Million Dollar Productivity

By Kevin J. Anderson

Life is crazy and hectic for most of us. We’re surrounded with personal and family obligations, jobs, fitness programs, virtual mountains of email, not to mention videogames, TV, smartphones, social networking, and millions of things to check out on the web.
With all those distractions, how does an aspiring author find time to write?
And when you do find the time, how do you make the most of it?

Award-winning and #1 international bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson is one of the most prolific authors in the business. He has published over 125 novels—an average of five novels a year, every year, for the past quarter century. Anderson has taught numerous writing seminars and lectured on productivity, and here he shares his tips on how to find the time to write, and how to make the most of that time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordFire Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781614752301

Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson has written dozens of national bestsellers and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers' Choice Award. His critically acclaimed original novels include the ambitious space opera series The Saga of Seven Suns, including The Dark Between the Stars, as well as the Wake the Dragon epic fantasy trilogy, and the Terra Incognita fantasy epic with its two accompanying rock CDs. He also set the Guinness-certified world record for the largest single-author book signing, and was recently inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame.

Reviews for Million Dollar Productivity

[publiusdb-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Spoiler alert: the trick to writing productivity is writing all the time. And you have a lot more time than you think. I promise.

Seriously.

I picked this gem of a book up at Salt Lake Comic Con after a panel that included the author was asked a question along the lines of how they avoid writer's block. Without missing a beat, one of the panelists (Larry Correia, I think) said there's no such thing as writer's block, and each of the panelists agreed. Now, I've never had a problem with writer's block, per se, but there have been times when I've questioned my own ability to accomplish much writing.

Sure, I can bust out a 140 character long tweet without two brain cells, and I can click 'like' on about 19,000 Facebook posts of LOL Catz and cute little babies without losing a single calorie. But writing something substantive? A blog post? Finishing the fourteenth short story that I've begun this summer? Rounding out the outline of that space opera novel I've been working on since my first child was born (alright, it's not the same novel anymore, but the point remains)?

Then it's a bit more difficult.

Back to Salt Lake Comic Con and the author's panel. The panel was a list of fairly illustrious--if also fairly local--authors, including the not unproductive Brandon Sanderson, Larry Correia, Dave Farland/Wolverton, and the currently being reviewed book's author, Kevin J. Anderson. Somewhere in that discussion about writer's block (which was not the panel topic, by the way), Anderson noted that a lot of times it was a productivity problem, not a lack of material to write about, and if you keep working, you manage to blow through the block. Coming from a guy who has busted out 125 novels--a number of which a bestsellers--and doesn't look like he's been parked on the couch consuming potato chips for the last five years, I was interested.

(Did you see the subtle way he plugged his book there? Yeah, me neither.)

So, naturally, I bought it as soon as the panel was over and I could make my way through the crowds over to Anderson's Wordfyre booth.

I read it that night. The book is short because, let's be honest: you should spend more time writing than reading about how to spend more time writing.

I won't give away the million dollar secrets here, because that's how Anderson's going to make his million dollars, but the $10 I dropped on the book was worth it, even if just to inspire me to change my habits and behavior to write more.

And I have: the last half week has been substantially more productive and useful than in a long while. Productivity is a fantastic thing; it builds on itself and creates more productivity and more success. That's worth way more than $10.