Good news! Work has begun on the second chapter for Diffused States.

Other good news! Attracting traffic to a website is still a lot of work with an offer of free books.

Nevertheless, thanks go out to all the people and followers who have supported and promoted the links on social media. It's a ghostly feeling when I see take a genuine interest in what I'm going. It's like I'm seeing something either isn't alive, or isn't alive YET.

I want these stories to succeed. I want them to achieve visibility. This is how we're getting the free books out there.

Ghost Little is built on simple principles:

• Transparency
• Everything counts
• Build invitations for all tastes
• Free books to get folks in on the worlds

When you think about how a modern person consumes media, and the idea that you want as many modern people as possible laying eyes on your work, your creative process changes. I didn't get into the promotional phase for Ghost Little and wipe sweat off my forehead, thankful that I had written 5 different entry-points via 5 different genres just by coincidence.

It began on the product level. The shared universe is the product. The free books themselves are the invitation in.

As fun as it was to write about the expert craftsmanship of the threads weaving the Avengers movies together, that wasn't an accident.

If you are going to build any product, determining the intended audience is step one. Then the inbound offers create themselves.

Who are you talking to? You're preparing something creative, YouTube videos, free books, original songs, paintings, and in your obsession and self-centeredness, you only rarely considered its audience.

Or, perhaps you considered them for the wrong reasons: you imagined your parent, or sibling, teacher, or work colleague: opinions you value, or at least are familiar with.

Trouble is, there might be five to ten individuals on earth whose opinions on YOUR work that you could accurately guess. You guess them because you know them as people. You know them better than you know your own WORK. Considering you can guess them so accurately, their usefulness wanes, because it already lives inside you.

Whether negative or positive, the only audience you can consider are the people close to you.

You need a target audience. You need to know your target audience.

"Independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective."

Imagine a hay wagon on a dirt road alongside some train tracks. Now imagine a Japanese bullet-train speeds by.

The wagon and the train were alongisde each other for a nanosecond. The hay wagon's driver caught a glimpse of somebody on the train but he doesn't think much about it. He can barely tell the smeared faces behind the glass apart. These passing trains are sleek. They break up the monotony of rolling down this dirt road.

They're not too quick for the human eye, but they are too fast for the wagon driver's brain to comprehend.

These trains are your social media feed blasting along beside you on the internet. They're free entertainment. I'd argue independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective.