If you want to get Becca to an in-person event, we have a couple of options:

1. You can back the "pop-up" level of the Kickstarter ($700) where you get to pick the date and location (within a few guidelines) of one of our pop-up events. You also get a one-on-one meeting with me as part of this level. This is a lower cost way of bringing the BFA to you, if you live in the US or Canada.
2. You can contact Angela about having me speak at your conference or event. Hit the contact button on our website.​

Also, if you're interested in attending something we put on, watch the Events page on the website (all those Kickstarter pop-ups will get scheduled soon) and/or fill out the interest form for August 2026 in Minneapolis (or the general form for Minneapolis event interest).

I'll be at SPS Live in the UK this year, and likely at Author Nation again (although I just got invited to an event in Australia that may pre-empt that), but those are the only big conferences I'm planning. My goal next year is to do many more small in-person events that can serve to also bring together the BFA community, and not just to feed our need for information. (Info is great. But community is necessary, and will become more so in the next five years.)

We did this level of the Kickstarter specifically to be within an easy range so someone could purchase it and bring Becca to their locale without having to put together a whole thousands-of-dollars event. We'll put the event together. We'll advertise it to our people (or to the community--we did have someone who wanted to do a non-writer event who asked if they could back and I approved it... I would be willing to do a few of those as well, and see what we get). I hope, if you've always wanted to bring Becca to your town, you'll consider doing one of the pop-ups so we can get out into the big wide world of writers!

Also, we have collectible paperbacks and physical decks on the Kickstarter now. All mailed boxes will get a physical deck and all paperbacks will be signed, embossed, and have the edges sprayed. I'm very excited about this. I hope you'll consider backing for the Author Business Phases deck alone... :) But for everything else, as well.

And now, instead of a "Dear Becca" letter that got submitted, I'm going to put in the post I wrote on Facebook this morning. It feels both appropriate to the time and also very applicable to the work I'm doing right now, finishing this Quitbook...

Here we go!

Folk wisdom in the publishing industry.

I was listening to an episode of Maintenance Phase this morning on Snackwell’s Cookies, and the host used a phrase that I have been searching for for years. Years. Folk wisdom.

There is this phenomenon in the publishing industry for people to give advice without understanding what’s actually going on under the surface of success architecture. (How each individual part of a particular action is constructed to hold the weight of success growth.)

I was trying to describe it to someone once as the product of not thinking very deeply about what might be causing success to happen (which of course my Intellection/Analytical hates). In the same way that if you don’t think very deeply about sports, you might think that your lucky jersey has some kind of impact on whether or not your team wins.

But in the study of success, it’s mostly that there are a hundred factors that have to align to produce success, and you have to spin the wheel to hit $1 on each of them, and it’s very complicated to understand why things don’t happen and what to change. It’s why this job can be so hard. Most people don’t want it to be complicated, so they simplify it.

“Just do this…” is the catchphrase. Or “if I can do it, anyone can do it.” Or “it doesn’t have to be complicated.” There are so many.

If you are a why-asker, you want to know why it happens, and you dig deep, but you still have to be willing to question the premise of the quote-unquote-common-knowledge (maybe “air quotes knowledge” is a better descriptor) that gets assimilated as knowledge around why success happens.

In the podcast episode, the host was using the example of Snackwell’s cookies (and the takeoff of the anti-fat bias in the 80s) as the height of “folk wisdom” in the diet craze that produced these incredibly popular cookies (seriously, it’s fascinating, go listen to it).

The folk wisdom at the time was, “fat is bad” (which we now know not to be true), and the willingness to believe it was pressurized by this sudden realization that heart disease was the leading cause of death in the US, and at the time, they thought heart disease was basically caused by fat. Again, fascinating episode.

But it reminded me a lot of indie publishing folk wisdom. Things like, “you have to do X tactic in order to sell,” and “you must write to market,” or whatever the current air-quotes-wisdom is.

Because here’s the thing about folk wisdom. Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes, putting peppermint on your tongue and swirling it around in your mouth can actually help you prevent a cold from getting worse. Sometimes, you wear the jersey and the team wins. And then, the folk wisdom doesn’t need to be questioned.

I mean, it does still. But. Not by everyone. Not everyone is designed to question the premise of everything. (For some of us, that feels wildly unsafe.)

When something that’s been promised to work doesn’t work for you, it’s a great signal that you’ve run into folk wisdom. That’s a great time to QTP.

Thank you to Michael Hobbes for using this phrase because it gives me a hit in my lexicon to explain something that has been escaping my explanation for a long time. Folk wisdom. It’s going to help me for years to come.

​And it will make an excellent last chapter for the current book.​

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