Every writer needs resources. Here are a few I recommend:
Courses
Intentional Blogging by Jeff Goins
This FREE 12-week email course delivers a new lesson on blogging every week, straight to your inbox. In this series, I share with you the lessons I’ve learned about starting a blog, finding a topic, building an audience, and more. Sign up here.
How to Start a Blog that Matters by Corbett Barr
Hundreds of millions of blogs are online today. Thousands more are started every day. Anyone can start a blog in 5 minutes, but very few people will start blogs that matter.
What’s the difference between most blogs and the select few that attract huge followings? That’s what this course is about. Sign up here.
Unconventional Guides by Chris Guillebeau
This collection of resourceful guides to “world domination” are invaluable for creatives who want to build an empire with their work.
Guillebeau is not just telling you how to do it; he’s telling you how he did it. I especially like the one on art and money.
eBooks
You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins
What do the world’s best authors know that you don’t? Why is it so hard to get published, or even noticed, by the gatekeepers?
This eBook offers practical tips and inspiration for how you can start living the dream of every writer — how to never pitch your writing again — and create a platform that attracts the publishers to you.
Wrecked for the Ordinary by Jeff Goins
This is a short eBook I wrote that was published through ChangeThis, a community of progressive thinkers who share ideas to, well, change things.
You can click the link to download it for FREE. Feel free to print it, email it to friends, or share it on your website. It’s totally free to distribute.
The Writer’s Manifesto by Jeff Goins
This is a super-short eBook I wrote just for readers of my blog. It’s based on the frustrations I’ve experienced as a writer — about working through the tension between writing for accolades and writing for yourself.
Get a free copy of it here (when you join my newsletter list). You can also get it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
31 Days to Building a Better Blog by Darren Rowse
Here’s a good one from Mr. Problogger himself. This excellent month-long workbook by Darren Rowse has helped thousands of bloggers get better at online writing, reaching an audience, and making a profit.
Whether you’re just starting out or ready to go the next level with your blog, this book is worth it. It has helped me with my own blogging. And it can help you, too.
Books and Articles
Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle
In this classic series of essays of faith and art, L’Engle explains that writers don’t write to get published. Rather, they write simply to write.
L’Engle shows how any creative act is, in fact, incarnational. When we create, we embody the nature of God. She questions the false dichotomy between “secular” and “sacred” that many Christians make, claiming that all art can be spiritual.
“How to Write a Book” by Donald Miller
Donald Miller, bestselling author of Blue Like Jazz, tells in this blog post how he writes a book.
For Don, content isn’t the most important part of writing a book. How you tell it, or literary voice, is what matters to him. If you’ve ever read one of Miller’s books, you know why.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott has a wonderfully unique and frank way of describing life, faith, and writing. This book is worth it if for no other reason than you get the fantastic essay, “Shitty First Drafts.”
Lamott’s basic premise is that every first draft is terrible. I read this in a writing class in college, and it set me free from obsessing over first attempts. She argues that writing is a process that requires patience and grace — most of all with yourself.
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
Seth Godin is renowned for turning traditional business thinking on its head. In his classic, Permission Marketing, he puts the customers, not the marketers, in control of how products are advertised.
This is where any successful business, entrepreneur, or idea-maker will have to go in order to succeed in the Information Age. You can’t interrupt; you now have to ask permission to share your message. If you do this well, you can turn strangers into friends and friends into fans.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
I don’t know why I went so long without reading this book. Pressfield’s The War of Art is a must-read for any writer. This manifesto for creatives longing to overcome “The Resistance” is both inspiring and challenging. It combines the art and science involved in being a writer.
This short read presents the reality of the creative life, which is contingent on both inspiration and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Reader: beware. Pressfield will kick you in the butt with this gem.
*Disclosure: Some of the above are affiliate links.
