figure out what it is about your books that people particularly like. For me, there are things that I love to write or things that I think I do well, so I will focus on those. I will talk about those. I talk about character building all the time because that is my Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Anytime somebody brings up anything about characters, I will be like, “Yes, I had this one character.” You have to nerd out about the things that you like about your writing. It is the same thing with TV shows or whatever. Find that one thing and like, “I do this well. Let me talk about this more.”
You will find the people who love that and books like, “I love good characters in books.”
I’m like, “I don’t care what happens with the plot. I want you to make me care about these people.” My focus for writing is the fact I can’t make you care about these people. Who cares what else happens here?
I’m going to give her a recommendation to maybe anybody reading but I have been rereading a series. I want to reach out to her but I like it a little bit nervous because of her character. Her name is Audrey Faye.
I had never heard of her.
As a book marketing person, her covers are not that great. I do not even know how I found her. I have no idea because she is not in my typical genre. Her covers are not like, “I love them.” None of the things that I would tell people to do, she has not done them, except writing an amazing story with good characters, except for her story, which has been enough because it is so good. Anybody who is reading, the series that I’m talking about is the Ghost Mountain series. If you want to look at good characters study, I haven’t read Tasha L. Harrison’s books yet. Sorry I can’t tell you yet.
I think that is figuring out.
You have these people who are doing 20K in 5 days. Do you have 20k in 5 days you all crush it the next week? What are you doing? It is not every Monday through Friday is 20K.
We do write Monday through Friday. This is what is crazy because someone who joined the group this particular iteration of 20K. When I was logging off on the last writing on Saturday, it was like, “See you guys on Monday.” She was like, “What happens on Monday?” I was like, “We back here to write again but it will be 1 write-in instead of 3.” I only run one during the week, during my prime writing time. It helps me. If everyone else could write during that time, that would be great but it is self-serving.
You do it once a month to bring people in.
That is once a quarter. I want to move it to twice a year. They were like, “No.” We do this quarterly planning thing, and everybody was like, “No, it helps us jumpstart our quarter.” “It’s going to be so much work. I just want to write.” Once a quarter, I do a membership drive to get new people in but we are in writing together every day.
A lot of people that I talked to were like finding their tribe of authors is one of the biggest challenges because everybody is introverted and working from home, which adds multiple layers of difficulty in finding people. My best friend and writing friend is a miracle. We even know each other because she is 100% introverted. I’m like, “How?” I know a lot of people who are like, “How do I find people?” That is amazing that that’s not the intent of it necessarily but it is. You sell it as 20K in 5 days.
It is like a comfort-a-challenge day for the community. All of the Wordmakers are based on the community. Nothing would be what it is without the community. I remember the first days because it felt like everybody was showing up for me. I had to sit them down and be like, “I am not your guru. I do not know everything. I cannot help you with all your writing. There are 200 other people in this group. Ask someone else.”
That was the point where the group started functioning in a way that worked for everyone. People have their own little groups of people that they write with on the weekends. Some people can only write late at night, and they write late at night together. A couple of them have met each other in real life. They have made trips across the country to hang out with each other. I was like, “This is wild.”
Do you have 200 people showing up on a call?
When you’ve written 20k words in five days, you don’t have to start from scratch anymore when you begin to feel like writing again.
No.
That is a lot of people. You are like, “End of the Pomodoro.”
During 20K, at most, we will have 25 people in a room at a time. That feels overwhelming. For the daily writings, it is probably the same ten people that have been writing together. We have all been writing together since I started doing it. There are a bunch of people in the group that lurks. I do not know why they are there. They are paying to be there. We run workshops and stuff like that. They get to experience those. For the most part, most of the people who were in the group, there were 66 people who were active all the time, interacting, posting in the group, and coming to write in.
In what group?
I have a group on Mighty Networks. We were on Facebook at first, and that was horrible because it was distracting. I was like, “We need to get off of Facebook, and I need to figure out where I’m going to put you.”
I have heard of that Mighty Networks. It is pretty big in the entrepreneurial space. Entrepreneurs know about Mighty Networks.
The reason why I thought of it was that I’m a member of two other groups on Mighty Networks.
I love that people are finishing and you are putting in the back. Clearly, it is working for a bunch of people because they are putting you in the back of their books. I want to talk about you and your writing. You burned out in 2020 writing for four books. You wrote one book to keep going but also recuperate in 2021 while you were focusing on this writing community. You are like, “I’m doing my things on Patreon.” When did that start? Why and how? Tell us more.
Katee Robert is in our group. She is an activator. If she has an idea at 9:00 on a Monday, by 5:00 PM on Monday, it is already got a website, a link, and she has mapped out a plan. When she joined, she already had a Patreon but she had something 700 members, and she was working on the Wicked Villains. She was still writing those books.
During the time that she was there, that was when her Patreon blew up. We were all watching the numbers go up and were like, “This is crazy.” It’s because she is an activator, she was doing too many things for me. When I see her packing those boxes up for her Patreons, I’m like, “Not for me, bro. I can’t do it. That is for you. That is amazing.” Every time I would think about Patreon, I would have liked this preemptive anxiety about even starting one but also, I’m impressionable. This is a thing.
One of my good author friends, I edited her books, and that is how we met, Lucy Eden. She is also much like Katee Roberts. She is an activator. She does and does. We were all sitting on Zoom and she was like, “We are all going to start a Patreon.” I was like, “No.” She was like, “This is how you can do it.” I built the whole thing out. She was like, “We are hitting publish. You are going to hit start on this thing.” I hit start and went to sleep. I woke up on Monday morning. It was like, “Turn that off. I do not want to have anything to do with this.” I sat like that for all of 2021.
Katrina Jackson is also in the group. She has started one. She was like, “This is how I’m going to do it.” We talked about it. She was like, “You can’t do it like Katee does it. You can’t do it like Lucy does it. You need to figure out how you can make it work for you.” After having that horrible year where I was pulling words out hair by hair and thinking, “I can’t have another year like this but also I can’t have another year where I’m burning myself out. I need to figure out a way to slow this process down. What if I serialize my novels on there?”
They all get the book first. They will have Patreon exclusive book covers, things that are only available to them. Swag that is only available to them. I can limit the number of people. Let’s make it exclusives. It is like, “Only 100 of you can get in here thing.” I was like, “I can do that.” I launched it during Christmas. As soon as 25 people show up, I will give you the first five chapters of this book that you guys have been bugging me to write in my DMs. By the third day, I had 40 people already.
The thing about Patreon, I’m still trying to figure it out. It is not like a membership group. Even if you give them the content every day, you still have people that drop off, people that stop and come back, and I have not figured out the thing that makes them stick all the time. I also do not know if I’m supposed to and how it is designed. In 2022, it was like, “I’m going to write all the content, see what sticks, see what works, and you do a re-haul next year if I need to.”
I like that you found a way to like take care of yourself in terms of being flexible with deadlines, being flexible with releasing onto Amazon or wherever wide or wherever you are going. Also, still keep writing, still build in some accountability because you have people on your Patreon who still make money. You will still have the books. That is a creative, lovely way of moving forward. A lot of times, for me, the hardest part is when I have a big challenge in my life. It is easy to sometimes stop altogether. You are like, “If I can’t do it this one way, I can’t do it at all.”
I was feeling that way about my writing. I was like, “This is too much.” As soon as I finished writing something, now we had to start the marketing and the promo. They do it all again. There is this constant wheel of always working on something. I was like, “I got to slow this process down.” Initially, what I ended up doing because I was like, “I do not want to be stuck being that person that was like, I don’t have your chapter this week.” I broke because of the deadline.
I was the downside of that. The reason I have started with it and then I’m like, “Do I want to commit to whatever it is? It could be nothing.” It could be a paragraph a week. What are you doing? How are you working around that?
What I did was I wrote and used that as my 20K in 5 days project for September. I wrote half of the book. I got half of the book edited. Once I launched the Patreon, I had 8 or 9 chapters already. I could still continue to keep writing on it.
“You have a technical deadline. You tricked yourself. You tricked your brain.” You were like, “There is no deadline.”
“You are not going to give me a deadline. I’m going to write it when I want to.” Honestly, I do not think I would have been able to do it if I had not done that. I do not know how people can write a chapter a day, have it make sense, and be worth reading. I started and abandoned it. I did not want to give myself a deadline.
20k in 5 days, oddly, is not a deadline. It does not hit the same way.
You have to write all these words about the days. Before that, I was a steady 1k to 2k a day writer. I have been doing the challenge for several years and 4k a day is easy for me. I recognized this challenge. I was like, “I need to stretch a little bit more.” That is what it is. It seems ridiculous when you are like, “Twenty thousand words in five days.” There are people who write 10,000 words in a day.
When you are starting off with a small word count, the goal is not to write like that all the time but to push yourself enough to feel like you can, and then regular everyday writing gets easier. Since I have done it many times now, it is like, “I need to stretch a little bit more. I need to challenge myself a little bit more.”
You personally might need a 25K in 5 days. You might not announce it to everybody but maybe.
It is time for me to bump it up a little bit. One of the other things that have been great about it is all the books that I’m publishing or writing in 2022 are projects that I started with 20K in 5 days. I’m not even starting from scratch with stories anymore. I’m starting with stories that have already been started. I have seven books that are banked, the 1st act sometimes into the 2nd act, depending on how long the book is. It is already written. I need to come in there and finish it.
When you come in with your 20K in 5 days for you personally, the way you do start a new book each quarter and that is where you are at now, are you finishing the one that you are working on? You pick one, put it on the Patreon, and finish that one with the Patreon.
In 2021, I started a bunch of books, and I only published one because I was struggling to get through that one. It has given me a different outlook on how I’m setting up my publishing schedule. If I’m always banking story starters, I never feel like I have to start from scratch. I spend a week with the group doing prep work to do all the planning and plotting. Everything is already there.
I need to be like, “This has started. Let me look at what here is tickling my fancy,” versus, “I have to write all three books in this series now, and I hate these people.” I settled down into thinking, “How are we using this?” I wanted to start it because I wanted to write novellas. I do not write short. I can’t write short. I can write shorter but I’m still like 80 to 90k. That is where I live. I’m a full-week novel girl.
All of my publishing has been short romances. I have a 7,500-word romance, and people love it. That is where I started because I wanted to prove that it could be done. I’m like, “I want to prove this can be done, and it needs to have a backlist to prove that it can be done.” This is the easiest way for me to get a backlist quickly.
When I imagine books, I imagine them longer, and there is a lot of freedom that comes when you have more words. Kickstarter, Patreon, and some of these other ways of making money, even your writing community in some way, these other ways of making money while being an author and not putting all your eggs in one basket, like having multiple streams of income. that way, in something, for whatever reason, dips, you still have other ways. I’m also an activator but I get tired easily. I have a ton of ideas, and some of them happen right away. If I were making more money and had assistants who could read my mind, it would be like that.
We have a unicorn person that I can look at ad be like, “Go.”
Commit to the process, not the outcome.
I’m like, “Here is my idea. Do it.” They would be like, “Got it.” I’m like, “That would be amazing.”
I am an activator. When that whole Brandon Sanderson thing was going on with Kickstarter, I went to bed, and I saw it. I was like, “I’m going to tag Katee.” I was like, “No. Let me wait for the morning and see.” It was late. I was like, “I do not want to activate her this late.” I woke up the next morning. She was the first tweet I saw. She was like, “If I was to do a Kickstarter, this is how I would do it.” I was like, “I knew you were going to do this for me.”
Whenever I see someone doing something that I feel overwhelmed by like, “This is way too big. I could never do this,” then I will sit down and be like, “If I was going to do it, how would I do it?” That is how I activate. I will be like, “Let me shrink this down to something I can do and maybe build up to where they are.” A lot of people do not, especially authors. They see Brandon Sanderson doing that. It was like, “I could never do that. I do not have his readership.” I’m like, “That is not the point. He is showing you what is possible. You have to start at your beginning, not his end.”
I love what you have done, which is seeing that someone has done it and like, “How does that work for you as an individual?” Knowing your strengths, what works for you, and all the other projects that you have going on. It is like, “How can I make this something that does not take too much of my energy but also supports me.” Look at how you have done it in this clever way. You are still learning like, “What gets people to stay?” Maybe you will find that out as you keep experimenting.
I always want to feel I’m learning. I do not want to be the one who decides, “This is the way I do a thing, and I never can change it.” I’m interested in different ways, especially to make money because it is virtually impossible unless you have someone who can do all the other stuff. As an author, it is almost impossible to do everything well. You have to figure out other ways to make money. Some people speak, run a workshop, do courses, and sell services.
If successful authors were a lot more honest about how they are making all of their money, the little newbies that come to my group who think they can publish one book and get rich would not have to spend that whole week being broken down and sad. Maybe your books are good but the fact that you think that you are going to be a breakout star is unrealistic.
I say this all the time because I want it to be true. I want it to be that easy. It is probably why I do not have as many people buying my stuff, like my services, because I’m like, “It is hard, and it will take a while. It has a lot of work.” “I do not know why people aren’t buying my stuff,” and I’m like, “You might love it but it is going to be a lot of work, and it is going to take time.”
I tell them all the time, “Commit to the process, not the outcome.” You can only write a good book. You can only figure out how to promote your book. You can only engage as much as you can to make that book get seen. You can’t determine how it is going to be received by other people. You have to commit to the process, whine through it, complain, learn new things, and build your empire the way that you can versus looking at somebody like a Meghan March and being like, “I want to do it exactly like she does.”
I love that all of these authors are making good money, selling their six-figure, whatever but I tweeted about this. I was like, “What if have I told you that all the strategies that made these people six-figure authors are none of the strategies that are teaching you because the strategies that made them bigger are obsolete now.”
Self-publishing has started. They’ve got in on in 2012 and have that lift or they came in as Kindle Unlimited opened up. They made it big on Kindle Unlimited, and now they have a big enough audience to publish wide. You are seeing them wide. You are not seeing that they had 45 books on Kindle Unlimited and were making bank that way. Some of those things you still can do to build a readership. There were a lot of people who were like, “I do not want to get on a loan. I do not want to have all my eggs in one basket.” I was like, “You have no eggs. You have no basket.”
I have been to other workshops where I listened to people, and I’m like, “I’m happy that you were successful. I’m glad for you but your information is not useful for me now in any way.”
If I were a new author and did not know how to navigate all this information, I would be super intimidated.
Rum is intermediate. It is not for beginners. It is intermediate to advanced. I like to work with beginners, and I have had this show for a while. I interviewed freaking almost 100 successful authors. I’m like, “Here are the things that everybody is mentioning and that still are applicable like they are evergreen.” They involve work, time, and multiple books. They were like, “These are the fundamentals that worked back then in 2012 and are still working now. They are not like a newsletter.”
You are not going to wake up tomorrow. The average author that starts now is not going to wake up as a six-figure writer. The average author that is working now is not going to get picked up by traditional publishers because it is not popular. It is hard to see beginning writers getting discouraged because that is the message they are giving.
Instead of seeing the possibilities, which is what it was for me when I started, I was like, “I can do this myself.” Figuring out how to do it myself. There is a lot of like, “What is the shortcut? How do I skip this space? I want to reverse and draw forward to get to where I want to go,” versus, “You got to sit down and do this work.”
I think you could start now and make 6 figures in 2 years.
If you are a student of their process and you implement every blessed thing they have done. You can’t go in there and be like, “This is too hard. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that.” You have to do it exactly the way they said it. Spend as much money as they say to spend. You are going to find yourself in debt before you make any money. That is the only way it works. It is if you commit completely to like, “I’m going to do this process exactly the same way.” You might get to be a six-figure author. Maybe, you will make good money.
It is possible because I did it. I’m not six-figure. I looked at the screenshot. I published it on January 31st, 2021, and I took a screenshot on December 2nd, 2021. I had $37,000.
You could make a living.
I had interviewed, at that point, 60 authors and deconstructed everything that I learned and started. That was an education in itself. It was not me jumping in knowing nothing. I knew a lot at that point.
If I wanted to know something, I was like, “How did you do this? Do you want to hop on Zoom real quick because I need to talk to you about this thing?” I’m never afraid to ask people questions, and this is a superpower. All we can do is say, “No.” I’m an introvert. I’m not someone who goes out and seeks company. If there is something I want to know, I will ask anybody that knows.
I love it when people do that, especially women. I love it when women ask me because I love helping women too. My favorite thing is to have you like, “This is my little baby dream.” To make it happen is bigger for a thing. Women tend to be hesitant sometimes. I love it when people are like, “Can you help me with that?” I’m like, “Yes, ask me.” After I stop recording, I always say to the person, “If you need me for anything, ask me.” I want to because it is such a generous industry.
When it comes to publishing, there is a lot of keeping their secrets. People hoard their knowledge, and then they want to sell it to you. If I know something, I’m going to give it to you. Unless I have to write a course for you to understand, I can pass on any knowledge I have. I’m like, “Have you worked with this person? What is this process? How do I do this? I can walk you through something.” Especially women, every time I get a DM or emails like, “I do not want to bother you but I do have a question. Do you have a minute?” I’m like, “What do you need? You don’t have to do this whole disclaimer before you ask me for what you need.”
Part of the reason why the community works well for me is because I was looking for something like this when I first started out. Finding authors that were going to be open and giving with the knowledge that they have was super hard back then. People were seeing everyone as competition, and it does not happen as much now but there is a barrier to it. People do not share freely. I never want to be that author that people will be like, “Let’s know about this. She never told me.” No, I don’t care. If I know, I’m giving it to you.
What is your best advice?
My best advice, and this is after working with a bunch of newbies this past year, is to figure out what success looks like for you. What does it look like for you? Do you want to be a bestselling author? Do you want to be in bookstores? Do you want to make money? You can have and want to do all those things but know that you are going to have to adjust your work and your expectations, depending on what you want to do.
If you are coming in and thinking you want to make money and be a bestseller, you are going to have a lot of work to do. You are not going to be able to pop on the scene and decide, “I have written this thing. Everybody should know who I am.” What I see happening, especially with social media, is that people are writing books because they see people talking about things. They see people talking about tropes. They see people talking about, “This particular show. This type of archetype is a character.”
They are Frankensteining these ideas together. If they get a deal, they are like, “This is not the story I wanted to write.” It was like, “You did not know what your values were. You did not know what you would say yes and no to. You do not know how to interact with the editor. You have not asked any questions.”
For you to get to that point, you need to figure out, “How does success look for me? Am I going to be the person who changes the character completely? Am I going to be the person who goes against everything that I have said on my timeline and write a completely different book because I need the money?” Figure that out so that you won’t be three books in and hate what you are writing.
Getting deals is all about writing the content publishers think they can sell.
I love it because I have talked to a lot of new authors too. It is like, “If you want to be traditionally published on New York Times Bestseller, that is a different thing than making your first 50K as an indie author.” You can’t do the same book for both of those. It is not the same journey.
You need to understand that if you are going to be looking to get traditionally published, you are creating content that they can sell, not the book you want and not the book of your heart. If you want to publish the book of your heart, you need to self-publish. If you want to create content for someone else to sell so you can see it in a bookstore, that is what you are going to be doing from a traditional publisher. If you are not okay with that, you need to come to terms with it.
That is what submission, getting accepted and deals are all about. It is writing the content that they think they can sell. This has nothing to do with whether or not your book is good or you write well. None of it has anything to do with that. They are looking at this and saying, “Can I put this in a box and sell it to a box store?”
It is like the blend that it can be. The more appeal it has to the larger audience.
Now with these illustrated covers, I was like, “I do not know what is in any of these books. I do not know what I’m getting.” When I opened the book, I was like, “This is the same blend book as the other book I read.” The content has been diluted.
Every weekend I would buy two books. They were different books every week. There was plenty to choose from because there were more bunches of new books. Now I go in, and it is like, “A lot of these books are the same books that I was reading several years ago that have been with new covers.” There are not that many new authors. I’m like, “They are looking for a blockbuster.”
Something that they can sell to Netflix.
One author, they pay somewhat, and they make a ton of money off of them versus it used to be more. They would make less money from a bunch of different authors.
It is gone now. The mid-list is gone. The mid-list is self publishing.
Where is the best place for people to find you, Wordmakers, 20K in 5 days, and all this stuff?
Everything about me, my writing, and the writing community can be found at TashaLHarrison.com. I am also on Twitter and Instagram. If you follow me on Twitter, be ready for a mess. That is all I have to say about that.
I have not been on Twitter in a long time, and I’m like, “It sounds like there is some fun drama happening.” I love drama gossip. I love that I do not have to get into it but I love watching it.
I have gotten to the point now that I will see it unfolding. I’m like, “You all see what is going on over there.”
Thank you so much, Tasha L. Harrison, for sharing. You have all this information and this positive attitude that has been refreshing.
This has been a great chat. Thanks for having me.
Thank you, everybody, for reading. Hugs and happy authoring here at Author Like a Boss.
Important Links
- #20kin5Days
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- Twitter – Tasha L. Harrison
- Ghost Mountain
- Mighty Networks
- Wicked Villains
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- TashaLHarrison.com
- Instagram – Tasha L. Harrison
About Tasha Harrison
I’m a romance author and the creator of #20kin5Days and the Wordmakers Writing Community where we come together 5 days a week to do the writing work!
