The book begins with Laura covering the essential groundwork of discovering your niché, defining your content categories, choosing a blog name, selecting a platform, and creating a healthy and attainable blogging routine. Then, she takes a deep dive into describing the the most effective ways to invest in yourself and your blog by explaining the importance of quality design, high resolution photos, email marketing services, and more. You’ll also learn how to partner and collaborate with brands by building an online media kit, how to promote your blog on social media, and how to create a thriving community around your blog that will stand the test of time.

    Prepared to be awed and inspired by Chris Froome riding on at the Tour de France with a broken wrist or Geraint Thomas finishing it with a broken pelvis.In The Hardmen the writers behind cycling superblog Velominati.com and The Rules will tell the stories and illuminate the myths of not just the greatest cyclists ever, but the toughest. From Eddy Merckx to Beryl Burton, and from Marianne Vos to Edwig Van Hooydonk, the book will lay bare the secrets of their extraordinary and inspirational endurance in the face of pain, danger and disaster. After all, suffering is one of the joys of being a cyclist. Embrace climbs, relish the descents, and get ready to harden up. . .

    Employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, he provides a conceptual framework for the examination of literature. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, he applies "scientific" method in an effort to change the character of criticism from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic.Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye's mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye's criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.

    With whip-smart prose, reminiscent of Roxane Gay and Meghan Daum, Action interweaves Spiegel's own sexual autobiography with loving advice on one-night stands, relationships, and everything in between. Action is a book about sex that people won't feel embarrassed about owning. There are absolutely zero provocatively shaped fruit on the cover, for one. In Action, Amy Rose Spiegel exhorts you to trust yourself and be respectful of others--and to have the best possible time doing the things you search for on the Internet, except in reality. The book covers consent, safety, group sex, gender, and the best breakfast to make for a one-night stand. Spiegel also includes dissections of threesomes, how to pick people up without being a skeezer, celibacy as a display of autonomy, and, of course, how to clean your room in 10 minutes if a devastatingly lovely side-piece is about to stop by. All told, Action totally doesn't think it's weird that you want to try that thing together. In fact, Action is very into it.

    Nobody gets tapped with a magic wand and suddenly has the ability to produce art, music, photos, films, or writing—they just do it. And you probably should too. Make It Till You Make It breaks down 40 myths and truths about the pursuit of creative expression, whether you want to make $0 a year doing your thing or $100,000 a year.

    But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it all but impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work. This important book looks deeply and broadly into the roots of the crisis of the creative class in America and tells us why it matters.   In this book Scott Timberg considers the human cost as well as the unintended consequences of shuttered record stores, decimated newspapers, music piracy, and a general attitude of indifference. He identifies social tensions and contradictions—most concerning the artist’s place in society—that have plunged the creative class into a fight for survival. Timberg shows how America’s now-collapsing middlebrow culture—a culture once derided by intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald—appears, from today’s vantage point, to have been at least a Silver Age. The book is essential reading for anyone who works in the world of culture, knows someone who does, or cares about the work creative artists produce.

    This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines. —from Part IVWith astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in this book chronicle a ten-year intellectual odyssey by one of the most important, creative, and respected minds of our time. Step Across This Line concentrates in one volume Salman Rushdie’s fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and irrepressible wit—about soccer, The Wizard of Oz, and writing, about fighting the Iranian fatwa and turning with the millennium, and about September 11, 2001. Ending with the eponymous, never-before-published speeches, this collection is, in Rushdie’s words, a “wake-up call” about the way we live, and think, now.

    The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.

    This is a detailed description of the life of one helicopter pilot and what he did in the air, on the ground, with the people during his first tour in the Central Highlands while assigned to and flying for an Infantry Division, the Cambodia Invasion, and what it was really like living in Vietnam. The second tour was in the Saigon area with an Air Cavalry Troop and recounts live for Americans at the final months of the War, final cease fire events, prisoner exchanges, life on the ground, Saigon, the final flight of combat troops to leave Vietnam and the end of American combat operations and involvement. For those who want to know what it was like to be there -- without the hidden agenda, embellishment, or hype normally associated with the Vietnam War

    Brimming with simple-to-follow techniques, rituals, and exercises for accomplishing day-to-day tasks and making progress on bigger goals, Big Dreams, Daily Joys offers tips on how-to organize a productive day, overcome the urge to procrastinate, make space for creativity, and achieve a healthy work-life balance. For anyone who is tackling a creative project, running their own business, or simply trying to manage time more efficiently, this is the ultimate handbook to getting things done with clarity, joy, and positivity.

    Sunday lunchtime kick-offs. Absurd ticket prices. Non-black boots. Football's menu of ills is long. Where has the joy gone? Why do we bother? Saturday, 3pm offers a glorious antidote. It is here to remind you that football can still sing to your heart.Warm, heartfelt and witty, here are fifty short essays of prose poetry dedicated to what is good in the game. These are not wallowing nostalgia; they are things that remain sweet and right: seeing a ground from the train, brackets on vidiprinters, ball hitting bar, Jimmy Armfield's voice, listening to the results in a traffic jam, football towns and autograph-hunters. This is fan culture at its finest, words to transport you somewhere else and identify with, words to hide away in a pub and luxuriate in.Saturday, 3pm is a book of love letters to football and a clarion call, helping us find the romance in the game all over again.

    Its hands-on, completely accessible approach walks writers through each stage of the creative process, from the initial triggering idea to the revision of the final manuscript. It is unique in combing the three main aspects of creative writing instruction: process (finding inspiration, getting ideas on the page), craft (specific techniques like characterization), and anthology (learning by reading masters of the form). Succinct, clear definitions of basic terms of fiction are accompanied by examples, including excerpts from masterpieces of short fiction and essays as well as contemporary novels. A special highlight is Alice LaPlante's systematic debunking of many of the so-called rules of creative writing. This book is perfect for writers working alone as well as for creative writing classes, both introductory and advanced.

     The research (conducted by the Center for the Study of Intent) uncovered a new dimension of human development and has revolutionized the way personal growth, meaning, happiness, and ultimately advanced spiritual topics such as ‘enlightenment’ are understood. The results, if you let them, will transform the quality of your life in ways you currently cannot even imagine as possible. During the research a formula was uncovered that is so effective at producing what seems like miracles in people’s lives it began to be referred to as the “God Formula” among participants and researchers. This book outlines that formula, and is the final version of the highly successful training material that was used with research participants. These researchers became the first scientists to successfully experiment with this new developmental continuum. The result has been the discovery of a series of techniques that lead from everyday consciousness to increased daily happiness and satisfaction, and finally to enlightenment and beyond (yes, there is a beyond!). This book covers the first stages of this process. You can view a summary of the results from the research phase that related to it, and later ones at: CenterForIntent.org/freedom. This book covers three primary components that combine to form a complete system of person growth, and an assortment of techniques for each component. While it provides the components, how they need to come together for maximum effectiveness will be unique to you. You’ll need to experiment with various combinations of these techniques until you find the one that works best for you. This may sound unusual. You’re probably used to reading books where the authors assert they have the one answer for everyone. The researchers at the Center tested an enormous number of techniques but didn’t find a single one that was helpful to more than a handful of individuals…when it was beneficial for anyone at all. However, they learned that there are a relatively small number of techniques that can be combined in ways that are incredibly effective. You just have to find the unique combination of these techniques that works for you right now. This book provides the distilled down wisdom from all of that testing. They were able to successfully identify core components from the methods that proved themselves. However, no one can tell you how to combine those components to get them to work best for you. People are simply too different for that to be possible. So, you’ll have to join the team, be your own scientist, and experiment! The good news is that the researchers spent an enormous amount of time and money narrowing down the possibilities for you. Most of the research participants were able to use this book to find the combination that worked for them quite quickly. It is likely the same will be true for you.It’s important that you not take the information this book contains lightly. Unlike other personal growth and self help books, this one is driven by a vast amount of actual research into what works. It was revised continually based on research participant feedback, so it’s very simple and easy to understand and use. But don’t let this simplicity fool you. Every line is there for a reason. This material has changed a lot of lives, if you’ll let it…yours can be next.

    But rarely did any teacher tell us how to write fiction--they simply urged us to write a story. But how is that done? Angela Hunt has been writing and teaching for thirty years, and she has boiled plotting down to the basics in thirty pages. Not only will you come away knowing how to plot, you'll be able to point the important structural points in movies and other books you read. It's all about the skeleton, Hunt says, and every working story has one. (A condensed version of this lesson was originally published in A NOVEL IDEA, a collection of writer's tips and techniques by published novelists.) Enjoy this writing lesson for a fraction of the cost of attending one of Angela's writing classes--your writing will never be the same.

    Romance author Serenity Woods and best selling author Mark Dawson provide ten short tips to help the eager beginner interested in turning their hobby of writing romance stories into a way to earn a living.