My readers have voted with their clicks and eyeballs. Now, I’m listening.

For the next month, I’ll only be submitting stories in the niche my readers like best.

I’ll be submitting a minimum of 15 stories in this niche.

I’m coming up to six months on Medium. I’ve published over 130 stories in that time, in a wide range of genres:

• Self-help
• Fitness and running
• Environmental awareness
• Spirituality and faith
• Poetry and fiction
• Mental health
• Creativity and writing

My articles on creativity and writing have consistently performed the best.

I’ve yet to publish a viral hit. But all of my…

I’ve been writing professionally for well over a decade, so I was surprised recently when I saw myself referred to as a “beginning writer” in another article. It stung my ego!

I contacted the article writer to let her know my writing background and asked her to update the article. She refused and told me that a beginner is how she sees me, and I shouldn’t be worried about it because there’s no shame in being a beginner or an amateur.

It felt like gaslighting, someone telling me to redefine my reality. But as I thought about it, I realized…

In 10-minutes you can do all kinds of crazy artistry:

• Freewrite 800 words of prose
• Sketch a simple drawing and add watercolor
• Compose a new song
• Grab some chalk and brighten up the sidewalk
• Write down 10 business ideas
• Snap photos
• Write a poem

Art schools and writing colleges love to teach us that creating art is hard work, and takes forever. It’s in their interest to spread that message, since then they can charge tens of thousands of dollars to teach creativity the slow way.

That message has infected wider culture — and it’s a myth. Art can be…

Allison Cecile went from 0 followers to 319 new followers, and from $0.01 in monthly income to $46.57 in 30 days. That’s an amazing result!

Liv Pasquarelli got a pay raise at her job, so now she’s got more time to focus on the writing she loves. She says the Challenge changed her life.

Trisha Dunbar achieved her goal of reaching 500 followers after just nine days. She’s still going strong!

Liv, Allison and Trisha achieved these results by taking the 30-Day Challenge.

Allison can now say ‘I’m a writer’

For Allison, the bigger transformation was in her identity. Allison explains:

“I wanted to stop saying, ‘I’m…

When I shared my method for writing at 1,000 words per hour, comments ranged from grateful to downright skeptical. The top-ranked comment is from Don Goldberg, and falls heavily in the skeptical camp:

Yeah. Right. Sure.

To create content.? Yes. Creative content? Takes time.

A quick riposte:

• Isaac Asimov wrote almost 500 books. In one series of books, he invented the laws of robotics.
• Ray Bradbury published over 50 books — including Fahrenheit 451, one of the most acclaimed novels of the 20th century.
• Enid Blyton — one of Britain’s best-known and favorite children’s authors — wrote over 700 books.
• …

“The sole purpose of the first sentence… is to get you to read the second sentence.” — Joe Sugarman

Joe Sugarman gets it. He’s made millions of dollars writing copy that grips readers.

If you’re anything like me, you write and publish for one reason: for your words to be read. You want to keep your readers gripped from the first sentence until the very last.

That’s not just for the sake of your ego, either. Google uses AI to track how long your audience spends reading your content. “Dwell time” matters. …

“The human brain loathes uncertainty,” writes James Altucher in his book Skip the Line. Uncertainty causes a spike in the stress hormone, cortisol. “We have fear of uncertainty baked into our genes,” Altucher says.

He continues:

“A modern example of this is the stock market. Often it doesn’t matter if the news is bad or good, the stock market will go up. But if the news is uncertain, the market will crash.”

Uncertainty is what causes writers to feel blocked. The act of writing is a risk, replete with uncertainty and unknowns. …