Strengths Workshops Function as a Curriculum of Study for a Commercial Fiction Writer…
At least that is our intent.
Let me see if I can explain as I did this afternoon to a couple of other writers who were interested.
As writers, looking into the future, the biggest question is always “What do I do next?” Second biggest question is “How do I get there?”
Now Kris and I have been crazy enough to try to lay out that path just as someone going into a college would get a path through courses to get to a certain resulting education in the end.
Only in these workshops, we also test you with each area to see how you are doing, see if you need work. We will try to give suggestions on what to study if you have a weak area we find. But mostly this is a path forward through the fog on the future.
That’s why we divided this up into three sections. Craft, Business, and Sales. In this new world you have to learn all three pretty much at the same time, progressing forward with all three. Writers always get in trouble if one of the three major areas gets ahead of the others, or if one falls too far behind the other two.
Having these Strength Workshops as a road map is why we will leave them up into the future for those who have signed up to keep coming back to. We will limit the sign-ups to this coming month or so since Kris and I don’t want to spend the rest of our life testing writers. But for those signed up, this roadmap, this curriculum of study in the three areas should help with a ton of confusion.
What it boils right down to is that we are doing what we wish someone had done when we were starting out.
So anyhow, that is the belief behind these Strengths Workshops. Helping writers know where they are at with skills and to lay out a curriculum of study in the three major areas of this new world of publishing.
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So Here Are All the Basics.
THE POINT…
Strengths Workshop is to help you understand in story craft, business, and sales where you are at at this moment in time. We will tell you where you are strong and where you need to work. And we will give you help on how to find ways to improve in each area.
We will do this in personal letters to you after five different assignments. It is very valuable to know in craft, business, and sales how you are doing and where you need work going forward.
And how to even do that work. And what to even work on.
Kris and I take this very seriously in trying to help you move forward and give you a plan for the future.
THE OVERALL STRUCTURE…
… Regular Craft (now available)
… Craft Two (in a week or so)
… Regular Business (now available)
… Business Two (over a week away)
… Regular Sales (available Thursday)
… Sales Two (available in under two weeks)
Each will consist of five assignments followed by a number of videos talking about the area and how to find help. (In essence, each will be about the same as a six week online workshop, only you can do it at your own pace.)
You will send us each assignment and within 24 hours we will respond with a personal letter talking about your answers and where you are strong and where you need work.
Yes, I said 24 hours. No more waiting until a certain day of the week to get the response. For only these strengths workshop we will do our best to respond in one day.
TWO RULES… You can not turn in the next assignment until we have gotten a response to you for the previous assignment. So you should be able to do the class in about a week if you are willing to work that hard. Second, you must take the regular workshop before you can take the second workshop.
TIME LIMITED
The videos for each will always be available for you to return to at any given point into the future, but in just over a month Kris and I will stop taking new sign-ups and shut down the workshops to anyone not already signed up. (Yes, everyone signed up can finish, no problem…And you can take your time, clear into 2018 if you want.)
Why are we limiting the time on this? Because as we discovered in the past, this takes a lot of our time and we have our own writing and work to do. So about one month after we get the last workshop up and available we will shut this down to new sign-ups. But as we said, the videos will always be there for you to return to.
LOCATION
The workshops will be on Teachable.com where the lectures already are and also where the classic workshops will end up.
The link to the site is http://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/
You will need to sign up into an account on Teachable and then go to the Strengths Workshop at the bottom of the list. Right now only the Regular Craft and Regular Business are available. All six will be there over the next two weeks.
DISCOUNT
Each segment is $300, but it you take three, you get the 4th one for free. If you take all six, we will give you a free monthly workshop as well.
(We are sorry but the Kickstarter discounted workshops do not count for this special. Those are good for all the regular monthly workshops only.)
PAYMENT
You can sign up and pay on Teachable with Paypal or Credit Card through Stripe.
We can also take payment in a regular way through the WMG Publishing Paypal account. Also, if you would like to write a check, write me directly and I will give you that information.
If you want to sign up for the ones not live yet and pay in bulk, you will have to pay through the WMG Publishing Paypal account hooked up to my e-mail address. I will give you a code to get in when each workshop comes live. Write me directly if you have questions. (Full cost of all of these combined would be $1,500… five workshops, one free, plus you get a free online workshop for doing all six.)
DETAILS OF THE REGULAR CRAFT STRENGTHS WORKSHOP
The regular craft strength workshop focuses on basically all the major areas of a novel or story. We will see how you are doing with openings, character, cliffhangers, endings, pacing, and a bunch more.
We will tell you where you are strong and where you need more work in all of those areas. And we will be clear and blunt.
Kris and I have been professional fiction writers for over thirty years and editors as well along the way. We have made our living at fiction writing in one form or another for over thirty years. You won’t find this kind of help discovering where you are at anywhere else.
Feel free to write me with questions.
